Chain Abstraction Explained: How HOT Labs & NEAR One Are Building Web3

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1. 0:00

   Welcome everybody. Um I'm here I'm here with Peter from Hot Labs, one of the most successful projects building on Near and a lot of other chains as well. Peter, welcome. Hi Jared. It's good to see you, man. So let's just jump right in here. You've been building for a long time. Hot Labs is the catchall. You've got a lot of projects that you've built over times that have evolved and stuff. So for everyone listening, what is Hot Labs now? Yeah.

2. 0:22

   Yeah. Um so we started hotlaps last year in 2024 and uh we started with making this chain abstracted wallet hot wallet and then we was expanding to multi- chains and we figure out a lot of things we need to fix and we end up building our own chain of market infrastructure.

3. 0:41

   It's based on near but it supported right now more than 14 chains uh including this very specific chains like ton salana stellar like it supported many nonvium chains as well and uh with hotlaps we developing a lot of open source product to make the whole internet whole web three chain abstracted that's the goal the goal is you don't need gas you can use your defi if you for most of use cases especially for like transfers swaps things like

4. 1:10

   this You can use any currency from any blockchain very seamlessly and there's no any like risk of regulation, risk of blocks, risk of uh like centralization. Uh that that's the vision like and we we experienced a lot with like you know we started last year with a wallet and we boarded more than 30 million users for last year. We faced a lot of users problem especially with like all this multi-chain stuff and the gas fees the

5. 1:37

   bridging assets they joining us on different chains like a lot of local specific about like your gas price your like storage cleaning like all these things was very very painful and we we have support of eight full-time people who are like spend the whole day in chats to like answer answer your questions and we probably answer like dozens of thousands supported plans I'm probably one of a few team who really understand pain of being multi-chain today for for for regular users and uh

6. 2:09

   and having this in mind we we kind of really have a vision of like how web three should look like in like in a two in a three years and that's what like it's not only about the like the valid product it's about some infrastructure we have to build and I'm very happy that our vision is very aligned with like with near one team for example with And we're building a few great product together with hot labs uh to to make

7. 2:35

   this world chain abstracted. Man, Peter, it is I mean we've we were talking earlier. We've talked a few times over the years and it's just like you know seeing how much you've one how much you've shipped that is just like I can't even explain to people that gets one of your you and your team are just really w it's amazing to see how much you guys ship but also in doing that and shipping

8. 2:57

   so much and iterating you are now on the front of the wave of this chain abstraction and it's really good because you are aligning what you said there with near one which is the team that builds out a lot of the blockchain stuff and your team are working together a lot. Can we kind of break down like what your relationship or how you guys are working together to help achieve this vision of chain abstraction? Yeah. Um yeah, with near one um well um there is

9. 3:20

   like if we're talking about chain abstraction, there's like four main like step infrastructure things which need to be done. First of all is chain signature, right? We need one chain to be able to control assets on another chain and that's what we work with near with near team very close. We have actually the same code base which we both contribute. Um we started it a little like earlier and then they joined

10. 3:43

    um uh in like early this year to like start to contribute this uh stuff too. They're doing amazing job like they have very strong engineers and uh we're building together this like whole core. So hot protocol core and near chain signature core is like 95% the same. We have a different validation. We have different like use cases uh on the product part but we have the shared security audits which have this shared code base. We we contribute there

11. 4:11

    together and uh that's that's what we do like completely together. The other thing the second big part of infrastructure is a bridges and uh right now we have a understanding that there's a two type of bridges that need to be done on near the one of them is bridges with which called light clients. This is bridge for Bitcoin. This is bridge for Zcash. This is a bridge for Ethereum.

