Building Blockchains Revisited: New Approaches and Innovations - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2024

all right well I'm glad that all of you were able to make it out today I know it's been a journey to make it here I was just uh I was just saying backstage this has kind of become the crypto fire Festival a little bit but I feel like it's also a moment that kind of brings a lot of us together because we've all been through some to be here this weekend so this is the layer one panel and um it's a little bit obligatory to do these every conference has a layer one panel but ours is a little bit different because we have five of the most exemplary figures not not the only ones but five of the most interesting people you can have on stage um I want to keep this panel relatively approachable so I'm going start very quick with intros um here's how I want you to do your intros though uh each of you represents a different L1 tell me your name the name of your L1 and complete this sentence my blockchain is like ethereum except okay only one sentence if you go more than one sentence I will cut you off okay Raj uh yeah so I'm Raj goal I'm a co-founder of salana that's the protocol that I helped get off the ground um salana is like ethereum but 10,000 times more performant nice I'm aming S I represent Avalanche here today and uh Avalanche is kind of like ethereum except with a very fast uh uh consensus protocol and uh with multiple chains on top such that it is everything that ethereum wants to be but doesn't know how to get there great hello I'm Mustafa I'm the co-founder and CEO at Celestia Labs Celestia is like ethereum but it provides more general purpose uh block space with higher data availability for rollups great hi my name is AD buen I'm co-founder of M Labs we are the creator of theu blockchain my blockchain is like ethereum but it doesn't have a Max throughput and allows you to build safe SM contracts using objects instead of using bits and bites my name is keone Han co-founder of monad monad is like ethereum but parallel very good okay let's show with something a little bit fun I'm kind of obsessed with blockchain naming because every blockchain has its own different take on how a blockchain should be named I want to ask each of you what you think is the best named blockchain and why but you cannot pick your own blockchain also not Bitcoin or ethereum because those are too easy okay we'll go in reverse order ke favorite blockchain name and why favorite blockchain what name name best named blockchain best name blockchain oh boy um I like salana I think it rolls off the tongue it's a good name rolls off the tongue okay I like have a lunch because it seems like something always progressing okay nice I think it has to be Bitcoin like it's simple and and people get get what it means all right Fair um let's see crab because I like the crabs and the the crazy playfulness that comes with it all right easy um I'll go with ethereum I think that I said no ethereum okay then I'll go with optimism optimism I think it's it's um I think we should be optimistic about what this technology enables and um I think it's a it's good vibes it are good okay so speaking of optimism um so we used to speak back in the day I mean I remember you know the the 2017 2018 era was the first time that people thought hey ethereum smart contracts are great but it doesn't scale and we need other l1s to be able to solve this ethereum scaling problem and back then we used to call this new generation of l1s ethereum killers nobody really uses that term anymore uh it's a little bit p a it's almost of a different era um and I heard Jill Carlson uh say recently the biggest lesson in crypto is this never fight ethereums you will always lose um how do you reflect on your Chain's competition with ethereum and how that's changed over time uh Raj start with you when did Jill say that Jill said that like a few months ago fa recently surprising um I mean Jill was an early investor in salana early supporter um I think if you were to ask Jill today how the competition is going between salana and ethereum I would say it's going pretty well it's you know um in the last 90 days you know stable coin transfer volumes monthly is over 50 60 billion dollars on salana um Visa is settling on it Shopify is using it um you know there have been days and weeks where salana has exceeded ethereum on daily trading volume on decentralized exchanges nft volume daily active addresses like I could go on so I think it's still EX early that's you know always been our so an often frames the relationship between salana and ethereum as not being competitive I think he he says that because ethereum at least right now states that its goal is to be a settlement layer and he thinks about salana as an execution layer and so there's clear separation of responsibilities in that World um if that's where it ends up uh how that ends up being complimentary and how they interoperate you know is uh yet to be seen but we already see that there are lots of use cases around like AI some of the founders in the last panel are building on salana uh dpen is you know almost exclusively happening on salana a lot of the payments uh and stable coin transfers are uniquely better done on salana that's why Visa used salana to scale from its ethereum pilot so um you know for now I think we do compete on M share for sure um and developers and you know most users of ethereum have Salona wallets as well uh but obviously in the long term term uh there's plenty of room this is why the ethereum killer uh label did not catch on cuz we are I think by most objective standard is winning we're