Bankless - 185 - The Superchain Explained with Jesse Pollak & Ben Jones

Episode Date: August 28, 2023

On today’s episode we brought on repeat Bankless guests, Ben Jones, Co-Founder of Optimism and Creator of Base, Jesse Pollock.  ------ ✨ DEBRIEF | Ryan & David unpacking the episode: https://www.bankless.com/debrief-superchain  ----- Base! Coinbase’s Layer 2 has almost hit 1 million users in 2 weeks. It has more transactions per second than Ethereum mainnet. Jesse digs into the magnitude of this development. Base chain was built on Optimism’s tech stack. This is just 1 chain of many thousands we’ll see over the coming years. How do we tie them all together? Ben dives into all things Superchain. The Superchain is how we bring 1 billion people onchain. ----- 🏹 Airdrop Hunter is HERE, join your first HUNT today https://bankless.cc/JoinYourFirstHUNT  ------ 📣 SAFE CORE | Smart Wallet Infrastructure https://safe.global/core  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ⁠https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2  ⁠ 🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING ⁠https://bankless.cc/MetaMask  ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  ⁠ 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle  ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE ⁠https://bankless.cc/uniswap   👾STADER LABS | ETHX LIQUID STAKING https://bankless.cc/Stader  ----- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 7:42 Base Launch Reflection  9:53 Optimism’s Reflection  11:35 Coinbase x Optimism Collaboration 17:14 OP Stack Incentives  23:43 Base’s Impressive Numbers  26:26 Explaining the Superchain   31:40 Why Join the Superchain?  33:55 The Law of Chains  45:26 The Coinbase Onchain Formula 51:15 Base Part of Optimism Governance  58:40 What About Other L2s?  1:04:56 Optimism Collective’s Fee  1:08:25 The Tech Behind the Superchain 1:13:34 Superchain Timeline  1:15:45 Fault Proofs 1:18:36 Risk Profile of Base     1:22:15 Optimism’s Governance Minimization  1:24:10 Wen Fault Proofs & Stages  1:30:00 How Many Clients Does Optimism Have?  1:33:36 Near Term Focus For Base 1:37:01 Near Term Focus For Optimism 1:38:27 Closing & Disclosures  ----- RESOURCES Jesse Pollock https://twitter.com/jessepollak  Ben Jones https://twitter.com/ben_chain  The Law of Chains https://gov.optimism.io/t/law-of-chains-v0-1-full-draft/6514  ----- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠

But Ben, you just introduced a newer structure, which seems to be a composition of many chains. And you called that a super chain. Super chain. How does the super chain idea tied to what Jesse was saying earlier of getting a billion people on chain? Like, how important is this structural element? Will they all come through independent chains? Like, just paint the picture of how this new structure will impact the future here. 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. We have two guests on today, and there's two parts of this episode. The first part, we're talking about base. And the second, we talk about the super chain. What is base? Bases, Coin Bases, layer two. We talked to Jesse, the creator of Bace, about how the launch went. This is now two weeks, I think, something like that from the launch of base. There's almost a million users already, and there's more transactions per second on base than the Ethereum Mainnet. This chain was, of course, built using Optimism's Tech Stack, and we think this is

one chain of many thousands of layer two chains that we'll see in the coming years. And so how do we tie all of these things together? We have Ben Jones on, who is a co-founder of optimism to discuss that. That is the second part of this episode where we discuss the super chain. This seems to be the key to how we bring on a billion people on chain. First, we talk about the the law of chains, which is a constitution for uniting layer two chains. That's the social layer of the super chain. The second part, we get into the technical. Chain hopping today is very clunky. It's kind of painful. It feels like a border crossing. How do we make all of this feel like one chain? Finally, we end with the question of fraud proofs. How decentralized is the optimism

tech stack today? Can Coinbase goink your funds from base? We don't have fault proofs yet. When are they coming? We discussed that with the two guests. I think one theme throughout this episode is it's becoming clear that Ethereum is more than just a digital nation. It's a substrate for building networks of digital nations. And this for me was the most interesting part of the episode. David, why is this episode significant to you? I think the super chain is so cool. I think it's really emblematic of what brought you and me and so many others in the bankless nation into crypto. The conversation of the super chain is one that is about crypto economics. It's about political philosophy. It's about coordination and the relationship between the individual and the collective.

I think a lot of the subject matter that we have explored here on bankless is all being comprised in this super chain conversation. It's not just about the technical hurdles that come with wanting to allow for 10,000 chains to blossom and then figuring out how to blur the lines, the boundaries between 10,000 chains to make them seem like one seamless super chain. it's also about the coordination incentives of people joining a digital collective. How do we actually convince people to come into the fold? How do we incentivize coordination rather than defection? How do we get large centralized institutions like Coinbase to cooperate and to coordinate with decentralized DAOs? I think this is what we've been training for, quote unquote, Ryan, when it comes to exploring so many different facets of what makes crypto crypto. And this is why the optimism super chain conversation and really the whole entire optimism endeavor has always resonated

very, very deeply with me. This is one of the, I think, most important conversations that we've had in a long time and perhaps will have. If the optimism vision does manifest, especially the super chain vision, which is being validated by Coinbase and base, I think this is the substrate for change in the whole entire world. And so that's why you can just hear the excitement coming out of me right now. Yeah, I think the whole time for me, I was like, uh, I can't wait to get to. to the debrief because I want to discuss this. A lot of ideas bouncing around in my head that I want to talk to you. And of course, the debrief is the episode that we do and record right after the episode. That is available for bankless citizens on the bankless premium RSS feed. You can access that

now. David, I want to talk to you on that episode about this idea of the super chain. The united chains of optimism, is that we're creating here? How will other layer twos respond? Will they have their own united chains? I think so. A lot to discuss there. And before we get to the episode. First, we disclose both David and I are long-term layer two bulls. You know that. You know we hold ETH as well. We're also advisors to optimism. We're long-term investors. We're not journalists. We don't do paid content. There's a link to all bankless disclosures in the show notes at all times. Guys, we're getting right to the conversation with Ben and Jesse. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including our number one recommended crypto exchange,

Cracken. Go check them out. Cracken Pro has easily become the best crypto trading platform in the industry. I use to check the charts and the crypto prices even when I'm not looking to place a trade. On Cracken Pro, you'll have access to advanced charting tools, real-time market data, and lightning fast trade execution, all inside their spiffy new modular interface. Cracken's new customizable modular layout

lets you tailor your trading experience to suit your needs. Pick and choose your favorite modules and place them anywhere you want in your screen. With Crackin Pro, you have that power. Whether you are a seasoned pro or just starting out, join thousands of traders who trust Cracken Pro for their crypto trading needs. Visit Pro

to get started today. Are you a Metamask user? Well, you're listening to Bankless, so of course you are. The wallet you know and love just got a whole lot better. Metamask portfolio is the ultimate one-stop shop

for all of your crypto needs. It gives you a holistic view of your crypto portfolio across multiple chains and multiple addresses all at once. You can easily view and manage all your coins, tokens, and NFTs in one convenient place

just by connecting your wallet. Metamask portfolio goes beyond just viewing your portfolio, though. Inside the portfolio, You can do all the incredible money verbs that make defy so powerful. You can buy, swap, bridge, and stake your crypto assets with ease. It's like having a powerful battle station for all your defy moves right at your fingertips. So if you're looking to do more in Web3 your way, Metamask portfolio is the answer.

I already know that you have Metamask wallet, so go check out your Metamask portfolio. Learn more at metamask.io slash portfolio. Arbitrum is accelerating the Web3 landscape with a suite of secure Ethereum scaling solutions. Hundreds of projects have already deployed on Arbitrum 1 with flourishing defy and NFT ecosystems. Arbitrum Nova is quickly becoming a Web3 gaming hub and social datats like Reddit are also calling Arbitrum Home. And now, Arbitrum orbit orbit from secure scaling technology to build your own Layer 3, giving you access to interoperable, customizable permissions with dedicated throughput.

Whether you are a developer, enterprise, or user, Arbitrum Orbit lets you take your project to new heights. All of these technologies leverage the security and decentralized. of Ethereum and provide a builder experience that's intuitive, familiar, and fully EVM-compatible. Faster transaction speeds and significantly lower gasease. So visit arbitrum.com. Where you can join the community, dive into the developer docs, bridge your assets, and start building your first app with Arbitrum. Experience Web3 development the way it was always meant to be. Secure, fast, cheap, and friction-free. Bankless Nation, I am extremely excited to introduce you to Ben Jones, co-founder of optimism, and also Jesse Pollock, the creator of

Base. Ben, Jesse, both of you, welcome back to Bankless. So glad to be here. Thank you. Jesse, just two weeks ago, Base launched. And Coinbase has been putting a ton of weight behind this launch, both with marketing and promotion, not just internally to the crypto world, but also externally as well, which is great because we could use some external marketing of what we're doing here in crypto. And I would say I've put this tweet out not too long ago after Base launched, perhaps one of the most successful protocol launches. that the crypto industry has seen seem to go off without a hitch. So two weeks later, now we're recording this two weeks after base launch. How does it feel? Just like thoughts, reflections, sentiments, emotions,

dump them on us. Well, I mean, first off, it's just been awesome to see the response from the broader world about what we're doing with base. I think when we started thinking about base, we kind of had this vision of bringing a billion people on chain,

bringing the whole world on chain. And then as we got closer to launch, I think we started seeing a lot of organic energy around it happening this summer. And when we were launching base, we wanted to throw our weight behind that. We wanted to join the party. We wanted to kind of meme this on-chain summer meme into existence. And I feel like, that's kind of what's happened. And so I feel incredibly grateful for everyone across the whole industry, the ecosystem, kind of like believing in that future alongside us and throwing their weight in, throwing their energy, the optimism team.

