Bankless - SVM L2 on Ethereum: Bullish or Bearish SOL? with Neel Somani, Founder, Eclipse

Episode Date: September 20, 2023

Solana on Ethereum? Solana has a virtual machine called the SVM. Proponents say it’s much better than the Ethereum EVM…multi-threaded execution…now it’s coming to Ethereum in the form of an L2.  Today on the show, we brought on CEO & Co-Founder of Eclipse, Neel Somani. Eclipse is not only a new L2 on the scene, it’s also an L2 framework, kind of like the OP Stack. It’s a superchain contender.  This poses some very interesting questions….who wins? Does this kill Solana?  ------ 🎁 Check your wallet with our brand new tool: Claimables  https://bankless.cc/GetClaimables  ------ 📣 AAVE V3 is Here! http://app.aave.com/  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ⁠https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2   ⁠ 🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING ⁠https://bankless.cc/MetaMask   ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum   ⁠ 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle  ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE ⁠https://bankless.cc/uniswap   🔗 CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo  ----- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 7:10 Motivations For Eclipse 10:50 Why is the SVM Great? 16:00 How Fee Markets Work?  19:20 Ethereum & Eclipse Pairing 20:25 What Kind of L2 is Eclipse?  23:25 Celestia For Data Availability?  25:30 Security Trade-Offs?  27:30 Transactions on Eclipse 28:00 Economics on Data Availability  33:50 RISC Zero & Eclipse  36:10 Modular Thesis  41:00 Eclipses's Superchain? 44:35 Eclipse Today? 45:20 Winners vs. Losers  46:40 Eclipse vs. Solana  49:00 Bad for $SOL?  52:45 Eclipse Team 53:45 Solana as an L2 55:00 Eclipse Token? 55:45 Future Ecosystems 57:05 Naming This New Tech  58:50 Roadmap 1:00:30 Neel's Bio 1:01:50 Closing & Disclaimers ----- RESOURCES Neel Somani https://twitter.com/neelsalami  ----- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠

Solana on Ethereum, that is the question we explore on today's episode with a new product release as well. This is an opportunity to pick into a topic we haven't yet touched on Ethereum, which is a virtual machine that Solana has called the SVM. That's the Solana virtual machine. So proponents have said for a long time that it's much better than the Ethereum EVM as multi-threaded execution, lots of bells and whistles that Ethereum doesn't have. And now on today's episode, we're finding out that it is coming to Ethereum in the form of a layer two. The Eclipse mainnet is what it's called. That is the layer two that is launching today with the SVM embedded. And Eclipse is not only a new layer two on the scene, but it's an entire framework,

kind of similar to the optimism super chain network as well. So this poses a lot of interesting questions, as you might imagine, that we are going to dig into today, including who wins? Is this a W for Ethereum? Is this an L for Solano? Or maybe the reverse? What does this mean for the future of our industry? A lot to unpack on today's episode. I would even say that a lot of Ethereum people will say that, yeah, the SVM, the fantastic piece of technology. And it is better than the EVM, especially when it comes to the things that virtual machines do, which is execution. There are some massive questions that this brings to the table, and I'm about to ask them. But first, I want to talk about our first.

friends and sponsors over at Layer Zero, who have a brand new announcement on the scene. This came out of permissionless. Google Cloud and Layer Zero are partnering together to help thread together 15 different chains across the Web3 ecosystem. So what does Layer Zero do? It passes messages across from chain to chain. What does Google Cloud do? Well, it is the service provider, the Oracle that does that message passing.

It is the default Oracle for Layer Zero. But if you don't want Google, you are free to also pick your own Oracle. You could just like Google, how Google is the default search browser for many browsers. Google is the default Oracle for Layer Zero. There's a link in the show notes if you want to find out more Layer Zero.network. And so that is a call to action there. There's a link to the show notes. There are some big questions on today's episodes.

And so we have the founder of the Eclipse Layer 2. his name is Neil Samani, and he's going to be jumping on the podcast in a minute here. But David, we're going to be unpacking four different protocols. All right. So it's not just Ethereum and Solana. There are a few others as well that are woven into this layer two. So what are listeners in for? What are the big questions to prepare us?

Yeah, the question doesn't stop it. Is this Ethereum versus Solana, Ethereum or Solana? Celestia and Risk Zero are also relevant here. And I think one of the questions is like the big question, if we are investors in the space trying to invest in the future, we want to ask the question who wins. What are these components doing together? And does some of these components win more than others? What does it mean to win? Or am I just using this lens of winning versus losing because that's my lens for all blockchain system.

Is that even the right lens? So the first question I think we're going to get at is, does the Solana VM as an Ethereum layer, is that a bigger win for ether than it is for soul the salana fanboys in my mentions are convinced that this is the ethereum protocol moving closer to solana but the layer two centric take is that all good execution tech will eventually settle on ethereum liquidity and security but then what the hell does celestia have to do with this equation and what's risk zero doing there so this is not just a question about like the tug of war between these two cooperating competing protocols but what does this mean for the modular thesis at large? So some very big questions. And I think I listened to

Neil Simani over at the modular summit back in ECC and some of his talks around the space. And I think he's got some of the answers. So we're going to ask all of these questions to Neil here in a second. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Cracken, our preferred exchange for crypto in 2023. If you're not having a count with Cracken, consider clicking the link in the show notes to check them out right now. Cracken Pro has easily become the best crypto trading platform in the industry. The place I use to check the charts and the crypto prices, even when I'm not looking to place a trade. On Cracken Pro, you'll have access to advanced charting tools, real-time market data, and lightning-fast trade execution.

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virtual machine the SVM to Ethereum today eclipse has announced their SVM main net the first eclipse layer two on Ethereum that uses the SVM as its execution engine but Ethereum for settlement and liquidity is that is that a curveball well it doesn't stop there because Eclipse is also using Celestia for data availability and risk zero for fraud proofs. So Solana's execution environment, settling on Ethereum, with ETH has its gas, using Celestia for data availability, and then security offered by risk zero fraud proofs. My first big question to you, Neil, is what the hell is that? What is this? Who even allowed you to put all these? What did you create? What is this? I love this image. This is amazing. This is the what the

hell is this family guy meme for the for the people listening on the podcast it's like noah on the arc and there's some kind of hybrid animal like a giraffe elephant like well i don't know what that that is but some kind of hybrid animal that's been created like the platypus yeah that is awesome uh david rind thank you for having me yeah so neil let's let's where did this idea to put four different networks together come about and maybe talk about some of the motivations here So the original idea was just to put Salon on Ethereum. And that was the motivation behind the concepts. And what we ran into was just a ton of constraints and things that you'd expect to be true for a virtual machine because that's how it is in the Ethereum world.

