Bankless - Optimism Base Superchain 🔵_🔴 with Ben Jones, Karl Floersch, & Jing Wang

Episode Date: February 25, 2023

In today's show, we bring on Ben Jones, Chief Scientist of the Optimism Foundation, Karl Floersch, CTO at OP Labs, and Jing Wang, Executive Director of Optimism Foundation  The five discuss Coinbase's Base launch, the OP Stack integration, and what it means for the Superchains vision!  ------  MetaMask Learn  https://bankless.cc/metamaskshow  ------  JOIN BANKLESS PREMIUM:  https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/subscribe  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:  KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/kraken  UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE https://bankless.cc/uniswap  ️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum   EARNIFI | CLAIM YOUR UNCLAIMED AIRDROPS https://bankless.cc/earnifi   ------ Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 6:20 Sentiment at Optimism 7:00 Biggest Deal with the News? 11:28 Reflection on Coinbase's Base 15:45 OP Stack 17:15 Is Base a Competitor? 20:53 Puberty State of Chains 33:30 Superchains 40:35 Security of the Superchains 44:35 Superchain Standards  51:51 Base Decentralization Timeline? 57:10 Closing & Disclaimers  ------ Resources: Coinbase Base Announcement https://www.coinbase.com/blog/introducing-base  Optimism + OP STack Details https://optimism.mirror.xyz/2jk3D1Y8-hid8YOCUUa6yXmsyzNCYYyFJP0Nhaey9x0  Ben Jones  https://twitter.com/ben_chain  Karl Floersch https://twitter.com/karl_dot_tech  Jing Wang https://twitter.com/jinglejamop  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures 

It's a big week. We've got plenty of bonus content for you. Today, David, we're going to talk about optimism, base, the super chain, all of these concepts. This is based on news from yesterday that Coinbase is releasing a layer two chain called Base. That chain is now in TestNet. It's going to go to production, what, in the next couple of months, I say, weeks to months. And now, yesterday we spent some time with Jesse. We got the Coinbase reaction to this. And the new. this time, who do we have on and what are we going to talk about, David? We are bringing on the three co-founders of optimism, Carl, Jing, and Ben. And we got a lot of questions for them. We got the news yesterday, like you said, about the Coinbase side of things, why they want to build base. What does it mean for Coinbase to have their own layer two? But I think people still have a lot of questions for what this means on the optimism side

of things. What does it mean to be building on the OP stack? Coinbase isn't building base on optimism. they're building it on the OP stack. What are the differences between these two things? What is this super chain vision? Where are we in this super chain vision? What does that mean for the world?

And really, what are all the other implications between this optimism, Coinbase collaboration? Because Jesse and Coinbase are now the second core development team of the OP stack. What are the implications of that? I think people are still learning how to wrap their heads around this, myself included. And so I've got a bunch of questions.

And we've got the optimism team on the show today to go directly to the source. Yeah, I'm super excited for this episode. And the triad of optimism co-founders is always so enthusiastic. And so love catching them the day after the news. So optimistic, if you will. Yes, so optimistic. I should have used that word.

And disclosure, before we get in, David and I do disclosures at the beginning of every bankless episode. Whenever they're necessary, David and I are advisors in the Optimism Project. We believe wholeheartedly in the Layer 2 vision. We also own some eth. I think that covers it. Bankless.com slash disclosures for all of that info. Guys, we're going to get right to the episode with the optimism founders.

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So plug in your wallets at Earnify and see what you get. That's E-A-R-N-I.F-I. And make sure you never lose another airdrop. We are back with the three co-founders of Optimism. We got Carl, the CTO at OPE Labs, the Internal Optimist, Jing, the executive director of the Optimism Foundation, and Ben, the chief scientist, also of the Optimism Foundation. Guys, welcome.

Yo! I always love interviewing you guys because you guys are always in the same spot. And so we also have the anti-glare technology in the background as well. So thank you for setting that up for the optimized live stream. Anti-glare technology. Oh, my God. So first off, you guys, just absolutely huge congrats on the news. This is some of the biggest news that I think has dropped in a very long time.

And also some of the first very big positive news that's dropped in a long time. So thank you for shifting the meta into something more optimistic than what we've seen in 2020. too. So I just want to reflect on this news. How does how does this feel? Like what's sentiment like over at optimism? Pretty fucking cool. It's um, it's the thing about announcements though is that it's about all the work yet to be done. So there's a sentiment of like focus and motivation on the enormous pile of work we have ahead of us. Well, it's pretty high. I feel pretty optimistic.

You stole the optimistic joke in the intro. No, sorry, it never gets sold. It was too easy. It's too easy. Yeah. So, guys, we're should we really start on this conversation? Because there's so many different ways that we could take this. Like, Coinbase building a layer two,

coin base building on the OP stack, the super chain. There's a bunch of really big things to talk about. And we're definitely going to talk about all of them. I just want to throw this one to you guys. Where should we start? Like in your guys' opinions, what's the biggest deal about this whole bit of news to you guys, to optimism? Public goods. Coinbase is contributing back to public goods funding and public goods experimentation.