Like everyone, you know, I think there are hundreds of teams that have kind of come together to make this happen. So I think grateful is the primary feeling that I have. The other big feeling that I have is it's day one. This is the very beginning of what is a long, long journey to bring billions of people on chain. And so I think our feeling is like awesome. We're excited. We're excited. Other people are excited. But our heads are like already back down. And we're just focused on building, focused on making it so that folks can easily build the next wave of applications on chain so that folks can easily use those next wave of applications as they're being built and really doing everything we possibly can to shepherd in the next era of the internet.

So I'm grateful and back to building. Ben, what was it like on the optimism side of things for base chain, which is not the optimism main net. It's its own independent ecosystem, but it's also an OP stack fork and this has been a very long partnership between optimism and Coinbase. So how is it like to view these things from the optimism side of things? Yeah, no, I mean, and the partnership is deep. I'm sure we'll get more, you know, a lot more into that later.

But, you know, similar feelings of excitement and gratitude. You know, I think for the optimism community, like, this is just an incredible proof point for positive sum in action, right? Where, like, the proliferation of chains like base is going to, what we're going to see is that it's not just a bunch of users hopping from chain to chain to chain. It's going to be more users joining from every chain from every which way in every dimension. So, you know, I think a feeling of excitement for the future and like some of the next steps of like positive some thinking for the collective are like the first exciting moment of this. Obviously the other one is incredibly happy with like the code and the tech working, you know, like we've been working on the bedrock code base, which is like what enabled base to be able to go from zero to 100 real quick for a while. And so it's like absolutely incredible to see that now, not in just production on OP mainnet, but in production on another chain, getting massive use. and holding up real well.

And, you know, shouts out to the base team for all the engineering that went into getting that chain running. But from a fundamental core protocol level, that's incredibly, incredibly exciting. So, yeah, I mean, it's just like hype all around. You know what I mean? The future is looking bright. I think some of the excitement really comes from the clarity that base has provided a lot of the crypto world with what really the next steps for crypto looks like.

How are we going to scale Ethereum? What does it mean for layer two's to scale? And I think a lot of this excitement comes from just the fact that we see the next steps forward. We see where Coinbase is going. We see where Layer 2's on Ethereum are going. And that gives us a lot of excitement because we can actually plan ahead and see some of the future. At the same time, it also brings up a lot of questions. And I think a lot of these questions exist inside of the super chain.

What actually is it? And I think that's a lot of the questions that we want to ask here on the show today, because I think the answer to that question comes with some of the formations that Coinbase and optimism have created together. And this is a case study for perhaps future examples. And so I think this is what I really want to get done here on this show is start to peel back some of the questions behind the collaboration between Coinbase and the OP collective and what that might mean downstream and how that might be emblematic of the future roadmap for Ethereum scaling and also onboarding the world into crypto. So I hope I can lead us in that conversation. I really want to start with this broader question. Base is a part of optimism.

How does that work? An important part of the story is the collaboration between Coinbase and optimism. And so I want to ask first, Jesse, why is this collaboration so important for Coinbase? What does this collaboration mean from the Coinbase side of things? Yeah, absolutely. And before I answer that question, I do just want to like emphasize what you said, which is it feels like we've gotten more clarity about where we're going. and for me it feels like just in the last three months,

like no one's even transacting on Ethereum anymore. Everyone's transacting on layer twos. And that, like, we weren't there six months ago or 12 months ago. But now, like, every day when I look at my transaction history, when I look at other people's transaction history, it's like people are doing way more on L2, whether it's NFTs or DFI or social, than they are on L1. And so I feel like we've kind of sped run what I think a lot of people were nervous about,

which was like, is transaction activity going to move? Are people going to get comfortable with this transition? And now it's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, these things are here. So anyways, I'm just really fired off about that. It feels like we've taken a huge step forward as an industry. In terms of the collaboration and optimism, you know, when we were starting to think about building base, we'd actually looked at building a chain twice before. And both of those times, we'd consider building an alternative L1 to Ethereum.

And we kind of ruled it out. We said no. And the big reason we said no was that we didn't want to isolate kind of ourselves from the broader crypto ecosystem. And it felt like if we were going to build our own chain, that was the result. And we were going to be putting ourselves on island. We were going to be disconnecting our users. We were going to be taking them away from what has historically been our mission, which is bringing them into this global crypto economy that's way bigger than Coinbase. And so as we were thinking about building base, I think the things that really kind of enabled us to get comfortable with that

and get excited about it for two things. One is we felt like we could build it as an Ethereum layer two. And that meant that we would be bringing our users, our energy to scaling what is the largest crypto ecosystem in the world by far. And what we believe is kind of the foundation for the on-chain global economy. And then two, as we kind of zeroed in on how do we build an L2 and we realized we could be working really closely with optimism, we realized, oh, we could be building on an open source technology stack that's a public good, that's freely available.

So all of our contributions would be kind of a creative and additive to everyone else in the ecosystem who was using this technology. And we could be a part of a structure that was actually bigger than just us. I mean, this is where this concept of the super chain comes in. I think we kind of convinced ourselves that layer two wasn't going to end up being just one chain. But instead that it was going to be many chains that kind of collectively scaled Ethereum. And having a substrate in the OP stack, having a kind of organizing body and optimist, that could help bring those layer twos together to create something that collectively scaled Ethereum while making that experience really, really easy to use for everyday people,

giving developers the kind of confidence to be able to move across a bunch of these different chains. And kind of in general, shepherding this next era, I think that felt like another big kind of unlock for us. And I'd say the third thing was when you think about Coinbase and you think about our strengths, really it's, you know, we have scale, we have users, we have kind of this massive brand that, you know, I think in many ways is kind of the strongest brand in crypto, but we're also a large centralized public company. And so as we were thinking about, okay, how do we build a

decentralized open permissionless layer too and like do that in the right way, having a compliment someone who could really kind of counterbalance us and be kind of a pair to bring strengths that we don't have, like decentralization, like open source, like on chain governance. I think that's all kind of components we found in optimism. And it made it just a very logical kind of fit together of the coin base and base team and the optimism team in broader effort with the super chain. So Ben, base is not the only OP stack chain that's dropped. It seems that we kind of get a new opi stack chain one or two a week lately. We have the public goods network. There's Zora, cello, debank, Mo, just to name a few. But the problem that it rises here is that all of these

OP stack chains are their own chains. They are forks of the OP stack. And the optimism vision has always been one of a singular coherent network. And so we have this concept of the super chain. But if I'm on the optimism main net and I want to go over to base, I got a bridge. And so I'm wondering about like how we actually go from point A to point B. How do we go from many different forks of the OP stack to an actual coherent network. Because right now, like, the OP collective is just like a Dow. And so that's not doing much for coherence of all the users, for all the users of these things. So how do we actually get from the forking of the OP stack to actually a singular coherent network? Where does this story start? Yeah. I mean, great question. And I think I would echo exactly what Jesse

said in terms of clarity. I think like the one thing, Jesse, I hope this resonates with you for both of us in working together and forming a partnership was like each of us realizing what the other person's role to play was and like understanding how the pieces would all fit together, you know? The role to play in the collaboration and the agreement? Yeah. And just in general, like what does it mean for decentralized governance of a standard? What does it mean to be a centralized party like Coinbase, which has incredible strengths and bring those into the decentralized context?

Like, yeah, absolutely. I just like time and time again, right? So, I mean, look, I'll back up and tell a little bit more of the story. right is, you know, at the last devcon, like a year ago, right? Carl got up on stage and we talked about the OP stack and he said, hey guys, there's this thing called the super chain now. It's going to be a bunch of chains working together, right? And it's always been clear that to scale Ethereum, we would need to have some notion of multiple chains, at least in terms of like the underlying data structures that we envision as a chain. You know, I think in the future, a chain is going to look more like a

smart contract or like a sub-ecosystem or a, you know, social, you know, fabric more than it will sort of a religious ecosystem like you see in with Bitcoin or an Alt-L-1 or Ethereum. But that's all great, you know, to say. But there's a question of what does it actually mean and like, what are we going to do about this and what is the path to get there, right? And so when we put out the OP stack, you know, like you said, David, like the momentum has been incredible. It feels like every week now someone's out coming out with a crazy new OP stack thing. right? But this begs the question of like, what does it mean to have a bunch of these chains and what do we gain and what do we lose? And certainly we gain a lot of innovation, but we do risk losing some things. You know, it's like a really good problem to have, right? But there are certainly challenges that come with getting a bunch of chains. Jesse alluded to what I think is one of the most substantial ones, which is basically that you need a way for these chains to basically align and share improvements with each other. Right. So one of the failure modes that we could see would be a proliferate. of chains, right? Op. Stack makes it really easy to spin up a chain. If you can click a button and

deploy a chain, then you can modify the chain, click a button, and deploy that modified version. You can quickly envision a world which led to, you know, fragmentation where basically a bunch of people were working in different silos and making their own improvements, but because of a lack of standard, there's no way for those improvements to be shared between chains. And like talking about positive sum and public goods, right? Like, that's kind of table stakes to be able to have that kind of positive sum collaboration to make this all work. I think the other side of this sort of on the flip side is that you also are presenting users and developers with a real challenge of now there's a bajillion chains to deploy to and what does

it mean? And, you know, if you look at the scaling ecosystem today, for a developer or a user making a choice on where to deploy or where to bridge, there's a lot of idiosyncrasies and a lot of different security models and patterns and idiosyncrasies of how the EVM works, idiosyncrasies of how you bridge. All of these things are good in terms of innovation, but they are dangerous in terms of overwhelming users and developers with choice. So basically both of those perspectives are pointing at the same thing, which is that there needs to be a shared standard, even if there's, which there absolutely should be a ton of innovation on top, the core standard protocol that is like the best in class thing that everyone can use and everyone should use needs to be standardized.