12. 4:35

    This is a very technical complicated bridge where you have to implement light client for every specific chains. And u this bridge is mostly for like people who want to like lock like hundreds of millions of dollars. You want to trust to like very like uh simple cryptography. You don't want to trust any infrastructure. You want to only bat for your light clients. That's what the near team mostly focus on. And we are making something what we called hot

13. 5:00

    bridge. Hot brbridge is actually very flexible, very fast bridge which support more than 14 chains right now where we can add support of new chain in a few days because we use this our chain signature nodes and we just add specific light clients for specific chains and we make them all connected to near. Uh this is mostly for intense use cases for memecoin use cases for use case of like specific fund fast chain like ton or

14. 5:25

    stellar and like we really follow the market like the live class is something very fundamental for very conservative people who like when it comes around like use defi for like Zcash and the hot part we like we're disrupting the market like everything every cool things happening NFT gifts on ton we we are like two weeks after we will have our NFT bridge there on our hard bridge infrastructure And you know the web tree is a lot about

15. 5:51

    narratives and near is like has a like usually very conservative right and doesn't shift fast and our like the synergy we found with near one team is we can actually be in like like in top first players in every niche happen and make this niche happens on near chain abstraction. That's the goal. So this is a team where we like work on the same product but different parties. hearing

16. 6:15

    that Near One and the Hot Labs team are working together, like that's just like two teams that ship all the time and uh you make a really good point with like how you guys find a synergy together. That's a really cool I'm glad to see that that's how that's going. That's I didn't know that. So, thanks for that's cool. So, let's talk about like a couple examples of that if you have some like there's been a couple chains added lately. H how did you guys help with that? What was what was or how did you work together for that? Yeah. Yeah,

17. 6:40

    absolutely. Um like for example recently there was a new chain like polygon and binance smart chain and this chains fully connected with hot bridge that's mean every wrapped asset on near secured by hot bridge like if you want to bridge money to stellar from or to to polygon from to binance smart chain there and back it's all happening at our hot bridge um that's that's like full

18. 7:04

    synergy we iterate at our bridge a lot to work very seamlessly with nears And how users can feel it is you don't need near to bridge your assets on new that that sounds crazy but uh the bridge designed to be fully trustless. You submit all proof all your like instruction what to do with your money on your native chain like if you want to swap money from like polygon to binance

19. 7:28

    smart chain you create this transaction on binance smart chain and then you submit it to our locker on near you don't need anything we just will use your your intent which you submitted on on base and we will execute it on near and we will withdraw your money to b smart chain um this integration that's what we was working for like last four months since Denver with Alex team about intense And that's how we have like so

20. 7:52

    seamless experience and it's fully trustless uh for people to use like this chain abstraction stack and uh this is just one of examples where like um near intense team near one and hot like connecting our pieces of infrastructure together so users would not feel this is a different infrastructure at all. The light client you said it's super technical. What is some of like the key

21. 8:15

    technical points of that that make that so unique? Yeah. Um well then so what's problem they trying to solve like clients we we are on near and we know prove that users deposited $1,000 for us on like bitcoin and then we will give them this $1,000 wrap tokens on intense right and uh how most of clients work they have kind of network of like validators who like checking the state of their bitcoin and submit yeah this this transaction exist uh and this requires some sort of trust like this

22. 8:47

    validators need to be like some sort of like threshold or they have to be run in TE's like a lot of things which need to be done and on other side there's a thing which called light clients so we actually store the uh root hash of the whole uh bitcoin blockchain on near and every block on bitcoin we submit inside near like not the whole block we submit headers it's not that heavy but inside

23. 9:13

    near blockchain we can verify any transaction exist inside Bitcoin blockchain just because we have these proofs of the of the like we have these headers of the blocks that that's very that's very strong cryptography it's hard to implement for many chains specific like it's very hard to do for L2s it's hard to do for Salana but for some fundamental chains like Ethereum Bitcoin it's possible to do it's like and near is the only place where it's like pretty cheap because light clients store a lot of you know a lot of things

24. 9:46

    in their blockchain fate and near has charging that's a perfect match. What do you think about near intense and how do you understand the chain abstraction and how it works on near and all that. Yeah. Yeah. Um so near intense is a very powerful engine how users from any chain can control their asset on this intense balance and separately this is a like swap protocol. So let's start with this engine because for me it's like it's

25. 10:12

    more exciting things to start. Um so the idea is usually for blockchain if you have your money on base you need to have a specific base wallet you need to have specific sort of transactions you have to sign and if you have 10 different nonv chains you have very specific transaction in each of them so what nearense did they created one smart smart contract which support transactions from all these chains from

26. 10:38

    AVM chains from sana it's to oncoming and that's mean if you have any of this wallet you don't need near wallet. You don't need it like like if you have money on tone, you don't need create like another wallet. You can use your tone wallet to control your balance on intense.

