Redefining Blockchain: The Rise of Rollups and Multi-Chain Ecosystems with Rahul Sethuram, Co-Founder and CTO of Connext

This is Tim Dalhouse and you're listening to the Dao Talks podcast. In each episode you hear me talk to builders and makers of Web3. Together we'll be exploring our multichain future, share personal stories and discuss how we're investing, experimenting and failing with the startups that define the future. So join me on this journey of discovery as a chat with these leaders, change makers and misfits about tech, life, the universe and everything. Today I'm talking to Rahul from conext. Rahul is one of the co founders in a team of three and they've been hacking away at the interoperability challenges of Web3 since 2017. We're going to be talking about the multi chain Future layer ones, layer 2s, layer threes, roll ups, zero knowledge proofs and all sorts of other exciting stuff. Hey Raul, how are you? I'm doing quite well, how about yourself? Very good. Just went for a quick surf session and dried up. My hair is still slightly wet, my shorts are still wet, but all good, ready to go. Changing topics. I think your LinkedIn said you're in the Bay Area, you grew up there, but you're not currently there, are you? Yeah. Okay, first of all, hello from a fellow surfer. That's cool to see. I love surfing. I love Bali as well. That's really cool that you're out there. As for me, so that's correct. I grew up, I was born and raised in the Bay Area, you know, grew up around the tech world, Big Tech, Web2, so very familiar with that world, startups in general. Through that journey, it actually brought me to Dubai where I'm located right now. So it's cool how cryptos is, you know, such a decentralized world and you can really work from anywhere. You can find cool things going on all over the world. So it's been a really cool journey to explore different parts of the world and see how things are going out here. Not much surf in Dubai though, is there? There's a couple beaches out here that get waves, especially during the winter season. I actually just went out a couple weeks ago, so no way. I gotta give try the next stopover. I'm coming, you know, between Europe and Asia. I will do that. We had to stop over in Qatar. I knew you could do like wing foiling there, you know, went up to the kite beaches there, so that was cool. But actually waves there so gotta check that out. Very cool. Listen, you know, in digging or I'm digging into what the future Web3 is going to look like and obviously Part of thinking about Web3 is thinking about, you know, multi chain. And you know, you at Connext have been in this multi chain space for a few years now. You know, it must be like five years or something which clearly makes you a veteran in that space, right? Like five years is like a lifetime and you know, maybe it's like an entire technology cycle or two. So I really want to talk with you about this and get your perspective individually and so on, on it. When I personally think about multichain and no matter, multi chain is going to look like, the big thing that comes into my mind is really end user nightmare. You know, if I think about how it was for me initially and likely for everyone to just do, you know, get a wallet, get metamask installed, you know, make a transaction, signing stuff, understanding what you're signing, you know, worrying about your money. Now it seems like this is going to go, you know, in this multi chain universe no matter if it's going to be like 3 chains or 3000 chains, this seems to be like that's where it has the biggest impact. And I know you guys are working with your technology on this, but what are you seeing these days and what are you thinking about? You know, as you said, I've been involved in the multi chain world basically since its inception. So you know, I saw the very start of like the chain explosion if you will. So you know, right when like Binance chain came on the scene, Polygon, things like that, those are like the very first little facets of the multi chain world starting to grow and I think we're very much still at the beginning. We are yet to see like a giant explosion of chains. And I think this is something that is like really coming in the, you know, near future over the next couple of years because I think people are starting to realize that, you know, there are ways to build application specific chains, application specific roll ups, kind of like these little like micro like set of block space where you really only use it for a certain application and then you can do really cool things like you can internalize me, you can keep your set of block space secure from like let's say, you know, you don't want your application to go down because there's some like NFT mint happening on another part of the chain. Like that should not affect your user experience at all. So I think people are going to start to want these levels of isolation. We've already seen that where like DYDX is like moving to their own chain because they want to do things like they want to internalize this. This will only start to grow. You know, I think Uniswap, maybe in the future will plan to like roll out their own chain. So really like we're starting to see the benefits of this. We're starting to see toolkits, we're starting to see layer threes. And this is kind of one of the reasons why I refer to as just block space and not a chain. Because when you're talking about like isolated block space, you can have it where it's a roll up, where it's not technically a chain. It still relies on the Ethereum