Fireside chat with Peter Watts, Reservoir, and Kartik Talwar, ETHGlobal I Pragma Sydney 2024

[Music] so for our next interview I wanted to bring on Peter from Reservoir a lot of you may know him or you may have used Reservoir or you may have used it without knowing that you've used it but we're going to cover a lot of the history of how the nftd ecosystem has evolved from an infrastructure level and Peter has been in the the middle of all of this so without further Ado let's welcome Peter on stage and we'll go discuss some cool things happening in the world of information and multiple chains thank you welcome Peter um one thing I'm kind of super excited to talk about here is that you've been in this space for a handful of number of years and you've kind of seen all the common stages of where we've gone from crypto to the things that have worked and and definitely not worked so the the kind of thing I want to have you tell the audience is just overall take us back to uh to three or four years ago and walk us through what the nft ecosystem was like and kind of especially from the infrastructure perspective like what made you start Reservoir cool um yeah I think the ecosystem was opy and that was it just extreme domination like there was other marketplaces like a lot of them shut down and and Open Sea kind of really uh took off and and actually when we started we we kind of weren't Reservoir today is a developer platform but that wasn't kind of where we started we started trying to build something around making it easier to buy and cell nfts and actually kind of um going back further in history kind of the evolution was uh originally thinking about social tokens um and realizing that those are kind of a terrible idea for every Creator every app to have their own token and and this kind of realization that nfts were like a much more approp but yeah there was just like extreme domination of opy which was ironic because you know you have this new primitive on open rails decentralized but all the liquidity was in one marketplace's database was all offchain signed orders in a you know single database somewhere and you know we wanted to come and build something but we realized like we were up against that if everyone's just going to go to Open Sea uh to kind of do their buying and selling you know if we have liquidity over here even if there's better prices kind of getting people to use that would be a challenge and so that kind of pushed Us in this direction of you know what does openc have all of these pieces around indexing order book uh you know potentially aggregating liquidity from many places this difficult infrastructure basically going and building a developer platform to really unlock kind of a broad you know like the vision was there's these open rails you should have many marketplaces vertical marketplaces you should have like in your wallet it can be pulling in it can and know what assets you have but you know I can just kind of buy something within that experience in my social feed oh that's an interesting item that my friend just bought I click the button and I buy it um kind of none of this was possible you know like the nft Primitive is is kind of interesting you know and thanks roham for the kind of 720c core primitive but like on its own like there's no liquidity so then there's like protocols like Cort of many applications making that information easy to understand is kind of the hard part because you know the assets on some wallet and it's on chain and you can query that but you're kind of saying that being able to say for given this this wallet address what did they own or given this nft collection give me all the images or who owns that it's just the actual data as an API yeah and especially the offchain data like what is what is the price of this you can't query that onchain it's actually in Open Seas database or maybe you have to check blur and openc and a pseudo swap pool and kind of five other places to know like how hard was collecting all of that and making that streamlined as a process because if anything in the last two years we got way more marketplaces way more protocols and a lot more chains trying small different variations of each other how do you going to think about designing a tool that makes that still simple for everybody else to use yeah I think the kind of North Star is abstraction right so like even the nfts themselves you have 721c you have 1155 U but maybe a developer just wants to treat them all as an item and they also want to know what is the cost of that item so you know you can have a pseudo swap pool that has like a certain amount of liquidity so you know like the next price that you can buy that item and then you have an offchain listing in Open Seas database and so we kind of abstract that all to like this item is on this sale this collection has these items in it so it's really all about abstracting that complexity both at like the core like information level like what do people actually care about you know which is usually just like what is the item how much does it cost and and and then how do I buy it and like generating the call data to execute that all of those like underlying pieces we abstract and you know do these really nice things where we have this kind of fully abstracted system where we can Loop through steps you just say I want to buy it and you might need to make an approval you might need to transfer something so all of those like oh you might need to sign a message you know all of that can be kind of abstracted and you're just saying I want to buy and and we going to help you make that happen um we're still at the infrastructure level so so maybe one kind of question maybe to put you all on the spot is give us a scale for kind of how how big is this service and and this utility are there any kind of stats you can share can we talk about who's using it or how popular it is or the amount of stuff that you index what what can we uh can we learn about the size of this ecosystem yeah like you said it's it's changed a lot from the days of just openc and goal in like building the developer platform to enable many marketplaces um so yeah we have a number of different products we do all of that kind of data indexing and so we have a lot of the big wallets kind of metamask coinbase wallet rainbow so yeah if you've ever used the feature where it kind of tells you you know you have an offer on your nft and you can just you know accept it straight from your wallet that is us uh under the hood and then we have a full marketplace as a service which magic Eden is using today on their you know which I think we're going to get into uh more recently have you know you have the nfts are the goods you know but you need money to buy the goods uh and that money is increasingly fragmented and so this has been the kind of latest product that we've been working on is like how do you make it easier to buy things across chain and move money across chain with this new product relay let's well let's get I mean first of all that's awesome that majority of the major wallets and marketpl are are kind of using the simplified version of that same information from from Reservoir and you won really get to see that because nobody Associates kind of apis and tooling service to be the actual under obviously the big part here is going into what relay is and uh the thing I get some curious about is first of all let's let's tell people what relay is and secondly how did this even become a product from from a company that has nft data yeah I I think it comes from like the ethereum rollup kind of road map uh like the way to scale ethereum is kind of with rollups and so you have more chains um and I think that's a good thing the onchain game they were using arbitrum Nova chain very cheap chain everything was good and then somebody else decided to use that chain and all of a sudden kind of their gas cost kind of 5x over night and like you just can't have that so this idea of having your own block space while still kind of getting some of the security some of the interoperability benefits make clarify this for me is is fragmentation to you the same side of aggregation or is that a different thing altogether the way you think about making sense of all the different chains marketplaces and data out there yeah I think it's it's they're products of each other and uh I think fragmentation is you get kind of complexity fragmentation and so then you know you pull it back aggregation is kind of the solution to have both diverse uh kind of interesting things happening but then like pull the complexity back and and so like you know one way that I've framed it in the past is is you kind of um you know like the building block analogy where you have something that like the 721 uh token is this like nice Foundation that you can build all these building blocks on top of like exchanges like wallets able about Reservoir kind of aggregating what liquidity exists you know what assets people have and they own we can kind of build another floor another like uh simple to use floor for the next layer of like applications that you know like a wallet that wants to surface things like someone that wants to build a more vertical Marketplace but doesn't want to have to kind of build a lot of the infrastructure themselves like they just their expertise is their game or their music and like that's what they want to focus on so oh thank thanks for clarifying so I'll let you get back to it so what is relay yeah so uh um yeah we got pulled into it because there's just many chains um and increasingly you want to buy things on the many chains and I think one of the realizations for us was that there will be assets and apps on many chains and this is a good thing but people don't want to have to have money on every chain you know that's very you know inconvenient to we're just too slow and too fast e cost so that it