Gelato: Rollups as a Service for Apps and Institutions

0:00 And welcome back to another episode of the permissionless podcast brought to you of course by the team at Guardian as always and of course here on the permissionless podcast we're going deep with DeFi teams discussing everything from their journey how they got into DeFi what they're working on today how did they find their way to what they're working on and I think really importantly where do they see DeFi going in the next 5 to 10 years today we have a really special conversation with Joel from Gelato and we get to really discuss everything that they're exploring, all their different services and some of the new offerings and this new sort of niche of roll-ups as a service that Gelato is currently going after.

0:42 We get to hear a bit about the institutions that they're interfacing with and the types of clients who are trying to build on these roll-ups as a service and specifically what kind of features and infrastructure is important to this different array of different teams building on roll-ups and spinning up their own chain environment. And then finally, we get to dive in and talk to what are some of the pain points of scaling an organization and trying to bring some of these more complex products to market at scale for many different clients with all sorts of custom needs, etc.

1:14 But of course before we get into that, my name is Owen and about three three and a half years ago I co-founded Guardian and we set out based on the premise that DeFi would house trillions of dollars of assets and that the level of assurance and security across the application stack would need to be absolutely just a step-wise difference from where it is the day that we began.

1:36 And today, I'm happy to say that we have achieved that standard at Guardian using not one but two auditing teams as well as a lead researcher and a full-time dedicated fuzzing engineer to absolutely secure the crap out of the entire application stack and be able to be so confident in it that we actually in fact are able to put up our own funds as a bounty on the contracts.

2:00 And so really at this point we have achieved the level of security necessary. And really we're waiting for DeFi to catch up. And now without further ado, let us get into this discussion with Joel from Gelato. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. Really interested. We've got, you know, really so much to dive into, but I think it would be best maybe we could just start off.

2:26 How did you even find your way into working at Gelato? How did you find your way into DeFi in the first place? Everyone, thank you guys for for having me. That's a good question. That brings me back to COVID times. Actually, not really. I'm originally from Argentina and I think there was 2014 when I finally had some extra spare money to invest and I was okay where what should I do?

2:48 And somehow I opened the chart of Bitcoin and Bitcoin went from I don't remember from 100 to 200. And I was, oh, I missed the pump. this I'm I'm too late for this. Let me do something else. I ended up buying some Argentinian bonds. So that was Oh no. So and I didn't touch crypto anymore. But then it was 2020.

3:09 I moved to Singapore. COVID hit and I was by myself. I didn't know anyone and restrictions were quite tight. So I was close at home and with a lot of time. So, and I allocated the time to to to of course internet research and I ended up into the rabbit hole of NFTs and and DeFi and all the Olympus DAO forks.

3:32 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To me, what's I'm a former software engineer and what hooked me or the aha moment for me when I when I understood this the concept of the building blocks, right? The real the composibility and I saw what you can achieve with open source, right? you can build multi-billion SAS using open source tools and it was oh if you can do the same but you can do the same with money with those primitives this is going to be huge and that's when I fall into the rabbit hole and I never left and at some point I was okay I'm spending too much time in crypto or my personal time maybe it's time to d to converge my career and made the jump and that's how I ended up switching fulltime that's awesome dude

4:13 Well I mean first of all I totally agree on the the power of of define composer ability. I think that will just continue to compound in our favor. But also, dude, it's so funny that so many people I've talked to a handful of people now, including myself, who were almost like onboarded into DeFi through Olympus DAO and like crazy like APYs where it's like the APY can't even fit on the UI.

4:37 It's like quadrillions of of percentage return. So, yeah, dude, that's just funny to hear. I mean, I don't know how deep you you went, but like, man, I was in all of the Ohm Forks, like Spartacus on Phantom, and like I think there's like Hector Dow. Yeah. All just tons of them. I'm still holding. I'm a holder.

4:56 No, that's not good, dude. Unless it's M. I mean, M is like you're not down too too bad. But anything else is, man, compounding. Yeah, compounding losses. Yeah, it was really impressive. It was like I didn't know that you could lose this much. But it was it was incredible. But the surprise for me was that it was even touching some people out of my small bubble because spreadsheet that someone bit is like if you put this money you can retire if you put that money because this is this is how big is the APY.

5:32 And somehow it reached my non-crypto friends and it's like hey should we do this? It's like and I was no guys please don't do that. This is an experiment and it's not going to end up well. Yeah. But I was surprised about that, dude. The I could tell the top was when even do you know Tai Lopez?

5:47 Yes, dude. Tai Lopez had his own M fork. Yeah, I remember that. It was he bought he like bought Radio Shack and he turned it into an it was like the wildest thing. But yeah, dude, those were those were pretty wild times for for DeFi. But I I mean that was such a great onboarding moment and it's almost like the cost of entry to DeFi is to like invest in some crazy coin or DeFi project and just like I will say like I lost pretty much all the money that I put into those projects but I learned everything about Olympus and I was like cuz the model was so interesting what they're doing with staking and bonding and all that stuff.

6:23 So yeah, it's kind of like the the cost of entry. I mean you know once you go deep on a project like that you're not you're not leaving DeFi. So, I mean, cost of entry. There is no college course for DeFi, so that's kind of the equivalent, I suppose. But, yeah, dude, cool to hear more more folks coming in to to DeFi through Olympus.

6:39 Glad to know I'm not the only one who lost my seat on all those forks. But, yeah, I mean, picking up from there, how did you go from Okay, so got a little interested in D5, started to learn some of the primitives and started to see like the power of composability and the fact that anybody can come and build anything really.

