Simon Baksys I Crypto Needs Interop That Cares I LayerZero I Pragma San Francisco 2024

[Music] next up kind of adding on to this theme I want to bring on Simon to tell you all about interoperability so please welcome Simon from layer [Applause] zero all right hello and welcome everyone my name is Simon baxis I am the VP of Business Development at layer zero Labs the market leading interoperability protocol connecting 90 or so chains and Counting it's good to see some familiar faces here today although I can't see much over the SL and also a lot of new faces and thank you to e Global and pragma for putting together this excellent event and uh my talk is going to be a little bit different it's going to be a bit more zoomed out I was told that I can't show layer zero as much as as much as I'd like so we're going to talk about principles and and really just remember why we're here and um you know truthfully I I woke up this morning in South Florida and uh thought about the six-hour flight to San Francisco as well as the Redeye flight back uh tonight that I have to get on and it was uh not on the top of my favorite things to do by any means and certainly a tough one to explain to your partner as well right like she never understands why I have to be on a plane every week and go to to some exotic location to talk about crypto and to do another conference um but then I you know I kind of sat down and and and as I was kind of drinking my coffee feeling almost like a high schooler like thinking of how to like get out of class you know like how do I how do I not take this trip I thought about my team that put together this lovely presentation and that designed it I thought about layer zero and what we stand for and the vision and Mission um the principles of this industry um and I thought about why I joined this company in the first place and it's because we care we truly deeply deeply care and I think it's an important point because I think um we ought to All Care More and so today I'll talk about why crypto needs interop that cares but also why I think we all need to care just the more so starting with how we got here uh this is not meant to be education I think probably most people have seen this and know this um but I think it's meant to be a reminder of why we're here so in 2008 October we got this wonderful thing that's called Bitcoin and it was absolutely revolutionary and set out to change Finance forever and it's doing exactly that but at the moment in 2008 it wasn't perceived as revolutionary right it was perceived as radical um and it took a really long time to change the hearts and minds of people to look at it as not radical but revolutionary in fact Larry think just a couple of days ago on the Black Rock earnings call said we view Bitcoin as an asset uh as its own asset class although merely four years ago he called it moneya laundering um and why is that right it took a while to actually change those hearts and minds and the reason it was looked at as radical was because it introduced new core principles that weren't normal at the time but Bitcoin stuck through it it adhered to those core principles and it got to where it is today because Bitcoin cared in 2015 July we got ethereum sort of the peer-to-peer programmable money smart contracts right where code is law we're with a push of a button and without an centralized intermediary you can move around hundreds of billions of dollars of value that too took a long time to transition from say radical or unsafe or untrusted to something that is now used every single day and is appreciated every single day by more and more people and maybe it didn't take as long as it took Bitcoin and maybe thanks to bitcoin for Paving that path but it still took a long time but it it adhered to core principles that this industry was built on ethereum cared vitalic cared and now you have two of the best examples in crypto of true decentralization that actually adheres to the principles and the ethos of this entire industry probably the only two to be honest and in 2022 you got layer zero you're welcome layer zero the peer-to-peer transport layer the internet of blockchains as we like to call it um and that too may take a few more years to gain the traction that it probably deserves but it's also something that that will adhere to those core principles and we're going to talk about those principles in just a second we as a company cannot compromise on those we as an industry cannot compromise on those and we ought to care and layer zero does care so what do we actually care about like what are those founding principles vitalic said namely to make at least a part of the ethereum ecosystem actually be the permissionless decentralized censorship resistant open-source ecosystem that we originally came to build he said that in 2023 like like we kind of look at this history book and it's like oh well yeah of course we know that but he said that in 2023 because we often I think forget and we start sacrificing and compromising on these principles in order to extract value maybe make a token go up whatever it may be but not actually truly build amazing Tech and frankly the principles and caring about those principles nowadays is like half the battle to actually making something great to building something great to building something that will impact the world and so those principles are permissionless right we all know it we all know that word there's a conference named after it anyone should be able to use the technology anyone should be able to access it and anyone should be able to build on it without compromise it should be sufficiently decentralized just like how Bitcoin and ethereum are to the point where uh other principles come into play like censorship resistance the technology primitive the layer of that technology should be censorship resistent it cannot be censored no one should ever should ever be able to turn the internet off and no one should be able to turn this off and the last one that's not named here by metalic but it is named by us and we truly care about is immutability the ability to change something by a single party or upgrade something by a single party introduces risk it introduces introduces malicious intent and it can create a lot of problems and that is not the slide that it was supposed to go to it's supposed to be here and we're familiar with those problems right who here is OG enough that uh actually