We think this is really important because, I mean, the three of us have been working together for six years on scaling Ethereum from various different angles. We started off as grant fund. then as a nonprofit, well, I guess that's also grant funded. And so public goods has been a super core theme to everything that we're doing. And I think until now, it hasn't been super clear externally how public goods plays into the winning strategy. It's seemed like a cherry, feel good, fuzzy type thing, but it's genuinely not. It's all about the neutrality of the core tech. In order for something to be truly decentralized, you can,

can't just have the technical architecture be decentralized. DNS is architecturally decentralized, but the U.S. owns 11 out of 13 root zones. And like, anyway, sorry, not to go on that tangent, but sources of funding, the execution of work, the governance of it also all have to be decentralized in order for the architecture to, you know, uphold its decentralizedness. So going to the details between the mechanism that is taking Coinbase to contributing to public goods? Like what is that bridge? How is that happening?

Yeah. So in general, there's two big ways. One is a commitment to a percentage of the base revenues back to the collective, the collective treasury. So the base transaction fees, like the gas fees of base. That's right. The other piece of this is that Coinbase is joining OP Labs as the second core contributor to the OP stack, which is huge.

I mean, that's what it's all about is having multiple teams working towards the same standards and the same end states. Yeah. So there's a lot more that goes into it than that, obviously just like exposure to the masses and people understanding what an L2 is will definitely go up as a result of this. But those are the two big direct ones. So for the non-technical minded, what does it mean to have a second core contributor to like a repository? Like is that perhaps the right word? What does it mean to have somebody else who's not optimism being a core contributor to this stack of technologies? Why is that such a big deal for? people who don't understand the significance of this.

All right. Well, really Ethereum pioneered this whole concept of having many different core contributors and many different client implementations. There are two things that are really important about this. The first one is that we're building an open protocol. That means that it can't have a bus factor where if one team were to stop working on the protocol, the whole thing just stagnates. You need to make sure that this is.

is something that is open, decentralized, and being contributed to by a community. That is the first thing. And that's what like, you know, a lot, if you don't rely on a fundamentally decentralized contributor base, then you can't really call yourself truly decentralized. Long haul, baby. Long haul, exactly. And so we have to start building up that process in layer two, if layer two is going to be decentralized. Anyway, the next thing is security. It is absolutely critical to have multiple parallel implementations of the protocol in order to ensure that when there is a failure, a bug in one implementation, it does not take down the entire network. This is kind of security through redundancy of the client software. And so we're getting both of those things.

And, you know, it's just the beginning. It's not just going to be, you know, Coinbase. It's going to be a bunch of other contributors as time goes on. on, but it is really exciting that we're getting like started on this soon because this is one of the least talked about yet most important components to actually decentralizing a layer two protocol. And let's talk about layer two in relationship to Ethereum because with the roll-up centric roadmap of Ethereum that we're now on, basically layer two's become kind of the future Yeah, I mean, they're the future execution layer of Ethereum, right?

So it's very important that this future execution layer is funded, is completely open source, is as credibly neutral as possible, and has multiple client teams and is continuously building. I was pretty blown away that Jesse said there were like over 120 Coinbase employees that have been working on this project in one way or another. Like, that's absolutely massive. And I think I had forgotten, like, I know. And so one thing I think I'd forgotten as well, which Jesse reminded me of Coinbase has actually been active in EIP, 4-844. Thanks, David. Why do I always forget 4844? Which is like-EIP-515.

I know, I know. Oh, now I can't remember that. You only have two numbers in there. Come on now. There's only two we need to remember. Yeah, so they've already been developing for public goods. And this was what was so exciting to me about this. One thing I'd add, and I'd get kind of your response on this, is to me, it's not just public

goods. It's the way Coinbase went through the selection process, it feels like, and they ended up selecting a credibly neutral technology that would not give Coinbase more power in the network. right? It's very different than sort of a side chain where you kind of own the validator set. They like purposely, I think, made it such that they are not in the driver's seat, that they're developing incredibly neutral technology. And to me, that was so, because it's always been, you know, part of bankless is this idea, of course, of like the corruption of the banks. Centralized banks can bring corruption. And we'd always wondered, where will some of the

crypto banks, the crypto exchanges fall in the spectrum? Will they turn evil? Will they go a little bit J.P. Morgan? Or will they embrace crypto values with us? And so that's why this made me particularly optimistic that Coinbase decided to not only embrace public goods, but embrace credible neutrality and develop along with us. Anyway, that's why people have asked like, why is this such a big deal? I'm like, that's why it's a freaking big deal. We have a coin-based level of resources on our side, and they chose to go with public goods and credible neutrality. That was a statement more than a question, but do you guys have any reflections on this? Yeah, I mean, it definitely doesn't pattern match to the other flavors of Fortune 500 blockchains. This is a pretty Web 3 native move.