consensus. However, for user purposes it looks like another chain. You have to bridge funds over there, you have to get your own funds, you have your own kind of like gas, you have to pay, you have to sign transactions, you have to send transactions to this. So each of these rollups is developing their own platform to build like infinite numbers of chains on top. This is what we refer to right now as like layer three. So and then we have these other toolkits like Stacker for example is one company that I've been kind of working and involved with. They're trying to create this framework for like micro rollups that are like truly app specific rollups that can be written in different programming languages. And you have this like very customizable roll up that is only for your use case. And I think people are really going to take advantage of this. They're going to go all in. Like there's going to be like governance specific roll ups. There's going to be like, you know, Dexes, there's going to be like NFT roll ups, there's going to be. Gaming is going to be one. Basically every game is going to have its own roll up because that just makes sense for a game. They don't want to deal with any of the other stuff, they just want their game. So I think we're just at the start of this explosion. So maybe we have a couple hundred chains right now, maybe a dozen of them are actually useful and highly used. We're going to see this number grow to the thousands very quickly. That's very interesting between positions from maybe even just two years ago, three years ago. Strong voices about from Bitcoin maximalists. You're looking at everything besides Bitcoin going like it's not going to exist. And I personally feel they have kind of like somewhat drowned in the noise. It's going to be impossible to prove anybody wrong who believes that today, but at least not as present on that as hurt. And I would say there have been a certain degree of like Ethereum maximalism as well. And there's not a lot out there. And you know, between talking to different people there's clearly, I would say there's a good consensus around that there is going to be a multi chain future. There's and multi chain meaning, you know, there's going to be Bitcoin, there's going to be Ethereum and it's likely going to be a bunch of other chains. Right, but this is then where you know, the opinion split. Like, you know, I've talked to people that go like, hey, we're going to end up with half a dozen to a dozen chains and everything else is not going to make any sense. And you know, we now have, I think if you go and look it up it must be 200 or something, could be more, could be less. And you just said, hey, it could be a thousand, could be multiple thousand. I think that's very exciting and interesting. And you combined that with talk talking about, you know, you repeated this several times now that you know, this is roll ups and you said block spaces and you know, so it's not necessarily its own chain. However from the user experience it will be same. Explain to everyone that's listening, you know, what are you really thinking there? So what's the place for this roll ups and why are they important? So maybe start with you know, a simplified logic of what they do and how that would apply to a game. And you know, how this idea of roll ups come, you know, somehow connects to you know, block spaces as you labeled them. Or is it the same or is it different? Yeah, totally. So in a nutshell, a rollup is a way to batch transactions on like a single layer one. So instead of sending all your transactions on layer one, like everyone is familiar at this point with like ethereum gas fees, like how expensive it is to do anything on Ethereum. So what rollups do is they've kind of pioneered this construction where instead of sending a single transaction, they will batch all the transactions into something called a sequencer. They will keep track of essentially all the transactions that happen on like a virtual chain, if you will. And then they will batch that and put the proof of this new set of transactions onto the chain. So essentially what you get is you get extremely efficient and optimized fees and like isolation from the main chain while still inheriting all the security of the main chain. So it's a really cool construction. You know, it's been around it's clearly got product market fit. We have maybe like a dozen roll ups right now that are all trying to do their own thing. But then now this layer 3 thing is another construction where it allows you to build roll ups on top of roll ups. So when you build a roll up on top of a roll up then you get even more benefits where you get even cheaper transactions and then you get some of these other things like you can have control over the actual like ordering of the transactions is really important for mev, which is you know a topic that might up and is sort of a very important topic these days. But yeah, so essentially each of these roll ups is now innovating to create this stack where you can create even more roll ups on top. And that's why you know, I really think like, you know, leaning into this vision is how we're going to get to this point of like thousands of chains. And you know like you brought up, even if you're like an entire ETH maximalist and you think like ETH is only going to be, you know, there's a lot of people that are saying like why do you need anything else except Ethan, you are still going to end up in this roll up world where you have all these roll ups competing with each other that are essentially like being these like