The Real Strategy of Optimism's Superchain | Ben Jones & Ryan Wyatt

The sort of opening premise of your question of, well, there are these chains that just can fork the code and go do their own thing and there's no like value accrual. That may be true at a financial level, but it is not true at an innovation level. And that is the power of open source.

Giving out $800 million in retrofunding tokens that we have over the next, whatever, let's just say 10 years, I'm making it up. There needs to be value that's created from that for that flywheel to come in. And so none of it's sustainable unless you do that. You want to get this ecosystem up and running. Once it's up and running, you have to, you have to fully and fundamentally believe that the value that you're offering is something you want to participate in.

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Of course.

Of course. Nothing like a good melodica session to get a panel.

I love it.

So, Ryan, I think this was before you joined Optimism, but Ben graced us with his presence at Permissionless in 2022 with— I don't truly know what this instrument is, but it's called the melodica. It was great. I love it. Great. Yeah.

If we have— if my rule is if I'm the first, like if there's an early morning talk, you got to hype the crowd up. So I do.

Yeah.

Wake them up.

Nation Army, like, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, you know, and everyone gets hyped and then they're like on it. They're paying attention, they're responding to the speakers. It's great.

Especially '22, because the NFT parties were like quite the hit in 2022. And so you got a lot of people that were staying out late the night before.

Yeah, exactly. So Ben, maybe actually this picture is a good place to start because I remember this conversation and you weren't really talking about the Superchain. You were just talking about like Optimism, the L2, right? And I remember there was a panel that, that, that conference, it was like you guys, Avalanche, Arbitrum, and everyone's talking about like how to scale Ethereum and like L2s. And now Optimism is something much bigger and very different than just like an L2. Obviously, I think most people listening know that at this point. I'd love to just hear your like view of what is Optimism today.

It's a superchain, baby. I think, you know, yeah, there's a few levels to that question. The most fundamental one that I think is the one clear one to start with is to talk about the technology. Obviously, Optimism is building a scaling protocol. And we call that scaling protocol the Superchain. So effectively what that means is it is a collection of L2s that share a standard and basically try to work together in unison to accomplish shared goals, to build on shared standards, and to result in positive-sum outcomes. So what does that look like in practice? Basically what it means is that you don't just have one L2 chain, you have many L2 chains, you have a Superchain of L2 chains. Jason Yanowitz. And I'm sure we can get into lots of the awesome members of the Superchain and the collective these days. But fundamentally, what that's about doing is about horizontally scaling blockchain block space. That's about taking Ethereum, which is sort of like this fixed pipe, like only so much can go through it, no matter how many transactions people are trying to put through it, the pipe is only so big. And so if more people are trying to fit more transactions in, it gets congested and prices go up. So when you talk about scaling Ethereum horizontally, You'd want to create multiple pipes, each chain in the superchain, so that we have more total throughput and we don't get congested and we keep fees low.

What was the— I know you've told this story before, but just refresh my memory. Why didn't you— what happened with this pivot? Because I think the original thought was, okay, Ethereum, and you've got this pipe and it's not big enough and we got to make a bigger pipe. And the solution was the L2. But then But then eventually you decided, hey, actually, we need— there's maybe going to be millions of L2s. We want to be like the stack to go create those L2s. A very different type of company and business model. What was that pivot actually like and why did you do it?

Yeah, in many ways, I might actually push back a little. I think the perception shift is as significant of a pivot as the fundamental plans that we had. So to stick with the pipe analogy, it's always been the case that Ethereum, an Ethereum-style pipe, like a quote-unquote EVM, has a certain amount of stuff that it can fit through. And so even when we were building L2, starting the L2 journey, it was understood and appreciated that you would need to have multiple of these chains to truly increase the throughput in a meaningful way. Yes, there were things that we could do in terms of making those pipes a little bit bigger and making certain resource requirement trade-offs like that. Things like that. But fundamentally, the reason that an L2 scales is because it uses a small portion of the L1's throughput while inheriting all of the security properties from that L1. And so in some sense, from the start, the reason that you do scaling is to have a bunch of these L2 chains that are each taking up a portion. So with one bucket of kind of Ethereum security, you get a bunch more chains, pipes, a bunch more pipes worth of throughput at the same level of security. However, that is a very different thing said in practice than actually deployed in practice and in production. So the reality is, well, we kind of always had that in the back of our brains of like, this is the true way that L2s scale. It was also the case that just building one of those pipes, just building one L2 was a handful, to say the least. And so in many ways, the transition to Superchain, which occurred basically at the same time as those photos you sent, was as much a indication of readiness from Optimism's perspective to be able to handle multiple chains running, to be able to handle other people other than the experts that built it running those chains and being able to support and maintain those products without that expertise. So the big precursor moment for us really was a release that we called Bedrock, which was basically us taking the 2 or 3 years of running OP mainnet V1 chain and saying, okay, we have learned a lot of lessons in how to productionize L2s, how to make it easy to run these L2s, how to document the L2s, just how to build them at a fundamental architectural level. And once we did that rewrite, we felt like it was time that the OP stack was capable and it was a responsible thing to do for a bunch of other people to start running these chains and sort of start building towards the same chain. So that's kind of what it boiled down to, honestly, was readiness. It's like, you know, you want to crawl, then you want to walk, then you want to run. If we had started out with 10 OP mainnets that would surely have not gone well, probably more than 10x worse, quite frankly. But once we felt ready to go multichain, it was time to take that vision to the next level. And I think you're right to call out there are lots of clarity in business model and things like this that we found along the way. But fundamentally, it's about the stack being ready for other people to use.

Okay, Ryan, maybe I would ask you, the way that I see Optimism today is that, okay, you have the DAO, which you guys, I think, call the collective. And then you've got the OP stack, which is like MIT license, open source, no limitations for builders. And MIT license open source is like the gold standard, right? No, no limitations for builders, people can kind of just fork it. I think Blast did this, but the downside for you guys is there's no value capture. And then you have the Superchain, right, which is core business. But there are some limitations, right? And expectations for builders and there is value capture. Can you talk to me about just like the relationship of those? First off, is that, is that a correct way to define, like, lay out Optimism today? And like, how do you see the relationship between all of these?