got goed by Mount goau don't see a lot of hands I did um my friend in I think maybe 2012 gave me a birthday present which was uh however many litecoins that was on gaau and disappeared you know was like $10,000 but in current prices it's $45 billion worth of value that were that was lost which is a lot we all know our favorite exchange FTX and what happened there Wormhole hundreds of millions of dollars multi-chain hundreds of millions of dollars it has almost become normal like we have normalized these Black Swan events we've become accustomed to them we've almost grown numb to them but that doesn't mean that it's normal what normal is is a what normal is is uniswap what normal is I'm happy to say is layer zero long-term strategic thinking over shortterm greed will win 10 times out of 10 and we see that every single day and you see the other ones that didn't have that thinking and where they ended up so how does this relate to interop and my slides are a little out of order so I'm going to come back to this which is there's absolutely no arguing about it that the reality today is multi-chain like just you can't you can't disagree with that right we have layer ones we have layer twos we have layer we have orbit chains we have super chains we have subnets we have sub super Nets we have rollups we have permission permissionless private public You Name It We have a name for it and that's a fine world to live in uh in fact obviously for us that's good that's what we're in the business of doing is solving the multi-chain reality and in some cases right you you compromise for Speed or control or privacy or cost or value extraction or whatever that may be and that's okay but it does create problems it does create fragmentation so if you look at the ecosystem today the blockchain ecosystem users are spread out all over the place right be that based arbitrum ethereum Bitcoin Salon or Ronin polygon it doesn't matter users are everywhere value is everywhere and for the most part it is actually not as interoperable as it should be it is not as modular as it should be and it is not as composable as it should be there's a reason why we have 17 different versions of usdc wrapped on a bunch of different chains there's a reason why we have now I don't know the 17th wrapped Bitcoin uh token that launched I think Kraken came out with the newest one today there's a reason why you have RW being tokenized on chains and then failing because they don't find the liquidity or the ecosystem or the user base is and they can't get out of it and so they die there's a lot of these problems that exist and those problems can be solved with good interoperability and they can be solved with technology that actually adheres to the core principles that this entire industry was built on and so you don't want innovation in silos right we have today unique ecosystems unique architectures unique unique use cases that's great that's sort of the the the value prop of crypto and weip 3s you want all those things to exist but you also want them to work together you have limited network effects right a Network's value is usually tied to the number of users and the amount of liquidity and we all talk about a billion users and we want to get that in crypto but it's hard to get to a billion users if everyone is fighting for tiny portion of the same pie rather than grow the pie itself you have user experience barriers the most commonly pointed to issue on any panel that you go to right oh why doesn't you know crypto get adoption while the user experience is terrible yeah it is right you have multiple wallets you have multiple interfaces multiple tokens you have multiple standards um and again part of the value in crypto but at the same time in my opinion I don't think we're pinion it enough everyone in crypto sort of lands on this concept of like we're super agnostic right you build anything thing no one's going to have an opinion and the best tech is going to win and to some extent that's true some of the best tech has won but to some extent I think we should be more opinionated right like we should Crown the best tech we should make a choice we should say well this thing is better than the other and I'm going to use this thing and not that thing because that thing gave me $10 million more and I think that's going back to the principles and why it's important to adhere to them and to have long-term thinking on what you're actually building you have SC scalability constraints for developers couldn't be more true right interoperability the lack of Standards creates that constraint and creates this Tech that again is built in silos that has a terrible user experience and everyone is fighting for a small piece of the pie so when we think at layer zero how to build the best interop in the world how to build the next internet how to build the internet of blockchains we go back to these core principles we go back to caring we live and breathe every single day the principles that our Tech should be permissionless that the Primitive layer of technology that we are building should be permissionless it should be truly censorship resistant and it should be truly mutable we also live and breathe and say well hey like we're building this primitive any application on top should have full customization and configurability on what is centralized and what is censorship resistent or not at the application layer totally okay you should own your own security you should own your own users you decide what to do but the underlying primitive similar to the internet similar to ethereum similar to bitcoin should always adhere to those principles to achieve what we all set out here to achieve and we live in bree standards this goes back to the opinion topic there are so many standards being built in this industry but no one can actually win because everyone is too unopinionated so how do you build standards that seamlessly create in compatibility across any application and across any blockchain and that is what we do every single day that is what we live and breathe and so going back to sort of why this all matters I urge I think everyone here to to think about those core principles to not be short-term greedy to have a strategic long-term Outlook care about the in interop that you use care about the technology that you build care about being better and care about making this entire industry better thank you [Applause] [Music]