**A** (0:00):
The amount of automation and reusability available in the cloud era. We want to bring the same thing to the crypto era.
**B** (0:09):
You want like strong security ties with the people you have economic ties with. And I think that's what we're going to see with like applications. That's where we can plug into something like eigenlayer or into the Atom security.
**C** (0:19):
Or Babylon for Bitcoin security, you know, the evm. I don't think there's anyone in the world today that if they were designing the EVM today would come up with the design that we have. And you can just look at the backlog of like eips and the wishlist of things that people can change.
**A** (0:30):
The point that we all operate at is how do we maximize the surface area of open innovation? Bitcoin chose the most extreme viewpoint here, that we are one and done and Ethereum's like, oh, you know, we want to enable some more permissionless innovation. And I think Eigen is at the very extreme. We want to open this up as maximally as possible.
**D** (1:00):
This topic I think, and I feel like this panel specifically is of big personal significance to me because I've been very interested in this sort of non monolithic class of infrastructure for you know, better part of like three, three or four years. And this is, you know, I remember. So for context, I am currently a protocol engineer at Osmosis, working on for nearly two years before I joined. I feel like essentially the people here were the ones that I was looking up to. So thank you all for coming. I think most of you need no introduction. I do want to give the floor however to give brief intros just to not steal that thunder. So maybe we can start with Homer here and then.
**E** (1:50):
Sure. Hi. Hi everyone, my name is Hilma, I'm one of the co founders of Gelato Jadal is a platform for projects to deploy their own rollups which leverages suite of cool web3 services such as smart contract automation, account abstraction, etc.
**F** (2:06):
Hi, my name is Emin Gun Sira. I was a professor at Cornell University for many years. Recently started AVA Labs and we launched the Avalanche Blockchain. Avalanche prides itself on bringing the best of technology to blockchains and we have currently the fastest fastest layer one and the most scalable layer one with its subnets and I'm really excited about what we are about to build.
**B** (2:30):
Hey everyone, my name is Sunny, I'm one of the co founders of Osmosis which is a decentralized exchange app chain. So that's a decentralized Exchange built as its own custom blockchain and it is built using the Cosmos SDK stack which I helped develop prior to starting osmosis.
**C** (2:51):
Hey everyone, I'm Steven. I'm a co founder and CEO of Off Chain Labs. At Off Chain Labs, we build. We're primarily known for building the Arbitrum technology stack. Arbitrum is the leading and Most adopted layer 2 technology stack for Ethereum and we also build Prism, which is the leading consensus client for Ethereum.
**G** (3:13):
Does it work? Yes, it works. Hey, so my name is Matthew. I'm a founder of Linara. Linara is a new kind of layer one infrastructure that is inspired by research I was doing at Facebook Libra and is aiming at structuring block space in a very different way. We give users their own block space and yeah, that's what we do.
**D** (3:35):
Sriram, you want to give a quick intro as well?
**A** (3:38):
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Alpin. Hi everybody. Sorry I couldn't be there in person, but great to join you on this virtual call. I'm Sriram Kannan. I'm founder of a project called Eigen Layer. Eigen in German for your own layer. And our mission is to maximize the surface area of open innovation. Permissionless innovation is one of the things we pride ourselves off in this space. One of the things we are trying to do is bring permissionless innovation all the way down to building arbitrary distributed systems. On eigenlake, if you have an idea for how to build a complex distributed system, you don't have to go start your own trust network. You can borrow the existing trust network underlying Ethereum via the concept of restaking and then anybody can deploy on top. Great to be part of this app.
**D** (4:31):
Amazing. Thank you. Thank you everyone. I think before we did this event, we surveyed all of the audience and I think basically one data point that really stood out was that nearly a third of the people in the audience are founders working on infrastructure projects. And I think so are actually many of our panelists. So one question I want to ask all of you is are we building too much infrastructure? And yeah, actually, maybe. Sunny, do you want to start?