doing well and ethereum is not dead so your answer is Bring It On yeah bring it on and and and ethereum is doing incredibly well too okay okay let me go to goon goon what's your take on the competition with ethereum sure um we never ever uh marketed Avalanche as an ethereum killer that is a phrase that some marketing people at consensus actually use to elevate ethereum well we've always been complimentary to ethereum ethereum is a single chain system Avalanche is a multi-chain system we can do many more things that they cannot do and one of the most important ones is we allow other people to launch their own blockchains according to their own rules this is something that ethereum just fundamentally is incapable of and we have consensus protocols that are far faster than ethereum so that puts us in a different game and my competition is with Wall Street my competition is not with my good friends that in the ethereum community of which I'm a part still so that is not where we are and we're not one of these l2s that are trying to sort of carve things away from ethereum we've always been about bringing new tokens new assets into the blockchain space we've always been about bringing new science that other people cannot bring into the blockchain space so that's what distinguishes us we're not at all in competition so Mustafa Celestia has somewhat different relationship with ethereum than what these other guys on stage are doing um how do you characterize so obviously you guys are in some sense not competing for the smart contract uh execution stuff that ethereum is doing but you are competing with uh you know as a data availability layer what ethereum is offering with respect to blobs and blob storage how do you think about that competition versus cooperation with ethereum sure so um as you said Celestia is complimentary to ethereum in many ways um like the idea of Celestia is to scale any ecosystem so it's not like it's just scaling its own ecosystem uh well rollups scale ethereum and cesia scales rollups so um yes ethereum has EIP 444 and also has uh data availability but ultimately that data availability even with the full dang Shing road map is very limited even with the full kind of like sharding road map it's only 16 megabytes per block and there's many applications um that makes sense to use for offchain data availability for cheap for higher three and cheaper fees so for example there's something like 15 optimism stack chains deployed um on ethereum that use Celestia as a data availability layer under the fair enough what's your answer yeah I mean that argument I I I disagree with that argument I mean if it's just purely on the existing Market I kind of understand but again I think I resonate what im's saying our competition is not ethereum our competition is to be a global coordination layer for digital assets globally and that's a big big Market compared to just focusing on the small crypto Market in a large scheme of things um S as we all as we explained is a very new chain we've been around for 11 months and andu typically does greater transaction volume than most of the l2s in fact it's one of the fastest growing chains today um overall you know in the space of 11 11 months of launch um we've seen a massive growth in tvl massive growth in transaction tradeing volume um lots of new Builders come into the ecosystem just because writing applications on it is way simpler than writing an eth so if you want to compare Broadband to dialup that's why i' compare and contrasts we to ethereum but we love the E community in fact more than 60% of the bridging activity on Wormhole is happening directly from east to S so nothing against East but it's simply um we think it's a system that's not going to really change much in terms of per and the long term fair enough K so I mean your chain monad is not launched yet but it's probably the most similar to ethereum of anybody on the stage how do you think about competition versus ethereum yeah I think it is very simple and the answer is that ethereum ultimately needs much more performance execution it needs low-level optimization at many layers of the stack including the actual execution layer where parallelism is needed as well as the state storage and access layer where a custom database is needed to much to greatly increase the overall throughput of State access ethereum needs all these improvements in order to ultimately scale to hundreds of millions of users and monad is pioneering some of those directions of going really deep on execution ultimately so that the entire ethereum ecosystem can benefit so is that a yes and or how would you how would you characterize that answer of are you competing or are you cooperating or something in between cooperating cooperating okay fair enough um all right let's take ethereum aside let's talk about Bitcoin so uh you know I was just at Hong Kong and now here you know Bitcoin l2s are a big story I feel like in the US people don't tend to talk about it as much but in this side of the world Bitcoin l2s are top of mind for a lot of people and there are some big launches that are happening soon um many people think of Bitcoin okay they're the granddaddy that people are adding these quote unquote Bitcoin l2s you know depends on how you want to characterize what an L2 is but um what would you have to say to a developer who's planning to build on a Bitcoin L2 because they say look Bitcoin is Bitcoin right like why are we going further a field and creating all these new trust assumptions blah blah blah um why would I build on one of your VC chains rather than build on bitcoin what would what would your answer be to such a