Bankless - 103 - Blockchains are Cities | Haseeb Qureshi

Starting point is 00:00:07 Welcome to bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. Really excited about this show. This is on blockchains as cities. We use cities as a metaphor to determine how blockchain scale. We have Haseeb on the podcast who shows us what this looks like. The big question here for the guest was, are we going to live in a multi-chain world or will there be one chain to rule them all? Hasib is very much a multi-chain world person. A few things to listen for. Number one, we talk about why networks aren't the right analogy for chains, why cities are.

Starting point is 00:00:49 Number two, how blockchains actually scale like cities. Number three, why Ethereum is New York City, Solana is L.A., Avalanche is Chicago. Number four, what this means for layer one investors. Number five, we end with where David and I disagree. David, what were your thoughts on this episode with Haseeb? I mean, you know, Ryan, that I'm a big sucker for metaphors and mental models, and so that's why I thoroughly enjoyed talking with Haseeb today, because metaphors are just a shortcut to understanding. And I think a lot of newer people who are still trying to wrap their heads around the blockchain space,

Starting point is 00:01:24 are you really going to appreciate just understanding the relationships between cities and blockchains and how they relate to each other? And I think perhaps understanding Ethereum's roll-up-centric roadmap using New York City as a mental model for that. And then also how Solana is like L.A. And L.A. kind of sprawls very horizontally where Ethereum builds up very vertically. I think people are going to really appreciate these mental models. But also just talking about why blockchains have scalability issues in the first place.

Starting point is 00:01:53 We talk about stuff like this in the first half of the show. But then we go into the second half of the show where you and I take apart a little bit of his sieve's mental models where he calls blockchains as cities. But we think blockchains are actually nations. And so we unpack all of these metaphors. At some point, at the end of the day, all metaphors break down. So we really stretch these metaphors into their limits. But I think it was just overall super helpful nonetheless.

Starting point is 00:02:16 Yeah, and this is worth listening, guys, because I do think this is the question of the year, maybe the question of the next few years, maybe the question of the decade remains to be seen, which is multi-chain. That means multiple layer ones, or will there be one primary central chain? Like an Ethereum, for instance, that provides settlement to many of the other change. That is the discussion, the debate today, and the context as well. Guys, as always, if you're listening with us, thank you very much. Make sure you like and subscribe wherever you're listening. If you're a podcast subscriber, make sure you review this podcast. If you liked it, that's how we

Starting point is 00:02:50 go top of the charts. Right after this as well, David and I are recording our debrief, where we give our thoughts on the episode with Haseeb. I've got a lot of thoughts swirling around. I know David does too. If you are a premium subscriber, premium bankless subscriber, you can tap into your premium feed and listen to that as well, kind of a bonus episode that comes out every single bankless podcast. We will get right back to the podcast with Haseep. But before we do, we want to tell you about the sponsors that made this episode possible. Alchamix is a defy app that offers self-repaying loans that lets you spend money and save money at the same time. Alchimix allows you to deposit the die stable coin into its faults, which earns some of the highest.

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Starting point is 00:05:25 Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. The Uniswap Grants Program is accessible. accepting applications for grants. Do you have something of value that you think you want to contribute to the Uniswap ecosystem? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a unique grant at Uniswapgrant.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. Thank you, Uniswap for sponsoring Bankless. Bankless Nation, we are super excited about our next guest, Haseeb Qureshi. Haseeb is a managing partner at Dragon Fly Capital, which is a cryptocurrency venture fund, a pretty fantastic one. He invests in all aspects of crypto, this entire industry.

Starting point is 00:06:02 He's one of those investors who's also had a very successful background in poker, which would be a topic for another podcast, but we're not going to get into that today. We've had him on the show before. We were talking about something similar. Subject of cities, how crypto was going to scale, how it was going to evolve in the future. And we've invited him back to talk more about that today. He published a fantastic post using cities as a mental model for blog. blockchains, which we're going to dive into. Hasib, great to have you back on bankless. How are you doing

Starting point is 00:06:32 today? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Oh, man, it's an exciting time in crypto. Of course. We're trying to figure out the scaling thing. We're wondering if there's a bare market going on. And in the backdrop of this, you wrote this post. And I think this post is kind of an analogy for probably one of the most important debates, I guess, in crypto or investment thesis, which is this, are we going to live in a multi-chain world or will there be one one chain to rule them all. By multi-chain, of course, I think that means multiple layer ones versus one chain to rule them all is one heavily dominant layer one. That's kind of the juxtaposition. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. But I want to start with maybe the city's

Starting point is 00:07:16 metaphor that we're using. Let's get in the frame of mind where we're, you tell us about cities. What cities have you lived in in the past of C? Where are you living now? What city you living in now? I'm living right now in San Francisco, actually. Since COVID, I have been kind of floating around a little bit, but San Francisco is usually home base, which it features in the article. It's interesting, actually, kind of the genesis of this whole metaphor, because as you mentioned, I'd written about this metaphor of cities and kind of trying to contextualize blockchain spatially, actually writing about sharding and writing about ETH2.0. And in many ways, sharding is, the whole idea of sharding is actually very similar in principle to what we think about

Starting point is 00:07:54 when we think about a multi-chain world because you have these logically separate kind of mini-blockchains operating alongside each other, kind of doing different things, but being able to connect up to each other in some way. And almost every vision of how to scale blockchains is directionally similar, right? Like layer twos are sort of these like mini-blockchains that kind of spin out from layer ones. Other, you know, alternative layer ones are, so many of them are EVM-compatible. So they're literally built on the exact same virtual machine that Ethereum is built on,

Starting point is 00:08:22 but they happen to be, you know, totally different validator set or totally different consensus mechanism, you know, the vision of sharding is kind of similar. And what I found in the last year, so, you know, I'm an investor. In the last year, I've been chatting with lots of folks who've come into the crypto space who are brand new and don't know about any of the prior art for all these conversations that like you guys and ourselves have been having. And they just come into this world. And they're like, okay, I keep hearing all this stuff about Solana. Solana is the future of, you know, crypto. Isn't Solana just going to eat everything? And isn't this just like an open and shut story that, you know, Ethereum was like MS DOS and then like Solana is now, you know, Windows 10 and isn't that just how it works?

Starting point is 00:09:01 And I realized that it was very difficult for a lot of folks who were entering into the space to wrap their head around a good mental model of why isn't it that a blockchain that's just faster and can fit more people into it and fit more transactions into it, why is that not obviously going to win? And in most technologies, that's the case. The thing that's faster and bigger obviously wins, right? If you just have, you know, if somebody comes along with a database that is, you know, 10 times bigger, 10 times faster, 10 times cheaper than Postgres, it's just going to wipe the floor. Everyone's going to be using it in five years. That's just obviously how it works. And the thing is, I think you and I know, and people have been in crypto for long enough,

Starting point is 00:09:40 know that in crypto, that's the wrong way to think about it. It's correct to an extent, but it's not sufficiently, it doesn't sufficiently understand the nuance of why it is that blockchain's are what they are. If that were true, then, you know, Bitcoin would have been superseded by Bitcoin cash and by Bitcoin SV and by Lycoin or whatever, right? Like, we know that these things don't happen in things like Bitcoin. Why don't they happen for Ethereum? And that's what led me to coming up with this metaphor and trying to, you know, I used it informally in a lot of conversations with people when I was trying to explain to them why it's not the case that Salon is just going to eat everything necessarily. It could be that Salon eats everything, but it's not obviously going

Starting point is 00:10:17 to happen. And that's why I decided, hey, you know what, I should write this thing up because a lot of people seem to find it a very valuable mental model for understanding their ones. And Haseeb, bankless listeners will know that we are just a complete sucker for mental models. And just the actual concrete imagery, I think, will actually allow people to just grapple on to this concept of using cities in geography as a way to understand a blockchain. So let's just go and get started with unpacking this metaphor. Why are cities a good mental model for understanding blockchain? just setting the context for the whole rest of the podcast. Why cities? Yeah. So usually when people describe blockchains, the word they use is network.

Starting point is 00:10:57 And the place where I want to start is that network is actually the wrong word to use when you're trying to describe a blockchain. And the reason why is that network brings with it a lot of implications about the other kinds of networks to compare blockchins to. Right. So when you think network, you think like the internet. You think like, you know, an electricity grid. You think like something like telegram or Facebook. You think of traditional types of networks. And in traditional networks, when you add another node to the network,

Starting point is 00:11:23 you add another server to Facebook, you add another whatever, you can basically scale a network linearly. It's almost this kind of ethereal thing that can grow as a larger, larger cloud over time. But blockchains are not like that. Blockchains, when you try to make a blockchain larger, the larger you make a blockchain,

Starting point is 00:11:38 the more expensive it is for that blockchain to get validated. And there's a bound on how large a blockchain can be, right? even something like Solana, which tries to be extremely sort of scaled vertically by just saying, look, the nodes that run Solana are going to be super beefy and highly optimized and have, you know, 16 GPUs or whatever it is. Even for this, there's a limit on how big Solano is going to allow its nodes to be, right?

Starting point is 00:12:02 There's not arbitrarily scalable the way that Facebook is arbitrarily scalable or Google is arbitrarily scalable. And so the realities that blockchains, unlike traditional networks, are physically constrained. There's only so big that a blockchain can get per unit time. And that's why we have finite block sizes, and that's why we have this fundamental problem of blockchains that they cannot get arbitrarily big. And that makes blockchains more like cities. Cities are constrained by the land that they're on.

