Unchained - Can dYdX Become a Decentralized BitMEX? How It Is Scaling With StarkWare - Ep.218

Episode Date: March 9, 2021

Antonio Juliano, founder of the decentralized exchange dYdX, and Eli Ben-Sasson, cofounder of StarkWare, discuss the recent launch of dYdX on Ethereum layer 2 using StarkWare’s scaling technology. In this episode, they cover: what cross-margin perpetual trading is and why dYdX chose StarkWare to be its scaling partner (1:13) ZK rollups and how they contrast with optimistic rollups (8:49) how many transactions per second StarkWare can handle through its layer 2 solution (16:57) lessons learned and critical takeaways from their six months spent working together (20:15) the similarities between Ethereum and StarkNet (26:07) why Antonio believes that scalability is more important than composability (27:30) the benefits of decentralized exchanges and how dYdX fits into the dex marketplace (31:54) why dYdX chose Chainlink as its oracle provider, and how it got oracle prices onto layer 2, which previously had none (38:11) why Cairo, StarkWare’s Turing-complete programming language and platform, can be the “one verifier to rule them all” (42:10) what it was like for StarkWare to compete in the Great Reddit Scaling Bake-Off (45:41) whether or not DeFi could handle a GameStop/Robinhood situation (48:56) fair launch tokens versus VC tokens (54:12) the likelihood of dYdX and StarkWare each creating a token (58:19) upcoming developments and projects for both companies (1:02:14)   Thank you to our sponsors!  Crypto.com: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/unchainedcardearnfeb2021  Download the Crypto.com app here: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/laurashinpodcasttesla   Square: https://square.com/go/unchained   Episode Links: Antonio Juliano Twitter: https://twitter.com/AntonioMJuliano  Eli Ben-Sasson Twitter: https://twitter.com/EliBenSasson  dYdX Twitter: https://twitter.com/dydxprotocol Website: https://dydx.exchange/  Exchange: https://alpha.dydx.exchange/trade/BTC-USD  Reading Material Recent funding: https://www.coindesk.com/big-guns-back-10m-investment-in-defis-dydx  2020 in review: https://dydx.exchange/2020.pdf  Decrypt profile: https://decrypt.co/resources/dydx-ethereum-margin-trading-platform-explained-learn  Medium post: https://medium.com/dydxderivatives/introducing-dydx-2d0f0f326fd StarkWare Twitter: https://twitter.com/StarkWareLtd  Website: https://starkware.co/  Reading Material: ZK roll-up explainer: https://medium.com/starkware/on-the-road-to-starknet-a-permissionless-stark-powered-l2-zk-rollup-83be53640880  Understanding Cairo: https://medium.com/starkware/hello-cairo-3cb43b13b209  Funding: https://www.coindesk.com/paradigm-leads-30-million-funding-for-crypto-privacy-startup-starkware dYdX and StarkWare Relationship Original Twitter announcement (2020):  https://twitter.com/dydxprotocol/status/1295791012552597507?s=20  The Block’s original coverage:  https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/75209/dex-dydx-starkware-layer-2  Layer 2 is live announcement:  https://twitter.com/dydxprotocol/status/1364591430447091719  Blog post on why dYdX is moving to Layer 2 (2021):  https://dydx.exchange/blog/alpha  CoinDesk’s coverage:  https://www.coindesk.com/defi-tech-cefi-speed-dydx-touts-new-starkware-integration    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin, a journalist with over two decades of experience. I started covering crypto five years ago, and as a senior editor, Forbes, was the first mainstream media reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time. Subscribe to Unchained on YouTube, where you can watch the videos of me and my guests. Go to YouTube.com slash C-U-Schained podcast and subscribe today. Building a web application to sell products or services, integrate with Squares robust and secure APIs to easily take payments. Learn more at Square.com slash go slash unchained. The Crypto.com app lets you buy, earn, and spend crypto all in one place.

Earn up to 8.5% interest on your Bitcoin and 14% interest on your stable coins. Paid weekly. Download the crypto.com app and get $25. with the code Laura. The link is in the description. Today's guest is Antonio Giuliano, founder of DYDX, and Ellie Ben Sassen, co-founder, president, and chairman of the board at Starkware. Welcome, Antonio and Ellie. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Excited to be here. Antonio, you and Ellie partner to launch cross-margined perpetuals, which went live at the end of

February. Explain to us what cross-margined perpetuals are, why you chose that as your project to scale and why you chose Starkware? Yes, absolutely. So perpetuals are a type of synthetic product that's really popular in the crypto space. So not a lot of people know this, but perpetuals by volume are the most popular type of trading instruments on all of crypto. Basically, the volume for perpetuals is more than all of the volume for all the other products, including just base spot trading on crypto combined.

So it's a really big market. But I think we're one of the first in DeFi to really get. get into this market. So we think it's going to be really big. The reason why we're so excited about it long term is normally in kind of the traditional financial markets, you see the derivatives or synthetic volume being about 5 to 10x higher than kind of the base spot volume. One interesting thing that happened in crypto just in the past year is for the first time the derivatives volume on crypto surpassed, like I said, all of the other volume in crypto combined. And it's well on its way to kind of reaching, we think, that 5 to 10x, the volume mark of the entire rest of the market

combined. So it's a huge market. We're really excited about it. And the main reason, yeah, and that's the main reason that we're excited about launching this product. More specifically, what perpetuals are is, like I said, they're a type of synthetic product. All synthetic means is that when you're trading these types of products, the actual currencies that you're trading don't actually exist in the contract. So, for example, if you're trading a Bitcoin perpetual, there's no actual Bitcoin being custodied and there's no actual Bitcoin under the hood. We just kind of come up with this synthetic contract and it tracks the price of Bitcoin. And the reason these are so popular is that they can be traded with leverage.

Leverage basically just means that you can multiply your gains and your losses and trade as if you had a lot more capital. So it's much more capital efficient to trade on these types of products and that's why they're so popular. All cross margin means is it's a bit of a technical term, but it basically means that you can have one accounts or one pool of collaborative. that collateralizes any different type of market that you might want to trade on. So as compared to isolated margin, which is what we had on our layer one or kind of our original

product, that means that for every different type of product that you want to trade, so say you want to trade both in Ethereum perpetual and a Bitcoin perpetual, you have to put down collateral into two separate accounts. So it's not nearly as capital efficient. Whereas because of the scalability that Starkware is now able to provide, we're really able to offer cross-margining. And that's a really important product feature that we're excited to launch to our users. Yeah, that seems like a no-brainer if that technology enables you to do the cross-margin.

