Latest / CRYPTO 101 / Ep. 704 Exploring Optimism: The Future of Ethereum Layer 2s

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Ep. 704 Exploring Optimism: The Future of Ethereum Layer 2s · CRYPTO 101

0:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to the Crypto101 podcast, presented by Gemini.
0:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Your bridge to the future of money.
0:14
[SPEAKER_02]: all right everyone welcome back to the crypto 101 podcast hope everyone is having a great day out there I'll tell you what this is going to be a really exciting podcast I know we come in we say they're all going to be really exciting a little bit of a humble brag I just think it's because we bring in the best guests
0:32
[SPEAKER_02]: of a today.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It's going to be a very, very familiar one.
0:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Most of you are going to know who the project is, who the team is, a lot of their work.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I think you're going to find it interesting because we get to take a deep dive and to not only Ethereum, but specifically the layer two side of Ethereum.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So today we're joined here by Jing Wang.
0:50
[SPEAKER_02]: She is the founder and CEO of Optimism.
0:53
[SPEAKER_02]: Jing, welcome to the show.
0:55
[SPEAKER_02]: It's great to have you.
0:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, thanks for having me.
0:58
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, it's funny for all of the video listeners out there.
1:01
[SPEAKER_02]: If you're watching on YouTube or one of our other sources where we have video, we're just bantering a little bit before this because myself and our producer Tiva we are coming in here and I'm wearing a T-shirt, I'm a little bit sunburn and Jing is bundled up.
1:14
[SPEAKER_02]: And so we're just coming in from two different places of the United States as this snowstorm is hitting us across the board and so Jing, you know, we are appreciative of you coming in.
1:24
[SPEAKER_02]: We are joking that hey, you're the CEO, you could have said, hey, we're taking a snow day, we're taking the day off.
1:29
[SPEAKER_02]: But you're saying, no, you know, you're going to be here and of course you have a lot of great things to talk about.
1:34
[SPEAKER_02]: And the crypto market never sleeps, especially when it's decentralized and.
1:38
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, you work at home, which is always going to be a factor as well.
1:43
[SPEAKER_02]: But jing nonetheless, great to have you here.
1:45
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, let's just kind of get started and let the audience know a little bit of bouts you at what point did you first become interested in working with the theorem?
1:55
[SPEAKER_02]: Because a short little note.
1:57
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, to front run this idea is that, you know, optimism is really one of the leading to layer 2's for Ethereum.
2:05
[SPEAKER_02]: Now for everyone out there that's listening and you're saying, what's a layer 2?
2:08
[SPEAKER_02]: A layer 2 is often referred to as a scaling solution.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It is a layer that is built on top of Ethereum that typically operates faster, cheaper, you can do more complex things on it.
2:21
[SPEAKER_02]: And layer 2's have become extremely popular in recent years and we're going to talk more about this.
2:26
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, you know, at what point Jane did you first become interested and even maybe find out about Ethereum?
2:36
[SPEAKER_00]: I actually used to be a Bitcoiner.
2:38
[SPEAKER_00]: I became familiar with Vitalix work writing for Bitcoin magazine.
2:45
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember reading his article on BIP 32 higher article deterministic wallets.
2:53
[SPEAKER_00]: and just being completely taken away by the clarity of technical writing, the simplicity with which he explained what I found to be a complex topic at the time as a student in college.
3:07
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's how I became familiar with the Talik and then with Ethereum.
3:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And when the opportunity presented itself in 2017,
3:23
[SPEAKER_00]: alongside Carl, who was appointed as our, you know, onboarding buddy at the time and the other person in my kind of unofficial onboarding class was actually Hayden, who ended up starting Uniswap.
3:40
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
3:40
[SPEAKER_02]: And what year was all this again?
3:42
[SPEAKER_00]: This was late 2016 early 2017.
3:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
3:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, that's even before for the listeners out there.
3:50
[SPEAKER_02]: That's really before what I would say is the first real alt season.
3:54
[SPEAKER_02]: I think most of us felt the first real alt season around 2017, leading in the 2018.
4:00
[SPEAKER_02]: And so.
