Good afternoon everybody. I hope everyone has enjoyed today so far. Uh we've seen some pretty incredible talks from some real innovative thinkers and I'm glad to see they've saved all the best ones for last. Uh my name is Angus or Lamps. I lead the Stargate Foundation.
Our purpose is to serve and support the Stargate DAO and Stargate protocol. I would say we're a small and growing team supporting a a large and growing protocol that's trying to tackle some of the biggest issues in DeFi today. For those who may not know, Stargate Finance is currently the largest bridge in DeFi by volume and by users. It has done over $30 billion in lifetime volume, never lost a single dollar of value. Its goal is to become the composable liquidity layer that lives at the heart of omnichain DeFi.
Um it was the first and still is the largest application built on top of LayerZero. And I think that's it for today. That's as far as I'll go into about who I am and and what Stargate is. I want to spend today focusing more on why Stargate is. Why is it important that we have universal composable liquidity?
What is it? How do we achieve it? Does it even matter and if so, what does it unlock? Um and what are the stepping stones that we can take to tide us over until we have full synchronous composability? So, I don't think I have to spend any time today either on what Ethereum was built for or why we're all here in this room.
I think the truth that we can all agree on is that Ethereum and its ecosystem have grown faster than it could scale. And while that's a beautiful thing, it has also led us to the world we're in today, which is the roll-up centric future or the roll-up centric now. Um and there's some other speakers who spoke about this earlier. I pulled the numbers this morning from L2Beat and there are apparently 45 active roll-ups or L2s and 34 upcoming. Uh 11 that have already been archived and stopped producing blocks with tens of millions of dollars of liquidity sat within them.
And um apparently only four L3s, but I think I've personally spoken to at least 40 or 50 and there are probably 10 to 20 in this room as well. So, each of these, of course, have their own advantages, their own tradeoffs. Um their own applications that exist in this siloed execution environment of cheap, fast, and scalable UX. Some of them give you yield just for hanging out in their ecosystem. Some of them are gasless.
Some of them enforce royalties. And the quite brilliant part, I suppose, is that all of them work for the most part. The roll-up centric roadmap is a beautiful trial by fire and scalable innovation and we're doing just fine. The issue with these isolated execution environments is that the liquidity fragmentation that comes along with it. It creates broken interoperability.
It creates a disjointed user experience. And frankly, it's just an onboarding nightmare. So, what is the actual issue that we face? We have L2A that can't communicate with L2B or its associated L3s. You can use some of the current messaging standards like LayerZero to pass information from A to B and sometimes back again.
You can achieve some semblance of interoperability, but what we do not have is universal synchronous composability. Yeah, of course. Our problems today manifest in a cacophony of wrapped assets, an abundance of asynchronous execution, uh and a frankly daunting surplus of bridges both canonical and third party. I think we've heard enough about the various bridge hacks of 2022, the various bridge hacks of 2023, and unfortunately already the various bridge hacks of 2024. So, I won't dwell on them, but the issues these issues and and the bridge hacks are eroding the very underpinnings that made Ethereum so wonderful in the first place.
So, I can no longer withdraw my capital from Aave and go farm some new DEX LP pair because that DEX sits in another stack and there isn't a bridge that I trust that I would move used to move my liquidity over. Uh or maybe there isn't a bridge at all. And so, I'd have to do some sort of multi-hop between various aggregators and use some wrapped assets in between and I need to maintain a multi-chain account with multiple gas tokens on all of these chains. And while I may be willing to do it and the rest of my DJN Telegram chat are willing to do do it, my normie girlfriend and her mother probably are not. And so, native bridges are slow for the right reasons.
They should be slow and they're built to be slow, but um they are probably too slow. And so, there is this inevitable finality risk of reorgs on certain chains and who should bear this risk and how should it be priced against time? These are questions that must feed into the design decisions that we make when thinking about how to solve liquidity fragmentation. Uh I don't think there's a perfect answer and even if there was, it would probably look different in 3 years' time or probably 3 months' time. So, the the fragmentation that we're seeing at the moment, I think, is temporary and is arguably necessary to continue the onboarding of both users and developers.
But where do we actually go from here? Um I think third-party bridges go a long way in improving unified liquidity. Some are fast. Some are secure. Some do particular routes very, very well, but not others.