developer why should they not consider the Bitcoin l2s popcorn style anybody yeah I think it's an argument about Providence basically so Bitcoin is the OG cryptocurrency the OG distributed blockchain system and there's an argument to be made that maybe some of these systems that are being built on top of Bitcoin can somehow inherit some of the Providence of Bitcoin with that said it's still very early in terms of the actual Trust assumptions having trustless Bridges between Bitcoin and whatever that layer is we definitely don't want just like a multi- that's securing that actual relationship but there's a lot of speculation going on right now for people jostling to try to Define that layer on top of Bitcoin that inherit some of the Providence I mean I guess for is a little bit difference because we would encourage people to build on bitcoin l2s because um like they there's a big need like for you can build a Bitcoin L2 with celesia uh as a data availability layer and for Bitcoin there's even a bigger need for um kind of offchain data availability layers than even ethereum because the data Avail even limited but and the Bitcoin L2 space is very um kind of like naive and exciting but there's definitely a lot more work to be done like the bit VM like the main bridging mechanism right now is bit VM which is very complex and janky and um has a lot lot of trust assumptions so right now it's just like a very kind of like very Tech technologically mature space but there's definitely a lot of activity happening there so I'll say a few words about this um the entire L2 space is generally smok and mirrors these l2s are typically multisig they typically do not have a decentralized sequencer nor do they typically have uh fraud proofs so these things are not in the crypto Spirit they're just somebody's laptop running a little bit of an execution engine and issuing tokens so you could go that route that's possible but really the right way to view these things is as chains connected by different kinds of bridges with different trust assumptions and the right place to build is always on the most decentralized chain and when it comes to that Avalanche is by far the superior decentralized platform we've had a Bitcoin layer 2 for more than a year and a half and there's more value on Avalanche than there is a value in the lightning Network The Chosen L2 of the Bitcoin community so we've already proven ourselves and that's the right place to do your programming because you have all the flexibility of of a programmable smart contract platform in Avalanche with all of the decentralization and all of the normal uh normal trust assumptions that we came into crypto for um say I think I agree with with emmen about you know l2s mostly being marketing what we've seen with salana and Bitcoin is salana is effectively an L2 for Bitcoin for certain things so the pups meme coin that just launched on on bitcoin and went super viral 20% of it is now on salana and that team actually markets salana as a Bitcoin L2 for trading that that token um when if I were talking to a developer and I have talked to developers who are making this choice I I think most of them get there because of bitcoin's Mind share if I ask my Uncle you know what he's doing in crypto he's going to say oh yeah I'm I'm in Bitcoin you do Bitcoin right how's your Bitcoin going that's most people still think of Bitcoin as crypto so and the you know the asset the the the the value of Bitcoin that can flow into these systems is enormous I don't blame any entrepreneur for trying to pursue that magic Eden you know the the largest nft exchange on salana uh now has the majority of its nft trading volume in ordinals on bitcoin um so a really high performing team can execute there and do extremely well um so you know I think it's important for all of these um solution spaces to be explored um I think if people have demand for using Bitcoin in uh you know in Defi and in layer to like Solutions um you know we can't stop it but I do agree with them in that uh it's a risk if the same centralized uh solutions for scaling that have happened on ethereum end up happening on bitcoin um I would rather see you know more decentralized versions of uh of those Solutions happen sure yeah from my my perspective I'm still on the side it's still on the fence um I'm a big fan of Bitcoin I've been in the crypto space since in Bitcoin space since 2011 um I'm still struggling to understand the problem space of what problem are they trying to solve with a new you know new stack so I'm waiting to be impressed um we have some um zero knowledge and briding technology that is coming to the market that allows you to trustly bridge assets from s um from Bitcoin to S and and vice versa um I would say take the S codebase forkit it's the most scalable there is out there it doesn't have a Max throughput scales horizontally use ZK bridging technology and see what you can do again I'm still waiting to see what the problems they're trying to solve is I am still unsure but again I'm I I think I could be proven wrong well so a common critique that many people make of L ones is that we have too many right you go to page one of coin market cap probably something like half of them are L ones of some sort of another um what do you say to people who say that hey there are too many L1 why do we have all these why do they keep kind of you know instead of having applications uh we we seem to be creating more and more blockchains uh what do you say to somebody who says we have too many um I would say I think as an industry I would still consider us to be pre-product Market fit and until there is and you know what they say about