**A** (0:00):
We were talking before we got started and she was kindly asking how she should introduce me and I was like, I run a four minute mile. I am, yes, I'm the fastest here in the conference.
**B** (0:14):
I am defi.
**A** (0:16):
All right, well, hey, thanks for joining us everyone. I'm gonna. Here we go. Yeah, I'm Defi Dad. I'm a longtime Defi super user, so it's just a privilege for me to get to talk with these folks who are building at the bleeding edge of Multi Chain Defi. We're gonna talk mostly today about, yeah, the importance of Multi Chain Defi. I feel like years ago when There was like 10 protocols live on Ethereum, it was easy to be able to focus our attention on just those 10 protocols. But now, you know, we've matured and grown and grown beyond ETH and we've got ETH L2s and we've got every other, you know, chain under the sun. And so anyways, let's, let's walk through this. So we've got Will, who is truly like One of the OG DeFi builders. From Zero X. We have Sunny. Another just Sunny needs no introduction, but I guess best to say he is from Osmosis. We have Maria from Summer Fi, another just Mega Defi platform. And then we have Jelena. Oh my gosh, sorry, I almost mispronounced your name. Jelena from Noble, which actually, why don't we just kick off with you, Yelena, since I nearly forgot your name and introduced myself.
**B** (1:35):
No, it's okay.
**A** (1:37):
Can we talk a little bit about just some of the area we see or some of the improvements, opportunities for improvements or challenges in Multi Chain Defi? And just how are you thinking to address that from Noble's perspective?
**B** (1:52):
Definitely. So I'll start off with an introduction on Noble. So Noble is a Cosmos app chain. We are built to do native asset issuance. So in Cosmos for a long time we've had challenges with liquidity, fragmentation, ux, challenges around bridged assets, and back in the day we even had ust, which is actually the native stablecoin that Terra obviously put out. And when that went to zero, there was a huge, huge hole kind of left in the ecosystem of no native stablecoins. So Noble was built to address that concern and work with asset issuers to bring them to Cosmos. So we brought native USDC to Cosmos. We've done in the last four months, 165 million USDC minted. We do about half a billion in transaction volume to various Cosmo chains, such as of course, OSMOSIS mdydx and Kujira and and many other chains. So we see app chains taking off as a development framework for builders. If you have something as successful as Uniswap, it makes a lot of sense to build a Uniswap chain. Maybe we'll see more of that in the future. And yeah, Noble is really built to facilitate that development and to bring more users to Cosmos. So there's a lot of challenges, but maybe I'll just pause there and hear what the.
**A** (3:10):
If anyone wants to chime in on that before I prompt one of you with another question. If anyone wants to weigh in, go right ahead.
**C** (3:16):
Yeah, I can go if you guys mind. So I'm. Yeah, Maria. And yeah, summerfi, as dad just told, is a platform to access basically the main lending defi protocols. And why I'm here because we started as the basically front end of MakerDAO and we were born in maker and then we moved away after decentralization and now we are hosting five different protocols on four different chains. So that's why I'm here. We helped the growth of the multi chain system. Now we offer the products on the mainnet Arbitrum, optimism and base. And yeah, and you can access basically maker Ave Spark, ajna, which is a pretty new protocol and Morpho Blue. So yeah.
**A** (4:21):
Will, how do you think about, you know, I guess addressing the needs of us as multi chain defi users through the lens of zero X? Because when I think about when you started zero X, I remember just there were very few decentralized exchanges. I mean you, you were like building ahead of its time. And I'd like to think like a part of the world we live in now was clearly the benefits downstream of all that fundamental work you guys were doing. So I'm curious like now as one of one of the few Defi founders who's still, you know, full time committed to his or her original protocol, what's occupying your time? Where do you focus your time and attention?
