PANEL: Achieving Global Interoperability and Mass Adoption for Stablecoins

to three one to three okay hello everyone uh it's great to be here uh I'm really pleasured to be here with my fantastic guests uh I will be using my phone I'm I'm promising I'm not tweeting I just have questions here uh because yes we do have questions prepared but like you know the road is the goal so we'll see where it will take us um we should be tweeting live tweeting uh at first I will I will uh ask my guest to introduce themselves uh so please say a few words about who you are and who are you representing here y happy to kick us up thank you um so Simon baxis uh I am the global VP of Business at layer zero Labs uh been with the organization for about 9 months um and spent the past seven years before that at uh at Google where I was leading the web three and digital asset efforts for alphabet Noah Mar and and a few others from from those days but good to be here hey everyone U my name is marski I'm one of the founders of cell it's uh I see that some people are still stuck in the immigration line over at the airport um they'll get here eventually um but yeah I'm one of the founders again of cell cell is a um layer one evbm compatible layer one that's really focused on ease of use that's now uh transitioning to a layer two uh and so on the interrupt side I think the the layer two aspect might be interesting to you guys we're really excited today we just launched Dango uh which is the name of our new uh cell L2 test net uh and so this is the first uh test net that includes all C features and we're really really excited about that and then on the adoption side you know cell's been going through I would say pretty rapid growth uh right now um I think usdc and usdt in addition to Mento stable coins um are have been usdc and USD launched earlier this year and men has been around for a while and um yeah stable coins have just been kind of exploding right now there's over 200 million uh in circulating stable coin Supply I think on defi Lama they were showing that we were kind of the fastest growing stable coin platform in the last year so there's lots of exciting things uh to talk about on thaton too hey everyone I'm Jal reginato I lead um strategy and product for mzero um mzero is a is an infrastructure that powers uh what we think is the first open uh Federation of of stable coin or crypto dollar issuers um I've been at mzero for about a year now but before that I spent um 8 years at Circle um when I leted the the build out of USC um I'm I'm really passionate about the topic of interoperability my teams at Circle were responsible for bringing uh us from ethereum uh to over 10 blockchains right now and also uh building out uh cctp which is the circles proprietary kind of cross chain um interoperability protocol um I think I think um all of those topics are different dimensions of interoperability I'm interested in all of those so thanks for having me he everyone I'm Angus or lamps I lead the Stargate Foundation which supports the Stargate Finance protocol uh supports the Stargate Dow which owns and controls the protocol um spent the past year uh working on Star A2 which we released uh about four or five weeks ago uh has grown to become the largest bridge within defi operating AC costs 24 25 different chains um very passionate about interoperability so sorry thank you very much and I will wrap it up because I forgot to introduce myself my name is Chris uh I'm working at El beit uh we are assessing all the different El in the eum based ecosystem and at Al I'm leading governance and recently I also am responsible for relationship with the projects that we are covering so like I like know all these guys from from the day job and yeah like interoperability my favorite topic and mass adoption my second favorite topic so I'm super excited to hear what you guys have to have to say uh on that and let's start to let's set the stage so at al2 we have like from inception we've listed 79 projects to date which is which is counting l2s and l3s however in the upcoming top projects that are supposed to launch probably by the end of this year there is another 79 projects so like the the sorry only uh yes only because we haven't added everything yet like our pipeline we we we are out of capacity to Simply add them um when we when we learn about them so you know the the the the world used to be simple we just had the tum maybe you know some polygon and some few other chains and now we are in this world when there's abundance of chains and while you know I'm excited you're probably excited but how are how the users are supposed to you know make up their mind of what ex what what is it how are they supposed to use it how are they supposed to know what chain are they at and where they need to go to use their assets so obviously like we already know then we we have to somehow abstract it and I would like to to to see your point of view like how are you addressing this how do you see this multi-chain world in which users don't care who wants to go first yeah I'm happy to start I think that's where everyone is today they're probably building ronell to uh somewhere and and then not here listening to the panel um that's exactly right um yeah I mean you know we at layer zero so you know we've built the the market leading uh interoperability protocol we connect 75 plus chains today um including cell and and and and quite a few others and I think um you know whether you subscribe to the chain abstraction theme or not it does seem to be the direction that it's all heading in um with you know hundreds of l2s so so many chains app chains Etc um and I think you know it's it's it's probably a bit analogous to uh to Cloud providers right in the sense where