Bankless - Kraken's 'Ink' - the Newest L2 in the Optimism Superchain | Ben Jones & Andrew Koller

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

Optimism’s Ben Jones and Kraken’s Andrew Koller join us today to talk about Kraken’s latest release. Kraken is launching Ink, a blockchain built on the OP Stack, joining the Superchain to scale Ethereum. Ink offers 1-second block times and connects users to top DeFi applications while contributing to a unified ecosystem. Kraken will share revenue with the Optimism Collective and participate in OP Governance, alongside major players like Coinbase and Uniswap. Ink’s mainnet is set to launch in early 2025, focusing on onchain wealth management and developer engagement. ------ 📣 SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2    ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | BROWSER EXTENSION https://bankless.cc/uniswap  🪄MAGIC EDEN | HOME OF WEB3 https://bankless.cc/MagicEden  🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle    🤖0G | MAKING THE IMPOSSIBLE, INEVITABLE https://bankless.cc/0G  ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/83?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E  ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 5:43 Ink Explained  10:23 What Happens on Ink? 12:52 Technicalities of Ink 14:00 Kraken x Ink Synergy & Goals 16:15 Why Superchain? 17:36 Ink Roadmap 19:08 Scaling Ink  24:41 Wen Superchain Promise 33:19 Superchain 2025 Forcast 37:36 Kraken BTC x Ink 38:38 $INK 39:35 Superchain Economics 48:28 What’s Next?  51:30 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES Ink http://inkonchain.com  Kraken https://x.com/krakenfx  ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠ 

Welcome to Bankless, where today we explore the frontier of the Cracken, layer two. Ladies and gentlemen, Cracken is going on chain. There's a big announcement today. It's just breaking. A couple of weeks ago, we talked about the Unichain, which is joining the Optimism Super Chain. Well, now Cracken is announcing the launch of Inc, which is its on-chain Cracken experience. It is a layer two. It's in the Optimism Super Chain, and it's very exciting.

We got all the details today. David, I just got to say, I'm super excited about this. You know, there'd been rumor that Cracken was going to launch a layer two for a while. We'd been like, you know, prodding our folks at Cracken, the people we know, just be like, hey, you got any news, got any news, got any news? Apparently. We knew it was coming. We just didn't know when or how.

We just always knew it was inevitable. Well, I was hoping it would be cool, is what I would say, you know. And this exceeds my expectations. I think they've got a fantastic approach for it. And I'm very excited about their, you know, what they're building, what their architecting and some of the dates around this. You know, I think this actually marks with the advent of ink, Crackens Layer 2. There's extremely few large centralized exchanges or even medium-sized centralized exchanges

left that do not have an associated blockchain. Of course, finance has B&B. Coinbase has base. Cracken now has ink. OKX has a chain. Kronos has the ZK sync chain. Kronos is the crypto.com one. Crypto.com, yeah.

Uh-huh. Bybit, created. mantle. So actually, it's kind of cool. We got all the centralized exchanges on chain. It's like one of the best validations of like one of our earliest theses that we had in 2020. Like all blockchain, all centralized exchanges, which what is a centralized exchange? It is a bank. What's a bank? It's just a ledger. Well, they're going to use blockchains, which are just ledgers. And it's just one by one. We're just knocking them down. And the crypto banks or aka the crypto exchange are going to do this first. And then after, shall we make another prediction?

Okay, so another prediction after this is all of the traditional banks will come on chain two. We'll be long until Black Rock rolls out at Slayer 2. And as crazy as that sounds now, okay, it sounded crazy for us to say back in 2020 that all exchanges would have their own L2s. And so they do. Here's the next evolution of that. I think the next step is, so right now they are creating an additional ledger. So they have the internal centralized ledger that they have of who owns what.

Now they have also have the layer 2 ledger. I want to see their people's layer two's to start to internalize the business logic, take out the guts of the bank and put that on chain. We need some scalability. We need some privacy. We need some ZK for that because people don't want to see have their internal business logic broadcasted. So we need to make that internal business logic private. But that's also the next step. So the race is on for that one.

It's part of the great migration. All right, guys, we're getting it right into the episode. But before we begin, we got a shout out and thank. Our sponsors who made this episode possible and support many bankless podcasts. Who made this episode possible in multiple ways, in all of the ways. And now they were coming on chain. Couldn't be more excited. That is Cracken.

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Andrew Kohler, the founder of Inc. But Andrew, what is Inc? Inc. Is a new on-chain unit from Cracken. It started over a year ago. This really famous kind of long walk in Amsterdam with somebody I rehired, a very old friend. And we kind of just walked around for like five hours. figuring out what the hell are we going to do with like taking Cracken on chain.

So it started with all these different experiments and we didn't have a name for it. It was like Cracking Innovation Unit type of thing. And then we decided one day to just call it Cracking Ink because it's like there's cephalopods, you know, tentacles and ink and all that kind of stuff. Of course. So it's like you're writing your future with ink and, you know, we're bringing that like easy to use experience that we have on our centralized platform, hopefully all on chain. So Cracking Inc is the evolution of all of our ideas and experiments into partnering with optimism for the announcement today,

which is that we are partnering with optimism and launching our own superchain. That is going to be very defy-centric. And the test net is at DevCon. Ben, give us your side of the story here from the optimism super chain perspective. What's going on? Yeah, I mean, the story, this, Andrew just hit it perfectly, I think, you know, from our perspective, it's obviously a huge honor to have Cracken joining the collective and hopping on board to build on the super chain.

