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A | Welcome to bankless, where we explore the frontier of Internet money and Internet finance. And today on bankless, we explore the frontier of Ethereum's roll up centric roadmap. The roll up trilemma. What is that? It's something I've discovered as I've gone down the roll up rabbit hole. Three interconnected parties in a... |
B | I'm doing great and yeah, really excited to be here. Long time listener, first time caller, and good to chat with Andrew again. |
A | Hell yeah. Hopefully the first of many. Andrew, not your first time on the podcast. Andrew Huang is the founder and CEO of Conduit. Conduit is a roll up as a service platform otherwise known as a RAS Conduit helps spin up, operate, and maintain many of the layer twos that you have likely used, including Zora, Avo, Lyra... |
C | Yep, thanks for having me back, David. Excited to be here. |
A | So I think we're going to try and uncover as many, turn over as many stones as possible here in the roll up framework. Shared sequencer Ras trilemma. I'm calling it a trilemma. Not terribly long ago, I put out this tweet titled the roll up space in 2024, and it was the classic office meme of Michael and the two other o... |
B | Yeah, absolutely. And maybe I'll take more of the skeptic side or the lesser Kumbaya side here, because I do think at a very high level, these are all infrastructure providers that are competing to own the developer relationship with the roll up teams and are finding ways to monetize, and often that's through sequencer... |
A | Miles, before. Before you do that, I just want to put a pin in something that you said I think can help define the rest of this conversation. It's either vertically integrate or partner. And I think that is the tension that I think we're going to talk about, like, is going to be a theme of this podcast. Do these differ... |
B | Yeah, totally. Exactly. And I think, you know, it's not one clear answer. I think it really depends on what, you know, which actor you're talking about and which other pieces, you know, potentially going to be vertically integrated. So I would just say, like, if you're looking at these things in isolation, if you're a ... |
C | I think that's a great high level overview. I think it's in terms of framing and I'm sure we'll get into this. I think the only ones that are doing anything substantive with real customers today are the roll up frameworks and I think the RAS teams. I think I constantly show this. I think it's becoming more clear over t... |
B | Yeah. And maybe if I could jump in for 1 second just to compare like, you know, I think the benefits that you get with that, with seeing what happens when you don't. And Cosmos, there has been no like cosmos version of a RAs provider. And there is no even, like, central sort of development team for the Cosmos SDK. And ... |
A | Define what the actual, like, prizes are here. Like, what. What are people fighting over? Because, like, the nebulous idea of, like, value capture could, could. I think we could make that a little bit more clear of what that actually is. Like, where does the value actually come from here? So there's this three person t... |
B | Yeah, I do. I think if you were to just try to cast the broadest way to describe it, I think it is you're in the best position if you own the customer relationship and if you're operating. I think the sequencers are finding other very elegant ways to monetize that doesn't actually impede adoption. I think sequencer ops... |
C | Think the value cruel story everybody has analysis and thoughts on. I think the reality of the situation is none of us know how it's going to play out. I think if you asked six to nine months ago, you'd say there's only going to be a couple major roll ups and they're going to earn the majority of the fees. Something li... |
A | Just to really explain, like I'm five, what the implications of this analysis of yours is, Andrew, you're kind of saying that if the frameworks were the vertically integrated structure here, they would be incentivized for having like layer one settling layer twos that all use ETH as DA, because that's where they get th... |
C | I think that's exactly right. And just to give like a concrete example here, with blob posting and like blobs being free, there was an opportunity for a conduit to migrate all of our, you know, all DA chains to blobspace, right? Because like, if it's super cheap and it's free, it's going to be equivalent. That would ha... |
B | Yeah. And maybe just to jump in, I think there's. Raas has kind of a unique angle where it doesn't need to be necessarily crypto native revenue. Right. It can just be traditional SaaS revenue that is not priced based off of what the sequencer operations are. It could be much more holistic. Right? It can be like, how mu... |
