Facilitating the Modular Blockchain Revolution w/ Amrit Kumar (AltLayer)

**Speaker A:** Foreign. **Speaker B:** Hello and welcome back to the Strange Water podcast. Thank you for joining us for another episode. These days you cannot scroll through crypto, Twitter or through Warpcast without saying the phrase modular blockchain. And I'll admit I often succumb to using the buzzword casually and without definition on Strange Water all the time. So let's define it. We'll first start with a monolithic blockchain, the original design of most blockchains. We've spoken before about how Ethereum uses a decentralized network of computers coordinated by proof of stake to host the Ethereum virtual machine. Now, the Ethereum virtual machine, or the evm, is a Turing complete computing space. Think of it like a general purpose virtual computer, complete with a processor, a hard drive, etc. A monolithic blockchain looks to scale by increasing the processing speed and reducing the cost of using the network directly, often just by requiring more and more advanced machines to participate in the network. And this is effective, but it has direct implications for centralization and so it inevitably limits the value of a credibly neutral system. But modular blockchains approach the problem from a different angle. A modular approach involves examining the system, asking what what needs to happen on chain and what can be offloaded into less resource constrained environments. For example, let's say you want to make a financial transaction, maybe borrowing USDC against ETH collateral on something like aave. If you're to do this on a monolithic blockchain, all the computation required to make this happen would need to go on inside the network. How much is the ETH worth in USDC terms? **Speaker C:** What's your borrow rate? **Speaker B:** What's your liquidation point? And on and on and on. Finally, this would all be resolved and the result would be recorded on chain. And from that point on, no computation is required, the position just exists. We can recognize that the important part. **Speaker C:** Of what happened here is the result. **Speaker B:** And and not the actual calculations. And so we can move the calculations to an outside environment where it is trivial to calculate all these answers and then just post it. And yes, we need to find a way to trust these outside environments. But fortunately we've developed technologies like fraud proofs and more importantly ZK cryptography to solve this. Now that's just one example of modularity in blockchain. Another is something we refer to as data availability. And as listeners to this show, know more, modularity is on the horizon. Hint, check out episode 42. But as you can clearly see, even explaining this at a high level is pretty complicated and we haven't Even started talking about how to use eigenlayer to. **Speaker C:** Create a restaked backed rollup. **Speaker B:** The modularity forces so many more choices and integrations than the monolithic paradigm. Can you imagine how much more difficult it is to implement? Fortunately, we have people like today's guests building tools to make the transition to a modular future far less painless than most developers are anticipating. Amrit Kumar is the Chief Operating Officer at Alta Research, developers of Alt Layer. You'll hear all about Amrit's journey through academia and entrepreneurship to his current position as a key player bringing the modular blockchain thesis into reality. And then we get into Alt Layer and how they're building tools to make deploying flexible customized blockchains and app chains easy and painless. And stick on through to the end to hear about some of the big unanswered questions in this space, including about data availability and restaking. One more thing before we begin. Please do not take financial advice from this or any podcast. Ethereum will change the world one day, but you can easily lose all of your money between now and then. **Speaker C:** Okay, let's bring on Amrit. Amrit, thank you so much for joining us on the Strange Water podcast. **Speaker A:** Well, thank you very much for inviting me. **Speaker C:** Of course. Man, I am so excited about everything that you're doing with Alt Layer. I mean, of all of the darling projects right now, like, you're definitely having a moment in the sun. But man, before we get to that, I'm a huge believer that the most important part of every conversation are the people in it. So with that as background, will you tell us a little bit about yourself? How you found crypto and I guess maybe why you didn't run away? **Speaker A:** Yeah, of course. Well, I'm originally from India, so I did my undergrad in mathematics in India and then I got a scholarship to. I mean, of course most Indians end up being end up in the US because they want to study at MIT or whatever. For some reasons. I got an offer from a university in Paris. It was an engineering school. And the reason I went for it was mostly because they were offering me a scholarship. And so I felt, okay, the guy is giving me a scholarship, I should go for it. So I went to. I didn't understand the challenges at that time, but anyway, I went for it. And so I interviewed the, you know, went through the whole process of interviewing and everything. So anyway, I got selected for this interview, for this scholarship and I went to Paris and then I realized, not that, I mean, I realized before that, but then I think it hit me at that point that everything is going to be in French. So