Unchained - The Chopping Block: Will Modular Blockchains Win? - Ep. 501

Episode Date: June 3, 2023

Welcome to “The Chopping Block” – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner, chop it up about the latest news. In this episode, the gang answers audience questions, digs into the discourse around rollups, and debates whether modular blockchains will vanquish existing monoliths. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, Castbox, Google Podcasts, TuneIn, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Show highlights:  How someone asked people to just give them money, and raised over $1 million Answering audience questions from Twitter, including ‘what’s Tarun’s favorite drug?’ Whether there’s tension between Haseeb and Tarun How the incoming generations of crypto people (e.g. “Class of 2017”) have changed over the cycles The five-level explainer on what a rollup is  Why everyone’s debating the ontology of rollups and why Haseeb still thinks blockchains are like religions Tarun’s take on the modular blockchain thesis and why Haseeb is skeptical Whether app chains like the ones in Cosmos will become dominant Whether one of the top 4 chains will be modular in the next five to 10 years Hosts Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly  Robert Leshner, founder of Compound Tom Schmidt, general partner at Dragonfly  Tarun Chitra, managing partner at Robot Ventures Disclosures Links Binance Feed: Bored Ape NFT Holder Ben.eth Launches Third Crusade of Memecoin Psychopathy Rollups, Rigor, and Reality by Kelvin Fichter Rollups Are L1s (& L2s) a.k.a. How Rollups *Actually Actually Actually* Work by Jon Charbonneau Haseeb’s question on Twitter Previous episode of The Chopping Block on the L1 debate: Why Are We Still Building Layer 1s? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Not a dividend. It's a tale of two Kwan. Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. Unnamed trading firms who are very involved. D5.Eat is the ultimate pump. DFI protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the chopping block.

Every couple weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So first quick intro is we got Tom, the D5 Maven, and Master of Memes. Next we've got Robert, the Cryptoconnoisseur, and Captain of Compound. Then we've got Tarun, the Gigabrain, and Grand Puba at Gauntlet. And finally, I'm the head hype man at Dragonfly. So we are early stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice.

Please see Chopin Block that XYZ for more disclosures. So gentlemen, it has been a pretty quite weak in crypto. We're getting a few of these now. It seems like volatility is low. Change volume is low. People are really reaching for headlines these days. There's not a lot that's super happening. the one thing we were just talking about before we started recording was there's there

people now who are just like begging for money from Twitter and Twitter is giving them lots and lots of money for no reason, which I feel like is also a sign of collective boredom. Like there's nothing else to really do but to manufacture stupid things to happen on the internet. I don't know. What's your what's your guys take about what's going on these days? First off, if you're thinking about sending your money to a stranger over the internet, without any specification of what to expect, don't do it. This used to be a scam back in the day where people would say, hey, send me money and they would have a really good excuse. The same scam

exists today and they don't have a good excuse. So don't fall for it. Don't send money to just Ethereum addresses because someone on Twitter told you to. I see the thing is I can't tell. So just for background, the setup basically is that some guy, so there's some guy, Ben.eath, he's, you know, there's a bunch of meme coins and stuff that he's raising money for. Some other guy was like, you know what, I'm not even going to create a meme coin. I will do nothing. Send me money. I will do nothing. Yes. All right. Let's ignore the meme coin stuff. Let's ignore the meme course stuff. That is, our collective IQ is going to drop so much if we talk about it. I don't want to bother.

But this other guy, right, I forget his name, whatever, he's some guy. And he's basically, I'm going to do absolutely nothing. I make no promises, no guarantees of anything. I'm telling you explicitly I will do nothing. And here's my address. And he got like a million dollars in ether over about 24 hours, which I feel like is in some way in evolution where like in the bull market, you would say, I'm going to, you know, like Andre would be like, I'm going to create a new, you know, a ZK Oracle for, you know, construction work or whatever.

And it's, oh, great, let's throw money into this contract and pre-buy the token as aggressively as you can. And now in the bear market, it's like, you know what? Why even pretend that you'll get anything from this? Well, people think that there's a coin called nothing coming. That's the, I think, scam is like, you think that's what people are doing? No, but this is the whole point. There's no expectation of profits, you know, and that's, he's trying to get around securities laws.

There cannot feasibly be an investment here because, you know, I didn't promise anything. You're just giving your money away. Okay, so you think people. That was a joke. That was not, that was not. I don't actually think that's what. What do you think people are actually doing? Because I'm confused now.

Do you actually think people expect to get something from this? Yes. I think people think that this is just a cool alternative approach to releasing yet another pointless meme coin. This one called dollar sign nothing. Okay. And if he doesn't do, let's say, let's say that he actually doesn't release anything, what do you think happens? I think people will be like, hey, what are you doing with the money? I think they're going to accuse him of like, you know, wasting their money.

Yeah. I mean, they waste their money. Yeah, they waste their money. Like, do you have a claim against this guy who's explicitly said he will do nothing? And I don't want money. I feel like this is one of those DYOR type of thing. Someone's going to come out and be like you didn't DYOR and do your own research. I mean, what research is there to do?

I mean, yes. It's really kind of an open-shut case here. I don't know. I'll just say don't fall for it. Please don't send any money to these things. Yeah, in general, I'd say it's a bad idea to send money to random addresses, regardless of whether they're promising you things. This is generally not a formula for success in life.

We generally don't get an investment advice on the show. That is the one thing I feel pretty confident in giving investment advice about. So, anyway, all right. we asked the viewer, because it's been kind of a slow week, besides this stupid meme coin stuff. We asked the viewers like, hey, what do you want to see us talk about this week? Because there's not a lot of, like,

really glaring news stories in, in the media these days. So one of the things that people asked us to comment on is, so one, they wanted to know, what is Tom's favorite video game? Tom, do you have a favorite video game? Was that actually on the list?

That was actually one of the, one of the questions that was given. Okay. It used to be Dota. All time. It used to be a big Dota guy. All time. Okay.

I've been playing a lot of Valerant lately, like Valorant, because I used to play Counterstrike, basically, like Counterstrike, age of vampires. I don't have a favorite favorite. I like PVP games. You know, it's like crypto, but it's a video game. It's a PVP. Got it. Okay. The next question right after that was, what is Tarun's favorite drug?

This is not life advice, okay? Wow. That one came out of nowhere. Yeah. I mean, these were back to back. And so I feel like somebody was looking at the two of you on the show and is like, okay, that guy is a favorite video game. That guy is a favorite drug. You know, all I got to say is I am waiting for the day that Red Bull calls me up and sponsors me to be an extreme sugar-free Red Bull drinking athlete.

