Scaling Ethereum with Starknet

Edi Sinovcic:
Yeah. I think we’re live now, so it’s good.

Louis Guthmann:
Hi everyone.

Edi Sinovcic:
Hey. Hey. Are we live? I think we are.

Louis Guthmann:
I think we’re live. Yeah. Awesome.

Edi Sinovcic:
Awesome. Sounds good. Okay. We are.

Louis Guthmann:
Good. So do you start or should I start, Edi?

Edi Sinovcic:
Sorry. I’m losing you a bit, just the sound. So can you repeat? Yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
Yeah. I’m asking if I should start or you should start.

Edi Sinovcic:
Yeah. Oh, sure I can start, so no worries. So yeah. Hey, thanks for having me, man. It was a pleasure always talking in person and now we can also do live-streaming. So it’s always… Yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
Yeah.

Edi Sinovcic:
Some interesting stuff on Nimbora’s side. So yeah. Happy to have a chat also this way. So yeah. So maybe, yeah, I can do a short start what you think about Nimbora in general just to introduce-

Louis Guthmann:
In this case let me start. So yeah.

Edi Sinovcic:
Okay.

Louis Guthmann:
Okay. In this case I’m just going to start and serve as the host. So the first question is, if you can introduce yourself very briefly. I’m going to introduce myself before. So I’m Louis, I’m the head of product market strategy at StarkWare. I’ve been in crypto for [inaudible 00:01:31], so between four and five and a half. And today I’m very happy to be with my dear Edi that now I’ve been knowing for two years and a half almost since he joined the Starknet ecosystem and starting to work on various of awesome stuff. Edi, if you can start to introduce yourself, who you are, what you do, what Nimbora does, what is your path to crypto and how you get to Starknet and why do you love it so much?

Edi Sinovcic:
Yeah. Why I’m so hooked now. Yeah. So my journey in Web3 started in 2017. Before that I worked enterprise, Java, boring stuff and so on as a developer. But then an opportunity came to work on something that’s called ZoKrates, which some of as a toolbox for zk-SNARK and Ethereum. So back in the day the idea was to build this high level DSL, something that Starknet is doing this today, to make basically onboarding to ZK easier. Five years ago it was too far away and so on. So that’s why I decided to switch to Solidity and spend basically there for almost two and a half years. So I was a core dev basically there, led something that’s called Sourcify, which is automatic verification tool for smart contracts and that’s how the story started. And then we had the amazing stuff for something that’s called DeFi Summer. So those who remember are old enough to remember how crazy it was.

Louis Guthmann:
Ah, the good old time. The old time. I woke up at 5:00 AM-

Edi Sinovcic:
Oh, yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
… to [inaudible 00:02:58] those things also. That was a good time.

Edi Sinovcic:
Yeah. We had shifts over the weekend, who likes what and so on. The APRs were crazy. I remember the first meet-up we have in Croatia, there were three of us and we were pitching to ourselves because nobody knew about this. Everybody was like, “Okay. You’re crazy. It’s Ponzinomics, is going to die. And look, we are still building those kind of things. So yeah. It takes basically a bit of faith to start up these things. But yeah, back in the day DeFi started and so on. So we were like, “But we are working on this protocol stuff in Ethereum Foundation and it’s nice, but it would be fun to start some product work, try something and so on.” And I was a dev, usual dev jumping into the product waters, don’t know nothing, trying to build stuff. But when you think about it, back in the day everybody was a dev, even community managers, everybody basically was a dev. So basically that’s how I started.
And that’s how Shard Labs basically started as a company. We basically, a bunch of us gathered that started building stuff, started experimenting, and then obviously during that time, Shard Labs as a company grew up and so on. We built a bunch of prototypes. One of the biggest projects basically out there was Lido on Polygon, which is the biggest LSD on Polygon to this day, the biggest LSD on MATIC. So some stuff were built that really, really survived test of time and tried.
But my personal passion was always ZK because back in the day I scratched the surface with ZoKrates and so on. And then I think Tom had a presentation in Paris or somewhere about Starknet, it’s becoming public and so on. It was pre-Mainnet. I was like, “Wait a sec, is this the thing they manage actually to build this? It actually kind of works? I can build apps?” Of course everybody was like, “Oh, just come build like the apps,” and so on. And that’s how basically the journey of Starknet also started. So how we started tackling it.
First thing we want to build some DeFi stuff and then we figure out, “Oh, but there is tooling missing. So okay. We contribute on tooling side.” So that’s how we started on that front. And yeah. Two and a half years already I think on the ecosystem. And it’s been amazing, to be honest, because when you think about, Louis, also back in the day how it was and now we told this team ecosystem how many people there are. When I see electric capital reports, how many three, four, 500 people building. Back in the day it was 10, 15, 20 people. So you know everybody. So it was really good. But yeah.
The ecosystem evolved and so that’s the possibilities what we can build the top. So that’s why basically the idea of Nimbora. So I know we have this meme that Starknet should be unaligned, Ethereum unaligned, but we are trying to help it move in the different direction. So the whole idea behind Nimbora is actually quite simple. So the idea is we have a one DeFi, we have a local created there and we have this cheaper execution on L2s, in this case Starknet. So why wouldn’t we use that to scale this? Actually I think one of the first articles I read about, this was actually yours on the Starknet blog or something like that back in the day. So maybe you’re sort of to blame for the Nimbora story. Who knows?

