Caldera: Rollups as a Service and the Metalayer

0:00 Welcome back to the permissionless podcast brought to you by the team at Guardian. And as always, of course, we're going deep with DeFi teams and teams building in web 3 and trying to solve those core crucial issues that are holding DeFi back. And today we've got a discussion that touches on all of those things exactly with Matthew from Caldera, which is building in this really interesting space, this market that has just recently started to to grow and expand very rapidly known as roll-ups as a service.

0:34 So using underlying rollup technology, differing stacks to be able to provide arbitrary networks to clients and sometimes institutional players, sometimes gaming studios who need custom needs for their network and helping them scale that infrastructure for them. And so we got to learn all the ins and outs of what goes into providing this service and some of the interesting use cases and we got to discuss about some of the teams that are coming and building really interesting things on top of this stack and some of their technical needs under the hood.

1:11 And of course we got to discuss all the different customizability of Caldera and how this is serving every one of Caldera's clients. But I think even more interestingly, we got to cover what does this mean for the future of of DeFi and interoperability and what new use cases are coming with this technology underlying. But of course, before we dive deep on that, my name is Owen and over three and a half years ago, I founded Guardian based on the premise that DeFi would house trillions of dollars of assets and we would need really a stepwise increase in the level of security available to us to be able to ship confidently in that environment.

1:52 And today, I'm happy to share that Guardian has achieved the standard necessary. We use not one but two independent auditing teams led by a world-renowned lead security researcher and accompanied by a full-time fuzzing engineer to give so much confidence that as a part of our methodology we're able to put up our own funds as a bounty on the contracts on behalf of the protocol to not only show our confidence but also to show the effectiveness of our model.

2:24 And of course now really it's just a matter of time for DeFi to catch up. But without further ado, let us get into this conversation with Matthew from Caldera. Well, I mean, yeah, dude. First of all, really appreciate you making the time and and setting aside the time to to meet with us and discuss like I mean even beyond Caldera like your your journey into DeFi and everything you've sort of picked up along the way but I mean yeah let's start exactly there like how did you even find your way into crypto and and we'll get to how you even found your way into Caldera a bit later on.

3:03 Totally. Yeah. So, I got into crypto fairly early. I want to say, you know, like 2010, 2011ish era, like the kind of prem collapse sort of era, you know, honestly, for me, and I was like, you know, 12 years oldish at the time, it was like a mix of kind of falling down the sort of, you know, libertarian/ like anarco capitalist know type of rabbit hole, which I I feel like was a lot more preval prevalent in like kind of main mainstreamish online spaces at the time.

3:34 Yeah. And then also just you know as a kid spending a lot of time on like sort of gray hat hacking forums. So being a bit of a script kitty and then obviously when you're in those communities like Bitcoin is kind of the currency of choice. so that's how I got into it and then yeah mostly you know kind of as a speculator just using Bitcoin to like buy and sell like video game accounts online and then you know now as more of like a founder or builder.

3:57 Okay cool. So I mean yeah in from the early days using Bitcoin as you know some of its like initial use cases and then Ethereum comes about 2015 2016 DeFi kind of starts to exist but not really until like 2020 2021. What did how did you first get into actually like building with the tech and building on web 3?

4:21 Because I think there's like a pretty distinctive switch to where people are actually able to like build cool stuff. what did that look like for you? Yeah. So, it's funny you mentioned like the launch of Ethereum because I was one of those people that really kind of faded Ethereum in the first few years and I think a lot of that was because you know I mostly saw crypto as a currency.

4:43 Yeah. flash being used mostly for like payments. And so if you if you kind of constrain the way you think about the technology to just those things, you end up like thinking, well, you know, why do you need like a Turing complete VM on a right now that feels very silly. I think back then it was a little less silly just because even though Ethereum had been out for some time, you know, from the launch of Ethereum all the way up to like kind of cryptokitties or NFTs, there's there are very little things that you know that were being done on Ethereum that couldn't have been done on a more kind of like specialized blockchain.

5:18 So actually when I started building in crypto as a developer, this is more like 2017 2018ish. I got my start on Stellar, which was like in spirit an offshoot of Ripple. And the thing I thought was really cool about it were like the gas fees were super low and they had like built-in primitives for an exchange and for tokens.

5:38 And at the time when like the only app on Ethereum was like Ether Delta, you know, basically an exchange where people can launch tokens like you know, it felt like it made more sense to actually have that built into the blockchain. So first thing I built on that was like a kind of mobile like SMSbased wallet you know targeting you know these things were really popular at the time in like a lot of developing countries and so building hackathon projects around that theme and then only until like the kind of like post cryptokitties era did I start getting into Ethereum.

6:10 So you know I got into Bitcoin fairly early but got into Ethereum I think like comparatively later than I should have. Yeah. Yeah. And definitely that was like the first I think outside of obviously Bitcoin and then Stellar with like remittances payments and stuff like this and I think there are a few others also kind of going after that sort of addressable market.

6:32 I think that was one very lowhanging fruit of like this just makes sense and the tech was like right to the point of like okay we can solve this issue and then Ethereum starts to gain a little bit more and we start to get more complex obviously EVM becomes like the first turn complete blockchain language and then we get like interesting use cases we get like a Uniswap comes around we get lending and we get you know with things like a what did you start building after we started like actual interesting DeFi applications that could like compose with each other and and that almost seems like kind of this Cambrian moment for for DeFi.