A | And especially, I would imagine if a RaS has more traditional business models of just service license agreements, just fiat based, typical pen and paper contracts that would be conducive to a RaS relationship with a framework, because then they're not nibbling at the same pie. There's actually different revenue coming ... |
C | I don't know if that's a hot take. That actually sounds like it would make us natural complementary partners, and I think that is the case. I think we work closely with optimism and arbitrum today. We'd like to work closely with other folks. Frankly, it's just a bandwidth thing on our side. It's an underrated amount of... |
B | Yeah, I totally agree with all that. Maybe I would make one distinction between the long tail of rollups versus some of these larger roll up hubs, because I do think when you're talking about the long tail of rollups there's only limited, you know, like costs that they can, that they can really handle. And I think if y... |
C | But I generally agree. And I think the question is what are the complementary feature sets? And then we see the fee splits today. I think theres a lot of, I guess fog of war around that because theres also just a lot of token grants that are happening. The question is if you look at the fee split and then the token gra... |
B | Yeah. |
A | So when he opened up this conversation, this whole like three way trilemma, three people, three entities pointing the finger guns at each other, it's also kind of missing this element that, like, not all of these parties are starting from the same position here. Like quite, quite literally, the actual layer two framewo... |
B | I think just maybe a little tangential to that point is the frameworks didn't have that cold start problem because they released their own first party roll ups. But I think what's going to be really interesting is when maybe the focus shifts from drawing as much activity into op mainnet as saying, actually, no, we want... |
A | Yeah, totally. And it's a really, really interesting problem to have for these roll up frameworks where like, what does optimism want? Like, once upon a time, optimism wanted to have more users on the op main net, more builders on the op mainnet. But then, like, I think they just like, looked at this in the future and ... |
B | I think you're totally right. And, you know, maybe the only thing I'll. I'll add is that it's a little bit harder to find a way to. If you want to have a token as a raspberry provider, I think that's totally fine. I think so. I think even though we might see much, much higher market caps of a token than, say, a RaS pro... |
A | Andrew, what are your thoughts here? |
C | To miles, to the earlier conversation, I think optimism, self disrupting. It's the Netflix transition from mailing out dvd's to this online streaming business. They were early to that trend, and I think theyre definitely capitalizing on it now. I think base is a great first partner, and I think there are more on the wa... |
B | Thats true. Fair enough. |
C | I think that its a different business model. I think optimism, arbitrum, all these role frameworks, really good at protocol, core protocol development and thinking about Ethereum and big brain protocol stuff, I think it's a separate type of DNA to go out there and sell customers and be really customer centric to roll o... |
A | What would that network actually look like? What does a conduit network look like? |
C | Ultimately, we're going to be very driven by the customer here. I think that to Miles point earlier about shared sequencers, I think there's a question as to what does this actually technically enable. If we look at Espresso, for example, I think they had come to us over a year ago. I think fundamentally the question w... |
B | And Andrew, you mentioned basically, like, you're just basically driven by customer demand, right? And when we talk about like maybe the conduit or any sort of ras network, is it fair to say that's basically what that actually means, is opening up your supply side of operators to third parties? And maybe they come in a... |
C | I think that's an interesting point. I think that fragmentation is just going to happen. I think you have a permissionless platform, people are going to do what they want to do. I think that you need to offer an incentive to get people to conform to a standard, and I think there are great incentives to do so. I also th... |
A | Andrew, I want to take a peek and study your brain about your perceived relationship with the super chain, because your incentives and the super chain's incentives are pretty harmonious. What does the super chain want? A bunch of chains. What does conduit produce? A bunch of chains. And I would imagine also to unpack, ... |
C | Yeah, I mean, I think we're very pro super chain and we're pro. So like I said, I think we work very closely with the role of frameworks. We want to enable what they're doing. And it's a non trivial amount of work. And I think the reason why we have so many chains is because we're the only ones doing it. And again, it'... |