**B** (5:07):
Yeah, I mean, I guess I, you know, I started my blockchain career working on infrastructure. I helped build like Tendermint, Consensus, Cosmos SDK, ibc. But like my goal was always to go build applications and when we start, at least when I started, like the infrastructure wasn't there to build the applications I wanted to build. But you know, so I had to get to that point. But you know, I think at the end End goal is like, one of the things we believe in osmosis is that we do a lot of infrastructure development, but it's all with the end goal of making our application, like, work for the needs that we need to do. And so I think, you know, build. I think that's one thing that makes us very good infrastructure developers, is that we are the app developers as well. And so we have like, I feel one thing that often happens, I feel that in the crypto space is infrastructure developers get very caught up in building things that sound very cool or sounds good on a VC pitch deck, but actually has no actual usage to app developers. By being the app developers ourselves, we know exactly what to prioritize and whatnot.
**F** (6:15):
Let me say a few words about this. This is something I'm very passionate about. The game is easy, okay? So what happens is, what I'm reminded of the most is, are the lyrics, right? It's method acting. You just get up there and you bullshit something about, you know, whatever it is, scalability, performance, you know, this and that, and they all sound the same. And it's incredibly easy to take something, put a little bit of a, you know, take a hat, put a feather on it. Now you have a novel hat. You did not invent anything new. You didn't bring new technology in, and yet you can start selling that thing and you can talk on the same panel as everybody else who's actually bringing new technology in. At some point as a space, we will get called out. We got called out when FTX crashed. That was a colossal failure of all of us. And we will get called out if we go around selling dreams to people. Oh, this is the best rain protection technology. This hat, unlike every other, has this cool feather on it. It's so novel. The world has never seen anything like it. Well, you know what? It's the same damn thing with a slight bit of veneer on it. The world doesn't need yet another vm. The world doesn't need yet another centralized solution. We were not going into the space because we wanted to reinvent what's over there a mile down the road with more steps, more complexity and more hacks in it. Okay? So we came in here to build decentralized solutions. A lot of quote unquote infrastructure is just somebody's pet project. It would not pass muster at Cornell as a master's project. And these things are completely centralized and they end up selling to people a dream. People love buying into dreams. People also love buying into Ponzis. They love buying into Sam coins because they're Ponzis. They knew that all along. And at some point we have to look around and say, that guy who's LARPing an academic, that guy who's LARPing to be a genius, that guy who's fluffing up his hair to look like a genius boy from mit, these people have no clothes and we have to start doing that for infrastructure as well. At some point we have to look around and say, look, you've been selling this dream for a year, for two years. At some point it better be that you'd better deliver. Where is the decentralization? Why is it that I should use any of these quote layer two solutions that don't have a fraud proof in them? How long am I supposed to wait for technology to arrive? I waited for VDFs to rescue Ethereum scaling, I waited for VRFs to rescue Ethereum scaling, I waited for accumulators to rescue Ethereum scaling and now we're waiting for yet another set of technologies that have failed to deliver. At some point, I posit to you, we all collectively have to say, look, this is all bullshit. It's a bunch of people doing, you know, selling dreams that have no backing and it's time for us to call it out. Thank you.
**C** (9:23):
So I actually agree with a lot of actually the, the things that Gun said and I think that there is a lot of smoke and mirrors or fake technology that people push that doesn't actually exist. And actually one of the things you mentioned directly in our area is layer twos without fraud proofs. And a layer two without a fraud proof isn't a layer two by any means. And it's just a centralized solution. And I think we as an industry need to call that out. And I've called that out on many, many occasions. And it does everyone a disservice because you have the builders that are actually trying to build the right tech and take the time to do that, but others are sort of trying to leapfrog that and build in growth and build their communities. And then it just creates the wrong incentives for people to not build the actual technology, but just to try to grow and proliferate the technology. And that's very, very dangerous. That's particularly dangerous in a world today in which more and more people are deploying this technology themselves. So you know, a year or two ago people would say, well that team that's doing that and not launching fraud proofs, it's okay because we trust them, they're good people, they're going to get it eventually. They're not going to rug. But now there's like 100 others running this technology that fraud proofs and the model here just collapses entirely. So with that part I agree. I do think though that we shouldn't paint too broadly with one stroke. And there are layer twos that are fulfilling that and are constantly delivering. And we at Arbitrum, we at Off Chain Labs are building Arbitrum that has had fraud proofs deployed since day one of our initial test net. And I share your frustration there immensely when others are cutting corners and we have to continue building our vision, our values. Because the problem is we might have values, but as more and more people adopt this, as it goes mainstream, those values get diluted. And it's really up to the people up here, up to the people in this room, up to the builders that can understand to make sure that we stay firm on those. Because if we give, you can be certain that someone that joined, you know, a month ago to buy an NFT doesn't actually understand the core technology they'll give as well. But this is important because there will be a time and hope there isn't a time, but there may be a time where security becomes important and that centralization comes back to bite you. So I definitely think that we need to do that. And we at Off Chain Labs are pushing forward the, the, you know, pushing forward the industry in terms of building secure fraud proofs. I think Ethereum does scale and scales well with the Arbitrum technology. But to answer your actual question about is there, are we building too much infrastructure? I don't think we're building too much infrastructure. I think we might be deploying too much infrastructure. And what I mean by that is there's no scarcity of block space anymore. There are a ton of layer 2s that are in many cases deploying Arbitram's infrastructure or deploying other infrastructure. And we need to find some killer applications to fill that block space. And I think we will. But I definitely think that right now we're past the. There's a lot of block space and we need to actually really understand how we're going to fill it and work on that part of the stage.