when a user is using Instagram or Uber or whatever and they're not thinking about AWS or gcp or you know which which service support that and I think with you know with chains if we and and many others do our job right I think the the future is probably similar right where a user um is using the service that benefits the most is getting um the value from said chain without necessarily picking one and just sort of absorbing the benefits without ultimately having to make that choice and kind of the you know the bigger and broader applications so I think that's and that's a common theme I think especially now but um it seems to be the direction that it's heading in yeah I think just tuing on to that they I I think the chain abstraction and and the user not needing to care about what chain they're on is definitely the goal I think there's probably a few things that we need to do to get there a new chain that launches tomorrow it's not that easy to know exactly how you get assets onto that chain or to know what the gas token is or how to get that gas token and so I think there's a lot of building blocks that we can do to help us get there at least from a user perspective and and for with Stargate for example we're aiming to kind of unify those assets because as I said when when a user is looking to get to a new chain they may want usdc on a new chain but it may not be the right type of usdc it may not it may be the bridged usdc or circles is issued or maybe a wrapped usdc so um something that we're we're aiming to do and and have done with starg V2 is kind of unify this the assets within an ecosystem or at least reduce the amount of fragmentation that we're seeing which I think is a real hurdle to to more adoption yeah I I think the perspective that we have almost like sits on top of these guys right and what they do the the and I I I I see uh applications like stable coins or crypto dollarss as as I prefer as a term um they even a layer that is not even like close to actually very close to the top layers right the the layers that actually end users are using which are probably like the applications the wallets they're sitting at the top and these guys need digital dollars and they need a bunch of other things and then you have interoperability layers and the actual substrates um it's quite it's quite clear right now that as as an application developer um what what I'm interested in for example is going where the developers are right and uh we we have to be like chain agnostic from that perspective of or substrate agnostic from that perspective in the same way that somebody developing a traditional web 2 application has to be platform agnostic right they don't really care if the users are coming from Android or Apple like they're just going to build where the where their target base is and uh for us Builders of digital dollar layers this is a very very generic kind of layer so you got to have you got to be everywhere basically and to the extent that we can minimize the the impact and the friction for developers um I think it's very important because otherwise developers will start uh leaking uh sort of those abstractions all the way up to the upper layers and that it produces like a very poor customer experience Etc I think the first time that I that I actually realized how big of an issue this was was many years ago when somebody showed me some some application on Salen some wallet on Salen I think or some daap on Salena that had uh I think 12 versions of USC on like one screen uh because you know like Bridge versions are path dependent so like very quickly this thing like gets out of control before before like these guys started to normalize the ecosystem and uh and that was just horrible it was horrible for developers it was horrible for end users to have that experience leaked and I think uh I think I think we are in a much better place now compared to a number of years ago but we're probably still in the equivalent of I remember a few years ago when uh you know I would copy some files from like a PC and go to a Mac and have to be worried about the file system system that was different and like you don't you don't you don't use you don't remember those problems anymore I think we're going to get there eventually to that abstraction layer where developers can actually code uh independently of the substrate we're not there yet but I think we're making progress as an industry excuse me mar before you before you jump in I would like to ask specifically you because like we are speaking here about you know chain being irrelevant then like we should not know what chain are we at how does it look from your perspective as you you do have a chain and you do have to distinguish yourself from others and how do you first of all compete with them in this perspective and also how do you approach you know the users from all those 159 other chains yeah that's a really great question I think from our perspective I think there are two things that are just important in this kind of future one you want to be connected so that means you know certainly being connected uh with layer zero and and all the bridge providers uh and then also with kind of our launch uh today um with the Dango uh L2 test net you know we're also going to have in the future a native Bridge as well and so that's I think pretty important um but then the second piece that's important is just around differentiation right so cell from the GetGo I think has been a pretty differentiated evm chain it's really focused on ease of use it's really focused on mobile payments and and I think that will continue you know even as an L2 um the ability to pay for gas uh with tokens uh is just a really useful feature that um you know I think for users and daps