Because I could imagine as a user, it would be very frustrating if you wanted to trade multiple assets and had to collateralize each. And so why did you choose Starkware? Yeah, absolutely. So we did a lot of research on this about six months ago right before we started working with stockware. And of the main things we were considering were obviously Starkware and kind of by extension, zero knowledge roll-ups. And Ellie can talk a lot more about that. We also considered optimistic roll-ups and specifically optimism. And then the third kind of thing we also considered was other layer one blockchains, so things like Solana or Near.

And the reason we chose Starkware was for a couple different reasons. So first of all, the level of scalability that they're able to provide is really, really high. So I won't touch on this too much because obviously Ellie can dive a lot more into it than I can. But basically the way it works is you take just an arbitrarily long list of in our case trades. And through zero knowledge proofs or stark proofs, you can basically transform them down into a constant size data object. And so it basically doesn't matter how many trades you have. You just transform it into this constant size thing, put that on the blockchain. And that's where all the scalability comes from.

So the main requisite thing that we're obviously looking for is a really high level of scalability. And this isn't exactly rocket science. But right now, for anybody that's used, defy, just the fees and the gas fees on Ethereum specifically are obscenely high. Currently, it's costing about 100 to sometimes up to literally $1,000 per trade in gas fees to execute a trade on layer 1 on Ethereum. And this was just obviously something that we had to solve as soon as possible. And kind of the second main point was exactly that, be as soon as possible. And StarCware already has, is kind of one of the very few scaling technologies that already had a really good history of building quality products in production.

We're not the first exchange or decentralized exchange to launch with StarCware. They're also launched with another decentralized exchange called Diversify, and they've been running successfully in production at that point. Whereas a lot of these other kind of like optimistic roll-ups and other L-1s are very much improvement. So it was really important to us, and it was a really big selling point that it was already live, it was already working in production. We solved all the architecture problems, and we knew how to do it. And kind of the last, which is kind of like the last point, which is a bit more subtle, is something called like withdrawal times. So for anybody that's

kind of familiar with optimistic roll-ups, one of the drawbacks is that you actually can't withdraw from optimistic roll-ups for, you know, it depends on the configuration, but oftentimes, like, up to a week. Whereas for Starkware, with their Stark blocks, you have basically instant finality once the block is mined on layer one. And that's really important because, you know, for us, like, who's going to use an exchange where you can't actually withdraw for a week? Yes, there are certainly ways to get around this by kind of, you can have like liquidity providers front fast withdraws, which we're actually also doing on Starkware. So that means you can have instant, you don't even need to wait for the Stark batches to be confirmed to the blockchain to get

withdraws. But if you're thinking about becoming a liquidity provider and happy to talk more about this in detail. But the thing that you need to think about is, like, what the withdrawal period is, because suppose you're a fast withdrawal provider for optimism or, you know, by extension to any optimistic roll-up protocol, you basically have to have enough capital to cover, like, an entire week's worth of withdrawals for the system, which even for us as kind of like, you know, a relatively smaller exchange compared to centralized exchanges is like millions and millions and millions of dollars to the point where it was just like totally financially unfeasible. Whereas for us, because the stockware blocks are mined roughly like once every hour or so,

we only need to have like a smaller amount of capital to front withdrawals in the system. And then the last thing I'll say is compared with just kind of other layer one chains, starkware and the system we're building on top of starkware settles back on Ethereum. So it has basically exactly the same security properties, exactly the same decentralization properties as Ethereum does, which is really important to us. And even more important, it works with all the Ethereum wallets. And this is just absolutely critical from a user experience perspective.

If you're a decentralized app and you want to get users, you have to support the wallets that people are using. And because we're just settling back on Ethereum, we can use exactly the same wallets that all of our users are used to using and just continue to provide what we think is a really top class product experience on defy to them. And Ellie, so I know Antonio described briefly how, the Starkware solution works, but why don't you dive a little deeper into these ZK roll-ups and also maybe contrast it with optimistic roll-ups, which you mentioned, and that is another

popular layer two solution that a lot of DeFi projects are trying out? Right. So the basic problem that all roll-ups try to solve is the problem of this limited resource, which is the block or the block space on a blockchain. In the case of Ethereum, you only have 12.5 million gas to allocate among all the competing transactions in every block, every 15 seconds or so. And because there's a lot of demand these days for this resource, there's, you know, prices are shooting up. So the way that roll-ups work or all scalability solutions, L-2 scalability solutions work,

is that they sort of take a lot of this computation and data and everything that It costs so much and takes it off chain. And so it's a little bit like an iceberg where you put the tip on L1, which is Ethereum, and you use Ethereum to sort of verify or do the minimal kind of stuff that needs to be done to make sure everything is safe. And then all the rest is taken off chain, so like an iceberg where you only see onchain the tip. Okay.

Now, this is the idea of all L2 scalability. solutions that we're aware of. Now, roll-ups are a particular version of scalability solutions that have added security. It's sort of a trade-off. What they say is we need all of the information for each and every user to know exactly the state of her account at any given point in time. We need that information, that raw data, to appear constantly on L1. We don't want any of this data to sit with some data availability.

solution, which is another option. So this is a trade-off. You get the security of L-1 for your data. The downside is that there is a linear amount of, basically more transactions means more data on L-1. But it's a trade-off. We at Starkware support both options of this data availability situation. So D-Y-D-X chose to go with the roll-up mode,

which means that all of the data sits on L1. Diversify, for instance, chose to work with offloading the data to a data availability committee that is also very secure and operates in a different way. And so these are two types of tradeoffs. There's even a third type where you can let the users decide whether they want to pay extra for having their data on-chain or whether they're willing to, they want to save costs, but rely on this L2 data solution. We call this volition,

and we're also going to support that with some of our customers. In any case, that's what roll-ups allow you. Now, within roll-ups, there are two main ways to deal with security. One branch is called validity proofs, which Starkware and Starks are one of these ways, which basically means whenever you move the state, whenever you change this tip of the iceberg to something new because you're updating the state of your system, it must be accompanied by a cryptographic proof.

In our case, those are starks that are very lean and short and cheap to verify exponentially cheaper than the amount of computation that leads to this change on chain. And you cannot move the state without a validity proof. And this ensures that you will never have any movement to a state that is not valid and does not have integrity. So this is one way to deal with it. And that's these validity proofs and the cryptographic assurances they give allow you to have the instant finality that Antonio was talking about and that the DYDX customers are going to benefit from. The other kind of solutions are game theoretic fraud proof-based solutions, optimistic roll-ups, which, Say something like this. Anyone can move the state of the system to any new state, right, including to fraudulent or invalid state. And then there's going to be a period during which parties can sort of raise a flag. And there's going to be some process by which you sort of sort out whether the state of the system is invalid or is valid. And there's a certain game going on that has a bunch of interactions between two parties. One is saying, no, this was fraudulent. The other party. saying, no, this was good.

