Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Noble: Solving Crypto's Liquidity Problem, One Chain at a Time - Jelena Djuric

Episode Date: October 12, 2025

In this episode, Sebastien is joined by Jelena Djuric, co-founder of Noble, a generic asset issuance chain built for the Cosmos ecosystem. Jelena shares her journey into crypto, which began with an interest in political science, leading her to discover Bitcoin's potential. She describes the origins of Noble, created to solve a critical need within Cosmos: a native, fungible source of liquidity like USDC.Before Noble, assets were often bridged in fragmented ways, creating poor user experiences. Noble was designed as a simple, secure, and neutral "asset issuance hub," a purpose-built chain for natively issuing assets and distributing them throughout the Cosmos network via IBC.Jelena emphasizes that Noble is intentionally "boring," with a minimal feature set to reduce the attack surface. It operates with a proof-of-authority consensus model to meet the compliance needs of asset issuers like Circle. Jelena also discusses the importance of CCTP for moving USDC between Cosmos and other ecosystems, with Noble as the routing hub. Looking ahead, Jelena sees a future where Noble supports a diverse range of assets beyond stablecoins, including RWAs.Topics discussed in this episode: Introduction Jelena's background and entry into crypto Why fragmented liquidity is holding crypto back Noble's vision for unifying liquidity Why a "boring" chain is a more secure chain Noble's proof-of-authority model for issuer trust Bringing a single source of truth for USDC to the Interchain Using CCTP to connect liquidity across ecosystems Noble's business model The future of solving liquidity for RWAsLinks mentioned in this episode: Jelena Djuric, Co-Founder, Noble: https://x.com/jelena_noble Noble: https://x.com/noble_xyz Sponsors: Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at gnosis.io This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture.

Really, it's only now, I would say, that we've had proper scalable infrastructure, like, ready to take stable coins to the masses. Noble is neutral purpose-built infrastructure for the transmission and proliferation of these stable coins. I do believe and can anticipate that the launch of the app layer will be like a new era for Noble because, again, we've never actually had Defi on Noble itself, which is kind crazy and yet there's all of this traction. Is Cosmos finally dead? Yelena, I guess that's the question I want to ask you. Like, do you think? This episode is brought to you by NOSIS, building the open

internet one block at a time. NOSIS was founded in 2015 and it's grown from one of Ethereum's earliest projects into a powerful ecosystem for open user-owned finance. NOSIS is also the team behind products that had become core to my business and that are so many others like Safe and CowSwap. At the center is NOSIS chain. It's a low-fee-fee-lars. one with zero downtime in seven years and is secured by over 300,000 validators. It's the foundation for real world financial applications like NOSIS pay and circles. All this is governed by NOSISDAO, a community-run organization where anyone with a GNO token can vote on updates, fund new projects, and even run a validator from home.

So if you're building in Web3 or you're just curious about what financial freedom can look like, start exploring at NOSIS.io. Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people, driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Sebastian Quiccio, and I'm here with Yelena Jurek, who's the CEO at Noble. Noble is a cosmos chain that's purpose-built for native issuance of stable coins and RWAs. They are one of the key players in the USDC ecosystem. I believe they're probably fifth or six in issuance now.

You'll correct me on Yelana, but if I think I'm... check uscccccccccccccccccc issued on noble you also have your own usdablecoin usd an which we'll talk about but yeah how you how you doing how's how's everything going for you yeah no thanks so much for having me on said it's been great obviously it's stablecoin summer that is going into the fall i guess now that it's october 1st it's been great there's a lot of things going on obviously in the stablecoin space and i'm excited to talk about that and also some setting updates on the noble front. So thanks for having me. So like stable coin, you mentioned

stable coin summer and actually I think it's a very apt way to talk about it because the stable market is now surpassed $250 billion. It's up, I think something like 45% this year alone. There's much clearer US rules now. We have lots of announcements. Also, if you hear Paxos just announced their privacy focus stable coin. I also read that Circle is going to enable things like reversible transactions. Obviously we have like plasma that just launched there in Neobank. It seems like everyone is trying to get a piece of the stable pie coin coin pie. And, you know, a little bit reminds me of other hype cycles we have in this space like NFTs and Defi Summer and meme coins.