Starting point is 00:12:33 They can grow, they can kind of scale out more and more over time, but they can't get arbitrarily big, right? You can't have a city the size of an entire country. When you do, naturally what happens that the city sort of gets cut off and a new city starts at some point, and that's just the nature of how cities evolve. And so if you think of blockchains as cities, what is Ethereum? Everyone complains about Ethereum, right? Ethereum is super expensive.

Starting point is 00:12:56 It's super slow. It's congested. Everything's super old. Things never changed. People are like, oh, what happened to, what about Turbo Geith? What about E2.0? Nothing ever seems to actually happen around here. Ethereum is Manhattan.

Starting point is 00:13:09 It's a super expensive, or New York City more broadly, it's a super expensive city. It's super old. It's been around forever. And everyone is annoyed. Anyone who goes to Manhattan will just complain nonstop about how, you know, the train sucked and the infrastructure sucks and the homeless are everywhere. Everything's too expensive. The rents are crazy.

Starting point is 00:13:27 Nothing can ever seem to get built. But Manhattan is the most happening place on earth. If you want to be a somebody and you want to be at the epicenter of the financial activity and the cultural activity in America, the one place per square foot, that that is maximized is in Manhattan. And ultimately, if you want to find the richest people in the U.S., they're in New York. If you want to find the most culturally influential people in the U.S., they're in New York, maybe in L.A., but let's say New York.

Starting point is 00:13:58 And in the same way, if you look on Ethereum, Ethereum has the biggest whales are all on Ethereum, the most expensive NFTs are all on Ethereum, the biggest DeFi protocols are all on Ethereum, the biggest Dow's are all in Ethereum. like Manhattan slash New York is like Ethereum in that it is the oldest and most robust place. Now, if you are going to go start a new defy protocol, the same way, if you want to go start a new bank, if you don't have a headquarters in Manhattan, then you're not serious, right? You're not going to be playing in the biggest games. Yes, I know Manhattan's expensive.

Starting point is 00:14:29 Yes, I know that everything's crowded and everything sucks. But look, if you're not there, then you're just not going to be playing in the biggest games. And that's also true today on Ethereum. If you're an emerging defy protocol, you might say, look, Ethereum's too expensive. I'm going to go here. I'm going to get an roll-up. I'm going to go to another little one.

Starting point is 00:14:45 But it's obviously true today that the vast majority of TVL that exists in DFI is on Ethereum. Now, if you're a newcomer and you weren't around in the early days or you're not super wealthy or you're not, you know, one of the sort of rich and famous or part of the intelligentsia, then you might say, like, look, it's a little late for me to show up on Ethereum. The fees are already crazy high. There's no room for people like me. I don't have a rent control, you know, I don't have a rent control department. And so if I want to strike out, like, look, I can't move to New York.

Starting point is 00:15:14 It's just too expensive. I got to go find someplace where I can build my career. And for that marginal person, that marginal entrepreneur, that marginal user, they might say, like, look, this stuff is too expensive for me. The Ethereum's for the billionaires, I got to go somewhere else. So the question there is, how do you scale a city? When New York, there's only so much land and not that many more people can go there. So broadly speaking, there are three approaches to scaling blockchains. And in order, they are roll-ups, interoperability networks, and other other ones.

Starting point is 00:15:44 So I'll go through each of them in turn. Well, can we just pause here before we go through each of those to see? I want to go back to what you said around the physical constraints, right? And make sure that is hammered home because what you said is like Facebook, you can just add servers, you could scale. And blockchains, you can't just add servers and scale. Just to ground people on that, particularly those who are new. Why are blockchains physically constraining themselves?

Starting point is 00:16:08 right? So I'm not sure that this necessarily might make sense to someone, but like, are they doing this because there's a tradeoff? Are they doing this because our cryptography isn't going enough? Are they doing this because there's some sort of other bandwidth limitation? Like, why are they even constrained in the first place? That's a great question. So the reason why blockchains constrain themselves is not because you can't build a big distributed system that grows arbitrarily big. The reason why is that the core, The more foundational component of what makes blockchains' is the fact that they are trustless. Now, what does it mean to be trustless? I mean, this can be itself an hour-long conversation. But part of what it means to be trustless is that you, yourself, don't have to trust any third party in order to verify that the blockchain has been executed correctly. No one's cheating.

Starting point is 00:16:59 No one's making shit up. No one's creating money out of thin air or deciding to change the rules on the fly. Everything is according to the way that the rules were originally set into place when the blockchain was initially created. right? That's what everyone wants to know. And so in order to you not to have to trust a third party, you have to be able to run the computation yourself or verify the computation yourself that what has happened in your corner of the world, in your blockchain and everything that touches you, has been executed correctly. Now, if the blockchain can only be run by a supercomputer

Starting point is 00:17:30 because it's so large and it's so big that all the computations in it cannot be compactly executed or verified on consumer hardware, the kind of thing that you or I could get our hands on and actually run ourselves, then ultimately you have to trust the third party. You have to trust somebody else, who is actually going to go run the supercomputer, who is actually going to check all the transactions on the blockchain.

Starting point is 00:17:52 Now, you might think that, look, I'm okay with trusting a third party because, you know, whatever, I want to. But the core philosophy behind Ethereum, and not every blockchain shares this philosophy, but the core philosophy behind Ethereum is that, individuals should be able to check themselves, that everything that happened on the blockchain is correct. And therefore, that they do not need to rely on any third parties outside of the kind of things you could run on your own consumer hardware without relying on AWS, without relying on

Starting point is 00:18:21 the government, without relying on anyone intermediating between yourself and the blockchain. So, go ahead. So blockchains are physically constrained because they are attempting to keep the cost of verification low while also scaling the amount of transaction throughput. So that's the key there, is keeping the cost of verification low. And that's why they can't just, like, expand indefinitely. That's why they are more like cities because they have some borders, they have some limitations, they have a set of square miles that they've allocated for themselves,

Starting point is 00:18:57 and they can't really expand beyond that. Exactly. That's exactly right. And the way that I've thought that's a useful way to understand this is that if we want to just scale up a Web 2 database, right, like a Facebook database, we can just arbitrarily add more CPUs, more GPUs, more memory, and it doesn't really matter because generally we're adding that physical hardware into the same spaces as all the other physical hardware. Like Facebook only has so many databases. Google only has so many databases. There's a handful of them, you know, five to ten-ish. In blockchains, and when we want to have things be trustless, we have. an arbitrary number of databases that all need to maintain consensus. They all need to sync up with each other. And so in a Web 2 world, when you add hardware to a database because it's centralized, you just linearly add capacity, just resources. But in a blockchain world, because all these locations of these databases are spread out around the world, when you add a new computer to the

Starting point is 00:19:53 network, when you add a new node to the network, you on net actually slow down the network. So in Web 2, when you add resources, it speeds it up. And Web 3, when you add resources, it actually slows it down. And the way that it slows it down, just to unpack that a little bit more, is that some blockchains accept a certain level of speed with how much data they allow the network to handle. And some networks want to throttle themselves back so that any computer, any reasonable computer that was made in the last five to ten years can keep up with a chain. And then other blockchain say, like, oh, we only want computers that have been made.

Starting point is 00:20:30 in the last two years and also are super powerful. We only want those to be able to keep up with the chain. And so it's an inversion. In Web 2 world, when you add network resources, you speed up databases. But in Web 3 world, when you add network resources, you slow them down because you need to make sure that every single individual is able to keep up with a chain. And the tolerance for how many individuals can keep up with a chain is a spectrum that different blockchains can tinker with as they see fit.

Starting point is 00:21:00 Do you want to add anything to that metaphor? No, I think that you nailed it. So I think the intuition that most people should be walking away with is that, look, different blockchains have different ideas about what that threshold ought to be. How much is it okay to say that this is the kind of hardware or the kind of cost that you need in order to actually verify the blockchain yourself? If you're Binance Smart Chain, then that cost is very, very high. It's very difficult to run a node for Binance Smart Chain on any kind of consumer hardware.

Starting point is 00:21:25 For Solana, it's maybe, you know, similarly quite expensive, but maybe a little bit cheaper than by a smart chain. And as you go further down the chains with respect to their intrinsic performance requirements, those things get cheaper and cheaper. And sharding throws a whole other curveball into this whole story because sharding kind of makes a story a little bit more complex, but I think it's probably beyond the scope of this particular conversation because it applies in general, even across individual shards about, okay, even within the context of one shard, how big is that shard going to be that you can actually verify it on your own consumer hardware? Okay. Well, so now let's return to our thread, Haseeb and where you're a

Starting point is 00:22:00 going, the question of how do you scale up New York City? How do you scale up, you know, generalize any city? What are the different paths? You mentioned three of those. And maybe you could reiterate those and then we could dive into them one by one. Yeah. So if Ethereum is New York and Ethereum is too crowded, how do we scale up New York? And the three approaches within blockchain land are first roll-ups, second, interoperability networks, and third would be other layer ones. Let's start with roll-ups. Roll-ups are the, you're taking to the city analogy, right? Let's say you're in New York. And, you know, it's, I don't know, maybe the year 1900. And you're like, okay, New York is full. Everyone is here. Rents are super high. Everything sucks. How do we get more people into the city?

Starting point is 00:22:45 Because there are a lot of people who want to live here. And the answer, of course, in urban planning, is build up. So start building taller and taller buildings until you culminate into skyscrapers. and skyscrapers are obviously they're marvel of engineering. They're incredibly complex to actually build and get them to where we are today with skyscraper technology. But the fundamental thing that skyscrapers do is they allow more people to fit into the same city with the same kind of underlying land. The same footprint. Yes, exactly. The same footprint on the underlying land.