4:01
[SPEAKER_02]: All that happens, and then that kind of leads into optimism, right?
4:06
[SPEAKER_02]: So walk us through that process of founding optimism, what led to that decision, and really what you guys are all about over at optimism.
4:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so the first category of scaling solutions was called Plasma.
4:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And we iterated through a dozen different designs.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Each with various minutia in the technical trade-offs.
4:31
[SPEAKER_00]: But at the time, there weren't a lot of people using crypto.
4:38
[SPEAKER_00]: and crypto kitties was just a single app and it really took off in 2017 and it brought the network to its knees.
4:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Oftentimes the fees required to purchase a cryptocurrency or in excess of the cost of the cryptocurrency itself, which is really a terrible user experience if you're trying to build an application.
4:59
[SPEAKER_00]: And transactions were like anywhere between 10 and 15 minutes, transaction fees could be up to $25.
5:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And so plasma was this theoretically, you know, infinitely scalable transactions per second solution.
5:13
[SPEAKER_00]: It just required you to write the contracts, smart contracts in a different language.
5:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And as we started talking to more developers, we realized this was not an option.
5:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we went back to the drawing board and we developed optimistic roll-ups, which enabled you to take the exact same solidity smart contracts that you had on Ethereum and port them over into a more scalable environment in essentially a single click.
5:39
[SPEAKER_00]: So that was really the key innovation of optimistic roll-ups.
5:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And on that, we raised our seed round and the rest is history.
5:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and now you've all been around since, I mean, what for about seven years now, is that right?
5:55
[SPEAKER_02]: It seems like that.
5:58
[SPEAKER_02]: I believe it was around 20, eight, 19, 20, 20-ish.
6:02
[SPEAKER_02]: At least if my memory is so correct, and so the purpose, I'm sure, has evolved over the years.
6:08
[SPEAKER_02]: As the crypto industry has evolved, what would you say that the primary purpose of optimism is now?
6:15
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I would say the mandate has always been the same, but the packaging has evolved.
6:20
[SPEAKER_00]: The goal has always been secure, decentralized, scalable computation.
6:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Our understanding of the latency or the transactions per second, the gas throughput that we need to process has changed and evolved.
6:37
[SPEAKER_00]: different use cases, strain different parts of your network differently, and, you know, we didn't know what the killer app was going to be in 2017.
6:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
6:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think that makes sense.
6:50
[SPEAKER_02]: And one of the things that we've gotten to do over here, we've had the pleasure of doing it, is talking to both some of the Ethereum mainnet devs and talking to several of the different layer to use like yourself.
7:00
[SPEAKER_02]: And I always like to ask them, like, and people like yourself, like, what you think or what do you think is the purpose of the Ethereum L1?
7:09
[SPEAKER_02]: The Ethereum mainnet versus the purpose of L2s like optimism?
7:13
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think Vitalex stated it incredibly clearly in his vision post.
7:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Ethereum is for censorship resistance, resilience, decentralization, and it will never compromise on those things, even if it means the cost is higher, even if it means latency is worse.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Those are the key properties that the Ethereum L1 is optimizing for.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I love that.
7:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Having a very clear set of principles that never changes makes it so much
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[SPEAKER_00]: to make different trade-offs on top of the base layer.
7:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And we rely on the base layer for our security guarantees.
7:51
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's important.
7:52
[SPEAKER_00]: For L2s, the beauty of L2s is that it's an environment that you can customize at will.
7:59
[SPEAKER_00]: And so different L2s will make vastly different trade-offs.
8:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Security profile of one L2 chain could be very different from another L2 developed by another company.
8:08
[SPEAKER_00]: We basically help enterprises or these large super-apps spin up their own blockchain environments.
8:16
[SPEAKER_00]: They typically don't want to deal with the spikes of traffic produced by other applications.
8:22
[SPEAKER_00]: They want consistent, estimable fees for their user base.
8:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And they want to build the most ideal user experience for their user race.
8:32
[SPEAKER_00]: So world chain, for example, will care a little bit less about defy activity.