7:10 But how did that sort of switch what you're building and and the way you were thinking about this tech? Yeah. So, it's funny because now I run an infrastructure company, but really when I think about what I was building like it was all kind of consumer apps. I was really interested in like onchain social. There's like a long history of of companies that have that have tried that.

7:29 Many of whom you know are kind of dead now. There was like minds network library cloud for a time and and I thought like those types of concepts were were pretty cool. Then you know this is now when I was you know college age like I was getting fairly deep into the fully onchain gaming community. So for those who are familiar with that, like things like Dark Forest and and its offshoots, but basically like wanted to kind of build things that felt like they were doing a lot of things on chain and like real applications.

7:58 I never interfaced too much directly with DeFi. I'm a huge user of DeFi still. but did not really build anything on the financial side of things. It was always like trying to build novel apps and then now building infrastructure for novel apps. That's interesting that you came from the consumer crypto side sort of approach and then directly into infrastructure.

8:19 Was there anything you saw where it's like one of the key bottlenecks on consumer crypto was the infrastructure and is that what kind of led you down that path? Exactly. Exactly. So wanting to build consumer stuff was just like you know honestly I think consumer in theory like you know at its most successful will always have the largest kind of addressable markets.

8:40 It's also just kind of the coolest stuff to build. All of those things I was building, I wasn't really trying to turn them into companies. I was just going to try to build interesting stuff. And so like forking a is like less interesting paradigm than if you're like trying to build a game or like a social network, etc.

8:54 And then in doing that, especially at that time, which is, you know, kind of early to mid 2021, you actually, you know, ran into scaling bottlenecks pretty quickly. Like gas fees were very high. so all the alt ones got popular like Polygon, Avalanche, etc. You know, eventually because those blockchains were so popular, they ended up having high or at least like spiky gas fees or congestion.

9:20 And then so in the process of building those things and even just kind of like modeling out, okay, what would happen if we had a thousand active users at any given time or 10,000 active users at any given time, you realize like very quickly, okay, this is like not going to work. And so like from that, you know, we came up with a thesis.

9:36 My co-founder and I that like really for the the biggest applications they're going to want dedicated block space and like all the benefits that that comes with you know comes with that and then roll-ups were getting very popular in like the research community. So we ended up going deeper into rollups and offering that as effectively like a cloud or a SAS service and that kind of was the initial inkling of Caldera.

10:01 Yeah. And yeah, I totally I remember when there was some game on like Polygon and it was like a clicker game and every every single click was like a transaction and it just shut down the chain. It was awful. so yeah, I think definitely this was something that I mean even if you could get the consumer adoption which is like that's just a massive problem in its own right is like how do you even get the users?

10:27 Then it was like, okay, well, you're just going to lose all of them because you're going to onboard them to a chain that has like just a terrible experience at anything beyond like I don't know, like you said, like 10,000 active users or like 10,000 concurrent users is just like that's not going to happen. And at least like Polygon or something like this 3 years ago.

10:51 Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I also I like the infrastructure approach because to me it seems like the consumer apps, maybe it's just like the types of businesses that I have experience with, but the consumer apps are just such a lower hit rate. It's like like the payoff is of course like okay, you could build the next Facebook.

11:10 But there's like a 0.00001% that you can actually get like the adoption and have the use case and have something that retains the users. to a point where it actually becomes its own like ecosystem. So I mean from my perspective I love the the infrastructure play because somebody's going to get it. You just you don't know who who is going to ultimately solve that.

11:35 But if you're the infrastructure provider, they're going to have to use this type of a underlying tech stack to be able to achieve it. regardless and there are a number of players that I've heard of are you know starting to do this starting to look into rollups as a service I think people are calling it like R aas now something like this I mean yeah what what's your take on the market for like rollups as a service right now are you also seeing like a ton of competitors what are the dynamics like in the market yeah I mean by last count I think we have on the order of about 20 VC back competitors the category was most hot I would say maybe 9 months ago, 9 to 12 months ago.

12:16 So leading up to that and then kind of immediately afterwards, I think a lot of people tried to get in on the market. we're also now seeing a lot of the kind of legacy RPC providers trying to get in. so like Alchemy and QuickNode have both announced, you know, very competitive products. I think for us, I mean, you you you know, when we first started the company, it was like the most common question from investors like, wouldn't this get commoditized?

12:41 And I think it surprised even you know us as founders that that hasn't really happened like just like with you know cloud or like dev tools it's like you have a bunch of theoretical kind of competitors but everyone is so different in terms of like interface and what exactly they offer and reliability and infrastructure and a lot of it is like literally just execution like a lot of our competitors they can't really run chains with high throughput or if they are they can't really keep those chains up to date or online.

13:16 So effectively despite like theoretically having a lot of competitors we found you know it there there are definitely some but there aren't that many and you know we've been able to to kind of to you know maintain and grow our market share over time despite more and more people entering the market. Yeah. It's it's also like it's not the the easiest thing to just like spin up and and start a business like this.

13:40 Like you do have to have like very deep technical expertise. You have to understand I mean hey even the sales and like relationship building is is not easy on that front to be able to like find who's going to actually have a use case for some of this infrastructure. so I mean in that sense like it's definitely it's not like something that could easily get commoditized in like you have to take the market to its most efficient frontier to see something like this get commoditized.

14:13 I think with other stuff that are like low skill like services that stuff very much quicker especially with like AI and stuff like this but like you're not going to build a RA app with like a bunch of AI like VAS and stuff like this. So, yeah, there's definitely a moat in that sense. And I think there is also some kind of strategic advantage in the fact that there's a ton of different use cases for this type of infrastructure.