Starting point is 00:23:16 Now, putting more people into a city is a beautiful goal. But when you have skyscrapers, when you have a city full of skyscrapers, the reality is that, so, one, although a lot of people have managed now to be able to move into the city because they can live up above the underlying ground, each person who enters into the city through the skyscraper, they require less overall land, but they still tax the underlying resources of the land to some degree, right? If you have people living on the ground floor and then you add another layer on top, right? And then so great, now you have a two-story building and new people come into that two-story

Starting point is 00:23:48 building. The overall utilization of the city has increased much less than it would be if you had to add more, you know, those people on the ground floor. But it's increased somewhat. It's increased very, very slightly, right? And as you keep adding more and more layers, you can add people more and more cheaply. But the experience of those people, if I come in and live in a skyscraper in Manhattan, right, it's maybe nice because we've added a lot of headway, a lot of extra rooms, there's a lot of vacancies.

Starting point is 00:24:15 Rents can go down now that we've added more land, or not more land, but more rooms, rather. But the downside of living in a skyscraper, of course, is that if you live in a skyscraper and I live in a skyscraper and I want to come see you, I have to go down my skyscraper, get on the ground floor, go hail a taxi, get across town, pay the tolls along the way, and come to your skyscraper and go up all the flights of your stairs to I go find you. And by the way, in New York, it takes like one hour to go like, you know, three miles. That's right. It's a huge pain in the ass, right?

Starting point is 00:24:43 We do not get to escape the fundamental constraints of the city we live in if you and I live in different skyscrapers, which we most likely will if there are going to be a lot of different skyscrapers in the city. So now what's the blockchain equivalent of that? It's roll-ups. Vitalik has claimed that roll-ups are the future of Ethereum scaling, right? We now have this full capitulation in the story of Ethereum, I want to say 2.0. The future of Ethereum that post-sharting, Ethereum is not going to have native execution on its shards. It's instead going to be a roll-up-centric view of how Ethereum is going to scale.

Starting point is 00:25:19 And so what that means is that these roll-ups get probably beyond the scope of this to exactly describe. the mechanics of Rollos, but long story short, they are scaling solutions. They're like kind of mini-baby blockchains that emerge from the underlying blockchain with the security properties of that underlying blockchain. They sort of obey the institutions and the trust properties of that underlying blockchain. In the same way, if you live in a skyscraper in Manhattan, you might have, you know, some rules for living in the building, but you're still fundamentally living in Manhattan. All the rules of Manhattan apply to you. And all the trust model, all the taxes, all the whatever, you're still a member of Manhattan just because you live in a

Starting point is 00:25:54 skyscraper, you might have extra rules on top of it, but you fundamentally still live in the same city. The same thing applies in a roll-up. A roll-up extends out from the layer one. Everyone who lives in that roll-up has the same trust guarantees as the underlying layer one that they're operating on, which in this case would be Ethereum, but things are a lot cheaper. Things are faster. Things are more scalable, right? Now, they're not infinitely cheaper or infinitely faster. And, you know, there's some non-roll-up designs like, you know, volition or volidium that might have very, very, very high-scaleability properties. For most roll-ups, it's a very significant factor increases, you know, 10x or 20x or something like that, but it's not, you know, 1,000 X or 2,000 X or anything like that for most of the

Starting point is 00:26:36 roll-up designs that exist today. So all that is to say, roll-ups have the same issue that I just described in a skyscraper. If we're in a roll-up, if I'm in a roll-up and you're in a roll-up and we're not in the same roll-up, then if I want to transact with you, I have to exit from my roll-up, go down to layer one, transfer across layer one, and then go up into your roll-up to go and transact with you. Now, there are other solutions like cross-chain bridges. You can imagine, you know, there's maybe, you know, kind of like those sky bridges. You have those visiting towers. Yeah, Skybridges, yeah, that's what they're called. You can imagine, like some skybridge type things, type contraptions. But, you know, if you want to move an enormous amount of stuff across the

Starting point is 00:27:14 sky bridge, maybe you can't do it, right? Like, it's somewhat complicated with these cross-chain bridges. They can't bridge exactly everything. There's something that can't be bridge. Also with optimistic roll-ups in particular. Some of the sky bridges look a bit more like tightropes, right? Exactly. It's a very narrow skybridge, at least today. And I think there's some fundamental reasons why those sky bridges have to be narrow because of liquidity that's needed for the different assets that you might want to bridge on each layer, too. But at the end of the day, skyscrapers are great. They're a huge improvement of what you can build inside of a city. but skyscrapers are not themselves.

Starting point is 00:27:50 I mean, if you think about it, like, okay, we got skyscrapers now in big cities. But not everybody lives in Manhattan or in New York, even though we have a lot of skyscrapers, right? There is only so much you can get in cheapness from living in a skyscraper in New York, right? Like, fundamentally, living in a skyscraper in New York is never going to be cheaper than living in, you know, just some random town in Virginia. and that's a fundamental property of the fact that you have to be taking up space in Manhattan. There is some externality for you being there that is imposed by your presence in the city. And if you want to get to the place where basically you're paying, you know, some small town in Virginia type rent or let's say, you know, some new layer one type fees,

Starting point is 00:28:36 which can be, you know, in the fractions of assent, you're never going to get that on a roll-up. It doesn't matter how, you know, it doesn't matter how beautiful or how well-designed the roll-up is going to be. or at least to a first approximation, if it's truly a roll-up and it actually is posting transaction data on chain, which all roll-ups do, then you're never going to get it

Starting point is 00:28:53 to be that cheap compared to an underlying layer one transaction. And that's why roll-ups are themselves probably not the end of the story on scaling. Every city eventually as it grows has skyscrapers, but skyscrapers are not themselves alone enough to say, okay, great, everyone's going to live in one city

Starting point is 00:29:10 and that's the end of the story. And that's why we have to explore other solutions. Okay. This is the building up approach. This is what you would consider, just to classify which chains you would consider doing this. Ethereum, you would say, is doing this building up method. Any blockchain maybe that's taking this modular blockchain design type of method where they're scaling up with roll-ups, like maybe a NIR or a Tezos is probably taking this approach.

Starting point is 00:29:34 Are there any others that come to mind? I think those are the main ones. And the reality, of course, is that the one that needs it most desperately is Ethereum, because right now, you know, it's almost like the year is 1850s. and New York is the one city that's starting to push up against the boundaries. But almost everything else is still frontier. And as a result, you know, when prices are sold cheap and people are building new housing every single day and like things are growing and, you know, cities are on the rise,

Starting point is 00:29:58 there's not a lot of need to start figuring out how to build skyscrapers. The demand for skyscraper, I mean, you can sort of see this, right? Like plasma, which was the first layer two that was seriously considered for Ethereum, that was going to scale kind of general computation, plasma was first, or I'm sorry, Plasma originally was not general computation, but eventually there were designs for general computation. Plasma was first announced and explored in 2017, when Ethereum started getting congestion.

Starting point is 00:30:23 And of course, almost every other blockchain today is not seriously facing congestion, except maybe in times of total turmoil, like what we saw a couple last weekend during the market downturn. But generally speaking, most of these blockchains have tons of headroom. So there's not actually a burning need the way there is for Ethereum today to build vertically. at least not yet.

Starting point is 00:30:44 One thing I really appreciate about this metaphor is a couple things. The subway system in New York, Hissibu kind of talks smack about the New York infrastructure, but coming from Seattle, the level of degree of New York's public transportation infrastructure is just astounding to me. And while it's got this fantastic, just mesh network of subways connecting, you know, skyscraper to skyscraper, and that feels like the Ethereum L1. The subways are not where you live. Like, that's not where you spend your time.

Starting point is 00:31:12 you just are there while you are going from more desirable place to more desirable place. The more desirable place is being the buildings, the ones that are building up vertically. And even though, like, you know, you can build a pretty damn tall building with a ton of apartment units in it, but at some point you approach physics where we cannot build an infinitely tall skyscraper. We can innovate, but at some point the laws of physics get in our way. And so that, to me, is like what a roll-up-centric roadmap looks like. We have all of these machines that are faring people and their stuff from skyscraper to skyscraper.

Starting point is 00:31:48 And then the skyscrapers have built up to match the demand as much as they can of the people that want to live in Manhattan and are willing to pay to live in Manhattan. And that's how we get scale. And so we have these very, very vertical skyscrapers that are being coordinated by the roots of the city, which are the subways, which are like the faring of value between roll up to roll up. That's kind of how I think of Ethereum in this city metaphor. I think that's absolutely right. I think in a post-sharting universe, if we do actually see this roll-up-centric roadmap be delivered, that's what Ethereum is going to look like. Now, the big thing, of course, about that vision, if you imagine a vision of a city

Starting point is 00:32:27 where basically everyone either is in a skyscraper or they're in a subway, it sounds like a slightly dystopian vision of a city. And I think part of the reason why you're actually seeing so much demand, for some other approach beyond just, okay, we're all in shards and then we, like, move in between these roll-ups, is that it's actually very complex because you don't have the composability that right now we have. Like right now, Ethereum is basically like one of these old-timey cities where you just like walk down the street and there's like horses or and there's, you know, old ladies selling their wares and there's a park over here and you can walk around to the park and like there's an ice skating rink over there. And it has a kind of dynamism that comes from composability. And in this post-roll-roll-up world, one of the things that you give up,

Starting point is 00:33:09 by having a world where it's all these vertical skyscrapers and a subway system that connects them is you give up that composability that is defining characteristic of a theorem today. So obviously within a skyscraper, everything's composable because, you know, you can say, oh, great, you know, you can, this floor has the gym and has the swimming pool

Starting point is 00:33:24 and has the this thing. But in the vibrancy that we get from cities, unless we see something like where there's one super dominant roll-up or maybe two super-dominate roll-ups within which the composability is enough. So there's, you know, one giant, you know, sort of snow globe that, is kind of one mega roll-up and there's almost like an entire city embedded in that roll-up,

Starting point is 00:33:44 you know, it's too early to say it's too early to really know. But I think it's one of the reasons, one of the weaknesses, I'd say, of this vision of blockchains is that lack of composability. Okay, well, let's move to the second approach for blockchain scalability, which UT's didn't, you mentioned. So this is interoperability network. So this is kind of the cosmos polka dot type of approach where you have this internet of change, this network. of chains and they're all linked in some way. Can you talk about that approach to scalability and the pros and cons that you see? Yeah. So if you take, okay, so let's take for granted that skyscrapers are coming, but let's see what other ways are there to scale New York aside from skyscrapers?

