Speaker A: All right, hello and welcome everyone to another episode of Waiting to Be Signed, a special interview episode. Today we're joined by Nicholas Straczynski, The head of DeFi at Trillitech, Trinity is here. We're really excited to talk to Nicolas about Etherlink, something that we've been mentioning on and off on the show that we're trying to learn more about, which is why Nicolas is here. How's it going, everybody? It's great to be recording this morning.

Speaker B: Glad to be here. Excited to get into it.

Speaker C: Same. Etherlink is something that we've heard about. We know a little bit about. We've read the documentation. I don't understand, not quite sure how much of the documentation we've fully understand. High level, yes. But getting to some of the extra information around what Etherlink is, what the value proposition is, what it means for Tezos, the generative art space on Tezos, really looking forward to digging into that.

Speaker B: It's good that you guys didn't dig too deep into the documentation. First, it's still a little bit technical and we're working on this. And we're also like working, it's an ongoing effort. That's picked up in the last few weeks to make it more approachable and also include more details not directly related to the consensus or how it's linked to Tezos L1 and things like that. So that's something that if your viewers see that in the next few days, probably wait a couple of weeks and then you'll see a version of the documentation that hopefully resonates a bit more and gets you on the right path to start listening to the videos of the various experts and the apps. discussing Etherlink integration in more details.

Speaker A: And there's also a great video that you did for Nextblock Expo that's up on YouTube that we'll include in the notes for anyone who wants to dig into that. It's about 17 minutes of explanation, high level of what Etherlink is, but we're hoping to get a little more detailed than that in this episode. But before we jump into everything Etherlink, Nicolas, can you introduce yourself to our audience? Tell us about your background in crypto. and how you came to join Trillitech and get involved in Tezos.

Speaker B: So my background is in mathematics and finance. That's what I studied. And I was planning on going to a trading career in traditional markets and things. So I started with that at European and US investment banks as a trader of various types of derivatives, mainly equity derivatives. I got interested in crypto when Ethereum came out really early 2016 or so. I was not a Bitcoiner because I don't really code well in C++. And more generally, I was Not a gold bug, so I never actually quite got Bitcoin. And I'm starting to get in more and more as I as I go along, actually. But for Ethereum itself, that's that's what got me into the space to begin with. First as a research guy on the side, and a little bit in the markets, and then a lot more involved in the markets. I left my role back then in 2018 at Merrill Lynch, an investment bank, and I went to the dark side of crypto for the first time by being the first trading employee of the crypto effort by Brevin Howard, which is a A London-based global macro hedge fund that is relatively well known in the crypto space. Obviously, the timing was terrible. 2018, all of the prices were going down every single day. The volumes were going down. So many people were like even making fun of me for being in the space, to be completely honest. And actually, like, you know, that was the bottom of the bottom in hindsight, but you never really know, right? And so I went back to traditional for a little bit, but I kept my interest in crypto on the side. And I especially got back to it with DeFi summer. So 2020 DeFi summer, that was prompted by that very big effort by Compound, that application on Ethereum. And that Compound token did really well and that drove an enormous summer of activity on chain because new things were doable that I just didn't think would be doable that soon when I left the space in 2019. And so I went back, I was again quite involved in protocols on Avalanche. One thing after another, I joined another firm to do crypto trading. And now I'm actually like on the builder side of things, base layer side of things, by having joined the Tezos ecosystem as part of one of our core entities, being the one in London called Trillitech. The role here to finish on that is to essentially facilitate the use of Etherlink, Tezos, and any associated rollups we do in the future for financial applications or applications where transfers of value are crucial to the functioning of that application. So it could be SocialFi, for example, could be NFT finance, could be things like that. But anything that's related to transfers of value and finance on-chain one way or another.

Speaker A: When you were on Avalanche and stuff, did you ever get involved in the rebasing tokens?

Speaker B: Yeah, I was. So I was not at Avalanche Foundation or at Ava Labs or things like that, but I was one of the builders and one of the ecosystem participants. And yeah, that was one of the very big narratives, all of those Olympus forks. Yeah, that part of the cycle was so crazy. Like, you know, there was an entire 3-month period where anything people could talk about around crypto was really related to those Olympus DAO forks. And on Avalanche, there was one on Fantom, which is still around, kind of. There are 2 on other ecosystems as well. And even Olympus itself is still kicking and still innovating, actually. So it's, yeah, it's been a full circle.

Speaker A: Could come back in the next cycle. We'll see.

Speaker C: Still rebasing. Still there.

Speaker A: Like we said in the intro, we're really excited to talk to you about Etherlink and get a better understanding of what this project is. So why don't we start with the Trillitech side of it and your role? When and why did Trillitech decide to start the Etherlink project? And like, I guess in tandem with that, what are the goals of Trillitech as an organization? This is actually not something that we really talked to Valerie about because that was a very art-focused episode.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: Is it generally just to grow the use cases of Tezos? Can you kind of describe a little bit more like what Trillitech is trying to accomplish in general?