And you have to wait a little bit and allow this thing to sort of peter out. And this is what causes this capital inefficiency that comes from, you know, funds need to be locked for a long enough time in order to make sure that no one raises a flag. And if a flag is raised, you know, to sort out what happened. So those are the optimistic roll-ups. So just to summarize again, scalability solutions take a lot of the load of computation off-chain. Roll-ups mean that all the data, the raw data, not the computation and not the storage still appears on L1 for added security,

but there's a trade-off. You pay a little bit more. And then within the two families of roll-ups, you have validity proofs like Starks that allow you instant finality, and you have optimistic roll-ups that come with this finality period of roughly a week or so until you can remove your funds off. As far as I understand, just from the description, it seems. kind of obvious that it's better to have the instant finality. And yet there are teams that are choosing optimistic roll-ups. As far as I understand, is that simply because the technology is maybe

easier to implement now, like it's further along? Is that what the case is? I don't think that's the case. I think that our technology is further along. You know, we have more projects that are launched or ready to be launched with our technology. It's a, okay, one thing that is offered by some optimistic roll-ups projects is to say that, or, you know, to describe it this way, you basically take all of your existing solidity code, you press a button and it automatically works just as previously. Now, I'm not entirely sure that actually is the case, but this is a very tempting proposition that causes a lot of projects to say, okay, we want to press that button and have it automatically working. So I think a lot of projects are definitely saying we want to wait to see that happen.

Now, it hasn't happened yet for any meaningful project. You know, we have to wait and see. So I think they're saying we are willing to take the, you know, by, you know, budget. the bullet of the capital inefficiency and the, you know, the extra sort of security issues with having these fraud proofs, you know, the ability to attack them and delay the system and whatnot, because we are tempted by this, you know, proposition that we won't have to modify our code significantly. You know, I'm biased, of course, but I think Antonio and DYDX made the right choice of going

with a better solution in terms of capital efficiency. You know, we started working with them roughly six months ago and it's already on Mainet. So I think this sort of, you know, practically shows that this is, I think, a better route that we hope other teams are going to go down this route as well. Yeah, definitely. When I realized the timeline on that, I did think that that was pretty quick how you guys roll this out. And before I forget, because I've now forgot multiple times, I wanted to mention that

Diversify, who we've mentioned, a few times is a previous sponsor of my shows. And so then in terms of scalability, how many transactions per second are you now able to process versus, you know, what it was before? So I prefer to talk about things that we actually demonstrated live on Mainnet rather than, you know, various, I mean, there are a lot of numbers floating out there for things that theoretically could be done or, you know, on. So on Mainnet, we, for a redact,

break off, we demonstrated a single proof that settled 300,000 transactions, and it was in roll-up mode, meaning that all the data was on-chain. And the effective TPS for this, and this was on Mainet Ethereum, this was a few months ago, before we were working with DYDX. This was a TPS of 3,000. With Diversify, we have demonstrated the ability to reach trades of 9,000. thousand TPS and for payments we can go to 18,000 TPS with the DYDX. You know, the system is just now being ramped up and we'll be very proud to announce the,

you know, effective rates that we get once we actually demonstrated them. But, you know, we can go, we can support, well, I mean, you know, we saw this tweet that there more than 80,000 people waiting to join the, you know, the DYDX system once it launches. So, of course, this causes, you know, we're up for the task, but it sort of causes you some, you know, some sort of, you know, some angst, you know, hoping that everything will function properly, but we will report in a small number of weeks, the actual numbers that you'll see on Mainet, like. I can just see it now.

I'm going to have to, like, run an update and be like, by the way, way, they, you know, tout out all these numbers. And it, no, I'm just kidding. All right. So for the perpetuals products, some of the features are that traders can now trade with zero gas costs. And so how are you making them possible is just, is DYDX just paying for them? Because it's like such a small amount compared to what it was before. Pretty much, yeah.

Obviously, because it's a roll up and sells on layer one Ethereum, they're still. our gas costs and we're basically paying for like every time a stark batch it's called, like a stark block is committed to mainnet. We're paying for that. But it's really not that much. And that's kind of where all the scalability features that I was talking about just really come into play where it's just costing us, you know, however many X less than it was before.

It's gotten kind of getting down to the points where we're really able to charge fees that are much more in line with what traders are used to paying on centralized exchanges. So even like fees on centralized exchanges in crypto are like fairly high, right? Like they're kind of like even like 20 bips is like a lot higher. And that's kind of what you'll experience on like an FTCX or a finance than what you'll see in traditional finance. So that's like the revenue that you make in fees is more than enough to cover in this new case like what we would have to pay on gas. So we're like I said, just aiming to charge fees that are really in line with what other exchanges charge and no longer will the fees have to be determining. or kind of dynamic based off the current gas price environments on Ethereum.

Very interesting. And so in working together, I mean, like I said, it is impressive that you managed to roll this out in six months. But I'm still wondering, you know, everyone in Defi in particular is looking at different scaling solutions that is really deemed to be probably the main issue right now. So I was wondering what lessons you guys you feel you learned in working together, especially for defy in general or other defy protocols that are interested in scaling. Yeah, maybe I can start.

I think the first thing is kind of what Ellie touched on before, which is that for my opinion, for a good technical team, it actually doesn't really matter that much what language your smart contracts are written in. Like we're happy to port our smart contracts to like rust or solidity or, you know, soon to come out like Cairo, which is StarCore's new programming language that they're coming, out with for their Stark roll-ups, which I can talk a lot more about. So I think the first lesson was that it's really not a big of a deal if you're a good technical team to move to a new coding language.

And I think people just put way too much weight on that in terms of making things backwards compatible. Yeah, I'd say that maybe one second learning that we had is that basically for the current contracts that we have, Starkware wrote them, like they wrote them in kind of their own Cairo language. And one of the things that they're working on, which I'm really excited about is why I just mentioned before is their Cairo programming language, which will allow third-party developers to come in and write their own contracts. So I think that'll even be like a really big step up from the build process that we had. Because of course, whenever two different companies

are working together, it's just a little bit harder to have like coordination across the two teams. Like, for example, like StarCore was writing all the contracts and we gave them like pretty detailed specs, but of course there's like some back and forth on various edge cases for those contracts and just making sure we have all the kinks ironed out and have it exactly the way we want. If like later we're able to come out and our developers are able to just code in Cairo directly and have that run directly through StarCware, like I promise you, we could get the build times down like to like three or four months or like even less. So that's something I'm excited about looking forward into the future as well. Yeah. So on our part, the first thing I just want to say

is, you know, it was and still is such a pleasure working with such a professional team as the counter parties on this. It's like, you know, we, so we learned a lot about, first of all, the business and the business logic that is needed in these cases. And this, of course, helped us and will help future customers and players that want to build, you know, on top of this. and extend the capabilities of Stark's and Cairo. The second thing that was really important for us here was, Antonio mentioned this. Cairo is a programming language, which allows you to express in a way the programmers, you know,

express themselves, any computation and any business logic that you want to scale. And I want to emphasize this because probably not all of your listeners are aware that when you come to ZKP technologies, one of the hardest parts is taking the computation, the high-level computation that you have in mind, and then converting it to these very intricate mathematical objects that are really, really hard to deal with, various things like polynomials or finite fields and so on.

