UNSTOPPABLE GROWTH: SUI Blockchains plan for domination!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K07VjCJZOOI
Transcript:
Already, SWE is by far the most performing system, but we’re not making a future group. Being first isn’t always a good thing. I don’t see a world where like, slow chains actually survive. It’s impossible to secure the EVM. It’s impossible to scale the EVM. This year, SWE will experience the largest consumer platform coming off the crypto in the world.
If you thought 2024 was a good year for SWE blockchain, then wait till you see what they have coming. Today, I sit down with Adin E, the co founder and CPO of Mistin Labs, to discuss the explosive 2024 growth of Sui blockchain and their massive plans for 2025.
Plus, we discuss the current state of the market, meme coins and AI and much more. This is one you don’t want to miss. Welcome back to another Beyond the Basics. I’ve got a great guest today. I’m talking to Adani, the CPO of Mistin Labs, who’s building Sui Blockchain. How are you doing today, Adani? Doing fantastic. Thanks for having me on. Excellent. Thanks for joining me.
I’m looking forward to this chat and talking all about the amazing stuff that you guys have going on you released your article i think about a week or two ago and i read through it and right away i i dm’d you i’m like i gotta chat with you more this is just this is amazing everything you guys have accomplished but everything you guys have coming up just it’s phenomenal so i wanted to dive into it a little bit more so thanks for taking the time to do this absolutely so first question by far the most important though it’s gonna kick off the entire conversation is Kirk or
Picard oh man all day long I’m sorry the card was always my fear I was a big next-generation fan I grew up on that stuff yeah because nice yeah I saw one Picard was always my favorite. Yeah. I was a big Next Generation fan. I grew up on that stuff. Yeah, Picard. Nice. Yeah, I saw one of your recent interviews where you’re talking about that and said you were more of a Star Trek fan than Star Wars.
And I’m like, well, I guess I’ll… Interestingly, I’ve never really watched Star Wars end-to-end. I get bored quite quickly, so that’s going to hurt a lot of feelings. But yeah, I hope that the movies are sometimes three hours long too. It’s too long. I’m like, ah, next thing. I kind of like the Star Trek thing.
It’s just how I grew up. Honestly, I started watching Star Trek first before I even knew Star Wars was a thing. So I’m probably a victim of that. Yeah, I’m with you. So now let’s get into what you guys got going on and the article. And I kind of want to skip past a lot of the early stuff that you’re always talking about.
Everyone’s talking about Libra and where this all comes from. Oh, yeah. If you were to meet a random person on the street and try and explain what SWE Blockchain is and what you guys are out to do, how would you do that? blockchain is and what you guys are out to do how would you do that i would say i’ll start first out of saying um the internet today is built in a way that’s fairly broken not very well connected and because of the way in which it’s highly fragmented people are encouraged to build
kingdoms and silos and eventually their business model takes them to a direction that is oppressive, if not dangerous and damn right, like, you know, anti-competitive to a large degree. And I draw on comparison. Companies such as Facebook and Google, because, you know, coordinating across the internet is very, very difficult, they end up building silos for themselves because it’s easy to control, easy to move faster.
And generally they can keep costs or at least the outcomes bounded to something they can control. So they start owning your data, they start collecting more information about you in the view of providing more products and services to you. And for others to engage or interact, there’ll be laws, whether it’s privacy related laws or just simply, you know, just by competitive nature that would keep people locked out from integrating with that ecosystem.
So that’s how the internet is built. If anything, it encourages people to build predatory business models. Now, and that’s because the internet does not have a cohesive mechanism that allows protocols or services and products to talk to each other. SWE is that. SWE is this base layer that gives interoperability at the API level.
So for the first time in history, all the APIs that you publish, whether you’re Airbnb offering a room for people to stay in, or we’re a payment service provider offering payments to people in whatever country you want, whether you are a decentralized exchange offering swaps, these are simply just public APIs to a large degree. And for the first time ever, you can atomically transact across APIs using any programming language you want.
If you wanna write in Python, if you wanna write in JavaScript, if you wanna write in C-sharp, whatever, you can write in any language you want to coordinate interactions across APIs. It’s never been possible to do that on the internet, and SWE makes that possible.
At the same time, SWE gets classified into this generic term called L1 or blockchain. And I put it to people that SWE is beyond just an L1 or blockchain. It’s taken on a multi-trillion dollar market in our view, which is way, way bigger than just being a ledger for balances. Yeah, it makes sense. And it sounds like like so you’re really following the id ideologies of web3 especially with the ownership part of it and getting like you said the i forget the word you used but the uh predatory nature of this model too and the businesses yeah yeah interestingly if you look at web3 today right like if you look at a smart contract on east for example you don’t
really own your assets it’s a smart contract that owns your assets. The notion of ownership is not really that well baked in. And these systems are not really built in that world. They’re pretty much built in a different era. And a lot of design decisions were taken without thinking of the long-term consequences.
When we built SWE, we took on the idea that, look, you should own your own assets and you should be able to own your own assets. Control of assets should be took on the idea that, look, you should own your own assets and you should be able to own your own assets. Control all the assets should be something within the privilege of the user rather than some smart contract.
And that notion is actually there on SWE today. So you can own your assets, smart contract is hacked, you still own your assets, smart contract is, your assets are unaffected. So having that separation is actually very valuable, but it’s also that separation that allows us to have insane performance yeah, you guys definitely took a very different approach and kind of change things from the the base layer that Ethereum created and I think the two of us we’ve chatted a bit CI die that it’s Outdated is maybe way one way to say it and yes, it’s it’s just not ideal. I think I’ve heard you say it’s
impossible to have a secure EVM system. While we’re at Facebook, we did some research on a number of candidates for a programming language platform. Because we wanted, for a smart contract platform, we wanted to have a platform that would power billions of users. While at Facebook, of course, you don’t do things at 1,000 scale.
It has to power all the users on Facebook today. And there are a number of concerns, scale being one of them, security being one of them. And there’s been a bad programming paradigm. It’s just another one as well, right? It’s a horrific language to code anything in. There’s not a lot of things done for you.