And, you know, if we look at those, a lot of that innovation and certainly the valuations have dropped off a lot. Why is stable coins different? Why should we treat stable coins differently? Should we treat stable coins differently? Will we still be at this level of hype and excitement in a year from now? Yeah. It's a really good question. So I think it's important to distinguish to your question, like, what is different about this time around?

I think inevitably, you know, there will be overhyped projects that maybe don't sustain themselves and don't last into functioning products and businesses. But despite that potentiality, there is something concrete kind of happening now, which is maybe different than previous hype cycles that we've had in crypto, you know, to your point, whether that's NFTs or meme coins or the like. And that reason is pretty simple. That's legislation, right? So we had obviously the passing of Genius a couple of months ago where it was signed into law by President Trump. We've had a very concerted effort by multiple interest groups, right, that actually want to see Genius operational and in full force. One part of that interest group, of course, is the crypto lobby, but it's also actually bigger than that, right? Basically, what Genius is, simply a revolution in payments, right? And so if you think about like the payments industry and you think about kind of what payments are and how payments kind of work today, it's pretty antiquated, right? And a lot of this payments infrastructure is running on legacy infrastructure that is pretty old and antiquated. And so what is genius? Genius basically set the standard,

a legal framework to issue stable coins as payment instruments, right? And obviously, you know, for crypto-native people such as ourselves, we've been very familiar with stablecoins for quite some time, you know. Some of us maybe, you know, do payroll in stable coins, get paid in stable coins, ourselves as employees. Myself, I've paid rent in stable coins in the past. You know, we're very familiar with these products, not to mention the trading defy use cases. But if you think about what genius is and the framework it establishes kind of on more

mainstream legacy level, it actually allows, first of all, like legacy payments businesses to like legally, let's say innovate and, you know, offer really interesting, you know, kind of innovative products that maybe are cheaper, more seamless, etc. But then it also allows crypto projects like Novel to kind of play a role within that. So yeah, as you said right now, it's about a $275 billion market. Citibank just, you know, they had a report that said that by 2030 will be at $1.6 trillion. They then actually up that prediction to $1.9 trillion by 2030. And I'm like, let's remember like five years ago or five and a half years ago, we were at half a billion. So, yeah, I mean, today, you know, today in the last year, we're up 50 percent. But basically, basically,

We have a much, much longer way to go. And that is in a large part due to genius and the appetite from the legacy mainstream world to basically bring payment into the 21st century. Yeah. I think one of the key insights in what you just said is that it enables, or what I take away from it is that it enables a new form of infrastructure for payment for payment issues issuers for payment systems issuers. And in many ways, that's, I think, what we've kind of wanted blockchains to be. You know, there's this idea that sort of been circling for a long time now is like that we want blockchains and Defi to be the rails of the financial system. And I feel like stablecoins may be the catalyst that actually makes that finally the case, right? It sort of makes it possible.

And so like this sort of instance. institutional sentiment has really flipped. I think CoinDest had this figure that 83% of investors are now planning more crypto exposure. Stable coins, I think, are a big part of that because there's yield. You know, a lot of stable coins are sort of promising yield. How do you look at that? And, you know, how should investors institutional or even retail sort of be assessing the different

yield sources, right? Because 4.5% over here or 10% over here may not be, you know, not all yield is created equal. And I think people need to be more familiar and sort of aware of that. How do you look at that? Yeah. Well, well, okay. So I mean, first of all, like, let me just back it up for a second. So basically, you know, to your point, obviously, like the promise of blockchain rails was, of course, you know, a lot of the kind of use cases and kind of ideals was around pay. It was, you know, peer-to-peer payment systems. Obviously, this idea of financial disintermediation, even in the original Bitcoin white paper, you had this vision for Bitcoin as a payments mechanism.