Louis Guthmann:
I did write a couple of article back in the day and I’m working on making more now. I’m super excited. And as you said, you’ve been here for a long time, you’ve been building a lot of tooling for the ecosystem as well as now Nimbora. I’m curious to hear more about what Nimbora actually does.

Edi Sinovcic:
Mm-hmm.

Louis Guthmann:
And what do you think that brings to the market? Sorry. I’m reading [inaudible 00:06:45] hilarious. I can’t. Oh, God. I literally cannot read. Okay. So-

Edi Sinovcic:
[inaudible 00:06:59].

Louis Guthmann:
… yeah. So I’m curious to know, so you’ve been build infrastructure, you build application. So maybe you can just walk us around what is Nimbora and what is, from your perspective as a builder, the difference between [inaudible 00:07:15] the others?

Edi Sinovcic:
Sure. Let’s start with the biggest issues with you have Heldwana and you have Starknet and so on. So what the biggest issue is you have this asynchronicity on when you want to bridge from Mainnet to Starknet, it’s easy. You can do that relatively fast and so on. When you want to bridge back, you have to wait for proofs, so it takes some time and so on. So there is asynchronicity with this, but users don’t usually understand these things and you have to explain them. And then you have L1 strategies or L1 DeFi which works on L1. So how do you bridge it to the users so they can use it from L2 without knowing the whole bridging logic or synchronicity, having to wait for staff, having to do this multiple steps. Can we create monthly DeFi that moves across boundaries? So that’s the idea behind Nimbora.
So this kind of infrastructure that basically abstracts all the bridging part, aggregates users into batches and that way decreases the cost per user also and enables them to interact seamlessly with L1 DeFi. One of the promises of rollups in general is… ZK-Rollups is to scale Ethereum and this is directly way to do so. And in this case that was the Liquity DeFi pooling per se.
When we have five users on L2, let’s say you want to borrow against Liquity on L1, we aggregate that. We’ve reached that as a one asset. Let’s say there are five of us, everybody deposited one E, so we have five E, we’ve reached that to L1 deposit into Liquity, [inaudible 00:08:46] borrow USD against that and bridge it L2. But the issue with that is you don’t know what the gas on Mainnet will be in the future. You have delays on that and so on. So the current iteration we are building with Nimbora is actually you don’t care about L1 fees, you just care about L2 stuff and we basically give you this experience, but without exposing to L1 gas fees and stuff like that. So that’s coming basically.

Louis Guthmann:
So what you’re describing, and when I say correctly Nimbora, it’s a one-click DeFi you said, but not from Starknet. It’s one-click DeFi… You’re basically batching from L2 to L1 and back and among other things?

Edi Sinovcic:
It’s starting. It’s starting.

Louis Guthmann:
Yeah. [inaudible 00:09:29].

Edi Sinovcic:
[inaudible 00:09:29]. So yeah. Yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
So it start with this, but it also involve things like direct withdrawal, right? So if I understand Nimbora, if I say correctly, basically you’re trying to make interaction between layers invisible for the users, is that a correct assessment?

Edi Sinovcic:
When you think about the internet, it feels it’s synchronous, but you don’t know, it’s asynchronous, a lot of components, information going around. So why would we have to expose users to all these things? Why can’t it feel synchronous? And they’re basically for the deposit obviously of the assets you deposit to L2, you don’t have to care about L1, all that pieces that are moving around. And then when you want to withdraw, you’re also basically L2 user that wants to do this faster or slower, depending basically on-

Louis Guthmann:
Right.

Edi Sinovcic:
… how much you’re willing to pay. But you never should touch L1, you never should bridge and those kinds of things because issues happen there. We need to make basically these things abstracted and one of the beauties of Starknet is account abstraction. So we can do wonders with this.

Louis Guthmann:
Amazing.

Edi Sinovcic:
Multi-calls and stuff. So you can do whatever. So let’s say you want to stake with Lido but you don’t have it, you have stables, you can do multi-calls here, swap with avenue and then deposit to Nimbora and then we aggregate all those things and you can do multiple of these things and that’s the beauty of the whole thing. That’s why we’re building on Starknet one of the reasons basically. It’s really good. So yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
No, it makes a lot of sense. And so we discussed basically your motivation historically to join Starknet. My question now is, on term of L2 network infrastructure, what makes you stay? What made you choose Starknet over another environment or even deploying on Crosslay as many does?

Edi Sinovcic:
Yeah. Exactly. One of the things is community. So one of the key things you can never buy or you can never artificially create is obviously the community. When you have a strong community on the ecosystem, people that are building this, it’s one of the key ingredients. And I always joke that Cairo is a feature and the bug because it’s harder to get started, but once you get started you can just easily go and deploy somewhere else. So you have to build on top of this. So that’s why one of the reasons we believe is because of the strong community, products building on top, and so on is basically Starknet is going to be here and it’s going to drive in two, three, five years, 10 years and so on. And obviously this is a long-term architecture infrastructure we are building that we also need on the Starknet side.
Because we go step back, so we can do this kind of L1 DeFi things and so on. But the key point would be integrating that locally to L2s because let’s say you [inaudible 00:12:17] Lido, but you want to withdraw faster, you go to local decks that basically withdraw from there. Maybe you want to do some leverage on money markets, maybe you can do it locally and so on. So Nimbora can use both layers to business. So yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
Makes sense. Makes sense. Makes sense. And so just one second.