product Market fit is there's no one way to define it but you know it when you see it and I think we'll know it when something becomes so powerful at the application layer that it takes all the attention away from the infrastructure layer and it starts to decide who is a winner at the infrastructure layer um and so you know that's so you think we only have product Market fit if and when something some application is way bigger than the l1's I would say yes yeah yeah maybe it's a few applications with the same users but something needs to we need a Tik Tok we need a Facebook we need something that gets to you know 100 million a billion users hold on I want I want to I want to pause it and pivot the question a little bit do you guys agree that blockchains don't have product Market fit yet sorry what's the question the question is do smart contract platforms have product Market fit absolutely they do Raj says they do not absolutely they do I I think on on the metrics that Em's probably thinking about salana absolutely has product Market fit we have you know organic developer uptake organic user uptake those things are all happening sure but um you know I would consider the product Market fit that I want to see uh a period of time where applications are more powerful than infrastructure and I think at that point we'll stop to see we'll stop seeing this much Capital flowing into infrastru so so Roger's claim is that we don't have product Market Fit until an application flips the infrastructure so blockchains are platforms end every day if you look at any platform business ultimately what you want is a net present value of all apps or applications across the ecosystem to be greater than the underlying value of the underlying infrastructure itself right we're not there yet and I think we want to be there ultimately so I actually agree in a sense but crypto's existing product Market is in trading and we're seeing trading volumes especially on salana and other other l1s and l2s significantly high right now but we want to be in a place where we have applications that are clearly indistinguishable it there should be no distinguish uh there should be no separation between a web to and web 3 app it should just be an application and I think once we get there and we start to elevate the user experience to something very akin to web 2 we're not there yet and I'm waiting to see that day coming and some of the Technologies we've been building with ZK ZK login allows you to log in with your Google account to use the the chain the the ability to abstract away um gas these allow you to build applications that completely remove the blockchain I don't go to website and say this is an amazing website because it's built on Google or it's awesome because it's built on Alibaba no one gives a damn it's an application it's a website a website is a website so we need to get there en crypto where the chains are put further down the stack and no one thinks about them and it's really about the user experience that's when we know we've reached product Market fit good we we skipped over your answer you said yes you think it does have product Market fit why so um no the blockchain is clearly a product Market fit Raj is actually pointing out something interesting when the do com explosion happened applications managed to capture value that is greater than the value that was capturable at the platform level that was true of of era and I don't know that that will have to necessarily be true in the blockchain space at all and I think it's quite the opposite I think the platforms have a a a place a unique angle where they can capture far more value than applications on top and that's why we're seeing this rather uh stable situation where l1s are more valuable than most other tokens but going back to your original point do we have it you know do we have too many l1s yes we have too many l1s but also we don't have enough let me expand what you see is a bunch of asinine plays to issue tokens people take something that's very well known you know you take a hat it protects you from rain you put a feather on it now you have a novel hat okay nobody needed that hat you just invented an Alpine hat you put two feathers on it you know the ZK technology verifiable random functions verifiable delay functions accumulators these were all supposed to save the day for ethereum none of them went anywhere you do not and I tell you this as a crypto expert I'm an academic I was a professor at Cornell for 19 years I know all of these acronyms and I assure you you do not need one of those for whatever you are doing next you just don't need that stuff what you do need is you need to be able to issue your own chain according to your own rules so you need a multi-chain platform and that's really what most people clamor you do not need these fancy Mumba jumo words you don't need to read 15,000 blog post to try to figure out where the space is at and I think that's the the universe that we're going to see I want all of you application developers to have your own chain that's what you should think about and what you shouldn't think about is this crazy mumo jumbo crypto stuff that's that yeah so again for me I personally don't believe you need your own chain right I think that's what we don't want I think um it's already shown the amount of fragmentation of the causes you want a global State machine where you have shared State across in fact we believe the value of a smart contract platform is the the the abundance of available interesting state that you have to use when you start sharding State you start to create fragmentation and you actually create new problems