Of course, that is now not the case. Bitcoin is not used as, you know, most often in the majority of cases, is not used as a payment instrument. It's obviously a speculative asset that is traded and, you know, at this point quite commoditized. So on the one hand, like, it did take us actually quite some time to. get to this point where we actually do have the infrastructure and we actually have stable points, again, as a product that are instruments that will not only have, you know, very sound legislation kind of governing their utility, but we also have the infrastructure and the actual, again, blockchain rails kind of ready and able to transmit and proliferate these stable coins

across, you know, a wide variety of use cases and distribution channels. And so I will just emphasize like before we talk about like yield and stable coins that really it's only now I would say that we've had again like proper scalable infrastructure like ready to take stable coins to the masses and I would also like kind of love to talk about why that is and how far we've come and again like what is this infrastructure that we're talking about that is suited for us bringing stable coins to mainstream but yeah to your question around yield I mean it's interesting right So first of all, when we talk about yield as released as staple coins, we're typically talking about yield that is generated from short-term treasury bills.

Obviously, that is the mechanism that I would call classic traditional staple coins are collateralized by. And so obviously within genius, there is very clear distinctions around how that yield is passed on. So kind of out of the box, it's actually not completely. compliant to pass on that yield sort of passively, right? So you have to basically have a mechanism where that yield is claimed or where distribution kind of partners or entities like a coinbase can actually take that USDC and pass on the yield by having, you know, people, you know, hold that USC on the coin base platform. So there is a bit of nuance and like legally how stable coins, you know, are, you know,

able to pass on yield. And another big part of this question, of course, is the Clarity Act. And basically that is more governing like around Defi and just generally kind of, you know, crypto tokens that are perhaps more speculative. But that will also kind of have some guidelines on again, like passing of yield and how that's kind of compliant. And basically for, for noble and this is like one of the principles that we have held

very dear to our heart since the beginning. is noble is neutral purpose-built infrastructure for the transmission and proliferation of the stable coins. So Noble itself is a protocol. Okay. Noble itself is a layer one. We, of course, are not ourselves a stablecoin issuer. You kind of mentioned in the intro that we have Noble Dollar. We're, of course, working with M0 on that product.

M-Zero is a stable coin issuance protocol, which, works with a network of off-chain mentors and issuers. Recently, Stripe or Bridge was announced as one of their partners. But basically, Noble is distinct from the circles or the stripes of the world in the sense that we are crypto infrastructure, again, for the transmission of these table coins. So we like to work with wide variety, diverse set of issuers. And so, yeah, to your question around, I guess, like, yield and like how this will kind of play out. I was. say like the issuers themselves are kind of up the forefront of these discussions like again when it comes to noble we are crypto native obviously defy will continue to exist but as an issuer that

kind of consideration or on how you pass on the yield if at all to end users is basically within their purview right so basically you're going to have a situation where obviously you know sort like what currently exists which will probably what be the reality kind of after genius is operationalized but you'll have a situation where the issuer themselves, like a circle, can't by default pass on that yield. But the distribution partner, like a Coinbase, like an AVE, like a finance, really any entity, whether it's an exchange or even a defy protocol, can, of course, you know, pass on yield in ways that is like safe and, you know, make sense. So anyways, we can we can chat a little bit more about that and how kind of Noble thinks about it. with composable yield as it was to Noble Dollar. But basically the rules are just like now being established.

