Flash Talk by Matt Krak - Developer Relations Team Lead, LayerZero Labs

Yep. My name is Matt. I'm the developer relations lead for Layer Zero Labs. If you're not familiar, Layer Zero is the protocol Stargate is built on top of. We recently acquired Stargate.

Um, show of hands really quick. Who's heard of Layer Zero before? Just raise your hand really high. Cool. Who's heard of Stargate?

Keep your hand up. All right. Who knows the difference between Stargate and Layer Zero? Keep your hand up. A lot less.

Okay, good. This hopefully will cover a lot of those uh topic areas and get you a better understanding of what is layer zero, what are OFTs, why Stargate. Um layer zero, if you don't already know, is the leading interoperability protocol for building any type of crosschain smart contract application. We have sent over lifetime total 150 million messages. We support 150 plus blockchains.

We've transferred over $190 billion worth of assets and uh host the second largest bug bounty in the world at $15 million. Um layer zero at its core is a smart contract protocol that lets you the asset issuer, the developer, the application owner create crosschain applications and control directly the level of security that your application uses to validate that a message is legitimate crosschain and also control what type of data is moving between chains. That's raw byes, assets or data and those tokens as well. With that in mind, what are omni chain fungeible tokens or simply are our token standard for seamlessly moving value between different blockchains? Every single O of every type or variant of an OFT implementation is simply a bytes packet that is sent using the layer zero protocol which is comprised of a recipient address and amount of tokens to deliver to the destination chain.

This bytes format is very extendable because it means that we can support broadly any non-EVM chain as well as EVMs. And if you want to send tokens and any arbitrary call data, if you're a DeFi developer, you can easily append the sender address that is making the call and any arbitrary data that you want to deliver to destination chain. So you can think about this for things like if you want to send tokens and swap them on unis swap, if you want to send tokens and stake them in a anything that you interact with on chain can be put in a packet like this and delivered to the destination with your tokens. So with that in mind, OFTs in general give you some really unique features. is you're able to broadly speaking take any fungeible token, take an O of implementation and send that token crosschain with any arbitrary data that you want to trigger DeFi coordination or things of that nature.

In general, we have four different types of O of implementations that you can work with depending on the asset that you're issuing. Uh in general on EVM, there is a standard O of which just inherits ERC20 directly. It takes advantage of the internal mint and burn functions and that means that you have no worries about liquidity fragmentation or things like that when assets are transferred and burned on one side and minted on the other. Uh our second type is a lockbox of this is for existing assets that may not have access to their mint or burn permissions. This simply works by whenever a transfer is made, tokens are locked on one side into the OFT contract and then a corresponding OFT on the other side will receive that message that I showed earlier and then do its credit operation.

Uh the other type of OFT that we offer is a mint and burn of. This is for if you are an asset issuer that still has your mentor role or your burner role accessible, you can simply give the access control to the OFT contract. This is a contract that you deploy and own. So you safely can manage it and then that token can easily be sent crosschain with again no liquidity fragmentation because you're just burning tokens on one side and minting the equivalent amount out on the other. Uh and lastly, if you are a chain operator, if you are, for example, Aptos or Salana or other EVM chains, you can issue your native token as an ERC20 on other networks and extend that token crosschain to other networks that you want to, you know, get additional liquidity depth on or make it easier for people who are not on your chain yet to access your token, start getting involved in your ecosystem.

Um, with that in mind, for the asset issuers that are listening today, something that I think is very interesting is that with layer zero, you can have your native mesh of chains that you've deployed to. And starting today, you can now have asset zero. Asset zero is a way for you to extend the number of chains that you're on without needing to directly deploy there or support your token uh, as of yet. The way that it works, and you can think about this canonically with uh our announcement that came out yesterday with uh PAXG or Paxos's global dollar network. Uh PAXG has an OFT deployment on some native chains here, for example, Base, Ethereum, BNB, or Avalanche.

A common chain called Arbitum. And the advantage here is that as an asset issuer, if I'm waiting for compliance or needing to wait for some uh amount of time for whatever reason, whether it's technical or business related, to add a new chain to my mesh, I can still have day one liquidity access by using asset zero meshes. This is basically a mesh that is managed and maintained by layer zero labs. The way that it works is that when a user wants to send tokens to any of these new expansion chains, I could send tokens directly from base. My transaction will hop onto arbitum, for example, as the hub chain and then it'll automatically transfer the zero asset or asset zero directly to, for example, bar chain.

In this transaction flow, I have hopped meshes. I've gone from a native canonical mesh to a mesh managed by layer zero. But the advantage here as an asset issuer or a stable coin provider is that you are easily able to have day one liquidity on any new chain that layer zero supports and when you finally are ready to take that chain into your native mesh and you feel that it's trustworthy enough, you can easily take over that deployment and add it to your native mesh seamlessly. So this managed service is great for teams that are trying to expand chains as fast as possible but still keep within compliance, still keep within whatever their business agreements are or who just don't have the technical capabilities at the time to launch immediately day one. Uh outside of that, let's get into Stargate.

What actually is the Stargate protocol? Uh Stargate is simply liquidity transport as a service. The way that it works is that it is a application built on top of layer zero. And similar to OFTs, they are essentially the exact same. The only difference is that these are managed OFTs by layer zero where on some collection of chains, we have pools of assets like USDC, native ETH, USDT.

And on new frontier chains, we have what we call hydrofts, which are just OFT contracts paired to these pools of native assets that allow for you as a chain operator to have native day one expansion. So, same OFT interface, same fundamental debit and credit logic, but you're moving native assets now as opposed to your own asset that you issue. Uh, finally, Stargate Finance is the home for all OFTs. This website is where you can find all of our Layer Zero tokens that have ever been issued by various asset issuers or ourselves. And ultimately, I hope that this presentation gives you an idea of the type of asset issuers that we work with.

We're live with USDT0, PayPal, BitGo, Ono, Athena, the list goes on. Um, if any of you have more questions or want to learn more about how you can get started with layer zero, find me after the talk. And uh, yeah, thank you guys so much for listening.