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Speaker A: But Ben, you just introduced a newer structure which seems to be a composition of many chains, and you called that a super chain. Okay, super chain. How does the super chain idea tie to what Jesse was saying earlier of getting a billion people on chain? How important is this structural element? Will they all come through independent chains? Just paint the picture of how this new structure will impact the future here. Welcome to bankless, where we explore the frontier of Internet money and Internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan. Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we are here to help you become more bankless. We have two guests on today, and there's two parts to this episode. The first part, we're talking about base, and the second, we talk about the super chain. What is base? Base is Coinbase's layer two. We talked to Jesse, the creator of base, about how the launch went. This is now two weeks. I think something like that. There's almost a million users already, and there's more transactions per second on base than the Ethereum mainnet. This chain was, of course, built using optimism's tech stack. And we think this is one chain of many thousands of layer two chains that we'll see in the coming years. And so how do we tie all of these things together? We have Ben Jones on, who is a co founder of Optimism, to discuss that. That is the second part of this episode where we discuss the super chain. This seems to be the key to how we bring on a billion people on chain. First, we talk about the law of chains, which is a constitution for uniting layer two chains. That's the social layer of the super chain. The second part we get into the technical chain hopping today is very clunky. It's kind of painful. Feels like a border crossing. How do we make all of this feel like one chain? Finally, we end with the question of fraud proofs. How decentralized is the optimism tech stack today can coinbase yoink your funds from base? We don't have fault proofs yet. When are they coming? We discussed that with the two guests. I think one theme throughout this episode is it's becoming clear that Ethereum is more than just a digital nation. It's a substrate for building networks of digital nations. And this, for me, was the most interesting part of the episode. David, why is this episode significant to you?

Speaker B: I think the super chain is so cool. I think it's really emblematic of what brought you and me and so many others in the bankless nation into crypto. The conversation of the super chain is one that is about crypto economics. It's about political philosophy. It's about coordination and the relationship between the individual and the collective. I think a lot of the subject matter that we have explored here on bankless is all being comprised in this super chain conversation. It's not just about the technical hurdles that come with wanting to allow for 10,000 chains to blossom and then figuring out how to blur the lines, the boundaries between 10,000 chains to make them seem like one seamless super chain. It's also about the coordination incentives of people joining a digital collective. How do we actually convince people to come into the fold? How do we incentivize coordination rather than defection? How do we get large, centralized institutions like Coinbase to cooperate and to coordinate with decentralized daos? I think this is what we've been training for, quote unquote, Ryan, when it comes to exploring so many different facets of what makes crypto crypto. And this is why the optimist super chain conversation, and really, the whole entire optimism endeavor has always resonated very, very deeply with me. This is one of the, I think, most important conversations that we've had in a long time and perhaps will have. If the optimism vision does manifest, especially the super chain vision, which is being validated by coinbase and base. I think this is the substrate for change in the whole entire world. And so that's why you can just hear the excitement coming out of me right now.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think the whole time for me, I was like, I can't wait to get to the debrief because I want to discuss this. A lot of ideas bouncing around in my head that I want to talk to you. And of course, the debrief is the episode that we do and record right after this episode that is available for bankless citizens on the bankless premium RSS feed. You can access that now. David, I want to talk to you on that episode about this idea of the super chain, the united chains of optimism that we're creating here. How will other layer twos respond? Will they have their own united chains? I think so. A lot to discuss there. And before we get to the episode, first we disclose, both David and I, our long term layer two bulls. You know that, you know, we hold eth as well. We're also advisors to optimism. We're long term investors. We're not journalists. We don't do paid content. There's a link to all bankless disclosures in the show notes at all times. Guys, we're getting right to the conversation with Ben and Jesse, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including our number one recommended crypto exchange.

Speaker B: Bank of the Nation. I am extremely excited to introduce you to Ben Jones, co founder of Optimism, and also Jesse Pollock, the creator of Base. Ben, Jesse, both of you, welcome back to bankless.

Speaker C: So glad to be here.

Speaker D: Thank you, Jesse.

Speaker B: Just two weeks ago, base launched, and Coinbase has been putting a ton of weight behind this launch, both with marketing and promotion. Not just, not just internally to the crypto world, but also externally as well, which is great because we could use some external marketing of what we're doing here in crypto. And I would say I've put this tweet out not too long ago after base launched, perhaps one of the most successful protocol launches that the crypto industry has seen seemed to go off without a hitch. So two weeks later, now we're recording this two weeks after base launch. How does it feel? Just like thoughts, reflections, sentiments, emotions, dump them on us.

Speaker C: Well, I mean, first off, it's just been awesome to see the response from the broader world about what we're doing with base. I think when we started thinking about base, we kind of had this vision of bringing a billion people on chain, bringing the whole world on chain. And then as we got closer to launch, I think we started seeing a lot of organic energy around it happening this summer. And when we were launching base, we wanted to throw our weight behind that. We wanted to join the party. We wanted to kind of meme this on chain summer meme into existence. And I feel like that's kind of what's happened. And so I feel incredibly grateful for everyone across the whole industry, the ecosystem, kind of like believing in that future alongside us and throwing their weight in, throwing their energy, the optimism team. Like everyone, I think there are hundreds of teams that have kind of come together to make this happen. So I think grateful is the primary feeling that I have. The other big feeling that I have is it's day one. This is the very beginning of what is a long, long journey to bring billions of people on chain. And so I think our feeling is, like, awesome. We're excited, we're excited, other people are excited, but our heads are already back down and we're just focused on building focused on making it so that folks can easily build the next wave of applications on chain so that folks can easily use those next wave of applications as they're being built and really doing everything we possibly can to shepherd in the next era of the Internet. So grateful and back to building.

Speaker B: Ben, what was it like on the optimism side of things for base chain, which is not the optimism main net, it's its own independent ecosystem, but it's also an op stack fork, and this has been a very long partnership between optimism and Coinbase. So how is it like to view these things from the optimism side of things?

Speaker D: Yeah, no, I mean, and the partnership is deep. I'm sure we'll get more, a lot more into that later. But similar feelings of excitement and gratitude, I think, for the optimism community, this is just an incredible proof point for positive sum in action, where the proliferation of chains like base is going to. What we're going to see is that it's not just a bunch of users hopping from chain to chain to chain to chain, it's going to be more users joining from every chain, from every which way and every dimension. So I think a feeling of excitement for the future and some of the next steps of positive sum thinking for the collective are at the first exciting moment of this. Obviously, the other one is incredibly happy with the code and the tech working. We've been working on the bedrock codebase, which is what enabled base to be able to go from zero to 100 real quick for a while. And so it's absolutely incredible to see that now not in just production on op mainnet, but in production on another chain getting massive usage and holding up real well, and shouts out to the base team, for all the engineering that went into getting that chain running, but from a fundamental core protocol level, that's incredibly, incredibly exciting. So, yeah, it's just hype all around, you know what I mean? The future is looking bright.

Speaker B: I think some of the excitement really comes from the clarity that base has provided a lot of the crypto world with what really the next steps for crypto looks like. How are we going to scale ethereum? What does it mean for layer twos to scale? And I think a lot of this excitement comes from just the fact that we see the next steps forward, we see where Coinbase is going, we see where layer twos on ethereum are going, and that gives us a lot of excitement, because we can actually play plan ahead and see some of the future at the same time. It also brings up a lot of questions, and I think a lot of these questions exist inside of the super chain. What actually is it? And I think that's a lot of the questions that we want to ask here on the show today, because I think the asking of that the answers to that question comes with some of the formations that Coinbase and optimism have created together. And this is a case study for perhaps future examples. And so I think this is what I really want to get done here on this show, is start to peel back some of the questions behind the collaboration between Coinbase and the op collective and what that might mean downstream and how that might be emblematic of the future roadmap for Ethereum scaling and also onboarding the world into crypto. So I hope I can lead us in that conversation. I really want to start with this broader question. Base is a part of optimism. How does that work? An important part of the story is the collaboration between Coinbase and optimism. And so I want to ask first, Jesse, why is this collaboration so important for Coinbase? What does this collaboration mean from the Coinbase side of things?

Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. And before I answer that question, I do just want to, like, emphasize what you said, which is, it feels like we've gotten more clarity about where we're going. And for me, it feels like just in the last three months, like no one's even transacting on Ethereum anymore. Everyone's transacting on layer twos and that. Like, we weren't there six months ago or twelve months ago, but now, like, every day when I look at my transaction history, when I look at other people's transaction history, it's like people are doing way more on l two, whether it's nfts or DeFi or social, than they are on l one. And so I feel like we've kind of sped run what I think a lot of people were nervous about, which was like, is transaction activity going to move? Are people going to get comfortable with this transition? And now it's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, these things are here. So anyways, I'm just really fired up about that. It feels like we've taken a huge step forward as an industry in terms of the collaboration and optimism. When we were starting to think about building base, we'd actually looked at building a chain twice before. And both of those times we'd consider building an alternative l one to Ethereum. And we ruled it out. We said no. And the big reason we said no was that we didn't want to isolate kind of ourselves from the broader crypto ecosystem. And it felt like if we were going to build our own chain, that was the result. We were going to be putting ourselves on island, we were going to be disconnecting our users, we were going to be taking them away from what has historically been our mission, which is bringing them into this global crypto economy that's way bigger than Coinbase. As we were thinking about building base, I think the things that really enabled us to get comfortable with that and get excited about it were two things. One is we felt like we could build as an Ethereum layer, too. And that meant that we would be bringing our users our energy to scaling what is the largest crypto ecosystem in the world by far, and what we believe is kind of the foundation for the on chain global economy. And then two, as we kind of zeroed in on, how do we build an l two? And we realized we could be working really closely with optimism. We realized, oh, we could be building on an open source technology stack that's a public good, that's freely available. So all of our contributions would be kind of a creative and additive to everyone else in the ecosystem who was using this technology. And we could be a part of a structure that was actually bigger than just us. And this is where this concept of the super chain comes in. I think we kind of convinced ourselves that layer two wasn't going to end up being just one chain, but instead that it was going to be many chains that kind of collectively scaled Ethereum and having a substrate in the op stack, having kind of organizing body and optimism that could help bring those layer twos together to create something that collectively scaled Ethereum while making that experience really, really easy to use for everyday people, giving developers the kind of confidence to be able to move across a bunch of these different chains and kind of, in general, shepherding this next era, I think that felt like another big kind of unlock for us. And I'd say the third thing was, when you think about Coinbase and you think about our strengths, really, it's, you know, we have scale, we have users, we have kind of this massive brand that, you know, I think, in many ways is kind of the strongest brand in crypto, but we're also a large, centralized public company. And so as we were thinking about, okay, how do we build a decentralized, open, permissionless layer, too, and, like, do that in the right way? Having a complement, someone who could really kind of counterbalance us and be kind of a pair to bring strengths that we don't have, like decentralization, like open source, like on chain governance. I think that's all kind of components we found in optimism, and it made it just a very logical kind of fit together of the Coinbase and base team and the optimism team and broader effort with the super chain.

Speaker B: So Ben base is not the only op stack chain that's dropped. It seems that we get a new op stack chain one or two a week. Lately we have the public goods network. There's Zora, Celo D, bank mode, just to name a few. But the problem that arises here is that all of these op stack chains are their own chains. They are forks of the op stack. The optimism vision has always been one of a singular coherent network. We have this concept of the super chain. But if I'm on the optimism mainnet and I want to go over to base, I got a bridge. I'm wondering about how we actually go from point a to point b. How do we go from many different forks of the op stack to an actual cohered network? Because right now the op collective is just like a DAO. And so that's not doing much for coherence of all the users or all the users of these things. So how do we actually get from the forking of the op stack to actually a singular coherent network? Where does this story start?

Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, great question, and I think I would echo exactly what Jesse said in terms of clarity. I think the one thing, Jesse, I hope this resonates with you. For both of us in working together and forming a partnership, was each of us realizing what the other person's role to play was and understanding how the pieces would all fit together.

Speaker B: The role to play in the collaboration and the agreement.

Speaker D: Yeah. And just in general, what does it mean for decentralized governance of a standard? What does it mean to be a centralized party like Coinbase, which has incredible strengths and bring those into the decentralized context? Yeah, absolutely. Time and time again. Look, I'll back up and tell a little bit more of the story. At the last Devcon a year ago, Carl got up on stage and we talked about the op stack and he said, hey guys, there's this thing called the super chain. Now it's going to be a bunch of chains working together. But it's always been clear that to scale Ethereum, we would need to have some notion of multiple chains, at least in terms of the underlying data structures that we envision as a chain. I think in the future a chain is going to look more like a smart contract or a sub ecosystem or social fabric, more than it will a religious ecosystem like you see with bitcoin or an Alt L one ethereum. But that's all great to say, but there's a question of what does it actually mean and what are we going to do about this? And what is the path to get there when we put out the op stack? Like you said, David, the momentum has been incredible. It feels like every week now someone's coming out with a crazy new op stack thing. But this begs the question of what does it mean to have a bunch of these chains, and what do we gain and what do we lose? And certainly we gain a lot of innovation, but we do risk losing some things. You know, it's like a really good problem to have. Right. But there are, there are certainly challenges that come with getting a bunch of chains. Jesse alluded to what I think is one of the most substantial ones, which is basically that you need a way for these chains to basically align and share improvements with each other. Right. So one of the failure modes that we could see would be a proliferation of chains. Right. Opstack makes it really easy to spin up a note chain. If you can click a button and deploy a chain, then you can modify the chain, click a button and deploy that modified version. You could quickly envision a world which led to fragmentation, where basically a bunch of people were working in different silos and making their own improvements. But because of a lack of standard, there's no way for those improvements to be shared between chains. And talking about positive sum and public goods, that's table stakes, to be able to have that kind of positive sum collaboration to make this all work. I think the other side of this, on the flip side, is that you also are presenting users and developers with a real challenge of now there's a bajillion chains to deploy to and what does it mean? And if you look at the scaling ecosystem today for a developer or a user making a choice on where to deploy or where to bridge, there's a lot of idiosyncrasies and a lot of different security models and patterns and idiosyncrasies of how the EVM works. Idiosyncrasies of how you bridge all of these things are good in terms of innovation, but they are dangerous in terms of overwhelming users and developers with choice. So basically both of those perspectives are pointing at the same thing, which is that there needs to be a shared standard, even if there's which there absolutely should be a ton of innovation on top. The core standard protocol that is like the best in class thing that everyone can use and everyone should use needs to be standardized. So that's a bit of a ramble, but that is how we think about unifying chains. Ultimately, we can talk a lot more about technical specifics and sequencing and crazy things. At the end of the day, it's about having a standard that benefits all the people that are building chains so they can all share in their efforts. And having a standard that allows users to make an assessment that is not on a per app or per chain basis. It's an understanding that this is their accepted properties of decentralization.

Speaker B: So if I'm understanding this correctly, maybe the op stack is the basement level standard that is being accepted by all these various chains. Right. And the idea of the optimism vision is to actually make that standard grow based off of the shared consensus. What are the shared attributes of every single op stack fork? Well, if they're focusing the op stack fork, and then they also all incorporate this one additional additional property, maybe that one additional property needs to be merged into the main op stack codebase. Is that how you envision this moving forward?

Speaker D: Yeah, I think you can think of optimism governance as basically being a vessel to facilitate those positive sum integrations. Any change that someone makes to a chain that is really, really good, everyone should be able to take that and run with it. But it shouldn't come at the cost of a terribly fragmented ecosystem where users are overwhelmed and developers are overwhelmed with choice of where to deploy and idiosyncrasies and security models. And basically the developers of the public goods are faced with just like a flurry of 100 different repos, all with their own little differences that they're trying to reconcile into one thing.

Speaker A: So I want to ask the question, something you said earlier I think is really interesting, Jesse, and both you and Ben and I think all of crypto are kind of working towards this. The idea of base is a kind of day one in this attempt to onboard a billion users into crypto and get a billion users more than into crypto actually, on chain. Okay. And that's really cool. And I want to dive into this super chain type concept because part of the question is, okay, how do we do that? Right now we have base, and I know it's quite speedily reached over 100,000. I think users like different active accounts. I don't know what the numbers look like today. Yeah. How many is it? How many users right now, Jesse?

Speaker C: I was looking, I think in terms of monthly transacting addresses, we just crossed like 700,000 or something like that. So those are addresses, not users. You can't directly connect them. But it's a lot. So I think the 100,000 number, that was just daily people who are coming back daily. Then yesterday, which was pretty cool, we crossed the number of we had more transactions than Ethereum, which, candidly, I expected it to take us maybe six months or twelve months or something like that to get there. And so to kind of cross that milestone in two weeks was kind of mind blowing.

Speaker A: Absolutely. I mean, that's amazing growth and amazing progress, right? And probably, I mean, I don't know how many years it took crypto to reach those numbers, kind of the numbers that base saw in just like two weeks. So our cycles are accelerating here, which is absolutely phenomenal.

