Onchain is the Next Online with Jesse Pollak, Konstantin, and Chris Sharp

hello hello everybody gather round gather round we're about to have a great panel Clara's gonna introduce us hello everyone please quiet down we're about to have a very exciting panel start this panel is on on chain is the next online and we have some of the most foremost experts in the space all gathered here to talk about this topic so we have Constantine who's the CEO and founder of block demon we have Jesse who is the head of protocols at coinbase and then it's going to be moderated by Chris sharp who's the CTO at black demon so please welcome our extraordinary panelists here today and we'll kick it off yeah hello yo dude this makes not work hello hello oh it does can you guys hear me oh great okay okay well Chris you wanna yeah I'll kick us off here um maybe what I'll do is I'll start by introducing myself and then um I'll get Jesse and Constantine to talk just give a little bit of their background um I'm Chris CTO at block demon I started uh just uh it feels like 10 years ago but it's really only been a year prior to that I was at Apple for 23 years and had built this little thing called Apple pay which was awesome and just having so much fun in the space I love working with Constantine Jesse is amazing this is actually a really awesome place to be right here right now um we're gonna hear from these guys and this is actually I I look at it as a privilege to be able to talk to these guys because these are the guys that are thinking about things that we haven't even considered these guys are literally like five steps ahead of the rest of us and this little intimate audience is going to have an opportunity to listen to some forward-looking really in-depth interesting things so I'm gonna actually just turn it over to Constantine if you could do a quick introduction of yourself and then we'll do the same with Jesse and then I'll get started with some questions yeah totally and I kind of start also I'm going to add a couple of sentences about base which is really sort of the elephant in the room when we talk about on chain is obviously based and so I'm the CEO and founder of block demon we started blockchainment five years ago to help institutions to ultimately connect to D5 which at the time was dedicated notes right and so over the last five years we've become the uh well I don't know the largest but maybe the second largest in the in the full node organization we run 85 000 nodes the only other company that probably has a similar footprint at this point in time is coinbase and the reason why we run so many notes is that we were always really concerned about Network performance and decentralization and so we run these nodes around 70 data centers and we really wanted to make sure that the compute infrastructure is decentralized now our viewers that we see a sea change we think there's sufficient compute around the world powering l1s we think that the economical incentives that are underpinning this infrastructure is often misaligned and not really serving the the purpose of these chains and so block Demon's vision is to lift our stack of our sort of the hard-coded infrastructure onto an L2 the other big thing is that we think transactions and the user experience at this point is really the the the the the the the perspective you need to put into this and for the user the only sense it D5 makes is if it happens on chain that means that people need to be able to swap tokens from one to another seamlessly without intermediaries and it translates to Auto staking tokens need to natively do what they do best consumers really shouldn't be burdened with any of that it also involves encryption and NPC because key management needs to be a lot simpler and so for us when we met Jesse and coinbase and talked about bass we found the fellow Spirits where we saw that they want to take base into something much more revolutionary than it initially seems and for Block demon that's a seizure change in our strategy how we see ourselves and also how we want to continue to operate in the space so super excited to be here Jesse congratulations also the base launch was uh outstanding and uh you know really a real privilege to have you here thank you hey everyone that was too kind uh I'm Jesse I've been at coinbase for six years spent four and a half years growing all of our retail consumer facing businesses and then the last two years has been trying to figure out how do we bring a Fortune 500 centralized business on chain and out the other side of what was a lot of wandering in the desert in a large organization trying to figure that out came base and base is really the platform it's it's an ethereum L2 and our goal with it is to make on-chain the next online bring coinbase's business entirely online and then on chain and then alongside our business create an ecosystem that can bring millions of developers and billions of users on chain over the next two years so you know block Damon have been incredible Partners they had nodes for the test net on Day Zero um uh and we're excited to keep building with them in the years ahead awesome thank you both very much all right let's get started here so the title of this is on chain is the next online and that sounds really simple but you guys have obviously been thinking about this for a long time and and what does that mean and so maybe I'll start with Jesse and if you could just tell me like that little simple catchphrase what does that mean to you and and and and and then I'll and then we'll have Constantine answer the same question yeah so if you look at the history of kind of Technology over the last 40 years I think what you'll see is that pre-internet you had you still had developers but in many ways they were building in silos and when you look at the two key things information and money pre the internet both of those were things that were gate kept if you wanted to distribute information to a large part of the world you had to go through centralized news organizations if you wanted to create a money product you had to go through banks hello hello and then around came the internet and for the first time information lost the Gatekeepers now it's the early 2000s mid-2000s and anyone anywhere can build an application that can reach anyone anywhere in the world and that was this insane change in the way we build uh and developers everywhere got 10x 100x 1000x more leverage more distribution more impact and it was incredible and that's what you know has made it so we can have this live stream and we can all be here right now talking while everyone else on the Internet is communicating with us over Twitter and still money has been gate kept and that's meant that that ability to build applications for everyone everywhere doesn't exist for every kind of application and I think our thesis is that right now we are sitting at the beginning or you know a little bit into what is about to be the same level of