Speaker B: It's actually not so straightforward in the Tezos ecosystem because in a way it's slightly more decentralized than your typical ecosystem out there. Typically, how does it work? You have a foundation which holds some of the money that was raised through a fundraiser or something at some point. And then you have Ava Labs or like Aptos Labs or whatever. And those guys are in charge of developing the tech, submitting some proposals to the ecosystem, the community, the bakers in the case of Tezos and so on. And that sometimes gets rejected, sometimes gets accepted, and that moves the whole thing. In the case of Tezos, there's actually a few of those entities, 3 more practically. There's one which is the largest one currently called Trillitech. Which is mainly London-based. We have a few employees here and there. Then you have a large one in Paris called Nomadic Labs, which again is core engineering focused. It's a historic one that knows quite well what Tezos is about and so on, and has an adoption arm as well. And then you have one in Singapore, and this one is called TZA PAC and is focused on adoption. So broadly speaking, I think you could think of Trillitech as Tezos Labs. However, there's more than one. And all of them actually cooperate in various ways. So combined, they're Tezos Labs, and in particular, Trillitech being the biggest one, we do run a number of specific, what's called verticals. So you had Valérie on, and Valérie does arts, and that's part of arts and culture, which is one of the 3 verticals. The second one is gaming, and you might have Jeremy on, on the podcast at some point to talk to you about gaming. He was at Riot Games and stuff. He's got a super interesting background. And then you have me here for the DeFi vertical. And now historically, and that will lead into Etherlink sort of naturally, the Tezos ecosystem has been less developed when it comes to DeFi than on the 2 other verticals. Arts and culture, as you know, was a strength from quite early on. That's still the case. And there are some like new things that we're interested in and so on. The gaming vertical has been around and has been quite fleshed out, especially at Trillitech for some time now. Yeah. And so it's a bit more developed. It's a bit more further along, especially when it comes to like spreading the news out there and giving an understanding to people about what gaming is about within the Tezos ecosystem. DeFi is more recent in terms of the approach we've taken since I've joined and even a bit before that. For DeFi specifically, it is arguably like the part of the most ecosystems that have done well. And so There are some requirements for it because there is some real money involved and therefore some risks with interacting with the chain in a certain way. There are some exploits all the time. There are some hacks. There are some things that frankly, like, are neither of the two, but are still undesirable, like MEV on most chains at this point. And to give you an idea, as we speak right now, over the last month and a half, there was more MEV extracted on Solana than there was over the past year before that combined. So it's an important point as well, but it's a bit less talked about. And so for the DeFi vertical, one of the needs we had, because so many of the DeFi use cases and applications have been developed in the EVM/Solidity ecosystem with Ethereum, and in the previous cycle, quite a bit was done on Avalanche and Fantom and so on. And now with the Layer 2s taking over, it was super important to have that possibility for builders coming to the Tezos ecosystem. To take some of those tools, have some off-the-shelf codebases that they could draw from, and be able to not reinvent the wheel and have some stuff that they could stand on instead of reinventing the wheel and doing everything from scratch. And so Etherlink, which was initially aimed to be an example of what the smart rollup technology of Tezos can do, evolved quite a bit over time and is now thought of as a community rollup. That is developed internally by those core entities I was talking about, Trillitech, Nomadic Labs, but actually will be rolled out as a public tool, right? And the only link with us once it's launched is that we will continue to do some work to improve and update that rollup, that layer 2, but subject to, you know, the bakers of the Tezos L1 actually agreeing that this is good for the ecosystem and that this is the right way forward and so on, exactly like what's happening on the L1 right now. So Etherlink, and to summarize what I've kind of said, at this point is a layer 2 that is coming out. So a blockchain in itself inheriting its security from the layer 1, which in our case is Tezos, first of its kind, and will be EVM compatible in the same way Avalanche C-Chain is EVM compatible, or Fantom, or Arbitrum One, or HOP mainnet. And it will hopefully have every single bits that you would take for granted on the EVM ecosystems that are doing well when it comes to base layer functionality, what's actually embedded in the kernel that makes Etherlink run, but also what's built on top in terms of infrastructure. And that could be oracle price feeds à la Chainlink or Peace Network, or it could be things related to how subgraphs and how API, off-the-shelf APIs that make user interfaces very easy to develop for frontend developers work like Zoograph and like, you know, Subsquid and Chainstack and a few of the others. Or even like, you know, things related to the block explorer, having the right functionalities, being able to expose everything that you would be accustomed to in other EVM networks and things like that.

Speaker A: All right. A lot there. I think I understood most of it. But so to continue on Etherlink, I think a natural question would be to ask, How it works and what makes it different from other L2s. You know, you rattled off some L2s there. And as far as I understand, like all of those L2s, right, they all inherit the security of Ethereum ultimately, right? They're trickling down to Ethereum. If for whatever reason they fail, at least you're going to collapse into the Ethereum L1 and have that security of that decentralized network. Obviously, one of the differences here with Etherlink is that we're going to enable Ethereum applications to use it, but it's going to be collapsing down to Tezos. Everything's going to be transacting through Tez, right? It's going to be like kind of the native gas token for this. But aside from Tezos being the underlying L1 that secures it, what are some other things that are different about Etherlink? You know, we hear a lot about centralization. You already brought up MEV, which maybe you can give a really basic explanation of for people who— I can try to give my understanding of it, but it's probably not going to be exactly right. So yeah, maybe you could just talk a little bit about about what makes Etherlink different from other L2s?

Speaker B: I think you've said a lot of it in your question, actually. At the end of the day, you know, like from a very high-level standpoint, which I think your audience will appreciate, L2s and the concept of rollups, let's be honest, it was invented on Ethereum and it comes from the Ethereum world and so on. What people think of when they think L2 rollup or anything like that, or even newer blockchains in general, they think of Arbitrum One, Or Optimism, which has been renamed into OP Mainnet, or Base more recently, which uses the technology of OP Mainnet, and so on and so forth. What essentially we're trying to do by going to L2s in general, and that's true for Etherlink, but that's true for Arbitrum One as well, is we're trying to scale one particular part of blockchain, which is execution. So before that, we had another approach which was called sharding, and now we have one which is called rollup. Now Tezos has gone that way, the Tezos ecosystem, but with a particular angle, which is that right now, yes, we're doing Etherlink, and Etherlink is indeed a rollup, similarly to what Arbitrum One is to Ethereum. However, the difference in angle is quite subtle, and it is that Etherlink is actually launched and developed by the same core entities that are developing the Tezos Layer 1, and it is actually an enshrined rollup. Enshrined sounds like a sophisticated term or anything, but at the end of the day, what it means is that the L1, the code that makes the L2 run, actually sits in the same codebase as the L1. So in order to update Etherlink, you actually need to update Tezos, right? That has some pros, some cons. And to be honest, Ethereum themselves down the line, if you look at some of Vitalik's latest blogs and things like that, would want to go that way with a different type of technology called ZK rollups. If you look at it right now, and again, to keep it high level, there's essentially 2 ways to do those rollups and to provide the proofs that are needed to inherit that security properly from the layer 1 you're rolling up to. You have one which is ZK rollups, very complex, actually an outstanding piece of technology, but not ready for primetime in our opinion, meaning that The transactions are relatively slow and encumbered. The technology is complex, and as a result, the cost of transactions tends to be quite high. And because I started with the fact that we're trying to scale execution, we actually want the cheapest cost of transactions possible while remaining secure. And that is the other one, which is optimistic rollups. And that's what we've went for. So every time you go on the Etherlink website, On some announcements related to the Etherlink handle that is managed by yours truly here at with Anthony and things like that, you'll see things about optimistic rollups, and this is what it refers to. That is the type of technology we went for in order to make sure that whatever is written on the Etherlink blockchain, whatever interaction you're having with it, is actually exactly as secure as if you had done it on the Tezos layer one. And so now that's for the general explanation. And now quickly on what separates Etherlink from its competitors at a high level. Essentially, some of it comes from the fact that it's coming to the game relatively late. You know, Arbitrum One has been around for 20 months and things like that. One of the things is we've looked at how the others were doing things and what exactly were the pain points. And one of those pain points is the fact that You have a bunch of actors that can sit on the chain at some point or another when the blocks are being crafted, constructed, and can actually choose to reorder the transactions in a way that benefits them. And of course, this being a zero-sum game, because at some point the transactions are already there to be included in blocks, if it benefits them mechanically, it doesn't benefit you, right? So that's like what MEV really is. Okay. To a large extent unfair advantage that comes from validators and the whole complex ecosystem around this reordering transactions once they've already been submitted in a way that will hurt you and benefit them. And that matters most for use cases that are DeFi-like, where there's a transfer of value that's important. But in reality, most of the MEV back in the Ethereum days when the MEV was at its peak, which really was a few months ago, like less than 6 months ago, were linked to NFT mints, for example, that created what people called MEV spikes. And a lot of the MEV being extracted on Ethereum through that reordering of transactions was linked to those NFT mints that I think your audience would be quite familiar with. That's something that we've looked at and we thought, okay, you know what, that would be a great thing to even down the line when the roadmap of Etherlink is completely implemented, Which means that Etherlink itself will have a healthy dose of decentralization. You don't need a layer 2 to be completely decentralized in the same way that a generic layer 1 blockchain should be decentralized. Tezos, Ethereum, Cardano, and others should really be as decentralized as possible, as credibly neutral as possible, and all that. For layer 2, it's less clear because the worst that can happen at a layer 2 level is that the transactions are reordered in a way that benefits a certain party. And that's already happening on a lot of layer 1s as we speak, right? So because at the worst case, there is no real loss of money for most of the cases we're talking about where decentralization matters for layer 1, it's less important for layer 2, but it has its importance. And as a result, to make a comparison very quickly, if some of those layer 2s on Ethereum decide to have a decentralized sequencer, so someone at the layer 2 level that is not a centralized counterparty, just one computer ordering the transactions, but a bunch of computers that could potentially misbehave. If that setup is not done properly and they don't take into account the fact that some of those counterparties can misbehave, you can end up in a situation much like the one we were in on Ethereum before, like, you know, the guys at Flashbots and all of the MEV boost process was done properly. And even now, actually, like a lot of people don't use that protection when they interact with the chain. And therefore you're subjected to that potential loss from the MEV. I think that's a very complex answer. But hopefully, broadly speaking, that made sense.