Speaker C: One other thing that I'll say is base cross number of transactions that Ethereum did. And we were just like, just over, I think we were like, whatever, 16 transactions per second, and Ethereum was twelve. Yesterday was also the largest number of all l two transactions, and it was five x. So Ethereum was at about, I think, like 11.7, and all l two s were at like 56. And so if you look at that chart of l two transactions, that is probably like the most epic growth chart I've ever seen in crypto because it's so consistent. It's literally like two years ago, if you go back two years in time, we were at one 100th of the number of transactions on Ethereum. I think it was like one 10th of a transaction per second. And now we are at five x the transactions on Ethereum. And that is just like a straight line up and to the right, or like a log, whatever, exponential lineup and to the right. And that's a huge shout out to everyone, obviously, the optimism team and op Mainnet and also like Arbitrum and Zksync, there's so many people who are coming together to embody this vision, and I think we're just excited to be a part of it.

Speaker A: Okay. All right, so we've got traction so far, and I want to get back to this idea of the super chain, because I have a feeling it's going to take more than base to onboard a billion users, even though we're making great strides here. And I'm interested in something that Ben said about this structure that we now have. If you think about the human body or all of these structures that underlie systems of nature and that sort of thing, cells, which are one set of structures, and there's a lot of complexity there, and independent system working together, and that kind of composes up to the organs, and then you have an organism, and then a group of human organisms compose a society. We have greater and greater complexity in our systems that are stacking. What's kind of interesting about the concept of the super chain is. It seems like we're introducing a new structure into crypto. We have this structure of the chain. First there was bitcoin, and that was the original chain. So we have single organisms, single cell organism, and then we got a multi cell kind of organism, maybe with ethereum and smart contracts. And, oh, here's another structure that we didn't know we could do. It's a programmable chain. We have this new structural system element called smart contracts, and then birthed on top of that, we have a smaller atomic unit called kind of a token. And now with layer twos, we have this idea of chains, right? And so base is maybe an example of one of those chains. There's all sorts of op stack type chains out there. But Ben, you just introduced a newer structure, which seems to be a composition of many chains, and you called that a super chain.

Speaker D: Okay, super chain.

Speaker A: How does the super chain idea tied to what Jesse was saying earlier, of getting a billion people on chain? How important is this structural element? Will they all come through independent chains? Just paint the picture of how this new structure will impact the future here.

Speaker D: Yeah, so, I mean, a few things to be said there, I think. I love the life analogies. And shout out to the bankless team, both you and David are so good at the life, the slime mold, and the collective. Anyway, one of the great other things that we see there is the notion, or another great thing to talk about is the notion of emergence, which is the notion that basically smaller parts come together to form a whole that is greater than their sum. I think effectively, the super chain, you can think of as the emergent structure that will emerge from chains like op Mainnet and base and Zora and others coming together to form something that is more cohesive and looks more like the third wave of the Internet. It's actually very similar. When you look back into early days of the Internet, there was a notion of networks, and everyone thought of, there's a network that this company has, and then there's a financial credit network over here. Eventually, what happened was that the Internet emerged, which was basically just saying, ok, sure, they're individual networks, but they're all also connected in this global Internet that is changing the world. You can almost think of the super chain as analogous to that, practically speaking, what are the properties that that thing should have? Or like? What does that look like? One of the things that you said, and I was touching on this before, one of the things you said earlier, David, was sort of, this is fulfilling the vision, I think one of the core aspects of fulfilling the vision of scaling Ethereum that we've had for many, many years at optimism. Ethereum is one cohesive thing, and there are sub ecosystems and communities. But ultimately, when you think about using Ethereum, you're thinking about one decentralized platform that you can understand and wrap your head about and reason about, right? It should also be the case that these chains should be a part of one larger system that in the same way you can wrap your head around. Right? And when I say wrap your head, ultimately what that is going to boil down to is like the properties of the block space themselves. So we're not fulfilling the vision of Ethereum. If we scale to a billion users, which, to your point, will require thousands, millions whatever of change, it's not enough of all of those chains are wacky all over the place. Some of them are centralized, some of them are decentralized, some of them make these assumptions, some of them make that assumptions, and there's no way of understanding what's up. Ultimately, what we need is a consistent substrate for us to build this new wave of the Internet on. Basically, what we've come to realize with the super chain and with incredible folks like bass, is that the basis for doing that is basically a bunch of chains that share upgrades. So I think probably when you were asking questions about things like, how do these chains talk to each other? And you still have to bridge, there's a lot that we could get into there on technical specifics, and if you want to dive into, ask away. Ultimately, I think what we've realized is that for any of the crazy technical future stuff to work, that makes these chains all really feel like one chain. The basics are that we need to have an environment where a bunch of the chains that are forming today are effectively governed and upgraded together because the block space is homogenous.

Speaker B: So, Ben, trying to get down to the actual practical details of how a super chain comes to be, and how 10,000 chains blossom without creating 10,000 choices for users. I see this conversation unfolding in the, um, two, um, different domains. One is the social, and then one is the actual technical, like, technically, how do you get one transaction on to happen twice on two different chains and have that be like, obfuscated for users? But I I want to start with social because I think the technical one is, um, uh, the more hairy. And so I want to leave that beast for further down into the podcast. So, socially, let's define this. Why does a chain want to be a part of the super chain? What is the incentive for a chain to join the collective? What's in it for the individual chain to join the collective chain?

Speaker D: Yeah, so, I mean, it's interesting because that answer will surely change over time on the social layer. But I'll talk about on the technical layer. Right. But I'll talk about the basics is again, the substrate of the future of the Internet needs to be standardized and it needs to be understandable. Right. So the simplest reason to do this is because it should be the security model and the construction that we as a community, we think, upholds the rights and the protections of the users and the developers and the sequencers on the network. Fundamentally, there needs to just be consistency across that space. Obviously, there's going to be incredible innovation, and that's going to happen constantly. And we need a way to get that innovation back into the standard like we were talking about earlier. But the fundamental social basic is just getting to a point where we have a governance system that says that all of this block space together is going to work the same and it's going to work the best in class way that everybody needs to. So socially, I think the first step is basically just understanding the homogeneity of block space. And the reality is, before we solve bridging and we make, make it so that, you know, users are transacting seamlessly between chains and people don't even realize what chain they're on, the place to start is nothing more than they don't have to think about what they're bridging to and from because they understand that the properties of that chain, those two chains, are consistent and something that they agree to, to, you know, I think.

Speaker B: The homogeneity of block space is probably a really good foundation to start with. Say we have, you know, 10, 15, 20 op stack chains and they all have homogenous block space, but we also still want to encourage innovation and differences. Right. And so I think this is when we can get into the law of chains, because what actually, what actually sets the standard, how does the standard become set? So maybe you could walk us through this law of chains concept and what that does for the formation of the super chain.

Speaker D: Absolutely. Very, very, very excited about the law of chains. I think it's also great because what's fascinating is that this is like the law of chains is a fundamentally incredibly important social construct. Okay, so first of all, what is the law of chains? The law of chains is a governing document that is a proposed amendment to the constitution of the optimism collective. So that's our our governance system, our DaO. And it is basically the governing document that will adopt all of those constitutional principles into the land of multiple chains. Right. So the past year and a half of optimism governance has all been about op mainnet. With the introduction of Bayes and other chains, we've got to change how optimum governance works, basically. And particularly the way that we're going to do that transition. Or the thing to understand about that transition is that optimism governance goes from governing upgrades of a single chain to governing upgrades to a protocol that are shared by many, many, many, many chains. So, right. The way to get that homogeneity is to have all of those chains basically share the protocol, and it's that protocol which gets upgraded. Right. So that's a very important basis for what we do with the law of chains. Now, the law of chains itself goes a lot further than that, and it basically is a framework for how optimism governance should behave neutrally and how to enforce the neutrality of that block space. And I also want to say huge shout out to the base team, among others, for massively collaborating with this. Like I said, it's been absolutely incredible to have, like, these things realized and put into writing as we ink these partnerships. So. Okay, actually, I'll pause there. I can keep going into ramble mode. Does that make sense? I think that's the most fundamental nugget, is we're going from a world where optimism governance governs op Mainnet to governing a protocol that is used by op Mainnet, but it's also used by base and all of the other chains that join. And this gives us the homogeneity.

Speaker A: Ben, when I hear you say that, I'm trying to, again, because my brain just works on analogies and maybe some listeners are kind of like me, right? And so David asked this question earlier of, like, what's in it for a chain to join the super chain? And that seemed pretty obvious to me based on something you said earlier. It's kind of like, that's like asking why a local area network that a company set up wants to join the Internet, right? Well, the answer is obvious because the Internet is just fantastic and you can communicate with all of the other local area networks. Right. And that, you know, so everyone is going to opt in and join unless you're doing something super, you know, secret and, you know, you don't want to interact with anybody else. So that, to me, is obvious. Now I'm trying to get, like, the analog of how you actually join the, the super chain and what this law of chains is. And it almost, to me, it feels like one part standards body. So it's like some kind of technical standards body that you're opting into. You're like, yep, I'll agree to conform to a set of, like, you know, the Internet did this in the early days. Like, we got a set of Internet protocol standards and we all conform to that so we can talk to one another. So it's one part that, but then it's one part, like, governance nation state thing. And it almost reminds me of, like the articles of Confederation when you had, like, the original 13 colonies in the US that were independent states, essentially nation states band together and create this document that they all signed to form a proto union of types. So it's like one part standards body, and that's technical and geeky. And we've seen that before in the early days of the Internet and then another part governance experiment thing. And we've seen that in almost like the birth of nation states. And to me, that is just so fascinating. Do these analogs hold up to you, or are you seeing some of this?

