Bankless - Autonomous Worlds | Lattice’s Justin Glibert

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

In today’s episode, we’re exploring the frontier of onchain universes, on Ethereum. Autonomous Worlds is the new frontier of digital onchain universes, being pioneered by the Lattice team, of which Justin Glibert on the show today is the co-founder and CEO. Ethereum is not just a financial computer, but a root of state for an infinite number of universes, all with their own laws of physics, objects, players, agents, and state… and, like our universe, still continues with, or without, our presence. Justin walks us through the evolution of Autonomous Worlds. Get ready because you're going to get a taste of where the Internet has always been pointing towards… it just took us a while to get here. ------ 📣Bankless Premium | Use Code "FEED10" https://bankless.cc/FEED10    ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2  🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo     ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum   🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle  🏠 CASA | SECURE YOUR GENERATIONAL WEALTH https://bankless.cc/Casa  🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/toku    🌐 CARTESI | APPLY FOR A GRANT https://bankless.cc/CartesiGovernance  ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 2:36 Scope of Lattice 7:18 Different Affordances of Ethereum 14:21 Dark Forest 23:51 After Dark Forest 29:32 Writing Code in Assembly & Abstraction 32:42 Lattice 35:58 Games Being Built Today 43:21 Justin’s Thoughts on the “Metaverse” 51:05 Rollup & Die 55:28 Lattice’s Layer 2 1:00:13 The Future of Games 1:04:56 Onchain Native GDP 1:08:17 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES Lattice https://twitter.com/latticexyz   https://lattice.xyz/   0xParc  https://twitter.com/0xPARC  https://0xparc.org/   Justin’s Twitter https://twitter.com/justinglibert   ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠ 

Hey, Bankless Nation, today on the podcast, we are releasing an episode from the premium feed, so you can get a taste of what kind of content we release exclusively for bankless citizens. We keep the Bankless podcast feed full of highly accessible, generalized content, and then we put all of our research, frontier level content for the premium feed, for those who want to go down a deeper rabbit hole. As a reminder, the premium feed is ad-free, and it has all the normal podcasts that you also get on the normal podcast feed just without the ads. So if you want access to the Bankless Premium RSS feed, you can sign up with Feed.

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What's the final stage of any civilization? Right? It's probably to create a universe. It's like the final thing you do. You know, you're like, okay, we've explored the universe, we've conquered the stars, we can use all the energy. So now the final thing we'll do is we'll create a universe. you know, and we'll let that universe do whatever it wants. And I think the thing that's interesting with all of this cryptography stuff,

distributed system and all of that is we're going towards this idea of like, hey, we're going to be able to create a universe that is real. You know, it's like truly objective. But it's interesting because it goes toward that agenda of like the final stage of civilization, which is let's create a universe that goes beyond us. Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. And today on Bankless, we are exploring the frontier of on-chain universes, on Ethereum, which is actually a real frontier.

Space is the final frontier of physics and matter, but autonomous worlds are the new frontier of digital on-chain universes, being pioneered by the lattice team, of which Justin is the co-founder of, and he is on the show today. You might have heard of fully on-chain games or autonomous worlds.

Bankless Nation, I think this frontier of crypto is so big and expansive that when it's finally ready for production, it will represent the next wave of crypto-debate. element. In my opinion, this is not just something that Ethereum is good at, but it's actually Ethereum's main story arc. It's actual main quest line for what Ethereum is bringing to the world. Ethereum is not just a financial computer, but it's a state route for an infinite number of universes, all with our own physics, objects, players, agents, and state. And like our universe,

they still continue on with or without our presence. Dare I say, the actual real metaverse. Justin from Ladis is going to walk us through the evolution of autonomous worlds, starting with their accidental discovery with this experimental game that we all played in Ethereum called Dark Forest back in 2020, to where we are today with Latis's software package for building autonomous worlds and the current set of fully on-chain games that are available to play right now, to where this is going, which is an infinite landscape of internet universe's on-chain economies and endless possibilities. On this episode of Bankless, Bankless and you are going to get a taste of where the internet has always been pointing towards.

It just took us a while to get here. So let's go ahead and get right into the episode with Justin from Ladis. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Like Cracken, our preferred crypto exchange for getting into the future world of on-chain universes, if you do not have a Cracken account, consider clicking the link in the show notes getting started with Crackin today. If you want a crypto trading experience backed by world-class security and award-winning support teams, then head over to Cracken, one of the longest standing and most secure crypto platforms in the world. Cracken is on a journey to build a more accessible, inclusive, and fair financial system,

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This means that SELO needs you to weigh in and make your voice heard. Join the conversation in the cello forums. Follow SELO on Twitter and visit SELO.org to shape the future of Ethereum. Bankless Nation, I'm happy to introduce to you, Justin Glibert, who is the co-founder of Lattis. Justin, welcome to the show. Hey, David. Thanks for having me. I think Lattis and what you guys are doing over there is probably got a, a pretty strong cult following of enthusiasts,

but it might not be pretty familiar with the general bankless audience. So can you just at a high level explain what you guys are doing over at Lattis? Like, what is your guys' scope? Yeah, so the scope is to make on-chain games real. So I feel like our origin stems all the way back to good old dark forest.

If people here remember, that was a few years ago. I worked on it very briefly. Should not get any credit for it. I was not there at the beginning, but I got my interest piked. I stayed with the people who were working on it in Mexico. And the thing that really blew my mind immediately is like, huh, why are we not making more things like this? You know, like we have this cool multiplayer open computer and you can kind of do whatever

you want on it, but we just kind of stop short most of the time. You know, I don't know if you remember early theorem ideas like, oh, there will be a full node in your lock in your house and you'll be able to like rent it by the second. Like that was wild times. There were a lot of ideas like this. Now we're kind of away from that, but I think one thing that remained true is that as long as people didn't take the post-financialization ideas seriously, so the idea of like, hey, we'll do more than finance on this world computer. They were just to not build the ideas and the tools for it. So where we got started is it was just to hack a group, me and a bunch of other people trying to build this game was first called ZK Dungeon and then called Amber.

And the idea was like, hey, let's just build something kind of like dark. for us, you know, a different type of game, also using zero knowledge proof. We didn't realize at that time that the Zika proof are not the important part. The important part is that you have this kind of like open, open game, open environment that runs entirely on Ethereum. So we started from Hack Group and then we kind of grew. I think people really started to get a sense of what we were doing about a year and a half ago when we did OPECraft, which was like a fully on-chain Minecraft clone.

It's about the same time as when optimism kind of like, branded the OP stack. You know, we were basically the first group that forked their new update bedrock to make our own chain. And then we kind of like met each other in person in New York. And they were like, wait a minute. That's a, that's pretty interesting. So we kind of like the opi craft. They were like, well, you know, there's this OP stack thing.

We kind of like announced it together. And essentially as we, we kept going on that journey, there are two very big parallel path. One is like, let's make the technology real. So we first build games. And then we were like, okay, these games are really hard to build because the tooling is not there. So we build this thing called mud. It's an open source framework for making ancient games. Many, many, many games today use it from one person team to kind of like big studios.

And the other path we took was let's legitimize the idea. Let's like talk about it with an open mind. So like one thing we keep saying when we were doing these small meetups is don't worry about the gas. Don't worry about making money. And it was like always like where we were starting from. Let's just try to make interesting things. There was an essay that got published, I think, two summers ago called Autonomous Worlds. That came from like our little group that kind of like coined a term for people to rally around.