that want to expose that to their users you know cell will be the home for them even in this multichain world thank you very much and coming from that another part of our topic is mass adoption so I would like to you know and we we tend to to speak within our you know own groups uh our own bubbles and uh when when speaking about user adoption I hear way too many times uh different lus thinking about how to capture users from another or two but this this will like this will not bring us Mass adoption if Mass adoption simply means one or two Gathering users from an adult two then the mass is not there yet so I would like to hear your perspective exactly about Mass adoption how are we going to reach out to those masses how are we going to what are you doing and what we can do and should be doing in order to reach out to those people that are not yet in this room what can we do for them to be in this room two years from now don't be shy sure I'll start um yeah I think that's I think that's um I think that's a very good point like in general I think crypto and web 3 seems to be a bit of a often times a bit bit of a closed Circle right we're all sort of talking to each other to your point selling to each other you know everyone's trying to sell to binance to coinbase whatever and it's sort of like a like almost like a closed system of of kind of of users and money um and and I think you know part of the reason for that is because and actually uh the the gentleman that was moderating the previous fireside chat with stannie you know said something about Black Rock and saying you know black Rock's pay playing by our rules because they're you know they're building bid on ethereum and and I don't know if it's necessarily like our roles versus rayer rules right it it's not like it's not meant to be you know a revolution it's meant to be an evolution and I think for that kind of mass adoption to happen like everyone sort of has to work together and and welcome it a little bit rather than just sort of fight it away and I think now we're seeing you know more and more institutional money coming Etc but it's not necessarily because we're welcoming it it's almost because they kind of have to and they're and they're figuring out their own way and so I think like you know the general um way should be to open that up a little bit more and and kind of welcome that and and and sort of and educate and teach and and figure out ways to to to bring in that mass adoption rather than hope that everyone's just going to sort of fall in line with you know the the ethos that we all believe in because we're here um but it doesn't necessarily mean that the random person on the street thinks about that day in and day out how much they care about decentralization or how much they care about ownership and and all those kind of things until they do until they do yeah but it's a long way to get there right yeah maybe my answer would be you know let's build things that general consumers want I think for the longest time we we wanted to do that but we couldn't right we didn't have the scalability we didn't have the custody we didn't have the smart contract wallet support that we needed to build things that were easy enough for your general consumer and I think all of those reasons I think are now behind this right I don't think there is really that much that is preventing someone from building a mobile app that regular consumers can use to solve their problem I think the challenge is finding those problems and actually solving them and that's that's obviously difficult I think one problem that I think is very near and dear to our hearts and many people in crypto is one of uh Financial inclusion is one of payments you know it's easy you know being here in Brussels um uh to forget you know just how uh um lucky we are that we can you know use the existing Financial rails to easily pay for our flight to get here easily pay for the Uber ride to get into town or the train ride to get into town um there's a lot of still Financial infrastructure globally that isn't at this level and crypto actually is a really great um opportunity or piece of infrastructure that can help um these markets Leap Frog the existing Financial infrastructure that they have and we're seeing that now more and more so we have Bora here in the audience we have also mini pay uh by Opera the browser company on Cell between the two of them they they've onboarded four million users uh into self- custodial really easy to use wallets that people are now using for payments amongst each other uh primarily in markets uh throughout Africa uh and that's exciting right that is um solving real problems for real people if you look at kind of this last bare Market uh searches for selfcast wallets didn't really drop in uh many markets in Africa but if you look elsewhere in the world all the interest kind of disappeared it was like a 10x reduction interest and the reason for that was people weren't speculating in these markets they were using it for their day-to-day problems and so I think um yeah I think focusing on on solving these problems is is the way to go I la this perspective of solving real world problems and building what people need so what people need what problems are you solving that that are that people need I I'll answer from the perspective of again of um stable coins or or digital dollars right I think I completely agree with what Mar said I think I think the Genesis of crypto probably you know when you go back to like the the founding of of Bitcoin I think there was a clear value proposition there right just this like internet native form of money you know for the first time representing scarcity in a digital form like that actually solves a ton of super interesting