So that's a bit of a ramble, but that is how we think about unifying chains. Like ultimately, we can talk a lot more about technical specifics and sequencing and crazy things. At the end of the day, it's about having a standard that benefits all the people that are building chains so they can all share in their efforts. And having a standard that allows users to make an assessment that is not on a per app or per chain basis, it's an understanding that this is their accepted properties of decentralization. So if I'm understanding this correctly, maybe the OP stack is the basement level standard that is being accepted by all these various chains, right? And the idea of the optimism vision is to actually make that standard grow based off of the

shared consensus. What are the shared attributes of every single OP stack fork? Well, if they're foking the OP stack fork, and then they also all incorporate this one additional property, maybe that one additional property needs to be merged into the main OP stack codebase. Is that how you envision this moving forward? Yeah, I think you can think of optimism governance as basically being a vessel to facilitate those positive sum integrations, right? Any change that someone makes to a chain that is really, really good, everyone should be able to take that and run with it. But it shouldn't come at the cost of a terribly fragmented ecosystem where users and developers are overwhelmed with choice of where to deploy and the idiosyncrasies and security models.

And basically the developers of the public goods are faced with just like a flurry of a hundred different repos all with their own little differences that they're trying to to reconcile into one thing. So I want to ask the question, is something you said earlier, I think is really interesting, Jesse. And both you and Ben, and I think all of crypto are kind of working towards this. The idea of base is a, you know, kind of date one in this attempt to onboard a billion users into crypto and get a billion users more than into crypto, actually on chain,

okay? And that's really cool. And I want to dive into this super chain type concept because part of the question is, okay, how do we do that? Right? Now we have base. And I don't know, it's, you know, quite speedily reached over 100,000, I think, users, like different active accounts.

I don't know what the numbers look like today. I think it's much higher than that now. But also a billion. Yeah, how many is it? How many users right now, Jesse? I was looking, I think in terms of monthly transacting addresses, we just crossed like 700,000 or something like that. So, you know, those are addresses, not users.

I mean, we can't directly connect them, but it's a lot. So the 100,000, I mean, I think like the 100,000 number, that was just like people who are coming back. daily. And then yesterday, which was pretty cool, we had more transactions than Ethereum, which I expected it to take us maybe like six months or 12 months or something like that to get there. And so to kind of cross that milestone in two weeks was kind of mind-blowing. Absolutely. I mean, that's amazing growth and amazing progress, right? And probably, I mean, I don't know how many years it took crypto to reach those numbers, kind of the numbers that

base saw in just like two weeks. So our cycles are accelerating here, which is absolutely phenomenal. One other thing that I'll say is base cross number of transactions that Ethereum did, and we were just like just over. I think we were like, whatever, 16 transactions per second and Ethereum was 12. Yesterday was also the largest number of all L2 transactions, and it was 5x. So Ethereum was at about, I think, like 11.7 and all L2s were at like 56. And so if you look at that chart of L2 transactions, that is probably like the most epic growth chart I've ever seen in. crypto because it's so consistent. It's literally like two years ago. If you go back two years in time, we were at one one hundredth of the number of transactions on Ethereum. I think it was like one-tenth of a transaction per second. And now we're at 5x the transactions on Ethereum. And that is just like a straight line up into the right or like a exponential line up into the right. And you know,

that's a huge shout to everyone. You know, obviously the optimism team in OP Mainnet and also like Arbitrum and ZK Sync. Like there's so many people who are. coming together to embody this vision, and I think we're just excited to be a part of it. Okay. All right. So we've got traction so far. And I want to get back to this idea of the super chain, because I have a feeling it's going to take more than base to onboard a billion users, even though we're making great strides here. And I'm interested in something that Ben said about kind of this structure that we now have, right? If you think about like, you know, the human body or all of these structures that underlie, you know, systems of nature and that sort of thing, you have

cells, which are one set of structures, and there's a lot of complexity there and, like, an independent system working together, and that kind of composes up to, like, the organs, and then you have an organism, and then a group of human organisms compose a society, right? We have greater and greater complexity in our systems that are stacking. What's kind of interesting about the concept of the super chain is it seems like we're introducing a new structure into crypto, right? So we have, like, this structure of the chain. You know, first there was, Bitcoin and that was the original chain, right? So we have kind of the genesis moment of the chain. Single cell organism. Single cell organism. And then we got a multi-cell kind of organism maybe with

Ethereum and smart contracts. And oh, here's another structure that we didn't know we could do. It's a programmable chain. We have this new structural system element called smart contracts. And then birthed on top of that, we have a smaller atomic unit called kind of a token. And now with layer twos, we have this idea of chains, right? And so base has made. maybe an example of one of those chains. There's all sorts of OP stack type chains out there. But Ben, you just introduced a newer structure, which seems to be a composition of many chains. And you called that a super chain. Okay? So how does the super chain idea tie to what Jesse was saying earlier of getting a billion people on chain? Like, how important is this structural element?

Will they all come through independent chains? Like, just paint the picture of how this new structure will impact the future here. Yeah. So, I mean, a few things to be said there. I love the life analogies. And shout out to the bankless team, but you and David are so good at the life, the slime mold and the collective.

Anyway, I love another great thing to talk about is the notion of emergence, right? Which is the notion that basically like smaller parts come together to form a hole that is greater than there's some, right? And I think effectively the super chain you can think of as the emergent structure that will emerge from chains like OP Mainnet

and B. and Zora and others coming together to form something that is more cohesive and looks more like, you know, the third wave of the internet, right? It's actually very similar when you look back into early days of the internet, right? There was a notion of like networks and everyone kind of thought of like there's a network that this company has and then there's a financial credit network over here, right? And eventually what happened was that the internet emerged, which was basically just saying, okay, sure, there are individual networks, but they're all also connected in this

global internet that is changing the world, right? So you can almost think of the super chain as analogous to that. Practically speaking, what are the properties that that thing should have or like, what does that look like? You know, one of the things that you said, and I was touching on this before, one of the things you said earlier, David, was, you know, sort of this is fulfilling the vision. I think one of the core aspects of like fulfilling the vision of scaling Ethereum that, you know, we've had for many, many years at optimism, Ethereum is like one cohesive thing. And there are sub-ecosystems and communities, but ultimately, when you think about using Ethereum, right,

you're thinking about one decentralized platform that you can understand and wrap your head about and reason about, right? It should also be the case that these chains should be a part of one larger system that in the same way you can wrap your head around, right? And when I say wrap your head, ultimately what that is going to boil down to is like the properties of the block space themselves. So we're not fulfilling the vision of Ethereum. of if we scale to a billion users, which to your point will require thousands, millions,

whatever, of chains, it's not enough of all of those chains are like wacky all over the place. Some of them are centralized. Some of them are decentralized. Some of them are decentralized. Some of them make that assumptions. And there's no way of understanding what's up. Ultimately, what we need is like a consistent substrate for us to build this new wave of the internet on. And basically, what we've come to realize with the super chain and with incredible folks like base is that the basis for doing that is basically a bunch of chains that share upgrades, right? So I think probably when you were asking questions about things like, you know, how do these chains talk to each other and you still have to bridge, right?

There's a lot that we could get into there on like technical specifics. And if you want to dive into, ask away. Ultimately, I think what we've realized is that for any of the crazy technical future stuff to work that makes these chains all really feel like one chain, the basics are that we need to have an environment, where a bunch of the chains that are forming today are effectively governed and upgraded together because the block space is homogenous.

So Ben, trying to get down to the actual practical details of how a super chain comes to be and how 10,000 chains blossom without creating 10,000 choices for users, I see this conversation unfolding in two different domains. One is the social, and then one is the actual technical. Like, technically, how to be you. do you get one transaction to happen twice on two different chains and have that be like obfuscated

for users? But I want to start with social because I think the technical one is the more hairy and so I want to leave that beast further down into the podcast. So socially let's define this. Why does a chain want to be a part of the super chain? What is the incentive for a chain to join the collective? What's in it for the individual chain to join the collective chain? Yeah. So it's interesting because that answer will surely change over time on the technical layer, right? But I'll talk about the basics is, again, the substrate of the future of the internet needs to be standardized and it needs to be understandable, right? So the simplest reason to do this is because it should be the security model and the construction that we as a community like think upholds the rights and the protections of

the users and the developers and the sequencers on the network. Fundamentally, there needs to just be consistency across that space. Obviously, there's going to be increasingly. Obviously, there's going to be incredible innovation and that's going to happen constantly and we need a way to get that innovation back into the standard like we were talking about earlier. But the fundamental social basic is just getting to his point where we have a governance system that says that all of this block space together is going to work the same and it's going to work the best in class way that everybody needs to. So socially, I think the first step is basically just understanding the homogeneity of block space. And the reality is before we solve bridging and we make it so that, you know,

users are transacting seamlessly between chains and people don't even realize what chain they're on. The place to start is nothing more than they don't have to think about what they're bridging to and from because they understand that the properties of that chain, those two chains, are consistent and something that they agree to, you know? I think the homogeneity of block space is probably a really good foundation to start with. Say we have, you know, 10, 15, 20 OP stack chains and they all have homogenous block space. But we also still still, want to encourage innovation and differences, right? And so I think this is when we can get into the law of chains because what actually sets the standard? How does the standard become set? So maybe you could

walk us through this law of chains concept and what that does for the formation of the super chain. Absolutely. Very, very, very, very excited about the law of chains. And I think it's also great because what's fascinating is that the law of chains is a fundamentally incredibly important social construct. Okay. So first of all, what is the law of chains? The law of chains is a governing document that is a proposed amendment to the constitution of the optimism collective. So that's our governance system, our Dow. And it is basically the governing document that will adopt all of those constitutional principles into the land of multiple chains.