Starting point is 00:34:28 Now, one approach that is one of the classic approaches to scaling blockchains. I mean, this has been going on since, you know, 2017, 2016, is this idea of let's create an internet of blockchain so that other blockchains can help scale the sort of the excess, the overage from Ethereum. And this was the original vision behind Pocod and Cosmos. And increasingly what you see today is that the way that Pocod and Cosmos have kind of oriented themselves is that instead of really focusing on, okay, let's connect up Ethereum to a bunch of other chains, what they really focus on is let's create a network of blockchains that all obey the same kind of SDK that have the same kind of underlying sort of infrastructure and underlying guts.

Starting point is 00:35:07 and you can really easily spin up a new blockchain that only does one thing. These are often called application-specific blockchains. So you can imagine that someday MakerDAO could have its own blockchain or compound could have its own blockchain. In fact, Compound was talking about this with what was it called Gateway, I think. Compound Cash. Yeah, compound cash, which is going to be issued on top of. Oh, no, that was the, yeah, yeah. Which is going to be issued on top of gateway.

Starting point is 00:35:28 Cash. Cash would be the native stable coin. So there are many applications that have contemplated the idea of creating their own blockchains and becoming these application-specific blockchains that connect back to Ethereum. Now, the vision, and this is something you talk to the folks at Cosmos or the folks at Pocodot, they'll tell you,

Starting point is 00:35:45 is that the idea that you're going to have one big super city that's going to encompass everything, that's just never going to work, that's not going to scale, that's not how modern distributed systems are built. They're built with lots of individual systems that talk to each other asynchronously, right? And so you will have, according to these people,

Starting point is 00:36:01 you will have a lot of small blockchains that do one thing and that talk to each other over some interface, whether it be through the Pocoddolet relay chain, whether that be through the Cosmoshob or through osmosis or whatever, through IBC. And you're going to have lots of individual chains that do only one thing. And that's how smart contracts are going to scale.

Starting point is 00:36:20 Some things will live in Ethereum, I'm sure. If you really need to be in the metropolis, sure, fine, be in the metropolis. But lots and lots of industry is going to take place in these small application-specific chains. The way that today, most applications on the Internet, that they don't take place in common servers, right? You go to CNN.com and they run their own server.

Starting point is 00:36:37 And you go to, you know, AT&T.com or you go to Apple.com and they run their own server. And everyone has their own machine. That's the vision of application-specific blockchains. Now, the equivalent analogy that I give in the city's metaphor is that application-specific blockchains are kind of like factory towns. Or they're kind of like, you know, sort of a town that's just just as one thing. So you can imagine a town that's like, you know, just has outlet stores and nothing else and there's maybe a gas station.

Starting point is 00:37:00 Or a town that's like, you know, it's just a might be. mining town and everyone here is mining or everyone here is like, you know, there's an oil rig and everyone here works for that oil rig. And the town exists only to do one thing. And it's not a generalized, you know, cosmopolitan place the way that we think about a place like Ethereum. So if this is the right mental model for these types of chains, then what I argue is that, look, I think it's very likely that we will see some applications-specific blockchains. The application-specific blockchains that we see today are pretty small, though. Right?

Starting point is 00:37:30 So, you know, one example of it is something like osmosis. Osmosis is a Cosmosis-D-K-based chain that only does one thing. It's just a big, basically the equivalent of balancer. It's a big giant balancer thing that exists on Cosmos SDK, connects to other cosmos chains across this big highway system that is the Cosmos IBC routing system. It only does one thing. And it does it pretty well. You know, it's pretty good at being this kind of Cosmos balancer thing.

Starting point is 00:37:55 But that's it. It's not, you know, there's not a whole thing. whole universe of things happening on top of osmosis, it only does one thing. And it's likely that things like this will exist. But I don't think it's likely that this is going to be the lion's share of activity. And if you sort of think about the city's metaphor, it drives you in the same direction. There are towns that only just, you know, mile, everyone works for some oil rig. Or there are towns that like everyone here works for this one office of this one company that happens to have a factory nearby. But they are not the lion's share of where people live. They are not

Starting point is 00:38:27 the lion's share of where economic activity happens. They're not the lion's share of economic innovation. They're important. They're a part of the landscape. But it's very clear that cities are really important. Cities is where almost everything happens because of the fact that they're these tightly connected, very dynamic, very interconnected places. And those interconnections is what creates innovation, economic opportunity. And if you live on osmosis, and all you can do is trade, you know, one different, you know, cosmos-based token for another, that's useful. But there's not a lot of creativity that's going to merge out of cosmos. And it's very clear, the reason why cities and, you know, layer one blockchins have become so valuable is because of all the innovation

Starting point is 00:39:05 that's occurred on top of them. And that's why I think, although these, you know, sort of application-specific blockchins exist, they are not going to be the most important part of the scaling story. So you are bullish metropolises and Berrish one-factory towns. I mean, bearish is a strong word, right? It's sort of relative to the price. If you look, I mean, if you look today at the landscape of layer ones, or sorry, the landscape of public blockchains. You can see, you know, look at the top 100, there aren't that many application specific blockchains there, which it's kind of like, look, the market is telling you that they don't really value the application specific blockchains very highly. And I roughly disagree with it.

Starting point is 00:39:38 I'm not saying that I think Osmosis going to do badly from where it's sitting or these other application specific blockchains are going to do badly from where they're sitting. I just don't think they're going to be the lion's share of where value is created in public blockchains. So when we look around the distribution of cities in United States or the world at large, we see many, many cities of the type like Manhattan, like L.A., like Seattle, like Chicago, but I'm trying to think of a like company town or mining town that I know the name of and I don't really know the name of one. So perhaps like the distribution. And if we want to take like physical real estate land geography, I think that would equate to block space. And really what do blockchains do?

Starting point is 00:40:23 Blockchains sell blocks. There's not that much physical. real estate that is claimed by the world of specific like one use case cities like a mining town. And so perhaps if we extrapolate out to the end game of whatever this crypto industry morphs into, perhaps application specific blockchains only take up a relatively minor portion of the total block space demand. Would you agree with all that? Yes. Not just that they're going to take up a relatively small amount of total demand. The demand that they're going to be competing for is going to be valued less highly. which is an important distinction, right?

Starting point is 00:40:58 You can imagine that actually a lot of the U.S. is taken up by like wind farms and, you know, things that take up a lot of space, but that space is not in high contention. No one is fighting for that space. In the same way, look, trades on osmosis are really cheap. And they're really cheap because not a lot of other people are trying to do things on osmosis other than just trade on osmosis.

Starting point is 00:41:17 But if osmosis lived on Ethereum or on Terra or on some other, you know, blockchain that had more contention for that same underlying land, that underlying block space, that underlying resource, then you would see things be more expensive. Yeah, it's like metropolis space per square mile per square foot is much more valuable than like some rural geography, right, from a real estate perspective. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:41:37 And like I think you have to go back to why people choose to live in the city that they choose to live in. There are many factors, quality of life, you know. Culture. What do they enjoy? Culture, all sorts of things. But also economic opportunity is a massive driver of where individuals choose to locate. Like, where are the jobs?

Starting point is 00:41:56 where are the good jobs, right? And I think that's another driver that probably comes into play. You're not going to find the same type of job in a small rural town as you are in Manhattan or L.A. or some other metropolis, and that factors in. So let's talk about the third path then, because there are three paths here. What is the third path here? This is more cities, Haseeb. What are you talking about? More cities? We could just build more of these things? Yeah. Turns out, you know, when New York got full, or I guess it was originally, Boston and the history of America. When the first city gets full, people know what to do. And the answer is you go build a new freaking city. And the history of cities is obviously that there is

Starting point is 00:42:37 not just one city in every single country. There are many cities. And interestingly, what you often see is that the cities tend to be far away from each other and they tend to become very different from each other. And so, you know, the two major cities in the U.S. are New York and L.A. And L.A. is really far from New York. It's literally the absolute opposite as far as you could possibly get from New York. And it's really different. The culture of L.A. is completely different than New York. Now, when you build a new city,

Starting point is 00:43:05 the first thing about building a new city is that there's a lot of stuff you have to do all over again. It's a lot of redundancy, right? When you start a new city, you have to start with building a bunch of basic infrastructure. So you have to go in, you have to build, you know, there needs to be plumbing. There needs to be roads. There needs to be a police station. The marketplaces, the bazaar. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:43:23 You need basic infrastructure in order for people. to actually be able to live there. Like if there are no schools, if there is no, you know, fire stations, if there's no any of the stuff, then people are not going to want to move to this new city. So initially, when you first start a new city, there's a lot of just, you know, infrastructure, plumbing, redundant work that needs to be done that you don't need to do when you're building a skyscraper. And you don't need to do when you're building a, you know, like a factory town or like a,