And there's no one path yet because the rules of the road have yet to be written by the OCC in the US as it relates to things like passing on yield. Well, I'm glad you brought up composable yield because I think it's a perfect segue into the next question I wanted to ask you, which is currently, I think most of the yield that these, you know, this kind of floor that we see around like four, four or five percent, you know, comes from treasuries. You mentioned short term and long term treasuries and having sort of a mix there. Some stable coins, you know, recently we had cap on. We also had FX protocol. Of course, like these are these are stable coin issuers, like different from, from Noble, but they're generating yield. in different ways. Like FX has a stability pool that generates yield basically from, you know, deposits in its protocol. You know, I feel like probably, you know, we can keep juicing these yields for some time, but they'll probably dry up. Like the native defy yields will start drying up unless new sources of yields start coming on chain actual cash flows from off-chain businesses. So, yeah, how do you think about sort of like the bringing more yield on chain? and how are you guys integrated then to this,

this, so your yield strategy and composable yield moving forward? Yeah, I mean, composable yield is actually quite simple, and we don't like to complicate things as it relates to noble dollar itself, like the core product. Obviously, there's like, you know, kind of funky things that could be built on top of that. But as it relates to noble dollar itself, composable yield basically is as follows. So you have USDN, which is actually over collateralized, 103%,

by short-term treasury bills. Of course, that collateral pool is, again, managed and governed by the M-Zero protocol. But our implementation of USDAN takes that yield component and basically makes it programmable and programmatic at the same time. So we tell distribution partners or we encourage distribution partners like a Dex, a payments app, really can be off-chain distribution, on-chain distribution. We really don't distinguish. We basically say take that yield accumulation that is kind of happening in real-time on a per block basis, and you can program it and direct it to any source or any destination that kind of fits your use case. So you could obviously take that yield revenue and you can distribute it to validators.

You could do a buy-and-burn of your token. You could keep it as revenue. And basically Noble's thesis, again, is on-chain distribution. It's making sure that the Noble Protocol can service app builders and make sure that there is proper incentives and, like, safety and, like, liability around that distribution of the underlying T-bill yield. And we've had some pretty good success. So a few months ago, we ran a points campaign where we wanted to kind of demonstrate, like,

this utility of composable yield. yield, right? And so we basically said, okay, so people can participate in this points campaign. They can get, you know, points, noble points by depositing their noble dollar into a points vault. But by doing so, you actually forfeit or give up the T bill yield that you would otherwise get by holding the double dollar. And what happened to that T bill yield, that actually got distributed to a second vault, which is a boosted field vault. And basically we sold people. you can also just, you know, deposit your USDN into this boosted yield vault where you don't get points, but you get all of the yield that the people and the points vault gave up.

And that was generating about 15 to 20 percent yield. And that ran for about four or five months. And basically, you know, why we did that and like a lot of people were kind of asking, well, you know, how is that 15 percent yield generated? Like, is there something like happening on the back end like like like lending or something funky in that way and the answer was no like it's literally fundamentally uh treasury bill yield that just got redistributed in a way uh that was quite simple if you think about it um where it was basically all of the people that gave it up it just got redirected to this other uh group of

of holders and the reason we were able to do 15 you know to 20 percent consistently was because obviously overwhelmingly the distribution or the ratio of deposits was within the points vault. And so basically, you know, on the one hand, we wanted to show, you know, Nobel Dollar. Look, it's like a thing that exists. It's very powerful. And of course, the composable yield is this like kind of interesting new mechanism where you can start implementing it in, you know, a wide variety of ways. And you could gamify it and you could create incentives around that.

And again, it's all possible because the token itself has been designed and engineered to allow for that composability of that yield component. Makes sense. And so the USDAN campaign, how successful was it? Yeah, it was quite successful. We reached about $125 million at an all-time high, all organic demand across 30,000 unique wallets. And so, you know, it was very, very great to see that kind of organic, you know, demand kind of popping up. And yeah. I want to talk about Cosmos a little bit. I mean, so Noble is a Cosmos app chain. And, you know, launched at a time, I think, when Cosmos was struggling from the downfall of U.S.T.

quite some time afterwards. But I think, like, you know, I think U.S.T and the collapse of Luna. I think had a pretty significant impact on the cosmos ecosystem overall. You know, if you look at some of the all-time highs there and like the, the FDVs of most of the chains that were around in 2020, 2020, 2021, 2022, a lot of liquidity got, you know, sort of removed out of the ecosystem in one moment. I think when Noble came online, a lot of people were expecting lots of U.S.D. liquidity to come into cosmos. And some has, right? I mean, 350 million or some change, right, is nothing to sneeze at. DYDX also coming to the ecosystem at the same time, I think, was very much anticipated and people saw that as a positive sign.

