Sovereign: Low-Latency Rollups and Better Onchain UX

0:00 And here we are with another episode of the permissionless podcast brought to you by Guardian. And we're going deep on every episode. We're talking with DeFi founders, contributors to DeFi protocols to figure out how did they find their way into the DeFi landscape, what initially got them in, what initially got them building, where they are today, what they're building towards, and of course, what keeps them up at night.

0:23 Today, we had a really insightful conversation with Cem from Sovereign. Sovereign is an L2 SDK. They've done a ton of R&D on building and deploying performant low time to soft finality L2 chains on which apps can build. You can spin out your own app chain. And really, they're here to address the issue of scalability and latency for blockchains and Ethereum in general.

0:48 And in this conversation, we went really deep on what does it mean to bring crypto and blockchain UX to the rest of the world and expand beyond the user base that we have today. We look at some of the UX constraints and where those are really pinpointed from in the technological stack and how this is now being alleviated today and what the next goalpost is to get to now that we've reached this sort of singularity point where we have chains that have very low time to finality or at least time to soft finality and we've solved the problem of block space.

1:19 So of course much more on that in just a second. Before we dive in, my name is Owen. I founded Guardian over 3 years ago and we started off based on the premise that DeFi would consume trillions of dollars of assets and we set out to build the security audit solution that would allow teams to ship in an environment where they have trillions of dollars at risk.

1:40 We use two competing audit teams and a dedicated fuzzy engineer to perform in intense adept fuzzing on the smart contracts and really many projects get an audit and are subsequently hacked and this is why we have the guardian model here today to provide a new tier of security and confidence. Today we've achieved this standard necessary with already over $10 billion in smart contracts secured by Guardian.

2:06 Really now it's just time for DeFi to catch up. And now without further ado, let's dive in to this conversation with Cem from Sovereign. Yeah, Cem, happy to to have you with us today and excited to learn more about everything you guys are building, the the research R&D that you guys are doing and how you're bringing Sovereign to market and helping on board more and more builders to this infrastructure to really unlock a new type of product in the DeFi space that probably we we did not have access to before.

2:41 But yeah, I mean really happy to get started. Maybe we can just talk about like how did you even find yourself into this sort of niche of building out this infrastructure for roll-ups? like how did you even get into the roll-up side in the first place? Yeah, first of all, thank you so much for having me Owen and Brendan.

2:58 Feels like it's going to be a fun combo. so I guess I will just give you the whole gist of like hopefully it's not too long but how I got into crypto and how I got got interested in all of this because it all kind of ties together. Right around the time as I was trying to find software engineering jobs in college, I was looking around and this random company called ConsenSys was the only firm that would give me an interview because I switched to computer science super late, had no tech background and like they were like I gave them like a few like cool ideas to like hack on.

3:32 They're like okay just like come like you seem like it was the most relaxed interview process I've ever been part of. They also seemed like they were working on like pretty cool things. Their website was super cool. So I like understood that the tied to Bitcoin and like I had used Bitcoin in the past to buy stuff off some websites and like I was excited about that.

3:56 So I joined I came in and like right right as I started they gave us this like Bitcoin and Ethereum white paper like reading homework basically. And like at school I was extremely excited learning about like internet infrastructure TCP IP and like having understood how fundamentally like that kind of tech like impacts people's lives was like super exciting for me to like study and then like reading the Ethereum white paper and like Bitcoin white paper initially and then Ethereum white paper I had goosebumps and I was like holy this is like be like next actually most like impactful technology ology right now that's questionable with the AI in the mix but who knows maybe in 100 years with settlement having progressed I joined like consensus and I worked at like a app smart contract application

4:51 Like it was like a it's a project called adchain and I worked on with smart contracts enabled bidding on like ads onchain and it was a really interesting idea super fun team one of friends I worked on there is still one of my best but it ultimately didn't go anywhere but by the end of the internship I got interested in like the infrastructure side of Ethereum because was like now conversations about proof of stake about scaling because as I also like built like an application like the the questions that we're dealing with like the infrastructure that we're dealing with felt really weird like everything was extremely slow like the user experience was horrible and I was like okay like before we can actually work on applications and this industry there's clearly like so much of

5:37 A need to work on infrastructure. I I don't know like just as due to probably my personality the moment I got in the industry and noticed this could be the next big thing I kind of took it on myself as like I want to like grow this industry as much as possible. I want to make it as impactful as possible and like it seemed like the actual effort necessary right now is to should be put on infrastructure because that's the bottleneck.