I think that says a lot about what Coinbase's intentions are. I don't think this is some like, you know, side science project. They are contributing real resources in a bare market when resources are tight to pushing for decentralization. And core contributions means they're committing engineering firepower to writing code for fault provers, multi-clients. It's crazy. Yeah. I'll build on that 100% agree. I'll build on that a little bit, David, to say, which it's also, I think, just as awesome to be continuing to use this as a shared standard.

So you can totally see a world in like a Fortune 500 environment especially where they see the OPE stack as a public good. And they're saying, okay, this can form the basis for our technology because it's, you know, just the best way to build a roll up. But it doesn't mean that they have to also not just take that code and run with it in their own direction. and custom fit it to their needs. So they get that it's not just about base. It's about the other chains that are going to end up interoperating with them. I'm sure we'll get into that more later on. But it's also just as important to be building on the same standard as other roll-ups.

So that's what we're very excited about. Yeah, precisely. Okay. So I think I'm starting to wrap my head around this. And so maybe to answer, to ask a question, like, why did Coinbase choose the optimism technology instead of like the Arbitram or Polygon technology? And I think the answer is what you guys are saying is that like the optimism OP stack is this MIT open source technology stack of software that allows Coinbase to not create its own like Jesse used this term. Coinbase wants to build bridges, not islands.

So like they could have made their own client for their own layer two and run off in their own direction and built base with their own technology stack. But that's not really what they're interested in. They're interested in joining ranks with other groups. to be co-contributors to the same technology stack. And then the idea is that that becomes a third group of people or a fourth group of people. So it's not just OP Labs and Coinbase. It's OP Labs Coinbase third, fourth, fifth. And so they wanted to pick a technology where they could work together.

And it's even stronger than that. Because the O.P. stack is a public good. Like part of the reasons for choosing the O.P. stack is certainly it's licensing and being a public good. It's also just a darn good code base. But because it's a public good, you can take. that darn good code base and run with it in whatever direction you want. But the problem with doing that is if everybody does that, we're going to have a lot of L2s, a lot of fracturing. There's going to be a lot of issues. So building towards the shame shared standard, like not a fork of even the public good,

super, super important. How people understand this too. So is base a competitor to the existing optimism EVM chain that's out there in the market? Like, are you guys like shooting yourself in the foot is base going to come cannibalize the existing optimistic roll-up, like the one that you you have out there right now? I've heard that question on Twitter, and what would you guys say to that? Yeah, I mean, that's definitely from our perspective, the naive but clear take that, you know, that immediately comes to mind when you talk about this. We think it misses a few key things. Obviously, one of them is that positive some outcomes are critical in this game. And the reality is that yes, while there are going to be some chains that maybe have numbers and you can probably

construct a narrative that this is a race and compare the two numbers between these chains, right? The reality is that that ignores the fact that the entire pie is getting bigger when more people do this. And quite frankly, the truth of the matter is, while we have saved our user is something like 2.7, I think it was 2.69 when we wrote our article, billion dollars in fees, the reality is that including ourselves, nobody has scaled Ethereum yet because one chain is not going to cut it if we're going to take this to global scale. So the reality is it's inevitable and it's a short-sighted view in our opinion to be looking at some like exciting crypto Twitter fueling, feud, you know, pole making, you know, angle on this because it's so much more. I also think that

the way people think right now is a little too chain oriented. The reality is that right now, we access the internet, we don't give a fuck what ISP we're accessing it through or what hardware or whatever. And chains have been like the sexy thing for people to invest in and talk about somehow protocol research is like a really hot thing, you know. So we talk about chains a lot. But the reality is that it shouldn't matter where you're deployed. And so far, the applications that have been built in crypto have also been very chain oriented because that's where the funding has been. That's where go-to-market strategies have been centered around. What we're trying to get to collaboratively with Coinbase is the super chain interconnectedness,

which users interact with similar to the way that they interact with the internet. It doesn't matter what ISP provider you're on. It doesn't matter what state space your application is deployed to. Applications that require atomic composability habit, and you're just accessing the application. You don't have to think about what's happening. There is an awkward transition phase between where we are now, the chaininess, and then where we're headed, the chain agnosticness. And so in that period of time, there are things that could be perceived as competition. There are choices that applications may have to make before they're re-architected and before a lot of this composability tooling exists.

Should I deploy on optimism mainnet or base or as some other EDM chain, should you? I deploy everywhere. And ultimately, it's going to be different for every single application. A lot of applications should probably start deploying their own chains. Let us know. We've got a superchain intake form on our website. Optimism. I.O. slash superchain. Wait, wait. Give that URL again. Optimism.io slash superchain. Boom. Optimism.comas.io slash jobs. Two links and one. You only get a third link to Shill in every bankless episode. So use that third one wisely.

Okay. So slash superchain, do people have to like apply to be a super chain or can they just be a super chain? Like there's no permission required, right? I could just fork the code. No, there will be no permission required. To Jay's point, obviously, this is a rollout stage process. And so right now it makes sense for people. folks to get in touch with us and start coordinating together, right? Which is super important.

