185 - The Superchain Explained with Jesse Pollak & Ben Jones

but Ben you just introduced a a newer structure which seems to be a composition of many chains and you called that a super chain okay so super chain how does the super chain idea tie to what Jesse was saying earlier of getting a billion people on chain it like how important is the structural element well they all come through independent chains like 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're here to help you become more bankless we have two guests on today and there's two parts to this episode the first part talking about base the second we talk about the super chain what is base bases coinbase is Layer Two we talked to Jesse the creative 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 constant Institution for uniting layer 2 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 goink 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 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 cryptoeconomics it's about political philosophy it's about coordination and the relationship

between the individual and the collective I think a lot of the subjects matter that we have explored here on Bank lists is all being comprised in this super chain conversation it's not just about the technical hurdles that come with wanting to to allow for ten thousand change 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 or how do we incentivize coordination rather than defection how do we get large centralized institutions like coin base to cooperate and to coordinate with decentralized Dows that I think this this is uh 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 optimism 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 bass I think this is the substrate for a change in the whole entire world and so that's why you can just hear the excitement coming out of me right now yeah I I think the whole time for me I was like uh I can't wait to get to the debrief because I want to discuss this like 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 at the episode that is available for bankless Citizens on the bank list 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 is that what we're creating here how will other layer twos respond well 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 are 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 Bank location I am extremely excited to introduce you to Ben Jones co-founder of optimism and also Jesse Pollock the creator of bass Ben Jessie both of you welcome back to bankless so glad to be here thank you Jesse 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 uh 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 well I mean first off it's just been awesome to see the response from the broader World about what we're doing with bass um you know I think when we started thinking about bass we kind of had this vision of bringing a billion people on chain bringing the whole world on chain uh and then as we got closer to launch I think we started seeing a lot of organic energy around it happening this summer her 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 um kind of like believing in that future alongside us and throwing their weight in throwing their energy the optimism team like everyone you know 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 the

other big feeling that I have is it's day one like this is this is the very beginning of what is a long long journey to bring billions of people on chain and so um I think our feeling is like awesome we're excited we're excited other people are excited but our heads are like 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 applications as they're being built and really doing

everything we possibly can to Shepherd in the next era of the internet so I'm grateful and back to building Ben what was it like on the optimism side of things for for base chain which is you know not enough not the optimism uh main net it's its own independent uh ecosystem but it's also an OP stack fork and this has been a very long partnership between optimism and coinbase so how how is it like to view these things from the optimism side of things yeah no I mean and the partnership is deep I'm sure we'll get

more you know a lot more into that later but you know similar feelings of excitement and gratitude you know I think for the optimism Community like this is just an incredible proof point for positive sum in action right where like the proliferation of chains like bass 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 you know I think a feeling of excitement for the future

and like some of the next steps of like positive some thinking for the collective are at the first you know like the first exciting moment of this um obviously the other one is incredibly happy with like the code and the tech working you know like uh we've been working on the Bedrock code base which is like what enabled base to be able to go from zero to 100 real quick um for a while and so it's like absolutely incredible to see that now not in just production on op mainnet but in production on another chain getting massive usage and and holding up real

well and you know shouts out to the the base team for all the engineering that went into getting that chain running um but from a fundamental core protocol level that's incredibly incredibly exciting um so yeah we're I mean it's just like hype all around you know what I mean the future is looking bright I think some of the excitement really comes from the clarity That Bass 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 uh and I think a lot of this uh 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 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 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

they spawn the 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 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 mean 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 in that conversation I really want to start with um this this broader question bass 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 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 12 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 L2 whether it's nfts or D5 or social than they are on L1 and so I feel like we've kind of spedrun what I think a lot of people

were nervous about which was like is transaction activity gonna move are people going to get comfortable with this transition and now it's like oh 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 you know when we were starting to think about building base um we'd actually looked at building a chain twice before um and both of those times uh we we consider building an alternative L1 to ethereum and we kind of ruled it out we

said no and the big reason we said no was that um 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 and we were going to be putting ourselves on the 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 and so as we were thinking about building base I think the things that really kind of enabled us to get