6:02 Mhm. and so I joined like I started reading about Ethereum proof of stake. after college I joined consensus again and quickly moved on to their protocol engineering team like Ethereum 2.0 research had just started and some teams were being formed to prototype potential like clients of this Ethereum 2.0 protocol and Ethereum 2.0 at the time was both a mixture of like proof of stake which is obviously good because like a lot of like the energy waste but it also like focused on scalability which I think like I thought at the time was like the biggest bottleneck and so I was super excited to work on that project.

6:44 I worked on like one of the Java clients on Ethereum of Ethereum it became one of the consensus clients later like later down the line but I felt like I moved away from that project after like Ethereum beacon chain launched like with kind of a little bit of a sadness because I just hadn't been able to work in scalability and was the primary bottleneck in my mind.

7:06 I co-founded like I just got like a really good offer from a connection to like co-ound like a hedge fund, a crypto focused hedge fund and I was like potentially I can make a good amount of money and then use those funds to like invest in infrastructure and like build my own infrastructure startup without any worries. I to be quite honest didn't know like how the VC market worked and like if you had a good idea and a good team like you could that you could like raise.

7:34 So I was like let me do this like hedge fund thing like and so I did it. but after like a year or so of that year and a half I noticed that like with the like Celestia LazyLedger paper like as I was reading Celestia LazyLedger paper that like in terms of scalability the data scaling was pretty much solvable.

7:55 There's no research problems left but mostly saw engineering work and I thought like there should be a lot of rollup focused teams that are building like good infrastructure we should be taking advantage of this as soon as possible to me it seemed like none of the roll-up teams at the time were engineering focused enough there was a lot of teams focused on ZK research there's a lot of teams focused on like the optimistic bridge but I believe that like the right type of like progress in any engineering related field is done is gets done when like research and engineering is like as close to each other as possible.

8:32 Why in the past I hadn't really liked how Ethereum and its like client implementation teams work together. They were like quite far away from each other. And so I I thought that like there's a gap in the market for a company that can combine both research and engineering in a very tight-knit way in a very serious way and like push like infrastructure products in a way that like makes it way easier to build rollups and like basically blockchain based applications that have seamless UX.

9:04 So that that's when I started like Sovereign and like I knew that I couldn't do it I couldn't do it on my own. I didn't like have like the right like research or engineering talent myself, but I knew people that would and so I just like immediately went on like team building mode. that was around like 2022.

9:26 So you've been at Sovereign for a little while now. It's been is it almost 3 years at this point? Yeah, it's almost three years. Yeah. Three years. So, I mean it's really impressive to see all the R&D that's happened in that time and you've also got stuff. I mean it seems like pretty much to market. I think you guys are maybe still like fine-tuning and obviously continuously improving and and doing more research.

9:47 You can always get lower time to finality. You can always get you know faster confirmation stuff like this. But I mean really impressive to see that now you guys are rolling out with like several launch partners like I saw like Bullet and stuff like this which we'll we'll get to and we'll talk about some of the applications of what you guys have worked on.

10:03 But yeah, I mean really awesome to see what you guys have achieved in I think a little under like 3 years at this point. But yeah, I mean bringing it back to the beginning what you said about like you know only like a crypto company would like take you on an intern and just like sure we'll we'll have you on.

10:17 Like I feel like that's one of the beauties of the space is just like, you know, we don't go based on merits. We we don't take anything at at face value. And I mean, even today, I feel it's still the same. It's like we can never really know until like let's just work together and let's just see what it's like.

10:36 Like I mean, we do that even at Guardian when we're onboarding security researchers. It's like we really don't know until you've just worked with our team and and we can really tell like what you're made of. It's hard to predict even based on obviously like like CVS, you're not going to be able to predict who's going to be a security a good DeFi security engineer based on what they did 5 years ago because it's a very low probability that they were doing DeFi security 5 years ago.

11:02 But anyways, yeah, it's something about the space that's always been so attractive that it's so open to anybody who can come in and provide value and there's no barrier to entry in in that way. I mean sort of similarly to how everything is of course permissionless onchain the businesses built on top of them are also in some sense you know they're not gatekeep in in the sense that only folks from Harvard go and work at consensus or like you know whatever like web two sort of sort of alternative there is but yeah so got in by way of we almost never look into CVS hiring more non-technical people that will change but like the thing that we love doing is just going through the person's committed history and like PRs just reading through the code

11:46 It's so much more valuable than like going through the CV or like seeing where someone like worked at that usually just contains no signal almost. Yeah. And I mean also I mean at least in my experience the interview process for web two even on the technical side it's all like algo algorithm like whatever. I can imagine you guys don't have anything like that like we actually do.