So, you know, the past, you know, year and a half of optimism governance has all been about OP Mainnet. With the introduction of base and other chains, we've got to change how optimism governance works, basically. And particularly the way that we're going to do that transition, or the thing to understand about that transition is that optimism governance goes from governing upgrades of a single chain

to governing upgrades to a protocol that are shared by many, many, many, many, many chains. So, right, the way to get that homogeneity is to have all of those chains basically share the protocol and it's that protocol which gets upgraded, right? So that's a very important basis for what we do with the law of chains. Now, the law of chains itself goes a lot of,

lot further than that. And it basically is a framework for how optimism governance should behave neutrally and how to enforce the neutrality of that block space. Oh, and I also want to say huge shout out to the base team, among others for, you know, massively collaborating with this. Like I said, it's been absolutely incredible to have like these things realized and put into writing as we ink these partnerships. Ben, when I hear you say that, I'm trying to, again, because like my brain just works on analogies and maybe some listeners are kind of like me, right? And so David asked this question earlier of like, what's in it for a chain to join the super chain? And that seemed pretty obvious to me based on something you said earlier.

It's kind of like, that's like asking why a local area network that a company set up wants to join the internet, right? Well, the answer is obvious because the internet is just fantastic and you can communicate with all of the other local area networks. So everyone is going to opt in and join unless you're doing something super, you know, secret. and you know you don't want to interact with anybody else so that to me is obvious now i'm trying to get like the analog of how you actually join the super chain and what this law of chains is and it almost to me it feels like one part standards body so it's like some kind of technical standards body that

you're opting into you're like yep all agree to conform to a set of like you know the internet did this in the early days like we got a set of internet protocol standards and we all conform to that so we can talk to one another. So it's one part that. But then it's one part like governance, nation state thing. And it almost reminds me of like the articles of confederation when you had like the original 13 colonies in the U.S. that were independent states essentially, nation states, banned together and create this document that they all signed to form a proto-union of types. So it's like one part standards body, and that's technical and geeky. And we've seen that before. in the early days of the internet. And then another part governance experiment thing. And we've

seen that in almost like the birth of nation states. And to me, that is just so fascinating. Do these like analogs hold up to you? Or, you know, are you seeing some of this? I think so quite well. I mean, you know, I'll draw on the analogy further. And you're 100% right. And I think the only thing that I would say or add to what you're saying fundamentally is that the standards body and the governance experiment are all the same thing all along. It was all the same thing all along, buddy. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Right. Right? So it's like part of the governance experiment is that it's governing this standard, right? And that makes it a standards body. But you're 100% thinking about it the right way. I think one of the additional things that the law of chains says, I kind of got into the basics of like fundamentally it's about being a standards body. But what the law of chains really in bulk talks about is what does it mean to be a standard's body and like how should the Dow and the governance system react? And so one of the key things that it does is it basically a lays out a set of all of the stakeholders across. the super chain. So an example of a stakeholder is Jesse and base as a chain governor,

which are the people that are, you know, basically bringing these chains into existence and driving usage to them and providing the distribution and all of that, right? There's actually another role, which is the chain servicer, right, which is the person that's actually providing the sequencing services, which right now is also base for base, but for other chains, there are other people that are basically like roll up as a service providers. And so that is another stakeholder that governance needs to think about. And then, of course, the most important set of stakeholders are the users. And, you know, when I say users, I mean both users and developers. And one of the things that the law of chains does is it basically lays out protections or

guidance for how the, you can almost think of it like a bill of rights. And this is where I was going with the analogy is like, I think if you want to go the whole like founding document analogy thing, there's something really similar there in the bill of rights. And it basically lays out what are the protections when governance is making decisions. about the standard, it should think about how decisions impact each of those stakeholders. Yeah, and I think from the base perspective, as we were kind of working through this and contributing to law of chains and thinking about kind of how we join the super chain, there are a few things that we were trying to solve for.

One was how do we ensure that base remains open and permissionless? And how do we ensure that it kind of preserves that characteristic, which Ethereum started for its block space? And this was something that we felt like we could get kind of from optimism and from the law of chains. It's like if we kind of set up the chain in the right way, if we commit to this thing, then we're going to have kind of a forcing function to ensure that we don't have kind of single person in control in a way that could risk that open, permissionless nature of base. And so I think that kind of characteristic is one of the big things that we're getting from the super

chain. Now on the flip side, I think one of the things that we thought a lot about is how do we, while kind of ensuring that open permissionless nature of base is enforced, all preserve our sovereignty. You know, like, we want to be a part of this larger structure, but we also want to have economic sovereignty. We want to have governance sovereignty. We want to have social sovereignty. We don't want to be completely subsumed by this superstructure. And so that's, again, where the law of chains comes in. And it says, hey, like, even if we, you know, are enforcing this open, permissionless nature of, you know, the block space, we're not going to infringe on these other characteristics or these other kind of areas of sovereignty.

like economics or governance that are really, really important to protect for chains. And kind of going back to your kind of analogy with the articles of Confederation, I forget what it's called. I think that that's a similar kind of tension that you see in unions like the United States and other unions around the world where you have these kind of local regions that want to have some guarantees, you know, whether those are guarantees of protection or, you know, rights for citizens so that folks can move across those regions and know that they can have kind of a consistent set of expectations, regardless of where they are. And those local regions, the states and the United States, they want to have sovereignty. They want to be able to set their own taxes.

They want to be able to have their own governing bodies. They want to be able to vote in their own ways. And those two things need to live in tension. And I think that's kind of the tension that we are trying to capture in this law of change. We're trying to capture the tension between the fact that this is many kind of social systems and groups that are coming together to create something bigger than any one of them. And that requires alignment. It requires coordination, but it also requires soft renterity. And like one thing I'll say on this is, you know, me and Ben, and, you know, a bunch of people, we spent the last nine months thinking about this and trying to figure out like, what does this mean? Like, how does this work? How do we kind of articulate this

in a way that people can understand and articulate it in a way that can, you know, persist for years or decades or centuries, right? And what we've kind of released thus far is the V0.1 of that. It's first draft, right? Like, and the optimism team released that. We contributed to it. And it's not truly not perfect. And we do not have all the answers. I think what we're trying to do is we're trying to believe that this is possible. And we're trying to take kind of all the brainpower of a bunch of really incredible people across a bunch of different diverse organizations and say, what would this look like? And then we're putting it open to the community for feedback and saying, hey, come and tell us, like, what's imperfect? What can get better?

And that's why we're on this call right now, because we don't have the answers. We just have the best intentions and the best effort that we're putting into it. And so I guess, like, there's so much complexity here, but if I could kind of leave one message with people who are listening into this, is like, get curious, ask questions, like engage with us, help us figure out, what is the right version of this and how do we make that something that can both support this kind of homogenous blocks based, this consistency so that users and developers can build with confidence and transact on chain with confidence, but also protect the rights of those folks and protect the rights of chains and protect the diversity that comes with that.

And I think, you know, it's going to be a learning process, but super grateful to be getting to work on it and get to talk about it. The tension between the sovereignty of a chain and the alignment, of a collective, I think is a really great articulation of this. And you see the same pattern throughout history. This is the tension between defection and coordination and the balance between the individual and the society, where the best societies allow the maximum expression of the individual, while also ensuring that there is rule of law, that there isn't things like murder and theft and lying and cheating. But there's only the minimum level

of law needed to produce a society. And then after that, it's up to the individual. And this is what I see forming in the super chain, where we are establishing quality assurances of block space, while still allowing for innovation and freedom of expression of protocols to be expressed by all the different chains that elect to join the super chain. Now, that last phrase, elect to join the super chain is, I think, the crux of what optimism's role is, the OP collective is. I'm sure optimism wants everyone to join the collective. But right now, Jesse, as you know, perhaps less than 1% of the world is not on chain. And we need that to grow to at least 1%, so that we can get to 10%, so that we can get to 100%. And I think this is one of the biggest parts of this story,

is that Coinbase is blazing a $17 billion public company-sized hole through the jungle that is the path towards becoming on-chain. And so I'm hoping you can take a moment and talk about the way that Coinbase is actually showing a way for very large public companies that aren't on-chain into getting on-chain. What is the formula that Coinbase has provided the world here? Yeah. And I think, again, we're still trying to figure it. it out. But, you know, for the last two years, you know, at the end of 2021, that was the mission

I set on. It was how do we bring Coinbase on chain so that we can kind of show the world what's possible here. And, you know, a lot for Coinbase has been, you know, building base and contributing to this. I think as we're thinking about how we build base, we're making a number of commitments that kind of guide how base is going to be built and how we're going to come on chain. One of those is obviously contributing to kind of the underlying OP stack. And so we've joined as a core developer. And we've already landed a huge number of positive changes from scaling to centralization to monitoring. We're working on Op. Reath, which is the second client with paradigm. And we're going to keep

kind of like blazing that path so that the foundation of the OP stack is something that other organizations, whether they're public companies or small, private companies, can use to run chains, super chain or not. So that's the big way that we're trying to kind of pave this path. It's like make sure that the technology is really solid. The second big way that I think we're trying to pave this path is we are committing base to this law of chains. We're joining. And we're saying we're going to uphold that commitment around open neutral block space. We're saying we're going to participate in this collective process of bringing chains together to create something that's bigger than just base, but is this full super chain. And we're saying that we're going to participate

in that kind of governance process to make sure that the standard is ensuring in the right way, to make sure that neutrality is being upheld in the right way. And I hope that's going to pave a path for other organizations to similarly make that commitment and similarly benefit from those guarantees of the law of chains and the sovereignty of the law of chains. And I'd say the third thing that we're really doing is we're putting our money where our mouth is. We are actually taking a percentage of the revenue from base and the sequencer that's base and we're contributing it back to the optimism collective to fund public goods. and that's going to enable us to actually support the work that's happening to make this infrastructure

be possible for everyone else to use. And we're going to be participating in governing that as well. So, you know, I think for kind of us, this is about doing this in the right way so that other people can say, oh, this is the right way to do this. We can follow that path. We can also fund this public infrastructure. We can also opt in to open neutral, permissionless block space. We can also contribute technically because at the end of the day, we think that those are the things that are going to ensure we have the decentralized open foundation that enables us to have an open global on-chain economy that brings a billion people in and increases economic freedom everywhere. Plus, one, I want to everything that Jesse was saying. And I think I just want to take a moment to express my gratitude for you, Jesse, and the rest of the base team. I think, like, you know, if we were looking back in the very early stages of this partnership, there was,

talking about this balance between you know like sovereignty and you know and the collective that only works if someone actually wants decentralization right and it could totally have been the case that Coinbase jumped in here and launched some L2 that wasn't actually planning to be decentralized and was just like some sort of meme

land grab thing and so I think it's like a testament to where we are like that basically Jesse and the rest of the base team like actually are putting their money where their mouth is and like building a decentralized thing So, yeah, I'm just grateful for that. I thought I'd throw it out. Jesse, you mentioned that base is going to be part of optimism governance because it's part of the collective. So it's going to participate in governance. What does that look like to you?