comfortable with that and get excited about it for 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 um and what we believe is kind of the foundation for the Unchained global economy and then two as we kind of zeroed in on how do we build an L2 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 uh kind of a creative and and additive to everyone else in the ecosystem who was using this technology and we could be a part of a structure was actually bigger than just us I mean this is where this concept of the super chain comes in I think we kind of convinced ourselves that layer 2 wasn't going to end up being just one chain but instead that it was gonna be many chains that kind of collectively scaled ethereum and having a substrate in the op stack

um having a a 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 uh chains and kind of in general shepherding this next era I think that felt like uh like another big kind of unlock for us and I'd say the the third the third thing was when you think about coinbase

um and you think about our strengths uh 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 Center socialized public company and so as we were thinking about okay how do we build a decentralized open permissionless layer too and uh like do that in the right way having a compliment 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 the coinbase and base team and the optimism team in broader effort with super chain so Ben Bass is not the only op stack chain that's dropped it seems that we kind of get a new OP stock chain one or one or two a week lately we have the public goods Network there's Zora Sello D Bank mode just to name a few but the

problem that it rises here is that all of these op stack chains are their own chains they are Forks of the op stack and the optimism Vision has always been one of a singular coherent Network and so we have this concept of the super chain but if I'm on the optimism main net and I want to go over to base I got a bridge and and so I'm wondering about like 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 cohere Network because right now like the op

Collective is just like Adele and so that's not doing much for coherence of all the users who all the users of these things so how do we actually get from the forking of the op stack to actually a single year a singular cohere Network where does this story start yeah I mean great question and I think I would Echo exactly what Jesse said in terms of clarity I think like the one thing yeah Jesse I hope this resonates with you for both of us in working together and forming a partnership with like each of us realizing what the other

person's role to play was and like understanding how the pieces would all fit together you know like the role to play and the collaboration and the agreement yeah and and just in general like what what does it mean for decentralized governance of a standard what does it mean to be a centralized party like coinbase which has incredible Saints strengths and bring those into the decentralized context like yeah absolutely I I just like time and time again right so I mean look I'll back up until a little bit more of

the story right is you know at the last Devcon like a year ago right 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 tank chains working together right and it's always been clear that to scale ethereum we would need to have some notion of multiple chains at least in terms of like the underlying data structures that we envision as a chain you know I think in the future a chain is going to look more like a smart contract or like a sub ecosystem or you

know social you know fabric more than it will sort of a religious ecosystem like you've seen with Bitcoin or an altel one or ethereum but uh that's all great you know to say but but there's a question of what what does it actually mean and like what are we going to do about this and what is the path to get there right and so when we put on the op stack you know like you said David like the momentum has been incredible as it feels like every week now someone's not coming out with a crazy new OP Stacks thing right but this begs the question of like 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 there are certainly challenges that come with getting a bunch of change and 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 uh 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 op stack makes it really easy to spin up in a 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 you know 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 like talking about positive sum and public goods right like that's kind of table Stakes to be able to have that kind of positive sum collaboration to make this all work

um I think the the other side of this sort of 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 you know 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 uh uh you know security models and patterns and idiosyncrasies of how the evm works

and your synthesis of how you Bridge all 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 um that's a bit of a ramble but that is

how I we think about unifying chains like 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 you know properties of the decentralization 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 stock fork and then they also all incorporate this one additional property maybe that one additional property needs to be merged into the main op stack code base is that is that how you envision this moving forward yeah I optimism governance is basically being a

vessel to facilitate those positive sum Integrations right you you need some like you basically 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 the idiosyncrasies and security models um 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 so uh I want to ask the question is something you you said earlier I think is really interesting Jesse and uh both you and Ben and I think all of crypto are kind of working towards this this is um the idea of bass is a you know kind of day one in this attempt to onboard a billion users into crypto and uh get a billion users more than into crypto actually on chain okay and that's really cool and um I want to dive into this uh super chain type concept because part of