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[SPEAKER_00]: More about keeping these consistent for their human users.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And world is blowing up in emerging countries right now.
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[SPEAKER_00]: or the average transaction size is only 25 cents, which is so different from the transaction profile that you see on like this.
8:53
[SPEAKER_00]: So for world, we have things like priority human ordering when we order and sequence transactions on their blockchain.
9:01
[SPEAKER_00]: So small customizations like this that aren't available in Ethereum L1, you can use your L2s for.
9:06
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm glad that you brought up world because there's probably listeners out there who aren't familiar with a lot of the projects that are built on optimism.
9:16
[SPEAKER_02]: So could you walk us through a couple of maybe the most well-known or the biggest or maybe just your favorite when it comes to projects that have been built on or through optimism?
9:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
9:29
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, AI is taking off, as you know, and various platforms like Reddit or dating applications are being flooded with bots.
9:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And world's whole thesis is that verifying that your truly a human is going to be valuable.
9:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And they've been working at this for many, many years, and that thesis is proving out to be correct and they're at the forefront of it.
9:56
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's a really cool non-financial use case.
9:58
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's incredibly important, very legitimate, and I'm very, very excited that world is one of our customers.
10:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Base is obviously pushing the envelope for what's possible.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They truly are building a global financial system and paving the way, whether it's on the regulatory front or on the product innovation front.
10:19
[SPEAKER_00]: There are most recent event in San Francisco.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They launched like a dozen different trading, lending, prediction products, super, super impressive.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think there's an opportunity right now to innovate more quickly, launch products more quickly, and reach a wider distribution of users.
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[SPEAKER_00]: on an open network.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so all of our customers are doing some form of that.
10:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Sony, for example, in tokenizing Sony IP on SonyM, I think is also something to watch out for.
10:57
[SPEAKER_02]: So it sounds like, and again, we've kind of heard this from a lot of the different project owners and people who are part of these things, is that the L1 is kind of this big,
11:12
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't want to say all purpose, but very broad brush that you can use.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And when it comes to L2s, it's a little bit more niche and focused on a job or a task or a business that needs to be done or specific problems that need to be addressed.
11:26
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that's where the strength, that's what it sounds like, that's where the strength of these L2s come in, correct?
11:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, totally, that's definitely one way to put it.
11:36
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
11:36
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I read that optimism supported networks grew to represent 62, just over 62% of Ethereum's activity.
11:45
[SPEAKER_02]: Is that true?
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[SPEAKER_02]: And if so, what areas contributed the most to that?
11:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Among all L2s, that's our market share.
11:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Come on.
11:54
[SPEAKER_00]: The top 100 blockchains in crypto.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think we're around 14% market share.
12:01
[UNKNOWN]: Wow.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think Solana processes more transactions, and we do and I have to double check this, but I don't think there's any other stack that exceeds the number of transactions that we process.
12:13
[SPEAKER_00]: What has produced that?
12:16
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean,
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[SPEAKER_00]: transactions are incredibly fast and incredibly cheap, usually less than a hundredth of a cent, and they confirm in less than 250 milliseconds.
12:29
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think really what has produced that is that the way we operate is we embed into your team since
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[SPEAKER_00]: This infrastructure is still pretty nascent compared to internet infrastructure and a lot of these use cases are also pretty different from each other.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We really get in there with each of our partners and we understand their strategies.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Our internal mantra is to become indistinguishable from someone on their team and then and only then can we bring the correct product mindset, the correct
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[SPEAKER_00]: architectural intuitions into how we progress the underlying infrastructure.
13:16
[SPEAKER_02]: When it comes to these specific areas that I mean 62% market share amongst L2s is a lot, right?
13:22
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, that is a pretty dominant number, what areas, what verticals are you seeing the most growth or interest in right now?
13:31
[SPEAKER_02]: Because people see all these different headlines, right?
13:34
[SPEAKER_02]: And the headlines, they always change.
13:36
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, NFTs or hot, meme coins or hot, gaming's hot, stable coins or hot, privacy tokenization.
13:42
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's constantly changing right now.