**D** (5:02):
Yeah, well, so I guess kind of the core kind of thesis that motivated all of our work going Back to like 2017 Is this idea that all forms of value will be tokenized on public blockchains. So billions of tokenized assets ranging from stocks and bonds, fiat currencies, video game items, airline miles, and even abstract forms of value that you couldn't really, you know, represent in any sort of digital form before. And for us, we were really focused on how do we build the infrastructure that will allow anyone to access tokenized value in a peer to Peer way using a decentralized exchange protocol. And one of the things that's been really interesting over the years is as you mentioned, a lot of the early activity, a lot of the early product market fit was on the Ethereum blockchain. And as there was more and more users, there's more people building things use cases on top of Ethereum. It got so expensive to use the block space could not support the demand for throughput and transactions. And so you have people that are paying $80 or $100 just to do a transaction on the Ethereum blockchain. And that's not really consistent with our vision of creating a tokenized world where it doesn't really matter where you happen to be born or located, you can tap into this globally accessible markets. And so eventually we kind of got to the point where we users were being kind of forced to spill over off of Ethereum onto these other networks, whether they're layer ones or layer twos. And fortunately now we're also seeing like a lot of adoption on like non EVM blockchains as well, which is really exciting. And this was a necessary step for us to be able to go from maybe supporting a million different users, kind of technology enthusiasts, to actually being able to support real world use cases, global payments, global financial services, millions and millions of people. So it was great, great seeing you know, this kind of transition to a multi chain world because it allows way more people to utilize all of these different technologies that we're building. But at the same time it created immense fragmentation. So you have, you know, one of the things that I feel like is kind of like a textbook example of like one of the annoying things that comes with like multi chain defi until recently was having a different version of the USDC token on every single blockchain. So you have like eight or nine different versions of usdc. None of them are fungible or compatible with one another really. So you have a different USDC token on every single blockchain. And for end users this is just kind of a non starter. And so more recently we've started seeing things like cross chain transfer protocol by circle, so allowing you to have a single kind of canonical version of USDC that you can seamlessly move between blockchains and you kind of avoid all of the risks that come with bridging and so forth. And so I would say you know, more recently our focus has been how do we eliminate the complexity of accessing tokens and dex liquidity across this multi chain ecosystem that we have today. And so we have, you know, we, we, we're building developer APIs that make it really easy for you to essentially access any token and allow your users to swap tokens within your, your application. Uh, we're also building a consumer product called Matcha which is intended to make it really easy for you to find any token. We support over 5 million tokens across 8 EVM blockchains and to get any of those tokens at the best possible price by aggregating Dex liquidity. And so yeah, recently a lot of our focus is on how do we make this multi chain ecosystem something that is accessible to a wider audience.
**A** (9:34):
I think this is a great lead in for you Sunny, because I mean you've been at the forefront of, of multi chain defi last cycle. I mean I remember the osmosis launch and it was just exciting to see, I wanna say such like a powerful primitive attract all the trading volume that it did and it continues to be kind of an epicenter of all the different chains in Cosmos. So how are you thinking about the UX challenges that you're solving for us as DEFI users with osmosis?
**E** (10:04):
Yeah, sure. Really briefly on what osmosis is trying to accomplish. I think most DEXs today are very focused on providing infrastructure for a specific chain, right? Like you have multiple uniswap deployments on each chain and they're mostly focused on trading the assets of that chain. But when you look and largely within EVM ecosystems, right? When you look at most volumes on centralized exchanges, they're usually between like the L1 assets of different chains and different ecosystems. And that's where you know, if we really want to like compete against centralized exchanges, that's the volumes that we need to capture. How do you go from trading Bitcoin to ETH to SOL to XRP to Doge, right? And that's kind of where Osmosis has really been focused on is how do we provide this like interchange Dex. You know, we want to be the Switzerland of Dexes and connect everywhere, right? So we are connected to I think over 50 blockchains right now, a lot of Cosmos SDK based blockchains, substrate based blockchains, EVM based blockchains. We're working with the Cardano foundation to connect to Cardano, we're working with on connecting to XRP ledger. And so you know, that's kind of what we're doing and that's the problem that we're trying to solve now. With that comes a lot of difficulties because unlike many developers who are just focused on developing within the EVM ecosystem. Right. There's a standard set of like smart contracting languages or like solidity and stuff. There's a standard set of wallets you have to integrate. There's you know, a lot of these like LTUs usually have like a canonical bridge. When you're going this like L1 to L1 stuff, we have to start working on different smart contracting systems. We have to connect with like different types of wallets. You know, the Solana wallet is incompatible with an. And Metamask or you know, Cardano has its own set of wallets. It's, you know, Cosmos SDK has its own set of wallets we have to do. And a lot of these, you know, L2s have like canonical bridges to Ethereum, but there's no canonical bridge between Solana and Ethereum right there, you know, there's different people who build different bridges between them or let's say between Bitcoin and Ethereum. Right. You have like tbtc, you have nomic, you have, you know, a couple others that are in development. Right. And how do you choose which one to use? And so those are some of the challenges that we face when working on a very interchange environment that there's a, you know, while there's good standard standardization within ecosystems, there's poor standardization across ecosystems. And our job that we have to handle is how do we build UX that tries to smooth that over for the users.