factions and they have roll ups on top of them. So still you have this like giant like mess of like chains that are like somewhat interconnected. Another cool thing is like between these like layer threes. So like say you have optimism and you have all these roll ups built on top of optimism. They will all be like inherently interoperable with each other but they're not going to be interoperable with like the arbitrum side of it. So then that's when you get into this whole like interoperability mess that you have to navigate. Very cool picture. So would it be then, you know, this is just what's coming to my mind maybe a way of thinking about this that you can look at this multi chain future, this multi chain ecosystem really from two sides to say well you know there's going to be, I'm just painting this out, right? You could say hey, there's Ethereum. Like looking at from a technical, from a blockchain site you'd say hey, there's Ethereum. And then on top of Ethereum there's this layer twos, right? Which are, are technically not chains until layer three are also not necessarily chains when you look at it from a classical like blockchain definition. However if you look at the same picture from the end user or the developer side, it really is a multi chain universe. So this definition is maybe also somewhat unclear in that like when people talk about it because there's likely going to be a lot of people that say hey, you know, I don't think most of the chains are going to survive. There's never going to be more than half a dozen. But they might actually agree with you and say hey, you know, but there could be, you know, a dozen layer twos and then there could be 500 layer threes or layer X on top of that. Is that how you would think about this? Yes, I think that's exactly correct. I do think, you know, I think it's not going to be just one layer one because like you said, you know, there are these camps, there's like the bitcoin camp. There's like, you know, bitcoin has enough like Lindy effect at this point stick around, like people know it's going to stick around. Then you have things like Solana, which is like trying to improve on top of what Ethereum did and build from the ground up and do things a different way. You're going to have like other things like Aptos and swe which are also like, you know, trying to be like a better version of Solana. So people will constantly try to innovate at this base layer. And then there's another whole ecosystem which we haven't even talked about which is Cosmos, which has like totally different idea where they want to also do like multi chains, mini like kind of like very application specific chains. But they don't want them to be roll ups. They want them to be like full sovereign chains with their own validator sets, but have built in interoperability. So if you look at that world, you know, Cosmos alone is going to give you like hundreds or thousands of chains. If that ecosystem starts to catch on, which it seems like, you know, it does have the network effect right now to stick around and catch on. People are building there, you know, DYDX is building there, A it's kind of a huge thing. And then from that standpoint, you know, there are still going to be like discrete chains and within those chains, if those chains adopt this roll up model then yeah, you are going to scale up. And like you said, it's really important to consider the user perspective because the user is not going to know whether it's a roll up or a chain. They're just going to be like, okay, well I have to deal with this. The way I deal with the chain, so I have to connect my wallet to it. I have to deploy contracts. If you're a developer, I have to get gas on this thing that I'm trying to use, whether it's a chain or a roll up or whatever. In your mind, if I'm reading this correctly, you would look at this as a bunch of different kind of ecosystems with like base layer technology, like this Ethereum with its layer twos and layer threes and layer X. There's Cosmos with its own kind of approach and you're going to end up with this kind of like, you know, as you put it and like, you know what, I just took a note while you said that I've had this before, but it's kind of like this temporarian explosion, right? In terms of evolutionary, you know, diversity of blockchain, but kind of springing up on top of like certain base level kind of technologies or chains that you're going to have, you know, several hundred years and several hundred there's. But ultimately there's likely going to be, you know, whatever, half a dozen or a dozen maybe, who knows, like ground laying technologies and every other chain or network is kind of like plugged on top of that and you're going to have a big variety of like families of chains. Is that what's in your mind? I'm trying to capture individually? Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it and that's mostly correct. I think, you know, underlying technology will converge on certain primitives around like, you know, this is how you do consensus, this is how the VM should work. This is maybe the built in base interoperability layer, like Cosmos style and then like it will just kind of build on top of that. So I think, you know, these things will converge into like a few different ways to do things at the base layer and then like you said, it will just like Cambria and explode from there. All right, so you guys started Conext in 2017. I think if I remember right, try to rewind a little bit and try to get into your mindset of what did you see in 2017? Like a lot of the stuff that we now talked about, like layer twos, layer threes, you know, roll up was around in like either early prototypes or white papers. But the ecosystem as it is obviously didn't exist in that way. How did you look at the ecosystem and what problem did you see in 2017 or earlier that you said, hey, this is worth solving and we're going to start a Project around this. What, the origins of Connect? Yeah, totally. So as you may imagine, Connect looked very different in 2017. The whole blockchain world looked very different. But it's really interesting because conext was founded to solve basically the same problem we're solving right now, which is like how do you increase adoption? How do you bring Ethereum to the masses? How do you bring not just Ethereum but blockchain technology to the masses? And very much we did start and we still are quite Ethereum centric, but we do understand the multi chain world as it is right now and we kind of leaned into that. So when we started Connex in 2017, the whole space looked very different. This is like when ICOs were starting. This was an ICO boom, right? So like there were all these projects launching different kinds of like projects with different tokens doing these token sales. So we started Connext initially as a way to easily onboard people into ICOs. So like we were almost like a fiat on ramp. We were like, how do we make it so like my grandma can use a product? But that did an ico. Like for example, maybe there's like status or something that had like this token called a status token. Like how do I ease easily get this token? So we're like okay, why don't we like try to be like a credit card processor so you can like into these tokens. That's actually the initial way that we started Connects. However, as we started like get more and more into that. Of course not even considering all the crazy stuff, deal with banks, regulations, payment processing, which was, you know, a big reason why we didn't pursue that anymore. But after like talking to a lot of people in the space and potential customers, they all said that the chain isn't scaling. There's no way we can onboard massive amounts of users if Ethereum itself is not even going to scale past, I don't know, five transactions a second or something like that. So what we said instead, we've always been the type who is customer focused, user focused. We want to solve the problem, the real hair on fire problems that our users and customers are seeing. So we said, okay, we need to change to scalability. That needs to be the ultimate problem that we solve. And this was like pre rollup days. This is in like 2018 when we first made this shift. So what we did is we attacked the scalability problem. We said, okay, where can we make Ethereum scale? Since rollups didn't exist, the only construction to do scaling on Ethereum was through State channels. So state channel is a technology like it's a pre roll up technology that allows you to kind of move transactions off chain and then put them back on chain in like a trustless way. So you deposit things into a smart contract, you kind of send sign and forth with you and a peer and then you put that back on chain at the end and there's like a built in dispute mechanism. So we built that, we kind of launched products, we built the first production mainnet state channel hub. We kind of like collaborated with a few teams on building that. And then all of a sudden once we had that product like spun out and built, we kind of realized that something weird. This is like when BSC and Polygon. So this was like the multi chain. So bsc, Polygon, xdai were kind of like coming up as like EVM chains that were advertised. They were side chains, right? So they were like, okay, you can get all your EVM stuff, you can deploy the same contracts, you can use the same kind of apps, except it's not going to be cost the same as Ethereum and it's going to scale because they were like very centralized, right? So what we realized is our state channel technology can actually bridge like funds and assets between these different technologies. So we kind of like that was kind of like a light bulb and we were like, okay, why don't we throw together like a quick demo of like a bridge. So we put up a demo. It like basically caught on like fire. Like we were like, you know, inundated with like usage and it like broke all our infrastructure and everything like that. We were like constantly on fire. Which is, you know, like looking back, it was like a really good thing because it's like, wow, this is how you know like kind of have product market fit is when you're like, you can't deliver the product as fast as your users. Like the users are kind of taking it from you like however you can give it to them. Then we were like, okay, we got to make a full pivot in interoperability. This is like the thing like the multichain is here to stay. Then we kind of rebuilt our product from the ground up like two or three times since then. And we rebuilt it like two times since then and finally we're on the third iteration of our product right now which is our full interoperability suite. Talking about this, you know, obviously in this different iterations and you know, talking about the interoperability suite, you know, would you be able to summarize this in the simplest words possible like how does it work today and what are the kind of core assumptions that are under it without going technically too deep. But if, you know, somebody listens to that and goes like, oh, I understand how the suite works and what makes it different from other