12:08 We actually do. Well never mind. Hey, our like I guess like sourcing like or like after we get like recommendations from recruiters, we like look into like the PRs and like the work that like people have done. but then in the we we don't have too many calls but like in one of our like high in like the one call that we do like we basically try to one get we at at least so far we've only hired senior and principal engineers and we try to make sure that like they really understand blockchain protocols that have been built up to date like Bitcoin, Ethereum, any other blockchain of their choosing that like so that we can actually like learn from all of them like Solana like almost every time we're having like some like research

12:50 Or engineering conversation like we will have knowledge or like quickly dig up like oh what does Solana do in this like transaction application case? What does Ethereum do? What does like like Aptos do? Like so that like take all of those and like we can learn and like because like rollup frameworks are at the end of the day again blockchain frameworks.

13:11 They're just blockchains that inherit the security of other blockchains by submitting their data to other blockchains. And so yeah like it's it was very important for us to both have like make sure that like people know or have worked on or actually have worked on other blockchain protocols and then like we have the algorithm question to kind of understand like how how intelligent someone is how quickly can they like through like a lots of complexity and have come up with a simple solution.

13:38 To be quite honest I probably would not be able to pass any of our like like like hiring pipeline like pretty sure I wouldn't be able to. Not a don't give me a dynamic programming question the worst. Exactly. But yeah, I mean you can always tell like once you see it once you can tell exactly like what the good fit looks like.

14:00 Like if somebody comes on and and you're obviously like walking them through I mean I even like to walk us through like you know what our setup is like for you guys like walking through here's our design here is like here's our scaling principles. This is the number one bottleneck we have right now. And when the person almost goes into like consulting mode and they're like, "Have you tried this?

14:19 Have you considered this?" That's very much when you could tell like, "Oh, this is this is going to be a good fit or like this person, they've been there, done that, or they know how to tackle this problem right from the get- go and they're like excited about it from the jump." But yeah, I mean it could it could be really anybody.

14:33 It's not based on the CV like you said. And I mean bringing it back to even before you you jumped into computer science, what was it that made you make that switch? And you said you made it a little bit late. What was kind of the thought process that that went into that way back? From like a very early age.

14:50 I don't I don't remember like when but like or like four or five. I maybe like American culture like media kind of black actually. Yeah. Me, but like I wanted to build a global scale like tech company where I could like innovate or like play with gadgets and like just like push technology forward. That's been like literally like my like dream since I was like four years old, five years old.

15:14 And I lost track of it along the way. Like things like confused me a bit, you know, like you end of high school, like puberty and then college, you kind of get distracted a bit. But then like when I came back to US when I came to US, I noticed how impactful computer science was like and how you could learn it.

15:33 I in Turkey I kind of assume that like you're either like a like programmer by the age of like 14 or not and here I noticed like there's actually like science behind it and you study it and you can become like a good engineer around like software and so like just basically also like the American culture and I guess like the good people that I was surrounded with in university kind of like made me notice that like oh like it's not too late for me I can actually shift back to my like dreams of doing something in tech and like pushing tech forward bringing special like the tech and so like when I noticed that when I noticed it's potentially like in my capabilities I just like made the switch and like got pretty serious

16:17 About it. Absolutely man. Yeah. I mean, it's funny how we we come back to maybe even without realizing what our original like childhood goals and dreams were because I mean, I think you're you're doing exactly that now. It's like building on the forefront of scalability for blockchains is I I don't know. I think that qualifies. I wouldn't qualify it yet.