in s it doesn't have a scalable scalability problem we've already solved that we've already shown you throw 8X the hardware you get 8X the TPS and no increase in latency so scalability is solved what you do want to do is to be able to Define rules around your assets complex rules around your assets while we're Facebook one of the most important things we're building for Libra is the ability to have well defined rules around assets and now you can build Clos Loop token standards that say you could trade this asset on Friday you could trade this asset only on Mondays you could only transfer if you have a kyc credential you can only transfer if you're you have an at JP Morgan account so we start to think about the um lowlevel elements that you need as a programmer and I actually disagree you do need things like ZK Tech I want to be able to use my web two accounts but protect it against from Google snooping or any other infrastructure providing knowing what I'm doing online it allows you to onboard millions of users without having to have wallets so we think we do need elevated user experiences for for Builders and we don't believe in a world where you need multiple chains now it's an I think it's more of an exception rather than a rule there are scenarios where INF um infrastructure um organizations might want to have a private chain but realistically they're always asking how do I get access to the broader Market of liquidity so I think there are ways in which we solve that but I think for everybody building a chain I I think we don't want a broken internet the internet works at this massive Comm communication Services connecting together and I think that interoperability is very important and I think blockchains having multiple chains actually breaks that problem and let me let me pause here ke you are actually building a new L1 what do you say to people who say that there are too many l1s um in in one sense I think we I was asking ke oh sorry go no worries yeah I think just to regarding the product Market fit thing I just want to mention that I think decentralized currency has achieved product Market fit like if you think about um the fact with Fiat governments have arbitrary ability to inflate the currency at their own will and take all the inflation for themselves that's a huge issue and you can see that um in countries like Argentina um where they have incredibly High inflation rates like I think 20% 30% something like that having a decentralized currency where that's not possible that already has product Market fit um but then beyond that like to talk about ones I think we're still in this Cambrian explosion phase where there's still a lot of unsolved problems um but at the end of the day there is product Market fit in the sense that any developer can build an application deploy it into this shared Global State and immediately have access to tens to hundreds of millions of users in an environment where it's composable with everything else that's already out there so there's still problems to be solved in terms of user onboarding on- ramping is quite tough uh on- ramping into defi we solve these problems and then solve the infrastructure problems and at the end of the day that's what gives us something that could take over the world fair enough okay so Mustafa sorry let me let me translate the question a little bit obviously you're not building a smart contract blockchain but many people argue there are too many da layers obviously you know Celestia in some sense was the first or maybe etherum was the first you guys were the second um now there's a bunch of them what do you say to people who say there's too many ders now well maybe maybe there is but ultimately like Celestia is the first one so what am I supposed to say to of of course like competitors exist and um but I just want to go back to the to the the question about the too many l1s first even though that's that's been over aners like what this because this is fundamentally the reason why I'm building like why we're building Celestia um like every cycle like I've been in crypto since you know 2011 and every cycle there's this new phase of new layer ones that have incremental improvement over the old the previous layer ones and those layer ones just copy like replicate the entire same ecosystem as the previous layer ones a Dom main name system nft Marketplace so on so some def amm so on and so forth Just in WR a different pring language with some you know with in a different color or flavor and um I don't know maybe sui will be the final L L1 that solves everyone's problems maybe salana will be the final L1 or man will be final L1 and that's the only L1 we we use but history has shown that's unlikely to be the case because and even in um web 2 there's always incremental improvements to be made and the reason why um like we're we're building in a modular rollup stack is because developers can deploy new what we're seeing in the market is that developers can like deploy own rollup chain with incremental improvements within seconds not in years because they can just take the evm add modify it paralyze it add a up code um for their use case and deploy it within seconds using using a roll op as a service provider I don't think it's all just smoken mirrors because arbitrum for arbitrum does have working for proofs it does have uh a force inclusion INX it's it's just sake there there's working for proofs there's detial fraud proofs with the resent system anyone can submit a fraud proof and so on and so forth and I agree with go that is a multi kind of chain ecosystem I we just disagree on whether it's l2s or independent chains in the own right