Yeah, it's been a, it's been a little bit of a journey for us like the past year. Yes, you can. Absolutely. If you look at kind of there's really what we want it to be two paths. That's probably oversimplifying it, but one is MIT open license. Your point, anybody anybody can go do it. Yes, Blast is a great example of that. There's no value capture there, but it's truly Ethereum ethos and the principles and values that Optimism wants to have. To your point, the gold standard. The other is like the Superchain really coming to life where the upgrade keys are with the Optimism Security Council. You're on the right version and standard. You are adhering to that framework. And by doing that, this allows us to do something very unique with interoperability. But there's also this kind of other path that I would say like OP Stack chains waiting in the wing, right? And Celo is a good example of this where they have made customizations or have deviated off of this kind of standard version, standard config of, of OP Stack. But long term, their aspirations and goals are to get in line so that they can be part of this, you know, superchain set. And so this is a group where I would say they've made configurations or changes, but their aspirations— and they are sharing revenue, but their aspirations are to be a part of this Superchain set. And so in a couple of weeks, on January 16th, you know, depending on when this goes out, we're going to be rolling out something called the Superchain Index with another team that's, you know, in the Optimism Collective called Superchain Ecosystem. And inside of this, it will leverage the Superchain Registry so people can get a better lay of the land of, okay, what's the percentage of revenue that they're sharing back with the collective? How much revenue have they generated in ETH for the collective? You know, what version and standard are they on? Where are they at? And Season 7, which is kind of our next bucket of rewards starting effectively now through the first half of the year, will focus on interoperability. And so the visibility of where chains are is really important. What we obviously want to make sure what we're offering is like really valuable, that where you could have this path where you don't have to share any revenue with the broader collective, people see such value in being part of the Superchain, being a part of something that's bigger. And as we upstream a lot of the changes into OP Stack, this whole thing of, hey, it lacks the ability to customize or deviate from the, you know, core stack, these become lesser of issues because you start to integrate them, right? And so Uni's even a great example of like the work and the innovative work they're doing with like block times, right? That will all be stuff inevitably upstream to the OP Stack and everyone will benefit, you know, in the Superchain. And so I think that we need to keep hammering away at these things. Interop will be something that's massively valuable. You know, being able to spin up a chain— think about where today the Superchain is today, and it's like early days. If you look at L2B, 50% of all TVL is on the Superchain, right? Uh, 55% of all L2 transactions that are happening on Ethereum are on the Superchain. And this is, you know, driven largely by Base and to some extent, you know, OP Mainnet, which has, uh, you know, a significant amount of TVL. When you start to have these, this TVL interop with each other and you start to see teams like Ink and Uni and Swell, these other teams who are going to be powerhouses at driving liquidity and TVL into their chains, all of a sudden becomes accessible by everyone. I do think you're going to see this like knock-on effect of a lot of other people saying, look, I could just up and run. I can have shared security, I can have shared upgrades, I can plug into 75% at that time of the TVL that exists in the ecosystem, uh, you know, 3/4 of the transactions that are happening. And we started getting this weird thing of like, what customizations are you making that are so wild, so outbound, that, that are not going to be upstream tier or part of this cohort, that you would not want to tap into this, that you wouldn't want to contribute some of the fees that you're generating back to this, this mission that's greater. So I'm excited. I think like we're, we're, we've got a lot of work to get there, like no doubts, but This will be, you know, moving from last year, which was, you know, OP mainnet being kind of Optimism's identity to this thing that's greater and bigger in the Superchain and how we work with all these different chain operators to realize this vision. I think we're really, you know, going to see a lot of excitement in Q1 just because you'll have Ink, you'll have Unichain, you'll have Swell and all these chains up and running and, you know, causing a big impact.

So I can't help but think of our— actually, yeah, Ben, go ahead. Go ahead.

I'm just going to build on that. I think I just— I cannot emphasize enough the importance of open source, both like for industry broadly, but as it relates to this conversation. One thing that stands out to me is, you know, the sort of opening premise of your question of, well, there are these chains that just can fork the code and go do their own thing and there's no like value accrual. That may be true at a financial level, but it is not true at an innovation level. And that is the power of open source. Like, the beauty of it is even those folks that just take the OP Stack, don't talk to us once, and build awesome products are building that in such a way that those product features can come right back into the mainline OP Stack and be benefited. So like, the power of open source cannot be—

So you're saying because Blast takes OP Stack, they— if they don't want to, they never talk to you once, they fork it, and then you can go see that code and then you're like, oh, actually Blast did something really cool there. We're going to go build that into the Superchain stack and then Ink and Swell and Zora, etc. get to benefit. That's the flywheel. Okay. What is keeping these folks on the Superchain? And the context here is we have— we've had two models of our podcast business. We— our original podcast business is we went out to all these like big names in the industry. We're like, hey, Selkis, Pomp, Charlie Shrem, Meltom, Jill, like, come on and like we'll launch a podcast for you. And it was great. And like we were making all this money and then like a few years later they had built these audiences and the podcast had grown and they said, hey guys, actually been really fun working with you guys. You know, we're going to pull the rev— like we want to pull the rev share down. And we're like, no, no, no, you can't do that. They're like, yeah, we can. We have the leverage. And we're like, crap, actually, they're right. And in the worst cases, they could just leave, right? And so that's actually what forced us to do a new podcast model where we now just build our shows in-house. So this kind of reminds me of our podcast business early on. And I'd just be curious, like, why I'm wrong, or like, what's actually keeping these folks?

Yeah, a couple, a couple layers there.

Yeah.

I think one of them is, first of all, I think, well, the first layer to it is the philosophy that I think you need to approach these kinds of things to build a long-term sustainable network that is going to survive the test of time. And you— the basic premise of that philosophy is you should not cut corners to extract more value in a way that makes you uncompetitive in the long term. So I think you're right. Like, the first thing to acknowledge is that you are right, that there are sort of like different problem statements, different associated challenges. That come with saying, "We are going to give all of our code away for free. You don't have to talk to us. You don't have to pay us. You don't have to like us. You can just take the good code and use it as you please." So, there's no question that that comes with a layer of complexity and challenge when you talk about the kinds of scenarios that you alluded to. At the same time, if you zoom out, it seems incredibly clear that there is no winning stack that does not have that property. The ability— some— if you imagine some counterfactual where you say, okay, we're going to restrict this, we're going to add a license, like, I don't know, maybe in your analogy, that's like, we signed the podcasters up to a 10-year deal so that they had the rev share locked in. That's not the basis for a long-term sustainable business. And it's a market opportunity for somebody else to come along and build the MIT-licensed, totally free, make money off it in other ways, kind of starting point. So I think that's an important starting point is like, we're here to build a long-term sustainable collective. And so We want to be mindful of not taking too many shortcuts and being too concerned about these things. With that being said, there are more non-philosophical layers that are super relevant. The fundamental nature of L2s, or one of the fundamental trade-offs that L2 landscapes are making today, is effectively the trade-off of fragmentation. If you are a Solidity dev, and you want to come and deploy some Ethereum app, The, uh, the magic wand marketing would tell you, oh, just go to any L2, hit the deploy button, and you're off to the races. And if you were running on L1, you just redeploy on L2, your prices are cut 10, 100x, your transactions are getting confirmed really, really, really quickly, and everyone's super happy. From many perspectives, that is just not the actual reality that we see in the Ethereum L2 ecosystem today, and the reason is fragmentation. Issues span like, oh my gosh, how the heck do wallets and bridging work when you have dozens of these chains? Like, you open up your MetaMask and you see a bunch of different coins listed, or they're aggregating them, but you don't actually know which coins are on which chains. And what does that mean? You want to go use an app on some other chain and, oh snap, all of your ETH to pay for gas is on some other chain and now you have to bridge it over. There's that whole experience. And from the perspective of a developer, you actually can't just hit deploy and say, I think the contracts will work. You really need to dive in and say, okay, for all of these potential chains that I could deploy to. What are the nuances? Where does this differ in security, in like block times, in the behaviors of certain like, uh, you know, developer libraries and things? All of these things in practice cause fragmentation, not just for the users that are like caught in, you know, sort of bridging wallet hell, but also the developers that are caught in like, what chains can and can't I deploy on safely? So what does L2 need? L2 needs unification and it needs standardization. The end state of crypto should be that you can deploy to the cheapest block space possible and you can do it without thinking about it. Like, it's built on a standard where everything just works. And so at the end of the day, this is where the long-term sustainability of the Superchain comes from. It's the fact that when you put chains on a shared standard, there are many, many, many network effects that fall out of that naturally that you can't have without a shared standard and a shared governing body that mediates that standard. Got it.