**D** (12:14):
So as a quick follow up to that, I think app developers these days have choice overload. Way too many options, way too many stacks. What's your pitch to developers? Understanding that they're a savvy audience and that they understand the stacks that they're building in. Feel like this is the, the line between subnets between Arbitrum Orbit between Cosmos app chains and then also various other stocks has been like very blurred. And I think that, you know, there's a lot of leakage between narratives. It'd be great to clear that up. So what's your pitch to developers?
**B** (12:52):
I can start for Cosmos app chains at least. It's a heavy belief in vertical integration where, you know, you believe that you have an application that, you know. I think vertical integration is what builds the best products. Apple works like all their products are amazing because they build apps, they build the OS, they build the phone that build the chips. SpaceX managed to like squeeze out every last cost via extreme vertical integration. And you know, for us we're building a decentralized exchange, a perp st, a spot decks, a fully integrated replacement for Binance and Coinbase. Right. And it's like to achieve everything we like, you know, every time our, when we iterate on product stuff, it's like, you know, we start from like what is the user experience we want? And then we like figure out like, oh, okay, this actually to make this thing work, we needed to build a way to like verify captcha at the chain level. And that needs this custom cryptography that needs to be added to the chain. Right? And it's like doing. But like, okay, if I was work, if we were building on an L1 or an L2 or anything, like we'd have to go back. Oh, go talk to the L1 team. Okay, we'll make an EIP for this. We'll get it in two years. It's like, no, as an app chain, we can be like, oh, our product needs this feature. All right. We talked to the chain, the chain team that's within our vertically integrated org and be like, oh yeah, okay, they're going to ship that out the next chain upgrade next month, right. It's like through extreme vertical integration you can like ship faster, ship better products.
**E** (14:22):
Yeah, maybe. From our experience, we are really framework agnostic, so we don't really mind if users want to go with a ZK roll up or if you want to go with an optimistic roll about this framework or that framework. And from my experience talking to projects, they don't really care either. What they really care about is that they are close to the assets and existing users. So they want to have it very seamless for their users to bridge over assets to their chain. They want to create an environment where they can abstract the underlying blockchain away from their users. So they don't. The user shouldn't even have to worry where they are on it should all be gas free. And then there's a whole other set of customers or projects that for example saw the base launch of this year and they saw the revenue that they were generating there and they finally saw an interesting business model which is, hey, we can actually charge the sort of blockchain business model which is sequencing fees rather than trying to invent something new here. And this is something that they're super interested in. And yeah, I think that's, that's kind of like the sentiment that we are seeing. It's, it's not really about what they want, like what stack to choose, it's really about what they get out of it. What's the UX they can finally bring to users and then with a good UX then I believe we can actually get to a point where we onboard more users.
**G** (15:49):
If I can say yeah, yeah. So Alinara, we think that there are the current infrastructure have been kind of implicitly optimizing for certain kind of applications. So what we're doing is we exploring new geometry in the black space that we think that would provide better characteristics to application developers in other kinds of applications that you would think maybe are closer to Web two. So if you want to look at something like a decentralized debate or decentralized Twitter, right now they would typically be using a single chain or a few app chains on the existing infrastructure. And that might not be the ideal geometry for these kind of applications especially. I mean maybe now it's a bear market, so we don't see that maybe as much. But imagine one of those applications being super successful and suddenly there's a billion users using it and they all want to have the same, same responsiveness. And so that's kind of what we're looking at, right? So like predictable performance and with the account. So the idea is that okay, applications are going to pay for the fees, but the fees still need to be reasonable. Right. Like it's not because you pay for it that they can just fluctuate.