27. 10:53

    That's that's very powerful stuff because it's a lot about the mass adoption for people, right? Because like even in chain abstraction world, someone still store your private key, right? It's a and it's something signs the messages in specific format and we will one way we force all people go to chain abstraction wallet which we also do in hot but we also have a billions people who use like metam mask right and like phantom and new intense allow you

28. 11:20

    control your chain obstructed balance with your phantom wallet because they support all this authorization way from all these chains that's that's very very powerful engine we use it a lot on top of hotend near intense where gas refuel is hot. Uh hot bridge like deposit withdraw uh test nets if you if you have your token on test nets it also works on top of the same engine uh airdrops uh

29. 11:45

    mints and now NFTs coming and all this stuff we build we connect to this omni balance. So if you have phantom wallet, you will be able to trade on like our chain abracted NFT marketplace by submitting proofs from Salana blockchain to this intent balance. Dude, that's that's cra that's awesome. like the the infrastructure you guys are making it's it's what that's already works like um if you if you will like you know add the fire drops and hot as

30. 12:15

    there was a special page and you can like claim it from like uh from having no gas no near wallet like it's very it's very seamless yeah it is man it's man you got me all hyped because I knew a lot of this stuff was happening but hearing you explain it like you're doing like a really great job at like bringing it to like my level so I appreciate that but like you know because this stuff can get super heavy

31. 12:38

    or like you guys are basically building the infrastructure for what is soon to be like the DAP ecosystem wave that's coming you know uh that's two are the great thing about new tense the first one it's fully godless like because the engine is of work trustless you don't need to have an account on new to submit transaction you just have your transaction which you created inside fun

32. 13:01

    wallet and like there's a rare who submitted all on near intense and it's very easy for users and second part they have their own swap engine this is a separate stuff um there is like swaps actually near intense can work with any sort of swaps it can be solvers it can be order book it can be mm in the future maybe and u right now it's only one of swapways which is like kind of very like

33. 13:26

    first iteration but now the team's working on order book and when order book is done and we have all this powerful chup engine we can actually will have stack to build up our own hyperlquid and not just hyperlquid it's not it's going to be way more secure because some assets secured by like light client and uh like which is very secure and some other assets secured by hot brbridge which is like open source t

34. 13:51

    uh um chain signature infrastructure it's not like centralized by hyperlquid where you have the engine and they just execute something you don't know like uh what's going on there uh and like think all those things coming together and like seeing like how like actually like hot connected here here here here and like actually make all the system work is very incredible. It's actually I think intense is like the juggernaut

35. 14:16

    that is like it's just gonna it's everybody's gonna use it in the future and engine like let's let's start with like the swap stuff they they have like in V1 and like there's a lot of you know people a lot of discussion on Twitter about like benefits and like problems with this swap engine but this asset management stuff is very great and like I think they it's very fresh I haven't seen this tech before in other chains and uh that's that's what we like mainly

36. 14:43

    focus to all our infrastructure be connected and work on top of intents and last four months again we great like first of all for last year we made many of this by our team internally like this all fire drops gathering fuel bridges working of our own omnibales and for last four months we migrated to connect all this to intents so right now they're like there's like all and they also migrated from their bridges to our hot

37. 15:07

    bridge so that's like a lot of work internally to like all these things actually work like with each other to like power each other not to create like pearl infrastructure. Uh that that's a lot we actually after our like Denver conversation uh we we had like four months ago. So, and I I'll honestly man like I think fire drops I know dude from a marketing standpoint I love the fire drops. Those things are we have more than 10 million drops claimed for the day on chain on year. That's wild.

38. 15:40

    That's congrats. That's it's a very clever mechanism and it's probably one of the better simpler use cases for like the telegram like telegram stuff that I've ever used. Like the the flow of it so simple it's it's really nice. Okay, let's let's shift a little bit. What is the hot omni token and what is the road map for integration with near intents?