Because I probably drink like 40 to 50 ounces of sugar for Red Bull a day, which is, probably bad for you, but I still do it. Wait, how many cans is... Oh, my God. Eight ounces. So it's like, it's like six... You drink five cans a day of Red Bull. Yeah, six...

Wait, wait, wait, wait. Yeah, yeah. How much caffeine is that? You might not know this, but like Therun actually consumes five cans. It's only 80 milligrams for can. You spread it through the day. It's not like you're like... Okay, it's not that.

It's not that. That's a lot of sugar. No, sugar-free. It's sugar-free. It's sugar-free. Oh, sugar-free. Free. Okay. So that's a lot of what? Aspartame? What is in there? Yes. So my favorite drug is some cancer-inducing sugar substitute.

Oh, beautiful, beautiful. Okay. And you're just like, you're just like titrating this throughout the day to just like keep your aspartame levels up or whatever. Yes. You know, just like a baseline of caffeine and artificial sweeteners. Basically. Okay. I don't know. It's just, honestly, it's just, you know, I feel like when I was in college, I was, much more of

an asshole coffee snob person and like, oh, like, if it didn't come from like, blah, blah, blah, siphon from this particular region, I'm not drinking it. And then, you know, over time, I just like fell down the cliff of like

how do I get caffeine faster? How do I get caffeine faster? How do I get caffeine faster? How do I get caffeine? And then eventually sugar for redble was the optimal just like titration curve. I would have totally pegged you for a coffee snobes. afternoon. I'm surprised. I was. But then I just like, it just became just like, I have to wait. I have to prepare it. You know, it's like literally was the latency.

It's like, it became a latency thing. And, and I think I started really drinking it before all the like random coffee in a can things became, you know like the like nitro cold brew coffee in a can. That wasn't there when my, my cycle started. So I, I'm just. just, and I've never been able to like those, because now I'm just so used to this taste of this thing. It's like, I got it. I used to drink. It must be like smoking, right? You just like, you don't even notice the, the taste anymore after a while. No, that's true. You just acclimated to it. I mean, I, when I was in college, I used to drink a lot of, a lot of Coke just to keep myself caffeinated. But I haven't, I haven't drank any caffeine in like 10 years, which is maybe 10 years.

Well, I'm drinking yours for you. Yeah, that's very noble. Okay, so the next question we got, the next question we got was, why is there so much tension between Haseeb and Turun? So I didn't know what they meant by this, but I'm curious, Tom, Robert, what is your guy's perception of the tension between me and Tarun? We never talked about this on the show. Okay, I think the tension is, Haseeb, you have like no hair, and Tarun has lots of colorful hair. And Tarun is trying to inception you into growing out colorful hair, and you're trying to inception Tarun into going shaved head.

I think that's the core tension. Honestly, I feel like with the headphones on, I can kind of see it. I can kind of see what it would look like if Tarun were to come over to my side. Yeah, and also just different working styles. You know, see on time running the show, Turun. Sometimes they even know that we're recording a podcast. It just thinks we're hanging out. So there's a lot of attention there, but.

You know, I need the seventh Red Bull of the day to get to the on time. You know, it's like Maslow's hierarchy of needs is like in cans of Red Bull. Okay, okay. Got it. Well, so I will say from my perspective, I don't feel any tension with Thru, but I do feel like we are probably the two most cantankerous people on the show, is that we're just the first to complain about something that we don't like. And so we'll get into it very easily.

but I think both of us are also very, we're just pretty brash people. And so I think, you know, it's funny because I have the same kind of relationship with my brothers is that I remember once I was hanging out like when I was very young, when I was like 18, I was hanging out with some folks from college

with my brother, my older brother. And we started arguing. And we just argue all the time. It's just kind of our relationship. And the guys who were sitting with us were like, holy fuck, are you guys like about to fight? And I was like, no, that's just how we are.

Like, we didn't feel any heightened feelings, but we just had this like super, I don't know, like hyper aggressive dynamic with each other that we just grew up with. I don't know why. But we just had that and we didn't feel anything about it. But I feel like that is maybe part of what people are detecting. Is that like, I think Trud and I just kind of do that,

but we don't have any, you know, our feelings are not really flaring up. Yeah, exactly. There's no beef when we're going back and forth on something. The only exception might be when we're, talking about anthropic or EA or SBF. I feel that's the only place where Tarud will really get worked up in a very serious way. Yeah, I agree. I think it's just like a form of directness and being kind of like very direct.

I'm going to say something. I'll offend many of our listeners. So I'm excited to say it as an homage to this question, which is I think that like every cycle in crypto brings new people. But I have to say, like, this last, like, I would say, like, the first cycle, you know, of, like, huge, let's say 2013, 2011, brought very angry libertarians into crypto, right? Like, it was like Roger Vair, Satoshi Dice. Like, people are generally a little bit, you know, on the anger management versus, like, Vipasana spectrum. They're definitely on the anger management side. And then like 2015, it was kind of similar.

It's like you had Mount Gawks. People lost all their money. They're angry. If they had the emoji with the cursing in the mouth, they would have used it more, but didn't exist then. And 2017, again, same thing. People were, that was actually the first time it got a little weak sauce, right? Like people started being a little less like on the anger, anger, you know, say my, they say my thoughts unfiltered. direction and there was a little more like drink the Kool-Aid socialism vibes kind of like what we

talked about there again and then this last cycle it was like i mean that on steroids in some ways and so like there just wasn't like as much you know that that that that style there's fewer of that style of person i think maybe has even i come from that kind of old generation of angry people I think we aren't we both 2017 vintage yes neither one of you should be angry yeah yeah yeah so that's not the angry we're not like the 2015 2014 angry we both were kind we both are kind of around like I don't feel like it was as organized right like how long you were actually paying attention for a long time right right like I had mount gock's deposits so I like definitely was like I was angry in that way you know right okay fair enough fair enough I that's an interesting

It's an interesting way to describe the generations of crypto. I actually like that. I like that concept. I think it's definitely true. Like the 2020 vendor, like if you came in during defy, as opposed to you came in during the NFT boom, I feel like there's also a difference there.

A huge difference. Yeah. A lot of finance people, a lot of folks who are just like, this is the coolest thing happening in finance. And those people, I think, tend to be more brusque, more utilitarian, more adversarial.