So an example is like chain ID, when you switch your metham wallet to another Ethereum chain or another EVM chain, then they actually have like a well-defined mechanism for doing that. Another example is there's no global miracle treat for Solano. So the lack of these primitives means that that initial idea was, not so easy to implement. So we basically implement, we had to add in Celestia, risk zero out of necessity in order to make this possible. Wait, so you had to add Celestia in risk zero? Like it wasn't an option to just do a layer to just pure Ethereum. I think so it depends on the amount of transaction volume that we end up running. But at our projected amount of transactions, Ethereum DA would just prove to be very expensive. And it also

lack a lot of the benefits of the salon of the end, which is that you're going for scale, meaning that you want the transactions to be really cheap. So right now it's like the base cost for writing 200 bytes to Ethereum is about 15 cents. So that would be like much more expensive transactions. And that opens us up to a count from the Salonic community, which is like, oh, we're much cheaper than you. By doing it this way, then we can actually be competitive on price too. I want to get back to why Solana because that's the big question. Why the SVM, right?

But before we do, just really quick, yes, data availability is very expensive in today's world. However, there was some hope. We just did release an episode earlier this week with Dom from ETH research on blob space and EIP 4844, where the cost of data availability for roll-ups is going to drop quite significantly. Or maybe let me just rephrase that and say, the availability of data availability is going to be increased massively in the form of these blobs. Does that change the calculus at all for you? Or is it kind of the same?

It's still more expensive than. something like Celestia. It definitely changes the calculus. Given that it's a fee market, we have to see where that fee ends up landing. So I want it to be live, but yeah, there's great research going on in the Ethereum community for scaling DAA. We're watching it closely. And we have ambitions to eventually just be fully on Ethereum and just use that for a DA as well. Okay. Well, let's talk about the big thing here. So the Solana virtual machine, the SVM. We've not done an episode comparing the SVM versus the EVM. We've been thinking about doing one. gives us a little taste of that.

Can you tell us, what is so great about the SVM? Why do people, some people, you know, sing its praises and seem to prefer it for certain things? The way to think about it is by starting with the EVM and just understanding the failures of the EVM so far in scaling Ethereum. And I think that if you ask a lot of the researchers in the Ethereum community, scale is pretty much the biggest issue. But it feels kind of redundant for me to be saying that because everyone's talking about it. Yet the way that they've tried to bring skill to Ethereum,

is just by taking the EVM and turning into a roll-up effectively. But what's nice about a roll-up is that once you decouple the execution, consensus, settlement, and DA, is that you can make that executionally or whatever you want. So the issue with the EVM is that it's single-threated as it exists right now, meaning that all the transactions get in a single file line. They're executed one at a time. And that means that if there's a big NFT drop, for example, then that's going to really spam the network.

And there's no way to get your D5 transaction in unless you're competing with all those other transactions that are in line. But what's nice about a parallelized virtual machine is that you can execute those transactions concurrently, given that they're not touching the same piece of the state. So that's what the Solana virtual machine primarily brings. And it's the most battle-tested VM in the sense that Salon has been around, as opposed to move or some other parallelized virtual machines which are much newer. And that means that you also get the benefits of the existing Solana code base, any existing libraries that are written for the SVM, and we can take all those and immediately ported to Eclipse. So that's the main reason to use that.

which is just scale. And scale is inherently maximalist take for a roll-up to claim because we're basically saying that if you have one SVM, you don't need all these other single-threaded VMs around it. Yeah. So one of the reasonings I've heard around the EVM is that while the EVM does execute, because that's what virtual machines do, it was not built for execution. It was built for the Ethereum layer one, and that has prioritized other properties. And while the EVM has had a ton of just network effects, the open source network effects around the EVM are super, super strong. I think in this day and age, in the year 2023, one of the things we're seeing is that the network effects around the SVM are growing sufficient tailwinds that, Neil, I think what you're saying is that, well,

I can feel safe that there is sufficient momentum in the network effects of the SVM code base that is going to be an alive code base moving forward into the future. And so it is going to be the execution virtual machine that we can deploy to Ethereum because if we have a roll-up-centric roadmap, we aren't beholden to the EVM on layer two's. This is my interpretation. Is this about right? Yeah, that's right. And what's cool is that it actually goes beyond just the existence of the SVM per se. It's a bit of a misnomer because the SVM is actually the Berkeley packet filter virtual machine. And that's been in the Linux kernel for like decades. So this is a very old. virtual machine and it has Ross support and Russ can compile to the bytecode and there's a few

surrounding extensions that are pretty battle tested as well. So we're taking all this existing wealth of open source code and just repurposing it as an Ethereum ML too. How much better is it, Neil? Like I would argue if it's like orders of magnitude like a hundred a hundred times or some something, some ridiculous magnitude or faster. Yeah. Okay. So like if we take a roll up with the exact same stack you're talking about, but rather than the SVM, we have the EVM versus what you're doing with the SVM, how much better is yours? You're saying in order of magnitude, like 10 X, 100 X? Yeah, it's always tough to talk about throughput because the reality is it depends on what are the state access patterns. Like if everything, let's say every transaction

the SVM was accessing the same piece of state. Then you actually can't beat sequential because that's just like the fact about databases, right? You'd have to impose if it was sequential rights, let's say. So then you have to lock that piece of state to execute the transaction, then do the next one, then do the next one. So you're not saving anything in the sequence. case, but assuming they're all touching different pieces of state, which if the cryptothesis is right, we're going to have all kinds of applications, doing all sorts of different things. And that's effectively what these EVM roll-ups are mimicking. If you look at OP stack, the reason why people are deploying these, a lot of times they cite

dedicated block space. But that's exactly what the SBM already solves for them. So our thinking is why fragment liquidity, fragment the user experience, make them switch networks. It's looking like a mess already, but you can prevent all that by just keeping it all in the same chain. Okay, so one of the, I guess the bull case for the EVM is basically, I don't think anyone really prefers it for its execution prowess and capabilities. They all prefer it because of the network effect. It's because we started with the EVM, a whole bunch of apps were built, and now we could just very easily port those apps to roll up. So that's kind of why. And I guess with SVM, it is,

you're making the case that it is much better for just kind of the execution layer type thing. and you're still taking advantage of some of the network effect that Solana has built as well. I want to ask a question here because I'm not sure I fully understand this, but about like kind of different fee markets and resourcing. How does that work? So is it the case inside of your roll-up that if there is a big NFT drop or some sort of app that is consuming a large quantity of the block space inside of Eclipse, Is that somehow isolated or segmented or is there some kind of bifurcation of resources between another layer?