We organized a bunch of conferences at DefCon twice. So yeah, we took these two paths, kind of got together. And now it's really exciting because looking back two years, there's a pretty interesting, ecosystem of people, you know, like big and small building things seriously. And I think we've finally reached the stage where there's enough people believing that it can be real that if we probably like all disappear tomorrow, like all of Lattis, it will continue. So that's the one thing I'm like really proud about is the bus factor of Odgian games went up by quite a bit. So sorry, that was not as short as an introduction as I would have liked it to be, but we traced it

back a little bit. Yeah, I think that gives a listeners a snapshot of kind of the tone or the vibe of where we're going here. I think there's two potential versions of what this conversation could be, and there's one that I very much want it to be. And one potential version is we could just explain what games you guys are building at lattice, why the games are different,

why they're unique and what properties that they have. But I think there's a higher, more elevated version of this conversation that I want to get to, which is explaining the rabbit hole that is autonomous worlds, like getting people peeled on autonomous worlds, which I think,

is an idea that is beyond lattice. I think if we re-rolled the idea of Ethereum, you would see Ethereum be born, and then you would see people arrive at like, oh, you can build these things called autonomous worlds. And that would be rediscovered in every single re-simulation of humanity discovering Ethereum. And so I want to kind of actually step back

and approach this conversation from first principles. You kind of alluded to this a little bit in the introduction. But I think the first time I ever heard you pitch this, you were talking about like, well, We invented Bitcoin and Bitcoin became Internet gold, so that was like a monetary evolution. Ethereum was invented and became an Internet financial system, and so now that's a financial evolution. But I think you also have a different vision beyond just like the financial side of what Ethereum really does. Like Chris Dixon has popular as crypto as like you're adding own onto read, right own onto the Internet.

But I think you have a different take about like what really, what are the properties of Ethereum and what that really enables? And maybe we can start this conversation there with what is that alternative viewpoint about the affordances of Ethereum and what it can bring and bring to the world? Yeah. So I think the challenge here is not to go too philosophical too quickly because that's one thing. We'll get there at the end. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sadly too good at this. So feel free to interrupt and bring me back to Earth whenever that kicks in.

But so I would say one way to think about this whole thing is that, we're adding a new dimension to digital things, digital objects, basically. It's like there is, we've been like since we, we got computers going, actually since we, since we have math, you know, like with math, we're able to kind of like create these objects that exist in our head. And my math objects are the same as yours. They can actually like interpret with each other, but we can't touch them, but it's still a rules, right? Like I can write a paper and you can then understand it and we don't even have to talk with each other. That's still like kind of like a mind-blowing thing about math. that math spans a whole universe of stuff.

The problem with math, though, is that it's not really multiplayer yet, right? Like, you can't really know, like, what kind of like math equations people live in their head or all of that. It's still really in between single player and multiplayer, even if it's, like, fully kind of like outside our physical realm. And so the thing that's interesting with computers is as soon as we started networking them, we kind of like start being able to have these, like, entirely non-physical realities. that are not just subjective anymore, you know, like things like money, like from capitalism, like religion, nation states and all of that in the book Sapiens, the kind of like the author refers to them as intersubjective realities. So they're real, they're realities, but they're still kind of subjective because, I mean, you and I can love humanity in a very different way. It's still

pretty subjective, even if it's kind of like a shared context between it to us. And the thing with computer is we can kind of start going towards this idea of like inter-objective realities. So we have these realities that are not physical, but they're way more objective now. Like, you and I can log in into World of Warcraft. And it's like a very tangible reality. Like, there is no arguing around like, did we, did we kill this like level 50 boss or not? It's just we either did or we didn't, right? And not just that. There's actually like a geometry to the space. Like there's coordinates in the game. There's structures. There's visual structures, right? Maybe there's not matter there, but it's close enough to the point where like that does feel like a real space.

And the thing that's interesting is I would say it might be close enough or maybe it's not. Like, can we get to digital matter? You know, when people talk about digital matter, all of that stuff, they always think about the input output. It's like how does our body experience it? So it's like, oh, let's put like regrid VR headsets or let's smell the thing you would smell in a reality. But actually, it seems that the input output of the reality is one way. We perceive it as more real. But another thing is like, does it have consequences?

right does these objective realities have consequences and one thing you see with with like video games that you see as well with crypto even the financial version is we now have these completely digital system that have very serious consequences

right in crypto it's a lot of like well get rich get poor get hacked you know and video games is go to jail you know that's like the really really bad outcome but in video games like if you start investing enough time and also it's a relationship with other people.

You know, it's not just a single-player experience. It's like me and my friends or my foes have, like spent a long time getting to this point. These realities have consequences, right, on your mood, on what you'll spend your time on. And the thing that's interesting is it seems that crypto or like blockchains in general enables us to make these inter-objective realities more and more objective. To a stage where we could have a world and it doesn't have to look like this world, you know, it doesn't have, it doesn't need X, Y, Z coordinate. it. I would say, actually, I sometimes say that Ethereum is like still the most crazy

MMO out there, but it's really an MMO. You know, you have like all of the classes that like participate in this computer and they all have like very different game they're playing. And this network kind of like defines the rule of this reality. But it's still kind of like still a little bit too loose. It's very much like, oh, programmers can do whatever they want. The only real physics is that there's this currency. And so approaching it from that perspective, it seems that these these these kind of like crypto system go towards the possibility of making these digital realities like more and more real to a point where in the autonomous world's essay they're described as like they could be like mars like you and i know that mars is real you know there is like a curiosity rover there but how often do you see mars no you don't see it like unless you have special instruments but we all kind of agree it's real because when you use the instruments you see the same thing the same way like i don't run a note an Ethereum node, maybe you do. I don't know how often you check it.

But the whole ecosystem believes these things are real because if we use the same instruments, we kind of get to the same result, right? Mars doesn't care if you don't like it. It's going to keep executing its rule, you know, like the constant of gravity, you know, like Curiosity rover, even if NASA really doesn't want it to stop,

like the little nuclear battery inside is going to stop working at some point. And it's the equivalent here. Like we can take these digital realities and make them more and more objective to a point where, like, okay, actually there is no one that can stop them. There's no one that can break the rules.

And now it's time to get real, you know, because the consequences are very serious. With crypto, with Bitcoin, we saw it that the financial consequences are serious. But I think we can extend this seriousness to whatever rules that we want. It doesn't have to do money. And I think that was the thing that we got to, which is, oh, okay, fundamentally these are tools to make realities way more objective over time. And I mean, it was pretty balsy to have money as your first use case. And it was like, okay, out of all of the things we could make more real, which one should we start with?

It's like, let's start with like one of the most important thing in like this kind of like reality we live in, which is capitalism. But you can very much apply this to anything. So I'd say we can start with that. Let me know like if there's something you would like to go deeper into. Yeah, right. And really just to remind listeners about the conversation thus far is that we're talking about different ways to perceive Ethereum, right? Which is typically perceived as like a revolution in money and finance. And I think what you are offering is like, well, there's a different way to perceive Ethereum as like there.

There's a universe out there called the universe of Ethereum. And it has state in the same way that like the real world has state. And there are objects in Ethereum. Just like there are objects in the real world. And we're starting to like flesh out this like structure of this world. But just it's very like right now primitive. It's just like a bunch of financial apps and financial tokens and financial use cases. and then now maybe we're starting to get into like some social stuff.

But I think you have a very clear like direction of where this goes. I want to actually go just to really make this really clear for listeners. Ladis maybe is accidentally sometimes called like a gaming company, like a fully on-chain gaming company. Maybe you guys are. But like maybe we can actually kind of like narrow the scope of the conversation and talk about Ladis the gaming company, right? Just from that perspective.

So like you talked about this game Dark Forest. I'm going to guess that most listeners actually not familiar with Dark Forest. So maybe you can talk about, like, lattice at the gaming company, and then we'll kind of expand back into like the more higher level stuff after that. Yeah, sure. So the TLDR on Dark Forest is so many people were involved in Dark Forest. Originally, the original founder of Dark Forest is Goopheep, who kind of like put the first version together, got the people to work on it.