I think that we're at a point in time in the industry right now where we're getting lots of another L2 announcements. And I think the thing that I feel a responsibility to like ensure happens is that that does not lead to like chaos and fragmentation. So it is an honor to have Andrew and folks like him joining the super chain and it is also critical that in doing so, we don't turn into a big fragmented mess. We have all the people doing the best things that they can do in positive some ways that connect together into one cohesive thing.

So, yeah, what it means is another amazing member of the super chain, another incredible set of strengths that Crackett is bringing to the table. And at the same time, trying to ensure that as we perform this journey and we go down the roll-up centric roadmap towards many, many, many L-2s, that the super chain can play a part in helping unify and standardize those L2s. Okay, okay, very cool. I will say that Bankless has long held a thesis

that all of the exchanges would eventually come on chain, and it sounds like that this is holding true, and this is Cracken's endeavor to bring a lot of its core business and some of its offerings on chain. So, Andrew, I just want to go over what you said, and just by way of recap. So you are a representative, a leader of Inc.,

which is this a business unit within Cracken, or is it a separate entity and you are bringing some, like you're deploying on-chain functionality inside of the Cracken ecosystem. So some people listening might think of something like a base. I don't know if it's going to be similar to base, different from base,

but this is an inside internal Cracken initiative. Is that correct? That's correct. It's entirely a business unit within Cracken. You can kind of think of it as a separate entity, You know, there's all kinds of structures that, you know, we're set up to make this happen. But it really is, you know, it's similar to any other exchange or company, I think, that's trying to go on chain and realizing that there is the convergence like in the 90s. And this is like a really cliche analogy.

And I think it's overplayed. But TCPIP was the convergence in the 90s. I really think that all companies are going to be merging and doing things on chain. Obviously, centralized exchanges are the first to start doing this because we have our central order books. and we have all of our users, we're going to start bringing all of the layers that let you authenticate into the centralized order books and everything that Cracken has to offer to on chain. And I think other, you know, say, Coinbase or Zora and everybody else is kind of doing those like immediate layers. But like I'm extremely bullish on this that it's like it doesn't stop by centralized exchanges. It's like thousands of companies are going to be having their own L2s, banks, whatever it is.

I hope there's a day we wake up and like NASDAQ is joining the super chain. I have no idea. That would be really fun. But yeah, I mean, to answer your question, it is an entire business unit within Cracken, and it's really ink and the wallet together. So we are kind of joining forces with our Cracken wallet with ink, and we're trying to see just across the whole stack. As it relates initially to Defi, what we're going to bring on chain. But then, like I said, there's the authentication of the Central Order Book and KYC and all that.

There's no reason that shouldn't be on chain too. Okay. So can we talk about some of those component pieces? So, of course, you, Cracken is most known for being a crypto exchange. So a way, as we say on bank lists to sort of, you know, on board from Fiat across the chasm and go into kind of the crypto world. That's the centralized exchange piece. It's also true, Andrew, that Cracken has rolled out a wallet.

So you have already an on-chain wallet that is like fantastic, great user experience. But that's basically starting to expose Cracken users. to the on-chain ecosystem. So you've got that piece of it. You've got the exchange. You were mentioning some sort of authentication, kind of like credentialing, AMLKYC, and now you are rolling out ink.

And you said, would that be, did you say test net or main net by devcon? Testnet, devcon. I think mainnet is what we're targeting for early Q1. Wow. Okay. So test, test, test, devcon, main net, early Q1.

So you're bringing all of these things together. And like, what is going to, happen on ink, do you think? I mean, is it sort of, you know, permissionless ecosystem where defy and other applications are invited to kind of like build things in the, on the platform? Are you taking, like, a different, you know, is there a different lens on this that that Cracken sees? Like, what exactly are you putting on chain? What sort of apps are you hoping will be in this ecosystem? Initially, it's, it is inviting the world. to build like their defy applications on chain.

It's, it's, you know, helping provide any kind of tooling that would make their experience easier. So it's initially kind of like laying this foundation of that we, we are incubating something that is going to allow any kind of builder. We also have a hacker house to do a little plug for a devcon where people can use our tooling, work with our partners, partner with us because we also have a little incubator that we're going to be doing and helping kind of like fund some of these. these projects that might want to build on ink.

But it's really taking the easy-to-use UX that we have across Cracken right now and really bring that to the Defi experience. So instead of having all the weird bridging and hops and, you know, multi-approvals and things that, you know, defy users have to, like, live with, we really want to bring, like, that Cracken OG kind of cypherpunk and privacy and self-sovereignty values

into the easy-to-use UX space. When you pop up in the hood, technically speaking, can you talk about the technicals of the actual chain? Like, what's the engine? What's it built on? I know we're using the O.P. Stack, of course, because we're part of the super chain. But can you go into any more detail? Yeah, I mean, right out of the gate, like, it is O.B. Stack. We do have to, you know, be in the super chain and be compliant with that.

And, you know, we have a ton of ideas for, you know, improvements. So we definitely will be giving back to the community and making sure that we're core contributors proposing anything that we think is good for our applications that could be going into governance. But we will be targeting less than at least a start for main net, less than one second block times. We are leaning into 6783 for cross chain and tense. We're leaning into 7702 when that hits main net. So we're really taking like our foundation of like the wallet experience too in moving that fully into smart wallets, fully into 7702, 4337. And, um, You know, there's not too much modifications to the stack when we go live, really just kind of the block time and then focusing on these EIPs that haven't hit main net yet.