Okay. Two questions here. One is, maybe this one's for Ryan. If I am Coinbase, I'm like, hey, all this activity is happening on Base. Kraken in the traditional world is my one of my main competitors. I don't want stuff flowing over to Ink. Like, I'm Jesse. We've done an amazing job. We've got all this liquidity, hundreds of apps. I don't want things flowing over to Ink. Take me into the conversations where people are actually comfortable with that. And like, what? Yeah, it just, it doesn't really track with my— maybe I need to get more on the Ben's. I need to put a shirt on like Ben and get more collective.

Well, a lot of people, you're not alone, right? I think it is like a, it is a foreign concept and there is a little bit of like scariness and hesitancy. We saw it first with ourselves. Like the idea with OP mainnet, you know, before Basis launched, far bigger, you know, you know, one of the biggest L2s, second biggest, right? And you're still making a sacrifice there when you're like, we're going to believe in something that's bigger. We're going to start to invest in these other chains like a Base and so forth. And that means when we do interop, we will be sharing out of that L2, like that OP mainnet TVL and liquidity and users and across the board. So I don't think it's like an unusual thing for like a Base to just naturally feel that. We felt it and we can kind of like be empathetic around that. I think at the end of the day is what are you building and trying to build something like much bigger and much larger? And I do think Base is very aligned when they think about the Superchain and Ethereum. Are they going to be the first movers into the interop set?

No.

And I wouldn't be either, and nor should they be, right? Like, I think there is something about like, you have time to observe this. How is this thing growing? How will I participate? How will I play a role in this ecosystem? And that's not just from like joining the interop and sharing liquidity. It's a role that Base has to play from a governance perspective where they did get a large grant, you know, and that is focused around gov influence and participation and so forth. And so they'll have a voice. So when you think about, oh, the rev share splitting, the rev share splitting, like, are changing, right? Chain operators will have a voice in the governance process of like what that rev share should be. It's not like, oh, I don't want to share any revenue, so I'm just going to hit the ripcord. You know, I think people will be able to have very thoughtful conversations of what value does the collective bring, does the OP stack bring? How do we as a chain that's participating in a group of many other chains feel that split is, or the fees that we pay pay in the future of interoperability, what value do we believe is being captured? And I think ultimately what's going to happen will be seeing applications be able to simultaneously operate across the Superchain and being able to deploy across not just one but many chains, you know, and have a seamless experience. That's going to be something application developers are going to just say that's like a prerequisite. Like moving forward, they're going to be like, I want an experience when I deploy. I'm like deploying across the Superchain. That is my new expectation of what life is as an application developer. People that are not in the interop set or are choosing not to be in the interop set are now going to have to be like, I am not joining that, or like not joining that interop set. And therefore you have a fractured application experience. I think what will happen is long-term applications will start to become very successful. They will be the influential leaders in the room versus chain operators. This is my opinion, and that you will want to be a part of the shared standard and want to deploy and want to participate in it because it's really good for application developers. It creates the best experience you can possibly have for app developers in the Ethereum ecosystem. Users want to be a part of very seamless experiences, and chain operators will go where the builders are, where the users are. So it's like if you look about like YouTube, technically creators could go like fuck off and start a video site and take and have no revenue, but they lose distribution. So like you're going to have massive distribution. Yes, Base in the early days, because they have massive distribution, they can kind of, you know, sit and say, when is it best for me? And that's why the Superchain needs to be more than just Obi mainnet, more than just Base. So I think you'll see players like World and Ink and Uni all be massive participants and you'll start to be like, oh, I'm going to hoard my small amount of TVL and small amount of users, small transactions relative. Like, is that where we're at today? Like, that's what you're going to want to do. Maybe that's not a very exciting game plan. So we're talking timing and sequencing here where I think that makes sense. But long term, I don't think—

I like that. I mean, I know you came from YouTube. I like the YouTube analogy a lot, actually, which I've never thought of, which is like MrBeast. Is maybe the base is base here. And, you know, OP, maybe the super chain is YouTube or something. And, you know, MrBeast could easily say like, look, I don't want to give any distribution to all these other influencers who are kind of leeching off of me. But obviously he knows that the platform is bigger than himself.

Yeah. And as somebody who works—

am I right?

He very much knows it. Right. And it's like, this is better, you know?

So I would— yeah, I would throw out a couple of other things. I'll don my philosophy hat and give you that answer you're looking for. One thing I would just note is that regardless of the Superchain conversation, that question is already answered in the affirmative that people are willing to collaborate and use shared systems by the fact that they're building Ethereum L2s in the first place. Like all of these competitors, regardless of whether they're even participating in Optimism or other stacks, are all participating in Ethereum.

Sure, Base could have just built an L1 is what you're saying, but they didn't. Exactly.

Yeah, exactly. Because fundamentally there is value and what what, uh, building on-chain is about to some extent. It's about being able to credibly give power to the application developers and credibly give power ultimately to the users. Like, that's the same thing the app devs do, right? Like, Uniswap is powerful because Ethereum runs it exactly as it wants. Uh, that's powerful to Uniswap because they can make an app that is really trustable. The users that are using it understand that it's following the rules of Ethereum, which is what they want. So they understand that Uniswap can't mess with their ability to use Uniswap because it's on-chain. And so you have a— I think the stories are similar where, like, counterintuitively to the Web2 world, in some ways, like, relinquishing control is the thing that, like, summons success in this industry.

Yeah. Ben, what do you think? I mean, my understanding of the BASE deal is like they— I'm sure I'm going to botch some of this, but like they contributed 2.5% of chain revenue or like 15% of the profit to the collective. We're like roughly 2 or 2.5 years into the deal. It's like, I think, a 5-year deal. What is your best guess of what happens at the end of the 5 years? What is actually— sorry, let me rephrase that. What is the worst case scenario and maybe the best case scenario?

Yeah, good question. I think Ryan is right that it boils down to like a reevaluation of the value that is being provided by Optimism and like economics are very relevant part of that. That situation. In general, I think it's very important to understand that the, like, Ethereum crypto scaling journey is like not a one-and-done, like, it's just one cycle away kind of a thing. Like, this is going to be like decades of work, I think, literally. And within that context, one of the things that we need to understand as a collective and as an industry is that these kinds of values and value propositions will change over time. So I think, you know, what does it look like in 5 years? Probably it looks like a reevaluation of where are we at? How important is the stack? What are the new features? Like, what are the new ways that the stack is being used that are different from the original deal that was set out of just having one rollup? Like, at a big enough scale, there's lots of like more app-specific chains or sort of like a broader network. Um, and so ultimately it will look like a reevaluation of where is Optimism providing value, where are these network effects, um, coming from, and also how much, uh, funding is needed to continue sustaining that. You know, one thing that we haven't talked about very much about Optimism yet is the public goods funding portion of it. But the goal of all of the revenue coming into the Optimism Collective is to be recycled into the OP stack and contributors to the Superchain and builders on the Superchain to make it better and improve it. So the other side of that equation from like, what is Optimism providing right now is what do we need to do to continue that scaling journey for the next 5, 10, 15 years into the future?

Yeah, yeah. It's just an interesting— Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, just like adding to that, I think like, you know, if you look at Base has contributed $12-13 million in ETH equivalent to the collective to date, and that kind of pales in comparison to the broader deal. But the impact that they've had on the actual stack moving things forward, their contributions have been massive, and the halo effect of others who they've inspired to go out and think about chains and launching, like, people working with us, they have, they have driven tremendous impact. And so I think like long term, it's so hard to tell. Like what, like a year ago, the things that we were talking about in general in this space of like what the future is will be so different a year from now. I actually think it is very simple thing of how do we continue to collaborate where there is reciprocated value being offered back and forth. And that's the fucking theme with everybody, right? It's just like Basis is further ahead and yes, they're bigger, but that's like, That is going to be the gist of all of it. And so I think worst case scenario is like 2 years from now we didn't offer any value and Base offered so much and they're like, we're out. But that's like, that's not, that's a, that's a broader, much bigger Optimism L2 ecosystem issue than anything else. And I think the likely scenario is 2 years from now we continue to have these like conversations and things change and collaboration is where we all can like have the biggest progress and move forward.