And they're less idealistic, right? Whereas almost everybody who came in during the NFT boom, super idealistic, very kind of socialist kumbaya, like, hey, blockchain is going to make everything better. And I think the 2017 vintage was a lot of people who are very idealistic who then got jaded, which I feel like is the best kind of people, you know, who like know what it is to be idealistic, but also realize why it's stupid. because everybody who came in in 2017, they were like, oh, everything is going to get tokenized. The entire world is going to live on the blockchain. Blockchain is going to take over governments. That was what we were all force-fed in 2017.

And it was all bullshit. Taking over governments for the record was always the goal. Yeah, yeah. Well, so taking over government in the sense of all government software, whatever is going to run on block. Every government is going to get on blockchain, all that stuff, right? And that just died. It just died in a way that it was never going to come back.

And so everybody from that era, like, had a dark night of the soul about what is this stuff and does it matter? Not me. I'm still on the Ethereum rainbow side. Are you? Yeah. Okay. Robert, you might be the one exception. But I feel like most people, like, you got some, like, gnarles in your gut after going through 2017, 2018, and 2018.

And it makes, I think people, like, you know, they can take a couple more punches if they went through the 2017-2018 cycle. We'll see what happens to this, you know, this 2021, 2022 vintage. But right now, I feel like a very snowflakey vintage. I agree. Tom, what's your take? Yeah, I can kind of see that. It also feels uniquely kind of very consumer-facing or very, like, web two in some ways. Like when I think about things that kind of defined it, it was like, there are applications

and there's a lot of people. And it's like friends of mine are asking me how to use it. And I feel like that was not true in like, you, 2017 or other cycles where it's like way more kind of like nerd dev focused. Yeah, the only thing in 2017 that in my worldview and circle ever reached mass knowledge of, you know, kind of existence was somehow like the Brock Pierce E.S thing. Like somehow that they're like the Mighty Ducks guy raised $4 billion. Like someone said that something that's like, what the fuck? Like how the fuck? Is that the thing you know?

The mighty ducks guy. I forgot about that. That's still the craziest ICU of all time and nothing will ever eclipse it. Period. False stop. For sure. That hit the level of like random friend asking me, I think, compared to everything else. No, that is true.

It was a weird time. Okay. Well, one of the other things that people suggest that we speak about was this whole roll-up ontology debate. So this, before we actually talk about what the debate is about, I first want to comment on the fact that this debate is happening. Why don't we do what we did last week? Where you went through each person. The five levels. The five levels of what a roll-up is.

That might be hard for this one. No, of what a roll-up is. Oh, what a roll-up is. Who wants to start? Who wants to give the-old? I'm going to take the five-year-old answer. Okay. Robert, you do the Eli-5.

Okay. So do you know fruit roll-ups? They're delicious. and they taste like strawberry. Well, inside each fruit roll-up is like 100,000 strawberries. That's what a roll-up of a chain. You have like 100,000 transactions in one. First of all, just like the SEC, like subtly,

that tries to say something to the security by invoking it in a trial, you just subtly invoked some fruitism where you just said apples and bananas aren't fruits. because the only fruit roll-up was strawberry. I'm not trying to be prejudiced against apples, bananas, or other things that could be a fruit roll-up. Maybe it's like a fruit leather, you know? Anything can be a fruit-lather.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we should have an ontology of roll-ups. Okay, perfect. I feel like a five-year-old would get it. Okay. Let's keep going. All right, Tom, you're explaining to a high schooler. I was going to say, remember plasma?

It's that, but we put the data on. chain. That's a roll-up. That's good explained to a high schooler. That's not the high schooler definition. Yeah, I don't think there are any high schoolers that know what plasma is. Unless they worked for Omisa Go. Yeah, some very precocious high schoolers. Okay, so you give a confusing explanation to a high schooler. All right, I'll give, I'll give, no, that's fine. I'll give an explanation to a day trader.

A roll-up, it's like an L-1, but it's more levered. So it's got its own token. And you can trade it. It's got, and it settles slower than the L1. That's L2s for day traders. All right, Turun, you explain it to a dev. Yeah, so you know how it took 10 years for Linux to go from single core Linux, like you could run it on a single processor, and the entire kernel would work to multi-core Linux,

where you could write code that you didn't have to know which, processor was running on, your machine might have had 32, but you just hit, like, run my code and it would figure out how to, you know, allocate your, which processor ran your code, where the memory was, all of that stuff. Imagine that change for a blockchain, where you deploy a contract. Instead of deploying a contract once, you're able to kind of separate A, the state from the availability of state of that kind of program from where it gets executed and the dream kind of in the 10-year vision of Linux is in my mind what the long-term vision of for roll-ups says even though people who are making roll-ups may not want to hear this

for their token price is that the end developer doesn't need to actually really care where it gets run right they post the data on somewhere that's trusted and the actual state is the valuable part state is money TM and then the execution gets done wherever somewhere else and the execution has some guarantees that it's run correctly or not. Some of them are used cryptography like ZK. Some of them are purely economic-ish, like optimistic. But in some sense, the dream of this world is you just send your program and you say, hey, I want my user's state to be really, really safe and really secure. It's like money. But the actual, who actually executes the state transitions, it can be somewhere else with different security guarantees.

Okay. This whole debate, maybe it's also useful framing the debate before we kind of go into the actual sides of the debate. So the core debate is critiquing this, the way that roll-ups are often described, or the way they're often kind of, this shorthand that we tend to use for roll-ups, which is that we often say roll-ups inherit the security of Ethereum. Right. So if you have a roll-up, whether it's truly trustless and it does all the things it's supposed to do on the tin, then you can trust the roll-up just like you can trust Ethereum. and all of its state is sort of a function of the state that's on, that's, you know, posted to Ethereum ultimately. It's sort of a compression technique for stuff that's, that's put on Ethereum. That's the sort of canonical, state approved, Vatallic, you know, stamped it and they said, yes, this is what roll-ups are.

