NEAR Intents Day LIVE with Illia, Mert, Haseeb, Eli & more

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 0:10

   I'm above the I'm above the JP Morgan, Black Rock, DTCC, Fidelity, the entire thing was just institutions. It's just it's next level. This industry is going to the next level. And guys, I I don't know what else to say.

2. 1:13

   You said it. Finally said it. So boys, boys, I'm bull. We're boys. I'm above the above the B.

3. 2:35

   How the fuck? How the fuck Time back. How the fuck? JP Morgan, Black Rock, DTCC, Fidelity, the entire thing was just institutions. It's just it's next level. This industry is going to the next level. And guys, I I don't know what else to say.

4. 3:33

   You said it. You finally said it. So, I'm bullish. More bullish. I'm the mother. I'm the mother.

5. 4:43

   above the Back down the back. I'm about the I'm the mother.

6. 6:01

   JP Morgan, Black Rock, DTCC, Fidelity, the entire thing was just institutions. It's just it's next level. This industry is going to the next level. And guys, I I don't know what else to say. I'm bullish. You said it. You finally said it. So bullish bullish. I'm bullish. We're bullish.

7. 6:37

   I'm about the How about I'm the mother back.

8. 7:40

   JP Morgan, Black Rock, DTCC, Fidelity, the entire thing was just institutions. It's just it's next level. This industry is going to the next level. And guys, I I don't know what else to say. You said it. You finally said it. So boys, boys, I'm bullish. We're boys.

9. 8:15

   I'm the How about the fuck? I'm the mother.

10. 9:21

    It's just it's next level. This industry is going to the next level. And guys, I I don't know what else to say. I'm bullish. You said it. You finally said it. I'm so bullish. It is bullish. I'm bullish. Boy, down break down break down.

11. 9:49

    I'm the I'm above the I'm the mother. I'm above the

12. 11:01

    Corola is headed to the top. If we're not already at the top, we're going to the top. We're on fourth floor today. We're going to be on floor one and then we're headed straight to the moon, boys. Yo, happy near intense day special, baby. Let's get it. Buckle in, guys.

13. 11:24

    This is a near intense day special. We got the party controls. Andy's back. Let's go back. I'm back. Andy, where you been? Trying to go surf pipe right now. You been catching waves out there? Barely been building fucking SOPs. Clad building SOPs on claws. I've been doing Oh boy. Okay.

14. 11:50

    Party has been [snorts] pretty week's been solid. Obviously we had uh a bunch of good guests. Uh who did we have this week that was really really solid? Um we had Rand from Zama come on talk to us about FHE. They have over 20 20 million that they raised in their public sale.

15. 12:10

    uh which is pretty pretty legit and it's all like shielded and so it's also very privacy oriented they raised 100 plus mil from VCs they went and they raised another 20 from this community sale and people are trying to back engineer there's a lot of cool game theory around like this encrypted auction because you shield your bids before you make them and so you can see certain elements you can't see other elements so no one really knows like what the price of the token is, but everyone's placing bids into it.

16. 12:43

    So, it's a pretty pretty interesting game theory as far as how much you should bid at what levels and seems to have worked for them because they raised 20 mil. Um, who else was good this week? Oh, we had Omar from ZK Sync. Those guys are great talking about RWAs. Um, and then we had a good Stabled Up episode yesterday. Uh, DeFi Dave who used to be at FRA, you know, obviously Stabled Up sponsored by Fracks. Um, those guys are doing great over at CAP and they released a bit of alpha on the show. So,

17. 13:11

    they're doing this stable drop. So, this it's it's kind of like, you know, this financial experimentation seemed it seemed to kind of have like lost its lust over, you know, like the last quarter, Q3, Q4, there was so much apathy. No one was really trying anything new. But this week, like the Zama guys are trying this new encrypted auction method. And then the uh the CAP guys are doing an airdrop, but it's stable coins. So you don't have like this catch 22 of people dumping their stable coins as soon as they get it.

18. 13:41

    They're literally just dropping stable coins to people. Um which I think is like who doesn't like getting stable coins, right? You don't have to you don't have to like pretend like you know you don't have to be a community member and hold and you don't have to uh you don't have to dump day one and feel bad about it. So, I think everyone's going to be enjoying that. And then, um, they also announced that they're going to run a season two of this campaign uh, coming

19. 14:06

    up in a few a few weeks. Uh, they announced that on the show yesterday, and I I made the prediction, look, I think people are actually going to really like this stable drop idea and they're going to get a lot more traction uh, for this season 2 homestead campaign. So, I think those guys are doing great work. Obviously, we've known Ben and Dave for a long time. they've kind of been, you know, around the circuit when it comes to crypto projects. And it feels like they've got

20. 14:29

    500 million uh in cap now. So, it it feels like this one is pretty sticky and uh and it's working well for them. Yeah, man. I mean, look, [snorts] uh we've got the Near Intense Mega Stream today and the, you know, the Near Intense product has been so good. I've I've just been using it quite a bit and really I've just found it to be incredibly incredibly good.

21. 14:54

    So, um, I'm really excited to have a a full slate of guests today and, uh, see what the latest is from the near intense side of things. Uh, pretty excited. Yeah. So, you know, we're going to hear from people kind of all around the world, which I think has been one of the most value creative things that they could do. like you know you I'm sure you've seen these guys that are putting out like you know the measures of wealth that they created for other people. I

22. 15:26

    think it was Jana that put out like this Jeff Bezos like wealth list uh as of recently put up a dashboard on block works about you know these people that have then created wealth for the rest of the people in their company and the equity and stakeholders and frankly I got like anyone who did well on Zcash and you could even say the spillover effects of this privacy narrative kind of spilled over into Monero even Dash

23. 15:50

    who we're going to have on uh in this first panel they were also benefactories beneficiaries of this. And so I I I think it's almost immeasurable how much wealth near Intense has created because it opened up, you know, Zcash and then that spilled over into Monero into Dash and ultimately reignited a lot of these privacy coins. Pretty cool.

24. 16:13

    Definitely did. It was it was it was quite the run that a lot of them had been on. And and I mean the thing is there was no way to get to Zcash prior to Near Intense going live. And so it's definitely definitely good to have them be live, have them be active um and basically just like be able to create a easy seamless crosschain experience from uh different chains to to different chains. Before Before we bring our first guest up, why

25. 16:44

    don't we we take a quick commercial break and we'll uh we'll be right back with uh our first flight. Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get a Treasure at treasure.io.

26. 17:35

    Go anywhere onchain instantly with relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion dollars transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now. Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more.

27. 18:10

    KHI is the world's largest prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to kshi.com to trade today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai AI to have a fully private chat experience.

28. 18:43

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29. 19:22

    Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz XYZ to never write a smart contract again. Open, stable, borderless. Frack is building the next generation of stablecoin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit fra.com to learn more today.

30. 19:56

    Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get a treasure at treasure.io.

31. 20:35

    Go anywhere onchain instantly with Relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now. Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his Rio upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments.

32. 21:00

    Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. KHI is the world's largest prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to cgi.com to trade today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience.

33. 21:43

    Havachi is fast and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today. Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinify is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz.

34. 22:22

    Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz to never write a smart contract again. Open, stable, borderless. Frack is building the next generation of stablecoin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit frack.com to learn more today.

35. 22:56

    Yeet is built for big moments, the most fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get a Treasure at treasure.io.

36. 23:36

    Go anywhere onchain instantly with relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now. Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his Rio upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments.

37. 24:00

    Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. KHI is the world's largest prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to kshi.com to trade today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience.

38. 24:43

    Havachi is fast and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today. Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinify is a battle tested, reliable defy platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz. XYZ.

39. 25:22

    Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz to never write a smart contract again. Open, stable, borderless. FRA is building the next generation of stablecoin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit frack.com to learn more today.

40. 25:57

    Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get a Treasure at treasure.io.

41. 26:36

    Go anywhere onchain instantly with relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion dollar transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now. Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments.

42. 27:00

    Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. KHI is the world's largest prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to kshi.com to trade today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private, and here today. Visit near.ai AI to have a fully private chat experience.

43. 27:43

    Havachi is fast and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today. Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinify is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz.

44. 28:22

    Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz XYZ to never write a smart contract again. Open, stable, borderless. Frack is building the next generation of stablecoin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit frack.com to learn more today.

45. 28:57

    Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet.

46. 29:19

    Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get a treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now.

47. 29:52

    Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. KHI is the world's largest prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to kshi.com to trade today.

48. 30:25

    Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience. Havachi is fast and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz XYZ to start trading today.

49. 31:00

    Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinify is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz. XYZ Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz to never write a smart contract again.

50. 31:39

    Open, stable, borderless. FRA is building the next generation of stablecoin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit frack.com to learn more today. Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto.

51. 32:02

    Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get a Treasure at treasure.io.

52. 32:36

    Go anywhere onchain instantly with relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now. Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments.

53. 33:01

    Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. KSHI is the world's largest prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to kshi.com to trade today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. yours private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience.

54. 33:44

    Havachi is fast and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today. Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinify is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz.

55. 34:22

    Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz to never write a smart contract again. Open, stable, borderless. FRA is building the next generation of stable coin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit frack.com to learn more today.

56. 34:57

    Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get a treasure at treasure.io.

57. 35:36

    Go anywhere onchain instantly with Relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now. Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments.

58. 36:01

    Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. KHI is the world's largest prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to call sheet.com to trade today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience.

59. 36:44

    Havachi is fast and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today. Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinifi is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz.

60. 37:23

    Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz to never write a smart contract again. Open, stable, borderless. FRA is building the next generation of stable coin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit frack.com to learn more today.

61. 37:57

    Yeet is built for big moments, the most fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get a Treasure at treasure.io.

62. 38:36

    Go anywhere onchain instantly with relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now. Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more.

63. 39:11

    Colshi is the world's largest prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to kshi.com to trade today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience.

64. 39:44

    Havachi is fast and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz XYZ to start trading today. Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinify is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that is ready to go.

65. 40:13

    Head to infinifi.xyz. XYZ Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz to never write a smart contract again. Open, stable, borderless. FRA is building the next generation of stablecoin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit frack.com to learn more today.

66. 40:57

    Ye is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get a Treasure at treasure.io.

67. 41:37

    Go anywhere onchain instantly with relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion dollar transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now. Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments.

68. 42:01

    Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. Colshi is the world's largest prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to kshi.com to trade today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private, and here today. Visit near.ai AI to have a fully private chat experience.

69. 42:44

    Havachi is fast and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today. Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinify is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz.

70. 43:23

    Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz XYZ to never write a smart contract again. Open, stable, borderless. FRA is building the next generation of stable coin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit frack.com to learn more today.

71. 43:58

    Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get a treasure at treasure.io.

72. 44:37

    Go anywhere onchain instantly with Relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now. Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more.

73. 45:11

    KHI is the world's largest prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to call sheet.com to trade today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience.

74. 45:44

    Havachi is fast and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today. Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinifi is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz.

75. 46:23

    Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz to never write a smart contract again. Open, stable, borderless. FRA is building the next generation of stablecoin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit frack.com to learn more today.

76. 46:58

    Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point.

77. 47:26

    Secure your coins. Get a Treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now. Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his Rio upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more.

78. 48:11

    Colshi is the world's largest prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to kshi.com to trade today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience.

79. 48:44

    Havachi is fast and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz XYZ to start trading today. Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinify is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz. XYZ.

80. 49:23

    Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz to never write a smart contract again. Open, stable, borderless. FRA is building the next generation of stablecoin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit frack.com to learn more today.

81. 49:58

    Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get a Treasure at treasure.io.

82. 50:37

    Go anywhere onchain instantly with relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now. Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more.

83. 51:11

    Kalshi is the world's largest prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to kshi.com to trade today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. yours private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience.

84. 51:45

    Havachi is fast and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today. Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinifi is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz.

85. 52:23

    Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz to never write a smart contract again. Open, stable, borderless. Frack is building the next generation of stablecoin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit fra.com to learn more today.

86. 52:58

    Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get a treasure at treasure.io.

87. 53:37

    Go anywhere onchain instantly with Relay. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now. Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more.

88. 54:12

    Khi is the world's largest prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to callshi.com to trade today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience.

89. 54:41

    Hey, hey, hey.

90. 56:51

    Hey. Hey. Hey. Oh, hey. Hey, hey, hey.

91. 58:37

    Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat.

92. 59:51

    Hey, hey, hey.

93. 1:01:04

    Hey, hey, hey. Oh, hey. I love you.

94. 1:02:24

    Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey, hey, hey.

95. 1:03:43

    Oh, hey.

96. 1:05:38

    Hey, hey, hey. Oh, hey.

97. 1:06:40

    Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey, hey, hey.

98. 1:08:06

    Oh, hey. Heat up. Hey. Hey. Hey.

99. 1:09:50

    Hey, hey, hey. Heat. Heat.

100. 1:10:55

     Hey, hey, hey.

101. 1:12:02

     Hey, hey, hey. Oh, hey. All right, guys. Um, we had to pause the first panel. We had an insane um set up firewalls and VPNs and guests and frames and everything. But we are back.

102. 1:13:04

     We're going to continue with panel two. We're going to reschedu that first panel to another day. We're actually gonna do a whole podcast episode with the first panel. We were really excited for it. I know we you guys were really excited for it, too.

103. 1:13:16

     So, we're going to have that conversation. It's going to come at a later time. We're being chill guys. 30 minute commercial break. We just went through hell and back to get that thing back. Um, and yeah, we had a hell of a hell of a hell of a first uh panel operation. So we are going to just reschedule that first panel guys. This is the intense day special. Uh what what would life be without a little bit of obstacles in your way? I think I think honestly Andy I think one thing to address here is how difficult the

104. 1:13:46

     multi-chain world was difficult. It was so difficult to navigate before intense. I think this is just a bit of a microcosm of that entire that entire journey because I remember bridging from multiple different providers bridging hacks all over the place. Now we have easy to use UX solutions. So we're still integrating those easytouse UX solutions, but the idea here is that we're going to get those integrated

105. 1:14:11

     before our next panel. Um we know you guys have been exposed to quite a few commercials on the show. So we're we're going to save uh any more commercials from you guys. Only if we absolutely have to. We're going to go to commercials and we're going to do our best to uh to bring you guys a great intense day special.

106. 1:14:29

     Yeah. And we'll bring it we'll bring the first panel back shortly at some point in the near future. It was it was good to have them on. Uh we were in the back. We we didn't want to go without getting Ilia up, but we are good to go now. And we have panel two coming up. Panel two is intense and apps. Um we are going to be talking with some of the best application builders uh in intense

107. 1:14:53

     talking about how abstraction changes how users interact with applications. We've got Alex Shvchenko from Near Intense, Anna from Cow Swap, VibeHub from Socket, and we have um PaperX Art, the CEO of Thor Swap. So, should be a great fun second panel talking about intents and apps and ready to go uh there. So, guys, we'll we'll get them up here in just a few minutes. And we're back. It's Thursday, January 22nd. Thank

108. 1:15:23

     you guys for being here. I wanna be before we have our our panel guests join and I know we're getting them set up. I I have the Dune dashboard for Near Intense um in front of me. Maybe you guys have it as well, but let me just read off some of these stats because it's pretty incredible what Near was able to do. Obviously, and and Ilia has come on the show before and has said this, the vision for Near is a a a primarily AI ccentric blockchain.

109. 1:15:51

     Yep. as a means to accomplish that end near had to do all of the blockchain infrastructure work that is necessary to stand up a proper blockchain. So what did they do? They went and they launched you know payment rails. They they launched the blockchain because they realized that is what tool is necessary for AI. Then they went and they launched you know their their private privacy enabled features around this both on the

110. 1:16:16

     AI side and the blockchain side. The intense product and we're going to talk about how much you know product market fit it's enable it's been able to experience is only a consequence of them trying to accomplish their goals in AI.

111. 1:16:30

     So sometimes I think it's just incredible that near being an AI first company is still able to find all kinds of product market fit in the blockchain space despite being an AI first company. Let me just frame what I mean here. Alltime volume has recentlycliped 10 billion. It's at 10.6 billion in terms of alltime volume through near intense.

112. 1:16:55

     Wow. Absolutely incredible. Uh the top two tokens through near intense are USDT and USDC. These are obviously like the engine, the lifeblood of a lot of token economies. No surprise here, but you know oftent times when we're measuring how healthy a blockchain economy is. You have to look at the stable coin supply and and it's not just you know memecoin vaporware with one holder. It's not RWA

113. 1:17:20

     helilocs with one holder. You know this is real like retail volume. that showcases the breadth of this product uh and the distribution of it. Uh volume in the past day, the past 24 hours, 120 million in in 24hour volume, 670 million in the past week, uh 30 days, you got 2.3 billion. So alltime volume, I'm not sure exactly how near how long Near Intense has been live. I think it's been

114. 1:17:48

     about about three months or so. to say, you know, to go from zero to 10 billion in three months is is absolutely fantastic. Yeah. Uh it's generated almost $20 million of fees, $18 million of fees. And if you guys have listened to the show and you've heard Ilia and you've heard some of the other guys from the Near team, you know that they've got some very interesting plans as far as

115. 1:18:11

     how they're going to reallocate and distribute these fees. Um, nothing is public yet, but you know, we we have uh we have a suspicion that that's going to be, you know, really really positive for the entire ecosystem. 16 million total swaps, 117,000 unique users in the last seven days, and 569,000 unique users in the past 30 days.

116. 1:18:34

     Yeah, man. It's pretty insane. I mean, it's pretty insane. It It is. It is incredible. I've used it so many times to do um swaps from like soul to ETH or ETH to soul or uh near chain Zcash Bitcoin. Actually, I've actually taken ETH from ETH chain, put it into Bitcoin onto a hard onto a um kind of like hard ledger like a hardware wallet. It's been super easy. Um yeah, I mean I'm I'm uh I'm excited. I'm I'm

117. 1:19:08

     excited to have our next panel up. Um, and yeah, ready to ready to get the in the panel two, which is intense and apps on air and get the rest of this marathon mega stream started. Rob, it's been a journey here for the first hour, but that's not going to stop us from getting the next set of guests up. Um, absolutely not. Absolutely not. I mean, I'm I'm pretty excited. Let's take a look at the panelists uh for our next panel. Uh panel two.