And then how is the relationship with the crack-in exchange going to synergize with ink the layer two? I know there's a bunch of moving parts here, right? We already talked about the wallet, but also the exchange is going to be like the big onboarding flow. I'm assuming there's going to be some special treatment versus all the other networks out there for ink, right? Maybe. It's kind of undecided, honestly, because we don't really view it as like competition. Like we're not trying to compete with Zora. We're not trying to compete with base or anybody. It's all the super chain and we just like, again, kind of cliche, but we do view it as rising tide all ships, right? It's we are joining into an ecosystem where it is fully going to be interoperable.

Liquidity is going to be shared everywhere eventually. So it's not like somebody trying to hoard everything and say like this is the best chain out there. Of course, we're going to make it really awesome experience on our chain. But as far as the rest of, like, Cracken, I think we want to get our foundation out the door, make that really good tooling in U.X, and then ensure that everything at Cracken eventually has like an on-chain component to it. We want to make sure that everybody is thinking of the on-chain perspective first. And, you know, how can we push the limits and make sure that our financial services and products go on chain? What would you say are the goals that you're trying to measure? Like, what are the KPI?

Are you trying to get active addresses? Are you trying to get TVL? What's the North Star that you guys are having and looking for to grow ink? What does it mean to grow ink? I mean, to put simply, I think transacting users. We want to, like I said, we want to take our easy-to-use experience

and just push that as hard as we can into Defi. You know, a huge shout out to like Azora and Infinex. Like those are beautiful projects that have, you know, a lot of good ideas that, you know, we want to collaborate with and kind of do some of our own flavors of those. that. So I think like for KPI, it would be transacting users if I had to put it specifically. But this, it started a year ago in very much an experimental phase. Like we did, we did dozens of

test nets. We were trying every stack out there. We were having fun with zero knowledge proofs, making our own like, you know, proof checkers and all this kind of stuff. And we eventually landed on joining Ben and doing the super chain. And, you know, that's kind of like our, all of our experiments coming true. And then what can we experiment on, in going to? forward. So why the super chain, Andrew? Why did you land on that after exploring lots of other alternatives in the LT space?

Because Ben has a long hair. Long hair. I had to join in. For the podcast listeners, we have two gentlemen with some fantastic flow. And the flow goes so low below the camera that I don't know. I think it's actually about the same length.

It's the same. Yeah, you guys, yeah. Very bullish. Great flow. Yeah. Yeah, why super chain? I just, like no bad ill on any other, you know, sack out there. Like I said, we had so much fun experimenting with everybody else, ZK Sync, Arbitrum.

It was fun running all of their kind of test nets and everything. It's just we saw like a lot of other people wanting to join the super chain. We really enjoyed the roadmap of interoperability. And it's not just interoperability within the superchain. I love seeing all the proposals of not ignoring everybody else that's outside of that. So to me, it just felt like this makes a lot of sense. We have a really good launch partner. The stack is like, you know, a non-developer can go use cursor and run the OPEC stack in like a second, right?

Like you just spawn that thing up and you're seeing how Ethereum works. And we felt that experience and we just wanted to join in on that. Very cool. So, you know, a few different roadmap items that I think are relevant to Inc now, like when you go to a test net and then mainnet. One is the L2 beat sort of stages of decentralization. And I imagine you're starting at like stage zero. But what's the plan to progress to kind of stage one to stage two?

Do you have any thoughts on this? We have like high level plans. Like ultimately the goal is to fully decentralize. We don't want to be the only sequencer operator at all. But like we just kind of have like a rough outline. And I think once we hit Mainnet, we want to publish. like actual timelines and how we want to decentralize this. Pretty rough timelines because it's a difficult task.

But yeah, we don't want to be the sole operator to start. It's going to be like level zero or stage zero. So the plan is to decentralize, get as close to stage two or end up in stage two at some point in time and also have some path to decentralize your sequencer as well. Is that in the cards? Yep. We want to fully decentralize the sequencer. I don't know what that looks like.

you know, everything is like high-level plans. Like, does that look like we have, you know, a Dow? Do we have governance? I don't know on how we do that exactly. But that's been top of mind, even before we started exploring the super chain, it's just like we don't, we really want to lean into like the OG crack in values. Like I said, it's the self-sovereignty. I have always viewed us, and this is why I joined, I've always viewed us as like the OG

cypherpunks in the space. And we want to stay true to those values. Bad ass. That's great. Okay, cool. How about another scaling function is the quest to get to gigagas in terms of scaling actual execution performance. And we've seen many OP stack kind of communities on that path, you know, adding a little bit more every week. My understanding of this is kind of rough, but like it's sort of an infra type of initiative, some engineering, some DevOps required to get there.

What's the plan for scaling to giga gas levels and beyond? So initially, I can definitely shout this out because we're announcing today. Jolato is one of our launch partners. And so we're working really closely with Jolato on helping us with all infrastructure. And we're going to be plugged in to, like, we already worked with them to do sub-second block times. So it's anything with gas optimizations, we're going to be plugged in with them. I don't know if you want to comment on that, Ben. Yeah, I would love to.

