Unlocking Institutional capital Through Multichain UX - Panel

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1. 0:06

   good afternoon everyone uh I work with near foundation with e ecosystem infrastructure and I'm joined by three of my uh ecosystem Partners um we have Os from meta web we have Phil from uh uh airfall and we are mad from panta today we are going to discuss a couple of uh topics how can uh uh we unblock institutional Capital using multi-chain user experience uh before we begin I would like like to ask uh all of my colleagues to quickly give a quick introduction about what they're engaged in and how do they work with

2. 0:46

   near on and in which capacity or to you sure everyone I'm uh Matt Stevenson I'm the head of research at panta Capital um mostly engaged on the on the research side uh everything from you know uh stable coins to crypto AI to chain abstraction um and so we're involved with near because of course uh you know near is a here's a portfolio company that we're really excited about and has been for a long time so we work really closely with yall hello everyone my name is Amos uh

3. 1:17

   I'm the founder of metaweb Ventures uh meta web is a $3 million uh fund uh focusing on early stage um crypto investment uh so some of our LPS including near Foundation uh seoa Capital dragonfly snz uh and more uh in ter of my my I guess you know connection with near so I was actually part of the the the earliest team of near uh were multiple has back then you know across BD marketing product uh I'm very excited to the see near uh become what it is

4. 1:49

   today hi everyone my name is Phil had ATA um I'm the co-founder of a company called airfoil that we do design brand and Dev for a lot of projects across web 3 now over 200 projects across also worked with the near foundation and proximity teams in a few projects including um a uh an online uh kind of web wallet that you can use to send digital assets called keom um and we're based in Singapore soul and SF nice thanks for the introduction so we've all been discussing and we' have

5. 2:20

   seen this wave right where the entire crypto industry is moving towards a multi-chain uh future right where one way or the other whether it's through cross chain Bridges or multi-chain supported wallets or smart contract interactions across chains these are some of the ways that we have seen but also with near we have heard a lot today and also earlier this year the chain abstraction narrative right where you

6. 2:45

   can you know abstract the account but also communicate across chains using chain signatures among others so I want to know what is your opinion and what is your input or um your feedback about how do you look at chain next signature or multichain in general uh and the future of it from from a research perspective Matt yeah sure a couple interesting ways to look at multi-chain right like there's a couple different thesis you

7. 3:10

   might have one is you might say well look ultimately the user doesn't really care about the chain that much right and in that case we just sort of have like these Network effects of liquidity in certain chains and so that's why people are stuck there but they ultimately don't really value one particular chain more than another for any for any reason and so you might kind of say that thesis is like the multi-chain future is just inevitable and it's just a question of pathing our way there um another view

8. 3:34

   might be that like chains actually do matter and people do care but there there's these natural points of differentiation and I think actually I'm not sure where Ilia really falls on his opinion but he's been actually pretty good at pointing this out as well the sort of like trade-offs and differences across the different approaches from the you know along the modular monolithic multi or app chain um spectrum and how those might differ right and you could imagine multi-chain is sort of falling

9. 3:58

   along those Dimensions instead where we actually do care but it's just the case that we care you know that this chain does this thing well and this chain does this thing well and then if we want to work with both we don't want to have to deal with thinking about you know we keeping track of private Keys across both right that might be one where there the each chain retains a little more Market power but you would still you would still see a multi-chain sort of future so those would be uh those would be two approaches you could think of

10. 4:21

    others but like those would be the big two yeah right em what do you think about it yeah I think uh it's actually mind-blowing uh in the sense the change people how people kind of view you know multi chain uh and how people can interact with you know different apps uh and different chains uh because we always know that one of the biggest problem about crypto is that it's actually very fragmented

11. 4:45

    which is almost you know uh contradictory to to what is uh really about originally right because it's supposed to be decentralized supposed to connect all the Dos together uh using this you know uh distribut system uh technology uh but then again reality like uh the user experience uh a very you know uh separate from one another across chains uh so I think this new chain signature approach uh to if it works um it could actually change how

