Everyone’s Building New Chains,but Why?| Devin-Uniswap,Andy-The Rollup,Maghnus-Interchain,Jacob-Sol

[Music] cool so keeping it going uh this next panel is going to be great um everyone's building new chains but why and I'll hand it over to our moderator Liam from anagram awesome thank you guys and and if you wouldn't mind just taking a conversation just outside please Perfect all for the conversation let's just take it outside that way we can listen to our wonderful panelist today um so pleasure to meet you guys my name is Liam I'm with the anagram team um you know before we jump into kind of our topic today I would love to pass it through our panelist to talk a little bit more about themselves and kind of what brings them here today mnus please take it away yeah sure uh I'm Magnus uh I'm one of the Coos of interchain labs which uh is basically the the cosmos foundation and Labs entity uh so we build you know if you've heard of the cosmos SDK or IBC or uh tender those are all things that um our company builds and maintains uh Cosmos ecosystem if you're not familiar is a internet of blockchains um it has over 150 uh blockchains in its ecosystem uh also has a lot of evm chains so for example uh Kronos um story protocol uh bar chain are all built on Cosmos technology hi I'm de Walsh I'm the executive director and founder of the Unis swap Foundation um I'm here I believe because Unis swap uh the ecosystem launched um uni chain a um a chain for dii applications that has been built by the unpop labs team is supported by the Unis spot foundation and uh launched about two weeks ago now so I think I'll be chatting about that hello everyone um so my name is Jacob Cree I do developer relations at salana Foundation uh so that can be anything that has anything to do with developers anything under this sun with devs that's me hey guys GM my name is Robbie cleis I am co-host of the collective learning experience that is the rollup uh we talk about everything that goes on chain and more thanks awesome and then finally a little bit more about myself uh my name's Liam I got my start in Block uh in crypto through blockchain at Berkeley many years ago in 2017 2018 uh left that to go uh work on stablecoins at PayPal before joining the cosmos ecosystem and working on a project called OS which is building evm compatibility for the cosmos ecosystem system um and now I'm at anagram where we focus on investing advising and building um particularly across the salon and ethereum ecosystems um and today we're going to be talking about everyone's building new chains but who the [ __ ] cares um and you know as more and more chains pop up you know like how do we bring uh more attention to them and and how do we spread out that mind share across all these projects um and so I guess without further Ado I would love to start the conversation with you Jacob um you know we've got repres presentation here from a lot of different uh teams that are looking at various scaling options um especially as it comes to you know l2s or app chains um salana has largely taken the stance of you know focusing on growing the main L1 uh rather than looking at Alternatives I'm curious to just get your perspective on what do you think about the L2 landscape and afchain Landscape um as it continues to grow at a pretty quick rate okay um so I'm very much into the L1 landscape right for salana I think there it can be a place for l2s it really depends on what is the L2 doing differently that the L1 cannot do um like for example uh if one day that okay a great example is the the network like the internet is a bottleneck for salana uh because the way that like packet sizes or whatever I don't want to go into too much detail but it's it's literally a bottleneck for salana so there is a room uh for l2s to make uh larger changes than salana can make because Solana's full focus is increased bandwidth reduced latency so I think there is a place for l2s depending on what their L1 cannot do uh and then if there is a place there is opportunity and it should definitely be built I'm curious then you know as you know l2s are taking over ethereum and uh I mean there's been a lot of criticisms from a variety of folks in salana ecosystem about that fragmentation um how are you guys thinking about that fragmentation and you know like is there anything that you guys are doing proactively where you think you'll be able to solve those problems Le differently than uni chain or uh you know Cosmos ecosystem has yeah so salana in general is trying to innovate as much as possible to where it is going to be limited by just the physical limits of reality like speed of light is too slow um so as long as get to that like execution time it's an execution chain of for anything that you want do that settlement then you get to the point where the opportunity space for l2s on top of salana are more like if you want a permissioned L2 or you have something that needs to do something that is uh like for gaming you obviously can't build games on salana uh so you have people building like ephemeral rollups on salana yeah totally totally fine they do things differently that salana limits even if it reaches that high execution State um so that's what we continue to focus on like make it so that we have the high execution path so that the opportunity space is not going to fragment it's actually going to allow new things to be built do you see projects like uni chain and and Cosmos kind of competing for you guys for mind share and tvl and you know possibly taking away from the salon ecosystem you you can say anything don't worry not really I just like I can I mean I think like different kinds of us prefer different kinds of tradeoffs I guess and that's why I think I think there's there's a lot of beef between salana and ethereum these days and you know like some healthy competition is I think good to be honest I think it makes both ecosystems stronger probably it helps point out the points but but generally I think like like any given user um you know they they typically they may just