the question is okay how do we do that right now we have bass and I know it's quite you know uh quite um speedily reached over a hundred thousand 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 uh I was looking I think in terms of monthly transacting addresses we just crossed like 700 000 or something like that so you know those are addresses not not users but I mean we don't you can't directly connect them but um it's a lot so the hundred thousand I mean I think like the hundred thousand number that was just like daily people

who are coming back daily and then yesterday which was pretty cool we we crossed the number of uh we had more transactions than ethereum which I I kind of the I expected it to take us maybe like six months or 12 months or something like that to get there and so to kind of cross that milestone in two weeks was um kind of mind-blowing absolutely I mean that 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 uh the kind of the numbers that that base saw in just like two weeks so our Cycles are

accelerating here which is absolutely phenomenal one other thing 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 12. yesterday was also the the largest number of all L2 transactions and it was 5X so ethereum was at about I think like 11.7 and all l2s were at like 56. and so if you look at that chart of L2 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 1 100th of the number of transactions on ethereum I think it was like one tenth of a transaction per second and now we're at 5x the transactions on ethereum and that is just like a straight line up and to the right or like a log whatever uh exponential line up into the right and you know that's a huge shout out to everyone you know obviously the optimism team in op mainnet and and also

like Arbitron and ZK sync like there's so many people who are coming together to to imbias vision and I think we're just excited to be a part of it okay all right so so we've got um traction uh so far and I want to get back to this idea of of the the super chain because I have a feeling it's going to take more than bass to onboard a billion uh users even though they're we're making you know great strides here and I'm interested in something that that Ben said about kind of this the structure that we now have right if you think about like you know

the human body or all of these structures that underlie you know systems of Nature and that sort of thing you have cells which are you know one set of of structures and there's a lot of complexity there and um like independent uh an independent system working together and that kind of composes up to like the organs and then you have an organism and then a group of uh human organisms compose a society right 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 right so we have like this structure of the chain you know first there was Bitcoin and that was the original chain right so we have kind of like single channels and the chain single cell organism uh and then we got a you know multi-cell kind of organism maybe with uh 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 bass 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 a newer structure which seems to be a composition of many chains and you called that a super chain okay so super chain how does the super chain idea tie to what Jesse was saying earlier of getting a billion people on chain it like how important is this structural element well they all come through independent chains like just

paint the picture of how this new style texture will impact the future here yeah so I mean a few things to be said there I think um I love the I love the life analogies and the shout out to the bank listing both you and David are so good at the life of the slime mold and the collective anyway I love one of the 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 right which is the notion that that basically like smaller parts come together to form a hole that is greater than their sum right

and I think effectively the super chain you can think of as the emergent structure that will emerge from chains like op mainnet and bass and Zora and others coming together to form something that is more cohesive and looks more like you know the third wave of the internet right it's actually very similar when you look back into early days of the internet right there was a notion of like networks and everyone kind of thought of like there's a network that this company has and then there's a financial credit network over here right

and eventually what happened was that the internet emerged which was basically just saying okay sure there are individual networks but they're all also connected in This Global Internet that is changing the world right so you can almost think of the super chainous analogous um to that practically speaking what are the properties that that thing should have or like what does that look like you know one of the things that you said and I was touching this before one of the things you said earlier David was you know sort of this is fulfilling the vision I think one of the core aspects of like fulfilling the vision of

scaling ethereum that you know we've had for many many years at optimism ethereum is like one cohesive thing and there are sub ecosystems and communities but but ultimately when you think about using ethereum right 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 you know thousands millions whatever have changed it it's not enough of all those chains are like 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 like a consistent substrate for us to build this new wave of the internet on and 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 right so I think probably when you were asking questions about things like um you know how do these chains talk to each other and you still have to bridge right there's a lot that we could get into there on like technical specifics and if you want to dive into ask 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 uh are they are are effectively governed and upgraded together because the block space is homogeneous 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

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 yeah so I mean it's interesting because that answer will surely change over time on the social layer but I'll talk about are on the technical layer right but I'll talk about the basics is again the substrate of the future of the internet is it 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 like think upholds the rights uh 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 his 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