Speaker C: Mostly.

Speaker A: And there's also just, I mean, not that it's even a Layer 2 yet, but there's some L2s like Blast, right, where they're not even really, it's just a multisig wallet that they're asking you to send ETH to. right now is my understanding, right? And so that presents its own security issues of all you need is like the 4 signatories to that wallet to decide to take the ETH and you're done. Obviously, their roadmap is to launch their L2 and I'm sure decentralize it a little bit, but I think starting from a decentralized place here, we're kind of avoiding all that conversation of risk that comes with those methods.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: So how is this all going to work with wallets? Is it only going to be Tezos wallets? Like, are people I'm just trying to think from an adoption standpoint, right? Because for a lot of the L2s, and we've both been dabbling with Base and some of the other L2s to collect NFTs, and even though it's a bit of a pain, I can manage it all from my MetaMask wallet by adding those there. So is the eventual goal or the idea to have Etherlink in MetaMask?

Speaker B: That's a good question. Something that's quite relevant to, at the end, how users actually benefit from this in one way or another, right? One of the benefits of being EVM compatible is that the chain essentially forget about Tezos itself or anything like that. Etherlink in itself, if you don't want to look under the hood and understand where the security comes from, is a blockchain in and of itself. Just like actually Arbitrum One is a blockchain in and of itself. It does get its security from Ethereum, but really if you're just a day-to-day user, you go on your Binance account, your Bybit account, your Coinbase account. You withdraw to Arbitrum One or you deposit from Arbitrum One. And really, you don't, you don't care about Ethereum at any point during that process. And similarly, once, once you're using Arbitrum One, you go on MetaMask, on Rabby Wallet, on Rainbow Wallet, on Uniswap Wallet. Okay. And you, you interact with whatever application adding the Arbitrum One blockchain to your MetaMask. Everything I just described for Arbitrum One will be possible for Etherlink. And that will be the main way to interact with Etherlink. So you are in the EVM ecosystem where every single tool that has been designed for Ethereum with Ethereum in mind and Ethereum execution layer particularly in mind is usable for Etherlink. And that is massive because a lot of those tools are extremely good quality. So like, you know, all of the middleware providers for builders, for example, Alchemy, Third Web, Ethers.js, Web3.py, things like that. All of those are usable day one for Etherlink. You change the chain ID and up, you can start using it. The chain is compatible enough and has all of the right bells and whistles in order for you to be able to do that without thinking, I'm using Etherlink or I'm using Arbitrum One or I'm using Ethereum mainnet. Now, from a user standpoint, you go there and the current meta and what people are doing currently is not too different from what people are doing on Tezos currently, right? On Tezos, you would spin up your Temple wallet. It's a browser extension. And you connect your Ledger physical wallet to it, or you do a hot wallet on Temple directly. And you interact with apps. And every time an app prompts you to approve a transaction through Temple, you have a pop-up and you click approve, right? Hopefully having checked what's happening there, but you see my point. MetaMask actually pioneered that process and still works this way. However, that touches a relatively small amount of users, small number of users who are like, you know, quite familiar with the space and would be expert enough and confident enough to go in there, create an account, have a seed phrase that they need to take notes of on a paper, hope that the cleaning guy or the cleaning lady doesn't find it and you don't lose your money and, you know, things like that. If you think of how the space is going to evolve 6 months from now, that is actually a very different picture. And that's something that I think your audience would be super keen on because it can attract a lot more people who frankly have no interest in blockchain itself, but just in what it can enable for them. And that's something we're super focused on for Etherlink. And that is enabled by something that's a standard created by Ethereum, the Ethereum Request for Comments, they call it, which is called ERC-4337. Okay. So that's a barbarian name, like many of those names. But essentially what that standard established is how smart accounts are going to work going forward and how we agree collectively that we should design smart accounts to make it less painful for a new user to start using an application. And let me describe the workflow, and that's going to sound a lot more concrete and realistic. You have heard of an app, you Google it, and you click on the website. Okay? Now you're on the website, and there is no point about connecting wallet or something where you would have already installed Temple or MetaMask or Rabby Wallet. What you have instead is login with Google, login with Apple, with Netflix, and so far you get it. You log in with one of those services, and then a wallet gets created for you in the background. But it is actually self-custodied. So no one can actually steal those funds that you deposit on that wallet. You are the only one being able to unlock that wallet. You even have a social recovery feature in order to recover your wallet in case you don't have access anymore to your Google or something like that. That's still an ongoing process, but that's getting very, very mature as we speak. And applications like friend.tech and blackbird.xyz in New York and builder.tech and so on are actually leveraging a first version of this. Which you'll see improve quite a bit over time. What that means is the following. As a user, you will then think of that embedded wallet as something that is associated with that app. So let's say you wanted to use an Etherlink NFT marketplace. You didn't have a wallet or anything like that. You went on there and you logged in with your Google account. Whenever you go back there and you log in, you have access to those funds. You can spend those funds and anything like that. However, reusing that wallet for another application requires a bit more skills and brings you back to the current world of like your MetaMask thing where you need to understand the concept of wallets, of seed phrase and all that. However, if you just want to use that wallet with that application, yeah, you're happy to just do that just with your Google account. And so what that might mean in practice, and that's me speculating because I can't know for sure. Right? But I think what's going to happen is the wallets are going to progressively lose the ownership of the relationship with the customer, and the apps are going to go back to that Web2 sort of paradigm where, like, they actually control the relationship with the customer. And the customer thinks, okay, I have my account with that NFT marketplace on Etherlink, or I have my account with Uniswap or something like that, you know? That I think is a game changer because once you have that kind of thing possible, then a lot of users who might be crypto aware but not crypto native might think, okay, you know what? I think that's interesting. I really don't care about blockchain. I don't even really understand what Tez or BTC or ETH actually are. And that's fine. I just want to mint some NFTs and sell them to my friends or collect them or like do something with them because there's some utility. Attached to them, be able to prove to someone very easily that I own that portfolio of NFTs or like anything like that without actually taking notes of a seed phrase, understanding how the piping works with private keys, public keys, or any of that. And then like, you know, all of those marginal use cases, which for now have been marginal, but could become quite real, then become a lot more hopefully mainstream with like ticketing, And things related to representing loyalty points for various brands out there in the form of ERC-20s or NFT-like events or things like that, that becomes not much more cumbersome for the brand in question or their end users at the end of the day to actually do it that way, as opposed to just doing it in the Web2 way with a centralized database. We've spent quite a lot of time on Etherlink making sure that this kind of use cases And the middleware that you need for this to be achievable by your average developer is there from day one and is quite well explained. And we're going to prepare some videos to walk people through that. And Third Web has done some great work around those things and Alchemy as well.