6:56 How did you go from there to ultimately getting to where you are at Gelato? So, it was not an easy journey. At some point, I decided to, okay, this is too much of my personal time in crypto. I was leading product at Food Panda, which is a delivery app in Southeast Asia, one of the biggest ones. And I was interviewing with a startup in Singapore.

7:16 They were trying to build a self custody solution for institutions. And FTX happened. while I was in the interview process and I was okay maybe this is not going to happen now and we need to wait a little bit longer and basically there I was in other processes at the same time and they were all okay we are going to pause here and and reevaluate in the future but I really wanted to do the pro the the move so I compromised a lot and I ended up joining the company because I it was time for me I knew that there are cycles but then the good times definitely at the end of the day will come back and then joined this start been there building for a year and then for other reasons we ended

7:58 Up moving to Switzerland last year and then I was on my gap year building on Farcaster some frames and some site communities there where the founders reach out HR and then founder reach out and they were looking for someone to lead product at Gelato and it was the perfect fit. So I decided to stop my sabbatical year and join the join Gelato.

8:24 It was decision ever. It's like we've been having so much fun and we built so many things in the last 12 months that is like loving it. Best experience ever. Yeah, that's awesome to hear. And what particular experience do you think it was that made you the right fit for this troll at Gelato that you had previously?

8:42 Sorry. Like what experience from So you're working at this company in Singapore. what sort of like product area were you working on there that ultimately translated to what you guys are building today? I think that in this case what Gelato wanted is they were looking for somewhere that could lead across all the products have the kind of generalist mindset because at the end of the day you can zoom out enough where a product is just a product and principles applies and then you just need to go extremely deep when you need to have the experience.

9:10 That's right. And I had my year of experience building this web three selfcast to the company. Yeah, that was enough just to allow me to have the conversation and then again I spend a lot of my free time. So I knew more or less about all the primitives and first and the mental models. So I think that the on boarding was relatively straightforward and catching up with all the products.

9:35 Yeah, it's extremely important like for somebody at Gelato to be a DeFi native and be using all these applications. I mean, at the end of the day, those are your customers. Those are your your users are the the applications in DeFi. It's such an interesting business model where you're serving the applications that are serving the DeFi users.

9:53 And if you're a DeFi user yourself, you see exactly what kind of a UX that you want and like as a product person, you can sort of see like what needs to happen infrastructurally to be able to get there. And I mean, so you guys have a suite of of products at this point and I think a lot of them are aimed around like obviously they're at the infrastructure level, but I think the end outcome for users and as a middleman for that the apps is the UX.

10:16 Like how do we get the UX right for the user so that we can make the the app experience as seamless as possible and ultimately hopefully get to the next sort of wave of users that will be able to enter DeFi and you know not have to interact with like MetaMask and stuff like this. What do you guys see as like the ultimate end vision for what you're trying to provide to your users, which are the applications?

10:39 I think that you hit the nail. This is basically what we challenge ourselves every day, which is how do we make our developers lives easier first and foremost because those are our customers, those are real users. And then how do we empower them to build the best experience, right? Regardless if it is sponsoring transactions, right? So users can have a way 2.0 experience or having their own block space and that can satisfy their needs right and if there is not an opportunity there is not a solution in the market that will satisfies that then we will be in house.

11:14 So this is what happened with rollup. So we jump into the rollup market a year ago. We started with OP and Orbit pretty much the standard frameworks but then we saw needs for other type of solutions right and we couldn't find us those solutions in the markets and that's when we develop ABC which is our own so rollup framework for these applications that they meet pawns of block space right we're talking about giggas per second and that's how we unlock also those opportunities so at the end of the day is how do we empower empower our developers.

11:50 How do we empower developers so they can innovate, right? Because if everybody at the same time is using the same tools, then it's getting difficult to to innovate. So we are pushing those boundaries. Yeah. And I think it's also that a lot of teams are solving the same problems multiple times like every team has to go and address like oh we want to have gasless transactions or every team another one that's you know kind of tangential to to user UX but is more like developer UX is like monitoring and introspection like having introspection into your crypto app.

12:25 Like every team that we work with basically has to build their own monitoring apparatus and be able to like put up like charts and stuff maybe with like Dune but there's no like really easy modular monitoring setup for teams and stuff like this. So I think there's there's a ton of work to be done there but I think I think Brendan you had something to say.

12:44 Yeah, just with like that that goal that you mentioned of servicing developers in mind and like you know branching into rollups and then even there like diversifying what types you're offering now like crypto 2025 like what do you what do you see as developers like wanting the most lately? What are you you know thinking about building next?

13:00 If you can share anything about that too at Gelato. Yeah, that's a good question and I'm happy to see that finally on the early calls with many developers is all about web 2.0 O experience how do we abstract all the complexities it's like how do we bring the next wave of users and even for projects like Infinex right that they are targeting crypton native but they are still how do we push the boundaries and have this web 2 experience so definitely that's the topic of the year I think that wallets as a service providers they have a big opportunity here and they are the ones that can innovate a lot But at protocol level, Pectra is going out pretty soon.

13:47 And that's going to level up the game for everybody. Able to convert a EOA into a smart account. is definitely great. it removes a lot of complexity. It simplify things for the user as well and the developers. So, we are extremely bullish on that. We've been building many demos and and sharing them with our customers because we really want them to leverage that.

14:08 Yeah. And of course with with all of these so it's such an interesting place to be because we're right at that moment where in my opinion we've we've reached the TAM of individuals who like really care about self- sovereignty and they care about their self-custody and they care about their privacy and their ability to transaction transact with peers directly and they care about that enough like they're just over the threshold to where they're willing to open their laptop and like download MetaMask and and use this.

