The Future of Cross-Chain

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1. 0:00

   Let's talk intense. This is the product. This is the stack. This is what people know near for. This is the I mean, I don't know if this is, you know, confirmed, but I think it's the winning interop model. I think it's pretty clear. You know, we had a lot of like different attempts at things over the years, and it just seems like, for lack of a better term, market makers or solvers, just fast, cheap, any chain,

2. 0:24

   any asset. Here we are. Will Allan, great to have you guys. to be here. Yeah, gentlemen. Um, what a what a last six to eight weeks in the market. Um, what a last couple months in the institutional adoption of this industry. And I think this is a great place to start as far as like where we're headed, right? So, I think we've moved effectively from a chain centric and I I'm sure this is not new, a chain centric view of the world. you've got all these blockchains, you got to connect them all to now it's much more of an asset centric view of the world.

3. 0:58

   We've got tokenized equities, we've got memes, we've got um assets across different venues, you've got different chains with different assets. You've got launchpads for different assets. It's all about what what do people want to buy, sell, hold, trade, and how do we get it to them in the cheapest, fastest, easiest way possible. And when you throw in the institutional adoption of the space, we're now seeing another layer.

4. 1:20

   You've got tokenized equities, securities, money market funds, commodities, all coming in with different compliance, KYC, you know, and different types of requirements. And so the interop space, the crosschain space has expanded much more into the asset centric view with now kind of entering the compliant era of the world. I just wanted to kind of like lay that foundation and if you guys want to fill in any holes here, Will, Allan, what

5. 1:44

   what am I missing about the state of crosschain today? um helped helped to kind of fill in the foundation here. Yeah, I mean I guess from from my perspective of uh crosschain's come a pretty long way. Um there was a time when you were paying like insane slippage to jump from one place to another using like a really dodgy exchange in a really you didn't know if your funds were going to be able to like

6. 2:08

   be withdrawn. Uh you would just sort of send USD do some trade and then maybe you can withdraw it, maybe you can't. Um, we we've come a long way from there. Obviously, like there's been a lot of hacks. There's been a lot of like crazy things. There's been a lot of protocols like going up and down. Um, but I think we're at a point where a user can ape into a memecoin on BNB and then very quickly in one or two clicks swap that

7. 2:35

   into a stock on Salana. And then if they want to earn yield on that stock, they can do that. and uh they can do it from their telegram, they can do it from their phone, they can do it from their browser. Um so I think we've come a pretty long way. Um obviously I believe that the best way to execute that is through intents and I think we're proving that with like our volume and a lot of the the flow that we're getting

8. 3:00

   through a lot of the sources that it comes from. But there are certainly different different models to do it. But um but yeah, I I think we've come a long way and I think the next leg is probably getting even better price execution, getting even better compliance, um attracting bigger players with larger liquidity that want to trade things other than memecoins and NFTs, but like RWAs and like important more important

9. 3:23

   assets, if you will. Um but yeah, we're definitely on in the right in the right path. Inside you there are two wolves, Will. There's the RWA and the and and the meme wolf. If I may, will and then Allan, I'm super curious to hear your perspective, especially around the immutability of of Thor Swap, which often gets you guys in some trouble, but I'm super curious your take there. is will on the near and

10. 3:48

    near.com front end when you were doing swaps or sending um you get this um slippage notification where it says like 0.1% is like the max accepted but then sometimes when the when you actually do the swap it says like the minimum you'll receive and sometimes it's a scary number sometimes it's like I'm swapping you know Zcash to near and it's like maximum imum amount you're going to pay six Zcash. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. This is like a 20 grand swap.

11. 4:20

    You're telling me I might lose six $8,000 on this. Like, so I don't know if that's a front end thing, but I don't know if it's a legal thing that that you have to do, but I just wanted to present that to you as a user. Just some some feedback. It's kind of a scary It's kind of a scary site sometimes.

