Bridging the World to Web3 by Will Robinson

okay next up we've got a talk and it is called Bridging the world to web3 which sounds very exciting so give it up for Will Robinson VP of engineering at coinbase moderated by Jason yanowitz co-founder of blockworks [Applause] hi everybody great to be here nice to meet you in person indeed indeed yeah Empire round two uh so I think the first place to go with this we're talking about coinbase Bridging the world to web3 really where I want to go with this is just base and what you guys are building especially on the developer tooling side of things I think the first place to go is like from conversations I've had with you and with Jesse it seems like bass and the and the L2 announcement there were like 10 other products that you guys almost built before that and sounds like you maybe you even did build but didn't actually push into production so I'd love to hear like why was this the number one thing that you guys should build especially as like developer resources at every company are tight like this is the why was this the absolute best thing to build yeah it's a great question and I would say really three things came together the first is as we shop this idea around internally light bulbs went off for every team we talked to as an unlock as as the importing of a superpower that building on chain gives you even in a place that has built a bunch of stuff not on chain um so that was the first the second is the availability of things like the op stack right the technical foundation not just that it exists that it's open so but that they were eager to partner and the third thing and the thing that was really most important to me as Jesse and I talked about in the early days was I said talk to the community right talk to daps talk to other builders and see see how this feels and what we found um was as we went out there and said hey we're considering this confidentially what would you think about this would you want to be there the response was overwhelmingly positive and that that really showed me okay we're on something here and we've got to go forward one of the things that I think one of the reasons I think you guys had such positive reaction to to the announcement is um you guys have 108 million registered users on the like traditional coinbase app the the Twitter threaders are excited because the 108 million users now move on chain then maybe skeptic in me says like most of those users don't actually want to live an on-chain world what is your take on moving these 108 million users into on chain land yeah so I I think it is it's not a simple thing right you can't just stop your thinking at oh 108 million that's the number of users that are gonna be on chain day one like no doubt um but I do think these are users we have a connection with we have a high trust relationship with we built over a long time and we've got a lot of experience understanding what makes sense to them what doesn't make sense them how they can progress in their crypto journey and having this is another destination that we can help steer them toward I I am cautiously optimistic that we're going to be able to really move that needle yeah what's been the biggest surprise so far since launching the biggest surprise yeah biggest surprise yeah I mean I uh I don't want to sound like we weren't supremely confident because we were we were really excited about this strategy but I would say just the number of developers that have already taken up the mantle the number of smart contracts we've seen deployed on our test net the number of unique developers that have come the number of repeat unique developers that are coming back day after day even just a couple weeks into the project that that is an incredible Milestone and something to where I feel like the momentum is there and now we just need to keep going yeah I want to maybe start to figure out like the second order impacts of this so that's our high level actually let's talk about like the business model of of the L2 then then we'll eventually get into the developer tooling stuff that you guys are building but what like when you think about the business model of this there's like fees there's Mev there's launching a token like what do you think about as like the business model behind base yeah it's a great question and I want to say right off the bat we have no plans to launch a token I want to be really clear about that um so fees fees just as you see in other l2s that's a component of it but I was also really thrilled and again like striking this balance between absolutely coinbase is a for-profit business we make no secret about that but what is the community ethos who are we partnering with how do we interface with all of you and and you know in our personal and private lives we're also you I closed my laptop for coinbase and open it back up and play on defy right like this is who we are in many cases as well and so being able to strike that balance and make a commitment for a percentage of this to go back to the optimism Foundation funding public goods like we we really see that this industry is absolutely in this growth era and in this win-win era where we really think all of us collectively need to focus on growing the pie getting more users into the space as opposed to knives out cake cutting pie cutting zero-sum thinking so that's um that that really has guided us and and as we've looked at this internally I think there's plenty to go around like this is not something where I am going to have a quarterly hard Revenue Target that's super super high and like that is why we're building base right we are going to make some money with base I hope we make a lot of money with bass but that's not where this conversation started and that's not where it's centered yeah how much interaction is there with other teams at coinbase so like as soon as you guys announced this the first thing that came to my head was CBE and the million things that you guys can do to make CBE which is probably second or third largest LSD right now behind Lido uh there's so many things that you guys can do to make CBE the dominant staking derivative how much interaction do you have with folks like John and the staking team and like how do you think about how other coinbase products whether it's usdc CBE how base will make those businesses Stronger Yeah and it comes back to my answer to your first question that first unlock that we saw as Jesse especially but the whole team sort of made the rounds