You know, I think, quite frankly, I think that this line of questioning is exactly where I feel super excited for the super chain to innovate and help Andrew out. And quite frankly, in many ways, the goal of the collective and the goal of the super chain is to make all of these infrastructural scaling questions much less sexy than I think they have historically been treated. The reality is that like Andrew is an OG cypherpunk trying to bring, you know, a huge centralized exchange on. chain has his handfuls, handsful across every layer of the stack as it is. And ultimately, what we need to do as an industry is move up the stack away from these low-level innovations and towards building fantastic products that, to Andrew's point, brings the world on chain and brings many users on chain, not just the power users, not just the people who are willing to like, you know, understand how all of these, you know, seed phrases and UX and network switching and

RPCs and all of these things work, you know? So one of the very important things for us in the super chain is to balance standards so that there is a ground truth across the super chain that Andrew doesn't have to think about, that Andrew's users don't have to think about, that just work. So for example, you asked a question about stage one earlier. Andrews should have to do very little to get ink to stage one. Optimism has built the security council to do it. We've built the standards to do it. We've built the governance processes to govern stage one chains. The super chain will bring a bunch of chains to stage one into 2025. And the goal is for that not to be some massive one-off contrived process, but is to work across the industry for all of the chains

that are benefiting from the shared standards in the super chain. And the same goes for things like the gas limits that you were talking about as well. There's a very important balance to also give what we call chain governors like Andrew the space to be able to make decisions about things like sequencing because you don't see a universally applicable set of standards there. But when you hear we want a lot of throughput on our chains and we want a lot of decentralization on our chains. Anything that I can take that is uncontroversial that Andrew and all of the folks that are running chains and the super chain wants should just be magically complete for him. And that's like very much the goal of the super chain.

It's also the primitive on which we build interoperability. So, yeah, that would be kind of a... This is kind of dangerous comment of rising tide lifts all boats in the super chain ecosystem. It sounds like that's really what you're striving to. I want to make one just general comment about why this is so exciting, like, to me. And bankless listeners may have gone back to an A16Z state of crypto report where there are some stats thrown out there. And this is the most interesting stat.

So, Ben, you were just talking about bringing a large centralized exchange on chain, okay? The total market of crypto asset holders right now, centralized exchange and others, is something like 530 million. Those are users by holders worldwide. And there's only a tiny subsection of those users that are on chain today. So A16 Z's estimates were like between 20 and 30 million. So that delta, all of the rest, that 500 million or so are basically within our funnel, of moving them from not just a centralized exchange where they hold crypto asset to actually come on chain.

That really is the opportunity for Inc, for the super chain, for layer 2s, for Ethereum, for the wider crypto community, is convert holders to actual on-chain users. And this is the massive white space that crypto has, an expansionary that we have, is bring the world on chain. Yeah. And it's, like I said, it's just to make it stupidly simple to use, right?

Like that's, you know, I've been, I've been in crypto since early 2015 and, you know, just found Antonopoulos's mastering by Coinbook and like read it inside out. And it's quite frankly, it's been a shitty experience since, right? Like, we don't, we're bridging everywhere. We're doing all this, you know, seed phrase, storing and stuff like that and people lose it. We all know the story. But yeah, it's, it's, if we can bridge that, that delta and, you know, just attract more. easy to use experiences like this where again you're taking like your whole life and what you do on you know in the real life for like taxes and mortgage and all these different things if you're bringing

all of that on chain we can absolutely do that with with ink and the super chain ben something i want to lean into i i really like the idea here of the super chain having this like universal upgrade mechanism where all of the optimism super chain chains all upgrade seamlessly at once reduces a fragmentation reduces security fragmentation uh and i think but from the user's perspective I think people are kind of looking for like, well, when is the UX fragmentation going to disappear? And that's been like one of the core promises of like the super chain ever since the super chain was announced. And I think like even all the other like layer two frameworks are kind of all working their own secret like Manhattan project for how to reduce fragmentation inside of their own standard. Right.

Like ZKSink has their elastic chain, which promises to reduce the fragmentation inside of the elastic chain. The super chain has been promising to do this for for a while. since we have you here what's can you like kind of let us in to like the Manhattan project that optimism has been building what's the secret sauce that you guys got that's going to reduce the reducer fragmentation of the super chain

and make the super chain one single seamless experience because notably the super chain is singular not super chains it's super chain and so when does that experience come into play for the users the alpha is always on GitHub David I think the first thing that I would say is like

I don't know how to look at GitHub I must strongly object to, no, well, I mean, really, I must strongly object to, like, Manhattan Project because everything that the OP stack and optimism as a collective does is out in the open. So go to Spex.O.O.O.O. or the Spex repo. Go to the protocol R&D Discord. You will see everything being developed out in the open in public, and that includes arguments and mistakes and the whole nine yards, right? And so, you know, while maybe we're not in it, you know, maybe that like we lose in some adversarial mindset, some ability for like alpha that I could uniquely like drop here only if I wanted to and if I felt it was comfortable. That's not the goal of Ethereum.

The goal of Ethereum is to like bring the world on chain. And like the best way to do that is to release everything is open source and build a community around it. So, okay, dumb. Yeah, go ahead. But that's my caveat. And then I'll answer the question. Okay. Yes, this transparent inside-out open Manhattan projects.