Speaker D: I mean, I'll draw on the analogy further, and you're 100% right. And I think the only thing that I would say or add to what you're saying fundamentally is that the standards body and the governance experiment are really one. It was all the same thing.

Speaker A: It was all the same thing all along.

Speaker D: Exactly right. So it's like part of the governance experiment is that it's governing this standard. Right. And that makes it a standard spotty. But you're 100% thinking about it the right way. I think one of the fascinating, one of the additional things that the law of chains says, I kind of got into the basics of, like, fundamentally, it's about being a standards body. But what the law of chains really in bulk talks about is what does it mean to be a standards body? And like, how should the DAO and the governance system react to that? And so one of the key things that it does is it basically a, lays out a set of all of the stakeholders across the super chain. So an example of a stakeholder is Jesse and base as a chain governor, which are the people that are basically bringing these chains into existence and driving usage to them and providing with distribution and all of that. There's actually another role, which is the chain servicer, which is the person that's actually providing the sequencing services, which right now is also based for base. But for other chains, there are other people that are basically roll up as a service providers that is another stakeholder that governance needs to think about. Then, of course, the most important set of stakeholders are the users. When I say users, I mean both users and developers. One of the things that the law of chains does is it basically lays out protections or guidance for how you can almost think of it like a bill of rights. And this is where I was going with the analogy. I think if you want to go the whole founding document analogy thing, there's something really similar there in the Bill of Rights. And it basically lays out what are the protections. When governance is making decisions about the standard, it should think about how decisions impact each of those stakeholders. Okay, I'll pause there. Hopefully that's resonating. We can talk about some of those protections and guidance. And I'm also curious if you have perspective, Jesse. But, yeah, I think the analogy is a great one. It's like part standards, body, part crazy digital nation thing, and it all comes together with some real beauty.

Speaker A: So wild. Yeah.

Speaker C: And I think from the base perspective, as we were kind of working through this and contributing to law of chains and thinking about kind of how we joined the super chain, there are a few things that we were trying to solve for. One was how do we ensure that base remains open and permissionless, and how do we ensure that it kind of preserves that characteristic which Ethereum started for its block space. And this was something that we felt like we could get kind of from optimism and from the law of change. It's like if we kind of set up the chain in the right way, if we commit to this thing, then we're going to have kind of a forcing function to ensure that we don't have kind of single person in control in a way that could risk that open, permissionless nature of base. And so I think that kind of characteristic is one of the big things that we're getting from the super chain. Now, on the flip side, I think one of the things that we thought a lot about is how do we, while kind of ensuring that that open, permissionless nature of base is enforced, also preserve our sovereignty? We want to be a part of this larger structure, but we also want to have economic sovereignty. We want to have governance sovereignty. We want to have social sovereignty. We don't want to be completely subsumed by this superstructure. And so that's, again, where the law of chains comes in and it says, hey, even if we are enforcing this open, permissionless nature of the block space, we're not going to infringe on these other characteristics or these other kind of areas of sovereignty, like economics or governance, that are really, really important to protect for chains. And kind of going back to your kind of analogy with the articles of Confederation, I forget what it's called. I think that that's a similar kind of tension that you see in unions like the United States and other unions around the world where you have these kind of local regions that want to have some guarantees, you know, whether those are guarantees of protection or, you know, you know, rights for citizens so that folks can move across those regions and know that they can have kind of a consistent set of expectations regardless of where they are. And those local regions, you know, the states and the United States, they want to have sovereignty. They want to be able to set their own taxes. They want to be able to have their own governing bodies. They want to be able to vote in their own ways. And those two things need to live in tension. And I think that's kind of the tension that we are trying to capture in this law of change. We're trying to capture the tension between the fact that this is many kind of social systems and groups that are coming together to create something bigger than any one of them. And that requires alignment, it requires coordination, but it also requires sovereignty. And one thing I'll say on this is me and Ben and a bunch of people, we spent the last nine months thinking about this and trying to figure out, like, what does this mean? Like, how does this work? How do we kind of articulate this in a way that people can understand and articulate in a way that can persist for years or decades or centuries, right. And what we've kind of released thus far is the V 0.1 of that. It's first draft. Right. Like, an optimism team released that we contributed to it, and it's not truly not perfect, and we do not have all the answers. I think what we're trying to do is we're trying to believe that this is possible, and we're trying to take kind of all the brainpower of a bunch of really incredible people across a bunch of different diverse organizations and say, what would this look like? And then we're putting it open to the community for feedback and saying, hey, come and tell us what's imperfect, what can get better? That's why we're on this call right now, because we don't have the answers. We just have the best intentions and the best effort that we're putting into it. And so I guess, like, there's so much complexity here, but if I could kind of leave one message with people who are listening into this is like, get curious, ask questions like, engage with us, help us figure out what is the right version of this, and how do we make that something that can both support this kind of homogeneous block space, this consistency, so that users and developers can build with confidence and transact on chain with confidence, but also protect the rights of those folks and protect the rights of change, and protect the diversity that comes with that. And I think it's going to be a learning process, but super grateful to beginning to work on it and getting to talk about it.

Speaker B: The tension between the sovereignty of a chain and the alignment of a collective, I think is a really great articulation of this. And you see the same pattern throughout history. This is the tension between defection and coordination, and the balance between the individual and the society, where the best societies allow the maximum expression of the individual, while also ensuring that there is rule of law, that there isn't things like murder and theft and lying and cheating, but there's only the minimum level of law needed to produce a society. And then after that, it's up to the individual. And this is what I see forming in the super chain, where we are establishing quality assurances of block space, while still allowing for innovation and freedom of expression, of protocols to be expressed by all the different chains that elect to join the super chain. Now, that last phrase, elect to join the super chain, is, I think, the crux of what optimism's role is. The op collective is. I'm sure optimism wants everyone to join the collective. But right now, Jesse, as you know, perhaps less than 1% of the world is not on chain. And we need that to grow to at least 1%, so that we can get to 10%, so that we can get to 100%. And I think this is one of the biggest parts of this story, is that Coinbase is blazing a $17 billion public, company sized hole through the jungle. That is the path towards becoming on chain. And so I'm hoping you can take a moment and talk about the way that Coinbase is actually showing a way for very large public companies that aren't on chain into getting on chain. What is the formula that Coinbase has provided the world here?

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. And I think, again, we're still trying to figure it out. But for the last two years, at the end of 2021, that was the mission I set on. It was, how do we bring Coinbase on chain so that we can kind of show the world what's possible here? And a lot for Coinbase has been building base and contributing to this I think as we're thinking about how we build base, we're making a number of commitments that kind of guide how base is going to be built and how we're going to come on chain. One of those is obviously contributing to the underlying op stack. And so we've joined as a core developer. We've already landed a huge number of positive changes, from scaling to decentralization to monitoring. We're working on op breath, which is the second client with paradigm, and we're going to keep blazing that path so that the foundation of the op stack is something that other organizations, whether they're public companies or small private companies, can use to run chains, you know, super chain or not. So that's the big way that we're trying to kind of pave this path. It's like make sure that the technology is really solid. The second big way that I think we're trying to pave this path is we are committing base to this law of chains. We're joining and we're saying we're going to uphold that commitment around open, neutral block space. We're saying we're going to participate in this collective process of bringing chains together to create something that is bigger than just base, but is this full super chain. And we're saying that we're going to participate in that kind of governance process to make sure that the standard is maturing in the right way, to make sure that that neutrality is being upheld in the right way. And I hope that's going to pave a path for other organizations to similarly make that commitment and similarly benefit from those guarantees of the law of chains and the sovereignty of the law of chains. And I'd say that the third thing that we're really doing is we're putting our money where our mouth is. We are actually taking a percentage of the revenue from base and the sequencer that's base, and we're contributing it back to the optimism collective to fund public goods. And that's going to enable us to actually support the work that's happening to make this infrastructure beef possible for everyone else to use. And we're going to be participating in governing that as well. So, you know, I think for kind of us, this is about doing this in the right way so that other people can say, oh, this is the right way to do this. We can follow that path. We can also fund this public infrastructure. We can also opt into open, neutral, permissionless block space. We can also contribute technically, because at the end of the day we think that those are the things that are going to ensure we have the decentralized, open foundation that enables us to have an open global on chain economy that brings a billion people in and increases economic freedom everywhere.