12. 4:35

    Yeah. So, I think that's really good feedback. And I think with near.com specifically, um, this product only just shipped in February. Um, but it's built on top of intent. So before that, the front end of intent, if anyone's used it, it looks ancient compared to what we have now. Uh, and intense like near intent as a whole, has all these features. We have one click earn where you can go into any yield opportunity

13. 4:59

    that that we have integrated. We have all the swaps. We have RWAS, a lot of other things. We have pers. like they're trying to put everything together. So yeah, I would probably fault that down to like a like a like a platform issue, like a front end bug. Um, but having but having said that, uh, on the slippage side, um, most users don't really understand what slippage is and how it comes about. And I think what you

14. 5:24

    need to think about is like, you know, some users think, okay, I want to swap Zcash for near. These are two very volatile assets. And if I create this intent right now in 10 minutes or whenever Zcash the Zcash chain has passed that on to near um the quota is going to be the same. But like at the moment with this volatility we're seeing Zcash go like insane numbers up and down and near as well to be honest in a matter of seconds. And so often the quote that you you get is stale and the

15. 5:53

    the slippage is a lot different than you might expect. Um this is what sometimes causes swaps to get stuck. um sometimes causes uh worse price execution. Um there was a good example recently on FOMO where there was a a trader that lost like 40% just by swapping out of an asset and they were sort of blaming FOMO and it was like well actually it's just you're trading a meme coin that's super

16. 6:17

    liquid and super volatile so like it's going to have this. Um, so that's just like a side note on slippage because a lot of people they want to like I don't know one click 100k clips in and out of an asset and like there's going to be some slippage regardless like even if you went to Binance and you swap 100k whether Zcash just a market order no limit orders like you're going to see some slippage. Um, but we have some cool features coming out for that soon as well. So hopefully that won't be a problem for long.

17. 6:45

    Very cool. Very cool. Very cool. And and Alan, how how do you approach this? you know, obviously when there's, you know, times of volatility, it kind of stress tests infrastructure. How do you manage this at Thorro? Yeah. Um, I think this goes into some other questions we could dive into, but on a higher level, um, we've we've been building, you know, basically a decentralized um, exchange front end since 2021. Um, the name comes from 4chain. uh and even before that you know it was really looking at um atomic swaps

18. 7:13

    like you know previously as a kind of a peer-to-peer solution for you know doing you know uh decentralized permissionless trading crosschain especially right um and I think AMM last cycle you know defy summer was the solution um and I think now intent has proven to be a more you know uh even more capital efficient you know model on top of that um but certainly uh because we aggregate so many different providers and now you know I think uh in times of volatility

19. 7:38

    sometimes AMM models actually um do provide a benefit in that you know um uh if the pool just rebalances then you know you might get a better execution um or you know there there may be other models where it's kind of like you might want to tap like like slightly split up a trade into smaller chunks so that you don't get you know hit with one um one big slip you know in in one trade um but

20. 8:01

    uh I think the benefit of us you know you know you know u you know using near intense um we're one of the first to integrate like you know uh I think July last year um and you know Zcash and everything really took off and um we've seen the volumes like obviously you know tremendous volumes on on for swap and um uh you know through near intents and that's purely because of the you know both the the the pricing um and execution and uh and yeah just the

21. 8:26

    amount of like chains that can be accessed that was previously siloed. So, um, it's funny you mentioned about slippage cuz I remember in the DeFi summer was kind of like, oh, if you want to buy a memecoin, you know, you should set slippage to like, I don't know, like 10% 20 10 10 to 20% or something or else it'll never fill. Um, but but I think folks are very used to um now with, you know, Salanner and just like sniping,

22. 8:51

    you know, into meme tokens. Um, it's gotten very very um aggressive, you know. So, um I mean to be honest, it's not really something that we we tend to um uh that's not really like our platform because it's not really a trading platform as much as it's a um yeah, it's more of a kind of OG cipher cyber punk like you know exchange you know for for self custody you know and that's one of the things I love

23. 9:13

    about what you guys have built and I think uh Fither is going to come in as well so we can send him over. Um, and Allan, I mean, you guys get yourself a fair share of flack for not giving in to authorities, to uh bounties, to all these things because you guys just persist a immutable opensource transparent um system and then obviously like there's privacy embedded in when you cross chains and things. But you know I just am curious to understand your

24. 9:46

    perspective on why the value of immutability is so important in crosschain systems in decentralized systems. you know what is Allen's take on Thor Swap's ability to remain immutable no matter what happens right I think just just to clarify first um so you know we were founded in 2021 um alongside Thor chain um but we're actually independent team so you know it's um at the time was like basically the main and only front end um and to be honest you know all of this I think I

25. 10:18

    called a previous panel and it was really good you know it covered a lot of this topics about you know regulation and compliance and you know everything. Um so for us it wasn't really a you know a huge issue until I would say 2023 um when the topic of like okay is moving assets crosschain considered um a mixer so to speak if a elicit like a bad actor happens to use it right um because it's