**B** (12:51):
Yeah, for Noble, you know, very similarly as a Cosmos project, we very early on saw these challenges like building in a multi chain environment. Even though there are Cosmos standards like ibc, like the SDK, there's still a lot of coordination that needs to take place for those chains to, you know, be fully interoperable, to be fully working together so that users don't even have to necessarily think twice about where, let's say they have to send one token from point A to point B to get to point C. Maybe you simply route it like what Noble does in the case of native usdc or you use something like an outpost or things like this to make that user experience more friendly. I think right now with L2s and then definitely with rollups, we're going to see a lot of these actual UX challenges that again for Cosmos folks we saw years ago. So I think it'll be very interesting. I think the about like the canonical state of like certain bridges, like that's why we have these, you know, debates in Ethereum around, you know, various bridging, I don't want to call them Bridging wars. But they're very, you know, heated topics. And so we're gonna. We're see a lot of that as we converge on, you know, these standards over the coming years.
**C** (14:06):
Can I add some? So I'm. I'm doing marketing. Okay. In the space and. No, I just want to mention that all of these is very, very complicated. So again, as you said before, the claim of defi is experiences be open to everyone. And our goal, the overall goal is to scale, to get new users. All of these is amazing on the one end, but on the other end is even more complicated to explain to the users. So for us marketers, working in this space is very hard already to explain, you know, to people, normal people. What is one blockchain, Ethereum, what you should do. Now we have multiple, multiple options of the chain. Multiple options for you to maybe save some money. Because in the end, this is the main point. Right. But it's complicated to make users understand how not to be afraid and scared, you know, because you are scared when you use something new. You don't know if. When you bridge where your money is for like hours and you're there watching the screen during the bridging, you know, so it's a. It's a challenge also, like, in this sense, in my opinion, I mean, let's.
**B** (15:41):
Just remember there are $4.5 billion or so worth of hacks of bridges. Like, that's an astronomical number that if you tell anybody like, that, that's enough to put them away from crypto forever. So there's a lot to do to build up trust.
**C** (15:55):
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So also educational part is very important.
**B** (15:59):
Yeah.
**A** (15:59):
Do any of you have thoughts on, like, how far off are we from using DeFi? Where our knowledge of what blockchain or what L1 L2 that we're using is totally abstracted away. And I guess, like, if you have any thoughts on that, do you have any thoughts then on like, what needs to happen next for us to get there? I actually, I think of you will right away just because of, like the Dex aggregator experience. Like, I can imagine folks in the future, like, you know, they would trade, let's say like sol for eth, eth for soul. And like, they don't need to know that they're like going cross chain. You know, they just want to like, trade the asset without the risk of being on like a centralized exchange.
**D** (16:42):
Yeah, yeah. I mean, this might be a little bit of a hot take, which maybe we're here for some hot takes too, but I Wouldn't be surprised if we really see something like cross chain transfer protocol kind of become the canonical bridging layer between different networks. Maybe for like layer two. Networks that share security of a layer one. Maybe there still is a lot of bridging going on or depositing and withdrawing going on. But I really wouldn't be surprised if you want to access something that is on the Solana blockchain and you have assets on the Ethereum blockchain. I wouldn't be surprised if most of that activity ends up going through something like cross chain transfer protocol. So in summary, centralization is, is really what we should be aiming for here.
**B** (17:32):
So.
**A** (17:33):
Just kidding.
**B** (17:33):
By the way, that was a great hot take. I mean so Noble as the issuance chain for native usdc, we're actually the first non EVM chain to implement cctp. So CCTP was very much designed, you know, for the evm. The next CCDP implementation will likely be Solana, so the svm. So we'll have EVM Cosmos Solana, which is incredible. But it's a hot take. But it's also not a hot take because if we think about it, stablecoins are already used for settlement so much in crypto. It's not just like, you know, an asset to be traded, it's also infrastructure for settlement itself. And so CCTP itself just makes that easier and it's actually a really nice user experience. So tomorrow you can literally, you know, burn your USDC on eth, natively mint that on Noble in one hop and go to Osmosis. So you can tomorrow, right? Or today currently. So that's how you know Osmosis is getting all its liquid, not all of it, but a ton of its liquidity from users coming into Cosmos. Not even knowing Noble is actually minting the asset on the back end and in one hop going towards.