Localized fee market is. Yeah, this is a term that I have not fully understood, but I know our friends on the Salana side really purport this is one of main virtue of actually Salinas, like these localized fee markets. Tell us about that. Yeah, it's critical. And if you've looked at Arbitrumb lately, fee is still spiked substantially on roll-ups. if they're single-threaded. And that's because of that exact reason that you're mentioning,

the global fee market. If GMX gets a bunch of activity, then everyone suffers as a result. But economically, that's not actually really the way that it should be because there's this negative externality to GMX being imposed on all of the other apps, but really it should be constrained to that one app.

So it's as if you took all these global fees and you just concentrated it on the one app that's actually causing on the hot spot or a state hotspot as some of the folks on the Saloniside will describe it as. And everyone else can just keep like merely happily walking along and they can execute on other cores. So it's really a property of a scheduler within the validator because in every validator

they have to somehow decide what order am I going to process transactions. And they're saying everything that's accessing this piece of state is going to all go on a single core and everyone else can use the other course. And there's no contention on those. So Neil, this is really just a statement. The design philosophy of Eclipse is just a statement that it's a bullish statement on the growth of the SV. network effects. So maybe in this day and age, if you are like optimism or arbitram,

you're going for this thing called Ethereum equivalence. And they are making a statement that, hey, we are bullish on the growth of the EVM network effects. And I mean, network effects of different virtual machines can grow independently. It's not an either or. But what you're the philosophy of eclipse is saying like, hey, there's the SVM network effects are going to grow. You're going to grow a lot. We want to take that and couple into whatever the value is of being a part of the Ethereum ecosystem. That's my synopsis of this. Yeah, I'd even argue that EVM network effects have proven to be not so important.

And I think it made a lot of sense initially a few years ago when you had Polygon and BSC launching. But if you look at the types of apps that were deployed there, you get like sushi swap, which is effectively a fork of uniswap. And now I recognize they deployed even to like Ethereum. But those are the types of apps you often get. And it's rare that those apps are actually. net new. Whereas by bringing the SVM to Ethereum, I think we're actually going to see net new applications in the Ethereum ecosystem, just given that there's a lot of apps that just couldn't exist without parallelism.

Central limit order bugs being a great example. We've seen a lot of decentralized physical infrastructure networks on Solana so we can bring those to Ethereum as well. Apps like that, I think, are going to be more interesting to me rather than porting apps that already exist. Certainly. So that was the execution environment of the Eclipse project. And remember when we live in the modular world, that there are different modules. So there's a few others that we're going to go to. I want to go to the Ethereum module next. Ethereum is directly enshrined in the Eclipse tech stack.

The Ethereum bridge enforces the correct ordering for Eclipse transactions. Can you talk about the significance of this? Like what is Ethereum providing to Eclipse? What is the Ethereum module doing here? Yeah. So what this means concretely is that an Eclipse full node includes an Ethereum folder. So an Eclipse full node is also watching Ethereum. It's looking at that bridge.

and that bridge has significance in how the protocol operates, meaning if the bridge gets rolled back, the bridge gets reordered, this all influences the eclipse phoenone, and it will also get reordered or it will also get rolled back. So that's what it means. And there's a second more subtle aspect, which is that we use Ethereum for gas,

or we use ether for gas. And that's an important fact because that increases the money in us of ETH. And we could have, we had the option to deploy our own token and use that for gas instead, but we recognize that everyone in the Ethereum ecosystem already uses ETH, there's a ton of it. And people are looking for things to do with that. So we wanted to keep that intact and use it for a gas bar chain too. So how similar is, this is what makes Eclipse a layer two, how similar is it to other layer twos that that we know today versus kind of different? So one,

one categorization, is it an optimistic layer two or is it sort of a ZK layer two? That might be one way to look at it, but there are probably others. Can you classify it with respect to the existing players that people know about. What's weird is because the Solana VM settlement is so different from EVM layer twos, the terminology might have to change a little bit. And I have some thoughts on that later. But in general, I would describe this as this is an optimistic roll-up that uses some zero-knowledge technology or uses some zero-knowledge proof in the optimistic settlement.

So that's what the roll-up is as it exists today. And moving forward, there's a route where we can actually become a full zero-knowledge full up. An optimistic roll up because there is some sort of fraud-proof window. Right. You're not using kind of like ZK to do sort of all of the, you know, all of that side of things. There's a, there's, yeah, we don't prove every single transaction. Got it. Okay. Okay. So we have, so this is a layer two. An eclipse node and contains an Ethereum node, which is the bridge. Ethereum enforces correct ordering for Eclipse by proxy of all of this. This means that like the assets on Ethereum, the liquidity on Ethereum have a direct

and open pipe into the Eclipse ecosystem. Does this mean that Eclipse gets Ethereum for security or is that the fraud proofs element of this? So security can be thought of as safety of blindness. So the fault proofs are basically providing execution safety. So if something gets executed incorrectly, then the fraud proof will prevent that. from being settled to the bridge. And users should really look to that bridge

if they're figuring out what's the last correct state of this chain. That's the truth. And that's the canonical chain. Whereas the full note, yeah. There is like this trustless bridge type concept then. Yes, that's the critical part of the protocol. Yeah. Yeah.

And of course, like the main poll for being on Ethereum in the first place is I'm assuming just it's the most secure, decentralized chain with all of the liquidity and all of the assets. Like that's the simple cases or anything else to add to this. I think that's exactly what you'd want for Staddleman. Yeah. Beautiful. Okay.

I feel like that checks the Ethereum box relatively quickly unless you have anything to add, Ryan. No, I'm just, it's fascinating to me this decision. I'll just make a comment to use eth for kind of gas rather than a native token. And we might come back to that. But of course, I'd imagine you have to like eclipse has to pay taxes denominated in ether, right? You guys are at the end of the day buying some block space from Ethereum. So that element certainly makes sense. Yeah, and I'll just comment that's an interesting design decision and certainly, you know, one that is commendable, I think, in many ways.