14:43 And I feel like almost if you specified into like one vertical and you served that better than anything else, that seems like a winning proposition as well because I think if blockchain technology is if it's really going to reach you know into the depths of traditional finance and I mean gaming and AI and all these different areas, then there's going to be more than enough for 20 companies, probably even hundred couple of hundred companies to be able to carve out their niche and like serve that way better than anybody So, I mean, with your guys' perspective, who are you guys serving?

15:17 Like, what's the ideal use case for Caldera chains? Yeah, for for us really, it's kind of everybody. I I do agree with you. I think eventually the the space is going to kind of end up niching down on certain use cases. I will say that I think relative to our competitors, we have a really really strong reputation in gaming.

15:40 Our biggest chains like ApeChain and B3, you know, are mostly kind of gaming or sort of like content focused chains. and we have a bunch in the pipeline. That's kind of nice as well because I think honestly gaming as a category is just the most technically demanding. It's often times the thing that has pushed technology forward from VR, you know, graphics technology to hardware like, you know, Nvidia obviously.

16:03 And so we're really comfortable kind of being in that position and being like the clearly like the number one choice for a lot of gaming companies. Yeah. But candidly like I think the the core technical and product problems are fairly similar right now across different categories. And so we try not to be too prescriptive about what exactly we want to see.

16:23 I think the space and the industry is still relatively nent. So you know the goal is to just build the biggest ecosystem that we can of many different chains. I would say it's not dissimilar from a lot of the ecosystem building efforts that a lot of like L1's or L2s take where they might have specific focuses but so far the most successful chains whether it's Solana or it's arbitrum like they go after everyone from institutions to dgens to gamers and everything in between and so for us it's like a fairly similar go to market for now.

16:52 Yeah, that definitely makes sense. But I mean underlying all the same and I think the demand for stuff like this has I mean obviously plenty of companies just raised VC to go after this. It's like a pretty it's it it is an established vertical like there is significant demand for this. I mean so you said gaming is like the number one I guess like client archetype for you guys.

17:18 What kind of use case is it just like high throughput low latency? Is that what they care about? is there any like specific use cases? I would say that the gaming just it just tends to be the most broad. there are like a lot of teams that are just using this for like high throughput, low latency, kind of like an app chain model where they're just they're running a single game on their chain.

17:39 There are others like B3 where their ultimate goal is to create a huge ecosystem of chains. So, okay, we launched their L3 on top of Base, but they're actually going to have a bunch of chains even in their own mini ecosystem that are these app chains with their chain is like a hub. So, for them, the most important thing is us being able to not just run one chain, but to quickly spin up many different chains for their ecosystem.

18:03 And for a lot of these teams in gaming, both B3 specific teams and the ones we work with directly, they just have very very wide and diverse customization needs. I think the gaming chains are are the ones that'll be the first to try out new technologies to reduce costs. They're more interested in kind of novel economic or cryptoeconomic constructions.

18:26 You know, we saw this all the way back with like Axie Infinity and their like two token model. more of our gaming chains, they're experimenting with like changing the gas token of their chain. So, it's a rollup, but it doesn't use ETH as the token, changing consensus mechanisms, changing reward mechanisms for participation in the network, etc. And so, through working with a lot of these teams, we've developed like a pretty good kind of library of customizations that they can choose from.

18:52 But, yeah, really, I would say it's one of the most kind of heterogeneous categories in the space where everyone wants to push the envelope a little bit and do something a little different. You still get a compounding effect though from that because like each customization you add on. Now you can do that for everybody. So there's definitely a compounding effect there.

19:09 Yeah. Initially we were custom building a lot of things and now we we almost never need to do that. We just it's just kind of plugandplay and yeah now we have this big moat of you know stuff we've built inhouse that we can offer these teams. Yeah. What are some of those teams or games building on Caldera right now that you're finding interesting?

19:27 So, I've already mentioned B3 and ApeChain. Outside of that, we've worked with a team called, Hytopia for a very long time. They've built all sorts of different games, but I think their core product, it's sort of like an onchain Minecraft. So, of course, you know, strong performance requirements for them. One of the most interesting things was we built out a guardian node architecture system for them that allows them to incentivize people to run validator nodes for their rollups.

19:51 And that's something that even a lot of the biggest chains like you know optimism and base for example don't support right now. So we custom built that entirely in house. It allowed them to raise some money by selling NFTs you know lic license keys to run these nodes and it allows them to like decentralize their their token holder base by you know giving basically you know proof of work in a you know in in a sense for token rewards.

20:14 Yeah I mean I mean outside of that I'm not too sure which we have a bunch of projects in in test net. I'm actually not too sure what I what exactly I can say about them, but just a lot of people experimenting with using the blockchain as like the backbone for kind of AAA quality games. And so we're really excited to see that as well.

20:32 Yeah, absolutely. Very cool. No, it sounds cool. And do you have like RFPs or like games that you'd like to see people build? Like areas you think haven't been scratched yet, but should with like the combo of blockchain and gaming? That's a great question. I think the most kind of untapped area right now is in like the kind of mobile like gacha game category.

20:52 If if you've seen some of the data on that industry, it's like absolutely staggering how much volume in terms of transactions a lot of those companies, you know, are are pushing. And really like I think there are there's a lot of opportunity for them to like build real kind of sustainable like cryptoeconomic economies into their games. I actually think one of the most bullish things for this future is the fact that there are like a lot of legal battles being fought around like app store policies right now.