39. 15:59

    Yeah. Yeah. So um I already a little touch the road map on our previous step. So every token like how omni works how omni token is token which you create with omni bridge hot omni bridge. If you have your salana you can send your salana to special locker smart contract and this locker smart contract state actually can be verified by the hot chain signature network. And once you deposit money on your locker contract, you can mint this salan on near. This is

40. 16:25

    very simple and you can swap this salana to USDC from base and then you can burn this USDC base USDC on near and you will be able to claim the real base USDC on like on base chain. Um these tokens which you create on near we call hot omni and they actually one to one backed by some assets on uh on original chains and lockers and they secure by hot protocol. Um and the integration yeah um yeah let me let me unpack this a little bit. So where will I be able to launch

41. 17:00

    an omni a hot omni token? It's not to launch. It's you have your token on u on Solana your memecoin and uh you want your token to be available from all chains. So what you do you create omni token you send it to a locker you mint omni token and this omni token is minted inside your intent balance like this is a hot brbridge and hot brbridge meet this token on your intent balance like these things connected in like same transaction you m your token department to intent balance and now this token

42. 17:31

    from intent balance can be bought from like user space ethereum wallet for ethereum from like for sui wallet for sui for ton wallet for ton and like your token from Salana when it became omni hot omni token it became available for trade for every every wallet users every chain users for like any currency and a single transaction say you have a billion tokens on like your example Salana do you have to all lot like a 100 million goes into that or the second you put any on there do all the tokens

43. 18:01

    become an omni token it depends how much you want it to be traded like it's kind of you provide this multi channel liquidity so when you made omni token you actually put some assets to this multi-chain pool and they became available to tradeable on all chains and yeah and later when order book is done you will be also be able to create like per for your hot omni token or like another way like landing stuff and it will be available for any token from any once you deposit to hot omni you

44. 18:31

    immediately unlock all this multi-chain defi uh with like which will be available for like all all users all different chains u that's very fant Fantastic. Like actually making a omni token is like converting your like local specifically chain project to like very chain abstraction like right now wallet and like it's not how you have to bridge right it's like if you if you if you connected to the bridge right user from

45. 18:57

    EVM wallet still have to bridge money to Salana connect and make transaction on Solana like it doesn't make and he need gaz on salana register tokens clear storage it doesn't make things simpler and uh if you come to discord of sui chat and send them link for your solena token like they're going to like do like but but if it's an omni token you send them a link for sui website where they

46. 19:21

    can connect their sui wallet and buy this omni token on near intense but they don't know about it because they make transaction only they sign transaction in their sui wallet so they're buying it with whatever pair they can buy sooie or say they have sui usdc they can just buy the token with su USDC and it all gets done in the back end yeah Yeah. Yeah.

47. 19:39

    Yeah. Yeah. And they they also control it like it's not some like centralized entity where like they ask us to buy and we hold it on our balance. It's fully decentralized like they sign actual intent. I want to buy like this talking for my sui. I send my sui to the locker with this message and magic is executed right. Uh that's bridge the message is executed. You have your money on intent which you control by your sui wallet.

48. 20:03

    There's no middleware like login password Google mail or like it's control. It's Salana token balance which fully connected to your private key from your sui wallet. Wow, that's wild. I think the So I I you walking me through it. I get it. Is there going to is it going to be one of those things where you have to buy it on certain exchanges like you'll have to go to like a near intense swap exchange or will it be in

49. 20:27

    wallets like is this just going to be something that in like five years from now it's just how you do everything? Are you talking about the interface for user right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's Yeah. Let's take this to the users, right?

50. 20:36

    Right. So the interface for the user what does that look like? There's a two two different teams who work on league with two different vision. Our team and my vision is we want to build interface like hyperlquid. We want to have hot exchange which called hex hot exchange hex and uh this will be the similar to hyperlquid product where you have like your old token traded and like

51. 21:00

    an interface and you can connect your salon wallet and trade multi-chain tokens and there's another approach which um Alex team working on uh this called oneclick swap oneclick swap idea is you don't really need like your special interface any wallet can connect it and you can just buy it from any wallet. Um and it's all stuff going to be on background a lot of back end part and like that's partically centralized

