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Masa Foundation 7

A

Hey, guys. Welcome to Debrief after episode with Sergei Nazarov from Chainlink, our first chainlink episode. David, he did not like your zapper for banks.

B

No, he did not like that whatsoever.

A

I knew where you would be going with it.

B

The guy is a rigid guy. I just learned in that one moment.

A

Yeah, I don't think he could flow with that metaphor. Maybe.

B

I don't even know what Zapper is. I think it's an interface for Defi. I don't know what it is, bro. He totally knows what Zapper is.

A

I know where you're going with that, or you meant to go with that. I think he was stuck on. It's not a user interface. We're talking about a protocol.

B

But, yeah, he couldn't. There's a lot of people in this industry that can't really use their imagination well.

A

Oh, yeah? Like, who else?

B

Oh, am I naming names here?

A

No, no, no. Don't name names.

B

I will. Cause I've got one in my mind.

A

No. Let's talk about this episode. So this has been a long time coming. I think we have delayed doing a chain link episode. I mean, I think the very genesis of bankless back in 2020, we had the opportunity or potential to do a chain link episode, and we never, like, wanted to. Never did. Because we hadn't had a strong thesis around decentralized oracle networks. And it very much seemed at the time that the frog army. At that time. And literally, when I say frog army, I mean, like, literal, you know, Pepe, frog frogs.

B

Frog army on Twitter. Yeah, the chain link army, the link marines.

A

Yeah, they were all about. They were all about chain link.

B

Deafening.

A

Sorry, Link. The asset, I should say, in a very pushy way. And I don't think that this necessarily reflects on Sergei Nazarov at all. I think he always sort of rose above it and was speaking mainly about the tech, but there was this hyper aggressive set of Twitter accounts that made.

B

Me, like, it was the first spawn of four chan into the Twitter world. So it started in four chan, and it was like, to chain links credit, I'll call it like the immaculate. You remember the immaculate IcO. Like, you can never repeat the Ethereum ICos. It was immaculate. All further icos are tainted by. By bad incentives. Yeah, I'll give chainlink the benefit of, like, it was kind of like the immaculate frog army. Like, it was the first one, and it was organic and real. There are conspiracies that it might not have been so organic, but I think that's all conspiracy. So, yeah, the immaculate frog ception of chain link. All further frog armies past chain link, I've deemed as, like, well, now you're just playing the game. Shout out, avalanche. And so, like, those have been like, well, now you know that that's a strategy and you've tried to corrupt it. But, like, the chain link frog army, I think, just emerged out of four chan because of the fundamentals of chain link. Like, they rallied around the shelling point.

A

That's the thing, is, there's this fundamental chain link technology which, quite honestly, has always been strong and always been net beneficial to crypto and to the world and coherent, of which I think Sergey has been a very credible founder. Right. Like, continuing to build, dude, steadfast, laser focused. Laser focus.

B

One of the most laser focused people in this industry.

A

Also an executor in a time where, you know, so many other crypto projects are not executing. He's got, like, a 510, 20 year vision for this thing, and he's just, like, just hauling ass and executing. And I admire the heck out of that. But that was almost overshadowed back in 2020 by this very rabid tribe in a crypto, specifically Twitter. Twitter social. That made it hard to have a coherent conversation about chain link itself and isolate the technology from the token. That is.

B

Why don't you have Chainlink? Put chain link on the show. Put chainlink on the show. Have Sergey on. Have Sergey on. I'm like, y'all are doing fine. Everyone knows what chain link is. So anyway, Sergey to be on the.

A

Show, that has died down so much, and it's just not even present anymore. And chain Link, it feels much healthier to have a conversation in 2023, it probably would have been healthy, like, last year, even late 2021, but we just haven't gotten around to it until now. Here we are. I think that there is basically, look, it's very simple. There's just a need for a connector, some glue between banking systems and swift and crypto and blockchain. What Chainlink is doing is creating middleware for those two things, messaging and data middleware. It's as simple as that. They can do the beady b two b, and focus on Swift and focus on the DTcC, and they can kind of unite these two tribes and these two communities. And it seems like it's a pretty technically sophisticated take. I've seen a lot of crypto projects not only adopt Chainlink, the oracle, for defi pricing, but is it synthetix that is using CCIP?

B

Yep.