Like what is that actually like base and the optimism governance? What does that relationship look like? Yeah, absolutely. So alongside the revenue contribution or the sequencer fee contribution that we're making to the Optimism Collective, we're really grateful that base is going to be receiving a grant that we can earn out over the next six years. that will be up to 2.75% of the total supply of OP tokens, and we're going to be using that to participate in governance. And this grant is being kind of rewarded retroactively for the contributions that we've made thus far, and then we'll be earned out over the next six years for the contributions

that we make to the super chain going forward. And what we're going to be doing with that is we're first off going to be capping our overall governance participation. And so we will never be voting more than 9% of the total votable supply. That, ensures that base doesn't have too much of a voice in optimism governance, but we kind of preserve the decentralized neutral characteristics of that body. And then we're going to be working to uphold this kind of neutrality commitment that, you know, the super chain and the law of change is making. We're going to be working to ensure that the right public goods are funded. And we're working to do that in a way that's aligned to the community. And so we're actually just starting

by listening. We've had some experience participating in decentralized governance with E&S, but we've taken a lot of learnings from that, and we want to take a lot of learnings from the folks in the optimism ecosystem about what they've seen work, what they've seen not work. And so we're starting by listening. We have a forum post up

that's going to be kind of asking for folks for feedback. We're talking with delegates. And if folks have perspectives on how should base participate in this process, we'd love to hear it. And then over the next few months, as we listen, as we learn, we'll be sharing out kind of clear perspective

on how we're going to participate going forward to make sure that we are really, living up to the best of what's possible here. Anything else to add there, Ben? No, I mean, I think the only thing I would add is like this is yet, check another box in exciting uncharted territory that we're doing here together with y'all. Having a Fortune 500 participating in the Dow is incredibly, incredibly exciting. So appreciate the thoughtfulness that you're bringing to that.

And looking forward to the future of that, that would be awesome. Awesome. So, Jesse, you said over the next six years, 2.7% of the total supply of OP tokens. Is that like a linear vesting, as in like every single day, linearly vests and so it becomes available to Coinbase linearly over six years. Is that the mechanic? It's not daily, but yes, that's the mechanic. Okay, not daily, but effectively the same. Okay, cool. Yeah, yeah, effectively the same. And there's milestones that we have to be hitting along the way, basically in order to do that. What do those milestones look like? What are those parameters?

It's basically following through on the commitments that we're making. So we have to continue contributing to core development. We have to continue joining the super chain, participating in the security council, basically fulfilling on these commitments that we're making around technical decentralization and contributions there, the law of chains and the kind of commitment to that overall, and then participating in being an active governor in the optimism governance body. Basically being an aligned chain and aligned player. Being an aligned chain and aligned player and continuing to provide value to the overall collective and support the public goods that are making all this possible.

And one note that I'll make on this, which I think is... Positive sum, baby. Yeah, positive sum. But when we first started thinking about optimism and thinking about kind of building on L2 in general, this wasn't a consideration for us. And actually, when we launched a test net, this wasn't a consideration for us. We hadn't even had a conversation really about like what would this look like from a kind of governance participation perspective. It was really only after we launched a test net and we started realizing, hey, there's like a really important opportunity for us to contribute here that we had this conversation and figured out how to make sure a Coinbase could participate. And so I think that's really reflective of like this retroactive model that optimising.

optimism has been pioneering. We didn't say, hey, we need this in order to use this technology. Instead, we said, hey, let's go use the technology. Let's go show that we are good stewards, that we're ready to show up, that are ready to do the work. And then through that contribution, I think we realized, hey, there's actually a lot of value that Coinbase is adding here, has added already, and that base is going to bring over the next decade. And let's figure out how to align those incentives so we can continue bringing the best of base to the optimism collective, to the super chain. and ensuring that that's kind of happening in perpetuity. Mantle, formerly known as BitDAO, is the first Dow-led Web3 ecosystem, all built on top of Mantle's first core product, the Mantle Network, a brand-new, high-performance Ethereum Layer 2, built using the OP stack, but uses Eigenlayer's data availability solution instead of the expensive Ethereum Layer 1. Not only does this reduce Mantle Network's gas fees by 80%, but it also reduces gas-fee volatility,

providing a more stable foundation for Mantle's applications. The Mantle Treasury is one of the big, biggest Dow-owned treasuries, which is seeding an ecosystem of projects from all around the Web3 space for Mantle. Mantle already has sub-communities from around Web3 onboarded, like Game 7 for Web3 Gaming, and Buy Bit for TVL and liquidity and on-ramps. So if you want to build on the Mantle network, Mantle is offering a grants program that provides milestone-based funding to promising projects that help expand, secure, and decentralize Mantle.

If you want to get started working with the first Dow-led layer-2 ecosystem, check out Mantle at mantle.xyz and follow them on Twitter at zeroxmantle. You know Uniswap. It's the world's largest decentralized exchange with over $1.4 trillion in trading volume. You know this because we talk about it endlessly on bank lists. It's Uniswap, but Uniswap is becoming so much more. Uniswap Labs just released the Uniswop mobile wallet for iOS, the newest, easiest way to trade tokens on the go. With the Uniswap wallet, you can easily create or import a new wallet, buy crypto on any available exchange with your debit card with extremely low Fiat on-ramp fees, and you can see. seamlessly swap on mainnet, polygon, arbitrium, and optimism.

On the Uniswop mobile wallet, you can store and display your beautiful NFTs, and you can also explore Web3 with the in-app search features, market leaderboards, and price jars, or use Wallet Connect to connect to any Web3 application. So you can now go directly to Defy with the Uniswop Mobile Wallet, safe, simple custody from the most trusted team in Defy. Download the Uniswap Wallet today on iOS. There is a link in the show notes. Introducing ETHX from Stater.

ETHX is a liquid staking token designed to maximize rewards, all while securing Ethereum. With Stater, you can run an Ethereum node with just for ETH, which is 85% lower capital and 35% higher returns versus just solo staking. Stater has a multi-pool architecture with both permissionless and permission node operators to enable decentralization and scalability. Stater has extensive experience in building liquid staking solutions on six proof-of-stake blockchains and is trusted by over 70,000 stakers. Stater has partnered with over 40 leading protocols on these chains to bring defy utility to their liquid staking tokens. Stater is actively building integrations and partnerships across Ethereum to bring the same great defy utility to the ETHX token. While smart contract bugs are always a risk in defy, the ETHX smart contract has received three independent audits and has a million dollar bug bounty with Immunify. Go to Staterlabs.com slash ETH slash stake to access the Stater staking protocol today.

I'm just zooming out here. So we were talking about the social layer here and the social element here. And then I think David maybe wants to pivot to tech. But before we do, I'm going to attempt to kind of summarize this. I just feel like I got some breakthroughs in the conversation that we just had. And I want to try to summarize this. So one thing I'll just say is we keep referring to this law of chains. Okay. And we talked about that. You know, my analog for that is like articles of Confederation for the 13 colonies. Think of like a constitution. So the law of chains is an actual draft of a document that chains opt into. And we will include a link to the law of chains. You can read the document. It protects rights for different groups, covered participants, users, chain governors, chain servicers, talks about user protections, right? So when Ben says kind of a prototype of the Bill of Rights, it's kind of right. And here we are. This is the Continental Congress. Like, we're figuring out. So this is version 0.1, and there's going to be a version 0.2 and a version 0.3. That's what we're actually talking about when we say the law of chains, is you're opting into a governance collective, and you're also

opting into a technical standards body of this is how you're going to implement the chains. So that is cool. I guess the part that this also unlocks for me is, I think probably two years ago, if you asked me what Ethereum is, I think a mental model that Dave and I have had is a digital nation, we'd say. It's a digital nation, right? I'm starting to get the feeling that maybe Ethereum isn't so much a digital nation, and it's more a platform for love. launching digital nations. The meta-nation, the meta-collective. Right.

So what I see in the super chain and this whole collective that we're building is Ethereum is basically the infrastructure to launch this confederation of states, this confederation of chains, essentially, right?

And so optimism and OP Mainnet is kind of a lead organizer of this confederation, this loose confederation of chains, and then base is opting in and more will join and you can fork.

So I heard a politician this morning talk about like, you know, this is a new moment for America, you know, it's 1776. I actually think he's right. It is 1776. But for digital nations, like, because we've just created the superstructure for launching these new social experiments, and it's incredibly exciting for me to see. Now, I guess one question maybe that's lingering in my head to sort of tie this off, and then we'll get to David and we'll talk the technical side of how this all comes together. So is the super chain that optimism is creating. It's kind of a lot of. off chains, is this interoperable with other infrastructure that is being developed in other chain

ecosystems? So we look at other layer twos, like stuff that's going on in the world of ZK EVMs, and we look at like Arbitrum, are these distinct separate silos, are these also interoperable with optimism? I'm trying to get a sense of whether this is kind of its own unique, I guess, digital nation over here, and this is the optimism digital nation. We're going to have other digital nations, like the Arbitrum Digital Nation and, you know, maybe the ZK Sync, digital nation, all of these other systems, or if they're somehow tied together as well, what would you say to that, Ben? Yeah, it's a really good question.