14:38 But I think really to grow beyond that, we've got to make a fundamental shift in like our our go-to market or like, you know, the experience, how we're able to reach users. And I think we start to hit up on a lot of resistance there. One of them being like just straight up regulatory resistance. And of course, like if you want to get into the app store now, you've got to, you know, be compliant with Apple and and make them happy and all of this stuff.

15:01 But another one of these is just UX, right? And I think there's a few. Absolutely. So, I definitely want to talk about the the role as a service, but even before that, there's a lot of interesting things changing, like you said, at the at literally the the chain level at at the Ethereum level and the the client level that are affecting what this UX ultimately ends up looking like at the top of the stack and how it's achieved technically.

15:23 So with respect to specifically like the the relayer service that you guys have, how is this changing at all with the introduction of 7702 or or some of these other upgrades that are happening? What what does that look like today? So our relay is currently 4337 fully compatible and we have Infinex and we have Courtyard, which is one of my favorite projects.

15:48 I think that they really nailed the user experience and now we also made it compatible with 7702 and what we are still trying to figure it out is how do we even make it easy for you to start right it's like what if you don't even have to go into our dashboard and create an API key how can we make it is extremely easy for you to start to sponsor transactions on testness and start to build your own your user journey so there we try to partner with providers so in this case We partner with our friends of dynamic.

16:19 They're a wallet as a service provider and then we're trying to to build this experience that then we demo to our customer to show them what is feasible right and of course that we have a big advantage here because most of the time we run the rollup for those customers as well and we can deploy the services colloccated on the same regions.

16:39 So the performance you will get through our the combination of our relay or web three functions and RaaS is is is hard to match right and then when it comes to games or perp DEXs that's where we see the big difference. Yeah and you guys are well now I think all the perp DEXs they're trying to catch up and they're trying to have like UX feature parody.

17:01 I think Hyperliquid was it was an kind of a disruptor in the UX side and I think that's what fed a lot of their hyperrowth. Are there any apps that you look at like a Hyperliquid that you you just see like cuz I imagine as a person working in product in in Gelato you're probably looking at a lot of the UX's and studying a lot of the UXs.

17:23 Did you look at Hyperliquid and and say like, "Wow, this is an experience we need to be able to support for every other application like what what sort of stood out to you about that experience?" Yeah, definitely. But I also mentioned Courtyard is a customer of us and they have this experience. They basically are tokenizing cards like a Pokemon cards or baseball cards.

17:44 And to be honest, it's the best experience that I seen so far. you never realize that this is about crypto. you don't see a transaction, you don't have it's like it's full abstracted. so that that's on the top of my list. I still have to find a better experience than Courtyard, but we do also have Infinex that they are building a powerful wallet using our gelato services where the experience is also super smooth with pass keys.

18:14 Or RAD which is also a perp DEX which they are targeting a different set of customers is not may not be for web 2.0 but they are optimizing for other things right so at the end of the day when I also evaluate user experiences I try to understand what are they trying to target right because not everybody needs or want to have this web 2.0 no experience because that's not their user, right?

18:40 You may be targeting just enterprises and then the whole experience is different and users need to bring a BitGo or a Fortify or a Fireblocks into your chain because that's how your customers are operating. So definitely there are a lot of nuances and intricacies there. But yeah, Hyperliquid, they did an amazing job there and I think that they they set the bar.

19:02 I'm happy to see that because now it's one of the reason that most likely now when we are talking with many projects, new projects, they are just starting from there. It's like okay the bar is here we need to meet the bar here then we need to innovate on top of that. Yeah. And of course so you guys are constantly trying to figure out well how do we get I mean I guess your ideal is like how do we get literally every application to that level of experience?

19:26 What is it that's that's missing that you guys saw? I think you know maybe this even leads into the the RaaS that you guys are working on. What pieces of the stack do developer teams need to get to that end experience? I think that there are two phases, right? One is the phase when the teams are starting to build and they are starting to collect what are all these pieces of infrastructure that we need to put together and this is where I'm really spending a lot of time on making things easier for them.

19:54 So for example, you're launching your chain, most likely you will need oracles, you may need an indexer, you will need a an explorer, of course, a bridge, etc. But for some of those things like if you want inter but you want layer zero, you're going to take you a few months, right? So how can we make it happen literally in one click?

20:14 So we do have all this concept of one click deploy pieces of infrastructure that we are building. And the key for us now is how do we make it happen fast? So you need oracles on your chain. How do we make it happen now? Right? So you do one click you deploy your chain and you have oracles already there.

20:33 So we didn't want to go into oracles ourselves but here we partner for example with chaos and stor and we make sure that they are deployed on every single rollup where we are. We build an interface for our customers where they can go and say I just want it price push into my chain every five seconds or if this threshold is met and with two clicks you have your chain with oracles and like that we are simplifying all these moving pieces that we are observing that this developer needs right because that's the first phase we cannot think about how do we optimize the journey we we we are facing developers waiting for four weeks for one of providers to deploy on their chain.

21:15 So that's the low hanging fruit for us. This is where we really want to push the developer experience and and be sure that you go to gelato and you get everything or if we cannot provide it to you, we will connect you with the best partners in the industry like for example dynamic when it come to wallet as a service.

21:30 Yeah. And then is where we start to work with them on okay what problems do you want to try to solve now that are not even feasible because the infrastructure is not there because we don't supported or for example when we work with the mega e theme and we want we try to deploy our services there it's like oh now we have a millisecond blocks and maybe our web3 functions have to be adapted to that and support to that.