And what Cairo achieves is a very clean abstraction of all of that. And it sort of allows you to just write your business logic in a very clean way. And this partnership was for us yet another test case for the agility and the feature velocity of Cairo. And of course, along the way, we're constantly improving it and the whole framework that it builds on. And all of this is really important for us because, as we already announced, and this also ties to what Antonio said, Our plan is to allow teams like DYDX and, of course, anyone who wants to permissionlessly write their own contracts and then deploy them on an L2 to reach arbitrary scale. We call this Starknet and it will be launched later this year.

And basically it will be an L2 in which you can deploy your logic. So each further iteration where we work with teams, especially such a professional team as D.D. D-Y-D-X, you know, we sort of hone and make the tooling much better so that when we release it to the public, it's going to be much more ripe. I just want to mention that when I say releasing it to the public, it's not something that is in the future. It's actually something that happened in the past. So everyone's invited to go to Cairolang.org, Cairo-Lang.org, and basically download

Cairo start programming and send proofs right now to a service that is on Robsden. It's called Sharp, basically shared proving. So you can have several different applications, sending their proofs all to be combined into one single proof that goes on-chain and is verified for all of them. And then you can amortize gas cost a little bit better. So Cairo and the same programming tools that we used in order to build the system, our part of the system with D-YDX. These tools are already available for everyone to use with a lot of tutorials. And so we're very excited about that and much more is going to calm down.

And so just so I'm understanding this idea of a Starknet, it's almost like a new kind of Ethereum in the sense that, you know, it has its own programming language. It's turned complete. And so now people can use that programming language to create deep. programs that use ZK roll-ups and so are inherently kind of like scaled from the get-go and maybe even then also have that feature of composability that layer one DeFi protocols have on Ethereum. Is that correct? Yes, Laura, it's exactly that. We think of it as just like Ethereum and being

touring complete. It does not have the gas limit of Ethereum. That's the whole point. it's an L2. In terms of security, it gets its security, its security is as safe as that of L1 Ethereum, and is going to rely in a lot of aspects on L1 for various aspects of sequencing, allowing users to,

you know, send commands to this L2 to extract their funds if they need. And you will have composability. You can have permissionless, I mean, you will have permissionless deployment of smart contracts. It will be transactions. Again, permissionless.

And a user can submit. you'll have decentralized operators, provers, and yes, that's her vision. Well, that sounds really fascinating because, so my next set of questions is about DYDX and perpetuels and kind of diving more into that.

But why don't we just jump to one of them right now? Because I was going to ask Antonio about the fact that, obviously, these DFI protocols do benefit from composability on layer one. I think it's slightly less of an issue for D-YDX, but Antonio, can you just tell me how you have been thinking about that and, you know, how that factored into your decision to go with Starkware and CK roll-ups?

Yeah. So it definitely is a factor, first of all, but I think you touched on it. And I think for us, and specifically for derivatives or synthetics, it's actually, in my opinion, much less of an issue than it is for different spot trading protocols. Like, for example, like, let's suppose like Uniswap wanted to migrate to like any given layer two. One of the things they would have to really think about is like, well, okay, are there actual tokens that people want to trade on this layer two? For us, again, we don't need that because we're just using synthetic contracts. And all we need is one, literally one token, like basically just a collateral token to exist on this layer two.

And then synthetically, we can create just any given asset that users might want to trade. I'd say I also have kind of a counterculture view on this, especially as it comes to DeFi, but really our MO at D-YD-X is to take a very full-stack approach to building our products. So we like to think that we do everything, like everything down to building the smart contracts, to building like the backend servers that run the order books

and the matching engine, to building the front end, to eventually like building the apps that we're going to come out with. And honestly, like, we just think that we can build it, like, better than like other third-party teams would be able to for the most part, whereas a lot of other defy is, you know, has this ethos of composability and, like, this product is cool because it's like built on top of like zero x API, which is like built on top of uniswap and curve and like all this stuff. And that's awesome. But that's just like

for us specifically, like not exactly the target that we're going for. We really just want, we have like a singular mission, which is just making the best product for advanced traders on cryptocurrency. And we really think that we can offer that in a really high quality way without too much composability, just through perpetuals on layer two, even right now. And that's not to say that, like, there will never be composability for D-Y-D-X, like, especially with a lot of the stuff like Ellie was talking about with kind of moving just other contracts to the same, basically, like, stark roll-up chain. I think that's really awesome. And we'll certainly unlock some things for us, but just when you think about the trade-off of, like, okay, like, you know, a thousand X or whatever

scalability versus, like, you know, some composability. It's like, you know, I will take a, thousand X or like, you know, 1,000x plus scalability right now over that any day. All right. In a moment, we're going to talk more about the Perpetuals products, but first a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. The scorebed app here with trusted stats and real-time sports news. Yeah, hey, who should I take in the Boston game? Well, statistically speaking.

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grade payments accessible to everyone. They also have your back. Use their APIs and you'll get dedicated developer support, dispute management, and fraud detection. Start building your online payment form today. Visit square.com slash go slash unchained. Back to my conversation with Antonio and Ellie. As you've noted, perpetuels are some of the most popular trading products in crypto, at least on centralized platforms. And I wondered, what benefit do users get from trading perpetuals on a decentralized exchange? Yeah, absolutely. So I think it's pretty similar to the benefits users would get from using any decentralized product. So the first is just security. It's a lot more secure to hold your own keys. I'm certainly not the first one to say this, but trading directly on a smart

contract through your hardware wallet is just a lot more secure than trusting your keys to a centralized exchange. I actually have a lot of experience with this. I used to work at Coinbase as an engineer. And I was an engineer where one of the things I worked on there was their hot wallet service. So I'm really familiar with kind of the security level of centralized exchanges. And one of the cool things is that even if you do a good job on security as a centralized exchange, there's just so much overhead that goes into securing, like that level of funds, because now there's like a $90 billion incentive or whatever to hack Coinbase. And you have to, as Coinbase, to spend resources proportional to that to secure your platform, even if you're doing it the best way.