And I think the abjane thesis generally, and so the sovereign abjian thesis continues to stand up. And people across the ecosystem, across crypto, I think still believe that's the case. but the Cosmos ecosystem as a Defy ecosystem has not really done very well in the last two, two, three years. Despite all of this, right, despite Noble coming there, despite having native U.S.C. Despite, you know, lots of chains of using Cosmos tech, what's happening? Why do you think that is, is Cosmos finally dead, Yelena? I guess that's the question I want to ask you.

It's like, do you think God? No, it's not dead. Yeah, I mean, I think it's kind of a misnomer of a question. question because basically if you look at where Cosmos is, it's fundamentally the stack, right? It's Tenderman, it's Coma BFT, it's the SDK, it's Cosm wasam, it's IBC. And if you look at all metrics across those like levels of the stack, it's actually quite strong. What's not strong to your point is Cosmos native token performances. So if you like look at a chart or coin market cap and you kind of look at, you know, a token that is like an IBC token that like launches like

Unfortunately, there isn't as much, you know, retail kind of demand for those tokens. It's, you know, partially why Noble, of course, is launching this L2 on EVM, which is the Noble app layer and why the Nobel token will be an Ethereum token, not a Cosmos token. But basically, as it relates to like the stack itself and it relates to adoption, I mean, again, by all accounts, it is the most performant stack to build an app chain, right? And whether you use IBC or not, I think also kind of dictates whether you're kind of considered to be like Cosmos. So like Noble, for example, right? We, of course, have IBC out of the box.

We, you know, a lot of like volume, of course, liquidity routing is is via IBC. But we also have CCTV circles bridge. We also have wormhole. We also have hyperlain support, you know, probably will have other bridges supported by, you know, through Noble. And so, you know, I think that a lot of the times, you know, when you kind of look at what happened to Terra, like, you know, how much of Terra's success was because they were Cosmos or because they had a great product. I would argue they had a great product for its time. Obviously, that was not sustainable. Obviously, UST was fundamentally unsound. But, you know, Anchor and what they, you know, did with the Terra Protocol was obviously, you know, very valuable in some level. And that's why you had UST. at a $40 billion market cap and you know you had you know all of this like like you know liquidity mining of UST and you had these like crazy like APYs and anyways um you also had like a lot of like like really great defy on on Terra and so basically yeah Tara was Cosmos and it was Cosmos because

it's the best way to build an app chain but they also just had like a good product story and good use like a like a really you know bullish community and so I think again like it's not to say that that can't happen again, right? Like, it's all about the product. It's all about the, you know, like what you're actually building. Who's a for? Is it useful? Does it work?

Is it broken? Is there a good U.S. All of these things. And so I think when you look at like what's happened since U.S.T. collapsed, obviously there was like a really serious bear market. You know, you had FTCX. You had Celsius bankruptcy. You had many things happen.