problems uh for for like a core group of people and then people imagine in the same way that you know back 30 years like you know oh the same way the internet has grown to these things like we think this can grow to like occupy and disrupt the entire um like stack of financial services but then but then it started from like a good core and user problem and the tools were not there so when you started to try to extrapolate that to other places like we all realized at some point right in our journey in crypto that the user experience is very bad like it doesn't scale it's slow it's expensive and and like we're all working on those things but I think it's it's not an unusual phenomenon in some of these industries for people to focus on the application realize that the substrate or the infrastructure is not actually quite there and a ton of people pivoted into building infrastructure I think we're still in the tail end of that phase of like improving the infrastructure and I I I have always been a a big believer that I think um we we still overestimate I think the the end user benefit of a lot of the things that we as an industry build and we underestimate the um the institutional uh benefit of all this architecture right I think the amount of um the amount of efficiency that that like a lot of the tools that we collectively build can bring to institutions um I mean I'll give just one example right like because I'm very passionate about this topic of interoperability of stable coins and singleness of money right and and like the idea that you have a single dollar that that a federation of issuers actually issue um I I feel a lot of people like attacking that model and saying that's not possible you know never mind that like wbdc is like a multi- isure model never mind that like there's a ton of examples that kind of show that that model is inevitable people keep like trying to to build um like a slightly better version of the today um but I think if we continue down this path of uh of like improving efficiency for example not having to have um you know Clearing Houses as we have in the traditional Financial system just because there is better singleness of money and more efficient settlement and all these things the the these institutions then will naturally bring this infrastructure to touch and users because another thing that I believe is that and users they have much less power in financial services that we want to to perceive or we want to believe right the reason why people use tether is not because of their perception of tether it's because of the use case that they use tether is the best tool for that the reason why people use USC in defi again it's not because they like uscc better it's because it makes more sense for them to use us in those use cases and so on and so forth and and again if people don't buy this argument why is it that the moment that you know binance launches a stable coin all of a sudden it becomes the third biggest in the world right it's not because people loved B USD it's because it was the better thing the better option for them there so I think I think these are a few principles that I always try to get people to to think about like you know can you can you find uh like an advocate for the infrastructure that you're building to then bring that to a valuable use case without actually having to worry that the end users care about implementation because they usually don't right and they shouldn't yeah I think we've I mean we've definitely found some use case that that people are interested in people are very interested in Defi and people very interested in in stable coins for the purpose of you know Global Payments or or something like that um but maybe in in previous Cycles we didn't have the infrastructure to actually scale and and you know going back to massive adoption of defi trying to convince a friend to deposit some eth to a last cycle for example and he was like I I deposited $100 but actually only $50 went in because I spent $50 on Main net gas fees and and now we've actually built the infrastructure that allows you to scale and maybe you could do it on arbitrum and pay much less in gas fees and so um kind of rolling that back into how Stargate is is helping actually being able to access some of these different execution environments some of these other l2s is is how Stargate is kind of contributing so I would like to you know follow on this uh on this cost um perspective and you know we can speak about abstracting things away and hiding the details um you know from the user however one thing from from my perspective something that I recently realized one thing that we are not able to abstruct completely or at least some we need to hide it somewhere is the cost as we you know we are proud and we are you know it's the very great thing of Defi and crypto in general is that these are those like Lego breaks that we can stock together and build better bigger things from those Lego braks but the thing is that with each of this break there is some kind of a cost some kind of a fee you know um attached to it and when recently I was onboarding like you know on ramping um through one of the services I I realized that when I uh expanded the fee um like the the fee description like this fee Network fee this fee this fee this fee this like why and how can we how can you approach this like how do you see in the future taking your service also into perspective because each of you have some service which probably plans to have some fee attached to it uh down the road in this um in this defi stack how do we somehow abstract away those costs I think I guess to take your Lego brick analogy a lot of the models where there are fees stacked on top of each other the more fees and