So I think this part in the conversation, I think, is that relatively easy for people to wrap their heads around, take the Solana virtual machine, put it inside of a layer to settle on Ethereum. But we got some extra curveballs. Celestia for data availability. So now we're bringing in the cosmos ecosystem. So why not Ethereum for data availability? why not now? And then also why not Ethereum for data availability even considering post 4844 proto-dank charting? Like what's the thought process behind Celestia for data availability?

So Celestia, when it goes to mainnet, will be the most advanced, scalable block space that exists right now for making transactions available. So that was the, and the reason for that is, one, if you just look at the amount of bandwidth available on Ethereum, you can pretty much upper bound the amount of transactions that can be posted by like a few hundred. hundred transactions right now. And then, of course, the thing that I don't want to ever bet against research. So that's why I don't want to write off saying, like, oh, we could never use Ethereum for DA because research happens in like this exponential way. But as it exists, it's just a little bit too constrained. And that's exactly what Celeste has been solving for.

And Mustafa actually wrote the original data availability sampling white paper. And he co-authored that with Vitalik. And what they're basically doing is as a user, you can verify yourself whether a block is being metallic. And the more users are doing that, the more blocks-based Celestrii can provide. So that's their path to winning, which is that there's this critical network effect around the more people that are using Celestria, the more secure it becomes and the more scalable becomes.

And for that reason, Celestia might just always be ahead of whoever's the next best in DA. So even with Proto-Dank charting, 4-844, and then even with full-danked sharding, given the fact that Celestia achieves some sort of critical mass of adoption, there's a world where Celessia can even outpace full-dank sharding, because full-dank sharding has a lot of scale. But what you're saying is like, where jury is still out as to the race between Celessia versus full-dank sharding as who can provide the best band with.

Exactly. Like one of Celestia's biggest advantages right now is that they're about to be live. And no one else is there right now. Okay. Is there a trade-off in your mind, Neil, about, you know, on kind of security here? So in this entire episode,

we've called what Eclipse is doing a layer two, notably rather than a roll-up. And this is because there's some recognition, I think, in kind of the Ethereum community in general, that in order to be called an Ethereum roll-up, you actually have to do not only your settlement consensus on Ethereum, but also the data availability layer, the DA on Ethereum as well.

And so that's like, you know, Dankrad posted this. And I think it's certainly, this idea has some merit. And the idea there is, in order to be given the title of an Ethereum roll-up, then you've got to be doing every thought, all of both of those layers on Ethereum. And so the the notion that this is a, you know, it comes with increased security is certainly present there. Do you see that as a tradeoff?

Or is that not something that you are worried about for eclipse or is eclipse just optimizing, you know, somewhere else on the on the tradeoff landscape? So it is technically a tradeoff. I will say that we're doing everything we can on Ethereum just to start. But the tradeoff is back to those properties of safety and liveliness. So in order to, create a fault proof, you of course need to have access to those transactions. You need to run them all yourself. You need to identify which one was invalid. And in order to do that, you have to look at whatever layer one, those transactions were posted to. So if they were posted to Ethereum, then you haven't really added any additional trust assumptions that Ethereum is behaving correctly. But if you post to Celestia,

theoretically, the Celestia validators could collude. They could sign off and say, yeah, we got the block, but then they just don't give it to. So to me, that threat is unrealistic in practice. We could have, like, theoretically made this into a validity or something like that, where we post the blocks to some centralized DA or some DAC or something. And that, I would say, is a very different point in the security spectrum, because the DAC really could clue. That's not that many entities that would be required to say we're going to withhold the block. Whereas a full out one block chain with slashing, that's a little bit harder to imagine.

Let's talk about the other side of this equation. So the benefit of this and how you've laid this out is how cheap are transactions going to be on Eclipse? So it's hard to say for sure because DA is always a fee market. So because Celestia is not lying, we need to see where that fee market lands. But based on our projections, it's going to be comparable to Salon. Comparable. Okay.

And what are Salana transactions going for these days, guys? It's like a hundred of the zeros. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So I want to talk about the economics that are created as a result of this choice. So settlement and liquidity come from Ethereum, ether as gas. there are economic tailwinds behind ether there, Celestia for data availability,

instead of using Ethereum for data availability, so Celessia is capturing some of Ethereum's value captured, if you will. How can we think about who is splitting the pie here between Ethereum and Celestia when you choose to use Celestia for data availability? So I think it's a difference between moneyness and quote unquote value flow. So if you look at the cost of a transaction, the majority of it typically does go to DA in the case of no congestion. If there's congestion, then a lot of it will go to the execution layer. That's what causes the fee spike said.

I was referring to an arbitralum with their global fee markets. So that value, of course, goes to slash yeah. Of course, the cost of operating slash gas is much higher. So as far as what's the validator profit, it might end up being like even close to zero after you've accounted for all the costs of their bandwidth. But given that ether is used for gas, then we're all like transacting things in ether or denominating our NFTs in ether. I think that's probably the bigger piece of value accrual for a token, in my opinion. So that's, that's how I think about it. And then, of course,

there's a critical dependence on Ethereum for security. So just given the fact that we're just posting to Ethereum periodically with the state route, well, it's not really a state route, but with commitments, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's one fourth source of value flow onto Ethereum. Okay. So put, you're posting data to Ethereum. It's not a blob in 44. It's just, it's kind of is it call data? It's in the call data field? So the data that we posted Ethereum is that state route is actually been to a smart contract. Okay. Yeah, I keep saying state route because that's what it is for an Ethereum role, for an EVM roll-up.

But because there is no global mercilitary for our roll-up, it's not quite that. Instead, it's like a commitment to what the output of the transactions are. Okay. So previously when we think about these things in what we will call normal roll-up land, like optimistic roll-ups, optimism, arbitram, we talk. The meme that Ryan and I say is that layer two buy Ethereum block space. But that's less true with Eclipse because you're buying Celestia block space for data availability. But you're still buying some block space because you're doing something.

You're updating the state of a smart contract, the Eclipse smart contract on the Ethereum layer one. I know rough numbers are always hard to ask for, but how do you like, how much gas is that? Basically, how much are you paying Ethereum is the question I'm trying to get at? Yeah, well, one other, like, critical place for paying gas is for all the bridging. Anytime someone puts money into a clips or takes it out, it's like a hash time lock contract the way it's written right now. So that costs money. Anytime, I mean, that's true for any asset if you want to do forced inclusion.