I would say a couple of things. I think I love the whole digital nations coming to life thing. I totally love that. I also think it's digital nations all the way down. Like, I think we can absolutely think about base as a digital nation as well, right? And like probably that like one-to-one thing that we were talking about is really going to extend many levels down, right? So like ultimately you can imagine a big tree structure of like nations on nations on nation, you know, in some weird sense, right?

So coordination all the way down. Yeah. So dude, oh my God. David's memes are on fire. Coordination all the way down. I'm stealing that one. I thought I stole that from optimism. I thought that's you guys.

Oh, man, maybe we did. Okay. Well, we've got a great marketing team. So yeah, I mean, that's the first thing that I want to say is like I love that analogy. And I think it's just like you can draw that analogy all over the place and none of it is really long. It's like different layers of nesting and how we're going about it. I would like to think that what we've put out with the law of chains is a innovative step in governance that we haven't really seen historically that puts into practice a lot of these analogies that we're trying to get at. So I think that's very exciting.

And I think there's a little bit of ego left to me that would say, yeah, this is new and exciting and its own thing. At the same time, I think everybody is going to converge around similar things to this. I think we're just first, not last. And then in terms of actually, like, the boundaries between different chains, right? and between different super chains, if you were, right? Fundamentally, the EVM as a substrate is just about the most interoperate. It's like one of the superpowers of the EVM, I think that's actually slept on a lot of Ethereum, is not just the decentralization of it, it is the interoperability of it

and the ability to extend it and interconnected. So I think whether or not we make it explicit, the way that different chains are being connected today is a trend that's going to continue. And so it's definitely the case that we'll see, you know, optimist. super chain, bridging, get better and better and better, from optimism to, you know, some polygon or whatever, right? At the same time, what we're doing here with the blocks -based homogeneity does afford, in the long run, technical advantages that allow you to do that interoperation in a fundamentally, like, more secure, more decentralized way, that basically

comes from it being a standard, right? So if you want to have two chains talk to each other, and it's not guaranteed that those chains stay in sync, and like one of them might do an upgrade that breaks the interconnection in a way that the other one can't do, right? Then that does pose challenges. And like, people will continue to overcome those challenges. But at the same time, that homogenous block space property, I think will be a stronger connection within the boundaries of individual super chains because of that shared standard and because of the homogeneity, basically. One last topic to make sure that we touch on before we go to the technical details about how these lines between chains become blurred is the 15% fee that goes.

goes for the optimism collective. Ben, why does the optimism collective get to charge a 15% fee? And where is that fee going to go to? Public goods funding. I mean, Jesse talked about this. First of all, having a fee, I think, is a huge win for sustainability because it completes the part of the picture that maybe we didn't previously had. So zooming out, when the optimism collective was birthed, right, we made it very explicit that our mission was here to fund public goods sustainably. And at the time, that story was very clear. We had a chain. It was OP Mainnet. And we committed to those fees being used to fund the public goods that produce it, right?

And we've done, you know, two rounds of retroactive public goods funding. I could go into a whole rigmarole about the mechanisms, leaving that aside. One very exciting thing that we have here is that the narrative extends to multi-chain now, right? Because the question you might ask is, okay, well, you have OPMNet, but when a bunch of big people go and fork you, then aren't you going to lose the sustainability because those other chains aren't contributing back? And so just mechanistically, one of the key components to talk about is the fact that because we can embed a fee into the standard, right, then we can tie the sustainability together in a more fundamental way. With that being said, I want to call out some very important caveats. One caveat is that it is incredibly important for the collective to provide additive value and not coercively extract, right? So it's very, very, very important for us, for our values in a way that goes way.

way back, but I think also equally important, quite frankly, for this whole thing to work is for the ability for Jesse and I sit in a room and go, okay, well, Coinbase could take this code and run with it and go do something totally different. The ability to do that will massively legitimize anybody that's going to opt into some system, right? It's much, I think, just legitimately stronger for a super chain ecosystem to say, the tech that underlies this is a public good. It is given away, and the only reason for you to join and pay a fee is because there's an additive value that is going to be provide it to you. So I think that's like you can think of it almost as an accountability, but that's an extremely important piece that I think is worth bringing up. So we have the

mechanism. The way that we say this on bankless is the freedom to exit is always a check on the power, right? And so the only reason why a chain will join the collective is that if the 15% fee that's being charged produces more than 15% of value for the chains that join it, otherwise they'll just work and leave. Yeah. So that funding should go back to public goods funding, right? Because the people paying will benefit from the technology stack constantly improving. The only other thing that I want to call out is that we have a notion in our public goods funding of like the scope, which is basically like what is the set of public goods that optimus is meant to fund. And I think another key part of this is in a chain like base joining,

we need to expand the collectives model for what public goods we fund to include those public goods that are beneficial to base, right? And repeat that for any other chain that's joined. And so this will also help make it more compelling. So it's not just about funding public goods. If you're a chain that is contributing value to the collective, the positive impact that public goods have on you should be rewarded just like, you know, the OP stack itself. So I'd like to get into some of the technical details as to how the super chain actually forms because, okay, we've got, say, all these organizations that have forked the OP stack recently, they all desire to be a part of this super chain. Base very clearly has stated that they desire

to be a part of the super chain, but there's like 10 other O.P. OP stack forks that I'll desire to be a part of the super chain. So we'll just imagine the future where this law of chains is adopted by all of these OP stack forkers. And so we do have homogenous block space. But that doesn't produce the super chain. That is just producing the foundation for the super chain to emerge. We still have a bunch of other technical hurdles that we need to get across because you're still going to have to bridge between chains. We're still going to need, and this is me putting on somebody else's dev cap, things like cross-chain, execution, cross-chain messaging, cross-chain transaction calls. And so, Ben, I think for like

the idea of the super chain is going to emerge, it's going to be this one network of interconnected blockchains. It's going to be great. It kind of feels like that draw the rest of the owl meme. If you're familiar, there's like four steps of drawing the owl. In the first step, you draw the first two circles and then you draw the second circles. And then the third step is just like question marks. And then the four step, you have this beautiful, completely constructed owl. And like, we're missing a step. Maybe you could like fill in the rest of the of the owl for us. Like, how technically does the super chain actually emerge? I love that meme. That is a hilarious meme, and that's a good analogy to the question that you're asking. I do think that the power of

homogeneity is not to be underappreciated. And I think the more time that we've spent on it, the more we've realized that that's like the table stakes for anything else. So like that homogeneity property, like in the owl meme, right, you draw the circle and the other circle. That's missing a lot of steps, but it is the right two first steps that an artist would actually do about the owl. So like, We're starting with the right thing, and we think that, like, it's table stakes to have, you know, basically homogenous block space that upgrades together to be able to upgrade together into something that's more interconnected. And even that homogeneity on a technical level will bring, I think, a lot of things to the table that people don't appreciate. You know, one example of this is

integrations. Like, I talked a lot about application developers, having idiosyncrenacies to pick between chains. There's a whole suite of tooling, like, you know, infrastructure providers, like inferior alchemy. there's like your block explorers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Having a shared standard and homogenous block space will also make it a lot better to be able to get all of those integrations to happen, right? Quite candidly, if you're making a chain today, like one of the hurdles is definitely bridging and getting that set up. There's an equally big part of it,

which is the huge amount of developer tooling that's out there that you need to integrate. And being on a shared standard allows us to integrate that shared standard and get those integrations everywhere. Okay, anyway, homogeneity is great. So I'm just re-emphasizing, like, let's not undersell that. Concretely, what needs to happen for us to bridge these things more and more together? I think one of the big next steps is just going to be not even solving the bridging problem in terms of some core technical improvements to the bridges,

but it's basically just like making it really easy for users to bridge and transact across chains. Like the whole notion of switching your RPC provider and going and changing the Metamask network and then like going to some bridge website and going in bridging. Right. Like, even just using the core underlying tooling that's there, like, one of the first things is just going to be make that really easy, right? Like, people should be able to go from OP Mainnet to doing, you know, the next basement and on-chain summer in a way that does not feel like they're like switching between, you know, two worlds, right? And like it shouldn't feel like a border crossing. So, you know, that'll be one of the first steps. And you're right. The next ones are basically like shared sequencing, which basically gets you the ability to sequence, basically gets you the ability to include. two transactions on two different chains. It's sort of in the same spot. And that's one step

along the way. And the ultimate final boss, of course, is not just to which that is a prerequisite, is like shared execution or like cross-chain atomicity. So basically the ability for one transaction to be executed and like do everything that it does that you can do in a flash loan between two contracts on Ethereum between two chains. And that's going to be sort of the final boss of all of this. It's going to be a long way to get there. Like I said, we have drawn the correct circles for the owl for now, and we actually think that those circles are much more valuable than, you know, the owl analogy, but we'll continue to get there until it's all one giant homogenous EVM magic land. So maybe to frame this in a timeline that many

Ethereum people will be familiar with. From 2015 to I would say 2019 was Ethereum research and development phase, where we had the North Star of what we wanted Ethereum to be, but turns out things like proof of stake and sharding were more concepts, more than they were actual engineering challenges. And then in 2019 to 2020, we had Ethereum 2.0 Serenity arise and everything that was research and development just turned into just an engineering challenge where we knew the path. We just needed to code for it. Where would you say the super chain is on this timeline? Oh, man, that is a toughie. That is a toughie. I think I would say, candidly, somewhere in the middle is a really tough one to answer.