118. 1:19:41

     Let's have a look here. We've got uh Alex from the Near Intense team. This guy was instrumental in building out this product where we we just read out, you know, how incredible the stats are. Over 10 billion of dollars of volume uh flowing through it. So, we're gonna have Alex from the Near Intense team. Uh we're also going to have Anna from Cow Swap. She's going to join shortly. We're going to get uh Alain from Thor Swap uh which is another fascinating project

119. 1:20:09

     that is experiencing particularly uh particular growth as a result of Near Intense. And then finally, we're going to get uh Socket. We're going to get Vibe up on the show as well. I think we're going to start with Alex and Allan. Okay.

120. 1:20:23

     And we're going to roll into Anna and Vibhov once they are ready to to go. Uh, everyone is on the 247 crypto schedule here. So, we're just going to get this show started, get the next guest on, and uh, get Allan and ViveHub in. So, sorry, Alan and Alex in the show.

121. 1:20:43

     There we go. Allan, Alex, welcome, guys. Welcome to the show. Hi, guys. Always nice meeting you and seeing you and being with you in person. Not in person, but online on the same stream. Oh, yeah. Yeah, man. Pleasure, man. It's a pleasure. Hey guys. Hey. Pleased to be here.

122. 1:21:01

     Absolutely. Guys, we've uh we've had a doozy here. Um our first panel got rugged unfortunately. So, you guys are our first guests of the day. Um it's a pleasure to see you guys. Why don't we why don't we start quick round of intros and we're we're going to dig into apps intense and just broadly this near intense ecosystem. Alex, why don't we start with you?

123. 1:21:20

     Yeah. Hello everybody. If if because of some reason you haven't seen me over the past 10 years of me being cry um I'm mostly techie building for 10 years different infrastructure uh in the blockchain vertical uh responsible for uh rainbow bridge the first decentralized bridge uh that was that was launched and permissionless and trustless uh and then I also launched the project that is called Aurora that's

124. 1:21:44

     the new VM solution top of near and now I'm a GM or uh the guy who is responsible for everything around in your intense and Allan, welcome to the show, man. I know it's your first time calling in. Yep. Yep. Really pleased to be here. Um, yeah, my name is Alan. Uh, better known as PaperX. I've been with uh Thor Swap since 2021 and currently lead contributor at Thor Swap. So yeah, we started as um as you guys know, one of

125. 1:22:15

     the first Bitcoin indexes uh going from Bitcoin to Ethereum on blockchain and now we're a meta aggregator of different crosschain protocols, but very much still focused on connecting Bitcoin to anything anything to Bitcoin uh in a decentralized manner. So yeah, Nar Intense is um one of our newer uh uh protocols that we integrated last year in late June. Um but we were able to do

126. 1:22:40

     uh o over 300 uh million in volume um over you know in under six months uh thanks to the really awesome technology of intents and uh yeah and and the new chains we managed to integrate uh over the over that period. So yeah super excited to be here and talk about all things you know application wise uh for consumers and just bringing DeFi to everyone.

127. 1:23:00

     Yeah man. Alex um Allan thanks for thanks for joining us. Um Allan, starting starting with you with regards to this crosschain swap landscape that you um kind of laid out that that you guys have built so well with uh Thor Swap and and Thor Chain. When you're thinking about actual users using crosschain swaps, when something goes wrong, when when swaps fail in messy ways, what do users really not

128. 1:23:24

     understand about the complexities of crosschain as it pertains to this um you know uh abstraction when it comes to using applications? What are the what are the most common misunderstandings about crosschain swaps uh in the ecosystem today?

129. 1:23:42

     Sure. Um so one big thing for us is we always want to make sure users can perform their swaps um seamlessly in one transaction right so traditionally we found you know kind of doing like multi hopping especially crosschain is quite difficult for the user to understand like hey you know I can see on e scan for example my assets have gone from this this my one wallet to this address um but then they don't know where it is

130. 1:24:06

     you know following that so um and so all of our providers including their intents um We provide the experience for users whereby they connect their own wallets and uh you know they can see that it's gone from for example Ethereum um you know onto near intense the crosschain protocol and then you know finally onto you know the bitcoin wallet um so I think just offering that uh first of all

131. 1:24:30

     the actual swap experience and then you know once the swap has happened allowing the user to see everything transparently on chain um where the assets are going you know um and how it arrives eventually back in their own self costly wallet right is is quite important. Um you know the transparency of you know being on chain and and you know seeing the assets are um essentially that is the only part of it where you know it's the assets in flight right the rest of the time it should be fully

132. 1:24:55

     self-custodial and that's kind of like the the peace of mind you you know you should be getting from you know trustless um protocols. Got it. Okay. And you know speaking trustless protocols here you know we've been around in the space for quite a long time. You know, we initially saw Ethereum in its sort of, you know, singularity where it was sort of a closed uh a closed loop and you know, there was a lot of smart contract applications that were available there.

133. 1:25:20

     There wasn't really the rise of the alt L1s quite yet, you know, and then and then we saw, you know, several blockchains pop up. We also saw the modularity uh movement and that caused kind of this belief that there are going to be multiple blockchains. Um and and so you know the the primary problem with interop at the time was extensibility.

134. 1:25:40

     It was like okay you know if we're going between rollups on Ethereum it's relatively easy because all of them share you know some underlying state. You know when we're going between L1s maybe it's a little bit different. Thor you know Thor swap you guys know Bitcoin to ETH or Bitcoin and near this is you know been a problem for some some time.

135. 1:25:59

     And so, Alex, I'm curious. How were you guys able to solve the extensibility issue that people were facing? You know, whether it was if it was EVM, that was like another degree. It's like, okay, that's a little bit easier. But when we start going and and we're using you know blockchains that have different VMs, different DA layers, different fundamental security models, how are you able to solve the extensibility and

136. 1:26:23

     still maintain like when your asset does get deposited over there, you know, we can still get a confirmation that this thing really exists on the destination blockchain. Yeah, we can we can have a separate one-hour talk from me uh about all of this stuff. There are lots of interesting pieces there. Uh but I think um uh I'm I'm just going to note just a few I will try to keep it like short in in within tw uh so that we can keep up the pace. Uh

137. 1:26:50

     but like one of the core innovations is this technology that is called chain signatures that is developed inside of near. Um what this technology allows is for near smart contracts to have private keys and uh the way how it works is that it's powered by the multi-arty computation network that have that are having the shared secret and then this shared secret is is actually the is is

138. 1:27:14

     kind of like the core secret for all of these uh private keys that are derived. But fundamentally what this allows us to do is for the near smart contracts having these keys means that they are able to authenticate themselves. These can be like API keys for call of the APIs or alternatively they are able to have wallets on different blockchains and these wallets on different blockchains can become like treasury accounts for people who are willing to move funds inside of near and outside.

139. 1:27:48

     That's why on top of chain signatures we've developed a bridge that is called omni bridge and uh uh and this is like the the proper properly designed bridge. This is like a next step after the rainbow bridge that was developed uh previously but it was supporting only ethereum mainet and near. And once we have you have this this super powerful system that allows you to move assets

140. 1:28:09

     from any chains to near then suddenly you understand that any asset is able to exist on near or is or like it just just exists on near. It means that any D5 primitive that you are going to build on near whether it is a swapping settlement protocol or it is a lending protocol or it is Walt or anything else prediction market. Now suddenly these uh these applications are all becoming natively crosschain because they're able to work with all of these assets. That's the

141. 1:28:40

     core part. That's the core innovation that led us to this model and um um super happy for uh like for that moment in time when we started to figure out how to how to deliver this and I mean all right. Yeah. you you early on realized that, you know, we're we're going to have to solve interoperability. And so I'm just curious, you know, from the the perspective over at Thor Swap, did you guys take a similar approach to kind of, you know, obviously, Alex, you know, you guys you you talked about chain

142. 1:29:14

     signatures and omni bridge and sort of these layers, you know, that are built on top of some of the underlying infrastructure for the interop. What what was the approach that you took over at Thor Swap? You know, Allan, what how did you build this? You know, you guys have been around a long time as well and I and I see that there's probably multiple paths that ultimately get us to a similar destination. Can you describe and then ultimately you guys ended up implementing uh near intense underneath.

143. 1:29:41

     What is give us a before and after picture of Thor Swap, you know, before and after near Intense and welcome our new guests to the panel guys. Welcome on Allan. Okay, sure. Um yeah, I'm sure Alex can you know go on for an hour about um intents. uh but you know as I think to break down the um hopefully in in you know in a simple way um you know crosschain technology has come a long

144. 1:30:08

     way um since you know DeFi summer right so I think uh when we first started building on top of chain um at the time it was trying to adopt a improvement from the traditional sort of atomic swaps model where it was peer-to-peer and the limitation was it's just to find liquidity on the other side um so often um the solution was reliance on like wrapped bridges. So you can only have like a wrapped representation of Bitcoin for example on Ethereum rather than the

145. 1:30:34

     real thing, right? Um and so blockchain basically borrowed from the unis swap amm model. So essentially it's native assets native asset. Now um you know I think we've kind of come full circle with intents where whereby it is still um you're able to get uh you know um sort of like atomic swaps right but there is like you know market makers and solvers on the other side that actually

146. 1:30:58

     meets you you know um in time with good price execution um with real actual liquidity and native assets. So um it was kind of a no-brainer for us to integrate near intense you know because there was a mature technology and we're able to see that our users will be able to benefit from um you know trades uh with good uh pricing and and and exe you know speed execution um and the rest of really for us is what's really important is just like I mentioned before um

147. 1:31:25

     allowing users to you know do perform these swaps um seamlessly uh you know in in one transaction without relying on you know uh like centralized counterpart studies and you know without needing to KYC and uh losing custody of their funds. So yeah that was quite quite key to us and I think ultimately you know this is the way we're going right and to extend that you know you you'll be able to build better uh interoperability by

148. 1:31:50

     connecting you know native native asset to native asset swaps crosschain with uh say liquidity on you know those chains or like smart contract calls on those chains. So it's yeah there's a lot more to to go but uh I think you know we keep mentioning the the phrase multi-chain future you know you know for many years now and we're very much in a multi- chain presence you know and it's thanks to technology such as nar intent and you know other crosschain protocols so we

149. 1:32:14

     can connect everything together in a very seamless interrop way I see we've got a special visitor here on Alex's side a lovely cat Anna Viphop welcome to the show Allan thank you for the in-depth answer guys we want make this a more collaborative panel. Feel free to kind of jump in, follow each other up. It doesn't have to uh come back to us. We're celebrating an intense day, the first one powered by near intense. Um Anna, the CEO of Cal Swap, By from Socket, guys, welcome on.

150. 1:32:44

     um would love to hear your perspective on the state of the crosschain world and specifically what you guys are doing there with regards on cow websites to routing me execution and then from the socket perspective on abstraction and kind of making the experience more clean and then would love to just get into a bit of a brainstorming session if anyone disagrees or wants to debate happy to do that as well guys thank you for being

151. 1:33:09

     here welcome to the show thank you so much for having us. Yeah. Um I can just start giving a very very short overview and then later on we can dive deeper. Um but yeah since half a year a little longer essentially in Kosovo we have enabled this experience for users in a single interaction with the K swap UI to be able to not only do a swap but then also bridge over to a different network. And um we actually

152. 1:33:38

     started with integrating Banji um as our very first partner and then started to expand on it by also um integrating the intents. And um essentially what we do is um user just very in a very easy way is able to decide what tokens they want to receive on the destination chain. Um pick that and then in the background we pick currently what's basically the best price execution for them. this is being shown to the user and then in a single interaction with our UI they can um sign

153. 1:34:12

     the transaction and it's being executed on their behalf and yeah so basically the idea is to really make it simple not having users to wait and coming back later but being able in one go to exactly decide what they want to do and then have the piece of mind that eventually it's going to they they receive the tokens on the target chain.

154. 1:34:30

     Yeah. Um, makes sense and and big fan of cow swap and near intense over here. I I love uh to use both of them. Um, fab I got a question for you, man. Um, you've you've been around, you know, and seen the evolution of a lot of crosschain infrastructure over at Socket. H how have things developed in recent months?

155. 1:34:49

     It feels like we've kind of moved from some different architecture models. You know, you had mint and burn bridges, you have intentbased bridges. Give us a sense of how things have developed in recent months as we go across chain.

156. 1:35:01

     Yeah, I think um not just like recent months, I would say um like bridging was sort of like pretty much close to being like a solved problem in the sense that we we had technology that could connect two different blockchains together.

157. 1:35:19

     That's why like for us we were focused on like how do we now make products that feel like you are just interacting with assets without even knowing what chains they are on. People just often want to buy BTC in a fully self-custodial manner. They don't actually give a fuck about the BTC chain itself. Like they don't need to give a fuck about it.

158. 1:35:38

     People just want to buy assets. Uh and I think the technology is at a point where you can do that. And I think the interesting part about how the space has evolved is all of us have realized that there are different solutions tackling at like different you know uh taking different trade-offs uh for a particular segment right. So there's a line of like spectrum and people just like lie at particular points in the spectrum and I think what

159. 1:36:01

     we realized was that hey ultimately combining all of them under a single abstraction layer is what people actually want. So that you know sometimes maybe going from a particular chain to particular chain for a particular asset there might be a certain you know type of bridge uh that is best suited for it. Maybe when you're trying to send $10 million, you do need a, you know, wrap and mint sort of model. Uh, but when you're sending $10, you don't, right? So, I think like

160. 1:36:30

     ultimately that's where we settle where you can almost think about what we do as sort of having this like off-chain order book that runs, you know, sort of globally and people just like send in orders and we match them through maybe near intense, maybe relay or maybe like any of the other mint and one bridges, even native bridges, even CCTP. For us the job is to provide the right abstraction so that users don't feel the pain about you know swapping or bridging

161. 1:36:55

     you know it's really the same thing guys kind of zooming out here from each of the specific protocols and thinking about the the problem space uh we we had this thesis about there there's going to be thousands of of chains L1's L2s um you know there's going to be all these app specific chains they're going to be very specific for use cases this was kind kind of right kind of wrong like Hyperlid kind of had their own L2 lighter has their uh you know app specific chain but a lot of the other

162. 1:37:25

     ones kind of have slowed down in terms of their success simultaneously there's also been a consolidation in terms of the way people are thinking about L1's you know there's the L1 premium from the in investment perspective has really gone down the consolidation of user activity has actually consolidated to less chains how do you guys think about where you guys are placing your focus as as as as far as almost like chains or or

163. 1:37:51

     ecosystems to bet on, right? When it comes to your technology stack, where you want to uh implement and integrate as well as just generally how you're thinking about the evolution of the space as a whole. Was the modular kind of idea wrong? Is do we really just need a couple really good chains? Are we going to get a lot more uh of kind of app specific or use case specific chains? How do you guys think about this especially as it pertains to you know

164. 1:38:16

     the rise of institutional adoption too right we've got tempos the arcs the plasmas these kind of stable coin chains etc there's a lot of these different kind of permissioned setups happening too it almost takes me back to 2017 2018 enterprise blockchain era right um and that sort how do you guys think about this development where do you guys see the kind of quantity and quality of blockchains going forward um from from

165. 1:38:41

     the builder perspective Ive um Allan maybe we can start with you guys and love to get a more uh uh interactive debate going here. Sure. Um yeah, like I previously mentioned, we started off uh trying to solve the problem of connecting Bitcoin to uh Ethereum, right? Uh and now, you know, we support many of the UTXOs. Some call them dinosaur chains. Um but still a lot of users, a lot of holders, right?

166. 1:39:05

     And a lot of new chains popping up like you said. And um and I've also seen, you know, talking to to different ecosystems, uh you know, during different market conditions. So I think it's all about liquidity, right? Um and sometimes you know if the if if if the market feels bearish maybe some ecosystems are worried that hey you know liquidity is exiting the ecosystem but I think ultimately know connecting um different blockchains especially to

167. 1:39:29

     bitcoin which is you know like the dominance is so high right that's where majority of liquidity is I think ultimately you know what we want to do is connect ecosystems and liquidity um you know in a decentralized manner so there's always decentralized rails so if your ecosystem um like say you So if you don't have USDC, USDT stable coins then um deployed and you know that's like you

168. 1:39:52

     know it's a very difficult um uh issue for the chain right but you know if you have these centralized rails then users can come in from Bitcoin from USC USDT which is a large you know source of liquidity um so really can help boost your ecosystem. Um so yeah I think ultimately um and and likewise if you're a new protocol like you know if if you can't afford to say oh I need to have you know all the centralized exchange listings for my users to be able to access my token then you know having interoperability and aggregation

169. 1:40:22

     allowing you know any users with assets from Salana Bitcoin Zcash ETH um which majority of users have to be able to you know directly go to your token or your ecosystem is a huge benefit. So um I think you know regardless of institutions or consumer rails there's always demand for this and everyone ultimately benefits from interoperability.

170. 1:40:44

     Yeah I mean go Alex go first. Yeah. Thank you. From my point of view like I think it's it's very straightforward that um that the multi-chain thesis is is actually what is the the type of the world where we're living in. Uh humans are always curious.

171. 1:41:02

     Humans are always going to continue to innovate and uh creating proper infrastructure to help them to innovate is the actual uh very positive thing to do. Um and uh the amount of startups that were launched because of uh angelist uh is insane and it increase the increase this uh this thing and make it a little bit more available u for everybody. I think the whole point of crypto is making things accessible. You know, banking the unbanked, you know,

172. 1:41:33

     permissionless, trustless, you know, all of that stuff. Uh these are very deep into our DNA. So why we should limit people to a single chain. We need to have a very robust solution that actually connects the chains and make it very uh easy for people to uh get exposure to everything that they want and then let the people decide, let the market decide, let the proper product find their product market fit and then we're going to be living in a much

173. 1:42:03

     better world where uh all of these different things are accessible to everybody. I would say um the answer is not that black and white, right? It's not either there's just going to be one chain or there's going to be all chains. Um I do think there's definitely going to be a couple of very competing chains. And I think that's desirable. You don't just want to have one blockchain ecosystem

174. 1:42:26

     that wins them over everything else, but you want to have that competition. you want to have that um maybe niche where one blockchain is significantly better in one use case and another in a different one. But I don't think that we're going to have a 100 different blockchain ecosystems that are all going to be equally relevant in the future. So while it is good to keep them interconnected, I do think if you have

175. 1:42:50

     limited capacities probably if you focus on the major 10 or whatever you you basically cover the majority share of the market. So I would say there is definitely an explosion but there will be some dominance by some ecosystems and by covering those majority once you cover them like 90% of the market.