in terms of the question is like is there too many D layers um competition of of course competition will exist right now Celestia um is the only general purpose the LA Live of course we're going to have others launching soon like um IG da Avail and so on and so forth so we're going to see how the market dynamics Dynamics uh play out but I think the way it's going to happen the way that it's going to play out is going to be there's a few da layers um there's going to be even more settlement layers and even and millions of application specific rollups okay um you guys are out there doing battle every day for mind share for Developers for applications um but look we're here together I want to see you a little bit of Love on stage so what I'm going to ask you to do is for each of you to go around and say one thing about the next person's project that you admire okay so Raj say something about Avalanche that you admire sure yeah um can I say two things you can say two things all right I'll give you two things uh one I'll say um you know as you can kind of tell I think salana loves competition we love Fierce competition we love honest competition from people that have you know um ferocity about the ideas they're bringing to the table and I think Emon is probably the most ferocious L1 founder that I know um and he never backs down from a fight uh but he'll shake your hand behind stage and um you know he's friends with everyone and he's been very supportive uh to a lot of Founders so I think as an individual I I have a lot of respect for emmen and what he's brought to the space um the second thing I'll say is uh Chris berisi has this framework of uh how L1 uh architectures might uh converge over time and you know ke was talking about store of value Bitcoin has clearly you know proven that and wins that um I think the other way that we see Divergence happening is uh monolith and integrated designs like salana um where salana is kind of the the largest market share and sui and and monad are are following with uh uh inspiration from our design and then uh over in you know Sovereign chains um and you know the idea that anyone can run their own chain really Avalanche and Cosmos are the the clear winners um and you know Cosmos is um uh it's an OG project and and um uh it's not that coordinated I think Avalanche brings the coordination and the ability for developers to um you know uh configure their own chains how they want um so I like that about their design and uh obviously it's a a function of Em's DNA and his great vision as a Founder thank you so much and we very much like the engineering work Salon did good you are doing Celestia let him do me too it's okay no no no not no we're going in circle we're going to circle all right so uh for Celestia I think what I would say is uh they did a fantastic job of uh taking a a very complex and I would say relatively unsolved issue still that's why you're seeing the competition rise there um of and giving it a nice name data availability and making that uh you know part of daily parland so now people think that data availability is a is a problem that needs to be solved is thato a compliment compliment um yeah I think sui um well I mean uh the the um actually the the chief research officer M Labs is my former uh Professor my PhD adviser at Geor georgis and I think um like the the the cool thing about sui is their kind of the men pool and consist protol Nal and Tusk um because I think they've identified um one of one of the key bottlenecks of kind of blockchain scaling that no one else ever ever No One Else recognized cuz it was previously thought that the the Bott neck was consensus but everyone overlooked their kind of like what the major B neck was which was menol transaction gossiping from for me um moad we we looked at um scaling ethereum while we're at Facebook we couldn't get enough confidence on being able to scale it and also keep it secure and we have a lot of Promise in what monad is working on we really hope to see parel evm become the thing that actually works at scale we we do think a strong e is actually a strong thing for the ecosystem we'd love to see um you know users be able to benefit from the existing ecosystem apps actually don't take forever to load um that we have right now with e so look forward to the work you're doing you're circling around Raj yep yeah I think salana really showed the world that really plentiful really cheap transactions are possible and just showed the world the promise of an environment where you could have thousands of transactions per second throughput and people you know using def with very small um with very small Bank rolls honestly like they're not paying $50 in gas or $5 in gas showing the world what was possible and what we should all be aspiring for lovely agreed this is very heartwarming I I like I like the way you guys we keep going we could keep going we make this a whole Love Fest but um I have a a couple more questions I want to get through um so Kion right now is the only person on stage who has not actually launched is L one the rest of you are you know among the titans of Industry of people who've launched L ones so um as the senis to K what is the advice that you would give to a new founder of things that you think L1 Founders often stumble on or mistakes that they tend to make that you wish you would have not made when you built your L1 and let's let's maybe go around more or less in order of seniority in terms of how long you guys have been been at this yeah it's kind of true yeah I think Emon is well I've been around more but you guys have have been on Main net longer oh sure yeah um I think you know