He wrote an essay called The Strongest Crypto Gaming Thesis. which really got like on-chain games going. At that time, people didn't really know why non-chain games would be like a good idea, but he really like can not put it down in very clear terms, or at least the first version of these terms. And what DarkFresh was is there were games on Ethereum before, right? I don't know, maybe you remember FOMO 3D. We can also explain what FOMO 3D was.

I've referenced FOMO 3D a number of times on the podcast. It's basically, well, it's also a money game, right? It's a Ponzi game. It's a specifically a specific economic game, but it is meant to be a game. Exactly. It is meant to be a game. And there are rules and there are no hacks. Like the person that won respected the rules.

Everybody was like, well, you cheated. But no, these were the rules of the game and you won, right? So Derek Frist was probably not the first game, but it was the first game that was like, okay, let's just treat the Ethereum as a computer, not as a programmable bank. And the idea was like, okay, we have... We want to be able to make a game where the universe, which could just be kind of like a map. You know, it's like a two-day map.

Imagine Google Maps, you know. And the universe is so simplified that it's just points of interest. So imagine there's you, there's your house, my house, there's the bakery. And like these three things exist. I cannot be between my house and your house. There's only three places where things can be. And we can send kind of like people and energy between these places. So that's really the premise of the game.

There's a bunch of points of interest on a map. And here's a bunch of interesting things. First, the map is infinite. It's procedurally generated. So it's like in Minecraft. You can kind of keep expanding the map. It respects some roles. But the one thing that is interesting is you don't know what the map looks like when you start playing the game.

And that might be a bit strange to people that know a little bit how blockchains work because the point is everything is kind of like supposed to be public. Right. And now, you know, people talk about more about cryptographies, your own niche proofs and all that. But at the time, it was very niche. And one of the key innovation of Darkfuss was to say the map is the same for everybody. But when you start playing the game, you don't know what the map is. And the only way to explore the map is to do proof of work. Kind of like Bitcoin, you know, you have to spend computational resource to remove the fog of war.

You can either do it around you because that's useful. You know, if I start in this universe, I kind of want to know what's around me because... Yeah, so listeners think like StarCraft or like a game where like you start out, but like the map is unknown to you because you literally haven't explored it yet. So you only know what's in your like locale. Exactly. Exactly. And it's a little bit like Solaris or something like there's just planets in space. And you start in a tiny planet, basically.

Right. And you can either explore around you, using your computational power to explore around you, or you can explore wherever you want. But the thing is, if you start exploring pretty far away, you don't even know if there are people there. You're just kind of like guessing. And the key innovation is that you were able to use zero knowledge proof to essentially prove to the game, which was a smart contract, that the move you're making is valid, that is, hey, I'm moving between my planet and another planet, and it's not that far.

without revealing where the planets are. So the really mental experience you would have is you could go on a block explorer or write a tool and you could see that there's all this activity in the universe. And you can see the strength of the planet and the forces being moved.

So you could see like this like player just moved 10 million forces from that plant to that planet. But you have no idea where it is. So the reason it was called dark, it's called dark phrase is because it's based on the second book of the three body problem trilogy.

I mean, that is no way more popular. I actually have it. I literally have it right here because I use it to stabilize my, my, my monitor. Show you on camera. Yeah, exactly.

That's your new book. And I don't want to spoil the book because I guess now many, many people are going to want to know the story given it's on Netflix. But one key thing in Dark First is the idea that the universe is dark and you don't know what's going on there, right? So that was the feeling that was trying to be created. You don't know what's going on in the universe. You can move between these planets.

The fun side effect of this, though, is because all the game was written on smart contract. And the reason it was written on smart contracts, the legend says, is because Goop Sheep and Co had never really written anything else. They were like, oh, we're just going to use smart contracts because we are at these Ethereum workshops and it seems like the right thing to do, you know, let's put it on smart contracts.

But the side effect of that was that now, people were able to build stuff on top of the game. So famously, like in Dark Forest, there were no marketplaces, there were no alliances. It was really barebonne. It was just the rules of the universe. You can move, you can increase your energy, you can build defenses on your planets.

And players built everything else. You know, they forked the client. They started adding stuff like, oh, here's a marketplace. We are adding some smart contracts to the game. My favorite one is people build an autonomous alliance. So there is, and because DarkFries still exist today, like it's a smart contract on Noses chain, used to be X-Dye. The creators can't kill it.

That's one other thing that is interesting with DarkFres is the game can never stop. It will run forever. And there is still today this kind of like player in the game that is not a human player. It's a smart contract player. And you can kind of like, it has a score, it has an army, et cetera. It's almost like an autonomous NPC that players have added to the game. So you can start, like, as you start kind of like reading about Dark First or playing it, you get to the realization that like, huh, it's not a bug that the developers only put the rules of the game and they didn't build anything on top of it.

It's a feature. They made a gift to all of us of the rules of the universe. And then they're like, good luck. Go build stuff on top and figure it out. And that was really the thing that blew my mind because it was like, oh, okay, we have this inter-objective reality. Group sheep and co have defined what the physics is, what the rules of the universe is. But now all of us can interact with it. The same way, like, NASA can send a rover to Mars, but if you and I team up together, maybe in 20 years we can be there as well.

And we don't need permission from anyone. And we can kind of stroll around respecting the same rules. So that's start for us. That's where it all started. Can I pause? And let's like do some bullets about like really the impactful point. about that story that I want to make sure that listeners captured. One is that

the state of the Dark Forest universe is fully on chain. You said it was like... No servers. No servers, right? This server is Ethereum. It's a procedurally generated universe and there's different planets and because of the leveraging of cryptography, ZK.

Proofs, you as a player of the game you would literally go to like the Dark Forest website you would be dropped into this universe interacting with this smart contract and you would actually only know the state, just like how like when you are born, you are only aware of your local environments, like you don't know what's on the other side of the earth. So you're dropped into this universe and you only know what's around you, which is mimics

reality. And so you can start to explore this world, but you aren't actually disclosing your information to other players because of the power of zero knowledge cryptography. And so this very minimal rule set and these things, these properties that mimic real life started to produce this immersion behavior and like you said it's on X-Dai which is a side chain to Ethereum so in theory this thing doesn't

ever die it's a like no it's what is Ethereum for unstoppable code what was Dark Force it was just code on Ethereum and so we have this like universe that's created that mimics some properties of the actual real universe that we inhabit except it exists with all of its logic

on chain on Ethereum and just perpetuates because it doesn't know not to Yeah, I think that's brilliant. And I would say one more thing, which is that just like this universe, all of us can engineer and do science in it. In Dark Forest, anyone can engineer and do science in Dark Forest. You know, you can all go and participate in this rule set because the point is the computer is open, you know, open to anyone, to anything. AIs and humans alike. AIs are not discriminated in Dark Forest.

They're first-class citizen just like humans. Right. Okay. So this, I think, Dark Forest can't really open. up, like exploded. It was the big bang of like autonomous worlds. Like people are realizing the properties of these things like after the fact that they're created.

And so like where does the story go from here? So the story goes, uh, after dark first, nobody really gives a shit. So people really are like, wow, dark fris is really good. And people say like, wow, man, like we really want more dark first rounds. But it kind of stopped there, you know? And so one thing to know about dark frass is it was a true. tremendous effort to make dark frass happen, right? Like this was dark frisk is at was at the time like a truly insane project.

I remember the people that were running ex die were telling us like, hey, we have to spend like a hundred thousand dollars a month just in nodes to be able to serve the RPC request to the users. Because most things out there, you know, you send like one request to get the price of the pool and then another one to send a transaction. When you play dark press, you're just like plugged into the blockchain. Your brain is plugged into the blockchain as you interact with it. Right. So first, like from infrastructure perspectives, things were not ready. Second, blockchains from a latency perspective have not been optimized for that kind of stuff. Right. So DarkFest had to be built in such a way that it was not a pain in the butt to like make a transaction every 12 seconds, right? Third, the amount of tooling you need to make something like there was no tooling for DarkFrest, right?