And this roll-up ontology debate is basically people saying, that's a simplification. That's not really the way roll-ups are, because roll-ups are really just, they're basically an L-1 that has a special bridge and a sort of social contract with that bridge that says, hey, we're going to follow what the bridge does. But the roll-up itself and the way in which it offloads data availability or the way it offloads consensus

and the way that enshrines this bridge are two totally different things. And it can decide to basically fork away from the bridge. And if that happens, it's not as though like the universe explodes or the roll-up just dematerialize it or something. There are real things that happen when a, or alternatively, when a bridge itself upgrades

to keep some kind of consistency with the way in which the blockchain is changing. So the roll-up is changing. And so this idea of a roll-up as being, ah, it's about this like bridge with L-1, and that's what the roll-up is, and the roll-up is kind of stuck, like affixed to the layer one, and it can't really move,

and it's sort of, that's kind of how we imagine roll-ups is like some Velcro, you stick a blockchain onto Ethereum, and that blockchain is now stuck and can't really move, and Ethereum controls it. All these people are basically, arguing, is that really true? Is it not true that actually there are more degrees of freedom to the roll-up? And maybe we should stop oversimplifying the story around roll-ups as being this like, ah, inherit security from Ethereum thing. That in broad strokes is how I perceive back and forth

the argument. Turin, would you say it's a good encapsulation of what people are going back and forth about? Yeah, I mean, you're right. It's mainly focuses on this idea of like, does the bridge need to be agreed upon by both of them? And if it's agreed upon by both of them, does that make it kind of its own chain in some ways. Only other thing I would add is that, like, there's definitely a debate of, like, how much the developer needs to do to maintain their application and how much the user needs to do to maintain the state. And, like, that's also another place where people are fighting about what it actually, you know,

how much should a user be required to think about, for instance. Yeah. So the first thing that really came to me when I was reading all this. is like, why are we arguing about this? And I mean that not in a, like, derisive sense, but in a more, like, sociological sense of, like, why is this suddenly the thing that all these smart people are arguing about?

One, it feels to me like there's very little going on right now. Like, any time that, like, the main conversation is about philosophy, it's like, wow, we are really not making progress. Well, this was, like, do you remember the 2019 L1 consensus wars, like, between, like, Mir, Solana, Eith, et cetera. And they were all bike shedding on, like, particular nuances of their consensus protocol. Sharding versus vertical scaling versus all that stuff.

Yeah, totally. And a lot of the bike shedding actually didn't matter because the practical thing they implemented didn't really, like, added a lot of duct tape and bailing wire around those particular details. Or I'm not saying that, like, some of them didn't implement what they claimed as much as, like, the precise things they were attacking each other on were not these, like, sharp, like, A and B are completely separate objects, but they actually were like fuzzier and overlapped a lot more. I think that that's the same thing here.

I definitely agree with that. I feel like though, going back, I keep coming back to this theme of like blockchains as religions, and I'm going to do that one more time here because I feel like it's constructive. So why are people talking about this? Like who cares if, oh, people are kind of using the word roll up a little more loosely than they should. Like Robert. What I would say is that the reason why people are arguing about this is that roll-ups have become so fundamental to the teleology of Ethereum, basically. It's like, look, the end, like the story of how Ethereum, you know, the story,

what's the, what's the, what's the, what's the book, Revelations, right? That's the book where the world ends or whatever. Like, the sort of the, the revelations for Ethereum is that are all roll-ups. Roll-ups are the way that Ethereum will see the future. It's the way Ethereum's going to scale. And these guys are basically going in and like attacking the high priests of Ethereum who are claiming they're like, ah, roll-ups are this beautiful, kind of transcendent way, this like golden bridge to the promised land of unlimited scaling. And they're like, ah, ha, ha, no, not so fast. There is no promise land because in the future, every roll-up can fork and do whatever we want. It's just another blockchain. There is no magical way to scale Ethereum

without making ugly governance trade-offs. And it's like, okay, well, what's your point? Like, why bring that up? Do you want people to not use roll-ups? Should people do something else? Should they, like, change the way they do the roll-ups. There's no real recommendations in any of these arguments. People are not saying like, ah, so we should, you know, make the bridges immutable, or we should do this, or we should blah, blah. It's all, like, I feel like the takeaway from these arguments is all, we should educate people. And it's like, okay, we should educate people about what, exactly, to do what? I agree to an extent. I think it's a little bit kind of like Bitcoin in the early days when people are like, well, you know, all money is a social construct. So why can't Bitcoin be

money. And it's like if you kind of have, if you're attacking like the incumbent, you kind of want to, you know, unravel them a little bit. And there's obviously a lot of people pushing modular blockchain and, you know, stuff like that. And so it's like, well, you know, actually, Ethereum isn't that important because you can do DA somewhere else. And the bridge actually isn't part of the roll-up. So in reality, like nothing is actually happening here. And like my other company and thing that I am also trying to sell conveniently fits into this narrative. And so I think, that there's definitely like, you know, something going on. For the sake of our industry, please do not.

Recommend no more news like this. You say there's a data availability layer. That's what you're saying. The whole, this whole thing is manufactured by data availability layers to just get attention. Yes. Yeah, kind of. Or anyone pushing modular blockchain, it is extremely in their benefit. People are like, oh, actually, you know, you're right that the bridge

actually isn't that important. And we don't have to use, you know, an L1 like Ethereum to do DA. There's actually other stuff out there. And again, I would say the same way people are like, oh, money is a social construct. What's so great about, you know, currency XYZ? Tom, can you define modular blockchain? Because I think a lot of people listening may not be familiar with that term. Sure. So modular blockchain is this idea that you can basically separate execution from data availability. So you don't have to, for example, you know, On Ethereum, we all agree there's a set of state transitions that occur. And then the chain itself is used to actually store historical state as well as what the current state is.

Modular blockchain, for example, you can make your own roll-up that might have its own EVM that's using to sort of set state transitions, but it's actually storing the state and storing all the data, you know, on some sort of decentralized file storage system. Or it might be using a different type of VM, but also storing the data actually on Ethereum itself. So it's not using the EVM, it's using something else. And so the idea is sort of, hey, you can pick and place different parts of this stack to suit your own needs. And that's what these companies are working on. So if I can analogize, it's sort of like, you know, today or like, you know, today we might be in the prehistory phase for modular blockchain people where everybody has their own verticalized stack. They store stuff.

They execute stuff. They do consensus. They do all this stuff in-house, right? But in the future, it's almost like cloud providers. You'll use somebody for storage. You'll use somebody else for execution and you can kind of mix and match vendors, quote unquote. And this is better in the modular blockchain world because it leads to, I don't know, specialization or something. I don't know, whatever.