12. 5:15

    people you know transact uh because right now you know for example I personally have you know 501 100 accounts spread across different chains for different applications uh it just you know very frustrating experience right and often times you know like the other day I realized oh I actually have have some some more usdt on this new wallet that haven't you know take take a look at for I don't know like half a year also right so so and then there's

13. 5:40

    some like accounts on ethereum actually have some you know uh nearest Aurora like on there um and should I you know put that into like a better use other than just sitting in the wallet right uh so I think you know uh what I really look at is like this whole like stack of near you know po like from guess from from da from you know all the modular stuff from near itself as a powerful

14. 6:04

    like L1 uh plus uh a abstraction ch ch chain signature uh can really combine all those like moving pieces together and then can provide like unified you know uh multichain multi-chain experience because at the end of the day I don't think users should actually care that much about like what app uh they're operating with watch World account like on what chain like it should be as easy as web to right I just opened up the app

15. 6:29

    that I can just start interacting with it so uh so that's that's my opinion yeah very well said Phil so Phil you work very closely with some of these uh products that you design right for for the for the projects and the founders what do you have to speak on this topic for sure um I think that wi Founders are really Crypton native I think they're decent at navigating the trade-offs

16. 6:51

    between different ecosystems and and especially when they're going for a Crypton native audience right getting somebody who's already downloaded you know three different wallets to download a fourth one is it as much the issue but I think you know one part of our work is we try to work with large web two companies with IP holders with Studios with labeles stuff like that and get them to start building in web 3 because there's so many important applications of the tech right especially we think

17. 7:14

    about like creater economy applications enabling artists to sell their songs online and receive better margins um having closed fan relationships things like that these things that in we talk a lot about in web 3 in theory are just far better on web 3 rails than web 2 rails but when we actually get in the conversations with those players to get them to build they're all saying okay which chain do I build on what is the what are the kind of unique aspects of

18. 7:38

    that development environment um if something happens to that chain um if that chain goes down for whatever reason does that impact the investment that they're making and and so they don't get they often don't get past those conversations and so a lot of stuff doesn't get built um we've been hired to build a lot of prototypes of web 3 applications for traditional players that haven't shipped and it comes down to that almost every time or the

19. 8:03

    specifics of working with a particular blockchain but on top of that I'm worried about the degree to which we're burning people when uh when web two players choose to build on an on particular blockchain have a bad experience building on that chain or their users don't show up in the case of um uh Starbucks that launched a web 3 Rewards program on polygon the issue as I heard from them was that very few

20. 8:26

    people interacted with it that's correct and and and a big reason for that is because you know they had to be somebody who was already onboarded to a particular chain so when that happens do you think Starbucks is ever going to make an investment in us again until there's another crazy bull market that's even bigger than this one I don't think so um so I I think that the longer that

21. 8:43

    this fragmentation problem exists the more people will actually repel from building on web3 Rails and and and so I think like solving this is like an almost like an existential threat to to the work that we're trying to do right very well put and I think you touched up one a couple of very interesting uh points uh the first being the user experience indeed we'll talk a bit more about it uh the fragmentation of the

22. 9:07

    assets also the identities of users on multiple chains uh there are other topics as well that we do not want to delve deeper but we spoke about it briefly off the stage like security and interoperability as well right so that's also something that chain signatures or chain Abra as a whole really solves for the for the industry so going back to the user experience part I think if we go a little deeper and talk about uh the

23. 9:33

    the challenges that we currently see right of users uh in terms of handing multiple wallets right OSU briefly spoke about having 51 wallets and you do not know you know what's it where or you you have not used couple of them for years uh do you want to stress more about you know the experience on the wallet side but also bridging assets but as as well as you know paying different transaction

24. 9:57

    fees or different consensus mechanism anything around that in terms of multichain environment versus what you would see in a chain attraction Bo yeah I definitely want to talk more about D5 because uh I guess until uh right before this panel I didn't have the realization of you know uh what's the benefit of change signature and construction for uh def I then realize there actually