Okay. So I want to go back to this Jing, Jing's idea because I think we're going to talk about the super chain, obviously. That was a tease in the title here. But, but, um, Jing's idea that we are in this weird, awkward, like puberty phase of, uh, crypto where there's too much chaininess going on. And I, I want to, me, like we're still, yeah, we're in this weird awkward phase. So, okay, so I think maybe there's two reasons for this. Here's an idea for you. And I was thinking about this while you're talking. One is kind of a technical reason why we have these chain borders, right? And that is because

when you're on one chain, it's hard to get to another chain and your security assumptions change. It's very much like, you know, like I go from the U.S. to Canada and I have to, you know, do my path. It feels like a different country, right, even though maybe it's culturally similar, whatever. So there's that. There's kind of the technical and security type border. The other reason is because we have tokens for all of these chains. And I think that that kind of breeds some tribalness sometimes. It's just like, well, my token's better than your token. And like, look at this.

We can compare, you know, how fast the tokens are growing and price. Are you like the red token? I like the blue token. Yeah. No, I like the purple token. Yeah, it's very like, you know, star-bellied sneaches of us. Like, we're just kind of like we like to separate into tribes based on a team color or, you know, something like this. What was really neat about the base token or the base chain as well,

there's no token. There's no token. Like they're using Eith. Imagine that. So that's very cool. Anyway, I'm going to test those assumptions, Jing. It's like, so is that why we're chaining us? It's because all the chains have tokens. And so we organize in token-based tribes. And also because there's technical limitations right now in that it really does feel like there is a border. It's hard to go from one chain to another? Is that why we're in this current state? Yeah, I think all of those are like components of the fracture of mind share liquidity, energy in the ecosystem at large. And the existence of a token kind of ossifies that fracture and makes the time to like converge on a single standard take longer because there's financial incentives not to.

Especially if that token is required to run the chain like most of that. L1s out there. Yeah, I think the core thing with the like composability and the adamicity is message passing between different state spaces. So like, you know, chain B receives data from chain A and there's a process by which that the validity of that data is verified. Like that whole thing, that whole standard, we need to coalesce on a single one of those things. And that's what the super chain is, is all coalescing on a single message passing standard and a bridge standard in order to enable the type of U.S. between chains that imitates the U.X of being in a single state space. Okay. Yeah, yeah. And I want to hear Carl Redd. Well, I mean, okay, I mean, I was just going to say,

I was just going to say that like, yeah, there is, there are technological limitations that have resulted in this fracturing. And the solutions to the fracturing oftentimes actually introduce new technology, which then further fractures the developer base. The thing, it's like, oh, build on this new language, build on this new, you know, like all this. Fracturing on fracturing. Yeah. Exactly.

It's going crazy. And so I'm just going to, I mean, I started out with my multi-client, my standards rant, but I just want to like double click and just say like this is so important from a community building perspective, not only the technology becoming standardized, but the process. But the process by which we come to what the technology is, as in the standards bodies, the people, contributors building together, working together on this, that is another key critical element to ensure that we do not result in crazy developer fragmentation. Like, it is so nice that all the browsers can load up the same websites and display the same things. That was not a given for many, many years, right? until people realize, hey, why are we building out incompatible features for our browser software?

Let's work together. So that is like what we're going to start to see in the Ethereum space for the OP stack. And this is, it's really exciting to see the snowball like just beginning to grow. And this is really the long term arc, at least for what I see, of the optimism project and the optimism like philosophy. is that like every time we have you guys on, you guys have made one more innovation further down the stack that keeps ever all the developers cohered into the same tech stack. And so like this whole idea of like EVM equivalents

and making sure that optimism is equivalent to Ethereum means that we can imbue Ethereum technology into the optimism technology. And now with its OP stack, it's just every time we talk to you guys, it's just the technology is one step further along in making sure that all the developers, are on the same page and we're reusing and recycling all of the developer technologies and tooling that need to be leveraged in order to build a coherent ecosystem. Yes. And I will even build on that a tiny bit because not only are we trying to push

forward the actual technology and the actual things, EVM equivalents, whatever the OP stack, what we're also trying to do is build an incentive system, right, that enables people to continuously contribute in perpetuity without having a centralized dictator governing body that's like giving out money or some corporate, you know, control, right? So this is actually, I want to like, I wish if I could, I would love to like give a click moment for like literally everyone, which is just like, retroactive public goods funding, which we've talked about on other things, you can go look it up. Retroactive public goods funding, a funding source for public goods, that is absolutely the like, complement the puzzle piece that enables the OP stack to grow and be great.

In other words, what we're doing is we're not only building out the open source protocols and technologies that will become the standards for how we use blockchains, how we use the internet generally. Well, we're also building out the funding source that funds that development. And guess what else? I'm sorry, I just can't stop. But base and optimism mainnet, all of and end all the further chains within the super chain, the cycle is those, the usage of those platforms go back into retroactive public. It's funny, which then goes back and funds the development of the OP stack, making it better and better. Right. Like this is going to be a crazy decentralized standards development. Like no one's going to own it and it's still going to happen. Anyway, it's, it's, it's, it's. it'll be a very wild ride.

