Endless Summer: DeFi Across Chains | Jelena Djuric - Noble | Sunny Aggarwal - Osmosis Labs

we were talking before we got started and she was kindly asking how she should introduce me and and I was like I run a 4-minute mile I am uh yes I I I I am the I am the fastest here in the conference I am I am def all right well hey thanks for joining us everyone I'm gonna here we go um yeah I'm defi dad uh I I'm a longtime defi super user so it's it's just a a privilege for me to get to talk with these folks who are building at the bleeding edge of multi-chain defi um we're going to talk uh mostly today about yeah the importance of multi-chain defi I feel like years ago when there was like 10 protocols live on ethereum it was easy to be able to focus our attention on just those 10 protocols but now you know we've matured and grown and and grown Beyond eth and we've got Ethel 2s and we've got every other you know chain under the sun and so um anyways let's let's walk through this so we've got will who is truly like one of the OG defi uh Builders from zerx we have Sunny another just Sunny needs no introduction but I guess best to say he is from osmosis uh we have Maria from summer.i uh another just Mega defi platform um and then we have uh Yelena oh my gosh sorry I almost mispronounced your name Yelena from from Noble which actually why don't we just kick off with you yelling since I nearly forgot your name and embarrassed myself here no it's okay can can we talk a little bit about uh just some of the area we see or some of the improvements opportunities for improvements yeah or challenges in multi-chain Defi and just how are you thinking to address that from Noble's perspective definitely so I'll start off with an introduction on Noble so Noble is a cosmos app chain um we uh are built to do uh Native asset issuance so in Cosmos for a long time we've had challenges with liquidity fragmentation um you know ux challenges around Bridge bridged assets and you know back in the day we even had um us which is actually the native stable coin that te terara obviously put out and when that went to zero there was a huge huge hole uh kind of left in the ecosystem of um no native stable coins so Noble was built to address that uh concern um and and work with asset issuers to bring them to Cosmos so we brought native usdc to Cosmos uh we've done in the last four months 165 million usdc minted we do about half a billion in um transaction volume to various Cosmo chains such as of course osmosis and dydx and kuira and and many other chains so we see app chains taking off um as a development framework for Builders you know if you have something as successful as Unis swap it it makes a lot of sense to build a Unis swap chain maybe we'll see more of that in the future um and yeah Noble's really built to to facilitate sort of that that development and to bring more uh users to to Cosmos so there's a lot of um challenges but maybe I'll just pause there and and hear what the other if anyone wants to chime in on that before I prompt one of you with another question um if any anyone wants to win go right ahead yeah I can go if you guys mind so I'm yeah Maria and yeah summer f as that just uh told is a platform to access the basically the main Landing defi protocols uh and why I'm I'm here because we started as the um basically front end of maker da uh and we were born in in maker uh and uh then we moved uh away after decentralization and now we are hosting five different protocols on four different chains so um that's why I'm here we we helped the growth of of the the multichain system now we we offer the products on the main net um arbitrum optimism and Bas and uh yeah and you can you can access basically makeer a spark AA which is a pretty new protocol and mor for blue so yeah Will how do you think about you know I guess addressing the needs of us as multi-chain defi users through the the lens of zerox cuz when I think about when you started zerox I remember just there were very few decentralized exchanges I mean you you were like building ahead of its time and I'd like to think like a a part of the world we live in now um was clearly the benefits Downstream of all that fundamental work you guys were doing so I'm curious like now as as one of one of the few defi Founders who still you know full-time committed to his or her original protocol what's occupying your time where do where do you focus your time and attention yeah well so I guess kind of the the core kind of thesis that motivated all of our work going back to like 2017 is this idea that all forms of value will be tokenized on public blockchains so billions of tokenized assets ranging from uh stocks and bonds Fiat currencies video game items uh airline miles and even abstract forms of value that you couldn't really uh you know represent in any sort of digital form before and uh for us we were really focused on how do we build the infrastructure that will allow anyone to access tokenized value in a peer-to-peer way uh using a decentralized exchange protocol and one of the things that's been really interesting over the years is as you mentioned uh a lot of the early activity a lot of the early product Market fit was on the ethereum blockchain and uh as you know there was more and more users there's more people building things use cases on top of ethereum it it got so expensive to use uh the block space could not support the demand for