approaches. Yeah, totally. So, you know, to begin with, the first few iterations of our product are focused around like asset bridging. So it's like I want to get funds from this chain to this chain. How do I just move my funds? And that's the very basic primitive of interoperability. It's like I want funds here to here. What our thesis is at Connext is that these kind of bridge UIs where you have to bridge from one chain to another chain, you just get your funds and like you have to take these like extra steps to do that, is kind of going to disappear. And apps themselves are going to become multichain at the core. They're going to be cross chain compatible at the core. So they're going to have all these different interactions with different chains built in under the hood and there's going to be no need to actually like bridge as a user. Like you will just interact with the app you want to interact with and the app will take care of everything else. So these are kind of the layers of abstraction that we believe are going to show up and we want to help build. So with that said, our newest iteration of the product right now is focused around that is like building applications. So what does that involve? It's like, how do you send data, not just assets, but actual data across chains. You need a message passing mechanism, you need like a execution mechanism, you need a way to like send liquidity. So we think funds and data should be kind of sent together as like one packet and able to be consumed by applications. So now the latest iteration of Connex is, it's no longer just a bridge, like a user facing product, it's a developer platform. You know, one of the things that whenever good level of ignorance and technical understanding, but every time I hear this, I think that happens to people that listen to this as well is when you first hear, yeah, you know, there's a difference between passing data and between, you know, bridging tokens. When you're kind of far away from this world, that somewhat makes sense. But the closer you look into it you go, well, the token doesn't actually exist. It's also just a data package. Right? Like, so what is the difference between passing data and passing tokens? By definition, because you see this quite a lot, you just use it. But what is the difference between moving a data package and moving a token from A to B? Yeah, that's an interesting question. Well, it's kind of interesting because if you really look at it like you're saying you're not really sending anything from one chain to another chain, you're just kind of like replicating it and kind of you have a mechanism to basically validate that this replication of data from one chain to another chain is correct. And when you're doing it with assets, you can do it different ways. Like you can basically like how our old bridge worked is you send to a liquidity provider on one chain and they send you assets on the other chain. So really there's nothing, there's no interaction between the chains. In that case, there's just a liquidity provider who's looking at something happening on one chain and then executing it on another chain. So. And then the assets themselves are just kind of like completely discreet. You're just like trading one asset for another asset. So in that sense, yeah, it's quite different than like passing data around because you know, you just have this like liquidity provider who has liquidity on one chain and is trading it for liquidity on another chain. When you get into data, then it's a bit more complicated because then yeah, you have this like issue of like data replication. But then you have this whole thing about like how do you validate that that data is correct? And there's different ways to go about doing this. There's, you know, of course there's a lot of other bridges at this point and most of the bridges use this, this mechanism of external validation which is you have this fairly, I don't know, different levels of decentralized set of validators that can be more or less trusted. You can have a proof of stake system. So you have some kind of external consensus mechanism between a few different parties that will say, okay, now that I've received this data on this side, I see that. So all these people are going to agree that this data should be passed to this side as well. Connect's approach is slightly different. So what we want to do is we want to minimize the trust assumptions that any user needs to make when they're bridging data or messages across chains. So we say that you should basically use the most trustless system. So without getting too much into details, we use underlying mechanisms like roll up bridges themselves to pass data between and we kind of just like wrap all that up in a very nice interface and we use optimistic verification mechanisms. So we use a fraud based window or mechanism to validate the data rather than an externally verified mechanism. Run me through this optimistic process and you know, explain for a second what you know to people listening. What does optimistic actually mean? Like optimistic means like you hope for the best or what is it? It actually does in a way mean that you hope for the best. So like it works kind of like an optimistic roll up. So what optimistic means is you send something and if nobody disputes it during a certain period of time, then it's considered to be valid. So you're saying, okay, I'm going to send this data and I'm going to give anybody the chance to dispute that this is the correct data by providing a proof that it is incorrect data. So you're assuming