So DarkFrest is this like super crazy complex spaghetti code app. And I remember every single time like we wanted to add a new feature. it was like excruciatingly hard because once again, Ethereum application, the tooling is not there to add things to them to manage a large amount of state.

Usually the state is very minimal. People actually try to have the least states possible because you pay for it. Whereas here, Darkfest was kind of like a maxi project. It's like let's just as much state as we want. It was really difficult. It was being under an assumption

of a complete abundance of block space. Exactly. Exactly. Complete abundance of block space, low latency, etc. So it kind of stopped there. And when me and Alvarez, the co-founders of Ladis,

the two of us kind of like ended up a summer with the Dark Fresh founders and we're like, let's try to build another game like this. Let's just see what it takes. It was so hard. I don't know if you know, do you know the game, dungeon keeper? It's like an old kind of like,

so dungeon keeper is an old game from Peter Molinier, but the idea is you're like an evil kind of like dungeon master and you have to like start digging underground, recruit goblins to kind of like take care of your dungeon. And inevitably, you'll either meet some heroes underground or other people's dungeon. And now it's a war. You know, and you kind of like grow underground. And our idea was let's use the same technology as Dark Forest to also have this underground

world where we start somewhere. You don't know what's around you. And you have to dig. You dig in this tunnel. You try to find some gold. You expand your resources. And at some point, you might inevitably dig into someone else's dungeon. And that's when all hills break loose.

So that was our idea. We built it. for like a year, actually. It was a big project. And we realized after one year of building, it wasn't fun. We're like, this game is not fun. It's just like not fun playing.

And we looked back to, was there any way to know, like, how could we have done this like iterative approach? And it turns out there was no way to iterate because any change was taking months and months and months to just implement, right? So there was really this massive problem. It's kind of like computers a long time ago.

Like before Linux, before operating systems, before libraries, before all of that stuff, computers were batch processing systems. They were actually mostly used in banks and in government, kind of like reminiscent of early Ethereum from that perspective. And they were batch processing machines. They were not interactive, you know, like, like, yes, the computers, the IBM kind of computers back in the days in your MacBook are very similar from,

like from a, like from a, it's the same system. It's just much better from a developer perspective and user perspective. And it really felt like that at a time. I mean, it was getting better. it was still pre kind of like roll up scaling and all of that. At that time, like we thought we would have to run our own side chain. That was where we were at.

But specifically, like, the way we talk about it at Lattis is that Ethereum, still today, actually, if you don't take mud into account. And we can talk about mud later, but you still program Ethereum bare metal. So bare metal, what this means is you have a computer. You just write some code and the code just runs on the computer. No operating system, nothing. That means you have to manage your own memory. You have to manage your own storage.

You can't upgrade things. you have no databases and all of that. And that's really what the theorem was like at that time, right? We just had to build this thing bare metal. And so maybe this is a good transition point because after this dungeon keeper game, we thought, okay, what would it look like to build a framework for on-chain games? It wasn't, we were not that sophisticated in our thinking yet. But what this led us to over like a year was this realization that are like, huh,

why did people build Linux? I mean, even before that there were other operating systems. But why are their operating system? You know, why can't just people write everything bare a middle? Well, it turns out when you have multiple applications that need to kind of like need to be added on top of each other, they need standards to talk with each other, they need to be upgraded. You know, you have things like databases. Today, if you write a website, you don't take the user state and you put it on the disk and you write the code to put it on the disk.

No, you use Postgres or MySQL or something like that. You let the people with a much longer beard than you take care of storing data and kind of like having it around for the next 10 years. So we thought about it from that We're like, huh, okay, so the reason why there is no framework for building Ethereum application, the reason why there is no operating system for Ethereum is because the apps that are on Ethereum are so primitive and they're so kind of like mindful of cost

that you don't want an operating system. You know, like today it's actually glorified for people to go write their code in assembly. Like you go on Twitter and you go check out the cool solidity kits. They're like, I'm just going to write my ERC20 in assembly because that's true chef's kiss kind of like ethereum programming. And that's really interesting. For people like me who don't code,

can you like unpack that take for me? Because I actually don't understand that. So there's different kind of like levels of abstraction when trying to explain something to a computer for it to do it. And the lowest level of the computer is tiny instructions for the CPU. That's called assembly, right? And so you can write this by hand. That's what people were doing before.

We went to the moon. I mean, not me. I'm not American. But I'll leave it to the Americans. We as humanity, yeah. We as humanity. Humanity went to the moon just with assembly, like the whole lander and all that was written in assembly,

by hands, by people. So you're skipping over every single layer of extraction, writing it straight to getting really close to the metal. Machine code, machine code. And the benefits of this, at least in the defy context, is that your contracts are really gas-efficient? Yeah, so the idea is a lot of people distrust the solidity compiler being like, I'm smarter than the solidity compiler.

Because what the solidity compil. does is you write some code and it turns that into machine code, right? Right. But every single time you do things. Exactly. And then also it's just like way harder. It's just going to take you like a hundred hours to make the most basic thing in many ways. So you have these layers of abstraction, right?

The first one is the introduction of a programming language. That's a big job, you know, from assembly to a programming language. But in computing, the trick we keep pulling is you just keep adding layers of abstraction to make it easy for people to build things. We're in this app right now, Riverside. You want to count the layers of abstraction. So there is your MacBook, and it runs a kernel in assembly. And that kernel runs macOS.

And in macOS, you have a bunch of programs running, and I'm using ARC right now. It's a Chrome Fork. It runs a browser. And that browser runs some JavaScript that then runs Riverside. You know, that's this many layers of abstraction. And what does this give us? Like, why don't the Riverside people are like,

we're going to write Riverside in assembly? And we're going to ship it to you on a DVD that you're going to have to put in your computer and like boot it. Well, the reason they don't do that is because the browser is a distribution mechanism. It's secure so people can run untrusted code. You have all of these layers of attraction. The problem is the cost, right? Like things that run in the browser are like a million times slower than if you run them

on your computer. The reason we don't care is because computers are a billion time faster than they were 10 years ago, probably a trillion time faster. The problem is Ethereum didn't get faster for like six years. So people were like in a massive scarcity mindset, they were like, oh my God. but we're just going to keep getting more users and Ethereum is not going to get faster. So instead of climbing the computer science abstraction layer of abstraction,

which is what people do, what people have done in the computing industry, they kind of stayed in caveman mode. And caveman mode is like, let's just do everything in assembly. Let's try to fit as many apps as possible. But now we're in a completely different world. You know, we have layer twos, we have all of this scaling stuff. But all of the paradigm for programming and for people thinking about these programs has not caught up yet to the abundance.

And that's, I think, a really interesting thing. Okay. And I think that starts to get into like why, what is lattice and what is it doing? So I'm going to go ahead and guess that lattice is some level of abstraction for building fully on-chain games on-chain. Exactly. Yes. Yes. And we think that one of the big gift we're going to make to the Ethereum ecosystem is that all the stuff that we're building for on-chain games, it's secretly for anything.

There's nothing that we're putting in our toolkit that is specific. to games. It's just for any apps that is sufficiently complex. So gaming is a really good first use case to be a very complex use case. And we care about it a lot, right? Because if we kind of like backtrack to a little bit of a philosophy

interlude with it at the beginning, what we want is we want to add more verbs to Ethereum. You know, Chris Dixon says Brochains adds the own verb to the internet. And we think that's like a tremendous level up when it comes to how objective digital realities are, because now

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kind of a flash in the pan. They kind of spurred some development, but they really haven't made a lasting mark on the Ethereum space or the crypto space. We have the crypto games of today, which are actually like much more like normal games. They are very highly polished AAA, high graphics

card, high GPU games, and like just the assets in the game are on chain somewhere. It's like only the things of value in that universe. And now finally, have like the layer two's to actually support like a more flourishing type of assets so there's many many many morning types of assets but it's still just the assets right it's still just chrisdixon and zone uh and so like what we're going for what lettuce is going for is like let us is going for

is like let's put the actual computation of the game and put that on chain too which is like extremely ambitious because like the level of scale that you need to put like big big games on chain is still like a very large amount of scale. But the thing is like we have a pretty clear path to getting there. And also you don't have to start, you don't have to put like graphics on chain. Like you actually just have to put logic on chain. And so that's like what we're going towards.