21:53 So we have to catch up and do some catch up also with our infrastructure that now suddenly is extremely efficient. So it is a combination of what customers are doing, what other participant in the industry industry like me are doing that are also pushing you to innovate and to to improve your services. Definitely speaking of like partners and integrations like how does how do you or like Gelato go about finding those like best teams to work with and also for like other builders in the space that think they might be compatible to work with Gelato like how can they go about you know getting in touch with the team I guess.

22:28 Yeah, definitely. That's actually my small kingdom. I I usually are the one that is like constantly looking for for new providers that can just improve our offering, right? So, we are we are quite opinionated. We we we try to work with the best. Mhm. but we have a marketplace that is opening the our website and we are constantly looking for what are those new providers innovating that we can partner and definitely help our customers, right?

23:02 Because at the end of the day, we all want the same. We want our customers to have the best all the tools for them to succeed. Yeah. So reach out to me. Happy to talk to you. I talk to at least two or three teams per week. sometimes things doesn't that doesn't align because of timelines or because priorities or because we already have a preferred partner.

23:21 But always happy to talk with teams. Yeah, of course. And I mean this that's exciting because it comes it becomes a pretty hefty network advantage that you guys have once you have all of the best options and you have the partnerships in place to spin up a chain and you automatically have Pyth. Maybe you automatically have a a chain link.

23:41 Maybe you automatically have I mean you could take this really to the extent of you want to spin up an entire ecosystem. You could spin up a chain that has like an entire DeFi ecosystem with all the primitives already right there. You could have an a right there. You could have a native stable coin from from day one.

23:57 You can have like a layer zero, you know, all this stuff. So, I think that's that's really powerful. And I actually I actually personally didn't even really know that you guys were getting into the rollups as a service until recently. So, I mean, you said you started on this about a year ago. What was the shift? What was the what were the signs that made you guys go and say like this is we're going to go all in on this.

24:20 This is the next product that we're going to start working on. There were definitely enough signs in the industry that this was a topic that it was not just temporarily but there are clear signs that at this stage the industry growth then if you have an application with enough users you will need your own block space right you are not want to you don't want to we are talking about user experience here and you don't want to offer a worse user experience or your users because the network that you chose is congested right there's no need for that and I think that the critical point was also when we understand when we understood that users at the end of the day they don't care much right it's like this is a rollup L2 and

25:02 L an L1 or L3 as long as I can use a tool that is great for me it gave me purpose it add me value it's enough right and we are seeing this trend now and actually there was a great post that we published yesterday there is this whole controversy on L1 and the canonical bridge and how secure is that this L2s and how funds are flowing into L2 and if you go basically to L2BEAT which is basically this place where you can see the the source of truth of how these rollups are functioning and the security models of the rollups you can observe that for for big rollups like base for example maj majority of the the liquidity is not going through the canonical bridge by form partners like across right and then if

25:49 You are the majority of the assets are bridged through Across then you're not secured by the canonical bridge then doesn't make sense for you to be a rollout you're just a sovereign rollup right it's like so that proves that at the end of the day what matter is the user the the user experience users don't care and is user don't cares if this is an L1 or a L2 or how many sequencers or or validators are there as long it is secure and that gave us the confidence to go all in into rollups and I think that fast forwarding now it's like it was a great decision.

26:23 We are running more than 50 rollups and 30 more coming soon. We have ink from Kraken, one of the big ones of course, but then we have across the board, right? We we we have rhea which is a perp DEX we have list which is another general purpose chain. many games. So definitely we believe in the world where every app will have their own block space.

26:49 Yeah, there will be many flavors and shapes of rollups. There won't be a orbit or OP. This is expanding. Super rollups is definitely a growing topic and if you want to offer the best experience, you will choose that. Yeah, it's becoming more and more like you want to be able to customize your environment to fit exactly what your application needs.

27:09 Some applications need like you said like tons of box space. Some of them need like really really fast time to finality or at least like soft finality. So yeah, it definitely just makes sense to be able to control that environment for your applications specifically, especially as we start to get into a place where like pushing the limits of what we can do with with blockchains and L2s.

27:31 I mean, it's actually it's it's good timing that we we had this today because I think just recently there was that game on base which like they're saying it like crash base or whatever. but I think it's a great example of like why you brought up like you don't want to share your block space with the network.

27:48 You want to be able to control that yourself as some applications grow to a certain scale and have a certain complexity. They have these needs. Do you think that if I don't even know what the the name of the game is, but do you think that if they had like a you know maybe like a a custom rollup from from Gelato, could they have supported this this scale?

28:08 Absolutely. We have planans that is doing I don't remember the number of trans transactions they are again they are very fun game and they have tons of users so definitely there is evidence for that but I also wanted to add when you was talking about customizations I think that rollas will also enable institutions to finally come in because now I don't have to have a risk of sharing the block space on a chain with fans that Maybe I don't want my application to touch but I can have my own rollup which is of a compliance KYC KY whatever type of setup you want is already feasible and we are running some of them stealth mode but extremely bullish on that I think that institutions are finally coming and many of them are exploring it

29:02 Takes time right it's like those those decisions are usually takes a few even a few years where they build and test and then they they go live but it is happening. So rollers I think that are going to be key on that. Yeah that that is really exciting. So yeah, that level of customization obviously with a little bit of tweaking to the the underlying how do you persist to the the data layer, you can just have the sequencer impose any kind of validations that you need to be compliant and require AML, KYC, stuff like this.