internally said hey if this was out there which you have a use for it how would you think about it how would it play with your strategy really the hit rate was almost 100 percent internally where you had this latent desire to build more on chain but but without a clear path to do is sort of this philosophical oh we know we need to do this someday and with this as a catalyzing event something we could all rally around the idea started popping people started working nights and weekends um you know Jesse's got a small But Mighty full-time team at a much larger part-time volunteer team internally just so excited saying oh with this with this coming this year we could put this on chain we could put this half of this existing product on chain and I really feel like the thing we're trying to show and Lead the Way in is building on chain is not is not just a philosophical statement it's a superpower if you build the right parts of your product on chain it is a better way to build certain kinds of things and that's true whether you're a startup with two people in a garage or a big publicly traded company we think you'll see lots of big publicly traded software companies building more and more on chain in the coming years and we just want to be ahead of that curve yeah I want to talk about some of the stuff that you guys are doing to help those companies come on chain two more questions about base then we'll move past it is um would you ever think about making cve the gas token of Base you know I I haven't contemplated that and it doesn't you know I'm going to design this on the fly on stage my knee-jerk answer is no you know I think that at the end of the day bass settles to ethereum mainnet eth is the gas token of ethereum mainnet I think having you know at a baseline technical level having that be hard coupled and very straightforward yeah I feel like has a big Advantage now building layers on top of that through account abstraction through all the things that they're working on on Basin and I know many of you are working on other chains that makes sense as well and you can have both right like you could have a user experience that's Loosely coupled or decoupled from that eth token potentially for gas but then at the end of the day at a chain level sequencer level settlement level I think um you gain a lot by saying eth is the common currency this is how these chains are all settling nice all right topic of this panel is supposed to be not about bass I was just more interested in that but uh it's about onboarding millions of people billions of people into web three one of the ways uh that you guys can do that is with developer tooling another way is with um like usdc I'd say how do you think about like how bass plays into that in terms of could you make fees on usdc zero which then incentivizes liquidity and people and apps to then come to base yeah it's a great question and you know I think we think about uscc very broadly um not just with in the base context but across all chains I mean I onboarded my mother-in-law to a self-custody wallet this past weekend shout out Donna I hope you're watching um so I could pay her 30 of usdc and start that conversation and I think it's an incredibly powerful tool an intuitive tool for the mothers and fathers and laws of the world to have their first experience on chain it makes sense the utility is clear it's adjacent to what they're already doing and then on the coinbase side it is a great Revenue stream for us today and I think that there are great possibilities for for the business but I don't want to hard couple the idea of usdc and basis yeah when you talk to so like a lot of these so let's talk about developer tooling can you maybe give Insight I have a feeling this is not the last developer tool thing that you build this year what else can you give us a little hint of what else is coming like what else do you think about on the developer toolkit side of things yes it's a great question so I would say broadly speaking the thing that I wake up every day thinking about is it was two things first of all is how do we get more users using on-chain products services and tools every day and that that is something that lifts all boats and that I think is actually really critical for our industry at this point in time for a lot of reasons um and we've when I think about that realm I think that onboarding having just watched my mother-in-law do this onboarding is still a really big challenge that right now we're sort of asking people to progress through this sequence that most of us went through of we'll first buy a crypto asset for some reason right then maybe get a wallet because someone's telling you you should and then you could use that wallet and go do something and and I feel like that is that is a funnel where we see people falling off and I think coinbase and all of many of us here in this room have a lot of work to do watching your sisters brothers-in-laws fathers-in-laws on board and and say okay how do we reduce that friction how do we get people who have a first class need in their minds I want to do this right now how do we get them using crypto right away without forcing them first to become crypto people so I know that's pretty Broad and it's just kind of a tease I'll tease a little further and say keep your ears open on March 8th we're going to have our next announcement so more to come Alpha March 8th March 8th we've got we've got an announcement of some exciting stuff we're doing that I think should help move the needle in that space um and then the second thing I think of is just where is coinbase's place to play in all this where's our unique value at and our unique right to win because there's so much that needs to be built and we want to partner where it makes sense and then we want to double down in places like distribution to a big user base like connection to the off-chain world of Fiat rails and things like that where I think coinbase does have a unique set of assets that we built up over time that that I think we're leveraging well but could do a lot more to get people on chain yeah like eat Denver is such an amazing event it was funny walking around different booths still like nearly every Booth is a different D5 protocol like exotic options and like different ways to lever up and defy I want to get your take on just like how you or how coinbase thinks about non-financial use cases and like I don't know if folks in the room ever listen to Empire like Santiago and I have been exploring