52. 21:26

    like the one click swap is like nice for developers but it's like it's it's been done to work on background like if I'm coming to trust wallet a nice guys connect our like very powerful swap exchange on intense I will go to one click swap but if I want to people to my chain absorption app I will go to hot I will go to hot I will make this interface where people can connect and see what's are not on intense and we

53. 21:51

    also it's very different way how we connect intense as well because we trying to like all of the things we trying to directly connect like we users control his omni balance directly like we never try to have a middleware we don't try to like send money to app we will deposit it for you because it's simpler we do a lot of like stack like it's a little longer users like transaction we have to very carefully track it but in every second user is the

54. 22:16

    only person who control his money and this interface we can build all that this interface will be you know live and user will able to go back there and like withdraw money from their intents uh the approach which Alex say team do they say there's my address send me money I will take care about it and like that's a lot of like part of custodial it's also have their own point like for some use cases because it's also way easier for integrate because we spend like nights

55. 22:47

    to to actually make things work. It's not as simple as it sounds unfortunately right now. Uh but the result we have this like truly chain abstraction system and we are betting on this approach. We are betting for people who will understand what's going on or like at least a little like who will care about the security part who will deposit it like millions of dollars through our

56. 23:10

    interface and who don't want to send million dollar to like address to like wait until someone will take care about it who want to make sure they know where money are right now and um not only this we also believe this like architecture need to be more like robust right so um if everything happen front end can take care about it. We don't we don't have like team of that's also the reason why we only have team of nine. We don't need

57. 23:35

    team of like very big team to like carefully track all these deposits um withdraw like stuff trying to make more more based on raw cryptography and robust. That's why you guys can ship so fast. You go like from idea to execution to shipping and like your your delta is super short. Um but it does sound like both both sides can maybe be for different users too. The main use case for one click swap is for wallets. If

58. 23:58

    I'm a wallet developer, I don't want to like create like connect this like HDK with a lot of code. I want to just ask API get my address, send users money there and have a signed deal with Alex to make sure this guy will not, you know, scam my users. That's what this these teams want and that's the best great services which they provide for them. Awesome. So Peter, we've really talked about like where Hot Labs is now,

59. 24:23

    where it came from and all the the chain abstraction working with Near One and with you know Intense team. What are Intense, how you're using it, what the hot omni token is like? We've really hit a lot of really interesting points. So if you can what what is the future of hot labs look like? You know, maybe one year and and beyond.

60. 24:42

    Yeah. Well, the ambition for hotlaps is to create this infrastructure and um on boarding a lot of a lot our mission is to create this tech to make the web three chain abstracted and then make web three chain abstracted which is way more complicated part because it's uh it's a lot about the like the interfaces the features the speed the on boarding like that's a lot of work coming up front and the piece of this like big engine power of this on boarding will be Hot hot um

61. 25:14

    you know it's live for like a little more than a year right now people can mine it in an app and that's hot is a uh something what powers all this chain abstracted infrastructure and um we don't have any exact uh news about it but um as I mentioned new intent is working on the order book and u we are very very aligned with their progress in this direction uh so um our vision is that we will be able to use like hotlaps resources and like potential hot

62. 25:46

    resources to incentivize pro projects to on board and board and board more people more liquidity to this chain abstraction part and uh then like we will use all this um like volume all this activity on this chain abstraction to u reward people who like who contributed and who like hold caught colleague build with us for all this journey. Uh well that's my my vision about it. Um but uh that's what we all want to come to. Yeah, Peter. Wow, it is

63. 26:23

    really cool. I you know we've been talking for over like the last three years and I'm hoping we could talk for many more because of just all the stuff you're building and then you know in five years from now we'll have a we'll have a talk and it'll just be like man the whole world is using you know chain abstracted stuff that you've built which it's you know I see it going that way.

64. 26:40

    Well, they thank you so much for like taking the time to chat and really thank you for all the work that you and your team are doing, right? Like as as a as just a fan of Near, it's like really cool to know that, you know, the Near One team, the Intense team, and you and the Hot Labs team are all working like together to build basically the only chain that can be chracted this way. So, thank you so much, man. Yeah. Yeah. Um,

65. 27:04

    I was happy to share. Thank you so much for being here, Peter. Thank you. was uh was happy to to talk to you today. All right, man. Have a good day.