13:44
[SPEAKER_02]: You are seeing a lot of like,
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[SPEAKER_02]: tokenization and stable coin headlines.
13:48
[SPEAKER_02]: But what areas are truly contributing the most here?
13:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, totally.
13:55
[SPEAKER_00]: mostly trading, you know, people want to tokenize their assets with the hopes that others will trade it.
14:04
[SPEAKER_00]: The types of assets that each chain wants to trade tends to be different.
14:09
[SPEAKER_00]: The kinds of arbitrage opportunities that might exist on one exchange on one chain would be different from that same exchange on another chain.
14:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And so each chain operator, whether it's Uniswap or Coinbase, has slightly different hypotheses that they want to test for the growth of their business.
14:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And we get in there and we build the unique nuanced features or accelerators that help them test those hypotheses more quickly.
14:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you think that some of those same areas you mentioned trading and other things?
14:38
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you think some of those are also some of the most important sectors to watch out for this year?
14:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, totally, um, the most important sector.
14:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, I mean, at least if you're in crypto, um, who believe that this is the future of finance finance will come on chain.
14:59
[SPEAKER_00]: It is net better in almost every way.
15:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, I mean, the UX will get there.
15:04
[SPEAKER_00]: The UX has improved year over year, but these are markets that are naturally open 24, 7.
15:09
[SPEAKER_00]: These are naturally global markets.
15:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Fast, you know, sub 250 milliseconds, things settle incredibly quickly, there's already a set of standards that every protocol shares and these are things that the traditional financial system either doesn't have or has worked very hard over decades to get so yeah, definitely finance is coming on chain trading lending these are parts of it and a focus for 26.
15:38
[SPEAKER_02]: You're right about that.
15:39
[SPEAKER_02]: We see a huge push towards tokenizing.
15:43
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, you see Larry Fink from BlackRock talk about it.
15:46
[SPEAKER_02]: You see Jamie Diamond from JPMorgan talk about it.
15:49
[SPEAKER_02]: We've personally talked about reports from Bank of America and city and the list goes on.
15:54
[SPEAKER_02]: There's been a lot of push for this and now Nasdaq has come out and said, hey, you know, we want to start having a 24, 5 market and then we want to work our way towards a 24, 7 market and you're seeing them say, hey, if the crypto market has done it so successfully for so long, they've kind of set the standard for this idea and clearly traders like it.
16:16
[SPEAKER_02]: And you're right, you know, we are seeing the traditional markets, even things as as large as NASDAQ start moving towards that and create partnerships.
16:25
[SPEAKER_02]: And it seems like that's the clear direction that they want to head in, which which I find fascinating.
16:30
[SPEAKER_02]: And so if they're publicly announcing this stuff, I think that listeners need to be on the watch for what supports that kind of infrastructure and build out.
16:39
[SPEAKER_02]: And right now, I think most people can, you know, largely agree, you know, that it can, you can say, hey, some of this market share might go to some of these other chains, maybe some goes here and there and, you know, there's always going to be competition, but it does look as if right now from an institutional standpoint that Ethereum, you know, and its entirety looks like it's winning the race in terms of where institutions are the most
17:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I agree with that.
17:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Ethereum is incredibly lindy.
17:12
[SPEAKER_00]: It's proven itself as a trustworthy steward of an insane amount of capital.
17:17
[SPEAKER_00]: I think institutions and enterprises see how successful their defy counterparts have been.
17:23
[SPEAKER_00]: And um...
17:24
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, companies like Aave and Uniswap are behemoths in their own right, and you see this push from these companies towards legitimizing and starting to offer some of these more traditional financial services, like Aave with the recent launch of their app, integrating a earned product, and then similarly with these more traditional, thin texts, starting to take a look at what crypto offerings they can make to their existing user base.
17:52
[SPEAKER_00]: There's like there's definitely like a combing wing that's starting to happen like a battle of the super abs we call it internally and you know the battle is good for us either way like more than infrastructure that you want to be launching your financial products on too so it's going to be fun for all of us to see.
18:12
[SPEAKER_02]: Well speaking of infrastructure, I saw you say that 2025 reset expectations for what quote unquote production ready infrastructure actually means when legacy assumptions start to falter.
18:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Can you walk us through what that means?
18:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Because I think it kind of ties to the very point that we're talking about.
18:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, we have more experience bringing enterprises on chain than any other stack or infrared provider.
18:38
[SPEAKER_00]: We've gotten a glimpse into the levels of diligence and KYC, whether it's across the codebase or compliance.
18:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, uptime security latency that these companies have, and it's just completely different from what our crypto customers demanded of us previously.
18:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, whereas crypto customers might have been okay with a little bit more downtime or less ideal UX for the customers.
19:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, the quantity of customers and the expectations that.
19:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Web 2 companies have set for them.
19:11
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a completely different ball game.
19:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there's a lot of terms that crypto companies may not even have heard of, like, SOC 2 compliance that are part of the day-to-day vocabulary for enterprises as they evaluate what partners and integrations to rely on.
19:31
[SPEAKER_02]: Is that where you think, like, on-chain systems?
19:36
[SPEAKER_02]: when or do you think that that's where they lose compared to like more traditional capital like traditional systems?
19:45
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that on-chain systems have been built mostly from first principles about how money should move or how it's natural for money to move.
20:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think because of that on chain systems will win.
20:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Now there are also whether those regulations should exist or not, there are many rules that enterprises have to abide by today.
20:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And so where projects that start on the defy end of the spectrum on the on chain end of the spectrum have built this UX from first principles, they might struggle a little bit to keep up
20:27
[SPEAKER_00]: legitimizing and following these new regulatory requirements.
20:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And where the larger companies might be a little bit less agile, they're definitely a lot more in tune to what the regulation is today, and can help write the next step of that.
20:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there's different advantages on each side of the spectrum.
20:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Where crypto companies may have a much more intuitive understanding of what kinds of financial products should be launched.
20:54
[SPEAKER_00]: The triadfly companies have a much more intuitive understanding of what it's really like to deal with 50 million daily active users.
21:03
[SPEAKER_02]: But yeah, and it doesn't a lot to go on there, especially when the expectation is full up time, no fault-touring.
21:13
[SPEAKER_02]: And there's a lot of moving parts that go into that.
21:16
[SPEAKER_02]: It feels like one of the arguments that we've seen is that these larger companies, the people that are coming from Tradfine and outside the world of crypto and blockchain,
21:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Why don't they do this themselves or will they do this themselves?
21:37
[SPEAKER_02]: And it seems like we've seen pretty mixed results so far where there have been some people to do some things by themselves, but there's been no like clear answer to that.
21:47
[SPEAKER_02]: I think if you look at what a lot of these asset managers and banks have done, some of them have done partnerships, some of them have built their own products, some of them have done their own things, but it's largely on Ethereum instead of creating their own
22:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Right?
22:02
[SPEAKER_02]: So we've seen kind of these quasi models where they are saying, well, we're going to be on Ethereum, but we might do our own thing on Ethereum.
22:09
[SPEAKER_02]: And then some just outsourced to crypto natives.
22:12
[SPEAKER_02]: And they say, hey, you know, just handle this all for us.
22:16
[SPEAKER_02]: Where do you think that the balance beam is going to like push towards or drift towards as this becomes more popular?
22:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you see these companies coming on chain outsourcing are doing it themselves?
22:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, for enterprises, there is always some degree of risk that you have to manage yourself.
22:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, um, anything relating to that risk that that company is accountable to the law to the government for has to be done in house.
22:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, the hard thing to understand about crypto is where you actually produce risk.
22:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's say you know nothing about crypto.
22:55
[SPEAKER_00]: You just know a little bit about Bitcoin and Ethereum as assets.
22:59
[SPEAKER_00]: You're this like, you know, you're a manager at a fin tech.
23:04
[SPEAKER_00]: You're looking at the roadmap for what you want your team to accomplish.
23:07
[SPEAKER_00]: You think crypto is super interesting.
23:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Where do you even begin?
23:09
[SPEAKER_00]: No, like, if you ask five different blockchain engineers to define a chain,
23:16
[SPEAKER_00]: You get five different answers.