So yeah.

I'm at with it.

Yeah, I was talking to someone at another L2. Yeah, another L2. Leave it at that, I guess.

Not in the Superchain. There's not many of them, so I can narrow it down.

Who said it's becoming— I guess I'll just say another chain. It's becoming tough to compete with Optimism because there are now— it's not Optimism that's contributing to Optimism. It's now the best engineers at Coinbase Base, Kraken, etc., are contributing.

It's like that value of saying it's like even if I get 5 years, they go somewhere, the impact and value that they've driven will, will be amazing. We'll be forever grateful for it.

Yeah. Okay. So you kind of have this like interop as a service, we could call it. I don't know if you guys like that or not, but what happens if— what is the impact of this on Ethereum interoperability? Because I could see I could see it's like if everyone, if all the best teams are working on OP interoperability, well then who's working on Ethereum interoperability? And then maybe vice versa. Like if people solve Ethereum interoperability, does that actually hurt your guys' value prop?

100%. So maybe we could put in the show notes, by the way, I was on a panel at DEF CON with a bunch of awesome folks talking about kind of exactly this.

Yeah.

Bunch of other L2 leaders, as well as Hard from Uma. We had a mullet analogy that I threw out there that I might reuse, but I think the, the fundamental answer to the question is that interoperability really fundamentally needs to come in two parts. It needs to come in a part that is Ethereum-wide sort of EVM standardization that makes everybody's lives across all of the L2 ecosystems, not just Optimism, not any other one, but all of them really, really, really powerful and as good as they can be. And you can't do everything with that, but you can do a lot with that. So EIP-7683 is the big, like, intents standard that is a super important way that basically gives you a way to say, hey, I want to do this thing with this token on this chain. Somebody please fill that kind of like order for me and I will give you the tokens that I have on this chain, which is the wrong chain or a different chain than I want it to be on. And like, you have a way for market makers to come and like play this role and fulfill these intents. And we will continue to see more and more standards like that. Like, there needs to— we need to go kind of from that world, which is, you know, right now focused on just like raw bridging to being super well integrated into the apps where like the first time you come to an app on any Ethereum L2, you can like hit your first transact button and there's a way for the interoperability standards to basically generate the exact transaction that will bridge your funds from wherever they are to wherever you want them to be and execute the transaction that you wanted to. So you don't feel like, oh snap, I'm not on this chain, I have to bridge. So that is something that we can do Ethereum-wide and that we need to do Ethereum-wide. And there are more efforts that we need to continue doing. At the same time, on the backend, the L2, the ecosystem-specific interoperability innovations will come around security and efficiency and like application, kind of application-level unlocks around doing that. So what I mean by that is, at the same time as we're working on those standards, You have Optimism core devs that are working on making the OP stack the best possible way to fill those cross-chain intents within the Superchain. So now that we have this infrastructure that says, I want to be able to move assets anywhere with the click of a button and like do my first transaction on a new chain I've never touched before, we want to make the interoperability of the OP stack that goes on behind the scenes to like fulfill that intent to be as efficient and secure as possible. And so, you know, we can talk about how Optimism OP Stack Interop is doing it. But I think to answer your question directly, it's kind of like we call it intense in the front, settlements in the back. There's like, there's a notion of you want Ethereum-wide interoperability standards to express user actions, and then you want eco-specific interoperability architectures that are only possible right now within a single ecosystem to fulfill those more efficiently, more quickly, more securely.

I also feel like interop has gotten it just like it's, it's so conflated. I mean, like, you know, I have people be like, oh, you know, there's like AggLayer will solve interop for all things. It's like, okay, it's like a, you know, we are, I think bridges will get better. Things are going to improve. Ethereum will have some level of interop, but like the interop that we're talking about with the Superchain and what does it look like when you can do things at like sub-1 second and what kind of user and application developer experiences can you offer is a very different thing than like, oh, let's solve Ethereum interop or even just connecting more highways into the Superchain. right, where all of these things become interesting from an egg layer to a layer zero and everything in between, you know, and like what do we do with ZKPs long term and all of this. So I think it's going to be a funny comical year of just people throwing the word interop around and just like talking past each other on what, what, what timeline, what is it, how you doing it. So it'll be fun. I, you know, good luck to you on all the podcasts you do this year talking about it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, maybe we'll move from one big word to another, from interoperability to customizability. My understanding is you get more customizability with the OP stack, less with the Superchain, but with the Superchain, obviously you get to opt into like what I think will be interoperability in 2025, like we're talking about. So how do you just think about like customizability of folks building on the Superchain? Because I think like, like Uni, right? Uni wanted Uni wanted fat blocks, I'm pretty sure, because they're trying to make this like, uh, yeah, fast blocks because they want, excuse me, because they want to, um, have a very like DeFi high performance chain. Right. So like, like maybe just tell me how you guys think about customizability on the Superchain.

I mean, at a high level, then Ben, I like, Ben should jump into it. You know, one, I think it's technically the OB stack is MIT open license. You could do whatever you want, however you want. It is, is like peak level of creativity. I think the one thing that we've seen is when we go talk to these, you know, particularly those who are likely to be larger chain operators, and we talk about like, what is it that you want to do that you feel like you can't do? We haven't gotten a lot of different answers, and the times that we have, like fast block times, we're like, hell yeah, that's a great thing. Other people should want it. We should want to support it. We should do the work to upstream it and make it happen. Uni's a great example, and kind of that, that's like a perfect example of like how you work with somebody to upstream it. Other than that, I think it's like we continue to look and see, but like, we are not having— like, when you look at the Swells and the Inks and the Unis and all these folks that continue to pick OP Stack and do it on the standard inversion they need to, there's not a lot that we seem to be like missing that's not upstreamed and feel that we're able to kind of prioritize it to some extent. Um, so that's, that's what I'm seeing, at least interacting with the partners. I'll, you know, Ben, you can chime in too.

Yeah, I would just say, um, Yeah, I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head, Brian. It's like when you look at the personas that really want to aggressively customize, those are usually a different persona that even really will find the largest value from the Superchain in the first place. And if you compare that to the folks that are better suited for the Superchain that expect to have like much higher security considerations, like much larger amounts of user assets, you know, in the protocol, etc., etc. All of those things are associated with a general conservativeness that you want to bring to the table anyway, to not YOLO code into prod when you have you know, the next billion on-chain users in your system. So that's a piece of it. And to Ryan's point, it doesn't mean that you're stuck on some version if you're on the Superchain and that's never going to change. More than half of the upgrade proposals passed through Optimism last year were authored by external contributors or like members of the collective, but not OP Labs or the Optimism Foundation. So you are— it's not like those big players are even completely disempowered from making those changes. We see lots of great active contributions from those members. To your point, like all of those engineers are building on it. But depending on the nature of the change, you know, we want to move a little bit more methodically. Like we have a core development process for the OP Stack that lets us hold us to high, you know, security bar, high performance and uptime standards, stability, etc., etc., etc. And yeah, and then the last thing I would just say, I mean, if you want the technical deep dive, there's a bit more nuance of like what customizations can you support while not sacrificing security and what customizations are just like completely wonky and scary. So like, an example of this is actually the Uniswap example. So like, the way that Uniswap together with Flashbots is building their fast block times is actually completely additive to the protocol. It's basically a custom sequencer that they've written that runs in a TEE and basically like promises slices of the block at a time. So we call these like microblocks. So you say that they're faster blocks, they're really like these little mini blocks that then get combined into a block every 2 seconds, which is the same way that the rest of the OP stack works. So that's an example customization that does not require a protocol change. It does not require an upgrade. They are able to do it fully within standard and without doing any sort of upgrade because of the nature of that. If you do some crazy, like a new way to send ERC-20s with a new type of cryptography that could be hacked, like that's when you get into territory of, okay guys, let's slow down. Like, that's great to do on a custom chain off to the side. Maybe let's not— yeah, billions of TVL behind it quite yet.