So it's hard to ask. I mean, that depends on what's the gas price for Ethereum and what's the price of getting up a block space. So it's hard to estimate that. But compared to like an optimistic roll up today, that's, you know, I don't know, way. Last I looked at this, all of the roll-ups in general were like consuming 200 to 500 ETH per day or something like this. There's going to be a fraction of that. Yeah, mostly. So if you look at like optimism like OPE stack, I think it's worth separating the DA cost and the settlement cost.

And the DA cost is the vast majority of that, that 200 you were mentioning. And then settlement is yeah, me like one-tenth of that if even. It's a settlement is actually a small fraction of it in terms of just raw cost. But I don't know if that's even what's valuable for the, I mean, I don't want to ever say like price of anything, but I think the reason why ether is so valuable is because we use it to pay for so many things. And that's the, that's a fundamental benefit of it. It's not play a critical role in our ecosystem. Yeah, one of the models that we say for the layer two, for 4844 for proto-dank charting and full dink charting is that ether is making, Ethereum is making a tradeoff with its own layer two's, where it is extracting less,

rent from them by producing extremely cheap data availability for these layer twos. So it doesn't have to consume that much gas to post blobs. And the tradeoff is that while it doesn't charge much to be a rollup post-4844, it gets to be money in all of these networks. And so I guess extending that logic, Celestia gets to capture the value flows. Who is what you're saying? That is why you said flows, I'm assuming. Celessia gets to capture the value flows, the bulk of the buying of the block space.

but Ethereum, ether still gets to be retained as like the money of eclipse. Am I on track here? I think that's the right way to think about it. What's fascinating about this conversation is because I feel like we've been trying to describe the animal that Noah has just brought in the arc over the last like 15, 20 minutes and how long we've been talking. What's so fascinating about this, and I love it, by the way, is because I think this is going to break crypto Twitter's brains.

because do you know how we're all always so divided in terms of tribes, right? And here's Neil saying, I've got this layer two called Eclipse. And by the way, ETH is money. Solana has the best virtual machine. Celestia is the best data availability layer. And by the way, it's not an optimistic roll-up or a ZK roll-up. It's something in the middle. You're just going to, like, I don't know if everyone's going to love you or you're just going to piss everyone off.

But I know you're going to confuse a lot of people with this approach. It makes me so happy, honestly. Yeah, I'm pretty excited about it, too. And it's going to force people to also think a little bit more about, like, what are the security assumptions? What are they actually like about each blockchain? I think that's a really good reevaluation, especially in the roll-up landscape. There just hasn't been enough innovation in my view.

Like, all the EVM roll-ups kind of looked at the same. And I'm glad to push the frontier on that. Can we ask this last piece? So risk zero is being used for fraud proofs, I believe. and our first exposure to risk zero was just a couple of weeks ago. And this may be an indication of how fast this space is moving. So I only just learned about your project yesterday, Neil. And that's how much is going on at the moment,

which is a very exciting time for building in crypto. But what is Risk Zero doing for Eclipse? How is it helping you? Yeah. So to take a step back, Risk Zero is a very ambitious ZKVM. And in general, ZKVMs have been break and strain. It's like they just want to prove some bespoke program. They want to prove a virtual machine that's restricted to crypto, like the EVM.

But Risk Zero took a ordinary virtual machine, which is Risk 5, and they're ZK proving any Risk 5 program. And what's cool about that is that Risk 5 has been around before Blockchains, but also that there's so much stuff written for Risk 5. So you could just take these existing Rust programs or whatever you want, compiled it to Risk 5, which almost everything does. and run it there. So what's weird is that the Salonaut virtual machine doesn't use Risk 5 bytecode.

But what we've effectively done is we take a BPF bytecode, which is the Salonov VM by code. We output Risk 5 bytecode. We prove that compilation. And then we executed it within Risk Zero. And this way we can prove that the execution of a transaction was done correctly. And we can say these are the outputs and here's a little small piece of proof to show that it was actually correct.

And that's what we use Risk Zero for. So the reason why it's relevant for our fault proofs is that if you want to say that something is fraudulent, rather than re-executing that transaction on Ethereum, which should be very difficult given that the SVM uses pre-compiles and stuff that doesn't exist in Ethereum. Instead, we just generate the ZK proof and we just pass it to Ethereum. We just say, here's all the proof you need, that it was executed incorrectly. And notably, one of the most, the popular optimistic roll-ups on Ethereum, Arbitram just got their fraud proofs. optimism still TBD, which means base still TBD. And then in comes Eclipse.

We're like, oh, yeah, we've got like this super ambitious ZK fraud proofs. Here we go. We're already ready for them. And yeah, it's live. It's kind of nuts. Surprising. Yeah. And I think maybe like Ryan talked about all these different tribes that are now confused here.

I think that if there's one thing that is definitely the absolute winner here, assuming that, you know, eclipse achieves its division that it wants to achieve, is the modular thesis, which actually isn't any one tribe. There are many handful of tribes that are all modular. Like Ethereum is a modular network. Celestia is a part of the cosmos modular ecosystem and it's providing a module of data availability. So no one tribe works, but the idea of modularity, I think, is uncategorically taking the dub here. Would you agree with that, Neil? Definitely. Yeah, this is a very modular maxi type, if that sentence even makes sense, given the modularism isn't really like maximalist. It's almost oxymoronic, yeah. I actually, I recently read Anatoly of Salana being described

as a single shard maximalist, which is the first time I've heard this. So maybe there's a counter to the modular maximalist. Well, they just really want to re-brand away from Monolithic. Yeah, calling it integrated now. They have the no-sharding podcast. As you said, one of my team wrote a really good response, Sidney, against the whole integrated blockchain's piece. And there's all sorts of things you can basically only achieve in the roll-up world. So that was the premise of it. Yeah. Sovereignty being the big one. Yeah, that was a great piece. I didn't know if she was on your team. Okay, so there are a few more things that we want to talk about. This is not just a layer two. This is not just a single network, but Eclipse also is coming with its framework.

So just like the OPE stack or Arbitram Orbit or the ZK stack, eclipse has a framework that is bringing to the table, which means there can be multiple eclipse chains. But a question that comes to mind is like, well, I thought if we're using the Solana Virtual Machine, I thought we just needed one execution environment. So I want to ask you about that. And then also there's a roll up as a service component of Eclipse, the company. And so that is another vertical that I want to talk about. And then I want to get to ultimately, Neil, the big question of who wins here? Who wins? We have four different projects in various loose competition, cooperation with each other. I think everyone kind of wants to know the punchline.