before that it was like, okay, you know, maybe there'll be some English component, maybe lectures will be in English, whatever. But it was only when I got there that I realized that it's going to be hardcore French. So the good thing was that they had this three months, if I recall correctly, three months of a language internship. So basically from 8am in the morning until 5pm you basically learn French. And it was for three months. So I went through that process. I won't say that my French went up to, I don't know, level that allowed me to take serious science or mathematics or history or whatnot. But I guess it gave us enough, I guess meat to actually go and go to the lectures and at least understand half of what was going being said. So it was painful experience. I would say reading, I don't know, geopolitics or I don't know, the history of religion and whatnot in French was not an easy task anyway, so after that I went to, so I studied computer science. I then did a PhD in France. And then around that time there were researchers in academia. They were looking at bitcoin and other things that were happening in the space and they were like, hey, this is something that's exciting or interesting. Before that, I'm talking about 2013 or around that mark, right before that it was like, hey, it's this people doing their thing. There's nothing, I mean it's interesting but nothing serious. Maybe it will die away or whatever. But that was changing. So I think there were at least two academic papers that were published from very big academics in computer science. And that I think pushed people's interest into bitcoin and other related cryptography and systems. And so some of the people, or I would say senior researchers, the lab where I was doing my PhD, they were getting interested into or hooked up into bitcoin and related protocols. And so this was, I would say, the last year of my PhD. So I said to my advisor, can we work on something around bitcoin? And my advisor basically said, your funding is secured from a certain thing and you're not supposed to focus on this topic and not basically move away. So I didn't have much choice. So I said, okay, fine, I'm going to finish one extra year of my PhD and then I will try to work on something that the relative bitcoin. So, so I, I got interested already and by the way, at that time I was mostly interested at a superficial level. So I had not read the Bitcoin white paper. People were talking about it, so it made me interested to know this is something interesting, the fact that you could build kind of money where you don't have a bank, which is interesting. But I had not, you know, even though I was, I was academic and I had this technical background, I did not actually go into, you know, reading the white paper at all. And then I said, you know what, let's finish my PhD and let's go and look for a postdoctoral research position. And this is where I will go and get into my bits of Bitcoin. And then I applied for a couple of postdoctoral positions and I went to, I got an offer from nus, which is the National University of Singapore. And by the way, this was the time when ICOs were happening, right? So I was not following that news that much. I was more on the academic side of things. But when I landed in Singapore, I realized that a lot of people are actually thinking about that Ethereum was there back then. So people are doing ICOs, EOs and Tezos. Some of the other projects were doing ICOs at the time. And Singapore, by the way, interestingly, I didn't realize back then, but at that point Singapore was one of the countries that was the place for these ICOs. So it was kind of neutral country, they didn't hate crypto. And the other country was, by the way, Switzerland. So surprisingly, I applied, only went to two countries that were, I guess, supportive of crypto. And then I got an offer, I joined the lab and sadly my advisor, he said, there's nothing interesting to do in crypto anymore. You're too late to the party. And then again, I got very disappointed because I wanted to do research While during my PhD, I got basically slapped there. And then when I come back here, I'm getting the same story. And my advisor said, you should work on machine learning. This is the new area of research and you should go for that. I worked on that for about a month and I think my advisor kind of got a sense that this is not his thing, he doesn't want to do it anymore. Interestingly, at that point, every single person in the lab was working on crypto. So by the way, there was a guy called Loy Liu who was the founder of Kyber Network, which was one of the first in the Ethereum space. So everyone else was working on crypto. I was the only guy, the new guy who was supposed to do work on something new. Anyway, at some point my advisor gave up and said, you know, there's this shiny thing called Monero that is picking up, you know, theme, maybe you should take a look at it. And that was my opportunity. I had to seize it because otherwise he would say, you know, go back to your machine learning. So I picked up Monero and then, so I read the Monero white paper first and then I understood, okay, how Bitcoin would work because there were references about Bitcoin and all that. So I read Bitcoin, Monero's white paper first and then went to Bitcoins white paper. And I found very interesting because Monero's idea was simple and still quite interesting compared to at that time, zcash was there. Zcash was much more complicated at that time. Monero was a