Speaker D: Plus one, everything that Jesse was saying, and I just want to take a moment to express my gratitude for you, Jesse and the rest of the base team. I think if we were looking back in the very early stages of this partnership, there was talking about this balance between sovereignty and the collective that only works if someone actually wants decentralization. And it could totally have been the case that Coinbase jumped in here and launched some l two that wasn't actually planning to be decentralized and was just some sort of meme land grab thing. And so I think it's a testament to where we are that basically Jesse and the rest of the base team, like actually are putting their money where their mouth is and like building a decentralized thing. So, yeah, I'm just grateful for that and I thought I'd throw it out.

Speaker B: Jesse, you mentioned that base is going to be part of optimism governance because it's part of the collective, so it's going to participate in governance. Just what does that look like to you? Like, what is actually like base and the optimism governance, what does that relationship look like?

Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. So alongside the revenue contribution or the sequencer fee contribution that we're making to the optimism collective, we're really grateful. That base is going to be receiving a grant that we can earn out over the next six years. That will be up to 2.75% of the total supply of op tokens, and we're going to be using that to participate in governance. And this grant is being kind of rewarded retroactively for the contributions that we've made thus far, and then will be earned out over the next six years for the contributions that we make to the super chain going forward. What we're going to be doing with that is we're first off going to be capping our overall governance participation. And so we will never be voting more than 9% of the total votable supply. That ensures that base doesn't have too much of a voice in optimism governance, but we kind of preserve the decentralized, neutral characteristics of that body. And then we're going to be working to uphold this kind of neutrality commitment that the super chain and the law of change is making. We're going to be working to ensure that the right public goods are funded, and we're working to do that in a way that's aligned to the community. And so we're actually just starting by listening. We've had some experience participating in decentralized governance with Ens, but we've taken a lot of learnings from that. And we want to take a lot of learnings from the folks in the optimism ecosystem about what they've seen work, what they've seen nothing work. And so we're starting by listening. We have a forum post up that's going to be kind of asking for folks for feedback. We're talking with delegates, and if folks have perspectives on how should base participate in this process, we'd love to hear it. And then over the next few months, as we listen, as we learn, we'll be sharing out kind of clear perspective on how we're going to participate, going forward to make sure that we are really like, living up to the best of what's possible here. Anything else to add there, Ben?

Speaker D: No, I mean, I think the only thing I would add is this is yet check another box in exciting, uncharted territory that we're doing here together with y'all. Having a Fortune 500, participating in the DAO is incredibly, incredibly exciting. So appreciate the thoughtfulness that you're bringing to that. And I'm looking forward to the future of that. That would be awesome.

Speaker B: So, Jesse, you said over the next six years, 2.7% of the total supply of op tokens. Is that like a linear vesting? As in, like every single day, it linearly vests. And so it becomes available to coinbase linearly over six years. Is that the mechanic?

Speaker C: It's not daily, but yes, that's the mechanic.

Speaker B: Okay. Not daily, but effectively the same. Okay, cool.

Speaker C: Yeah, effectively the same. And there's milestones that we have to be hitting along the way, basically, in order to do that.

Speaker B: What are those milestones look like? What are those parameters?

Speaker C: It's basically following through on the commitments that we're making. So we have to continue contributing to core development. We have to continue joining the super chain, participating in the Security Council, basically fulfilling on these commitments that we're making around technical decentralization and contributions there, the law of chains and the kind of commitment to that overall. And then participating and being an active governor in the optimism governance body.

Speaker B: Basically being an aligned chain and aligned player.

Speaker C: Being an aligned chain and aligned player. And continuing to provide value to the overall collective and support the public goods that are making all this possible.

Speaker D: Positive sum, baby.

Speaker C: Yeah, positive sum. But when we first started thinking about optimism and thinking about kind of building on l two in general, this wasn't a consideration for us. And actually, when we launched the testnet, this wasn't a consideration for us. We hadn't even had a conversation, really about what would this look like from a kind of governance participation perspective. It was really only after we launched the testnet we started realizing, hey, there's a really important opportunity for us to contribute here, that we had this conversation and figured out how to make sure Coinbase could participate. And so I think that's really reflective of, like, this retroactive model. That optimism has been pioneering. Like, we didn't say, hey, we need this in order to use this technology. Instead we said, hey, let's go use the technology. Let's go show that we are good stewards, that we're ready to show up, that are ready to do the work. And then through that contribution, I think we realized, hey, there's actually a lot of value that Coinbase is adding here, has added already, and that base is going to bring over the next decade. And let's figure out how to align those incentives so we can continue bringing the best of base to the optimism collective, to the super chain, and ensuring that that's kind of happening in perpetuity.

Speaker A: I'm just zooming out here. So we were talking about the kind of the social layer here and the social element here. And then I think David maybe wants to pivot to tech. But before we do, I'm going to attempt to kind of summarize this. I just feel like I got some breakthroughs in the conversation that we just had, and I want to try to summarize this. So one thing I'll just say is we keep referring to this law of chains, okay? And we talked about that. My analogue for that is like articles of Confederation for the 13 colonies. Think of like a constitution. So the law of chains is an actual draft of a document that chains opt into. And we will include a link to the law of chains. We can read the document. It protects rights for different groups, right? Covered participants, users, chain governors, chain servicers, talks about user protections, right? So when Ben says, kind of a prototype of a bill of rights, that's kind of right. And here we are, this is the continental Congress, like we're figuring out. So this is version 0.1 and there's going to be a version 0.2 and a version 0.3. That's what we're actually talking about when we say the law of change is you're opting into a governance collective and you're also opting into a technical standard. Spot of this is how you're going to implement the chains. So that is cool. I guess the part that this also unlocks for me is, I think probably two years ago, if you asked me what Ethereum is, I think a mental model that Dave and I have had is a digital nation. We'd say it's a digital nation. Right. I'm starting to get the feeling that maybe Ethereum isn't so much a digital nation and it's more a platform for launching digital nations.

Speaker B: Okay, meta nation, the meta collective.

Speaker A: So what I see in sort of the super chain and this whole collective that we're building is Ethereum is basically the infrastructure to launch this confederation of states, this confederation of chains, essentially. Right. And so optimism. And the op mainnet is kind of a lead organizer of this confederation, this loose confederation of chains. And then base is opting in and more will join, and you can fork. So I heard a politician this morning talk about, like, this is a new moment for America. It's 1776. I actually think he's right. It is 1776. But for digital nations, because we've just created the superstructure for launching these new social experiments. And it's incredibly exciting for me to see now. I guess one question maybe that's lingering in my head to tie this off, and then we'll get to David and we'll talk on the technical side of how this all comes together. So is the super chain that optimism is creating? It's kind of the law of chains. Is this interoperable with other infrastructure that is being developed in other chain ecosystems? So we look at other layer twos, like stuff that's going on in the world of ZK evms, and we look at, like, arbitrum. Are these distinct separate silos, or are these also interoperable with optimism? I'm trying to get a sense of whether it's, this is kind of its own unique, I guess, digital nation over here, and this is the optimism. Digital nation. We're going to have other digital nations, like the arbitrum digital nation, and maybe the ZK sync digital nation, all of these other systems, or if they're somehow tied together as well. What would you say to that, Ben?

Speaker D: Yeah, it's a really good question. I would say a couple of things. I think I love the whole digital nations coming to life thing. I totally love that. I also think it's digital nations all the way down. I think we can absolutely think about base as a digital nation. Well, right. And like, probably that, like that, like, one to one thing that we were talking about is really going to extend many levels down. Right? So, like, ultimately, you can imagine a big tree structure of, like, nations on nations on nation, you know, in some. In some weird sense.

Speaker B: Right, so coordination all the way down.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker D: Right, yeah, yeah. So, so, yeah, I mean, that's the first thing that I want to say is, like, I love that analogy. And I think it just, like, you can draw that analogy all over the place, and none of it is really long. It's like different layers of knowledge and how we're going about it. I would like to think that what we've put out with the law of chains is a innovative step in governance that we haven't really seen historically. That puts into practice a lot of these analogies that we're trying to get at. So I think that it's very exciting, and I like, I think there's some ego, a little bit of ego left in me that would say, yeah, this is new and exciting and its own thing at the same time. I think what you. Everybody's going to converge around similar things to this. So I think we're just first, not last. And then in terms of actually the boundaries between different chains and between different super chains, if you were fundamentally, the EVM as a substrate is just about the most interoperable. It's like one of the superpowers of the EVM. I think, that's actually slept on. A lot of ethereum is not just the decentralization of it, it is the interoperability of it and the ability to extend it and interconnect it. So I think whether or not we make it explicit, the way that different chains are being connected today is a trend that's going to continue. And so it's definitely the case that we'll see optimism, super chain bridging, get better and better and better from optimism to some other polygon or whatever. At the same time, what we're doing here with the block space homogeneity does afford, in the long run, technical advantages that allow you to do that interoperation in a fundamentally more secure, more decentralized way that basically comes from it being a standard. If you want to have two chains talk to each other, and it's not guaranteed that those chains stay in sync, and one of them might do an upgrade that breaks the interconnection in a way that the other one can't do, then that does pose challenges, and people will continue to overcome those challenges. But at the same time, that homogeneous block space property, I think, I believe, will be a stronger connection within the boundaries of individual super chains because of that shared standard and because of the homogeneity. Basically.

