Cecilia Hsueh I Consumer Applications Need Different Infrastructure with Morph I Pragma Bangkok 2024

[Music] for our next interview I want to bring on Cecilia from morph to tell you about how we are thinking about building consumer applications with the infrastructure that we really need to support this so for this interview please give a massive Round of Applause to Cecilia [Applause] [Music] welcome so this was an interesting week for you and uh just uh couple weeks ago you uh launched the morph midet and my kind of first question is well in addition to congratulations um what have you you kind of seen happen in the rest of the community in the ecosystem and how has it been received and kind of what are your reactions to the mainnet so yeah I would say it's uh actually a very big news for us um because our development team have been developed for one and a half years um and we just launched it like two weeks ago uh on our test net we have uh over 6 million wallet addresses and over 100 million transaction volume so which is really great for a test net uh um and now we are expecting like more um like help and support to really help the builders to build on more Manet yeah because on test net like I think a lot of things are happening about telling about your narrative sometimes it's just about telling your VCS your investors about a big story right but after your Manet is launch it's really about like how can you help the builders how can you help them to scale how can you get real users how can you get real TV and transactions yeah so really excited about that amazing um and maybe kind of to to contrast have there been any unexpected things that uh either you have to deal with or learnings from uh what could have been better in an ideal scenario yeah I would say if we what we've learned from the men at launch I think the announcement itself is really good we learned from our last time like our narrative um announcement which happened also like one or two months ago and then we learned like how can we communicate better with our audience so for this time we have like a video to uh like me personally talking about our Manet launching that and that achieved 1.2 million view uh a single video on on Twitter I think it's really big announcement on on Twitter um but what we have learned from the whole process of menet launch is that we should have launched all the these marketing promotion things much earlier because what we focus on is a lot on just technical um development we spend so long on that so we forgot about you know we can actually create a little bit hype much earlier right so this is uh if we do that again I I think this is definitely something we should change amazing uh uh the the things I want to actually cover here are basically kind of from your perspective what you've seen from your own Community but also as you think about what made you start originally uh building building the chain is uh kind of how you thought about consumer applications in crypto and uh we've kind of seen a lot of conversations recently whether it's at this event or all together on Twitter or even at Devcon on hey that we are we're finally ready for Consumer applications infrastructure is here we have all these things just waiting things are growing people have access to all these things but um when you kind of look at this for something like in contrast to something like AI uh we've seen that same wave of AI has gone crazy in just a year and so many people have kind of brought in and if you look at chat GPT applications there's 100 millions of users there but when we kind of reflect on the same parallel for crypto we haven't really seen that so kind of the question I have is like why do you think it's been super slow to adopt uh applications that are leveraging on chain activities and and how do you kind of think about what is missing here yeah it's um it's actually a very good question so if you look at the adoption rate of blockchain five years ago it was something around 3.6% and today if you look at the number it's still something around like 3.9 9% so it's always like lower than 5% but if you look at the other mainstream Technologies they have already have so many users um a lot of them has uh like passed 50% of the the total adoption rate so uh that's also the reason why we started Mo at The First beginning so MO is a global consumer layer right it's more focused on building for consumers which means the everyday users uh for me um consumer is actually the opposite side of deun um not saying that we are not building for deun deun is a very important group of the whole crypto Community but we cannot only build for the djan people which is a small population so we are basically washing the same group of people's money again and again again I mean it's bull market now definitely everybody is very happy about the the new the good liquidity but what if their money is washed away or they lose the money uh that's why m is here we think that we need someone to make the pie bigger which means that we need new liquidity and the new users new retail users in and how to attract these people uh means that you need to build for them if we are still still building for dun uh crypto native people and just creating very complicated um defi applications no retail users will come in they basically just don't understand about the applications how to use that what's a what's a design uh methodology behind that they cannot use the applications so yeah that's uh I I think yeah to answer your question the first thing is that we need to boot for the retail users the everyday users and second is that we need to buot for everyday use what they use um for daily base it's not just like um uh trading for hype this kind of usage yeah no that makes that makes a lot of sense and and I completely agree I think uh we've kind of seen a disproportionate amount of activity start from that that dent audience but it doesn't really behave like a sticky user base and they move on to the next thing and that affects not only kind of the reputation of the space but also the success of different projects and and products uh you've kind of used this a couple times now but you youve kind of talked about global consumer layer a lot