So like I say that to mean, like for us as a decentralized exchange, we can move a lot faster, can offer like a lot more products after we just like focused on securing the smart contracts. I'd say the second is transparency. So especially for more advanced financial products, like synthetics and derivatives. You're not only trusting your coins to the exchange, you're also trusting the entire execution of the contracts that you're entering into to set exchange and are counting on that exchange to, you know,

honor the contract exactly as it was written up. So for things like, you know, Bitmex and FGX, and not to pick on anyone, I mean, this is just like the way, like technology works before blockchain. It's just like really a black box, like how a lot of this stuff works on the centralized exchanges. Like, you know, when were people getting liquidated? or the index prices that caused these liquidations to happen,

how much money is in the insurance fund, like all these different things. When is the insurance fund used? Those are all kind of factor into it. And on DYDX, of course, because all the contracts are open source and transparent. Anybody can just go in audits or can look at our audit reports and just understand exactly the contract that they're entering into. And then I'd say kind of the last thing, and this is something we're going to be focusing on just more going into the future,

is access. So we're not quite there yet in terms of DYDG. IDX right now is what's known as a hybrid exchange. So that basically means we have some decentralized components, and then we also have some centralized components. So the central components are kind of our portable in our matching engine, which basically we have running on our servers to just offer a much more performance level of trading to our traders.

But one of the things we're going to be focusing on going into the future is just decentralizing more parts of the stack. And that'll allow us to just offer DUDX to more people and more places of the world. because again, once we get closer to this vision that all the Defi has, where it's just open source code running on a permission this blockchain, anybody, you know, basically anybody anywhere in the world will have access to that code. Yeah, and something that interested me was when I was looking at kind of the descriptions of DYDX, it sort of almost seemed to me like DYDX was aiming to be almost like a uniswap of perpetuals, maybe offering more like a long tail of a variety of perpetuals. But then as I read more, I realized, oh, well, since you're kind of using this closed order book-based dev, which then competes against these other derivatives exchanges that operate more like automated market makers that are like Uniswap, I was like, hmm, so maybe I'm wrong, because

maybe those are the ones that are going to fill that spot. So kind of what vision do you have of DYDX? Yeah, it's a great question. I think the order book versus automated marketing. market maker question is certainly not just a consideration for DYDX. I think anybody operating at X is thinking about that right now. My opinion on this, and this isn't a super original thought, is kind of somewhere in the middle where I think that orderbook-based models are vastly superior for trading kind of the top, call it like 100 or 200 markets by volume. We've seen various centralized exchanges be extremely successful working directly with market

makers. And, you know, FTCX is a prime example of this. it probably has the exchange that has the most different pairs. And you're able to just offer a really high amount of liquidity on those top markets. I think automated market makers certainly do serve a purpose. But in my opinion, I think they're better for just trading like the long tail of assets. And in my opinion, like that was the product market fit that Uniswap found, which I think is awesome. Just people coming and trading like all these various tokens before they were listed on centralized exchanges or kind of that weren't even listed ever on centralized exchanges.

But they were listed on Uniswap, like the moment that they launched. And that's a really powerful thing. But again, for us specifically at DYDX, like our goal is to become one of the biggest crypto exchanges, period, but on a three to five year time horizon. And we think kind of the combination of, you know, what I talked about at the beginning with derivatives, becoming already being the biggest market, and then just we think we'll become even more of a percent of the market. And then obviously decentralized exchanges as well, which are currently like, I don't know,

five percent or so of the market, but are super new. and we think we'll grow over the next three to five years. So if we're able to win that market of like derivatives plus DFI, we think that'll be really big. But I'll conclude by just saying like I think specifically for derivatives, where we see the real volume is not in the like 200 plus like markets by volume. It's really in those top like hundred markets and honestly really just in the top like five or so, like the Bitcoin perpetuals to a lesser extent like the Heath Perpetuals that are traded on centralized

exchanges. Like literally just Bitcoin Perpetuals. think almost do more volume than literally everything else in crypto combined. So it's like, it's a real power law thing. And it's like, if you want to be the biggest exchange, you have to be, you have to serve like this biggest market that's 10x bigger than all the other markets in the highest possible quality way. And we think that's by order books just because order books are able to provide just a much higher level of liquidity given a certain amount of capital for the markets that they operate on. And I'll say,

because you're using perpetuals, which as you mentioned are a type of synthetic, the Oracle that you're using becomes ultra important because that then becomes probably a main attack vector. So how did you decide upon ChainLink as your Oracle provider? Yeah, absolutely. So I think Chainlink, almost the name sort of speaks for itself in Defi at this point, just most of the leading products or building on chain link, or at least things that use technology that's like similar to ChainLink. D-YDX also actually operates on MakerDal oracles, which are not exactly the same, but kind of use similar technology to ChainLink.

But we're really excited about partnering with ChainLink. And one of the really important things that we had to design with this layer two, which was an open question, and we designed this alongside Starkware, was how do we solve this Oracle problem? Like, do we want to, like, there's no oracles right now on Layer 2 basically because nobody's on Layer 2, right? So, like, how do we get these Oracle prices on Layer 2? And we thought about a lot of different things, like potentially, like, building our own oracles that are specifically specific for L2.

And we potentially could, but we would have had to have sacrificed on security there. So the thing that we ended up on was just working directly with kind of the three of us, like us, StarCware and ChainLink themselves actually did a good amount of work for this, was basically just putting the exact same Oracle prices that they're already reporting on layer one, but putting them on layer two. And this is a really powerful thing because now we get the exact same level of security that everybody else in DFI is used to with kind of the leading chain link oracles. But we get it on layer two instead. And it's actually even better than that because the whole point of layer two, again, is that it's just much more scalable and much faster. So one of the really big problems we ran into on layer one with any Oracle provider is not at all limited to just chain link. But the problem we faced was there was a lot of lag or like a lot of latency in the Oracle prices, especially when prices were moving fast, which is the worst time to have lag in your price circles.

Like every time, this is a bit of a generalization, but more or less like every time like the price would drop by like 10%, it would take, you know, five to 10 to sometimes 15 minutes for that to be reflected on the Layer 1 oracles. And this is a real problem if you're operating a leveraged exchange because your contracts don't know that they should liquidate people. And if the price keeps dropping, the entire protocol could become under collateralized. And this was the main thing that was holding us back from offering higher leverage. So on our layer one product for our perpetuals, we were only able to offer 10x maximum leverage. And it was exactly due to this problem of like the oracles are laggy, basically. But now

on layer two, take the same security, like I said, but we can reduce the latency. You can reduce the lag by a factor of like 10 to 20x roughly. So now instead of having to wait minutes for these Oracle prices to be reflected on our system, we can do it in seconds. And that's kind of what centralized exchanges can do as well. Because again, they're not even using a chain. But for us, we can offer like a similar level of leverage starting out at 25X, potentially could raise that higher, just starting out a little bit more conservative.