the higher you stack these Lego bricks the more likely they are to topple and so the I think the the beautiful thing about maybe crypto and defi is is it is as much as possible a very kind of free market and everything will tend towards either the cheapest or or the best solution and so if you do have some of these Solutions where there's a you know your Source chain gas fee and then there's this messaging layer and there's this LP that also needs to get paid and then there's a clearer and a filler and a relayer that all need to get paid I think if there is a better solution out there people will Trend towards that better solution and so I think because it's quite a a nent market there's a lot of people trying to or a lot of protocols maybe trying to capture value in different points but I don't necessarily think that they will L into the long term if if they're trying to extract too much value from the from the end user maybe just to add to that I think one one place where we've seen fees Stack Up is whenever there's risk whenever there's risk people want to be compensated for that risk by charging a bigger fee and so one way you know uh to your point just now about finding um finding cheaper options I think we can enable that as infrastructure providers by lowering risk and you know there's a lot of stuff happening in the ethereum road map that is working on this I think you know obviously the the whole L2 um landscape but now talking about base sequencing shared sequencing regardless of what bridge you've used to move an asset over to one chain if you can atomically swap assets across uh chains with much less risk then suddenly those LP providers will be able to charge lower fees and so I think that's something to look forward to yeah I think a couple things I think generally speaking I mean you know everyone is um not doing charity work here right so people are creating those building blocks hopefully they provide some sort of um conven I or some sort of complexity abstraction that the user is ultimately willing to pay for I think um generally the established Technologies a loud Bell um the established Technologies I think typically push for improvements pretty continuously right to actually drive the cost down I think like Stargate is a great example of that right uh with with V2 coming out costs Dro dramatically by you know 60 or 70% by batching transactions and finding new ways to optimize right so I think established players tend to make improvements to to drive the cost down um and you see that with protocols as well um and then I think you know the the other point is probably that the very amazing thing about crypto is that um you can ultimately own a lot of the pieces of the puzzle right and so if you don't want to abstract that complexity if you don't want the convenience you can actually go ahead and do it yourself in in many cases and that's the case with layer zero right there's two pieces of critical infrastructure within the protocol it's verification and execution both services that layer zero can provide in in the scenario that you want to basically get that benefit get that complexity abstracted but if you want to own that then layer zero goes away and then and the protocol is entirely free to use and I think that's that's true for a lot of uh pieces in crypto that you can actually own it or if you don't want to then you you know pay that service fee or pay that pay for that Lego Breck yeah I agree with that I I think the good the good side I think the improve the Improvement that we have definitely built in crypto is the transparency right because as as Merck said I agreed like usually intermediation is is like what adds cost to to financial services but uh but if you're using your F pick your favorite fintech app on your phone usually you you actually don't understand what's going under the hood and you're probably uh you know bearing the cost of um either uh you know by paying for the service or by being uh like an eyeball on the service whatever the business model is but you're probably paying the cost of layers and layers and layers of intermediation right and um and and when you have transparency over those layers usually the cost gets pushed down like you know for example the C networks right they they have been pressured over time to be more transparent and now everybody who works with a card Network understands The Interchange Plus+ model and and is able to kind of drive it down because there is more transparency uh I think the same thing is true for crypto right you can always see like very very transparently everything that is involved in the composition of a service and I think naturally that will be attacked over time by people just trying to make it cheaper so that's one side but the other side is honestly and this is one one of the sides of interoperability that we are passionate about it mzero I I also think there's a lot of waste in what we're doing in in crypto sometimes I think because of the lack of um Imagination I'm not pointing the finger of blaming anyone but I think it's just you know we as humans it's hard to imagine like how new technology can create a future right just in the same way again that 30 years ago um people thought that you know scanning up the page of the first page of the New York Times and putting it online was a great way to to do like digital media and then people realize it completely disrupted the industry uh for example like the the current situation in this just to keep in the stable coin sector that we have today where you have uh multiple siloed issues issuers of effectively the same product um that that adds cost users right because if I'm using an application of a digital Dollar on chain a and I want to move over to an