16:37 If we actually like became a like successful established like business and like then like started growing the blockchain and I'll feel much better. right now. I think like it's still like pure like hustle grind like until we make it. still hungry. I appreciate I appreciate the kind words like regardless. I don't I mean it seems like you guys are are killing it and and there's a lot of exciting stuff going on which we'll we'll we'll get to but yeah I mean really interested to hear like obviously you guys have come to to your solution of like an internet of scalable roll-ups that you know maybe they're all on the same data availability chain or maybe they can even be like cross data availability chain something we can we can get into but how did you

17:19 Sort of come to this as the solution for scalability? maybe walk us through like what were the cuz I'm sure it's not the the only model you've considered. What were some of the reasonings there? So I'll preface by saying that the internet of rollups idea is something that like we have like it's ingrained in our DNA but like our core focus have been since like two and a half years ago since we actually started the engineering work and like stop like pure research and started actually implementing it's been on Sovereign SDK which is our rollup framework and I'll come back to that but like generally the internet of rollups idea which I think is already playing out but in like in a nuanced way is just like the idea A that compute whatever it happens it

18:03 Happens in a bunch of different places it's like it's horizontally scaled. We like went through that in the ' 70s with like the first examples of compute initially like they were being done in mainframe. People were sending their like programs and everything was being executed like the main frame was like doing CPU time sharing between different programs and responding to different users.

18:27 Then people just moved on to like p personal compute or their own servers and like the internet of rollups idea is like just like the same thesis playing out in the blockchain world. I think there's a few reasons like there's an aspect of it from scalability because I guess in one side like you're trying to do all computer on one blockchain J on one blockchain or one computer that just like vertical like scalability has its limits whereas like with like horizontal scaling you can scale almost infinitely and so that's like the general idea but also apart from scalability I think as we built Sovereign SDK and like talked with a lot of customers Like we're also seeing that it's much more than that like the need to have horizontal scaly or like the need to

19:14 Have blockchain different blockchains or different computers for different like use cases. There's much more like psychological and economical reasons. One like application builders want to capture as much as revenue of like the value they create makes complete sense. Entrepreneurs like should be greedy. That's how people are incentivized to create value. And like other thing is like people want to build the best apps they want to build because they want to compete at the highest level they can compete.

19:42 They want the most customization as a result like having their own computer because like if you're running inside Solana blockchain there are certain things that the Solana foundation might change or like the there are limits like to what you can do with your program inside the SVM. Also, if you're trying to be like a really competitive DeFi teams like churn out products one after another, you're like building something with the SVM takes a lot of effort.

20:07 Same goes with like EVM and like you're fighting with like solidity a bit but generally like just like even beyond scalability there's a lot of value in like for scalability there's a lot of value too but also beyond scalability for these reasons there's a lot of value in like having this internet of blockchains. Yeah. I think that like Yeah.

20:25 Yeah. So having the the customizability, the granularity for teams that are basically building out their own app chain or their own maybe ecosystem to be able to control and also take ownership over their own security trade-offs because again there is there are considerations with like time to finality, time to confirmation and all of these things. send it.

20:46 For one application, it might make sense to have like near instantaneous and then for another application obviously you know that could be much different depending on on what the optimize application is going to be. And for what you're seeing in the marketplace today, what are you seeing as like the most in demand type of use case? So obviously I think you guys are launching with bullet is like an order book based app chain or something like this with EVM apps built on top of it or something maybe SDM I'm actually not familiar but what is it mostly order books what are you seeing what's what's the demand for a a rollup on your your SDK I'll like specifically talk about like bullet and is it a markets team who who have built bullet and like

21:30 The goals of bullet and why they're using Sovereign SDK but then we can like talk generally about so bullet is a trading avenue like DeFi Avenue trading avenue for people like trading on Solana. because like one thing that like the Zeta markets team have experienced as they were building their like previous derivatives exchange on Solana was that due to Solana block times their market makers were constantly losing money.

21:58 Price discovery was happening elsewhere and as a result like market makers like almost always had like stale orders that would then like could get snatched by people that are doing the CEX arbitrage and as a result incentivizing like market makers were likely super costly for them or they could just did not want to pay that cost. They they had like very little number of market makers.

22:23 And what happens is that like if you are can make market makers happy, you don't have enough liquidity. If you don't have enough liquidity, that the spreads just like grow so much and like the user experience for like the end users like retail institutionals like trading on chain is just horrible. Making market makers happy is like crucial for anyone building trading like products on chain.

22:47 And I think like trading products on chain is probably like the most successful or like most revenue generating like category of blockchain applications so far. And there's clearly like they clearly have a gap to their like centralized counterparts. But it's a type of like engineering gap that can be fixed and that we've been like very laser focused on fixing for the past year and a half like two or so.