Speaker A: Trinity, I think you are the candidate for a follow-up here because this is like everything that you think about with crypto all the time.

Speaker C: So it sounds like really the end goal for this is really thinking about how do we make something that's scalable and foolproof from an enterprise perspective, whether it's something as big as the NBA, something like the NFL, something like Ticketmaster, that sort of thing. Where else do you see folks within the Web3 ecosystem really trying to tackle this problem? And do you feel that it's a differentiator or do you feel that there are other competitors out there that you'll have to compete with at this particular lens, especially if we're thinking about the Google account, like self-custodied wallet that doesn't involve MetaMask? It's super fascinating.

Speaker B: Yeah. So like clearly we're not the only ones thinking about this. We didn't write that standard at all and things like that. However, I think that there's room for a lot of people here because like by definition, when it's a new thing and when there's growth, you're not trying to take market share away from incumbents. You're actually capturing new business and that's typically much easier. So of course, other people are thinking of capturing that new business and what needs to be offered. To the ecosystem or to laymen in various ways for that to be useful to them. A lot of ecosystems are looking at this. If you look at what Ethereum themselves have done around this, I think StarkNet was quite a pioneer on this. They have this wallet that is developing not only on StarkNet, but on others called ArgentX. And I'm not saying that because they are French or anything, but I think they did some good job there. However, this is really something that so far has remained still way too complex because, you know, they were there quite early on and obviously the technology is improving over time. For like really someone like, I don't know, my wife or my father or like someone who has heard of crypto but really couldn't care less and actually would use something that was truly useful to them and there was no pain point in using them whatsoever. And I think we're getting there. And if you see some of the examples, again, friend.tech, I think is a great one there. If the marginal efforts of using that solution are tiny, for example, ERC-4337, that account abstraction, smart accounts standard, allows for something called a paymaster. And what that means is that, like, you know, one of the pain points of interacting with blockchains, let's say right now you go and you spin up a Temple wallet to interact with the Tezos blockchain. And even if you're happy to take the seed phrase and all that, You get started, you've created the wallet, and guess what? You have zero Tez in it. You need to go out there, get a friend of yours to be generous enough to send you 1 Tez for transaction fees, or you need to go to centralized exchanges, or you need to leverage one of a million on-ramps. Some of them charge absurd amounts of fees and things like that. What if in order to claim your first few NFTs or do some things on-chain that are not super high added value and you wouldn't necessarily go out there, And get some tests for. Someone pays for you your first few transactions. That's something that happens in Web 2 every single day. If you go to Amazon tonight and order some new shoes, do you care whether Amazon is doing is using AWS in the background or Azure? You really don't, right? Like no one cares what's happening in the background. What you care about is that you're able to click, the shoes are sent, and there's a payment provider that enables the payment, and they're delivered to your. Home or office, right? That I think is one of the like mini steps that again need to be ironed out. We spent a lot of work selecting the right on-ramp providers, making sure that there are some API calls that can happen, potentially involving a KYC provider if the amount is large enough in some jurisdictions, so that you can very easily, after a few transactions that might have been covered by the application you're trying to use, but now you know what, you need to actually, maybe you might want some to buy some NFTs on that marketplace. Or maybe you might want to sell whatever currency is the main currency in your jurisdiction, let's say euros, and buy some, some TES or like buy some piece of fractionalized real estate or anything like that. But for this, again, you need your euros to be stablecoins denominated in euros and tracking euro 1 to 1, not euros which are fiat euros reflected by your bank account. And all of those things, you know, like Have been pain points in the past, and there's massive improvements made by those various counterparties. Here, our added value is mainly about selecting the right partners, having them from the get-go on Etherlink, on Tezos as well, to be able to facilitate those new forms of blockchain use cases.

Speaker C: And so it sounds like from a you know getting into the business side of things, it can also be about finding the correct. partners who are willing to eat particular fees because they're able to find or extract value from these end users elsewhere within the chain or the cycle. Like you used the example of Amazon earlier.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker C: I think we often use the free shipping at Amazon as a classic way of, you know, getting people in. They don't need to pay for shipping. They're setting expectations. They're changing the game. But obviously Amazon is recouping those costs through other ways by pushing competitors out. Through membership fees, you know, through potentially higher prices sometimes. It really just depends. Is that something that's on the forefront and, you know, really thinking about ways to make Etherlink like a profitable entity in the long run and the short term?

