Optimism Is Done With “Ethereum Alignment” — Users Come First

0:00A special thanks to our wonderful sponsors Nexo, a digital wealth platform to receive interest on your digital assets and borrow against them without selling. Medcurio, which provides seamless payment flows for businesses with on and off ramps that connect to banks all over the world. This doesn't really matter. What is an L1? We're also kind of an L2 and chains should not be defined within their proximity to Ethereum. What matters to me is that the security properties of the protocol are incredibly high and well understood by the users and the customers that are adopting that protocol or transacting on that protocol. Quick update before we get back into the episode. After we recorded this conversation, base announced it is forking the OP stack and moving to what it's calling a unified base stack. In response, Jing framed this as an evolution, not a break. On the technical side,

1:00she emphasized that the OP stack remains the most production hardened roll-up stack. It still processes about 13% of all crypto transactions and bases new stack reportedly still shares about 99% of its code with OP stack flashbots and wreath. She also said base will continue as an OP enterprise customer under its mission critical support tier, meaning base is self-managed but still receives technical support from optimism. On the economics, she acknowledged this impacts near-term on-chain revenue but said optimism has already been shifting its business model, moving from super-chain revshare to a tiered enterprise model. Her broader point was that OP stack was always MIT license to encourage forks and become the standard for building roll-ups. So if major companies run their own chains on OP tech, that's validation of the strategy. With that context, here's the rest of the conversation.

2:01All right, I am thrilled to be with Jing Wang, the co-founder of Optimism, back on the Defiant podcast. Jing, it's so great to have you here. All right, thanks for having me. So yeah, so we were just discussing that Jing was one of the first people I interviewed for the Defiant back in like 2019. So we are long overdue for a catch-up, so much has happened on optimism, on cereal, on crypto. We're in a completely different landscape and we'll get to that. But first, yeah, let's just get a like basic overview of what optimism and OP labs are for whoever might not be so very familiar. Yeah, it's crazy. It's been seven years since the first interview and I guess this is some extent during the same thing for seven years, which is making computation in transactions on blockchains, scalable, fast, cheap, secure. So yeah, that's what we're doing at Optimism. We are a

3:05network of blockchains. Each blockchain is customizable in its own right and they're all interconnected by a share of liquidity network. In what three, payments are the most vital and vulnerable step. That's why you want them solid. You want Mercurio. Mercurio provides seamless and steady payment flows with on and off ramps but connect to banks all over the world and custom payments APIs with DeFi connectivity if you want more than a simple buy cell crypto button. Polygon, trust wallet, visa, mastercard, major web-through players are partnering with Mercurio. Now is the time for your business to get a solid payment ecosystem. Partner with Mercurio. Awesome. Okay. Optimism is one of the largest Ethereum layer tools. OP mainnet but also the other chains using the Optimism stack. Like you said, are important chains in their own right, base being probably the most important one, but also think OKX is chain and so on. Optimism

4:07just like a key piece in the Ethereum ecosystem as a whole. Recently, I think the biggest news on Optimism is that you guys announced OP Enterprise and it's just it's been the I think the biggest narrative and shifting crypto recently. This convergence with Wall Street with institutions and with Enterprise. So it makes sense but like beyond just like the headline like, okay, you're focusing on Enterprise now. What does that mean? Like what does how do things actually change in practice with this? Yeah. So in our very first interview all those years ago, we were really focused on the research aspects like the industry's understanding of how blockchain's scale was still very limited and we've obviously learned a lot since then and over the last several years, we've been in a really unique position of creating standalone blockchains for other companies which is something that most blockchains startups do not do and we have had the pleasure of onboarding

5:07the largest exchanges in the world. Whether that be the B&B chain, whether that be Coinbase, whether that be Kraken, Uniswap, OK, and now Upbit and we have learned a lot from onboarding these large companies and institutions. We've learned how deep the customizations need to go as without violating any of the benefits of a shared standard like shared upgradability, shared security, shared liquidity layer and so we think we are really well positioned for this new influx of enterprise adoption. There's so many different factors whether it's the maturation of the underlying infrastructure or global regulatory stability now, whether it's Japan, Korea, Europe, United States, making it a simple decision for enterprises to consider having their own crypto offerings. So is this like a strategic, like a business decision from OP Labs to directly go after enterprise more than like like a technical change? Yeah, I mean, I think it's both. We have been