You’re doing a lot of boilerplate code for checks and ensuring that you don’t have errors. And then you’ve got the VM that could rug you at the same time. It’s just really, really bad. And then, you know, there are a number of paradigms that are built into the EVM alone that makes it malleable to all sorts of high vectors of attack that we did away with Move.
So when we did all the research, we just couldn’t find a candidate, a good candidate to allow developers to build at scale, but also to remove all the basic errors that developers would be making with the likes of EVM or writing and just pure rust. So Move was what was developed by Sam at Facebook. And since we’ve left Facebook, we’ve seen improvement now significantly by adding object-oriented properties directly to it. So it’s like move++.
It’s really just been supercharged significantly. So I’ll make the statement again, it’s impossible to secure the EVM. It’s impossible to scale the EVM. And if you want to scale the EVM in a way that is usable for developers, you’re going to have a very, very, very hard time, which is why people have all these weird sharding models at different domain spaces that we don’t think most developers would ever be able to use at any time soon or in any way that’s meaningful. So we believe that things around scalability, things around safety, these things
should be inherent in the programming language. It should be afforded to the platform builder. From a developer building on a platform, it’s all something you have to figure out yourself. So that’s the way you really allow as many people to build apps that can be useful on day one. Yeah, and I believe the Move language is growing pretty quickly too.
I think a few months ago, you were about, what, 7% of developers in the space, I believe, were using Move? Yeah. And that was three or four months ago at least. Yeah, I think it’s well over 10% now. So I believe it’s going to be one of the fastest. It will be the JavaScript for the Internet of Assets.
You need a programming language that is asset-centric, that focuses on assets and ownership to program the world of composable APIs. And JavaScript is not that language. You need a domain-specific language for smart contracts, and that domain-specific language, we believe, will be move. And it’s proven itself out to be.
In fact, we’ve heard early reports from developers, they’re learning move very quickly in a space of eight hours if you’re very, very adept, all the way to four days. You can become very, very useful in the move ecosystem after four days of learning it.
And people are saying it’s a 10x improvement on developing on the likes of Solana or other non-move-based chains. So I’m actually looking forward to a world where other platforms take advantage of move and start to offer move on their blockchain, just because I think the less hacks we have, the more developers we have in Web3, the bigger the tide is for everybody. It rises for everyone.
So I think it’s a great thing. For sure, for sure. I think security is one of the biggest roadblocks right now to web 3 adoption and we’re at well over 4 billion lost in i think the past four years and that’s not even taking into account the little daily evm erc hacks that we see on people’s wallets that just get drained for whatever reason and it’s just not a secure model.
So I love the object-oriented type approach that you guys are taking. And you guys have obviously had a ton of success with it. Let’s kind of go over real quick some of the early stuff you put in the report about just the growth that you guys have had in, I think, what is it? 19 months at this point? 19 months, yeah.
19 months since you guys launched. Yeah. And top three non-EVM chain for TBL, users, developers growing quick. I think the chain as far as market cap is, what, top 20, if not top 15 last I looked. Yep, yep. So it’s cranking really well. And everything you guys are building, you’re just launching at an insane pace.
Let’s talk a little bit about Mistacetti V1 to v2 and what that all is going to bring yeah i always say i’ve been in crypto since 2011 and i’ve seen all sorts of cycles ups and downs and what gets me so what i can’t stop laughing about today is you know it’s amazing it crypto is the only space where your competitors are vehemently like distracted by random nonsensical things.
Our competitors are completely focused on some random narrative that comes up and down or meme coins. And it just leaves us free to really innovate and build really cool stuff. It’s great. Be distracted. But we came from a place of where, like, if this cycle is going to mean anything, we need to bring on real users that actually can do real things on a day-to-day basis.
And one of the goals we set for our team was we need a transaction to execute and be final in the same time it takes for a website to load. We exceeded that. And for us, right, user experience is everything. Clicking a button and waiting more than three seconds is already painful as it is, but also it’s worse if you’re like an engine and you need to get finality, you wanna be able to trade.
So what SWE gives you with Mid-City version one, SWE already had the most scalable consensus protocol in the market. I think we were at 1.8 to 2.5 seconds for end-to-end finality with the previous model, and single-writer objects were already at 500 milliseconds finality, which is already the fastest system there is today.
So with Mistetti version 1, what that afforded us was to lower a shared object consensus to 400 milliseconds. So end-to-end finality for trades are between 400 milliseconds to 600 milliseconds. We’re talking about real finality, not the optimistic stuff that you get from Sol or ETH or whatever. Actual end-to-end real finality.
You know your trade has been submitted, executed, final, not possible to revoke or fork or anything like that. That for us is a game changer, and we’re getting adoption by means of having the best technology and then you add in the fact that you’ve got programmable transaction blocks and I can do 15 trades, 20 trades, a thousand trades in the same time it takes to do one trade with a single transaction. That gives you a new level of composability that you’re not getting anywhere else.
Now with Mississippi version 2 that’s going to be coming out this year, what that does is right now SWE operates as almost like a dual system. There is the consistent broadcast system that’s really used for FastPath. FastPath transactions are single order transactions that can be final instantly that doesn’t need consensus.
Those are final within 500 milliseconds. And then you also have the shared object transactions that use the Mississippi consensus engine. What Mississippi version 2 does, it merges the FastPath and Mississippi into one singular protocol, greatly simplifying everything and also reducing the complexity of verifying transactions, especially for the single writer path.
So what you’re doing now is you’re removing all the expensive signature verifications that were the call that were absolutely required for the consistent broadcast protocol and now it’s being done using the dataconsensus mechanism that’s given to you by mr city so what you what is the end result one you’re going to get lower latency again for transactions but more importantly what you get out of this is the um is this is also greater throughput on a single machine.
So as people know, SWE is a multi-machine system. Single machine transaction throughput is absolutely important because you want to optimize the machine so you can go as broad as possible. So what we’re doing is I think we’re cutting down the amount of complication for transaction by forex. So you can actually, we’re already getting tests where transactions on a single machine exceed 20,000, 30,000 transactions on a single user signature.
But if you do PTBs, you’re all the way to 300,000, 400,000 transactions per second. So if you ever need to, now with Remora that we can talk about later, that allows us to add more and more machines. If you add seven times the machines, seven times the throughput, zero time, zero increase in latency.