Paradigm Shift where literally the entire world is going to be re-platformed over the next 10 years from the online platform to the on-chain platform and the powerful thing about that on-chain platform is that for the first time money and value is going to be able to be built by anyone anyone anywhere can build an application like uniswap like Ave like chain link like uh you know the cross chain liquidity stuff that block Damon's talking about that can reach anyone else in the world with money and that is just this it's a revolution and we're you know here as developers getting to be at the heart of that Revolution getting to make the change actually happen yeah um I uh everything Jesse said I think one thing when you've been in crypto for a little bit the the weird thing for me is that we started thinking about l2s like a year ago really when Chris joined us from Apple and I'm so giddy with excitement at this phase of our industry which is sort of kind of weird because people are so focused on token prices and what happens elsewhere and I have this dichotomy where I feel like this is probably the biggest shift um in crypto that we had in a very long time and because it brings us so much closer uh to where we need to be the success of crypto requires a crisis and it requires problems to become more visible so that we can ultimately put stuff on chain over time and so it's like the perfect time to move on to this transition and uh so from a sort of I'm air quoting a crypto bro perspective uh this is what the one of the most exciting times in my career in cryptos to be here today and actually see tangible solution and software that actually does that right and when you build stuff it's super easy to talk like when we started with crypto around like what this can be and to actually have a product roadmap that is tangible monthly and monthly iteration to bring that to life is super exciting for us on chain and then I um I'll start but uh you know it's like for example for Block team and what that means is the sort of cross-chain mesh Network kind of running router sequencers like enabling uh you know every train to interact which is other seamlessly for the user and so um really to avoid also middleman within those Frameworks right and so I think it's a really really exciting a change and there's been a lot of companies working on that as well for a long time liquid staking pools have been addressing this there's a lot of great bridging companies and so it's kind of bringing all of these together ultimately to serve a normal end user with a wallet that does these things all automatically and very simply yeah and I'll just plus one the excitement about this moment I don't know how many people here were around in 2018 2019 the last bear Market there was like nothing going on we had like kind of crypto kitties um and and people are saying we're a bear market right now what I say is we're in a builder market like literally look at this place there are 25 000 people here building incredible applications every day it feels like there's new innovation we are at the beginning of the on-chain Revolution that's going to transform our world absolutely but I mean just for the audience let's go like take a step back for a moment and like I want to hear from both of you this time I'll start with Constantine why does on chain matter like like and how does bass um fit into that sort of narrative yeah I I feel like again you have to look at it from an end user perspective so there's two angles on how I think about it one on chain obviously creates transparency which is obviously something we've need uh I think what's interesting in the last year there's been so many so much talk about how crypto is failing um crypto obviously is not failing what's failing is centralized institutions and the way to fix it is to move everything on chain right like and so if a exchange like FDX had every transaction on chain everything would be recorded visible uh and we wouldn't have had that problem right and so I just want to uh so obviously the timing for on chain is perfect because of that narrative it also really plays into the whole kind of regulatory discussions right now right like one thing we need to change is the whole dialogue around speculative tokens powering infrastructure for example and and a lot of that has there's a different subject but um so so on chain is a transparency thing and then I think it's also conceptual holistic with NPC and cryptography because you know you can't like if you have perfect encryption and you really want to empower users to self-custody over time uh you also need to make sure everything is very transparent like one without the other doesn't really work right so I think the promise I'm on chain also is that it really will allow people over time to be self-custodians um and and and believe in what they see right and so that's really a requirement that kind of to me complement each other yeah huge plus one to the transparency aspect I think that's total Downstream impact of unchain I mean the thing that gets me most excited about on chain is literally how much leverage you can get from building on chain you look at a product like uniswap uniswap the original version of uniswap was built by one person and they built a global decentralized exchange that has moved billions and billions and billions of dollars of transactions the users of the swap V3 that we used today was built by five people and they built again a global exchange that has facilitated trillions of dollars of transactions if you look at what it would take to build a centralized exchange and you know I've been building a centralized exchange for the last six years you don't build a centralized exchange with five people it's literally impossible you need tens you need hundreds of people and I think what that illustrates is that the the developers the builders the people in this room who are building on chain you can literally have 10x the impact because you are building on a platform that is global from day one where the identity Primitives are solved in many ways because you have wallets that are self-custodial where you have payment rails built in by default so you don't have to do all this crazy integration work with the Legacy systems or a financial system that leverage means that the 25 000 people here are not just going to be able to build you know the 25 000 things that they would have in web 2 they're gonna be able to build to 25 000 things and then they're gonna be able to build another 250 000 things and that amount of impact I just don't think the world is ready for like I feel like this is this kind of uh closely kept secret in crypto where all of us who are actually Building on-chain Products know that we can be 10 times more impactful than anyone else but no one else does and I think over the next few years what we're going to see is the World's Gonna wake up to that and they're going to be like holy crap like wow the