6:12evolving our technology over the last several years to prepare for this very moment and so the tech stack of three years ago is not the same as the tech stack it is today, but we have been building for this and so as enterprises come on, they have all kinds of requirements whether it be privacy, compliance, different kinds of scalability, depending on the products and the applications that they want to bring on chain, the characteristics of the computation are also going to be different and so we've built all these knobs and dials to enable that customizability and we're wrapping up, we're packaging that as OP enterprise and we're providing a simple way for enterprises to control their own economics and control the important parameters of their blockchain in order to manage the risk of bringing their business and their assets on chain. Perfect. So you mentioned all these exchanges, the toes optimism is the idea to really specialize on exchanges or do you want to broaden your your weeks to other types of institutions? Yeah, no, it's not just exchanges, I think I

7:15bring exchanges up because exchanges operate at a different level of scrutiny whether on security or on compliance and so I think it's really like the gold standard for what we've been able to develop, but we have a variety of use cases such as world chain such as this cello, which focus more on payments, emerging markets, there's a really huge diversity of use cases on the OP stack, which I think speaks to the customizability of this stack, whether we have world, which is on boarding users where the average transaction size is 25 cents or enabling mechanisms for coin base on base to charge arbitrageers up to $3,000 for a single transaction to take advantage of a yield opportunity or an arbitrage opportunity. There's a huge amount of tunability. And just thinking back to our first interview, just like the very, very early days of Ethereum when you were a plasma and how different ecosystem is today, like with you talking about world coin and cracking and coin base and like all these big players using Optimism and it's just been such an amazing journey.

8:19I'd love kind of your personal first hand view on this, like how does it feel? I don't know, how have you seen the crypto ecosystem and your ecosystem evolve all these years? Yeah, I mean, I'm also curious for your answer on this. It's definitely been a wild ride. Like this is the moment that crypto as an industry has been waiting for and I mean, like, I mean, the first time we had a big customer, like you just felt this like immense pressure, like it was really on like you needed to guard somebody else's assets. The code that you were writing would be protecting like a level of influx that you've never seen before. And so it's been really motivating, really exciting. You know, over the last several years, we've grown 10 times faster than the second fastest growing blockchain. And so yeah, it's been crazy. It's been really fun. That's amazing to hear. Yeah, so happy for you. Yeah, I think for me, it's similar. It's been like seeing crypto actually achieve all the things it's set out to do, like upgrade financial rails.

9:22And I just see that happening before our eyes and it feels a bit surreal. Yeah, I think it's like also like the fact that like what's what's happening doesn't really match the sentiment. Recently, at least has also been strange, like with prices down on the market down, like everyone's like, oh, like this is over. And I'm like, what do you mean it's over? Like there's like paid balance, drive and black or all all using blockchain. So I don't know, it's just it's a it's a strange time, but I'd feel like blockchain is finally becoming mainstream. And so yeah, it's great to see that it's happening on kind of like the one of like the very early players in Ethereum. What is your take on why the sentiment is not magic? This is what we always wanted. I'm so, I like, I have my own hypothesis. I'm curious for yours. I generally just think it's it's prices. Like I think that's what moves most people sentiment right now. I think maybe 90% of people in the space are in it because they're investors and they hold crypto. And then the minority

10:26are builders who are actually excited about, okay, like the adoption that's happening. So I think that's that said, like I don't I think it's very simple. Like I don't read that much into it. I think like as soon as prices recover, you'll see a shift in sentiment. What's your take? I mean, I think we see a lot of like OG crypto people leaving, which is different from other bear markets. I think a lot of people who've been just grinding for a really long time are just tired. Part of it is prices. This is the like deepest altcoin bear we've seen. And the other part of it is there used to be almost as like religious fervor around decentralization and like cypherpunk ideology. And we've just started talking about it less, but I don't think it's any less prevalent. I think institutions may not understand the definition of decentralization, the way that crypto companies do, but they are using decentralized rails. And so you see all these companies, for example, integrating with crypto lending protocols. And it's predominantly

