ETHDenver Intents Day Special LIVE From The Livestock Center

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

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   Heat. Heat. Heat. Hey, Heat. Heat. Heat. N.

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   Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat.

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   Heat. Heat. N. Heat. Heat. Heat up here. Heat. Heat.

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   Heat. Hey. Hey. Hey. Heat. Heat. Intense day at ETH Denver powered by Near Intense. I'm your co-host today, Andy. What's up, guys? I'm Robbie. Let's go. Get the energy up. Come on. We'll be MC the event. Let's go. Uh, if you guys don't know us, we run a media platform called The Rollup. We do a lot of live streams, conferences, etc.

5. 4:55

   So, check us out on YouTube, Twitter, etc. We have a big rumor mill firing this week as always. Uh but we're here today to talk about intents and the rise of intentbased architectures in the blockchain ecosystem. I mean first shout out to Near for uh for building in the space. We we've got a an AI show powered by Near. It's called AI Super Cycle.

6. 5:17

   We've been doing it for going on about five or six months now. We've had a ton of awesome guys, really smart guys that have come on talked to us about open claw AI agents and jet tick payments. A lot of those concepts are going to weave together here today with intents.

7. 5:30

   Definitely. [clears throat] We've kind of seen the interop space evolve over the last few years. Intents are the the endgame. So, we're gonna be talking about it. Yeah, I think the intentbased architecture has certainly won the likes of a lot of the technical uh folks.

8. 5:44

   We've actually got a robot today. Uh bring him up here. Yeah, he's got boxing gloves on. He's got boxing gloves. He's ready to fight. He's got a near intense hat on. He's ready to go. Let's go. We're living in the future here in Denver today. It's right now.

9. 5:59

   So, don't mess with this guy. He's got the boxing gloves on for a reason. Very soon, you're going to be able to pay this guy with intense crush chain to fight you or your dog or your child or train you in your boxing career. He's not just a boxer. He's a financial adviser. He's your lawyer. He's your doctor. He's everything you want him to be and more. Just make just be friends.

10. 6:21

    I think for right now, all of us in this room could totally destroy this robot, but I think within 12 months, that might be a different case. Yeah, he's he's a little bit short, but he's got the beanie on. He's got the boxing gloves. So, we're we're glad that he's he's with us here today.

11. 6:35

    Oh. Oh, losing his balance a little bit. He's going to sit down. Guys, we have an awesome first fireside chat. We've got Alex Chevchenko, the pioneer of near intense. uh as we spoke about earlier, intents have really become the primary crosschain infrastructure for uh transferring assets and really just unifying the entire space. Alex is an expert in this field and will give us kind of a lay of

12. 7:01

    the land to start off. So guys, without further ado, please welcome up Alexenko to the stage for the fireside hosted by Robbie. Guys, give a round of applause. You're welcome. It's uh it's not Alex's first time on the show. He's been on several times uh intense day that we did online as well as several rollup appearances. I think it is. You know, usually you have your cat with you uh you know in in your room when you come on the show. This this

13. 7:33

    time we have a robot. So, a little bit different today. Yeah, a little bit different, but that's okay. When I'm at home, obviously everybody are able to see my cat. Um well we we've seen the space move so quickly. Uh you've been at Near building the Intense pro protocol from the ground up. Um why don't you just give us a sense you know set the stage for us here today. We're going to be talking about intense for quite a while. Uh we've come to believe that intense is the endgame

14. 8:00

    after mint and burn bridges. Remember when bridges at4 billion dollars of hacks we're kind of past those days. Now we have intense which seems to be the apex of navigating crosschain on blockchains. just give us a sense of how you've seen things evolve and and your uh reaction to how much adoption intents have gotten thus far.

15. 8:20

    So um I'm I have been building different solutions in interop for many many years. Uh have seen different um versions of use cases that these uh crosschain interop solutions are are presenting. Um I would tend to agree with Hib from Dragonfly um who was uh talking with you guys and he was saying this thing that people want to have the actual asset if I if I have if like I would like to own Bitcoin. I don't want to own CB BTC WBTC

16. 8:54

    or whatever Salana version of Bitcoin that is there. Uh I would like to have the actual assets. Why? just because if I'm storing it for a long period of time, I don't want to get exposed to the risk of whoever wraps it because who knows what is going to happen with with this provider, right? Um, and maybe some providers are more stable like Coinbase, but maybe some other providers are not that good. So if I'm storing assets especially spot assets for a longer

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    period of time I want to have the actual exposure to the assets which means that wrapped versions is not the answer to this. the one thing and on the other hand uh I think we we can like very easily say that we are living in the multi-chain world and that's why people need to have assets on different chains and uh at the moment it is extremely complicated to to take care of it uh like different wallets uh you need to

18. 9:59

    manage different seat phrases some tools are supported others are not supported if you're a user of phantom how can to store you know you can store assets uh from Salana Sui ETH and if I have some Tron liquidity how about Tron now I need to have a separate wallet there if I'm a user of Stellar if I'm a user of Cardano I again something different so this approach should be changed um self-

19. 10:29

    custody is good that's a core value of the of the block vertical but But with the maxis of of self custody uh like we are not doing very good job in comparison with custodial solutions like Binance where you're having your account in Binance and you have all of the assets directly in there right it is very convenient that's why many people are saying that yeah they have some crypto but never ever have left the centralized exchange so our point here

20. 11:00

    that let's simplify this experience let's make sure that the way how we are designing user experience for everybody is very simple, straightforward. It is not requiring many complicated things and this is where intents are getting into. This is like a an ideology how you should develop um user experiences and products in general. Building on your point that people want the actual asset.

21. 11:26

    They don't want wrapped assets, which was a result of all of the fragmentation that we saw in the bridge space from the mint and burn types of bridges. Um, this might catch some people off guard, but there's kind of been talk that uh there's more than 21 million Bitcoin out there. And and the reason, you probably know where I'm going with this. The reason is because there's all kinds of

22. 11:48

    derivative products, you've got strategy, you've got options products. All of this is diluting the supply of Bitcoin. These are all wrapped versions of the actual spot asset. And I can't help but think, you know, maybe if all of the capital was flowing into the actual spot asset, we wouldn't, you know, maybe we would be a little bit higher than we are today rather than flowing into derivatives. Um, you know,

23. 12:08

    I think, uh, a lot of that has been driven by so much speculation, so much hype around some of these derivatives products. Um, you guys have seen billions of dollars in flows through near intents. So, it has significant product market fit. Yeah, I think that deserves a round of applause. 10 billion dollars.

24. 12:26

    I mean, I think it's actually closer to 15 right now already, but I checked last week was 10 billion, now it's 15. Things moving fast. Things tr truly are moving fast. And so, I I I wanted to get your reaction to how much of this do you think is sticky liquidity? How much do you think despite everyone seeing prices, we know where things are, obviously we still have people in the room today that are very excited about intents and building in the space. How much of this is sticky

25. 12:53

    product market fit versus mercenary capital chasing narratives? Yeah. So from my point of view like different crypto users are on the scale what is okay for them and what is not. There are crypto maxes that never ever gonna use centralized exchanges and there are people who are okay with this right everybody is deciding for themselves. what near intense is given to everyone uh is an additional option right so up until now it was only like the way how

26. 13:28

    you are able to do crosschain swaps was only focused with a good user experience was only uh on the centralized exchanges near intense gives you very good experience but you can't do this in a decentralized manner so this is just an option so I do believe that right now what we're seeing is a very very early adopters who are starting to use this this technology and starting to become familiar with this and here is a very simple uh observation for this that

27. 13:59

    supports this point. um the global crosschain market for the decentralized solutions uh many of which are more centralized than than near intense um uh this market is approximately 200 to 500 millions in volume per day and if you're going to open coin market cap and you're going to open Cardano trading volume it is going to be two billion per day only Cardano which means that the and this volume mostly is served by the centralized entities. So imagine what is the volume

28. 14:40

    for Bitcoin for Stellar for many other things where is this volume happening and the answer is mainly on the centralized uh venues right so if decentralized solutions can match user experience of Binance if we are able to create a Binance 2.0 Oh, that is ex that is um like easily usable for everyone.

29. 15:05

    When people are not going to contemplate about thinking about gas, thinking about nonsense, stuck transactions, different wallets, when we're going to remove all of these barriers, I think we're going to to see the rise of people who are moving from the centralized exchanges to the decentralized solutions in order to manage and balance their risks that that these two solutions are providing. So I

30. 15:29

    think we are very very early uh within this and um kind of like it is sexist sexist game to lose because like you cannot go down from 500 billion in comparison with Cardano trading volume right so it means that this thing is only going to go up there is a Binance 2.0 uh and its name is hyperlquid and uh we're seeing no not so not a hyperlquid pool.

31. 15:56

    No no no it's the name of Binance 2.0 know is your intent, right? So, yes. Okay. So, I think um well, you know, it's Coinbase's game to lose, right? It's Binance's game to lose. And and either way, we're bringing more of this this financial uh ecosystem on chain. Slowly but surely, first, it's making its way through, albeit more alternatives that have four validators and are completely decentralized. And then ultimately, you will reach the

32. 16:23

    endgame where a lot of these things are traded through intent. They're actual spot assets. It's not paper derivatives or or pers. Um, but the the trend is clear. These things are moving on chain. Um, I wanted to get your your read on something that we didn't talk about in our in our last chat, which is another secular bull market that we're seeing happening outside of maybe if you look at coin market cap. We're seeing a lot of institutional capital flow into uh

33. 16:50

    crypto, defy, this this space. Black Rockck went, you know, partnered with Uniswap, bought some UNI tokens for their Bidd product. Apollo went partnered with Morpho. Um, it seems to me that this is almost creating like an asset centric view of the world. It used to be that, you know, three chain had a DEX and it had a lending market. Now, you know, you're looking at asset, the asset has a has an exchange, the asset has a lend to borrow.

34. 17:18

    when we're moving and creating more of this institutionalized DeFi ecosystem on chain, how much do you think we're creating these silos, this permission DeFi ecosystem versus another narrative that we're hearing a lot about today has been synchronous composability, which I think intense plays a much closer role into rather than creating these silos.

35. 17:41

    I'm just curious from your perspective being, you know, on the ground building this. How do we overcome some of the permissioned aspects, they're not so much at the chain layer, now they're at the asset layer. How do we make sure that these these assets, these high quality RWA assets are composable with the rest of DeFi?

36. 18:00

    Okay, give me just one minute before we are going to go into the composibility question. I would like to wrap up really quickly the centralized exchanges versus decentralized then um uh I would like everybody to understand me correctly.

37. 18:14

    I'm not against centralized exchanges. If you would take a look at for example at FTX from one side you can say oh my god this is uh this is scam like this is really really bad. From the other standpoint the guy went to prison which means that the liabilities were converted into the punishment.

38. 18:35

    What happened with the multi-chain bridge? Who is the founder? Where is this person? The was 180 million, right? And uh these are lost funds. So from that standpoint, what I want to say is that decentralized solutions just provide different set of risks and different set of exposure. and uh through having different solutions now people are finally will be able to manage these risks and this is this is

39. 19:07

    an important thing um so I would like everybody to understand this right we are not against centralized solutions we're just an alternative to them they like to say if FDX was on chain it would have never happened well potentially we would have known that we would have known yeah or maybe or maybe it is going to happen we would know the next block when it happened and then we don't know who who is the mastermind behind it and then the guy would still continue living in

40. 19:32

    Bahamas. Right? So now coming to the composibility crosschain is inherently asynchronous like blocks are generated on Ethereum at the speed of 12 seconds once per 12 seconds. The blocks are generated on near with the speed that of once per 6 seconds like we cannot composably combine this tense but I can tell to everybody uh especially to the blockchain developers hey guys we're

41. 20:05

    living in general in the asynchronous world visa is not working synchronously swift is not working synchronously revolute Robin Hood and many other applications including all of the financial applications, they are working on top of the asynchronous world and we as the blockchain developers, we need to grow up and figure it out. Obviously, you can hide these things and make it a little bit more usable for all of the different developers who are building use cases on top of this and intents are

42. 20:39

    definitely helping with this thing. Uh so for example, imagine you are willing to buy a stock is the best place to buy like on the stock directly on the onus chain and the answer here is no. The best play to the best place to buy stock is on the respective stock exchange.

43. 21:02

    So you can create an intent to get a particular token and then wait for some time for some kind of solver or a market maker to figure out what is the most efficient way how to do this. And in this case, this market maker is going to go to the stock exchange, purchase at the most efficient, the deepest liquidity market, this stock that it will take it, go to on tokenize it, and deliver straight to your wallet. And from the standpoint of the user, this is

44. 21:34

    exactly what he wants to do. He wants to get just this token for this particular stock. And he doesn't need to think about all of these complexities that are behind this behind the thing. He doesn't need to go to uh a unis swap clone that is working on the on those blockchain to you know purchase this within this slipage blah blah blah all of the different things let the system figure it out you also don't when you're working with your brokers you also don't

45. 22:00

    know how actually the stock exchanges are working what is the APIs there and stuff like that that's this is a natural thing you are specifying what you would like to get and then something is getting executed so yes intents are brilliant things closer to this composibility, but the the the composibility from the standpoint of the like Ethereum as a synchronous execution of transactions. Well, this probably is not going to happen anytime soon and uh up

46. 22:34

    until like the world is going to be eaten by Salana working on the main frames. Um and yeah, and hopefully this is not going to happen. Um but even if this happens uh near intense already integrated Salana so if you want to trade Salana tokens you can do it directly on Neur intense.

47. 22:52

    I think it's more likely our robot friend eats eats the world before Salana. That that's my last question Alex is like what do we do when these things are ubiquitous? What kind of property rights should this robot have? Like how do we incorporate Oh, he's he's turning around. He he hears us. He's listening. Right. because this one's for him. What like how how do we bring robots humanoid robots into

48. 23:20

    int like what role do a does AI and robotics play in intent? Yeah. So this is a very very good question. I do believe that we are at the stage of the fight for the authentic commerce in between the centralized yeah the fight um in between the uh traditional world systems and blockchain. I do believe that the uh the most straightforward and the greatest application of blockchain for the AI is actually enable financial rates. So like agentic finance, right?

49. 23:58

    And the reason for this is very simple. This guy would never ever pass the KYC of Binance. But this guy somewhere inside can have a small chip where there is his private key. Actually, all of our mobile phones already have a chip with different private keys. And that's great. You even don't need to have a ledger for it. Um so it is very easy to have a key which means that on boarding

50. 24:25

    this guy to c to the blockchain and let him transact when he wants to do this is a straightforward and very simple way and I do believe that that crypto and blockchain technology is very very ahead of traditional finance here and uh enabling agentic commerce is one of the primarily use cases that crypto can fight for uh with Wall street.