And then what happened after that was somewhat of a global market that was started basically within the Salana ecosystem. Why? Product. What was the product? Meme coins. And so, again, like Cosmos showed you could build really performant app chain infrastructure for DFI for stable coins for trading for all sorts of things. Solana showed that you could get incredible mine share and retail adoption of meme coins. And of course, there is like some performance reason for that because of the way that

Solana works. But basically, it's to say that if you look at any major L1, L2 ecosystem, typically it's like power law distribution of like where the activity and liquidity is and it's usually concentrated among a handful of products and applications. So like even salonah, right? Like yes, pumped off on like kind of kicked off the trend. You had bonk. You had obviously, you know, then there's like things like Gito. But like overwhelmingly, a lot of that activity and liquidity and mine share was around pump dauphin. And, you know, you look at, you know, things like. you know, hyperliquid overwhelmingly now, that's kind of maintaining a lot of mine share. And so

basically, you know, I would say that on the one hand, Cosmos, of course, can never be dead because you have the stack, which will continue to be like the best stack. Like, I mean, even talk about like stable coin chains. Like Circle, of course, is building their stable coin layer one called arc. And that uses comment BFT for consensus. You know, you. you have obviously Noble, which, of course, leverages some parts of the Cosmos stack, and of course has this like separate execution layer around the EVN. But yeah, I think there's definitely no logical way you could see that Cosmos is dead. Yeah, that's really great.

I think it kind of aligns with how I've seen and talked about Cosmos over the years and that the analogy I often use is none of the nerds, that were fighting over the right distribution of Linux to use back in the 90s got rich because Apple devices and every Android device uses a Linux kind of like core kernel. The nerds will come up and tell me that what I said is inaccurate. But basically that most devices nowadays use Linux infrastructure. And I think Cosmos is kind of similar, right? It is really the best stack to build sovereign app chain infrastructure,

just that, you know, unfortunately there isn't a mechanism by which, which atom holders get rich or so Cosmos token holders get rich because your circle built, circle builds their their app chain using common pfd. And I think to some extent, Ethereum does suffer a little bit from a similar fate with the rollup roadmap where value from all these rollups doesn't necessarily accrue to Ethereum. And, but, you know, the EVM is the best way to, you know, write smart contracts and right applications on blockchains that has the most amount of developers and etc. So I think a lot of stacks are kind of reeling with the same sorts of problems of value capture.

And I don't know what the way around us. You know, do we have licenses where those who use the stack for commercial purposes need to pay some fee or some licensing fee back to the token holders? I mean, it seems very difficult to manage. So I don't know what the solution is here. Maybe the solution is just, I mean, maybe there isn't a solution and just people who have to accept that just because someone's using your stack doesn't mean that you're, or someone's using the stack that, you know, that, that, uh, that you invested in some other token, uh, doesn't mean that you're necessarily going to benefit from that.

Well, I'll give you like an analogy here. Just because I have an app in the Apple App Store doesn't mean my app will be successful. Um, I think that stands up very well, yeah. So just because I have quote unquote distribution through the app store doesn't mean it's going to be in the top 20 used apps because it has to ultimately be a good app. So I think like this idea that just because you're building something on salonette means, oh, all of a sudden it's like the next pumped off fun. Like it doesn't make any sense, right? Just because I'm building, you know, on Ethereum means I'm going to now get. all of the liquidity of Ethereum, defy, like, that doesn't make any sense. So, yeah, I mean, I think that the same goes for Cosmos.

I think the difference maybe is because, like, from a narrative perspective, the app chain thesis has been focused on apps, right? And so we understand, like, apps is where the value accrues. And if you don't have a good app, then you won't get value. And neither will perhaps that value trickle out to other app chains. within that same ecosystem. And so I think like with Terra, obviously, we had a very successful app, right? Very successful app chain for its time.

And then of course, it just destroy itself. But what did that show? It showed that value can accrue to the app layer. It could accrue to the app chain. It could accrue to the token holders. And, you know, you could argue, oh, well, that's why, you know, other Cosmos app teams did well. I think that's a bit of a rewriting of history. Like, it was also just generally a bull market.