application that uses another digital Dollar in chain B chain a and chain B is is going to like you know involve some cost for the for that interoperability uh but effectively the fact that I need to go through price Discovery from Dollar a to Dollar B like that that's a waste right now that I think we will quickly like get over that and it will become cheaper again uh and as and as I said the the I think the solution is to disrupt those structures as opposed to rebuild everything that we have in the traditional Financial system I keep I keep getting people pitching me like uh you know Clearing Houses for stable coins and all this kind of stuff I'm like no please what are we doing yeah but to to follow up on that because like one thing that Stacks UPS on on on the those you know inter multi-chain and interoperability Stacks is cost and another one is risk and you know coming from L2 be I cannot not talk about risk and and uh you know we we said about look hiding the details um from the users the users don't know like that they are using the asset on this chain and they're bridging to this chain using this particular bridge but those like each time we are adding something like that we we are actually adding risks and stacking risks and with your you know we we we had a very heated discussion with player zero like a year ago but it was very productive and I think we should be talking about more I would like to understand how do you address the fact that each time we add this complexity we are stucking up risks like by favorite quote from from if Denver this year was somebody mentioning to someone hey we are building you know this orbit chain that settles to Bas and the da is on Celestia but shared sequencing is being done by espresso and I instantly figure out okay how do we assess the risk of that on L2 be like how do we communicate the users what risk are they taking by using a token on such a you know on such a creature how do you assess those risks involved underneath in your cases I think from Stargate perspective a lot of that is we try to eliminate that away and kind of to use I suppose like Unis swap as an example if I have usdc on ethereum and I want some other token because I maybe I think the token price will go up I go and I swap my token for that other token I'm now no longer taking any risk sure I'm taking price risk on my new token but this is not a wrapped asset it is just an asset that has been issued on the ethereum main net but the the the person or the group that is taking that risk is actually the lp and similarly on Stargate we have these pools of liquidity on on different chains but as a user I have usdc on on ethereum and I want to bridge to arbitrum and I receive usdc on arbitrum but I no longer need to concern myself whether or not the Stargate pools are going to be exploited I have my usdc on arbitrum and I can go participate in Def and so as as much as possible moving the risk away from the end user and moving it to someone like an LP who is earning some percentage of yield for example for taking that risk I think is um something that we should continue to strive to do yeah it's a difficult problem I I don't like I don't know if I have the solution I think uh I think it takes like us as an industry continue to to talk about risk I think for for a long time we again as an industry right blaming blaming all of us in a way I think we we didn't talk about risk enough we we actually were okay or were bullied into like not criticizing like certain models where you know there was there was like quite obviously like a ton of risk uh I think we have gotten better especially after the last two or three years and and all the the sort of purple eyes that we have gotten as an industry you know the teral Lunas the ftxs uh which were basically a lot of solutions that were piling up a ton of risk that was very opaque for whoever was sitting at the top and uh and some some Braves Souls who like attempted to like Point finger and and you know do an intelligent critique of those risks were were bullied out of the the sector for a while right I think that's definitely not something that we should welcome in any way I think in the sector it's uh I I I tell my teams like especially on the product side that I think in crypto actually people need to be experts in Risk Management right they need to it's a muscle that they need to flex they need to for everything that they do they need to think about it from a risk perspective you know because there's so much composability there's so much uh programmability and and the wh ifs like you need to be thinking about that all the time I think for chain inoperability that's particularly like a critical aspect um but but I don't there's no easy solution like we as an industry we have to mature in the same way that Financial Services or tread fi is is very very robust on risk right like Regulators a lot of people I think misunderstand Regulators sometimes and say uh you know oh a regulator is going to be there to catch you because you're doing the wrong thing and actually most of the time they don't care if you're doing the wrong thing or the right thing they care if you're thinking about what you're doing and if you have robust processes to manage the risk um you know eventually everybody gets to the wrong outcome but it's not their fault if they have managed the process properly so before cello and Le zero I would like to maybe add a Twist to this question so whose responsibility is it to actually you know to to address those risks and I will give you an example to set something to set the stage when Bas launched obviously instantly there was a there was this rck uh project Bol something and the question you know the question was raised is coinbase or