Yeah, see, this is, the bankless listeners can tell why I call Carl the internal optimist. And so just to really drive this point home, we've got the OP stack technology, which is designed to be an equivalent extension of the Ethereum technology stack to allow for all of the same shared standards and just like tech stack to be expanded and scaled across many organizations, which is the story of base and coin base building on the OP stack. and also the retroactive public goods funding and the OP collective is also a economy, a system of recirculating funds to support and further development in a way that doesn't need a central coordinator of those funds.

So that's always been the optimism vision and the fact that we are now having a second huge core contributor to the OP stack is a huge vote of confidence in that vision. And having that mechanism that Carl was just talking about, just to tie exactly what Carl said back to what we were talking about before, that is what prevents the fragmentation and the fracturing. Because you're totally right, Ryan. So often fracturing occurs from people trying to get a business model behind something that fundamentally that they're doing is just building a public good

that's some software, right? So having that funding mechanism is how you keep this thing cohesive. Yeah. Yeah. And that's also why it's so important that some percentage of the base transaction fees goes to the OP collective. that's like to add energy into that flywheel. Guys, okay, so we've been talking about the super chain.

We also want to talk about fraud proofs as well. Like we want to hear about the optimism fraud proofs trajectory, but also we've been teasing the super chain. And I want to dive into that. What is that vision? Because it's very, very sci-fi. And I kind of want to understand it a little bit more. So we're going to talk about those two main subjects as soon as we get back from some of these

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So if you want extra help exploring the frontier, subscribe to Bankless Premium. It's under 50 cents a day and provides a wealth of knowledge and support on your journey West. I'll see you in the Discord. Right, Bankless Nation, we are back with the Optimism team. And now we're going to dive into the super chain because what the hell is a super chain? So there's a Ryan is showing the link that you guys talked about earlier. Optimism.com.com slash superchain. Is that where we go?

You got to click Superchain up at the top. Super chain. Boom. Look at this. I'm here. I'm in the super chain. So I know what a blockchain is. I know what a layer two chain is.

What is a super chain? It's a chain that's super. What's a super chain, Carl? All right. A super chain is a network of chains which share security, decentralization, all built on a standard technology stack, the OP stack. And the key insight of this, is that by creating a shared set of chains that all conform to the same properties,

what you do is you make it so that each one of these chains can work together, interoperate, and you can use them as interchangeable resources. So today we think, oh, what chain am I going to deploy to? I need to look at all the custom features. I need to understand the custom tradeoffs that I'm making. And then I deploy my app. Well, what if there was a network of chains where you could have the, exact same security features across all of them. Well, now I don't need to learn about every one of

these chains that I'm deploying to. I literally write my application and boom, deploy all to all the chains. What this enables is not only developers to kind of abstract away the underlying chains. It allows users and wallets to also do the same. So you get the crypto experience that we really need, which is super scalable, low fees, and you don't have to worry about what network you're on. You're just secure, happy, and getting your application on. Okay. But it doesn't exist. It doesn't exist.

It doesn't exist. Okay. Let's fast forward to a future state that is something more incremental that we can imagine, right? So now we have this base thing. And then we also have the optimism chain over here. So we have two chains. And let's assume that they are in the superintend.

chain right now. Okay? And so I'm a user. I got MetaMask open. What chain do I set it to? Is it just like a box that says super chain? The super one. So I set my settings in MetaMask for super chain. And then let's say I want to do something with the version of Uniswap on base. And then also like, can I, does, would that Uniswap tie into liquidity over on the optimism chain? Like, how does this work? See, the super chain is such a new, new model. And this is, to Jing, your point earlier, we're so used to, even as users of like the cheniness of the feeling. Oh, if I want to go from this place to this place, I have to like change my settings, change my, you know, RPC connection.

And then I move to another chain. How does this work in the super chain as a user? Yeah, this is like the puberty phase that we were talking about and also like speaks to the enormity of the work. It's not just about a single application or wallets, like block explorers. Like, what the fuck are we going to do with block explores? There's just so many different mindset and paradigm shifts that need to happen. It's a collaboration. And so we're talking to a number of other applications that are also deploying their own

OP chains, similar to base. And so it's something we're actively figuring out right now. How are messages passed? What does the user experience look like? Yeah. I was just going to say one really easy mental model that is not here yet, but that we are working towards is you can kind of think of chains as like powerful smart contracts. And so imagine your question about Uniswap. You know, imagine you had two liquidity pools, two smart contracts with the same token pair, right, but they're both different liquidity pools for some reason. Now you can have the Uniswap front end find you the best price across both of these. And, you know, maybe. maybe it trades on one, then it migrates to the other and buys on the other. That kind of thing becomes possible. So we're trying to make it so that there is an API,

an easy-to-deploy interface where you can spin up a new chain very, very seamlessly. Yeah. But Carl, so there's a uniswap on optimism. There's a uniswap on Polygon. There's a Eubon swap on Arbitrum. And there's also cross-chain like aggregators of these things, which are doing a similar job to what you just said. But I'm guessing if it's two chains on the OP stack and with that shared standard, that job of a cross-chain dex aggregator just becomes a lot easier and fluid and fast. Yes, it becomes so much easier.