29:37 So I think that's another really big unlock and I think you're you're absolutely right. It's like these institutions, even if they're fine with like sharing their block space and all this other stuff that comes along with being on a public network, they literally cannot be because they have to be able to like validate who's able to use their transactions and their their applications and stuff like this or even maybe even use their the network that they own on.

30:00 I mean really the regulatory framework there is kind of like a black box to me. Yes, I think that there will be could be that the uptake that we are seeing on interest for institution is also because okay US also shifted toward being more pro pro crypto and regulations should come out soon and and that will basically unlock hopefully the institutional adoption because definitely is is going to elevate the whole industry 100%.

30:29 Yeah. And I think if there is a way to to make it happen where these institutions are coming on and they're sort of adding on their surface area into the composability of DeFi and they're like if it's even possible in a in a regulatory environment to have that capital composed with DeFi, I think that will be extremely meaningful for for the rest of the industry to be able to have, you know, maybe some kind of an inter interoperability with whatever their app chains look like, etc.

30:59 But I mean from somebody who's like kind of on the the cutting edge of interfacing with some some of these institutions is there anything that you could say about like what is important to them? What are they looking to to build towards? Definitely compliance. Yeah. So being to able to run a chain that is compliance with different type of regulations depending where the organization is from and the local regulations and legislation.

31:26 That's the the first topic and then customizations customizations at the chain level regarding especially regarding how this can scale right because these institutions of course they're coming with the mindset that they will grow it right they want to scale it up so is this really going to scale and how are you going to scale it and what are the opportunities there so this is where we see a big opportunity for ABC which is our sovereign framework because it's something that we build in house and we can customize or we can enable that customization layer that other frameworks for example cannot do.

32:08 Yeah. for many reasons, right? For example, we saw lately that OP decided to deprecate the custom gas token support which was a key component for many of the projects and then I think that because they want to be more Ethereum aligned and then of course that leaves an opportunity in the market as well. So it will be depend the type of depending the type of institution but definitely there is a difference here between cryptonative projects that they will for example care about being part of the super chain while institution is like why would they care about that right so it's like they just need a technology that they know that they can maybe modify our own in the future because it's open source right that can be compliant with all the the regulations and then

32:56 From there they can go and run all the experiments and start to build their own products. Definitely. Yeah, we do have sorry, we do have experience working with the institutions. We've been running a rollup for Fox Media for quite some time. And what I really like that use case is because it's not about money. It's not about sent what Fox was basically trying to do.

33:22 They were trying to hash content and push it on chain so everybody can validate if a piece of content was tempered. Yeah. And yeah, guess what? You cannot do that on Ethereum because every piece of content will be I don't know five dollars maybe at some point 100 bucks hopefully if gas goes the price also goes up.

33:40 So they needed their own block space. They on boarded other publishers like the New York Times. So I really like that use case. I think that we will see more of those ones institutions just adopting blockchain because it's a way of doing things that you cannot do today on a trustless manner. Yeah. So really happy about this use case.

34:00 I hope that we can see more of that. Yeah, that's an incredibly interesting one, especially because as AI is like increasingly powerful in terms of like just replicating like media that you really can't even tell if it's real or fake. Like this is starting to become and maybe that was even the impetus for them starting to do this.

34:20 I don't know. But I can imagine this is going to be like that's really the tool that we have to combat AI and being able to verify this stuff on chain. So I can imagine that's going to have like pretty good product market fit with the rest of the media industry. So you mentioned institutional players are coming in they have a lot of considerations like obviously compliance and everything like this and they want to you know probably run their tests and they're slowly building in in the dark in the shadows.

34:46 They're building some some magnificent use cases for this technology. I was interested is are they have have any teams been like particularly worried or curious about like the cyber security implications or like have they you know like brought in their own teams to look at like hey how does this stuff what is the risk model of these chains what is the risk model of these applications are they even interested in ensuring their chains and ensuring the assets that they have there like what what are the some of the concerns that you've heard there all of them and many more so you guys are in the security space so you you you know and all of these conversations takes a lot of time.

35:28 Yeah. But and I'm pretty sure that they do many more checks internally that we are not aware of. of course security it is one of the main concerns but it's also true that we we are seeing first is we are exploring right what are the capabilities what can we do here is this is a good fit what are the commitments and can we just try and then when you really are ready to go live is when you do all this scrutinity right we saw with Kraken when we've been working with them for for more than a year right before they finally launched the before they launch inc with us.

36:06 So different phases on the journey of launching a rollup especially for institutions where it takes time but yeah definitely security it is one of the key topics. Yeah, that's incredibly interesting. And I'm I'm particularly interested to see if where it goes in the sense that maybe these institutional players want all of their DeFi to be insured. And like if you're going to have smart contracts, you're going to have smart contract risk and you're going to have the risk of some kind of a smart contract level exploit.

36:35 You could have the risk of some kind of chain level exploit or like some like super long reorg or something like this. I'm interested to see like what kind of compliance is is made standard for the traditional financial world. Like are they going to want it insured? Are they going to want you know some of these things?

36:52 So we we'll see how that sort of plays out. yes I think that we will see those that playbook in the next 12 to 18 months right we start to see this adoption from institution most likely we will come out with those okay this these are the steps this is what have to be checked that would also be beneficial for the rest of the industry yeah yeah I mean well that's the thing if they establish like here's what is compliant for us here's here's the cyber security practices and systems that we're trusting with trillions of dollars ultimately hopefully then you know the rest of DeFi can take that and I mean if we can all share in that procedure and get like the P get the hack rate to like a P99.99999 that's where we

37:40 Need to be to be able to to scale this. So, yeah, definitely interesting. Are getting smarter and smarter and they get access to to to all the tools and they use just the tools to to get to find more opportunities. So, yeah, definitely that's a hard one to to beat, but I'm optimistic as you. I hope that we can bring it close to zero.