A

Um, like, it has some real traction for cross chain interoperability so, um, yeah, it's. It's great to have chainlink in the ecosystem, I would say. And I think they're doing good work with connecting some of the legacy traditional finance systems.

B

Yeah, I do have, like, a. Well, not a super hard time, but, like, I have to actually do it is like separating Sergey from Chain link, from the frog army. It's like, the. One of my hesitations about having Sergey on is that he was just gonna come give us his stump speech, which I feel like is what he did. Other people, when we, like, are they more adaptable? They're more flexible. The show is more unique. It's. The bankless show is the bankless version of whatever this episode is. But I think we just. I feel like if we could cut up other pieces of Sergei's podcasts in different venues or talks or whatever, and then you could, like, okay, now, like.

A

Well, I think that's how he is. I think he's basically like, yeah, it's.

B

Just not my vibe. It's not my jive.

A

Well, I think he has. I think he has a pretty ironclad, like, vision. Right, for basically, like. And that's.

B

I said those words, like, 10,000 times before.

A

Well, I think he has. I think he's got presentation. Like, the five levels of security is kind of, like, you know, thought through, and it's definitely. I mean, I think he's obviously, he's also a masterful not only executor, but, like, marketer. I think they've done a very good job in terms of packaging decentralized Oracle networks and birthing the industry and making them what they are today, and they've really crushed it. Name another Oracle network competitor, Layer zero. This is only on the interoperability side of things, by the way, one thing I didn't get a chance to ask is, how is CCIP and interoperability and cross chain interoperability related to Oracle networks? It feels like it's a different product offering in some ways.

B

No, it's all about just passing data. Everything's just passing data.

A

I guess it's just trusted validators passing data. So this is like what he was saying.

B

There is no such thing as interoperability between networks. There's no pure interoperability between, like, unless you're, like, you have to be on the same level of communication, like IBC. Does interoperate with IBC, layer two s do interoperate with Ethereum. Crossing those languages requires what we call an interoperability layer. But that is just what Sergey is calling of a decentralized consensus around compute.

A

Yeah, yeah, I think there's probably more use cases for like verifiable compute or verifiable data than I thought there were.

B

Yeah, pretty open ended.

A

I think that, you know, I sort of stopped with chainlink after price Oracle. I'm like, okay, you're the price oracle for Defi. Okay. But it turns out there are a lot more use cases that are, it's not ever going to be like it's.

B

First complete level of use cases.

A

Yeah, exactly. It's not ever going to be as trustless as like pure Ethereum layer one or layer two and kind of that level of security, but it's off chain data, so you don't need it to be that trustless.

B

That's why he uses the words trust minimized.

A

Yeah, I think that's a good set of words.

B

Right. And as the data becomes more valuable, it becomes more trust minimized because more people will pay for that data and then therefore more nodes are incentivized. I did like how he talked in his five levels of security. That's just sharding. Like first you have a central database, then you have a distributed database, then you have a decentralized network, which is like bitcoin or Ethereum. And then you have multiple decentralized networks, which is ethereums roll up centric roadmap. And then you have level five, which is you produce the uniform output of that. Everything kind of comes back and points towards CCIP, which in the Ethereum landscape is like, how do we actually achieve composability in our sharded layer two roadmap, which is the Ethereum's problem, but like the, it maps on directly to Ethereum's roll up centric roadmap.

A

Yeah. What do you think of the idea of the, the bankers coming to crypto and kind of tying these systems together? Do you think that there's enough carrot for them?

B

Probably, yeah. I mean, he made his case of just like banks are super profit maxi and if they can package up assets and securitize them, and they can do that more with the more expressivity of blockchain ledgers over bank ledgers, then they'll find a way to do that. I think it makes sense that Chainlink allows them to stay in the cozy comfort of their own centralized ledger home and still take advantage of crypto tokenization. So that checks out to me just out of gut take.