21:21 And if those loosen up and the antitrust gets a bit stronger in like the mobile software ecosystem, I could see a huge explosion in like blockchain based like mobile native casual games within the next year or two. Yeah, definitely. I think someone even sent us today like a tweet that Apple is kind of loosening up crypto transactions, you know, like through through the app store, which like you know, even a year ago felt like almost impossible.

21:45 So I I bet that's bullish for you guys as well. Totally. Yeah, I hadn't seen that. That's that's great to hear. Got the good news. Yeah, I think it's blowing up right now. I just saw it as well. So, that's that's pretty exciting. And I mean, you even mentioned like the the multi-chain approach. So, teams want to they want to spin up multiple chains and they also want to have interoperability between them sometimes.

22:07 And I think this is where like Metalayer comes in to basically how do we synchronize these chains and actually give like a network of chains instead of just like let's just spin up a bunch of isolated environments. Do you guys see this as like a network effect for you guys? Like what's the the game plan with that?

22:25 It's both like a a new network effect for our ecosystem and just like the product we have been wanting to build for a long long time. so as you mentioned when you know when you're launching a chain basically your number one problem is always going to be interrupt like you need people to get their funds into the chain.

22:43 If you have valuable assets being built on that chain, you want those assets to be able to expand to many of the the top like liquidity venues. This is doubly important if you're building an app chain where you're not going to be able to expect to have like a very, you know, powerful and wellused DEX and lending protocol on your chain.

23:02 And a lot of these teams don't even want that. They would rather, you know, that activity happen somewhere else so they can focus on whatever app they're building. and so the Metalayer, it's our idea of like a native and full stack interoperability solution for all of our chains. So it's native as in it gets automatically deployed.

23:20 It uses, you know, standard format. So we guarantee it'll always work on all of our chains and as well like the other big chains in the space, you know, arbitrum, base, eventually Solana, Hyperliquid, etc. it, you know, people get it or well the chains at least get it for free integrated with their chain and they can basically trust that it'll always exist and and always and then it's also totally full stack.

23:45 So we help we you know with the Metalayer you get a very basic low-level messaging protocol you know a lot of people like to say TCP IP chains right but just sending messages from chain to chain of any type we have liquidity and bridging solutions we're partnered with a lot of great teams in that space so eco relay cross network basically facilitating like intents-based bridging across all our chains and we're working on liquidity partnerships to ensure that on any chain the Metalayer is deployed there will be sufficient liquidity for major assets.

24:19 And then we also have like an SDK and a bridge interface. So, the combination of all those things turns interop from this thing where if you're an app launching a new chain, you need to run like a multimonth BD process, get everybody aligned, make sure everything works together to getting like a single thing out of the box that you can integrate in your app with like of code.

24:41 You know, we, as you said, like we're building this to turn our ecosystem into a network in and of itself, but even if that goal like didn't exist, this was like the number one request for almost anyone we worked with. And so, you know, from my perspective, I'm just really happy that like we can solve more problems.

25:01 Yeah, 100%. It's like and and it's very modular in the sense that it sounds like you have multiple interop providers that kind of plug into the SDK under the hood and so you guys have like an intents-based like declarative structure. So SDK you say I want to pass this message over to this network and then how is it rooted through like how do you decide which one of these interop providers to ultimately use?

25:26 Yeah. So we we have like a routing API or routing service on the offchain as well and then yeah ultimately like developers will have the ability to choose if they have preference but our understanding is most people they just want to get from A to B. so we'll offer opinionated defaults where they exist. That's great as well because you still have the optionality for like let's say you know some team comes on and they need super low latency interop versus maybe another team is like some kind of defi or like tradi they need to have like better security guarantees or something like this they could tentatively be able to like configure the kind of interop that works for them so that's pretty cool and yeah I mean it's it's very disinflationary the fact that you

26:09 Can go you can do the same BD process for you six months or whatever and then solve it for everybody all at once. and that like I mean that's a great value prop is to just have an your ecosystem in one click or something like this. That's like a really cool value prop. And there's a ton of stuff that's like this.

26:28 I mean not even just interop like a native stable coin an oracle provider. I mean there's different types of oracles obviously you know if it's like a DeFi type application borrow lending having a native DAX stuff like this have you guys explored like the need for adding like a native oracle or stuff like this is that coming yeah it's definitely coming like our goal with a lot of these these types of things which we see as somewhat auxiliary is is always to partner rather than build ourselves but as you mentioned like our ecosystem they kind of get the benefits of like collective diligence and collective bargaining so we run those process processes.

27:04 We typically work with a few teams in every category, but we're always looking to kind of make deeper, more like native partnerships where those opportunities exist. And so, especially right now, that's been one of our focuses on like the business and BD side is getting more folks kind of bought into the ecosystem so we can offer more like truly native services to a lot of our chains.

27:23 Yeah. And I saw you guys also offer like customizations where you could even settle to like a different layer that's not even like Ethereum or not even like base like Celestia if you want to have like a data availability layer like I'm actually interested like what are the vast array of like customizations like what's the most common customization and then is there any like really crazy asks that you guys have had?

27:48 Yeah. So the most common customizations are what I would call like the kind of the modular like puzzle pieces. So as you mentioned like where do you settle? Are you settling on Ethereum or base or bar chain right? Are are you what where are you posting your data? Celestia native Ethereum DA what are you using for your gas token etc.

28:07 Like you know those are all customizations and they're all decisions that every chain needs to make. Like maybe they'll decide to stick with the defaults but that is a decision in of itself. And so those are like the majority of those quoteunquote customizations that we talk to teams with or or about. But you can basically go as deep as you want.