23:18
[SPEAKER_00]: I asked my co-founders to define this and they all came with different answers.
23:23
[SPEAKER_00]: You can call it a database, you can call it a linked list.
23:25
[SPEAKER_00]: You can call it a bridge with a proof system.
23:29
[SPEAKER_00]: There's so many different ways to describe it and it's not an intentional malice from the industry to confuse.
23:35
[SPEAKER_00]: It's simply that there's so much nuance at the protocol level and not enough abstractions that have been built up for easy education to newcomers.
23:45
[SPEAKER_00]: So you have to understand what's an L1, what's an L2, what is even a chain, and then people might be pitching you on ZK or on like, you know, apto, sui, salana, herium, all these different options.
24:01
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you even evaluate who's right, who do you like where do you go and who do you ask?
24:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And then if you do want to, you know, dive into crypto.
24:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Now there's all these different asset issuers.
24:10
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
24:10
[SPEAKER_00]: all of these different regulations that you have to comply with.
24:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Now you have to integrate with an exchange.
24:15
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a dozen of them.
24:16
[SPEAKER_00]: They all have different ways to think about pricing.
24:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And then once you do, let's say launch a stablecoin, which people think is the simplest thing to do.
24:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Now you're competing with everybody in their mother who's also launched a stablecoin, and they're hemorrhaging incentives to get 14% APY, and you have to compete with that, too, if you want adoption of your stablecoin, it's just so much to think about.
24:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And if that doesn't work out, then what do you like do integrate with an earn product.
24:43
[SPEAKER_00]: There's so many different options.
24:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And where we have found success as a team is.
24:51
[SPEAKER_00]: getting in there at the beginning innings of somebody considering what their crypto strategy should be.
24:57
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't have to go and understand what asset it sure does or what it changes.
25:02
[SPEAKER_00]: You have to understand what what are your moves as a company?
25:07
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you want to expand?
25:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, do you want to start offering more crypto services?
25:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it the crypto market that you want to unboard onto your platform?
25:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it more yield opportunities for your existing users?
25:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Once enterprises have their business strategy down, um, we are their partners for guiding them through the crypto native implementation of that strategy.
25:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and I, you know, I would say it's time to throw the buzzword around and all the listeners who are going to love this.
25:35
[SPEAKER_02]: They love every time we get to talk about base in the base ecosystem.
25:39
[SPEAKER_02]: But
25:40
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, it's a little bit maybe different from the enterprise side that you were just talking about, but I mean, base uses your tech, and I don't think you can miss that with the explosive growth that they've seen over the last year or two.
25:51
[SPEAKER_02]: But can you just walk us through that, because people are going to hear that and go, why I thought base was it's only your two, what do you mean that base the layer two uses optimism the layer two and that they use their tech like what does that mean and how do they benefit from it.
26:04
[SPEAKER_00]: totally.
26:05
[SPEAKER_00]: So all of the code that the base blockchain uses is written by us with great input from the phenomenal Coinbase engineering team.
26:18
[SPEAKER_00]: They've been really pushing the limits of scaling more so than any other application.
26:23
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they have been a really exciting customer to partner with because they have added enormous clarity to our roadmap and where we should actually focus
26:33
[SPEAKER_00]: base is the perfect example of this.
26:37
[SPEAKER_00]: They've really written the playbook here.
26:39
[SPEAKER_00]: They knew what they wanted their business strategy to be.
26:42
[SPEAKER_00]: They had an idea of the crypto products that they wanted to launch, the kinds of users that they wanted to target, and they were just bottlenecked by the scalability of the infrastructure that they wanted to launch these on-chain products onto.
26:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's, you know, it's not the case that if you launch a stable coin, you'll suddenly become successful.
27:05
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not the case that if you launch a blockchain, you will suddenly become successful.
27:10
[SPEAKER_00]: You need to have a business strategy, and all of these auxiliary things are simply tools to go out and implement the business strategy.
27:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, base has been a phenomenal success, really impressive team there.
27:23
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it has been, and it's cool to see the crypto ecosystem support each other, right?