Speaker B: I'll just precise that Etherlink is not an entity, but I see what you mean with the question. Etherlink being like, you know, this community rollup, you can think of as an extension of Tezos. And in fact, if you look at the roadmap, Tezos and Etherlink will be one at some point. But profitable in the sense that, like, you know, what is the notion of profit in that context? It's essentially for the Tez holders, the holders of our token, to be able to get some benefits in the long run from network activity. And that materializes in the context of Etherlink because whenever you do a transaction on Etherlink, there is a base fee. That is paid by the user. And that base fee is paid in XTZ. Everything is paid in Tez, the native token for Etherlink, as Will mentioned. And that base fee is burnt. So that is something that ultimately benefits all Tez holders collectively from more activity on Etherlink and obviously on Tezos to begin with, because like on Tezos, the more activity, the more need for Tez to be able to pay for gas and so on. To get back to your question, which was quite core and something that a lot of people are speaking about on various podcasts at the moment, and that is linked to customer acquisition in blockchain, in crypto, but also overall. Blockchain and crypto customer acquisition has been extremely costly since, you know, 2020 and DeFi summer, really. It's taken so many forms and it's probably the most complex form of customer acquisition out there. But I might be biased because I haven't worked in Web2, but You know, in the case of Amazon, yes, there is free delivery. There is a Prime subscription, which is a loss leader because so many things come out of that Prime subscription. And you're like, it is some way to make the customer more loyal, thinking I'm already forking $9 a month for the Prime subscription. So I might still use it and I get the free delivery every single time. In the context of crypto, you've had a customer acquisition that is through the roof. That is more expensive than anything you can think of out there by an order of magnitude, at least. And so I think for an app, if you tell the app, but you know what, you might have to pay for the first 20 transactions of the user. Transactions on average on Etherlink are likely to be along the lines of maybe 1 cent per transaction. 20 transactions, we're talking about 20 cents. 20 cents user acquisition, to give you an idea, is the customer acquisition for games. A typical game that's launched on the App Store and the Google Play, they would be happy to pay anywhere between $1 and $5 per install. So 20 cents seems reasonable on that front. But then, like, if you look at crypto, because airdrops are considered by some, not all of the VCs, as part of customer acquisition, then you get to customer acquisition cost of like sometimes hundreds of dollars per user that doesn't even end up being a user who does a single transaction with your ecosystem. And so I think on that front, there's a lot of room for improvement. And I'm going to get a lot of critiques for this because like a lot of people like airdrops and so on, but, and I do myself, right, as a user, but going from hundreds of users that you pay for your users on average in the current paradigm to a few dollars here and there that you use sparsely to facilitate the user actually using your app, I think is probably a no-brainer for a lot of the apps out there. And we're definitely willing to help on that front as well through various schemes and various incentives that we've actually refined over time. The Tezos Foundation has really stepped up under new leadership. And that's something that, like, you know, you're not alone in there. And there's help for the right type of apps and builders there.

Speaker A: It's gonna work the same way as any blockchain, right? There's gonna be fees accrued to the validators on Etherlink. And that's how it's going to provide incentive for people to secure the network. And that's just like how it's gonna work. But the fees in this case are incredibly low. I mean, they're low on Tezos already. And you can get like between 4% and 5% through the liquid staking there. But in order to provide any kind of reasonable yield, then we're kind of projecting forward to an extremely high transaction meta, like a lot of people using this thing all the time in order for the fees to like accumulate, I assume, especially if they hit that 1 cent or lower. How do we onboard people to the idea of like, hey, no one likes Tezos, but use this Tezos L2, right? Like, I think that's like a big barrier right there. There's a lot of skepticism around Tezos in the wider crypto community. So the idea that we're securing it with Tezos might not actually be attractive to a lot of the users here. But Nicolas, a lot of what you're talking about is like, well, we're not necessarily going after those current users, we're trying to expand the ecosystem and bring new people in. What does this all look like? And do we have any partners kind of lined up or anyone interesting that you can hint at?

Speaker B: Let me take the first part of that one. So let's address the elephant in the room, which is the latter part of your question, and which is For people who are already in crypto, specifically the subpart which is already familiar with Tezos in one way or another, what's in it for them? What could bring some of them back? What could make some of them become more active again on Tezos, Etherlink, or other associated rollups in the future? And the answer is good apps. Good apps that enable you to do something that you actually want to do, not because you're paid or incentivized very highly to do it. But because that's genuinely entertaining or useful from your personal finances aspects, or like there's some very good art that you think is worth collecting in a digital way that is traceable and cannot be faked, whatever it is. But that is actually like good enough as an app or as a use case to drive people to it regardless of whether, first of all, it's on Tezos, Etherlink, Ethereum, Arbitrum One, Solana, or anything else, right? What I described before is how we lower the barriers to entry in every way possible for those use cases to actually be incentivized to come also to Tezos or to build firstly on Tezos. And one of the things that we're doing on that side for DeFi specifically, we're running an incubator from the 15th of April in Singapore. So the first 2 weeks are in person in Singapore. 4 weeks after that are remote. And then you're gonna go to investment committee and some of them are gonna be funded jointly by us and a partner of ours. And after that, we're going to help them go to VCs and actually raise substantial amounts of money pre-seed. That is the goal, at least. And that kind of thing will hopefully provide a solid pipeline of apps who will be available on Tezos and/or Etherlink relatively quickly. And for those apps, we're thinking along the lines of what I described earlier, of getting not only the guys who are currently in crypto, but actually the wider audience of people who might Have had some kind of crypto-linked activity in the past. I'm thinking of users of, for example, Voyager, BlockFi, Celsius in the past. You know, it was a very low-touch approach of getting some yield on crypto. Didn't pan out too well in the end, I have to agree, for a lot of the users. But the idea there was remarkably good, actually. The execution was poor, but the idea itself had some merit. And similarly, if you look at centralized exchanges right now, the Binances, Coinbase, Bybit, They're all doing one thing which is relatively consistent across all of their strategies, which is going much closer to the on-chain aspect of things. Binance has seen themselves since the very beginning as ultimately a gateway to DeFi. That is what they're trying to enable more and more with their newly established Binance Web3 wallet and all of this. And that's true for Bybit as well. They've launched MANTLE recently, which is a layer 2 competing with us actually. And Coinbase has launched Base and so on. If I touch on Base for a related part of your question, you were saying, okay, the fees are going to be low on Etherlink and they're already low on Tezos. So how do you get to a point where those fees are substantial for billions of dollars in market cap and hopefully tens of billions in the future?

