The Exchange of Digital Assets is Universal - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2023

my goodness I still have to get used to walking in with a theme song um so this is this is all pretty new to me so I appreciate everyone for for taking the time today uh today I'll be talking a bit about say um what you'll find pretty different about my presentation is I like to keep things really really simple so no buzzwords um just exactly how me our team and our foundation sees things so um a bit about myself I spent my entire life in San Francisco born and raised in the US have a bit of a background in finance spend some time at Goldman started my last company with the same co-founder and then most recently was at a large hedge fund in BC called cotude so a bit about say um say is very simple say is a layer one for trading um practically speaking it's like if you took ethereum Solana you optimize every single part of the layer one for just one purpose just the exchange of digital assets and that's it fully open source fully general purpose the team today is a bit around 35 people and we're spread completely globally and we'll talk a bit about our thesis we only have one simple thesis we believe that the fundamental use case of blockchains is the exchange of digital assets that's it period there's so many other things that people can talk about for blockchains that people can get excited about at the end of the day the thing that matters the most is the exchange of digital assets and you can see that across every big important app in crypto today gaming the largest applications have their own exchanges it's the exchange of axes tokens it's the exchange of step-ins tokens the biggest social apps all come down to the exchange of assets for step in you have to exchange the step-in tokens the step in nfts for nfts what's the main thing that people do with nfts they exchange them on another exchange except instead of Finance instead of okx it's open c and Magic Eden and in D5 I think that's that's very obvious I don't need to touch on for for that too much so why are we making this claim uh when you think about all successful applications in crypto they by and large fall into two big buckets the first is there directly in exchange very obvious it's uniswap open C blur axi magic eating these are directly exchangers axi and step in they might look like games but the core thing you do in both those games is you exchange the digital assets you exchange nfts the second big bucket of successful widely adopted applications is indirectly trading apps metamask tether uscc Abe they're not directly trading apps but all of their demand organically still comes from Trading tether and uscc stable coins they have deep product Market fit as a trading pair they are used to swap out of one token to another token it's the main reason why stable coins are used metamask most of the users that go on metamask they end up in the same locations uniswap and openc or metamask swap so all of the demand organically comes from the exchange of assets if you look at ethereum the core core product is uniswap openc that's where all of the users end up there's a lot of supporting applications but all of them end up doing some kind of trade this one's pretty obvious if you look at just digital asset trading volumes over time they go up into the right for both sides both centralized exchanges and dexes that are gaining a lot more especially now that people don't maybe trust every centralized exchange as much so what does this mean a simple way to think about L ones and the way that our team really thinks about it the way that the save Foundation thinks about it is there's a common misconception that crypto is different it's a brand new industry brand new paradigm it's the exact same as any other industry we've all known and most Industries are dominated by publishers in gaming those Publishers are Activision EA Epic if you and I wanted to create a brand new game we'd go to Activision they take five percent of the game revenues and they distribute it to all the Game Stops the the the the steams and help distribute our game if we created a brand new drug together we need to go to Pfizer they would help distribute our drug to all the hospitals and everywhere else in music if we created a brand new song you'd have to go to Warner you'd have to go to Spotify they will help distribute that song the same happens in crypto so the question is who are the publishers who are the big Publishers in crypto and by and large they fall into three big buckets it's either a centralized Exchange an L1 or an L2 the job of being a publisher in crypto is you build your application on this layer one and they will distribute and help you get your first set of users today the biggest publisher in crypto is pretty obvious it's the biggest exchange and the biggest layer one it's ethereum ethereum is today's greatest publisher that's why so many users and so many apps are still around the table it's slow it's expensive doesn't matter none of that really mattered they have the most users so that's why people still go back to ethereum so for any layer one to be successful they need to successfully convince incredible Founders and applications that building on their layer one on this infrastructure versus that infrastructure versus Solana versus ethereum is somehow better and will get you more users than building on the biggest publisher today ethereum so that's all that matters there's so many other things that l1s and chains will pitch they'll pitch the speed they'll pitch the cost that's all helpful but at the end of the day what does the core founder and application care about they care about users they don't care about anything else they just want users they want to offer the best user experience they want to keep those users and retain them and that's exactly the easiest way to think about what state is focused on what's our big bet our bet is that the largest publisher in crypto in web 3 will be the destination for