Edi Sinovcic:
Sure.

Louis Guthmann:
And so when it comes to Nimbora, this is currently the main project you guys are building of Map and Starknet. My big question is what’s the first go to market? What’s the first product you’re going to release or what did you release and what does they do? How can users use it and, I guess, make money with it?

Edi Sinovcic:
Of course. So the idea is to target… We’ll have three tiers, low risk strategies, medium risk strategies, and high risk strategies. It’s all about yield and getting basically assets on your money. So the first basically ones we are going to integrate a simple one like SDIs, like [inaudible 00:13:21] and so on, some risk-taking and those kind of things. So theoretically you can get exposure to maybe the angular points plus some yield from ETH, plus maybe some Nimbora points STARK and so on. So there is a bunch of basically stuff bundle and for the user it’ll be one click, they basically just come to the UI as we released in couple of weeks. They choose which strategy to use and just deposit the US. Then whatever else they have in the wallet, we are figure out a way to get it there. And that way basically they start [inaudible 00:13:51] on this. So you can [inaudible 00:13:52] it’s here, but cross-chains and so on. So you have basically strategies that can be components of both sides. So you can think about it like that.

Louis Guthmann:
And so how can someone… So right now it is available and what can someone build on top of it?

Edi Sinovcic:
Yeah. Any yield generating strategy. So technically can build anything, but for example with Liquity integration, the issue is LUSD you borrow doesn’t bring you yield, doesn’t bring you any additional income and then the whole who pays the L1 gas cost doesn’t work. So what we did is we abstracted that say, “Okay. We are going to take 10% profit fee on L2, you basically don’t pay L1 gas.” So all the yield stuff that basically is out there more for finance, any other lending to other for example whatever you can scale these things to Starknet, it can be seamless for users. So let’s say you have some stables you want to get exposure to other on Mainnet that you can use it also to hit this and so on. So there can be a bunch of stuff, the possibilities are let’s say limitless on this kind of thing. So anything that generate yields. Yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
And so do you already see people building, using grow? Is it something that you hope for?

Edi Sinovcic:
Absolutely. Absolutely. We just basically see the second strategy today, some restating stuff like integration.

Louis Guthmann:
Wow.

Edi Sinovcic:
I’m amazed, to be honest, I didn’t expect this to be completely frank because we released the SDK when? Three weeks ago or something like that and people already started building that, three themes was a little different stuff. I’m like amazed to be honest. [inaudible 00:15:24]

Louis Guthmann:
That’s amazing.

Edi Sinovcic:
Yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
That’s amazing.

Edi Sinovcic:
It’s like, “Okay. What? Really?”

Louis Guthmann:
It starts with three and end up being a thousand people.

Edi Sinovcic:
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
I’ve been there, I done that.

Edi Sinovcic:
Yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
That makes a lot of sense. And so what would you wish for people to be building? What do you expect people… What is the next thing that is going to be exciting for you? Builders either is building in the assembly right now, what kind of cool idea, what kind of alpha can you give them to build?

Edi Sinovcic:
Absolutely. So one of the key points we want to iterate on is, as I mentioned strategies on both sides. So let’s say you have SDI, so you have SPARK or Mainnet, you have some stables, you want to basically [inaudible 00:16:14] SPARK you get 5% on that. But then you have SDI which you can maybe LP to some DEX on the, let’s say, a Cubo or mySwap or whatever you can possibly LP there so you can get additional things. And then people build Lidos atop and the whole idea for us is to expose this. So if you’re a Cairo dev then you can easily build whatever L2 strategy you want. If you’re a kind of Solidity dev, you don’t even need to know basically Cairo, you can build strategies on top also that leverage target as an engine to scale, which is even more amazing because Cairo is so good for building all the stuff on the Starknet side, but even if you don’t know it in short term, you can still build stuff for the Starknet users-

Louis Guthmann:
Using Solidity thanks to [inaudible 00:16:56]. And so I’ve been to the Nimbora website, right now I only saw Liquity. Is there are others [inaudible 00:17:09] coming up? What should we expect?

Edi Sinovcic:
Absolutely.

Louis Guthmann:
And are we expecting integration within the wallets? How do you see the future coming up?

Edi Sinovcic:
Absolutely. So the first basically iteration will be integrating like Lido’s, SDIs, and so on. Restaking products, some indexes and so on. We are discussing about those things. Also getting some leverage possession from Mainnet and so on. So that would be the first step. And then obviously natively integrating this into depth because we believe… Okay. Well Nimbora will have its front end, you can use the from there, but it’s ultimately an engine and SDK that anybody can build on top, can build on all front ends, and basically can integrate into their own apps. So what we believe will happen down the road is we’re building an engine to creating cross-chain strategies and people will leverage this to build stuff on top and so on. We are already seeing that crazy ideas, we didn’t even think about that people basically are building on top. But the simpler first step would be this simpler strategy that you will get exposure to and so on.

Louis Guthmann:
Amazing. And so we discussed partnership on L2, but do you also see partnership as with L1 project?