**C** (18:41):
Yeah, I think that's the point. Not knowing like hiding, try to hide abstraction.
**E** (18:46):
Yeah, I'm going to push back on this and I think like CCTP is like a centralized bridge run by circle and like I think it would suck if all of crypto like you know, interoperability depended on like one centralized actor that can like censor all cross chain movement, extract MEV at all cross chain movements. Like I think we should be moving towards like properly decentralized bridge.
**D** (19:07):
Yeah, I agree. I was kind of kidding.
**A** (19:10):
Sunny, do you have any other thoughts on. I feel like by building in Cosmos and Yelena here as well, but I'm thinking specifically, I guess here again of just how popular OSMOSIS has become. Are there any lessons there to learn from what you've experienced in the Cosmos ecosystem? Because like again, like years ago I just, I didn't think we were going to get this far this quickly. And then I look at Cosmos and I go, well, they've been doing this for quite a while. Like all the benefits that we love of multi chain defi and some of the challenges there, like Cosmos builders have been working on for much longer. So. Any other thoughts? You haven't yet, Yelena as well?
**E** (19:51):
Yeah, I mean I think like I said, a lot of it comes down to figuring out standards and canonicity. You know the nice thing is within the Cosmos ecosystem we have this standard called IBC which is a direct point to point bridging protocol like trust, relatively trust minimized uses, like light client level security between two chains. And what's nice is that like you know, I want to talk to, you know, the osmosis chain wants to talk to the DYDX chain. Right. We want to send tokens back and forth, you know, instead of having to choose oh, which bridge should we use? Right? It's like, no, we're just going to like, our chain has a built in light client of the DYDX chain and the DYDX chain has a built in light client of the osmosis chain. And it like removes this like oh, which bridge should we use? It's like, no, no. Both of our chains have a native bridging protocol to each other. So this idea of like spreading the concept of like native bridging, baking it into more chains, I think that that, that's one takeaway. The other was, man, I lost my train of thought off of that first one.
**B** (21:05):
Yeah. So I think the actual hot take is that the native kind of bridge that will connect all of these like desperate ecosystems is right now. CCP is working very well. Like that is a fact. But it'll, it'll be ibc and I'm quite confident on that. There's many teams, like as Sunny mentioned, that are working on extending IBC to the EVM to other ecosystems. And so for us in Cosmos, we really understand that the native interop protocol should not have a token. It's kind of weird that we have these Interop protocols that have their own native token because that actually misaligns incentives between the Interop protocol or the bridge and the destination. And IBC doesn't have a native token. Like there are many tokens in Cosmos, Atom, osmo, others, but IBC itself is this very Neutral, very, very stable infrastructure. It's a bridging protocol without a native token. And that is the thing that we in Cosmos understand very deeply.
**E** (22:01):
Oh, I remember what I was gonna say. So I think like two things that we started, I think we've encountered in Cosmos, I think that hasn't really hit the EVM ecosystem yet. Just cause it's a little bit, you know, lagging on the like, you know, interoperability work. Like you know, one is a lot of work needs to be done on beyond like standardization of cross, like of protocols, beyond token transfers. Like yes, you can use like today most bridges are focused on how do I get asset A, like from chain A to chain B. Right. But that doesn't solve the question. I have a DAO on chain A and I want to like deposit into a lending protocol on chain balance. You need to have like a standard for how you make that cross chain contract call and, or you, you know, so we have this like thing we have in Cosmos called interchain accounts. We have these things called cross chain hooks where like allows you to make a transaction on another chain, set a promise on our chain and like it calls back. So you need to like, you know, I feel like I haven't seen in the EVM ecosystem as much of like focus on standardization on cross chain EVM contract calls. The other one is I think people are not. The UX is not being built around like account abstraction correctly right now. So basically you know, today we're all operating under this world that like private keys, like addresses are based off of private keys and that the same private key works across every chain. But that's just not the case when you move towards an account abstraction world. We saw early key situations of this where you know, Wintermute had a gnosis safe on Ethereum. They thought that they had the same gnosis safe on Optimism. They didn't get that money sent to them. And it caused this like, you know, whole issue where they lost like what, $50 million or something like that. And as if we expect smart accounts account abstractions to like continue to grow. We have to handle that because what's, you know, I, I built a, a multi sig on one chain. You know my company, we have a multi sig on ethereum. We fired 1, 1, 1 of our board members. Okay, we, we changed the multisig and it's like shit, we forgot to change it on polygon or something, right? And it's like now they have access to our fund. So really thinking about how account abstraction is going to work in this cross chain world?