Yeah, okay. What is it? And is there some, is there like a timeline that we can expect for it? So again, it's all in the open. I would encourage you to go make your own timeline judgments as you go see things evolving. What I'll say is that the core insight that we have had is that standardization is key. So in the same way that my goal and the collective's goal is to make folks like Andrew's life easier on the infrastructure side so they can focus on bringing their users on chain and solving all of the horrible things that will allow like my mom to use crypto super seamlessly in a way that's not directly in my will house other than like spending hours with her. The key insight that you start with is that standardization enables a stronger degree of interoperability.

So the key kind of concern that you have when you're trying to make a seamless network of chains is kind of exactly what you alluded to, David, which is that security matters. And any time that you introduce fragmentation in security, you introduce another hop that developers have to think about. You introduce another hop that wallets have to think about being responsible in how they show things. You introduce an economic efficiency that bridges have to deal with, right? For example, we have a seven-day withdrawal period for the fault proofs. That introduces economic inefficiency if you don't do it right. So once you have a shared standard that everybody follows, that is governed together, and that follows a shared security model, the next step is to make those chains interoperate.

And there are lots of awesome initiatives that are happening across Ethereum to make Ethereum chains interoperable. And of course, we're working strongly to make sure that all of those things come to Ethereum and to the super chain and in a way that's compatible with the rest of the ecosystem. But fundamentally, I think the core insight that we have that is, you know, if you want to call it the Manhattan Project, Alpha, even though it's all freely available, ultimately comes down to the same thing that allows folks like Andrew to focus on bringing awesome shit to market and not dealing with a bunch of infrastructural, you know, cruft is the exact same thing that brings

interoperability forward. So, for example, Superchain ERC20 is a supertrial. chain-wide standard that you can use that is meant to enable like zero slippage, fungible assets to move across different chains in the super chain. This is an extremely powerful primitive. You can build things like it across the boundaries of security, but ultimately it is within a cohesive model and unit of security that you can really get that economic efficiency and truly have like the, you know, slippage-free,

bridgeless bridging kind of experience that I think we're all, we're all dreaming out. So yeah, anyway, I don't want to ramble for too long. Honestly, just the core insight is let folks have a unified security model. And once you have that, you can build much more powerful interoperability on top. And so that's kind of the core of the interoperability roadmap for the super chain. That's how we go from seven days to move assets and send messages as developers across chains, you know, down to a matter of seconds. And it's how you do it without causing, you know, big mistakes on the security front

or the next bridge hacks of 2024-22-5. I got to call out on the removal of the seven days or reducing that. That was like one of the first questions that we asked you guys was, okay, it's seven days, it's optimistic roll-up, how can we plug in our own proofs or something like that? And it was awesome because that was already in the works

of like, okay, there's going to be eventually some kind of modular proof system. So anybody can, you know, bring your own proof type of thing or have your own, like, proof as a service or something if you wanted. and then you could do whatever you wanted on the super chain. Yeah, the seven days thing is that, you know, because it's an optimistic roll-up, obviously if you were going to bridge with full kind of like fraud proofs to Ethereum, there would be a seven-day sort of way?

Would that also be true in the default state for like moving from Cracken, you like back to ink and you look back and forth, you sort of have to wait seven days in the default? Or like from the centralized exchange to ink? Yeah. Well, so that we fortunately have all of our centralized liquidity that we can kind of do some magic on and move some stuff around. So people could, you know, if you wanted to get from ink to, you know, say another chain on the super chain and you don't want to go through some bridge mechanism on chain, you could use Cracken as like a hop, you know, as like your own bridge to then instantly go to another chain right now. I think ideally that's not like the future, and we don't always have centralized exchanges

as like the hop to do that kind of stuff because it does get kind of funky, you know, managing the liquidity across those. Ideally, that's all just instantly on-chin. New projects are coming online to the mantle layer two every single week. Why is this happening? Maybe it's because Mantle has been on the frontier of Layer 2 design architecture since it first started building Mantle DA powered by technology from EigenDA. Maybe it's because users are coming onto the Mantle Layer 2 to capture some of the highest

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Use your wallet to transfer funds directly from a top centralized exchange and taping thousands of tokens across Ethereum. And over 10 other chains like base, arbitrum, and optimism. Uniswap wallet delivers deep liquidity, fast execution, and reliable quotes with zero gas swaps through Uniswap X. And when it comes through security, you can rest easy knowing it's backed by Uniswap Labs. one of the most trusted teams in Defy their code is open source and independently reviewed so you know it's protected. So why wait? Download the Uniswap wallet today on Chrome, iOS,

and Android. And don't forget to claim your free uni-eath username directly in the mobile wall. Start swapping smarter with Uniswap. So I guess maybe a question on the super chain, Ben, so if I'm like from a user perspective and I know a lot of work as being done on standardization, you know, like your shared security, these sort of things, but what I kind of want to know as a user is at the end of 2025,

Let's give it kind of like another year. So, you know, ink goes into prod, you know, for Q1, 2025. But let's recall, I mean, this has been a big month for optimism in the super chain. Just a couple weeks ago, we were talking about the uniswap chain, the unichain, becoming part of the super chain. That was just an announcement a couple weeks back. So now in the super chain, you've got big sources of liquidity. You've got, you know, base. You've got the OP main net.