176. 1:43:13

     Yeah. I mean if you really like zoom out there never has been a time in history like today where we have BNB doing its own thing and actually that thing working out. We have Tron doing its own thing, Polygon doing its own thing, Solana doing its own thing, Hyperlquid doing its own thing. They're all pretty successful in their own sort of like use cases. Never before this has been the

177. 1:43:36

     case. Never before multi-chain thesis has been this rock solid in production as it is like today, right? I think um I used to think about this a lot of like what will the future look like and where I sort of like narrowed down my thinking to was that we are going to have something like state bubbles like it's not like chains are really just like platforms chains are like accounts

178. 1:44:00

     almost and what makes chain special is what unique state that exists on that particular network and people will want to build on that network to access that unique state in atomically that's the only reason why a chain should exist, right? Why why base is valuable is because Coinbase is going to push some of their proprietary features onto that network and people that are building on base will be able to access it. Same for hyperlquid. Like the reason you build on Hyper EVM is so that you have this

179. 1:44:32

     special connection to the core order book that is hyper core. So honestly, I think in my opinion, it's going to look like state bubbles where you would have these like sort of like themes and sort of chain sort of targeting narrow use cases and all the players that want to build for that use case will want to like stick together because of the network effect it creates. A really good example of this is like Tron and Polygon and what they're doing with payments,

180. 1:44:56

     right? Once you have like retail users using the chain for payments, you have on and off ramps, you have exchanges, it's really hard for any other thing to like you know come and sort of defeat that network effect no matter how strong the tech is. It's because all like to have a successful payments app you need all three of these layers to exist be highly liquid and all of all of those things. So my my thesis is like state bubbles uh chains will go apply like

181. 1:45:23

     theme ccentric and people that want to build in that like sub sector will sort of like work together because it's mutually beneficial to do so. Yeah, go ahead Andy. No, I just want to talk about apps because I I feel like uh I was just using onchain stuff like last week for a ton of uh moving around. end of last year, I I had kind of like changed my entire portfolio. I had so many wallets across so many chains and all these things and like just doing the

182. 1:45:54

     experience on Salana versus Near versus Ethereum versus L2s versus like nonem, it was just like so different and vastly unique and then you like get on something like on your mobile phone like a phantom or a base app and it's like also very simple and like and also very different than actually having like a ledger or a treasure out and like you know clicking every single thing. I'm kind of like a OG kind of like uh security nut. So I don't do anything on

183. 1:46:18

     on hot wallets all all ledgers etc. bad opsec here but that's the state of affairs and and so when I've um kind of came to realize this that I must not be the only one who is thinking about how how each experience is so different from like uh one another. So like there's all these UX gotchas that kind of forces you to to like learn how to operate whether it's reading a block explorer on one chain or a different type of chain whether it's operating with the different approval functions. I'm curious like what you guys think are are

184. 1:46:50

     the biggest gotchas today that forces users to kind of learn more and and do more than what they really should. Is it chain switching? Is it gas? Is it bridging? Is it the approval functions? Is it uh you know failed transactions?

185. 1:47:03

     like where are we kind of still struggling when it comes to this application and intentbased interface um and how do you guys see any uh progression there either previously or going forward um Anna maybe you can start yeah I mean it's interesting points you bring up from our perspective really the one that we were trying to tackle next was like this interacting between different networks as in bridging experience experience had been horrible

186. 1:47:33

     in the past, right? Before we started having aggregators, it was like users not knowing what would should I be using to switch from this my tokens from this network to another one. So many different ones. Um uh do I swap a native token? What what are the available tokens that I can receive on the receiving network? How do I get gas tokens into that wallet etc.

187. 1:47:53

     like that was just um time consuming to do the research and then on top of that depending on what bridge solution you ended up using also just time consuming and for some people probably anxietyinducing until you actually start receiving the tokens on the destination chain. So that in my view was kind of the the biggest hurdle that needed to be tackled and now with bridge aggregators that has significantly improved. Um I

188. 1:48:20

     had a hot take on one of the points you mentioned. I don't know if people necessarily agree where you mentioned one thing could also be that people have issues with setting approvals etc. I think um that that might be hot take but I'm I still am worried that the majority of users today obviously there's the OGs who are more taking care of what they actually do what they sign as in transaction but I do believe the majority of users at least of the new users that

189. 1:48:50

     come in you can't really expect them to do that due diligence themselves like they just want to have a smooth experience and they want to make sure that whatever they do on chain is secure even if they don't fully understand what is underlying transaction and how it's different.

190. 1:49:04

     So you're saying that new users are just infinitely approve they're approving this infinite amount of tokens in their wallet and they're not really paying attention to like how much they're approving for a particular smart contract is my assumption. Yes.

191. 1:49:17

     Yeah. This is a default behavior for almost all of the DeFi applications, you know, just to get the infinite approval and and you know, that is something that we can't really blame the new users, right? Because most of them are just kind of clicking. Of course, we want them to know about self- custody and take these proper precautions, but I would go out and say, you know, that's

192. 1:49:34

     primarily on the app builders. And so, you know, I think that's a great example, but I wanted to build on that and say, you know, given the new state of affairs, the new interop solutions that we have, all of the all of the the work that's been done, you know, over the last few years in the space, what do you think for the new app builders, you know, there's this these neo banks, all of these things. What are some dos and don'ts in this multi-chain world? I

193. 1:49:58

     think everyone sort of agrees we're going to have multiple chains. They're all doing pime primarily pretty well. So, we're in a multi-chain world, but maybe not, you know, millions of chains. There's like a few dozen that are doing particularly well in this in this kind of multi-chain world. What are some dos and don'ts for app builders? Maybe we can go around the horn again. What would you guys suggest to the new cohort of developers that are building in this space?

194. 1:50:23

     I just can go ahead and mention one thing that I know I can't name who is doing this but obviously we have also been talking to a lot of trap players in the last year and one thing not by everybody but one thing that came up is that some of them are trying to really abstract gas away so they rather charge the users directly than having to explain to them why they spend their gas on a transaction. That was definitely one thing that they're trying to abstract away as much as possible.

195. 1:50:54

     Great that people are not paying any gas on the near intense and the only thing that they do is only signing the uh the messages uh with their key. I think the core thing what people need to focus on and the builders is on on like maturing technology. Even the fact that we have gas stuck transactions, even the concept of slippage which is pretty um alien to like traditional like the ordinary

196. 1:51:25

     people. Um these concepts are very very low level. When you're opening a browser, nobody is asking you to verify the PGP certificate of a particular site by your hands, right? Something inside is is is doing this. And uh we are at the level of the maturity of technology that this is by default available in all of the browsers right like there is no other chance that this is not working.

197. 1:51:49

     So I think that the great user experience is an indication of the maturing of the technology and people need to and for the builders my advice would be take a look at what what is the your closest competitors on the web two site. Take a look at the user experience. try to deliver the solution that would have at least these type of a user experience.

198. 1:52:14

     Um, I'm not saying like completely hide hide uh blockchain from the user, but try to make it at least that simple because in the AI in the AI world, we're going to have just the massive explosion of all of the applications. And we are all competing not only with centralized exchanges and with traditional finance, but we are competing with Twitter and Elon Musk because he's just occupying our time and the time of our users. uh it the tension is all you need. It's not

199. 1:52:46

     only about the AI, it's about the distribution and the way how you're able to earn money. So make great user experiences and and this is super super important. I think um my hot take is RPCs were a mistake. Um I think I think on on our end we've abstracted away the gas. Users don't even send transactions anymore. We send it for them.

200. 1:53:13

     You don't even need like an RPC to interact with Bungie because we have like APIs u you only need like a wallet to like sign with your private key and that's pretty much it. I think what we see happen across a lot of other applications in the space is that they overly rely on RPCs and sort of like look I think a little bit of rant here but in the last few years in crypto all of us like have started using all of these like decentralized services the graph and like whatnot and what has seen support tickets happening across the

201. 1:53:45

     space is that people go and complain about something and people just say oh it's you know the graph is not synced go and complain there right so In my opinion, you should build APIs over pretty much every interaction you do with the blockchain. Go vertical end to end, right? Uh do not blame the RPCs, do not blame the chain, do not blame like congestion, all of those things. Uh pay

202. 1:54:09

     like fix uh take like fixed cost from the end user and sort of handle the gas volatility for them. If it costs like $.1.1 today, $22 tomorrow to the end user it should cost like some sort of like average of that it is a lot of like complexity that you will need to take inhouse when you do this but the output from this would be like a massive multiplier in the UX effect.

203. 1:54:34

     Can I can I push back on that? Like I I think you know I is that the verticalization of this right is is that how we end up with you know I saw the other day like we went down because they didn't pay their Amazon AWS bill and and you know if we have like these decentralized unstoppable things it it seems to me that we wouldn't fall prey to some of those centralization bottlenecks right if we verticalize do we end up implementing a lot more of those what do you think

204. 1:55:04

     I think in my opinion Like it really depends on what you're building, right? So if you're building a blockchain, please build it in a decentralized fashion. But if you're trying to build an app, don't play this like halfass game of like being centralized and decentralized, right? Like build like a consumer app.

205. 1:55:19

     Go vertical, go end to end. Let blockchain be the decentralized ledger. You build like a fully like you know vertically integrated uh app for the end user. So you don't have all of these external dependencies calling causing like failures for your end users.

206. 1:55:35

     Yeah. Yeah. Guys, we are um we are uh pushing forward this idea of neo finance, which is effectively the convergence between legacy finance and DeFi. It's not fintech. It's not DeFi. It's not it's not centralized exchanges. It's very much so. Users want a forgot password button. Users want a customer support agent. Users don't want to manage uh seed phrases. They do not want to be responsible for Anna's infinite approval button. They just want to be able to do things in a way that that they're used

207. 1:56:07

     to. And so, it's kind of like this like the the infamous DeFi mullet coming back again, right? Where it's like Coinbase um with their uh Bitcoin backed loans via Morpho is a great example or even some of these really good uh applications on your phone that that allow you to borrow against crypto and spend it in the real world like EtherFi, etc. Um, and so we're pushing forward this idea that this is really where the space is going based on the

208. 1:56:32

     institutional adoption that we've seen as well as just like the general user trends. And so we've spent a good bit of time talking about how we kind of think about uh the the user experience, the application experience, building the applications, but from this lens of kind of it's always been finance, but it's not just this set of onchain DeFi powered users that is going to take this industry to where we all want it to go,

209. 1:56:55

     which is ultimately tokenizing every asset and bringing every asset onchain. it it's doing it in in a new way. Guys, as it pertains to Neo finance wi with regards to intents as well as building applications in an abstracted fashion, how do you see the future of applications being built as well as kind of user onboarding and generally where users are going to be congregating, what their what experience they want. talk to

210. 1:57:23

     us about this intense landscape which is ultimately powering this Neo finance stack under the hood as it relates to each each of your companies. I'm curious if you guys jive with this term if you have push back on it. Talk to us about kind of like if you think that this makes sense. Um Anna, maybe we can start with you and then go to you Alan.

211. 1:57:45

     Yeah. Um high level I mean I completely understand where you're coming from. I would honestly say from an application perspective, it really depends on whether you are aiming to be the part where you do user onboarding or not. I think this is not necessarily the direction we are currently taking. So I can't speak so much to it. I think a lot of user onboarding takes place in wallets. Um there's a lot of um it's a

212. 1:58:09

     very saturated market to some extent already. Like this is not necessarily the direction we are taking. Um in that sense I see the the DEX market rather as something that is being integrated by Dexis by partners etc that will do the onboarding and then they choose underlying what is the infrastructure they want to provide including swaps um and will choose the provider because users in the end they will just use what is the easiest access for them so I don't necessarily think in

213. 1:58:43

     the future user who who are being onboarded by Coinbase wallet, whatever, are going to go to different blockchains and then do their own research and see, oh, those are all the different dexes that exist, and I'm going to go to whatever UI I like the best. But they're just going to go and swap whatever is per default integrated in the wallet that they're using. That's my my thought on this.

214. 1:59:08

     Alan. Yeah, I think out of like the panel here like uh Thor swap, we're probably the most applications like on on the spectrum of applications. Um so I think we previous talked about vertical stack, right? So we are very much the consumerf facing stack. Uh we actually built on top of swapkit uh which is our back end spun off you know B2B uh aggregation uh you know SDK. So that in turn, you know, you

215. 1:59:35

     know, integrates like all of the crosschain protocols. Um, but all of this is to say that our users don't really know about this, right? And what we trying to offer them is basically alternative to centralized exchanges. Now, um, you mentioned, you know, the D5 model like CD5, right? And I think basically it's like there's different ways to like do cut that hairstyle, right? So, um, you know, since we've been around for 2021, it's really there's always going to be some degree of counterparty risk, but what it really

216. 2:00:03

     depends on, I guess, what your motivation is, right? For us, it's really about financial sovereignty. So, I think we want to help our users be able to um interact with blockchains and interact with crypto. Uh, obviously, you know, in a way that's like as seamless as possible. So you know trying to strive for that centralized you know experience um UX you know having chain abstraction and wallet you know um

217. 2:00:24

     abstraction but at the same time um I think ultimately we want to offer them you know as little counterparty risk as possible so that you know to some degree um we're trying to lead them to understand hey it's your seed phrase right you know it's store locally or you got to back it up locally because this you know if it depends on where you lie on the screen spectrum you can say like oh okay we'll abstract the wallet part so maybe it's stored on server side you know for you and you just sign up, you know, using your email or something.

218. 2:00:50

     Now, that might be really easy, but I think, you know, when things go wrong, they really go wrong, right? So, uh what our users use us and apps for, I think, is uh versus say, you know, centralized exchanges is basically like a trustworthy brand or an app um that's built on top of trustless systems. So, when something goes wrong, they can, you know, open a support ticket. Um and you know it's our job to figure out like okay how what what happened and we can

219. 2:01:16

     reach out to the protocols or or we'll find a technical solution to that. Um and uh yeah so I you know in a way I don't know if that shapes what you mean by neo finance but I think you know every cycle um I I I think you know we're trying to make it easier for users but also I feel like we shouldn't underestimate users right because you know in the in the past um maybe in prior cycles you actually have to spend a long time even explaining what a

220. 2:01:42

     crypto like what bitcoin even is what mining is you know how Ethereum smart contracts even works but now it's almost like for a lot of users is is it's already common knowledge you know so um I think it's about kind of meeting in the middle you know taking experienced users um uh you know off centralized exchanges services um and and just purely you know offering them a you know a UX that enables them to do things

221. 2:02:06

     crosschain multi-chain um mean but also you know onboarding new users um in a way that's like you know seamless and then they can become you know um more experienced users over time because that's how they actually gain financial sovereignty right you know your your keys your coins um you understand what your assets actually do um and uh yeah the risk if they understand more of the risks that's involved with that um they'll I think they'll be likely more likely to stay around and actually you

222. 2:02:31

     know become you know um experienced users I I find that difficult Allan like I want I'm I have self- custody because we like we grew up with it right but I I just know that like like these users that are coming in now they want the forgot password button. Like they want to type in if they have an issue and you know their number all of a sudden it's not what they think it it's supposed to be, you know, there's a customer service agent or an AI agent that can like help walk them through it. You know, do do

223. 2:03:03

     you do you guys still believe in self- custody? Do you think that, you know, the the incoming wave of users that we all, you know, expect, do you guys think that they're going to prioritize self- custody the way that we've, you know, kind of held it in high regard? We I think, don't get me wrong, I know it's important. I believe that it's important, not your keys, not your coins. The banks are, you know, doing fractional reserve lending. They're literally taking our money. They're

224. 2:03:27

     giving it to someone else. But like, you know, h how can we help get them into a world of self-custody without all the complexity and and kind of giving them the user experience that they they already trust and they're very familiar with?

225. 2:03:42

     I think of this a little bit like, you know, 100 years ago, electricity was not that common um everywhere and then electricity is pretty harmful and pretty risky thing, the same as the self custody. M but if you will figure out the standards around it we'll figure out the sockets and unfortunately we the world didn't do a good thing the good job about figuring out the single standard of a sockets um but uh we're going to pass this but like once you're going to have these

226. 2:04:13

     standards uh then it's just going to work and then everybody are just going to use it um I think it is about the the kind of I already was saying this but it's about the maturity of the technology. I think fundamentally uh being able to do the for example uh crossborder payments in between any two humans in seconds is a great feature.

227. 2:04:40

     Something the traditional finance doesn't have. An ability to fully control your funds and do whatever you want to do with this is a great feature. A feature that decentralized finance doesn't have. So from that standpoint, the neo finance uh concept is something that I'm absolutely fully aligned and uh I'm kind of pushing this forward uh the way I can with building the infrastructure for this thing. Um I'm a little skeptical about the Neo because in the end of the third film, the Neo

228. 2:05:11

     died. Um but uh in general I think this is going to be a better version of the of the world uh with neo finance and I think that uh smart people will be able to move the technology to the level that it is safe to use for everybody. Um and uh this world um is going to bring us lots of innovations and lots of uh new exciting things uh the same way as electricity did to all of us.

229. 2:05:43

     curious. Yeah, [clears throat] self, sorry, just to jump in here, self custody is really one of the core fundamentals for me for why blockchain is relevant, why it's so much better than traditional um technology. And there's yeah, I agree with the statement that there is ways of um allowing self-custody and adding some safe guard rails into it. Um and it's also highly important. I mean maybe

230. 2:06:07

     bringing up a little bit of another topic that is kind of scary. I don't know who's all following these recent kidnappings etc that are happening in France. So that would also be an argument to say oh why um self custody is risky because in a way it's like a new way of how you can put a gun to someone's head and immediately allow them to do an $8 million transfer that in a traditional banking system wouldn't work. Um but there's ways right like

231. 2:06:33

     there's delay modules etc that you can build in that whenever a transaction is larger than X um it has to be either verified by someone else or it will take at least X amount of days or whatever you want to put in before the transaction actually gets executed things like this there is ways around it and we need to work on this and we need to provide good UX but it's possible to build good UX around these safeguards

232. 2:06:57

     and that's what we need to double down on but I don't think the right way is to just compromise on self custody. I think like from our point of view, people don't necessarily, you know, care that much about self custody. What they care about is being global from day one.