Yeah. Ben, side note for my small brain, can you explain TEE quickly for me?

Trusted Execution Environment. Basically, the— basically it is a— think of it as a special kind of processor where the hardware manufacturer said, I constructed this processor such that if you— it's kind of like a hardware wallet combined with a just general machine. It basically is like you can give some code to this trusted execution environment, and it is guaranteed to run that code correctly. So basically what that means in the context of Uniswap and FlashBlocks is it means as they're proposing the little itty-bitty chunks of the block, of this sort of pending block, because it's running in this trusted execution context, there they could shut it down, but they couldn't like reorg out those blocks or do anything other than like progress end block. Yeah. So it like it improves the trust model basically.

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We haven't. Ultimately, this is a very interesting problem statement. I think the place that I would start is to say the right to exit and forkability is baked into the constitution of the Optimism Collective. So we haven't seen it happen yet, but quite frankly, it is a critical right to maintain, just like a critical protection for the users of the Superchain. Because, I mean, it's the same story we said before where you don't want to do some short-term lock-in for the long-term failure. Like, if there's something that you can get in and then you can never get out, that's going to fail in the long term to a system where you can get out because it lowers the barrier to entry and improves people's willingness to opt in in the first place. So, um, that's what I would say there. In practice, because we haven't seen this explored, I'll just kind of more talk about the hypotheticals. And it really is going to come down to what what the application developers and kind of the users and chain governors end up choosing. So there are schemes where you can imagine basically writing a chain such that the chain governor can click a button and it can pull all of the bridge funds just unilaterally into some new bridge that respects a new chain. And they say, this is the new chain and it's all been upgraded. Um, that obviously comes with a big centralization trade-off. And so it's not clear whether or not the right way to provide an exit is just allow any of these chain operators to click a button and migrate the user funds to whatever other new smart contract they want. That would allow them basically to steal all the funds in the system. But it's obviously the cleanest, because if they do well, they just click the button, and it's all very seamless. Then you kind of have a spectrum, like the other end of the spectrum is just like, you know, Uniswap style, like Uniswap has no upgrades, when they migrate to new versions, they just give a front end where all the users opt in, they click a button, and it migrates all their, you know, v2 positions to v3, it migrates all their v3 positions to be v4. And so you can imagine a space like that on the other end of the extreme, where where every single user that was participating in the Superchain is going to basically opt in and click a bridge transaction to migrate to some new version of the chain. So those are kind of like the two ends of the spectrum of exits. And there are some middle grounds involving app devs that are maybe reasonable as well.

Ryan, there's another element I'm sure that you didn't mention, Ben, which is I'm sure there are contracts with these people. You guys are a business that does need to make money at some point. How long are the contracts usually for?

It depends. It varies, right? It varies greatly. I mean, you don't, you know, I think in the end they really like, Base is the longest one that we have. Like, I give you that as far as like from a transparency because of all kind of like what Ben's point is to begin with is kind of the same thing. Like if you have an agreement, you need it longer than like 12 to 18 months in this space because you're trying to build something. You're investing a lot of resources on both sides into standing something up. You know, Ink's going to be a stage 1 chain. You know, Uni, if not at launch, very fast after will be a Stage 1 chain as well. There's resourcing that goes in all that, yada yada. So we want long-term commitments. But at the same time, if this thing isn't in a place where people are participating, people actively want to be here in a couple of years, you know, it's like we need to, we need to, you know, think about our strategy, pivot our position, do a lot of these different things. So there's no point in having these long-term contractual obligations. And so we don't have them. I think Base was so different, was the first of its kind. You know, it was really somebody we want to like lock arms with and build together. And that's what we've done with Base. So that, that like level of length is quite unique. That's not what we're looking for, right?

Well, what was the biggest mistake? Because Base was the first of these deals, right? So, I mean, I'm sure you made some— there's some learning there. Like, what was the biggest mistake that you guys made with that, with, with the actual contract and the agreement or like the biggest lesson or the biggest—

I think one thing in general I would say is we've gotten really We've gotten a lot better at the kind of the outcomes and aligning the incentives, right? So it's like what, you know, we, we understand, you know, like fees generated, the collective is something that's really important to us. How do you model a deal where you have an understanding of the fees that are going to be generated, the collective? How do you put, you know, milestones behind that? If you're going to put tokens into a deal, like how do you hit milestones behind that? Tokens also aren't just like like, it's not just like it's governance, right? It's participation. As they get bigger, they deserve to unlock more because they will, they will participate more as well. And so, yeah, I would say, you know, the, you know, not speaking to any deal specifically, moving towards a direction where you feel much better about like you're happy to, to reward these teams these tranches of OP tokens because they are doing things that are impactful to the collective that it is a thing that you want to give up versus not understanding that. And whether you do them time-bound, whether you just give them, you know, in tranches, whatever the case may be, this is a better way to make sure everybody is, is, is, you know, aligned in their interests.

Is there any concern about just the sustainability of that model? I was, I was doing like rough napkin math and it looked like, I mean, you guys have spent a lot of money. It was like 500 or 600 million in tokens, I think. Or no, maybe that number is wrong.

Okay.

My napkin math. That's why it's napkin math, Brian.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But yeah, two things on that.

One, Superchain Index, which we launch on the 16th, you'll be able to see all of the tokens that are remaining. So it's like, you know, there's hundreds of millions in the gov fund. There's like 500 million left in airdrops. There's 800 million in retrofunding. There's like 300, 400 million OP tokens. So there's like billions of tokens in OP tokens as far as like rewarding developers. This is none of it sustainable if you don't have the flywheel going, right? Like, right, obviously, right? Like giving out $800 million in retrofunding tokens that we have over the next whatever, let's just say 10 years of making it up. There needs to be value that's created from that for that flywheel to come in. And so none of it's sustainable unless you do that. So on the deal front though, because I think that's like obviously, you know, more where you're at, it's not sustainable, right? Like You want to get this ecosystem up and running. Once it's up and running, you have to fully and fundamentally believe that the value that you're offering is something you want to participate in. Right now, we're not there yet. We're very close. We kind of talked about it at the front of the podcast of right now, 50% of the TVL, 50% of the transactions on Superchain. When that's 75%, 80%, 85%, you should just want to participate. There's not going to need to be a grant. Why would I need to give like anybody or anybody a grant? Because you're like, oh my God, TVL's there, great stack, great security, I'm interoperating. Boom, I'm in. So there shouldn't be any grants. Grants should be something that is like, you know, waning and done at some point.