A

Yeah, that's somewhat of what I always thought. And there's always this chicken, there's kind of a discussion of, well, the banks won't come until the regulators green line it, but actually I think it works the opposite. Once the banks have a profit motive, they will lobby the regulators. And the revolving door of regulators is basically like Goldman Sachs. Where did Gary Gensler used to work? It's like Goldman Sachs. That's how it kind of works. So if you give a big enough win for the bankers, then they will push the regulators in whatever direction that they want. This is, by the way, why I'm very certain that we'll get a ETF. BlackRock now wants a bitcoin spot ETF, so now it's going to happen. It's a shame that the system works this way, but that's kind of how it works. So I actually think if you create a big enough win for the traditional banking system, then they'll push the regulators along. And if they don't like what these are, multinational global institutions. Right. And so they'll say, well, we can do this in Europe or we can do this in Hong Kong or some other jurisdiction, and we can't do it in America. So we'll just go do it over there. So they'll get their way. All the regulators can do is like, put the brakes on it. So I do think that's how you solve the chicken and egg problem, is you give the carrot, like there's a big enough carrot for it. The banks. Now there's a larger question, though, of like, do they then come and corrupt the existing, you know, system of crypto and they can't, does it become banker control?

B

Cryptos will always have its wild west.

A

Yeah. I think it's basically the protocol. Sync. I think it's, it was interesting in the, in the intro, you just said, like, ethereum has the larger ledger, and I think what you meant was like, the more credibly neutral and like, dense.

B

Ledger that follows more writers on the Ethereum ledger. More readers and writers, yes.

A

And it's like super national or super national in that it's not even operated by a nation state. It's like deeper than a nation state. And so in that sense, it's a larger, more weighty ledger. But it's certainly not, there's more stuff.

B

On it and more value.

A

Well, but it's certainly not more value when it comes to raw amount of dollars on chain. Right. I mean, we're talking about like a trillion dollars, max, of all of crypto, whereas with tradfi, we're talking about like hundreds of trillions of dollars.

B

DTC well, Tradfi is one single ledger like the central bank of America has a larger ledger than Ethereum in terms of TVL, but there's only one read write access to the central bank. So it's actually very small in that sense. But even there's many different ways to define the size of a ledger in this parameter that I just made up in the intro to the show.

A

Well, yeah, we can define it in lots of ways, but the size is crazy. The DTCC settling 2.6 or something, quadrillion dollars worth of securities transactions in a given year. I don't even know what that means. It's so large.

B

It feels like a very strong central point of failure. That's a pretty important piece of infrastructure. What if that went down for some reason?

A

Yeah, I mean, if it. I'm sure it's replicated. I'm sure they have a copy of the database somewhere.

B

They probably started that database.

A

Yeah, it's, you know, I'm sure there's a lot of good information there. Well, let me ask you another question then. So in your travels, Chainlink has basically won the, I think right now anyway, the price Oracle game, decentralized price Oracle game. But they're still very early in trying to win the chain interoperability solution, and there have been a lot of companies that have recently raised and deployed against this strategy. So CCIP is. There are a mix of other competitors like Lear Zero is one. How much have you explored? Kind of the multi chain interoperability space and. Yeah. Where do you think CCIP stacks versus some of the other solutions you've seen?

B

I don't have an informed take here.

A

Who else is there? There's layer zero, layer zero, CCIP.

B

Then there's other types of bridges, more narrow bridges that are ethereum only optimistic bridges, intent based bridges. By the way, what he was saying was totally fucking intent.

A

No, no, I actually don't think it was.

B

He was right. I really liked his answer when it was like, yeah, but it's about execution because that is the nuance of. But like, it starts off with an intent from a bank, but everything starts.

A

Off with an intent. I think he was just making the point that CCIP is actually. It's not just kind of broadcasting intent, right.

B

It's also executing it with intents.

A

You broadcast the intent and all the MEV bots, whatever, they fill the intent. This is actually.

B

You broadcast the intent and CCIP executes, like the message. It starts as an intent.

A

Sure, everything starts as intent.

B

No, not everything. No, no.

A

What doesn't start as an intent.

B

Your on chain dex trade is just a transaction. That's not an intent.

A

Oh, it starts an intent in my brain. I'm like, I want to make an on chain transaction. It's my intent. And then I click the bottom.

B

There's an intent in my brain. Get the fuck. A neuron impulse at one point in time.

A

Everything's an intent.

B

In my future blog post, everything's an intent.

A

What else is here? Anything else here? I learned about swift. Some stuff I didn't know. Yeah, that was cool.

B

That was actually the coolest thing. Is it Proto Dao? It's another one of the examples of man. He could not be flexible in his metaphors. But maybe I'm too far on the creative spectrum for me to expect that of all my guests.

A

Well, I don't know. Yeah, that was interesting. Learn a little bit about tradify. That's about it. Well, there's our CCIP, our chain link episode, bankless nation. We hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for sticking around.

B

Thanks. Bye.