So already SWE is by far the most performing system, but we’re not making a future proof. As you have use cases like AI, chatbots and all these things, and now we need to have their own representation on chain. SWE is already well set up to serve that market at scale. For sure. Yeah. And that’s obviously a big thing, the transaction speed.
You guys are the fastest pretty much in the space and definitely with the latency finality. And so, yeah, you mentioned Remora. Is that an adaptation of Pilotfish or what is exactly, how do those work together? so see remora as pilot fish version two so pilot fish was the idea that okay how do we separate workloads from a single machine to multi-system machines because our consensus core already and the fact that we have an object system already takes us beyond the realms of a single machine which no other blockchain does
today every blockchain is fixed to a single machine because consensus cannot be done beyond the realms of machines so they always talk about oh you know moore’s law the bigger the processor the faster we get that’s nonsense that’s not how the internet works today that’s not how high performance compute works today high performance compute does work by making thousands of machines seem as though they’re a single machine.
That is what Remora and PilotFish does. It effectively allows validators to operate as many machines as they want and behave as though they’re one machine. So the more machines a validator adds, the more throughput the network gets with zero increase in latency. So it’s an improved version of what we’re doing with PilotFish and greater performance, but the same ideology, namely, how do I split workloads beyond the realms of a machine, a single machine to multi machine.
And that narrative, I’ve not heard anyone else talk about in crypto, they’re all talking about sharding, they’re all talking about, they’re all talking about, you know, bigger CPUs, and, you know bigger cpus and you know increasing block space and all these random things that don’t really work yeah um we’re very very happy about it we can’t wait to get out to market yeah i’ve seen you comment on that a little bit too especially i think l2s they’re they’re made for you they’re not made for eth but eth is the only
blockchain that really should have them or should use them. What are your thoughts on the way the space is kind of moving towards these highly centralized, massive machines, especially for the L2s that are saying they’re going to do five millisecond or 10 millisecond transactions and just crazy numbers? Yeah, first of all, five millisecond transactions makes no sense because that’s faster than the speed of light.
If they can do that, they’re broken some rare physics that we don’t even know about. But, yeah, the thing about L2s, again, L2s only make sense for ETH because ETH has zero chance of actually scaling, ever. It will never scale. It will never really get to the scale that, you know, SWE, Solana, Aptos, all the top high-performing chains are talking about.
It will never get to that level. So, yes, they’ve chosen a very old convoluted model for for the system so they need um tertiary or secondary systems by which to give users experiences but those experiences will always be second class one they’re not going to be fully safe because you’re trusting centralized parties at that point just have a centralized database and generally they’re always going to be less performant than you know well-focused high performance systems so i i think it’s great for eth it’s a way to go but if you’re not in the ecosystem you should be building a highly focused
uh scalable system it’s it’s funny how now some evm l2s are pushing the idea of single committees or single centralized, what do we call it again? Sequences, right? Sequences. The fact that they would even push that and think that’s a great idea, it shows how far back technology has gone, how they just throw their hands up in arms and say, we give up.
It’s never going to work, right? But people buy this stuff. Great. But that’s never going to compete with real scalable systems.
But for ETH, it’s never going to work right but people buy this stuff great but i that’s never going to compete with real real scalable systems but for eth is great but i think if you’re building on soul um sweet aptos there’s no need for an l2 there’s no need for an l2 just build a better blockchain but unfortunately those systems are already live um solana is already live and they’re pushing um fire dancer which we don’t think is actually going to get that much of improvement. You’ve got the Aptos crew who are trying to do this optimistic execution, which we already know is not going to do much for you.
Great. What if you have a contention? Well, you’re going to have to reverse and do it again. Well, great. Our view is you can do both on Sway, actually. You can do optimistic and do the static um um parallelization that you get out the boat because the system is designed as an object-based system from day one the more objects you have the more processes you have the faster the network gets ultimately we think that’s the right model um so yeah we i think this is a scenario where being first isn’t always a good thing.
And having a team, a very small dedicated team that’s had the experience of building search, building Spanner, building high-performance systems at scale, really, really comes home because that kind of research can go into this space that’s been lacking real research for quite a while. Yeah, no, I completely agree.
that’s been lacking real research for quite a while. Yeah, no, I completely agree. It’s kind of disappointing almost to see the the direction the space is taken. And it reminds me of a quote that I got in a previous interview. The interviewee said cryptocurrency is possibly the worst thing to happen to blockchain.
And I entirely agree. While it’s it’s needed, it’s also completely distorted everything. And you look at it, and how many of the ETH supporters and builders would actually continue to do so if they didn’t have massive bags or skin in the game? If they could actually see the value that is elsewhere? Probably not many of them.
But here we are fighting over old, outdated technologies because of our bags. I think the other thing to look at is what is the size of the developer community in Web3? It is a laughing number, like what 20,000 30,000. Yeah, there are more devs on Facebook, more devs in Google, more devs and like some of these smallest banks, right.
So like, the ability to adopt the technology is very difficult. It’s complicated. It’s not akin to what they’re used to doing today. I think that’s really a barrier to adoption. You add the fact that Hax is already the biggest consumer barrier to adoption. You cannot bring consumers onto platforms that are inherently unsafe. It’s not right.
It’s not the right thing to do. And you actually just burn a whole heap of people that will never come back. Separately, you have dev tools that are ancient, that the idea of parallelization doesn’t exist. Everything is a single sequencing. You order transactions, you process transactions into order. We solved that problem 20 years ago in like a multi-threaded compute.
Why are we still doing this stuff, right? So it’s funny. And again, I keep saying it’s funny. Everyone’s just disfacted random, you know, mantras and memes or whatever. And again, I keep saying it’s funny. Everyone’s just disfracted random mantras and memes or whatever. And great. We’re simply doing the real hard work here.
I think cryptocurrency, the thing about technology, I do believe at the same time, you want to have something fun for people to play with before they do something serious. But I don’t believe that all the variations of what we have on chain today are the right way. I also believe DeFi is not a product, DeFi is infrastructure.