And you—

but you do need to make bets and invest in people that are going to participate. Like, Uni is dedicating, and Kraken and Coinbase dedicating a lot of engineering resources and investment believing in this, participating in this. They deserve something from Optimism. They deserve governance, you know, influence. They deserve some kind of, you know, reciprocated energy and effort. And so I think it is all very fair, but it's not sustainable. And at some point, the flywheel will to kick off, which I think between sequencer fees, between kind of the interop long term, there's a pretty beefy model there that will work in the event you can 100,000x this ecosystem. And I think you can only 100 or 1,000x the ecosystem in a design space like the Superchain.

Hmm. I was reading about, weirdly enough, this morning, Amazon, the history of kind of like Amazon Alexa, like the Alexa product. And at the beginning, nobody— no, they couldn't convince any companies to join Alexa and build apps on Alexa, so they just they gave out grants and then once there were enough companies on, it drove more users to sign up for Alexa and then now they don't have to give out any grants. So there's a tried and true model here. Ben, what happens with OP Mainnet? Because it sounds like just from hearing you guys talk in this podcast, like your mindshare, like the— where your priorities seem to be focused on is the Superchain. What happens with just OP Mainnet?

Yeah, so this is one of those things that I think will continue to change in flavor and answer over time, just like the rest. And it will evolve with the architecture of Ethereum as a whole. I talked in the beginning about when we were just OP Mainnet, that was clearly the right thing to do because the stack just wasn't ready for dozens, forget hundreds or thousands of people to be running their own chains and staying sane and not up in the wee hours of the night, you know, fixing things or figuring out what the heck's going on. So, um, you know, I think the caveat here is that always the story changes as the architectures, um, continue to change. OP Mainnet is a great neutral home for builders. One of the things that, uh, we try to communicate with OP Mainnet is that, um, the decisions that we tried to make there, we tried to make the, like, kind of most reflective or of the standards that are shared within the rest of the Superchain. So, like, it should continue to be a good place where if you want to test something out, working on OP Mainnet means that it should work in other places, should be one of the goals. And of course, the other big thing is that it's the home of Optimism governance. And so, you know, just as we talk about more of these chains scaling, to Ryan's point, there are more participants that have, you know, need a voice in governance and will be participating in that. So the more activity I think we would expect to come to OP Mainnet around the governance front as there becomes more to govern and more people participating in the governance. Yeah. Yeah, Ryan, I don't know if you had anything to add.

I mean, you can even see it here. We have a We, for, by the way, I should have said this at the beginning. We have a free dashboard on the Superchain. It's optimism.blockworksresearch.com. You can actually see the TVL of, I mean, you can see of everything like Base and Zora and Mode and OP, but if you just filter down by just OP mainnet, like number is still going up and to the right.

Yeah, we were doing a million transactions on OP mainnet last month. You know, it's like a 7 billion, some TVL. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, we're excited.

And I think there's like, I mean, even look at some of these folks that'll grow quickly, like a Swell and Uni. Sony as well, we haven't spoken about a lot. And so yeah, I'm excited, I'm excited for all of them. Like, um, it was funny, you know, like a year ago was kind of like, oh, what is Optimism going to do if Base doesn't succeed? Now it's like, what is Optimism going to do now that Base is so successful? So I'm excited to like have more of those questions, you know, as Kraken and Uniswap and Sonium and World and all these other folks continue to have kind of the same success.

Would you ever think about just cutting it? Cutting that and just focusing on Superchain?

Cutting what, OP Mainnet? Yeah, you don't have to. I don't think it's a decision that needs to be made because if you think about interoperability and the way that we're thinking about it and application developers deploying just across the Superchain, it's also kind of like our home of governance. It's neutral block space. So like a good example is World, right? Like World started as an application, you know, they wanted a place where it's like, I don't know if any of these chains have my aligned interests. I do want to be a chain. I want to start as an OP Mainnet was a great place. Like, if you think maybe Kraken or Sony or whatever, Base, are not interest-aligned for you, you can kind of say, I'll deploy across the Superchain. You know, like, OP Mainnet is kind of how I'm looking at as home. So there's just no point. I think it serves as a valuable anchor in the Superchain.

World is a really good example there where, like, it speaks to what I was trying to get at with the, like, it changes with the architectures where when World you know, deployed on OP mainnet, they kind of had ideas that, yeah, a chain would be cool. But at the same time, the trade-offs for them at the time didn't make sense. The overhead that it would incur, the state of, you know, providers that make it really easy and kind of like a service to have a rollup and so on and so forth. And it was very— so it just made sense architecturally to not have to deal with the entire overhead of managing a chain at first for World. Then they continued to grow. The RAS ecosystem got more mature. The ability to run these chains got easier and easier. The demand for World kept going up. Now it's like, okay, now it's time to look at the story of having our own chain. And we think that story makes sense now. So that's more about the architecture and about the state of the world that changes what the right decisions for application developers is to make. And that will continue to shift. And it's hard to predict, But I know— oh, and the last thing I would say is OP Mainnet will never go away from a perspective of being secure block space. Even if the OP Mainnet sequencer shut down, even if a bunch of infrastructure providers shut down, it is a Layer 2 chain. It is secured by Ethereum. It is permissionless for anybody to run a node, follow the chain, secure the bridge with fault proofs, and keep going. So like it or not, chains are immutable, baby.

Um, all right. Pivoting to a totally different place. Can we talk about Andreessen Horowitz? Um, Ryan, I heard that, um, sorry. I mean, you were a, uh, if people are assets, you were a, you were a hot asset when you were on the free market. Um, and yeah, for people who don't know, you're at a different, I mean, I think you're Polygon, right?

I think Polygon and then YouTube before Polygon. Yep.

Yeah. Um, and I'm sure you basically had your pick of, you probably could have gone anywhere. And I heard the thing that got you over the finish line was a call from Ben Horowitz who said, hey, optimism is great. And Ben and Carl, great people. Chris Dixon.

But yes, it was.

It was.

Yeah, it was Andreessen Horowitz.

What has the role of Andreessen just been like? How helpful have they been? And I can kind of give you my perspective, which was like an outsider.

And now.

Yeah, yeah. Because I'd love to pose the same question to you as well, but.

Yeah, huge, huge, huge fan of them. Okay, so I'll make this like a quick story. When I was at YouTube, I was asked to think through our Web3 strategy. This is like end of 2020 going into 2021, and I didn't really know much about crypto and blockchain in the space, just like very surface level. So I went down a rabbit hole and Crypto School was kind of the first thing of how I learned about it, which was Chris Dixon and all that. Knew some other people at a16z, had spent time with them previously. Their games team was awesome. John Lai, you know, Andrew Chen, some of those folks, Sriram, all of them, right? And so got connected with Chris and yada yada. Anyway, around that time, you know, he did call me and I didn't know Ben Jing or Karl. Like, I knew a lot of the other folks in this industry. It was weird, actually. I didn't know any of them and kind of knew everybody else. And so he was just like, look, this is a great team. Like, we love them. We're super excited about them. you know, you should definitely talk to them. And so I watched actually Jing's video on Crypto School, like she did one of them in a later year and was like, ah, like just absolutely loved her attitude, her thought process, the way she talked about Optimism, Optimism's mission, like everything. So I was like, please. And that's, you know, the rest is history. I will say being on the inside now, I, they're just like incredibly helpful, like just being tapped into their team who has a lot of different perspectives across the board. They're just a great resource, whether it's hiring, whether it's thinking through strategy, whether whether it's having honest reflection with yourself on how you improve as a manager or a leader or as a cross-functional worker. And they just have just an abundant amount of resources to help you with that. And the more that you want the help, like you have to want it no matter what, like the more you will receive from them because there is a lot of it. And so yeah, it's been super valuable for me and I'm like, I can't say enough positive stuff about them. I think they are head and shoulders above the rest.