that a person sending it is an honest person and if they're not, then you have an option to basically like come in and say that they're invalid. So this is how we verify our messages when they're going cross chain. So we say, okay, we're going to pass this data, but the data is not going to be valid for a certain period of time until anybody who wants to is able to come in and submit proof that this is an invalid proof, invalid claim or message. So instead of like an external validator set is like an M of N. So that means like say you have 10 validators, you need six of them to say that it's correct. So that basically you're relying on six honest people or six people to agree together and not be dishonest. So only six people have to be dishonest for your basically for malicious data to enter the system. But in an optimistic model, only one honest person needs to exist. So only one person needs to be there to say that this packet is fraudulent, otherwise everything is good. Anybody can just watch the system and say that it's all fine. And as soon as one person says there's something that is not right, it enters a dispute. That would be the way to think about this in the easiest way. Yes, that's correct. One person finds that there's fraud, then it enters dispute, it stops the bad data from going through the system, then everything could be unwound and then we can find the correct data to go through the system again. And you know, all the dishonest people get slashed. And you know, there's mechanisms, economic incentives around that to make sure that things work out right. But this ultimately means that once you enter dispute, you again need some kind of validation mechanism. Right? So I guess it's like, think about it upside down. Like in one case you validate everything, in the other case you just validate when somebody lifts their hand. Would that be way of thinking about it? Not quite. Because you have the proof in it that they can do it, so you can see that it was wrong. Otherwise, in the other case you're talking about, it's not really validating anything. There's just a bunch of people agreeing that something is correct. So how did you get into this? I mean, you've been deep diving on interoperability and, you know, these procedures and validations and consensus and so on and now for several years. But I think your program grammar from, you know, background, that's what you learned. I think you worked at Tesla doing stuff for some time, you've participated in other startups. What drew you into Web3? Yeah, I mean, like I said, I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay area, so grew up around tech, grew up around startups. My dad was a entrepreneur as well in the like Silicon Valley days. So, you know, I've always had that inspiration where I be an entrepreneur, start my own thing, kind of like, like run my own companies, things like that. So that's always been like in the back of my mind, my vision. I was of course very into cars and electric cars. When I was kind of like growing up, I really wanted to kind of like work in that space. This was like pre Tesla days as well. So when I went to school I did electrical engineering with the idea that I'm going to work on like cool electrical systems, batteries, cars, things like that. Then eventually got kind of my dream job at Tesla, which, you know, I was very grateful for at the time. Yeah. And then worked there for a few years. I learned how to code basically during that job. Kind of got randomly into finance around that time, I think partly because of the fact that I was getting stock and learning about that whole process. So eventually I left to start my own, like fintech company. This is like pre crypto days. When was that? That was around 2014 is when I left Tesla. That's when I kind of started to experiment and start my own thing and started the fintech thing. So dabbled in that for a couple of years. Got Aqua hired into like another bigger company. It was doing things more on the cloud security side. So still was kind of programming, writing code, experimenting with tech there. Ended up not liking it. So then I left in 2017 itself and I was kind of like figuring out what I'm going to do Next. And this is right when like Ethereum was starting to come on the scene. The DAO hack happened. I was kind of like free at that time. So I was like, let me kind of explore this and see what it looks like from a developer point of view. Because people were already talking about like kind of speculation and this kind of stuff. But I was like, okay, let me dive a level deeper and see what the like developer platform looks like, the interface, the API, smart contracts, things like that. So then I started doing hackathons, started going to like meetups in San Francisco, things like that. And then, you know, just meeting people in the space. And that's how I eventually met Arjun, who was my co founder and Lane. And we kind of started connects together and hit it off and yeah, that's where it. So it connects. You have three co founders? Yes, three co founders. And you're all three still active? Yeah, all three still active. Been active, very close. How do you divide the roles? So Arjun is effectively the project lead. So he kind of like leads everything on the non technical side, BD side, even strategy side. I mean he is very technical, he understands everything very deeply. I'm like the engineering lead cto, so I kind of manage all the tech side and you know, everything that happens on the engineering team. And then Lane is focused on like protocol and security. So