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: The reality is, if you look right now at what's happening for others, and if I take the example of Base when they launched and when friend.tech was quite hot and quite used and so on. Yeah. You know, they had amounts where like the profit was something like $10 million or something. We're not talking about billions of dollars. We're talking about amounts that were already substantial a month or two after launch and with fees that were very small, right? At a time when like the price for publishing data on Ethereum was low because there was very little activity and the base fees themselves were low, they still managed to like, you know, make some money. So I think over time, as you see more users coming on-chain and for more repeated sort of aspects. Like right now it's very specific. It's on the one hand people trading NFTs, on the other people trading meme coins. That's like 90% of the activity at the moment. That is not an endgame. That is the state where we are right now because there's nothing else that you can really do easily or that is sexy enough to do on-chain. You have like, you know, to some extent you have Rollbit on Solana and things like that. But those are like here and there piecemeal. A very beginning burgeoning of what we could get to. I think what's really going to drive this cycle is finding that next use case or set of use cases. I have a hunch might be unlocked by having that lower barrier to entry to get the masses, really, like tens of millions of users as opposed to the 1 million active users that are currently on-chain doing things on-chain, whether they realize it or not, or whether they're super familiar with what on-chain means or not. I kind of went back to my answer to the previous question, but I think all of this is kind of linked to like no blockchain has product market fit at the moment, in my opinion, in the grand scheme of things. If you're talking about big tech or big finance or big oil type profits, no one is making that kind of profits in crypto right now apart from Binance. And Binance is off-chain. So how do we get some of their users on-chain, which I think they're keen to do themselves? And also, how do we essentially scale some of those use cases to be widely used enough to generate like billions in profits as opposed to tens of millions or single-digit millions in some cases. Obviously, the core of who we're trying to attract here, you know, at the end of the day, we're an infrastructure piece, a piece of software that does infrastructure for others to build very cool apps, B2C apps that actually work and do the right things and are exciting and things like that. So for those guys to come, we need to have very well-structured and well-crafted programs, grant programs, investment programs, incubators, you name it, that actually create that sense of community. The CEO of the Tezos Foundation calls it closeness. When you come to Tezos, one of the things that I've really, really liked, I was not super familiar with Tezos until I joined recently. I was, but you know, always in the background. And one of the things that surprised me the most here is how tight-knit that community can be. I'd really like to actually take that and scale it, but keeping that very warm aspect and like, you know, all of those like in-person events and like the Dev Success Team, for example, does that really, really well. I would like to see this at a much bigger scale. And that's what I'm trying to do with that incubator, that incubator which we've called DeFi Catalyst Accelerator. So DCA, right now it's a one-off. But really, I would want to run that once a quarter in different cities and have people sort of coalesce around this and build use cases that more and more, as we get more of them, compose with each other, rely on one another. Those guys giving tips to one another on how they've overcome some of the struggles linked to the Tezos tech stack, linked to more general Ethereum execution layer hurdles and/or regulatory hurdles. Linked to a jurisdiction or another on how to be compliant with XYZ because DeFi is getting increasingly regulated, right? And that kind of thing is partly what we're marketing towards. The Discord has a builder section which is quite active. The Etherlink Discord has, you know, like some of that team has done some good work. Anthony has been working with 2 other guys, David Ryan and Sasha Aldrich, getting that Discord to be super alive and very, very vibrant actually. If you go there after the show or something, you'll be surprised that How many people there are like suggesting things. And you know, they can be angry, they can be super enthusiastic. Anyone is welcome. We want a civilized conversation. But at the end of the day, every idea can have merit if the arguments are put right and things like that. The builders are the first goal here. And then like for the wider community, having them really understand that at the end of the day, Etherlink is worth a try, is very, very easy to get started with. Especially when we have some of the first few apps using that embedded wallet setup that I was telling you about. At the end of the day, if you look at some of the friend.tech users, when they started using them, they were like, what actually is Base? I was able to transfer some coins from my Coinbase account to Base. That's it. I use friend.tech. They are not super into Base as a blockchain itself. What they're into is friend.tech. And that, I think, could be a very big source of like users and awareness in the wider crypto ecosystem by having the right apps built either ready from day one or relatively close to the launch and co-marketing with them and having events with them. I think they could benefit from our support, but also like the secret sauce there is to engage with the right people in the right way. It is about the builders in the end.

Speaker A: So I am in the Discord, by the way. I got in before the gates opened 2 weeks ago. I would color my impression a little different. I think it's very chaotic in there. And it's a lot of people just begging for an OG role and stuff. We can cut this out. But I'm actually like really confounded and perplexed by what's going on in the Discord because it's, it kind of feels like people expect that there's going to be an airdrop or something the way that they're behaving in there with all the different levels and the cycling, but then there's not going to be an airdrop. So I don't really understand what the goals of the Discord as it exists now are because I don't understand it.

Speaker B: I think like, you know, criticism and constructive engagement is super important, right? At the end of the day, what you said is 100% true. It's shared by a lot of us, right? There are a few aspects to this, and it kind of relates to my answers before. The current community that is still in crypto, like, let's remember 2022. Terra, FTX, Celsius, like, you know, we've had a bunch of this cycle. And the guys who are still there, Are there for a specific angle? Not all of them, but a lot of them. And I'll be honest, even I do that. Like I go in various ecosystems based on what incentives are in there. I think a lot of us are like that, and that is helpful because it means that there are still some people engaging with the tech that is being built. But obviously, that is not the end game because that's not sustainable. Jupiter yesterday or two days ago releasing five hundred million dollars. For an airdrop. In what kind of industry do you spend $500 million on customer acquisition? That is very large, right? And that's because we're early. That's because American VCs are extremely risk-taking. And that's because we're hoping that there is a next step where people are actually using something that makes sense for them aside from the pure incentive. I kid you not, you watch videos these days of like guys using Vertex Protocol, which is a great protocol actually on Arbitrum One, or like, you know, Hyperliquid or some other trading protocol and saying, but you know what, I'm going to trade once in a while. Yeah. Because I want my point allocation to go up. And who knows, you know, I think the airdrop is going to more than make up for the fees I'm paying. But obviously, by definition, the app so far doesn't have product market fit because the only users are guys who think that by using it, they're actually going to be paid, not be paying themselves. Right. But the guys who are doing this and those VCs who a lot of them are super on top of their game are financing this. They're saying, okay, you know what, so far that's what we have. But the plus one user, the users that comes from more of a mainstream audience.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: We'll add value there and we'll find something that is valuable for them aside from the potential airdrops, the point system, the incentive in various ways, and the liquidity mining. That's where we are at the moment. And that gets reflected because we are part of the wider ecosystem in the Etherlink Discord. And not only, not only us, let's be honest, Blast has some of that. Menta Pacific has some of that. The upcoming ones like Monad, Shardium and stuff will have to deal with this. I get your feedback on board. And I think there are ways to refocus the conversation in a more productive and engaging manner than purely saying, who is the OG? That kind of thing, right?

Speaker A: 100%.

Speaker C: I mean, I think just in summary, despite the name of Etherlink, it operates much more like an Avalanche or other EVM-compatible chain, just on a Tezos L2. So it's like in no way connected directly to Ethereum other than being EVM-compatible. And I know that we've already talked about the relationship between the Tezos L1 security and Etherlink. Is there anything else that we should be expecting from Etherlink as a chain in terms of like not airdropped tokens, but its own level of security, whether it will have an L2 Tezos, will it have just a native Etherlink token? Is there anything else that people should be thinking about?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Are we going to have to wrap our Tezos to have it work on Etherlink? Is it going to have to be like wrapped So that's a great question.