And many applications did well, not just in Cosmos, but also an Ethereum. But basically, if, like, your only source of, like, demand for your token or your app is because, like, your neighbor is doing a good job, like, that's not a sustainable moat. And so basically, you have to kind of think about, okay, well, how will distribution happen in the future? Where will demand come from? What is the product? Is it sustainable? Is there a moat? is it easy to use? Is it differentiated? So, you know, basically I think crypto people like have to

build real businesses and I think that's a good thing. And, you know, I think Cosmos is still, the stack itself is still a very solid stack. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think all that makes sense and it bears repeating and it bears reminding ourselves and folks in the ecosystem altogether, you know, all that's Cosmos people. So I, I mean, I think all that's, I agree. So, I think all that. I mean, I think I think the last time we spoke when you were on the interop was quite a while ago. And there was some, you were talking at that time about having an UVM on Noble. How has that, yeah, can you sort of share the latest on that? Yeah.

So this is something we're working towards and really excited about. So we're going to be launching something called Noble App Layer. We'll probably be branding it something different. but for now we're calling it the Noble App layer. And basically the Noble App layer is an EVM L2 using Celestia for data availability. You know, kind of speaking of Cosmo, speaking of the stack, there's quite a, you know, a few reasons why we decided to build the EVM component as an L2 versus adding it on top of the Noble L1, which of course is the Cosmosel 1, which is currently, of course, in production and, you know, quite, you know, significant in terms of volume and route. and adoption. And basically the reasons kind of are as follows. One, you know, there is a lot of exciting innovation taking place, like in the Ethereum world as it relates to performance.

You know, Celestia, I think, is obviously like a huge part of, you know, what makes, I guess, like Ethereum more delightful to build on top of kind of given their, you know, data availability innovations. And so, you know, that's one part of it. We wanted to, you know, also make sure that we were exposed to the EVM ecosystem. And just, you know, historically, EVM on Cosmos has been challenging to say the least. And so, you know, we figured, first of all, there was a huge product need for smart contracts and programmability, you know, for Noble. And adding an EVM layer on top of Noble was not necessarily the best engineering decision. And so we figured let's deploy basically an L2 on top of Noble. That would be validated and secured by the Noble layer one, but which could act as a

distinct execution layer for... Sorry to interrupt here, but even with the Cosmos sort of EDM stack, yeah, curious why you chose to do an L2 rather than use that stack, which has the EVM kind of built send to it. Well, so the EVM is actually not super well maintained, right? If you kind of look at like how the EVM kind of software has developed over time, you have like EVMOS, now you have other kind of players attempting to maintain that. But I mean, I'm sure you understand like EVM is as a, as a software, you know, it needs to be maintained to make sure that it's like secure and that there's like, you know, de-risking from like a bug's perspective. And so basically we felt a lot more comfortable in the maintenance and the, you know, software of EVM proper kind of on, you know, as it relates to

Ethereum. So that was, you know, very much like a concern around, again, like stability, security, making sure we're always properly following major releases and that the software that we use is well maintained. And so it just made sense to, again, build this EVM app layer basically as an L2 using Celestea for DA. And then again, performance, right? Like our EVM app layer, you know, I think like yesterday, we were doing some benchmark testing and it's like 100 millisecond block times, right? Super fast. That's faster than Noble Core. Right? Noble Core is like 1.2 seconds, which is fast, but it's not call it fast like the app layer, which can support, you know, all sorts of things that core can't support from like an execution perspective.

And so, you know, that was an obvious decision for us. Again, we love working with the Celestia team. We think the, you know, the kind of software that is maintained, again, is very solid. And it just kind of made sense for us. Also, again, like talking about like the power of like the Cosmos stack. Like, you know, it, not that this was like trivial work. It was definitely a lot of hard work. But there is also a world where, of course, Noble Corps validates and secures the L2.

And that's also was a big part of the discussion. Like, can we have a single sequencer L2 running on Celestia DA secure by the noble validator set in a very secure manner? The answer was yes. And so we're very excited to be basically championing that model. I did a long tweet thread on kind of what makes this model perhaps different than like other kind of roll-up designs within the Ethereum space, which maybe we can link them in the notes. But basically a lot of what we've done with the Noble Corps validating and securing the L2 is very similar to kind of like the native roll-up vision that I believe Italic and others put forward. And yeah, we think it's pretty interesting. I mean, of course, it's different where the noble core is a proof of authority chain, right?