It's like, all right, who, even though we are definitely growing the pie, somebody's taking a larger piece. And so I want to unpack that conversation as well. But first, I'm going to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Metamask portfolio is your one-stop shop to manage your crypto assets and to tap into defy all in one place. And the most important part of that experience, buying crypto, obviously, MetaMasque portfolio's buy feature enables you to purchase crypto easily without going through centralized exchanges. Designed with you in mind, you can fund your wallet directly in just a few clicks with convenience and simplicity. What happens when you press the buy button, rather than being

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most trusted team in Defyte. Download the Uniswap wallet today on iOS. There is a link in the show notes. And we're back. And now we're going to open up the topic of the eclipse super chain. Should I call it super chain, Neil, or is there a different word that you have for this? I almost feel like it's an anti-super chain because super chains that imply many chains that are all being connected, whereas I feel like it should all be on this one.

chain. Okay. So the Eclipse Mainnet that launched today is, is the chain that you're saying, well, we don't need more of these things. Just use this one. Yeah, there are cases where it makes sense to have your own chain. And it comes down to the things like ownership, if you want to be able to fork and upgraded at your free will.

But in general, most applications, I feel pretty much belong on a shared chain. And that just arose from the fact that we've deployed a lot of the map, specific chains. We actually got to see those unit economics firsthand. We were the ones paying the cost. And we were just like, this doesn't seem to make sense, given the value of the transactions that are being run on the chain. So I'm confused here. So is Eclipse going to be just one chain?

Or like a network of chains? It's our, the Eclipse team is only going to own this one chain as of now. Okay. But we do have a roll up framework that anyone can deploy. You can deploy your own instance of it. And it's built in such a way that it's easy to do that and even swap out the modules. And we've actually dog fooded it with a few folks as well. Why would you build a framework then?

if yeah so it's because we didn't anticipate that it would be so scalable we thought that it was going to be like a hundred chains or something initially or a thousand of chains and and honestly just through our experience we realized it wasn't needed and it also just wasn't practical okay so the idea here is that there's the eclipse the eclipse maxi take maybe that we're going to get some eclipse tribes now is that there will be like 95 plus of economic activity on the eclipse networks on this one dominant main net chain. And then there will be a splattering of app-specific eclipse chains that just want to have their own home base, not unlike the MakerDAO Roon conversation that got started not too long ago about Maker-Dow forking Solana to have its own

app-specific chain. Things like this. They could just use this. Rune could just use this framework. Well, I think Rune and I think they wanted to make their own layer one specifically, but for people that don't want to go that far and still want to have some tie to Ethereum, yet still use a salon of code base, they could use Eclipse. Is this right, Neil? So we are chatting with Maker, to be fair. There's a way to get that. But we don't have any, you know, Ruin, I'm sure already has a pretty thought through vision

of what he wants to do. But, but yeah, I think that's the right way to thinking about it. And in my opinion, it's just that there aren't that many whales that could justify their own chain. I think base is a great example of the chain that makes sense. Base absolutely should have a chain. And we can see the results of that. They generated millions and revenue already. They haven't even been live for that long.

But how many coin bases really exist in the world? Right. Right. Yeah. So you think there'll be a small number of layer twos then? Not, you know, hundreds of thousands of roll-ups out there and layer two's out there? I think we need more scalable roll-ups. And if we have scalable roll-ups, then we don't need thousands or...

One time I saw someone say we're going to have millions of roll-ups. I was like, this is getting truly out of hand. That might have been me. I might have said that. One reason why I don't like it is just aesthetic reasons. I just think it looks very ugly to have a bunch of these, like, tiny little chains. And then you have to have shared sequencers and you have to like prove the bridging, the liquidity is everywhere.

You have DOS starting a chain. Someone posted a tweet of their Metamass wall live. And it was like 40 chains. And they're like, can Metamast please have to wait for me to search chains? And like this just shouldn't be an issue. It seems like an anti-pattern. And just to be clear on. What's shipped today?

So what shipped today on Maynet? Because you mentioned Celestia isn't even on Mainnet. So obviously, you're not doing the DA with Celestia right now. So what's shipped today on Eclipse? And what can people go do? So right now it's, so right now what's live is actually the TestNet and the Mainet and the Mainet and architecture is announced. So that's going to be shipping later this. Yeah, exactly.

Got it. So TestNet now. And then when is when MayNet? When Maynet? I don't want to say it publicly yet. So it's, but you can, yeah, we can. Weeks, not months? It's on the order of, yeah, it's on the order of weeks.

Yeah. Okay. So we flubbed up the intro. Sorry for bankless listeners. I feel right to buy that. Almost a hold your breath amount of time. Okay. So, Neil, I want to get to the who really wins here conversation.

Four different protocols. I'll have components of their protocols being used, but not no one protocol has all of the protocol being used. So how do you think about like the winner and losers of these of these systems? So I think the most obvious benefit is to Ethereum, right, given that ether is being used to denominate everything and it's being used for critical security properties. I think value flow to Celestia is a pretty big win, especially given they're about to be main net. So having a big roll-up on there and having some value flowing in is going to be really valuable

for them. Sawana is the one that's really tricky because there are indirect benefits to broader VM adoption. That's true. There's also risks that are incurred because, of course, projects can move from Salana to the roll-up. You might have folks that maybe they would have been forced to use Salana before. Now they can bridge to this, via this trust-minimized bridge and stay on Ethereum and get a lot of the benefits. So that's definitely a question mark. They have that, you know, that's like there's like BCG growth share matrices.

There's like a question mark. It's like, we don't know how this is going to turn out. I think that's where I'd probably put my answer. for this kind of thing. One difference between Eclipse and Solana is that Solana is further down on the decentralization scale. And layer two is famously don't have to be decentralized in order to actually fulfill some of their vision.

That's one of the reasons why layer twos are layer twos is because of fraud proofs or trustless bridging, et cetera. You actually can be, have the operators of a chain be centralized because you are checked by Ethereum. So how does this dynamic between Eclipse and Solana change the game here? Because I would imagine Eclipse in terms of hardware nodes running the system, there's much, much fewer of them than with Solana. How does that change the numbers in economics and game here?