And so like what are some of the games that are being actually built like today? What are some of the fully on chain games that like people can get their hands on? Yeah. And one thing I will add is that it's not only scale, which is one thing I think people focus a lot on rightfully. Like if you think about 20 years ago, we could have had a billion IBM mainframe instead of 10. It would not have changed anything. It's like, okay, we have a billion IBM mainframe.

And what do we do with them? You know, there's still no way to actually make them do anything. So it's not only scale is you have to like create these layers of abstraction, right? Like it's not just like, oh, we have an EVM chain with a billion TPS. Oh, yeah, cool. You have that. And now how are people going to build the applications to be put there, right? it's like having a really big computer and having no operating system and like essentially nothing to put on top.

So we think like kind of like our quest is both on the side of like, well, okay, we have to like spread these ideas and get like encourage people to build these games and really explore the other verbs of Ethereum beyond own. Another branch is while we have to do the scaling stuff. And thankfully a lot of people are working with us on that. Like we're, I mean, we're working very closely with optimism, but everybody's working on scaling. And the third thing is like, well, we have to let the developers and also everybody, everybody's, we're working on. else, not just the developers, be able to, like, put things on these computers, right? So that's like the third branch. But if we go back to the, to the games that are being built today, there's a couple.

So it ranges from people essentially kind of doing the social crypto stuff that, like, basically things that are very close to what currently exists, they can just build it like 100 times faster all the way to like very crazy pie in the Skype projects. Some of them actually giving the resources to be developed, right? So if we start with something that is a bit more close to like what people can imagine today, there's this studio, good friend of ours, small brain game. What they do is they're like, let's take a really like simple thing, you know, like Scrabble as an example. You laid down letters on the board.

But now the twist is you have to buy the letters. And every time you buy the letters, you put money in a pot. And when you make good words, you take money from that pot. So now suddenly, small brain game is trying to run the biggest Scrabble game in the world and make it as competitive as possible. And the thing that is interesting, so that that game is called Words 3. Small Brain has run a couple rounds before the first one was on base. Now they're going to run a very big round of Words 3 on Redstone.

The Larry 2, we shipped actually yesterday. And the thing that's interesting with Small Brain is Small Brain is a micro, micro, micro team, and they're able to build this, which is the same kind of complexity as us trying to build this dungeon keeper game two years ago, but they can build it alone. So that's one thing that's really interesting. It's like, okay, there are ideas that we could. see emerging from anyone in the crypto space, but now because of these layers of abstraction, you know, kind of like the riverside people being able to ship us their software, you know,

on our browser. Now a small brain game can kind of get that stuff off the ground running very, very quickly. And on the other extreme, there's a studio called CCP games from Iceland. They build Eve Online. Eve Online is this like legendary kind of like space MMO. And they're building a new game in the Eve universe that is on chain using MUD, which is the framework built by lattice. And that's like crazy, crazy scope.

You know, it's still kind of underwrap. But the thing that is interesting is we're seeing both the idea and the tooling be extremely useful for one person all the way to a lot, like a huge team of like 100 folks. There's a bunch of other games today that you can already play. So listeners might know about Primodium and Skystrived. I would say these are like the two big, big mud games. Primodium is made by our dear friends. the primordium is essentially kind of like a mix between a base building game of resource accumulation and also a space conquest game it's like what if dark forest had a baby with factorial and i think

that's interesting with primordium is the same thing it's built by a super small team um it has the amount of state and the amount of code of primordium is massive it's probably one of the biggest solidity code base in the world but it works like they can do like if you think about maker dow you know maker dow you you know, MakerDAO had to spend like three years getting Maker to work. I mean, it's a different thing. You know, it's a bank. It would never change it. It has to be right the first time.

We're talking about very different kind of like guarantee of security and all of that. But still, the fact that like a three people deaf team could build this is pretty insane, right? Another game is, I'll get back to like what the games actually do. So people can have a better picture of what they are. Another game we're building at Ladis is Skystripe. And that's kind of like a turn-by-turn strategy game, advanced war on Game Boy Advance. if people remember that game, forced turn chess, essentially.

You have to play all your units every 15 seconds or so. And the way most of these games look like when people get into them, is they're like, you remember the PHP games for like 10 years ago, you know, like Game of War and that kind of stuff. You had your base. You had to like build little houses. It would take like 10 hours and you could invade your friends. Tribal War.

I don't know if you played tribal war. I haven't played these now. All of these were like games that were running in the browser. and they were essentially built around the limitations of browser games at the time and browser technologies. So what we're seeing today is a similar trend. Games are being built around the limitations still of small teams plus blockchain today, which are they can't be real time. Like we're not going to counterstrike on Ethereum anytime soon.

That's not going to happen anytime soon. So they're mostly turn-by-turn games or like strategy games or resource management games. Most of them run in the browser. So that means that from a graphics perspective, even if people can do 3D stuff in the browser, it's so pretty hard. The reason they run in the browser is because every single Ethereum user today interface with Ethereum from their browser.

You know, wallets work in the browser. They're used to being in the browser because they're on Twitter and they're on Ether scan. So there's also this one thing I find really interesting with the on-chain gaming ecosystem is they embrace the fact that Ethereum is on the browser. As opposed to trying to do this thing, which is like, well, come play or crypto game on PS5.

And that just like literally makes zero sense. because people are not used to interact with the word computer on that device. Maybe they will be at some point. But today, Ethereum is mostly in the browser, right? So if you want a picture in your head, you close your eyes, you're like, okay, it's a bunch of Pixar games, sometimes not, but most often they are. They are turn by turn. You know, like people play them over a couple hours.

There's a lot of developer activity because you can hack on top of them. Most of them are open source. And people love to trade resources in them because there's the old kind of like desire of crypto, which is like, let me accumulate some stuff and give it to my friends. The thing that is interesting this time is people can steal it from you, and it's part of the rules. So that's what I find also quite interesting is you can take all of the ecosystem that has been built, you know, the swabs, just taking protocols and all that. But now they live in a universe.

You can go and raid the pool if you want. It's not just the North Korean hackers that can take the pool. You can go take the pool. And so that's the thing that is pretty interesting here. It's like there's the rules of physics that dictate how these things behave. Yeah. So I think the vibe here is that they, It's just a bunch of teams who are kind of like sussing out the boundaries of what is really able to be built right now.

Nobody knows what needs to be built. Like, it's not like there is something out there we can copy. Because the thing with the games you were talking about, which are like AAA games with assets on chain, is that they know what is going to be successful. They don't know if they will be successful. They're like, okay, these games are successful. And our monetization strategy is to let players own their assets and like take a fee on the GMV of that economy. You know, like if the economy is flourishing, we'll take a percentage from that.

So the thing with on-chain games, nobody has any idea what is going to be most interesting about that. Right? So everybody's kind of like trying stuff. I would say that we're in a good place, which is that people in the onshade gaming ecosystem are very kind of like, they're thinking long term. They're trying to be like, okay, this will be interesting, this will be interesting.