38:01 Yeah, we've we've got to I mean, really that's it's imperative for us to be able to take this technology to really where it can be. Like I mean obviously there's the UX constraints, there's the regulatory constraints, and then the cyber security constraints as well, but we just we've got to solve all three of those. I think they're all getting solved at the same time, which is really exciting where we're at right now.

38:23 Yeah, definitely a lot of progress. Yeah, 100%. So yeah, I actually didn't know that you guys were behind the the Ink. chain deployment. I know they launched with USDT0 initially on the chain. Were you guys involved at all in in that partnership there on getting that onchain? I won't be able to go into the details on that because I was not involved, but most likely we have to support on our side.

38:48 But this is not something that we drive. Yeah. Because I mean it is something that depending on your use case, what you want to spin up, you are going to want like some kind of a a native stable coin on the chain to help bootstrap the the the DeFi economy there. And is that something that you guys are thinking of offering like right off the jump is like partnering with one of these crosschain stable coins?

39:10 Yes, we do actually have already a few partners on that front. especially when it comes to native yield that allows you basically when users are bridging USDC for example y under the hood it gets pushed into a pooling on any protocol right and then users can earn while holding the stable coin in your rollup. We definitely saw a lot of interest on that model.

39:36 I don't really know if there is a chain with that on production. We do have a few of our customers already using it but not to the extent where every single asset goes through this model. There are a few partners there that are that are quite helpful to enable this for any rollup and you can really get a roll up with native yield extremely easy I would say with a few clicks.

39:57 So it is a model that we see. Yeah. Do you see really any other competitors in your space that are also sort of tackling this problem of spinning up L2 spinning up ecosystems in in like one click? There are definitely competitors. There are really good and tough competitors out there. Alchemy joined the party last year at the end of the year and of course that Alchemy brings with them all the good practices and and all the bundling opportunities that they have with all the rest of the services that they have.

40:28 But conduit caldera they're also OG's on the rollup ecosystem. So those are I will say the main competitors that we have at this stage. Yeah. And like from working on the product side, what kind of KPIs and like metrics do you guys measure to see like where you guys are standing in relation to some of the other offerings?

40:50 What are you guys trying to improve specifically? What do those look like internally? So internally what the main KPI or what we really care about is we've been running now change for more than a year. That means that those contracts are being renewed, right? And it's like are these customer sticking with us? Are are we helping these customers also to be able to survive right because we are seeing this trend of many cast many projects launching their own rollups but most likely at some point some of those rollups are going to die right and I don't think that we are prepared for that like how do you win down a chain what do you do with all the assets that are on that chain so this is actually that we also take care and we

41:33 Try to work with the teams on how do we make your chain profitable right how can we configure your chain. Can we change the block time? Can we change can we work with different alternative DS to make the cost of running your chain as low as possible so you are profitable? You have a chance you you can get enough time to bootstrap liquidity and uses on your chain.

41:52 So definitely that's the main one. It's like the renewal the the stickiness of our customers because that means that we are doing our job. We are helping them. we are bringing all the moving parts that they need to build. And of course then is okay how how how do we fit in the industry right it's like there are different flavors some some competitors are focusing on different type of technologies we are mostly focused of course only EVM and now all in into sovereign rollups with ABC which we do believe that is the future so tracking also there on how where the industry is going as well yeah and with your sovereign rollups is that EVM obviously it's EVM M compatible.

42:36 Do you support other languages for smart contracts or is it just EVM? Is EVM compatible? the only big difference here is is customizable. So you can do things that you cannot do on with other stacks. For example, we been running ABC chains with 7702 now for a few months, right? So basically customer have already been building on top of it leveraging these EIPs that are not in production yet for other stacks but you can get it and then you have the benefit of not being not having an enshrined bridge to any settlement layer then therefore you your cost of running your chain is lower because you don't have to pay a tax.

43:19 Yeah, which is not needed because as we already described at the end of the day, nobody use the canonical bridge. You don't want to wait seven days, right? This is ridiculous. Usually going to use a Across or any other protocol that allow you to go in and out on a few seconds and then you don't need for that reason you don't need a canonical bridge.

43:38 Then therefore rollups is a compelling solution for most of the projects out there. Yeah. is the goal to get as many different kind of projects onto their own sovereign roll up and continue to get that feedback and improve. What is like the the near-term goal for you guys? What are you working on right now? Well, I don't think that every single project needs their own block space at least not now.

44:01 At least. Yeah. Yeah. It's not just a matter of pushing them to run their own roll app. They may not need it now. But that's where we come with other services that we have like relay and web three functions or oracles that they may also need on other roll apps right on other chains that may not be our roll apps and a few more services that we are working on on secret that we will soon release that basically satisfy those needs that we're constantly finding.

44:30 Yeah, I think that this is one of the best things of working on the industry which is we work extremely close with the developers. We know what they are doing. As you mentioned before, there are a lot of opportunities out there. It's like we're constantly battling to decide what what things do we should not do, right? Because like there are so many opportunities that actually we are now going through the process of planning the Q Q2 and it's like okay, how do we cut?

44:56 What things do we we don't want to prioritize now? So definitely we will have a lot of things going out this quarter. Yeah. And and how do you separate the signal from the noise with like determining like this is where the deep value is that we actually want to invest in and provide value to developers versus this is more of just like a nice to have.