26. 10:41

    technically all onchain is actually transparent and traceable but um for platforms um like protocol holder like protocols or just you know front ends directly serving users um you know uh like is there a solution where we're not like you know con like forever going to be essentially seen as um the only you know use cases serving bad actors right so I think the obviously centralization

27. 11:06

    is a spectrum and then when you're talking about managing like funds across you know moving funds that's like um a very difficult you know way to like um mechanism to say like you cannot interfere right so um I think in in terms of that like we've like since you know the past few years um on a front end level and we we I think the some of the previous topic um covered this is you know we try to do our best to uh enforce like um air mount so we know you know we can try be be on top of that and work with the best you know um teams in

28. 11:38

    the space to make sure that we're not deliberately serving bad actors um because to be honest like we intend to be around for another you know five years and we want to be serving users who who are going to be here for another five years and not because they just like you know exploited some protocol and you know so Um I think our intent like you know not to use a pun here but is our intent is to serve good users um who needs a you know financial sovereignty and and self-

29. 12:01

    custody. So um we try to do our best and we work with protocols that are doing you know a good job on this as well such as scenar. So um I know for chain has their own like every protocol has their own stance on it to be honest and um you know and if people choose to use protocols directly you know whether um it's you know through onchain messaging or what have you um then you know the protocols will have to respond and you know um build mechanisms you know for

30. 12:26

    that but for front ends I think our first of all is because we cannot freeze funds you know we do not take funds into custody so you know the first instance is basically saying like if you can you know um observe that you are a bad actor and work with, you know, teams in space to make sure that we all do a collectively do a good job to prevent, you know, these things from happening, then, uh, the least we can do is not to serve them, right? Um, regardless of how much revenue is at stake, you know, it's

31. 12:50

    just not the business that we want to be in. So, got it. Appreciate that. Um, thither, did we got you, Tither? Close. It's like, uh, slither slither with a th at the start. Um, and yeah, sorry, a little technical difficulty joining, but uh, hey, no worries.

32. 13:08

    Thanks for having me. Um, yeah, man. I mean, would love to get you involved. So, we're talking just kind of generally about the growth of intents and just how the space has progressed um, with the lens of entering this like compliant era. And I mean, it's kind of boring, but I saw you guys got your SOC like one and two licenses.

33. 13:28

    I think like yesterday or two days ago you guys dropped that. So, congrats on that. Um I'm just curious like from the layer zero perspective maybe just like what's the biggest um like focus point right for expanding the interop and kind of crosschain stack you guys have obviously in this institutional era we're also in this like Robin Hood chain meme era in this like tokenized equity crosschain era where we're seeing a lot

34. 13:51

    of the fragmentation issues that we had in like the early days of crosschain stable coins just kind of you know paint the picture for us of what layer zero is tackling right now as far as uh priorities Yeah, I think you know in terms of priority there there are kind of these two things that we're doing as a company right now right there's the interop business that we you know have been a player in for five six years now um and then there is the upcoming L1 that we're

35. 14:16

    launching at some point you know hopefully before the end of the year um I think the two do play on each other and they do certainly overlap a lot in terms of the you know very institutional use cases and and partners that we're going after for both of them um the sock one and sock two stuff. Yeah, I appreciate that. I think that that, you know, definitely is confidence inspiring for people in that institutionally facing uh bucket. But at the end of the

36. 14:41

    day, I think, you know, a lot of these teams are they're they're led or featured, you know, with people that have been in the crypto space for a while who kind of understand the way that the, you know, ecosystem of chains and the the ways to move assets and use cases for assets and all of these different DeFi related concepts have have grown and evolved.

37. 15:02

    Um, I think the ball just rolls much much slower um in that world when you compare it to DeFi, right? And so there are things like, you know, proof of concepts, pilot programs, um, extensive testing, you know, in private before teams are willing to be able to actually launch public mainet products. Um, and I think, yeah, we're seeing that, you know, certainly with interop, but to an even greater extent with zero with the

38. 15:26

    chain. Um on the interop side, yeah, we work with obviously a ton of RWAs, with you know, virtually all of the tokenized equity issuers with a lot of these different um stable coins that are rappers for things like like private credit, for example. Um and yeah, I think at the end of the day, uh giving these people the confidence that they need to succeed is only half of our job.