23:09 And so one of the primary goals of like Zeta's like Zeta markets bullet was to get as low latency as possible and like add like other like special like features to make their like market makers happy and like to like incentivize as much liquidity possible as on their platform. That's why like Sovereign SDK like leveraging Sovereign SDK soft confirmations they're able to get P90 of like 5 milliseconds or so and we recently lowered the P99 which was like something that we've been working on for a for a while to like down to like 20 milliseconds.

23:46 So that means like 99% of like your transactions are hitting they are being completed like 20 25 milliseconds. Yeah. should give market makers like a lot of confidence to be able to trade on like Zeta without know like knowing that like their orders if they act act fast like like won't be susceptible to be snatched by other like CEX-DEX arbitrage y that price discovery can actually happen on bullet so yeah like that's like basically goal of bullet like taking advantage of like the high performance low latency of like Sovereign SDK and also like we work with like the Zeta team very close to you bunch of different things like they for example have they're able to use Solana addresses and so they're like customers although it's like a custom state machine kind of like

24:40 Hyperlquid it has Solana addresses so like the Solana users can use like the phantom wallets and they get the same like UX basically they see the same address yeah so like they als also like use preview in the background like they have to click the sign flow. so it actually just feels like a Binance feel and like it's actually run on chain and it will be run with optimistic rollup security and it's a roll up on Solana.

25:07 So hopefully we've built like something that like is really fun for users and like profitable for traders like profitable for market makers. That's what like bullet is and it's we're very happy that like a very high domain knowledge and expertise team like Zeta Markets incredible founders. I feel very lucky to like work with like Tristan and Mo at like such a close level and we learned so much from them.

25:33 We're very happy that like they're one of our ear like earliest customers. Yeah, definitely. There's so much we could talk about there and I'm sure you learned a lot from working closely with them and seeing like oh actually we're going to need to change this aspect of it or sort of you know that sort of user learning journey as you you actually bring the research and the R&D and and actually meld that with an actual like market application.

26:01 So there's there's a lot we could we could dive into there but also just touching on technically. So you mentioned like you've got your your P90 down to 5 milliseconds. That's pretty wild. And the the P99 down to like 20 milliseconds. And so just to be clear, this is for like soft confirmations by the sequencer. Is that correct?

26:19 Yes, that's correct. And we also just like our sequence our soft confirming sequencer was bottlenecked by like a state root calculation. We unnecessarily duplicated the state root calculation both on the sequencer and the full node. We removed that from the sequencer. So basically move that out of the critical path and we're also now like seeing around 400 TPS on the soft confirming sequencer.

26:40 We know that our full node like performance is about like 5k TPS or so. So we'll slowly be picking up like the low hanging fruits in terms of like improving the soft confirming sequencer but that's still already I think I see. So taking more off of the sequencer and pushing it further back into you know when you're starting to batch up and then commit.

26:59 I guess like the soft confirming sequencer just did not does not need to like calculate the state root. The state is only relevant when bridging and like bridging happens in an asynchronous fashion in like blockchains rollups and so like we had unnecessary like we since we tried to use like the same code base across across the full node and sequencer to like not duplicate the amount of effort we we had to like make like sequencer was unnecessarily calculating the state which we just removed and so in this way we're seeing way less latency and way higher throughut I see.

27:35 Very cool. And then in terms of bridging you mentioned, is there an L1 to L2 bridge naturally or like what does that look like? So, we're integrating Hyperlane. we're in like the pretty like late phases of that integration and honestly that's one of like the last pieces before like Zeta Markets like bullet becomes production ready. So the Hyperlane I the Hyperlane bridging like protocol is already deployed on like almost all the chains I can think of including Solana and so like it's with a Hyperlane so integration and like a Hyperlane module deployed on bullet and people will be able to bridge back and forth between bullet and Solana bullet between Arbitrum ethereum base in a pretty seamless fashion obviously like Hyperlane is pretty modular in terms of like security.

28:33 You can either like depending on the security module you plug into you can get multi security or like ZK fro security or full on ZK proof security. that's up to the like the app developers. Yeah, I think Brendan you want to say something? I was going to say overall like this is very sophisticated but most importantly like efficient trading product that you're powering, right?

28:57 And just like from a personal perspective, you know, like getting into ETH in the early days where we're paying, you know, quite a lot of money to send a transaction through on mainet. Like what's your perspective on being able to power like infrastructure like this versus back in the day? Like is the dream realized? Like we have a lot more to go like Yeah.