But even just this fact of now the Oracle prices are much more performance, allows us to offer a new feature on our product, that's really important in higher leverage. Higher leverage is actually super important for operating a leverage crypto exchange, as you might expect. Binance recently released on statistics on their users' usage of leverage and what kind of multiple leverage like all of their users use. And I believe the most popular leverage was around 20X. I can't remember the exact statistics, but it was something like 30% or so used 20X.

it was like some small percent like five to ten percent used their like crazy like hundred X leverage but if you're able to offer this kind of like 25 X like maximum leverage that's just a huge step up in terms of like the quality of our product yeah yeah I could see that appealing to people in the crypto space and so let's also dive a little bit more into some of the Starkware things like Cairo in particular I wanted to ask a little bit more about because Ellie, I saw in some of the blog posts who was being described as one verifier to rule them all. Can you explain what that means? Yeah.

So that's a terrific question. Typically what happens is, and this is something I spoke about earlier, you have a computation in mind and you want to use a ZKP to scale it. So this computation, you have to somehow express it and convert it to some algebra. format that is very hard to deal with securely and efficiently. A bunch of polynomials or, you know, I can throw a whole bunch of math terms here at you that basically say the same thing. Some complicated algebraic problems sometimes has some number theory in it. And it's very complicated.

So whatever means you did for that, you would have to work very hard and really there was a limited amount of complexity that you could deal with. And then you ended up with some system that is very specific for the problem at hand. So, for instance, in Zcash, I'm a founding scientist of Zcash. So there's a very specific circuit that deals with, you know, shielded payments and it's crafted towards that. At Stark, we're in our initial version one of Diversify was a specific set of, you know, the analog of a circuit. specific set of polynomial constraints that had to deal with that. So it's a little bit like building an ASIC or some chip that is, you know, one per computation. Now, with Cairo, basically we have a

set of constraints or, you know, a set of this math object that is the ZKP analog of a CPU. So a CPU is one chip that can deal with any computation, right? You send the computation as a program, is data and it is executed. That's precisely what happens with Cairo. In fact, the name Cairo, the C comes from CPU, and the next three letters are air, which come from the algebra. So it's like a CPU algebraic object, and you put it once out there.

And now you can basically express all computations that you want and have one verifier that you don't have to modify and change that deals with all of them. And again, the analogy you should have in mind here is that of a CPU. So you bought a laptop. There's one CPU there until you replace it, you know, in two years' time with a faster CPU, which likely will also happen at some point with Cairo.

You're going to run all of your computations, all of your programs on using that one CPU without replacing it. So that's the same idea with Cairo. It wouldn't work well if the way you had to express computations to the CPU was very hard, but it's not. So there's a programming language called Cairo. that is very developer-friendly. It looks like a programming language.

And now you can write all your computations in this language, and they get automatically compiled, and proofs for them are generated for the correct execution and put on chain. Through this one verifier to rule them all. Yeah, it's really impressive. And you also earlier mentioned the great Reddit scaling bakeoff, and that was when Reddit and the Ethereum Foundation invited some of the, or not some of it,

just any Ethereum scaling projects to show how their project could be used to scale Reddit's community points, which now I think is used by just hundreds of thousands of users, but later they want to roll it out to all 430 million Reddit users. So explain a little bit more about your participation in that and how it worked. And I mean, you talked a little bit about what you were able to achieve,

but just describe the experience. Yeah, so they gave a choice. challenge in which they said, well, we have this point system. So think of these as some tokens that currently are, you know, administered over the Reddit servers, but they would really like to put them on on main. And actually, the way I think it started, at least from our point of view, was that we took one of the more popular Reddit subreddits, and we basically took all of their transactions. I think it was like something like 12 million accounts, if I'm not mistaken or something or 1.2 million accounts.

I forgot and we just put one proof for, you know, for a whole bunch of stuff. I think this impressed Reddit, I'm speculating that maybe some other, you know, L2 solutions said, oh, you know, it's not a fair fight. Why don't you do a challenge or something like that? Anyways, they said, okay, we have this grand challenge. You're supposed to take, to show how you can deal with 300,000 transactions, which is a huge amount and show us how your scaling solution is going to, deal with them had they been given to you as part of the system.

And you want to sort of have these transactions be spread out over a period of five days. Because 300 transactions, you know, that's a big amount of transactions. Let's see. Okay. So there was five, the time for this bakeoff was given five weeks. So we did it in four weeks. And instead of spreading the transaction. on five days, we put it inside 10 blocks.

And these 10 blocks, basically nine of them, the proof was one block, or could fit in one block. But there was all this data. They didn't ask for it to be in roll-up mode, but we said, you know, what the hell? Let's do it also in roll-up mode. So we put all of the data on chain, and then it took us 10 blocks.

So instead of five days, we put it on mainnet in one, proof, you know, 10 blocks, most of it is just data, not the proof itself. So, you know, I think the Twitterati agreed that we sort of hit the ball way out of the park. You know, I would love to have Reddit pick up the phone and say, hey, guys, you know, you nailed it. Let's work. But I don't know. I don't know what they're doing there at Reddit with respect to this thing. You know, they haven't announced anything since then. So, okay. So we go. got some pretty nice PR, and we moved on.

I guess we'll have to see where that goes. What happens with that? So, as we all know, there has been a lot of talk in not only crypto, but also in the traditional financial world about GameStop and Robin Hood and scaling of these centralized solutions, I mean, not solutions, but exchanges. And even if we, it's just thinking about like a Coinbase, how they've had so many outages. And, you know, I mean, when you look at how when markets act the way that they did in the GameStop period, which I think we all know is pretty much how crypto acts like pretty much all the time. And we see that that caused problems for Robin Hood.

We know it does cause problems for Coinbase. I was wondering what your, what your thoughts were on how Defi is positioned. to address these issues. I'll try to answer this. I mean, there are two aspects to it. There is one, you know, the sort of technical scale, can you deal with it? And, you know, in the conventional markets, it's not the scale of, right, the trading systems that is the problem, right? That sort of, they can deal with that.