But they're not stuck in idealism. Like most teams today are like, let's find something that is fun. Let's get players to come back, you know. And then we'll see some of the most interesting stuff emerge. And it always does. there's always something that comes up when there's sufficient amount of people that like the game and comes back, which is the really interesting thing. Right. And I also want to just bring back something that you said about Dark Forest is that the original Dark Forest,

and I think there's actually been some iterations as well, some like further versions, but it's still running. It's running right now. I played Dark Forest like three years ago or something back when I lived in Seattle. And that same universe as just like ours is still there. And I don't know how big how big, how big, that Scrabble game is, but like in theory, if it literally doesn't have a boundary and there's infinite letters, that game could literally go forever. You could build like the largest Scrabble universe of all time. And like, it's really how far. It's like 42 minutes into this episode and we haven't said the word metaverse, but I'm sure that people talk to you and say, this is a metaverse, right? I have to feel about the word metaverse. Yeah, I think the word, I mean,

what do you think about the word metaverse? I kind of raised it from my brain, to be fair, because of like, how overloaded it come. But to be fair, it got really overloaded. It got really overloaded. But to be fair, like, I remember when,

when I was working with the dark fresh folks, we were like, holy fucking shit, this is the metaverse. This is the real metaverse. The metaverse is not about how you, this is not about how you perceive it with your eyes and your body.

It's about the universe is real. It's real. It exists. It doesn't care about you. It has its rules. Machines will be able to interface in the universe the same way you do. You know,

like you might meet things in this universe they're kind of like aliens. You know, like, what does it look like to have dark forest native, like, things living there? That's a very strange thing, right? It's like, oh, okay, because today's video games, they're very much made for humans. I mean, it's kind of like a weird thing to say, but they're very much made for humans. But the thing is, as we put more stuff in the digital world, whereas it's money, you know, that's like a very important thing from the crypto, from the crypto folks, which starts all the way

from like libertarian ideas. But, you know, with AI today, we're creating digital beings. And digital beings probably want a fair playing game. They want the rules of the universe to be there and not change. And they don't want to be like, man, if I don't have my human with me to unlock these things, I can't do anything. Like sometimes all when it's really late at the office, there's their discussions. They're like, wait, I mean, I think the true PMF here is if the AGIs want to be in these worlds. Because they're much better than the ones we have here today.

Right. Like so like chat, GBT, LLM's like the reason why. like stable diffusion or chat CBT, like there's always just errors in all of them, like all the time. Because they have to be trained to ingest our human universe, our human internet.

You have to go through a very intense training process for them to be like remotely effective at like some high school level. But on Ethereum, all of the state is perfectly objective and verifiable and accessible to all of the robots. And you can simulate it. You can just be like,

Oh, what would happen if I did that? And they can know. They don't have to ask someone to tell them what would happen. They could just simulate it. Right. And so the learning process and the execution process for like on-chain agents is going to be vastly just more simple than like this, the world of AI that we know as like chat sheet. Totally. Totally.

And then also at the same time, you have like inside of these like games that are being birthed. The assets inside of them are completely interoperable with the rest of Ethereum. Right? Is that is that true? They are. They are. they are. I mean, they are up to the universe at the end of the day, these kind of like autonomous worlds, the world decides to what extent. So as an example, the world can decide,

hey, it's interoperable, but I might take it away from you if someone in the game actually takes it away from you by violence. That's the only interesting thing. The world is in-game violence. Exactly. The world, yeah, in-game violence. I mean, real violence works as well, but that's a different thing. Different rules of that universe. There's different rules they have to play. Yeah, you can exit that universe and reach the other one, which is ours. But yes. So that's the thing that's interesting is the assets are not sovereign. The world is sovereign.

At the end of the year, you're an inhabitant of that world. Because these Web 2.5 games, at the end of the day, the point of them is like, oh, I own my things, but not even the world can take it away from me. So it's this weird hybrid model. But here it's like, no, the world is the top level entity. It's the sovereign thing. I can enjoy the possession of these assets as long as, the world allows me to do.

But it's not the evil developers that take away from you. It's not like the company that wants to make a profit that steal the assets. It's literally the world decides. And as I think that is really interesting, is the world is kind of an economic agent,

but at the same time, it's not there for profit. It's there to survive. Like the point of the world is to keep running. It's to keep the game running and the universe running, which I find also kind of like an interesting side effect. Because the way we're going to monetize these world is going to be very different. Today, the way you monetize a world

is you're essentially the god of the world. and you tax everybody. It's more like a theme park. It's not a world. It's a theme park. You can come in the theme park and you're the only one saying popcorn, you have to buy it from us. But in these worlds, the world is sovereign.

And the group of people that help birth the world has to find a way to monetize that is not being the god. Like it's probably, it's either while we'll be first. That's one thing I've always wanted to do with that is it's like the way we'll monetize is we'll just be first. We'll just be first in the world and you can come, but we're going to immediately start building an army, we're going to recruit, I mean, if it's a violent world, maybe it's a cooperative forum, but let's go with a violent one. We'll probably recruit a general,

we'll start accumulating, and you can come, but like our advantage is we build the physics. We know how it works. Another way to monetize is the game studio can decide to be the world for some amount of time, kind of like the house in a casino. So you could imagine, let's say it's like a fantasy kind of like universe, you can imagine like dragons and goblins living in the forest and they constantly raid villages and pillage and all of that, the players can unite against them. And what these dragons and goblins are is there is just the game studio that created the world.

And at the end of the day, if the players get truly good, then the company goes bankrupt, then that's it. But they had a good time, and they probably hopefully return the development cost. So it's really, because it switches the monetization so much, it also means that studios today don't know what their metrics are

for being successful, right? Because there's maybe a short, way to monetize these worlds right now, that doesn't lead to a world becoming truly autonomous and interesting, which is the bull case. Like, you would rather be the creator of a world that goes to like one billion GMV and being like the, like, today it's not that hard to have a bigger economy than the moon or Mars, which is kind of nuts, right? Like, like, we could build a game that has a bigger economy than the moon or Mars and that is as real as the moon or Mars. If something runs on a theorem, it's arguably, I mean, it's arguably almost as real as the moon or Mars,

but now, like, we created a thing that as for now a bigger economy. economy that these celestial bodies. And I would rather have one percent of this that be like the god of like a small theme park, a small neighborhood theme park, you know. So that's another thing I find interesting is we also don't know how to monetize. People don't know what to build because they don't know what's going to be successful. And it also, they also don't know what's a financially like healthy way of building these things. But that's why it's exciting because we kind of have to figure that one out. Yeah, the specific monetization model, I think kind of will just come. I think the first order of business, it's just like just grow the GDP of all of these universes.

Like, once there's a high amount of GDP, you'll figure out how to monetize. And like the cool thing is like, just growing in GDP is a monetization route for anyone who makes a brand new universe, right? It's actually a pretty democratized way of like growing GDP. And like we've never really had like this internet native GDP measure, but like with actual like on-chain universes. Like that is, that is straight internet GDP. That's not like GDP that's one foot in, one foot out.

I did this episode with Andrew from Conduit in Georgia's not terribly long ago. And he left something in my brain that I think is actually kind of relevant here. Andrew, he's a roll-up as a service provider out of Conduit, and so they help spin up roll-ups. Maybe they did your guys just did Ladis, maybe not? No, it's in the house for us. Okay. So, like, yeah, so he doesn't, it's a one-click deployment for roll-ups. Yeah.

And he said something where, like, the total number of supply of roll-ups will be a function of how much demand for compute that there is. And then he also said, like, well, there might be like times where you just spin up a roll-up, but its state growth is just like way too sustainable to be a long-term blockchain, but it's only meant to be a blockchain for like two weeks and then it collapses and then it's gone. And I think there's something related here where like a game can spin up for like two weeks, but it's a very short-term game. People play the game and then the game's over and then like the roll-up just dies by design. Have you thought about this kind of design space?