51. 24:51

    That said, we are much smaller than Wall Street and they are going to fight back to us very very hard. However, building more um open world banking the unban unbanked giving more opportunity for everybody on earth including guys like him uh is a proper way to do. I think that this is more justifiable future.

52. 25:14

    this is a better version of the future that I would like to live in and uh that's why I do believe that especially for Agentic Commerce everything that we are building is a straightforward and a very important application we have quite a lot of features that are in development some of them are going to be announced just next weeks on Nearorn I'm inviting everybody to come to Nearon uh INSF Monday and Tuesday next week um uh so some of them are going to be

53. 25:44

    announced But there are even more and more of these on this intersection of AI and uh intense. And the important piece here is that your financial data is extremely private, right? So we're getting into the privacy here. And if you will take closer look in into what Near is building uh on the AI stuff, it's all about privacy, decentralized confidential machine learning, private AI, private memory, uh like private chat, everything is about privacy. I

54. 26:17

    would not want to share my financial data with OpenAI or Entropic or even some Chinese models that are run by Open Router, right? So I just don't want to do this. That's why I want this to be private and and Near is building the infrastructure with Neari that is going to be directly applicable to advanced financial use cases uh that Near Intense started off.

55. 26:44

    Incredible. Well, look at the time. Near Intense just crossed uh 20 billion. So, Alex, thank you so much, man. It was always a pleasure. Mr. Cat, but this time we got the robot. Um yeah, give it up. This is Alex Dashenko. Thanks everybody. Have a good day.

56. 27:23

    Kendall Cole, the CEO and co-founder of Proximity Labs, uh, today to talk about stable coins, crosschain payments, generally kind of how intents are playing a role in the space that we are more excited about. We're calling it Neo Finance, really this convergence of legacy finance and DeFi. Let's give Kendall a warm welcome to the stage.

57. 27:49

    Great to be here. Thanks for thanks for uh setting this up. Yeah, man. Um stable coins, huh? Stable coins. It's about the only thing in crypto that has a positive perception these days, isn't it? Yeah, I think uh weirdly that does seem to be the case.

58. 28:02

    Yeah. What's going on here? Well, you guys have just recently launched a stablecoin kind of transfer protocol. Uh but before we get into that, maybe just give us a bit of a lay of the land from your your your perspective as to the evolution uh of Proximity Labs, your company, as well as just generally how you guys have looked at the space at large and kind of the core trends that

59. 28:25

    you guys are seeing now investing in and betting your kind of company on. Yeah, great question. Um I mean, so we've been contributors to the near ecosystem for the entirety of our existence. Um as you know anyone who's been following year's journey knows uh basically there's been a lot of exploration that's happened over the years and um you know I think as this name of this event kind of entails like definitely one of the areas that we are super excited about is near intense and what that's offering and that started with mainly you know crosschain swaps

60. 28:53

    and basically unlocking these gigantic pockets of liquidity that existed in ecosystems like Zcash and Ripple and uh and Stellar and others. Uh but now actually we've you know expanded to just trying to support basically bring bring liquidity to all of the different assets that people are excited about and people are interested in getting exposure to and as you kind of kicked it off with like stable coins is like one of the one of the key areas there. Um, so Proximity's goal this whole time has

61. 29:18

    basically been to just kind of further the new ecosystem and kind of identify areas where we can actually just like have as much of an impact in sort of you know helping these teams like bring products to market and you know really deliver the best possible experience for any users that are touching your related products. And so fast forward to today and you know as Neurochance was starting to get a lot of traction and um volume liquidity starts you know generating some revenue uh one of the things we

62. 29:41

    recognize is that uh there's all these new stable coins that are starting to come online and we don't actually have a great way to sort of help solvers like actually get access to liquidity for all these new stable coins uh for a few reasons. one because these stable coins a lot of times are not listed on centralized exchanges primarily just because like due to the market structure it's not very lucrative for a lot of participants to actually provide liquidity on order books on these

63. 30:06

    centralized exchanges for these new stable coins that a lot of people may not want or or like uh and then you know in the onorth chain world things are a bit better you know we have we've had curve for years uh unisoft obviously does a ton of stable coin volume now and then newer projects like fluid who came up with more efficient models for a small number of stable stable coins started to do very well. But uh none of these systems really were designed in a world where we had you know potentially

64. 30:31

    dozens or even hundreds or thousands of stable coins. And then you know I even while all this was happening we had a real landmark with you know the genius bill passing through Congress. And I think for the first time what that actually unlocked is that we have a new class of stable coin that is regulated and has you know its backing like regulated and that actually introduces a world where really under normal conditions these stable coins that are

65. 30:56

    genius compliant should actually trade one to one because they're effectively using you know very similar or very tightly controlled collateral whereas before you know when curve was designed like that was a world where USDC die and USDT might all diverge due to some kind of event because you know it just it was a very different it was a very different type of environment. So all of those things sort of happened together and as part of it we recognized like there's a real need to basically create a new

66. 31:21

    category of infrastructure that's built for that world where we have a category of stable coins that should trade one to one under normal conditions and also there might be thousands of them. Um and so that's what led us to building the stable coin transfer protocol which is what we you know announced a few weeks ago and are taking to market over the next couple of weeks and months. So, are

67. 31:38

    you expecting like a Walmart stable coin, a Starbucks stable coin, like a JP Morgan stable coin, or you expect like like how much consolidation do you do you anticipate? What's your what's your current mental model for post Genius Act? I think we get Clarity Act. Maybe my prediction is Q2. I think we're going to get it sometime April, May, right?

68. 31:57

    That should also unlock the gates for stable coin providers to be able hopefully pass yield back down to holders. like in this expansion of stable coins, how much like what what what's your kind of current current view of what to expect? Right? So like for those in the audience, are we expecting new forms of payment across different commercial environments, custodians, how do you think about where that's going? And then let's get into STP.

69. 32:20

    Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think initially, and this is like whenever we have kind of a new toy for people to play with, I think everyone wants to try it, right? So, I fully expect we're going to see every institution that can issue a stable coin. And I think it's actually uh almost been a bit slower than people expect, but everyone needs to remember that like Genius is technically not really it's passed, right? But it's not actually in effect yet. And so, I think we're going to see the floodgates open as those like rules and regulations become like fully clear

70. 32:44

    over the next 18 months. So, yeah, I mean I all the companies you just mentioned have publicly announced stable coins or I guess Walmart not yet, but there's some rumors, right? Um, I think we're going to see definitely every financial institution have some type of stable coin product. And then, yeah, I expect actually the biggest change is that we're going to see any sort of company that uh wants to hold a user balance or actually just wants to reduce the friction of like there's a user balance that's closer to their product

71. 33:09

    and paying for their product is going to want to experiment with a stable coin. And it'll be very interesting to see, you know, which of those sticks and which of those don't. Like we might ultimately I think we'll end up with a lot more over the next three to five years than we might have in 10 to 20.

72. 33:21

    But uh yeah, we're going to see a lot. Yeah, I think I agree with that. I actually saw a chart um on X the other day that mapped out a example example company's revenue on a recurring basis with a couple core assumptions about churn. Uh, and the key the key kind of breakthrough here was uh the slope of the graph of using a credit card provider including a 3.5% fee or a 2% fee from like a Stripe plus uh averaging out four to five% of failed payments. uh taking out both of those uh taking out

73. 33:54

    the fees and taking out both of the failed the failed payments what you got was the slope of the revenue of that company was significantly higher than the company which kept credit card fees and so like I think there's a very very clear demand which I think we we're all excited about in the space for stable coins for for actual businesses to use them as their rails. We also just saw

74. 34:17

    Bridge recently got their OCC banking license. So all of this is happening. But as we talk about this, we kind of think about the same thing that happened with with blockchains and with assets. We got this fragmented state of do I really want to use my one stable coin here that's accepted there and not be able to use it here? Doesn't make sense.

75. 34:36

    How do we unify dozens and dozens of stable coins into a easy experience? I want to go use my uh stable coin online at you know a point of sale custodian. What's the backend required? What are you building to you know solve this fragmentation problem?

76. 34:52

    Yeah, great question. So I think the the key there is actually that uh you need to make the assumption that you can conver you can easily just move the entirety of like a pool of capital between any of these stable coins at a moment's notice. I think that's like that's sort of the key design principle is like we don't know what users are actually going to want or what the market's going to want, right? Like we have no idea what the mix of stable

77. 35:14

    coins is going to be in 12 months. We have no idea like what the demand for those different stable coins is going to be and I think it's actually going to change very rapidly. And so we need to design a system that's able to respond very rapidly. So kind of the core thesis like the core design principle here was basically like okay we look at these pool based systems and I I mean I think like the most efficient model that exists on chain today is fluid in my opinion right it's like fluid recognize like hey uh the swap fees that are

78. 35:39

    actually earned from stable coins like they've basically been competed down to like close to zero so you cannot actually like really get uh liquidity providers to allocate capital to these pools um in mass anymore because like even with large volume they're just not actually able to make that much money on those and so there's just places for them to deploy those stable coins and stable coins are the most competitive asset to try to like get people to deploy into your system. Um, so that idea made sense, but the problem is that

79. 36:03

    it does not scale past the few stable coins. I think they just support USDC, USDT right now. They can definitely add a couple of more, but uh it's going to fall apart pretty quickly because like they won't know what stable coins users are wanting and so unless like that liquidity had already been deposited by someone, it's not going to be able to be utilized. We wanted to come from the

80. 36:19

    angle of like we can we just want to be able to take like basically the entirety of that pool and convert it into whatever coins like whatever stable coins the users actually need at that time because if we can deliver on that if we can have a system with one pool of capital they can basically convert between any stable coins in its entirety at a moment's notice then we can basically give developers the tools to abstract that experience of converting between stable coins entirely away from the user which is what should happen

81. 36:44

    right because like like you said users don't want to be like oh I've got Revolute stable coin But you've got Walmart stable coin and oh no, you know, like that's insane, right? For them, they're just like I have money and I want to pay and I want it to happen as rapidly as possible because like that graph you mentioned is like it's all about friction, right? Like you remove the friction as much as possible, good things happen for businesses, for users, for the economy, for everyone. So uh yeah, I mean the core of STP is basically that it's like we have one

82. 37:08

    pool of capital and that pool of capital can actually be used in its entirely entirety to be converted into initially any of the genius compliance stable coins. And and the reason that that piece is important genius compliant is like the system assumes under most conditions that it's going to treat all of the stable coins that it's are effectively whitelisted as uh as one to one redeemable, right? So the lenders who are like depositing liquidity into

83. 37:30

    this pool like they they need to be comfortable with that fact as well, right? And the reason we think they'll be comfortable with it is because we do now have this regulation that like actually should lead to those conditions being true. and likely we'll have need to have some kind of backs stops for like really crazy scenarios that you know could happen with like the treasury

84. 37:46

    bull market or something like that. Uh but under normal conditions like this should actually work. So that's the core of it is one pool of capital that can be converted into these different stable coins. And then the second piece is and this is where like near intense is a core part of kind of the design is uh in order for that to be true. This means that solvers need to be able to ideally borrow the majority of that pool of capital also at a moment's notice, but they should only be able to do so if

85. 38:08

    they have like a committed order from a user that they're fulfilling. And so like one it effectively acts as though the collateral of the of the solver is the fact that they're running a specific set of solver code which we verify using the T infrastructure that the New York system has been building over the last two years or so. Um, and then they also need to present basically a signed order from a user and so they can show like I'm actually going to convert this

86. 38:32

    capital for a specific reason into this new stable coin, fill the order. You can see that like there's going to be some profit here that then ultimately makes its way back to the lenders. And so like the TLDDR and the cool part of the system is it can support any number of stable coins uh as long as uh the solvers are able to get access to the issuers which is becoming better and better. Like these issuers now actually have pretty good products for basically minting and redeeming stable coins. um that we're going to be able to do this.

87. 38:56

    The initial version of it is going to rely pretty heavily on a couple of centralized exchanges like Binance that have good liquidity for USDC USDT. Um but we already have identified some venues for this these market makers and solvers they're going to be able to onboard so that they can actually access like all the stable coins that users will will want to get access to.

88. 39:13

    So okay. So and then as as far as your kind of business logic here um there should be very low slippage for stable coin to to stable coin swaps within that pool. you should effectively be able to get one to one for all genius compliant stable coins. And we have a mental model that there's kind of two types now.

89. 39:30

    There's genius compliant and there's effectively yield bearing kind of more that could be algorithmic stable coins. It could be ETHback stable coins. It could be kind of like a mix of you know private credit you know longdated treasuries, shortdated treasuries, a money market fund kind of a whole kind of uh crockpot. So like very clearly a distinction here for genius compliant only. And then you guys can do I think

90. 39:52

    what is it one to three bips is your fee on a swap from 1 mil to 10 mil. And that's kind of like the business logic here. Talk to us about like like what's the growth story? Like if I'm an investor here, what's the what's the uh stable coin transfer protocol growth story? What are you what are we forecasting from like uh a volume perspective as well as a revenue perspective?

91. 40:12

    Yeah, great question. So I mean the the key numbers that we're sort of looking about at as far as the market opportunity here um $300 billion a little more than that current stable coin supply heavily concentrated with the duopoly of USDC and USDT. Um what's exciting though and what we what we're sort of banking on is like those two stable coins are still growing a little bit slower over recently but like still growing and yet the market size is growing even faster. What that means is

92. 40:35

    that we're seeing other issues come in that are able to get some traction, right? USD1's gotten some traction, PYUSD's gotten some traction. Uh obviously all the brid stable coins are like really exciting and frankly very new and now that they have the charter, I expect that to expand even more, right? Um and so we basically see like we I mean a lot of the estimates are showing like what $3.5 trillion by 2030 total stable coin supply. So that's about a 10x. Um and then we're going to

93. 40:57

    see you know we're going to go from say 10 issuers that matter if that to probably hundreds or even you know more than that issuers that matter. So a lot more fragmentation a lot larger supply is going to equal much larger growth in the actual like trading volume. So currently the the like both onchain and offchain stable coin trading volume is somewhere around like5 to 10 billion a day. Um we expect that to at least 10x over the next five years just like based

94. 41:22

    on the growth of the supply and increasing fragmentation. Um, so we expect the the onchain part of that story is closer to like a billion dollars a day. So if that gets to like $10 billion a day, then you start to have like a really serious sizable market even just on chain uh that you know that we're going to be able to tap into. So the goal is actually making sure that STP and thus near intense ultimately like near intense will be the interface. STP is not a retail facing product, right? It's like it's a

95. 41:45

    liquidity product basically for near intense that makes near intense as a more retail facing product the best place to trade stable coins both in size and also just get access to the to the unique stable coins. And so basically we expect that like we are going to be one of the first, you know, protocols that's going to be able to tap into all of these newly launched stable coins, thus

96. 42:02

    be able to pick up some of the volume, build the relationship with users, and like ideally get to I mean, I'd say, you know, if we're looking at $10 billion on chain, I'd be disappointed if Neur Intense isn't doing, you know, 10% plus of that per day just in stable coins.