**D** (17:12):
Shuram, how about you?
**A** (17:13):
Yeah, yeah, maybe I'll make a quick point on both the questions. On the question of whether we're building too much infrastructure, our own view here is the following. So if you imagine web application development circa 1996, let's say you're building a complex web application in 96, you'd have to do the following. You'd have to build your own server stack, you have to build your own identity stack, payment stack, database stack, and then build the particular application you were building. This is how you would build an application back in 1996, you know, in 2023. This is not how we build a web application. You build a web application by using all the cloud providers like aws. You would use one of the several, you know, thousands of SaaS services out there to use for your authorization, for your payments, for your database, all of these things, and then build only the depth, the things that don't exist in the core infrastructure to actually fill in to build your consumer facing application. The amount of automation and reusability available in the cloud era, we want to bring the same thing to the crypto era. So what would that look like? You, of course, the dividing hyperplane, the line dividing the crypto or blockchain solution and the cloud era solution is decentralized trust. So if you take the same solution and then run it on a more centralized single point node, then there's no point. And one of the things that we see is in the, when people are building distinct modules and you concatenate various modules, you are now bound by the lowest trust point across these different modules. Our vision is you have a shared trust layer. That's what we're trying to build with Eigenlayer is a common pool of stake and node operators. And anybody can build and deploy new kinds of modules. Now you can think of them as decentralized software, as a service kind of solutions that you can build on top of this common infrastructure. And these will be things like what kinds of things can this be? These could be the standard things that people think about when they think of blockchain modules. Maybe it's data availability, maybe it's consensus, maybe it's chat sequencing, chat proving, but it's also all kinds of things that people have never built before. It's a proof of location service. You want to testify like what location are you in relative to other nodes. You want to have AI inference, you want to have a secret sharing, you want to have secure multiparty computation, you want to have trusted execution environment networks, all kinds of core functionality that you will never have by going and building on top of a blockchain. But you need raw access to a general purpose distributed system. These will all be built as these SaaS modules, decentralized SaaS modules, because you can absorb decentralized trust. So I can layer. And then now as a consumer application, you integrate a bunch of these things because they all share a common framework, a common trust network. You can actually get really high expressivity while not having to do a lot of programming. So in this sense I have a little bit of a counterpoint with Sunny here. Of course these are two really interesting approaches. One is to vertically integrate everything and then try to just like build all of it together. But the model that we are going after is actually permissionless innovation. So everybody who's really, really the expert at building that kind of infrastructure should be building that and then we should just give a framework for sharing trust and concatenation across these different. So that's the model that we are looking to at.
**B** (21:14):
I, I'll just, yeah, so I, I, I, I agree. In the sense that like, okay, you vertically integrate everything that is core to your product and where your core competencies are and then you partner and outsource the things where you can't focus on. Right? So like, you know, like I said, osmosis, you know, fully focus on vertical integration wherever possible. But we were like, oh man, bridges, that's a hard thing to build. And like we don't want to be in housing that, right? So instead we go like find a team that we like really trust and like, you know, we've been working with Axelar for a long time, right. And like we're like, okay, you guys handle the bridges and we're going to make you our bridging partner, right? And like that's how you know. So yeah, it's not like, you know, you don't have to do everything under the sun, right? You pick like, okay, we are going to build the best trading engine in the world and then we're going to like vertically integrate everything to make it that optimal. Now how do we get assets onto our trading engine? Okay, let's go partner with others to make that happen.