In the crypto world, this used to be the problem. I think with technologies like ours, this is no longer the problem. We can reach the scale of, you know, NASDAQ or Visa or, you know, if need be even AliPay or WeChat date. So this doesn't have to be the problem. The other issue is that of the, you know, the sort of T plus two that everyone's talking about, right? That the way the markets work is that the finality, you know, you're giving some time for finality. And in that respect, crypto is way better because, because, because, because, because, you know, it on L1 or L2 with instant finality like D.YDX perpetual has basically as fast as the market,

sorry, not as the market. There's as fast as the blockchain progresses or the L2 progresses. That's basically the state of affairs. And again, you also, these issues. And then there's a third aspect of like centralization and censorship. You know, there were various rumors that I have no idea about, about, you know, various parties, not being happy with certain transactions, sort of. stepping in. And of course, the decentralization of blockchains is what prevents this.

So blockchains have instant finality. They are censorship resistant, had such a thing, such as GameStop, been played on crypto. The main problem would have been scaling. You know, can you deal with such an amount of transactions? But with our technology, that is solved as well. Yeah. So, you know, NASDAQ, you're listening to this episode, you know, please pick up the phone. and we'll be happy to serve you. So I don't know what the number of transactions per second were when the GameStop Media was happening, but are you saying that it was an amount that something like Starkberg that ZK.

Roll-ups can handle? Do you know what the number? Yes, we can handle, we can handle, we can handle, I mean, you know, we'll have to put a lot of, like, okay, the technology can handle any reasonable TPS that is currently, you know, in any financial system in the world, okay? You said it was 3,000 transactions per second? Was that the number? Well, we displayed on Mainnet something that is at 3,000 TPS.

This is something we displayed. But if we, you know, if we had to service Alipay with 250,000 transactions per second, there's nothing in the technology that couldn't put that on L1. Of course, you'd need, you know, we need to have a lot of engineers to sort of move to bigger machines and whatnot. But there's nothing that prevents it. And if we needed to deal, let's say, with Visa payload, which is in the 2000 to 25,000 TPS, we could deal with that pretty much today. And Antonio, did you want to add any thoughts on the GameStop issue, Robin Hood? Yeah, I mean, I think I like gave a really good summary on that.

The only other thing I would add is what I touched on before in terms of transparency. And I think that was a really big factor that went into just a lot of the chaos around GameStop as well. Like, I don't know exactly what the facts were, but I think one of the issues was that there was more than 100% short interest on GameStop. And that just made it like once those hedge funds had to actually cover because the price was going up so much, they literally couldn't. buy the shares that they needed to cover because it was more than the entire float of GameStop. Whereas something like that in crypto would have been, you know, people would have seen that coming and people would have been able to see like, oh, okay, well, we know like all of the the short positions on Defi like total this much. We know that like float is this much.

So they would, they would just been able to have like much a lot more transparency around the market, which I think is important as well. Yeah. Or the systems even could have been designed where it would not be possible to short more than existed. So, yeah. So something else I wanted to ask about is there's been a trend in defy that differentiates between these like fair launch projects and then VC projects. And both of you have gotten investment from big name VC firms like DYDX has investment from Injus and Horowitz, Polychain Capital, One Confirmation, Three Euras Capital, Defiance Capital. Starkware has investment from Paradigms, Sequoia, CoinBase Venture, Scalar, Multi-Coyne Capital. And so I know neither of your projects have launched tokens yet, but I just wanted to hear your take on this debate between fair launch tokens versus VC tokens. Yeah, it's an interesting question. I definitely don't think that there's one that's objectively better in terms of like the path for any given system. I really think it has to do a lot with the complexity of the systems that you're building.

For example, like let's take us or I mean, actually StarCore is a great example of this too. The things that we're building are just very technologically complex. And sure, you could come out of the gates and be like, hey, I'm DYDX. I have this dream to someday hopefully build a protocol for perpetuals. And this is like theoretically how I'm going to do it. Like give me your money for a token. But I don't really think that that's like an optimal way to go about fundraising

or an optimal way to go about company building more generally. People always ask us constantly, I hear you, like why have we not done a token yet? like it's pretty obvious that you should do one. And I agree. And trust me, all the things going on in the market are not lost on me. But the thing that I always tell people and the thing that I really believe is we're not doing a token because we're like, you know, fundamentally opposed to them or something like that. We're not doing a token right now because we believe that it's more important for us to build a really great product first. And then like once we have a really great product and we have strong product market fit. We have a lot of great users. When you can throw just

fuel on the fire on top of that with a token, then it's like you get to be, you know, you don't just get to be, but like you have an opportunity to be like, you know, in our goal of like potentially becoming like one of the biggest exchanges in crypto period. So for us, like that's always been the goal has been really big to become one of the biggest exchanges. And we really feel like this is the best like expected value like way for us to do it long term to go through. And we've, And we've been around for like three and a half years now, which in crypto is like literally forever. Just like go through and take these like three and a half, four years, like building an amazing product. I think we had kind of started to hit our stride on layer one.

But then we just ran into like all of this nonsense with having to pay like hundreds of dollars in transaction fees. And there are a bunch of like other product limitations that we had on layer one. Like finality was pretty long like a block time, things like that that are now solved on our new product. And we're really excited about our new product. I mean, you know, I only touched on this before, but we've literally had 50,000 people, like, sign up for our waitlist on our alpha. And it's getting to be more like every day. So I think a lot of other people are excited about that as well. And again, that's like with no token or anything like that.

So it's just organic interest in our actual product. And then, like, once we have, like, strong product market fit, then if we, you know, later and no guarantees or anything like that. But later, if we go out and like launch a token, that's how we think we become really, really big. And we feel like the amount of the company and therefore the hypothetical tokens or whatever that we like sold to investors to do that is well worth it. Because now we have just like four years of development experience behind us and in a lot of expertise to continue to build great products. Yeah. And I meant to mention earlier that I did an interview with Antonio. Actually, I don't know what year that was.

Do you know what year? Was that 20? I think it was a long time ago. It was either like 20, I think it was 2018. Okay. So it was like right after the ICO hype. Yeah. Probably talked about the same thing.

Yeah. So, you know, clearly the project has evolved since then. It's just, yeah, it was quite different. And so people should listen to that just to hear more about Antonio's history. But from what you were describing, so it sounds like you probably will launch a token. And so what we expect it would be a governance token. And maybe you would, you know, add a little liquidity mining scheme on top of it. Yeah, I'm not going to talk too much about it in particular.

but like it's not rocket science probably like we're taking a look at all the things that have been successful like in the defy space and yeah those things that have been successful i would say are governance and liquidity mining um so if we want to fulfill our goals of being able to grow in the maximum possible way um you can use your own intuition about what we might do with with such a token but again it's like it's not a hundred percent that we're going to be doing this um like even like in this bull run or whatever, no matter how long that lasts. We're not going to launch one until we're really happy

with the current state of the product. And we're really think, honestly believe that once we throw fuel on that fire, that we'll be able to grow. And just appreciate everyone's patience until then. And of course, it is like in our long-term plans, like I was talking about earlier in the episode, to decentralize more of DUDX

and to not just have, say, for example, like our contracts be controlled by some multi-signature contract forever. And clearly that that goes hand in hand with governance too. And Ellie, so you also talked about how Starkware will be decentralizing. And do you plan to do that with a token? Yeah. So I'll get to that in a minute. I won't comment much on it. I just want to add to what Antonio said about, you know, the fair launch versus VC. We incorporated three years. years ago at the height of the ICO

craze and everyone was saying, oh, you know, you must do an ICO. That was the previous version of it. Another aspect, and we didn't, and another even though, you know, a Filecoin was raising quarter billion in Tesos and so on.