11:31Ave and Morpho. And both of these protocols are like the pinnacle of decentralized. Each version is immutable. And that is a really easy way for enterprises to understand and manage risk with the integrations that they're doing. And so there's a huge value prop there for enterprises. They just don't call it decentralization anymore. And I think that has been at least part of what I've witnessed, part of the kind of malaise in the sentiment. Yeah, yeah, you're right. Maybe kind of the fact that this is becoming a lot more institutional has turned off a lot of the OGs who were really in it for the like most cypherpunk vision and they see Franklin Templeton launch RWA's and all the like the not very cypherpunk aspect that goes into that with like KYC and like gating aspects and so on. And yeah, you're right. Like maybe some people feel feel dissolution, but I agree with you. It's like you can't expect the entire world to use

12:31blockchain in the same way. Like I think there's going to be a spectrum. Some users will require a more kind of controlled access into it. And so like related to that, like on kind of your the like in thoughts of enterprise users and like the customized civility that you want to provide them on bad aspect on like privacy KYC which have been like main barriers for institutions to come in. How does optimism manage that? So every institution is different. And if I were to generalize, I would say like these institutions are thinking about privacy on two fronts. There is what is legal to make public? What information is legal to make public? And then what's good UX? So with crypto, everything is public by default. And I think institutions are grappling with whether or not this is a, even if it's legal, is this something that is desirable for my depositors? What impact does this have on people's willingness to utilize the product? And where does

13:35actually making that information public improve the product? So they've off-chain everything is private by default. And so it's been interesting partnering with folks to understand what their desired UX is, what their target customer is, what kind of experience they want to create. We have this in Toronto, mantra that we should be indistinguishable from someone on our partner's team. And so yeah, that's how we've been thinking about it. We've just been partnering with people to better understand what they specifically need on privacy and compliance. Step into a new era of wealth, discover Nexo, their premier digital wealth platform. We see interest on your digital assets, borrow against them without selling, trade a variety of cryptocurrencies, all in one platform. Now available in the US with 30 days of exclusive privileges, experience wealth club premier and access higher interest rates and reduce borrowing costs. It started today at nexo.com slash defiant. Are you able to to provide the level of privacy that I don't know, like if there's any

14:40suggestion that requires most data on transactions to be private and KYC for all their users, like just like a very kind of restrictive version of like transacting on chain. Are you able to provide that or like do you want to provide that even or is there like a line that that you won't cross? Yeah, even with something like KYC for all users, there's a huge amount of tunability. So is it that all depositors must be KYC, or is it that anyone can deposit permissionlessly into your chain, but all transactors must be KYC, or is it simply that LPs must be KYC, liquidity providers must be KYC, but borrowers don't need to be. And so like there's not necessarily regulatory clarity and this is where the question around UX and where you might be willing to take some risk as an institution come into play and the more risks you're willing to take kind of the more of defy you're able to access and the faster you are able to move from the standpoint of product

15:41development. And so it is incredibly tunable across that wide range and we have the tools to do it. The question really is like what do you want to do and we help you with that. There's really no line. I mean like we are not for example a wallet company and so if you want to build a wallet, we would connect you to the right team to do that. We are a infrastructure company. So okay, right now there's there's different players going after really the same market and similar approach to you. I think like Arbitrum is probably your biggest competitor here. So how do you differentiate this like just like the ecosystem is getting more and more competitive? It's a huge validation of the strategy that we've been working towards over the last several years. I would say there are technical differentiators but I think the most important thing to keep in mind here is that we have experience. We have three years more experience than anyone else does in bringing enterprises on chain and we are the only stack that has successfully

16:42brought an enterprise not only into production but also to scale. And so if I told you with the technical differentiators we're here people may not understand but there's hundreds of tiny micro things that we've developed to tune these environments based on learnings that we've had over the last several years of operating at 70% of L2 market share. Yeah, that's a great and number to be able to to have because you're counting market share as like all of the different chains built built on the stack on like a TVL or like how do you measure that? Transactions and transaction revenue. So revenue generating transactions you got it. That's I also was meaning to ask on these metrics. Saw that on activity transactions per second and I think it's forget what it will to be calls it like a user operations per second. The main it is near all time highs. I still like even surpass transactions on Ethereum every Sunday so that yeah just shows an increasing