**C** (22:13):
For Arbitrum, I think the pitch is really starts with not Arbitrum but actually Ethereum. It's a belief in that Ethereum is the or will be the smart contract layer of the future. And the question is how do we scale that and how do we make sure that remains the case? Because we can like be very values based and say Ethereum's great, it has the best decentralization, has the best security. And that's true, but the problem is if it doesn't actually speak to users who cannot use it, if it costs you dollars or tens of dollars to do something on Ethereum where there's just not enough capacity to build something that's interesting, users are going to go away and they're going to go to the other chain. So we believe very strongly in the security of decentralization of Ethereum, but also realize we live in the real world and need to make that accessible for users. So the question that we ask ourselves is, can we make that accessible without compromising on that security? Can we scale Ethereum and keep that security and decentralization? And that's what Arbitrum chains doing. We're seeing that play out in real time with some of the biggest applications. If you look at, for example, Defi, Arbitrum is, you know, the number two after Ethereum when it comes to core metrics like Dex volume. If you look at ETH bridged onto all layer twos, Arbitrum has more than every layer 2 combined eth bridge on the chain. We're seeing that play out in a bunch of ways. And the interesting thing is, while we want to scale the security and decentralization of Ethereum, we can also say, can we in the process make the user experience even better? Can we solve some of the other limitations of Ethereum and get that security and decentralization scale it, but also improve the ux? And in a few ways I think we do that both for developers and users. Users get much faster confirmations. For example, on Ethereum there are different levels of security for those confirmations and ultimately you wait till it goes on chain to get the best level of security. But for many users, the fast confirmations that you get are a massive UX unlock and make Web3 a lot more similar to Web2. And for developers, we have programs like Arbitrum Stylus that allow you to write smart contracts in other languages like Rust and C and C, which is pretty cool because we're secured by Ethereum and we're decentralized by Ethereum, but we're adding the capabilities for developers to do things that Ethereum itself can't do, both in terms of the amount of computation you can do, the cost of the computation, and even the core tooling that you can do there. So it starts with Ethereum, but then Arbitrum is an extension of that. And again, the last thing I'll say is I spoke about the technology of Ethereum, but even if you disagree with everything I say, you think, you think you know some other technology is better. The second core prong of Ethereum is the community. That's where the developers are at, that's where the community is at, that's where the innovation's at. And scaling that community is as important, I believe, as scaling that technology and the security and decentralization.
**F** (24:43):
So at Avalanche, we believe in fast, decentralized sovereign chains. We believe that every app developer should be able to control everything about the chain that they operate on, that they should be able to flexibly build their applications in any language, whether it's rust, whether it's go or what have you, and that then they should be able to have access to a decentralized set of chains that offer a full suite of applications that seamlessly work together. But that's just the technology when it comes to integration with other chains, we are right there. We were right there helping Ethereum scale on day one when we launched. We are still there with the world's best bridges, most secure bridges ever devised. We're the only people against a whole lot of academics who spoke against me when I was bringing that bridge technology. It's not too hard for us. We built new bridge technologies using SGX that have never been hacked. We're right there with the best of technology when it comes to any other aspect of our operation, including having built and launched secure exchanges that are fully encrypted. So we brought a lot of new technology. But at the highest level when it comes to ethos, we believe in the best technology that's present here today. I know how to write papers with a lot of gobbledygook and moon math. I have written papers where I ran out of Greek letters and had to dip into Aleph and others in different fonts by the way because they weren't enough. But I will never do that with you or with any other audience. We don't larp, we don't act like academics. We are here to help you build. That's our pitch to you. Our technology works today. We don't dangle a carrot in front of you about any technology that will come in the future and rescue the day. Our tech is here. It operates it, it doesn't stop every month. It actually operates every day, every second and it's a joy to use and we invite you to come play with it.
**D** (26:40):
So one question I have is I'll specifically start with Avalanche because I feel like subnets have always been a mystery to me with regards to the pitch. Has always felt like you can build whatever you want, but that also does seem like the pitch for a lot of different stacks. So specifically what can you do with subnets that you can't do on any other stack, say like an Ethereum rollup.