world is going to change faster than we expect I love both of your answers scale transparency leads to financial inclusion this is beautiful this is absolutely amazing we're building a Global crypto economy that's going to increase economic freedom and bring a billion people into a better version of their life yeah let that sink in for a moment that's I mean this is this is phenomenal maybe I can start with the next question with Jesse um we talked about the importance of on chain we get transparency we get scalability we have the ability to really truly impact and make people's lives better are there areas that you could talk about or be willing to talk about that coinbase is thinking about moving on chain and maybe some low-hanging fruits some things that that we you know that we could kind of you know get our get our whistles wet with yeah absolutely and I think if you look at the history of coinbase we started in 2012 as a web 2 company there was no on-chain platform then there were no smart contracts there was no ethereum and then over the last 11 years we've been trying to transform the business you know and that started in 2018 with usdc which is you know the most trusted stable coin in the world coinbase wallet CBE the DAP wallet um but if you look at our portfolio today at coinbase I'd say that it's about 10 on chain that's things like uscc CBE coinbase wallet and 90 on off chain and our goal over the next five to ten years is to make it 100 on chain so everything everything's coming on chain the the thing that I'm personally most excited about right now I think is stable coins I think if you look at what what's possible over the next year I think there's a pretty clear path for us to have stable coin transfers on base that are totally free for people who have a proof of humanity so if you have a Bitcoin passport or you have a coinbase Identity or you have anything that says you're a real human we can make it possible for you to transfer dollars or other stable coins to anyone else anywhere in the world globally for free and that's a result of better identity better wallets and low-cost l2s and to me like how how many people here have had problems transferring money to another person because they don't have the same app we got some hands up you know how many people have sent money to your family in another country and had to pay 10 10 20 30 like the world is not ready for us to have a global settlement layer that has programmable money that is subset transactions that anyone anywhere can use with transparency and we obviously have to solve the Privacy problems around that but I think like stable coins are obviously a huge huge um focus for us awesome thank you Jesse next question is um you know Constantine where do you see block team in playing a role in l2s over time yeah sure so first off so if I could dream like what I would hope we get to achieve with base and you know obviously this is all early and like where every group there's a lot of stuff to figure out is uh one thing I've seen because we run really three distinct products which is transaction enabled apis we run staking liquid staking uh and we run sort of on-prem wallet Tech and so we're working on combining everything our mission is to bring institutions safely onto crypto so different to coinbase um you know we're helping other institutions who want to you know test the waters here but for us the the bigger thing is I want to also fix some of the current infrastructure Problems by allowing larger institutions for example theoretically to run nodes on base and get a fixed fee reward so what I would like to do is also change a little bit the current model we have around speculation around staking into a model where there's more fixed fee for solid node operation and so we can also start bringing institutions into running these nodes so we don't have to do it right and so block team that's kind of blocked him on us so I'm not saying like I would love to stop doing that mostly because I think now our role has changed you know like I think the infrastructure is ready for that and so on an L2 layer it's enabling institutions to participate running notes on l2s is one way and then the other way is on top of it which is cross-chain liquidity right and so an enabling and decentralizing uh the router and sequencer ecosystem over time and so for us that's a sort of native approach really that's in sync with our mission and uh yeah that's why we're excited about it yeah yeah thanks we'll get just another one more question but I I would say to say that block team and we feel like stewards of decentralization and and carrying that forward and making sure that all of the promise of transparency is something that we can all realize all right last question um maybe I'll start with Jesse in five years where do you see coinbase if you can answer that and then same question but for Block demon um I I'm singularly focused on two goals bringing one billion million builders on chains so we can have a billion users on chain and my I'm ambitious I'm like a million builders in 2023 a billion users in 2024. people look at me and say I'm crazy but then you look at other viral growth stories and it's not insane we just have been I think collectively traumatized over the last 10 years because crypto actually hasn't been that useful but crypto is about to be useful I think it's already being useful for huge parts of the world and over the next 10 uh two years as we drive down fees as we make it easier for developers to build as we make it easier for users to use that utility is going to shine through and it's going to stop being this thing that's esoteric and start being this thing that makes a real world impact on everyone's life so that's that's it for me a million Builders a billion users we will not stop until we get there yeah for us it's democratizing compute power and we want to bring any every financial institution in the world safely onto crypto rails and so uh you know in five years what I hope is that block time is just a sort of sliver of a software that runs silently in the background ensuring that institutions find safe pathways through the wonderful beauty of defy you know and so um yeah that's uh what we're dedicated to well it's been humbling to be on stage with both of you just such Juggernauts and amazing thought leaders here so thank you guys so much thanks for having us two shout outs three shout outs if you want to come learn more about base come to the basement it's over there it's in the basement it's actually called home base but you follow the green thing down the stairs two if you want to build on basebase.org full documentation test that went live last Thursday we've already had tens of thousands of people deploy contracts on base and three if you want to participate in base you can mint the commemorative base nft we've had I think 420 000 mints the largest open Edition mint ever mint.base.org thanks guys [Applause] [Music]