we have like a really good like split of roles between the three of us. That has worked out very well. How big is the team at this stage? How many people you're in like full time, not employees or not, but how big is the team? Yeah, we've grown to about 17 now, which is crazy because, you know, for probably five of the years of connext it was three to four of us. So we've always been very small and only, you know, within the past couple years now it's grown. So it's been really cool to kind of see growth and actually be in a position to be able to grow and scale up. What's been your biggest learning experience as a co founder over the last two, three years with this thing scaling, you know, from four, five people to almost 20. What have you learned over the last two years that you would pass on? If anyone asked, I would say like, you know, focus on end user experience. That's been like my thing more and more. Like, you know, I'm a tech guy, so I've always been a tech guy. I've always been like deeply interested in using the best tech, getting the best tech, building the best tech, but really like you know, in a lot of ways that doesn't matter as much. I think what you need to do is you need to focus on the user experience. And like Polygon is a great example of this. Like, they kind of had like, you know, if I'm, I can say it like a shitty product in terms of like, the tech was not good, but they focused really hard on like selling it and like, like they were able to gain like large scale adoption and now they're doing the cool stuff like with zk, EVM and things like that. So like, they can always do that. But like, we always started tech, we're always going to innovate on the tech side first. And you know, it's really important to maintain your values because we never want to be at a point where we're like, okay, well we're just going to do everything centralized and like, you know, figure it out later. And I think that's not the right approach. But I also think the approach is to like really like, look at it from the user point of view. Another thing I would say is like, don't like rebuild your product from the ground up if you can help it. We've done that like literally three times now. And I think we ended up like losing market share, like giving space for a lot of other people to come in. And when we had a clear like, lead, we kind of lost out on some of that by taking so long to like rebuild things from the ground up when we could have just kind of baked it on top of our current offering, you know, so it's congrats on that because, you know, I agree. And hearing this for 20 years and doing startups as well, there's an entire graveyard of startups that try to rebuild their product, right? So kudos on you guys that you have actually done it because others have literally failed on that. And we're like, oh, we got to just rebuild everything. And then, you know, it doesn't. It's what you don't see, right? It's what happens, you know, in the future when rebuilding and how the market shifts and you know, you're distracted on building while others are busy marketing and winning users, right? Suddenly you look to the side and you're like, oh, what's going on here? And it sounds so cool because you're like, oh yeah, like, you know, now we have all these new ideas. We learned so much from like building this. Like we can build it from the ground up. It's going to be a thousand x better. But you know, like, you Said you're just going to kind of like dive in on the weeds and you don't understand how long that process takes. Like we thought our rebuild was going to take three months, it took almost a year. So we really had to like claw ourselves back into the scene after that. But luckily, you know, it's still early. There's a lot of opportunities still, but it easily could have killed us. It's somewhat exhausting and risky. I hear you. Two more questions. What are you most excited about that you see happening in the web3world in terms of technologies and standards and projects? When you look around from your vantage point, what do you see that gets you excited and go like, oh, if this really moves forward or that really moves forward, or this has moved forward, this is going to change everything. What are the big things on your radar? Yeah, there's a couple things I think like zero knowledge stuff is really exciting to me. I think like, I feel like, you know, it's really like deep tech kind of stuff, but I think it really unlocks a lot of like real world use cases that people are not really seeing yet. Like, you know, things like identity, you could do like actually like civil resistant identity proofs using like zero knowledge. And that's going to like unlock a whole set of new use cases. Privacy, of course, I think privacy is a big part of the whole zero knowledge movement and I think that's incredibly essential part of blockchains that is, you know, I think people talk about like oh, privacy rights, blah, blah, blah. But you know, another thing I think is like institutions need privacy. They don't want all their like everything they do to be like visible on blockchains. So I think that's a big part of what's holding them back from actually being part of this world. Also I think, you know, just in general defi is something that really excites me. I just, just you know, I think I'm kind of like a degen at heart. So I love to just like experiment with defi platforms. I like to see what's going on. I think, you know, lending protocols are really cool. I think like, you know, and I think lending protocols, I think in their