B | Yeah. Andrew, I have a quick question for you, and no need to share too much, but you have customers that are using the op stack that are part of the super chain, and you have customers using the LP stack that are not part of the super chain. And you probably have customers that are not yet launched and probably asking... |
C | Well, ultimately we're very, I think I keep repeating it, but ultimately, we're very customer driven. And I think the customers come to us with the product requirements and we help as much as we can with meeting their requirements, with the kind of technical landscape. And that's where we thrive is I think we're very m... |
B | That makes sense. They come to you and say, I want to have fractions of a penny cost for my transactions like Avo. And you say, okay, well, you have to use an alt da solution or be an l three for that to be possible. And that kind of makes the decision for you, right? Yeah, maybe. Last thing I would be interested to se... |
C | Well, actually there's some. So if you've heard of op plasma, I believe this is an addition created by lattice, who is the, you know, they're behind mud. They're a great team. And you know, that's going to get integrated into the obsec code. I think it's already upstreamed, and that will be the official kind of all da ... |
A | I want to hop back into the super chain conversation here. I mean, conduit is one of the dominant roll up as a service providers for all of the op stack chains, if not the dominant one. So there's already this very intimate relationship with this super chain concept and conduit. I know philosophically, culturally, opti... |
C | I mean, that sounds not great for conduits. So my initial vibe is, you know, not great. Listen, I think that the way that we look at it is we want to make it so that conduit is the no brainer decision. I think it is today for the super chain. I think it is today for any roll up, but it's on us to continue doing that. I... |
A | Do you pay attention to the world of optimism governance or does anyone at conduit do that? |
C | I mean we see the governance kind of proposals for upgrades because that sets the timeline right. Beyond that we're not super involved. Is there anything that we should be paying attention to? |
A | Oh no, just that you're a consumer of optimism governance information but not a contributor to the process is what I'm hearing. |
B | Andrew, you're not applying for retroactive goods funding anytime soon. Just joking, just joking. |
C | I think we. Yeah, I think we were in the last round, we, they wanted us to. |
B | Oh you were. |
C | Okay, but. |
B | Okay I got you, I got you. That's interesting. And I think, but David, I think what Andrew's also saying is like that is a challenge for frameworks where I think they may have one image of what they think is best, right. Of like the future for them and for Ethereum. And it's like we gotta listen to the customers and li... |
A | Or I could see universal supplier of all frameworks, right. |
B | Or I could see a future where I think Andrew, to your point you said it's hard to manage all these code bases and it actually could make your product worse. The more you try to add and the more thin you're spread out. Maybe there's a winner for the optimistic EVM roll ups and there's a different winner for ZK because t... |
C | Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think the framing or I guess the context that I think would be helpful here is what are the frameworks that are actually production ready and at a price point that customers can actually use? So I think the names are out there. I'm sure you're familiar with them all. But we've seen things like... |
A | What I'm hearing is that there is an interest in expanding the scope of frameworks inside of the conduit product offering. You're just saying that. Further scope in frameworks, they're just not ready yet. What is ready? The op stack and arbitrum or carpets. As soon as ZKC hyperchains and Polygon ZkevM as soon as they'r... |
C | Totally. I think when it's ready we're happy to have those chats. Just based on what we're seeing in the market and based on where we're getting the inbound from, we have a good sense of what isn't and what isn't today. |
B | And maybe just to play devil's advocate here, there could be, you know Andrew, you've started building with like op stack before bedrock, right? So you've actually, you've been, you've seen it since the very beginning and I think that's, you know, a lot of why your product is just so reliable and robust for the op stac... |
C | Expertise in the role framework is one dimension of that. I think where we feel very confident is one developing the relationships with the frameworks. I think having a support relationship speeds up that learning curve. I think where we have the distinct advantage is in the infrastructure. Not only do you have ha sequ... |
B | Makes a lot of sense. And maybe there is a future where it's so battle tested that even the op stack swaps out portions of what? Their architecture for ZK components. We are a long way away from that. I think the approach you're taking makes. |