It should be offering a service to a number of consumer apps. And that’s the way I see it. It’s not like everyone goes to gamble and trade, right? Like there’s some service and product that is leveraging the liquidity offered to you by DeFi so that you can build a better, more connected, lower cost product for consumers.
So that’s where I think crypto takes on its own as it starts to bring on other industries that use a liquidity provider, that uses the open set of APIs that you can compose across. Imagine a future where like Airbnb puts all its APIs publicly, you know, you name it. If you have a chatbot, you want to have people pay for play, you offer that on-chain directly.
Any API you want, and people can compose the most amazing super apps that you don’t have around anymore. You can create these apps now without having to sign crazy contracts to gain access to APIs, to know what inventory is. All these things can be done in a fully composable way in a truly safe atomic environment, which I think is a game changer.
That’s what I’m very, very excited about. Not memes, not like, you know, pictures trading for, you know, the latest craze or random AI quotations. But the fact that now the future is going to be really connected with atomic services across any number of APIs that you want to call. So question, how do we get there? I know you guys are building some amazing tools. You guys have the ZK login, which is great for onboarding.
And then the transactions where you can pay for other free transactions, basically. And your onboarding tools are great. I know you’re, I’ve heard you say you’re going heavy into the gaming side of it, because gaming is going to be a big factor. But how else do we get to the Airbnbs and other companies eyes? It just lack of awareness and understanding what the industry is.
So I would say this year we will experience the largest consumer platform coming on to sweet coming off the crypto in the world. That’s going to happen this year. I can’t say much about it, but this is the kind of thing we’re talking about. Right. Because you’re right. All this technology is great, but what we want is show us the examples that really tell us we’re going in the right direction.
I actually believe one of the best ways to do this is gaming, by the way, because gaming, people already use the notion of ownership. People already use the notion of trading. The asset model is already something in the minds of consumers but i think the way the games have been offered to the market so far has been largely distasteful if anything it doesn’t add to the gaming experience it’s just another way to charge rent but we’re working with a number of top studios are building fun games at leveraging this as a base layer to enable interoperability
of assets marketplaces offer products and services in new interesting ways, build new rewards and learning systems that are not incumbent or closed loop systems to a large extent. So now with StreetPlay 0x1 launching this year, that is yet another platform that allows game studios and game devs to publish games in a world that isn’t ripping them off for high app store fees that exist today.
I mean, if you want to launch a game on any of the existing app stores, you’re paying through the nose. But then the FreePlay Zerx One will give you rewards whether you’re playing a Web2 game or Web3 game. It is actually just a great gaming system. And yeah, very powerful gaming system that’s launching this year.
I’m very, very bullish. Gaming is going to bring in more users to Web3 than any other use case. And guess what? Those games have in-game currencies that actually have value. Those games have assets that people actually care about and build a law towards, right? There’ll be marketplaces that interoperate across every single one of them, but they don’t need to rebuild every time a new custom layer to do this job.
They just simply interact with a set of APIs that is sweet. Right? And now they can build a lot faster than they could before because liquidity is there trading is there all of our frames are built into the system the ability to ensure that there’s no double spend across databases no longer needed it’s intrinsic to the platform rarity is provable all these amazing um you know provenance um um base requirements right already baked into the platform that’s very exciting and i think that that’s why i can’t wait to see what people um enjoy on sweden this year awesome yeah
and you mentioned you’ve got the game system coming out which will pro hopefully be a huge driver for that adoption i’m also wondering how it seems like it needs to be a mindset shift for a lot of people and perfect example a i don, six months, maybe a year ago, Avalanche released a game that got a lot of hype.
They had a lot of professional Web2 gamers that played it for a while. And then a couple of them found out it was a Web3-based NFT game, and they stopped instantly because they’re just not interested in that. So how do we flip the switch on that and get people thinking differently about the ownership of this and the benefits. Yeah. The way you do this is you got to do in both ways.
Number one, you have to allow it to integrate with existing games as an enabler, not a crypto primitive, right? What I mean by that is now your fees for buying and selling in-game is lower. Now you can view the assets that you own across a number of games and titles you play much more easier. Type in this URL.
Now you can send and receive assets that you have or rewards that you have with friends and family. It has to be an enabling technology, not this in-your-face crypto anarchist type of technology that’s being pushed. And I don’t blame gamers for having this allergic reaction because they’ve been burnt before.
We’ve been given really crappy games to play that really just end up being spreadsheets that aren’t really fun to play. And that, especially when you already have a game studio that’s charging you through the nose for a title and skins, and now they want you to buy some random NFT, that’s insane. That’s never going to work so it needs to make the gaming experience or make the consumer experience better hide the crypto right now with a game you’re able to log in with your google account no mention of crypto we’ll give you an at notation at game name or whatever and people can send you
assets directly remove the concept of blockchain remove the concept of gas it’s just simple pay with usdc you know bank into your platform put money in the account start trading um buy and sell game um assets and receive rewards in in-game assets directly using sweet but sweet doesn’t have to be mentioned crypto doesn’t have to mention like the platform should be as boring as possible it’s the enabling part that is most interesting i think people get it wrong they want to advertise a blockchain they
want to advertise a wallet they want to advertise something so people buy a token that’s a wrong way to go it’s give people a better experience and that is impossible for people to switch from in my view yeah no again that makes total sense and you have to just make it easy so they don’t even know it’s there.
And you guys are building a lot of the tools to do that. Bonsor transactions, no need to worry about gas, it’s all hidden in the back. We have now a mechanism that lets you send assets using SMS, that’s going to be launching this year as well. Just hit people where they already are. Don’t ask them to do new paradigms, right? Don’t ask them to download new wallets or random things.
use what they already use that’s how you get the right experience you know i think forcing people to go download wallets is the worst experience but having to bake into their normal game experience where they don’t even know there’s a crypto part to it it’s just now there’s more flexibility afforded to them than they had before it’s a way to win you’re not changing consumer behavior which is already very expensive to do before is a way to win you’re not changing consumer behavior which is already very expensive to do yeah so with sweet play is it going to have a a wallet kind of like an inventory built into it yeah so when people order the sweet play device when they get a sweet play device they sign up
for a platefront account and you notice there’s no mention of crypto there you sign up for platefront account now that platefront account you actually have an on-chain address, right? And you’re gonna have a human-readable name. They’ll be able to choose. It’ll be your username, your Play-Tron username, your full name, at Play-Tron.