Those were the happy days then. What we said to ourselves and also to other projects we were talking to who did do tokens was that you're basically going public, you know, from day one. And there's this price ticker, right, that everyone sees, you know, your employees, the outside world, and you haven't really done anything yet. So it's a very,

it could be a very demoralizing experience. And it's a, you know, it's a, and you're, there are these market fluctuations. So that's another aspect of just, you know, managing expectations of your employees and everyone and the public as you're sort of building something. And we wanted to build something very quietly and to get, you know, top engineers and mathematicians just to work very patiently on this. So, so that was the obvious route for us, but others have gone the other way. Now, regarding, you know, decentralized starknet and tokens. So, so I won't comment on tokenomics. I will say this, that it's clear to us that an L2 that is decentralized will need to have proper cryptoeconomic incentives for the various players that are out there.

We're going to have decentralized proving services that are operated by numerous players. You need to have coordination among them. There are going to be sequencers of transactions. You need to take care of payments to the L1 and amortize the gas cost and so on and so forth. All of this begs for game theoretic mechanism design and cryptoeconomic mechanisms, but those are yet to be determined. And just like we waited patiently with any tokenomics until now, we really need to understand how Starknett is going to be governed and administered before we can make decisions on the right

mechanisms. All right. So neither of you want to comment too much on any tokens. But are there any other developments coming up this year that either of you want to mention? Yeah, maybe I can start. I mean, I think the main thing that we just, I mean, I guess it's even hard for me. to like, even for the next year, we've just been so heads down, like, focused on building out this new layer two product with Starkware. And the other thing I think I didn't mention, but

is worth talking about, too, is it's not just that we took our layer one product and put it on layer two. We literally built an entirely new products, like new servers, new UI, new everything. So we've been working really hard alongside the protocol work that Starware's been doing then. And I've kind of been in the thick of that as well in terms of coding and stuff. So, yeah, certainly we're about to have the public launch in about a few weeks from now, so that'll be really exciting. Further on down the line, I think the main thing we're to be focused on for the rest of this year is just further decentralization of the protocol.

So starting with kind of decentralization of like the governance of our contracts and things like that, and then starting to think, like, how can we decentralize, like, the orderbook and the matching engine components that we still run in a centralized way right now? no timelines or anything like that for any of that, but that's what we'll be focused on for the rest of the year. I'm excited about that. It's really hard problems, but that's how we're really going to realize

the long-term vision of what we're building. So on our side, first of all, I'm very excited and anxious about, you know, the public launch of DYDX, which is going to be the first, you know, major public event, the closest public event on our horizon at Starkware. We're really, really excited

for this. Shortly after that, Immutable X is going to be launching. This is for NFT and massive off-chain minting of NFTs, which is a big, big problem that no other solution can deliver right now. And Immutable X is going to do that. That's going to come very soon over the next few weeks. Looking a few months ahead, we're going to be launching with Badger Dow and AMM on L3. and that's another exciting thing. And a little bit further, I mean, those are the projects that we can sort of announce right now. There are other things, of course, being worked out, and we hope to announce them really soon. Another exciting thing is basically the launch of phase is one and two of starkness called planets and constellations.

That's going to be in a very small number of months. and these will allow, you know, developers at large to just write smart contracts and deploy them and benefit from the same scale that D-Y-2X is going to have in the next, you know, when it goes public. And I want to mention in this respect, and this also ties the questions, you know, we're asked a lot, you know, how do we, how can we participate in this thing that is, you know, Starkware's journey and start with the things like that and people ask about. you know, tokenomics and whatnot. And there's only one very simple answer that I and we had Starkware always give them, which is go learn Cairo because this will be, just like if you asked about, you know, early day Ethereum, what was the best thing you could advance your time in would probably be to learn solidity or whatever precursor was to there.

So right now, this language on which all of Starknet is going to be built with all its scale is Cairo, and it's already accessible, and you go to Cairo-Lang.org, and basically start learning. There's a bunch of tutorials there. There are tutorials for running your own AMM. So you can build today your own AMM on layer two with much lower gas fees.

There are voting and signature aggregation tutorials that you can do there. And again, you can start building your own products and have them integrated into start. So this is, I think this is, this potential of having a developer ecosystem that learns Cairo writes in it. And then you have this massive amount of depths on Starknet. This is very exhilarating to us. Yeah, it definitely sounds interesting to me because, yeah, you know, we see all these Ethereum killers trying to come and take developers

to these other blockchains and attracting them with you know, defy capabilities on their platforms. And yeah, I could see the appeal to a developer who wants to stick with Ethereum. All right.

So we will have to keep an eye on that because that does sound interesting. So thank you both so much for coming on in chain. Where can people learn more about each of you and your work? Yeah. For us, the best place to start is just going to our website at dyDX.

dot exchange. There you can sign up for our private alpha, which will be live really soon. I can join our Discord. If you want to ask me anything, just literally tag me in our Discord and I'll probably answer. So just head over on to

D-YDX. Exchange and check everything out there. On our side, first of all, follow us on Twitter, Starkware LTD. You can check out our website is starkware.c.c.0.c.c. And finally, if you're a developer and you want to start building in Cairo, you go to Cairo dash lang as a language.org.

Great. And I meant to mention earlier that A Mutable has been a previous sponsor's of my show. But that also, you know, when you mentioned that, I hadn't been aware of the difficulties of minting NFTs, like in terms of gas costs. I only That's something I only found out about recently. So I will also be watching that. I think that sounds very interesting. All right. Well, thank you both so much for coming on Unchain.

This has been super fun. Thank you, Laura. Yeah, thanks so much for having us. Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about Antonio, L-E, D-Y-D-X, and Starkware, check out the show notes for this episode. Don't forget, you can now watch video recordings of the shows on the Unchained YouTube channel.

Go to YouTube.com slash C-U-Lchained podcast and subscribe today. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Anthony Youne, Daniel Ness, Mark Murdoch, Dan Edelbeck, and the team at CLK transcription. Thanks for listening.