what does that actually mean and kind of how do you define this yeah so um mof is a global consumer layer so there are basically three words in it Global consumer and layer for Global which means that we are globally focused um like our funding team is based in Asia and also us so we have a very strong concept of philosophy which is like West meets East and East Meets West which means that we want to be the bridge in between because what you can see from a lot of Western developers they have very strong developer Community but the thing is that they don't understand about the Asian market they don't know what is a GTM to Asia Market uh there are plenty of Asia Traders investors retail users here but for us developers or like Western developers they don't know how to have access to them so this is the first thing we want to help to bridge that part to the East part and for the east side we actually also see a lot of excellent Builders here but because of language barrier or because of that they haven't really talked globally on the global stage before so they can't reach the other part of the world so Mor acting in between as the bridge here and the second word is about consumer so we talk a lot about consumer and also mention something about consumer before here uh for Consumer as I said that we are building for everyday users for everyday use so which means that we need to bring the everyday applications on chain for the retail users and for the layer uh we don't call us a layer two anymore because first of all I think Layer Two doesn't have a very good reputation at the moment I think people had a lot of hype about it before but when people talk about layer twos they feel oh another layer two so that's why we um kind of abandon that layer two positioning although technically we are still uh evm layer 2 but I think it's more Mor is acting way more than a layer 2 which is not only a technical tech company we are more like uh I I met some incubator two days ago so he said that Mor is actually a big group of all the resources basically in our ecosystem we have VC we have incubator we have wallet we have exchange um we have everything to support the buers it's not only about technical support so if buers coming to us basically what we can do is first step we help them to start up uh to set up their team to get them all these best resources on the market and second we give them users we are incubated by bigot uh I think everybody know about them they are one of the biggest crypto Exchange in the world now uh The Exchange itself and the wallet Pig wallet have 50 million users so which means that on day one we have 50 50 million users which we can help to funnel to our buers uh which I don't think any other chains have probably Bas with coinbase or salana with FTX at early stage and B&B with binance chain so you see that with all these chain success at First beginning they need a huge traffic um and mostly are from exchange so this is also what we can do and bring to our buers and definitely the marketing support and Community Support PR resources it's not only about you know logo with logo uh post on Twitter it's more about uh I what I always say is that I want to make our uh Flagship um um projects Builders or Founders as the star Founders so many chains want to be a star themselves but for more we want our Builders to be Stars not like me or our CH Mo to be Stars so we actually have some documentary videos uh recording now and we put our Founders in front of the the camera and talking about their stories talking about their projects and we're going to push it together uh everywhere on social media that's awesome um I do want to dig into a bit more of what you just said and kind of one interesting piece here is that when we kind of hear layer tws or just other scalable blockchains on top of ethereum you kind of get put into into the bucket of either your optimistic rollup or ZK rollup but you are in a really interesting spot you're you're a hybrid and and you've kind of made some really interesting technical decisions around what that infrastructure looks like um we don't have to go too much into detail but I'd love to kind of understand sort of how does more fork and how did you decide to come up with this architecture and and why uh when we started our um technical development one and uh one and a half years ago uh ZK was was still at early stage I think at that time uh the performance was not very good or the technology was not very mature and also the fee is was super high at that time so we find uh Middle Point which is uh op and ZK hybrid rollup so which means that um you still need to do the fra proof and once people challenge you uh you use CK proof to prove yourself so the consequence the outcome is that it's uh much safer than the pure P op rollup and meanwhile it's more uh like cost efficient than the pure ZK rollup so that's the middle point we F but our whole architecture is Beau for eventually uh turning switching into pure ZK rollup so we are on the way now amazing and does this require any different ways of building in an application or do the developers not even have to know about what's happening no they don't even have to know about that uh we are anyway like evm compatible awesome um how do you think about what this means now relative to where ethereum and Main net layer one is and uh do you kind of have any different definitions or different viewpoints on morph versus kind of have that relates to ethereum compared to a different L2 like base or anything on the the super chain ecosystem kind of talking about where they see themselves in relative to ethereum so I think actually many uh it's not only like optimism who are building super chains now many other um chain they are also trying to switch thems into a super chain role so when they approach us we have a internal discussion about that and then we still think that to owning the technology by yourself um to make it really safe and smoothly running is a key to run a chain so I know that um some other chains they are also Outsourcing their technology but for us we never Outsource any part of our Tech uh technology um to make sure everything is 100% secure on Mo uh and also the role ethereum is playing for for