Speaker B: So there are a few ways. Let's say Etherlink launches tomorrow. How do you actually use the chain? How do you bridge to the chain? How do you deposit to the chain? Whatever you want to call it, right? I'll start with, I think, what is going to be the most used way day one. And I'll go down like that in number of users that I would expect personally. That doesn't reflect what we think as a team or something. We haven't really spoken about this too much. The biggest one, I think, is our partner LayerZero. Which is a cross-chain messaging technology that allows you in particular to bridge value and in particular tokens, right? So they have this standard called OFT standard and they have a wrapped asset bridge. And I don't want to be too complex for the audience, but essentially you'll have a bridge. And that bridge, if you use target.finance or any of those other bridges facilitated through the LayerZero technology, that is very similar. So you go on the UI that will be linked directly on the Etherlink portal, or you could find it on DeFi Llama or anything, where essentially you can go and from any of the layer 0 supported chains, could be Ethereum mainnet, could be Arbitrum One, could be OP mainnet, could be any of them, you could bridge at low to no cost to Etherlink a number of tokens. And that could be ETH, that could be USDC, that could be USDT, and so on. Okay? And that could be a way to get started because there is a feature in there which enables you to, let's say you want to bridge ETH to have some ETH at the beginning or USDC. You can bridge 100 USDC or 10 USDC, right? But one thing you can do is tick a little box at the bottom of that page saying, I also want some gas tokens as a result of that transaction. And what LayerZero will do for you is in the background, they will convert those and they will give you some Tez tokens to get started when you get to Etherlink. So you'll have your USDCs that you've bridged from, let's say, Arbitrum One, but you'll also have a little bit in Tez to get you started. And then you can use a decentralized exchange or anything you want to have more Tez if you want to, by converting some of the USDC you got into Tez or anything like that. That's a very well-known way that people who are already in the space would be comfortable with and would know already to get your money from other ecosystems you've been part of to Etherlink. The second way is for users who would have used Tezos recently, are still using Tezos, things like that. Let's say you have a few TES on Tezos, Tezos being the L1 in that context. You can use the L1-L2 bridge, which is a bridge that we've designed ourselves that you kind of get for free by virtue of Etherlink being a rollup and things like that. But I don't want to go too much into detail. So essentially you have a bridge And that bridge lets you bridge native Tez from Tezos to Etherlink and vice versa. That bridge lets you bridge any FA1.2, FA2, FA2.1 token that you would have on Tezos onto Etherlink in the ERC-20 format. So you have a token on Tezos, let's say USDT, you put it through the bridge and you get it almost instantly on Etherlink as a USDT, which is an Ethereum-type contract. And not Tezos contracts, but they are given to you one-to-one when you bridge using that bridge. And the final possibility, which I very much hope will get live by the 13th of March, which is the first time Etherlink mainnet will be available, is a withdrawal or a deposit to and from a centralized exchange. So right now you can go to Binance and let's say you have some test tokens on Binance. You are able at very low cost and very fast to withdraw those test tokens from Binance directly onto Tezos Layer 1, right? And it costs you 0.1 TES, which is very cheap. I'm hoping you could do exactly the same from day one, maybe Binance, maybe another exchange, directly from the centralized exchange where you've topped up your account in dollars, for example, converted to TES or left it in dollars, in USDT. And directly withdraw it to Etherlink as opposed to having the intermediary step of Tezos, which I think we can all agree is not that user-friendly given that there is a hoop in the middle. You go to Tezos and then you bridge to Etherlink and so on. So those are the 3 main ways to get value and native gas tokens to Etherlink from the get-go.

Speaker A: I just want to make sure I understood this one part. If I have a stablecoin on Tezos L1, I'll be able to bridge it up to Etherlink, the L2, fairly cheaply because it's Tezos.

Speaker B: Very cheap.

Speaker A: But now once it's on Etherlink through LayerZero, that stablecoin could travel to Arbitrum or somewhere else. So you could actually bridge something entirely off of Tezos into Ethereum fully if you wanted to. So does that open a door for— I mean, I know there's a lot of other complexities with topic, but does that open a door to NFTs going either way, back and forth? Like, could you take an Ethereum NFT and bring it all the way over and down to Tezos L1, or vice versa, a Tezos L1 all the way over to like eventually ETH L1 through Etherlink?

Speaker B: The short of it is not necessarily. It depends on whether the NFT in question, or even the ERC-20 in question, like the token, is a fungible token like USDT or an NFT like, I don't know, Bored Apes, right? Has the necessary function in their contract, in their code. And those functions are layer 0 specific functions that create a standard which for NFT is called ONFTs. It stands for Omni-Chain NFTs. And if you have that function, essentially that makes it so that the layer 0 infrastructure understands what that token is about. And then you're able to speak to the bridge, and then the bridge can take you from Etherlink to Ethereum mainnet, from Ethereum to Arbitrum One, and so on and so forth. And it is actually a super cool piece of technology because, I mean, we love those guys and we're working quite closely with them. And at the end of the day, they've created that thing where like it's only one pool of tokens. It is a bit marketing and stuff, but it's actually true in the sense that let's say your NFT, we create a collection, you and I, and we call it the Nico Will Penguin. If those guys, 10,000 of them, have that same codebase, right? And they have that ONFT function in them, then we are able to burn them when we leave Etherlink and mint them over on BSC or Arbitrum One or anything like that. And vice versa, if we want to come back. And so that creates an omnichain NFT standard, which has been a bit less used so far, as far as I can tell. Than the OFT standard, which is the same but for fungible tokens like USDT, USDC, and so on. Which is, I think, super interesting going forward because it means that you don't have silos where those NFTs are only available on one chain. And you can do something with them in the context of NFTFi applications or things like that, or for games that are like multi-chain on other chains as well. So that could be a use case in the future that gains in prominence. I think right now it's a bit behind. the pure OFT aspect of things that LayerZero is famous for. But who knows what will happen?

Speaker A: Had to ask because it comes up a lot in the discussion of, you know, and I know you guys are working on Tezos and stuff, but obviously with all the FUD around Tezos, it comes up with collectors, especially what happens if for whatever reason Tezos goes down? Like what happens to all my NFTs? Like that's the last failure point. It's like if the chain fails, my $50,000 of NFT is just go to zero? Like, is there a way to rescue them? And I understand it's got to be super complex, right? Because it's not as simple as just moving them, quote unquote, right? There's like so much you want to inherit, all of the provenance of the NFTs and all of that. But this is not saying that I think Trinity or I in particular think that's going to happen. But I figured I would ask because, you know, we've heard other collectors who straddle both chains express this fear. It sounds like it's gonna be something that's maybe more applicable for new NFTs that might be created in the future versus existing Yeah.