care about one thing in which in which case you know whatever platform or layers of infrastructure most optimized for that thing matters most but like a series of inputs for instance like what is within the ecosystem in which they're they're operating within um like what are the trust assumptions of of this infrastructure like like those things may play to what apps are built on top of the the chain or the L2 um and what users may may come so so I think it's you know like we're all working to build a better internet right and I think like having different tradeoff spaces is healthier um and will make us stronger to ultimately supersede the internet yeah I definitely agree on that because like the competitive space as long as you have competition it's good no one becomes complacent and you continually to build what's best for the user yeah yeah uh I I I was on a panel earlier at Salona rapt where with Max Resnik um who has very strong opinions on um whether yes yeah I think he posted yesterday that the apch thesis was wrong um so it's not wrong uh it's it's sort of hard to argue that it's wrong when it's like already in existence uh and you know we have here one of the most successful uh uh dii protocols ever in existence that made the decision to build their own chain right um and many others following suit uh you know Ando just announced their chain uh Athena is is exploring their chain uh and I think it's precisely for this reason of there's this question of sovereignty in in crypto which is the ability to basically fully control the infrastructure and uh the trust of on which you run and being able to do things that you would never be able to do on a generalized L1 no matter how amazing it is and it that's not to say that I think there's going to not be uh really successful major l1s like I'm I'm a huge uh supporter of the Salona ecosystem um you know Lily the head of the salana foundation was also on the foundation of Osmosis uh there's tremendous uh ways of collaborating there uh but but I do believe that there are going to be increasing class of more performant applications that specialize their hardware and specialize the very rails on which they run uh one of the best examples I think recently is is hyper liquid uh which is an extremely extremely performance performance focused L1 for one specific use case perpetuals trading right it's built on top of Cosmos technology uh and I think they did that because they really wanted to push the limits and I think it would be very hard for them to do that in in a place that's that's shared and has infrastructural concern shared with with other places so Magnus you talk about you know a lot of these notable projects that are building their own rollups or building their own app chains um but and while that's absolutely true it's not without its challenges um there's been a lot of projects who have really struggled to attract TBL to attract attract mind share uh to have Integrations and composability with other defi um I mean even when I looked at unit chain earlier today you know there's not even $10 million of TV um two weeks I know it's only a couple weeks in right I I totally get that but like but like especially since like Unis swap has already had all these deployments and all these other ecosystems you know you're now competing for mind share with your own existing deployments and so I'm curious like for for both of you guys like how how like what challenges do you see for building an app chain or building an app rollup and like how do you guys plan on overcoming those uh to be still competitive with the Salas of the world yeah I I can take a first shot at at answering that so so I mean I think like generally for for any app chain any application any team looking to launch um launch their own L2 they there's a lot that goes into it I mean just from like the design specking something out like like figureing out okay even if you're using something that's kind of out of the box like from from arbitrum or from the op stack like you have to think through how is this going to be differentiated it's it's launching a product right and it's launching it for many cases an entire developer ecosystem which depending upon what your application is you may not have experience like launching an ecosystem it's expensive just having like like Baseline indexers um like node infrastructure like like just like running the sequencer all of those things you get to like the tens of millions of dollars of cost just like Baseline pretty quickly and not a lot of teams can necessarily take that on like like I think to your point there have been op stack chains which have wound down just because they've been like you know like unprofitable for for so long um I think from from I guess like Unis bop's perspective like while I'm incredibly excited about the prospects for for uni CH I think it's high iated and serves like an incredibly important use case for the future development and like scaling of of ethereum specifically I do not think I do not foresee a world in which uni chain is the only player in the game I think that would actually be kind of like the the entire kind of like thesis behind uni chain in some ways is to be a settlement layer and like like a hub for like to um enable more seamless fast easy interop across many chains so I definitely see a world in which there are many chains in which salonic continues to thrive in which Cosmos continues to thrive continues to thrive and I think um I guess like having unop as just like like a a platform as a developer platform like like a protocol across other chains I think there's a really strong use case for that as well yeah I I can build on on that a bit um on the rollup we start uh talking a lot about this mental model of a healthy economy a healthy onchain economy not so much in terms of tvl but more in terms of monetary velocity um you know it it it's not to it's not very indicative of a healthy economy to just have you know a million billion dollars just sitting there not doing anything uh what's really