Edi Sinovcic:
Absolutely. So L1 is part of our strategy, so L1 project scaling to Starknet because they want to come to Starknet, but it’s harder sometimes to build Cairo stuff, to do all these things which they don’t have a domain knowledge. We are offering them basically this to scale those L1 protocols to Starknet directly and then obviously we want native integrations on Starknet with DEXs borrowing markets, money markets, wallets and so on to have this natively. Because some stuff is happening, some new amazing thing is it is happening and so on both the Ethereum side and Starknet side and I feel like Starknet is finally attaining to full production version. Quote unquote, Some people mentioned token and so on and that will-

Louis Guthmann:
Yeah.

Edi Sinovcic:
… open a lot of possibilities and so on. So some call it money time, I call it production time because that will enable a lot of stuff. Yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
Yeah. Money time. I been the word on the mouth of people lately. That’s quite true. There have been a couple of memes that have been surrounding Starknet, the list align, build different, built different, the more TPS daddy.

Edi Sinovcic:
Yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
The various emojis. What strikes you out the more culturally significant one? What do you think the most expressive, what do you think about the Starknet culture as a community and how do you see it grow in the future?

Edi Sinovcic:
To be honest, it reminds me of Ethereum one back in the day. When I joined Ethereum Foundation, basically it was a baseline, the bear market after 2017 and so on, there wasn’t a lot of builders out there and there wasn’t a lot of products building on top. And the same ethos are focused on building, focused on long-term and not caring about short-term profits, counting people and so on. But I won’t name names, there are some other systems that have more of this. We have a lot of builders that are focus here on building long-term, which is good. And I feel now that we are entering from this developer phase everything is built for developers by developers and so on. We’re maturing fast into this amazing ecosystem that will cover a lot of stuff.
When you think about it, obviously, StarkWare as a company is people in it and co-founders even help these things and led the space forward and so on. And it’s important that this builder culture is something that we enshrine and have for the future and push forward and so on. And that’s what driving us also here because Starknet is the best technically at this point, maybe in the future all the ZK-AVMs or whatever will come to the same level, [inaudible 00:21:06]. But you can get this same feeling of builders, a lot of support that you get around and so on. It’s like it’s just built differently and that’s basically…

Louis Guthmann:
So you prefer build differently than-

Edi Sinovcic:
Absolutely. Absolutely. I think all of those are good, more TPS daddy was always the best-

Louis Guthmann:
Yeah.

Edi Sinovcic:
… but…

Louis Guthmann:
The more TPS daddy was the best. Yeah. That’s Starknet for you guys.

Edi Sinovcic:
Exactly. Right.

Louis Guthmann:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was good time. It was good time. And so, as an ecosystem, as we say we’re growing, we keep growing all the time, right? And my question to you is, what kind of alpha do you have for builders out there and for the user? So it’s two part, what would you say to a newcomer that wants to build, doesn’t know where to go, doesn’t even know Solidity, doesn’t know Cairo, doesn’t know anything. Wants to build a good app, make money, make a good product, make a good company. Or for the user what they should explore, what they should have a fun with, where can they also find the best opportunity, both economically for them and in terms of experience?

Edi Sinovcic:
Absolutely. So obviously Discord, discord, Discord is always the best answer to all those questions because our team is on Discord and we invite you all guys to join the Discord and so on. So we recently just opened it, so if you join now you’re still early. And yeah. For basically the idea for the strategies for people building on top is that in the future Nimbora will have its point system where basically part of our fees for the strategies and profit will be shared with them. So if you build a strategy on top, if you build the stuff on top, it will be basically shared between you and the Nimbora as a protocol. And for the end users basically like a bunch of frontends that will arise from this because we already have builders which are building their own frontends showing this… Using basically it directly. Or you can come to Nimbora website which is nimbora.io and in two to three weeks use all this certain kind of stuff. So it’ll be live soon. So brace with us for two, three more weeks until we polish all the stuff and then we’ll move to production.

Louis Guthmann:
Okay. And for the user, what can they already try and do they have good yield and do they have a way to be an early participant of Nimbora?

Edi Sinovcic:
Absolutely. So the best is to come to join the Discord and then you will give you access to some of the alpha basic conversion of it. You need some referral key and so on to join and so you can use it. So that’s basically the best way to come and then we’ll progressively open it and so on. So the best place, again, is to come to Discord and then you will get some early access. Yield obviously is going to be really interesting because we combine both L1 yield plus the L2 yield, which is in my opinion perfect combo. So we get best of both worlds. So yeah. Pretty soon I believe there will be a lot of demand and a lot of users will use this. But for them in the end it’s just one click. They won’t need to understand all the complexity of logic, all this stuff of this happening in background because I believe that’s how we should build stuff. Usually builders build for other builders, so it’s more complex.

Louis Guthmann:
Yeah.

Edi Sinovcic:
But yeah. Products are intended to be easy to use for normal people. That’s my motive and the team in general.

Louis Guthmann:
Okay. That makes a lot of sense. And so how do you see the future of scaling onward? What scale will get you excited? What is the next generation of stuff that will-
Edi Sinovcic:
Yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
And what you see the future then?