Speaker B: One last topic to make sure that we touch on before we go to the technical details about how these lines between chains become blurred is the 15% fee. That goes to the optimism collector. Ben, why does the optimism collective get to charge a 15% fee, and where is that fee going to go to public goods funding?

Speaker D: I mean, Jesse talked about this. First of all, having a fee, I think, is a huge win for sustainability because it completes the part of the picture that maybe we didn't previously had. Zooming out when the optimism collective was birthed, we made it very explicit that our mission was here to fund public goods sustainable. And at the time, that story was very clear. We had a chain, it was op mainnet, and we committed to those fees being used to fund the public goods that produce it. And we've done two rounds of retroactive public goods funding. I could go into a whole rigmarole about the mechanisms. Leaving that aside, one very exciting thing that we have here is that the narrative extends to multichain now, because the question you might ask is, okay, well, you have op mainnet, but when a bunch of big people go and fork you, then aren't you going to lose the sustainability because those other chains aren't contributing back? And so just mechanistically, one of the key components to talk about is the fact that because we can embed a fee into the standard, then we can tie the sustainability together in a more fundamental way. With that being said, I want to call out some very important caveats. One caveat is that it is incredibly important for the collective to provide a additive value and not coercively extract. Right? So it's very, very, very important for us, for our values in a way that goes way back. But I think also equally important, quite frankly, for this whole thing to work is for the ability for Jesse and I to sit in a room and go, okay, well, Coinbase could take this code and run with it and go some, go do something totally different that the ability to do that will massively legitimize anybody that's going to opt into some system. It's much, I think, just legitimately stronger for a super chain ecosystem to say the tech that underlies this is a public good. It is given away. And the only reason for you to join and pay a fee is because there's an additive value that is going to be provided to you. So I think that's like, you can think of it almost as an accountability, but that's an extremely important piece that I think is worth bringing up.

Speaker B: The way that we say this on bankless is the freedom to execute. It is always a check on the power. The only reason why a chain will join the collective is that if the 15% fee that's being charged produces more than 15% of value for the chains that join it, otherwise they'll just fork and leave.

Speaker D: Yep. So that funding should go back to public goods funding, because the people paying will benefit from the technology stack constantly improving. The only other thing that I want to call out is that we have a notion in our public goods funding of the scope, which is basically like, what is the set of public goods that Optimus is meant to fund? And I think another key part of this is in a chain like base joining. We need to expand the collective's model for what public goods we fund to include those public goods that are beneficial to base, and repeat that for any other chain that's joined. And so this will also help make it more compelling. So it's not just about funding public goods goods. If you're a chain that is contributing value to the collective, the positive impact that public goods have on you should be rewarded, just like, you know, the op stack itself.

Speaker B: So I'd like to get into some of the technical details as to how the super chain actually forms, because, okay, we've got, we've say all these organizations that have forked the op stack recently, they all desire to be a part of this super chain base very clearly and has stated that they desire to be about a part of the super chain. But there's like ten other op stack forks that all desire to be a part of the super chain. So we'll just imagine the future where this law of chains is adopted by all of these op stack forkers. And so we do have homogeneous block space, but that doesn't produce the super chain. That is just producing the foundation for the super chain to emerge. We still have a bunch of other technical hurdles that we need to get across, because you're still going to have to bridge between chains. We're still going to need, and this is me putting on somebody else's devkin cap, things like cross chain atomic execution, cross chain messaging, cross chain transaction calls. And so, Ben, I think for like, the idea of the super chain super chain is going to emerge. It's going to be this one network of interconnected blockchains. It's going to be great. It kind of feels like that. Draw the rest of the owl meme if you're familiar. There's like four steps of drawing the owl. And the first step, you draw the first two circles, and then you draw the second circles, and then the third step is just like question marks. And then the fourth step, you have this beautiful, completely constructed owl, and, like, we're missing a step. Maybe you could fill in the rest of the owl for us. How technically does this super chain actually emerge?

Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, I love that meme. That is a hilarious meme. And that's a good analogy to the question that you're asking. I do think that the power of homogeneity is not to be underappreciated, and I think the more time that we spend on it, the more we've realized that that's the table stakes for anything else. So that homogeneity property in the owl meme, you draw the circle and the other circle, that's missing a lot of steps, but it is the right two first steps that an artist would actually draw the owl. So we're starting with the right thing, and we think that it's table stakes to have basically homogenous block space that upgrades together to be able to upgrade together into something that's more interconnected. And even that homogeneity on a technical level will bring, I think, a lot of things to the table that people don't appreciate. One example of this is integrations. I talked a lot about application developers having idiosynchronouses to pick between chains. There's a whole suite of tooling, like infrastructure providers, like inferior alchemy, there's your block explorers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Having a shared standard and homogeneous block space will also make it a lot better to be able to get all of those integrations to happen. Quite candidly, if you're making a change today, one of the hurdles is definitely bridging and getting that set up. There's an equally big part of it, which is the huge amount of developer tooling that's out there that you need to integrate. And being on a shared standard allows us to integrate that shared standard and get those integrations everywhere. Ok. Anyway, so homogeneity is great. And so I'm just reemphasizing, let's not undersell that. Concretely, what needs to happen for us to bridge these things more and more together? I think one of the big steps, next steps, is just going to be not even solving the bridging problem in terms of some core technical improvements to the bridges, but is basically just making it really easy for users to bridge and transact across chains. The whole notion of switching your RPC provider and going and changing the metamask network and then going to some bridge website and going and bridging, even without some, even just using the core underlying tooling that's there, one of the first things is just going to be make that really easy. People should be able to go from op mainnet to doing the next basement and on chain summer in a way that does not feel like they're switching between two worlds. It shouldn't feel like a border crossing. That'll be one of the first steps. And you're right. The next ones are basically shared sequencing, which basically gets you the ability to sequence, basically gets you the ability to include two transactions on two different chains sort of in the same spot. And that's one step along the way. And the ultimate final boss, of course, is not just to which that is a prerequisite, is shared execution or cross chain atomicity. So basically, the ability for one transaction to be executed and do everything that it does, that you can do in a flash loan between two contracts on Ethereum between two chains, and that's going to be sort of the final boss of all of this. It's going to be a long way to get there. Like I said, we have drawn the correct circles for the owl for now, and we actually think that those circles are much more valuable than the owl analogy. But we'll continue to get there until it's all one giant homogeneous evidence of magic land.

Speaker B: So maybe to frame this in a timeline that many Ethereum people will be familiar with from 2015 to, I would say 2019 was Ethereum research and development phase, where we had the north star of what we wanted Ethereum to be. But turns out things like proof of stake and sharding were more concepts, concepts more than they were actual engineering challenges. And then in 2019 to 2020, we had Ethereum 2.0 serenity arise, and everything that was research and development just turned into just an engineering challenge where we knew the path, we just needed to code for it. Where would you say the super chain is on this timeline?

Speaker D: Oh man, that is a toughie. That is a toughie. I think. Let me think about that. I would say candidly, somewhere in the middle, it's a really tough one to answer. I've been really pleased by the progress of decentralized sequencing protocols. This has been something that's been on the protocol back burner for a while, in some sense, where ultimately the l two construction constrains the sequencer a lot. So decentralizing the sequencer isn't the top priority. Now that that stack is maturing, there's a lot of people in the community building decentralized sequencing and shared sequencing, and I think we're getting an increasingly good handle on that. So that's definitely leaving research territory and entering real implementation territory. For example, espresso right now is working on a leader election prototype for the op stack as a result of a grant from the optimism foundation. So I think that's all getting figured out. The final boss of atomic execution and how to coordinate all these sequencers and a mass thing together isn't perfectly solved. There's still a bit of research going into it, but I think all the foundation is being laid before our eyes. So I don't know, maybe not the most satisfying answer. The next steps are clear. Don't ask me to commit to an engineering timeline. Come on now.

Speaker B: I wouldn't dare. But maybe. Maybe I can ask you about an engineering timeline on this next question, which is going to come to the conversation of fault proofs. Now, fraud proofs and fault proofs are the same thing for the bank listeners. Maybe Ben will talk about why optimism elects to call them fault proofs. But why doesn't optimism have fault proofs? And so maybe we can talk about, like, what are the security assumptions of a chain that does not have, have fault or fraud proofs. Like, can base yoink people's money? What are the risks being beholden to the user in the current state of the optimism ecosystem? And then also, where is, where are, where are the fraud proofs? Where the fraud proofs, Ben?