very simple idea. And so I started researching into Monero. We published a paper with some of my interns and colleagues. We showed that Monero was actually not very private, at least at that time. I haven't been following that project anymore. And then funnily, Zuku from zcash reached out to me on signal once and he said, hey, we have some data set for DASH and would you like to run your algorithms on DASH and see what you get out of it? And of course there was conflict of interest thing. So he didn't want to do it himself, he wanted party to do it. And then again, my advisor said, no, it's becoming boring, let's do something else. And that something else became Zilliqa. So this was 2017. Zilliqa was basically based out of a paper that Loy and some of his friends and colleagues in the lab had published. This idea was to build a blockchain that would have sharding built in. So this was something that Ethereum foundation was also pursuing quite heavily. In 2017, 2018, my advisor has this idea of, let's take this paper and try to commercialize it in some way in the form of an L1. Me and some of my colleagues in the lab, mostly PhD students who were transitioning from PhD to postdocs, we joined hands together and we started Silica. I would say we're probably one of the last projects that finished or went through the ico. And after that, basically ICOS died. I was the Chief Science Officer at Zilliqa. So my role was to basically look at the problems or interesting problems that exist in the space, how to solve them. I stayed in that role until 2021. And then this is, by the way, where I met my friend Yao Chi, who is currently the CEO of All Flare. He was the CTO of Zilliqa. So he left Zilliqa early on. In 2019, he went to join Parity. And then in 2021, he said, you know, I'm starting this new thing. Would you be interested in joining me? I said, sure. So that's kind of the backstory of me starting as undergrad to altclay today. **Speaker C:** Wow, man, that's incredible. So, first of all, thank you for sharing your story. I think what your story is a microcosm of basically, like, everything that all of us in this industry and maybe in entrepreneurship know, which is like, the path to success is lined with people telling you, like, no, you can't do this. You're not interested. Like, this is not the right time. Like, go find something else to do. And what it takes to find success is just to, like, have passion and the ability to just say, like, fuck off, like, I'm going. And you know, like, that's what I hear in your story is regardless of all these people who kept telling you not to do it, you just knew that crypto was something interesting and you're going to be involved. And here we are in 2024, and you are at the flag, the helm of, like, one of the more exciting projects as we enter into this, like, new modular phase. So incredible, man. Before I let you move on from your background, I just, I have to ask, what was it like going through, like, schooling in a language that you, like, flat out didn't speak? And I guess, like, more specifically, do you. Were there any things that, like, looking back, actually ended up being, like, kind of advantageous for you? Like, did you look at things any differently? Or did forcing yourself to learn a new language, like, give yourself better discipline? Like, as. As an American who we over here are unaware of other languages other than English? Like, what was the experience like of educating yourself in a language that you didn't speak? **Speaker A:** I would say so. I mean, it definitely was difficult. I won't say. I mean, okay, French is relatively easy language compared to something like German. Right. Some of my colleagues were friends, were learning German at some point at the university. I didn't have the courage to take that, so I, I felt, no, I have to go a notch higher. So I picked up Chinese later on. So I think, I think it's interesting one because it gives you different, different perspectives. Because I think language is not just a thing to. To communicate, but it also teaches you culture. Right? And what you learn from just by learning a language. For example, when we're learning French. At that time, we had to spend, I think about a month at a local family. So as a paying guest, you basically pay them and they will, they will you stay with them, you know, you spend time with them, they will take you with to shopping and whatnot. So they take you, you kind of go through that culture. It's not just about, you know, speaking the language. It's about understanding, you know, how, how to, you know, how to stay in that society. Right, Basically. And of course, you know, I came from India, so of course we have a completely different culture, right. And so we were taught, for example, you know, it feels a bit silly right now, but at that time we were taught how to hold knife and fork and things like that. This was taught to many of us, including Indians and Chinese as well, because Chinese are more used to using chopsticks back in the day, right. Nowadays everyone uses everything. So I think all of us were taught how to use these cutleries because they felt like, okay, this is how you learn the culture. We were taught how to position different cutleries on your table around, you know, things like that. So that's one thing. So of course you learn the culture, right? And then once you know the language, you actually can read things that were previously completely inaccessible to you. Right? So, for example, I was able to read