233. 2:07:15

     And that is something Tati cannot provide because you need to set up accounts follow like whatever laws and uh regulations of the countries you want to operate in. But having a wallet, you just need an internet connection to access it. So I think like it's it's properties like that that it's really is exciting for people from what from when we chat with people a lot of teams that used to operate with centralized exchanges are actually moving to self custody because sometimes centralized exchanges just block their

234. 2:07:47

     accounts and then they and their funds are then stuck and they are talking to customer support for like 5 days right so I think it's all of these like other reasons um than like maybe security that will sort of like push people towards it. People care about the security aspects only when they've seen the dark side of the picture when they don't have custody. They only value it. They they

235. 2:08:13

     only value self-custody once they've like seen the dark side. Otherwise, they don't really like get it. I think all of us OGs, we are here because we have seen the dark side and we sort of believe in self-custody. But for the new entrance, it will first start with being global, being able to, you know, access your funds anytime. You will never be blocked. Like that's a statement. It's less about self custody. It's about never being blocked by any of the apps

236. 2:08:38

     that you're trying to use. And then, you know, people start getting onboarded and we go from there. Uh I think quickly on the neo finance term, I have debates every two days about what company is a neo bank and what companies are fintech.

237. 2:08:53

     Maybe I'm too dumb. Uh but I think you know like I still don't get the differences. I think the custody aspect is the actual differentiator there. You've got like cryptonative neo banks that are non-custodial but provide a very simple similar UX to like a Revolute and then you've got a Revolute, a Venmo, a PayPal that are fully custodial. I think that's the key difference between the the two.

238. 2:09:13

     At least that's how we're thinking about it. I think they're having the same uh debate in DC right now. That's what's holding up the market structure. Bill. Yeah, guys, I know we're a bit over here. Uh last thing from me for you guys, we went around in circles in terms of interrupt and in terms of how to like build applications that are abstracted across tons of chains across tons of uh to build the best UX after all the bridge issues that we had in 21 and 22.

239. 2:09:38

     Uh even you know they still kind of persist. We just keep coming back to intense and so this is like an intense day special here um with near intense guys. Is intense the endgame for crushing? Have we finally conceded to the fact that intense is the best form of crosschain um usage for swaps for uh payments for everything or is there a different form of this kind of abstracted mechanism design which uh is

240. 2:10:06

     still contending to be the best for crosschain? Let's go around the horn guys. Let's get your take on if intents are the endgame here. And I'll I'll build on that one sec. I if it is the endgame, just tell us what's next, right? like how do you how do you continue to scale and what comes after if in if interrop solved and it is intense that's the endgame what what happens now I think I'm happy to take this first I

241. 2:10:30

     think intense is the endgame um because it suits us the perfect centralized decentralized sort of like solutions right intents are great because from a end user perspective you are signing something high level you don't need to know how blockchains work you don't need to know how transactions work, you need to understand approvals like whatever.

242. 2:10:52

     There is some guy in the middle who will sort of handle all of that complexity and then there is an onchain smart contract that will validate that what you wanted got done. So to me it's the simplest and the most efficient form of like translating what the user wanted to get done from the user point of view and sort of like take it like fully on chain where it's fully verifiable. Right? So

243. 2:11:14

     for me it's not just the endgame for like uh bridging but also swaps but also lending borrowing and in fact if people want to do new finance the right way I think this is the way to go. people will just come and say hey here's my money deposit it such that it earns like 6% APY some other guy will like figure it out and if he can't the onchain smart contract with this reward right so I think intense make intense is the right form factor and almost can be applied to

244. 2:11:39

     any application I'm very aligned with this there is very few things that I can that I can add to this um uh I think that intense in itself is just like a design philosophy is we were to I I was pushing this build a bit better user experience and stuff like that. Well, intense is a better user experience because like you don't need to know go into the nitty-gritty details of how things are working and uh so super fully aligned with this stuff.

245. 2:12:09

     Um and uh yeah I uh if the intents that how we like if if we're referring to intense protocols the protocols that we have right now um uh maybe these are not going to be successful maybe there will be other protocols that are going to come in uh but I think that from the design standpoint from the architecture standpoint uh this philosophy is is the right way uh to go forward.

246. 2:12:40

     Um let me add just for the purpose of making the discussion a little more interesting add maybe one constraint like obviously I'm in favor of intense um but I also think they have some limitations so I wouldn't sign a statement that it's an improvement for every application um because um you you're taking also assumptions on behalf of the user right like in the case of a simple dex swap you're basically assu assuming and

247. 2:13:11

     that's that's an easy one that user wants to receive the best possible price. Now you make it more complex for example right you're doing an intent on crosschain you already have more assumptions you have to take you you have for example different bridge providers so now you need to you have this tradeoff between speed price and security so how do you know what your user wants there are many different things there there is not only this there are also

248. 2:13:41

     different things that whether you're going to get whether the user is going to get black liquidity or But whether his uh uh whether the provider is uh is stable enough so that his transfer would not be blocked like it is all multi-dimensional optimization thing and it is definitely something that an application need to understand from the user uh like what actually he wants and

249. 2:14:05

     uh this needs to be put into some kind of form of a uh of a request. Exactly. But how that that's the point right like different users might have different preferences and then it becomes harder to take that assumption on oh yeah we should not we should not take this assumptions the the protocol should be working without this assumptions it's the UI that needs to translate it's either user need to click through all of the options like and say okay I I'm

250. 2:14:35

     against like liquidity I'm okay with a little bit longer swaps and stuff like that or there will be an alternative UI in a chat with AI understanding what you want and but on the on the infrastructure they will use the same protocol but I would say that makes the UX worse again right if in order to do this you first need to set up this is my profile and then again it doesn't really cover all niche niche cases right because you might be okay if my if it takes one

251. 2:15:05

     minute longer I it's not worth it for me to save the $10 but if it only takes 10 seconds longer I'm willing to you know like it's like the it's a granular tradeoff and I think to replicate this right you can also say okay it doesn't matter if it's about $10 like we just take the decision on behalf of the user but this is just to to showcase that intense also have some limitations that

252. 2:15:29

     we also that then makes the UX a little bit worse again and that's just something to keep in mind like I would not say intense is just the solution for everything like you it's depending on the use case the simpler the use case the more obvious it is that intense inside the solution. The more complex it get, the more assumptions you need to take or work with a user to understand what really their preferences are.

253. 2:15:49

     This is pretty unusual to hear from the inventors of the intense uh that intense is not the solution to everything. No, no, we have always maintained that. I think for for swaps it makes a lot of sense but there has been this hype at some point where it was in everybody's word for every kind of application and I don't think intended the solution for everything.

254. 2:16:14

     Ladies and gentlemen, thank you guys for joining us. It's been an awesome session and I'm glad that we got some spiciness there at the end. I was waiting for that. Um Anna Liveob, Alex Allen, you guys did great. Thank you for joining us on this intense day special. Um, and keep coming back to this idea of where we're going and and just knowing that abstraction and intense based designs

255. 2:16:39

     are pushing us in the right direction and you guys, which each of your individual companies are doing so in a way that I think is certainly shaping the future of crosschain as well as just better user experiences on chain. So, thank you guys for joining. It's been an awesome session and would love to have you guys on soon again.

256. 2:16:57

     Thanks. Thanks for having us. you guys. We'll see you next time. Mahalo. Much love. All righty. Good sesh there, Rob. Yeah, that that went much better than much better than the first panel. Yeah. Awesome. U some some new faces, some familiar faces, and uh apps, applications, applications, applications. The one thing that I didn't get to get to for uh Thor swap and cow swap was that they're that that

257. 2:17:29

     Anna made a good point of it is that the distribution strategy is no longer DeFi power users. In my opinion, it is much more around getting integrated into these neo banks into these fintech applications and being a part of like the NEO finance stack from the underneath full kind of DeFi mullet style. And then on the abstraction part, really understanding that from the work that uh um Alex and Vipob are doing with

258. 2:17:54

     regards to really making it easy for the underneath, right? Because a lot of us are still kind of struggling with the crosschain experience, but it's it's it's much better than what it was a couple years ago. Uh a and I just anticipate it to continue to get much better.

259. 2:18:08

     I I think you're right on the broad swath of infrastructure that's being built. you know, it's going to be difficult for these teams to to go out and find their own distribution, but there are exceptions to that rule. You look at Near Intense 10 billion dollars of pure retail volume just flowing through their own user front end.

260. 2:18:27

     Like they're not integrated, you know, they're starting to get integrated into some of these aggregators and whatnot, but primarily the the bulk, you know, the line share of their volume comes directly through their own front end. So yes, I think these neo banks um you got Etherfi and and again I I do believe that legacy banks are going to be forced to integrate and innovate and and

261. 2:18:50

     ultimately pass along a lot of yield and where they where is that going to come from? I think a lot of that's going to come from onchain. So obviously someone partnering with like a Wells Fargo to you know implement or Morpho implementing into a Coinbase like these are primary examples of how much you know distribution is out there that you can unleash through some of these integrations. At the same time it you know you can put a lot of hard work into getting distribution probably get you know billions of dollars of

262. 2:19:15

     volume flowing in as well. So there's there's multiple paths to heaven. Yeah. Yeah definitely man. We got our next panel coming up guys. Stay tuned. Stay in. Stay with us here. First panel was a success. Second panel is coming up here. Panel number three. We're going to be talking about the rise of DeFi and Neo Finance.

263. 2:19:39

     More specifically, we're going to be talking with Royal from Templar, Kendall from Proximity, Block Damon, and Rishbos from Encrypt Trade. Guys, it's going to be a panel all about how Intense and Neo Finance come in together uh to make a better experience for all. Hi, and I'm representing Near Legion. O say more.

264. 2:19:58

     Yo, love what Near Legion is building. Supporting the vision. What's up, Bob? What's up, Coke? What's up, Lee Club? Wait and see. What's going on, guys? Uh, good to have you guys in. Um, yeah, I mean, we've got a fun next panel shaping up and it should be it should be a doozy, guys. Neo Finance is what we're going to keep pushing on and keep asking these teams about. So, yeah, looking forward to to getting them in, especially [clears throat] as you as you think about the app landscape and how

265. 2:20:25

     it's going to evolve because we're we're hearing conflicting opinions on this. You know, we've heard how you know there is going to be sort of this uh you know this one app you're going to be able to get some yield, but then again, you can't make it extremely simple where it's just hey, this is how much yield you can get. There's all sorts of parameters and it's about how much you want to pass back that complexity to

266. 2:20:45

     your end users and and this barbell between choice and simplicity is going to continue to arise like we're going to someone says someone try launching a chain live on stream. Yeah, we pretty much did that during the first panel.

267. 2:20:59

     I think somebody launched an ads memecoin. Do not buy the memecoin. Do not buy the ads meme. Buy the ads memecoin. I'm glad that we got some good uh I'm glad we got some good CPMs there for our clients though. Rob, you were saying yeah, I think like these launchpads I think are going to converge into the same way too. Like we see the writing on the wall. There's only a handful of crypto applications that have gotten product market fit. Yeah. There's, you know, there's teams out there now that

268. 2:21:28

     are verticalizing their product stack and and you have teams like they're going to have a launchpad, a yield aggregator, and a swamp function all underneath the hood, and they're going to call it a financial super app or a neo bank. And it like we're going to see so many of those. I just I hesitate to think that there's going to be one application that once the technology becomes commoditized, you know, people still continue to go back

269. 2:21:54

     to, you know, something like a hyperlquid when you have, you know, Rabby integrate hyperlids underneath or, you know, you have uh a financial super app where you can get all of the same choice, you know, in per swaps and and dexes. Why why go, you know, to a place that's only a DEX if unless you're just you're just a creature of habit and you're just used to going to that and that's the user behavior that you trust, right? Yeah, man. I think I really think that this distribution question is is

270. 2:22:24

     the big one to hit on on this panel as well as just generally how how these folks are thinking about from the Bitcoin from the Bitcoin side in terms of actual lending in terms of institutional uh DeFi with block damon in with encrypt trades um kind of privacy based models. It's just really going to be how do we get to a world where we're moving all assets onchain in the best way possible for users. And again, I'm just going to keep coming back to Neo Finance. So, I think that's where we'll start on this panel. We've

271. 2:22:55

     got our guests ready to go. We're going to bring them up and we're going to get this show on the road. Panel number two, it's coming in hot. We've got the DeFi panel uh talking about Neoance and more. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the show, guys. Good to have you on. Royal Kendall, Alex Richbos, welcome to the show.

272. 2:23:18

     Absolutely. No ladies on this one. I think it's just Pepes and and gentlemen. So, great for having us. Great to be here. Thanks for being here, guys. We just had a great panel uh with Apps and Intense. We had Cow Swap, we had Near Intense, Thor Swap, uh and socket up there. And we were kind of, you know, describing this this, you know, multi-chain landscape as you you heard Andy and I talking before you guys jumped on. You know, we're we're also unpacking this neo finance landscape, which we believe

273. 2:23:43

     is this convergence point. It's the evolution of both the legacy financial banking world as well as kind of the old guard DeFi world, which some of it's found product market fit, but a lot of it hasn't. So, that's kind of where we'd like to start is in a multi-chain world in this like new maturation of of teams and projects where we're kind of forced to find product market fit. I'm curious about, you know, what you guys think sticks around and what you guys think is is left behind. And so, you know, maybe

274. 2:24:13

     that's where we where we'll start, but we'll also get a quick intro. Um, I think uh why don't we start with Royal and we'll go around the horn. Feel free quick intro about yourself and then uh and then yeah, tell us what you think stays behind, gets left behind, and what you think sticks around in this new era of DeFi.

275. 2:24:44

     All right. Uh, hey, thanks for having me on, guys. I'm the Royal Fool. I'm the, uh, co-founder of Templar Protocol, which allows you to borrow against Bitcoin or any asset on any chain without trusting centralized intermediaries.

276. 2:24:58

     Um to answer your question about uh what's sticking and uh you know what gets left behind here um you know I still think that we are very very early as far as transitioning uh the entire financial system onto crypto rails. Um and I believe that uh ideologically there is a place both for kind of like cippherpunk decentralized uh finance uh that was like the original spirit in which Bitcoin was built uh and Zcash has really kind of resurged under that banner as well. uh in addition to

277. 2:25:44

     um there's like an undeniable like title wave of assets that are coming on chain uh both in the US and internationally. Um so I think there's going to be a place for uh there's going to be a place for both. Um, so I don't I don't think it's necessarily uh like my focus isn't like on what quite stays and what gets left behind so much as it is um you know where where are the biggest opportunities.

278. 2:26:19

     Um, and I think some of the biggest opportunities uh in DeFi are a combination of hitting the assets that aren't EVM native or don't have a, you know, a Salana token. Um, you know, Bitcoin, Ripple, Cardano, Doge, etc. Um, and in addition to that, a lot of the RWAs that are coming on chain. uh and that's going to require um a number of updates to some of the different DeFi protocols. Um so if I were to actually answer your question on what I think might lose some ground and

279. 2:26:59

     what might gain some ground uh in the area of lending uh in which we specialize in I think that in the long run isolated modular uh designs are going to win out over uh poolbased models both because uh pool based models are constrained by government will kick off guys. Welcome again coming on chain cycles etc that are best handled uh in an isolated framework. uh not to mention

280. 2:27:49

     in my opinion the uh superiority from a riskmanagement and contagion perspective. Cool. Thanks. Uh so Alexinder, I'm a chief product officer at Block Demon. Uh prior to that I was with Ledger uh for uh three four years and before that I was a capital markets guy with with NASDAQ uh mostly the technology side. Uh I'm going to take a capital markets view to your to your question because I think it's it's what I it's what I know well and I think there's actually a good fit

281. 2:28:32

     there. Uh what what stays I think it's a two-sided problem, right? you need a supply and demand equation that works fundamentally right so on the demand side I think you know obviously retail adoption will continue to push uh so you'll have you know your existing players like crypto.com and Coinbase then obviously a lot of the traditional uh players that have the eyeballs today right your Erades your Robin Hoods

282. 2:29:04

     um your Schwabs your Fidelities ities of the world that have a very large captive audience with you know with a lot a lot of wealth advisory type of services. Uh and on the product side, what you need to deliver to that audience um on the on the supply uh is uh is yield opportunities, right? And there's a wide range of these. I think they'll continue to evolve anything from lowrisk full-on staking capabilities, right? Direct staking solutions generating yield uh

283. 2:29:38

     to, you know, to lend borrow models uh to kind of more Kendall and risk trading strategies on dexes, uh your cash and carry trades, other potential, you know, long strategies. Uh all of this is start going to start to get more and more productized as we as we keep going, right? We'll start to fit into different risk metrics and will be delivered to the right audiences um you know based on certain classifications. These models don't exist today, right? Frankly in D5.