This is what will happen. Yeah. I mean, if you believe this and you think Ethereum is literally just going to be used for DA, data availability in the future, you can argue it's probably not optimized for data availability. And there's probably a cheaper, better, more robust way to store state data and call data. and so why not build a blockchain or some sort of other system that exclusively does that and is optimized for it. And that's kind of the benefit of modularity is you can sort of have different parts of the stack optimized for the thing that they're trying to do. There's a famous quote which is completely unrelated to crypto and blockchain, which says that in, I think it's related to the media industry, but also more generally, most businesses are either bundling things or unbundling things. And I feel like when it comes to modular blockchains, it's like the unbundling of all the things that make a blockchain a blockchain and saying basically, oh no, you had all of this in one place. Let's rip it apart and do each thing independently. And maybe that's better for whatever reasons. I personally think that blockchain's in a bundled sense work pretty well right now. I, you know, at a really high level, don't know how much better it'll be if you like take a blockchain and just.

you know, turn it into its like individual components. But so maybe it's better. I think so you guys invested in Celestia, right? Yes. So you guys, what is your take then on the modular blockchain thesis? Like do you think modular blockchains are going to become a bigger thing? Why? Give us the pro argument.

Yeah. So one of these arguments and this, this is sort of my historical analogy argument, at least initially, was that Linux actually went from losing to Windows quite substantially to really dominating in the server market when Linux was able to actually do multi-core, multi-processor, multi-node operations a lot better than Microsoft was actually allowing. And part of that tradeoff came from Linux actually modularizing itself and people specializing in different things, like people specializing in open source drivers or even in the case of Nvidia, close source drivers, but for Linux,

the Linux and video drivers are a million times better for doing machine learning with them, the Windows ones in 2023. That was not true in 2008. And the Linux kind of, the way that it actually was able to kind of beat out the incumbents was allowing for the components of Linux to be separated and for the operating system to like only act in a shrinking manner as the intermediate. between different components, like between the graphics card and the processor, between memory and the CPU, between the hard disk and memory, it kind of acted more and more as a choreographer and less and less

as like, I'm doing everything all at once. And it took a long time to get that right. And it also took a long time to get the user, the developer APIs and interfaces for that to become a lot cleaner. And one thing you're sort of seeing in the roll-up world in general is that one of the reasons there's many different styles of roll-ups, different, whether they're optimistic, like Optimum, Optimum, Optimism, Arbitrum, whether they're ZK, like ZK Sync, Scroll, etc. Starkware.

There's sort of this sense in which they're all making these slightly different trade-offs, but all of them are converging to this idea that there are some subsets of applications that really want to separate concerns for their users. And those applications, for instance, the number one of that form is gaming. Blockchain games, the really valuable thing is the state that the users own, like their items or like some subset of their history.

But the actual game engine gameplay itself doesn't actually always need to be posting to the place that the valuable state is, right? And so now you can have this hierarchy in which the most valuable things stay at the bottom in the sort of DA style layer. and then the less and less valuable things can be further away, and they can all be running in concurrent fashion, just like a cloud system. And so if you believe that that architectural shift

of the world computer into the world computers happens, then you sort of inevitably come to this point that the specialization of the modular world is key to getting there. Now, there's a lot of other weird stuff, though, that comes with it, which is like the UX is crazy. here, right? Like, designing wallets to keep track of all of this is a lot more work. So I think the real thesis is that this is what happened before, and there's a lot of reason for certain types of applications that basically are non-economical right now for this to work. But the con is,

like, there's a lot of U.X change that will happen. But the thing is the Ethereum roadmap, if we really believe it's mainly the roll-up roadmap and not the, you know, any of the previous Roadmaps is already moving in that direction anyway. So this is just, you know, I think it's just people are choosing a different, slightly different version of it. In a way, in a way, I feel like the modular blockchain hypothesis is an evolution of the app chain hypothesis. Yes.

What's your reaction to that? Yeah, 100%. I think Cosmo sort of, you know, it has some of the best developers in the space, but it also has some of the, you know, and it comes up with all these amazing ideas first that get copied by everyone else, right? Like staking derivatives, first ever implemented in Cosmos. I mean, they kind of messed up some of their initial implementation, but it's still a really good idea. And if you look at who made it successful, it was Lido, right? It was certainly not a Cosmos staking derivative. And I think the same thing might end up being true with the App Chain thesis where actually, in order for

the App Chain thesis to work, you need to have a really valuable state layer. or data layer, that's the money. And then after that, you start building the apps. But you can't start with that first and then hope it turns into money or the treated like money. So let me maybe pose devil's advocate of sort of the anti-modular blockchain thesis. Is the picture you painted was that like, well, there's a specialization that's going to occur at different layers.

And that's why, you know, like just all. almost every other business, you have a certain vendor who's really good at X. So you use vendor X instead of billing it yourself. This is kind of the natural way that software evolves or that almost any economy evolves. Is it towards specialization and then kind of comparative advantage? If I can paraphrase. The argument would be that like, well, yeah, but blockchains are like these really complex distributed systems that carry giant quantities of money.

And it's all open source. And those two things are make blockchains fairly unique in that like one, if somebody else really solve data availability, right? And they are actually open source. Then you can just say, like, great, well, you're already trusting, you know, my node set, my validator sets to do XYZ. Whatever trust assumption you have

because I'm doing A, B, or C for you, you're already trusting me, right? And then you also have to trust this other system. You trust this other system. When you have a distributed system that has lots and lots and lots of points of failure, the likelihood of failure and just degraded experiences goes way up.

Because any single thing can go wrong and that'll degrade the entire thing, right? And so as companies get bigger, their products get more important and more robust, they start in-housing more and more things to make it so that, you know, because these uncorrelated failures are very fragile. Because if one thing fails,

or if the right fails, or if the persistence fails or if the, you know, consensus fails or whatever, it doesn't matter, oh, only one thing failed, like the whole thing failed if just one component of it failed. And so you'd rather feel like, look, I'm already trusting this set of nodes. I might as well just, like, fork the best data availability thing,

fork the best virtual machine, fork the best whatever, and just bring that all in-house and you just trust my nodes to run it. It's not as though it requires significantly more expertise on the behalf of my node runners or my validators to run this software. We can upstream whatever changes is being made at this data availability layer. But ultimately, I want both the value, the trust, and the work to live inside of a single system.

And if anything, I also probably get better latency guarantees because now it's all happening within the same node network instead of this node network, he needs to talk to that node network, and there's like some extra latency that's going to be imposed by two different systems talking to each other. They can't share a common format.