throughput and transactions uh and so you have people that are paying $8 or $100 just to do a transaction on the ethereum blockchain uh and that's that's not consistent with our vision of creating a tokenized world where you know doesn't really matter where you happen to be born or located uh you can tap into this Global uh you know Global globally accessible markets uh and so you know uh eventually we we kind of got to the point where uh we users were being kind of forced to spill over off of ethereum onto these other networks whether they're layer ones or layer twos um and fortunately now we're also seeing like a lot of adoption on like nonm blockchains as well which is really exciting and uh this was a necessary step for us to be able to go from maybe supporting a million different users kind of Technology enthusiasts uh to actually being able to support real world use cases uh Global Payments Global Financial Services uh millions and millions of people uh so it was great great seeing you know this kind of transition to a multi-chain world because it allows way more people to uh utilize all these different technologies that we're building uh but at the same time uh it created immense fragmentation uh so you have you know one of the things that I feel like is kind of like a textbook example of like one of the annoying things that comes with like multi-chain defi uh until recently was having a different version of the usdc token on every single blockchain so you have like eight or nine different versions of usdc none of them are fungible or compatible with one another really uh so you have a different usdc token on every single blockchain and for end users this is just kind of a non-starter and so more recently we've started seeing things like uh like you you know cross chain transfer protocol by Circle uh so allowing you to have a single kind of uh canonical version of usdc that you can seamlessly move between blockchains uh and you kind of avoid all of the risks that come with bridging and so forth uh and so I would say you know more recently our Focus has been how do we eliminate the complexity of accessing tokens and Dex liquidity across this multi-chain ecosystem that we have today uh and so we have you know we we we're building developer apis that make it really easy for you to essentially access any token and allow your users to swap tokens within your your application uh we're also building a consumer product called matcha uh which is intended to make it really easy for you to find any token uh we support over 5 million tokens across eight evm blockchains and to get any of those to tokens at the best possible price by aggregating Dex liquidity uh and so yeah recently a lot of our Focus on how do we make this multi-chain ecosystem something that is accessible to a wider audience I think this is a great lead in for you sunny cuz I mean you've been at the Forefront of of multi-chain defi last cycle I mean I remember the osmosis launch and you know it was just exciting to see uh I want to say such like a powerful primitive attract all the trading volume that it did and it continues to be kind of an epicenter of all the different chains in Cosmos so how are you thinking about the US challenges um you know that you're solving for us as def users with osmosis yeah sure um really briefly like on like what osmosis is trying to accomplish um you know you look to I think most dexes today are very focus on providing infrastructure for a specific chain right like you know you have multiple udah swap deployments on like each chain and they're mostly focus on trading the assets of that chain but when you look and and you know largely within evm ecosystems right uh when you look at uh most volumes on centralized exchanges they're usually between like the L1 assets of different chains and different ecosystems and that's where you know if we really want to like compete against centralized exchanges that's the volumes that we need to capture how do you go from Trading Bitcoin to eth to Soul to xrp to Doge right um and that's kind of where cos where osmosis has really been focused on is how do we provide this like interchain deck you know we want to be the Switzerland of dexes and connect everywhere right so we are connected to um I think over 50 blockchains right now a lot of cosos SDK based blockchains substrate based blockchains evm based blockchains uh we're working with the cardano foundation to connect to cardano we're working with on connecting to xrp Ledger um and so you know that's kind of what we're doing and that's the problem that we're trying to solve now with that comes a lot of difficulties because unlike many developers who are just focused on developing within the evm ecosystem right there's a standard set of like smart Contracting languages or like solidity and stuff there's a standard set of wallets you have to integrate um there's you you know a lot of these like LT usually have like a canonical bridge when you're going this like L1 to L1 stuff we have to start working on different smart Contracting systems we have to connect with like different types of wallets you know the Solano wallet is incompatible with an an metamask or you know cardano has its own set of wallets it's it's you know cosos SDK has its own set of wallets um we have to do and and a lot of these you know l2s have like canonical Bridges to ethereum but there's no canonical bridge between