97. 42:15

    And and from the user perspective, you expect or do you expect this to be like a very like you know gas fees are something that people do not like? I are we going to enter a world where stable coin volumes are driving a ton of transaction volumes but a lot of the fees are being subsidized and and like talk talk to us about how you you anticipate user acquisition and subsidizing costs as it pertains to like the businessoriented logic here.

98. 42:42

    Yeah, that's an interesting question. Um I mean I do think that we already see a world where like fees on every chain have gone down tremendously, right? I mean the most shocking is ETH mainet, right? It's like I still have the mental model from 2021 of like it's a $100 for a unis swap swap. It's actually more like a few cents which is so I mean and then if you're using you know fast chains it's like even a small fraction of a cent right so like I yeah I definitely think that we're we're in a world that's going to continue where uh

99. 43:08

    the expectation for like the the lay user is that there are there be fees but the fees are going to be more like uh you know a fee to deposit into like to do like a fast deposit into something I don't know actually I think that'll even go away to be to be frank right like stablecoin's kind of enable world where you can deposit into interactive brokers on a Sunday at 2 am and like it's not there there's no weird fee they have to charge you in order to credit that

100. 43:31

     balance. So yeah, probably we do end up in a world where like most users expect basically no fees and so a lot of the value across for business is going to have to be outside of just charging a fee just on like moving money around, right? Um which is I mean that'll be very interesting. That'll even be interesting for something like STP. I think that like, you know, I think the one one to three bit fee is defensible, especially in size and if especially for

101. 43:54

     like unique pairs, but uh probably not much more than that and that's not a lot, right? So, you do need a lot of volume in order for this to like really be, you know, long-term sustainable. Uh just kind of coming to a close, what's your most uh contrarian take about stable coins or intents? uh what is something that that people con continuously misconstrue or misunderstand about how this architecture works?

102. 44:18

     Yeah, I guess like there's still I think some holdouts on so I don't I don't know how contrarian this is, but I think there's some holdouts on like why do we need so many stable coins? Um and I actually just think that like most businesses are going to want to be as close to like holding users money as possible. And so and there's and having their own stable coin provide pre presents them a lot of like benefits around like the design uh the way they're able to like allocate the yield whether that's giving it to users hopefully we'll see how clarity turns

103. 44:43

     out hopefully that works out uh but even if not right like even if like you know what they're going to be taking or what they give to like an issuing partner um so I actually just do think we're going to live in a world where like most institutions or businesses will at least consider launching stable it's definitely not going to make sense for like coffee shops or random you know

104. 44:59

     small businesses to have their own stable coin right maybe not even a lot of like credit unions are like smaller banks, but I think there's going to be a lot more stable coins than people expect. Uh, and that's why I'm so optimistic about the work that we're doing is that I think that the only way that world is possible is if there's a frictionless experience and moving between them. Uh, and so I actually

105. 45:15

     think that swapping between stable coins will become itself a new payment rail. Um, that's my like probably most out there sort of take is like you've got a, you've got RTP, you've got Fed now, and you're going to have like swapping between stable coins. Kendall Cole.

106. 45:30

     Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Kendall, the CEO, co-founder of Proximity Labs. Thanks for having me, guys. All right, guys. We're gonna have Robbie introduce the next going. So, we've got Aurora, managing director and global head of strategic partnerships at G20.

107. 46:00

     Uh, if you guys are on the next panel, feel free to slide to the stage. S. Welcome to uh to Denver and uh intense day. Yeah, thanks for having us. Absolutely. Good to be here. Thanks thanks for being here. Um well, we're going to we're going to fire up our first panel. You guys have seen we've got a couple fireside chats. Uh and so this one is all about intent driven markets. Um feel free to build on each other. You know, we'll just kind of have a free flowing. Feel free to disagree with one another. It's always

108. 46:52

     more fun that way. Um, well, I think I think a great place to start is actually uh Alex and I were up here just a little bit earlier talking about, you know, centralized exchanges, decentralized exchanges. More of the flows are moving into decentralized markets. Um, I made a joke about hyperl that's not so decentralized. Actually, Near Intense is quite a bit more decentralized.

109. 47:16

     I'm curious how you guys are seeing the centralized exchange environment either grow or start to contract given the rise of hyperlquid and more decentralized venues and generally how you're seeing this topography landscape maybe how it's evolved over the last few months maybe we'll s we'll start with you and you know we'll we'll come back down the line sure I think um you know there's a there's a use case for centralized

110. 47:43

     exchanges and there's a use case and a user group for decentralized exchanges and obviously there's becoming a use case now for intents to be moving into the DeFi world too as well. I think uh from an intent standpoint, you're trying to combine the best of both worlds. In the DeFi aggregated world, uh you still see a lot of failed transactions. You see a lot of payment for gas fees and the intents really eliminate a lot of that which gives you that more assurityity in the centralized

111. 48:09

     institutional experience. So there's kind of a hybrid bridging to that effect. And so I think you know there's a big use case, there's a big landscape of people out there. There's the retail components, there are the early adopters, there's the more traditional conservative institutional players that want a regulatory landscape. So there's markets for each of them and eventually we'll get to this regulatory clarity and they'll be I think a hybrid of everything in essence.

112. 48:35

     Yeah. Yeah. I'd like to sort of add to that. I think sort of one of the challenges obviously has been on the DeFi side where where do you have that auditability? Yeah. uh and to be able to trace everything and there's kind of going to be sort of some sort of guard rails I think to get to mass adoption. I think that's sort of a bit of the challenge at the moment. I definitely see some consolidation on the centralized exchange side though. S what what are you seeing out there?

113. 49:00

     Yeah, I mean this this kind of plays into like the last three to four weeks like the peak sentiment and events around what's happened with open claw and kind of like where we see this going on a kind of accelerated pace now is a commerce and agents can't KYC on centralized exchanges and generally speaking you can't operate a centralized exchange in 2026 without KYC and AML programs in place and so you know like

114. 49:25

     the the flow and the dynamics that you've seen in the shift from CFI to D5 to has really been this organic adoption curve of retail and institutions over the past two years starting to engage in DeFi more meaningfully as I think you were talking about with Alex earlier today with Apollo and and BlackRock. Um but as we move forward, it's like if you imagine a world where each of us are operating on top of multiple agents that sit behind us, they're not going to be transacting in a centralized context.

115. 49:50

     And so I think we've hit this kind of tipping point towards the adoption curve which the next three years will be defined by. And in that world, volume and flows and interactions in the DeFi context are going to be the basis and surface through which agents operate and interact. So I think this this just continues and candidly accelerates much faster.

116. 50:09

     Um God, I know SA works closely with the MIR team and has been exposed to to AI agentic commerce kind of and how it's progressing, but I I'm curious in you know your capacity at G20 and then you know how how you guys are seeing this evolve. Is is this something that institutions and capital partners are really starting to wrap their head around? Are they just kind of dipping their toes in the water? H how how are you seeing institutions come into this agentic commerce space? How seriously are they taking it at this point?

117. 50:42

     Yeah, I mean the problem is they've got a lot of legacy systems at the uh traditional institutions. uh they're all have a bit of FOMO quite frankly uh and trying to look at ways that they can integrate some of these agents um and external providers uh with into their existing parameters and guardrails. Uh it's it's a bit of a work in progress.

118. 51:03

     Uh but but they're all they're all looking at it. I think I mean internally at block Damon we're absorbing a ton of AI not just from a trading perspective but just from efficiency perspective right in all aspects of our business. I kind of view the whole intense and agentic and capability and AI capability of kind of like back in the day because I'm old enough to remember when an order went to an institutional trading desk and uh and and it would be hey I got to sell or buy

119. 51:29

     a million of Amazon uh I want to do it in this price range I need to get it done in this particular time frame um I need to do it in these particular chunks because I don't want to move the markets and oh by the way that million is not all going to you it's going to about five other institutional trading desks.

120. 51:46

     You could do all that now in an intent. In essence, that's basically what intent does with with AI capabilities to it. You give it an instructions of what you want to do in a time period, set the slippage parameters, set all these things. So, that is really making us a ton more efficient and effective and it's going to take time for big institutions to get used to that and and and integrate that in both from an operational perspective and an execution perspective.

121. 52:11

     One comment to add on that if I can. Um, so I totally agree with your point in terms of where enterprise stands and in fully autonomous agent interactions. It's part of the reason why outside the scope of this panel near recently launched ironclaw which provides some of the permissions and systems around confidentiality and verifiability that put controls around what's going on with things like openclaw. uh but on the intent side I think there is a

122. 52:33

     familiarity and degree of understanding and experience around what that type of interaction looks like and the friction that is solved for by intent expression and fulfillment in a solver system. Um and we are driving part of the go to market motion alongside a number of the folks at a few slabs and on the near foundation side in the institutional adoption curve of near intense right now and there is real traction and I expect that you know the 12 billion or 15

123. 52:58

     billion Alex pointed to scales materially as we bring on the MS EMS landscape and some of the kind of SAS and qualified custodian players into the near intense ecosystem. So I agree on the the agent point but on the adoption curve for near intense specifically in institutions it's happening right now. Yeah.

124. 53:18

     Yeah. And I think with the intents if there's also sort of certain guard rails in place so whether that's restricted venues um you know settlement layers yes there's clear sort of parameters on what the intents can do within certain institutions and that's where I think you'll get a lot more greater adoption.

125. 53:36

     You're you're spot on from an institution perspective. hate to say it, but you're going to have to need the AML, KYC. Uh firms are going to have to be whitelisted because they're going to want to trade and and make sure the solvers have the liquidity necessary to solve the problem in essence, but they're all going to have to be vetted for an institution to be adopted. So, there are going to be these major guard rails for the institutions and regulatory clarity for them to come in.

126. 54:01

     I think most of the traffic that we're seeing today is early adopters on the retail side for the most part. uh the institutions you know as it pertains to intense and AI will are implementing it but they'll come later on the trading side it feels like the technology has largely been solved we can always get better on throughput and efficiency and these sorts of things a lot of the innovation now happens at the regulatory level you

127. 54:27

     know this integration with black rockck and unis swap was it it needed securitized in the middle to make sure that it had a permission carveout would you guys agree regulatory innovation is maybe one of the most you know pertinent areas of focus here or are there bigger blockers that we should be focusing on I think it's certainly a key bottleneck um and also cross jurisdiction as well

128. 54:50

     right so every region US kind of sets the benchmark and once that's clearly defined then others usually follow suit um but I think when you do get these early adopters they help sort of frame sometimes the policy and regulatory environment as Um, and generally how does that look onchain if we're digging a little bit deeper into mechanicalistically the components there? Um, you know, how how do we program compliance into a inherently permissionless uh system?

129. 55:24

     Yeah. So there's there's I totally agree with what you're saying on the regulatory innovation side, but the way I look at the existing intense architecture to meet institutional requirements and bring those flows into near intense today, it's largely taking the mosaic of existing AML compliance regulatory expectations, applying them in context of a solver which is then kybed by the institutional counterparty so they know who's actually solving the

130. 55:46

     intents or the network of solvers that they are interacting with. Um and then at the you know the MPC chain signatures layer we did a lot of work with an external law firm looking at existing MTL MSB requirements around how the foundational infrastructure in the context of near intents fits outside of the expectations for these types of rules and regulations and I've gotten very comfortable that we're in a good

131. 56:09

     place running an MPC node ourselves driving the expansion of chain signatures infrastructure. Um so I think in in order to solve kind of like what do institutions need for compliance to face off and push flow and volume through intents um it's almost less dependent on clarity specifically and more about how do we just apply the right counterparties for them to face off to within this system architecture uh so that they can get comfortable with their risk and compliance departments.

132. 56:36

     Anything to add? Yeah, I look, you're not going to get mass adoption and institutional adoption if you don't have regulatory clarity. Hard stop in essence. Um, it can be a a nice nichy thing that we talk about called technology innovation, but everything from the front-end UI UX to the solvers to the verification folks to the other liquidity providers are all have to be AML KYC and verified. You know, that's why, you know, people still use

133. 57:03

     Bloomberg terminals, right? And because they know when they're chatting in a Bloomberg terminal, those people on the other side, they're verified. They know that they're trading with somebody that is a known vented entity. And that's why a lot of stuff gets done on chat in Bloomberg. Same with Ice Chat on the commodity side. You want to know who you're trading with. You want to know that they have been they're good actors and they've been vetted and they're compliant and they have liquidity to do

134. 57:27

     the other side of the trade. So that's where you're going to get mass adoption. Yeah. Sal, I think this is a good question for you because you're not directly, you know, working on Near Intense right now from a from kind of an outsider perspective, but very familiar with it. Looking in would a permissioned near intense product where you can kind of KYC as a LP that you know could service liquidity to some institutional flows. Would that be would there be

135. 57:53

     demand for a a adjacent product in this intent stack for that? Yeah, the way the way I look at it is not like an adjacent product but more so extensibility of the existing system architecture into a model where say if I'm a counterparty like a qualified custodian and I have to KYB the counterparty that serves as a solver G20 and block Damon run solvers in the system sovereign wants to face off against those counterparties.

136. 58:16

     [snorts] I go through a peer-to-peer KYB process with each entity and then I just simply whitelist who are the solvers that can actually solve my intent when I transact in the system. And so in doing so, there's slight, you know, there's slight technical components that need to be implemented, but 99% of the system as it exists right now is extensible to meet my requirements. It's just more about the process and procedures that I implement. And then ultimately the

137. 58:40

     ability to specifically whitelist the counterparty that I face off to. And then you generally speaking get 80 to 90% of the way there on the compliance lift it takes to face off to near intents for a regulated institution. And that way permissionless flows and permission flows can kind of flow all they can exist in the same place.

138. 58:58

     Exactly. And like that's part of the magic and and beauty of what Near Intents offers today is like this liquidity surface aggregation. Um and I think if you had these bifurcated systems you would have you know less deep market less market depth shittier price discovery like all these things that are negative externalities from bifurcating liquidity for different use cases. It's really just more about how do you put the pieces around the edges in such a way that you can serve both

139. 59:23

     constituencies and and their requirements. Awesome. Um it's a very robust market out there. Um, you know, we're we're accustomed to intents primarily servicing crosschain really bridging which is the probably the most vanilla simplest way of you know expressing an intent given that we're seeing all sorts of institutional flows and RWA products and these things are becoming a lot more

140. 59:47

     expressive you know we're look if we're looking at the anatomy of intent you got order flow someone trying to express something and then ultimately the delivery of that via the solver can we get more robust in terms of how we're expressing some of these products and these markets. When I'm thinking about, you know, the path to intent driven markets, we've got, you know, a thin layer of some of the most basic

141. 1:00:12

     foundational markets crossing between chains. But when we're trying to express multiple legs of trades and really build a robust position, how might that look from, you know, the solver perspective? Well, I think it's sort of it's a function of whether the solver is acting as an agent.