29:13 What's your perspective on that? I mean, it's extremely like extremely exciting. Like one of the first times I like played it on with their test net, I was like, "Holy this is an onchain product. it's unbelievable." But at the same time like my like passion when I came to like came to crypto had become like I initially thought it was like scaling it but now I'm like realizing that it was not scaling but it was just like bringing it to like masses and I think powering crypto derivatives exchanges is like extremely useful on the path.

29:42 But we'll we'll be like very ambitiously looking forward to support other like use cases that actually like have like mass market breach and the job's not done until we get there. cuz I think like a frictionless like settlement platform like yeah like using blockchains as back ends for a lot of our applications. I think that's a very likely future.

30:07 I think like exchanges are going to be like one of the first products that really makes like like crypto used in a very widely way. crypto exchanges like we're starting with crypto exchanges. We're likely going to see regular like stock exchanges down the line potentially commodities like forex. I I expect like almost all trading to move on chain over time with different regulations and different solutions.

30:34 But after that I do think there's going to be even further like reach of like blockchain based applications and jobs not done until we actually reach mass market and actually like the technology adoption of this like slows down but yeah 100%. What are some of those applications maybe that you think like Sovereign can help power in the future that you're excited about?

30:54 Looking more for like the medium term. I think exchanges beyond crypto like d like crypto exchanges h is I think very interesting as I said like all those things that I like talk about like stocks like commodities generally like moving all exchanges on on chain is something that we're like very interested in payments platform again I think is like clearly a growing and like a proven category and like payment infrastructure being low latency is like quite important So that's also another area we're looking into.

31:29 And for other like categories, we're we're keeping an open mind and we're trying to partner with as many like we're trying to listen and like understand like but I think like for other other categories like we're just trying to listen and learn and like we don't have much opinions about like yeah what's like the next category to battle.

31:47 Yeah. That's really interesting too as well because you guys are coming from an R&D perspective originally and so you you say we have this problem of scalability and you start there and then you do all this R&D and figure out okay here's the our sort of thesis on how that gets solved and then what does the process look like from taking that and then bringing it to the market and seeing like how can our tech solve real market problems today.

32:15 So yeah, it we did like start in like a a bit like a roundabout way. If I am to like found a company again, I would not do that. Like we're like focused on like scalability first. Yeah. but I think the right thing like right thing is mostly like focusing on an application and trying to scale that application and then fixing that like scaling of it and over time for example Amazon tried to scale Amazon.com and then they came up with AWS and then they started selling that I think that's like like the right way.

32:49 Yeah. But so for us like as we're building like this like scaling like this platform to build blockchain based applications we de started developing like basically thesis that if people are going to like build like winning applications they're going to want to have as much as control and over them and they're going to have like want to build applications as quickly customizable as possible.

33:15 So like Sovereign SDK has turned into this like like the goal of with like Sovereign SDK is to make building custom blockchain applications as quick as possible. Yeah. We basically just noticed that like what we did was like we got into conversations almost constantly with builders and we tried to like synthesize what we've heard from them into like thesis.

33:36 And basically our realization was that we just need an infrastructure to make it as quick as simple as seamless as possible for people to build their custom applications. The current infrastructure is limiting. Scalability is one part of it but the other parts of it are like just trying to build exactly what you want. I think we kind of saw that thesis being validated with Hyperliquid for the specific use case like they wanted to solve.

34:04 They they built a custom product that has the exact right UX for that that has like the like right performance for that and like worked out really well for them. So but it took them like a lot of effort like a lot of engineering effort and they probably had to delay their time to market quite significantly. What we're trying to do with Sovereign SDK is really cut the time to market when you're trying to build a unique like specific problem solution that you devised.

34:34 Yeah. Solve this problem for everybody so that apps in general can move forward to that sort of unlock that next tier of UX for whatever you're trying to build. Yeah. Basically, I guess like scalability was like where we started, but we noticed like scalability is not the real like real thing. like UX is the real like main concern and then scalability is like UX is upstream of like UX sorry UX is upstream of like scalability and so like we tried to build a like platform for you to get the best UX out of your blockchain based application as soon as possible that also included like very low latency soft confirmations but it also included an incredible like like hardware wallet experience for example if you're developing an application with Sovereign SDK you can literally as

35:17 A developer dictate What exact string is going to be displayed to your user on your hardware wallet? Are you like let's say you're taking a leverage long position on ETH with a like liquidation price that that will immediately get that will actually get displayed fully on your ledger. So like by like building a like fully custom stack from the ground up we were able to optimize for ex not only on performance but also like hardware wallet regular like browser experience and a bunch of different like API like configuration like so a lot of like teams want to build like API similar to their like web 2 product counterparts but like most web 3 uses like JSON RPC which leads people to having like pretty horrible like dev like experience or like user experience.