Edi Sinovcic:
So one of the most interesting… For second in general we will have hundreds and hundreds of rollups and then you’ll have fracture Liquity, you’ll have a lot of chains that you need to use on your wallet, you have all this stuff that you need to change and it’s like we are basically breaking the user experience a lot. So it’s not really a great user experience. And on stack what I expect a lot of L2s, L3s and so on to happen, but we need to abstract this from the users again.
So I’m all basically how can we build this cross-chain functionalities that users don’t need to know basically all those things. Maybe wallet aggregation stuff, maybe these strategies that move across Starknet rollups or upchains and whatever and maybe even Nimbora will have its rollup in the future, we don’t know. Everything is a possibility. So that’s all the ideas, but in the end, kind the North Star is any basically chain you are on, any wallet that you use, it’s one click for you. So you don’t have to care about all this bridging complexity and stuff. As you know that’s like a big goal, but I believe nothing except huge goals and big goals is there to do and that’s one of biggest-

Louis Guthmann:
And so what do you expect expect the Nimbora chain to look like? What’s the end goal there? [inaudible 00:26:06]

Edi Sinovcic:
Yeah. [inaudible 00:26:06]. Yeah. The whole thing for the user is we need cheaper transaction costs and we basically needs seamless experience and so on. So one of the ways to achieve that is go layer down or go layer up, whatever you call that L3s and so on. Or using external DAs like Celestia, Vale and so on. So that’s active area exploration. But still, even if you go that route, I still believe that having assets to public Starknet and Mainnet and someone shouldn’t be dampered by that because if we create this friction where you have to bridge if you want to get this strategy or you have to bridge there, if you want to get another strategy, it won’t work. And that’s why DeFi pooling and this pooling with faults is a key point there. So we can abstract that from the users. But yeah. I definitely believe that some of the stuff on the Starknet side, both modular and custom Starknet, or this volition modes and stuff will improve user experience a lot because we’ll be the first ones to use it.
So I would say, imagine… Did you use maybe Revolut or did you use some Neobank for your program? You’re probably just like a DJ like me, so you just stay on chain. But yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
Exactly.

Edi Sinovcic:
Yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
Exactly.

Edi Sinovcic:
But basically they’re… For example with this Neobank, so what usually happens when you buy crypto is they are custodian of yours and it’s like, “Oh, you have crypto but you don’t. But it’s easy because it’s an app so you one click.” So imagine that, but it’s off custodial, it’s on chain, gas is abstracted from you, and you passively earn from this and the basically wallet is saved on your phone and so on. And when you think about it, we are not that far from it. We basically can build this on the Starknet stuff potentially not today but in couple of months, a year and so on. I believe this kind of user experience can bring us to the mass market. Obviously one rollup won’t scale enough for all the users and demand, but that’s why fractal scaling maybe is a solution for this.

Louis Guthmann:
Awesome. That makes a lot of sense. And so another dimension that is quite interesting in the context of Nimbora is bridging.

Edi Sinovcic:
Yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
And so I’m curious what’s your thoughts on cross-layer bridging and how it would go?

Edi Sinovcic:
It’s a mess, is a short answer. And yeah. Because the biggest issue with all those things is… Okay. L1-L2 communication, you have canonical bridges which, okay, under rollup underneath depends on the security of that bridge. So it’s one and the same with that. But let’s say you want to do L2-L2 bridging, let’s say from, I don’t know, Polygon to Starknet or the other way around or Optimism to Stark, how do you do that? You have to trust third-party bridges, create bridges to bridge from one side to the other, which is not the best. And then basically there is a whole area of exploration. Now how do you do this? There is this proof aggregation networks potentially that can happen that you have… In my opinion what will happen is you’ll have Liquity on its origins.
So let’s say ETH is issued on Mainnet, I don’t know, STARK is issued on Starknet and so on. And you won’t bridge it to the other side, you will just prove you have it on that chain, you will lock it in the vault or something so you can move it from there and then you’ll have all these things in tents aggregated on some separate thing. Is it off-chain? Is it a three-layer roll-up or something? But stuff won’t move on its own and then you can get this experience, its kind of cross-chain decks or whatever. You can build a bunch of stuff there, but bridges in its core today, Liquity bridges are like cross-chain decks, let’s be frank. So yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And so in the context of bridging, which one is the most interesting tech stack or tools you have been looking at and cross layer? Yeah.

Edi Sinovcic:
You have two kind of things. You have storage proofs and those kind of things which is like a ZK focus proofs and so on. And you have economic security ones like [inaudible 00:30:05] and so on. I believe the answer is somewhere in-between because. Okay. [inaudible 00:30:11] and those kinds of things you have security guarantees which can get you to the point, but maybe combining that with storage proofs for ultimate finality could be a thing to do. Still we didn’t solve the Liquity bridging part of that because, okay, we can transfer messages from one side to the other, but still how do we get this token, let’s say, that is ETH that is bridged to Optimism is not the same ETH that is bridged to Starknet, they have price discrepancies and so on. But we’re basically exploring that. We’re exploring like chain link CCIP, maybe even CCTP from basically circle. There is a bunch of these things.
I believe the aggregation layer there would be really interesting because you have Polygon is building this aggregation layer for their own ZK-AVM chains and then maybe Starknet will build that, Optimism is building these separate cluster is, also the Arbitrum who does the connections in-between. Do we do it only across layer one? Maybe. And that’s basically the part we are doing now. So L1-L2 communication, all the canonical bridges and then basically we’ll handle the rest maybe in the future. So you can use… Let’s say you deposit on Polygon, we bridge this deposit to Starknet and then settle it via Starknet so on. Because at one point we have to aggregate to Nimbora layer three-

Louis Guthmann:
Right.