142. 1:00:32

     So for instance, it's got sort of the best sort of path for the institution or client or whether it's acting as principal. So then it's got bestex me optimization. So it depends on also which the intent is uh is doing. Right? Now you have to be an expert in in all these functions, right? uh or you're going to get taken in some capacity, right? You're not guaranteed best XX, right? But you want to be guaranteed best XX and you need to be guaranteed best X, but unless you're an expert in the UI and the path and the

143. 1:01:06

     parameters and the slippage and and the time frame, there's too many steps along the way for you not to have a systematic best execution trade unless you're an expert. That's what we're trying to solve for in all this. on top of that with including AI and LLM systems on top of that. So like the old institutional desk, I want to give it an I want to give it my parameters and I want it to go do it for me, but I has to guarantee that the that

144. 1:01:35

     the people are legitimate, the volume is there, the liquidity is there, and I'm also guaranteed best execution. my sister's not going to do this, but that's where we're trying to get to for her to be able to place that order and know and guaranteed I'm going to get best XX with legitimate liquidity vetted providers.

145. 1:01:52

     I I guess another one of the reasons why, you know, this question is framed in my mind is because the the near intense user experience right now is unbelievably simple. It it is input output and you know when when Demetrius, you were kind of describing the the parameters here. I want to execute this much in this time frame with this much slippage, these blocks, these counterparties. I don't see all of those

146. 1:02:16

     parameter and those that customizability on the front end. And so are you are you guys saying that you know right now the technology exists? We're just not exposing all of that optionality to the end user out of simplicity reasons.

147. 1:02:31

     Yeah, I mean that 95% of the integrations that exist right now are through the one-click API which is effectively an APIdriven abstraction layer that removes all this complexity away from the user so that when an aggregator or wallet product is implementing your intents. It's a super simple user experience. I want to swap native Bitcoin for native Salana in a bestex capacity. Let solvers go compete.

148. 1:02:53

     Give me the best price discovery on that. Execute the trade. have full settlement and confirmation of finality based on the dependency chains in the example that Alex was describing 12 seconds on ETH 1.6 on near mainet and so um part of this is just in the spirit of chain abstraction and what near's gone after for a long time expressing that in the near intense product stack but behind the scenes there is there are these levels that you can configure and

149. 1:03:18

     design how for an institution who wants to KYB or pursue as a principle a best execution requirement set to actually implement that in intense yeah I think good point and that's when you potentially have sort of additional tagging right so compliance tagging the KYC so there'll defined parameters within you know these buckets of institutions and then no one else will be trading within that except for these institutions

150. 1:03:42

     um and and so how much of the order flow I mean I mean you mentioned 95% of the integrations but are any institutions currently using some of these behind the scenes parameters I'm going to be thoughtful because next week's nearcon and there's a lot of announcements coming at and I don't want to steal anyone's time that's bullish right um well I I I antic anticipate that we're going to see a lot more of it even if irregardless of how much of it is already happening. Um, okay. And S, you also mentioned something earlier that

151. 1:04:11

     kind of piqued my interest, which is that we may have multiple agents operating on our behalf. Um, you know, I think it's much easier to kind of think about and picture, you know, the the vision that you described, Demetrios, which was like I call it my broker. It's kind of a oneto-one relationship rather than a many agent to maybe some counterparty relationship. How might this shift the markets? Like are we going to be going and ex you know looking at best

152. 1:04:43

     execution off across so many more sources just generally as you know kind of shifting this conversation back to agentic finance and economy a little bit. How are you guys preparing for this inevitability? Yeah. So, so maybe like the way I think about this is in the context of like what you've seen maybe we follow the trai announcement in the travel booking space where you know the requirements that we're talking about for best execution in an institutional adoption curve of near intense are specific

153. 1:05:11

     regulatory requirements that are placed on principal firms operating on behalf of uh of clients. uh when we look at this aentic commerce expression of intent, it's more of like what do you want done on what time frame and how do you want that done and then allow your agent to express that intention on your behalf. Um and do that in the most seamless way possible to the user. So that may be something like book my

154. 1:05:34

     flight and have this hotel arranged for me. Prepare my travel itinerary. I want to be a human in the loop. Yes or no? Thumbs up. Book it. Send me confirmations. Schedule my calendar out. Things that are happening right now in the open claw ironclaw world. um that are the expression of these two components coming together which is how do we leverage agents in a meaningful capacity with a seamless experience for them to transact across both fiat traditional context as well as onchain environments as well?

155. 1:06:05

     Anything to add as far as any any particulars as far as how you're preparing for AI agents to incorporate more of these flows? Yeah, I mean I think there's to your point there's more adoption across other platform layers now. uh for the end user. So you know from bookings to really itemizing the whole schedules now can be done automatically with you know a couple of prompts and then the agent

156. 1:06:29

     will run everything. So I think on a on a um you know from trading perspective as well this is going to be more optimizing on uh pricing um and how you know trading firms operate across the board and at block damon we're doing it in a number of ways obviously participating uh as in within the network and solvers but getting our infrastructure prepared our wallets MPC technology prepared and our defi infrastructure prepared to integrate near intense possibly other intents to provide this

157. 1:07:02

     technology for the institutions and the trading firms and other wallet providers that want to integrate this into their platform. So, we're we've already built out a lot of that infrastructure and and providing that to folks in the industry today.

158. 1:07:16

     Yeah, I'm sure there's a whole tangent we can go on with prediction markets and how intents could service these two. The the last question I have for you guys is uh essentially around value acrruel. We've we've we've laid out kind of the anatomy of an intent. you know, it originates with order flow. Those who own the customer relationship and are further up the orderflow stack ultimately kind of set the price for everything that comes downstream of that. And then as you get closer to bare

159. 1:07:42

     metal, ultimately winning those that order flow and and solving those intents. Um, you know, you're going to end up taking some sort of spread, but that seems to get squeezed right as there's more competition in the solver ecosystem. How have you seen this evolve as intents have become ubiquitous as market standard more solvers come in? Do you guys see that fee compression and and how are you reacting to it?

160. 1:08:06

     Well, that that's a that's market efficiency right there, right? When you start getting the uh the spreads compressed, uh it means you are getting more adoption uh and uh things are things are working nicely. So, it's it's just a part of I think the a good working market when you when you start getting this compressed. Obviously not good for maybe some of the ones that used to get a little bit more from it, but I think it's a sign of getting this additional adoption now and uh and traction.

161. 1:08:31

     You want to see tight spreads, right? You do do that because the liquidity is there. The efficiency is there. When you see spreads that are big about you could drive 10 semis through side by side, you know that there's no liquidity there, it trades inefficiently and there's other stuff going on, right? So how we're protecting ourselves at block damon is every part of our stack whether it's node infrastructure staking infrastructure wallet and or the defy infrastructure we've have all that all

162. 1:08:59

     that solved for the efficiencies across all four of those stacks. Incredible guys give it up for our panelists. Absolute pleasure guys. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me man. with cow swap. Please give a round of applause and come to stage.

163. 1:10:11

     All righty, gentlemen. Welcome to the stage. Today's panel is called aggregators routing and the battle for best execution. Uh super brief intro so far and your any thoughts about Ethan this year. I mean for me at the conference always the same hotel lobbies, hotel lobbies, hotel lobbies.

164. 1:10:27

     So no impression of the conference yet. Yeah, I'm finding side events particularly interesting uh this year. I've been at the conference this morning. Um but side events so far brought quite a lot of interesting topics like this one. So that's good.

165. 1:10:43

     Uh Michael Moin from Swamp Kit. And yeah, I think the the bare market conferences are always the most interesting because you find out who the real builders are and who's really, you know, in it for the long run and not just here for the hype cycles. So, uh, glad to be here.

166. 1:10:58

     Yeah. All right, gentlemen. Today's aggregators routing and the battle for best execution. I think over the last couple of years as we've expanded much more into the multi-chain dynamic, there's been a lot of argument and controversial takes about where where it is most important to focus on for blockchains, for aggregators, for service providers, and just kind of generally what users want. I'd like to get a bit of of a debate going here if

167. 1:11:21

     possible. Uh is there a is there a sense of where you guys see the the utmost importance in the stack? Is it execution as far as speed? Is it low cost? Is it uh the ability to connect uh as many chains as possible with extensibility?

168. 1:11:38

     How do you guys think about what is the most important part of this kind of crosschain stack as it has evolved over the last couple of years? Uh so since Diva is implemented in over 800 applications um of any kind, we see uh we see all the use cases essentially and the answer is there is no specific answer. All of this is needed, right? An institutional trading desk has different demands than Metam Mask and Metamas has

169. 1:12:03

     again a different demand than a Binance web wallet. I'll give you an example. Binance web wallet um they are onboarding their centralized exchange users to the non-custoal wallet. So these users are coming from a centralized user experience. So logically Binance wants to keep up that UX as much as possible. So Binance really cares about latency cuts off third parties at 300 milliseconds,

170. 1:12:24

     right? But then again for Metamas they're like well we want to have as much of a spread as possible uh want to increase their own margin. So they're like we can we can wait for a second to get a quote um and do that. But then again Metamas is has so much distribution power already that they need to be on new chains day one right.

171. 1:12:40

     So for them um multi-chain availability in general just just is is very important again. So there is no clear answer. All of that has space and room. And um then for Ledger again, someone that managed so many whales, they profit from a bridge like Neense, which is able to dive deeper into BTC, Zcash, all of that. The whales have been storing for many years and never touched, right? So yeah, there's room for everything.

172. 1:13:07

     Yeah. I mean, traditionally for cow swap, we have always focused quite a lot on, let's say, execution quality and price basically, right? The as as the best outcome possible for users. But I tend to agree like there is like there are other factors that are important.

173. 1:13:22

     Now we are betting quite a lot of crosschain uh ourselves. Uh let's say that on speed we we normally take the whole block time right in order to ensure that we give the best out possible outcome. But yeah I think it's every every user potentially has its own preference right here. So yeah, I wish there was one simple answer, but I would say assets, price, speed, and we talk a lot about like train chain abstraction or uh being

174. 1:13:52

     chain agnostic. We can't really do that if we don't get really creative on the tech tech stack because you know something like Bitcoin is going to have a 10 to 15 minute block times versus you know other blockchains where you have 10 12 seconds or faster and until we can get rid of those problems I think it's going to be really difficult for us to bite into the centralized exchange volume and uh we also have to offer the

175. 1:14:15

     products that they offer. So we need things like per limit orders all that good stuff. Yeah. So just coming back to you Michael when it comes to uh under an assumption of equal slippage equal outcome how much should a user care for you know trying to swap one asset for another about the actual path versus the outcome how much do you guys kind of emphasize the path versus just getting the user the actual outcome that they want and how much should should we care well I don't think the user should have to think about it I don't think they

176. 1:14:45

     should care but I think our job uh building good products is to care about how the technology works and to make sure that it's sufficiently decentralized, that the guardrails are in place so that we're not going to have a black swan event, right? The bigger we grow, you know, we have hundreds of millions in swaps every week going going through our protocols. We really can't afford an event where, oh wait, all the swaps in flight disappeared or this one

177. 1:15:09

     protocol blew up. So, you know, we really have to be careful about how we build that stuff. But for the user, I think they shouldn't even have to think about it. Philip um you guys are very execution driven to get the best possible price across crosschain swaps in general as well as your new composer product offering more orchestration for more kind of complex transactions. How does this dynamic operate now with you know

178. 1:15:34

     with regards to intents? How much are you using intents underneath the hood versus more kind of uh you know mint and burn bridge or other kind of uh bridge dynamics? what kind of what what amount of of your transaction volume is powered by intents uh in in general.

179. 1:15:51

     So general when we talk about intents people like to confuse a few things. So so um there is the intent flow which is like the general idea of the user not signing a specific transaction order it's or like call data but just I have the intention to stop A for B. I don't care how that happens. that allows anything underneath, may it be an aggregator, maybe a bridge or or just a swapping interface to execute

180. 1:16:17

     transactions more reliably because they could technically use fallback solutions, retry whatever they somehow have to fulfill that intent and then they can can go different ways, right? Like uh and with EI having aggregated so many solutions um that gives us a lot of freedom to um guarantee better transaction delivery so to so to say.

181. 1:16:37

     Then there is intent systems um which are actually marketplaces. They operate by taking an intent which is essentially just the flow but then there's a solver marketplace behind well we see a lots of protocols have been going that direction. I think Kauso is one one of the of the of the leaders in the from the get-go one of the earliest people and actually Kauso has one of the most active and vibrant solver community

182. 1:17:01

     almost no one else no one else has been able to copy that diversity in in solvers not in not in relay not cross they're all running their own centralized stack filling at least 80% um of the requests themselves so there's an intent flow but there's not actually a network behind um so uh that being said we have most of these solutions aggregated. So we take intents and then we pass them on to other intent flow oriented systems. Uh so the majority today is intents.

183. 1:17:31

     Sorry complex answer. Yeah. Yeah. Uh Jacob on the cow swap side right there's been a a big shift of bringing different types of new assets on chain right uh we actually recently saw securitize brought build onto unis swap and we've seen money market funds t bills stable coins how does cow swaps fill or kill kind of intentbased execution based on batch auctions how does that change when it's not just crypto assets but more tokenized assets tokenized equities things on those e

184. 1:18:03

     equities onchain. Does it change? You know, you know, and and what does that actually look like from an adoption perspective for cow swap to bring your batch auction technology, not just for crypto assets, but for these more kind of tokenized uh off-chain assets as a new primitive.

185. 1:18:19

     Yeah, I would say um first of all, like let's say that cow protocol is the settlement layer, right, for these tokenized tokenized stocks. uh the intentbased and the the solver competition that we bring is kind of the same in in terms of how how that works.

186. 1:18:36

     uh let's say that there is an important let's say uh difference here maybe compared also to the typical rootbased uh infrastructure right in in rootbase you basically decide a specific path that looked the best path possible at quote time and then what happens is that if after quote time you have things that change because conditions might change then the user ends up bearing the execution risk right and this is true for any asset that you're you're trading

187. 1:19:06

     Um, with intentbased trading and solver competition, what happens is you're not talking about a specific path. You're just basically saying, okay, I I have this intent. I want to to do this swap and in order to do this swap, I want to get a minimum price and um this what happens is solvers compete to basically give you this minimum price, right? And so the the whole execution risks is shifted from users to solvers basically,

188. 1:19:35

     right? And I would say this is true for for any type of trading including tokenized stocks, right? So so yeah. Yeah. I mean we are uh definitely most interested in kind of this intersection currently with our research with our content and we found that that there's kind of this ongoing trend and your your uh ex lead investor Mr. Sani tweeted this that RWA looping is actually this

189. 1:19:59

     very very uh exciting kind of next stage for uh onchain protocols and a lot of this is going to be with you know has has to do with what we're talking about now curious kind of like how you guys think about hey I'm institution I want to bring my assets onchain I want to bring them into morpho I want to loop them I want to you know put them onto a different chain you know do another set of transactions there borrow against it

190. 1:20:24

     etc these kind of more complex transactions with non-crypto assets again more of these kind of tokenized uh offchain assets. How does this execution and aggregation framework change from your perspective and for your business strategy as it pertains to non cryptonnative assets coming onchain?