45:16 How do you sort of delineate that? Yeah, I think that I will I leverage a lot of the founders here. they've been in the industry for many many years and and and they able to read things that I maybe miss. But for example, a good example is ZK, right? Everybody talk about ZK and ZK rollups that ZK is not ready.

45:34 It's still extremely expensive. Most of the ZKs are just TEE under the hood. therefore, we made the decision at some point last year of not working with any ZK stack and it was kind of gut decision and internal information on how the industry and the technology works, right? while for example all our competitors went into ZK while I don't think that there was a massive adoption right so it is a mix between as you said filtering the noise and the whole marketing hype and what really works and what really customer care about which at the end of the day they just need a blockchain right they need a chain that works that is cheap to run that is secure enough for their purpose that they can customize in the future and they just need

46:19 All of these other services on top of it so that's where we see the opportunity How do we keep building things to make easy the adoption for developers for developers to start and then to scale of course? Yep. Yep. Solid fundamentals just talking to customers seeing what their pain points are working backwards from there and giving them what they need to solve those 100%.

46:43 Sounds easy. Yeah, it sounds easy. Yeah, I guess this is a different direction, but you mentioned, you know, like getting into the space the very first time, the own forks, right? And and all that stuff. And I guess fast forward to today, like all the partners that you're working with, what are you like personally bullish on? What what projects are you are you interacting with nowadays?

47:01 So maybe bias because they are running or they're using one of our services, but Infinex definitely I think that they are building one of the best wallet experiences in the industry. And then maybe I'm guilty because I'm cir just circling on our customers and testing mostly our customers products but oium infinex again big fan of Courtyard and there are a few projects that are coming that are quite excited but still mode so cannot share more.

47:35 Yeah, a lot of interesting stuff in the works. A lot of big UX boosts for a lot of popular DeFi apps today that are just going to get easier to use and of course all that's being powered by Gelato. So really excellent what you guys are are making happen for the rest of the industry. And I was also interested like what do you see as the number one bottleneck for Gelato from where you guys are today to getting to where you want to be with even more projects, even more services powering the greatest web 3 experience.

48:06 You know, maybe even there's like a mobile experience or something like this like what what is the bottleneck to to getting to where you want to be? I will say that what definitely one of the challenge that we are having is with hiring. it's like we would like to do many more things and grow the team way more but we want to keep the bar extremely high.

48:27 Yeah. And we are struggling to to fill some positions especially when we talk about RA developers or smart contract developers and I'm not entirely sure if it is because many people left the industry based on what happened the last 12 months. but we we were expecting to definitely have a different size of team at this stage. Yeah.

48:51 And we we are striking. I would like to hear that's something that you're also seeing on the industry and but definitely as I mentioned before it's like everything is is full of opportunities right so I think that there are no excuses it's just time and we need to execute and we need to be smart what we do and what we don't do.

49:09 I think that at the end of the year the the amount of things that we are going to unlock developers will be able to build really cool stuff. Yeah. So hopefully we get there and we can fill many position so we can get there faster. Absolutely. I think that's one of the hardest parts about building in DeFi is is hiring and building out an organization of people who have the experience.

49:31 Like I mean literally if you want to hire somebody who has like four years of experience in DeFi that that like barely exists like there's a small handful of those people and to be able to find it. It's like typically when you're building a company, if you want to scale really fast, you want to go and you want to find the people that have been there and done that.

49:50 Like they've already, you know, scaled a certain type of product in your vertical, but when you're working on the edge like Gelato is with like a lot of this roll up as a service stuff, like there's nobody who's been there and done that. There's nobody who's gone and, you know, brought this to institutions already and scaled it to 100 million in revenue or anything.

50:09 Like so it's like you you've got to find the people and it's almost like you've got to go more on intuition, more on values than anything to be able to to build an organization to do this kind of stuff that's on the edge. So yeah, definitely hiring is is hard in DeFi. and I think even more so for the for the senior folks especially, you know, from what we've experienced, it is extremely hard to find the right senior more experienced individuals.

50:35 But then once you once you do find them and you get like the the system that's working for you down, then it becomes it becomes a lot a lot easier and and it almost is kind of like a flywheel effect where you get, you know, you can get even more senior people just from having the connections from those people cuz of course they all know each other and yeah, you just get that reputation for for being an amazing place where those experienced folks go to work.

51:01 So I think it it definitely is like it's really hard zero to one and then I think it gets a little bit easier but then of course if you're trying to go to massive scales or you're trying to get to like hundreds of employees that is like really hard that's a really hard problem to solve but so I mean I'm right there with you and I think a lot of the DeFi companies working in DeFi are as well.

51:21 What's your strategy been so far to to try and fill those positions? networking I think events has been a good place for us to to to meet with really interesting people especially when there are those I'm not talking about the big events but more like a design events that are not happening where the big events is happening but it's like some technical events here even in Switzerland in Suri where we can go there and meet developers just building something on the side and those are really the the at least for us at Gelato we have this startup an entrepreneurship mindset where we want people with that kind of with autonomy and ownership agency we want people to join us and be part I don't really think that having the experience in the industry yeah for

52:08 Some roles it matters right but as you said you're not going to find a developer with five years of experience so you just need to find someone that is able to learn fast right someone that's able to learn fast to adapt a generalist probably I'm coming from web 2.0 Right. So definitely I think that is it is feasible but if you want to keep the the bar high then that's when we started to struggle and to me my view is that many people left the industry hope they come back and think that especially with what happened last year at the end of the year with president of US launches their own token and it's like you know it's like for the optics for my web 2.0 friends that are working on Facebook or Google, it's

52:53 Like, "Oh guys, what's going on with the industry? It's all about like, hey, this is not my industry, right? This is not what we do. This is something that happens in the blockchain, but we don't do that, right? We don't launch tokens and then I don't think that is a good image, right? If you are looking to change your career or to explore something new, unless you're very curious like us and you end up in the rabbit hole of DeFi and you understood from the outside, you see what's happening and it's like, okay, maybe it's not the time."