284. 2:30:34

     Yeah, thanks guys. Uh yeah, I'm Kendall from Proximity. Uh so what we do is we support teams building crosschain applications agents and more using primarily your intents as infrastructure. Um yeah so I agree a lot with what with what with what with what with what with what with what with what with what with what with what with what Alex and I've said there. Um, I think that like the biggest thing that's changing is we're seeing like the barriers to getting on I think happening

285. 2:30:51

     more through like you have a ton of fintexs and even banks that are going to start adding in kind of effectively crypto rails and they won't even look like crypto aspect of it um but easy way to get access I mean what hopefully will happen is products that exist on chain really start to prepare to product that's specifically kind of for you know seeing some interesting experiments at the institutional side USDA is a really good example here daylight's a new one that's kind of coming up that are uh you know really just early experiments in

286. 2:31:14

     that but you know as we like finally collap apps this like barrier between you know offchain and onchain thanks to you know things like genius bill and you know knock on wood maybe market structure I think that's where we're going to see um you know both both more experimentation and adoption of both the retail and kind of institutional side um with regard to DeFi y uh so I can go next yeah so a short

287. 2:31:38

     intro uh like uh so I'm building right now encrypt rate before this I was uh you know at Goldman Sachs I was working on the AI side over there for like two years. I've worked with teams like uh avail the data availability layer and uh yeah I started like doing encrypt rate trade like uh three years ago and to answer your question Alex and like uh I think everyone else has covered most of

288. 2:32:02

     the points but I still think like there are certain buckets that you can put uh the real utility of crypto or blockchain like uh obviously like there are stable coins which I think are the most valuable thing uh like the ability to transfer for assets like crosschain or like uh crosscontinent uh in a matter of seconds is still huge and uh I think it's one of the biggest use cases and uh there are other use cases like uh people love to like one of the major use cases

289. 2:32:32

     where people use blockchains or crypto is like uh speculation I think speculation is a very big use case and we are seeing this with all kinds of markets that are created like earlier it was memecoins from the retail side right now it's prediction markets and we see like institutional interest uh as well coming to the prediction markets and uh these kind of things like will evolve with time like there will be uh like more innovative kind of markets that

290. 2:32:58

     will be created and uh I think with time people will get exposure to them like every trading terminal every like they need to constantly evolve by integrating all these markets that are already existing or like getting innovated and when you have that front end which basically has all those things integrated like as you like right now your wallet is that front end. So most of the wallets are integrating prediction markets and already have

291. 2:33:22

     stable coins in them. So I think that is uh an ever evolving application which has the biggest mode in uh in in in my take like uh obviously like centralized exchanges are at that place but uh in if you see onchain finance like wallets have a very big mode in that scenario because they are like uh an entry point over there to the user and whenever user uh has assets over there then they can basically send it from there as well and if the applications are accessible from

292. 2:33:51

     the wallet it basically uh doesn't make the user leave that application and the wallets are moving toward towards a like a new uh banking application or a super app kind of a thing which allows the users to use everything from inside uh the majority of the D5 primitives from there and uh like the yield primitives the trading primitives and uh all these kind of things that are there so in my

293. 2:34:16

     take like wallet is one of those applications which has achieved that role right now. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Guys, we wanted to frame this conversation under the guise of this idea of neo finance, which is really this convergence point between DeFi and legacy finance. It's not fintech. It's not traditional finance.

294. 2:34:34

     It's not DeFi as we know it today. It's not holding your seed phrase. It's not necessarily using a ledger and clicking to sign off every transaction. It's really just usually mobile or in institutionalbased user experience uh with you know something akin to what you're used to from a a brokerage or a a mobile app. It's using DeFi underneath.

295. 2:34:56

     Alex, you know, you mentioned a lot of experience in capital markets and uh we know that a lot of these assets are coming onchain now through your work with blockchain and you guys are providing APIs and ton of different tooling for that to happen when it comes to this era of NEO finance as kind of like this next big step for the the onchain industry for for the blockchain industry covering tokenization, stable

296. 2:35:21

     coins, etc. Kendall covered quite a few of the other uh interesting credit credit vehicles USDAI and Daylight which are really focused on exogenous yields, not this kind of hyperlooping of CE DeFi that we saw with uh BlockFi and Celsius and Nexo. Really just a more uh sustainable path forward with the kind of institutional global T-W on on majors as well as their desire to get in into this asset class. Alex, kind of with that context in mind, what does this

297. 2:35:52

     idea of Neo finance as the evolution of DeFi mean to you? How do you think about this next set of of um applications and user experiences especially as it pertains to intents and the work that you guys are doing at block dam? Yeah, it's a great that's a great question. uh and I think you know the foundational elements are are are going to shift uh in the DeFi ecosystem to be able to support this momentum and the adoption by the traditional financial sector. So for for this uh kind of neo finance concept to really exist and

298. 2:36:24

     mature and continue to evolve. There's three foundational pillars. They're quite boring uh but they're critical right you need reliability. You need scalability and you need security. uh and without without those three things uh you know financial services do not do not function they they will not work uh and scalability is actually also a critical component because the the audience that we're talking about here

299. 2:36:49

     right like if you think about all the all the users of something like Erade right or you know the Morgan Stanley accounts uh that are out there it's very very different than the current footprint of what is what exists in D5 today uh so the scalability aspect is going to be critical. Uh so those are the three the boring pieces and then also regulation is very important there but it's not something that we can really control right that is just happening uh you know throughout the

300. 2:37:15

     maturity of the of the industry. Uh there's a lot of advocacy that's happening in that regard also an important component but I'm kind of taking more of a technical controllable aspect of it. So it's really up to us to build systems in a way where they're reliable, secure and predictable and scalable. uh and there is an exciting component to this as well from a institutional perspective from the kind of traditional finance perspective uh

301. 2:37:38

     there is a time tomarket aspect right so it's a very steep learning curve these user interfaces and these capabilities are quite expensive and uh quite timeconuming to build and evolve and put you know bring to that level of maturity uh so we're actually working on building some quite exciting interfaces that are completely pluggable uh into the existing financial services and financial applications that you see today uh and are directly working with

302. 2:38:03

     some of these players to embed that capability directly into their applications. Uh but again that comes with a certain threshold right like the these have to be audited right they have to be secured they have to be reviewed by their security teams uh tested at scale uh so it's quite a resource intensive uh and a time intensive process that we're looking to expedite and shorten that time tom market period uh from an adoption perspective uh it is

303. 2:38:28

     really an exciting time and an exciting catalyst for this and we're seeing a tremendous uptick in in usage uh and um actually uh integration uh from the larger organizations in the space and it it it will bring uh a you know outsized inflows uh into the crypto ecosystem.

304. 2:38:48

     And this is where also a lot of the liquidity aspects are going to need to be tested on chain uh to kind of look at that you know the the current uh behavior of some of these protocols and and systems and what happens to that at at a certain level of scale because as we know right you know outside of staking well even with staking sometimes right what we've seen with Ethereum and uh um you know the the um wait times to

305. 2:39:13

     kind of deposit and withdraw the liquidity constraints and some of the liquidity constraints of most the DeFi strategies uh that is going to come under a lot of pressure uh which simply means that there's going to be also symmetrical demand on the supply side right so more and more supply and the inflow of capital uh to be able to accommodate the retail needs um which just simply means that the infrastructure has to be robust on both

306. 2:39:38

     sides of the equation to be able to support this. Yeah, appreciate that perspective because we're we're seeing this happen more and more like for so long it was the institutions are coming, the institutions are coming. Well, they're here and they're integrating, right? And so it it it's validating in some sense that it means some of the foundational pillars, the reliability, the security, we we are there, but as

307. 2:40:00

     far as tactically integrating these two systems, you know, the the devil's in the details as as we get deeper and deeper into these integrations. And so, you know, Kendall, you mentioned private credit. Um, that's one of the asset classes that coming on board. We saw the New York Stock Exchange announced like they want to tokenize. They want to go 247 trading bringing US equity markets.

308. 2:40:22

     Um, and then, you know, we also see uh, you know, several more asset classes coming on chain. When that when the New York Stock Exchange made that announcement, it was very contentious on, you know, crypto Twitter. People were saying, "How is this beneficial?" Right? you know, if they come on, well, that's not really, you know, doing that much for some of the cryptonative assets, right? The bitcoins and the ETHs. They're just bringing equities on

309. 2:40:45

     chain. It's like, you know, they're they're improving their own internal efficiency. If they do it on a permission chain, what does that really benefit this crypto ecosystem we've built for so long? On the other hand, you've got Larry Frink and Davos talking about how it's important that all of this exists on one composable super ledger, you know, hypothetically who's talking about, you know, ETH or another, you know, predominant L1. How should we

310. 2:41:10

     think about these institutions integrating into our system? How important is it that they use an open permissionless chain? Is it is it crucial that it all exists on one chain? And would you guys, Kendall, maybe we'll start with you. Do you would you say this is them coming on chain? Is this a net positive for the entire industry or does this just benefit, you know, the efficiency of the New York Stock Exchange accounting layer?

311. 2:41:34

     Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I think the dirty secret about like all of the stuff that a lot of us have been building for, you know, for a very long time now is that it's pretty much all infrastructure. There's very few like real assets. I mean there's a few you know Bitcoin's amazing Zcash you know some of the layer ones and like and increasingly you know assets like a that you know support some of like some of the infrastructure right but like that primarily we don't actually have that many high quality assets that have come

312. 2:41:58

     on chain and I think what's really exciting is like now that is starting to happen and it's true most of it comes with caveats like we're not actually anywhere close to I think the the future we all still envision here uh but at the very least we do now have serious players who are responsible for issuing serious assets and also serious regulators that are taking this infrastructure we built very seriously.

313. 2:42:16

     They do believe it's like at least close to ready for prime time or components of it are. And so we're now able to like go up this this you know quality ladder of assets and I think that's ultimately what's going to like make Neo finance kind of live or die is like is it actually being used for high quality finance right um so that's that's one aspect to it that's why like I think it is it is very bright sign that this is happening I think the permissionless permission pieces is definitely very

314. 2:42:40

     important right I mean the I think the positive sign is some of the most serious players are pointing to like the value and benefits of like a permission permissionless underlying system Um, you know, I I don't have a whole lot of takes on like the permission aspect. I kind of thought we were sort of past that. I guess, you know, we'll never be fully past that. But at the very least, I think what is interesting, you know, you have something like Canton, which is like more on the permission side, but

315. 2:43:03

     there's actually already, I mean, in this, you know, even on like the intent side, you're seeing a lot of like bridges being built between permissioned and permissionless. And, you know, I think that the the devil will be in the details of like what does it mean, what is required to move from a permissioned to a permissionless system and vice versa. I mean, we've seen a few early experiments with this with like, you know, Ando launched a uh a permission

316. 2:43:24

     version of uh like fork of compound that like you had to be whitelisted in order to borrow, but you didn't have to be whitelisted in order to lend, which is really kind of an interesting hybrid. And I mean, this is where I think, you know, getting more clarity, like no pun intended, uh you know, with from some of the regulators is going to make a lot of reasoning about a lot of this sort of trade-offs much easier. you know, right now we are kind of very we're still in this gray area. Uh but you know, I think

317. 2:43:52

     the signs point to like we're going to be able to sort out a lot of this madness. And you know, again, like the TLDDR from everything I just said is like we need high quality assets. Uh and we need to be able to use all this great infrastructure we built, which is pretty much all it is, uh for high quality assets, both to create them, you know, to lend against them, to make them

318. 2:44:09

     tradable, you know, all these different aspects. I think these are great points. If if I can I would love to jump in for for one minute because I think there's an important distinction here that can drive the trajectory of the conversation further. I I love the permission permissionless discussion and it's a little bit kind of polarizing in some ways but fundamentally the way we look

319. 2:44:28

     at it and and for me for a while now it's not a black and white type of thing right I think per permissionless u capability and kind of where where that permission to permissionless spectrum sits is really a factor of scale at the end of the day right so you can have a permissioned ledger but when you reach you know billions of individual users how permission is that really like what are controls that

320. 2:44:50

     you're going to have and how does that how does that scale or you can have a permissionless laser like Ethereum right but then you know you can today set up a protocol in a vault with a whitelist you know of 10 participants right and and isolate that protocol and capability to a very constrained user base right and basically run a permission model on a permissionless ledger uh I think the important aspect of it is you know is

321. 2:45:14

     really scalability right like how many participants uh in the in the actual financial services do you want to support on an individual basis without intermediaries, right? Because current the current financial system is hub and spoke, right? Like we solve the scalability problem by introducing intermediaries uh into the equation, but having direct access to something is a is definitely a scalability challenge.

322. 2:45:37

     Uh and then uh it has to be composable, right? That's the you know that's the next piece of this, right? If if you have permissioned and permissionless networks that are that are composable, right? that you can actually move assets from one to the other under certain circumstances in different settings. Uh that makes for a much smoother user experience but also a much wider ecosystem. I think that'll be the value proposition of moving things onchain versus keeping in the legacy infrastructure.

323. 2:46:04

     Royal or resp? Yep. Uh go ahead. Oh, sorry. Uh I was just adding that uh yeah I also think that maybe the privacy aspect is also very important over here. Uh I think uh a lot of infrastructure right now is like transparent and obviously like I don't think like when institutions are coming over there like uh lack of privacy is going to be support them. So we do need a proper uh

324. 2:46:36

     layer on top of existing blockchains or maybe uh like right now new L1 are coming which are fully private by nature. Maybe those are the kind of solution which institutions are looking and there are there are solutions like canton network, Aztec there that are working on that direction but maybe like we are providing such a kind of a solution where maybe existing blockchains can have privacy like uh because most of the liquidity is there in the existing blockchains like Solana

325. 2:46:59

     and Ethereum. So I think I definitely think that is also a very big missing piece for uh you know solving the whole problem of that. Yeah. Um I think I view this uh permissioned versus permissionless uh question uh like with the framing of the Hegelian dialectic like uh originally there's this thesis of like centralized permissioned finance that's tradfi right and then Bitcoin comes out it's this cipher punk antithesis of the trady model where it's truly trustless

326. 2:47:35

     permissionless uh etc. Um, and what we're seeing right now, I think a lot of your framing around the neo finance is what you're seeing like a synthesis of the two, right? Um, so what I think that actually looks like this synthesis um is using uh a permissionless layer as the base uh and then you can add permissioned modules, networks, protocols, etc. on top of the base permissionless layer. Uh so the whole design space is not scale free. Um I

327. 2:48:17

     believe it was Alex that was talking a lot about scalability. Uh and I think it's important to realize that um the design for different levels of scale changes right you know at a base layer you do want permissionless because that's how you access the entire world.

328. 2:48:36

     You know, that's part of the appeal of crypto is that you can get billions of users on board, whereas, you know, in a permissioned model that doesn't really quite scale as well. You're inevitably going to have a ton of fraud and bots that you're going to have to fight uh in this uh you know, permissioned silo. Um whereas like a in a permissionless base, you can build on top of that, you know, your different walled gardens and the tempos of the world. uh you know

329. 2:49:03

     permissioned forks of open protocols uh and even in the context of you know you can have a base protocol like a D5 protocol on top of a permissionless layer that has like permissioned vaults on top of it. So the underlying protocol itself could be permissionless but then you could have a specific vault that requires whitelisting um or that people follow certain parameters. So, I think that um there's there's going to be this synthesis of permissionless cipher punk

330. 2:49:35

     crypto and uh permissioned regulated uh finance that are going to be uh you know kind of joining together to create uh a new experience and there's going to be a whole spectrum of uh apps for different use cases. You will have the cippher punk use cases that are completely permissionless and decentralized. Uh and then you'll have the completely permissioned ones like all the way up to

331. 2:49:58

     like CBDC. Those will exist in some parts of the world. Um but I think a lot of uh finance in the future is going to be somewhere in the middle. Um so yeah, I think that's the exciting uh the exciting uh opportunity here is to you know help shape like everything in the middle. Um, yeah.

332. 2:50:20

     Yeah, I think that's where our focus is, too. I think I mean, we've swung so far to the DeFi side, stayed very far away from the kind of CBDC side if you're going to take it to its fullest extent of the extreme, but it's really somewhere somewhere probably closer to to the DeFi side than closer to the CBDC CBD CBDC side in the middle, but over there somewhere, which actually brings me up to a interesting question for you, Kendall, uh, with through the chain

333. 2:50:45

     abstraction work that you guys are doing at Proximity Labs. How much execution detail can you actually hide and how much like abstraction can we actually build into these applications? Thinking about this thing from from this uh from the context of the spectrum that Royals brought up, you know, how much control do users really want? where how much execution detail can you hide and h how

334. 2:51:07

     much extractions can you do to make this neo finance vision come to life to make it easier than just you know clicking on all of the uh DeFi applications but also not having a full custodial kind of uh interface where do we kind of find the middle how do you think about this it's a great question I mean I think it it definitely depends like when you're talking about like the complexity you can hide it definitely depends like which layer of the stack you're sort of talking about so uh I think near intense

335. 2:51:32

     is like first big success when it comes to like simplifying the UX across chains came mainly from that specific piece crosschains, right? Like if you're a user and you have assets on one chain and you want to either use an application, another chain or even just get acquire assets on another chain that was kind of fraught with you having to use like multiple different systems and applications in order to accomplish that. Uh and also you had to like learn how different chains work. So you had to think about like how whether you have

336. 2:51:56

     gas on that chain. You to think about like do you have the right wallet for that chain. uh that there was just a lot of like added kind of mental load for for these users that like basically reduced a lot of like crosschain activity. Um the near intense team which I cannot take credit for because this this this is all them and Alex and his team. Uh they did an amazing job actually building this layer of abstraction for most users where you know using near intense is a simple

337. 2:52:19

     example which is like okay I have soul I want to buy hype and you just go there and you just do it and you know you can use your Solana wallet or your hype wallet or I mean they have like any number of kind of options that are available there and they abstract all the complexity of needing to make sure you have the right gas tokens on the right chains and needing to think about like how different these networks are.

338. 2:52:36

     And I mean even better example is probably like Zcash to you know XRP or something like couldn't be more different uh in how they're constructed right and so that's like the first step right is like for people who already using crypto who are already in one chain have one wallet but uh you can of course like take that a step further too like on the one side you can abstract uh

339. 2:52:53

     building for developers where you know if you wanted to build this kind of either chain agnostic or even multi-chain uh which I think are different um type of application then that involved having to I mean as the the other guys in this call black dam etc. know all too well. Uh there's there's a lot of work that has to go into that. Uh connecting the RPCs, you know, uh like learning how the chains work, uh learning different smart contract languages, different virtual

340. 2:53:17

     machines. And um yeah, I think what's really cool about, you know, this a lot of this chain abraction tech that we that is now somewhat mature is that you really can just like learn one set of APIs in one system and then you can get a lot of a lot of interaction for free. So that's on like the developer side.