So we don't have like a proof of stake kind of economic security model with like, you know, a bunch of token stakes. But we actually think that the proof authority model works very well for our use cases, which are stable point centric. So anyways, it's a lot of different decision making factors that kind of led us to where we are today. But I think that kind of speaks to like our approach and our philosophy, which is. which is like let's be very methodical, let's be very considerate around the architecture. Let's not rush things just because everyone else is doing it one way. We want to make sure that the way we do it fits our use case and fits our principles. And basically I do believe and can anticipate that the launch of the app layer will be like a new era for Noble.

Because again, we've never actually had defy on Noble itself, which is kind of crazy. And yet there's all of this traction. So, yeah, we'll see what happens. And can you talk a bit about the role of the Noble token in this new L2 and this DFI ecosystem that you want to build? Yeah, definitely. And we'll have some really exciting announcements actually on the Noble token very, very soon. But at a high level, we're thinking of the Nobel token in like two ways.

So one, it will be the base fee token for the app layer. Basically, users can still pay fees in stable coins as they currently do on court, but there'll be a mechanism where that fee, those fees are swapped into Noble token kind of on the back end and there's like a kind of a pay master's like account system around the kind of fee, fee mechanism for the app player, which again is Noble token under the hood. So again, assuming there's a lot of activity and users and, you know, products on Noble app player that are well adopted, that will be positive for the Noble token and then the other piece is actually governance. So we are keeping the proof of authority

model for validation. So there will not most likely be staking, but there will be governance. What does that mean? Similar to, you know, kind of other models where basically you could use the like the governance token to have certain incentives or have certain auctions. for, let's say, you know, deploying liquidity into certain pools, you know, what we call like bribes in the curve model, where you have like a V, in this case a V noble token. That's all kind of on the roadmap. And we actually think, again, Defi is at this point battle tested and we have some pretty interesting applications kind of in the works.

And if you can layer in a noble token on top of that, where you get the community kind of excited and incentivized and motivated to kind of govern those various applications. I think there could be some interesting, interesting things. Where do you expect stable coins to be in three to five years and what will be Noble's role in that ecosystem? Yeah. Honestly, I think it's just the beginning. Obviously, we have all of plethora of purpose-built stable coin chains launching, which I think is ultimately positive. One of the ways that I like to think about differentiation among those app chains and, you know, perhaps nobles kind of role within that differentiation is basically as follows, right? The TAM for stable coins, for save coin payments is massive, right? Like we mentioned earlier,

this kind of $1.9 trillion figure from city. I've seen, you know, I've seen predictions as $4 trillion from financial institutions. But if that is to be the case, you're going to have specialization within the payments landscape that basically leverages certain stable coin infrastructure, right? So for Noble, if we think about Noble's app layer, if you think about Noble core and performance and stability there, I do see Noble playing a significant role in this future payments kind of revolution around stable coins, whether that is more on the B to C side, you know, is something we can kind of anticipate, but we've had some pretty exciting conversations with, you know, legacy traditional players kind of coming into the space, looking at the space and saying, basically, we have a need to transform our payments infrastructure. Let's think about how kind of Noble and, again, layer ones kind of fit into that landscape. So Noble will continue to always exist as this kind of router of activity, as a origin chain for the minting, for the redemption of these stable coins. because of our performance, because of our battle-tested infrastructure.

And basically, we want to see Noble and the app player do a lot of stuff on the consumer-facing side. So obviously, it's early days. But again, it's exciting days. And there's a lot more to come. Great. Well, you know, thanks for coming on the show. It's been great chatting with you getting an update on Noble and also getting a glimpse of the future. So excited for Noble and the things ahead.

Amazing. Thank you, Seth.