Hmm.

Ben, what do you think? I mean, how helpful has it been to just lean on them? Because actually I'm sensing a trend of like the Superchain. There are, I mean, you guys have what, 30 folks, I think, on the Superchain, but there are World—

Jason Yanowitz likes good projects and we do too.

Yeah. World, Uniswap, Coinbase, like these are all, there's an underlying theme of the main investor behind these folks. So I'm just curious, Ben, like how helpful has it been for like, just from the founder's view, Yeah, incredibly helpful.

It's hard to choose which one. Hiring is definitely one of the ones up there. Like even very, very, very early on in our journey when we were like less than 10 people, Andresen brought— introduced us to like a very powerful mentor that stayed with us for a few years and was just like, taught us so much about how to company.

Who was it? Can you say?

And yeah, of course. Yeah, Josh Stein. He was— when we were Optimism PBC, he was the COO and General Counsel. Um, and he just brought like a level of experience that was just like an overnight wake-up call of like, oh wow, oh, you don't have Josh Stein, the, uh, Harbor Josh Stein. Yes sir, yes sir.

Yeah, I remember Josh. Yeah, Josh also took a risk on Blockworks actually very early on. He like sponsored I think our second ever dinner and gave us $10K when we thought that was more money than, than God.

So yeah, there you go, there you go. Yeah, so it's hard. I mean, people are, you know, ultimately like the most valuable resource of like organization. And so I think I would have to go with that. But like Ryan said, like things like strategy, you know, making connections, being able to just like talk through decisions as we're making them. It's, yeah, unmatched. Incredibly valuable.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I also heard from— I was talking to the founder of an L1 who's like launching their token soon, and I was like, how— like, what's the most helpful thing? And he's like, Andreessen has 80 people who are basically at our service right now. So that's cool.

That's why I say if you want the help, they have the team, you know?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Two other topics I want to cover is actually the Sony deal is interesting to me. And because, Ryan, I know you're at YouTube and there's kind of this like it's almost like a meme of like enterprises falling on their face trying to do things in crypto at this point. I'm just curious, like, do you think that will— obviously the financial institutions are launching ETFs and maybe launching L2s and probably issuing stablecoins this year. But do you think these enterprises will ever obviously they will at some point. What is like the 1 to 2 year time horizon for like enterprise crypto?

Yeah, it's a good thing you like— totally. I'm like forever associated with the Starbucks meme.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I look, I think in general, a couple of things. I think it's one, you want to like, you want to take swings at those opportunities if it makes sense. You know, if you look at like Starbucks, it was like a $4 or $5 million deal that we were going to recoup on. And it was like, is this going to be something where like you can get NFT adoption? I do that thing 10 9 out of 10 times I would do that deal, even kind of knowing the outcome. I think the things I would look for a little bit different is, you know, if there are R&D, just kind of like fun pet projects where you're not getting kind of the buy-in, you have to obviously be very wary as you go back into a bull market and there's that interest to come in. You know, I also think if we can keep as an industry out of having like fraud, you know, and some of the issues that we've had with FTX and 3AC, which were huge catalysts for scaring away traditional companies, both TradFi and more broadly, that also is like a real variable to consider. I think with Sony, what I've seen is like they have been very sincere about bringing in a heavily DeFi-native team with, you know, Startail and some of the work that they've been doing there. So I feel very excited and good about them. The sky's the limit for them. I mean, with what Sony owns across music and gaming and all these different things, they— if there was ever a company that wanted to do it, that is like a very traditional Web2 company that has a lot of different avenues that they could go to succeed in just like a blockchain crypto space, Sony's well equipped. Um, I think they recognize this as well, of the, like, there is going to be a little natural skepticism. Are you going to be crypto native? Are you going to do something different? This is a big bet for you. And so I think they've taken it in stride, have gone all in, and they've demonstrated that level of commitment and seriousness. That's very different than looking at like a Kraken team, you know, obviously.

Yeah. I mean, I mean, moving IP on chain has always made a lot of sense to me. Maybe just I see it a little more obviously because of just my seat is like in the media world. But yeah, that's made a lot of sense. There is a, there's a funny thing in crypto where if you go to enterprise though, people in the crypto natives see you as like trying to go enterprise.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so I think it's a balancing act.

We obviously, what we want to do is be the home of DeFi, and we really want to champion DeFi, and we want to do things that like allow for that. And so that's why you could see where the bets have— like, we haven't done crazy stuff in gaming. Sony is really our only bet that's outside of that model that you've seen, right? Like, look at, you know, even World is a little bit outside of that, right? Like, if you're seeing the teams that, you know, are coming on, it's very DeFi-focused. Focus. And I think we have a lot of progress that we need to make there. Like liquidity, users, transactions, these things need to be driven. They're not going to be driven by enterprise right now, or like Web2 enterprise, if you will. It's good to make a couple bets so you have visibility and line of sight into how these things are happening. But like, my background's in gaming, but there's a reason why we're not doing big gaming bets right now. I don't think gaming is ready for this space. I don't think it's part of the mission that we're trying to build today. Does that mean you make no gaming bets?

No.

I think there's like a couple small ones you make to have have a foot in that industry and be hedged in it. But if you spread your bets too much across the board, it's— you lose your focus. And so I think we really want to be focused on driving TVL, driving transactions. The best suited are for folks that have that same shared goal in mind.

Yeah. What is the— what are the like 3 metrics you guys look at?

There's a handful of them, but I would say right now, you know, TVL and L2 transactions have been really helpful in us understanding where we need to get. Because what do application developers want? They want liquidity and they want to know users and people are transacting. And so I think, look, are those perfect? No. And are there flaws in both of those metrics? Absolutely. Like all things from a data side with crypto. But I would say generally that has helped steer us in a direction of where our strategy needs to go. But yeah, it's important to be very thoughtful about the data you're looking at because We know people skew it like crazy in this space.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why we— yeah, we're pushing on the data side too. I mean, maybe actually let's talk about data. Ben, you guys, um, you guys have one of the best data cultures, um, actually in most of crypto, I would say. Uh, we know this because we've worked with a lot of teams on, on these data dashboards that we have, and we, we care a lot about like very good data because I think a lot of the misinformation action in crypto doesn't come from like clickbait news, it comes from like just factually inaccurate data. So we're spending a lot of time building these dashboards and you guys took a bet on us and we built this dashboard together at optimism.blockworksresearch.com. And what was behind like caring so much about just open data for Optimism? Was there a decision like, this is why it matters for the strategy? Or is like you found a good hire and like it became part of the culture?