191. 1:20:41

     What does it actually look like from an aggregation execution perspective? Right? There's different liquidity dynamics, there's different KYC dynamics, there's different uh user kind of uh slippage thing, right? There's a lot of new dynamics implemented here.

192. 1:20:54

     How do you guys think about this from a first principles perspective as it pertains to execution aggregation? Um so I think uh one thing we need at the top is a policy engine. The policy engine would from the get-go filter out which kind of liquidity sources um is this transaction allowed to tap into has it to be compliant or not. And then again, I think many of these uh tokenized assets are at the end of the

193. 1:21:17

     day ERC20s uh and or uh multi-chain native assets like of example or entities, IT, CCTS, you name it. Um so from an aggregation perspective, there are not much changes. However, I do believe that we're going to see new standards coming up um that are more aligned with FIX uh structures um and and things we know from chatfi. Um and also there will be there will be standards around meta information on

194. 1:21:41

     where stocks are coming from. Um how things have been collateralized. For example, when it comes to stable coins, stable coins are also RWAS, right? That's we put them in the same category. Um so uh we definitely have a dedicated team just around that where we look specifically into how is all of this evolving. But I can say it's very early like also these banks and also these tokenizing companies like they're still trying to figure it out. How are things supposed to look like? How do things become tradable and all of that?

195. 1:22:10

     Let me just add I agree uh with Philip here. Uh the for example the KYC right is normally settled at wallet level for example. So we have KYC solvers ourselves but users don't have to KYC with cow protocol right they KYC with MetaMask for example and then we are just as I said the settlement layer. So in that sense the KYC issue is not really an issue that we we have to worry about as long as we have KYC solvers and so so kind of consensus being

196. 1:22:43

     similar dynamics to a traditional ERC20 but potentially you know diff slight differences but more or less Michael do you have anything to add? Yeah, I think things like zero knowledge KYC are really going to help out this move into RWAs. Uh being able to, you know, have unis swap style, you know, defy contracts, but know that everyone interacting with that contract has, you know, some sort of KYC behind them, even

197. 1:23:08

     if they're accredited investors, things like that. As we bring in more institutions, more of these traditional markets, we have to figure out ways to replace the tooling that they have, right? So, we can't forget about AML. We can't forget about OFAC. All that stuff needs to be covered, but I think we can do it in a a more privacy focused way, onchain, more secure, more efficient.

198. 1:23:30

     So, that stuff is coming. There's a lot of people working on it, but like Philip said, you know, it's still being figured out and there's a a lot of different approaches. But I think that that market is just going to be a huge opportunity.

199. 1:23:42

     The there's so many institutions, big players that have wanted to be in crypto. That's why we see these ETFs, but uh they want access to more, right? They want to be able to to invest in companies to trade other assets. So, I think that's going to really explode the market. kind of uh centering around this point in general with regards to this convergence of of legacy finance and

200. 1:24:05

     kind of D5 primitives. How do you guys how do you guys think about uh the emphasis and importance of crosschain and of kind of generally this aggregation as we go from okay so we had a lot of these chains were kind of consolidating the chain landscape a bit but if you recall back when crosschain kind of first started and we had you know bridge to polygon to go on a and then you can bridge to your wormhole to salana and then we we had all this asset asset kind of a fragmentation there's all these different forms of USDC.

201. 1:24:38

     That's going to happen again because we're getting all these new tokenized assets on chain and then again all these different kind of standards for that. Also a bunch of stable coins. There's there's going to be a proliferation of the quantity of stable coins. So how do you guys think about uh kind of like reconsolidating again this time not chains this time more of an asset century approach? Yeah, and this is exactly what we have been foreseeing.

202. 1:25:01

     You know, really looking at exponential fragmentation not only across chains and intermobility solutions, but also asset standards. And what comes next with chains becoming faster and cheaper um different types of AMMs um and different types of orderbook style um exchanges like these things are coming too. Um so for LeFi that's perfect. Um like we have been building infrastructure to aggregate all that at scale for the past

203. 1:25:26

     five years and um yeah it is the same kind of boring work of of aggregating these things matching these things um obviously nowadays u so lea already leans heavily into AI um so we're working on an AI based routing um that leverages all the data telemetry for the past four or five years so there's a lot of experience and a lot of data we can leverage um so we're well prepared uh to to address this and we are doing this as of today already.

204. 1:25:55

     Yeah, I would say for crosschain we the idea is always the same for KOP. So like we we recently are launching on more and more chains right and we are trying to bet big on crosschain and the idea is you basically have only one transaction and you do everything with one transaction to maximize the user experience there. Of course uh especially when you start dealing with uh different chains right at the ideal

205. 1:26:20

     world also for solvers because it adds complexity also on the solvers level especially if you start doing crosschain swaps between EVM and nonVM chains right uh ideally the the great solution would be having some sort of chain abstraction uh so that users don't really care on on which chain their assets are and I think this is true for every type of asset and uh this way I actually this would make

206. 1:26:45

     also the solver's life way easier and way more capital efficient too, right? So that's that's something that we're trying to focus on uh right now. Michael, anything to add as we close out here? Yeah, I think intense has gone a long way to help solve that problem. So, you know, if you're dealing with an asset like USDC, it doesn't matter which chain you want to withdraw on, right? You can swap it for whatever intense you want and then withdraw it on the chain of your choice. But I think that we're

207. 1:27:10

     going to see a big explosion in different types of um you know onchain markets for like bitcoin style or curve style pools for bitcoin for example. So then you have bitcoin across many blockchains. We're going to see uh things like light spark u lightning network getting more used so that you know this process can be sped up. We're not waiting for slow block times. Uh ultimately I think that it's still very early.

208. 1:27:38

     there's going to be that fragmentation and you're going to have to live with it for a little bit, but I think the tooling is stronger than ever. So, we're much closer to that, you know, uh, promised land where users think about assets and not blockchains or technologies.

209. 1:27:52

     Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for your panelists today, Phil, Jacob, and Michael. Thank you guys. All righty, guys. We'll be right back with our next set of panelists.

210. 1:30:19

     handsome. It's okay. Guys, why don't we start off? We don't usually do intros, but as we're near in the afternoon, let's get the people fired up again. Why don't we do a quick round of intros, just a couple sentences, then we'll we'll get into the the heat here. Let's do it. Let me go for it.

211. 1:30:35

     Everybody, I'm Namkin Kumar from uh Proval actually which is a labs arm of Ilio and we are we just launched a shield wallet which is the most private wallet in crypto. Sender is sender is private, receiver is private, the amount is private and the fee you pay for it is private and so here to sort of promote that and make sure um you know it works well with here.

212. 1:30:58

     Private private private. Nick, what's up? Hey guys, it's Nick uh here from Trust Wallet. Uh you probably might know us. Uh we're pretty big, I guess, on the mobile side. Uh we support over 120 chains. We're kind of known for that kind of stuff. You know, per predictions, swaps. We're kind of big there. Um happy on this panel. I'm really excited to talk about what's next. Awesome. Clayton.

213. 1:31:19

     Uh I'm Clay PD director at uh Ledger. Um we're on 121 chains. um uh but uh mostly focused on the hardware and consumer side but um you know anything uh with a you know new go to market initiative I'm I'm generally involved with it.

214. 1:31:36

     I uh I'm glad I got this panel. I was uh having a chat with um the CE CIO of Bitwise Matt Hong the other day and uh we were debating fat protocol thesis, fat application thesis. Ultimately we settled on fat wallet thesis uh and and all of you here are working on wallets.

215. 1:31:57

     Um and so you know part of the idea there was where where value would acrewue whether it would flow down to the ultimate you know the under underlying chain in terms of gas cost or if it would be you know at the application level as people were kind of going to these browsers. Um, ultimately what we found was that as you own the end customer, uh, you're able to set the price that everyone else is downstream of. You know, the wallets are kind of

216. 1:32:22

     the portal to which people view the chain. They're interacting. They're conducting transactions. They're they're doing these sorts of things. I'm curious how you guys think of value acrruel. Is that wallet thesis fair? uh you know some of the you know some some uh mechanisms are starting to become embedded into wallets on-ramps off-ramps swaps exchanges you know some wallets are doing this more than others but I'm

217. 1:32:46

     just curious how you guys are thinking about value acral and verticalization of the stack from a wallet perspective uh Clayton why don't we start with you we'll move I I mean I think ultimately this industry is about uh value occurring more to the end user than you know uh industries of the past right so um I I think regardless of uh where you sit in the stack that that should be your ultimate goal obviously you don't want you know anything to leak out of that or like you know be in a position to where

218. 1:33:17

     you're kind of screwed and you know stuck uh dealing with other people who have like better distribution or remote at the same time um you know I think for people on this panel u all of us are collectively like you know trying to be this everything app um in non-custodial way, which is interesting, right? It's like um you know, I I think we're in America, most people have a Coinbase account, most people trust Coinbase, but

219. 1:33:42

     you know, historically centralized exchanges are still like a place where you know, people have gotten screwed over in the past. Um and uh but really like if if you want your product to be a feature complete product and and for us as like a hardware wallet, right? It's like we you know think of ourselves as the most secure solution for people to hold their assets and that's historically what people have used us for. Um but then eventually like people start to transact right um and you know

220. 1:34:08

     swapping staking you know other functionalities we have embedded on our UIs but like I think for us we can only be that secure product function if we continue to allow more exotic uh transactions to exist within the frontends that you know we run um to be the most secure front end in crypto uh that that offers uh uh this non-custodial uh you know uh platform to to do all these things right um but you

221. 1:34:33

     know anyone that can have like an underlying differentiator in that regard, right? Like for us it's security and then be everything for everyone. I I I think that's you know the fat wallet thesis makes a lot of sense. Nick value acrruel and how are you thinking about verticalization in integrating on-ramps offramps swaps that the whole the whole shebang.

222. 1:34:58

     Yeah, I mean you see a lot of players today kind of taking that whole value a curl, right? So the vertical integration versus horizontal. I I do think there are some key points in that like um if you look at some other companies like maybe Ripple for example that kind of own the entire ecosystem. I don't think that's necessarily the best approach to building a huge user base, right? Um and in regards to wallets, I kind of think about it like this. Like there's nobody

223. 1:35:21

     sitting on a panel today talking about like which um browser they use, whether it's like Chrome or Brave or something like that. Um I think wallets are a very important um kind of fundamental step for people to actually go on chain. Like we we spoke about you know some exchanges whether in the US Coinbase or outside of the US maybe Binance. Um I think people kind of refer to that more as a trading exposure not necessarily a web 3 experience. Um really wallets are

224. 1:35:46

     kind of serving as that whole experience for the end user right it might be the first time they connect to a D app or they place a crosschain swap or even same chain or maybe it's the first time they're staking. Um, I think at the end of the day, like there's a lot of wallets out there. They all kind of serve different niche purposes. I think it's important to have the key value props that are important to you as a user, right? Security, making sure your keys, your crypto, all those good things. Um, in terms of the whole

225. 1:36:11

     vertical integration, um, I think it's nice when you have it. Like Apple, for example, you have an iPhone, you have a watch, you have the computer, it syncs very nice, right? I'm not going to lie. Um there are some wallets are kind of doing the vertical integration whether it be from the on-ramp to the KYC. So um you know eventually when KYC comes to trading or you know prediction markets that you've seen maybe like KI's announcement um I I think it's a core feature that a lot of businesses have to

226. 1:36:38

     take. Um over at Trust Wallet I think it's something we've been exploring and it's kind of now at the phase where what are the key things we want to be the best in um and what do we want to make sure we prioritize for the future. And that's kind of the main question today is kind of what is the biggest next play? If I had a crystal ball, I don't think I'd be on the stage today. I'd be on a nice beach house. But at the same time, we have to kind of as an industry decide what is going to be the focus,

227. 1:37:02

     the narrative. You know, prediction markets, per those are gone. What's the next thing? Um, I think that's kind of where we talk in the horizontal integration versus vertical. I think there's going to be a lot more of the acquisitions and you're going to see a lot of these players kind of defined into smaller big ones. um as you're kind of seeing more of these more acquisitions in the last 12 months for example man how's it going very interesting

228. 1:37:25

     perspectives um start off with shield is only onen Ilio right and part of the reason is because hey the team built IO build shield but also is because shield like alio can offer some unique features that not chain can like full privacy right and that's just not your so that's where we stick and so what that means is by default we are vertically integ ated, right? And so like we've actually gone

229. 1:37:48

     out of our way to implement certain sort of services that the user doesn't even understand as we're working in the back end, but they make the UX just so much cleaner, so much smoother, so much faster, right? And I think you can do that to your example about Apple and and phones. You can do that when you're vertical integrated. You can't really do that if you're going to be sort of the one, right? like if you're going to serve many different chains or like many different user base user types, you kind of, you know, you kind of have to sort

230. 1:38:12

     of do the most common denominator and that's not always sort of the the best experience for all users, right? And so we're kind of mindful of that. Um, as for vertical integration, that's sort of our take on it. Um, in terms of like, you know, wild thesis, I'm I'm totally aligned with that, right? Like been building walls for like two different sort of um foundation companies for the past little while, right? But I think maybe we look at this question like, okay, what happens in like 10 years, right? 15 years and I mean you know it's

231. 1:38:37

     it's a buzz word that's been going around but I don't know if some are made for it but like neo bankang type stuff right like where you have your wallet it is your gateway into crypto as a user and you know we have swaps right now and we have sort of bridging and sort of on-ramp off partly because people don't know who or who not who to trust who not to trust trust is given to the wallet and that trust extends to all sorts of within the wallet number two well hard wallet's going to make money right you

232. 1:39:03

     guys make money by hardware and that's great but like most software wallets, right? They kind of stuck to charging a fee of whatever swaps or on top reps are. And so that's where revenue comes from. But I feel like and that's today, but I think the future, right? Like skipping a few steps here, but like you know that's the place where you store your you store value that's your savings account. That's where you earn, right?

233. 1:39:23

     Maybe that's where you spend money from through credit card, through paying your rent, whatever. But to me, sort of that's the future that I I think uh to me that's a future that's inevitable. How do we get there? are the steps in between. I'm sure like, you know, folks on this panel will will figure out in the next couple years.