27:28
[SPEAKER_02]: And they're building, they're working, it's collaborative, and it's not this, this style environment, where everyone's at each other's throats necessarily for market share, and they're trying to eliminate each other.
27:40
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's just not really the way that it works for the most part over here.
27:45
[SPEAKER_02]: But one of the other, you know,
27:47
[SPEAKER_02]: big areas again shifting gears a little bit here and we have to talk about it because just as popular as base has become stable coins as well huge huge increase in fact we just had for the listeners out there you've probably just saw this episode um but we just had uh one of the lead guys from Tether on and we were talking to him about just everything that was was going on
28:12
[SPEAKER_02]: Former CEO, former co-founder, and we just talked to him about the stablecoin industry and the historic rise that it's seen in recent years, but stablecoins have kind of shifted the challenge from speed and fees to more reliability and continuity and response and all these things, what have you seen on the stablecoin, frankly, just yeah, here's to get your input on at all.
28:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, there's definitely been an explosion in the launch of stable coins and deposit tokens and stable assets.
28:50
[SPEAKER_00]: So like algorithmically stable tokens.
28:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, you know, I think,
28:59
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's interesting, right now you have the silos of liquidity that happen from one chain to another and their solutions like across and layer zero that help with the latency of bringing liquidity from one state space like one blockchain to another blockchain.
29:17
[SPEAKER_00]: and the more tools you build to reduce the latency, reduce the risk of moving capital, reduce the cost of capital between chains, the more of a surge you see in things like trading activity, the size of trades that can be done.
29:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And so one of the beautiful things about the OP stack is that
29:41
[SPEAKER_00]: All OP stack chains share a set of standards for the transmission of information and so a dollar between two OP stack chains moves much more seamlessly than it would between any two other block chains.
29:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, because each blockchain has such a different architecture and such a different risk profile.
30:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, so this is part of the kind of collaboration that you see.
30:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, you think, oh, unislap huge exchange based huge exchange are they at each other's source?
30:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
30:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Not really.
30:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Uniswap is using the blockchain Unichane in a very different way.
30:16
[SPEAKER_00]: They really pushed us on latency last year, whereas base was really pushing us on throughput last year.
30:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we developed a latency feature for Uniswap and roll it out to the rest of the blockchain in partnership with flashbots.
30:30
[SPEAKER_00]: And with base, we continuously increased the throughput.
30:35
[SPEAKER_00]: The gas throughput of the chain and all chains utilizing the OP stack also benefited from that.
30:41
[SPEAKER_00]: So that includes world, um, that includes Sonium, that includes Inc, which is Kraken's chain.
30:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
30:48
[SPEAKER_02]: So to put a knot on this, do you think that stable coins are living up or can live up to the hype?
30:55
[SPEAKER_02]: Because there is lots of attention about it growing and use cases and all these things.
31:00
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, are we even properly kind of prepared to scale and to that extent quite yet?
31:05
[SPEAKER_02]: Or do you think maybe a little bit more needs to be done?
31:07
[SPEAKER_02]: I know we're also, we'll talk about the Clarity Act and Market structure and Genius Act and all these other ones, but real quick, your thoughts.
31:20
[SPEAKER_00]: This one is a nuanced one because it's not an easy question.
31:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Stable points, it reminds me of like the NFT boom and people would ask, well, what do you think is going to happen with NFTs?
31:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And the reality was that one company's implementation of an NFT was so different from another company's implementation of an NFT.
31:41
[SPEAKER_00]: You can think of an identity, as an NFT, an ID card or passport.
31:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Now the way that you would utilize that is so different from the way that you would utilize a piece of artwork, which is also considered an NFT.
31:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And so for assets that are considered stable assets, again, it's just a broad general tool.
32:01
[SPEAKER_00]: There's so many different ways that that tool can be utilized.
32:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think a bit across kind of like three categories of utilization.
32:10
[SPEAKER_00]: In the first category of utilization, it's a stable asset to trade against.
32:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And so for stable assets to trade against, um,
32:19
[SPEAKER_00]: liquidity, trade size, the ability to unify previously siloed pools of capital into one pool of capital gives you better pricing, latency, trading efficiency.