Starting point is 00:43:47 you know, a wind farm or whatever. And so initially it might look that building a new city actually seems really wasteful. We already have great hospitals and great police stations and great roads in Manhattan. Why are we doing all this all over again? But the advantage of building all that infrastructure over again is that you are not burdened by this sort of technical debt, let's call it, or like the bad decisions that were made by those older cities. And that's why you often see when you have older cities that eventually get too big and someone goes and starts a new city, that newer city is much faster. It's much cleaner. It's more efficient. It's laid out more

Starting point is 00:44:22 intelligently. Whereas the older city kind of, you know, it's a sort of process of accretion and things kind of get bolted on and everything's like, it's got this complicated story of like, why is it that the train doesn't go here and like it goes, does this crazy loop-de-loop before it can go to this other thing. It's like, look, it's so hard to explain. It's something happened like 70 years ago and like blah, blah, blah. Something about World War II, like, whatever. Just deal with it. And when you start a new city, it's a blank slate. You can do everything over again from first principles and with the tools of kind of modern civil engineering and science and whatever. And so when you see the equivalent of new cities in blockchains,

Starting point is 00:44:58 that's what new layer ones are. That's what all these new emerging layer ones are. New York was full. And so we decided to create L.A. We decided to create Boston. We decided to create Chicago and Houston and all these other cities. And now, you know, to my point about infrastructure, one thing that you notice with all these new layer ones, especially when they're new, is that a lot of infrastructure is missing. So it's like, okay, where are the block explorers? Why can't I see the smart contract code on chain? You know, why are the RPC endpoints so crappy? Why isn't there, you know, a good ether scan or a good Dune analytics or a good, you know, good security tooling or good, you know, developer experience?

Starting point is 00:45:32 All this stuff needs to get rebuilt for these new chains. And, you know, some of them can kind of piggyback on Ethereum if they use the EVM. But even still, there's a lot of infrastructure that is missing, no matter how similar you make it to the original city. But the advantage of building a whole new city is that you get to start. over with institutions. The institutions of New York are very conservative in a lot of ways, right? Because New York is this old, very stalwart city that's been around for a very, very long time. It was built on, you know, this global finance, this incredible pedigree that comes with being, you know, descended from New York, same thing with London, same thing with all these very legendary, massive cities.

Starting point is 00:46:12 When you start a new city, you can kind of say, look, we don't need to be what New York is. We can be more nimble. We can have different values. We can have different perspectives. We can value different things. We can be governed differently, right? One of the things that you'll notice about California versus New York is that the way in which laws are laid out that govern California are very different than what goes on in New York. And so the way that I liken these cities, and I have these very specific analogies, I'm sure we'll go back and forth on, but I compare Solana to L.A.

Starting point is 00:46:42 And the reason why I compare Solana to L.A. is that, look, Solana went as far west as you can go, right? So I said, look, New York, those guys over in the East Coast, they care so much about decentralization. They're so, you know, up their own asses, constantly talking about how nation state attacks, blah, blah, blah, blah. But like, look, fundamentally, I know what people want. What people want is they want entertainment. They want fast cheap transactions. They want everything, you know, straight, you know, fed down the tube of their TVs.

Starting point is 00:47:08 That's what people really want, and I'm going to give it to them. I'm going to go to the most beautiful, you know, the most beautiful and sunniest place in the world. Yeah, exactly. These manicured place where all the, you know, People who want their 10 minutes of fame, they can come out to Solana. Everything's cheap. Everything's fast. And, like, we're for the builders, right?

Starting point is 00:47:25 That's what we're all about. And if you want to be a gaming project and FTT project, but we are the best place for you to be, everything is cheap and fast, and we're going to sit down with you. We're going to help you make it happen. And for those people who are not too fixated on decentralization, and they don't think that that's the be all and all. For a lot of them, they say, like, great, that's an awesome vision. I love that vision.

Starting point is 00:47:46 and it's almost as polar opposite as you can get within the scope of all the kind of big dominant layer ones, Salana is kind of as far as you can get from Ethereum. And in many ways, you can also see it. You know, within crypto, the two biggest layer one blockchains are Ethereum and Solana. In the same way, the two biggest cities in the U.S. are New York and L.A. Now, I keep going down the list and give me more examples. I can stop there or I can keep going if you want to keep going. I was just going to bring that up.

Starting point is 00:48:15 Yeah. So you list off some other cities and some other blockchains that you think resemble certain cities. And so I think that's just a fantastic game. So let's keep on the list. So the next on the list that I put on there is Avalanche. It's not literally the next blockchain on MarketCat, but it's the one that I think is worth putting in this list. So Avalanche, the way that you can, that I like to analyze Avalanche is Avalanche is like Chicago. So Chicago is the third largest city in the U.S.

Starting point is 00:48:39 And of course, Chicago, you know, it kind of has this. It is sort of a financing city like New York. It doesn't have quite all the same kind of cultural sophistication that New York has, but it's an aggressive city. It's a fast-growing city. It's a newer city. And it's one that is ultimately, it's made a name for itself, by being really, really good at what it does. And in the same way, I think Avalanche is kind of this finance-oriented up-and-comber. It's very aggressive.

Starting point is 00:49:05 It has this kind of very brusque identity. But it's, look, we're going to be the next generation of Wall Street. We're going to take the wind out of the sales of Ethereum and be the future of what Wall Street wants to do. You know, it's a little cold in Chicago. Same way it's, you know, avalanche, obviously, is a snowy name. And they like to use a lot of cold metaphors. So I felt like it was very appropriate to brand them as Chicago.

Starting point is 00:49:29 And then the next one I put on that list is San Francisco. San Francisco is actually not one of the largest cities. Actually, they're pretty far down the list, actually. But in terms of cultural significance, I think it's pretty obvious that San Francisco is enormous in terms of its cultural roadmap. Or so its impact on the overall culture and, on the overall country by GDP. And the same thing is true in many ways for NEAR.

Starting point is 00:49:48 Near is actually pretty low on the list of total TVL chains, at least right now. But you can obviously see in terms of price, it's moved dramatically, especially over the last couple months. And Near, I analogized to San Francisco where Near is this, near actually very much embraces this Ethereum 2.0 vision, is that, you know, look, near, we are, you know, sharding before Ethereum could ever get to sharding. We are the decentralization maximists. We're the idealist about what technology can accomplish.

Starting point is 00:50:15 you know, we're a bunch of like ex-Google and X-M-Squel engineers. We're trying to build this next generation of tech. And we're true believers in that decentralization vision. It's not there yet. We're on our way. And I kind of analogize that to like, okay, you guys are trying to build the future. It's very, you know, idealistic, much in the way of San Francisco. So those are the blockchions that I threw into the post.

Starting point is 00:50:36 But, you know, it's a game that we can take further if it makes sense to. But I don't know what you guys think of this. know what the random town in Virginia was walking out is. Ryan took that one personally. Oh shit. I live in a random town in Virginia. I live in a random town in Virginia. Okay, okay.

Starting point is 00:50:55 Literally. But no offense taken. Yeah, I totally get it. But can I ask you a question, right? Because this is interesting. A lot of people frame different chains and bankless has we have in the past as taking completely different tradeoffs. But I think you're saying a little bit, like, yeah, and that's the point.

Starting point is 00:51:14 these cities are making different tradeoffs, right? You're saying L.A. is going in a completely different direction in New York. But what they're all after is sort of the same fundamental things. They want population growth. They want economic growth. They want prosperity. They want more citizens, I suppose, more GDP for their city. So they're all competing over the same types of resources and the same metrics.

Starting point is 00:51:41 And yes, of course, they are all making different tradeoffs. Would you agree with that? These cities are all making different tradeoffs, but they're all after the same thing. Yes, to an extent, right? So the classic way that the multi-chain story has often been portrayed is that it's a zero-sum battle. And the zero-sum battle is basically that who's going to be the dominant blockchain? And whoever picked the right trade-offs is ultimately the one that's going to be dominant, right? That's the traditional network effects model of blockchain, is that there's going to be one, that's the right one,

Starting point is 00:52:09 and everyone else is basically going to die off or be a ghost town. and the vision that I'm painting here is a different vision. It's a vision that, look, New York and L.A., obviously, in some sense, compete over people because some people decide whether to live in New York or whether to live in L.A. But when you see that there's a lot of, you know, when you see outflows today, not, you know, 100 years ago, but today, from New York or from L.A., it's actually not that common that people from L.A. go to New York. Or the people from New York go to L.A. That's usually actually not what happens. What happens is that people in New York go to other places in New York or they go to Connecticut or they go to Jersey or a city or whatever.

Starting point is 00:52:45 And same thing in California. If you don't like L.A., you go to San Diego, you go to some other place in California. And the reason why is that ultimately, I think what is going to end up happening in blockchains, this is kind of the prediction, the underlying prediction of this model, is that the different places in the trade-off spectrum actually are going to attract mostly different people. The Venn diagram, there's some people who are going to be, look, I just want to be in the best city. And if New York is the best city and if it's the most happening city, I'm going to go there. And if it's L.A., I'm going to go there. And, like, I don't really care about the underlying culture or the underlying values, the underlying whatever.

Starting point is 00:53:20 But a lot of people are going to find that the cities are so different. They house such different applications, such different kinds of people, such different use cases that actually, it's like, look, if I want to be playing games, then I'm going to be on Solana either way. And if I don't choose Salon, I'm going to choose some other thing that's going to make a similar set of tradeoffs. I'm never going to be going on a theory to play games. It's just not the place for games. And in the same way, like, look, if I want to go be an actor, maybe actors is not a great example since they both have acting.