books in French. I was able to enjoy some of the comic books that, you know, French have written, like Dintin and some of the other very popular ones in French. And you can see that translations don't work, right. I had read that in previously in English. Yes, you enjoy it, but I think there's a certain flavor to it when you read in the native language, right. So I'd say that it was tough, but I think it was encouraging and it opened up new ways of, new ways of thinking. And the second thing was you can then assimilate in the society, right? Which is if you're going to live in France for seven years, I mean, you can't live if you don't know the language. It's going to be very painful to you. You can't, you can't make friends. But anyway, I also picked because of that, because I had picked French, you know, I also decided I should pick another language which ended up becoming Chinese. I learned for about two years and gave up. But that gave me my new. My wife, actually. So, so it, it, it also, it kind of, it went up in a circle where I think, you know, some people say every work that you put in, it kind of accumulates and you Know, it has a cumulative effect. Eventually I think that's what happens. You know, you start something and it leads to something else, and that leads to something else. And I think language is something where somebody opens up new perspectives for you. **Speaker C:** Yeah, no, and just a little bit about me. I'm engaged to a Russian woman who like, is from Moscow. Her whole family still lives there. And so I'm going through the process of learning Russian right now, which any language learning as an adult is impossible. But wow, Russian is just like a whole different category. But I do, I'm just so struck by like, they have words that are like entire, you know, like somebody will say a word and like, in order to explain what it is in English, you need to like call together like eight, like eight other words plus like a feeling and just like try to get people to kind of get what you're saying. And I think that to me that is just like a reflection of like the languages we choose are like the mediums by which we think bank, you know, And I guess let's keep this like, crypto related, like choosing, let's say Viper versus Cairo. Like Viper is all about like, readability and just like, like ease of access and it comes from like the Python world. Right. Whereas Cairo is all about just like pushing the boundaries and finding like the most like, advanced interesting stuff and like the, the solutions, the problems that are even trying to be solved. Like everything in Diff is different in these worlds because of like, how the thoughts and the expressions come out. **Speaker A:** Yeah, certain things just don't exist in certain languages. Like, for example, there are languages in Africa or even India where if you say, okay, how would you say this? There's a very common expression for that or word for that in certain languages that doesn't exist. And similar extended that to Cairo or programming language. It's very similar, which is their expressiveness could be different. There's certain things that you can express very easily in a certain language, in a programming language that you can't do, you know, in other languages. And I think that also gives you better developer experience. Right. Which allows you to express quite easily. You can write shorter code, maybe less readable, but at least shorter code, which would be more optimized in some way. **Speaker C:** Yeah. And sorry, just to harp on the point, and then we'll move on, but like shorter, but like less readable but more efficient versus like longer but more readable but maybe less performant. Like those are actual values, choices that like a community has made and like, from that the results will be Different. So anyway, I just, I. I'm a language. My head's on language these days. And to find someone who like, not only achieved a second language as an adult, but like, used it to further your education, I'm in awe, my friend. **Speaker A:** Thank you, thank you. I mean, if I extend this point right, to. To more crypto thing. Right. What I've also seen interesting is, you know, there were some experiments on the language side about three, four years in the Ethereum space where people were experimenting with different kind of languages. Ethereum itself has, I think, couple of languages before they converge to solidity. Right. Then other ecosystems were building their own language. For example, Tezos had its own language. Michelson at Silica, we were building our own language as well. And at some point we forgot or we felt like, oh, solidity has won the race, we should forget everything else. Let's just focus on Solidi. And I think Solana has definitely done something different. They have shown that languages can be a good option. We have seen, for example, MOVE coming up as a language. So I think it's a really good thing. Maybe some of these things are also tied to, I guess, the modular world that you mentioned. Because modularity, because execution had moved out of Ethereum, it has allowed people to experiment a little bit more and given people flexibility that, you know what, now you can do it. Previously it was kind of frowned upon. If you had gone with a new language two years ago, you would have said, why are you doing this? Already has gone up, done it and there's nothing interesting that you can do with this now I think that perspective has changed and so I'm really excited to see how MOVE