The Future of DeFi: NEAR Protocol's Role and Potential | Altan Tutar - NEAR Foundation

[Music] so I'm Alton and um I work for the near product near foundation and today I'll love to break it down a little bit about how I see the future of Defi and how I see near can play a big role in it I'm a bit jet laed so if I lose any technical details forgive me for that um so when we look at defi today it's it's very fragmented right so it's all crypto has always been fragmented in a way like near start as at separate L1 than than ethereum but the the modularity summer that we've been seeing lately is is taking to the extreme um if you go to l2b data l2b today um you'll see like 41 active l2s and with those of sorry I'm trying to get the clicker but anyway um with those of 36 coming on the way so we'll have roughly around like 76 l2s coming up in the soon and just like we heard about monad there's also new l1's coming in and this is just creating and fragmenting the whole Space now uh when we go back to user experience um obviously a lot of you folks know metamask and use metamask but um you can see that there's tons of wallets right I mean if you're using Stark net which has been a bit of a discussion on Twitter you probably use Argent and um there's also other wallets like leap and um that are like beyond the um evm ecosystem now um there's also the problem of bridging so if you want to bridge from I don't know near to uh to ethereum you would use um rainbow and then if you use I don't know trying to do L2 bridging you use an alternative um and this is just going to grow like as the number of chains grow um the Reliance on different wallets and the Reliance on Bridges is just going to increase um so and yeah again highlighting that point of new wallets having sort of their own wallets too and the there's actually a funny tweet about this from mert um if you look at the how many L2 Stacks are emerging and you look at the com sort of like the combination of that there's like thousand different rollups you can launch today and developer experience is just getting harder and every day and um the problem with this is that developers need to um marry a stack sort of right like you would just um you would just pick op stack and go with it and that's just creating a lot of problems in space now if we look at liquidity um liquidity is just fragmented so ethereum has roughly around when I checked yesterday has 47 billion tvl but then that liquidity is now going up to l2s which arbit from one is roughly around 12 billion and the rest of the the folks that are following arbitrum are 7 billion 1 billion so even though ethereum has the most sort of liquidity the liquidity is still going al2 and taking to the problem to the bit of the extreme really um you have different Stacks launching now so arbit morbit has chains right so then be more chains that's coming up and fragmenting the liquidity and uh you see the same problems with uh Opie op stack and polygon so now what let's coming back to near right so how do we solve this problem uh we think about chain abstraction is the is the new uh sort of solution to the problem that we're seeing in the market today and uh there's sort of couple ways to think about it uh the first way to think about it is just we're we're playing with Zer knowledge proofs to um to sort of aggregate the liquidity in in a couple of different layers and also um chains will keep getting abstracted uh we're we're playing with uh decentralized font end but also 's account model as well which I'll talk later and just to sort of set the mood here uh why we're the sort of the best one to work on train abstraction uh near like uh n's Vision has always been sort of building the open web and currently a lot of apps that are on near are abstracted so we've seen roughly around 35 million wallets being created on near since since its start and actually as of last month this number should be now 18 million with hot uh we've been seeing a lot of sort of Normy users coming into crypto and interacting with with near on abstracted uh abstracted user interfaces and yeah sweatcoin if you're also in the US sweat uh had their launch uh last year they this year um and they have roughly around 1 million active users as well and um when we think about sort of how we're um building in the chain abstraction it's it's good to start from the bottom to top how this works so um last year in near con we announced um we announced a ZK was improver which is just a research collaboration between um near and polygon to build sort of like ZK wasm enabled chains and we think that this is this works for sort of unification of security and liquidity across chains and the other benefit of this was that uh we're trying to bring near to uh closer to the ethereum ecosystem the other partnership we did is with IG lay uh then we're building actually it's coming to the test net now uh we're building a fast finale layer where rollups can can settle in uh the the layer is actually sort of secured by the IG layer validators and these will eventually they will settle on this layer and and eventually will settle down onto ethereum but they can use this layer for fast finality meaning you can do fast draws for for al2s and any bridging that you want to do you can on this layer too which allows sort of the again the security side of things and the other one that I actually worked on which is the data availability for ethereum rollups uh which is essentially building nearest cheap um cheap day uh da layer to ethereum al2s uh currently it stands around sort of 8,000 X cheaper than ethereum and also it's roughly around cheaper than 30X uh than Celestia and um there's more stuff coming up about da and the road map too in in the conference