Starting point is 00:53:47 But, you know, let's say that I want to, you know, be in, I don't know what's it. Hollywood, right? Hollywood, yeah, okay. I guess Hollywood is, if I want to, if I want to make movies, right? Like, I mean, obviously there's, there's, you know, the sort of play acting or like Broadway, which is in New York. But if you want to be in movies, there is one place to be.

Starting point is 00:54:05 And that's L.A. And if you are not in L.A. and you're not making movies like you're just, you know, what are you doing? Like, it's just the wrong place to be. And I think in that sense, you will find that as blockchains, as these emerging low ones grow, the prediction from this model is that, one, they will become more distinct from each other. Initially, when they all start, they're all kind of the same, right? Because they all just a big pile of roads and a police station and, you know, whatever.

Starting point is 00:54:27 It's all just, you know, it's a block explorer and then a, you know, a Twitter account that's like talking about how great it is. But eventually, and you've already seen this, the communities are getting more and more different. They're becoming more and more variegated over time. And as they do that, they're going to attract different communities, different industries, different kinds of developers, different kinds of applications. And if that happens, then the substituteability of these cities for each other will go down over time. And you won't say, okay, I don't like Ethereum, therefore I'm going to go move over to NIR.

Starting point is 00:54:59 What you will say instead is that like, hey, near is like really good for, I don't know, decentralized social media or, you know, some other thing that. is not the thing that Ethereum is dominantly used for, and vice versa. Do you think there will be some power law winners here at all? Yes, I do. And I think, again, this is another prediction of this city's model, which is why I like it, because it predicts a lot of things simultaneously. What it predicts is that, look, when you look at cities, you do observe a power law.

Starting point is 00:55:27 In every single country, there is one most dominant city, and that city is usually, you know, at least twice as big as the next largest city. Almost always. Very rare. There are two cities that are almost exactly the same size. And you see that in the U.S., right? In the U.S., New York is like something like 8 million people. And then L.A. is like, you know, 3. something million people.

Starting point is 00:55:43 New York is almost twice as big as L.A. And then it falls down and then there's, you know, one point something, you know, Chicago is maybe 2 million. And then, you know, Houston is like 1.5 million or something. I'm picking, I don't know exactly the numbers of something in this ballpark. In a way, there's almost exactly what we see with Lair 1s. With Ler 1, we see that Ethereum is huge. And then after that, Solana is pretty big. and then we see these other layer ones that are somewhat small,

Starting point is 00:56:09 and then it really falls off a cliff after you start going further down the list, right? But it looks like the power law distribution looks very similar to what we see with respect to cities. And so if you take the holistic view of this model, the reason why I like this model so much is that it almost perfectly describes

Starting point is 00:56:27 what we actually see. What we actually see in terms of layer one blockchains, their utilization, their prices, and their value is that the big cities are where almost all the value is. Right? So like Ethereum, Solana, Neer, Avalanche, Terra, et cetera, all those cities are hugely valuable, but it's concentrated mostly in Ethereum,

Starting point is 00:56:48 and then it kind of falls, it goes down a curve after that. And if you go further and further down the list of cities, those cities are not valuable at all. They're very, very small. Second is that when it comes to roll-ups or the skyscrapers, skyscrapers are important. We're seeing lots and lots of investment into skyscrapers,

Starting point is 00:57:03 as you would expect, as cities grow really large. But, you know, the largest skyscraper, which today is Arbitrum, has way less economic activity inside of it than L.A., which is maybe not surprising if this analogy is correct. And then third is that the application-specific blockchains, which are these factory towns, like, you know, something like osmosis, are tiny. Compared to all this other stuff going on within layer ones and layer twos, they're a tiny blip in the overall economic picture of what's going on on.

Starting point is 00:57:34 public blockchains. And Haseem, you're going through some of the predictions that you concretely write out in your paper, which is basically what we are going through right now in this podcast. But there's one prediction that we haven't touched on yet. And that's the very, very last one, which is that cross-chain bridges will be extremely valuable. Can you unpack this element of your thought and mental model here? Why are bridges so valuable? So this one, I think, doesn't follow directly from the analogy, but I think it's one that's not a far leap from the analogy. So cross-chain bridges are basically ways that you can connect up, between two chains or two cities or even two skyscrapers, for that matter.

Starting point is 00:58:08 And in a world where the distance between those two blockchains is very large and very treacherous, what you actually have seen, you know, in order for us to get the massive sprawling infrastructure that we have in the U.S., there was an enormous investment into a highway system. And the highway system that was, you know, built by the government is obviously very, very valuable. Before we had that, you know, we had roads and railroads. And railroads, of course, were extremely valuable. Some of those valuable businesses in the world before, you know, basically the highway system was built and totally made public. And transportation across the U.S. became much cheaper.

Starting point is 00:58:40 And, of course, before that, it was canals. And canals were extremely valuable. And, you know, it's because they were effectively the choke point for a huge amount of commerce. And in the same way, if there's any good analogy we've drawn here, you know, transportation is one of the largest industries in every developed economy. And transportation in the realm of public blockchains is basically bridges. It's how you connect assets and even potentially smart contract execution from one chain to another chain. If you're going to see more and more distribution across the landscape in crypto, across different layer ones and layer twos and applications of blockchain, then the connective tissue that connects up all

Starting point is 00:59:20 this stuff is going to be very, very valuable in the way that railroads are valuable and the way that canals were valuable. Again, it's not a direct consequence of this, but it's a prediction that I think is probably going to, I think probably going to come true. The layer two era is upon us. Ethereum's layer two ecosystem is growing every day, and we need L2 bridges to be fast and efficient in order to live a layer two life. A cross is the fastest and cheapest and most secure cross-chain bridge. With a cross, you don't have to worry about the long wait times or high fees to get your

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Starting point is 01:01:59 for Keystone Hardware Wallets so that they too can get into the world of Web 3. There's a ton of resonance that Ryan and I have had with these mental models, but there's also a few tweaks that we want to make. So we want to dive into how we would tweak these ideas and concepts to the way that we see this playing out. It's mostly the same. I would say it's 80% the same. But instead of cities, we've seen blockchain,

Starting point is 01:02:22 crypto-economic networks as nations, nation-states, not necessarily cities. And the reason why we think that we see blockchains to be cities, especially ones that take the modular approach, is that to us, the L2s, the roll-ups take the role of cities, where the Ethereum L1 takes the role of like the federal government, right, the coordinating body behind all the cities. And that's why you can drive from New York to L.A. without ever going through a security checkpoint. You don't actually ever have to cross a border. You can cross state borders, but like no one's there checking in on you saying, like, hey, can I see your documentation? And the way that this works is that because every single city, and we're kind of blurring the lines between cities and states here, every single state slash city is all

Starting point is 01:03:12 abiding by the same central protocol. And that is the Ethereum L1. And so the same citizenship that you have inside of L.A. is the same citizenship that you have inside of New York. and you mentioned earlier about how Boston was actually like the epicenter of the United States. And then also we have Washington, D.C., where like literally everything is decided. But let's go ahead just a discount all the ways that this metaphor breaks down when we make it extremely concrete. We'll just assume that the epicenter of the United States was New York because it kind of is.

Starting point is 01:03:40 When people decided to move out of New York, New York was settled in like 1650 something. And then we made the Constitution of the United States like almost 100 years later. And the Constitution of the United States set the rules. for how people can freely migrate across all the states, across all the cities, or perhaps across all the roll-ups. And so where Ethereum the L-1 has like this EVM, this central guiding protocol that allows for all of these different cities to sync up on their central nodes, right? And so all of these states collapse down to the federal government. And so all of these cities and states inside of the United States of America all abide by the same central. protocol, which is the Ethereum L1. And that makes interstate highways free for trades, free trade

Starting point is 01:04:29 between states. Like, you don't actually have to pay taxes to go trade between states, not to the Federal Reserve. And you also have all of the same rights that you do when you go from state to state and city to city. And that breaks down when you go across a border. And so, like, we'll have United States of America be United States, and then, like, Solana can be Canada. And there's friction going across the border. Like, you actually aren't guaranteed to be able to pass through that. And while users can freely consider themselves like a citizen of any single L1 and all of them simultaneously, assets are the things that actually have prominence.

Starting point is 01:05:08 Right. If an asset is born on Ethereum, then if you want to migrate that using a cross-chain bridge, a multi-sig bridge going from United States to Canada, United States to Mexico, or to Europe, you actually have to ask permission. and you need to go through a permissioned bridge. And that is the difference between a multi-sig bridge where you have a set of signers, which is how you cross across blockchains, versus a L2 roll-up cryptographic bridge, which has, as far as my understanding goes, much more bandwidth to allow for things on the L1

Starting point is 01:05:40 to pass up to the L2. And so there's friction between these borders. And that's because Canada abides by some certain set of laws. It is a particular protocol. and America abides by a certain set of laws. That is its protocol. And these laws are asynchronous. And so you have to actually go through like some sort of arbitrary coupler in order to have your things in one nation state go to another nation state.