36:03 So we completely rearchitected our like like API generation so that like people get rest APIs in a completely customizable way out of the box. so we did like a bunch of things like I can like talk into a lot of features but generally our core thesis was that provide the best UX across all crypto for a customuilt application.

36:24 That's what we obsess over every day. Excellent. And I mean, you guys are giving these teams like such an advantage over just building on like any L1 or any like public L2 or something like this that do you see you yourself like kind of eating DeFi in that like any application that's not built on top of a a Sovereign chain is like fundamentally disadvantaged in terms of UX?

36:50 That's the goal. I think like once people like play with a blockchain based application that's built on Sovereign SDK, they're going to be like I want to always have this hardware wall experience. I want to always have this like seamless signing. I want to have these like like browsers updating immediately with like the sequencer state. Like a lot of teams that kind of like think that like oh if we only fix about like the sequencer like soft confirmation latency then like everything downstream like applications are going to be great.

37:18 But that's also why people are running into a bunch of issues like using like regular EVM like trading products for example on mega because like all the whole stack like the like the APIs like everything has to be working in conundrum provide that best UX. So yes hopefully we'll get there. obviously like at our stage is like a bit early to say that claim that but like that's what we're obsessing over.

37:45 Yeah. And obviously you guys have a moat on the side of like the technology and you have a head start with the the R&D there. But I think also where this gets really exciting as an opportunity is the network effect as you start to get more app chains spun up with the SDK and I know you guys are talking about being able to interconnect and interoperate between these app chains.

38:09 That starts to get very powerful where you can't just go to anybody else to get an app chain spun up. If you go to Sovereign, you can get you know the entire ecosystem of interoperable like protocols that are built on top of it. So I guess what are you guys thinking in the terms of composability across these genes?

38:31 What kind of development has been done there? What are you guys thinking on that front? In terms of interperability, we notice that that that's not really a mo. I think there's some teams like some rollup teams that like have tried to turn it into a mo. but I we think that's like right now like that doesn't seem like a good bet to us because like with like bridging libraries like Hyperlane where anyone can permissions permissionlessly deploy like bridge contract like bridge module and then like spin up like a self-hosted like bridging infrastructure inter like message passing is basically commoditized anyone can you op like you have an op stack chain you have like a Solana main chain or you have Eclipse you have like bullet like you you can just like send message back and

39:14 Forth. doesn't matter which L1 it's on which doesn't matter if it's optimistic or ZK so like message passing I don't think it's a mode for any like rollup stack or like blockchain framework stack as a result and like permissionless bridging libraries like enable that like message passing that I talked about the only constraint of them is that like to securely send that message you need to make sure that like the source blockchain has finalized and can reorg and so you don't like the message like you don't lose any funds that adds a bit of latency and then like intent like message passing like intent bridging like frameworks come in like relay or across or like there are a few other like new entrance and so with them like a relayer like fronts liquidity takes that

40:02 Risk and they get rewarded for it but as a result you can bridge any token and like like at an incredibly low latency like something that's not noticeable to any users so I think like the interability like problem is like got to be solved. we're like in the last edges of like having these like SDKs like messaging and intap SDKs being widely used and once they are that's not going to be like a major concern for 99% of users and also as a result of that I don't think it's a most for any rollup team to because I think like these like message passing like libraries will want to work with any SDK obviously to increase adoption and so yeah we just don't think this is like mode for any rollup company.

40:49 Yeah, makes sense with like a Hyperlane or like a layer 0 v2 or anything that can that can come and deploy and then now you get access to the entire like mesh network of of a Hyperlane or a layer zero immediately with that chain being supported. So yeah, that that definitely makes sense. And then in that sense, is there any network effect that you do see that you guys are betting on?

41:09 Nothing jumps to mind. What we're betting on is like really obsessing over our like customers and like learning their problems almost hopefully ideally better than them and like building as much as like domain specific like features into the SDK as possible and obsessing over the UX and like luckily we have our own protocol that we can like make very rapid modifications.