28:25 I mean the nice thing about a lot of these rollup frameworks is like the quoteunquote proof systems whether they're of ZK or optimistic can kind of work on arbitrary code. And so we have some teams that are enforcing KYC at the chain level. So they've like baked in a third party KYC verification service and really your transaction is considered invalid if you're not KYC.

28:48 That's a company called Kinto. I mentioned the Guardian node system before that. Hytopia is using High Chain. ApeChain is doing native yield on their tokens. So they've had like a yield bearing protocol for Ape token for a long time. Now they've actually deprecated that protocol and all the yield happens natively on ApeChain. So if you deposit 10 ape on ApeChain, you know, and check back a year from now, maybe you'll have like 12 or 13.

29:15 It all happens natively via rebasing without the user needing to do anything. So yeah, I mean there are like the kind of the the toggle, you know, buttons and then because at the end of the day it's just software, you can basically do whatever you want. So we're seeing we're seeing a lot more interest in those the latter type of customizations that really require deep modification at the chain level.

29:36 Yeah, definitely that makes a ton of sense. And on the, you know, like the BD level that you spoke about, when it comes to onboarding teams, like in that gaming vertical too, are you looking at being the team that's taking existing games and convincing them or maybe they're interested in blockchain and being the first people to bring them in or is it also a lot of, you know, cryptonative teams that are, you know, looking for that provider when they're getting their start?

29:57 Yeah, I would say across all verticals, we are most interested in cryptonative teams. Candly, it's it's just because they have a better idea of like what they want, timelines, etc. so we love working with them. But that's not to say we aren't working with many teams a little bit in gaming and a lot actually on the kind of institutional side that are, you know, a little bit more kind of perspective and just dipping their toes in the water.

30:21 Those are also fun teams to work with because I find oftentimes that people's idea of what can be done with blockchain is oftentimes like many years behind what you can actually do. So it's fun to be in conversations with like an you know an institution or a fintech for example and very quickly realizing like hey you can unblock them on like many whether it's like a cost thing or KYC regulatory thing or etc etc you know concerns about too much decentralization or too little decentralization like you can start to like unblock a lot of those concerns very very quickly with with custom chains and so yeah but I would say like you know still 80 to 90% of our sales volume is with like fairly crypto native teams.

31:04 It's also got to be like the sales cycle between those two different groups has got to be like completely different where it's like somebody coming outside of crypto like man it could probably take like years for them to get fully educated and get ready to actually address the the problem versus teams. They just know what they want.

31:22 They know what they need. They're like take my credit card if you can do this. Exactly. Yeah, that's definitely true. the way the way we like to see it though is like, you know, the longer a company needs to have these conversations to to make a decision, it's a bit of like a moat for us because we've been around for a while.

31:40 If we've been in a conversation for a year and a half, like, you know, they are more likely to go with us than some, you know, random company that started doing this yesterday. So, we like to keep those conversations as warm as possible and keep keep them frequent. But, yeah, you know, for that for the reason you mentioned like most of our existing mainnets are very Web3 native.

31:58 Yeah, that's absolutely true. If you can just be patient, I mean, that's like a superpower, especially in the crypto market, is like, can you wait a year and a half to close a deal, not many teams can can do that, especially when the market gets, you know, pretty sour like it has been past couple of months. it gets pretty hard to be patient.

32:17 I mean, and those will end up being like some of the biggest deals and some of the things that move the product forward the most. I mean like all it takes is like a JP Morgan to come in and start using like a certain type of chain and and that's like the case study that you can then use and bring that to every other like financial institution.

32:36 So yeah, I mean patience is is definitely a virtue in in today's market. but like I was interested what are you working on mainly right now? Like what's the number one thing that you guys are trying to push out? What kind of new features? What are you guys working on? So, you know, we talked about the Metalayer that's about to go live on mainnet within the next month or so.

32:59 And so we've been working on it for a long time. I'm really excited to kind of release it out to the world. We've got a really, really strong set of launch partners. so really excited about that. And I think, you know, first of all, I think it's just like a great product that will drive a lot of value.

33:14 It's also something that kind of expands the surface area between our company and the average like crypto retail user. It's it's B2B, but it's also B TOC, of course. And and so I'm really excited for the company to start exercising some of that muscle a little bit because we we've brought on some really great like product engineers and designers.

33:33 And so like just just having something that's very very public facing is going to be really exciting. Outside of that, like personally, my focus right now is a lot on ecosystem and community building. We're going to be launching a marketing campaign actually just this morning as of you know, recording this. our Kaito Yapper leaderboard went live. Yeah.

33:52 You know, we we've had a very strong set of like dedicated fans mostly from the kind of modularity space who've stuck with us for quite a while. and now we're looking to just kind of expand that base and make it clear that Caldera, we're not just a SAS product. We are like an ecosystem and a community that it's probably worthwhile for a lot of these like users in web 3 to stay engaged with.

34:15 So you know just having over the next year or so we'll have many many many initiatives that seek to drive home that fact. Yeah ecosystem is a really magnificent play be because every every node that you add to the network increases the value of the network. I think that can become like if if you get that right and every user that you bring on or every you know customer that you bring on unlocks some new use case or add some kind of a utility to anybody else on the roll-ups and like the the rollup network.

34:49 I think that will that will start to be a really big value unlock for you guys. And that's like a huge moat because if I'm able to spin up a chain as a part of your network and I have access to all this interop and oh I need some kind of a you know liquidity for this but I could just use the interop network you guys already have that's very very hard to reproduce.