341. 2:53:32

     And then I think you know finally on the user side like we're going to see basically you know my my thesis still is like yeah everyone's kind of banking app is going to be a route to them being on chain and I think that like the those banking apps and those fintexs are going to be the ones who are going to be adopting a lot of this chain abraction tech on behalf of their users in order to basically completely remove that from the experience entirely. They may even

342. 2:53:54

     hide the fact like they might have you know Revolute will probably have Revolute USD USD whatever like their stable coin and they probably won't even call it that. they'll just call it USD, right, as far as like the user experience goes. And then that Revolute user might want to pay someone on like Venmo or like Robin Hood and Robin Hood will have Robin Hood USD. And in the background, what'll happen is there'll be like a swap from like Revolute USD to Robin Hood USD. Uh but the user will

343. 2:54:17

     just be like, "Oh, my friend has Robin Hood, I have Revolute. I sent them a transfer and everything worked out, right?" I think that's that's kind of like where we're going to go. and like all of the kind of you know block crosschain like cross asset you know different DeFi protocol all that stuff will be abstracted away and it's just basically just a lot of work by you know teams like Alex and Near intense and and black team and and a lot of the people on this call to you know roll up their

344. 2:54:41

     sleeves and and uh and build a lot of infrastructure but you know after many years of of uh letting this all bake we're we're getting really really close. Yeah. Um I I think it it's really exciting to see this play out because you know this is something that we interacted with at the base layer and I really like Royal Fools uh you know the way in which he's describing kind of the base layer here. We can all interact with it. Kendall you're talking about

345. 2:55:08

     abstracting some complexity. Before you guys joined it was like okay we've got you know this dimension of choice and simplicity. On the one hand we can give all the users all the choices in the world. It's going to be very complicated. on the other side we can be a very simple but we don't really pass along all those choices and so I'm just curious as you guys are thinking about risk management here like you know because we did see the CDFI you know

346. 2:55:32

     2021 2022 a lot of people went to jail because the money disappeared it all ended up in Docoan's Teraluna anchor farm paying 10% that was real easy there wasn't much complexity about like you know what the yield was or where the choices were it was like you know you get 10% that's it Right. And if there's a financial super app or a NEO bank that's like, hey, here you can earn six and a half%.

347. 2:55:57

     That's it. There's no more like there's no more choices or or complexity baked into it. How do we manage risk on that sort in that sort of paradigm? And if you guys have insights into how the Revolutes or the you know the Venmodes or you know how how are these guys thinking about risk management from this perspective um open question feel free any anyone to touch. That's a great question. I think there's also a

348. 2:56:22

     parallel to to the previous uh question that Kendall did a really great job kind of going through. Uh to me, it it's really a matter of financial incentives and where do you draw the line from ease of use, right? From abstractions from of the complexity from the user to the service provider and and there's risk baked into that as well, right? So, if I'm just, you know, if I'm just going

349. 2:56:47

     long on Bitcoin, right, and holding it in my own ledger, you know, my own ledger wallet, right, with with self-custody, that's great, right? That's a very easy model. I know the risk, right? Uh that the risk is all with me as an end user. And on the other side of me is a is a public network, right? Uh however, if I want to log into my, you know, Neo Bank account to my Revolute account and and to your point,

350. 2:57:11

     deposit and get 8% returns, they're pooling capital, right? They're they have different strategies that they're leveraging behind the scenes. They have liquidity concerns and constraints that they need to manage, right? They have millions of users that they're doing this for. Uh the risk is with the provider. Uh now the question is how much are they charging the user to manage that risk, right? To provide that

351. 2:57:32

     service. uh to uh you know to to manage that capital. Uh and and there it's really just an economics model and you know as long as there's a very varied user base with different risk acceptance and you know different levels of uh being informed you're going to have different models that that fit that. Um the interesting thing for for us though this is where I love being uh on the infrastructure side and really building

352. 2:57:58

     building the tooling around this that from our perspective it doesn't really matter that much right even if you look at the intent model and kind of the solver ecosystem you know that ease of use that's provided by by the solvers you know it's still that you know the solvers are still entities right they still need to manage uh the capital and the liquidity right they still need to interact with multiple protocols to manage their own

353. 2:58:21

     treasury after they've serviced the you know the the the intents that they're servicing it still needs to scale. So they will still need the RPC nodes, the connectivity, the the wallet management capability, the bridging to to manage their operations effectively um to provide that service to the user. And it's just a matter of like where does it sit like how much are we abstracting away for the user? How big of a service

354. 2:58:45

     is the solver providing and what tools does the solver need to be able to function effectively at scale? Yeah, if I can jump in on just the you mentioned uh Luna and in general like the uh risk of you know different yields in finance. Um, I think that this has been a problem since, you know, the beginning of the beginning of money, right? Uh, how do you properly manage risk? Um, and this is something that is in no way unique to crypto. There's always going to be people who are greedy

355. 2:59:22

     and are picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. Um and at various scales both at the crypto Luna scale and at like the global financial system scale as you get more centralization and everyone's piling into the same yield that concentration creates a lot more risk. So um what's really important to ensure that you have a robust financial system uh from like a riskmanagement perspective is truly free markets uh and the ability for those free markets to

356. 2:59:56

     function when something fails and something else to come back instead. Uh and the idea being that you have uh different sources of yield that um hopefully are isolated from each other and are generally um uncorrelated to the downside. Uh and that when there is a huge black swan event that the contagion from that is minimal. So I'm sure we're going to have more credit blowups. We're going, you know, we had 1010 and stream finance recently in DeFi as a microcosm of the um of the Terra Luna situation.

357. 3:00:34

     That's going to happen going forward. But what's important uh especially in crypto is that you have uh systems that are robust um and antifragile enough to survive those type of events that will inevitably happen. Kendall, anything to add there from the perspective of um just kind of understanding where this is all headed?

358. 3:01:00

     No, I mean I think that that sums it up, you know, quite well. Um yeah, it's ultimately I think this is where each of like the kind of application developers is going to make a choice based on whatever user group they're targeting is like, you know, there's there's going to be a lot of these applications that appeal to different people. More sophisticated people want more flexibility. Less sophisticated, you know, people might just want like set it, forget it. The big risk of set and forget it is you don't know what you're setting and forgetting and you know it

359. 3:01:23

     could blow up right and I mean you know um yeah it's gonna be a mess. I mean definitely our focus is on just giving the tools to the developers to uh you know navigate all these choices. I think like uh it one thing that can be really nice you know in the spirit of of what RF said about like decentralization is like if we can create a market where there are going to be a lot of a lot of choices that and then we make it really easy for developers to provide those choices to their users then we at least

360. 3:01:48

     like create the the landscape in which you know you can have a lot of like hopefully good choices definitely there'll be some bad choices but hopefully a lot of like good choices and you know a lot of kind of customization based on you know user needs and you know if there's anything if we're going to throw AI in here here it's like I I think AI is making it a lot easier for people to evaluate a broad landscape of complex choices and decisions. Sometimes poorly, but in a lot of times really well. And so, you know, still still hopeful that there's a future where

361. 3:02:12

     like, yeah, we see blowups, but blow-ups are a lot more contained and, you know, we make the landscape as competitive as it can be. Love it. I think we can't we can't forget about liquidity in that context. Uh, another very important aspect and something to think about, right? like we're we're creating the tools and the capabilities to drastically increase the number of options and and products that are out

362. 3:02:39

     there today available to the user. Uh the challenge of course is each one of these products needs to have certain liquidity requirements to actually be viable and and uh and manage risk in that regard. Um and I think that that that needs to be a conscious thing, right? because to support a much wider surface area of available products, you need to to extend your capital profile and capital allocations. So the

363. 3:03:02

     floodgates really do need to open on both sides. And you know, this is really how we think about the problem. And we, you know, we're just as deliberate about building infrastructure for uh inflows of capital from the large institutional.

364. 3:03:18

     This is to be able to actually properly create the liquidity capabilities required for this growth in in in asset profiles as we are in building the infrastructure to bring the the retail demand and in some cases also the institutional demand that is going to be to be buying and investing in these products.

365. 3:03:36

     Gentlemen, thank you for joining us on the NEO Finance special for the intense day. Uh it's it's been a great uh conversation. I think we we can all agree that the space is changing direction with the influence of legacy finance coming onchain and really trying to tokenize as many assets as possible and bring and bring more sustainable reliable yields on chain doing it in a private compliant manner operating

366. 3:04:01

     somewhere in that gray area in that middle ground um through through each of the work that you guys are doing. Guys, thank you for being here with us today and uh hope you guys have a great rest of your day and uh shout out to the intense day special, guys. Thanks everyone. Thanks for having us. Thank you guys.

367. 3:04:17

     Cheers. Bye. See you guys. Bye. The Neo Finance episode concludes. Panel three is done. Rob, what' you think of that one? Yeah, I uh you know, I think we're getting a lot of validation on this thesis. Obviously, [clears throat and cough] it's it's still um there's still a lot of open room to see how this is going to unfold, but I I think one thing for sure, and that's, you know, the the integrations are happening. We know the institutional flows are here. It's a matter of how exactly we see this

368. 3:04:50

     integrate in the near term. Um I I tend to think that we're going to see a lot more permission blockchains. We're going to see a lot more, you know, closed loops uh without the composability besides intent. I I think intents are actually one of the things that are relatively low lift that can connect these two like even a permissioned world like you heard you know Ripple and Zcash

369. 3:05:12

     right two vastly different worlds but you know that goes to show that that's a you know proof of concept that permission blockchains can connect to public blockchains not with full composibility that we eventually want but we will get there. So, just like, you know, we've talked before about how we're not huge fans of stable coins because we're crypto anarchists at heart and we believe in Bitcoin to rule the world. Eventually, like stable coins are a stepping stone to Bitcoin as the

370. 3:05:43

     global reserve currency, just like permissioned blockchains are the stepping stone to a to to one public, you know, an open permissionless blockchain. Guys, I gotta give a shout out to Near intense day at ETH Denver. Wednesday, February 18th from 12:00 pm to 5:30 p.m. local time at the Livestock Center at the National Western Center in Denver, Colorado at the main event. We will be there at E Denver doing the show. We will be We'll be at Near

371. 3:06:12

     intense day. Guys, get there. It's on Luma. If you search near intense day at ETH Denver on Luma, you will see the event application. Guys, we're going to take a super quick break and then we've got our next panel with VCs Avichel, Hib, and Matt discussing investing in the intense stack and more. We'll take a quick pause and be right back, guys. Should be a good one.

372. 3:06:46

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378. 3:10:22

     Go anywhere onchain instantly with relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now. All right, gentlemen. Investing in Intense Hib Aal Matt. Guys, great to be back here. Matt, I think it's your first time on the show. would love to just get a quick intro about who you are, what you do, and then we'll get right into it.

379. 3:10:48

     Thanks, Andy. Uh, I'm Matt Kummel. I'm the chief commercial officer for the Near Foundation. Um, I joined over the summer in July. I have been in crypto since, uh, 2021. I spent a long time at DCG. Uh, prior to that long career in consulting and traditional finance, hedge funds, banks, and and that world.

380. 3:11:05

     So, uh, this is the place that I'm most excited to be. The whole concept of intense is the reason I joined uh, I joined near. So I'm really excited to be talking about this today. Beautiful JENT. We're going to talk about investing in the intent stack where where we see value acrewing generally how we're thinking about it.

381. 3:11:23

     We we framed this to a set of application builders earlier on the show and just kind of speaking about how it seems like the industry has conceded that intents are indeed the endgame for interoperability for payments for crosschain swaps and just generally the best form of bridging that we've seen since the inception of basically the multi-chain world. We kind of had a good debate about it going back and forth

382. 3:11:45

     about there's a lot of nuance to to that take. You guys are obviously very very familiar with Near Intense and just generally the crosschain landscape. I'd like to get each of your takes on why or what you believe the the current status quo for interoperability and for crosschain uh value acrruel. Right. I think a lot of these applications in the in the interop stack have struggled from kind of being in in the middle kind of

383. 3:12:09

     you've got the base layer the L1's acrewing a lot of value and you've got the applications that own users acrewing a lot of order flow as well. in the middle has been kind of a sticky spot for a lot of teams. How do we think about the current state of the status quo of investing in this kind of in the middle stack with regards to intents and I'm sure we'll go from there. Hib you kick it off.

384. 3:12:34

     Yeah. So, we're longtime investors in Near. Um we actually invested back in 2019 it must have been in the seed round and near's obviously evolved quite a bit since then. Well, you you did this year in your metastable backable. Correct. 18. Was it 18? Yeah, it must have been 18.

385. 3:12:49

     That's right. That's right. We we did it at 18, too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [clears throat] So, I think we were in that same we did that round with you and evolve. That's right. And uh at that time, I mean, Near was totally different. And so, Intense was something that really evolved out of the explor the product exploration of Near in that time. And it's one of these happy accidents. often happens in startups is that you start you know trying to do something and you

386. 3:13:10

     end up finding this auxiliary thing that actually ends up becoming the the real thing that that consumers want and and pull out of you. So from from our perspective investing in intense um like our original investment in near was not predicated on intense but it's now become increasingly clear that as you mentioned a lot of the middleware you know if you're investing particularly in like a solver or uh you know these are these are not where the value is primarily acrewing. If you think about

387. 3:13:36

     the Zcash rise over the last few months, so much of that the rise of Zcash has been captured one obviously by Zcash itself, second by Zashi which is the application that actually routes or that sources the demand from users. Um and then third near itself which facilitates all the solvers coming together and actually settling transactions through their MPC network. But although there are other startups and other companies

388. 3:14:00

     that sit in between somewhere along that stack, I basically agree with your description that it seems demonstrabably most the value sits either at the bottom or at the top. But you don't really want to be sitting in the middle is Yeah. Yeah.

389. 3:14:16

     I think I think about it a little bit differently. I think there's like four players when you're talking about an intent. Um, you have the app and the or the wallet that owns the owns the end user that owns that that that relationship with the consumer. Um, you have the intent protocol that is coordinating and solving and finding uh the path between the the user's desire and uh and the liquidity. You have the

390. 3:14:40

     solvers, you know, and then you have the the other L1s and protocols that are there. And so um having looked at this hive like the app absolutely like deserves to get a lot of the a lot of the value acrruel here because they own the relationship with the user there's a lot going to the solvers as well. If you can if you can run an efficient solver we have 40 plus solvers running on

391. 3:15:05

     intents. Um there is a lot of value that gets captured at at that level. Um there's a little bit in that middle piece in the intent protocol. We're trying to to figure that out right now. Um we have done 10 billion dollars 11 billion dollars of of trade routing through there and um and we're working with our partners to make sure that that we get the right uh part of that. And then yeah, the protocol the L1 at the at the at the very bottom is is actually not getting as much as as you as you

392. 3:15:32

     might expect. They're kind of getting gas fees and that's about it. Yeah. Sorry. So when I was saying the solver the solver network in what I was referring to as the bottom layer which is actually like managing and routing all of this that would be near in this case not the chain that you're moving from or moving to those chains obviously are getting almost nothing.

393. 3:15:49

     Yeah. Yeah, I think there's there's a market structure thing here too, which is in a lot of markets this is the case where you sort of like I I can't remember if I published this or if there's an internal thing, but I've talked about this on a bunch of podcasts where you kind of have this like x-axis which is users on one end and and like heavy capex infrastructure investment on

394. 3:16:06

     the other end and you put a y-axis on it for who captures the value and you do get like this U curve in many markets. So you know uh Nvidia captures all the value, AWS which has a hard capex problem captures all the value and Facebook will capture a bunch of value on the front end or claude you know will capture a bunch of value. Claude code will capture a bunch of value and if you're like in the middle and you're systems integrator you're you're in a tough spot. I think there is there are

395. 3:16:27

     two things though that are sort of asterisks on this. One is um even if that's the relative shape the the total size of the market is a consideration here. Right. So if you're talking about a really tiny market, yeah, like the middle is not going to capture that much. If you're talking about something that's like trillions of dollars, actually the middle could still be like a $50 billion company, right? So, so one thing to think about is like what is the scale of what you're talking about? So even relatively speaking, okay, great.

396. 3:16:52

     Bitcoin is going to be worth 50 trillion, but actually that might mean that something that that we would sort of call middleware might still be worth hundreds of billions of dollars, right? So there's a scale question. The second thing I think to note is that that's not universally the case. this this sort of U-shaped curve. Um, and I think it's a little bit of a function of how fragmented are either ends. So, one example here would be Stripe, which is Stripe captures a crap ton of value. And

397. 3:17:17

     it's because it's so fragmented on both sides, right? There's millions and millions of apps app developers and people that need to do this sort of processing. And on the other side of it, if you're trying to do this at global scale and you're trying to do this with real users, the the payment methodologies are are extremely fragmented, right? you've tried to move money in in a legacy system around so everything just gets hyper hyper fragmented or like um Twilio used to be a good example of this the market structure has evolved over the last 15

398. 3:17:40

     years but um you know so many so many app developers on one side and so many so many places to route the messages and like the nuance and complexity of doing that is to do it reliably is quite hard and I think you can make an argument that intents look a little bit more like a stripe or a Twilio than like traditional middleware which is if you believe they're going to be millions and millions of developers trying to route stuff through networks and actually there's going to be you know thousands

399. 3:18:04

     and thousands of chains between L2s and L1's and specialized chains and permission chains yada yada you actually have a fragmented market on both sides which actually suggests that maybe intense could capture a lot of value in the middle and and near as the routing mechanism looks looks a little bit more like a stripe or a twilio um than it does like a traditional middleware company.

400. 3:18:24

     You guys are nodding so I assume nobody disagrees with me. I mean, I think I I I just feel right now it seems like based on what Matt said, like there's just been like like the qu like the issue now is okay, how do you meaningfully monetize this? Like like there's a moat from the perspective of like Near has some of the best chain routing infrastructure, right? You can go from Zcash to Bitcoin to Salana to

401. 3:18:48

     Ethereum to all ton of L2s, other non EVM chains. Um but but but but as as a user like am I gonna is my interaction with this application going to change if there's a a uh additional fee added and like how that kind of uh plays out from the perspective of like is there a moat that is monetizably defensible or is it just because right now it's a really great spot to go and do this crosschain

402. 3:19:13

     action but if there's if there's you know somebody else who has a very similar application with smaller fees you know it is there going to be a discrepancy in terms of like where users want to go. I guess like what I'm trying to ask here is like is it just the best product on the market right now for people to use to go from Zcash and you know kind of like these silos or is it a really really good product that can also then start to like charge and actually

403. 3:19:36

     create a sustainable kind of like revenue source from this? This I mean the story on these kinds of things is always that you get to scale and you make it up on scale. um it's very seldom the case for I mean unless you're Coinbase that you're going to have super high margins and that's how you're going to end up building a a big business. Um if you look at the big exchanges in the world, you look at the Binancees, the OKXs, the Bybits, they have very low fees. They they compete on fees there. There's there's constant fee competition. Uh but that doesn't mean that these are small businesses.