So I think if we look at the history of computing applications historically, like yes, there's a huge amount of value that has been created by extremely latency-sensitive things, you know, like both in trading as well as real-time systems, like for airplanes or spacecraft or things like that. On the other hand, if we look at a lot of where the big boom of like 2010 to now came from,

it really did come from sort of like horizontal scaling and bandwidth scaling rather than purely in C-scaling. In the sense of like, you know, machine learning only works because you can do horizontal scaling across many GPUs, across many nodes, across many FPGAs, whatever. A lot of the database stuff, if you look at the history of databases, like, yes, We've had really good acid-compliant, acid sort of like a set of standards that a database might need to follow. Databases, like MySQL and stuff forever.

But yet, at the end of the day, MongoDB is still a, you know, X billion-dollar company. And just a commonly used database that just doesn't have, that like doesn't have the same latency guarantees or safety guarantees, which at least with blockchain you really do get. And in some ways, people really love using it because it's kind of easy to bootstrap. certain types of applications with.

So I guess my argument is like, crypto spent a lot of time on the latency spectrum in the monolithic layer. And moving out on the bandwidth spectrum, I think effectively forces you to go down the modular route. Moving down the bandwidth spectrum, meaning that if you want to scale blockchains horizontally, you need modularity.

Yeah, to some extent. Yeah. Like, bandwidth lines. I'm not saying, I'm not saying like, right, like the L1 thesis. of like Solana, Sweet Aptus, that's much more focused on the like latency

thesis, right? That the applications really want this like instant like responsiveness property. But I think the modular stuff is actually going for something totally different. It really is going for this like separation of like the money stuff which hopefully doesn't need to be read as often

versus the actual raw application logic execution. I think it might end up just being that both survive in the same way that right now the modern cloud era, we have both really low latency applications as well as high bandwidth applications. I do feel like there was, you know, back when I was a professional software engineer, like,

and this is what, like eight years ago or something, there was a lot of excitement around, I guess what you would call in blockchain parlance modularity, which is, you know, service-oriented architectures, micro-services. Basically, like, there was this, there was a strong backlash against the notion of monoliths, which is basically this giant piece of code that runs is just one thing, right? That's Ethereum. Ethereum is a monolith.

It's just one big ass piece of code. And that's all you run. You just run Ethereum. And there was this almost like fetishization of microservices and kind of decoupling and all this stuff. And I feel like in some sense, things have reverted back

toward being more in favor of monoliths just out of this reality that like actually when you break things out and you decouple and you modularize and all the stuff, it doesn't like magically produce these beautiful, you know, perfectly, you know, shorn edges and these, these great beautiful boundaries that don't, you know, these abstractions that never get perforated that in reality, like, it kind of sucks and it's annoying and you like lose context and things don't talk to each other and you need shims and translation layers and like things just kind of end up getting calcified that stick in between the holes and the layers. And it's never quite as beautiful as it sounds. and in reality, like these things, if they end up becoming successful, they sort of become monoliths whether you want them to or not.

Where it's like if you've got one chain, let's say it's, you know, let's say, let's say finance smart chain, just for simplicity. Binance smart chain, it decides that it's going to use, you know, it's going to use R-Weave as a data-villability layer, okay, whatever, which is not a great idea, but let's say they did that. So, Binetist Smart-Changean use R-Weev as data-villability layer. R-Weave has so little else going on that basically, R-Weave is going to become like staple to

Binance Smart Chain. Like there's just no there's no way that R-Weave can fork without Binance Smart Chain also forking. Like if you force something if the test it on a Binance Smart Chain like these two things become so coupled because they are the dominant applications of each other that it's almost like a monolith except that

it's a poorly coordinated monolith. I feel like that is in many ways the reality you're going to brush up against in this idea that like well you know go ahead. Do you know Ronald Kosz a Nobel Prize winner. Yes. And so KOSIS theory of the firm, right, is like,

imagine you have N agents who are each individual contractors, and they have some economic interactions with each other. And now suppose that they have transaction costs for engaging in that. So think of like when you sell your home, you incur you and yours some transaction costs. Now imagine groups of people start saying, hey, we'll work together because we get to distribute our transaction costs between us. and the coast theory of the firm is really like, hey, there's some carrying capacity,

some natural size for a firm based on its cash flow generation for how much it matters for you to actually reduce your transaction costs by sharing, and that gives you a natural size of that particular company industry or whatever. There's a sense in which modular blockchains are trying to achieve something in the middle of kind of those two extremes like that. And I think in the same way that if you, if you in 1986 were, you know, trying to work on like non-monolithic hardware, you would have been kind of laughed out of the room because that was the time when

Moore's Law was happening and basically like single system on chip type devices by Intel were just like completely killing everyone. And, you know, all these people making custom supercomputers, custom chips with different forms, they weren't very successful at doing that. Intel was just able to have this like exponential growth. And then that kind of caused the like monolithic CPU era of the 90s and early 2000s. But eventually Moore's law petered out. And you had to innovate at the architectural level. And that's arguably where say, Nvidia really kind of shined. And so, you know, having worked in hardware and you heard all the war stories from people who

lived through that era where there was this transition from this like purely, you know, low latency type thing to the high bandwidth type world. All I want this caution is to not throw the baby out the bathwater. There might be that transition when that type of application is found that actually is on a different part of the tradeoff spectrum. Yeah, I agree with that. And to be clear, I'm not uniformly against modular blockchain. We invested into ZK Sync, which is a ZK roll-up, which also is trying to launch the

ZK Porter thing, which is a cross between a ZK. roll up in a volidium which is a modular blockchain right that's the that is exactly the description of what a modular blockchain is which is that you're not putting the data availability in the same place where you're putting consensus so i do think these things will exist right clearly and there's there's it's it's broadening the universe of choices one can make about architecture and i think that's a worthwhile goal in the same way that i think app chains will exist you know like i was sort of uh you know i remember arguing with like sunny and zucky back like five six years ago about the the theory was was not just that

will exist, of course app chains will exist. The question is, will app chains become dominant? That's the question. And in the same way, I feel like the modular blockchain hypothesis is not that, oh, well, will modular blockchains exist? Of course they will. The question is, will this become the dominant way that blockchains are architected? And when we say the dominant way, we don't just mean like, okay, some random startup that

some people are starting. It means like, where is most of the money going to be? Where is most of the most important value or the most important blockchains? How are they going to look? in five years. There I have more skepticism about the modular blockchain story, even though I do think that modular blockchains will exist. And like you mentioned, games and other things that don't have as much of a vested interest in rebuilding these different parts of the stack will probably be big beneficiaries of, you know, the ease of modularity with things like

eigen layer and eigenDA, which is their data availability layer or Celestia or what have you. Yeah. And I think that there is kind of this interesting. thing. And again, it's, I, I really respect a lot of people working Cosmosland. They've just like somehow socially found a way to shoot themselves in the foot 500 times. And part of the reason for that is that there's no single substrate religiously for them. And back to your, your, your, your, your, your religious view. In the sense that they have a leader that they assassinated, uh, effectively in J. I don't know what else to call the excommunication. It's like, it's a little bit like he hasn't quite, he has, he has,

he's been in exile, hasn't quite come back. He's still suing people, I guess, who are developers in the ecosystem or something. I don't know. There's all sorts of drama. Yeah, Cosmosland is like, it's a very drama-filled. Opposite of Salonaland, which you have to give them a lot of credit for, which is they did the opposite.