Solana and ethereum right there you know there's different people who build different Bridges between them or let's say between Bitcoin and ethereum right you have like tbtc you have namic you have you know a couple others that are in development right and how do you choose which one to use and so um th those are some of the challenges that we face when working on a very interchain environment that there's a you know while there's good standard standardization within ecosystems there poor standardization across ecosystems and our job that we have to handle is how do we build ux that tries to smooth that over for the users yeah yeah uh for for Noble you know very similarly as as a cosmos project we very early on saw these challenges like building in a multi-chain environment even though there are Cosmo standards like IBC like the SDK um there's still a lot of coordination that needs to take place for those um chains to you know be fully interoperable to be fully um uh working together so that users don't even have to necessarily think twice about where let's say they have to send one token from point A to point B to get to Point C maybe you simply route it like like what Noble does in the case of native usdc or you use something like an Outpost uh or or things like this to make that user experience more friendly um I think right now with l2s and then definitely with rollups we're going to see a lot of these actual like ux challenges that again for Cosmos folks we we saw you know years ago so I think it'll be very interesting I think the point about like the canonical state of like certain Bridges like that's why we have the these you know debates in ethereum around you know various bridging I don't want to call them bridging Wars but they're they're very you know heated topics um and so we're going to we're going to see a lot of that as we Converge on um you know these standards um over over the coming years can I add some so um I'm U I'm doing marketing okay in the space and no I I just want to to mention that all of this is very very complic so again as as you said before uh the claim of defi is experience is be open to everyone and our goal the overall goal is to scale to you know get new users all of this is amazing uh on the one end but on the other end is even more complicated to explain to the users so for for for us marketers working in this space is very hard already to um explain you know uh to people normal people uh what is one blockchain ethereum what you should do now we have multiple multiple options of the chain multiple options for you to maybe save some money because in the end uh this is the main point right but it's complicated to and to make users understand how not to be uh afraid and scared you know because you are scared when you use something new you don't know if uh when you bridge if where where your money is you know for like hours and you're there like watching the screen during the bridging you know so it's a it's a challenge also like in this sense in my opinion I mean let's just remember there are $4.5 billion dollar of so worth of hacks of bridges like that's an astronomical number that if you tell anybody like that that's enough to put them away from crypto forever so there's a lot to do to build up the trust exactly yeah yeah so also educational part is very important yeah do do any of you have thoughts on like how far off are we from using defi where our knowledge of what uh uh blockchain or what L1 L2 that we're using is totally abstracted away and I guess like if you have any thoughts on that do you have any thoughts then on like what needs to happen next for us to get there I actually I think of you will right away just because of like the Dex aggregator experience like I like I I can imagine folks in the future future like you know they they would trade let's say like soul for eth eth for soul and like they don't need to know that they're like going cross chain you know they just they just want to like trade the asset without the risk of being on like a centralized exchange yeah yeah I mean this might be a little bit of a hot take uh which yeah maybe we're here for some hot takes too but I I wouldn't be surprised if uh we really see something like cross chain transfer protocol kind of become the canonical Bridge layer between different networks um maybe for like Layer Two networks that share security of a layer one maybe there's still is a lot of bridging going on or depositing and withdrawing going on but I I really wouldn't be surprised if you want to access something that is on the salana blockchain and you have assets on the ethereum blockchain I wouldn't be surprised if most of that activity ends up going through something like cross-chain transfer protocol uh so in some centralization is is really what we should be aiming for here so kiding by the way that was a great hot take I mean so Noble um as the uh uh is issuance chain for Native USC we're actually the first nonm chain to implement cctp so cctp was very much designed um you know for the evm uh the next cctp uh implementation will likely be uh salana so the svm so we'll have evm Cosmos salana uh which is incredible but it's a hot take but it's also not a hot take because if we think about it stable coins are already used for settlement so much in crypto what it's not just like you don't asset to be traded it's also infrastructure for settlement itself and so