Yeah, that's right. There's thousands of validators for the Salana network. And so while I don't want to commit to specific numbers in terms of like what's the resulting dollar amount, it is correct. It is that the fixed cost of Eclipse is 4,000 times cheaper than Solana as an algorithm. one because there's there's only one you don't need four thousand validators so that that's true and I also hate like when people talk about roll-ups and decentralizing their sequencer because not that sounds like a bad thing it's just it's not an important conversation because what they

should be talking about is what are the security properties right today and that's much more important and if you get all the same security properties it doesn't matter if there's a component that's centralized I will say that like three sequencers like a handful of sequencers can make a ton of sense. But when people say decentralizing the sequencer, they're talking about like, yo, spread that all around the globe,

like smear that ice cream all over that, or cream cheese all over that bread. That's a weirdest metaphor I've ever used. But yeah, we only need like a small number of sequencers to preserve uptime and liveliness and still retain like the vast majority of execution and costs, right? And latency.

Yeah, exactly. And really the only impact is to liveliness because the risk is what if the sequencer just refuses to include your transaction. But what's good about roll-ups is that's exactly what the canonical bridge prevents, which is you can submit the transaction there directly. It doesn't matter if someone wants to censor you. So the downside there is that, of course, be submitted to Ethereum directly. It's going to be much more expensive.

So there's like a cost imposed on short-term liveness. Okay. So I want to make a statement here. And the Salon tribe might sort of hate this. but so I'm just absorbing this right now and I kind of feel like this is good for the SVM as a technology. The SVM is a huge dub. Yeah, this is a win for the SVM. And again, we're contingent on Eclipse being successful and all of these things, right?

But we know you're going to be doing major things and this is going to be very successful layer to. That's the contingency. A win for the SVM, but a loss for Solana. So everything that you're- A loss for Seoul, where Solana is for me kind of like Soul plus the SVM. not what Solana sole token holders care about, dude. They care about the same thing that ETH token holders do, which is like they want to propagate, they want their investment, they want sole number to go up. So sure, Solana as a concept has won just in the same way that,

you know, modular has won, but can I invest in modular coin? Do you know what I mean? Like, it seems to be a, because what you're just, what you guys were just talking about, which is like this decentralization that Solana has versus Eclipse. And they do have a much wider validator set, and they're much more decentralized than Eclipse. And of course, that's because Eclipse has outsourced its decentralization settlement consensus layer to Ethereum, right? And it doesn't have to pay those costs. So what one kind of group is holding up as sort of, this is an attribute, we're a bit more

decentralized. That's like a millstone because that's a massive cost of running the infrastructure, right? And this is why maybe your statement, Neil, of a modular, centric maximalist, is kind of coming true. This is what the modular bulls have sort of predicted is that the economics of running an execution layer as a layer two on top of something like Ethereum, far outstrip and far out pace what you can do independently

as an alternative kind of layer one execution layer. So it's really, I do very much see all of the different roll-ups and all of the different layer twos and clips included, it's execution layer against execution layer. That's really where the competition is in that world. And so my conclusion is that this is actually a win for the SVM, but potentially a loss for sole tokens and for Solana. And I know the Salana community may not like hearing that,

but wow, I don't know how else you interpret this. Can someone give me the counter to that? Or maybe not on this call. Maybe that's a follow-up. There's no question there. Yeah. Okay, cool. Just making sure I was going to get, I wasn't sure I should give commentary on that on the record. Do you want to give commentary on that? Have I said anything that's incorrect? I think that, well, I don't try to predict token price. That's the thing. In general, I don't even look at prices. I have like a ton of crypto. It's not about price. It's about value capture. Yeah. So, I mean, of course, like there isn't really any activity from this chain that translates to the Solana L1, right? It's like if you run a transaction or accepts, nothing happens on Solana as a result. So that that part, there's a part.

I think goes without say. But yeah, it depends on whether it's good or bad is the same as whether Maker-Dow's proposal is good or bad for Salonah, I think. Meaning that Maker-Dow is also proposing a separate chain and the Salon community seem to like that. So I think how are they received that? It should probably be how they treat the Olympics, is what I think.

Do you think that's going to happen? You think they're going to receive you with open arms here? The crypto tribes would love to reinterpret any news as positive for them. That's part of the game. That's part of the arena of crypto. Twitter. To be fair, totally is an angel investor in Eclipse. So he's very like grow the pie, I think, in his thinking. Neil, is there a BD person at Eclipse or are you guys all engineers right now? We have our chief business officer, Vijay, who is head of BD at Uniswap. He was head

at BD at DYDX. He has some great plans for bringing liquidity to Eclipse. And we're going to be supporting D5 protocols in a pretty big way. So that's going to be a big emphasis for this chain. So isn't one of like the biggest ways that Eclipse? Eclipse wins is to convince Solana apps and apps and consumers to migrate to Eclipse. I think there's a lot of reason for them to try out Eclipse. Similar to that point about EVM compatibility, like that go-to-market tactic, I think it's a little bit, I think it's a good initial tailwind, but in the long run, I really want to see new apps on Eclipse. Just like true innovation on the Ethereum side, especially in decentralized

physical infrastructure networks. I used to be a quant that said it all in the commodities group. So I do a ton of physical stuff. And in particular, like, all these energy-related projects, I think are really interesting. So I talk with those guys all the time. What's fascinating to me about this project, too, is a lot of people have said, oh, this Salana should just become a layer two on Ethereum, right? This is that.

It's been very clear that Salana is not going down that path, or at least not right now, not entertaining it. I mean, that seems pretty clear. And so they're not doing that. therefore someone else is. Like the white space will be filled by a market competitor, right? This is very Darwinistic, you know, evolutionary type social pressures where the space and the gap will be filled and you're doing that exact play.

Now, you have to start with a blank slate where you have no kind of network state, no apps, and you're building from the ground up. But it's basically that play. You're executing Solana as a layer two on top of Ethereum, and you're watching that experiment. play out. And that's kind of interesting. Yeah, I think that's true with markets in a really weird way, especially in crypto, where eigenlayers is another good example of that, where people are like, I want to do more stuff with my

eth that isn't necessarily enforceable on chain. And I don't want to change the Ethereum core code. So that eigenlayer pops up. Like you can restake your eth and we can have additional slashing conditions. I think that kind of like void filling happens in the Ethereum landscape more than anywhere else. So no token. planned or like what ever using eth for gas like what's the story here as of now the eclipse of main that has no token doing this all without a token and of course I guess costs are low right you don't have validators to pay in the form of token issuance because you're just paying a little bit for Celesteia block space and Ethereum block space then yeah that's what's

cool it's like a small business in the sense that like it's a small like it maybe I phrase that we're in the sense that it's just like profitable from day one. Every transaction pays for itself, unlike a layer one where they typically have to inflate the hell out of their token. That's just not how roll-ups work. So it's a big advantage. I feel like now we're at a different stage of the cycle than we were in 2021 and 2022, which is now we have real cheap block space and it is plentiful.