So if you wanna send things to people, just ask for the Play-Tron account and you send it to them directly. It’s nice and easy. So that’s already in baked into the device as well on day one. So no need to download a wallet or bridge or anything random. It’s already inbuilt. Yeah, so, and I just actually got my Sui naming service a few days ago, dbcrypto.
I know, I was going to put it ahead of you. I was wondering. Yeah, it was your post that actually had me fomo in, dive into it. So yeah, and with all this going on and with the blockchain layer that’s going to hopefully be extracted away, people at some point aren’t going to know what blockchain they’re on, what wallet, maybe they’re even using, any of that stuff.
How do you see the interoperability happening in the space? Do you think it’s going to be a multi-chain world? Is this going to be one, two, three primary chains? How do you see it? So I think, I don’t know. Just like if you think about it, right, we had like download modems, we had EDSL, we have Fiber, we have Starlink.
I ultimately think when you have higher bandwidth, you enable more utility. And as a result of more utility, you end up having more users. So I don’t see a world where like slow chains actually survive. Like it doesn’t make sense to me bitcoin is you know when that makes sense because bitcoin is really more of a um you know a network for transmitting an asset of value rather than really just a payment trail so but any chain that’s really slow i really don’t see a world where there’ll be much utility for
them where there’s infinite block space is where you really want to be. The more block space you provide, the more utility you can afford people and the more users you can onboard as a result. So I think interoperability matters only for the chains that exist. And I believe there will only be high-performance chains that would exist in that world.
And to that effect, we believe that, of course, you have move, which is the most secure way in which to write contracts between APIs. But separately from that, we have Ica that’s launching on SWE. Ica effectively allows SWE to be a base chain for every chain in the market. So you can, without bridging it for the first time, move and control assets on ETH, on Solana, on any network you want by using move-based smart contracts.
So we believe now you’re going to trade your memes that you love so much on DeepBook or any DEX on SWE and not worry about outages or worry about priority fees or worry about being front-run by MedBots. You’ll be able to trade Bitcoin directly on a decentralized central order book for the first time and do that at real, real high scale and that you’ve never been able to do before you’ll be able to literally treat other chains as maybe um record systems and use three as a coordination layer for those assets natively that’s an interrupt we believe that would
actually happen because suite supports um key agility you can have any key signature on suite because of all keys you support keys for whatever key you need will support on sweetie well of course having past keys directly on-chain. But we believe the story of this coordination, which is why I keep saying everyone’s distracted on random stuff.
It’s great. We can build this up for people who really, really need for the future from an engineering perspective. And allowing people to coordinate actions, not just across APIs, but also across chains, using an atomic system on-suite is a way to go. And we really can’t wait for that to go live. Awesome.
How does this compare to like bridges, for example, and paying gas? Like if you’re going to use this cycle layer and do a transaction or something on Ethereum, I imagine you’re not paying Ethereum gas like you would with a bridge back and forth, would you? Yeah. So this is more powerful than bridging because one is programmable, right? You can build really complex logic directly.
Oops, my thumbs up just went up there. I didn’t realize that, sorry. You can build really complex logic around the infrequentiality of assets that you just can’t do with a bridge directly. To a large extent, bridges want to be chains themselves anyway, in that respect. I’m not saying bridges will disappear entirely, but I believe this model of using an MPC network for verifying the transactions and allowing you to transact across any chain is the way to go.
You’re not subject to these very, very high gas fees that exist. I actually also think the Bitcoin Lightning Network could be done as a result of this. But we don’t need to use a Lightning Network anymore. You can just coordinate that or use an ECA on SWE and you’re done. And you now have programmable BTC for the first time.
You can have BTC that’s programmable, and you can have gas being paid in Bitcoin directly. So SWE does give you that too. You have a freedom of paying for gas in any token you want. There’s already a mechanism that Aftermath has built into that. So if you want to pay gas using Bitcoin, Sol, SWE, USDC, you can do that already on SWE.
And it just do a swap in the backend to pay the native gas all in a very fully transparent way from a developer point of view. So that’s a world we’re going to where you’ll coordinate whatever you want to coordinate on SWE. You’ll benefit from a high throughput, low latency that you can’t get anywhere else.
I’m sorry, eight seconds finality to 16 seconds finality isn’t going to cut it, right? And, you know, a MevBot ripping you off on a transaction is not a feature, it’s a bug. We solve those problems. In fact, we have Mev, Sam, before we get Sam on to talk about how Mev is intrinsically different on SWE, where it’s actually beneficial to consumers, Mev on SWE, where you actually get benefit from the Mev opportunity rather than being screwed on a fees. That, where you actually get benefit from the opportunity
rather than being screwed on the fees. That’s where you want to go. Extracting from consumers and thinking that is a good thing, that never works. We’ve already seen how that works with traditional exchanges who are using other weird means to extract value from their users. So we can’t do the same thing in Web3 and just paint over it.
So, yeah, that’s the future we’re living in. We believe that SWE is very well set up to do these things. One, it’s going to prevent you from being sandwiched from bots. It’s going to allow you to trade at very high throughput and not worry about priority fees. It’s going to make sure you can always trade in and out in a reliable fashion.
And that’s going to be a trusted system at that point. So it will be the best place to trade. I believe it will be the best place to trade other assets. So it will be the best place to trade assets from every other chain in a single platform. Awesome. Very cool. Yeah. And I’m definitely, I’m a very vocal critic of Amiibi as well.
So I completely agree. I’d be surprised if it’s not going to end up being illegal in some capacity with the regulations that we’ll hopefully see, the good regulations that we’ll see it should be illegal it should be illegal you can’t do this in traditional financial markets right so yeah yeah so hopefully it’s cleaned up and there’s some networks that almost rely on it which so it’s going to be an interesting couple of years seeing how things go.
And so obviously you guys are incredibly fast. And one thing that has come up many times is the node count and the validator set. On the smaller side, I think when I talked to Sam last, it was around 116. Is that still the- So right now there are about 108 validators, but there’s a SIP coming out, which is a suite improvement protocol that removes that restriction.