cctp itself just makes that easier and it's actually a really nice user experience so tomorrow um you can literally you know burn your uscc on eth natively mint that on Noble in one hop and go to osmosis so you tomorrow tomorrow right or today currently so that's how you know osmosis is getting all its liquid not all of it but a ton of its liquidity from users coming into Cosmos not even knowing Noble is actually minting the asset on the back end and in one hop going to osmosis yeah I think that's the point not knowing like hiding try to hide abstraction yeah I'm going to push back on this and I think like like cctp is like a centralized Bridge Run by Circle that like I think it would suck if all of crypto like you know interoperability depended on like one centralized actor that can like censor all cross chain movement extract me at all cross chain movements like I think we should be moving towards like properly decentralized bridges yeah I agree I was kind of kidding Sunny do you have any other thoughts on uh I feel like by building in Cosmos and yelling at here as well but I'm thinking specifically I guess here again of just how popular osmosis has become are there any lessons there to learn from what you've experienced in the cosmos ecosystem cuz like again like years ago I just I didn't think we were going to get this far this quickly and then I look at Cosmos and I go well they've been doing this for quite a while like all the benefits that we love of multi-chain Defi and some of the challenges there like Cosmos Builders have been working on for much longer so any other thoughts you have't Yellen as well yeah I mean I think uh like I said like a lot of it comes down to like figuring out like standards and canonicity um you know the nice thing is within the cosos ecosystem we have this standard called IBC which is a a direct point-to-point uh bridging protocol like trust relatively trust minimized uh uses like like client level security between two chains and what's nice is that like you know I want to talk to you know the osmosis chain wants to talk to the dydx chain right we want to send tokens back and forth you know instead of having to choose oh which bridge should we use right it's like no we're just going to like our chain has a builtin light client of the dydx chain and the dydx chain has a built-in light client of the osmosis chain and it like removes this like oh which bridge should we use it's like no no both of our chains have a native bridging protocol to each other so this idea of like spreading the concept of like native bridging baking it into more chains I think that that that's one takeaway um the other was uh man I lost my train of thought off off of that first one yeah so um I think the actual hot take is that the native kind of bridge that will connect all of these like desperate ecosystems is right now CCB is working very well like that is a fact but it'll it'll be IBC and and I'm and I'm quite confident on that um we there's many teams like as Sunny mentioned um you know that are working on extending IBC to the evm uh to other ecosystems and so for for us in Cosmos we really understand that the native interop protocol should not have a token like it's kind of weird that we have these like interop protocols that like have their own native token because that actually misaligns incentives between like the interop protocol or the bridge and like the destination and IBC doesn't have a need of token like there are many tokens in Cosmos adom osmo others but IBC itself is this very neutral very very stable infrastructure it's a bridging protocol without a need of token and that is the thing that that um we in Cosmos understand very deeply oh I remember what I was going to say um so I think like two things that we started I think we've encountered in Cosmos I think that hasn't really hit the evm ecosystem yet just because it's a little bit you know lagging on the like you know uh interoperability work like you know one is a lot of work needs to be done on Bey like standardization of cross like of protocols Beyond token transfers like yes you can use like today most bridges are focused on how do I get asset a like from chain a to chain B right but that doesn't solve the question I have a dow on chain a and I want to like deposit into a lending protocol on chain B you need to have like a standard for how you make that cross-chain contract call and or you you know so we have this like thing we have in Cosmos called interchain accounts uh we have these things called cross-chain hooks where like allows you to make a transaction on another chain set a promise on our chain and like it calls back so you need to like you know I I I feel like I haven't seen in the evm ecosystem as much of like focus on standardization on cross-chain evm contract calls um the other one is I think people are not the ux is not being built around like account abstraction correctly right now so basically you know today we're all operating under this world that like private Keys like addresses are based off of private keys and that the same private key works across every chain um but that's just not the case when you move towards an account abstraction world we saw early situations of this where you know wintermute had a nosis safe on ethereum they thought that they had the same nosis safe on optimism they didn't get that money sent to them and it caused this like you know