And also, I think that the key unlock that's really going to take it to the next level is the problem with all of these bespoke chains that have all these different standards is that as a application developer or like an aggregation developer, I need to. right, a custom converter for each one of these chains, which does not scale. If all of these chains are using the exact same standard, then I literally, there could be a thousand of these chains. It could be a million. It could be a million. A billion. Anyway, sorry.

There could be tons of these chains, and I can immediately aggregate across all of them. So it's really, it's really night and day. Like, that kind of shift in developer productivity fundamentally changes what is possible because before you're investing months in implementing something that becomes minutes. Yeah. Okay, so the idea with that is like, if you have this cross-chain un-swap aggregator

and a new version of a new layer two cross-up, you have to manually make that chain supported by your aggregation software. If it's on the OP stack, it's like automatic, like there are so many things that are natively supported out of the box by nature of the fact that it was built using the OPE stack in the first place. That's the idea? Yeah.

Totally. And look, to James' point, Jing is very right to bring the caveat. This will take a collective. This is the mission of the optimism collective is summoning the super chain, but it's not going to happen overnight, right? But what we're talking about here is a very logical, I think, comparison to exactly what we saw in the internet, you know? I think probably, and if you were in the early days of the internet, right,

in like the late 80s, you know, you're like, what do you mean? I don't have to like enter the eye. IP address of the university that I'm going to connect to connect you next. It's just going to disappear, right? It's going to have the IPs going to be the same for all of them, right? And obviously that Huex like improved slowly over time, right? And it took many years. And now everybody has, you know, probably 10 IP addresses and, you know, all this up. So, you know, it's going to take a while for us to get here. It's the point of building together. But it won't happen without a shared standard. And it certainly won't happen if we just keep fragmenting these things as opposed to coming together. I wonder if you could reinforce this piece about kind of the super chain idea, right? And what you're trying to summon, what you're manifesting into reality here. And this is concept of security. So I will say the whole Internet of Chains model sounds really cool, but it scares the shableness model.

The Adam model, right? The atom model. Because if we have all sorts of chains with independent validator sets and independent security assumptions, and then we have bridges trying to tie them all together with their own set of security assumptions, right? How many bridge hacks did we see last year? I mean, hundreds of millions of dollars. North Korea ended up with this money, probably. Yes. And so, like, that scares the crap out of me about sort of the whole idea of all sorts of internet of chains that have different security assumptions. Now, with the super chain,

my understanding is you have the same underlying Ethereum level fraud-proof security assumptions as every other chain inside of the super chain network. That's why you're calling it a super chain. It's because it's one big, like, fluffy blanket of shared security wrapping its arms around all of these chains and ecosystems inside of the super chain, right? Can you reflect on that? Or about that? Yeah, because I think sometimes.

in crypto, like we just, we forget about the long tail of the security risks here until it just like hits us in the face. And there's, you know, a massive hack that happens. Can you guys talk about this security aspect to the super chain? I think honestly, that's probably, I mean, it's a very good call out, Ryan, because I think it's saying that we take for granted because for six years now, we've been working on layer two scaling. Yeah. And what is the entire point of layer two scaling, it's to inherit the security of the layer one and make a layer two that gives you more scalability, but keeps the same security model, right, at least as close as you can get. And yeah, so I guess we kind of take that for granted, but that's a very important thing to say.

Yes, it's absolutely the case that the super chain ultimately is all secured into Ethereum, and this is how you can get a shared security standard. So that's super, super important for sure. And it comes from the nature of layer two technologies, which can inherit that credible neutrality of Ethereum in a way that scales. And by the way, I want to also say that the, this point is not just about like, oh, I'm like super security conscious, like, I don't want to use an asset that's bridged over.

No, the thing is that the compounding risk of having multiple chains and I bridge to this chain, then this chain, then this chain, and any one of these chains can fail, that weakest link security, that actually limits the total number of, of chains that you can possibly have. Because the more change you introduced to the system, the more existential risk you introduced to the system. So in order to ensure that we're able to actually horizontally scale the super chain and scale the number of chains

in the network, you need to have homogenous security across all of them so that the core assets are always secured. And that actually, in a weird way, that security enables scalability. I'm a quote from Elon Musk comes to mind, which is that all user inputs are an error. And I feel like applying this, that like philosophy here is like all bridges are a patchwork of incomplete technology. Like if you have to bridge, like it's the technology isn't done yet then. Because like the idea is to get rid of all bridges, right?

Bridges are hacks. Bridgeless. Bridgeless. Bridgeless. Oh my God. If you have a layer to podcast, it's been off. It should be absolutely called bridgeless. Richlist.E., quick. Go buy it now, dude. Quick.