You've got Zora, which has been mentioned. You've got, you know, like uniswap. You have now inkier. You have world chain. There's a lot of different pieces here, right? And so what I sort of want as a user is at the end of 2025, I'm not looking for all, like, you know, us to fix fragmentation across all of Ethereum yet

and all of the other ecosystems outside of the super chain. But when I'm in the super chain and I'm using a wallet that is connected to any one of these, like, you know, dozens of chains inside of the super chain and perhaps, you know, more than that soon, I want it to feel like one chain. Like I'm just, like the way. way Ethereum mainnet used to feel is just like I'm on mainnet and everything is accessible and

my wallet looks good. So I don't have to like, oh, I've got this asset over on this chain and this asset and that looks good. And if I want to move from like one place to the other, it's just like this. It's not a whole like bridge and then you do the thing. And it all feels like one seamless chain, including the liquidity. I want to tap into it. If I make a trade on a deck somewhere in super chain world and like I don't, I shouldn't have to know. It should be abstracted as to what chain I'm and I should get the best price across all of these chains. How close will we be to that vision by the end of 2025, do you think? Talk to me in a few weeks when we look into testaments, baby.

And also, like, can you come join the Optimism Collective Marketing Unit? Like, that is the goal. So, you know, timelines are hard. I don't want to commit to some timeline here. I think on the timelines you're talking about, there are very big strides that we can make on this problem. The core of the interoperability work that is being done in the collective right now, this Manhattan Open Source Manhattan Project is a word, David,

is to enable exactly that. It's saying, what is the first bite towards unifying Ethereum that we can take? That's reasonable. Well, if all of those chains, World Chain, Base, Inc. Unichane are all on a shared standard. They're all stage one with a shared governing layer via the Security Council and Optimism Governance. Then the first thing that we can do is enable,

I would even say it feels like one chain, it should like feel like one internet, or you shouldn't even know that it's a chain, right? But the goal is to get assets moving across there, basically at a two-block latency. So, you know, depending on the block times, like that's, you know, under 10 seconds easily. And so that is explicitly the goal. If you go to the specs and look at, you know, poke around the GitHub really hard, that's what you'll see happening.

You'll see super chain ERC 20 assets. You can actually go to SuperSim. right now, which is our local super chain testing environment where you can spin up multiple chains being simulated on your machine. And you can use the ERC super chain ERC 20 standard and move those assets between chains really, really, really quickly. So obviously there's a long journey in terms of like working through those standards and ensuring they're good for application developers in a way that we're really confident can ship to main net. Obviously there's work to be done in what does the story look like that it requires fewer button clicks than you might see if you go to the GitHub today

and move assets across those chains. But it is absolutely the point is to within the boundaries of that super chain make all the liquidity and assets seamless. And like ultimately the goal, you know, like Andrew said before is a rising tide lifts all boats. And guess what? It is going to be a lot easier for those rising tides to lift each other's boats if it doesn't take one week to move across the different chains in the super chain. And so, yeah, you pitch to yourself. That is the focus. And that's what we're doing.

Andrew, pretty recently, maybe just last week or two weeks ago, Crack and introduced Crack and BTC, of which we're calling Cracked BTC here at Bankless. Nice. Nice. Is there any synergy between Cracked BTC and Inc? You all are going to put the cracked BTC on the chain? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

I mean, the home for it right now is OP Main. but yeah, we will definitely deploy it immediately to ink. I think it's the first of many explorations in taking, you know, some of our best in class like, you know, custody solutions. We have our own qualified custody products so we can at least custody the underlying assets really safely. I designed that whole system, so I know it's nice and sound. Oh, beautiful.

So, yeah, it's like first in many experimentations. I think we want to lean into like what, where can we, plug this into our easy-to-use stuff on ink and what other assets can we explore that we want to bring to the super chain. You know, I can't say which ones, but there's definitely others we're trying to explore. Certainly. And just curious, Andrew, if there was a ticker symbol to go with this chain, what would it be? Would it be ticker sign ink?

Okay, absolutely no plans to do any kind of token or anything like that. So I do have to put that disclaimer. but we do internally I mean we love that the name cracked like like you know crack BTC or cracked or something or like a little bit more

inappropriate as like people internally have said like kink I don't I don't know if we want to lean into that I mean there could be a lot of memes for it but no plans for anything like that okay not this present moment I think when you go into their discord instead of saying GM you've got to say

what's cracking It's cracking. Yeah. This is... I mean, we built a big team of cracked engineers, so like we should probably lean into it. Nice. One thing that I think is interesting, and I'm wondering about some prognostication from both you guys in terms of what the super chain economic zone, as we're calling it, like, might end up looking like.

Because it's sort of interesting where you have like this melting pot of, I guess, different chains. And I'm wondering how generalized they will. be versus how specialized. So you look at something like Zora, and it seems like they are specializing very much in kind of the creator economy. And you have to kind of wonder what uniswap is going to do. It has to be something core around liquidity and exchange and defy. And then you look at like base, and it's doing a little bit of everything, including some of

the same things that the OP mainnet is doing. And now you have ink on there too. And so I sort of wonder if we're going to get chains that specialize in unique areas, like, oh, this chain does this specifically, or if there's going to be like a lot of, you know, apps that are repeated across all of the chains where just like we're all kind of generalized and doing a little bit of the same thing with some overlap.