**F** (27:05):
Compared to an Ethereum rollup. What you can do with for example with an avalanche subnet is not pay rent to anybody else. You can have an incredibly cheap roll up equivalent on A subnet at the same time, should you choose to pay rent for security, you can. And in fact you can pay rent to multiple chains. And one of the things that we're building is a dual home subnet that gets its security from the Intercept or the union rather of Ethereum and Avalanche. So that's something you could do as well. So think of subnets as a lower level primitive. It's at a far lower level than what other people are pitching to you. So you can do whatever you want with. In fact, subnets don't have to implement a blockchain. You could use a subnet just purely as a membership service. Suppose you have a video distribution, video content distribution network and you want to keep track of where all your servers are. You could use a subnet for that. So it's literally a lower level service we provide to you, something that is at a lower level. It's a lower level of abstraction and that is much more flexible than other solutions. So that whole discussion of like X versus Y, etc. It's always seemed weird to me because we're giving you something that is a more fundamental building block. It's kind of like someone saying Gothic architecture is better than a brick. I can't meaningfully get into that conversation. Bricks are more versatile. You could build Gothic stuff with it, could build modern stuff with it. That's the difference.
**D** (28:33):
Very interesting. Sunny, this sounds a lot like a concept you brought up maybe a year or so ago, Rod Mesh security, I guess. Would you like to respond to the subnet point?
**F** (28:44):
Yeah.
**B** (28:45):
So I actually gave my talk at Avalanche Summit about mesh security and so, yeah, I mean I. Basically the same idea, right? It's like the idea is you build a Cosmos chain using Cosmos SDK, right? You build a chain and then you can choose to get secure mesh security. Is the idea like, hey, you should be able to choose where you want to get security from. It can be a bi directional security thing because we assume that most chains will probably have some sort of native staking and governance token. But then you can augment that security from other chains, right? And there's like different ways you can choose to augment that, right? One is like through just like partnerships I mentioned earlier. Axelar is our primary bridge partner. You know, a lot of the assets on osmosis are bridged to us by Axelar. Osmosis makes up I think like over 60% of Axelar TBL. It's like it would suck for either of us if the other got hacked, right? And so it's like, okay, why aren't we actually doing a restaking system where OSMO can be helped to secure the axelar chain while axle token can be helped to secure the osmosis chain? And now you basically have both of our chains. You know, you design the incentives correctly where you basically end up in a situation where both of our chains are being secured by the sum of the market caps of OSMO and Axel, right? And so, you know, I like to look at like geopolitics as a common like analogy for how to design systems. And like economically only four EU countries are not part of NATO. And I think that's because like, you know, economic ties lead to like want. You want like strong security ties with the people you have economic ties with. And I think that's what we're going to see with like applications and like, you know, I think an Oracle network for example, right? Like would you rather have an Oracle network that's like secured by one token, like link, or would you rather have an Oracle network that's secured by link plus aave plus maker plus compound plus snacks, right? You want as much economic security on your systems as possible. Now I think at the app, my belief is that like long term, I think at the app layer alone that's what I think apps are what actually accumulate most of the value. And so there will be enough economic security by these mesh alliances of app app tokens to provide the security that we need. But that's where you can augment, but if that's not enough, you can augment security from other places, right? I think the Thor chain model is like very clever. Like clever where like they have an in protocol way of saying like, oh, okay, this is the TVL of our chain. We want to make sure our security of our chain is like at least x 2x the TVL of our chain, right? And they do this like incentive pendulum thing. Sriram actually wrote a paper on this a couple a year ago. But I think like you should be doing something similar, right? You should be like, okay, you should figure out in protocol ways of measuring what is the economic value of doing an attack, what is the TBL you can steal, what is the value you can extract. And then you want to target an economic security that is x percent higher than that, right? And so maybe you have a bunch of security already from osmo, Osmosis might have a bunch from OSMO and like, you know, our partnerships with Axel and Mars and all these things, but maybe we're not at that level that we need. That's where you like build your economic incentives. Be like, hey, that's where we can plug into something like Eigen Layer or into the Atom Security or Babylon for Bitcoin security. You can like rent security from these like larger economic capital pools to like get you to the level that you need of whatever the security target you're targeting.
**D** (32:30):
Great. Well, I actually was going to bring to Sriram as well, but I think this next question applies to everyone. So this question around alignment, I think Stephen, you brought it up for Ethereum. I feel like the definition has morphed a lot over time. When Avalanche, I remember, launched the C chain, it seemed like it was actually EVM was the point. Right now that Arbitram Stylus is launching, actually relaxing that definition to actually rolling up. If you're extending eth finality, then you're aligned. Where do we draw that line? What does it mean to be aligned with Ethereum?