Edi Sinovcic:
… or Starknet or somewhere so we have to settle this somewhere.

Louis Guthmann:
Makes a lot of sense. On the context of the existing team, did you talk to the Wormhole etc, Layer Zero of the word. What do you think of them? How do you see them? Competition? Partners?

Edi Sinovcic:
I mean they’re partners because we are basically doing L1-L2 communication. We’re building strategies on top. So we are not a bridge project per se, but obviously we have a bridging infrastructure and so on under the hood. We’re using Stargate at this point for Starknet communication to L1 to L2. And then down the road we’ll have to partner with some of those projects. So we are talking with all of them. But yeah. The issue with… As you know there are multiple parties, they have own token standards for bridging and so on. So you have ended lock-ins there. It’s all flavors of gray.

Louis Guthmann:
Yeah.

Edi Sinovcic:
There is no one gold solution that works for everybody. So we’ll see how it goes. But yeah. That’s definitely active exploration. So we are now focusing on Starknet and Ethereum scaling that and then we’ll figure out the rest down the road.

Louis Guthmann:
Yeah.

Edi Sinovcic:
So yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
So there is one aspect that we haven’t touched so far, which is as opposed to many solution, there is a high concept of what blockchain tends to have, which is synchronicity and embrace is very much into asynchronous messaging.

Edi Sinovcic:
Yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
How do you see this? What do you see? What’s going on there? What can we expect there?

Edi Sinovcic:
Sure. So as I mentioned, internet is also asynchronous. All the stuff that is happening in normal world or non-Web3 world is also asynchronous. So we can either go to in the terms of blockchains, Web3 can go to Solana and just build everything there, which can scale to a point, but can scale ultimately. Or we can have Ethereum roadmap which is scaling with back in the day with sharding, now with rollups. If you ask me it’s a flavor of the same thing. It’s a different technology, but we will basically again come to sharding at one point.
But the point with the asynchronicity is you have to embrace it. The whole thing is you have to handle it in the background, for the user though it shouldn’t be exposed and the users shouldn’t be exposed to it as much as possible because users are used to getting seamless experience. Let me go a step back even to let’s say how Robinhood works. When you want to trade something on Robinhood or whatever you feel it’s synchronous, but you actually don’t have the… You’re trading the derivative there. Yeah. I’m going too far now. But yeah. We can [inaudible 00:34:07]

Louis Guthmann:
No, that’s very super close.

Edi Sinovcic:
Yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
It’s super interesting. I just read a question that I found interesting we talk about, which is beacon scaling with Cairo. I can happily to discuss it-

Edi Sinovcic:
Oh.

Louis Guthmann:
… after doing [inaudible 00:34:18].

Edi Sinovcic:
Actually when you think about the design of Nimbora is similar to how beacon chain communicates. Let’s say Lido, how basically deposits and staking and unstaking work. It is quite similar to that. So we already have a synchronicity with Ethereum, but users are not exposed to that. [inaudible 00:34:36].

Louis Guthmann:
Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. Okay. So now we touch a lot of the Nimbora, we touch a lot [inaudible 00:34:42] labs. In context of maybe more macro or more global industry. What sort of application do you see growing under the new upcoming bull market that will reach us one day if the gut of bulls wants to wake up.

Edi Sinovcic:
Promise of a bull market. Yeah. Exactly. So one of the main things is this ultimate scalability of ZK. I believe or at least I’m optimistic that this bull market we can actually achieve the scale of ZK-Rollups that are bigger than the existing Optimistic and everything else. And we have that, we have rails like AWS was exploration basically for the internet, for the cloud computing back in the day because you have this seamless expansion and on-demand scale which is crucial because with blockchains at this point we didn’t have on demand scale. And then Nimbora comes as a part where you step back all this layer and make it feel like its synchronous communication and you abstract all this complexity is going to [inaudible 00:35:46] and so on. So that’s kind of there. And then what you can build on top is a bunch of stuff. This info will help you get normal users from Web2 that can use an account abstraction wallet in their apps without-

Louis Guthmann:
Yeah.

Edi Sinovcic:
… even having to know all this stuff. Because gas is a feature, but it’s a bug for the end user because it changes what are the fees-

Louis Guthmann:
Yeah.

Edi Sinovcic:
… there and so on. You need pain masters, you need wallets that work on their own, you need all these things and Starknet is promising that. And when you have multiple Starknet networks that are connected via Nimbora or otherwise, well you will have a lot of potential applications that work across shards, as I like to call them. But yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
Yeah.

Edi Sinovcic:
They’re like cross rollups, but kind of shards. So yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
So I just want to start touching a couple of points. The question that I asked which I found very interesting, so there is… [inaudible 00:36:40] to you directly. So I’m just going to answer them as they were asked and maybe we can continue with more questions for you. First of all, there was a question, are ZK-Rollups readily any better than Optimistic rollup? Because they are the highest cost. So if you go to L2 fees right now, ZK-Rollup and I have to give it to my dear colleagues at zkSync are now cheaper than Optimistic Rollup and they’re going to be even much cheaper under 44 4. So are they any better? The short answer is yes, yes and yes. And I’m writing a whole thesis about something called Pruger servers. I’m going to make public to the world soon, which is that ZK is going to finally make a lot of ideas that we’ve seen in the space of crypto for a long time, revise them in a way that would make finally successful. So yes, they are much better and to a point which is not even negotiable.
Okay. So now there is another question which was about Bitcoin and BitVM. So I happen to be a bit of a Bitcoin fan, I have to say. I do have proof.