17:43degree of adoption and activity on OP but at the same time TVL has been declining for the past few months. Why do you think that is is that like are people just like using L2s differently? Is it capital efficiency or I was just like wondering why kind of that difference? Yeah contrary to what most people believe we actually have not focused on growing OP main net at all in the last several years. All of our attention and focus has been on our partners and rapidly removing the blockers and the bottlenecks to their continued growth and so this year we're really excited to reinvest in OP main net. We've learned a lot about what is required to make a chain successful and so we're excited to start testing out some beta features on OP main net but we historically don't track OP main net growth and for example our OPRs we don't talk about it as a business we don't have people working on it and so like it kind of just does whatever it does and all of our metrics are about the success of our partners. That's so interesting and interesting to hear that you want to give it a

18:44bit more love or like focus this year. What do you see it's OP main net's role in the broader kind of super team ecosystem? The role of OP main net is twofold as a neutral launch pad which it has been and as a test bed for new features. So a lot of companies that aren't ready yet to deploy their own chain and want to do an application first but they want to do it on neutral block space. So we help them deploy on OP main net like worlds did and we made sure they did it in a way where it would be easy to migrate users liquidity state into their own chain down the line. So the other part is as a test bed for new features a lot of our customers have rigorous compliance and and so for alpha features that we want to iterate on quickly we're putting those out on OP main net's first. Right that makes a lot of sense. Okay and speaking of like your like all your stack or like all the chains that use a weekly stat. Obviously base is a really important one and so related to base two questions like one if you have a measure of how how big base is in your ecosystem

19:51and whether that poses a risk the fact that there's if there's like an outsized chain can it like for example I don't know influence business decisions or maybe you start kind of building just for base and not for others I don't know like maybe there's a conflict or how do you how do you see potential risk there if base is in fact like outsized member. Yeah that's a really good question. Obviously you want to do everything you can to support your biggest customer and early days we were like oh man like are we just like building whatever for base but I think the people need to keep in mind the reality that base was the fastest growing chain and most crypto applications and most chains were not bringing in the level of users that base was. So base app for example had a million people on the wait list whereas like a couple years ago in crypto like if you had like 10k monthly active users that was a huge number of monthly active users so internally we don't

20:52really view it as having like built for base we really view it as having built for the fastest growing onboard of actual human usage in crypto. So we're really obviously honored that base chose the OP stack and it was a really amazing opportunity to do what no one else had the ability to do which is build for a level of skill, demand, reduce congestion that no one else was able to. I think it's interesting like on on the risk that maybe base would influence a business decisions or conflicts of interest. I think like the fact that you have base competitors also choose optimism and build on the OP stack like crack in okay as other major exchanges like it's also kind of like validation that you're still kind of pretty neutral that like even if you have like bases like such a big chain like anyone can still come and build on OP. Yeah I mean it's also why they don't deploy on base but like if you think about the stuff that base might want like what might they want it's not like

21:52features that like features that push down crack and more scale lower latency cheaper transactions the ability to price transactions between what users are doing versus what bots are doing like these are all incredibly reasonable things that everybody else wants also and the level of like congestion and like pressure that base was pounding the network with was incredibly clarifying to our roadmap and just just to be candid like most chains and crypto aren't at that pace of growth. Okay so switching gears a little bit I really I'm interested in your take on Vitalik new like perspective on Ethereum layer 2's role as part of Ethereum. So I don't know like I read Vitalik at post and it was really surprising it really did feel like the end of an era to me and like a lot of people criticized me for saying that but I think it's true like like Vitalik was so clear in saying that Ethereum layer 2's were part of the scaling roadmap but now he's like being a lot more guarded on what he wants to consider an Ethereum layer 2 so

22:58he's like if you're not decentralized enough if you don't have like the like the right guarantees you shouldn't be using the the Ethereum name so yeah when I know your take does that change anything for optimism or I don't know like and like where do you think you are on on this like spectrum that Vitalik laid out? Yeah look like centralized enough like is not up to Vitalik to define the stage 2 definition that he was hoping L2's would get to was written years and years ago and like no L2 including us is willing to build to those requirements those requirements were not written with the realities of today in mind but all that said I'm really glad that Vitalik is seeing this like renewed second wind stepping up into a leadership position as decentralized as Ethereum is it is really nice to have the founder and the leader of the hell what he said I mean it definitely like made waves on Twitter it was fun to be talked about on Twitter it's always fun to be talked about on Twitter but it doesn't really change our roadmap and ultimately the differences