I've been really pleased by the progress of decentralized sequencing protocols. This has been something that's like been sort of on the protocol backburner for a while in some sense, where like ultimately the L2 construction constrains the sequencer a lot. So decentralizing the sequencer isn't the top priority. Now that that stack is maturing, there's a lot of people in the community building decentralized sequencing and shared sequencing. And I think we're getting an increasingly good handle on that. So that's definitely like leaving research territory and like entering real implementation territory. Like for example, espresso right now is working on a leader election prototype for the OP stack as a result of a grant from the Optimism Foundation.

So I think that's all getting figured out. The final boss of like atomic execution and how to coordinate all these sequencers and a mass thing together isn't perfectly solved. There's still a bit of research going into it. But I think all the foundation like is being laid before our eyes. So I don't know, maybe not the most satisfying answer. The next steps are clear. You know, don't ask me to commit to an engineering timeline. Come on now.

Oh, I wouldn't dare. But maybe I can ask you about an engineering timeline on this next question, which is going to come to the conversation of fault proofs. Now, fraud proofs and fault proofs are the same thing for the bankless listeners. Maybe Ben will talk about why optimism elects to call them fault proofs. But I want to ask, why doesn't optimism have fault proofs? And so maybe we can talk about, like, what are the security? assumptions of a chain that does not have fault or fraud proofs. Like, can base,

yoink people's money? Yeah, absolutely. And this is something that we thought a lot about. It's like, what is the kind of decentralization characteristics that we feel comfortable bringing base to main net with? And one of the big, kind of important kind of gates for us was we couldn't launch base in a structure where any single party could have control of the network in order to kind of negatively impact users or impact funds. And so the way we've solved for that in the absence of fault proofs, which obviously we're working towards to get out as quickly as possible, is we've set up the upgrade system of base such that there's no single party who can upgrade base.

So instead what we have is we have nested multisig structure where there's a base upgrade multi-sig and an optimism multi-sig. That's the same multi-sig that controls upgrades on optimism. And in order to make any upgrades on base, you actually need both of those multisigs to sign off. And so that means that Coinbase can't upgrade base independently, nor can optimism upgrade base independently. You need both of those folks to come together. So that was the first thing, basically ensuring that no party could upgrade base in a way that could impact user funds. The second thing was, you know, on the withdrawals, ensuring that there couldn't be an invalid withdrawal proposal.

And the way that that's enforced in the absence of fault proofs is something called the Challenger mechanism. There's basically a whitelisted set of parties who can say challenge a withdrawal proposal and say this is invalid and that prevents it from going through. And similarly, we didn't want to make it so only one party had that opportunity such that if that party kind of did something negative, they could withdraw funds. And so again, what we now have is what's called a one of two, which basically means that either that kind of base core multisig or the optimism multi-sig can challenge proposals. And so if the base team were to do something invalid, optimism could come in and say, hey, this is invalid. We're going to challenge them. We're going to ensure it doesn't go through. What those two characteristics get us is basically that kind of decentralization characteristic that we want, which is that no coinbase, no base, folk folk folk can make that decision to impact users in that way.

And then, of course, in parallel to that, we are working towards having full fault proofs that do this with a larger set of people, fully permissionless set, that can ensure. that, you know, there's even more confidence in the overall decentralization of the system. And one thing that I'll note is, you know, I think if you look at the actual decentralization characteristics of this, this means that base is more decentralized than OP mainnet, or I think any other OP stack chain. Because you have that kind of nested multisig, you know, that means that there's basically even more parties who are ensuring that base is acting in good faith. It's not just coin base who you have to trust. It's also kind of the whole optimism collective and the people who are standing behind that.

And so that for us, like, we wanted to go above and beyond. And, you know, we obviously are working to get fault-proofed out as quickly as possible, but this felt like the step that would get us there in the right way. What are the risks being beholden to the user in the current state of the optimism ecosystem? And then also, where are the fraud-proofs? Where are the fraud-proofs, Ben? Ah, yes, the hot button topic of the moment. I can speak to that a little bit.

I think that the most important thing to say overall is that we are incredibly thankful to have a community of folks like you. And, I mean, for going to sake, there's an entire company L2B that's literally devoted to holding protocols like ours accountable to their security and decentralization properties. And so that is incredibly important to have because it holds folks like us accountable, 100%. And furthermore, I want to be very explicit. that full stop, we are behind on this. I can talk about the bets that we've made that have caused us to be behind and our belief and confidence that we will accelerate and move past others, but fundamentally right now, we're behind. We're at stage zero. Others are at stage one. We need to close that gap, full stop. And we're doing so, right? So from the moment that bedrock shipped,

the number one priority of the engineering teams across the community is technical decentralization, and that means faultproofs. And I'm really proud of the work, quite frankly, that's going on there. all in the mono repo, like go check it out every day sick PRs are landing and we're getting closer and closer to a fault-proof alpha that we're hoping will land before the end of the year. So that's super exciting. I think the other question in there is really how are we going to get to stage two? Because the reality is that while we are behind a lot of stage one projects, it's also the case that everybody on stage one still relies on a multi-sig, right?

You're still placing your trust into some set of signers on a decentralized multi-sig. And you're trusting that they won't go rogue for the security of your system. And that is obviously not where any of us want to end up. At the same time, it's understandable because the bar to reach stage two has to be extremely high, right? This is the point in time in which you say, look, the fault proofs are final. They are immutable. And from here on out, if there's a bug, we're out of luck because there's no multisigda bail you out. And that bar just naturally is an extremely high bar to hit, and we have to be really confident in the security

before we can go to that bar. So from our perspective, the answer to that is basically mirroring Ethereum's multi-client approach for fault-proofs. Basically, a multi-proof approach. And basically what that means is that we should expect to have multiple individual implementations of fault-proofs, which share very, very, very, very little code, but the same specification, so that any bug in any one proof implementation is unlikely to be found in the others. And then we will require that for the real fault-proofs that we put the security into,

that those proofs have agreement between the redundant implementations. And so this is a very substantive improvement in our view to the security. And that in our view is what should get us comfortable to say, no more multisig to bail things out if they go wrong. This is the final immutable thing. So I'm super excited about that. And it also speaks to what we did with Bedrock making an extremely modular. We've got something like for execution clients and two consensus clients at this point for the OP stack.

The OP stack is the only L2 where you can run entirely different code on one computer and another and be syncing the same chain and running a node for the same chain. So that's super awesome. And that's basically the foundation for what we're going to do with the fault proofs. So yeah, I mean, I guess the bottom line is incredibly thankful to have people like you asking that question, incredibly excited and optimistic about the progress, but ultimately the only thing that speaks is shipping. And so we're going to let that do the talking. And we'll see it at the end of the year. So one of the critiques, Ben, of the OP stack fork strategy of optimism is that now that anyone can fork the OP stack, they're forking this chain that doesn't have fault proofs.

And so we are actually increasing the total supply of chains in the market that doesn't have faultproofs enabled. So I want to, I'll just you like put on my optimist hat, which fits nicely, and kind of reiterate something that you were saying earlier, which is that there was a sequence of steps that optimism needed to go through in order to do fault proofs right. and the optimism bedrock, which is what everyone is forking, was that first precursor step that the fraud-proof module ultimately slots into. And so once false proofs are actually coated up and shipped, then every single OP stack chain that's forks the OP stack will also be able to incorporate fraud proofs. And I would only imagine that inside the law of chains,

if we want this homogenous block space, that that is going to be a prerequisite for actually, being a part of the optimism collective. Is that the correct interpretation of events here? Yeah, I mean, the way to translate that in law of chain speak is governance minimization, right? So basically, while, like, the part of what the law of chain says is that, you know, optimism governance is setting this standard and ensuring that, you know, users' protections

are enforced. The best way for optimism governance to protect the users is for it to not have to do anything at all. This is the notion of governance minimization. Yeah. And so fault proofs are absolutely, like, key to the story there. because a fault proof is what allows no governance to be necessary, just one honest party somewhere out there that could be you to be able to keep the chain secure

and to ensure those user protections. Okay, so when are we getting them? Oh, good question. So, you know, when are we getting what and what does it mean to not have faultproofs is like probably the dynamic to dig into there, right? Like, I want to be clear, it's not like we embarked upon bedrock and left the fault proofs as an afterthought that like, oh, hopefully it'll work and we'll figure it out, right? For a year and a half now, we've had sitting on the mono repo canon, which is the EVM equivalent

fault proof that the basis for faultproof work that's going on very rapidly right now is based on. And that's since been moved into the mono repo post bedrock. So the question really that you're asking is probably when different stages. I don't know if the audience would be familiar with like the L2B breakdown there. I can go into that. That's useful. What do you think? Yeah, semi-familiar.

Yeah. We just did a show with the Arboretum team about the whole pie slice and everything. Yeah. Got it. Yeah. So, okay, so yeah, there's stage zero, stage one, stage two, right? And stage zero is no fault proofs, or at least they're not deployed, right? Because they're sitting there on the Mono repo. Stage one is they're deployed, but there's training wheels. And stage two is like training wheels off, right? So we are at stage zero. Nobody is at stage two. There's no question that we need to close the gap and get to stage two. That's like the number one priority of the community right now. And progress is going amazingly fast. I'm very, very excited about that. Ultimately, the question that we need to answer is not how to get from stage due to stage one, it's to get from stage one to stage two. Because those training wheels, which is effectively a multi-sig, right, everybody on stage one,

and nobody has patched stage one right now. Everyone, stage one, makes the assumption that there's a set of multi-sig parties that are not going to rug the users effectively, right? And it gives them the authority to do that via this multi-sig. That is obviously not where we're trying to land. and that is the most important milestone for us to get past. So what's going on in terms of this progress? Again, we need to get from stage zero to one, and we need to close that gap. Ultimately, everyone needs to land on stage two.