234. 1:39:40

     Uh Nick or Clayton, anything? Nick, you want to clap back? I I mean, everyone's tell their opinion on I know I know where I'm coming from. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I I totally appreciate that. I mean um at some point you have different niches. We all have to kind of focus on what's important to us. Like I was on a panel a few weeks ago with someone else from Ledger um and we were discussing like um the barrier to entry, right? So when you have to purchase a hardware wallet, obviously there's an

235. 1:40:09

     upfront cost, but if you look at maybe some of their holders, they might tend to hold a lot more um on average just because if you're buying a crypto wallet or you know uh hardware device for a few hundred bucks, you're probably going to put more than a few hundred into whatever it is you're doing. If you're downloading a free mobile app, you know, odds are it's left empty or you might put $5 in it and you never open it again. I mean, these are realities of the world, right? Um, it really depends

236. 1:40:34

     on what you're trying to target in the end consumer. You know, I think for us, our key mission is making sure that everyone has the opportunity and the freedom of reach. It is not necessarily about a barrier to entry and we try and keep that low. Um, as a, you know, a business, we do have to make money. Um, so you will pay trading fees on an exchange anyways. So, at the same point, like what's your alternative? If you have a better one, please let me know because I'd love to try it. Um, but at

237. 1:41:00

     the same time, I I think as an industry, we will kind of move away from transactional fees at some point. Who knows? Um, but I don't think I need another subscription. There's already too many and I should cancel Netflix anyways.

238. 1:41:13

     Imagine the Robin Hood model applied to blockchain transactions. Pay a $20 subscription fee, send as many transactions as you want. Yeah. And then you just route the order flow of all the transactions on chain and just backrun them all. I mean, it it is it is a feasible model. I mean, you certainly could. I don't think that's the best thing for the user because nobody likes a front run or back run in a sandwich attack. Um, if that's the way people want to move, I mean, we'll adapt, but not that.

239. 1:41:39

     Let me be clear, we should not do that. It's just crazy to think about. Um, you know, I've been kind of having an an a personal like internal identity crisis about how I feel with regards to self-custody. Um, I think, uh, you know, as crypto becomes more ubiquitous, stable coins, um, and more high quality assets come on chain, uh, people don't want to lose their seed phrase. I still have money locked in a wallet from 2016. I have like 18 ETH that you know I'd like it, right? But

240. 1:42:15

     forgot the password. It's a whole another story. We won't get into it. But you know, people don't want that reality. Like they don't want to bear the burden of self-custody. Um when we're thinking about, you know, lay people and and these sorts of things. Um people want a forgot password button.

241. 1:42:31

     They want customer service. How do you guys grapple with self-custody in 2026? I mean we we do have a forgot password button at ledger it's called ledger recover right um but you know ultimately for us right like we we are you know on the side of the spectrum that you know we are always going to be at right where it's like there is a group of people that will need this or want this and um you know to your point about us having a barrier um you know we see ourselves as

242. 1:43:05

     a premium product in the industry right it's like you know if you wanna trade, you know, Barcoin 69 with like $20 in a wallet, right? Like you don't need a you don't need a 60 to, you know,$100 $200 device. Um, but if if you want to, you know, be here for a while and, you know, maybe you have ideals that, you know, require you to to be non-custodial or also you're intelligent enough to know

243. 1:43:28

     how many attack vectors there are that exist in in this industry and like even more so now because of AI, then you know, having a hardware secured wallet makes more and more sense every single day. Um but yeah, I I mean you know the the the old school storing your seed phrase um you know thing is annoying. Um there there are paths to to you know uh you know mitigate that.

244. 1:43:53

     Yeah. Could you just tell us a little bit about how ledger recovery works like mechanicalistically? What are the the things there? Do we have a trusted setup or what how are you able to kind of get the best for us? Basically, it's a it's a trusted company that we work with that you know will will secure the seat praise and then you know you would have to you know request to recover.

245. 1:44:12

     So at the onset you request that they have a backup. You you can you can purchase it after right but but obviously you would need to have your seat phrase for that you know um to turn it on. You can't do it after the fact. I'm gonna interrupt you if you want.

246. 1:44:27

     Oh yeah. Um but but yeah I mean I I think um you you got our point. Um but but yeah I the onboarding process for for crypto today is is annoying. Um but uh you know ultimately right you can start to derive like a lot more you know keys uh you know with that private key.

247. 1:44:46

     So like if it becomes like something that you have to do once forever then you know that onboarding process starts to look like pretty silly um in terms of you know complaining about it um compared to you know everyone their mother who's attempted to you know vibe code over the past like month you know just to make a bot that like automates some of their messages even though they're not super important right

248. 1:45:09

     it's like um yeah so I I don't think the onboarding process is a problem in crypto right I mean especially if like Even if you're looking at like gaming in the past, right? People say that the gaming field because the onboarding was terrible, but like a shitload of people went on Axi Infinity to to play a funny game for a while. Um it's just that that like vertical actually isn't the reason why blockchain exists. Like I I mean maybe it can in the future, but like not

249. 1:45:33

     now. Um so I don't think we have an onboarding problem. I think we have like a use case problem. Yeah. From our side, we we don't have the same service. Um we've been exploring it. It's a potential opportunity for us. Um, we actually kind of take a different approach, right? So, if you're an iOS user, iCloud backup, secure back to the cloud, you know, Android backup again, but you'd have to have a password pin, you know, you have

250. 1:45:59

     to remember that password. So, it's kind of like a catch22. You know, I lost my seed phrase. Okay, but do you have the password? Uh, you know, it's it's one of those kind of issues. Um as a personal you know advice that I would give to people even like friends colleagues like I think the best advice I can give you is don't put all your eggs in one basket um even though I do work for Trust Wallet. I am a user of the product. I don't put all of my money in Trust Wallet believe it or not. I I use a

251. 1:46:24

     variety of products centralized exchanges and wallets. I kind of like to just keep it 50-50 between centralized self- custody uh and just kind of mix it up there. So I do have a ledger trust wallet, MetaMask, all of the apps. I have uh pusher centralized exchanges. I think it's about minimizing your risk as a user, which I know most people aren't probably that crazy and they don't need 15 accounts like me. Um it's a lot to manage. I'm not going to lie. But at the

252. 1:46:48

     same time, I there's a bit of a fear factor, especially when you're moving to self-custody, right? Because again, you lose those 12 24 words and there goes all your money. Like I had a friend who actually has a ledger, the device broke, and he doesn't have the 12 words, so he's like out of Bitcoin. You know, it happens. I have friends that have trust wallets that they lost their phone, they didn't back it up to the cloud, and hey, like how can I get my money back? It

253. 1:47:11

     hurts to see like nobody wants anyone to lose funds. Like it it sucks. Um I mean for the rest of people out there, I mean less money that's moving. Wonderful. Um but that's not something we want to look for, right? Um in terms of the best solution, if there was one today, I think we'd be having a way different panel. There is no great solution. So it's again everyone has to take affirmative action here. Um the best approach is limiting your risk

254. 1:47:36

     understanding your personal you know risk profile and having an opportunity to basically give the users the freedom of choice. Um whether they want to hold the keys themselves they want to have multiple keys they want to write it down on a piece of paper store a bank vault upload it to the cloud whatever they need to do. Um I I totally appreciate whatever it is. I think again my advice would just be don't put all your eggs in one basket. Don't sign random DFS. So make sure you're being very careful out there. Uh keep a hybrid approach.

255. 1:48:04

     Um lean. Yeah. Why is self-costing important? Yeah. No, I I think it's actually very important, right? Like I think part of the reason people choose to hold crypto is because of the self-serving aspect of it, right? Um you could easily put on Coinbase, Binance, and whatever have you, but then you know it's like if you don't hold the keys, do you really hold your crypto? Right? you can sort of get banned almost any day and fro's frozen and then you're kind of stuck right so I think and I think I think that as folks

256. 1:48:31

     said there's no good solution to it I think ledgers are the good solution for most people right now and I think that's fair to me I think what becomes interesting right like I think we should keep going down that path but I feel like the definition of you know like how do we maintain sort of selfying in crypto with selfities expanding like right right now as long as we hold our keys we feel comfort that hey this is this is our tokens but we're okay sort

257. 1:48:55

     of saying that when we move those tokens, it's transparent, everybody can see what I'm doing and and that's okay, right? A lot of people to avoid that. A lot of people do what you just sort of said, like you'll sort of hop wallets with multiple wallets because you're sort of wary of people going to the block store and sort of, you know, finding out who holds how much. And it seems like to be sort of to sort of offer a high degree of self-certainty, you need your data to be private as

258. 1:49:19

     well, right? And so the transfers um the metadata all has to be private. And I think that's sort of going to be the next I think expansion of you know self- custody into sort of being fully self-s sovereign. Um I I want to expand a little bit into uh emerging technologies, emerging markets. um given you know the the pace of acceleration of AI you know I anticipate we're going to see AI trading AI agents everyone's trying to code a you know polyarketer couch sheet AI bot that's going to make

259. 1:49:52

     them you know uh rich and wealthy never have to work everyone wants passive income uh and then you know Nean you also mentioned a lot of these neoang features were combining RWA products right alongside crypto products you can see this already happening on centralized exchanges like Coinbase you know, you've got lending, prediction markets, trading all in one interface.

260. 1:50:13

     Um, it feels like wallets are progressing towards a financial super app or a centralized exchange user interface. Do you guys think that's a good or a bad thing? Do you think that's a healthy progression for wallets or or should we keep these product offerings somewhat segmented generally? How how are you preparing for AI trading acceler today and the concerns that people will always have even if it's not cryptoreated right it's like oh net new website like what what is this yada yada

261. 1:51:01

     yada it's like Um, I mean I I there's like a study recently where it's like 67% of people trust their banks and like 45% of people trust blockchain, right? It's like that's pretty bad for us when we've been like kind of like resting on this idea that like everyone hates banks which is why we exist as an industry. Um and and like ultimately I I think a a a part of that problem outside of just you know narrative and you know the volatility and stuff is the experience

262. 1:51:31

     of of crypto is is you're scary right like even if you're in the industry right um so there is going to be some trust element associated with uh transacting from a front-end perspective right where it's like you know regardless of what we say about like trustless systems it like in in my opinion it's like trust minimized systems backed by reputable people or organizations or brands that you trust.

263. 1:51:55

     Um, and if we continue telling people that like you are your own bank and like it's up to you to figure it out and like they keep getting screwed like that percentage that I just mentioned is only going to get lower, right? So I I think having a unified front-end experience makes a lot of sense to to to mitigate some of the problems that we have. And then to the point of like trusting the banks, right? It's similar if like you're on Chase, right? It's like, you know, you can buy stocks and like you

264. 1:52:26

     can send a wire and like there's a variety of different things and like your credit cards enabled in that, right? So, you know, obviously like you know, most people are not using a single financial app, but at least like you have this as your home base and I I would like to see wallets be that sort of experience. obviously in a much cooler cryptonative the bank sort of way but you know I

265. 1:52:50

     mean I it's it's I think it's necessary the thing is always like can the innovators innovate quicker than the incumbents can build it themselves right like I I I see you know the the wallets are continuing to progress almost towards like an online banking or centralized exchange user interface um they've already got the incumbents already have all of the brand recognition, the familiarity, they own the customer relationships with the

266. 1:53:20

     masses and so you know can or no it's can the innovators get distribution before the incumbents can build it themselves and innovate right and so how I I that's always the balance right is are we going to see some wallets gain significant distribution to the extent where they can compete with the JP Morgan Chasees and have a similar product if there's a similar product stack there, we're going to have to compete on distribution. C, where are you guys at on this? How important is, you know, all these how are you guys

267. 1:53:52

     preparing for AI and and some of these neoang offerings? I could start with that, right? I think it's a good question, right? Like, um, I think what's happening is that incumbents are realizing that, hey, crypto offers more efficiency in almost everything except regulatory arbitrage.

268. 1:54:10

     So, they should move towards that. they start moving towards it. Um, right. And but but I mean what that also means is that there's a lot of learning for them to do. Um, and it's one of those thing that I feel like the market has, you know, like efficient market pieces. I feel like that's what's going to play out, right? And in my mind, because um, you know, startups, um, crypto company startups are able to move fast, they're probably going to be the ones to sort of

269. 1:54:36

     plant that first flag, right? Um, and I mean I think we sort of see a bit of that happening with Coinbase. You know, they evolved into the social app for the last one year, but they just just sort of said, "Hey, we're done with social for now, right? Going back to trading." But what that really comes down to, they have an earned product. A lot of people just leave their funds in Coinbase, right? They have the Coinbase card. So, you know, that hap that sort of neo bank sort of has been alive for for a bit

270. 1:55:00

     now, right? So, I think like and is getting traction. Um and you know it's one of those things that I think innovation wins and I'm sort of biased towards startups. So to me startups win because they can innovate fast toward a toward sort of uh towards sort of that you know towards that sort of point of efficiency of sort of market forces right and that's the sort of I look at it. Um and to your sort of question about are we prepared for things like

271. 1:55:25

     agents and whatnot that's a good question. I I feel like crypto is more um because AI agents work off of software off of interfaces AP APIs. I think you know we crypto generally blockchains are generally suited for AI agents. Um right but at the same time I mean bring it back a little bit to privacy it's about in when your state is private how do you sort of execute autonomous agents or even intents right and so that's where I feel like wallets

272. 1:55:54

     probably have to innovate a little bit and become more like policy engines versus just sort of hey I want you know I I want 10 E for all this you know for the hundred sort of shitcoin I have go find me 10 right um and then there sort of no guard else right now. But I feel like Wallace sort of the intermediate step for Wallace is to become that sort of policy engine that can control sort

273. 1:56:17

     of guide that essentially constrains autonomous agents and intents really of what's okay to do and what's not okay to do, right? I I I will say that the only way um a policy engine works for like the broader market, right? um you know going to the point of like all these people you know attempting to to code for the first time and you know allowing them to connect to like all of their accounts etc. um you

274. 1:56:41

     likely need some sort of hardware device with a secure element chip and like you know a a a secure screen to to sign those transactions right um so I mean you could use like tees which you know would would would solve problems for for some people right but for larger enterprise uh uh folks and people who are very very aware that you know everything that's happening right now is

275. 1:57:04

     extremely experimental like i.e talking like a month as opposed to like people talking about an experimental technology that's 5 years old, right? Like you probably want the utmost security now for for any of that and you know a physical signing device becomes absolutely necessary until like you know we start to give AI agents robotic arms right like you can guarantee that you're going to be able to physically sign that personally. So can we before we judge

276. 1:57:29

     whether or not you know hardware is necessary for these things let's just for everyone listening watching what's the difference between a wallet and a policy engine that's a good question right like what does w do today it does send receive and then we talk about it about store right um and when you sort of introduce intents what that means is oh hey wallet I like I said like I want 10 ETH and I have a hundred of I don't

277. 1:57:52

     know fcoin or whatever not the right ratios but you know um go fill this No matter how you do it, no matter what chain, no matter uh which account it comes from, uh what protocol you talk to, it doesn't really matter. Just go make this happen, right? But like, you know, coming from a sort of a privacy perspective, um I want to keep that intent private. I want to keep execution

278. 1:58:16

     private. I want that agent to only be able to see a certain token in my wallet and not others, right? And so that's what I mean by establishing guardrails and really sort of introducing policies into wallets, right? Because and I mean I can perspective here, but like that applies to I think all wallets because when you have for example agents being controlled by a ledger or by trust wallet, you also want to have to give them guardrails right on what they're allowed to do and what they're not

279. 1:58:40

     allowed to do. You know my limited experience on clawed and open claw and that kind of thing is like you know you treat it as its own employee. you give it its own credentials. Meaning, I'm not going to give my openclaw instance access to my own wallet. I would give it its own wallet and let it do its thing on that. And then if I have another openclaw instance, I would spin up a wallet for it. So, it only has context for its particular assets and its

280. 1:59:11

     windows. um is that I mean just a word of advice on people setting up their open claw instances and like how we should give them access to crypto. No, I think that's a fair point, right? But to me both both worlds exist, right?