is Bay responsible for the users that lost money on this rack pool or is that their fault that they got cheated they didn't know what they're doing who should be addressing this risk who should be responsible for that risk if we are hiding the complexity from the users are we responsible for this complexity that we just hidden yeah I think it depends what the risks are your initial example was one around the modular thesis right where suddenly chains are being built from multiple different components that are each created by different projects I think I agree that um it's going to just take some hardening of these protocols um through this cycle to prove that okay these are secure and that you can build chains on top of them and certainly the people who are building These Chains should take some responsibility uh thinking about that I think you know maybe for the rug pole example maybe dexes should think about you know what uh assets they list and promote and and I know many of the more reputable ones do do that already um and so I think maybe that would be kind of the answer there I do think maybe also to bring this back to stable coins um there's also interesting questions around the risk of stable coins as they move between these chains and and I think here there is this interesting issue where centralized stable coins Fiat back stable coins for them the risk model doesn't really change because they're already centralized they can just take an asset off of one chain and put it on the other chain and and that is a bit of a shame because I think it creates a disadvantage for decentralized stable coins and I'd like that disadvantage not to exist um and so I'm definitely curious to see what you know folks like Stargate and layer zero create level the playing field on this front and obviously I think the work already is really helping but I think there's more potentially to be done yeah I think it's a very interesting problem and a very interesting concept because you know in web 2 the typical user will trust Google because it's a trillion doll company and they have 10,000 security engineers and a big reputation a lot of money and it's like well if something happens that's okay they they're going to you know figure it out and web 3 it's sort of the complete opposite where we don't want to trust a centralized party and we almost lean too far the other way on the accountability piece right where it's just like well I don't know I'm just giving you those Lego blocks and you sort of figure it out and and you know and if you screw up then it's sort of your fault I think it's kind of the the general um the general perspective there's probably a balance there where where we're we folks do need to take a little bit maybe more accountability and I think to the previous point that Mark was making on the other question which is you know if you start taking on that risk then maybe that's where you can also charge a bit more right or or people maybe can trust you more or pay you for that because you're owning more more of that risk so it sort of starts to to balance out to some extent um you know from a layer zero perspective one of the big things that we introduced this year with with with V2 was was actually letting the applications own the security right so instead of us ort of being accountable you know the application own there itself whether it's a stable coin that's uh that's building on our on our of standard whether that's an application that's verifying messages back and forth they're in charge they they can be in charge if they want sort of of the validation and attestation of the messages and sort of owning that security so that's sort of another way to to address it is maybe give the the ownership of security another way would be to uh to provide more transparency right so people can look into it or own the risk and charge for it okay thanks before we finish uh there is one last thing that I want to touch upon because uh coming back to mass adoption and you know I think we made quite a good progress in like for Mass adoption in terms of retail making sure that users can easily on ramp and even offramp we also made a pretty good progress in you know onboarding uh institutions you know we are mentioning Black Rock security TI Franklin Temple talk you know a lot of them the interest is already there but what about the you know the the backbone of economy the smbs like small small businesses those those hundreds and thousands of businesses I don't see them using crypto that much right now uh the the promise that we'll be able to pay in store using crypto without going through you know normal rails of of financial providers it seems not to be there yet like what is your approach to that like how do you how do you address this do you even think about it I think it goes back to the earlier points that were made in terms of building things things that make it obviously simple um what I would actually compare that to is it's I think it's a bit analogous to like Mom and Pop shops and little restaurants accepting credit cards right um the world was sort of moving towards digital money but Mom and Pop shops are still you know not necessarily embracing that maybe still doing cash having you know old systems Etc and then you know things like square and toast come around we're we're making point of SES systems extremely simple and extremely cheap right and then you see every little pizza shop around the corner having a little that's all you need to do is just tap a card and I think that's that's sort of the similar thing here if you think about sort of smaller businesses and and and thousands of people Etc is just making things awfully simple yeah I like that um you know I think part of it is is the infrastructure