And the restriction is actually as a result of what’s the minimal stake that someone can have. So you have to think about, like when we think about things, we think from a product perspective, you can add 400 validators to suite, no problem. The question is, what are you willing to pay in fees and what are you willing to pay and trade off in latency so that’s how you build any product you start from the user perspective what do users think um what what is the minimum amount of latency users willing to have for the transactions what is the minimal amount of stake we’re going to have for the network and you start
to build our network that way and i’ll give you some examples just because you have a thousand validators but guess what? Only 20 of them control the majority of the stake. Why have 1,000 validators? It’s wasteful compute at that point. What security are you really getting at that point? You don’t really get additional security in that regard, right? So also, if you have 1,000 validators, but I have no guarantees of finality or it’s all optimistic, or i have to wait for 16 seconds to a minute for real finality does that capture the broad sense of use cases from what
we know the lower you drive latency the broader the use cases you can allow on chain that’s just a fact right the more bandwidth you have the lower latency you push the more transactions you can have that are valuable meaningful on chain so our goal is to have the lowest possible latency on-chain.
The validator set, the amount of validators that are going to be in the ecosystem will be a function of what the network thinks is required. So if a network is happy to have one and a half second latency for P90 finality, well, guess what? Let them have 500, 600, 700 validators on the network. Let the network choose, right? But then it just means that, well, if you have a world of 600 to 1000 validators, but only 50, 60 of them control the majority of the state, what are we really buying here? So I think people are unwilling to be honest about the topic.
They just like to talk about big numbers when it makes no real sense or no incremental sense. So you always start with what experience do we want to build for consumers and developers. If it’s low latency, let’s go for that. And then let’s make sure that the community can choose the primitives that work for them.
If community wants 300 validators, they can freaking have 300 validators. If the community wants a thousand validators, they can have that. But guess what? If you have a thousand validators, that’s a thousand times replication, which means storage feeds goes up in respect to normal validators and then latency would also go up respect to normal validators it won’t be as high latency as you get on eve or soul or anything else it’ll still be meaningfully fast but it should still be a choice that the community gets to make not mister not foundation it should be by the
stake um by stake delegation, by what the community feels is right for the network. So we start from that product principle, not these fanciful ideologies of what decentralized means. But what SWE will have, which is highly valuable, is like clients. So SWE will have the ability to have infinite number of like clients.
So you can validate the network with a mobile phone, you can validate it with any kind of device you want. You can have infinite number of people validating the network without having to participate in consensus. Additionally, SWE is also going to have something called sparse nodes, which is highly needed.
It’s actually something you expect from a high-performance computer system. Let’s say, for example, I only care about my balance or my address on chain. Well, my node could only replicate the state that I care about. But in doing that, I still perform validation of the network as a whole. It means that I don’t have to have multi terabytes of storage.
I can just store what matters to me, but I’m still participating in the network security. So these are the things that really, really matter from a product perspective. Let people vote on what they want in terms of latency and what security primitives they care about.
Let people want to validate, choose the mechanisms by which they can afford to validate, whether it’s only validating subset of state or validating using zero-knowledge proofs the entire state of the network as fast as possible. So these are the things that really matter. And I think anything else around this, we think it’s really just dishonest debates on numbers, which I think doesn’t really help the situation. Yeah, no, that makes complete sense.
So how do you think that we bridge the gap with users, with education to get them to kind of realize that and the decentralization component that is very lacking in the space or with latency, for example, I would imagine 99 out of a hundred Solana users have no idea what the latency on the thing is.
You just know that it’s… Those times of 500 milliseconds or something. Yeah, something like that basically. Or on Ethereum L2s, but they don’t realize the settlement on the Ethereum and what could potentially happen. My theory on this is most people with bags don’t care. They’ll just chime whatever narratives are thrown at them.
For example, the ETH crew, you can’t debate them on latency. Like they’re happy to pay $50 to 100 loss of gas, right? Because it increases their bags. It’s fine. The SOL crew at the same time, they’re given a number of 500 milliseconds and for them that’s finality. And we already know that’s not finality um but also anyone that runs a real training system will know that that’s you cannot guarantee you cannot build a business without guarantee you need stronger guarantees and what’s going to afford to you there so i think you you’ll be a mistake to try and
educate the already converted from one religion to another because they’re they’re they have a vested interest in maintaining their status quo or just buying into whatever they’ve been fed i mean our responsibility is build based on what we think developers and the real masses need which is why we invented zklogin people say oh google centralized blah blah blah why would you want google well guess what 99 of the world is not going to want to write one paraphrases and wallets and anything like that so we have to go for them so our principle is always where the users now what do they need
let’s build for that user base and make sure it’s as strong as possible so that in the future if they want to migrate to something more complicated like ledger devices or hardware wallets whatever they can but give them an in and don’t force them to change their behavior because we think we’re maxing in one way or the other So it’s the same principle we have with consensus.
We start from a product perspective, make it as fast as humanly freaking possible. And it’s the fastest on chain by far. Scale, make sure it has no limit on throughput because no respectable cloud company will tell you we could only support 100 customers. And as soon as we have more than 100, if we have 101, fees have to go through the roof.
No one does that. Our principles are based around those principles, right? Like, how does the real world really work? Let’s build a product around a real world use case and how people are going to expect things to work. Not gas fees that shoot up because you get successful. Like, it doesn’t make sense.
So I think we just have to keep building for that mass. And I think we’re the only company building a platform in our space that is focused on mass adoption, not just saying it for Mantra, but it’s showing through in the products and services that get built on top of Suite. Eka, giving you a broad sense of interoperability across any asset class or any network you want.
ZK Login allowing you to onboard 3 billion users who already have email. Your sponsor transactions, the idea that gas is something to be hidden away and any service provider can pay for it. Lowest latency transactions in the market by a long mile. These are the things that actually matter from a product perspective, not debates on, do I have 2000 nodes or 500 nodes? That’s not really what matters, right? But as long as you can do that safely and to a high fidelity, it’s the way we want to go.
Yeah, no, I completely agree. And there’s only, I think, one other chain I can think of that kind of follows the same mantra, one that I’m a big fan of, multiverse X. They’re fully sharded. They have X alias, which is the ZK login. Meta transactions, which are… I love that. That’s what I want to hear.