281. 1:59:25

     Like even open class wallet, you know, you don't want you can have multiple wallets, right? But and that's a lot of sort of operation security that you have to go through. But at some point as an early adopter you're fine doing that but if you want that product to sort of cross the chasm go for early from early adopter to sort of not going to say everyday user but let's say the early majority user right you're going to have to make some improvements in UX in in

282. 1:59:48

     sort of number of remove some of the friction point and then that to me there will be some kind of consolidation of wallets now I'm not saying that hey give agents access to your personal wallet right but maybe you're going to have agent wallet and within that wallet you know you want them to sort of be able to interact use this token on this protocol and this token to access this Discord and and and you know keep it keep those guard rules for that agents within the context you've defined for them right um

283. 2:00:12

     so to me like the policy argument still applies especially if you want to sort of expand into the wider sort of market maybe extending the programmability of wallets yeah because even open example is a great one right like everybody's trying to run it how people are trying to run it fail how people and when you succeed you're like oh what do I do with this right and then and then when you do succeed with it you're somebody's like, "Oh, I can access your private keys and I can do this to your so

284. 2:00:37

     there's so many different issues with it right now, but I think that's how technology is born, right? There are issues, but then you have to, you know, it's like a whack-a-ole game, right? You fix one issue, you fix second issue, you fix third issue, eventually it's friction free." And so I feel like that's that's what's going to happen with OpenCloud, but also the autonomous agents in crypto and wallets.

285. 2:00:55

     Yeah. And especially as we've got more chains, more assets, 15 accounts, Nick, on different centralized exchanges, decentralized services. Have you dabbled with AI? How many accounts have you forgotten about? Let me start there. No, I'm seriously come back and they're still Yeah, I had to start using like a password manager just to keep track of my accounts. This was two years ago, you know what I mean? So, this is not going to scale. Yeah, I honestly I do have a spreadsheet like an Excel to track it

286. 2:01:24

     all, but again I I'm not your normal user. The other weird thing I now have is like I get spammed on a lot of my wallets. Like people are spamming me with a bunch of stuff like so I have to create new wallets and move stuff around because I don't know why people are tracking me. But whatever it is um in regards to the uh AI and everything, you should use shield. Nobody can track you.

287. 2:01:43

     Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I need to start using shielded transactions, but not every blockchain has that. It's kind of defeats the purpose. But anyways, uh going into the whole AI uh cloud bot and everything like that, um I I think like at the same point like I don't think anyone would just say like, "Hey, random person, I'm in the street. Here's my phone. Like do whatever you think is good and like let's act in my best interest." Like as much as I appreciate

288. 2:02:06

     the idea that I think AI is going to save our lives, make it better. Like today, it is not secure. And if you're going online, you type in like, "How do I make a cloudbot to make me $1 million?" And they say, "Oh, here's a tutorial. copy this link and download this thing and you're all good. Just give it all your keys and it's good. And you wake up tomorrow and everything's gone. Like one in five pages, I think someone told me this statistic like one in five pages for how to download Clawbot is a scam right now. So so many

289. 2:02:31

     people are capitalizing on this opportunity. So again, am I going to give an AI agent access to everything in my life, my personal information and my crypto wallet, my 15 crypto wallets? Probably not. I might dedicate a, you know, a prepaid card with a hundred bucks on it and give it a wallet with $10 and say go crazy because it's an neat idea. Uh, I think we are a long ways from anything of that. And do I trust the AI overlords yet? Not today.

290. 2:02:58

     Um, please don't kill me. But we're not at the Terminator level yet today. You missed the robot we had in here with boxing gloves. That was pretty wild. I I I walked around and I did see it. Uh, so I I was nervous a little bit.

291. 2:03:13

     All right, guys. Give it up for our panelists. Another uh another great panel. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Cheers, guys. Thanks for that.

292. 2:09:09

     Shane intent execution panel here. Last one of the day. We've got Luke of Layer Zero and Jason of Relay. Guys, quick introduction. Uh, and how you how's your week been here at ETH Denver so far, Luke? Yeah, of course. Uh so yeah, Luke Levante, I've been at layer zero for about three years now. Um primarily leading the solution architecture team now focusing more on our value transfer um acquisition through Stargate API products. Um so kind of working across

293. 2:09:36

     the teams through that. Uh yeah, it's fun through the acquisition. Not many people get to do it, but uh yeah, my week's been good. I actually flew in two hours ago, so we just got here. Uh feeling good, but uh yeah, good to be here. Thanks for having me. Hey y'all, I'm Jason. I'm a co-founder of Relay.

294. 2:09:54

     Um, Relay is an intentbased interop protocol. We focus on payments grade interop. So, the way we think about it is basically consumer use cases where people care a lot about speed, price, and reliability. Um, and yeah, week's been good. Just doing some dinners, doing some meetings, one-on ones, that kind of stuff. So, happy to be here.

295. 2:10:13

     Seems like high spirits uh overall, which is uh good to see. Yeah, definitely. All right, gentlemen. um kind of looking at the lens holistically broadly here of the evolution of crushing. I mean, we've seen from, you know, 2020ish onwards the the explosion of a tons of chains and and tons of experimentation with bridge, you know, bridge designs, whether it be mint and burn, intense space, uh, hub and spoke, all of these, right? And it seems like we've we've kind of keep coming back to

296. 2:10:45

     intense. Now, today's intense day. Um, is it fair to say and perhaps if there's a more nuanced take, is intense the best that we've built for interrupt in crypto so far for this multi-chain world? Why or why not? Or what is the more nuance take there?

297. 2:11:03

     Yeah, I'll take this first. Um, I think I think they're both needed, right? I think intense solves something that um is is needed for a specific flow. So like retail flow they there's kind of a back and forth dialogue around like um like core ethos of like how you should build things or how like the the the overall crypto build things from the beginning of like core principles and like is it like

298. 2:11:28

     nation state resistant? Is it like mutable? Is it like can I shut down if if the government came to me and be like hey shut this thing down could you do it or could it just like operate in perpetuity? Right? And so for us like over the years right I think last two years specifically users mainly retail users don't actually care which is like I think I think it's like a not like a

299. 2:11:52

     growing up moment but it's more of just like a hard pill to swallow for like founders who like really have those core ethos. Um and I think with intense like it definitely does solve that chain abstraction ability to like hey I just want liquidity. I want to do the thing I want to do with what I have and I don't want to have to care about like a fragmented UX. And so for like speed and cost for um for retail flow I think is is is proven that it's it's like the

300. 2:12:16

     most optimal solution for uh for users across a variety of different applications. And I think where messaging it goes hand inand in my opinion um because messaging is like the most capital efficient way to move money across chains, right? there there's no better way to to move infinite amount of money without having like being liquidity constrained across any number of chains. So like burn models have been

301. 2:12:40

     proven to work um for like institutional flow a much larger value flow. Um like example there's been there's been a number of transactions a handful of transactions across layer zero that have been 300 million 400 million 800 million in in in one transaction for the price of gas and settles in two minutes right and so that's like a step function better than like anything that exists in payment world um but I think intense is

302. 2:13:05

     also solving something like equally as important for maybe just a different type of user um so you're solving for institutional retail and then on the intense side I Um I'll wrap this up but on the intense side they also use messaging for rebalancing. So it's like they go almost hand in hand um where they they they both need each other really at the end of the day for settlement and like efficiency of systems.

303. 2:13:29

     Yeah. I mean I think I completely agree like we really think that there are two different layers of interop. There's basically core interop which you can think of as like native chain bridges or native token bridges like and then there's fast interop which is where we operate right. So this is like chain abstraction being able to take finalization risk and actually these things are complements not competitors right like there's cases where you could

304. 2:13:52

     use either and so maybe there's some things that you know orders that we fill that layer zero could fill um but we we use layer zero right so we use layer zero to rebalance we want assets to be able to move across chains quickly um and we're serving a different use case right like we serve users that want to take actions and have it feel like they're paying with a credit card regardless of what they're doing on chain. actually think there's a benefit

305. 2:14:16

     for core interop in having this fast interop layer too which is um I mean and we saw this over the last number of years without the fast interop layer the core layer is getting pushed to maybe go too fast right so you have an you really want to be sure that um you don't have a global risk of the origin chain transaction rolling back and you creating more token supply than there should be in the market um so when you have fast interop. It allows the core

306. 2:14:46

     sort of more secure standard approaches to interop to actually do their job even better. Um, yeah. So, you know, we're happy uh happy layer zero customers and we will continue to continue to do that. And I think like we really think about us more as focusing on like the UX layer of money um which isn't just you know moving money between chains like relay is basically any input to any output across chains with optional call right

307. 2:15:14

     so basically it's not just moving value it's a user is paying with musd on line and they actually want to buy an NFT on base well okay we can make that happen and have it feel like a snap um and then we'll go you know rebalance with an OFC at the end And then so when it comes to more of of the payments use cases then Jason uh as it applies to like stable coins for you know any online business

308. 2:15:39

     or point of sale uh product you know you know any merchant how does how does the tech translate into more of a payments focused architecture not just like me as an onchain user wanting to do a crosschain swap more of like can this thing scale to like like you know very very high levels of payment uh expectations like how does that scale for the more I guess like institutional more kind of consumer grade use case

309. 2:16:03

     less like crosschain swap use case yeah it's a good question I mean we you know sometimes call relay onchain payments and when we say that what we really mean is just you know crosschain transaction execution to do anything on any chain it's like a little bit fuzzy when you also think about like the payments vertical of like the use cases of payments um which I think is starting to really come on chain so in that

310. 2:16:28

     world. I think there's a few things to point out. I mean, the first is that we see a world where users and merchants are not necessarily on the same chain. Now, sometimes they are and a user might have USDC on base and be paying for something on base and then like you don't really need relay there. Like there's some things that we can do, but then base is the payment rail. If you want to go between chains, then you need something that's going to happen

311. 2:16:53

     instantly. And so what we can do is say, you know, someone's building a neo bank that's on me. They have stable coins on Mega E, but they want to show up somewhere and be able to pay wherever that merchant is accepting money. We can help facilitate that. I think the last thing I'll add is um payments are not actually transfers on chain. Payments are oftentimes protocol deposits, right?

312. 2:17:16

     Right. So, if you look at something like Coinbase Commerce, their commerce uh protocol which is being used by Shopify, it's not like you're just transferring money to the merchant. You're actually doing a deposit into a protocol. And that protocol has all sorts of functions like voiding payments, doing refunds, all of these things, right? Because the the reality is um things like chargebacks are a feature, not a bug of traditional payment systems. And so

313. 2:17:40

     there's actually like a protocol layer of payments, right? And so we can actually help interact with those too. Um so I I think what we're going to see is um you know the burden is kind of on us to enable retail users to have their tokens anywhere, have it be seamless, have them be able to pay. And I think we're going to start to see this more and more like uh stablecoinbacked cards

314. 2:18:03

     are a really good first step here. We're starting to see a lot of new stuff with ramp and you know corporate treasuries and things like that. So I think it's all moving in the right direction. It's going to take time to break some of these cycles and and see uh what benefits we can provide users, but definitely feel like it's coming.

315. 2:18:19

     Yeah, Luke from from the layer zero perspective with regards to payments as well, uh even kind of looping in the recent launch of or at least announcement of zero. How is layer zero positioning for what you know I think we can consider to be one of the strongest current use cases of crypto rails which is stable coin payments for businesses lowering uh you know credit card costs uh getting rid of of char of chargeback

316. 2:18:43

     costs overall bringing more sustainable revenue to businesses on chain. How does layer zero think about that? Yeah, I think with with zero in general um and there's there's payment zone. So zero for for those who know is is an L1 that are um that layer zero and you know a lot of our research team have built out over the last two years um simply just to solve a problem right like we

317. 2:19:04

     saw forefront of chains launching in the last three years and like we really just like weren't seeing the innovation growth happening or progressing as fast as we would like to see as far as finality and I think that's like in part why intense got so uh gained so much traction is because the finality of the chains like wasn't improving at the speed in which like we thought it would where it's like hey if if every chain is instant finality um why like what other

318. 2:19:30

     way would you would you would you send money versus burn like it doesn't make sense but then if hey if these things like take three minutes two minutes like there's a gap there with payments when like hey I need this like I need to settle this for my user in two seconds or three seconds right and so for us we really like looked at that problem we're like how can we actually help solve that problem um ourselves and so we did with

319. 2:19:52

     zero is like built a per like high performance chain um that really is target focused on financial markets and and there's a EVM zone and there's like there's atomicity zones that you can kind of um do compute in parallel without actually like it doesn't uh block space isn't isn't like capped or isn't constrained based off of the transaction volume. Um it actually like decreases which is which is pretty

320. 2:20:17

     interesting. But there's a payment zone and we're basically like hey we need something that does the throughput of today of leg of these like additional of these u legacy systems or traditional systems that exist today. Like there's nothing on chain that or there's no there's no environment today that could settle all of these transactions like on a daily basis, right? It just it's not feasible. It's like a hard nonst non-starter for them. And so we're like,

321. 2:20:42

     how can we actually like build something not just like oh other applications that exist now where it's like well I want to build something net new that doesn't exist and this is the only place I can do it because it's the only requirements that give me the ability to do that. And so that's really like our premise behind whether it's the payment zone and like in working with a lot of our partners such as Tether um who made a strategic strategic investment in in in Layers

322. 2:21:05

     Labs um as well as kind of using our our our technology to to move crosschain and so really working with them to define kind of what this should look like and as well as other partners um on the fintech side of things that we work with and then the capital market side like right um working with folks like Citadel like how should this work right how should this work in a system where it's atomic across across every asset class, right? I want to be able to to trade my

323. 2:21:30

     assets, whether it's whether it's getting exposure to price of certain certain assets um across finance and interact with my payments like these systems should be atomic and they should be together. And that's really just the premise behind not just payments but like financial like just finance in general um is how we took the approach to to to zero.