exchanging All Digital assets because that's what this entire industry comes down to the problem is current infrastructure holds that back it's really unscalable by and large they take a one-size-fits all they build a general general purpose infrastructure and expect everyone just to come on board and the best part is they'll actually pivot and focus the value prop on certain industries like tomorrow we're nft focused infrastructure next day we're gaming focused City will only ever be focused on one thing just trading assets that's it because trading assets is general purpose typically a common misconception of say is if you're focused on the exchange of assets you must be focused on D5 well no it's the exchange of assets is the most general purpose thing in crypto gaming nfts everything depends on the exchange of assets if you talk to nft team they'll talk about a lot of things that they're excited about what they're fundamentally excited about is minting out their nfts they want to sell out their nfcs they want people to trade their nfts that's the only thing that really really matters to them the second big issue chains get very congested when things are expensive when things are congested it makes it very tough for the seamless exchange of assets to happen and finally they're too slow say is the fastest chain point blank in the industry latest you can all just go online and look up say scan and the current speed of the chain it's well under 500 milliseconds that is magnitudes faster than even Solana and some of the best change that our team really look up looks up to that our technology team really takes a lot of lessons from so that's a simple way to think about Sarah it's the optimal layer went in for for just the exchange of digital assets and the big thing that we're focused on is teaching and helping people understand that no matter if you're building a game an nft project a social app defy it all comes back to trading assets the way you get distribution as a product the way that you get users as a application is you need people to find out about your digital assets you need people to trade them that's why exchanges are still so big if you look at all the sponsors of this exchange of this conference they're all exchanges for a reason that's still where most of the distribution and most of the users sit so that brings us to the big vision where will say end up in 10 years if we're successful in solving this problem it is the single most important problem in crypto to be able to build an exchange an application and have the trading operate exactly like a centralized exchange there's no difference there's no trade-off today the trade-off is too high if you build a decentralized exchange today you get all the benefits of decentralization but the user experience is so so bad it is not even practically to practical to think about it's too big of a gap say We'll close that Gap that's the only problem that the technical team is focused on solving and what that leads us to is the Super Highway of all trading activity where any kind of digital asset whether it's an nft a gaming app a D5 token all ends up getting traded in exchanged on sale the apps can live elsewhere that's pretty realistic but all the assets get traded on just it that's a the end of uh at least my time if there are any questions I'd love to to chat more and our big call to action the thing that we're most focused on especially in the market like right now is I think the most underrated part of the industry are failed founders Founders that have taken their first leap their first jump and it didn't work out how they expected the market was tough they didn't raise as much money they made classic mistakes we want to give them a second chance it's something that resonates a lot with me my first many many companies did not do very well and I'm excited about the trajectory of stay Labs but I think every good founder deserves a second a third chance and say wants to be the ultimate supporter when they fail for their first time so if you know any strong Founders that maybe are struggling maybe things haven't gotten the way that they wanted during a market like this put them in touch with our team you can find our website and everything on all our information but that's probably the only way and the only thing we fundamentally care about thank you [Applause] Jeff would you like to open the floor I think for a couple of questions hello hi Jeff great presentation I'm tarun from build crypto I do a podcast and do technical talks and software um so my question was uh you said the scalability aspect right the um could you talk more about it how um transaction throughput are you proof of stake based or meta stable kind of like Avalanche protocol how does that work yeah yeah says Sage open source fully open source proof of stake I'll keep things pretty pretty quick the big difference about how say things about the technical roadmap versus most other l1s is instead of focusing on a big technical Improvement the only thing that matters is the user it's the same YC principles of starting any product as we've all sort of learned focus on the problem focus on the user problem what's the problem that users have right now they want to trade and exchange assets more we know the demand is there there's like half the presentation if we know that all the user demand sits on exchanging assets how do we solve that problem for them it includes a lot of technical advancements that some chains are purely focused on it's paralyzing the evm adding evm compatibility all of that are things that are on the roadmap you guys will probably find out about it over the next couple months next year but it includes a lot of things to ultimately solve what is just the user problem no technical issues no technical problems that we're focused on is just the user problem and that includes a lot a lot of things it's a great question oh we're good I'll catch you after ladies and gentlemen can we give Jeff a round of applause please great presentation