53:18 And then AI happened and a lot of people pivot to AI or they decided to go to AI and that took a big pool of talent as well. but definitely to grow the industry we need talent. So I I think that we need to do better here to convince people to to join us. Absolutely. No, it's so unfortunate that that side of crypto is like only what gets covered in the media.

53:43 Like that's like exclusively what they talk about is like the the coins and the price and the charts and the meme coins and like all the stuff with Libra. Oh man, it's like just a Yeah, my my president didn't help a bit with all of this drama. So yeah, of course. yeah, I don't even know what what that situation is, but yeah, it's just unfortunate.

54:06 I think the in the entrance of institutions though, I think it's signaling a change. I think it's like it's the beginning of some news that's not related to price, right? It's news of like utility that could actually reach the broader audience of people who are not already, you know, in DeFi, they don't see all these things being built sort of in the dark.

54:27 But when it does come out that, hey, JP Morgan has built an entire settlement layer, you know, using, you know, some kind of a a rollup maybe from Gelato. but yeah, I think that's the kind of news that will that will start to shift us away from this like memecoin craze. At least I hope. So, we'll see if that happens.

54:47 But, more on like the the hiring side, where if anybody's listening and and they're interested, they see the vision of what you guys are building and they want to join in, where should we send them? Do you guys have like a page for for job listings? Yes, absolutely. gelato.netcareers. We have a bunch of roles opens across many departments, engineering, product, BD, account management.

55:14 I think that we are we are looking for people across the whole organization. So you can also reach out to me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Happy to to connect. Of course. Yeah, we'll have all of those down below. So if anybody's interested in, you know, working on I mean really you guys have a lot of different work that somebody could come in and contribute to.

55:33 You've got everything like VRF to the relayer service to rollups as a service. So it seems like somebody can come in and if they're interested in multiple parts of the stack and multiple parts of like what goes on technologically under the hood, they can have an opportunity to explore all those layers. So I think that to me is honestly like a big advantage that you guys have and also all the cool teams that you guys get to work with.

55:56 I mean you guys are working with some of the coolest D5 products that are out there today. We have more than 600 projects building using our services. So I think that most of them at some point they touch one of our services and you you get to work with them. I I I get to talk to them once a while.

56:13 We have telegram with them and you learn what they are working on and it's like it's it's fascinating. It's definitely the best part is when you talk to them, you understand what are the problems and you start to connect the dots and you and you uncover opportunities. definitely I'm like super excited about that right like we are on the moment we're still so well I know that this is repeated and repeated but like we are still so early there are so many things to be done so definitely if you are looking to jump into the industry Gelato is a good place yeah dude it's awesome to see like all the value that you guys are providing to to the developer teams and then that gets leveraged into all the work that the developer teams are

56:54 Doing to provide value to the end users like I must imagine like I don't I don't know if you guys track this at all, but the amount of people that have used your services through all of your like client applications must be like like 80% of DeFi or something. So that's like that's pretty exciting. You guys have like the distribution, you have the usage there.

57:15 So if anybody's looking to come and contribute to that, definitely go and and check out the careers page there. And then of course if anybody wants to if they happen to be interested in running like a rollup as a service or any of the other products that you guys offer anywhere we should send them just check out gelato.net network.

57:32 Gelato.net network. If you really want to launch a rollup you can do by yourself. it literally takes two or three clicks depending the configuration that you want and you have your rollup running in five minutes. That's something crazy that we did this year. We were okay the the average industry to launch a rollup is 20 minutes or 30 minutes depending and we say what if we just make it faster.

57:56 There is not any benefit, right? At the end of the day, you launch your roll up, you can wait 20 minutes, right? It's a one time thing, but why not? Let's let's let's make it faster. Let's remove all the complexity. Let's push the limits and you can launch your rollup in less than five minutes. So definitely worth to try and then just yeah happy to talk reach out to us on Twitter or Telegram.

58:18 We are always constantly talking with many developers that sometime they are just looking for some advice, right? and they ended up going with a different provider, but they just want to chat with us. and we love to do that. That's excellent, dude. Five minutes is is crazy time to value, huh? Very low. No excuses to launch your own rollup.

58:35 Yeah, it only takes five minutes and a couple of clicks. Well, that's awesome, dude. Is there anything else that you guys want to draw attention to? Anything else to discuss before we wrap it up here? I think that we cover a lot of topics. Well, dude, once again, thank you so much for for hopping on. I think amazing conversation.

58:53 Learned about all the all the different areas that you guys are tackling and some of the coolest projects that you guys are on boarding and and helping them build. I mean to be honest there's a lot of stuff that you guys are doing that I didn't I didn't even realize that you guys were partaking in like Ink.

59:08 That was a huge launch. So I mean first of all like congrats on getting that to production. I'm sure you guys have some some even bigger stuff in the pipeline. So definitely excited to see that coming out in the coming months. But yeah, dude, thank you so much for for hopping on and it was a great chat.

59:22 Thank you for having me.