But I think bridges typically over-index on one of these desirable features, sacrificing scalability for specialization or sacrificing security for a better UX, sacrificing decentralization for an increase in speed in the order of seconds. Bringing things like intents, off-chain relayers, off-chain fillers into the mix leads to an oligopolistic market structure with prohibitively high entry costs and information barriers that would probably have Adam Smith rolling in his grave. I'm all aboard with the high standards for UX, but we're competing with a financial system that optimistically reflects what is actually a T+2 day time period without any true mathematical rigor. And so, expecting cross-chain finality on the order of milliseconds is not reflective of the state that I think we're in today. We still sometimes settle for 7 days of asynchronous state.
So, latency over time, I think, will trend to zero, but I do not think that we are there yet. And all of this is to say I think we should be wary of running before we can walk. Ethereum mainnet is intentionally slow in development and in its upgrades. You want as much ossification and as few breaking changes as possible to ensure the long-term sustainability of the ecosystem. And this goes back to the point that I made a couple slides ago.
The the roll-up centric roadmap is rife with innovation and that is exactly where this innovation can happen freely on roll-ups, whether ZK or optimistic. And we can experiment and learn and then experiment again. I would also be remiss not to mention some of the incredible research that's going on into some of the technical solutions to solve the fragmented liquidity. Um I think the number of teams and core development groups and foundations that are working on things like shared sequencing is proof enough not only of its complexity, but also of its potential. And so, the goal is lofty, but to provide users with an entirely abstract experience is something that we're all striving for.
A user interacting with one or more execution environments without the knowledge of what this execution environment is or without the knowledge of where which app which chain that application sits on is something close to an end state that I think we could all expect or all be proud of. And unfortunately, as I think Justin Drake mentioned earlier today and various other groups have alluded to, uh it's a difficult challenge and it is some amount of time away. It is also, in and of itself, not enough to provide pure universal universal synchronous composability. But the research is truly amazing. So, real-time universal synchronous composability and settlement can occur with real-time production and processing of SNARKs in a zero-knowledge environment, which we know how to do theoretically.
Um and I should probably point out, I mean, we collectively as the minds in this room, not me personally. Um but this is also some time away. We want to reach parallelization in recursive proofs. We are trying to We're seeing impressive hardware steps of of SNARK ASICs, but as I said, there there is some time to go. And so, these solutions are incredible technical discoveries, um but we're unfortunately faced with the liquidity challenges today and and hundreds of roll-ups today.
And so, where does that leave us? And I think bridges that we have today are a step in the right direction. They are a stepping stone towards our ultimate destination. When building Stargate, we made great leaps towards that destination. Um we wanted to stick to the values of trustlessness, removing wrapped assets, and removing this idea of trust to the user.
It was a bridge built with native assets, validations and proofs happening on chain, a novel on chain accounting mechanism that ensured guaranteed finality in the Delta algorithm. Um what this means is that when a when a user's source transaction goes through, they are guaranteed to receive those assets on destination in native stablecoins. Never once has a user initiated a swap of 1,000 USDC and received anything but 1,000 USDC on destination. And um this has all been running entirely immutably on chain for 2 days shy of 2 years now. Uh but the 17th of March 2022 was a very different time in the world and a very different time in crypto and the Ethereum ecosystem.
We launched on seven chains. We've scaled to 15 and we are now faced with hundreds. So, we've been working incredibly hard on Stargate V2. With all of these challenges that I've spoken about in mind, we are building for the user who's having their first experience in DeFi. We are also building for the user who wants to farm every new DEX on every new chain.
We are building for the developer who wants to abstract liquidity and bridging away entirely from their users' experience. We are building for the roll-up who is facing a cold start liquidity problem and wants access to users and liquidity but doesn't want to pay for them and shouldn't have to. Most importantly, I think we're building to be immutable. We're building to be censorship censorship-resistant and we are building to scale up and down with the ecosystem around us. So, Stargate V2 will be all of the incredible things that Stargate V1 was and Stargate V2 will be soon.
So, I think every challenge that we face in our collective journey is an opportunity to reinforce our values of innovation and decentralization. You will never hear us claim that we are the one-size-fits-all solution to that will take us to the end game. We are merely stone that will help take us to that destination. We are here to build a protocol that is aligned and a protocol that scales. Um and we will continue to iterate not for the sake of innovation but to improve interoperability, to bring the world on chain reliably and immutably.
And so, if I can end with one thing, I would end with uh one of the values that I think has been a core part of ETHGlobal and Pragma, uh which is that we can go further together than we can alone. So, if there's one thing I hope you take away from today, then it's that. Thank you.
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.