**C** (33:09):
Yeah, I think from us, the evm. I don't think there's anyone in the world today that if they were designing the EVM today, would come up with the design that we have. And you can just look at the backlog of EIPs and wish lists of things that people can change. So aligning and saying the EVM is sacred and we shouldn't change that and can't change that, if you want to change that, then it's sacrilegious. And that doesn't make any sense to me. That's not Ethereum, it's not the Ethereum community, it's not the Ethereum security, it's not the Ethereum decentralization. Again, I think if. I don't think there's anyone in the world and Vitalik concluded, I shouldn't speak for him, but I would imagine that if they could snap their fingers and make one or two or 100 changes to EVM, like having, you know, eight years of history that would make those changes. So that's a strange place to draw the line for me. For me, it's actually building the Ethereum community utilizing Ethereum security, utilizing Ethereum's decentralization, that's key and critical to me. Ethereum will evolve over time and if we can build protocols on top of Ethereum that use its security and decentralization, that's Corinth to speak about arbitrary stylus. If you look at the number of solidity developers in the world, they're estimated to be a few tens of thousands. If you look at the number of rust developers, about 3 million. If you look at the number of C developers, about 12 million. And if we actually want to get mainstream adoption, we have to realize that we should bend our technology to these developers, to these enterprises that have these capacities, not only to them, to the code that exists, to the libraries that exist, that they've written and perfected over the course of, in many cases, you know, years and decades. And there's no reason that we should stand and say, well, it's not EVM and therefore we don't. Again, I think that EVM is not Ethereum. EVM is critical. So the way I see it, it's the floor, but not the ceiling. So we should support evm. The amount of work that we have in EVM and the people, the knowledge and the code is critical and we should always support that. And arbitrum technology chains will support that. But that's the floor. And opposite them we should also say, how can we make this experience better? How can we bring the Ethereum security and decentralization to more developers? And I don't see how you could be more Ethereum aligned than that.
**B** (35:05):
I think Ethereum alignment is whether you're willing to go get an ETH tattoo.
**D** (35:12):
So then is Avalanche aligned?
**F** (35:15):
Absolutely. But, but let me, let me give you my definition of, of X aligned with Y. It typically means that Y came later and wants to kowtow to X and has bought out some influencers in X by giving them some backs. That's the definition of alignment. And it's hard to break into this space. And so one of the best things you can do is you start out small and you buy people out. You get them to talk loudly about you. They're influencers. At the end of the day, they wear a funny hat. There's always a hat guy. You get the hat guy on your side and you go with that. So that's alignment in practice. Now when you really look at what happens with that quote alignment, you end up seeing things like people use phrases that don't necessarily have an attached meaning to them. What does it mean to leverage Ethereum decentralization when you're in a fully centralized environment with a centralized sequencer? I have no idea what the technical definition of that leverage is there. So in reality, what is it that Avalanche does? Avalanche started out from the Ethereum community. I consider myself still a very much a part of the Ethereum community. And we started out with one of the world's best bridges to allow Ethereum to be able to shed its load securely onto another chain. But we are sovereign people and we believe that Everybody should also be in command of their sovereign future. We want you guys to be able to start your own chain according to your rules. And if you want to write your own VM in Rust or Go or something else, you can. We have Hyper vm.
**B** (36:47):
We.
**F** (36:47):
Which is achieving insane amounts of tps. Actually, we have Hyper SDK, which also allows you to build applications that talk to each other across multiple chains. So we believe that you should not need to kowtow to another community. And I think, personally, I find it a little distasteful when I see a talk any kind of narrative that isn't backed by technicalities behind the scenes. So this whole alignment thing is not something that I can bring myself to do. I love Vitalik, he's always been a close friend of mine, but it's not something that I will play up in order to attract users to my chain. Come to Avalanche because you like the tech, not for any other reason. It is much better. It's not a hat with a feather on it, it's an umbrella. It's different. It uses the best in consensus technology. It's something that no one else can say. Justin Sung can make all of the same noises as all of us on this panel, but we are totally different. We're genuinely different under the covers. So come if you like it.