32:32
[SPEAKER_00]: These are the features that will really focused on in 2026 and bringing to the OP stack.
32:37
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you want your stablecoin on the OP stack, and you not only want it to access markets on uniswap, but you also want it to access markets on OP mainnet or base, we make that super simple and super fast for you.
32:49
[SPEAKER_00]: So one of our goals this year is to bring that 30-second bridging latency between chains to four seconds, which again greatly reduces a greatly increases the efficiency
33:04
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's like one of the categories, a second category is like deposit tokens, tokens that are representative of a deposit of capital you've made in an application.
33:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Different depositing and different protocols might earn you, you know, different amounts of yields.
33:24
[SPEAKER_00]: They might come with different properties, might be subject to different regulatory restrictions depending on the entity
33:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And the third is algorithmic staples, and so you take on a little bit of the risk of this stable asset not being one to one backed up by some, you know, physical asset.
33:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And instead, you get exposed to greater risk, but also greater yield, which is part of the, I don't know, fun, making you dress beautiful part of DeFi.
34:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, what happens across all these three buckets?
34:03
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't really know, but I do know that all three buckets require latency, throughput, and security, and that's that's a roadmap.
34:17
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it's very well said.
34:19
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, everybody, Tvo here, punching back in.
34:21
[SPEAKER_01]: A crypto 101 first, literally, Brendan has lost power.
34:26
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a thunderstorm happening down here in Florida.
34:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Some lightning struck around Brendan's house.
34:31
[SPEAKER_01]: He said he saw a big flash in his power, internet computer, everything went out.
34:34
[SPEAKER_01]: So Tvo here, jumping back in with Jing.
34:37
[SPEAKER_01]: We really appreciate her coming on.
34:38
[SPEAKER_01]: We were 45 minutes in.
34:39
[SPEAKER_01]: We were literally about to wrap up anyway.
34:42
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm gonna jump in here and take it the rest of the way.
34:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Jing, thank you so much for coming on.
34:45
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a great conversation.
34:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Is there anything else that you want to leave our listeners with around optimism?
34:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Give us a final thought and then tell our audience where they can find you on X and optimism on X or any other websites that you want to plug.
35:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, jobs.optimism.io is a great website.
35:05
[SPEAKER_00]: You can find me on XAT, Jingle Jam, OP, and the final thought here I guess is that for the last many years, we have supported the fastest growing and the most resource intensive applications in crypto.
35:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And today, our partner is just generate up to three times more profit per dollar that they bring on chain and comparison to the most successful chains on other stacks.
35:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And that isn't just because we're building infrastructure.
35:34
[SPEAKER_00]: It's because we are strategic partners that really help you remove the blockers to growing your business specifically.
35:40
[SPEAKER_00]: So whether you are a growing application and you want to fast track your journey to becoming a super app.
35:45
[SPEAKER_00]: come talk to us if you've got latent assets under custody and you want to maximize the productivity of those assets on chain come talk to us if you're at a consulting firm or a bank or a fintech and you want to better understand how to put together your crypto strategy also come talk to us.
36:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't worry about what an L1 or an L2 is or this or that.
36:07
[SPEAKER_00]: We've worked at literally every single layer of the stack with every kind of integrator.
36:12
[SPEAKER_00]: and we will partner with you to map out your strategy and we can refer you to the right teams.
36:18
[SPEAKER_00]: So thank you for listening.
36:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, for sure.
36:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Perfect way to tie a ball on it.
36:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Check out optimism for everything that Jean just mentioned.
36:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for joining us today.
36:26
[SPEAKER_01]: It was really was a fascinating conversation of how you guys kind of view yourselves and kind of going into the future of crypto of where we are and how do we look at these projects.
36:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, whether it's a layer one or layer two, what are you bringing of value?
36:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And you certainly laid out your case here and put out a great piece of content out for our community.
36:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for joining us.
36:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, everybody, for listening.
36:46
[SPEAKER_01]: And we'll see you all on an episode.
36:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Very, very soon.
36:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Goodbye, everybody.