we were talking about trauma bonding earlier yes we were yes we were and uh it's pretty clear at least for now I think uh pre-main it seems like manad has really focused on community as a first class citizen um that Community is very excited I think they're very positive um which is a a great Foundation to build for the culture I think culture is incredibly important for the the user base and the developer base the chain um things don't go well forever uh they will go wrong and how you show up in that moment and how you lead by example um and how you support the ecosystem in that moment is I think actually where all of the culture is built um so uh I'm really happy that salana you know really went to Market very quickly we we uh launched in 2020 actually in a moment of trauma it was uh during the great financial crisis during lockdowns we launched on March 16th that was our first Crucible moment there are many more that I I sure I'm sure everyone knows about but um I think getting to those Crucible moments and um using them as a as a teachable moment and and a growing moment for your community is um kind of the whole game on culture yeah Raj has some good advice I would add that um as a new founder you're going to feel a lot of pressure to do things for regulatory purposes and I would suggest that you always do what you know to be right and have faith that The Regulators will catch up that they will not forever be stuck in five years ago terms they will not always be using outdated ideas etc etc but uh as long as you do what is true to the core crypto Spirit of decentralization that uh that things will work out well for you yeah I think um agree with those and additionally I think one of the most important things is shipping as early as possible and to make sure that you have a uh user product feedback loop as early as possible because I think a lot of uh customers U or sorry Founders they kind of wait too long to ship and like you should ship your product even if it's not ready so they have to make sure they have that that product user F uh user feedback loop as early as possible because that's extremely valuable in terms of figuring out how you should prioritize your road map and so on and so forth yeah I'd say maintain a strong opinion of on what you think your platform is supposed to be because that's key to the identity and separately higher the best I think we've always been crit critic that there's not been enough great talent going into web 3 especially on the infra side um hire the best infrastructure Engineers that you can it's going to pay off in the long run reflection on the advice you've been given yeah I appreciate that uh I agree that it's still pretty early in terms of overall growth of the crypto space there's so much ahead for um our entire ecosystem bringing in more Talent is really important moving quickly so that we can actually take over the rest of the world it's really important um and and yeah there's it's not always going to be easy so appreciate that all right so to wrap up the panel because we're running up on time uh I want to do just a quick lightning round of overrated underrated okay this is not in the notes I sent you but I'm just kind of feeling it so um real quick so we'll just go around very like short sentence of overrated underrated and just short sentence of why um all right number one binance chain overrated underrated um overrated overrated why one sentence um I I think every Market cycle brings more credible um exchange competitors that will have more ability to uh give strong distribution to other chains um hopefully more credibly neutral ones and so I don't think they have a big moat uh from cycle to cycle okay overrate underrated underrated because it's the first app chain that showed the world that people want to build their own specific chains for their own usage that's what I think binance smart chain showed to the world okay I agree with everything else you said Mustafa underrated because people underestimate how much the product uh the user experience can be improved by giving developers the flexibility to have control over their own execution environment app chain just look at a web 2 imagine if every single web 2 app used PHP the web web 2 would look completely different today okay it's entirely overrated entirely overrated I think it's only a minuscule Improvement on on ethereum in terms of if you look at the performance and cost of gas and everything else I think it's only a minuscule and it doesn't it makes a lot of um it doesn't have the decentralization aspect they you even get from ethereum so I think it's a lot of Corners that were cut I think it's entirely overrated okay K I think it's overrated the number of validators is quite low um but I think it did show the importance of distribution and how it's really important to bring more users just from purely trading cryptos to actually using the chain okay all right because we only have less than a minute left we're going to do no explanations now over underrated reaking reverse order overrated overrated what's the question reaking restak reaking overrated overrated overrated over overrated I'm just going to be contrarian and say underrated okay true contrarian I like that all right um last one crypto AI overrated underrated um overrated for now underrated soon okay exactly so overrated for now underrated in the future exactly what I was going to say oh come on agree yeah okay all right County overrated overrated all right I like that I like that contrarian okay I think we're up on time thank you very much for a very spirited panel and thank you for listening everybody thanks man thank you