25. 10:21

    multiple of those after talking to IIA uh so for example uh right now the only way I guess the only like Live use case of you know Bitcoin defi is that you have to you know use rap BTC uh which on one hand is centralized but also limits like the the potential of it right uh but in theory you can build this like a multi-chain you know Landing app or multi-chain you know Dex uh using you

26. 10:46

    know near tax stack you know chin signature accom exraction and for example you can cize your Bitcoin on the Bitcoin network uh without necessarily have to you know Bridge it uh but then you can then use that collateral and then start let's say borrowing uh from like a near base you know Landing protocol or like a Sana based Landing protocol uh which is part of this like multi- chain you know def stack right uh and they say let's say in the case of you know liquidation uh sure you know uh

27. 11:16

    the Bitcoin is still on the Bitcoin network but it just get to send from one address which you currently own uh to another address because you know you sign the signature to to to for for that transaction would you know just those conditions are trigger which in the case of this is liquidation right uh same thing could be apply for like a multi deck uh so what I'm really envisioning is the like right now the defi

28. 11:39

    experience is so far away from you know uh the the centralized exchange experience I'll say uh you know you know um um I'm like large binance user you know binance earn is great you know I can trade their perss you know spot it's all one in a single platform uh but there are two issue one obviously is you know the central ization risk of you know binance itself you know what if got hacks things like that right uh there

29. 12:04

    obviously like bunch of like regulatory issue right uh so for us you know we actually move uh almost all our funds away uh when when CZ actually actually right after FTX is not even you know C getting Su by the US government uh just because we're so worried about what if anything could happen uh but then again you know if you have the same amount of same type of experience uh fully unchain

30. 12:28

    that you actually have like full control of it uh that's actually great but right now just because like this fragmentation the lack of you know uh technology to support it you actually cannot enable like a similar experience so that's why people still go to go to binance right uh but then again even eventually I hope that you know uh defi are able to to match the experience and then another I guess like a real world uh pinpoint for

31. 12:52

    me is that like right now let's say um the the near defi yield for for landing is actually super great uh for Staples I think for for both gu ref finance and and borrow something like 25 to 30% uh that's great for you know um for for for you just to deposit USD and usdc uh but when I try to actually do that on binance B actually doesn't have enough near base usdt they need to replenish that you know with with you know tther or in the case of usdc to with circle and there's usually

32. 13:23

    like a delay right and I think the ideal war was you know change signature and I don't have have to do that because you know I could just like to it directly s yeah I agree and we also briefly spoke about the challenge is bridging right so where you have to deposit a large amount of some on for the liquidity of the bridges which is so vulnerable to ax we read about these incidents every now and

33. 13:46

    then so on the gaming side I would want to pick your brain very quickly Phil you spent quite a lot of time so in terms of use cases of multi-chain on uh the gaming what what do you do you want to share of the challenges you seen and how could you know cantion help there for sure um well I think that when when the Ronin Bridge got hacked it sent a chilling effect to a lot of the work

34. 14:10

    they were trying to do in gaming um it it it showed that you know you could have a web three native company with folks who are experience in the gaming space and still if there's some sort of vulnerability somewhere in a bridge um you know it it could it could potentially tank a game um and so that that makes a lot of those conversations I think very very hard the other piece is if people have to get multiple

35. 14:33

    accounts uh I I can't tell you how many different gaming focused wallets I've seen kind of come to the Forefront over the past few years and they've all been trying to solve the same problem which is game Publishers have expressed that they don't want people to have to create multiple different accounts for web3 gaming experiences it adds a lot of friction to web3 onboarding and so even if somebody can just have one single account and then you know interact via

36. 14:57

    NPC with other chains right it's not even about the chain fragmentation it's about the account fragmentation um the way that I've described it is um I I I normally say like one principle of design that we care a lot about is this idea of give first then ask before you're asking for more time or effort from your users you need to give them some sort of value to give them a taste of what they could get if they continue down that road and I think the problem is in crypto we we we flip that the