404. 3:20:07

     Actually, they're tremendous businesses, extremely profitable. So I think the story for Neo Intense is no different than that. is the demand for assets moving crosschain and basically the kind of you know the problem with dexes historically has been that okay you can do spot dexes spot dexes are great but they're constrained in the number of assets they can list if you go on Binance the kind of assets you can trade is basically everything in crypto but if

405. 3:20:33

     you are on you know uh if you're in DeFi and you're trading on unis swap you can only trade assets that are tokenized on Ethereum so you can trade WBTC you can trade ETH obviously reps, some there's some of that, but the further down you get on the list once it's no longer Ethereum based, you're kind of screwed or the liquidity is so thin and it's so annoying to have to wrap and unwrap and figure out exactly, you know, what you own and how to get it

406. 3:20:57

     out that what really people want is the centralized exchange experience, which is just I'm actually trading the underlying. And that's I think part of the reason why Near Intense has taken off is it's so simple. It's you're actually trading the underlying and that's what people want in a spot experience.

407. 3:21:14

     Yeah. And this this uh this holds true to the neo finance thesis that we have here which is sort of this maturation of a lot of the old crypto infrastructure that never really found product market fit. And then on the other side, you know, the legacy finance that we think is going to be forced to innovate whether through regulation or or the disruptors that are out there.

408. 3:21:31

     Ultimately, people want the centralized exchange experience. But thinking about value across the stack, you know, we we do have some data behind this. Uh Matt, like you mentioned, 10 to 11 billion dollars of volume flowing through Near Intents has generated $18 million in fees. Uh this over 500,000 unique users in the last 30 days, uh 100,000 users in the last seven days, over 16 million total swaps. So I I'm curious about how these how the market structure evolves when we have sort of

409. 3:22:03

     this multi-dimensional market between like this intense protocol and the solvers for instance as one as one dimension of this like where how do those negotiations take place? Are are we running these auctions behind the scenes and and it's a matter of you know these solvers holding inventory and this is how the market structure shakes out or you know what are these are these kind of like B2B like people sit down in

410. 3:22:27

     a room they hash this out face to face in terms of negotiations h how do you think we see this market structure evolve you know as we continue to see intense protocols scale more and more with more volume it was funny you know just just taking a clip at clip from what Hib said, you know, we'll make it up on volume. Um there's there's a funny thing there where it's like we have not been taking fees on a lot of this stuff. You know,

411. 3:22:52

     we've been creating the relationships, creating the network and um you know, it was mentioned earlier sort of the Zcash moment was the was the catalyst for for intense for us. Um I was really worried that um the analogy I used and this is kind of a gross one, but I thought it would be like a snake swallowing a hamster, you know, and you would just see this lump of Zcash thing going through and then we would have collapsed back to where we were. And I think the team that I work with here at Near did

412. 3:23:16

     such a tremendous job of [clears throat] capitalizing on that moment and finding the partners and workingers and building relationship. So a lot of it Robbie is onetoone negotiations. It's not exactly where I want to be. I'm trying to get to more standardized relationships and and more, you know, fair sharing of value between between the different parties that are that are in the ecosystem. Um, I want that value to acrue in a transparent [clears throat] way. I want

413. 3:23:47

     as I want a I want investors out there to see what we're doing. Like, you know, my dream is for someone to be able to DCF on the near protocol. And so, I want that I want the the revenue to be acrewing and to be to be visible. And so, that's what we're working on right now is um going out and working with our partners.

414. 3:24:07

     There's no specific agenda, right? It's everything just It's price and it's value that you're delivering to the end user. Like that's how the decision gets made. That's how they choose their routing. No one is sitting there in the Ledger wallet or the trust wallet going, I'm a near intense user. They're going, "That's the best price. I'm going to bang it and that's and I'm going to and I'm going to close that." Okay.

415. 3:24:24

     Um, thank you. Thank you so much. So, we have to be competing on value and and that value has to be, you know, shared across those network of partners. And so, um, it's going to be a really fun next, uh, three to six months as we go and have those conversations. Um, it's it's amazing, you know, for us to have our first real piece of product market fit for for near and to be to be seeing it it work and to have, you know, runs that you can put up on the board.

416. 3:24:51

     Um, but also know that you're providing tremendous value for the end user and I mean, all of us here have been around long enough, you guys have bridged assets. It's a it's a sweaty moment when you're waiting. I just remember moving something from ETH to Arbitum and then trying to move it back and it's a seven-day wait and you got to put a reminder in your calendar. Like that's that's not good UX. And so, um, that's what we're trying to do is provide a

417. 3:25:14

     fantastic user experience and, um, and provide a a thing of high value to them. And I think we we can and should get paid for that. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Avichel, kind of coming back to your U-shaped curve idea here with regards to the to the market structure specifically within near intense, but let's just kind of zoom out to the broader uh crosschain landscape and the intense landscape and perhaps

418. 3:25:39

     this is a silly question, but is this just a winner takes most or all market, right? Is it going to be something where um you know we've seen so many kind of like what Vance from framework calls t-u copycats of successful applications that get VC dollars because they think that they're able to kind of like you know take take a small share of a big pie that's been created by the kind of number one here near Intense being the the leading kind of intent crosschain

419. 3:26:03

     provider amongst tons of other uh crosschain providers. How do you see the competitive landscape for Intense playing out if if if we're uh convinced that Intense are are likely going to be the um you know at least part part of this endgame of the crosschain abstraction that we've been looking for?

420. 3:26:22

     Um isn't there going to be a lot of people coming for this market? You know, how do you think about that uh playing out as as we scale from 10 billion to 100 billion to, you know, trillions? Uh yeah, I think there will likely be people that try. I think with these kinds of things though, there's a real network effect. Like if you assume that the market is going to be fragmented on

421. 3:26:41

     both sides, then there is a true network effect phenomenon. Which is why I really agree with what I was saying, which is I think you don't want to worry too much about value capture on the front end. You just want to get to scale. Um and and sprinting as hard as you can to get to scale means you lock in the network effect. And then and then if there is a true network effect which I think there is here uh between the applications and all the chains across which you need to route um then then that almost always

422. 3:27:05

     results in some significant efficiency could be depth you know depth liquidity pricing advantages settlement times there's like a lot of dimensions of efficiency you might get but that network effect will give you all of that efficiency and then at that point you have you have pricing power um and I suspect this is going to be a winner takes post like it's likely some sort of power law where the winner for whoever is routing across all the chains and across all the devs and settling all of

423. 3:27:27

     this stuff. Um that likely is like the winner takes 70 or 80% of the market and then there will be some specialized you know 20% that's scattered between a couple other folks but it's going to look you know like uh social networking or payments or or search like it's going to be a power law um and and I think um that's that's what I'd be focused on if I were any of your team right now is just like market share. How do you just get to max market share? is, you know,

424. 3:27:51

     the market here is going to be 100x, a thousandx, a millionx bigger than it is today. We're still very early days and that early network effect will compound. So, if you can be if you can be like Facebook and just win colleges, you can take that and you can back into everything else and then as the market grows, then then you win then you're a trillion dollar company. Yeah.

425. 3:28:08

     Yeah. So, if two things two things I want to add to that is that, you know, imagine alternative world where Near was charging super high margins and they were making a bunch of cash. Uh that's actually the world where you want to be more afraid of competition because everybody's going to see huge target on your back. People are going to come and undercut you. They're going to they're going to try to compete for that margin.

426. 3:28:30

     But if you start super low margin and you basically say, "I'm going to go low margin or even go zero margin and just dominate the market first," then [snorts] all your competitors are screwed because nobody can come in and really compete with you. And even if they do, unless they get to scale more than you, there's no prize waiting for them at the end. So that, you know, it's hard to compete with free. And this is one of the things that social social networks learned very

427. 3:28:54

     early on is that like, yeah, don't charge anything. Just get to scale, dominate the market. So I I like this version of the world where NAR is basically just completing and dominating the market. The second thing I'll say is that you know one thing one thing to one thing to recognize is that we've seen this enormous growth in per in uh per onchain. And this is in large part because you know these are cash settle

428. 3:29:17

     instruments very very easy to do on chain. Not very easy but obviously straightforward enough because all you really need is to know what the mark price is to have some funding rate to have enough liquidity for the market to clear and boom you can trade anything.

429. 3:29:29

     But the problem with that theory is like okay yes you can trade anything but you can only trade the price you can't actually get the thing that you are buying you cannot get Zcash through hyperlquid and if what you want is a property of the underlying thing like if what I want is privacy you don't get privacy by swing trading Zcash on hyperlquid you only get privacy by actually getting the Zcash and so as we

430. 3:29:53

     start thinking more deeply about why people are using crypto and what they're using crypto for you know it's like I don't want to be long a USD per I want a stable coin and that's a big part of the reason why the the the DeFi story of just the rise of derivatives is not enough to satisfy the whole picture of why DeFi is so valuable and so important. The other side of that is the physically delivered stuff. That's what near intense is all about.

431. 3:30:19

     So then would a structural risk to the intense thesis being that users don't actually care that that they get the actual asset? Yes, that would be a huge structural risk. Um, I don't think we're that much worry that that will happen. I think it's pretty clear that people I mean, you can see already from the underlying demand that yeah, people want to use stuff that's available on other chains, right? I don't want Rapol if I want to go onto Salana.

432. 3:30:42

     I want I actually want Soul because I can't pay fees with Rap Soul. Yeah. Yeah. Um so outside of the competitive pressures then guys um and the actual asset issuance what are the other structural risks that you see from the investment perspective for intense as a as a category? Is it is it other bridge designs winning out? Is it uh the multi-chain landscape kind of fails and we get a lot of consolidation across activity into just a handful of chains?

433. 3:31:10

     Is it some sort of structural third-party um you know I don't know like going like uh solvers going on strike and being in a union like what are the other structural risks to to this thesis outside of uh competition fees and asset issuance or asset types or is there any I mean I I think I think we're on an inevitable path right DeFi is 25 26% of of daily trading that's up 6x over the last three or four years, we're going to see more and more people moving into DeFi. As so

434. 3:31:45

     just said, like people want access to the raw underlying asset. They don't want the wrapped asset. They don't want the derivative of the asset. They want the asset. Um they want to hold it in their wallet. They want to know that they that they own it and it's, you know, it's it's safe. Um I I think Intense grows for for me like Intense is not just a swapping mechanism. It's not just a crypto

435. 3:32:11

     mechanism. You know, our long-term vision is this becomes the commercial arm for the for the the artificial intelligence agents and transactions that are coming. And you'll see us build out intents in that way. So, we'll move from just a on the- spot swap between Hive and I to a escrow transaction between Hiv and I to a contractual relationship between Aashal and myself.

436. 3:32:35

     Like, that's where we're going to see it going. um we're going to see it move into physical goods and um this was a tremendous proof point. But that's the that's the long-term vision here. Hey, how's it going? You know that that intent intent [clears throat] concept.

437. 3:32:50

     I I would add kind of two things. Um one I think DeFi is obvious is certainly going to take off. I think Trafi is coming in like this is you know when we talk to people in New York and Wall Street like they're going to tokenize everything. It's very clear.

438. 3:33:04

     I don't know if I should tell you and that has to sit somewhere like the I don't think it's going to be that there's just like one chain where all the tokenized stuff sits. There's just too many competing interests. It's going to be complex, right? I think it's going to be many many chains, many many base layers, many L2s, many L1's.

439. 3:33:17

     Uh and so uh I think that fragmentation creates opportunity for intents. The other thing to think about here is the rise of agents. And I think the agentic economy while very very nent right now, I think if you look at any other financial market, you know, if you look at the stock market, it's mostly algorithms.

440. 3:33:34

     Yeah, one of my devs just heard me live. So, we're used to this world where there's like a bunch of humans clicking on buttons on in DeFi. What we're about to hit is this world where it's all bots. Um, you know, there's obviously a bunch of bots at the MEV layer and like in transactions right now already, but like when you can vibe code a bot that just does a thing on your computer. Um,

441. 3:33:51

     or every single app has some agentic interface. Um, I think you're actually talking about like an entire TAM expansion of a million X, right? Like I I think the actual users of this stuff are not quite here yet. Um, and once the agents are here now, now now you're talking. Um, and I think that happens over the next like two or three years.

442. 3:34:09

     A charm. Last thing I'll say, yeah, last thing I'll say just to just to put a bow on that is the reason why intense just just hammer this one more time. Like even if you just want exposure to the price, right? Let's say let's say I'm buying Bitcoin and I'm not buying Bitcoin because I'm going to be using Bitcoin fees to transact on Bitcoin, but I just want to own the Bitcoin, right? Even in that world where I just care about the price, if I'm an agent or if I am, you

443. 3:34:33

     know, somebody that just doesn't really, you know, look, Hyperlquid is a great exchange, but if I want to own this Bitcoin for multiple years, do I really want to have an open derivative position on Hyperlid for years? Like, do I know what that's going to look like? Do I know what the funding rates are going to be? Do I know that the exchange is going to stay up? Do I know what's going to

444. 3:34:48

     happen to my positions? Do I know there's not going to be a Hyperlid V3 or a V4? Um, I don't know any of that. I don't care about any of that. I don't want to know about any of that. All I want to know is I have my Bitcoin and you leave me alone. And so the the instantaneous trust I have to have of simply does this intent network. Am I getting a good price? That's the only thing I need to know. The moment I I have that interaction with the intent network, I am done. All I have now is

445. 3:35:12

     Bitcoin. All I have now is Zcash. All I have now is the tokenized stock. Even if I'm an institution, I don't want to have a long-term position open on some some DEX. I just want the tokenized stock. Give me the tokenized stock. I want no further counterparty risk than whoever actually did the tokenization. The end.

446. 3:35:27

     That fundamentally is why I think this stuff is going to continue to grow. Institutions care a lot about counterparty risk. To say nothing of individuals. Gentlemen, thanks for joining. Uh it's it's the intent day special today. It's a bit of a mega stream. Thank you for being a part of it. Congrats on the success on this investment, Matt. Great work. Um always good to have you.

447. 3:35:48

     Always good to have you guys. Pleasure. Shout out to the clean room guy Alex behind the scenes cooking. Cheers [clears throat] guys. See you guys. Much love. Bye. All righty. Rob, take away his thoughts. Um I think we're on hour three and a half and I'm losing steam.

448. 3:36:14

     You can't lose steam. We've got one more panel. We got the cross panel. I had to reup on the coffee there. Yeah. I I haven't had coffee in two weeks, believe it or not. I know. Um you car How's that? What's that? How's that been? Talk to us about your no coffee journey.

449. 3:36:31

     It's been interesting. I stopped uh I stopped all substances uh including alcohol and coffee and uh the mental sharpness and and uh mental acuity was definitely uh level up. So, no coffee, no alcohol, no no cush, no nicotine, right? Nothing.

450. 3:36:52

     Yeah. No, not none of it. None of it. Wow. So, I've been I've been extremely zen and and primarily very sharp, but as you know, like we've typically ended the stream around this time uh the last few days. And so I think uh I I think the routine is you know the marathons are are an absolute they're just they're a journey especially sober. I'm firing I'm fired up. You car you carried that last one. These guys were firing on coffee.

451. 3:37:21

     Good. I just got a text from Dan Elixir at Nent saying who coined Neo Finance. That'd be uh that'd be us. That would be That'd be the rollup co. That would be the rollup co. Yeah, I actually gonna take some credit there. I coined it. No, I'm kidding. Robbie Robbie fully created the category. He was like, "Bro," we were on the stream one day. He's like, "Dude, there's a term for this conversions that is

452. 3:37:49

     happening and I swear I don't know what it is, but it's in between this finance and DeFi and all this." And lo and behold, we got Neo Finance. And I think I would imagine I would venture to bet that on some pitch decks in the coming months.

453. 3:38:06

     You will see Neo Finance. In fact, I will expect more market map categories. I expect more Neo I'm seeing Neoance articles. I'm seeing Neoance blog posts. Yes, I'm seeing Neoinance everywhere. I am seeing blog posts. I'm seeing LinkedIn posts. I'm seeing newsletters.

454. 3:38:27

     I'm seeing podcasts. I'm seeing clips that are not coming from the rollup about Neo Finance. Guys, Neo Finance is everywhere. It's happening. It is on. It's on. I love it. Andy's had enough coffee for the both of us. Neo Finance has us fired up.

455. 3:38:44

     I I This is And as you know, Andy, uh we're developing resources for the community to take part in the Neo Finance landscape with us. Uh, so we will be um putting out a dashboard where people can keep track because ultimately we're going to put out a dashboard that's going to show that full on these tokens are going to outperform your shitcoins. Like guys, I am going to full crash out. Like they're you need to be investing in the Neoance category or you're going to get BTFOed this year.

456. 3:39:17

     You're absolutely fried. You're the only coin that I'm not liking is is Athena. The only coin that I'm not liking on why you save that for when hops off is Athena. I'm liking Sky over Athena 10x. I'm sorry. Not financial advice. Let's check it out. Guys, I'm telling you, if you're if you did not see the Neo Finance map, it's on Twitter. Search it, guys. We're going to drop a Dune dashboard. This category is going to outperform all your shitcoins and it's going to happen.

457. 3:39:50

     We've got the last panel, the multi-chain panel. It's coming up right now. While we're at it, let's have a look at the market. Yeah, let's take a look. I'm scared. I've been I've been on the stream. The market Oh my god, Skye's up 5% today. Oh my god. Oh yeah, Sky.

458. 3:40:08

     Sky is the number one Neo Finance token performer this year. I I I just I'm tempted to fullport it. Should we just rattle off some other picks right now? I am so tempted. If you're with us on hour four of the the intense day special, obviously we should drop some alpha here. Um I'll give my top three Neo Finance picks.