These are the kind of people we love, right? Because they’re taking a product driven approach to it. And that is very refreshing. When we hear people thinking along those same kind of lines, you do need sharded, hide it in a way whereby developers don’t have to think about it. You do need ZK login, you need mechanisms to allow people to use existing onboard mechanisms to interact. So yeah, very, very, very, very happy with those ideas.
Yeah, it completely. The Web 2 is technically sharded. So exactly. You have to follow you have to follow the same plan. Let’s move into you mentioned the data and data availability. And I know you guys have something fascinating you’re working on that’s I don’t know when it’s coming out, but hopefully 2025.
I don’t know if you can say, but Walrus. It will be this year, the first half of this year. First half of this year. So yeah, let’s talk about that. That sounds amazing. I wanted to learn more about that. Yeah. So I thought if I explained that SWE is going to be a global coordination layer for assets as a whole.
Well, it turns out that developers also want to be able to store data, which makes sense, right? Like we made SWE in a way where it’s cheap to store data, right? Like it’s actually cheaper. It’s 100x cheaper to store data on SWE versus SOL. It’s about 2,000 times cheaper to store data on SWE versus ETH, for example.
But SWE is still expensive. I mean, although it’s cheaper than SOL, 100x sounds like it’s a big discount. But realistically, you’re still overpaying for storage on SWE is still expensive. I mean, although it’s cheaper than Sol, 100x sounds like it’s a big discount. But realistically, you’re still overpaying for storage on SWE.
If you want to store a petabyte file on-chain in a verifiable way, doing that on SWE is not the right way to do it. You can store maybe a one megabyte file on SWE, you’ll do that, and you’re happy to pay the cost to get the money back with rebates. But it becomes very prohibitive, I just want to do larger, larger files.
So we’ve had ROEs, we’ve had like the IPFS of the world for storage, they give you really crappy guarantees on storage. They’re very slow, they become more basic archival systems and online systems, you have to pay for 100 years in advance for storage, because that’s the model, like nobody does that, you know, they come with all these crazy conditions.
And on top of that, they’re not composable. You can’t build rules around the storage and everything else. They’re very fragmented systems. So people are storing NFTs, right? They have an NFT and then they’ve got some file, an IPFS that has no bearing or meaning in regards to the contract you’re actually buying.
So those real disjoints, the disjointment we saw and the demand we saw from developers led us to build a walrus so walrus is the world’s global data storage layer you can build l2s on it if you want to build a global development layer do that by all means go and do that awards but what’s amazing about walrus is it is very low replication so if you want to store one gigabyte file, the replication factor on Morris is only between 4 to 5x.
But that’s split in a computational way across all participants in the network. So if you have 1,000 storage nodes in Morris and you’ve got a one gigabyte file, it’s erasure and code in the way whereby it’s split across all network operators. By the same time, you only get 5X replication, which means for a decentralized network, it’s going to be by far the cheapest and safest option.
Really availability of the AWS or GCP in terms of file storage. Greater guarantees because you do not need a computation over all the storage to get guarantees that your data is available. It can be immutable, namely you know the file is always going to be available indefinitely or for some fixed time period.
And it’s fully composable. You can build smart contracts and rules around it coordinating on SWE so for the first time ever you can store your entire front end on walrus use a swes name to for the domain system so you now no longer will have an issue of front-run attacks that you get on dns systems that exist today and your smart contract with your wallet will know that you’re dealing with a real front end so if you think about what that does for cybersecurity, where someone installs malware on your computer, you think you’ve backed up an NWS or some backup
store, well, they take your keys and delete the data. Now on Warris, that data is immutable, even if they do take keys, impossible to delete data so you can restore your system. So it does a lot for cyber security it does a lot for decentralization now we can have fully decentralized front end and back end front end being the um the storage service providing walrus that you can throw in front of any um cloud favorite system or a decentralized um load balancer and a back backend system, namely a smart contract platform, SWE, Solana, ETH,
you name it. You can build Walrus for any platform you want. If you want to take Sol front-end and put on Walrus, you can. If you want to use it for ETH, you can. In fact, we have people using it for any number of platforms. But it’s the first time that Web3 is actually given a storage layer that they can trust that is fully composable very low cost greater flexibility than you get with this with centralized storage service providers and then how uh i could already hear the icp people in my head right now yet
and uh no i i love that because the one of the biggest things for me is the security aspect. And knowing what you’re interacting with because it’s part of the chain, it’s in this data layer that’s immutable, is the biggest thing. The cybersecurity, I think, is going to be huge because I truly believe that’s one of the biggest hurdles we have to adoption right now.
Imagine the amount of money that gets lost because you think you’re interacting with a real website and then you get screwed it’s not just secure for crypto but it’s also going to be secure for banking and multiple use cases imagine like government websites going down or government websites being hacked you know put on wars you know it’s always available you know you’re acting you’re dealing with the right actor it has broad ramifications beyond GovCloud or anything else that you have.
It is probably one of the, for us, it’s a big network and we can’t wait to get this out to the public. It’s going to change cybersecurity. It’s going to change how we feel about Web3 and internet security moving forward. Amazing. And you said first half of 2025, right? Correct. Yeah. Excellent. Can’t wait to hear more and see all about the launch.
Let’s dive into probably one of the biggest things right now, AI, with the agents and DeepSeek that is, I think, just crashed the market and has, I haven’t looked in a couple hours, but Bitcoin was under 100,000 and people were freaking out. I’m sure you guys are taking a path towards AI as well. So what are your thoughts on where AI is going right now? Look, I think DeepSync is awesome. I think it’s great. It’s bullish for the market.
I think the idea that when you are given a small amount of resources, how resourceful you can become is very, very apparent. Small teams can achieve big things. Example, even with Libra, think about Libra, the amount of people we had, over 1,000 people working on Libra. The things we could build in that time, we thought it was amazing until we left Facebook and with a smaller group of people of like 9 to 10, 15 engineers, we built a system that was way better than what we built at Facebook because it was a focused, small group of people, limited resources, limited amount of time, the same kind of mantra.