A | A lot of sense on a very similar conversation. Integrating alternative frameworks in the ZK realm sounds actually pretty complicated. Maybe not as complicated as integrating alternative code bases in the Da realm, but still. Same conversation. Andrew, can you talk about just where you think the world is going in one to... |
C | Yeah, I mean, I think the question is, is da a commodity? And I think maybe the episode will be released by the time this goes live. But we filmed the podcast with miles on IPA with Jacob from Celestia. So I think it's an interesting question. I think ultimately, again, we'll have to see what the customer demands are, ... |
B | Yeah. |
C | The DA story, I think, for me, has to tell me more about what is differentiated over the existing competitors that exist today. |
B | Yeah, and maybe just to add to that, David, it could be a future where DA providers are the fourth in this current trilemma, because let's think about even Eigen layer. They're kind of anchoring with the DA service, but their big focus is bringing on a ton of third party avss that are also going to provide, like, compl... |
A | Miles, you also brought up AVss. There's a number of AVss that are specifically trying to enhance layer two's. Just increase functionality, increase just like stuff, increased capacity. And so, like, whether or not a layer two wants an AV's is going to more or less be up to them. But it sure would be a lot easier if a ... |
C | I think restaking and abs are pretty early. I think there are some obvious complement opportunities here where I think as an option, decentralizing sequencing, for example, using restaked sequencing or whatever, is an obvious product add on. I think the way that we think about it again is if you decentralize the sequen... |
B | Yeah, totally. And there will be avss that also have like a non restaking version of themselves. Like Hyperlane. Right. Is an integration partner of yours, not the, you know, restaked version of Hyperlane necessarily, but it could be. And so, yeah, I think that'll be interesting because I do expect Eigen Lair to kind o... |
A | Well, guys, this has been pretty fascinating of a conversation. I'm actually going to have to go listen to this once we're done recording here. As we come to a close here, just a question for each of you. I'll start with you, Miles, is just like, we get clarity every bull market, towards the end of the bull market abou... |
B | Yeah, I think the interop problem and where that's going is the most interesting to me. I think we kind of jumped ahead without having an interop standard, and that opened up the opportunity to monetize interop. And whether that's good or bad or how that ends up playing into end state market structure, I think is reall... |
A | But similar. Andrew, question to you. Slightly different, though. Blocker is outside of your control that you are waiting for the industry to figure their shit out about. What are you about? Like, yo, guys figure this out because it's stopping me from doing something. Is there anything that comes to mind about this? |
C | Yeah, that's a great question. I think the biggest one is just people getting comfortable with roll ups and using it as a new paradigm and it becoming the default. I think we've made a ton of progress. I'd say we're still on the initial. And so, for example, for things like our self serve deploy, we launched that. It's... |
A | Okay, so we're looking for the milestone where somebody comes and deploys their own roll up with conduit and they never talked to you ahead of time. That hasn't. We haven't crossed that chasm yet. |
C | We haven't crossed that testnet's for sure. Mainnet is a little different. |
B | It's great marketing, though. I mean, I'm probably like the least technical person that's ever come on the show and I stood up a roll up and put it in testnet. So, yeah, I think, I mean, it's literally just clicking buttons. It's incredible. So, yeah, great job with that. And I do hope to see that kind of open up the l... |
A | Well, Miles, Andrew, thank you guys so much for educating me and the bankless nation here on the show today. Miles, if listeners are curious about you and want to learn a little bit more about you, where should they go? |
B | Yeah. Miles O'Neill on Twitter reverie dot o. If you want to learn more about reverie and my DM's are open, so please reach out. And thanks for having me, David. |
A | Yeah, of course, Andrew. Same question to you. Where can people find more about you and conduit? |
C | Same as usual. Conduit XYZ. And we're conduit XYZ on Twitter. |
A | Cool. And that's where you can go click some buttons to spin up your own roll up. Bankless nation, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we are glad you are with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. |
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