current state are just like completely like. It's almost like they're just like a tool for leverage and speculation. But I just really think the idea of like, you know, collateralized lending of like other things just like, just besides lending crypto to get more crypto is like one very basic use case. But once you can like collateralize other things, like, you know, Your property, your like real world assets. You know, you could even like collateralize your own self to have like a credit score or something like that and do like under collateralized lending. So I just think that space has so far to go and it's just at the very beginnings of it. One more thing. It's. I mentioned this before a little bit, but MEV is just like an extremely interesting problem to me that I kind of like almost research it as a hobby and I'm constantly trying to like read up on it and stay on top of it. But I think there's just like so much interesting stuff around, like the transaction ordering, the order flow and the whole like kind of discussions that are going around. Proposer, builder, separation, payment for order flow, things like that. A end user or you know, a developer, an entrepreneur that's just getting into the space, why would you say, hey, you should know about mev? What's so important about it from the end user perspective? It's interesting because it's like MEV will, will only hurt you essentially. Like, you know, if you set your slippage tolerance too high on Uniswap and you do a swap, then all of a sudden you get like sandwich attacked and you end up like getting way less money than you thought you would. And you know, if you, if you kind of like understand those mechanisms, you can be a much smarter user. I think of course all this stuff needs to be abstracted away, but right now we're still in like the power user stage where like people do unfortunately need to like understand that kind of stuff. And you know, as a developer, founder person like that I think think, you know, figuring out ways like if you're building a protocol, like how can you use MEB to your advantage? Like how can you like internalize some of this mev? Whether it's like, you know, building an app chain maybe or like you know, figuring out ways to like work with these bots who are going to come in and just like find any way to extract as much money as they can. Like maybe in some ways that works to people's advantage. Like with liquidations on a lending protocol, for example, like, like you want that mev that's like good mev. So what's the difference between good mev, bad mev? How can you kind of harness that into your application? Very cool. Last question. So what are you excited about that is happening kind of behind the curtains at conex? What are you working on? What's coming next that you go like, I can't wait to get this on the market on one side, so exciting part on your tech and connected to that, you know who is it for and what kind of like projects DAPPS developers are you looking for where you go like hey we're building this and if you're planning to build this then you know you should really engage with us and come to us. Yeah, totally. That's a great question. I think you know like I alluded to, we have developer platform now so we are trying to onboard developers and we basically identified three different use cases for developers that should be building on connect. So like one is X token. So it's like a cross chain native token. So if anybody is doing like a token issuer that wants to issue a token that is natively cross chain, we are building tooling to help out with that. That one is cross chain governance. So we want the ability to govern protocols from any chain. We think this is just like a really important part. As these protocols become more multi chain they should not have isolated sets of governance or governance only possible from one main chain. We think it should just be interoperable by default. And then another thing which is kind of like the closest thing to production or production live right now is this concept we're calling chain abstraction. So this kind of of, you know, gets into a lot of the stuff I've been talking about earlier around like UX abstraction, stuff like that. So this is the ability to interact with a DAP from any chain. So say this DAP is on, I don't know, let's say Polygon for example and all your funds are on Arbitrum and you want to use this dapp, like you should just be able to use it. It shouldn't matter what chain you're coming from. So we're building basically a toolkit, you know, full SDK, smart contract frameworks, everything, UI components to allow DAPPS to easily integrate this functionality into their product. Very good. Any last words on the time? It's 3pm Here, you know, want to run over it? I know you got stuff to do, you know, product to ship, you know, developers to support, bucks to fix. Any final thoughts here? Yeah, no, definitely. This is a great conversation, you know, happy to come here and chat and if any of the stuff was interesting, please, you know, reach out, contact on Twitter, Discord, anything like that. So would love to you know, connect with users, get feedback, connect with developers. So Rahul, this was great, very insightful, learned a lot, appreciate your time. Thank you very much. Thank you. You as well. Dao Talks is brought to you by Grindery. If you enjoyed this podcast, consider subscribing to Dao Talks on Apple Podcast, Podcast, Spotify, Google, or any other platform you fancy. To find out more about Grindery, visit Grindery IO. Thanks for joining me, Tim Out.