They were just like, yeah, we're just all going to like kind of tombaya, like, pretend we're going to like move in this one direction. And in the cosmos world, it's like, anyone who got success immediately, someone would like, who would have an IBC transactions, would try to undercut them. and it's because everyone had their own token. And so like any, there was no like correlated incentive. Cosmos is really like the EU, I feel like.

It is, it is just, it's a seed of civilization in so many ways, but it's so fucked. Unfortunately. Prior to having a ton of value in it indogynously, right? Right. The big advantage for Ethereum, if it basically copies the App Chain thesis by OPEC stack, or Arbitranova or whatever. If you case, like, any of these different visions of the world

that actually do kind of look like that, is that they're starting from a substrate that's valuable, people care about, and people are just fundamental believers in, versus, like, Adam is Dogecoin for nerds. Like, you know, all the other random... Juno, like, the founder is dumping it. You know, Evmost.

Like, Evmos had to have this really ridiculous tweet about how, like, We are aware that a founder, a former founder is dumping all of the tokens. And then to write this amazing, I mean, that was like crypto history tweet. It's very funny. It was pretty funny. And my point is like that that lack of like substrate that's like sociopolitical substrate that for Ethereum is ETH. For Solana, it actually is soul.

It just doesn't exist there. Everyone's always out to cut each other. And like, it's like a knife fight constantly. there. And in some sense, it's very hard to do this type of modular thesis when everyone has their everyone's trying to backstab each other. Yeah, it does feel like the problem with Cosmos, it's not rowing in the same direction. And it's very true of Solana. And now that you mention that, I have to give them props as much as I've given them shit in the past. Like, even post all the FTX calamity and all the horrible stuff that they've had to deal with over the last six months,

like Salonnas been super no drama. They're just... focus on the goal. They're just shitting. Well, their only drama is shitting on roll-ups. Are they shitting on roll? I haven't. They love, they love the like modular versus monolithic debate, obviously. So like, but my point is that they're all, they're like, if everyone's a vector, they're all kind of roughly pointing the same direction. In Cosmos, it's like all other random directions.

So the magnitude of the thing is like nothing because they're all kind of like pulling in opposite directions in some ways. And I think that the lack of sociopolitical. substrate, whether it comes in the form of like an asset, whether it comes in a form of a leader, that philosophy and ethos is kind of their biggest lacking, biggest hole in some ways. Tom, what's your take on the kind of cosmos political scene? Yeah, I was going to say it's kind of like Protestantism where it's like, you know, if you have a different view, you can go do your own thing and like everyone's kind of cool with it.

And therefore you get a million different fucking branches versus like, you know, Ethereum and Ramatha's like Catholicism. It's like, you got the Pope and here's the rules. And like, that's the thing. And like, you've got to be, you got to be with us, you know. And so I agree. I mean, there's a bunch of other issues with Cosmos, but when to get into them today. I think going back to kind of the debate around, or sort of arguing by analogy about

these other parts of computing and tech and how they've gone from bundling to unbundling or modular to monolithic. I think the question in my mind is just like, how much utility are you going to get from the specialization of these different layers to sort of justify incremental transaction costs and overhead? And like, that's kind of ultimately the way it comes down to, right? It's like that equation and that tradeoff. And so far, it doesn't really seem like with any of these other architectures and any of

these other blockchains, there's like a huge clear benefit that results in some sort of like user story. Like even on Solana, people are still. still doing the same shit they're doing on Ethereum. It's not like, oh, here's this amazing new application that people can do on Solana that they can't do in Ethereum. It's still people trading on AMMs, people trading NFTs, like it's a lot of the same stuff. And so I don't, unless there is some bigger sort of story around, oh, here's this thing that is so uniquely enabled on Ethereum, you know, chain whatever that you can't do on Ethereum, it seems like kind of a hard sell. And so far,

I think it's just around a story around cost, which is true. Like I was just looking at the L2 economics dashboard from a couple ups ago, guess how much money Arbitrum spent this month on settling on Ethereum? A million dollars? $8 million. 4,000, Eth, almost $8 million. Yeah. So, okay, maybe there's argument that you take, you know, cost down towards a magnitude

and maybe that unlocks something new, but it feels kind of kind of nebulous right now. Well, okay, I think for the modular blockchain story, a lot of also what makes it attractive is not just the cost of operating, but the cost of starting up, right? So if you want to launch a game, you want to launch a blah, blah, blah, whatever, e-commerce or something. So we're investors in a company called Caldera, which does like this roll-up as a service stuff.

These are popping up everywhere because you couldn't really do blockchain as a service, right? It's kind of, there's just too much of a lift. Like getting 50 validators and getting them to do a token and having to be worth enough value and blah, blah, blah. all that stuff. It's just a lot of shit that you got to handle, which is why we had so few,

you know, blockchain launches, even in the era when people really were incentivized to launch blockchains, not that many people could actually launch a fully fledged L1. It's just the overhead is really high.

In the world of roll-ups and modularity, there's a good argument to be made that it's just easier to spin up something off the ground. There are just fewer pieces that you have to have for yourself. But it also seems true in the same way that, like, look,

if you want to start, like some very simple app, you just grab the Twilio API, you grab some Amazon Lambda functions, and you just, you pin something together, maybe you grab Zapier as well, and you don't really have to run that much infrastructure yourself.