459. 3:40:30

     Sky looks insane. Sky is number one, Maple number two, and I'm gonna go Canton. Canton is insane, too. Canton number three. And then obviously ETH you have to put in there as an honorable mention but looks a little shaky uh at the moment but I I do think you know if you know the rest of these do quite well ETH and Bitcoin do well.

460. 3:40:56

     Sky is literally the winner here. Like Sky is has not dropped at all. The other um the other important ones to mention are companies that are not launch crypto companies that are not launching tokens and instead they're going p uh going public. And so like Bitco is up 25% today on their IPO.

461. 3:41:18

     Wow. Anchorage Digital I believe is IPOing as well. They're looking to raise like between 200 and 400 million. Um I'm pretty sure Wisdom Tree is already public. I think they're going to do well. I'm way up on my uranium, by the way, guys. I'm way up. That thing's flying. I put a bag in that thing and that thing is ripping.

462. 3:41:40

     Honestly, my my worst performing asset is ETH right now, and it's terrible. And honestly, I I I I think we're I'm gonna have to eat this loss on this ETH position, and I think we're gonna have to take that over to Sky. I mean, I just I I I don't see a like Sky chart is just insane right now. Um guys, we've got uh we've got our next panel up. This is hour four of the intense day marathon. And so, uh, we got a little distracted there, but we're

463. 3:42:09

     gonna we're gonna come back and we're gonna be talking about, uh, one of our favorites here for our, uh, fifth and final panel, and that's going to be multi-chain. Yes. And, uh, and so, this one is going to be particularly fun. We've talked about multi-chain in the beginning. Intense helps to connect this multi-chain world.

464. 3:42:30

     We've talked about value acrruel. We talked about intense, defi, and apps. And ultimately, we're going to be talking about the base layer here. So, why don't we uh why don't we bring up our panelists and uh we'll kick off our fifth and final panel of the day.

465. 3:42:47

     Let's go. Let's do it. All right, guys. Welcome to the show. Hello. Hello. We've got Damian, we've got Escobar, and we've got uh Maki. Guys, welcome to the stream. It's a pleasure to have you. Yeah, thanks for having us. Thank you. Thank you for having us.

466. 3:43:06

     Yeah, guys, we're talking about intents today. Who owns the user in the multi-chain world? Do we really need intents? I guess we might as well just kick this off. Is the status quo today that intents are the consensus best crushing mechanism? Is that acceptable as a as an idea, as a as an as a thought, as a statement? Why? Why not kick us off? Uh Escobar to Mogi is intense the current interrupt. Why?

467. 3:43:38

     Why not? What do we what is the nuance that we are missing? Um Escobar, you can start if if you like. Yeah, sure. Uh well I think back in the days um before before we jump to the intense solutions uh I work for a bridge and it's a bit bridge and you know the latency the transactions everything is just is very horrible uh we take like probably around 24 hours to receive my bitcoin um where intense come in right now I think we have uh livei swap kit um

468. 3:44:14

     back in the days before new intent coming in as well it solve a lot of problem but then new in turn kicks in with a better uh quote sometime uh it is something that we see uh uh very useful at least for my point um because I'm spending my uh my whole life on the bridge uh solution before and it's all centralized and so on uh it just never helps right um so even in bitcoin we are uh imagine what if we have the intense solutions

469. 3:44:45

     um so why not Very well said. Yeah, let's go around the horn here a bit because we've we've spoken to several bridge providers and and I think we're hearing the same thing. Intents are the tip of the iceberg um and the tip of innovation. Um Damian, you're representing Levi here.

470. 3:45:03

     Why don't we kick it over to you as well? Lei is good friends of the show. We've had Philip uh and the guys on before. um tell us a bit about how you're approaching intents over at Lei given that you guys are an aggregator and have a bit of a different setup uh when it comes to the interop stack.

471. 3:45:19

     Yeah, of course. So, uh as you said, Lei is uh has historically been an aggregator. Uh I think at the moment we just want to basically expand our service uh with intents. So, essentially the thing is with intents as a primitive is that really they are kind of doing two things. They get you from point A to point B and they also help reduce complexity in that they reduce the amount of steps that are required to get

472. 3:45:42

     from point A to point B. So um yeah at the end of the day because the the crosschain world is so complex there's many different ways to get from point A to point B. There's many different options you can have to do that at any given time because crypto is such a wide market and there are so many markets in crypto. So um yeah, intent basically kind of help distill that market down to like a single primitive that you can action is the best way that I'd put it.

473. 3:46:08

     Yeah. Awesome. Um, guys, when you're thinking about owning the user in this multi-chain UX, I think a big part of of this intense conversation today is around kind of understanding the user flow. And, you know, you've got wallets, applications, aggregators, execution layers, right?

474. 3:46:25

     Being the blockchain, where do you guys see the most important user fulfillment happening here or user recognition of ownership? Right? Is it I know I'm using an L2. I know I'm using a EVM or is it I know I'm using MetaMask, Phantom, I know I'm using uh Near Intense, Leafy, Jumper, etc., etc. Where do you guys see the ownership of the user importance from a monetizable perspective as well as just like a building that trusted relationship perspective? Who actually

475. 3:46:55

     owns the most of that relationship? Um, and kind of how do you guys see that playing out as we scale into more and more chains, more and more users coming on chain? Right. Think non-crypto natives, think institutions, who who is going to own those and kind of where is the important part of the stack there?

476. 3:47:14

     Yeah, I think the most exciting thing about intents is that it actually allows the wallets who have worked so hard to get the users on board or you know the applications that the users are using to finally deliver the options that the users need to do their financial services and intense is you know the first and easiest way to do that through swaps. So uh you know pre previously uh you might be a trustwlet user because

477. 3:47:39

     you understand self- custody but when you want to do your actual trading you would go back to Binance you would go back to Coinbase and what intents allows is for a trust wallet now to own that user and to keep them inside of their app and to have the assets be tradable that they actually want to interact with. So this didn't happen previously um you know just because the DeFi technology hasn't been there. So you might have a really great experience on

478. 3:48:02

     unis swap with EVM or on Jupiter with Salana but as soon as you want to bring in an asset like Bitcoin it's really difficult to do so. So I think that's one of the biggest unlocks for uh an intense platform is that it allows you know the people who work so hard to build up their brand and get the users in to actually keep them sticky and then to generate revenue from them as well.

479. 3:48:28

     Anything? I I'll I'll add that on a little bit on the the Bitcoin side as well. I think Bitcoin uh yeah well um well for for us especially we are trying to serve all this non-s smart contract chain and non EVM chain as the main priority right because um the first cases is bitcoin we try to tackle all the abstracted bitcoin how to make sure they don't care about the uh the back end and simply feel like a bitcoin native divide uh that's the problem that we try to solve at first

480. 3:49:02

     place but then uh bitcoin users just or Bitcoin community just not that convenient to use defi sometime, right? They maybe prefer something centralized as well um to have a custody or whatever. But um yeah, but then we see Zcash as a one of the case study for us.

481. 3:49:21

     Uh we have go through uh Zcash um uh cycle as well uh this time. Then it's it's actually very helpful. So I think uh from our point of view at least um it's all solving the problem for non-spot contract chain and non EVM chain.

482. 3:49:40

     Yeah, well said. Um you know that that's a great point about kind of the underlying infrastructure EVM chains and you know alt L1s and how how these things fit together. Another point that we heard earlier today was that, you know, there's really not too many quality assets on chain. Like, you got Bitcoin, you got ETH, you got Zcash, and there's a few other ones sold. You know,

483. 3:50:02

     you can be used for for some things, but there's a long long tale of coins that were kind of a flash in the pan, and that was it. We do believe that there are tokenized products and tokenized assets that are coming onchain. And I'm curious how you guys are thinking and anticipating and building for this next onslaught of institutional assets and institutions in general. How do you

484. 3:50:26

     think intents may differ and and how do you think um you know the the way in which we build these platforms could evolve as we get you know more tokenized private credit more US you know tokenized equities tokenized deposits stable coins like these are sectors that we see are poised for incredible growth.

485. 3:50:46

     How do you think the apps es especially the interop and the intent in intense apps are preparing for you know the the uh the rush of liquidity that we believe is coming in these these particular asset classes. Margari maybe we can start with you on the swap kit side and kind of think how what what is your institutional plan here as we see this changing. Yeah, I think if we zoom out a little bit, you know, what are we trying to achieve here? And I think, you know, all of us believe probably in bringing finance on chain, but why do we want to do that?

486. 3:51:20

     Well, the reason is because uh number one, it's you know, more reliable. Uh it's safer for the user. It's less prone to corruption. Uh we have uh you know, transparency. So all the problems of traditional banks, of centralized banks, uh are the things that we're trying to tackle here. But what we're not trying to do is make users learn and understand what crypto is, what blockchains are, what all the underlying technology is.

487. 3:51:46

     They don't care about intense platforms or uh AMMs or however we achieve, you know, what's happening in the background. We care about that because we're super nerds and we build this stuff. But the user just wants to trade the assets that they want and they want to do it in a a you know uh fast efficient way. So as we move into you know these next billion users which are today using

488. 3:52:11

     Tradfi I think we really need to focus on making that real world experience as transparent as possible right so that it's just a it feels like you're using an app and I heard on the previous panel a great example like you're in your Robin Hood app and your friend is in Cash App or maybe that wasn't the example I don't remember but you know you can send interoperably between the two and I think this is a huge unlock block for intents and I think we're

489. 3:52:35

     going to see really cool things around you know real world assets around uh bringing things like uh accredit investment KYC on chain uh you know having zero knowledge KYC that can exist on chain so all that stuff is really coming down the pipe from a lot of these institutional players and intense is there already in the background to serve them yeah do do you think that the uh resiliency and reliability that a lot of these institutions want with regards to

490. 3:53:06

     counterparty risk with regards to moving assets across different chains, whether it's tokenized versions, whether it's uh stable coins. Do you guys think that um you know that that that the multi-chain landscape as it exists today is sufficient enough to support their needs or if so why? If not, what do you think that is kind of the next uh iteration of this landscape to support a more

491. 3:53:31

     institutional or even a more agentic kind of uh crosschain landscape from from that perspective? What do you think that uh we need to keep keep in mind to build going forward? Damian, maybe we can start with you here. Yeah, of course. I mean, I would say that the great power in intense is that with Intense, your total addressable market becomes crypto. like um because of the complexity that abstracts away at the end of the day. Essentially what intents allow is uh kind of multi multiVM uh chain agnostic composibility

492. 3:54:04

     and this allows uh institutions agents to orchestrate different actions across multiple chains um in order to provide or fulfill a service. Um, and I think that'll that'll probably be the real unlock with um, intents or kind of like multi-chain calls for example because at the end of the day like um, with the agent with the agentic economy like they have interop but they need to be able to

493. 3:54:26

     those agents need to be able to act on multiple levers I'm going to call it because they need to be able to compose these different actions to perform certain functions. Like if I want to move from point A to point B, that might require me to take three different steps on my own. But if I want to um do that in a click as an end user, um I can get my agent to basically do that for me.

494. 3:54:46

     But for me, it's just a click when I look at the the whatever front end I'm visiting essentially. And that really is the the key honestly because it's it's just not really a question of like how many choices do I have? It's more so like can I just get what I want? like I I have an objective on when I'm on chain and I have some sort of idea or semblance of like what sort of product I want to pursue. So say I'm I don't know after like 10% yield uh for like you

495. 3:55:10

     know for saving or whatever and I want to earn some yield on my stable coins then um I need to be able to get my stable coin everywhere as an issuer in order to make sure that I have the biggest market for people to use my earning product as an example. Um, and intents really do unlock that because again, it it just allows you to kind of combine the all of these actions and all of these steps into like one simple step for them to follow. And they do not need to know what chain they're on. They do they only need to kind of think about

496. 3:55:36

     what asset is it that I'm interacting with. And can I just like interact with it freely? Like can I can I like send it? Can I receive it? Can I like uh kind of you know onboard offboard easily between this asset and other assets that I might want to at any moment. So it's really just about offering that flexibility rather than choice. I would say Escobar Malarkey anything to add there from the institutional perspective

497. 3:56:02

     I've got two things I would throw in. Uh number one I think we need to deliver on decentralization a little bit better. So uh you know we have the infrastructure in place now but if you look at most intense protocols uh I I don't know the exact number but you know we have a limited number of solvers that are still fulfilling most trades. We have u some centralization around you know how the u APIs are built and things like that. So if we're going to you know really

498. 3:56:34

     deliver on trustlessness I think we need to go and push the envelope a little bit further on decentralization. And then the second piece is just liquidity because if we don't have you know always on super deep markets for every asset then that's how [snorts] institutions end up going OTC at Kraken or Coinbase or you know somewhere else because we can't fulfill it at at scale. So I think

499. 3:56:57

     those are the two real things we need to focus on. Do you murky I got to follow up there. Do do you see uh centralized exchanges as kind of the main competitor to the onchain interop landscape? Uh I think as of today, yes, that's true. But I I really look at like all of Tradfi as the ultimate competitor, right? Because what we're trying to do is build the financial services that compete with everybody's, you know, everyday life interaction interacting

500. 3:57:27

     with their finances. So whether that's payments, whether that's savings, uh whether that's borrowing, whatever it might be, we're trying to bring that all onchain. So are we competing with Coinbase? Of course, but we're also competing with in my mind, you know, uh JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo, etc.

501. 3:57:47

     Especially as you know, those those asset and product get tokenized, right? It's like they could and I think they have already built their own internal permissioned blockchains. You know, intense could in theory solve interop between those chains as well as, you know, open permissionless chains.

502. 3:58:05

     But I I I do think that once we see more tokenized asset classes and then it's sort of an applesto apples comparison, that's when these blockchains and these dexes and these routers are really like face to face with competition. Um because it's a matter of Yeah. is is Bank of America, you know, gonna develop its own, you know, permission chain and then are we going to see all the all the assets kind of, you know, acrue there?

503. 3:58:29

     Are we going to see them uh in a more composable world? Uh ultimately, I think we all want to see them in a more composable world, but the end user isn't going to care, right? So, we have to make it cheaper, better, faster, so that is in their favor. It's in their best interest ultimately to come over and integrate. Um, I'm curious for the for the rest of you guys, uh, Damian and Escobar, what what do you guys think are the biggest pain points that are still

504. 3:58:52

     yet to be overcome uh, in the onchain interop landscape? Well, I think from my perspective, I I'm quite agree with Michael. Uh, liquidity is one of the biggest problem that we have been uh, uh, uh, facing all this time, right? Um so uh just a little bit of background we are building a crosschain lending market on top of near intent itself. Um but then um sufficient liquidity is very very important to

505. 3:59:22

     build that cross learning market where we simply uh simply build a unified position for the users. But uh it always come to a better quote um uh better liquidity uh over the time. uh whenever people want to supply and borrow uh we need to get that uh liquidity out or supply as soon as possible because market is very volatile unless it will be a very risky move for them as well.

506. 3:59:49

     So um one thing yeah liquidity is more than enough I think for the next one year to be solved and we can look further on the on the decentralized side because I think decentralized uh things might take some time compared to liquidity.

507. 4:00:05

     Damian close us out here. It's been a 4-hour marathon. The boys are running out of steam. Close us out. Yeah sure. So uh in the interest of not agreeing with everyone uh I will say something a little bit left field. I would say that the biggest pain point for interop is actually noise. Um what I mean by that is that there's just a lot of noise on chain, right? So that means it becomes very hard for users today to

508. 4:00:27

     actually find the opportunities that they are actually looking for, right? Um that's historically always been the issue. You have all these different frontends, all these different tools, all these different bridges. And when with regards to interop that tooling to actually access opportunity has been abstracted away because you can get from, you know, one chain to another chain fairly easily today. But that has to still kind of evolve into um I would say personalization of certain

509. 4:00:51

     opportunities and products. So it's kind of like getting to the level of like having your Spotify weekly kind of recommended to you but onchain, right? Because you're interested in a certain kind of music. You are someone that is a consumer of music and you want to be able to enjoy music that you like specifically. So if that's the case in on crypto and we want to extrapolate it to that example, it's let's going back to like you know onchain yield once again. If say I want to earn you know

510. 4:01:14

     onchain yield but I only want to do it in stable coins and I don't want to take any sort of directional risk then I need to be able to have those opportunities kind of personalized towards my profile without having to go out there and do a bunch of research. So I think there's a real opportunity for the agentic economy to leverage the like groundwork that interrop has that interrop has it today actually um because I think a lot of the

511. 4:01:37

     work has been done. It's just about being able to kind of use the the roads that we built in order to actually service users um in a more meaningful way. Yeah, well said Damian Escobar guys thank you for being the final panel today of the intense day special multi-chain everything intense are here um near cross over 10 billion dollars of intense I know you guys are either in collaboration or or are helping to power the multi-chain economy in your own ways. Gentlemen, thank you for joining us.

512. 4:02:08

     Thanks for having us. Pleasure, guys. See you next time. All right, Rob, we've done it. That was a daisy. 10 special. The tech hiccups to the downs and the up. Call that a bullish reversal, Andy. Bullish reversal following the bullish reversal. Guys, thank you for being here. Shout out to Near Intense. Shout out to with over10 billion dollars of transaction activity, $18 million of fees collected, well over 500,000 individual unique users, guys. It's one

513. 4:02:44

     of the best experiences in the crosschain landscape that exists today. Thanks for rocking with us through the technical difficulties. Thanks for being here on the road. Appreciate you guys. We appreciate each and every one of you.

514. 4:02:56

     Check out our uh our live show with Near. We've got a few just to wrap up. We've got a few announcements here. Our live AI show is called AI Supercycle. It's powered by Near. We run it every single week. We have some of the best guests in the entire AI space, not just crypto AI, the entire AI space. Uh check it out every week live on the rollup.

515. 4:03:17

     And guys, near East Denver intense day is going to be happening. We will be there. You will see us there at E Denver. Catch you guys there. It's on the 18th 12 to 5 local. February 18th in Denver. 12 to 5. The last one we've got is we will be in San Francisco for Near Con. We're going to be live from the show floor. Guys, come out to Near Con. You're not going to want to miss it. Again, the best in AI

516. 4:03:43

     and crypto are going to be there and and uh you can come hang out with us. We're gonna have a great time. Don't miss it. That's it. That's all my announcements. Mahalo. See you guys tomorrow. Bye-bye.