37. 15:21

    other way around we say go download this wallet first then save a seed phrase somewhere then maybe you can find a game you can actually play if the user account already exists the user can begin to interact with the game maybe they can't buy iname assets but they can begin to get value from the game and then when they want to load in-game Assets in the game maybe they'll they'll they'll transfer assets onto that particular chain right so I think that

38. 15:47

    having a single user account that that people interact with solves a massive uh usability problem maybe the example I would give it actually comes from music so there's a platform um so given I you know work in crypto I expect I know most of the stuff that's like coming up and and one day there was an artist that I really like and he issued um an online version first 100 copies of his album and if you buy one of those copies you

39. 16:11

    can get put in a chat interact directly with the artist meet other fans I was like oh this is a cool idea I like this guy you know I I want to support his work went to the website put in my credit card um bought a version of the album interacted with chat and then I clicked in because I want to understand how they built it I clicked in and realized that the asset was actually um onchain on polygon and at no point did I realize that there was crypto even

40. 16:34

    involved it's not even pitched on the website but it is an onchain asset if we have enough of those experiences where users can just effortlessly sign in with their social account get those uh those uh assets and then begin to use them then once people are interacting in web 3 apps on a regular basis then the composability side can come in right then you can start to connect those applications together so I don't think it's as much that like users really have to be aware of the crypto side of things

41. 16:58

    the value uh uh from that like cross app interoperability will come once they've had a bunch of successful good experiences and those apps just natively work together right very well put and we see the same with dab dap on on near right so these things sound very interesting very promising uh also a great in theory of course we have some working version but imagine you know a few years later where you know there are 20 chains with their own abstraction story right and

42. 17:30

    that's where Matt you have this specialization of standardization right I would want to hear your thoughts about how do we standardize this across uh the industry so that people do not talk about you know from my chain to my uh abration story and it becomes a real web three abstraction story in terms of standardization and uh you know the processes around it yeah definitely so there's a couple different ways to think

43. 17:55

    about it right like one way you'll think about standardization is from a technical perspective and that work can be done depending on how it how it works out obviously one of the things that's kind of nice about near is it's already architected in a way that's very friendly with uh with chain abstraction but I think standardization can have a different meaning if you start to think

44. 18:10

    about this uh you know a little further into the future maybe a year or two right which is at a certain point if this is just a pure sort of intense space thing where the user is just saying I want to send this here and they're they are really agnostic to a chain then you're having to kind of like uh this kind of like figure out what exactly a chain is right it it does start to really matter uh who's doing the chain abstracting and what they're choosing to count as a chain or a token

45. 18:36

    and whatever and uh I mean that sounds like a challenge it's also winds up being a sort of huge opportunity you can kind of analogize it to like a time when you had internation you started to get international trade and they had to figure out what a tomato was which turned out to actually be a really hard problem right um and that's the sort of thing that you would you would kind of need to figure out and there are pretty interesting working groups working on problems at least adjacent to this and starting to approach this that I know

46. 19:00

    near is involved with like uh like Frontier research where probably the longer term future is something that sort of like identifies these things in a like I guess you'd call it like a coar grain sort of way right where you sort of figure out like here is here is the sort of thing that a user wants when they say they want a chain these properties right and then identifying those properties and so in the future I mean if if it's a multi-chain world you're probably looking at categories like that right that they reflect user

47. 19:24

    intents and that uh that becomes an interesting place to play like who's who's in charge of doing that that winds up being uh that winds instrumenting a lot of what or winds up instrumenting a lot of what blockchains wind up being about right so we've spoken about all the all the various topics but let's also go to a couple of uh real world examples right so on on near I don't

48. 19:47

    know if you have had a chance we actually did a chain abstraction demonstration at in Denver with sweat we have proximity building something uh that's some we saw earlier uh by m Mike uh we have something built by Mint base we also have a couple of ecosystem partners that have built something what are your ideas or thoughts uh that you're very excited about that multi- chain or chain exraction could bring to the near ecosystem oh should we we should give it to Amos first right he already had a