Edi Sinovcic:
Yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
I do have proofs. That’s my personal deeply pleasure and if you can even find video of me in 2022 arguing that Bitcoin makes a better L1 for settling than Ethereum. It was an Ethereum conference and I have to admit it was not well received, but it was good.

Edi Sinovcic:
Yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
So this why I’m getting Bitcoin through Cairo. That the short answer is yes, yes, yes, yes. But I would say by the way it’s not even true only for Ethereum. We’ll say also it’s true for Ethereum, things like Kakarot is rocking right now to become a type two, then the type one ZK-EVM. And zeroSync is here to basically make a Pruger Bitcoin ready to production, which is almost ready there.
Bitvm is not a rollup, just to be clear. How can I say that? It’s a sort of a better version of a state channel, which it’s like a fraud proof base. It’s a Optimistic product sort of, the reason why they’re doing ZK is just to simplify the model they’re working on, but it’s basically an Optimistic product. It’s not there yet to… First of all, BitVM is just BitVM is very exciting stuff. I’ll go first, Bitvm is a fraud proof mechanism, [inaudible 00:39:10] which is using BitVM is an Optimistic product. And so actually the interesting thing about BitVM is that it sort of spun out from the work that zeroSync did, but STARK were and [inaudible 00:39:25] is financed and co-developed. So the Bitcoin scaling through Cairo is already happening. It’s called zeroSync. And I think there is a lot more to come in the direction in the immediate future. So again. I’m very excited about this.
So we cannot touch a lot of questions. Is there any questions from my dear girlfriend Edi here? Which are not the ones you know I’m not going to answer because they’re very annoying and not… But yeah. So what else can I say? I do have a couple of comments about [inaudible 00:40:01]. Actually have some meta-comments about the others here and involving the community because Edi has been involved in the community for a very long time and the person who’s in charge of Nimbora is someone who was also in the community and got basically acquired or recruit by Edi.

Edi Sinovcic:
He joined the team. No, no, he joined the team.

Louis Guthmann:
[inaudible 00:40:21]. He join the team?

Edi Sinovcic:
Yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
He join?

Edi Sinovcic:
Yeah. [inaudible 00:40:24]. Look, when we build stuff, I don’t believe in there is a boss and there’re leaders and followers and stuff like that.

Louis Guthmann:
Yeah.

Edi Sinovcic:
We’re building it together. So that’s the key point and difference here. So just wanted to clarify that. So yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
[inaudible 00:40:35]. Yeah. So it’s very cool-

Edi Sinovcic:
Yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
… when they see all those people who have been in this space for so long and finally ended up working together and building companies together and so on. This is very exciting stuff and I find extremely fascinating to see all those guys and what Edi and Sasha has been doing in Nimbora. So I want to congratulate them for their work. And maybe Edi has questions for me.

Edi Sinovcic:
It is really interesting, as you mentioned Bitcoin, that’s one of the Pandora box that is going to be huge, especially if this tech starts to work where we can scale Bitcoin. So imagine now using Starknet to scale Bitcoin or zeroSync to maybe even scale Bitcoin at one point. So you can do with Cairo much, much more than you can do on ZK-EVM. So maybe that’s also one of the things, what we could build in the future. I don’t know, that’s a long way there. But that’s why I like this system, it’s a bit different. It’s not like, “Oh, we’re having EVM, we have to be compatible with that because blah blah blah, that’s the mainstream.” But let’s experiment, let’s build new things.

Louis Guthmann:
Exactly.

Edi Sinovcic:
Ethereum wasn’t built overnight and it wasn’t built like, “Oh, yeah. We have this clear roadmap we’re going to do.” Back in the day actually when I was starting, I started playing with Hyperledger Fabric. I don’t know if you remember Hyperledger Fabric. [inaudible 00:41:57]-

Louis Guthmann:
Oh, I remember. I remember. Wait, I remember that time.

Edi Sinovcic:
Man, that was a mess. That was a mess. Yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
That’s funny.

Edi Sinovcic:
When I think about it now, imagine those kind of things to see the enterprise change and so on. They didn’t, but because Ethereum was this new thing that trying to explore new things and was focused on ideals and trying to focus on long-terms and not short-terms. That’s why I like StarkWare also and Starknet as an ecosystem.

Louis Guthmann:
Awesome. Great. So that makes so much fun. I would just say to the user here who wants to…

Edi Sinovcic:
Ah.

Louis Guthmann:
There is a good question from Ezra before I probably end up finishing the conversation. Ezra is asking about scaling through Starknet versus Solana. That’s a very good question because people don’t really understand what scaling means and I love to talk about this, it’s one of my favorite topics.

Edi Sinovcic:
Exactly. We can run it on AWS, why even use the blockchain? It scales. You can spin out as much many machine as you want.

Louis Guthmann:
Right.