an indication of a healthy economy is uh buying and selling and trading and and money changing hands and goods changing hands and products Changing Hands um and so uh the the case of uni chain building out its own settlement um you know I I think that is an indication that we don't need a lot of tvl to to say that uni chain is working or any other app chain for that matter um facilitating monetary flows across all the deployments of Unis Swap and uni uni chain being a hub or a settlement engine for all of those flows can be just as uh a successful an indication um as a massive amount of tvl and so I think we'll start to kind of evolve the way that we're uh measuring success for a lot of these chains not in terms of tvl but in in terms of some of these other metrics like velocity of of flows going through that chain and I I know like the the metrics of like comparing chains is always difficult um but you know like as Devon mentions like there's this huge upfront cost of building your own chain and all the infrastructure that comes along with it uh meanwhile you know while it can sometimes be hard to find a usable RPC in the salon ecosystem like otherwise it's pretty easy to deploy and get started um same with ethereum right like why you know especially given how much value ethereum has given to Unis swap why take that value away and move it somewhere else is that a question for me sure the question I'm not sure yeah sorry I I I kind of combined a few points there um so maybe maybe let's just start with the first point there which is you know it's a lot easier to deploy to an existing L1 rather than like spin up your own L2 or or own app chain um and you know like well yes you know like the things that you can do with that app chain in L1 are very different it's still you know just like hard to get started and so like who is who should be building app chains I guess should anybody build building app chains yeah okay the question is you know built buil un who else should consider I think it's a good question I mean what like one of the the key inputs into the decision I guess from un's perspective is like the vast majority of Meb is tied to like Dex transactions and specifically on ethereum it's it's unisp and I think from from Unis spot's perspective like you know it it has like pretty you know considerable market share today but we're focused on growing the pie and execution quality to bring in the next wave of you know hundreds of thousands of users who will be trading real world assets and all these different other kinds of assets like FX Etc on Unis and the amount of leage that is happening today is just unacceptable and going to an L2 and working with teams like flashs to build flash blocks so which um when it launches later this year will enable 250 millisecond like uh flash blocks within kind of like a blocks transaction that is huge in terms of like mitigating meev not only for LPS but for users and so like like I guess I guess for for us that's just like one input into the equation but it's like okay we're it is a way in which Unis swap can provide an order of magnitude improved um user experience for swappers and LPS it's kind of like its core user experience I think like another interesting example from Unis bop's perspective is um just like more more ownership and control over chain development so I don't know folks who follow this closely but but uh Unis spop V4 launched launched recently and one the kind of the big obstacles to univ for launching was um the adoption of t- basically like a what do it called like basically like like an upgrade to um to eum chain um to ethereum that had to be adopted and I forgot the name of the actual like upgrade but allowed for like new form of storage that enabled to actually work and it's kind of crazy to think about you know like the the largest like Revenue driver for ethereum the largest most used application on ethereum like could not launch because like the change just like had its own you know and the um Al devs team had you know like other priorities for what to include so for ethereum or for unop it's just like that that is another like value prop right like having more control over like what um how how you know in this case the super chain Evol as a big player there so I guess you to stract that way I think like you have to be really solid solid reasons why not just like launching for any arbitary reason but order of magnitude Improvement to user experience un unblocking um you know obstacles that exist by build one I guess two exles and Jacob does this go back to your point earlier of just like you know the kinds of use cases that you think are good for you know l2s or network extensions is yes absolutely because it's like there's something that was not like it enabled you to do something better and being that you have more control you can do more things yeah and so that's what we also see like the SL ecosystem as svm l2s are and rollups are being built out it's like they're they have a very specific thing in mind that they want and they can't they can't wait for the chain to catch up or maybe it's a different priority like a lot of the ZK stuff has taken like two years to come out on Sal so you see a bunch of ZK stuff being moved out that's fine it makes sense because it's like okay we're giving you more control as an L2 uh and but the chain will still the main chain will still be moving on as long as you settled back everybody's happy basically yeah yeah I mean Robbie I'm curious I know a lot of your guys' content is ethereum focused but as salana you know maybe leans more into you know the world of l2s um like is that interesting to you like do you find that you know going to be interesting amongst the rest of your rollup peers we have lots of Solana friends we have friends all across the ecosystems uh we're not maximalists we try not to be tribal uh I'm a technology maximalist I uh am a big fan of innovation wherever it happens um and we and we try to represent that in our in our podcasts we've had Mt the the salana uh