now going back to sort of like a bit more on the application side there's a new um application coming which is live called DTaP so dap's vision is to have this one front end that you can interact with different uh let me start the video actually let it play at the back so the idea is to you have one front end and sort of 100 different applications from 13 different chains and the the benefit of this is when you think about al2 space today um the whole of the defi is separated so you have to go to uh different bridging protocols different um dexes and different all these different applications but the benefit of tap tap is to have this in one place as sort of like react components and what you can do is you can connect with your metamask and then do whatever you want to do with it in dii so you can lend you can borrow you can stake and and swap in just one interface and the great thing is the the the font front ends are decentralized and uh it's quite cool so if you it's it's it's live on dap dap. net but you it requires an invite code because you can collect points and uh what you can do is you can uh search dapdap on Twitter and you'll find some access codes that people have been sharing so I didn't share mine because it's there's only four and they're already kind of gone so I can't I can't send more now going back to sort of up to stack and thinking about wallets really um n has this unique account model that's been sort of active since its main net launch it has sort of this um account abstraction from the start and the cool thing about is is that you can have one account that can hold many keys so in this case what we're building towards is you can have one near account and that near account can control an ethereum address an OP address and even a Bitcoin address and the cool thing is you can have just one wallet and that's the one crypto wallet you have and you can interact with any other chain uh you want to interact with um so the cool thing is that um it's currently um compatible with evm and Bitcoin but it we we're working towards getting this into uh to be integrated with salana all the other sort of uh chains as well and the way it works is those keys live in the near blockchain they live in the near validators uh using this technology called multi party uh compute and when the user comes in this is all abstracted from the user but the user can recover those keys from the blockchain itself um and if you're a developer this is actually pretty simple so you're just going to use this sign um account uh sign sign function where you can just send um a payload to um to transact on the other chain so you have a near account and you sort of like do those transactions on near and then that would send that um sort of payload to the other chain using a sort of like an RPC provider and um coming to the sort of the end really how this would work is in a chain abstracted World um you definitely want to just have one wallet but also have the ability for um developers to pay uh gas fees right so if you're going to sweat today and if that's a multi-chain um experience the the idea is that users shouldn't pay um anything on on uh on the network because they don't want to deal with the blockchain the way it works is pretty simple all the um all the sort of complicated stuff works at near protocol that sends a sort of a chain transaction so the the transaction actually lives on the near protocol it's the indexers will take that transaction and send it to a um sort of a relayer service and that relayer service would handle all of that right so it will if it's a um sort of an a transaction go to the BSC Network it will just all handle that for you and the user doesn't have to even think about it so yeah what's next um with the cool like Primitives that uh chain signature allows uh we expect like there's a lot of sort of different um applications you can build uh some of these could be cross chain lending and borrowing uh imagine a world where you just have an account and then you can lend in all different chains uh and borrow an all different chain so ddap is going towards this Vision uh where although it's it's not inte gred yet uh you can you can do this All in just one interface um you can also do cross chain swaps um that uh actually a one decks in in in nearest thinking about doing this where uh you can you can you know swap in from op to um to op to arbitrum in just one Atomic fashion although will take some time and take some sort of like research to do this it is possible in using the using the newor account and if you're in the conference there's a chain abstract today that's I believe it's tomorrow where um the founder of sweat will talk about it too they've actually tested sending a uh transaction from near to to BC where you can you can pay uh something on bacc with um with just sweat which is a token that lives on near but makes a payment in in other network and um obviously we want to see more chain apps redacted apps where the interface is just a mobile app or u a telegram box whatever you want to think about it um it just abstracts all the sort of the the complexity and you can just do anything you want really uh not thinking about the blockchain and finally the other ways that you can t Bots have been sort of very popular into salon space and you can even think about a future where you can swap uh different assets and you just do that on a telegram interface and don't really have to think about switching networks or any anything else so that's where I'll step by um it's I know it's a lot information to take but we want to take sort of near technology to help scale ethereum and also sort of abstract the chains that um ethereum ecosystem has been launched and that's it