324. 2:21:49

     Yeah. And then Jason, similarly on your side, right, with the announcement of of of your chain, relay chain, how do you think about kind of reinvigorating the hub and spoke model with the relay chain being the hub again? I thought this model was broken in the past. It didn't work. Why why try it again?

325. 2:22:08

     Yeah. I mean, I think for us, we, you know, built a product where we were really focused on just like how can we provide the UX that people need? And I think the reality was, you know, we started running a solver in the market and we really felt like the design of the systems that were in the space didn't meet the requirements of what we needed to do to run a high throughput solver. Right? So I think the idea basically is, you know, you look at some

326. 2:22:32

     of the other systems and you say, well, I'm going to fill this order, but I'm not going to get my money back for four hours, right? like these are the types of things that we saw like running um you know one of the biggest solvers in the market and so we basically ran relay until we felt like we know what this needs to look like to serve like truly high throughput solving um and that's

327. 2:22:57

     why we kind of you know coalesed around this idea of launching the relay chain I think again like you know we launched a chain um maybe this came across in the announcement I hope it did for us it's a piece infrastructure. It's not like a generalized chain where we expect people to go deploy NFTTS or like build markets on top of or anything like that. For us, it's really like this is a proof point that what you're doing with Relay is trustless. It's decentralized. Um you

328. 2:23:26

     can always get your money back. We're never going to be able to like uh you know hold your funds or anything like that. And so um we are building for us it's like UX or bust, right? Everything we're building on the technology side is in service of complete flexibility to build a API and a service that provides the type of experience that consumers need. And so that's why we did it this

329. 2:23:51

     way, right? Like I think you'll see us like just continue to make slow and steady progress um on the chain to to do this. like we don't like we definitely don't see it as like competitive with zero or a bunch of the other chains that are kind of um you know taking a more um general and opinionated stance about having people kind of settle on them specifically. It for us it's like an application specific chain that allows us to kind of um

330. 2:24:17

     have what we need to provide our our users and our developers with the service that they're expecting. So Jenta as we kind of enter this newer era we call it neo finance it's really this convergence point legacy finance and defi is coming together right we saw with zero citadel arc all the likes coming onchain they you know they want to they contributed in some capacity to this to to your design choices to the entire facilitation of that launch and

331. 2:24:45

     we're also now just seeing tokenized assets really grow things like uh equity per commodity per stable coins obviously a lot of these funs are coming on chain. People are getting excited about RWA looping. Obviously, payments is happening. One thing that, you know, I think is interesting about this conversation is that it's been, you know, uh, rooted inside of the onchain environment, but not necessarily the off-chain environment. Talk to us about how your strategy changes as it pertains

332. 2:25:11

     to bringing offchain assets onchain, tokenized equities, uh, CLOS's, stable coins. What does that look like from from your your your perspective from a business strategy perspective as well as meeting these firms where they are? Part of this uh part of this panel title is privacy something that we haven't quite talked about yet. Talk to us about your business strategy and the logic around this newer era of institutional capital funds onchain and these types of

333. 2:25:37

     off-chain assets bringing them into your stack. Yeah, from our from our perspective like um we we we started layers like started as like general messaging. We thought like the messaging market was like vastly bigger and we still do. It's just like not right now. Um I think and it's largely just used for for asset movement and like how do you make these assets um ultimately just pro programmable and not just programmable in like an atomic environment but programmable in an

334. 2:26:02

     atomic feeling to the user across any environment. And so for for us like it's almost agnostic and I think this is the beauty of of of blockchain, right? It's like you can you can tokenize any asset that you want. you can you can codify any rules of of that specific asset, whether it's um whether it's some type of fixed income product, whether it's a stable coin, right? Like, and there's many many different like customized

335. 2:26:26

     features that you can put in these smart contracts. And for us, it should all work the same, right? And so being able for the all these things to work the same across any environment and have just the the atomicity for the user where I can say hey I w to I want to do this thing and I want to sign sign once pay once and don't have to worry about it and maybe it's like a multi hop maybe I'm depositing to a vault uh and I get

336. 2:26:49

     my receipt token back to me and I'm using that receipt token somewhere else to go like lend or something right all of that should feel atomic to the user and I'm and I'm I'm with Jason on this like we truly try to build um like make it seem like you're doing a single transaction on one environment when you're using layer zero, right?

337. 2:27:07

     Like abstract gas away, abstract all the complexity away because if you don't use make it at the UX level easy enough, like you've lost. And so for us to answer that question, we just were like agnostic to the type of product. As long as they're all composable together, like that's ultimately the goal, right? It's like how can we make every asset class composable together? Um and that's like truly the Lego box of finance. And I think that's kind of the the beginning

338. 2:27:30

     goal of what um with what DeFi really is. And now we're just seeing um more tradition traditional assets come into being tokenized and have that programmability. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I feel similarly about our product like um you know we focus both on onchain trading and payments as verticals that are coming on chain but the reality is like you really can just use relay to do anything. you know like from a technical perspective I might describe relay as a transaction execution protocol right it's more like you pay on any chain and

339. 2:28:06

     you can execute an array of transactions on any network that you want instantly right so um that is like kind of the core technical architecture that lives inside of like the payment stack as well I have a user on chain A who wants to pay a merchant on chain B that lives inside of the trading uh flow of funds when a user has USDC on Salana and wants to buy a memecoin on case. Um, and so I

340. 2:28:29

     think you know we look at these verticals that are coming on chain and think thinking about like how we can provide value added services for them. Um, how we can make sure our product really works for their needs. Um, but I think for us it's more like uh core infrastructure, right? Like we just think that chain should all sort of feel like one. Um, and that might be partially supported by interop standards

341. 2:28:54

     built into the tokens themselves, partially supported by intents. And I think there's a bunch of different reasons why those things are differentiated. Um, you know, not just speed. Um, and yeah, so like we're happy to see a burgeoning set of use cases really like come to fruition in in blockchain. I think, you know, the reality is um we haven't crossed the chasm. We're getting there. I think crypto is like we're like somewhere leaping over the middle right now. And I think something that people forget is

342. 2:29:27

     the users like the early adopters of crypto are not the same people as the majority that's coming next. Right? So, as an early adopter of crypto, I was more than happy to click some buttons on my screen, wait 10 minutes, and like pray to God that my ETH came out on arbitrum. Most people will not do that.

343. 2:29:44

     And I think it's like it's up to us to build a user experience that people tolerate. Like we're just so not there yet. Um and so I think like it just feels like UX you're bust, you know, we just got to get that part right. Luke from uh what can we expect from the go to market side of zero this year? Um or if not that, what's your priority for Yeah.

344. 2:30:07

     for layer zero? Yeah, it's a load on the zero side. It's a loaded question. Uh my colleague Parker's there. Uh we've leads D5 D5 Russ he's great. Um we I think it's like I think it's exactly kind of what I said before where maybe not exactly but the the primary focus is like what does this unlock that can't be built anywhere else for zero. Um and really just pushing the space forward, right? Like this should be the new benchmark for um chains that

345. 2:30:38

     are coming forward, right? It's it's it's that step function for um for for blockchains in general to to be able to handle um real world like throughput needs at scale. Um and so for us I think there's obviously the capital market side, there's the payment side and there's like the general purpose um EVM zone that's like existing things that are already built can come in and and

346. 2:31:00

     and ultimately build and compose across those two zones together. Um so that you can you can actually work with the financial markets that are being built in those specific zones whether it's payments whether it's um capital markets and trading. Um on the interop side like like there's like still all one business for us like there's no differentiate differentiation in like our focus. um we

347. 2:31:23

     still are very like super focused on value transfer and like the rails in which we've laid and like I think that is all um synergistic to to to zero and like its launch and like hey we've we've worked these partners over the years and like built these relationships and now we can help them kind of like expand into um what we're ultimately incubating uh with zero. So for us and for me

348. 2:31:45

     particularly I'm I'm just focused on value transfer right like Stargate acquisition was like the largest messaging based bridge in in the space like how can we make that a a better experience for for users um what what what should we add to it um how can we how can we embed other services within there like we have vaults products we have other things um similar to what Jason's talking about I think chain to

349. 2:32:08

     chain is very much solved it's we see it's like more appto so it's how can you make those composed actions applications and then build a consumer application that's like to Jason's point more usable uh to retail and so that's really my focus from the consumer app side of Stargate but also the API side of like how we how can we go distribute that um Jason for for your chain kind of

350. 2:32:33

     what's the what's the roadmap here what's the focus on the go to market yeah I mean I think on the the chain side like just to reiterate like it's not something that you're going to see us push ing to end users, right? It's for us it's like what can the chain do to make our core API and product better.

351. 2:32:50

     Um, you know, Relay V3 is designed, we're working on that. I think you're going to see us roll out a bunch of cool stuff over the next year. I think we're taking a pretty different approach to a lot of the other intentbased systems. Um, so excited to like see some of those pieces uh come to fruition. I think the other side for us again is like the missing pieces at the UX layer, right? So things

352. 2:33:15

     like fee sponsorship, um onboarding flows, how can you improve, make it easier for users to check out and pay and things like this that I think um there's just like still some missing uh some missing work there that I think we're super excited about.

353. 2:33:31

     um you know, you have all sorts of things like, you know, do new people coming into crypto want to connect their wallet everywhere they go and and things like that. So, um I think we're kind of like operating at two layers here, right? Like, uh we don't build um you know, checkout experiences. We work with partners that do that. They still need like the onchain infrastructure to make those things happen. And so, I think like we're very much playing a

354. 2:33:55

     supportive role there. Um and then kind of on the bottom side working on the relay protocol to make it faster, cheaper, more available routes, more chain support, right? All these pieces. So I think you'll you know the the short story is relay will always be any input, any output optional call. And it's like how do we make that as good as humanly possible?

355. 2:34:16

     Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Luke and Jason, the final panel of the day. Here we go. Let's go. All righty, guys. Uh we will have Robbie back up to close out intense day. Guys, thank you for being here. at ETH Denver. Come here, bud. You have fun?

356. 2:34:55

     That was a That was a a long day full of panels, fire sides, discussions. Um, intense, man. Intense indeed. I enjoy it. I I learned I I uh uh we had a couple spicy ones. Yeah. I found myself bringing in a lot of the conversations back to the things that we're interested in. Yeah.

357. 2:35:16

     Tokenization, the neo finance kind of talk, stable coins, agentic payments, it's all kind of coming together because I think like like there's so much builder oriented thought like product product like trying to be like hey like here's what's happening and like how does this product work in this environment, right? It's kind of our perspective that we we're able to go out, bring in new perspectives, and hopefully inform a lot of the builders and help shape some of these products.

358. 2:35:41

     And what are we seeing out there? Like we're seeing Neo Finance in terms of and and there's it's kind of a double-edged sword. Like permission DeFi is something that's unsolved and synchronous composability is something we're hearing, you know, we're hearing about as well at Denver. like the you know it's people feel generally positive Black Rockck buying unis swap and partnering and Apollo and Morpho but there's complications like there's intricacies to work out there.

359. 2:36:06

     Yeah. No, I mean I think there's been a lot of progress on the tech side to supplant the broader institutional adoption. I brought up self- custody on on my one like what how are people reacting to all of these and Jason just said right like this next set of users is not that does not have the same properties or care as the previous and that's something that like a lot of these

360. 2:36:29

     companies are are are starting to realize addition to that it's like I was asking Kendall like you know all right so we're launching a stable coin transfer protocol based on near intents what's the you know what's your like what's your growth here like what's the growth story from from transaction volumes, revenue, like where where's the business case here? Like, you know, explaining, you know, based on stable coin growth, transactions, onchain,

361. 2:36:52

     offchain. I think it's important to like like ask every one of these people like what's your business here? Like like where's your like how are you making money? We're no longer relying on uh narrative and hype and and there's not a retail audience out there buying these tokens up that we can kind of pull the wool over their eyes and say, "Yeah, this big trend is going to continue to happen. So, you got to get in now while

362. 2:37:16

     it's still early." Like, you do have to have a real business model that's going to have product market fit and is still early. It is still early. One of the things that really signaled to me like this is still early was uh the intense market panel which was I mean I we went from 10 billion dollars through near intense to like 15 or 20 you know at this point just here uh dur during during the day but at the near at the intent markets panel we had a couple of solvers and we had s from sovereign basically talking

363. 2:37:44

     about how um right now these are just vanilla intents that are flowing and we've and was able to you know generate upwards of 15 billion in volume once we're seeing the institutional capital flows RWA products more high quality assets like I was still under the impression that intents were just for you know crosschain maybe crosschain swaps because they can just deliver the asset no there's all kinds of parameters how much you want to sell when you want to sell what is your order block what is

364. 2:38:14

     your price conditions all of this can be expressed in an intent and you can structure all kinds of expressive products and trades as a result of that so it's really a tool that's built for like expressive robust market, but we're only using it for this very vanilla base case. And even that vanilla base case has 15 billion dollars of volume.

365. 2:38:32

     Yeah. I mean, I think that um the newer capital uh capital markets participants are going to actually really jive with intense because it all it is is is market. Yeah. Like you just explain if you can just explain intense in a single two words, it's market making. And so I think that that's something that a lot of firms will get behind.

366. 2:38:52

     Um, and again, will they even need to know? I'm not sure. Now, I think we're going to have to speak the we're going to have to translate, communicate, so they understand the technology. Otherwise, they're just going to go build it themselves. They don't think a solution out there exists. But I I think you're right. I think, you know, we're also in the position where we kind of

367. 2:39:08

     talk to both sides. And so, we're the job of a translator, right? And and helping to open the eyes to some of these institutions. These technologies already exist. Don't do it yourself. you're going to be spinning your wheels. You can partner or or uh yeah, partner with some of these guys that have already invested a lot into this technology.

368. 2:39:25

     Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think all of this technology I feel like Andreas on on Polos right now in Bitcoin 2014, I'm telling you guys, they will use Intense. Intense will be used by the institutional capital allocators. Guys, shout out.

369. 2:39:43

     It's been an amazing intense day. Thank you so much for for joining us live on Rollup TV live in Denver, guys. Much love. Rock. See you at Nearcon next week. Thank you guys. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat.

370. 2:40:54

     Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat.

371. 2:42:10

     Heat. Heat. Heat. Hey, Heat.

372. 2:43:42

     Heat. Heat.