So I think that’s great. It just means now compute and the accessibility of AI is going to be greater. More people can afford to use AI. The cost for running AI is not as prohibitive as it once was before. People who believed they had a moat that built themselves on this ideology that they had some amazing move because they’re in america now that’s gone great that’s a great thing so i i see it as all net positive our view is in the future every user will have a number of agents well guess whatous systems do not do deals with centralized systems.
Right. Autonomous systems do not engage directly really with centralized systems on the contract. They need an autonomous system to work with. And what I mean by that is for me, for agents to make payments, they’re not going to go by visa. They’re going to want a programmable layer that gives them real finality.
They’re going to want a layer that like if I want to say, hey, book my Airbnb for my trip to Tahoe, rent me a car that would take me there. Also, make sure you use the right reward system to get me the best amount of discounts. And at the same time, why don’t you, you know, make sure that the money that I’m holding in escrow is earning the right amount of yield? Well, how do you compose or coordinate that across the internet that exists today? It’s impossible to do that today. But with SWE, it’s not impossible. It’s possible today,
right? Every API is a public contract on SWE that you can compose dynamically using any number of forms. So AI agents can essentially scale the address space that exists on suite, look for the objects that are recognisable that it can interact with, and interact with the assets in a dynamic way.
That makes sense. It would book your tickets, it would pay for your flights, it would book your car that you need when you get there, it would book the rooms that you need and what is needed. It needs to do that and it’ll do that and prove your receipt that it’s all done. So I don’t think a world where you do that by some website clicking by Airbnb, that the the the UX of the world is not going to be some website.
It’s going to be these autonomous agents that you talk to. And Sweden’s very well set up for that. And you can’t do that in a world where you’re restricted to a single machine or you’re restricted to, oh, OK, sorry, we can’t make your booking because gas is too high right now. Let’s wait for things to calm down.
Oh, the network is out for a couple of hours because of guess what outage again right so you need a system you can rely on that would actually make that work and for every age every user tied down agent each agent will have its own object it’ll have its own address space and it can do that in an infinite fashion so we’re very well dressed for that there’s a lot we’ll be announcing this year in terms of what swedish doing with ai especially with remora as well that’s going to be a really interesting story to talk about awesome yeah you bring up a good point about the the the
not the ui but the interaction with it and it reminded me i was listening to the salesforce ceo i can’t think of his name off the top of my head right now he was did a talk recently saying in the future in the near future there won’t be ui anymore because you’re just going to be talking to these agents and there’s not going to be a front end of airbnb just you’re going to talk to these things and they’re going to do it for you in the back end which is crazy to think of how how we’re going to evolve and get to that place absolutely Absolutely. We’re already kind of moving.
You see that it’s already happening to an extent. You see the agents that are transacting between each other, and that’s only possible because of blockchain. So agents need blockchain, blockchains need agents, AI. It’s an interesting world. But what about the flip side of it? I’ve heard it said before, I forget who it was, it said blockchain could be the kill switch for AI in case it ever, the Terminator era, it ever does come up on us.
No, I think that’s the same fear mongering we had around like, you know, blockchain is going to rule the world or AI is going to take all our jobs. I just think we found as a human species a way ways to adapt over any form of technology that existed over time and I think this would just be another it would be a tool set everybody would have a form of AI that they could use and I think the most important thing is that everybody can gain access to an agent not only the rich or not only the few or not only the ones iPhones or not only the ones with iPhones, right? Everybody should have access to the same sense of services.
So in that world, I think we’ll find new jobs and new things for people to do. People just do way more in the timeframe that they’re given than they do today. People will be a lot more effective than they are. I also think it’s going to make the world smaller, a smaller place, because knowledge will be more broadly distributed, and your advantage you think you have is no longer place, because knowledge will be more broadly distributed.
And your advantage you think you have is no longer an advantage because we all have the same knowledge. So that’s actually a good thing. It’s a leveler for the world as a whole. It’s interesting, the socioeconomic aspects of that come out of that. I’m not an expert there, but I’d love to delve deep and find out what people are predicting there as well.
Yeah, I’ve seen the latest talks, but Altman and people are kind of up in arms around it. So you did bring up the aspect of being being closer so do you think social media brought the world closer um i believe it did absolutely of course it did right like think about the amount of people who wouldn’t have known each other unless they performed some kind of groups uh or they chatted with someone they never met or it brought a family member that you never knew, that you hadn’t spoken to for years closer.
So yes, it did. I think my concern about it is more the dependency built over time, that some people became fully dependent on it. And I think it’s almost like every drug or every kind of product. Eventually, there’ll be some people who take it one direction versus others. But I do believe social media did bring the world a lot closer.
I think AI will up-level that again to another degree. It would bring the ideas the world has a lot closer as long as it’s not sanctioned or restricted or censored. So I think that’s going to be very interesting. Yeah, for sure. And it just shows us how early we are too because so many people still don’t even know about it or use it. Just like Web3 and crypto.
But you guys have so much that you’re working on, so much that’s coming out, really cool stuff. What would you say you’re most excited for in 2025? Very excited about Basecamp. I think Basecamp is going to allow us to showcase yet again why MIS and Labs and SWE are pushing forward on all realms of innovation.
We would have debuted one of the largest growing consumer use cases in the world on on a chain with 100 million users we would really be showing how payments the world of payments in the future is going to change that’s what i’m really passionate about can’t wait to share with everybody on what we’ve been working on some of the things we talk about there have to be closed because of contractual obligations but But of course, at times in web three, people want alpha.
But I think more importantly is just look at what SWE is delivering. And that article I spread out, I actually missed a whole host of things we’re working on. What small teams can achieve is insane. I think I’ve never been so more bullish on building small teams than I’ve ever been since now. Awesome.
Love it. Yeah. So where can people best find you? Yeah, I’m on Twitter. That’s mostly the best way. It’s E-M-A-N-A-B-I-O and check out SWE.io. Lots of information there about what we’re doing and yeah. Awesome. Well, yeah, I really appreciate your time today. Congrats on all the success you guys have had.
It’s been fascinating watching SUI Blockchain grow with just the users, the developers, the TVL, everything about it, and just blast past a lot of others. So congrats on that.