Starting point is 01:06:06 And some nation states have really good partnerships. Perhaps like it's actually way easier to go from Ethereum to Avalanche because they are abide by a very common set of principles, the EVM. And that's why transportation across things like, United States to Canada, it's actually relatively easy because we actually have shared culture, but going from the United States to some country like Iraq gets a lot harder because we do not have shared protocols, shared laws. We operate on different rules. How do you feel about this tweaking of the metaphor? How has this landed with you? So I like it. I think by kind of zooming out a level and kind of saying like, okay, we're actually, let's pull everything up one kind of level of size. You end up at an interesting place

Starting point is 01:06:48 where as you were talking about, you can start contextualizing the relationships between layer ones. I like your analogy of like, look, yes, you're absolutely right. There is more interoperability much easier between Avalanche and Ethereum because they share this common language of the EVM,

Starting point is 01:07:04 which is kind of similar to like how Canada and the U.S. share common culture and common legal norms. Although it gets, like at the same time, though, it is a little bit early to start calling alliances between layer one blockchains because I think we don't actually really know how it's going to play out, right? Like, I think it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, the year is still like, you know, you know, 1790.

Starting point is 01:07:27 And, you know, France maybe just helps us out a little bit, but it's kind of like, okay, well, I don't really know what you want to do with us now that you got us out of this war. And I kind of feel like that's a little bit of how the L-1s are looking at each other today, is that, look, everyone starts friendly because they're like, look, what's the point of not being friendly? But as competition ramps up, we may see slightly less, friendliness over time. It's hard to say. But yeah, I think your analogy also works very well and capture some other elements of how the different little ones relate to each other. The other question I have about the multi-chain world and the multi-chain idea. And like,

Starting point is 01:08:03 we can get a bit more concrete. We don't have to stay with the city's analogy. Although I do think nation states maybe implies this better is the topic of security. So all of these cities, all of these chains, let's say, have to fund their own security budget, their own military, right? And this is more than like a police force. This is an actual military because, you know, police force is mostly for enforcing the law in a population. You know, your city, a military, you're actually fighting external forces, right? So like, you know, the U.S. might have to fight another country or something, or some other country might have to attack the U.S., right? And you have to defend against that as a nation state. And that, it seems like, is the primary cost of running a layer one, running a blockchain, is security cost.

Starting point is 01:08:53 And you pay for it in one of two ways. You either pay for it via issuance. So you mint new tokens and those assets are worth something, the layer one assets, or you fund it through transaction fees. And the minting of new tokens, the transaction fees, they either go to the military in the form of minors or they go into the military in form of validators, right? and all blockchains basically work this way. So you have a security budget. And so I guess the question for me, or what I've struggled with with the multi-chain thesis, is how is a layer one going to compete against a layer two when the layer two doesn't actually have to fund itself?

Starting point is 01:09:36 So the nice thing about being a layer two is you kind of get the military for free, right? So like you're just, again, if layer ones are nation states, you're in the U.S., you know, and a layer two is a city like San Francisco or L.A. The nice thing is New York City, L.A., they don't need their own militaries. They just depend on Washington, D.C. and the federal government, right? But if you are spinning up your own country, you have to have a sizable military, I think. Not necessarily to take on the U.S., but to build your network effect. Because I think there is an idea. here, and I'm wondering if you agree with this idea, that applications and users will go to the highest security blockchain. That will be the chain that wins. So the chain that has the highest security will eventually be the dominant chain. That may or may not be true, but that I think is an underpinning of this thesis. And if that's the case, then yeah, I mean, basically chains that become money, their underlying assets become a monetary asset of some sort. They're able to

Starting point is 01:10:41 create the highest security budget, they will attract the power law, the vast majority of all of the value, and other chains won't. And particularly because those other chains will have to compete against layer two that pay nothing for security. What do you think of that? How does security budget factor into the multi-chain thesis that you have, Hizib? Yeah. So there are a lot of things there, and I want to make sure I get to every component of them to kind of forge my answer. So the first thing is, I think, okay, the country metaphor here,

Starting point is 01:11:16 I think gets a little bit treacherous because if we actually want to play out the metaphor, then it's like, okay, well, one's the U.S., who's China, who's Germany? And I think it starts getting a little... And what year are we in? Very politically messy. It starts getting politically messy.

Starting point is 01:11:29 That's one of the reason why I like the city analogy is that it's more politically neutral, or at least less charged when we start like a signing name. Sure. But second is I do think there are actually some important disanalogies between nation states and cities, right? So cities still do have what we might call a security budget, right? You need a police force.

Starting point is 01:11:46 You need a fire station. You know, you need – there are certain services that must be administered by the municipality in order for a city to function correctly, right? There are public goods that must be administered by each city. And security is just one such public good, right? It's kind of the most principal public good in a blockchain. Now, the question that you live. laid out there is like, look, if I am choosing a city to live in, am I not going to choose the city that has the best police force? Isn't that just obvious? Because if I go to another city,

Starting point is 01:12:16 there's a marginally higher chance that I get robbed or that I get killed or that I get whatever. And the answer is, well, obviously not. Right. If you frame it in those terms, or the question is, okay, look, shouldn't I live in the country that has the highest military per capita, which actually, I don't know if the U.S. has the highest military per capita, but let's say, for instance, that it doesn't. Let's say there's some smaller country somewhere that has even more forces per capita, right? It's like, okay, well, I, no, I wouldn't choose where I want to live based on that. I might go live in Switzerland, because Switzerland is just really nice. And, like, it's good enough for me. And, you know, Switzerland hasn't been invaded in a very long time. And if it's going to be invaded anytime soon,

Starting point is 01:12:52 I can leave and, you know, find somewhere else to go live. The reality is that that's just demonstrably, not how people choose where they live. Now, there are certain people who are making their choices is based on security. There are certain people who are saying, look, I am going to live in New York because I want to make sure that, like, my assets are protected by the most ironclad legal framework possible for protecting people's assets, right? A lot of people do that. A lot of financial assets are, look, I'm only going to be in New York banks. And I am not going to entrust myself into any other jurisprudence. I'm not going to have money in Hong Kong or in Singapore or in Germany, because I never know what those governments might do. But I know what, you know, New York is going to do.

Starting point is 01:13:33 New York is not going to steal my money. And that, you know, set of case law is so ironclad that I can trust it. In that same way, some people are going to say, look, I'm only going to be on Ethereum because I don't trust anywhere else not to eventually fuck up. And that's why I'm going to choose Ethereum and nothing else. There are some people who will make that choice. But, one, obviously the people who do that are probably going to be the very, very wealthy. So, you know, it's the whales and the kind of billionaires and the kind of crypto elite who are going to be saying,

Starting point is 01:14:01 I'm only going to choose Ethereum because I don't trust Salana or Avalanche not to have faults or not to actually be able to survive a nation state level attack, et cetera, et cetera. So that's the first thing. Very few people are making their choices based on that criteria. Second, you can sort of see it by people's revealed preferences is that there are more users on Binance Smart Chain than there are on Ethereum, ostensibly. If you certainly aggregate all the other Layworn blockchain, there are definitely more users on all the other Layworn blockchain than there are in Ethereum.

Starting point is 01:14:29 If you combine them all, right? It does not seem to be the case that people are measuring the security budget of Ethereum. How many people do you know who have asked you, can you please describe to me the difference between the security budget of Ethereum versus security budget of Solana? I have never heard anyone ever asked me that question. That is not how people are determining what blockchains they're going to use. So there are important considerations about how long has this blockchain been around, how robust is it, how likely is it to be bug-free?

Starting point is 01:14:56 Those are all things people very much care about. But the security budget, and this is something that I've written about actually a bunch of times, I wrote a piece, I can't remember, I think we may have spoken about it, Ryan, a long time ago called why decentralization isn't as important as you think. And in that piece, I talk about this decentralization S curve. And the S curve basically describes that when you are not very decentralizing, you have very low security budget, increasing the security budget that you're spending doesn't matter very much. Because if somebody wants to go and, like, you know, if you're Robsden, right, let's say, or like, I don't know, cheap eat, do you guys know cheap eat? You guys know cheap eth? Is that another test net of some sort? It's like a real test net, but it's real money.

Starting point is 01:15:33 You can go buy it. It trades on like some random shit coin exchange. It was actually made by George Hots. It's kind of cool. But basically it was like, it's like the Casama for. Got it. Yeah, yeah. It's like a value-laden real main net.

Starting point is 01:15:45 So if you go on cheap Eath and you want to go do a 51% attack against cheap ETH, it's pretty easy. It's not that hard. If you marginally increase the proof of work on cheap ETH, it's not going to change that. anybody who really wants to and wants to go spend, you know, $10,000 or I don't know however much of cost to take it, take it over, you can just go do it, right? It's not that hard. So increasing the spend does basically nothing. But at a certain point, you'll hit this curve where now it's $100,000 an hour. If you increase enough, now you start climbing up this S curve where the amount of extra security spend is really materially changing the number of people who would need to coordinate or who can single-handedly coordinate to take over your blockchain. And so you start climbing this S-curve and really, having an impact on the effective censorship resistance of this chain and decentralization of this chain. But then eventually you're going to hit this point of declining returns. And then it really starts leveling off, right?

Starting point is 01:16:37 If I told you, hey, you know what? I think Ethereum should spend, you know, a billion dollars more per year on its security budget. Would that materially change your desire to use Ethereum? No. Of course not. Right? You probably wouldn't even know.

Starting point is 01:16:50 You didn't even know to ask the question of, hey, should Ethereum be spending more on its security budget? You're not even thinking about it, right? You know that Ethereum is safely past the point where it needs to be worrying about how much it's spending on its security budget. And if I told you that, hey, Ethereum is likely to lose 10% of its security spend next year, you would say, oh, okay, whatever. Like, that's probably fine, because you know that it's safely passed that rise in the S-curve. And so for that reason, the thing that really matters is that most of these layer one blockchains pass that really high ascension in the S-curve. And further marginal decentralization or increased security spend doesn't matter that much, right?