Speaker D: Twitter. Twitter meme of the month. Yeah, I mean, I'll let Jesse speak to base in his own voice. The fundamental question at hand around the fault proof thing is really a broader question of what is the development, what is work in progress, what is complete, where is the stack app through that broader lens, I'm incredibly, incredibly pleased with all the progress going down right now. Bedrock, which is the code base, that enabled base to go in less than a year from like zero to like. There's a whole. Pardon my french, there's a whole chain going on here that's incredibly exciting and doing record breaking numbers. Right. So to get us there was the bedrock release. And I think, I don't know how many months ago it was now that I was on here talking to you guys about bedrock. But the first thing that I want to say is that that release we actually view as a big milestone towards fall proofs in the first place. Because basically if you don't, if you missed that episode, what bedrock was, was basically ground up rewrite of all of the things after years of running op mainnet that we realized were broken and needed to be improved. And there's a whole host of. I mean, I could talk about the modularity of it, the minimal diff. I think there's actually a whole argument that. Not an argument, there's an entire point about the security of a better rewritten codebase being better in all sorts of other ways than just this one dimension of fall proofs. But fundamentally we viewed that as a prerequisite, as this next step in the journey to doing the fault proof thing in the first place. I can talk about some of the specifics, why later? But fundamentally, yes. Is it true that some of the folks that were working on bedrock, there was some opportunity cost that we could have kept with the old op stack that was pre bedrock and had some weird versions of fault proofs on that that would totally be possible. But to us, getting bedrock was the next step along that journey. And so, yeah, we're there.

Speaker B: Okay, we'll get back to the fault proof conversation with the OPSAC in a second. But Jesse, just want to talk about the risk profile of base base without fault proofs. Because since base is part of the op collective and it's been having all the homogenization of the blocks base, because optimism Mainnet doesn't have fault proofs, neither does base. So what is the risk? What is the risk profile of base? And point blank? Can base yelling people's money, what's the deal here?

Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. And this is something that we thought a lot about. It's like what is the decentralization characteristics that we feel comfortable bringing base to Mainnet with? And one of the big important gates for us was we couldn't launch base in a structure where any single party could have control of the network in order to kind of negatively impact users or impact funds. And so the way we've solved for that, in the absence of fault proofs, which obviously we're working towards to get out as quickly as possible, is we've set up the upgrade system of base such that there's no single party who can upgrade base. So instead what we have is we have a nested multisig structure where there's a base upgrade multisig and an optimism multisig. That's the same multisig that controls upgrades on optimism. And in order to make any upgrades on base, you actually need both of those multisigs to sign off. And so that means that Coinbase can't upgrade base independently, nor can optimism upgrade base independently. You need both of those folks to come together. So that was the first thing, basically ensuring that no party could upgrade base in a way that could impact user funds. The second thing was, you know, on the withdrawal, ensuring that there couldn't be an invalid withdrawal proposal. And the way that that's enforced in the absence of fault proofs is something called the challenger mechanism. There's basically a whitelisted set of parties who can say, challenge a withdrawal proposal and say, this is invalid, and that prevents it from going through. And similarly, we didn't want to make it. So only one party had that opportunity such that if that party kind of did something negative, they could withdraw funds. And so again, what we now have is what's called a one of two, which basically means that either that kind of base core multisig or the optimism multisig can challenge proposals. And so if the base team were to do something invalid, optimism could come in and say, hey, this is invalid, we're going to challenge and we're going to ensure it doesn't go through. What those two characteristics get us is basically that kind of decentralization characteristic that we want, which is that no coinbase, no base folk can make that decision to impact users in that way. And then, of course, in parallel to that, we are working towards having full fault proofs that do this with a larger set of people, fully permissionless set, that can ensure that there's even more confidence in the overall decentralization of the system. One thing that I'll note is, I think if you look at the actual decentralization characteristics of this, this means that Bayes is more decentralized than op mainnet or I think, any other op stack chain. Because you have that kind of nested multisig, that means that there's basically even more parties who are ensuring that base is acting in good faith. It's not just coinbase you have to trust. It's also kind of the whole optimism collective and the people who are standing behind that. And so that for us, we wanted to go above and beyond, and we obviously are working to get fault proofs out as quickly as possible. But this felt like the step that would get us, us there in the right way.

Speaker B: So one of the critiques, Ben, of the op stack fork strategy of optimism is that now that anyone can fork the op stack, they're forking this chain that doesn't have fault proofs. And so we are actually increasing the total supply of chains in the market that doesn't have fault proofs enabled. So I want to actually put on my optimist hat, which fits nicely, and reiterate something that you were saying earlier, which is that there was a sequence of steps that optimism needed to go through in order to do fault proofs. Right. And the optimism bedrock, which is what everyone is forking, was that first precursor step that the fraud proof module ultimately slots into. And so once false proofs are actually coded up and shipped, then every single op stack chain that's forked the op stack will also be able to incorporate fraud false proofs. Fraud proofs. And I would only imagine that inside the law of chains, if we want this homogeneous block space, that that is going to be a prerequisite for actually being a part of the optimism collective. Is that the correct interpretation of events here?

Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, the way to. The way to translate that in law of chain speak is governance minimization. Right. So basically, like, the part of what the law of chain says is that, you know, optimism governance is setting this standard and ensuring that users protections are enforced. The best way for optimism governance to protect the users is for it to not have to do anything at all. This is the notion of governance minimization. Yeah. And so fault proofs are absolutely key to the story there, because a fault proof is what allows no governance to be necessary. Just one honest party somewhere out there that could be you, to be able to keep the chain secure and to protect those and to ensure those user protections.

Speaker B: Okay, so when are we getting them?

Speaker D: Oh, good question. So when are we getting what? And what does it mean to not have fault proofs is probably the dynamic to dig into there. I want to be clear. It's not like we embarked upon bedrock and left the fault proofs as an afterthought that like, oh, hopefully it'll work and we'll figure it out. Right. For a year and a half now, we've had sitting on the Monorepo canon, which is the EVM equivalent fault proof, that the basis for fault proof work that's going on very rapidly right now is based on, and that's since been moved into the Monorepo post bedrock. So the question really, that you're asking is probably when different stages. I don't know if the audience would be familiar with the l two beat breakdown there. I can go into that if that's useful. What do you think?

Speaker B: Yeah, semi familiar.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: We just did a show with you, arbitrum team, about the whole pie slice and everything.

Speaker D: Yeah, got it? Yeah. Okay. So, yeah, there's stage zero, stage one, stage two. And stage zero is no fault proofs, or at least they're not deployed because they're sitting there on the Monorepo. Stage one is they're deployed, but there's training wheels and stage two is training wheels off. We are at stage zero. Nobody is at stage two. There's no question that we need to close the gap and get to stage two. That's the number one priority of the community right now. Progress is going amazingly fast. I'm very, very excited about that. Ultimately, the question that we need to answer is not how to get from stage zero to stage one, it's to get from stage one to stage two. Because those training wheels, which is effectively a multisig, everybody on stage one and nobody is patched stage one right now, everyone. Stage one makes the assumption that there's a set of multisig parties that are not going to rug the users effectively. It gives them the authority to do that via this multisig that is obviously not where we're trying to land, and that is the most important milestone for us to get past. So what's going on in terms of this progress? Again, we need to get from stage zero to one and we need to close that gap. Ultimately, everyone needs to land on stage two. Part of the work there is basically to a part of the work that's kind of actually tangential from these stages, but actually we do view as incredibly important is moving to a decentralized security council, which is effectively a stand in for the multisig, being not just folks from the optimism collective and folks from base, but instead of being a much broader set of community members that are holding us accountable. So that's one thing that's honestly actually kind of like independent from fall proofs. In many sense. It's just about like this set on multisig. We do have some designs in there that we think are unique and there's different technicalities I could get into there that's not worth doing. But that's one thing that's happening. So that we're expecting to land in early 2021 in terms of getting to stage two, the right, first of all, you have to ask the question, why is everybody on stage one right now? And why does everyone have stage training wheels? And the reason that you don't have training, the reason to have training wheels is because you can't ride a bike yet and nobody can ride a bike. I want to be clear that there's a reason for that. It's because the bar for taking off the training wheels is extremely high. Right. What we're talking about is a bar here that says this implementation of fault proofs is final, it is immutable, and we're entirely relying on it. So if there actually is a bug, sorry, you're out of luck, because there is no multisig to bail you out. So I think the most deep question ultimately that you've been getting at here is how are we going to get to the point where we're trusting in that? And the answer is basically a multi client approach. So our view is basically extremely similar to what ethereum does with its client diversity efforts and for instance ETH two having a bunch of clients and that diversity being very important. The reason for that is because security risks come from bugs, and if you re implement something, you probably will still have bugs, but they'll be in different places. So the key thing from our perspective that will get us to stage two, like full decentralization, where there is no multi SiG to bail you out if things go wrong, is only one in which there are multiple redundant implementations of the fault proofs that are checked and all have to agree with each other for the whole system to work. What does this give you? It gives you the ability that no one bug implemented in one of those implementations is going to break the entire system. Following so far, does that make sense?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think the way that I might re articulate this is that in lieu of a multi client ecosystem, a layer two has to fall back on a multisig as its stand in second client. That is, the role of the multisig is to be like, well, if our first client has a bug, then therefore that bug becomes canon because there's no second client to check it. Therefore we just have a multisig to act in as that second client. And so maybe what you're saying, Ben, is that optimism has been focused on building out the multi client ecosystem so that it can only have its training wheels on for a very short amount of time and it can go straight from stage zero to stage one and straight into stage two. Is that what you're trying to say?