24:02between L1's L2 side chains these are technical architectural differences and so the difference between two L2's can sometimes be more vast than the difference between an L2 and an L1 and so it's really we don't really think of it as like a useful like way to talk about the product although it is how the industry expects us to talk about the product most of the institutions and enterprises coming on chain really care more about their use cases and what you can do to serve those use cases and so the architecture that they just so happen to need looks more like an L1 will build that if it looks more like an L2 we'll build that if it looks more like a side chain we'll have to build that too that makes sense okay so you're saying you answered to your users not to what Vitalik might think is the right way to build on and here in L2 yeah yes so if you were considered an L1 like would that be I don't know would that be okay or like would it would it hurt a little bit it doesn't really matter like kind of are like what is an L1 we kind of are an L1 we're also kind

25:05of an L2 and like chains should not be defined within their proximity to Ethereum what matters to me is that the security properties of the protocol are incredibly high and well understood by the users and the customers that are adopting that protocol or transacting in that protocol so when you said that there were that like the states to definition by L2 was was reading a long time ago on that most Ethereum layer 2s are not willing to build to those requirements like can it be more specific like what exactly is it that about like that states to definitions that you think is like wouldn't be right for your roadmap yeah let me clear high if somebody wants stage two we will do stage two and the original purpose of the stages of decentralization definition was to enable a period of innovation on what the features that should be and ease of upgradability like you find a

26:05bug and you want to fix it ideally you don't have like a 30-day delay before that fix goes into production so that was the original goal of the stages it's the transition you gradually from this period of R&D into something that is immutable maximally decentralized ossified but the reality is that L2s are only just getting started L1s all chains are just only now getting started the influx of capital and usage that is about to hit crypto will be unlike what we have ever seen before so like we're really now coming out of the R&D phase there's still R&D left to be done and the global financial system like companies like visa like NYSE are doing thousands if not millions of transactions per second and we need to be able to meet that demand the this like idea that you have to specifically have a 30-day delay on bridge upgrades in order to be called decentralized is just so random and

27:09it definitely provides a level of trustworthiness insecurity there's like so many different things you can do to make something trustworthiness secure so again I'm not saying that we're not going to do stage two what I am saying is that we are we are maxing out security decentralization security and decentralization in order to support the specific use case that's coming in so if one of our partners wants to be able to iterate quickly we're going to iterate quickly and do the maximum of security and decentralization that enables you to iterate as quickly as that partner wants to so that's what I really mean and I really don't want this to be taken out of context definitely that's I think that's really just saying good nuanced stake on stage two on what it means and what it what it doesn't mean the other aspect that I think a lot of people in the industry fix fixate on or focus on is the sequencer how centraliser or decentralized it is where where is optimism there

28:10yeah look centralization exists on a spectrum and for people who want decentralized sequencing we will build decentralized sequencing I'm boring all my answers are going to be the same like it just depends on what our users want and like if you're a traditional financial exchange and like you legally cannot have somebody else or an unaccredited party ordering transactions on your network like we're going to help you meet those requirements okay and then now switching gears a little bit on ck I saw that optimism recently parted with so sin so sin on working on ck that yeah so wanted to hear kind of what how you're thinking about this like optimistic roll-ups like that it's it's in your name but obviously there's been a lot of progress and development on ck and I'm not sure what the right answer is but I've interviewed so many people that say like ck is kind of the long-term way forward to scale for privacy for like all these different reasons so so yeah like what

29:13how are you thinking about maybe adding ck to your stack or not like yeah what's what's a deal yeah actually we share the same the same belief zk is the future and if you go back to all of our interviews starting in 2018 when people first started asking us about zk our answer was the same first it depends on what the users want and the users want a network that is live today and zk wasn't ready at the time and so we had the foresight to build the protocol in a modular way such that when zk was ready we could swap out the optimistic proof system for the zero-knowledge proof system and so I'm glad we had that foresight I mean we have given huge amounts of grant funding to these zk teams as well we really believe in zk but again it's important that whatever our customers is using is secure and production ready so I'm really impressed with the succinct team that's been a pleasure working with them they've done a huge amount of work to create production grade zk proof rein infrastructure if you want to zk chain today we got you nice okay the other