chief of [ __ ] posting on the podcast and and um you know we we do see that the product Market fit that salana has with mem coins and eventually like the financial ecosystem is uh possible on a single state machine to a certain extent and then there's times to lead into uh customizations on rollups uh when the the time and and place is right for that change um we have this notion of the app chain life cycle or the application life cycle and the idea is that there's an iterative approach um these applications start uh with a a minimal proof of concept uh usually looks like some kind of contract smart contract on the L1 um with product Market fit and you see that with Unis swap you see that with lots of applications you graduate to an app chain so it's not something that you should really be building you know from Day Zero preed it's something that you kind of build your way up to um there's a a a third stage to that life cycle which is kind of fun which is launch a stable coin uh and try to uh get some monetary premium along with your project as well um not many teams have reached that level yet but you do see some see see some of those uh a kind of skipped right to the third step and I think you know eventually they may have an app chain approach as well um but this is kind of the life cycle that that we see um it's an iterative approach that allows your application to evolve its infrastructure as it scales its user base and its products I just going to add one thing which is um I think there are always going to be a set of applications that that really make sense on sort of like a large L1 uh so like in my mind I've seen so many uh pump. fun clones on other ecosystems that are like pump out fun app chains you know like pump out fun clones like within smaller chains they're just they don't work right and then and I think part of that is there are times where having incredible amount of synchronous composability with local liquidity is is really important right and I think we saw that play out as one of the biggest um one of the biggest successes of of of basically like a large app chain or or large chain thesis um I I think a a big piece of the conversation that that that might be missing uh is multi-chain is very new uh and and the thing that it really introduced is this concept of interop right like interop is this idea of you know going between different chains right over some Bridge or some message passing passing protocol and because multi-chain happened faster than interop was designed uh we have all these terrible user experiences and I think it makes the experience of using a single chain substantially better there's a lot of thought going into interop but uh one of the things you know in Cosmos we have IBC which is natively built in interop uh one of the things I'd really like to see is an expansion of of that interupt Mission and and to see what kind of applications we can come up with that employ sort of local zones of liquidity like salana like ethereum uh once that interrupt gets really really good like subc if if possible final question I have as we wrap up this conversation um we started with Jacob and saw I'll end with you Jacob as well um I was talking to Nick white the other day and and he had a potentially you know uh controversial take of you know he sees salana as you know as it's the home of Launchpad meme coins right now uh as also being the Launchpad for rollups and l2s and app chains um and he sees it as a lot of teams are going to go to salana and build their initial project and then they're going to hit scaling limits on because there's a really strong Community then they're going to hit scaling limits and move on to their own app chain or rollup um similar to how kind of Jupiter is uh kind of currently going through the process um I'm curious one are you supportive of that vision and two do you have any worries about kind of the value extraction um that happens you know by projects just like coming in temporarily taking a lot of that value and then potentially leaving with it to you know build their own roll up or app chain on Cosmos so the core Engineers that both on Anza fire dancer Etc will say if there's any ever a L2 that's building to be faster than salana um they will out compete them and to where they will basically beat them at their own game um I don't think like jup net is not actually being built for because it hit any scaling limits it it hit it was being built because it's waiting on cryptography schemes to be built on salana which I'm thinking are probably a year out um so the anything that's like execution based uh the core devs have made clear we will out compete that any L2 that's going based off of scaling limits uh that are in the long term not going to be real in salana so Magnus do you think you can beat salana scaling limits with your app chains I don't think any app chain will ever beat salana scaling limits okay um but I do believe that sometimes scale is not the decision that people choose when when they build their own app chain y great points you know before we wrap up I just want to mention that I I I think the chain Centric view is a bit outdated um I I tend to think that you know we have this multi-chain approach and I I I think everyone sort of sees this multi-chain approach continuing to proliferate um eventually every rollup will be a ZK rollup and we'll just continue to expand outwards and in that world I tend to think that these l1's l2s they they don't really you know there there's not really a hierarchical AR uh mental model anymore we kind of just have these amorphous Blobs of state that just exist in the void and we're going to connect them with some kind of interrupt probably ZK interrup um you know once every chain can can generate it's uh it's ZK proof and and verify ZK proof everything will just be a ZK application and we'll just connect them all via ZK proofs interesting I I look forward to seeing how the future plays out thank you all for the time today I I know we're over time um and thank you all for listening