BFFs: Bitcoin and Ethereum | Kyle Langham - DFINITY

everyone I'm going to talk about the topic nobody here is talking about today that is the 199s early 2000 sitcom Friends we got any friends fans one two all right well so here's the thing if you don't know friends it was a very popular TV show in the 1990s it followed six uh characters in New York City and it focused the two main characters Ross and Rachel had a very much of a will they or won't they relationship and spoil Alert in the end they they do get together but I think that their relationship is very similar to the relationship we're seeing with Bitcoin and ethereum so now hear me out Ross in the show was very analytical he was stuck in his routines he was overly serious he was focused on his work kind of sounds a little bit like Bitcoin right now think about Rachel she worked at a coffee shop she was a free spirit she evolved throughout the course of the show you know she she was always up for a good time sounds a lot like ethereum right and so I think we can tell a romcom story where Bitcoin and ethereum are the main characters right so like any good romcom story you first establish the characters let's say Bitcoin is working on Wall Street he's stuck you know he's stuck in his routines he's working a lot he's always talking about the proof of his work he's um you know he's he's got his eyes on a promotion to the ETF Department right so that's character number one character number two ethereum she's working at a coffee shop she's meeting a lot of people she's got a wide Network a lot of friends um she doesn't you know she's she's up for a good time she's she's hanging out and what we're establishing in this romcom is you always have to get these two characters where the viewers of the romcom are like well how are these going to how are these characters going to get together and then something happens to bring them together that something is 2023 so Bitcoin in 2023 he's working on his wall Street job he's hanging out um he's he's real serious about working and he's he's going for that um going for that promotion and all of a sudden he decides to get a tattoo maybe like a little monkey jpeg or a pet rock right he's got his eyes set on wizard in addition to that he starts getting uh getting a little bit of a token habit like a little brc2 here a little brc2 there and before he knows it 2024 is around he's just got his big promotion to the ETF and he feels like he's living a double life right he's trying to hide from his Wall Street colleagues his um tattoos and his token problem in short Bitcoin is becoming more like ethereum now ethereum on the other hand in 2023 she's she's still funloving but she's starting to talk about some more boring topics like deflationary tokenomics store of value she herself is looking to get into an ETF department ethereum is becoming a little bit more like Bitcoin and we start to see in the romcom the shaping of a story now let's take a pause from the romcom because I want to talk about something the there's if you think that this is a story about tokens you're wrong a good relationship is not based on financial transactions right nobody here I can't imagine anyone here would say your partner is really just somebody to help share your rent or just somebody to follow your taxes with maybe maybe some will the um the main point though is that a relationship a good relationship is based on positive shared experiences and I think it's possible for us to start having good experiences between Bitcoin and ethereum I'm talking about like a unified user experience so that um so that the the experience of using Bitcoin and ethereum in a single app is extremely seamless but let's put a pin in that because we got to return back to our romcom all right so we're we're um we're at the point in the romcom where these two characters are becoming a little bit more similar and typically in a com you'll have a friend who comes along to bring these two together typically in a uh a Whimsical way oh that's unfortunate there we go and uh so so who's that friend who's going to be the Monica of Bitcoin and ethereum story I'm going to hold up to you it's the internet computer so the internet computer uh has been friends with Bitcoin for a while actually in 2022 we completed a direct native of Bitcoin integration there's since 2022 there's literally been a Bitcoin node running on the internet computer protocol capable of reading the Bitcoin State and signing transactions using chain key technology in addition to that the internet computer recently completed an integration through evm RPC with ethereum that just went live or that went uh into beta about two weeks ago so now on the internet computer you can deploy smart contracts that can read and write to bitcoin and can read and write to ethereum including the ethereum ecosystem EVMS l2s and that gets us back to that positive shared experience that means that you can deploy apps that can interface with Bitcoin and ethereum in such a way that your users don't even have to know that that interface is going on the from the user experience it can be very seamless so if we want to tell this romcom because right now we're in present day in our story but developers get to tell the rest of the story right how do ethereum and Bitcoin Truly Come Together that's your story to tell and I think what we want to do is I want to establish again what that can look like on a very basic level it could look like um having inside your app the ability to accept eth or any uh you know any L2 token as well as Bitcoin native Bitcoin or um some sort of synthetic Bitcoin you you could for example have um an ordinals Marketplace that accepts eth as payment or a ethereum app that accepts Bitcoin natively as a payment that's possible today but we can go even beyond that we can go into a place um actually let's if we Zoom back uh go to when think back to when the uh friends series was ending that was around the mid 2000s and around that time the Internet was developed enough that you could have a um you could you could share your location via GPS online you could have instant chat online you could have credit card payments online but it took entrepreneurs to realize that if you combine those three properties into a single app you can disrupt the taxi industry right so obviously Uber and Lyft recognized those three properties of the internet combined them into a single app and not only not only disrupted the taxi industry but actually kicked off an entire Market segment uh that we call the gig economy if you zoom back and you think about all of this integration that is possible on the internet computer you can actually think about um unique properties with each of the chains that it's integrated with for example on bitcoin uh you could think of it just as a ledger which most people do you know with a token or you could think about it as the fact that it has a unique property of you pay once and you can store a small amount of data forever it also has a unique property that if if you think of it as a database it is probably the database that will outlive all databases that exist today just from its decentralized nature in ethereum you have so many different evbm and L2 chains each with a specific optimization that you can now tap into not just one of those chains but multiple chains optimation to make apps that are truly novel today and that's what I mean when we get um when that's what I mean by getting Bitcoin and ethereum together uh that's what I mean by telling this this love story between Bitcoin and ethereum so think just through like what is possible from an Innovative standpoint if um so you guys get to tell the story you guys build the apps that bring these two chains together if you build them on the Internet computer like I said you can one framework um uh integrate with uh many chains and if I could offer a couple piece of pieces of advice one is focus on user experience like I said it is now possible to have a multi-chain world with a very seamless user experience right you can abstract away a lot of the complexity that we currently present to our users within web 3 and it's very important that web 3 become uh competitive on a user experience with web 2 right if you want Mass adoption it's not going to come until we are uh half parody with web 2 experiences so make it easy on your users open up your apps to all communities and make it seamless for them to to to jump onto your app um number two innovate think through how each blockchain has a uh each blockchain has a um has a set of properties that make it unique and use that to develop new apps that aren't currently ex currently existing extend what crypto does today right we can go beyond dii we can go beyond nfts we can go be Beyond uh social apps whatever you want to do number three we're at an opportunity where we can end tribalism right that's probably AIT a bit of a problem within our industry uh if you're building multi-chain apps if you're bringing Bitcoin and ethereum together you can you can make it so that your app is applicable to to any user Community right you can accept uh any of the layer 2s EVMS and the Bitcoin communities and make it so that you don't have to force your users to choose whether or not uh your app is applicable to them based on the you know the the uh chain you deploy to and then number three again it is possible or number four is is possible to leverage Bitcoin and the entire ethereum ecosystem liquidity and us your community within your app that's extremely powerful it's possible I'm not I'm not pitching you a vision for the future I'm pitch pitching you a vision for today it's possible possible today on the internet computer if you'd like to learn some more we have the definity booth actually just around the corner here or you can learn more on internetcomputer dorg thank [Applause] you