41:37 We know we're the best and like betting on the fact that like all of these features and all of the how fast we can move with the SDK compounds and just like sets it apart over the long term. so that's what we're really betting on. But and also obviously if you have at some point after some point if you have a lot of customers and you're getting a lot of like custom feature requests and you're like building them as fast as possible and then like all these features can be leveraged by other like app developer teams.

42:08 So like the SDK on its own like will display network effects like or compounding effects not effects but that's what we're getting. Yeah, you do get a lot of leverage with the the marginal user can access any new feature that you guys ship. Yeah, you know pretty much as soon as you as you ship it. So yeah I I mean typical like software SDK type leverage.

42:33 So I think that that definitely is working in your favor. I'll give an example for like as we were working with our early customers, we noticed that like like market makers like don't like dealing with nonces because it's like a pretty web 3s concept. they don't deal with boxes when they're like reaching out to Binance API this like or like buy bit API and so like we came up with like a completely new deduplication method that like removes any like querying trying to get a nonce which might if you send a lot of transactions might like get reordered so these type of things is why like you can't just like have an EVM application run really fast like a regular like like or like a competitive like actual like web to competitive exchange UX because

43:18 Like there's all these like unique edge cases that you got to fix. But once we have this like interesting like the deduplication method now like if you're running any like extremely high performance like application like we like all of those applications benefit from this yeah like the deduplication method. So things like that I think over time will really compound and set the SDK apart.

43:38 Yeah, it's it's it's the classic like it's not one thing. It's the thousand small iterations. No golden bullet, but a thousand silver BBs or something like this. Exactly. If it was like a golden bullet, I feel like everybody would do it. I think it's about like compounding those like silver. Absolutely. Yeah. You get more and more users of the SDK, you get more and more feedback and it becomes a flywheel in that sense.

44:04 Exactly. Yeah. One one thing you mentioned was, you know, as your strategy right now, like learning more about your customers, problems, like, you know, sometimes better than them. And on that note, like how are you thinking right now about like user growth, getting more customers, you know, gaining that market share. What What are your thoughts on that?

44:19 Our number one priority is like current customer success. That's I spend a significant chunk of my time, probably the highest thing I spend my time on. make sure our customers features are like rightly prioritized are coming like the things that they demanded are like built as fast as possible and like if they have any questions that like those are answered as fast as possible and so customer success is number one after that as we're getting to production and like finally we're not going to be bottlenecked on product we do want to work with new teams ideally on like new use cases and like like increase the number of apps that will benefit like with like Sovereign SDK and increase the number of apps like customers that we have.

45:01 So we're currently like like we hadn't really like set up like a proper business team to do that and like we hadn't like we hadn't established a proper like sales strategy like we're working with like we're just starting to basically work on that. Yeah. I'd love to share but like I want to have like I want things to be more deliberate and like I want us to like know more of like what we're doing before I'll share anything about that.

45:25 Yeah, absolutely. Makes sense. For any like devs or teams listening to this that are, you know, interested in what Sovereign's doing, what's the best way for them to like, you know, join the community and get involved for when the right time comes? So, we're going to like make the repo and docs public quite soon. Been basically in stealth mode, only working with the early customers for about a year now, a bit more than a year.

45:47 But we're going to like in the next month or so get everything public so everyone will be able to just like without talking to us be able to like take advantage of them. With that being said, if any of like the things I talked about today or like if being able to build a custom rollup and like very quickly like specific for your like use case is something interesting for you like we'd love to chat.

46:13 They can reach out to me over Twitter or Telegram. I try to respond to everything quite quickly and like we can like have a conversation about how Sovereign SDK can be useful how what they think about could be potentially built. so we're open up to all those conversations. So if they have any like interest they can like just directly reach out to me, message to Sovereign's like Twitter account and we'll try to help as much as possible.

46:40 Yeah, of course. And we'll definitely have those below. So if any teams want to reach out and start to leverage the with something like the superior DeFi UX at least for for applications that for the time being really need to have low latency definitely we'll we'll we'll link those below for any folks to to reach out. But yeah, I mean beyond that, is there anything else that you want to say?

47:02 Anything else you want to cover before we wrap it up? Nothing on my side. I really appreciate it was a really fun conversation. I might have babbled at some of the parts but No, no. feeling that like you guys want to hear as much as the story. So, thank you so much for having me. No, dude. Yeah.

47:18 No, it was a great chat. Thanks, J. Awesome to hear, man. All right.