It's great for creating small things, getting them off the ground. But ultimately, like, I mean, as you were describing this top, of like, okay, how does this affect the user story? How does this affect the actual user who's using the blockchain? And the answer is that if you're in a modular blockchain, then if one of those systems, is upgrading or one of those systems has downtime, the whole thing has downtime, right? And if one of those

systems upgrades and the other one has something incompatible, like things, like, things just get fucked more when you have so many dependencies inside of your, what should be a mission critical system that's custodying money, you know? And that, that I think is one of the things that makes this the most difficult to imagine large, really valuable blockchains that have significant sums of money taking on this modular approach. That I think is probably the crux of why I think this. It's hard for me to imagine a Solana or an Ethereum or a, you know, a polygon, like the Layer 1 Polygon, not the ZKVM stuff, becoming modularized, quote, unquote.

Oh, I don't think an existing in-flight major L1 really is going to modularize. I think new competitors to it will be modularized. from the outset. Like I think it's really hard to take a monolith apart. I think it's really easy to build something new using Legos, right? So, you know, I don't think polygons like, you know, or Ethereum or Salon or whatever will be that pattern. I think, you know, widget chain, you know, 2032 is like the thing that's going to be, you know, completely modular from the outset and designed for like a very specific application or use case.

her pattern. Do you think maybe, let me ask both you and you and Turun, do you think that we will get to a place, let's say in five years, 10 years, where one of the dominant blockchains, like the Polygon or the Binance Smart Chain or the Solana of the day will be a modular blockchain? Yeah, I think. So obviously Polygon is trying, right? I think the Polygon ZKVM version of the world,

especially with the multiple different ZKVMs, R-D is sort of in that world. A veil exists, which spawned out of Polygon to do data availability. So I think they are committed to it in a lot of ways. But do you think they will? That's the question. Do you think one of the top four chains in five to ten years will be modular?

Top four? I think the answer is no. The fact that you're taking someone to answer this. I think the answer is clearly no. I think they will get somewhere in between creating another version of themselves or kind of making step chains that are modular and specialized for applications that start there, but then can't exhaust resources or aren't able to actually work on the mean. That sounds like no.

Is that, can I summarize that is no? I heard it not really. Yeah, that's what I feel like I heard. Yeah, I think maybe that's right. Unless there's a, you know, you need the uniswap of modular blockchains, right? But you need a killer like magnet that like just gets everything using it. Like, oh my goodness. Like it turns out we needed, you know, incredible data availability over here.

And we could detach the execution layer. And like what we were building is perfect for that, you know. Right. And maybe it's a game. Maybe like some crazy-ass game is like you play in the virtual Warcraft world or whatever and like it separately is storing your items. And like that's some game is like the perfect use case that just like gets crazy throughput on both of those systems.

Yeah. I think that's kind of the story. I actually expect to play out more where it's an app that gets too big for an existing chain and instead of doing a Ronin or instead of doing, you know, a Cosmos chain, as we've kind of seen the past approaches, they do, their own roll-up and that's sort of the new MO. Yeah, I mean, another way of viewing roll-ups is like the Ronan chain without, without, with better security assumptions than any of the Ronan validators made, right?

Like, it's like you don't have to figure that stuff out on your own as like, ye old application dev, right? And I think that is actually very powerful in the long run. For applications that find some product, some form of initial fifth, but then outgrow their initial substrate. And that's why I think like it's hard to say for these big L ones because like they haven't had applications that have really exhausted them. Like other than sort of spam mints.

No, no, no, but they haven't have like. Wait, wait, how can you say that they didn't get exhausted? No, no, no. I mean they haven't had like full game type things, right? Like like Dark Forest was on X die. It was not on, you know, things that actually had like full dynamic. These games are on these other chains. They couldn't possibly be on L1 without.

exhausting it. Correct, correct. But my point is that they, there's sort of this thing of like, I do feel like people are trying right now. The design pattern is still you try on test night, you try on main net, and then you figure out if you need more resources. But I think the question of like when the transition is to like you try on test site, you try on your own chain, and then you have some of it, you know, some of the logic. Right. That design pattern we don't see Yeah. And like if we see that, I think that's, you could view them also in some ways as like a in between Tessnet and Mainnet that's like continuous continuously. It seems. Yeah, yeah. I think it's more likely maybe that it's like, okay, you start with TestNet. You start with a roll up. Then you decide whether you want to go Mainnet or whether you want to go to your own, you know, roll up or your own modular or something or other, whatever we're calling these things now. it's apparently roll-up is not a not a not the preferred nomenclature interesting i guess the the big thing

after all this conversation um by the way i'm surprised that we spent so long talking about this because i thought this would be very short i didn't think there'd be much meat on this bone but it looks like there's quite a lot i guess the biggest thing is like look guys you're all very smart talking about roll-ups and whether roll-ups are really roll-ups or not a blah-bblah blah blah but like to tom's point like please can we get our collective brainpower focus on applications because right now like blockchain still suck we we we still suck we still don't have anything to do. So that'd be awesome if we can refocus on the like let's find things to do with blockchains. We just have to put a hundred million player game on top of, you know, a modular

blockchain and we're good. Maybe that maybe that's it. Maybe we're just waiting for the modular before. We just need Tom to tell us what, tell us what game it is. Yeah, yeah, Tom, what's your favorite game again? And how do we get that onto a modular blockchain? I think we're probably still a few years away from from something like that happening. Yeah, I'm optimistic. I want to say my friend is one of the early engineers on Valorant at Riot, and he despises blockchains. So I don't think Valorant is coming.

He told me he. Yeah. I was going to say, it is funny. People love doing the whole like, oh, we'll make a market for trading skins for, you know, game X, Y, Z. which is, I mean, it is a thing for Counterstrike because Steve and Steam and Valve allow that, but it's not a thing for Valoran

and it's like a touchy point where it's like, you spend money on its skins and it's gone forever. You don't get it back. Interesting. Okay. All right, guys. Well, hopefully next week there'll be a little more news to us to dig into, but I think we're up on time.

You know, I got to say, sometimes these random episodes are good because they draw out the animal spirit. And just to close this out with one final thought, if you know anybody in the Red Bull marketing department or an advertising agency that works with them, and you have an ability to get them to sponsor Tarun or the shopping block, get in touch with us.

We will do Red Bull ads. We don't run ads on the show, but we will run Red Bull ads. I will 100% run Red Bull ads for you, too. Look, thank you. I appreciate it. Let's think we can get through a lifetime supply. This would be amazing. Okay.

Awesome. I'm glad we're able to end that with addressing the tension between you and me to run. I think that's a good note to end the show on. I'll send you some Red Bulls for your birthday so that you can you two can learn. Give me addictive. That sounds great. All right. See you, everybody.