35:11 I mean especially liquidity like once you get captive liquidity then it's like that's like the big the big moat in in DeFi right now. And I mean that's what users care about at the moment. So yeah, that seems like a pretty exciting space to to be positioning wise for you guys. What is like the the long term that you guys see?

35:34 What's like the long-term vision, the super app that you guys want to get to? Yeah, I for for us really it's it's to bring as much onchain as possible. We founded the company on the premise that like the next Facebook or League of Legends or Stripe or Robin Hood is going to be built with a strong onchain component.

35:52 That's kind of the core vision behind the company. I think that thesis is turning out to be more clear now than it ever has been before. I don't know exactly the order in which all of these different categories will come on chain. It's looking like stable coins and payments might be, you know, the first major category, but crypto is, you know, and and the blockchain as like a fundamental technology primitive has gone from like a curiosity to something that almost every big technology company is at least taking seriously and thinking about how they can apply it to the problems they already have.

36:28 And so for us like if we are not the service provider for a lot of these different chains and they end up outside of our ecosystem we would consider that a huge failure. So that's that's definitely the northstar for us in the long term. Right now it's just you know growing the ecosystem making the tech and the product as good as possible and setting up ourselves really well for that future which we think is coming sooner rather than later.

36:52 And what is the strategy or the overarching like approach to make sure that those apps those providers do end up in your ecosystem and they end up seeing that hey this is the provider that I have to go with. Yeah I mean it's it's a combination of three things. The first is literally just having a good product and thatly which is a really silly thing to say when you say it out loud, but as we've seen kind of repeatedly in crypto, it's really easy for people to get distracted writing the best product.

37:21 The short-term incentives are candidly not to building product. there's so many companies in the space that have launched, you know, billion dollar token without mainnet. I like to joke, well, we've launched 50 mainnets and no tokens. so you know, we we invest a lot in product. but it's like still like the northstar. I mean, number two is just on the BD side, making sure we get to these conversations early and we keep them as like open and we're as helpful as possible to teams that are considering these types of solutions.

37:52 We are really used to even now with very very long sales cycles. There are some, you know, even even like web three companies that, you know, one would expect maybe to move fairly quickly, you know, but we've worked with a lot of companies that have just had some amount of like indecision in their processes, which is totally fine.

38:08 And so we already know like how to basically run a multi-yearlong sales process and keep those feelings pretty warm. And so as we've kind of exercised that muscle and as you as you mentioned just kind of developing that patience organizationally, I think that's going to be super super helpful. And then the third thing is is just it's like partnerships and forming like the strongest alliances we can.

38:29 Again, I think actually in many cases there are some short-term incentives for people to not do this because crypto you actually get a lot of benefit out of like making enemies of people, right? You're always, you know, like at least like socially or communitywise, everyone loves a fight. Everyone loves enemies. For for us though, like kind of in the the pursuit of of building the best thing, we work very deeply with a lot of companies who themselves might be enemies with each other, right?

38:57 So we're we work with the top rollup stacks, we work with a bunch of interop providers, we work with everyone and we do our best to keep those those connections really warm as well. And it's been great for deal flow so far because we like working with a lot of these teams and they like working with us and we'll refer folks to them and vice versa.

39:15 But you never really know what kind of angle one of these bigger companies will have into deciding they need a chain. They might be looking at you know wallet technology and you know then come to some conclusion that they want to move some workloads or business logic on chain or you know they might at oracles or something or you know another RPC provider or something like that.

39:37 And so just having great relationships has been really helpful so far. You know, our goal is to basically build like the strongest kind of network, not just the crypto network, but the the business network as we can for the Cambrian explosion of apps that's going to come. Of course. And yeah, I mean, the value of your business network is almost comparable to how much value you can provide to everybody who's on a caldera chain.

39:57 It's like, exactly. If I know, you know, you know, somebody at Pyth and I can get a Pyth set up on every single Caldera rollup, that's a huge benefit to everybody. So yeah, that that definitely makes sense the way that you guys are approaching that. What would you say is like the the biggest bottleneck right now? Like what's holding you guys back from going 10x from where you are right now?

40:20 Really, really good question. Yeah, I I think I think right now I think there are a lot of things kind of bubbling beneath the surface in terms of crypto adoption where ultimately just like every other kind of base layer protocol, we are limited by the amount of companies that want to build in crypto at any given time.

40:39 You know, if you were to go back a year and a half ago, I would have said the biggest threat to our company's competitors. We no longer feel that way. I think we've emerged as a pretty clear leader in our space. Of course, we still stay paranoid about the competition, but like really for us, like we see ourselves as like a an index on crypto adoption generally, and so the biggest bottleneck is just going to be crypto adoption generally.

41:01 Again, seeing a lot of very positive signs, but you know, it it'll become more clear, I think, within the next year or two is like how real those signs are. We we hope we hope they're real, but still kind of in a holding position right now. Yeah, holding our breath. Holding our breath. I mean thankfully things have been looking you know better and better day by day on the regulatory front on I mean the Apple news today was that's some great news.

41:27 I mean we'll see how big that ends up being. I mean there's all kinds of announcements that like end up like not really even playing out but hopefully hopefully this one actually means something. Yeah, I think I mean I think we're headed in the right directionally that problem is it's it's insurmountable by any individual, but like I think directionally it's it's only a matter of time at this point.

41:50 Yeah, that that's what I'll say about that. But in terms of like organizationally, what has hiring been like for you guys? Is there any bottlenecks on like specific positions that you're looking at? like how's that been for growing the or hiring has been really really good over the last 6 to9 months. I think it's been really clear about like we we developed stronger thesis internally about what we're looking for.