I'm not sure how that's all going to work out, but one of the interesting things, and you mentioned it earlier, Andrew, is it creates like this nice, you know, infinite game, kind of like a, like a, you know, a better coordination mechanism for everybody who is inside of, of the super chain on the Ethereum ecosystem.

So somebody that would formerly, probably in the exchange world, be viewed as a competitor. And maybe there's some, like, we want to get market share from Coinbase and Cracken. Now what's good for Inc is also good for base. And what's good for base is good for Inc. And that's kind of a different, I guess, coordination setup from two traditional competitors, I would say.

Now you're all together working towards some shared purpose and shared goal. Maybe the war becomes against everyone who's not on chain. Anyway, I'm throwing a lot of things out there. But my basic question is, what do you think this crazy super chain economic zone? Where do you think that's going to end up? Like, do you have any sense for this? Maybe I'll throw this to Ben first, since you've been there since kind of like day one.

What do you think this will end up looking like? Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, I think you hit the nail on the head with the positive sum. What benefits one, benefits all? You know, I think in many ways, like there's a much more smooth brain decision that Andrew could have made here, which was to not take that approach and kind of take the more, like, traditional web two. It's our boat that needs to go up, not the tide that lifts them all. And I really, really respect what what Andrew and Cracken and his team have done in making that decision.

And I think really, like, making it to the other side of the bell curve on time in terms of the kind of like dumb competition crypto Twitter games that you might see out in the wild. You know, to speak out, by the way, super chain economic zone, SEZ, fascinating. I've never heard that one. So I think the, first of all, there's no question that composability is a key property of Ethereum that makes it different. And I think I actually spend a lot of time repeating this story because in many ways before we have really scaled blockchains, that kind of gets forgotten because throughput is limited. And so things get congested and, prices go up. But actually, I think if you compare, like, how the internet works and Web 2 architectures work to Web 3 architectures, one of the undeniable superpowers is the nature of composability and that anybody can write any application that interacts with any other application, and they can all kind of follow their own rules and connect together, right? Compare what it takes to, like, integrate two websites that do, you know, like offer different services on the internet. it's like tens of millions of dollars, months of legacy integration work,

versus writing a smart contract that interacts with another smart contract. It's just night and day. There's a superpower here where everybody can permissionlessly innovate on top of everybody else. And so I don't think by any stretch of the imagination that's going away. In fact, I think that's just going to come more and more to the forefront. And so to answer your question about, you know, what is the degree of specialization? Are there going to be apps that are everywhere versus online? one place, I think it's going to be a mix. There's no question that some apps, superpowers,

will be integrating on top of other ecosystems and other applications. And those ecosystems and applications may be spread over different chain IDs. And the best way for those folks to serve their users and customers is to go across there. At the same time, I think things like culture and specific use cases are also going to specialize across different areas of the super chain. in the same way that we see, you know, more connected money Lego hubs on Ethereum L1 and then more connected NFT hubs on Ethereum L1. And they're all sitting on Ethereum L1, but the degree of connection within those ecosystems is where those applications are good at composing.

So anyway, maybe there was a second part of the question that I'm missing there. But I think the core answer is like everything's going to compose. There is going to be basic utilities and things like that that makes sense to go everywhere. I'm also incredibly excited for, again, folks like Andrew and Inc. to be able to focus on some of their core things that they can do uniquely well and not have that be in contrast or not that be an opportunity cost against all of the awesome things happening in the rest of the ecosystem. And especially as you move down that, you know, or move it forward through the tech tree of interoperability. And now across chains, you can send a message in, you know, two

seconds and those connect those things and everything composes together. It's going to be pretty dope. So I don't know. That was maybe a crazy Ben ramble. Go. Yeah, thank God, Andrew. No, no. I think Ben hit it there.

Like, it's, we have always viewed it as like if you're doing some kind of trade or swap or something on ink, we want to make sure that, you know, all the summary of what Ben just said and what we've been talking about. If you do a swap on ink, then you're tapping into liquidity somewhere else and the user has no idea. We want it like you could be tapping the liquidity in like 50 different locations and user has no idea. That's that's kind of like, you know, where we see the interoperability,

but also the, your question on kind of like app specific or more general, I think it's just going to be a blend of it of everything. Like, yeah, base might be more general. Zora is definitely, you know, very NFT and art specific. We're going to be very defy-specific. Unichane is the same. But as Ben said, like I don't want to, I don't want to have to worry. about a lot of the security and all the upgrades and everything like that.

We just want to take cracking products and throw them on chain and then do our own unique flavor with that, which some might look similar to some protocols deployed on base or deployed on unichain or something. But hopefully, again, if we don't have to care about the larger running a blockchain, then let's put all of our talent into innovation and trying new things. One of the analogies that we've started throwing around internally is to think about highways. So I don't know, I remember a number of, you know, years ago, David and Ryan, I was up here talking about the birth of the optimism collective. And back then there was only one chain. There was

only OP Mainnet. And we do analogies between OP Mainnet being a city and optimism governance being, you know, some of the like governing structures and economic zones of that city. And one of the ways you can think about interoperability is like draw an analogy between interoperability and the birth of the interstate highway system that allowed people to drive. much longer distances in much less time due to the great infrastructure that had been developed as a public good. And, you know, in some ways, it's like, it's almost as if, you know, you see, it's like, oh, my gosh, there are all of these roads connecting cities. I as a big city am concerned that folks are going to leave, I'm becoming competitive with these other cities.