39. 15:48

    The other half kind of comes from the regulatory environment on things like whether or not it's you know legal for money market funds to exist on blockchains or for uh major institutional market makers to trade perpetual futures and things uh of that nature. So it's a you know it's a rolling or a moving target. We're trying to stay one step ahead of it on both of these uh different business lines that we have.

40. 16:11

    Yeah. And Will, from your perspective, right, you know, Robin Hood chain pops up out of nowhere kind of to what to what I'm sorry, Slizzard's saying. I'm I'm gonna mess it up. Um, and um, you know, you guys have to make a a liquidity decision, right, of supporting this new chain with with your with your solver network, right? And you you know, you want to be there quickly. Um, and

41. 16:35

    also this app FOMO is obviously like really growing. How do you guys make decisions about porting solvers and market makers to support new assets and new chains? Um because yeah, I mean we're seeing tokenized equities take take the world by storm and a lot of it is like this like initial bootstrapping kind of meme phase, but it's obvious where this is heading, right? And so how

42. 17:00

    do you guys enable that future? And then you know what was the Robin Hood chain story for you guys? Yeah, sure. So um actually first of all like it's very difficult to assess whether a chain is going to be successful or not. Uh if we look at like last I don't know last year everyone was sort of ra or two years ago everyone was raving about bar chain and monad and and not to say that those teams weren't sort

43. 17:24

    of successful but I think it's fair to say they didn't have the the the great crypto impact we thought they would. They didn't go to like a top 10 as many people at least at the time were saying. Um we obviously we chose to support support support both of them and we're happy we did. Um great partners but obviously like ahead of time there was there's nothing to to say what is going to make Robin Hood be like what Robin Hood is or what is going to make it be not as successful not have the same

44. 17:50

    hype. So it's super difficult to tell ahead of time. Um it's not just a case of like getting liquidity over and getting solvers to to compete in those markets. That's like one part of the orchestration of it. But we also have to have our you know the bridging team actually integrate the chain. We have to look at um how does the chain work specifically what would um what are the risk factors within the chain. And this

45. 18:13

    takes some time. If it's an EVM chain it's relatively simpler because a lot of concepts and things are sort of copied over uh when people make a new EVM chain. But if it's like a like a Zcash uh that one's obviously like a little more complicated cuz there's a whole new technology. It's also got these privacy features that are really difficult to think through. Um, so yeah, it takes a

46. 18:37

    lot. I think it's a thing of like it's a balance of like how difficult is it to to support the chain? How easy is it to get solvers and liquidity on there? Um, and then how big of a priority should we make it based on the volume we think it's going to have. So, in hindsight, Robin Hood, we should have had it from day one. uh and we didn't and we don't have it yet, but we'll um but you know, it's it's very tough to know that Robin

47. 19:02

    Hood is going to go and pull that. Um now we have another a couple more exciting chains coming up and the question is like are they going to have the same effect as as Robin Hood or is it going to depend on the price of Bitcoin at the time or like what what's going to cause it? Um so yeah, that's kind of how we try and make the decisions, but it's definitely like a moving a moving target and um I don't I think it's more of like an art than a science. like it's very difficult

48. 19:26

    to predict what is going to pop next. Yeah. Um guys, as we kind of come to a a close here, I know it's uh tight on the hour. Just kind of thinking about the tokenized equity part of the qua part of the equation. Are are we anticipating a massive sum of crosschain activity to be non-crypto assets in a similar capacity that you know HIP3 did extremely well in Hyperlquid during like the commodities and AI run? Are we

49. 19:57

    are we expecting something similar in the kind of asset transfer and movement of assets on chain space or do you anticipate that it'll be consistently dominated by crypto assets for the foreseeable future? I'll open I feel like Yeah.

50. 20:16

    No, no, you Oh, thanks. Um, yeah, I think we've already seen the needle move considerably, right? I mean, even if obviously every, you know, everyone's seeing what's happening on Hyperlid, um, all of these other issuers and exchanges and apps that are launching their own flavors of tokenized equities in particular, but even if you look at a lot of the like memecoin activity, especially like Robin Hood chains memecoin activity, um, you know,

51. 20:41

    virtually all of the big tokens there are paired on the back end with Robin Hood tokenized equities, right? And I think like it is cool for, you know, I've been in in crypto for probably a decade now. Um, and it's cool to see the convergence of these things that, you know, we all know and love on kind of the more degen side of crypto. Uh, coupled with the things that we've all been talking about for years now, you know, in terms of wanting