Starting point is 01:17:24 if you had Massad or the FBI or these other really concentrated actors coming together and saying, you know what, we're going to go break Ethereum. There's a good chance that they could even do that to Ethereum today. And if a group of script kitties or, you know, as one of these hacker groups came together and said, I want to go break Ethereum or I want to go break Avalanche, they might not be able to do it today. And so they both actually are not that different in their material respects with respect to how secure they are. Now, you can argue at the margin, whether or not that's true of Avalent, whether or not that's true of Ethereum, whether or not it's true of Tezos or whatever. My point is that it's definitely not a question of whichever one is the most secure is the one that everyone's going to use.

Starting point is 01:18:04 Because it's not even the criterion people are using today to decide between them. I want to get back to that because I think the first two points you made are good. But do you think that that still holds true if we assume users are no longer individual people, but they're actually chains? because that effectively is what the Ethereum roadmap and the modular blockchain thesis is like pushing towards. It's like, no, users aren't going to be using main chain. Actually, other chains are going to be purchasing the block space of main chain. And so the argument would be, well, security actually really matters. Maybe not for individual users.

Starting point is 01:18:41 You don't care. Like, I'll use Coinbase all the time. I have assets on Coinbase. Like, whatever. I don't, you know. But for chains, if they are planning their entire economy and their entire future, they have to have the most secure chain in order to root themselves in order to have those settlement guarantees. Does that change the calculus at all? And to elaborate on that, the more security a federal government has, the stronger military a federal government has,

Starting point is 01:19:09 in the world of blockchains, when we extend this metaphor of blockchains, you are literally making more space for more cities because you can fit more roll-ups inside of your nation. And so, again, it's not asking the question to users, like, yo, like, do you want to go to the most secure chain? They don't really care. They just want to go to where the fun is. They want to pick their favorite city, the vibes with their culture the most. But when it comes to a nation or a blockchain, your level of security is determine how many

Starting point is 01:19:37 cities you can fit inside of your protocol, how many cities you can fit inside of your nation. So it's an interesting question. And I think I get your point is that chains are going to be in some sense they can aggregate the preferences of their users more effectively than users could maybe individually. And it might be that, look, when you're big and giant, you're just going to be more risk-averse and you're going to be more conservative the way that governments are tend to be more conservative than maybe users individually are. That being said, I mean, again, we can, one, I think it's very clearly, security is not the only thing that chains care about, right? They also care about composability. They care about, you know, economic value. They care about also.

Starting point is 01:20:19 I mean, one thing that a lot of chains can and do concern themselves with is, you know, what is the trajectory of this chain? Am I attaching myself to a rising country or a falling country? And, you know, people want to bet on winners. They want to bet on, and there's more returns in many ways to bet. betting on somebody who's rising than on somebody who's flat or somebody who's falling. The prediction that almost falls out of the suggestion you guys are making is that, look, the U.S. is the biggest country. It's got the biggest military, right? So wouldn't it be the case that every single other country in the world would become basically a satellite state of the U.S.? And the answer demonstrably

Starting point is 01:20:52 is no. Like, it's just not the case that every single country in the world is a satellite state of the U.S. because there are many other things that matter besides your military might. And I think that, again, this is where the analogy breaks down because there's obviously so many more variables in geopolitics than just your military. But I think what we'll find is that it's likely also true in blockchains. And it's also a matter of when. It's not just a matter of this will eventually happen when Ethereum achieves its eventual roadmap. There's also a question of like, okay, well, how friggin long is it going to take? Because I'm ready to go today. I'm like an entrepreneur. I'm here ready to build. I have users who are not sitting around waiting for this

Starting point is 01:21:25 eventual utopian vision of charting and blah, blah, blah. And I think all this stuff is clearly path dependent. Because if security is not the only thing that matters, which I think we can all agree it's not the only thing that matters, it might matter a lot, but it's definitely not the only one. Then if these other things matter and they can be delivered faster by these other architectures of these other chains, then I think it is very path-dependent how all this stuff ends up evolving. I think one kind of interesting implication of this, whether we see layer one chains of cities or whether we see them as countries, as nation states, like if we look at the world today, both of those things do turn into power law distributions, right? As far as, like,

Starting point is 01:22:05 like GDP, as far as like, you know, economic power, that sort of thing. Like, there are generally power law winners at one given epoch in history, and there are other, you know, smaller nation states as well. And so maybe we're also arriving to a similar conclusion, whether it's nation states or cities. Exactly. Okay. So how bullish are you then on non-Etherium chains right now, Hasib? Do you think that this is where the bulk of the growth and the value? will be had for investors moving forward? I'm quite bullish. I don't know about the bulk of, I mean, that's a very strong, that's a very strong phrase.

Starting point is 01:22:44 So I don't know if I'd say that the bulk of value is going to come from these emerging layer ones. But I do think it's the case. I'm not making a bold prediction. That's already happened, obviously, so I'm a little late to the party. But I think you and I talked about this briefly. I wrote a piece back in, I think it was the summer called I'm worried no one's going to care about roll-ups.

Starting point is 01:23:01 Yes. And in that piece, basically, one of the, I think one of the lines I put, I don't remember this actually was aligned. But basically I said, one of the reasons why I'm worried about these emerging roll-ups being this huge story, and people thought,

Starting point is 01:23:12 oh, skyscrapers are going to be the biggest thing and everyone's going to live in a skyscraper, which today is obviously not the case even in the world that most people don't live in skyscrapers. And one of the reasons why I was concerned about the story is that these emerging lower ones can move so much faster than the roll-ups. It's so much easier to just go build a new city

Starting point is 01:23:28 than it is to, like, go perfect skyscraper technology. And in fact, I was worried that, look, these guys, like, they can iterate. If there's a bug and a roll-ups, game over. Potentially you lose all the money. It's extremely careful engineering. If a skyscraper falls down, lots of bad shit and no more skyscrapers for a long time.

Starting point is 01:23:43 That's how bad it's going to be. But with emerging layer one, if something goes wrong, that's cool. Just fork it, fix it. If you have a Dow fork situation, that's fine, right? You're still in your infancy. It's all good. Everyone's calling this stuff beta software, even though no one's treating it as beta software. It's all good.

Starting point is 01:24:00 You can do that really easily. You have the flexibility. Whereas with layer two, you don't have that. And furthermore, from the perspective of a user, most users who are entering blockchain city, they're just here, you know, they're here to trade NFTs, they're here to like liquidity mine. They have no idea what's going on. They have no idea what any of the arguments that we've been, you know, going on about for the last three or four years. And so when they show up and they see a cheap chain, they're just like, hey, this skyscrap is really expensive. This other one is really

Starting point is 01:24:23 cheap. And both of them, you know, have, you know, Ponzi schemes on them. Great. I'll go, on this one, which is way cheaper. And from the perspective of a user, the best layer two is a new layer one. So that was a concern that I was voicing back in the summer. And I think so far, that's turned out to be the case is that the most vibrant happening places in crypto today are probably these emerging layer ones. And the layer twos are still relatively anemic in their growth. This is the closer question for the podcast. What's your favorite city to live in? In the real world or in crypto? I'll let you figure that one out. Okay, okay. My favorite city to live in.

Starting point is 01:25:02 I would actually say New York, although I don't live in New York. I think New York is probably my favorite city. It just happens that at Dragonfly, we do so much work with Asia, that living in New York would just be absolutely brutal in respect to time zones. But New York, particularly in, I'll say not in the winter. Non-winter New York, I'd say it's probably my favorite city. And maybe that betrays something about my views about Ethereum, is that I think Ethereum is amazing, except when it's congested, then it sucks.

Starting point is 01:25:31 I also heard winter. hopefully we're not in a crypto winter right now. Hasid, do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah. I mean, I was just asked this the other day from somebody who was like a reporter type. And what I told him was like, look, you know, are we in a winter? Do we know where in a winter? How do you know?

Starting point is 01:25:49 And the answer is like, look, you know it when you see it. Like the point where everyone's asking the question of are we in a winter? The answer is yes. That's what David says. It's like, you know, I'm not convinced we're in a bear market. But he's like, if you're asking that question, then we're in a bare market. Because it's a bare market. it's about sentiment.

Starting point is 01:26:04 Exactly. Bare market is when you look around and ask people, are we, guys, are we still, is anyone excited? That's how you know. It's like when you're looking around, looking for trying to get people hyped up,

Starting point is 01:26:14 that's okay, yeah, you're not there anymore. You're not in the market anymore. Well, this is great. Haseeb, this has been super helpful. Thanks for coming on bankless again and just talking about cities, man. I really like this analogy.

Starting point is 01:26:23 I do think geography, cities, social structures, all of these things are helpful, very helpful for understanding blockchains. and thanks for laying out the multi-chain thesis today. Totally. It's a lot of fun. Action items for you, bankless listeners, of course,

Starting point is 01:26:37 we'll have a few links to resources in the show notes. The first is read Haseep's piece we've been talking about today. Blockchains, Our Cities, is the name of it. If you want to throw back, go all the way back to summer 2020 when we last had Haseep on, where we talked about DFI and the EF2 Metropolis. It's another city's analogy to describe starting and how scalability would emerge on Ethereum.

Starting point is 01:26:58 So those are some resources for you. Of course, as always, risk and disclaimers, guys, all this stuff is risky, everything we've been talking about. None of it has been financial advice. ETH is risky. Defi is risky. So there's cities and chains out there, you can definitely lose what you put in. But we are headed west.

Starting point is 01:27:14 This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

Bankless - 103 - Blockchains are Cities | Haseeb Qureshi

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