In fact, what you saw is that there was a birth of interstate commerce, which led to every city, in the United States growing as soon as they got plugged into the interstate highway system. And it wasn't like, oh, no, I'm concerned that everyone's going to start driving to my neighboring city to go, like, buy bed bread from a baker there or like, that's not how it worked. What happened was that there was a positive some outcome because interstate commerce blossomed and everybody got better and the economy got stronger. So, you know, I think it's the same kind of story here. It's like, you go to the bell curve and you're like, oh, Interrob doesn't work.

oh my goodness now there's like weird competitive dynamics then you keep going down and you realize no the competitive dynamics are not are allowing people to specialize and do what they do best and benefit from everybody else doing what they do best and so yeah that's just an analogy i think this kind of fits into what my understanding is of both the ethereum like economic zone goals the north star if you will for all of these economic zones but also ethereum's north star which is just grow GDP just grow the economy uh making the on-chain economy, the largest economy in the world. The internet is the burgeoning, developing economy that we all get to invest in and whichever ecosystem grows their GDP the most

is going to win, but also take other GDPs with it as well. Ben, Andrew, this has been fantastic. Congratulations to the super chain for getting another very large centralized exchange on-chain. Andrew, congratulations to Cracken for making such a big leap into the world of the on-chain economy. Well done. It's been a long journey. Thank you. Yeah, the on-chain announcements, the wallet, the Cracked BDC, Inc.

Now, any more? What else you guys are putting up your sleeve? Okay, I will say that beginning in Q1, a lot of our development and everything is going to be out in the open. So, like, we really want, our wallet is already on GitHub. But, like, everything that we're doing, we want just completely out in the open. So as Ben was saying, like, if you want Alpha, you just go go get it. Read some code.

Yeah. You won't give it to me on the podcast. I have to go actually go into the internet. Yeah, do it work, David. Do the work. For proof of work. The new quad will do it for you anyway. Andrew, just one more time.

Give us the details on TestNet and Mainnet. So today is the announcement of just the partnership of like what the hell Cracken is doing and why we moved on chain. Testnet comes out at DevCon. The entire Inc team is going to be there with a lot of other functions at Cracken. and we're going to be running a hacker house there, have some of our partners come along and show off some of the tooling we've made

and how people could build. And then Maynett, not a firm date, but definitely early Q1. We just want to get this test set out there, experiment, and then get it out there as early as we can. So the test snap period of time is for, is there a call for developers, for hackers? If you want to do something on ink,

then you go talk to Andrew, or is there a link we can put in the show notes for this? Yeah, so ink-onchain.com is going to, be the site. And it should be, yeah, should be live any minute. And then there's Discord links, there's Twitter links, our telegram. Telegram is just for announcements. But you can find me in Discord. You'll see Inc. AK for my initials. You can, you know, ping me any time there. I'm going to be very open to chat with any builder. Everybody else that's a spokesperson or a moderator in there, we all want to chat with builders. And so again, with like, we also have this kind of incubator,

you know, incubator with a K, a program that we're going to have. Yeah, come on. We have to lean into the ink. So we're going to have that running too, where we really want some, like, projects that maybe haven't deployed yet to reach out and talk to us.

And we want to incubate, you know, as many as we can to get over to ink. That's awesome. This is great. So developers go check that out. Ink on chain. Was it dot com, Andrew? Dot com.

So we'll have a link in the show. And of course, users. This will be available sometime in Q1. I just want to end with this, but just by saying, dude, you know, like, David and I, we've been working with Cracken for a while. You guys have been supporting us as strategic sponsors. We're just, like, freaking proud of, you know, like how far you guys have come in kind of your bankless journey and moving things on chain. I mean, the rollout of a non-custodial wallet was absolutely huge. Of course, Cracken has never failed. Been there since, you know, like, 2012,

proof of reserves the whole time. You never failed crypto. And now you're moving to kind of, like, you know, back development with, I think, your ethics and your ethos and your value system, which was getting more and more crypto-native. And I've seen that trajectory from you. I had hoped for a long time, David and I had hoped for a long time that there would be a crack in L2. And now there is. So you guys are doing a fantastic job.

Well done. We're, you know, like, we're just proud to work with you guys. I remember when we had Jesse on right after the collapse of FTX, and he was like, yeah, don't keep your money on centralized exchanges. And saying that as the founder of a centralized exchange, I thought was pretty cool. And now there's a layer two for users to go put their money on, which all just, you know, it all comes full circle. Yeah. That's why so many people stay at Cracken for such a long time.

We have so many OGs that have just been here for like a decade. And it's because of those values. And, you know, we don't view that as like this walled garden type thing that's like, oh, go, you know, make crypto tradfire. I don't think a lot of us are about that. But yeah, one quick final thing is, I remember back in East Denver, earlier in the year, you guys both were hunting for some alpha from us. You're like, come on, give us something.

We know you guys are doing something on chain. What is it? And we were just kind of like shy then of like, well, we're experimenting. I don't know. But yeah, it's been a fun journey and we're finally here. No, I mean, the time to announce it is when you got like, you know, test net next week. So, I mean, I think you're doing a good job there.

So Andrew Ben, this has been such. a pleasure. Thanks for joining us today. Cool. Well, here we go. Got to end with this. None of this has been financial advice, but now we're going fully bankless with Cracken, which is pretty exciting. Got to let you know, crypto is risky. 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.