This is our high bandwidth moment. And so maybe a question for you of like, all right, so who's going to buy all this block space that we've now produced? I mean, where are the apps? What are they going to be? Is there anything that you see there? Or is this going to take some like months and years to really play out to build out these ecosystems? I think definitely on the order of months. I think on day one, it'll be stuff that we've already seen in crypto, just given that new apps need that. It's like a chicken egg problem where until the highly scalable infrastructure existed, I don't think there was any way for someone to build

like truly game-changing apps in the EVM world up until now. Like I think frantic has been highly constrained by the fact that the fees are actually getting quite high now. There's a lot of reasons why even the fact that it's, I mean, I can talk about like more details on it. But I think even like the AMM construction, for example, is kind of an artifact of a low throughput blockchain because if you truly had things your way, you'd probably start by trying to build an order book.

And people did try out at the area. It just never worked. So yeah, I think that this is going to enable a lot of new stuff that, people can start experimenting with. Neil, you said earlier, and maybe we'll come full circle this, eclipse in your mind isn't quite a layer two, isn't quite a roll-up. You had some ideas on, you know, the best term or the best way to describe this. So how would you describe it?

What kind of term should we use for this new platypus type of creature that has just emerged? So basically, I want to rename terms where I think if the word roll-up, maybe it should even be eliminated. But I know that that's too confusing and people have been using it for a while, but it's because it's too broad of a category. Like people call everything a roll-up. An L-2 should maybe even be reserved to in line with what Donkrod was saying, just something that is maximally using Ethereum for everything it can.

So ideally it's using Ethereum for DA, has a bridge there, ether for gas. That's an ethel-2. And then everything else, like for example, if you put your DA off-chain and you're using a ZK proof for the entire transaction chain, then that's a validity. If you're using off-chain DA for like, basically I want to like give new terms to each specific construction, but that might just be overly confusing for your average layperson.

So I haven't come up with a term for what a clip should be called per se, but I do have like some issues with existing terminology. I feel like it's so much easier to be a critic. So that's why I have issues with existing terminology, but I don't want to commit to. So I would call you guys an Ethereum layer to Vali. with the SVM as its execution. That seems reasonable. I think that that's like it's like it captures all the important properties.

Yeah. It's also a helpful. Yeah. But yeah, that's not a, you know, that's not memeable. We'll call it eclipse for now. All right. That's cool. Neil, I have learned a lot.

This is very, very exciting. Can you give us like kind of the short term roadmap? I know Maynett launch date weeks or months, maybe something like this. But also what else? on the horizon that people might be excited about. Yeah, so Maynard on the Order of Weeks, this upcoming quarter, we're going to bring so this is early next year, we're bringing IBC compatibility. So this is actually something at Salana Foundation gave us a grant for.

So we're just like wrapping up and productionizing that work. And what that'll mean is that all these cosmos chains who historically wanted to get access to the Salon ecosystem. Actually, what's weird about a clip, and maybe this is just like a fact about wallups in general is the bridging is the most important part. So historically, Salada just hasn't had very good bridges, such as Layer Zero, they announced their test net deployment on Salada, but the main net deployment has been repeatedly delayed.

And that's because the execution model of Solana has all these small little details. But basically what I'm saying is that we're going to be interoperable with more chains. That's something that's coming up on the horizon. And the Salana Foundation gave you a grant to do this. Yeah, for the IBC work. Yep. Well, interesting. Like full credit to Anatoly, who's maybe an investor here and also this,

the Salana Foundation for funding a grant because this has the potential, you know, to maybe cannibalize some of what they're doing. And it looks like they're, they're forging into that. So I certainly have to respect that. You know, as stated, Anatoly and others have always said, hey, we're just trying to propagate the SVM in this open source technology. And so some points there for Salana, maybe at the end. If we still have any Salana listeners left at the end of this conversation. Neil, last question for you, at least from me, and maybe David's got something too. We didn't open with this, and we usually do.

But I kind of feel compelled to ask it at the end. How did you get into crypto? This project just magically appeared on my radar kind of this week. And I don't know very much about, you know, now I know a lot more after doing this episode, but I don't know anything about you. So tell us about yourself. It's a bunch of facts that I try to hide,

but I was working in Trad V. So I was working at Set It All. And then around the time, I think March of last year I left. I was briefly building an EVM for Cosmos. That was actually my first thing that I was building in crypto. And then Tara famously depagged. And all the TVL just like float out of Cosmos.

And then I was like, wow, like that seemed to be like the thing that was holding, like kind of propping Cosmos up to some degree at that time. So I had to reevaluate that project. I ended up scrapping it. And then I just spent a lot of time thinking about the economics of L1s versus rollops. And the Celastia team reached out. and they got me completely roll-up pill. I was chatting with some researchers in the Ethereum world.

And yeah, then that initial idea was just, right, now I want to make so on it into an Ethereum roll-up and just ran into all the issues that I think most people probably wouldn't anticipate from first principles. But that's effectively what happened. Well, thanks, Neil. What a story. Yeah, that's a great story.

I guess we'll close it at that. We appreciate time. Looking forward to what you're building here. And thank you for introducing us to the eclipse platypus today. It's an exciting new world of new chains that we can construct here. And I like what you're doing here. Thank you so much for having me. Got to end with some disclosures, of course.

We are long-term investors, not journalists. We don't do paid content. There's a link to all bankless disclosures in the show notes. Neither David nor myself are invest in this project. Of course, we are bullish generally on layer twos and ether the asset. 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. Extra thanks to Cracken, our preferred exchange for crypto in 2023. Whether your dollar cost averaging into crypto to prepare for the bull market or you're taking profits out of crypto, be sure to do it with Cracken. The newly designed Cracken Pro makes it super easy to do both your basic financial transactions while also taking your trading to the next level.

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Follow at SELOorg on Twitter and visit sello.org to show. shape the future of Ethereum. So thank you to all the sponsors that support bankless and all the podcast editors, newsletter writers, and operations managers who make the bankless organization the best that we can be. We truly appreciate your support. And for all the listeners out there who listen to the mountains of content that we turn out each week, especially this one right here. So let's go on.