Speaker B: So there's a few things I can say about this. And like, you know, we've seen that that was quite a live topic when, for example, like, you know, I can't remember who it was. I think it was DeGod that went to Polygon and ended up on Ethereum giving back the grant or something. They did that because they didn't think that Polygon was a safe enough chain, having block reorgs of hundreds of blocks at a time and things like that. They saw that it was a great chain for other use cases, but not necessarily for NFTs.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Okay. So I can answer a few things there, and I think that's a good final point because it's quite generic. One, I might be a bit biased here. Bear in mind that I work for one of the core entities in the Tezos ecosystem, right? Having come from largely the Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana ecosystems in the past, the Tezos ecosystem, despite ups and downs, has a setup that is actually very decentralized and very safe from an incentive standpoint for the bakers. Okay, so you are talking about the 5% that goes to the bakers right now, and this is being reworked in various ways. And there's a lot of discussions in the community about something called adaptive issuance. But at the end of the day, the core focus of the founders of Tezos and of those core entities, Paris One in particular, is squarely around how do we keep Tezos as a very secure chain that is very decentralized and has a validation system that just works. Okay. That chain has, to my knowledge, never really been down. That's not the case for Solana. That's not even the case for Arbitrum One. We've seen that recently. And I really like Arbitrum One. So that's not a biased comment, I think. But that chain is still very robust from a first principle standpoint of like how the validation is done, how simple the consensus is, because that matters and things like that. Secondly, it is a proof of stake chain. So indeed we want the overall market cap, staked market cap, and so on to remain high enough. For that stake to actually be worse enough to make it difficult for an attacker to like misbehave or something like that. I believe that is still the case at those levels, and that's something that is hard to bootstrap for new entrants. I understand those concerns, and if you are concerned about that kind of thing, it means that you understand what you're doing, which is good news overall. Net-net, chain works well as is. We're doing absolutely everything we can with this earning in particular, but there's a lot of other. Initiatives in the background to make the validation, one, as safe as possible, and two, profitable for the bakers, but in a way that doesn't disincentivize holding of Tez or like, you know, usage of the various platforms, whether they be Etherlink, Tezos itself, and so on. And I think striking a balance in the interest of each of the stakeholders in that ecosystem is something that the Tezos blockchain and ecosystem have done Relatively well in the past. So my own take is that's not really a concern. Now take it with a grain of salt. I do work for an ecosystem entity, right? I think that, for example, if you compare it, and I don't want to drop names and stuff out there, but to other chains that have been used for NFTs in the past, to some extent are still being used for NFTs, there are more risks among some of the chains outside of the top 2, top 3 for NFTs than there is for Tezos at this point in time, or for Etherlink, which offers, and that's the whole point of what we're doing, the same security properties as Tezos from the get-go.

Speaker A: I mean, I think from our standpoint, as people who are really invested in the art NFT side of Tezos, I mean, and I guess now, I mean, we collect cross-chain now, but originally being a Tezos-only podcast, the idea of Etherlink enabling a lot more activity on Tezos, bringing more TVL to Tezos, just bringing up the price of the damn coin so that people can stop blasting charts on Twitter and basically making fun of the chain all the time. Like, I think that would go such a long way towards curing a lot of the FUD around the chain. Because like, you know, like you said, like people like us who really don't even understand this stuff so technically, like we still understand that all it takes is 20 people in Europe to want to run nodes and Tezos is not going to really go down, right? Like, every generative artist in Amsterdam could keep this thing afloat. off of some Raspberry Pis if they wanted to, right? So it's not like it's imminently going to die. And just hearing you kind of speak about it with your experience, I think is really helpful as well. So thank you for that.

Speaker B: I think ultimately those things are like part of a whole, actually. And a lot of the pieces in crypto, it might not be immediately apparent when you look at it from a 10,000-foot view, but they actually sort of feed into one another. And I can tell you, for example, in the last bull in 2021, 21 and stuff, the buyers of those Bored Ape Yacht Clubs and your Punks and all of the expensive NFTs, they were guys who had just made money from the price of like DeFi-related tokens or like AVAX and Fantom and so on going up. There was a very clear correlation that you were seeing between the prices of NFTs and the prices of tokens that shows you that the activity that underpins all of this is actually like quite linked. Right. They are siloed a bit, and you have people who will prefer to look at NFTs, profile picture NFTs, for example, or like utility NFTs for various things related to like trading on decentralized exchanges for perps, for example, or things like that. But they are all sort of intertwined, at least to some extent. And so if something goes well and something actually attracts people to Etherlink from an activity standpoint, you could very well see how like a rising tide lifts all boats and like everything else sort of like gets traction from that. And you've seen that like very recently with Avalanche, for example, where inscriptions became a big thing. I still don't understand why. And as a result, you know, the entire Avalanche ecosystem was lifted quite largely for a number of months just from this.

Speaker A: Yeah, I'm still trying to wrap my head around Bitcoin. Getting into a lot of heated debates with artists who are considering going over there, and I still don't fully understand it, but I'm trying to be open to it. At the very least. We've been going for quite a while here. We usually ask a rapid fire to wrap it up. Trinity had to drop for a work call, but Nicholas, you know, just to keep it short, 2 rapid fire questions from you. One simple, when's the next bull run? And 2, a real one, which is who would you like to hear us interview on the show? Like you already mentioned the gaming person at Trillitech. Obviously we've had Valerie on. Is there anyone else?

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: that you think in the Tezos ecosystem that would be beneficial for us to talk to?

Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. I'll answer the first one real quick. We're already into the next bull run. If you go with the definition that like a technical analyst would go by out there and things like that, you're already seeing, obviously, like, you know, prices have risen, but you're already seeing like the structures changing and the volume patterns Changing in a way that is consistent with you know I have no crystal ball right but that is consistent with what you were seeing at the end of 2020 at the end of 2016 things like that and it does happen to coincide for some weird reason that coincides with the economic cycle in the wider world with the Bitcoin halving and things like that right so I think arguably we're in the midst of the bull cycle however like you know it doesn't mean that it always goes up even during the bull. And it doesn't mean that tomorrow we're going to go up and up and up for the next months, right? But I think we're already in there. And I think that's encouraging from private market trends on what the VCs are funding and what kind of covenants and criteria they apply to the things they're funding. There's a bit of a relaxation on what they're doing it. So those are rapid questions. So I'll leave it at that. And the second one, these days I'm speaking quite a lot and I'm spending a decent amount of time with the builders. Who was in Tezos way before I arrived. His name is Dmitry Kovalevsky. He's the founder of CordFi, and you might have heard of him before, or maybe not. And he's a really great guy to talk to because he's been in Tezos for a while. He's looked at a bunch of other ecosystems and does some comparisons and things. And he's working on a very cool project that we're trying to support in any way we can, involving some things that arguably were not possible to do in blockchain until very recently, which is like, you know, this order book decentralized exchange where like you really have like an exchange that works in a very similar way to how exchanges work, like the NYSE works, or like, you know, the Amsterdam Stock Exchange works. That's something that is fairly new. And he's a very technical guy who has a very good understanding of this. So I think he's one of the good ones to talk to.

Speaker A: All right. Well, you might have to email me contact later. Definitely worth thinking about. I think that's a good place to wrap it. We've gone on for a while now. Thank you so much, Nicolas, for your time. That was great. I mean, I think hopefully our audience understands a lot more about what Etherlink is. I would hope that this episode gets circulated around. I think it's pretty bullish for Tezos and what's going on in the ecosystem here and just the fact that like, yeah, people are building here. There is a plan. You know, even if we're not necessarily coming for all of Ethereum, we're coming for the broader audience that hasn't adopted crypto yet, right? We're going to try to bring them in in a way that's cheap and fun and easy. Seems pretty, pretty simple from there, right?

Speaker B: Let's hope so. Fingers crossed. Thanks for having us. And yeah, it was a pleasure to speak with you.

Speaker A: That's it for this episode. Hope you all enjoyed. Check out the links below. Consider joining the Discord. You're not going to get an airdrop, but you might learn something. And yeah, definitely check out The YouTube video as well for more on Etherlink. All right, that's it. Bye everyone. Cheers.