42:14 People know that we're you know a leader in our vertical. A lot of people want to work for us. So we've been able to attract really really great talent. both people with great pedigree and also people who you know can actually do great work. when I say both I mean those two things in one person not not two distinct groups of people.

42:33 Then we also completed an acquisition late last year of a company called Hook. and so they they joined the engineering leadership and brought on some of their engineering team. and that's been really really helpful. I mean they were very consumer focused initially. They were also one of our earliest users. So they were building a product on a chain and it's just been like a superpower to have them on board.

42:57 They have the empathy for all of our users as people are building on chains and they have the product sense to really push amazing consumers out to market. So we we're ex extraordinarily happy with the hiring situation recently. That's awesome actually to have a user become somebody who's like managing the what kind of side of the business are they managing?

43:17 Yeah, like one is on protocol development like one half of the company and the other half of of that company is now on we call it like the product team. So it's a mix of like product design and engineering. It's gone very well. Yeah, that's awesome to hear. And and is there the product that they originally built on Caldera, is that still like up and running?

43:38 I think it's been deprecated. It might still be live in some sort of test net form. it was like an NFT per exchange. fully on chain. It was a really really good product. I I used it on and off. Very well designed, very well put together and you know done very thoughtfully. unfortunately I think that that category and they'll be the first to admit it like just never really hit exit velocity.

44:01 A lot of companies worked in that space and I think none really had massive traction but it was fortunate for us because we were able to bring them on board and you know have them work on stuff that that will hit hundreds of thousands of users. What an organic way to like hire some like I feel like the hardest problem in the space is hiring the senior folks and folks come in and like run divisions.

44:23 That part is very hard because I mean crypto's only been around DeFi's only been around for like realistically like maybe five years maybe. So yeah, it's hard. It's like a senior person doesn't exist past 5 years in in actual DeFi. So yeah, I mean that that's a great organic way to to be able to grow and expand and I can imagine that's just great for culture because like they probably believe in the product so much because they were able to like I mean it sounds like it fit exactly their their use case and their needs.

44:55 At the end of the day it was just like the NFT per vertical just didn't really like take off. So yeah, I I love that that approach. maybe are there any others who have like gone from the user to working at Caldera Path? None that I can think of. I mean we we certainly have some people who really understand the app chain thesis and worked for us.

45:19 I think partially because of that like we have someone who joined us from Uniswap who obviously you know eventually launched Unichain. We had an engineer join us recently from dYdX which you know was a pioneer in app chains even back before Caldera started. and so there are some very clear kind of through lines I think you can you can draw there, but yeah, no one who has like directly worked or run a company that we work with outside of these guys.

45:41 No, that definitely makes sense. And I was interested, so obviously you're interfacing with a lot of different teams that are building on blockchain for a lot of different reasons. I was interested if you saw any kind of a trend in the way that teams are interacting with smart contracts. Like for example, it seems like more teams are taking logic out of smart contract code and moving it more offchain and then using the actual blockchain smart contract layer as more of a custody layer or just like a proving layer.

46:14 Is this something you guys are seeing as well? Do you think it goes further in that direction and blockchains become like simply just a proving layer? Like what does that look like do you think in the next like 5 10 years? I think that that sounds reasonable to me where like the the the most important part of a blockchain is is that you have effectively global state that everyone agrees upon.

46:35 Doing execution on or offchain it's going to be really depend product dependent on like whether that's necessary. I I do think like verifiable execution is still obviously really valuable. That's, you know, you you you can't you need you need to have that in order to have like a system that you can fully trust. It's to be either verifiable or at least, you know, relatively transparent.

46:54 I think actually a lot of this is going to depend on how good ZK ends up being. There there are really positive signs for ZK, but still ZK is much more expensive than, you know, like optimistic systems. Yeah. So, we'll see how that ends up. I think for us, we're kind of intentionally, I don't want to say unopinionated, but we're intentionally keeping our minds open to many different possibilities here.

47:20 Yeah. Because how we respond to that that question is going to be important. We're kind of hedging our bets right now and just kind of waiting how the space will end up. Yeah. And I saw of course you guys support both OP Arbitrum Nitro and then as well ZK. What is your ZK stack? We use ZKsync.

47:39 So all of our ZK mainets are on the ZKsync stack and I think we also have like beta support for the succinct and RISC Zero provers that run on the OP stack. Actually related to this I'm not sure if you did you see the research that was done by LayerZero on what they call like V apps.

47:57 Did you see that going around at all? I got sent a link to that paper but I haven't read it yet. It was Yeah, I haven't really gone through it too much. It seems it seems promising. It seems like very tantalizing. I have some questions about like what it means for composability because it to me I haven't I haven't fully delved into it but it seems like what they're doing is they're basically taking the application layer and separating it from the blockchain and then they have like ZK like an SDK that just generates a ZK proof and uploads it to the chain.

48:32 At least like that's my cursory understanding. And then they have like you know their own whole like Rust like SDK and stuff for for building these. And I guess the value prop is like build like web two for web 3. which is very tantalizing. But I'm interested to see like it seems like that has very distinct tradeoffs with actually being able to build on chain and just compose permissionlessly and like read the code and then build on top of it.

49:02 So I'm interested to see like how that plays out. yeah, I was just wondering if you had read it. But yeah, something I'm thinking about and something that just looks like, you know, could be a trend in the space over time. Yeah, I'm I'm really interested in these types of paradigms. I do think that a lot of people are kind of sleeping on just making the underlying blockchain VM more expressive, which you don't need CK for.