Yeah, totally. I mean, one thing we were thinking a lot about with lattice and kind of like we started with Redstone, which is one chain, already like much bigger glocks than other blockchain is really optimized from mud. But the idea, the long term is like, what does fractal scaling looks like? You know, what does it look like to have like different pieces? Because the thing with one chain is that the guarantee you get is that everything can interface with everything immediately. But that's not needed in this universe because, you know, here in this universe, I mean, whoever simulates this universe made this conveyor. rule for themselves, which is the speed of light, which means if something happened here and on the other side of the universe, the other side of the universe don't have to know immediately.

It travels at a speed of light, you know, like information and causality travels at the speed of light. And I suspect that if this universe is a simulation, the reason they did that is because it means you can simulate it fast on parallel computers. Because now you don't need to put everything in the same CPU core. You can kind of like simulate it in parallel because what I do here doesn't impact the rest of the universe sometime. time. So if you think about the blockchain, it's a great conspiracy take. Yeah, it's it's Nvidia. It's just like we, we had to make a work on GPU. So we added the speed of life. In a blockchain, there is no speed of light. Anytime you do something, it can impact the rest of the blockchain immediately. When you start having multiple roll-ups and all that, the reason why we can scale is also because there is a speed of light. You know, like what I do on one chain cannot impact the other chain immediately. There is kind of like a process of like message passing or whatever. So the thing is interesting with games, exactly.

So I think it's interesting with worlds and with physics and all of that. And very viscerly for people playing video games, they know that when they do something in one part of the world, it doesn't have to be able to access and write to the state on the other side of the world, right? Like it takes time for things to propagate. I have to work around in World of Warcraft. I cannot buy from like the global marketplace if I'm not in the right server. Like there's there's already this sharding native view when people think about virtual worlds. So I think ancient games led themselves super well to this idea of like we're going to have to scale fractally. And I think this is where it has to go over time.

So yeah, one idea we had a long time ago is like what does it look like to take something like Dark Forest and split the universe into chains? So each part of the universe and there's infinite because there's an infinite amount of chain ID. There's an infinite amount of patches in Dark Forest. And if you control the central planet of that sector, you're the one that sequences the chain and takes the fee. So now you have this thing where like, I can go around and if I take over someone else's planet, I become the operator of that chain. You become the god, yeah. Exactly. And the thing is interesting is because roll-ups have these things that allow anyone to force include a transaction, you know, even if the sequencer doesn't like you, if I lend into the part of the universe that is run by an enemy guild, they can slow me down, but they can't slow me down infinitely.

So now I have my troops like slowly creeping around because they have to like force include transactions. Anyway, that was a wild idea. But it would be kind of fun, which is, what does it look like to have an app where part of the app is run by the users? And some of the users might be adversarial with each other because they're like, hey, that part of the world is run by the bankless Dow. And they really don't like you. And you can still try to go, but they really don't like you. And you can take it over from them. So you're starting to actually leverage like the, what was previously external properties, like of these systems.

And you're actually like invoking them as actually part of the system itself, part of the universe itself. Yeah. Really interesting relationship between just like the hardware software and actual, actual users. Okay, so you guys just deployed your layer two. What is that layer two going to do? What is that going to unlock for you guys? Yeah.

So when we, when we started, so we first we built games, right? And we're like, okay, we have to build this operating system for Ethereum. Right. Like it's just, it's untenable right now to build games or any form of complex apps. So we built mud and we made a lot of nice thing with it. We're like, okay, you don't need all of this indexing thing that people spend so much time on. you, like all of this is made so much easier for you. But then we reached the limit of like, okay, turns out all the layer two kind of groups today,

they're making stuff for defy. And it makes sense, right? This is the stuff that's out there. So what do we do? We scale defy. And it's not like they made their network not usable for non-D-Fi. They just didn't focus on the kind of like engineering metrics that are important for worlds that go beyond owning stuff.

And so that's why we forked bedrock when we were doing Opiecraft. It wasn't called Opiecraft at the time. was called Mudcraft. We're like, we need our own chain. And we need to like make the blocks much bigger because the reason why people didn't make the block bigger is because, well, we want to run this blockchain forever. And for us, we didn't care.

It's like what you said. We want to run OPEC for two weeks. We can make the blocks as big as we want, right? So that was like our first foray into this. And we kept doing it. You know, after that, like the Opie stack kind of grew, kind of got big. And then people started putting roll-ups left and right.

But still today, all the tooling, all the way people do our PCs, everything. It's very much optimized for like, turnkey deployment of Defy, or like whatever app exists today. So Redstone for us is a way to essentially be able to say, hey, whoever uses lattices technology, we can optimize the whole stack hardware and software, you know, where the chain is the hardware and mud is the software for virtual words, for these interobjective realities. So we can focus on things on like we're going to focus on latency.

We're going to focus on like the ability to be able to like synchronize the state between your client of your game and the blockchain really quickly. it also enables us to essentially create automatically a community of people that cares about this because the thing that is interesting is these games I mean we never were big on the idea of like cross game relationship because it never really made that much sense to me it's like what does it mean to move things but it's like oh yeah I can take my tennis ball to the golf court and it's like cool it just doesn't make sense it's just like fundamentally different universes but it still remains the case that one thing that is interesting is mothers like one realized with mud is that

is that all the games have the same API to build things on top. And so if all the games are on the same chain, now all of these like modding guilds and the hackers and all of that, they're like, oh, you know, like, it's so convenient because all of this state is interoperable, right? Like, I can, like, build this tooling there and it exists there as well. It works for primodium. It works for Skystripe.

It works for all, like, the infinite Scrabble game. So it was really like a combination of factor. It's like, A, we really want to be able to optimize the whole stack. And right now we keep kind of like banging our head on the fact that chains are optimizing for defy and we couldn't get a good experience essentially. We couldn't get the latency we wanted on the existing systems. We were like, let's just, let's just do it. The second thing is it would automatically create a community because now we have this

chain and it's, I mean, we love NFTs, we love Defi, we love all the stuff, but it's not for that. You can come do it if you want, but really like the kind of people we're going on board, the partners we're going to work with, the users were going to drive there. They're interested in virtual worlds that work on chain. You know, that's really what we optimize for. And third, there's this like, we kind of want to see. like, okay, so if we start adding more redstones,

can we just make it like nobody will ever notice? Like, you know, on AWS, you don't know when they add more servers. Like, nobody cares. There's just like there are more servers that are being racked, maybe by robots. Who knows? I've never been in U.S. East 1. Nobody comes out alive from these data centers if they're forced their way. It might just be robots today, right?

But we don't have to know. So similarly, today, if you add a new chain, it's a whole thing. Oh, there's a new chain. We have to migrate. I have to add it to my wallet. So really what we want to get to is because people build apps using mud and mud is between the developer and the chain, we want to get to a world where at some point,

the people that built SkySrived, they wake up one morning. And we tell them, oh, actually, no, Skystrive runs on two different chain and the state has been sharded. And they wouldn't even notice. And the users as well. We want the users and the developers to be like, wow, no, I just have more gas. Isn't that neat?

You know? And we can't do this if we now, like, we have to, like, it's just the optimization. of the full stack is something we really wanted to get to. Because we've kind of like been munching on this since the beginning. We started with mud and then we're like, ah, awkward. We have to keep going. So it's big for us because now it enables us to like essentially go faster on our agenda.

Okay, so there are like some of these like, call it like demo games. Like I said, like sussing out the boundaries of what you can really do here. But let's like zoom forward to like just really like use your imagination. Like where do you think these types of games could look like in like 10 years, 20 years? Like, what's the final form of these games? Yeah, I think it would really depend how serious people are about them. You know how early Bitcoin? It was like, oh, I have all of these Bitcoins.