MO is definitely uh the decentralization part and also the safety part we don't use any external da at the moment um Mo L2 to make sure that as I said 100% secure um and also I I think ethereum still have the the best you know all these infrastructure and tools uh buil on that so this actually give us a lot of flexibility and also when we talk to builders and infras it's much easier for us to find the right person um yeah I guess this is the role they're playing for us no and that makes a lot of sense and and that's actually very unique because most of the the rollups that we see are effectively making uh these decisions to actually Outsource not in a bad way but just actually use leverage other tools and that creates all these dependencies that may uh May compromise security and that's got to be important here um I want to kind of come back to building consumer apps and just sort of kind of think that you've been seeing in your own ecosystem especially post mainnet uh are have you kind of noticed any different Trends or what are kind of some applications that you're super proud of that are on morph and anything you can share about uh some of them yeah sure um I think six months ago when we started to pitch ecosystem projects it's actually difficult to talk to Consumer Builders because you don't find so many on the market most of them I would say 40% are defi buers 30% are game five buers and some are the rest are like nft Builders so consumer are never the men stream um but when we talk more and more about consumer crypto and also we have some other competitors or uh other builders coming in and build for Consumer crypto together you will see more and more consumer Builders coming to us and our morph right now we have um uh we have different definition about consumer it's not only about you know building uh Web Two consumer kind of applications but we do have some uh the ones what we are very excited about are for example we have um uh we have an application uh they haven't integrated with our Manet yet but they are very interested to work with more it's a like uh work out to ear so basically it's uh if you go to gym you need to pay for them right but if you walk out by yourself at home and you use your your phone with a AI tracking your motion on it after you finish a workout session they give you points uh which means uh the tokens um to you as rewards and also you can find uh your workout Partners uh online and you work together and earn the points and tokens together and then when you share on your social media you can also uh earn the tokens from that this is one example and also we have like dining to earn uh We Dine um like many times uh a week right uh in a restaurants but what if you go there and then um uh you you just check out there and then you earn the tokens from dining there and also when you write the reviews there you also uh earn the tokens and once you earn all these tokens you can spend for example I D out in uh New York today and next week when I go to Tokyo I can use my points or my tokens there to just um uh pay my uh pay for my my my bills um this is the another example we have and also we have uh for example wearable devices for example this ring it's a web three wearable devices it's kind of like Aura ring but when you wear it first of all you own your uh all Health Care datas and second of all uh when you wear it you also own earn tokens I think a lot of these applications they're using tokens as a first step incentive to encourage people switch from web 2 to web 3 and then find you know all these uh decentralization values more when they use these applications and meanwhile we are um CU we acquired one um u a bank actually uh recently so they are helping us to uh announce our own crypto credit card oh yeah so basically that morol credit card in the future can be used in all these applications the consumer applications on mool so it's basically kind of like you can imagine it as a huge loyalty program which I mean the traditional loyalty program for uh many parts of the world you don't know what are the points for or you earn a points and then you think these points are useless but what if we can build up a whole ecosystem with one points which you can use everywhere you can use in the restaurant you can use in the in a department store you can use for uh renting a power bank anywhere uh right all these us use cases can be um uh consolidated with one CR cred card yeah so this is uh the very an awesome list of things and maybe just to clarify these are things that you've already seen working and that's not a wish list these are things are building they're already building which is even better um so maybe my kind of final question to you uh as we kind of end this is uh a lot of people here are thinking about what to build uh whether it's for the hackathon or just start companies and uh having seen so many people kind of build things that actually fit into your day-to-day use cases uh what advice do you have to somebody who's trying to build something in crypto for for consumers I think first of all if it's already working very well in web 2 you don't need it on web 3 we don't have to build everything on web 3 right um uh so my suggestion is that really to find the key Point uh pinpoints for users who have in web 2 now or in traditional for example uh another very uh big focus of Mo right now is payment and transaction because we see it's a huge huge pinpoint in the real uh the in the real world so we are still using the Swift system which are um buil like 50 years ago it's super slow the transaction fees is super expensive and you need very very strict kyc at the moment but blockchain is actually the solution which can help to solve all these problems so for that we can uh we Mor is willing to spend all these resources we have and talking with the institutions talking with regulations to solve these problems we are trying to help for example turkey to solve their own fiat currency collab collabor uh ction um uh issues and uh so my suggestion is that to find the real world um problem and try to solve that uh on web 3 in web 3 amazing Cecilia thank you so much for this amazing conversation and please give her a massive Round of Applause thank you [Music]