I want to ask a question that maybe Carl kind of alluded to earlier about this idea of standards. And so my understanding of the super chain is, of course, optimism has its version of a super chain with all of the chains that use the OP stack, that kind of thing. And that's great. So we got the security blanket over this. We also have other layer two ecosystems, you know, the Matter Lab, ZK Sync, the Polygon, the scroll, the arbitration. from all of these other layer two ecosystems, are they going to have a separate super chain? And how do we make sure we don't fall into the XKCD scenario

of like, look, you know, situation it says, there are 14 competing standards. And then somebody says, 14, ridiculous. We need to develop one universal standard that covers everyone's use cases. Yeah, soon, situation. Now there are 15 competing standards. How do we avoid that problem of having just a whole bunch

super chains that aren't interoperable with one another. Is there some way to do that? You know, if all of these layer twos are settling on Ethereum, is there some hope here? Yeah, I think that, I mean, we are creating a new standard and there are other standards out there. I guess we believe our standard is a better standard because we're not... Because it's Ethereum, maybe. Exactly. We're not trying to create coercive lock-in. We're not trying to create like a fundamental new way to develop smart contracts, a new thing you have to learn. We're not trying to create a closed ecosystem where once you're onboarded, it's very hard to leave. What we're trying to do

is create an ecosystem that's as easy to onboard to as possible and to create non-coercive lock-in by providing value at the application layer. So if the platform is super easy to develop on, and the tools are easy to use and open source and easy to build, then we believe that that will make it easier for applications to build. And so we're trying to create lock-in non-coercively at the application layer by providing real value to users. Yeah, 100%. Let me give you guys a few examples of where this shows have been practice.

Early example was our EVM equivalence upgrade, right? in the early days of what we were building, we absolutely had introduced a new standard. We called it the OVM. There was the OVM compiler, the OVM bytecode specific, right, all these things. At the end of the day, what it meant was that application developers had to go and do something different to deploy onto Optimism Mainnet, right? EVM equivalence was a huge milestone for us that completely removed that. We just said, okay, look, we are doing the XKCD thing right now.

We can't do that. We must comply with the Ethereum standards. We went EVM equivalent, one and a half, two years ago now. Another great example of this is the big release of the OP stack that is upon us called Bedrock. Shout out David for having the dot Bedrock. Put dot Bedrock in your Twitter, yo. One of the incredible things that we use in Bedrock is something called the Engine API.

Have you guys heard of that? No, I have, yeah. I just still don't know what it means. It's a fancy name for the merge API. So think about this. Here's something that's really incredible to think about. A layer one, when you're building a layer two, the layer one is kind of like the source of truth because it's where the security comes from. And you sort of look at the layer one and the batch is submitted by the sequencer and these sorts of things to figure out the state of your layer two, right?

That is the exact same relationship between the beacon chain. and the old like Geph like execution client, the consensus layer and the execution layer in the merge. So what's fascinating is that every L2 pretty much out there has to choose some way to implement basically what the merge, what the engine API does and what they did with the consensus layer and the whole pandas, you know, doing their thing. The OP stack uses that exact same API

with like a few lines modified, precisely for the reason that we can't be going about and creating a new standard. So every standard that we see we're using. There are, to, you know, to Jing's point, there are going to be some new standards that are going to have to be created because Ethereum wasn't built with a multi-chain standard in mind. And certainly we're going to have to do that very carefully and in a community-driven, collaborative way. So it's absolutely a concern.

We think that the way to solve it is to always go with Ethereum when you can and be very careful when you are absolutely sure you can't. What's up, Carl? And I just wanted to say that you notice that we said the word we a bunch of times. Now, I want to remind people because this is a very hard habit to break out, but it is, remember that when we say we, we are talking about us, as in everyone, like all of these people. This is a decentralized project. These are public goods that we are creating. This is open source software. The software that is produced by you know, my hands and other people's hands who don't work nearly close with me. Those things are public goods that are now available to the public, aka everyone.

And so the way to, you know, make sure that the fracturing doesn't occur and we don't have a bajillion different standards is not by having some people sitting in their ivory tower, giving, you know, down the laying down the law of how the tech should be built. but instead it's about building consensus in the community that we are all a part of and building out those standards in a joint together fashion. And this is going to be more and more important as time goes on as the project grows, as more core contributors come back. And I'm back to the multi-clients. I'm sorry. Yeah, this is, go ahead, Jane.

I think that this also speaks to the 484-4 work that we've been meeting. We wanted to create something that benefited all roll-ups, including our competitors, not just us, because it's generally important that the ecosystem moves forward. I think that in creating the standard and creating the super chain, it would be really sick to have other ecosystems, zero knowledge or fault-prover. running in the super chain, we're not trying to only run the code that's outputted by the existing core team. We're genuinely trying to coalesce around a single standard. And hopefully the work on 48444 speaks to the cooperativeness that we operate with. And it's not just in 4244, but more generally, we're very interested in collaborating with other ecosystems. That's really great to hear.