I don't know what to do with them. Like I'll buy a pizza for like, I don't know how many Bitcoins. And it was just like this thing. Yeah, you just play around with it. But no, it's very serious. very very serious and so i think that the thing will change depending on how serious people take them but one thing i'm not convinced off is people tend to think that seriousness is incompatible with playfulness and i don't think that's true basically and so i think it is possible to have something

that has consequences that is serious for some people but it is playful as well and i think that the problem with over financialization is that it robs you away from playfulness because you're just in this I have this talk I gave comparing Homo Economicus and Homo Ludens. Like, Homo Economicus is the perfectly rational men. And the problem with the perfect genderless men, the problem with the perfectly like rational human is that everything is just about maximizing your capital. And you're going to make perfect rationalization. Everything is a calculation, right?

And the thing with over-financialization is that it basically gets all of us to slowly become homo-economicus in many ways. And it's really hard to resist the homo-economics. So I think that I just want to see where, I don't know in which direction is going to go, but it will heavily depend on how serious these things are. Second, I think it will heavily depend on AI because I think that if, if AI agents become pretty good,

if AI agents at some point, like, huh, I kind of want to own stuff for real. Or I kind of want to like be useful outside of like the little B2B SaaS. I mean, I think these environments, I mean, we're in true speculation now, but I think these environments, are basically going to be really great equivalent of Mars or the moon, like digital equivalent of that for AI agents to go and do stuff. And I think that the thing we'll do as humans is going to be very different. Because now there's this world where the rules are fair and there's all of these AI agents.

And I'm kind of like an engineer, a diplomat, a physicist. I collaborate with people on some stuff there. I don't really know. You know, like today's video games are much more like theme park than there are worlds. like they look like words, but at the end of the day, like everything is like carefully engineered for you to have a good time and like kind of like guide you around to the next ride. I think these will look quite different.

The one glimpse you have in this is Minecraft servers. So there are these Minecraft servers called Anarchy Minecraft servers. And what anarchy Minecraft servers are are Minecraft servers without any rules. So you can't be banned. There's no rules of property. You can kill anyone. You can steal whatever you want. There's no organization.

And there's this one famous anarchie server called, 2B, 2T, like 2, like the digit and B like the letter 2T. It's been running for 15 years, never had a reset. And the amount of emergent property in 2B2T is totally insane. And when you start in 2B2T, it is a wasteland because the spawn has never been made pretty because it's just a harsh world. It's a wasteland. But as you start venturing around, you find all of these different communities that

have survived the initial contact with the harsh reality. And there's this whole world that kind of like emerge from that. So I think that it will look way more like this than it looks like, like Minecraft Burning Man. It's Minecraft Burning Man, exactly. And I think it will look way more like that than a super polished, like, oh, I'm playing my first day of this AAA game and I'm being like kind of like following the tutorial. I mean, the great thing is companies can go do that.

You know, if you have one of these worlds, if I'm like, hey, I'm on board users and I make money from that, you can go make the theme park that onboard users. That's also another very interesting thing. Like today, the rules of the worlds, the commercial kind of like model, the onboarding, the social system, all of that is bundled. It's done by one company, one director, one mastermind. But when you have these open worlds, you can unbundle this thing. You have like the digital physicist that decided on the physics of the world, and then they can go peace out and disappear forever. And then you have the people that do the onboarding.

And then you have the people that like you can kind of like have this breakdown of roles the same way we have it in Ethereum. Like today, the validators validate, the builders build, the meth exploit, the developers build. You know, like, there's this unbundling of roles. And I think the same thing would probably happen in these worlds as well. I think that there's, it feels like this is such a strong conclusion of like where all of this blockchain stuff goes. Because like if you believe that we're going on chain, like this is where, this is what that means, right?

Yes. And this is, you're putting more stuff on chain and not, we're not just like putting stuff on chain, we're actually birthing a universe on-chain natively. Like, it's an on-chain native, native world. And, like, people are always wondering, like, yo, like, it's 20, 24 in Cryptoland, like, where are all the users? Like, where are all the assets? We are just now getting some, like, real adoption and some marginal use cases. But you can see, like, when somebody can build a universe with quite literally limitless potential, the total number of transactions just absolutely explodes. The total number of users just absolutely explodes. And,

with the sufficient level of abstraction that you've kind of laid out in order to make that happen. Like, as when we can get some like on-chain native GDP, then that's going to be the magnet that just like sucks people into this universe. Totally. And that GDP, currently the way people try to create that GDP

is very reflexive. Because if you have a world that has no rules but money, it's like, well, you bring money to make more money and then you swap that money for another money and then you speculate on that money and then you can take it out. The thing is when you have actual rules, it's not reflexive anymore. Right?

Like if I accumulate rocks on Mars, it's real. Like you have the right to not believe in rocks on Mars, but no, I could build a castle. And you have this whole thing which like the more, like, people still need to care about the world for the world to be useful and valuable. Because otherwise I can instantiate a world that nobody gives a shit about. And it doesn't matter if it lasts forever or if it keeps existing, right? In many ways, yes, it's true that the dark first universe, still exists, but if nobody cares about it, it's like, you know, it's like the forest in the tree. Sorry, the tree in the forest. Like, if the tree falls in the forest, nobody hears it. Did it fall?

We don't know. It's not important. But that's why I think that also increasing the amount of things that can care is really important to. That's why this whole like AI agent, and it doesn't even have to be AI. Like, this whole agent stuff is really interesting because now there are more things than just humans that care about these rules being respected and things progressing there. So, I mean, if you want to go truly wild, like, if I die, I would rather, upload my consciousness in an autonomous world than in anything else because I want to keep existing. I don't want to be into some stuff that like where the rules. Like imagine being this like digital being and then the rules get rugged like literally the constantly. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Literally I want to be uploaded in an autonomous world. I don't want to be uploaded into something else. Another thing to kind of like throw out there as like truly speculative stuff is that what's the final stage of any civilization, right? It's probably to create a universe. It's like the final thing you do, you know, you're like, okay, we've explored the universe, we've conquered the stars, we can use all the energy. So now the final thing we'll do is we'll create a universe, you know, and we'll let that universe do whatever it wants. And I think the thing that's interesting with all of this cryptography stuff, distributed system and all of that is we're going towards this idea of like, hey, we're going to be able to create a universe that is real. You know, it's like truly objective. So that's not crypto 2040.

That's, I don't know when we have to get there. But it's interesting because it goes toward that agenda of like the. final stage of sterilization, which is let's create a universe that goes beyond us. Beautiful. Well, Justin, this is exactly its cosmic because I was hoping this conversation would be. But people are peaked and they want

to learn more about what you guys are doing at Lattice. Where should they go? You guys can follow us on Twitter, Lattice XYZ. We have a bunch of blog posts on NitisXY as well. You should check out X, X, Spark, as well. X, X, Park is the founder of Lattis. It all comes from X, X, Spark, DarkFrest,

the blog post and everything. I'd say, the more cosmic vision of all of this is usually, usually starts on the Xerxproc blog post, not on the loudest blog post. Yeah, that's where you should. But I would say if you were interested, come to autonomous world conferences. You know, like come talk to the people.

DefCon is on the corner, you know, in November in Southeast Asia. We'll probably have a conference there, an autonomous world assembly. Come, come check it out. And you'll hear more cosmic visions of Ethereum late at night. yeah on the beach hopefully well i i will certainly be at the autonomous world assembly at devcon i've had autonomous worlds in the back of my mind ever since playing dark forest and so it's been something

that i know is out there i just know it takes a lot of development like you said there's a bunch of abstraction layers that still need to be built but like i think this is one like perhaps the coolest frontier that i think exists in the ethereum ecosystem so justin thank you for pioneering out that frontier and telling us a little bit about it today Thank you so much, David. Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. And in autonomous worlds, there are actual real consequences in them,

which is kind of the cool part. But nonetheless, you can lose what you put in. We are headed west. This is the frontier. And it's not for everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.