Yeah, it's a little, a little bit. Well, actually, I think I first have to shout out Josh Stein once again, who we were just talking about, because he was the one who said we— he was the one who was really pushing us for the first data hire. And we were like, what do you mean? We can pull data together whenever we need it. We don't get so much time. And it's like, no, you need to, you need to invest in that. I think there's, um, one part of the answer is just the standard product, like Web2 stories oldest time answer, which is like, you want to be tracking metrics and like doing your best that every time you make a decision, you see whether that decision like meets the prediction that you made in terms of some measurable outcome. So there's one kind of, I think, traditional lens, which is just saying it like that. And I think that holds especially true in our industry where we are constantly doing like kind of new science. So it's not, it's not like we're building some other website that is just like some, you know, a clone of some other website that that has a better UI and we can all sit down and like, reason about what is gonna have the best UI and then like do a little A/B test and watch the data. We're doing like new science here, like Web3 is super new, L2s are even newer on top of that, crazy new projects are the apps that are being launched on L2s regularly. And fundamentally, that means you're making decisions that have never been made before. Like you're— when you're doing things that haven't been done, you want to be following the data. Otherwise you're just like blindly shooting into the dark and because no one's ever done it, you don't even like have priors to really compare to. So yeah, I mean, that's honestly largely like you can borrow that from the Web2 SaaS playbook as well. I think the other thing, I mean, just to reinforce or to like echo your sentiment that data is, is bad though, I do think that there is still a long way to go, not just for Optimism, but I actually think for the broader Ethereum ecosystem. Itself. One of the narratives that we see come up a little bit in Ethereum, and whether this comes from external adversaries versus well-intentioned internal people is always tricky to develop. But one of the things that I think has come up over the past 6 months is a little bit of like, are L2s adversarial to the L1, which feels very backwards to us. But then people throw out intuition This is to me a space where the numbers really matter and need to be tracked. And a lot of those claims are just like shots in the dark. Don't—

how would you track it? Like if you could have a dashboard or you could have like a chart, like what, what would you want to see to, to talk about that?

It's so— okay, well, I'll give you the grand vision and we're starting to work on some of this with what we call Atlas in governance, which is the sort of like data repository for public goods funding, which I haven't talked about. But doing good public goods funding is— it's really important to have the data and that's both on-chain and some off-chain. Data. Fundamentally, what, like, what is my dream vision for Ethereum? Basically, I want to go on a website and you have a map, and this map is like a collection of like nodes that are all basically— it's just every project in Ethereum. There's like Ethereum the chain itself, there's all of the infrastructure providers, your Inferiors, your Alchemists, there's all of the L2s, there's all the RAS providers that use all the L2s, and there's like just a massive graph, like just a huge map map. Like, you know, like people do these like ecosystem maps where they'll be like, look at the status of X alt L1 or X L2, and it'll just be like a bunch of little icons of all of the like apps on that chain. That is a completely broken model in my opinion. What you need is not just a bunch of boxes within other boxes of categories, but you want every one of those boxes to have well-defined measured relationships that say, how does this this app use this infrastructure? What does this app pay that infrastructure provider to use? And you get a comprehensive view of like all value flow through the system. And you can like run a—

Swell leverage Gelato, which they click, they use Optimism, and they're on the Superchain, which flows back to Ethereum.

Exactly. And then maybe like Gnosis Safe is being used by all of those. And like, yeah, he pays Gnosis Safe. So that's an underfunded thing.

I like this idea. I like this idea a lot. Are you guys building this?

We're starting, we're starting to build it. Yeah, we're starting, we're starting first with some of the like Optimism kind of public goods projects. So the new Retro, Retro Funding flow, the way you will sign up for a project will be all on-chain and it will be like a kind of addressable information and you can kind of build these layers on top of it with different schemas from there. So it's coming, it's going to take a lot. Yeah, I'm sure you understand how tough data measurement Tough.

Um, okay. Let's tie this conversation together and start to wrap it up. So maybe if I could summarize what it seems like from an outsider looking in. Optimism 2021, building an L2. 2022, maybe get this big idea for the Superchain and start kind of actually building it out. '23, milestone deal with Base. I don't know if that was '22 or '23, but Base really starts getting going. '24, you start signing some actually big deals with other folks, the Sonys and the Krakens of the world. What does, um, How would you, if we're looking back at this in a year from now, what do you guys think you guys will, how do you categorize 2025?

I actually am excited to hear Ben's answer. For me, it will be great to see a couple chains demonstrating interoperability, at least having one up sometime around the summer so that we can demonstrate what this actually looks like so that others can be inspired and see the vision and actually feel something that's very tangible. And by that, I mean, users feeling that experience across multiple chains, application developers, so forth. So I think it's like so many people, the Superchain means a lot of things to a lot of different people, but the most literal sense, I think they think of interoperability. And so that coming to life will be epic. I obviously have already shared kind of the stats, but I do think if we can see the 70 to 75% kind of threshold, this idea of having some adopted standard for scaling Ethereum starts to become more of a reality. Interoperability and, you know, really seeing OP Stack come into its own would be also on my list. So I hope in like January 2026 we're talking about it and it's like, Ryan, there's chains that are interoperating and, you know, a vast majority of the activity that's happening on Ethereum is happening on the Superchain is, uh, is what we're talking about.

Yeah, nail on the head. I mean, I'll throw out a couple of other, a couple of other things, um, but interop 100% is the focus, Ryan, right? One of the things that I want to continue to see the trend line go up on is external contributions and the open source community really coming up to speed. There's a few elements of this. One thing that's happening is we're starting to move to contributors that are beyond just the core chain teams, like the Bases of the world. So we have folks like ZK-proof teams that are contributing actively to the OP stack, to improve it. We also have folks like FlashBots that are— blocks— FlashBots, which are working with Unichain to build FlashBlocks. These are all really substantive protocol contributions that are planned in the new year that I think are going to test the power of our open source development processes. So I hope what I see at the end of 2025 is a bunch of mistakes that we made and a bunch of improvements that we made to make it so that every contributor coming to the OP stack back, has a best-in-class experience, and every team building something substantive gets their stuff included and secured and sanely pushed through the proposal upgrade process. Yeah, I don't know. It's less sexy than like, oh, exciting interop, 75% of measures. But for me, that's good. I get it.

No, no, that's cool.

When you asked what metrics I track, the one I was going to throw out to build on Ryan was was the number of GitHub stars of the Optimism mono repo. Yeah, these are important. That's one that I really want to see.

The business perspectives of blockchain guys, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Maybe one question, which was from the Empire Telegram group, was a lot of folks wanted to know what you guys are doing with AI agents and just like AI crypto in general. Curious to get your take then.

I mean, the first thing I'd say is there's lots of awesome stuff going on on a bunch of other chains in the Superchain. So I don't want to take all the credit. Amazing stuff going on in the world of Base and others. This might be a spoiler alert, so I'll allude to it. Another thing that I would love to see is, and where I think, quite frankly, it's going to be a big trend of expanding, is AI agents for DAOs and for governance. So one of the things that I think is honestly been like a long time kind of in the back of our heads, or like, wouldn't it be cool if in the artificial general intelligence future kinds of things that are coming to fruition now is being able to have AIs that interface with governance communities to help participants make informed decisions, resolve conflicts, and get information. Information. Like right now, if you go to gov.optimism.io, there is a lot of amazing discussion in there. It is also arguably completely overwhelming. Wouldn't it be cool if I had some sort of extension or agent or bot that I could interact with where I could tell it some of my preferences, tell it what discussions I care to get it, take a closer look to in the conversations that I don't care, what my voting preferences would be and kind of like how I would want decisions to be made and have governance decisions be automatically like recommended to me, have a report at the end of every week that tells me what are the latest updates on the forum and in the Discord, and what are people talking about, and here's where you might want to spend a little more attention, etc. So yeah, that's a lot is going on in a lot of chains in the ecosystem. So, you know, go check out all the super exciting stuff. But for me, I'm really excited for governance. I think we're going to fix DAOs with AI.

And you're now the third smart person who's talked about this. The other two on the podcast who have talked about this are Rune and Ilya from NEAR, both of whom know a little something about something. So Yeah, I think you guys might be—

there you go, there you go. Cool.

Well, Ben, Ryan, this is great. Um, rooting for you guys. You guys have built something awesome. And, uh, yeah, congrats on everything and big 2025 ahead.

Thanks for having us on.

Thanks so much.

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