49:25 So obviously we're talking about RISC-V. in the EVM, Arbitrum is stylus, which allows you to, you know, basically write any was code. but they at the very least they have good kind of tool chains for Rust, Go, and C. That actually might end up being a little easier because ultimately, and I've done a little bit of ZDK development.

49:44 It's, you know, it's it's like non-trivial and I think it's going to be harder to build like higher level tooling on top of that versus just like modifying the blockchain to make it easier for other people to build upon. But, yeah, I think ultimately like both of those solutions kind of they lead towards the same thing which I'm excited by which is just more people building on.

50:04 Yeah. At the end of the day, that's what I think the most exciting teams are working on is how do we bring more people into the pie and grow the pie. I mean there's definitely two approaches. It's like either, you know, build something for native crypto or build something that can actually go out and bring more companies, more institutions on chain, bring the value of this tech stack to them.

50:25 And I think like that's where a lot of the work has to be done is to like meld the like some institutions they need to have some kind of built-in KYC or you know there's some like technical or like regulatory gap that just has to be bridged and I think a lot of what you guys are doing is you know right at that bridge and like figuring out how can we solve each one of these and I'm sure endless like sales cycles just come up with like oh we have to fix this and like oh we can do this and then just checking those off one by one.

50:56 But yeah, I think I mean finally I just wanted to ask you like let's say you had a arbitrary like gaming app let's say and they were coming to Caldera and they wanted to spin up the chain for you know whatever whatever game it's going to be. What is your favorite sort of setup? What kind of chain do you recommend to them?

51:17 Is it OP? Is it arbitrum? Is it ZK? What's like the out of the box solution that you see is the best? Yeah, I get asked this question a lot in different forms and it's kind of the one that I won't answer or at least I won't give it the most satisfying answer because I mean two things like the company we like to stay neutral you know and and you know we we also just like to understand the specific requirements of any given team and develop a solution from there and so really even for let's say a team like gaming we have folks building on the OP stack we have folks building Arbitrum we have folks building on the zkit to the ZK stack.

51:53 There are reasons to choose each of them and you end up getting into the nitty-gritty as to what exactly a team wants to do, what ecosystem they want to be a part of, what other apps they want to work with when they're choosing like the stack or the DA layer, etc. And so, unfortunately, I I tend not to give a really specific answer to this question, but generally like I think the thing that helps teams the most is to not go into it with any like preconceived notions about anything, right?

52:20 Some people say, "Oh, well, like ZK is really expensive, so maybe we shouldn't do ZK." It can be true in some cases, but in many cases, it's not it's, you know, not 100% true. There are ways to make ZK less expensive if you desire some of those properties. You know, people say, "Oh, you know, OP stack can do this.

52:36 Arbitrum can't or vice versa." It tends not to be true, but though there are specific like features of of each of them that like are exclusive. And so really like a lot of the times when we're talking with teams, it's like helping them kind of wipe away everything they've like seen or heard offhand on on Twitter and like come to the decision in like the most kind of thoughtful way.

52:58 That seems like you guys can provide so much value even outside of just being able to spin up the architecture for them by telling them like, hey, this is what you're going to need specifically for your use case. You're going to want to use this stack for XYZ reason. And I'm sure like this is something that teams could come and discuss with you and even if they didn't use Caldera, obviously they should be using Caldera, but even if they didn't like they're going to get so much value just from figuring out like hey here's the different architecture that we need to set up and this is like the right way to approach it.

53:31 You guys have this deep technical knowledge of all these different stacks. So you guys can accurately like compare, contrast, and sort of like show them ropes what they need to to set up to address their needs. So yeah, that's mostly the answer that I was expecting is like, well, it depends. which is fair enough. But yeah, I mean, beyond that, dude, is there anything any, you know, maybe big launches, maybe you can't discuss them just yet, but anything big coming out soon that we should we should call out?

54:03 Yeah, mostly the stuff I mentioned earlier. So, Kaito leaderboard is live. I know a lot of people they love yapping about projects and obviously that well, you know, that represents a lot of opportunity for people to get more involved with our community on the content creation side. By the time this goes out, our campaign will be live.

54:20 So, that'll be it'll be the most comprehensive campaign we've ever run. It'll allow people to interface with all the chains in our ecosystem, the Metalayer, other apps that are being built in our ecosystem, etc. It's something that our community has requested a lot just like they're like we love Caldera we want to participate but like what is it and how do I use it and like I'm just a user like how do I interact with Caldera this campaign is going to be running for quite some time and is basically our answer to that and so provide a lot of ability for people to interact and also just see what people are building on custom app chains and then outside of that I guess kind of inclusive of that is the Metalayer launch which

55:01 Will go live with this campaign, you know, roughly like part, you know, halfway through. And that'll be the first time we actually unveil this thing in in mainnet form and people will be able to experience very very fast bridging between a bunch of different chains for for stables and ETH. And so we're very excited about that and I I hope other people are too.

55:21 Yeah. Excellent, man. Well, exciting times. a lot of stuff coming out and I mean I'm interested to see more partnerships that you guys are launching, more chains you guys rolling up and of course Metalayer that's very exciting as well to see how that ends up scaling across all the different rollups and then even the other networks that you guys are supporting there.

55:41 So yeah, exciting times indeed. I want to thank you again for for coming on and discussing pretty much everything a toz about what you guys are are working on. And of course, we'll have, you know, links down in the description below to check out the Twitter, check out the the Yappers leaderboard and the website as well. Thanks so much.

56:01 This was a lot of fun.