whole issue where they lost like what $50 million or something like that and as if we expect smart accounts account abstractions to like continue to grow we have to handle that because what you know I I built a a multisig on one chain you know my company we have a multisig on ethereum we fired one one one of our board members okay we we changed the multisig and it's like we forgot to change it on polygon or something right and it's like now they have access to our fund so really thinking about how account abstraction is going to work in this cross chain world yeah I I think in the I think in the evm uh ecosystem intents are kind of a lot of people view intense as kind of being the way to have cross-chain interoperability uh not not just for like swap cross chain swaps or whatever but also for like real interoperability cross-chain calls and so forth uh and I I think it's a lot different model because uh in some ways you can you can kind of put like the the risk on an individual party that's willing to kind of take the other side of of uh you know a cross-chain transaction versus you know having the light client built into the network consensus uh for for each side of the of the transaction I mean that works for things that are like tokenize and transferable but that's like just not always the case I have a dow on one chain I want to make a govern you know we own a stake in a dow on another chain we want to vote on that Chain's Dow right how do I describe that in intent it's kind of I feel like people like over focus on intents like yes this makes sense for like a lot of trading based applications but it's like it's not it's not a generalized thing that works for everything we still have to figure it out like intents are like yes ux layer you build on top but you still need to figure out proper like full you know full customiz like fully customizable cross-chain messaging protocols that that these intents work on so you can build other protocols that don't work in intent Frameworks yeah yeah that makes sense so we we've got less than five minutes left I'm thinking we could uh sorry I'm not talking close enough we've got less than five minutes left so I just want to end with each of you uh naming a use case that you think could be unlocked with let's assume all the challenges we've discussed here you know get solved for um and and we're in a very happy place are there any use cases that you're really excited to see um become possible um I I'm I'm a bitcoiner at heart you know we just had all the Bitcoin uh panel up before but I would I'm just excited to see like Bitcoin start to become like more usable as throughout like the entire crypto ecosystem today you know we've seen it a little bit with like wbtc but like you know you don't have the ability to go from wbtc to bitcoin you have to have like a merchant account and all this but I I I think as we start to see some of the newer generation Bitcoin Bridges like namic and tbtc come alive uh I I I you know I I believe that Bitcoin will be like the money of the cosmos ecosystem and I hope that it continues to become the money of the overall crypto ecosystem yeah I mean for me uh I'm really passionate about governance and actually seeing like multi-chain governance like work in a way that like actually makes sense so you have these like you know Silo kind of governance processes right now be more multi-chain so not just relegated to 1 L2 but you know across all l2s plus Cosmos plus salana like that's going to unlock so much more mind share and excitement uh again in Cosmos you know we've been doing governance cross chain uh for a long time things like protocol own liquid things like you know treasury you know swaps between different chains all that amazing fun stuff uh I want to see that throughout the entire space so I will be utopic here my um dream would be in a years to see a user just deciding his like Risk approach and uh he is willing to to to to get this amount of risk uh to earn this is amount of uh money let's say using Defi and he doesn't need to know anything like the the the the the the platform the summer five for example will automatically select the best chain for him the best like everything for him without any like any of this stuff you know utopic but maybe will any final thought on this well I mean ultimately I think what really makes all of this even worthwhile or thinking about or spending our lives working on is creating a globally accessible Financial system uh where there isn't all this fragmentation depending upon like where you happen to be born which No One controls uh if you're able to transact uh Access Financial Services no matter where you're located on Earth uh we're going to need a lot of scalability and that probably means a lot of different networks that are operating in parallel uh so yeah I mean you user experience I I'm excited to see the user experience for for cross chain applications get to the point where it's acceptable and frankly like right now it just isn't in my opinion awesome well hey thanks everyone for joining us thanks to all of our panelists this is fantastic and uh thank you to eth Denver I I don't know if they get a shout out enough but they they do an amazing job I've run events they are awful to be behind the scenes guys it it is a grind so thanks for all you do thank you guys yes let's give a round of applause for the panel come on whoop whoop these trousers