49. 20:17

    good one yeah so so bed two you talk about I think there are like two more case obviously like Ricky talk about uh East flu I think that's a good one uh cuz right now uh already knows which is you know a protocol for for you to to index um and then inscribe on top of Bitcoin you can launch funable token and you know non mon fball token or nft a t of it uh which is pretty cool uh it attracts its own audience like I'm not

50. 20:43

    an nft person I don't understand why some of those are so expensive than others but there's definitely the audience for it uh and then there are people trying to build you know taxes uh or you know different like nft applications on top of those uh first all is actually super difficult to build because once again Bitcoin is not like a smart contract chain right so even you have have a life you you have to do it through like a l to or like a side chain

51. 21:07

    um and then you know so far yeah so far sure yeah but but but then like why why don't you actually just build it on top of near right uh using like chin signature you know account abstraction you can actually you actually do it like the Bitcoin and F still leave on bitcoin uh but the actual you know the transaction the user experience can actually on top of um and just one more use case before I

52. 21:32

    head it to you is the uh that that use case on near is linear protocol uh is one of the largest defi protocol on near uh doing liquid staking uh uh we actually incubated the project uh the the team is actually going uh multi-chain and right now they're focusing on multi-chain uh liquid RIS staking uh so from user perspective you know you can restake East you can restake near you can restake you know so

53. 21:56

    you can restake even Bitcoin uh on top of you know linear and then I can layer uh for better yield uh that other part I think is also crucial because near is now the only chain that doing you know chain abstraction right uh I think eventually all those will require some like security guarantee because any of the is NPC Network and linear could be like a part of it uh I believe is actually one of the first project doing it uh so super excited about it yeah I

54. 22:22

    would just sort of like double down on your nft example I think one of the things that's pretty interesting from the history of nfts like going back I guess aways right as you found the fact that like people would Bridge nfts from one thing to another and users didn't seem to care I think emblem Vault bridged something from an early nft protocol called counterparty to ethereum and people treated them just like um just like they were ethereum nfts and

55. 22:44

    traded them that way so there's already pretty good reason to believe that nfts specifically are a little bit chain agnostic um and that it's more like I don't know just because I did some like nerdy research on this I guess I would say it seems to be a thing that people count as an nft if it's recognized uh you know as some unique token across like a bunch of different notes well that describes basically every chain so in that case it doesn't

56. 23:07

    it does feel like a user basically wants their chain abstracted um and that's useful also you know it happens to be the case that it's really hard to bridge nfts credibly at least in the sort of like rollup L2 way I don't think arbitrum or optimism do it at the moment so so that's that's an issue as well in one one reason right that's a good point and that's something that we already have with the me base where you can you know me something from openc using

57. 23:31

    near I I wanted to throw in as well that I'm really excited about the applications in Emerging Markets um we're we're an investor in a company called Parallax they started out doing crypto bilion invoicing they ended up focusing in on the Philippine market and helping uh knowledge workers in the Philippines get paid from abroad which in the status quo is Laden with tremendous fees and Corruption and and all of that um but one of the struggles that they face is that you know their

58. 23:56

    clients may want to pay them in in different digital assets but they want to pay across different chains and so where we see users turn in the status quo is when they need to get additional wallets or set up their own uh kind of their their own self- custo wallets to collect those assets right and so like with a small team there's no way we can support Every Chain natively within Parallax so the ability to do that with again just one account is is massive and

59. 24:21

    it feeds more people into the crypto ecosystem the more people accepting payments and earning on crypto rails the more people who then can potentially invest in things like dii can buy digital assets participate in web 3 but that front door needs to be super clear and easy to use otherwise it's difficult for people to join in right very well said and that also includes the entire developer experience and developer tools right great so that brings us to the end

60. 24:47

    of the panel if there are any questions from our fellow audiences we'd be happy to take them okay thank you so much appreciate your time and inputs thank you guys every thanks everyone