a lot of like big web tube brands are now starting to dabble in the space is it real is it not real how do you think about building for those folks and like what are these non-financial use cases that you think about yeah I think that's spot on so I I see most on-chain activity today as being basically reflexive it's using crypto to do things or speculate about other crypto or lever up on crypto or these kinds of things um there's nothing wrong with that um and and I'm a I'm a big defy user myself and think that there's a lot of value to be had there um but it perpetuates this sense that it's this kind of closed ecosystem this thing off to the side this sort of black box and I feel like every single bit of light every single hole we can punch in that black box to connect sort of thermally couple this on chain crypto world to anything else whether that is web3 or just rather gaming in general let's not talk about web 3 games let's talk about great games that people just want to play that happen to have an on-chain component because that's the best way to build those features for that game connecting to real world assets is not a new insight but I think we've got these Ultra powerful rails instant settlement um you know incredibly cheap and getting cheaper everyday transactions globally across borders all these great advantages we're familiar with and right now they're used almost all for these reflexive use cases as soon as I'm able to tokenize the lien on my house and put my mortgage on chain now there's an awful lot of gnarly gross little details we have to solve and I know there's some pioneering startups that are working on exactly that problem but the more of that we can actually get over the line and solve completely not just is it technically feasible could someone do this as a proof of concept but we've figured out the regulatory regime we've figured out the safety characteristics we figured out how to deal with the fact that these users are not necessarily all going to be ultra sophisticated crypto heads we know that waiting at the end of that journey is all the superpowers these rails bring but apply to everything else we're doing in the world so real world assets the connection to real world use cases daily Commerce gaming I think is a big obvious one but the more of that we can do the more people will bring in and the more this will just feel like part of the fabric of Our Lives not something scary or other that needs to be regulated at arm's length and things like that are you still running a rocket uh rocket pool node absolutely and Shout Out shout out to Rocket pool but not just rockable shout out to everybody who's working on making staking more accessible innovating in that space yeah but I am a small small scale rocket pool homesteaker and occasional participant that Community nice I've read that you occasionally like just work to improve ux across different protocols and like pick off bug bounties and stuff and have a lot of respect for that what feels obvious to you about defy and like where the D5 ecosystem is going that maybe isn't as obvious to some folks in the room yet yeah you know I think part of the answer I touched on in the last question um but one that I didn't get to say and you kind of activated it since um with the mention of Rocket pool actually I am really interested in what's happening with things like eigenlayer where we're saying we've got this this one really strong flywheel in the heart of East staking this kind of economic engine that you could attach other things to and I think just like you saw some with merge mining back in the day like the possibility space there does seem interesting it's still very early of course but I think that could be really cool and I want to see how that develops and you know maybe add add a few merit badges to my home staking quiver uh the other thing that I would mention a little bit more from a kind of user experience standpoint and this could type back into base as well um not a new insight but I use my desktop computer on my laptop almost exclusively to interact with all these protocols today um it's a pretty bad experience on average on the phone and that's an outlier right like all the normal people out there in the world have made the jump every web 2 startup is is building for mobile first or mobile only and we're still back here and there's a complex web of reasons for that and I get that but I do think that if we're approaching a moment with things like base where we say hey we might get a pop of a few more tens of millions hopefully of less experienced users first time crypto on-chain users D5 users I think really taking up the mantle this year and saying let's meet them where they are on their phones and make that a great experience I do think that it's an obvious thing in a lot of ways it's really annoying to actually get right but there's a lot of value still waiting to be unlocked behind those phones last question here I have no idea how long we're supposed to talk talk for but I think we're supposed to wrap it up at some point soon um so I guess last question like if there's one thing that you want everyone in this room to take away just whether it comes whether it's about like the engineering team at coinbase or base or onboarding the next cohort of people what what's what's that thing that you want folks to walk away from this with I would say for the eat Denver audience there's so much I could say maybe one thing I'd want folks to take away that I've been noodling about lately is this sense of centralized is not the opposite of decentralized it's not matter in antimatter in opposition to each other and what I see like how coinbase is orienting toward building more and more on chain I think we're just the first of many you're going to see and the the vision that I think we should all work toward is actually we're going to when when web3 when blockchain when crypto takes over the world it's going to feel not like it burns the whole world down and replaces it it's going to feel like it merges with the world and we're going to have this large decentralized web connecting all of us with actors within it that are large centralized companies that are individuals that are Dows and Collective movements and there's room for all of that to play and so I really I felt the love and the warm welcome here at East Denver and I really appreciate that and I want to keep that momentum going um so thank you all very much now you will thanks everyone [Applause]