**D** (24:14):
Yeah, I think in the, I think in the EVM ecosystem intents are kind of, a lot of people view intents as kind of being the way to have cross chain interoperability not just for like swap, cross chain swaps or whatever, but also for like real interoperability, cross chain calls and so forth. And I think it's a lot different model because in some ways you can, you can kind of put like the risk on an individual party that's willing to kind of take the other side of you know, a cross chain transaction versus you know, having the light client built into the network consensus for each side of the, of the transaction.
**E** (24:55):
I mean that works for things that are like tokenizable and transferable, but that's like just not always the case. I have a DAO on one chain, I want to make a governance, you know, we own a stake in a DAO on another chain, we want to vote on that chain's dao. Right?
**D** (25:13):
Yeah.
**E** (25:13):
How do I describe that in an intent? It's kind of, I feel like people like over focus on intents. Like yes, this makes sense for like a lot of trading based applications, but it's like it's not, it's not a generalized thing that works for everything. We still have to figure it out. Like intents are like yes, a UX layer you build on top, but you still need to figure out proper like full, you know, full customizability, like fully customizable cross chain messaging protocols that, that these intents work on so you can build other protocols that don't work in intent frameworks.
**D** (25:43):
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
**A** (25:45):
So we've, we've got of lots less than five minutes left. I'm thinking we could. Sorry, not talking close enough. We've got less than five minutes left. So I just want to end with each of you naming a use case that you think could be unlocked with. Let's assume all the challenges we've discussed here, you know, get solved for and we're in a very happy place. Are there any use cases that you're really excited to see become possible?
**E** (26:15):
I'm a bitcoiner at heart. We just had all the bitcoin panel up before, but I'm just excited to see bitcoin start to become more usable as money throughout the entire crypto ecosystem today. We've seen it a little bit with wbtc, but you don't have the ability to go from WBTC to bitcoin. You have to have a merchant account and all this. But I think as we start to see some of the newer generation bitcoin bridges like Nomic and TBTC come alive, I believe that bitcoin will be like the money of the Cosmos ecosystem and I hope that it continues to become the money of the overall crypto ecosystem.
**B** (26:58):
Yeah, I mean for me I'm really passionate about governance and actually seeing multi chain governance work in a way that actually makes sense. So you have these, you know, silo kind of governance processes right now be more multi chain so not just relegated to one L2 but you know, across all L2s plus Cosmos plus Solana. Like that's going to unlock so much more mind share and excitement again in Cosmos. You know we've been doing governance cross chain for a long time. Things like protocol owned liquidity, things like, you know, treasury, you know, swaps between different chains, all that amazing fun stuff. I want to see that throughout the entire space.
**C** (27:37):
So I will be u topic here. My dream would be in years to see a user just deciding his like risk approach and his willingness to get this amount of risk to earn this amount of money, let's say using Defi and he doesn't need to know anything like the platform, the Summer 5 for example will automatically select the best chain for him, the best like everything for him without any, like any of these stuff, you know, utopic.
**A** (28:22):
But maybe will any final thought on this?
**D** (28:27):
Well, I mean ultimately I think what really makes all of this even worthwhile or thinking about or spending our lives working on is creating a globally accessible financial system where there isn't all this fragmentation depending upon like where you happen to be born, which no one controls. If you're able to transact access financial services no matter where you're located on Earth Earth, we're going to need a lot of scalability and that probably means a lot of different networks that are operating in parallel. So yeah, I mean user experience. I'm excited to see the user experience for cross chain applications get to the point where it's acceptable and frankly like right now it just isn't in my opinion.
**A** (29:19):
Well, hey, thanks everyone for joining us. Thanks, thanks to all of our panelists. This is fantastic and thank you to Eth Denver. I don't know if they get a shout out enough but they do an amazing job. I've run events, they are awful to be behind the scenes guys. It is a grind. So thanks for all you do.
**B** (29:41):
Thank you guys.
**E** (29:42):
Yes, let's give a round of applause for the panel.
**C** (29:46):
Come on.
**E** (29:48):
Whoop whoop.
**C** (29:49):
These trousers.