52. 21:04

    to see on chain, like tokenized equities. So, I think that'll probably continue. Um, but yeah, it's certainly been a fun last few months on chain in that sense. Yeah, Alan. Right. I I was going to say um I think we started this conversation by talking about you know with the state of like crosschain but um it's really about I think you know not crosschain multi chain but really about like you know onchain now right so whether it's to equities or commodities um the good thing is they are onchain assets and um

53. 21:36

    I suppose the other good thing is all things considered they all blue chips you know because most of them have a like you know they've been around for much longer than um you know all coins or memecoins in particular so uh I think that's very bullish to me in the sense that like you know as long as when the market shifts liquidity is not going offchain we you know it means the the whole ecosystem is thriving right and our job is basically to try to um you

54. 22:00

    know connect like go the rails and then offer them to to users so they can still um have access to them you know at any time right um I think uh you know the models of whatever is is the latest hottest thing will change but um the fact that we just have more you know market cap in general moving on chain is is a really bullish thing, you know. Um so yeah, I I think um especially I think

55. 22:25

    feel like we're moving into a into like a recovery phase now from the bear. So, you know, this this can only be good. Yeah. Yeah. I agree on the number of high quality assets. I think that's probably kind of more of what I was getting at is just you anticipate to to see a lot more demand and volume traded and swapped and sent around of these higher quality assets as investors kind of want to invest into these and less into more

56. 22:48

    speculative things. And it's also quite interesting as you say about the timing Allan where we we've gone through this bear where we've been you know we call it the revenue meadow where it's like the assets that are being bid are the ones that are making money that are giving money back to their token holders. they're doing that they're building an onchain business and so simultaneously you've got a lot of squeezing of the fat or the trimming of the fat where it's like a you've got

57. 23:12

    better quality assets, stocks, equities on chain now to invest in. So that's taking flows away from, you know, governance tokens, you could say. And and then B, you've got um high quality crypto assets now, right? And so you've kind of got this like dual force that's just squeezing the the market for legitimacy, right? And I think that's super super bullish for the market and for onchain finance as a whole.

58. 23:36

    Yeah, for sure. Because I think the one other thing is the tough part is the liquidity, right? you know, we talking about like if you want to build these rails is liquidity is very very hard unless you just completely abstract everything away and it's all just on a centralized, you know, platform. It's like, you know, trust me, bro, I owe you, you know, I've got the I've got the

59. 23:51

    liquidity, which we've seen doesn't work, you know, and um and I think, you know, that we just saw like the laptop token basically like people not really falling for it anymore, right? So basically, you know, uh like the tokens that stick around are have are going to have a better chance of, you know, having liquidity available. And as long as you have deep liquidity, um there's going to be, you know, opportunities for you to to not only keep building in in in in the space, but also um yeah, like

60. 24:17

    actually have a reason to be there, you know. Um so yeah, like the meta will change, but um I think we we're all a bit more, you know, I don't think the transfer has anything to do with this. It's just like a natural evolution of the space. I think I, you know, we've just gotten a lot better at this, you know, and um then because we've learned from the mistakes, I would like to say that.

61. 24:35

    Um I put out a post yesterday that was like unpopular opinion memes are good because I've been sending my my friends from like the fifth grade of my FOMO link and like sending them like $500 of memes. I'm like, "Guys, I know you're going to blow money this weekend on the NFL opening week on gambling. Just like try this instead." And people are all my comments being like, "Dude, you're an idiot. Like, this is not any better." And I'm like, "Okay, fine. At least they can like think about growing a portfolio and like they can go to bed at night and

62. 25:06

    the money's going to be there the next day. They're not going to zero out their account on some like plus 500 odds bet." And then Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, responds to my tweet and goes, "I agree. They onboarded me." So that's the state of affairs. Yeah. So, Jen, thanks for your time.

63. 25:27

    Yeah. I hope people learn about uh uh FTVs and market caps like from this whole thing. Yeah. If anything, that's that's a good thing to learn. Yeah. Yeah. J, thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day. Enjoy the bull market.

64. 25:40

    Stay long. Stay strong. There's no reason to be bearish. Don't let Rob's macro takes and the rollup get to your head. Stay long. Stay strong. We're all good here. Yeah. Great to always Great to talk to you guys, man. Yeah. Yep. Thanks for having us. Thanks, Chad. Thanks guys. Cheers.