Speaker D: That's exactly right, yeah. From our perspective, the delta to stage two is the big one, not to stage one, because before that it's still on multisigs. And you're exactly right. If you only have one client, the multisig needs to be a backup if that client has a bug. If you have three clients, that's how you get comfortable. And again, I want to caveat. That's from our perspective, it's possible that others could have one client and say, nope, we're going to fully rely on this, and it is immutable. And if it's wrong, then we're screwed. And so that could be a decision that's made our bar for decentralization and not sacrificing security to get decentralization. Is this multiple client approach.

Speaker B: Okay, how many clients does optimism have?

Speaker D: Oh, that's a good question. And shout out to the folks at base that are working to build out yet another one on Oprah. There are a fair number. Honestly, I'm not sure how long ago it was that Nethermind came out and just randomly released op Nethermind, which we like. I think we had talked to them a little bit, but it was extremely exciting for us. So it's going very quickly. One of the interesting things that we probably talked about in bedrock a bit is in the same way that there is consensus client execution in eth two. I'm sure you guys talked about this in the context of the merge. That also holds true for rollups, where there's basically the consensus client, which is reading the call data from l one and turning it into EVM execution. And then there's the EVM client. So we have two consensus clients at this point. One is the op node and the other is Magi by a 16 z. So we have two consensus client implementations. Then we have op Nethermind, we have op Geth, and we also have op Aragon shout out to testin prod, another core development and team and opera in the works, like Jesse mentioned. So if you do that, then we have two there and four here. So in theory, you could run eight different node configurations between the two for the consensus client and the four for the execution client. Short answer is, it's a lot, and it's going very swimmingly. And again, this is why we built bedrock, to be so modular like. It was infeasible to reimplement. It's infeasible to reimplement many other clients if you don't take the approach that bedrock does.

Speaker B: Jesse, anything you want to add to this before we move on?

Speaker C: I guess the only thing that I'd add is, I think, plus one to what Ben's saying. We got to find the path to get from stage zero to stage one to stage two. I also just say we clearly have a lot of work to do to get there. Like Ben said, we have a bunch of clients. I'm excited to see those fully productionized live. And then we have a bunch of people who are working on getting us to stage one and I'm excited to see that fully productionized and live. And so this is a p zero priority across the base team, across the OP labs team optimism and a bunch of other core developers. And you know, I think it's good and healthy for the ecosystem and community and y'all to ask questions and be like, hey, when's this coming? And so I'd say please keep asking the questions, keep following the progress. It's on GitHub, it's open source. And we'll keep sharing updates in the next few months about the progress we're making. And I think like Ben said, with bedrock, we've really laid a strong foundation. And, you know, that was the goal. It was like lay a foundation that we can build on top of. And now I think it's kind of up to us to leverage that foundation to deliver and to deliver with speed. So that's what we're going to do.

Speaker B: It's almost as if bedrock was meant to be a strong foundation for the layer two ecosystem. Jesse, Ben, I've learned a lot in this conversation and I think anyone who's listened to bankless knows that I get very excited over all things super chain. So this episode, I think is going to be a good one to help clarify why that excitement always shows up when optimism, a new op stack fork shows up in the news. Jesse, Ben, I want to ask you guys each this because each of you represent a different chain. Jesse, what is the near term focus for base? Once you hang up from this podcast, what are you going to go work on? What's the base ecosystem focused on at the moment?

Speaker C: Yeah, well, we got nine more days in on chain summer and then it's September and so, you know, we're still really focused on just telling the world about base and telling the world about what's happening on chain. Bringing one thing to do every day on chain that we're kind of curating and then helping surface all the incredible stuff that's happening across the community. So if folks want to participate in that, you can go to on Chainsummer XYZ, get involved, get on chain this summer. And then after that I'm going to take a break, going to take a few days to breathe. It's been a really crazy month of bringing this into the world and then we're just going to get back to building like we just talked about, getting fault proofs and security council and further progress on decentralization. That's our p. Zero priority. And then make it easier and easier for developers to build on base, easier and easier for people to use base, and kind of creating that ecosystem of builders who are bringing those applications, creating those applications and bringing the next billion people on chain. That's what I'm focused on. So, yeah, build, build, build.

Speaker B: I will say for the bankless listener out there, the last time I saw Jesse was at ETH, and the time before that was at a different conference. I can't remember which. And then also, then hopping into this chat right here to record. Ever since, every single time, he's running around like a madman talking to 10,000 different people, talking to different developers. And then we just, like, hop into the recording. Cause that's what I do, podcasts. And then once we're done, he hops around and starts running off to go do something else about bass or something. And then that's been what I've been seeing Jesse do for like, the last, like, six months. And then he comes into this recording studio on Riverside, and he's, like, scarfing down his meal, which looks like he's. It's the first meal of the day or something. Something. It looks like he's just been running around for, like, six months straight. So the fact that you're telling me, Jesse, that you get a moment to breathe in the next coming up soon. Congrats. Do touch some grass. Thank you for all your contributions, but we need you to also stick around for the next following decades, too, so don't burn yourself out.

Speaker D: You've been doing a stream a day for the past month, isn't that right?

Speaker C: Yeah. Stream a day every day for 15 minutes. We're doing on chain summer stories. It's the first time I've done direct content, and it's been having a lot of fun. Talked to the onboard team who is based in Nigeria today, and they were sharing about how Nigeria is coming on chain and how the african continent is coming on chain. And so I think, yeah, I mean, like, candidly, it's been a sprint for the last six months. And my feeling was like, we only get to do this sprint once. You only get to bring something like base into the world once. And I wanted to give that literally everything that I had, and I've given it everything that I had. I think our team's given it everything that I had, that we had. And now we're gonna take a beat, take a breath, and settle in for the marathon, which is gonna be the next ten years, the next decade, you know, the bringing the world on chain. So, you know, I guess, like, only thought I'll say is like, thank you, everyone, for all of the energy and positivity over the last six months, because it's really been the thing that's, like, made it possible for me to push as hard team to push as hard as we have to try and make this all happen. So really grateful for all that love and appreciation.

Speaker B: Yeah. Ben, same question to you. What's the near term focus for optimism? Op labs collective, what's going on over there?

Speaker D: Yeah, so technically, there is only one answer, and that is fault proofs. And like Jesse said, you know, go look at the GitHub. We're incredibly thankful to have a community of folks like yourselves and the people at l two beat. Like, there's an entire company basically focused on holding us accountable, which is absolutely incredible and really exciting. So technically, that's the number one focus. I can come up here and talk about the differences in stages and the unique strategy that we're bringing to the table. At the end of the day, we just have to ship and we're going to let that speak for itself as opposed to anything short. Then in terms of governance, I would say it's basically the law of chains and getting optimism ready to multi chain. I'm glad that we had some aha moments about the law of chains and what it means, but the work to actually get the DAO ready to fund the public goods on base and understand that there are multiple chains and understand that it has an obligation to create sequencers now, for example, that is a very meaningful amount of work for us to be doing. And we have an incredible governance team that I certainly can't take anything close to a lion's share of the credit there. But that's definitely the focus right now, is basically preparing the optimism community to go multi chain and for the next billion users to come on and join the super chain.

Speaker A: There we go. We've come full circle in this episode. Jesse, as you said, this is day one. Jesse, Ben, thank you so much for guiding us through the super chain and base today.

Speaker D: Thanks, y'all. It was a pleasure.

Speaker C: Thank you.

Speaker A: Action items for ebankless Nation will include a link to the law of chains. That's what we've been mentioning throughout this episode. There is a governance post you can look at to read more about that. Gotta end with this, of course. Risks and disclaimers. Crypto is risky. So are all the chains that we're creating. You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.