we talked about how the infrastructure maybe wasn't there before and I think now now it is you know Merchants probably want to receive payments in a stable coin of their choice and maybe on a chain of their choice and people want to pay perhaps with their own stable coins on on chains of their choice so interop was certainly one of the really important uh pieces of infrastructure that we needed to build and that we have it I think the other thing is that retailer needs to have lots of stable coins to pay with right I think will take money from people who have it and I think again here in of developed countries the need is perhaps smaller I mean I'm just kind of curious how many people here like have stable coins on a really easy to use kind of wallet and they split the bill at a restaurant with them like how many people actually do that I split the bill yesterday but I'm kind of curious how many of you guys do right I think this is the the reason right like if you're not holding stable coins in a wallet in your pocket that you can then buy Cy with why would that Merchant um accept uh start accepting those stable coins but I think if you ask in Emerging Markets I think the answer is very different um where the financial rails aren't as good as we're used to here um people are using these St coins so I think the answer to your question is this will happen and is happening already but it's not happening here it's happening in emerging markets and there is one project that um is on cell that is actually working on this they they've been doing a lot in in Peru lately and you know I was just showing you this card a second ago uh this makes me really excited um this is a self custodial wallet with a private key inside and they've created a POS where you can tap to pay uh so it's the same without traditional rails without traditional rails this is fully settled on chain the private key literally signs a transaction that gets beamed over NFC to the card and so it's the same ux that you know used to with with credit cards but it's fully self custodial fully onchain um and it's happening it's happening with Mento stable coins again meos in the audience uh in in in some emerging markets and I think it's only going to grow in adoption as stable coin adoption grows yeah the way that I think about that is is um democratizing access to like a lot of these layers in the stack right I think we like I I don't I don't spend my time thinking directly about b s or necessarily directly about like the end user stable coins but I do think that um in the experience that I have had in my life being a fintech builder you know even before um like my my crypto life um it is extremely hard it is extremely hard to innovating Financial Services I think you know there's been a lot of a lot of um a lot of development in this sector in the last 30 years but most of it it's what what you know it's a bad term but most of it is what you would call lipstick lipstick on a pck like you're not people haven't really innovated in these Services um you know they they kind of improved the front and the facade of it but you know things still shut down on a weekend they don't work uh you know after 5:00 p.m. on a on a weekday or like all those sorts of things and also it's it's it's very the bar for Innovation is super super high like you have to have a ton of resources you have to have really um understand like beyond the technicality of things uh you know legal risk like a lot of capability and one of the beliefs that I think I have with you know stable coins as a as a piece of technology as a layer in a stack if you will is to to promote this democratization of access to u to people building these Services uh faster and and iterating on it more securely so that more people can effectively and I think we have seen this in crypto already sometimes I feel like we are iterating on something that took the tradition of financial services 40 years to go through we have done in like two right so I think we will get there but we continue to I think the the topic for me the theme for me that I believe in can can you lower the bar for people to iterate and innovate um in a more democratic way on these rails and I think that's that's how we're going to get to to serving those needs that you mentioned yeah my the point that I was going to make was that final point there that I think we will continue to inate uh sorry iterate and innovate like that is one thing that this space does really well is it moves really fast and offens breaks things and hopefully will break less things going forward but also extending outside of kind of financial applications and decentralized finance I wrote my thesis kind of many years ago about bringing data health records on the blockchain for example and the conclusion of the thesis was that it wasn't possible like we we don't have the technology that we needed but already a couple years later like there's a lot of uh infrastructure that could now be used to help facilitate that and so I think as a lot of the infrastructure layer continues to innovate and um just become easier to build on we will see uh more applications that kind of extend out to these smaller s smps and and give them no choice similar to when when Square kind of launched and it was it it made their life a lot easier and I think we'll get to that point as well uh that point eventually as well where they will realize that it makes their life easier or better for for whatever reason maybe it's security or transparency and I think at that point is when we will hit Mass adoption quote unquote okay this screen tells me that while the road is the goal our road like is at the end so thank you very much please give a round of applause to my fantastic guests