30:18big news is on the op token I saw the governance proposal for introducing op buybacks can you explain what this is on how this changes tokenomics yes the op token is now for the first time ever tied to the growth of the super chain our network of blockchains so the transaction growth the tbl growth onboarding that new users this all now ties back to the op token as well can you get into the details on on how this works yes so the revenues that we generate on chain half of that goes towards buying the op token and we generate rough share on every chain in the super chain it is either 2.5% of revenues or 15% of on-chain profits okay so the the ideas that by having half of the revenue of the on-chain revenue on oh is it is it on the super chain or op main net you said all chains we liking op main net is like don't like pretend it doesn't even exist like

31:22yeah we have yeah we have 33 revenue generating chains in the super chain over 150 forks of the super chain it is the most widely used blockchain stack and op main net is just like our flagship environment the there's rough share on every single chain I mean I I guess our rough share on op main net is 100% but on all other chains we generate the greater of 2.5% of revenues or 15% of transaction fee profits and so all of that flows into buying or half of that flows into buying the op token and so you buy that you buy op token and then what like to burn it or what happens with that right now it's just a buyback and we plan on rolling out more things that our governance community can vote on whether it be burning that or hopefully doing the buyback on chain so earlier we talked about this being like the like a barriers bearer of the altcoin market and I think it's like we've existed for the last several years in this like paradise of like infinite

32:25growth for all of these blockchain projects and now as like real capital and real interest comes into this space a lot of the projects that don't actually have any revenues are their tokens are going to zero the projects that are legitimate and growing are now more focused on revenue than ever before and beginning to tie the growth of their chain to their token as well and it's different than before like before people had these like infinite yield mechanisms where you just like print more money and somehow that makes your protocol more valuable and now people are actually looking at real usage real product differentiation actual revenues and tying that to their tokens so the the buyback program is following the same trends doing the same thing so now as chains are added to the super chain now as revenue generating transactions grow on all chains not opinion not just opinion net this will go back towards buying the okay token I'm so relieved that this is happening

33:27that people talk about the revenue meta and I'm like what do you mean meta like projects are always like companies are always supposed to make revenue yeah I know but like we're comforted that also like we've just like our codebase is MIT license like it's the most permissive license possible and you have this like really interesting spectrum of like projects that provide no value they just like fork other open source stacks and then like do insane marketing and they just and their tokens go and then these projects that have been working incredibly diligently with the absence of marketing and like giving away all of their IP for free that have never done the serious work with tying all of that back to the token or really capturing the value that they're creating and so yeah I guess does that mean we're real business now I think it's just it's just healthy for the tokens actually reflect activity on chain but yeah I think like building open source has historically been so hard and it's been like trial and error to see how people can make it work somehow with tokenomics and

34:33with all the regulatory constraints that we've had I think founders were just like very limited in what they could do and how they could experiment with different business models so yeah hopefully like we're not asked constraint anymore to find a way to make this all work okay so yeah to round up would love just like your long-term vision for optimism if if Ethereum succeeds in bringing most or all financial transactions and assets on chain what role do you want optimism to play in that future well we would be bringing that on chain sorry can you say that again yeah I mean we would be bringing that on chain we bring the work of bringing that on chain whether it is the product work the product the the technical work or the business development work I mean optimism is doing that work we have been doing that work for the last several years of onboarding companies and enterprises onboarding their assets and doing the product and technical work to make those assets more productive on chain and so it is inevitable that the world will come on chain there are some

35:37enterprises that see this early they see companies like Uniswap and Awe eating into their market chair Awe is one of the top if you consider to bank it's among the top 50 banks in the United States it's so that is really really incredible Stort Brand said about the internet information years to be free and that is what crypto is for finance and liquidity liquidity years to flow freely into crypto infrastructure is built from first principles for how liquidity should and could move there is no like crazy two-month like huge regulatory burden for capital to move from one jurisdiction to another it just does and so I like it can't not come on chain if your business doesn't come on chain with sufficient time your business won't survive so a lot of people are realizing this for the first time and we are doing everything we can to continue making the valley pop of crypto 24 seven markets mutability missionless transparency and we're trying to make it as scalable as possible

36:38to expedite the onboarding of all these enterprises and users on chain love it awesome as always so great to chat amazing updates from you either I just like really admire what you built yeah thanks for sharing it with me yes