**B** (37:48):
I would say that there's an extent to which technology follows, like, alignment. Like, I think that, like, different communities have different cultural values and like, the technology to an extent reflects those cultural values. And I think, like, you know, part of what turned me. I don't know, I think Ethereum is a very. Has a different. The community and culture has a different worldview than I think that a lot of the Cosmos community has. I. Fundamental. I see. I had a tweet a couple of weeks ago, like, a poll, like, oh, do you see Ethereum as a fundamentally globalist technology? And like. And Vitalik Telegram messaged me, he's like, oh yeah, like, you know, you should follow this up with, do you think globalism is a good thing or not? Right? And like, I think. I think that's an important thing. I think like, Ethereum was the world computer, right? And I think that is a cultural value that is that that can be followed. But it's like, it's just not aligned with my cultural values. And I'm a big believer in like, localism and like sovereignty first, which leads Cosmos to make very different technical design decisions than Ethereum. Last week I was at the URBIT conference and they're like, you Know they have very different cultural values than you know, other a lot of blockchain ecosystems. Right. Like they are, I would say more focused on private property rights rather than like free market. Like everything is constantly up for auction. And so you know, I'm helping them design a blockchain for Urbit and it's like the design of how you do block space ownership in that system is very different than like anything you see in other blockchains today. Right. And like so I think that the claim like oh you come for the technology is like somewhat correct but I think it's like, you know, the technology that gets built reflects the cultural values of the community that's building them.
**D** (39:33):
Shuram, do you want to chip in for a quick minute? I have one last question that I do want to ask but I want to give you an opportunity to respond.
**A** (39:40):
Yeah, this is a fun topic. So this is the what of what is alignment? And you know, you can think about it on the social access. Is it a shared community? Is it a distinct community? That's the social access. You can think about it on a technical axis. Are you sharing stack? Are you sharing the evm, are you sharing consensus, whatever. And then you can look at it on an economic axis which is are you sharing economics? And this is X alignment to be aligned with something. You can look at all these different dimensions but I don't want to, it's easy to, to minimize this thing. So instead I'm going to actually talk about why alignment may be interesting at different levels. So firstly and when to realign and when not realigned. I think Sunny made a great point about the fundamental philosophy. So I want to just go to that layer from our vision. Actually if you look at it, the only kind of things that are interesting in the world are faster somedays and plastic games are like you, you know, these are women games and there are only two prototypical women games. I think number one is innovation. Innovation is you create something out of nothing. You make a resource out of a non resource. You take oil, you make energy, you take air, you make spectrum. You, you know, you're creating something out of nothing. So that's innovation. So it's a non zero sum game because you're producing something out of nothing. The other non zero sum game is coordination and because you know people come together and then they can do more than what they can each, each part can go and do by itself. So these are the two major kinds of non zero sum games and you know, innovation is its own.
**D** (41:31):
Sorry, I don't mean to interrupt, but I do want to say we're almost at time, so maybe we can very quickly wrap up this point.
**A** (41:39):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Our vision is, Eigenlayer's vision is permissionless innovation. And different blockchains have to make different trade offs between innovation and safety.
**C** (41:51):
And.
**A** (41:54):
The point that we operate at is how do we maximize the surface area of open innovation? Bitcoin chose the most extreme viewpoint here, that we are one and done. And Ethereum's like, oh, we want to enable some more permissionless innovation. And I think Eigenlayer is at the very extreme, we want to open this up as maximally as possible.
**D** (42:12):
Yeah, go.
**G** (42:12):
Can I make you just. Short answer? Okay, so first alignment with Ethereum, I guess first we're not really competing, so that's, I guess recognizing that there are like differences and we're kind of doing the opposite. So Ethereum, so it's like, and many, many layer ones, existing layer ones. So you have lots of like the goal was to have lots of validators for, for decentralization purposes. And they, they tend to be small, but then you need large block producers so you get concentration in other places in the system. And so at linear we're looking at different trade offs. So where we have larger validators, fewer validators, but then everybody is a block producer and so that's what we. And then we could use maybe Eigen layer also to align our validators.
**D** (42:55):
All right, it seems like we're out of time. Well, thank you so much for everyone. I think this was, we went all the way up and down the stack across ecosystems, across times is incredible and I really enjoyed this discussion. It's quite rare to have a group of leaders across such diverse ecosystems discuss these topics. So I really appreciate the time. Can we everyone just give a big round of applause to our panelists?
**C** (43:17):
Thank you for your time.
**B** (43:24):
Thank you, Alpin. Thank you, panelists.