Edi Sinovcic:
So yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
Exactly. So this is what I really find funny because people talk about scaling, but they kind of miss the point which is… For instance, when you compare the TPS of let’s say Solana versus ETH versus Bitcoin, you’re comparing an apple, an orange, the Ferrari. I always say that sentence, I always say that because it’s basically not the same thing at all. Bitcoin target machine is a Raspberry Pi, Ethereum is basically my MacBook Pro 2021, and Solana is a $2,000 machine per month. And this is the machine they want to use. So the second you’re still using stronger hardware, of course you can go faster. But it’s kind of funny to me that people compare them out of the box and people don’t understand that if you’re a kid in Nigeria then you’re not going to have a MacBook Pro 2021 because it’s out of your scale.
But if you are a company and even if you’re a rich kid from, let’s say the US, even by renting a $2,000 machine per month, it’s expensive. So we’re really not talking about the same thing. And where ZK comes to play and solve this is it allows you to verify what someone did on a data center and verify it on your phone. This is where the scale come from.
So Solana approach the scale. And so this is just on the verification problem, but what Solana is actually optimizing for execution. And anything that Solana have been doing either other custom could do, but we don’t take that path because we think that the width of that scale is access list. It’s a very annoying process for dev to write using it.

Edi Sinovcic:
Oh, yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
And for the frontend. And we prefer to make it easy for dev to build while remain optimizing also for parallelization of the things. So Solana is great tooling, but it’s leaky interaction to load the scale. We try to take another approach which will not be as leaky. So we should get to a thousand TPS by probably end of year if I hope so. Touch wood, but I wouldn’t commit to it. But it’s [inaudible 00:45:14] TPS, I would not be surprised.

Edi Sinovcic:
Yeah. Exactly. And one of the key points is trust. With ZK it’s trustless, that’s when you generate sprues and stuff, it’s completely different than Solana, okay, can you trust these guys who are running big machines. It’s fine, there’s a consensus you cannot have it, but still the metrics goes down and stuff. It’s fine, it’s early. But yeah. Yeah.

Louis Guthmann:
And by the way, there is someone saying I took a hit on Nigeria. Actually not, I’m not taking a hit on Nigeria. I’m actually referring to one special guy in the ecosystem that is… I won’t name who he is. He wouldn’t recognize himself who learned to code on paper because he couldn’t access a computer and the first line of code he ever wrote was on a five-inch phone. So it has nothing to do with me saying that Nigeria don’t have access to computers. I just mean that as a kid in Nigeria of course there’s less likelihood of accessing the machine that you’re requiring to run Solana. I, myself, the angry thing of being a rich kid from France, I’m not have the capacity to buy Solana, to buy a computer in Solana. It’s a joke. I making a joke, but you know what I’m saying?
And there’s one question before we finish that is, “Have you fired the e-beggar intern?” We actually promoted it just became the end of ecosystem now and he’s doing very well. I know [inaudible 00:46:52]. I know about the joke, but the reason why I was playing Nigeria when I think this example is because of this guy. I won’t name him because I don’t know if he wants me to name him, but he’s a very well-known figure in the Starknet ecosystem and he literally told me that he learned to code on paper at 15 and I was like, “What the fuck, dude?” That’s how cool.

Edi Sinovcic:
Imagine.

Louis Guthmann:
[inaudible 00:47:14].

Edi Sinovcic:
Imagine that will… Exactly. He will achieve much more. We like, “Oh, my laptop is from 2021, I need a new one.”

Louis Guthmann:
Right? That’s different. I actually have one Nigerian person in mind when I said that sentence. But to go back and to go back as you said to the guy who asked me the e-beggar intern got fired. Now he got promoted, he is now in charge of all the e-beggars and now he’s in charge of exploration and ecosystem team. So that’s very exciting. He actually took over my role and I moved towards… You see how you bring my point? You bring my point, [inaudible 00:47:55] prove my point. That’s it. So I think we covered, unless this another thing to do either the question in the chat or otherwise I think we’re going to close. And I want to thank you, everyone, for joining and asking those fun questions and all the free [inaudible 00:48:12]. I have to say any or funny, I don’t know who game is called any on the chat, but it’s funny, I did laugh a lot.

Edi Sinovcic:
Yeah. It’s always fun with a community like this.

Louis Guthmann:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, there are going to be a conference… Since I’m talking about Nigeria. There’s going to be a conference in Nigeria, I believe in [inaudible 00:48:37]. I’m not sure exactly the date in Lagos. So the Nigeria example is a very concrete one. And so thank you so much, Edi. Best luck for Nimbora. Nimbora is doing a really good job and I really love what you guys are building and looking forward to chat again and probably see [inaudible 00:49:00] in Denver?

Edi Sinovcic:
Absolutely, I will be in Denver. So let’s meet and chat.

Louis Guthmann:
Exactly. [inaudible 00:49:07]

Edi Sinovcic:
Thanks so much for having me. Pleasure as always, like on coffee, I enjoy it every time, you’re such a good-

Louis Guthmann:
Always. Always.

Edi Sinovcic:
That’s what I like always.

Louis Guthmann:
Always. Okay. So in this case, to all the participants who listen to us, thank you so much for listening, asking the body question. And I’m looking forward to see my Nigerian friends. As I said, I might be coming actually. And otherwise looking forward for the upcoming future of Starknet. See you guys. Bye-bye.

Edi Sinovcic:
See you. Bye-bye.