Guys, you've kind of taken us all through this. And I think people, we started talking about base and the value of that and public goods and credible neutrality and preserving these crypto values. And that's fantastic. We talked about the super chain and how that allows us basically to scale Ethereum. One last kind of question on my mind, I think maybe in the minds of some of the listeners. I certainly saw some of this conversation on Twitter, which was, about the ability of base to decentralize. So when we talked to Jesse yesterday,

you know, base is not going to launch fully decentralized. Like Coinbase will be the sole sequencer. My understanding is it won't launch with fraud proofs either. Can you talk about this? How long will it take a base? So a new chain in the super chain ecosystem to become fully decentralized. And what is optimism's path on that as well? with respect to things like fraud proofs and anything else you think it will require to get to

this state of full decentralization. Oh, man, if only OP Labs had recently posted under the Office of Carl Fersha, Decentralization Update, OK, I guess that was my cue. Okay, decentralization is literally the point. That is like all that we have been talking about. Now, the reality is that software takes an enormous amount of, of time to get right. And especially software, like false proofs, by the fault proofs, which there's no fallback entity. Because if there's a fallback entity for your fault proofs, that's a bank.

Yeah, that's a big. Yeah, like there's no, there's, you're not actually using fault proofs, right? You're not actually getting the benefits from fault proofs. So in order for fault proofs to work, we need to have multiple clients. It's not this kind of, uh, it's the thing that I was talking about in the beginning, which I for some reason have been going back to over and over in this podcast, is that in order to make sure that the clients will never fail, the way that Ethereum does it, and the way that we are following in Ethereum's footsteps, is that we have multiple implementations of the faultproof, all running in parallel and ensure that if any one of those go wrong, we are able to continue the system. Now, building one faultproof is really hard, and we've

like, you know, gotten quite far in canon, and you can take a look and contribute, but building multiple faultproofs is even harder. But in order to ensure that we have safe, secure execution that is decentralized, we need it. So that's the faultproof kind of side. There's another side to decentralization that we haven't talked about very much that was in the blog post, and that is the decentralization of the upgrade keys and the decentralization of the bridge. We are working to make a, you know, security council style upgrade system, which is still, you know, in progress. But that is another key component where we need to make sure that not only are their fault proofs, but the people who are upgrading and, you know, managing the software,

those people are community members from everywhere. So anyway, we're firing on all cylinders. It's, it's coming. Yeah. And like, you know, brass tax wise, we just haven't announced me yesterday that there are some of the best, you know, engineers at one of the largest companies in the world contributing to the same shared standard for all this that are very, very interested in that. The other thing that I'll say, and honestly, this is a shout-out. I don't know how the heck we have not made this, but the bedrock release of the OP stack is coming. The main net upgrade vote is how it is like there was a big, huge unlock moment that we got to earlier this year, which was basically completing the bed-uprock release.

because I'll be honestly, Ryan, previous versions of that code base were not up to the par of utilizing existing standards that we were willing to go out. Like, public goods funding, we're finally doing our second round of retro PGF. Shoutouts to David for being a bachelor in that. For us to get to that point, honestly, required that we go sit down from first principles and say, okay, what is the most neutral, what is the most code minimized, what is the most existing standards leveraging way to write a roll up. And that and a chain more generally. And that is what the bedrock release has been. So that is a huge unlocker that we've been really pushing on as a

priority to unlock the rest of the multi-client and all this stuff. Now it is time to really focus our attention on these. Was it you guys, did you guys write the blog post with the analogy of it's just like centralization is like the ring of power and at some point every roller has to, you know, throw it in the fire? Yeah, that's fantastic. All right. So where are we on the quest to throw the ring into Mount Doom. We're outside of the Shire now, right? Are we like Gondor? Movie one, movie two.

Are we approaching the Black Gates? Are we near Mordor? Where are we in this? I think Gondor. I think Gondor. Okay, Gondor, all right. So movie three, David. We got like all of the dominoes are right here.

You know what I'm saying? Anyway, it's pretty safe. We just called, I mean, the Natsy actually, it's kind of like we just called in the Roherom. I was back up. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. I just needed this.

That's, yeah. Final question, and that's how we can close, David. Guys, it's a lot of fun having you. Congrats on the success with this massive release. This is super huge for all of crypto for the ecosystem. SuperHarege, SuperChain. Yeah, Superchain, that's right. Now, you have one last link to Schill.

Please choose wisely. We talked about Superchain link, the jobs link. Give us another link before we close out here. What's the OPEC stack link? Stack.com. Optimism.i.O. Got to do it. Got to do it.

While we have a major second core developer, you know, joining the ranks of OP Labs, this is going to be done as a very large effort by a very large number of people. And we finally have some of the initial docs in place to really show you how to do the crazy stuff with the OP stack that is going to blow people's minds that we always can't focus our priorities on

for the reasons that we just talked about. So come contribute and build the OP stack with us. That is awesome. All right. We'll end it there. And guys, thank you for joining us. Thanks for setting up the tent background, getting the lighting working. It's very good. The makings of an early studio, I can tell. Bankless Nation will include some links, of course, in the show notes, as always.

Got to end with this. Risk and Disclaimers. Your name is risky. So are layer twos. All of crypto is when you think about it. You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier.

I think layer twos are the new frontier. It's not for everyone. but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Bye y'all.