Why Every Blockchain Needs an Intelligence Layer | Christian Obi @Web3LagosCon

Hello everyone. Um my name is Chris Adobi, founder of Layer 3. So, I'm going to talk about why every blockchain needs an intelligence layer. Before we get to that, let's go back like 17 years ago, the advent of Bitcoin. So, out of curiosity, I think everybody here knows what blockchain and Bitcoin is.

If you don't know, can I just see your hands? Oh my god, one person. Don't worry, after now I'll teach you. So, yeah. Bitcoin came in 2009 to solve essentially one problem, and it's to decentralize value, right?

And it did that perfectly. So, it means that I can send you value in form of Bitcoin, and you can send to me, and there is no middleman, and it's truly cross-border, right? Then, 6 years later, there come this guy, um Ethereum by Vitalik Buterin, right? So, he made the blockchain programmable in form of smart contracts. So, this means that you can manipulate the blockchain and create protocols to what you want.

And this was an infrastructure built something better than what BTC has done. Then, in the last few decades, other Layer 2s and other blockchains, they came into the space. And waves after waves of blockchain, right? They were competing on cost, scale, and how cheap it can be. And they are really good at this.

So, right now, gas fees are next to nothing. But, the question I want you to sit with for the next 10 minutes of this conversation is is infrastructure enough? And obviously, if it was enough, uh the adoption would have been through the roof. But, just sit with that question for a while. So, let's go into the blockchain and see what is the content of the blockchain in terms of data.

Every second, right, the blockchain emits data. So, you emit transactions, um smart contract interactions, wallet interactions, right? Um governance protocol and liquidity transfers. So, this is actually in the raw format. So, if you're not a technical person, you won't be able to access it, right?

It's just for who are really technical. And you you think that because the blockchain is open and everybody can access data, we'll be able to understand what's going on in the blockchain at every second in time. But, it's not really true. So, it means that the problem of the blockchain is not lack of data, right? Or, it's not even lack of access to data.

The problem is average people can't interpret this data. So, that the problem is not access to data, right? Because people can't um average people can't interpret this data. So, this data is in this raw format, and there's a word that I There's a quote that I like to say, right? So, what what good is gold if you can't refine it?

So, here data is gold, and how can we now refine this data? It's through analysis, like analyzing the data to make the data make sense. So, analysis. This This was a problem in the industry, and of course, when there's a problem, there are smart people out there that come out to create solutions for this problem. So, they created what people know as um block scans, right?

So, you have your sole scan, you have your ether scan, you have your monad scan, right? So, and people started releasing reports. So, most blockchains, what they do is quarterly, they release their reports on number of users, um the volume of their blockchain. But, the thing is they were only scratching the surface of data, and it wasn't enough. And other companies now spun up to solve this actual problem.

Next slide. So, what the companies did now is they actually lowered the the barrier of entry. So, companies like Dune, companies like DeFi Llama, companies like Bubble Maps, right? So, now they now assess the data much more than just the surface level. And what this does now is as an analyst, you can go on Dune and now create dashboards, right?

And create um insights just from raw data. But, it wasn't really enough. It wasn't really enough. What the analytics shows that it shows you what happened with the blockchain, who who was who participated in the blockchain in terms of um wallet addresses, right? But, there's something important I want you to look at.

So, what it didn't show you, right? So, what the analysis did not show you, they can't actually tell you why it happened. They can't tell you why what happened happened, right? They can't tell you what it means for you and your portfolio. They just hand you simple dashboards and expect you to be able to interpret them and make them good use for yourselves.

So, the most important thing is it won't really tell you what to do next. So, let me just bring it home to something that we all truly understand. It's just like NBS, Manja Bureau of Statistics, when they release their inflation data to Nigeria. As an average person, it's just like any other news. You wouldn't even know what to use it and do.

It's just there. So, how can you now interpret this data and make them very useful? There is still a gap there between you just looking at dashboards and you now using this data for something very useful. So, you need a level of inter- interpretation. So, what would it actually look like if you go one level deeper than analytics, right?

An intelligence layer doesn't just show you data. It answers harder questions. Why did this happen, right? What does it mean? What should I do next?

What risks should I know about? What opportunities am I missing when participating in the ecosystem? So, if you notice something, that's a fundamentally different relationship with just looking at plain dashboards and you wouldn't know how it actually affects you personally. That's when AI comes in. I know every speaker that has come has in one form or shape talked about AI.

But, AI comes in not as the headline of this conversation, but as an engine that makes it possible for this level of understanding. This is This is exactly the the problem we saw when we started building Len 3. So, Len 3 is basically an personalized intelligence layer for multi-chain portfolio management. The goal is basically very simple. Instead of looking at dashboards, you can just talk to your portfolio.

You can ask it questions like explain today's DeFi activity in plain English. What wallets are accumulating before major announcements? Alert me the moment governance activity signals and upgrade. Right. So, if you notice something now, you're going beyond analytics and you're now having conversations with your portfolio.

And this is a totally different level of understanding for just your wallet. And it's personalized to your own risk, personalized to your own wallet. How has it been like without this layer? Why do every blockchain now need it? Without an intelligence layer, here's what it actually looks like.

Developers waste time researching things that are already obvious. Right. So, you're you're burning time on things that you should know ordinarily on just research when you should actually be executing. Investors come into this space and see a learning curve so steep, right? They just want to stay out to be risk-averse.

So, they don't get burned out. And um The patterns for for risk for when you when you participate without an intelligence layer, you come upon risk that you didn't calculate for, right? And before a pattern shows that risk, it's often too late. So, I know most of us have been in situations where we buy a token and it's already rugged. And there was no previous research because it's hard for you to know the dev, the team, and so on.

So, this is the gap that I know that new generation of tools are going to come to solve. So, it's not like having another app or another dashboard. It's a way for you to actually talk to your portfolio, a way for you to talk to your wallet and get insights directly. Yeah, so what does the future look like? What does the future look like?

Let's just take like from by this time last year and look at the the year gap, you would notice the improvement in AI. It has been astronomical, right? From GPT to Claude to DeepSeek and they are always shipping out new things. So, look at the the kind of tools that have been released in the past few months only. You look at the likes of AI research assistants, autonomous monitoring agents, real-time fraud detection, natural language blockchain search.

I think Flipside just did that some new from months ago. Personalized insight and autonomous execution. So, you you now figure out that the intelligence layer is now become becoming as fundamental as the blockchain execution layer and the consensus layer. For years, most blockchains are we are focused on building to scale for the blockchain to be cheaper and for the blockchain to be faster. But, I can categorically tell you that the next phase of problem and blockchains to be built are blockchains that can understand themselves and help us humans understand them.

Thank you very much.