A part of the work that's kind of actually tangential from these stages, but actually we do view as incredibly important, is moving to a decentralized security council, which is effectively a stand-in for the multi-sig being not just folks from the Altonistu collective and folks from base, but instead of being a much broader set of, community members that are holding us accountable. So that's one thing that's honestly actually kind of like independent from faultproofs in many sense. It's just about like this set on the multi-sig. We do have some designs in there that we think are unique and there's different technicalities I could get into there that's not worth doing. But that's one thing that's happening.

So that we're expecting to land in early 2024. In terms of getting to stage two, right? First of all, you have to ask the question, why is everybody on stage one right now? And like, why does everyone have training wheels. The reason to have training wheels is because you can't ride a bike yet, and nobody can ride a bike. I want to be clear that there's a reason for that. It's because the bar for taking off the training wheels is extremely high, right? What we're talking about is a bar here that says this implementation of fault proofs is final. It is immutable, and we're entirely relying on it. So if there actually is a bug, sorry, you're out of luck, because there's no multi-sig to bail you out. So I think the most deep question, ultimately,

that you've been getting at here is how are we going to get to the point where we're trusting in that? And the answer is basically a multi-client approach. So our view is basically extremely similar to what Ethereum does with its client diversity efforts and, for instance, East 2 having a bunch of clients and that diversity being very important. The reason for that is because security risks come from bugs. And if you re-implement something, you probably will still have bugs, but they'll be in different places. So the key thing from our perspective that will get us to stage two, like full decentralization, where there is no multisig to bail you out if things go wrong, is only one in which there are multiple redundant implementations of the fault proofs

that are checked and all have to agree with each other for the whole system to work. What does this give you? It gives you the ability that no one bug implemented in one of those implementations is going to break the entire system. Following so far, does that make sense? Yeah, I think the way that I might re-articulate this is that in lieu of a multidis client ecosystem, a layer two has to fall back on a multi-sig as its stand-in second client. That is the role of the multi-sig, is to be like, well, if our first client has a bug,

then therefore that bug becomes canon because there's no second client to check it. Therefore, we just have a multi-sig to act in as that second client. And so maybe what you're saying, Ben, is that optimism has been focused on building out the multi-client ecosystem so that it can only have its training. wheel on for a very short amount of time, and it can go straight from stage zero to stage one and straight into stage two. Is that what you're trying to say? That's exactly right. Yeah, from our perspective, the delta to stage two is the big one, not to stage one, because before that, it's still a multi-six. And you're exactly right. If you only have one client, the multi-sig needs

to be a backup if that client has a bug. If you have three clients, that's how you get comfortable. And again, I want to caveat, that's from our perspective. It's possible that others could have one client and say, nope, we're going to fully rely on this and it is immutable. And if it's wrong, then we're screwed. And so that could be a decision that's made. Our bar for decentralization and not sacrificing security to get decentralization is this multiple client approach. Okay. How many clients does optimism have? Oh, that's a good question. And shout out to the folks at base that are working to build out yet another one, Op. Rep. There are a fair number. Honestly, like, I'm not sure how long ago was

that Nethermind came out and just randomly released Op Nethermind. which we like, I mean, I think we had talked to them a little bit, but it was like extremely exciting for us. So it's going very quickly. One of the interesting things that we probably talked about in Bedrock a bit is in the same way that there is consensus client execution in ETH2, right? I'm sure you guys talked about this in the context of the merge. That also holds true for roll-ups where there's basically like the consensus client, which is like reading the call data from L1 and turning it into like EVM execution. And then there's the EVM client. So we have two consensus clients at this point. One is the opt-ne. node, and the other is Magi by A16Z. So we have two consensus client implementations. Then we have Op Nethermind. We have Op Geith, and we also have Operegon. Shout out to Test and Prod, another core development team. And Opreth in the works, like Jesse mentioned. So if you do that,

then we have two there and four here. So in theory, you could run eight different node configurations between the two for the consensus client and the four for the execution client. Short answer is, it's a lot and it's going very swimmingly. And again, this is why we built Bedrock to be so modular. Like, it's infeasible to re-implement many other clients if you don't take the approach that Bedrock does. Jesse, anything you want to add to this before we move on? I guess the only thing that I'd add is, you know, I think plus one to what Ben saying, we've got to find the path to get from stage zero to stage one to stage two. I also just say, like we clearly have a lot of work to do to get there. You know, like Ben's said we have a bunch of clients.

I'm excited to see those fully productionized and live. And then we have a bunch of people who are working on getting us to stage And I'm excited to see that fully productionized and live. And so this is a P0 priority across the base team, across the OOP Labs team, optimism, and a bunch of other core developers. And I think it's good and healthy for the ecosystem and community and y'all to ask questions and be like, hey, when's this coming? And so I'd say, please keep asking the questions. Keep following the progress. It's on GitHub. It's open source.

And we'll keep sharing updates in the next few months about the progress we're making. And I think, like Ben said, with Bedrock, we've really. made a strong foundation. And, you know, that was the goal. It was like lay a foundation that we can pull it on top of. And now I think it's kind of up to us to leverage that foundation to deliver and to deliver with speed. So that's what we're going to do. It's almost as if bedrock was meant to be a strong foundation for the layer two ecosystem. Jesse, Ben, I've learned a lot in this conversation. And I think anyone who's listened to Bankless knows that I get very excited over all things super chain. So this episode, I think, is going to be a good one to help clarify why that

excitement always shows up when optimism. A new OP stack fork shows up in the news. Jesse, Ben, I want to ask you guys each this because each of you represent a different chain. Jesse, what is the near-term focus for base? Once you hang up from this podcast, what are you going to go work on? What's the base ecosystem focused on at this moment? Yeah. Well, we got nine more days in on-chain summer, and then it's September. And so, you know, we're still really focused on just telling the world about base and telling the world about what's happening on chain, bringing one thing to do. every day on chain that we're kind of curating and then helping surface all the incredible stuff that's happening across the community. So if folks want to participate in that, you can go to

onchainsummer.xy-Z, get involved, get on-chain this summer. And then after that, we're going to take a break. I'm going to take a few days to breathe. It's been a really crazy month of kind of bringing this into the world. And then we're just going to get back to building. Like we just talked about kind of getting fault proofs and security counsel and further progress on decentralization. That's our P-0 priority. And then, Make it easier and easier for developers to build on base, easier and easier for people to use base, and kind of creating that ecosystem of builders who are bringing those applications, creating those applications, and bringing the next billion people on chain.

That's what I'm focused on. So, yeah, build, build, build. I will say for the bank was listener out there. The last time I saw Jesse was at ECC, and the time before that was at a different conference. I can't remember which. And also then hopping into this chat right here to record every single time. He's running around like a madman talking to 10,000 different people, talking to different developers. And then we just hop into the recording, because that's what I do, podcast.

And then once we're done, he hops around and starts running off to go do something else about bass or something. And then that's been what I've been seeing Jesse do for the last, like, six months. And then he comes into this recording studio on Riverside. And he's like scarfing down his meal, which looks like it's the first meal of the day or something. It looks like he's just been running around for like six months straight. So the fact that you're telling me, Jesse, that you get a moment to breathe in the next coming up soon. Congrats. Do touch some grass.

Thank you for all your contributions. But we need you to also stick around for the next following decades, too. So don't burn yourself out. Yeah, absolutely. You've been doing a stream a day for the past month, isn't that right? Yeah, stream a day. Every day for 15 minutes. We're doing on-chain summer stories.

It's the first time I've done, like, direct content. And it's been having a lot of fun. Talk to the onboard team who is based in Nigeria today. And, you know, they were sharing about how. Nigeria is coming on chain and how the African continent's coming on chain. And so I think, yeah, I mean, like, candidly, it's been a sprint for the last six months. And my feeling was like, we only get to do this sprint once. Like, you only get to bring something like base into the world once. And I wanted to give that like literally everything that I had. And I've given it everything

that I had. I think our team's given it everything that we had. And now we're going to take a beat, take a breath and settle in for the marathon, which is going to be the next. next 10 years to next decade, you know, the 2020s of bringing the world on chain. So, you know, I guess like only thought I'll say is like, thank you everyone for all of the energy and positivity over the last six months because it's really been the thing that's like made it possible for me to push as hard in our team to push as hard as we have to try and make this all happen. So really grateful for all that love and appreciation. Ben, same question to you. What's the near-term focus for optimism, OP labs, the collective?

of what's going on over there? Yeah, so technically there is only one answer, and that is faultproofs. And like Jesse said, you know, go look at the GitHub. We're incredibly thankful to have a community of folks like yourselves and the people at L2B. There's an entire company basically focused on holding us accountable, which is absolutely incredible and really exciting.

So technically, that's the number one focus. Like I can come up here and talk about the differences in stages and, you know, the unique strategy that we're bringing to the table. At the end of the day, we just have to ship. And like, we're going to let that. speak for itself as opposed to anything short. Then in terms of governance, I would say it's basically the law of chains and getting optimism ready to go multi-chain. I'm glad that we had some aha moments about the law of chains and what it means, but the work to actually get the Dow

ready to fund the public goods on base and understand that there are multiple chains and understand that it has an obligation to create sequencers now, for example, that is a very meaningful amount of work for us to be doing. And we have an incredible governance. team that, you know, I certainly can't take anything close to a lion's share of the credit there, but that's definitely the focus right now. It's like basically preparing the optimism community to go multi-chain and for the next billion users to come on and join the super chain. There we go. We've come full circle in this episode. Jesse, as he said, this is day one. Jesse, Ben, thank you so much for guiding us through the super chain and base today.

Thank you. Thanks, y'all. It's a pleasure. Action items for your bankless nation will include a link to the law of chains. It's what we've been mentioning throughout this episode. There is a governance post you can look at to read more about that. Got to end with this. Of course, risk and disclaimers. Crypto is risky. So are all the chains that we're creating. You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.