and some of the other languages get developed and adopted by the community in general. **Speaker C:** No, And I actually think that's a great pivot point to talking about ALT layer. But before we get into kind of like why that's a great pivot point to talk about ALT layer, can you take us to this 2020, 2021 time frame? And I think like now in 2024, what alt layer building, it's just like so obvious that it hurts, right? But. And that is a reflection of how much further we've walked down the Ethereum roadmap and how much more well understood, like what modularity means in the blockchain context. But 2020, 2021, like, full disclosure, that was when I was entering crypto and like, during that time, like the idea of monolithic versus modular was just starting to be articulated. So can you take us to that time and like Talk a little bit about what is like the genesis of Alt layer and why did you know three years ago that this was like the right play? **Speaker A:** Yeah. So when we started 2021 and I think a little bit before that you had, you know, people are talking about Zksync. The idea of ZK was there, the idea of Optimism was there. Idea of Arbitrum was there, but it was not kind of set in the modular way we are going to build rollups. And that was kind of the idea. But what we felt I think very quickly was that, hey, and at that time, I think when we started, really when we set up the company or at that time, I think Arbitrum and Optimism were doing about 20k transaction day, something like that. A very, very low number of transactions, very, very early days. And at that time it hit us that, you know, look, you know, if you wanted to have an app specific infrastructure, you have two choices. You know, you could either. Sorry, let me step back. So if you're building a dap, you have mainly two choices. One is you can go and deploy on a general purpose chain. So you could, it could be Ethereum if you want faster and low cost and whatnot. You could go and optimism Arbitrum and that's the general purpose route. So basically you'd be competing for block space with every single app that's deployed on that chain. The second choice that you would have is an app specific route. So you could go and build, let's say, your own chain using something like Cosmos or Polkadot and they both have their pros and cons. In a general purpose model, you benefit from composability, you benefit from liquidity, you benefit from user base because it's the same central place where you have everything shared. So you have all that benefit. But the problem that you have in general purpose in you, you know, you have issues around cas. So if once you have because the resource is finite and once you have a lot of people using that finite resource, you will have gas war like situation. And we have seen that time and again. You could go to an app specific route where you could say, I'm going to build my own Cosmos chain. The good thing that I get from Cosmos is I can go and customize my chain in all sorts of ways. So I have my own validated network, I, I would have my own gas mechanism, I would have my own gas token or whatnot. And it's a chain that is dedicated for you. So you have your own block space, you can own it. And so no One else would compete on that chain. But the main problem with Cosmos or app chains at that time was that ability to bootstrap this. So you have to go and find validators first of all. And once you have found validators, you have to go and then pay them in some way. So you have to issue a token sometimes if the token doesn't do well, no one is happy. And then the transactions don't do well, and then your network is kind of somewhat idle. And so we saw rollups as a way to kind of find something in the middle in some way. Because the good thing about rollup was that at that time, you could spin up a single sequencer, you would have a bunch of contracts on Ethereum and you're good to go, literally because you're deriving security from Ethereum, so you don't have to worry about hundreds of validators. But no one was talking about at that time, hey, we should go and build an app specific instance of Optimism or app specific instance of Arbitrum. So I feel like if you build an app specific instance of a rollup, you could eliminate some of the issues that Cosmos and Polkadot and some of the other app specific infrastructures have. And one cool idea that we had at that time is maybe not everyone needs app specific rollups, at least for a long time. So we felt like maybe some people need these instances, but maybe just for a short time. So we came up with this idea of what we call disposable rollups. So essentially you spin up an instance of a rollup and when you use it for as long as you want, when you feel like you're done with this, or you don't need this anymore, or you feel like that transactions have dried up, there's no longer interest from the community, you basically take that infrastructure down so you don't have this recurring cost of operating the network, paying the validators and whatnot. So we feel like that could be a good balance of having an app specific instance of roll up, but for a short period of time. So I would say that was the journey we felt like that would meet or give you the best of both worlds. Best of a general purpose chain and a best of a Cosmos chain, because you take away all the cost of running and having validators, and also the cost of having a chain that stays there forever. And then obviously over time. OP stack, by the way, when we started, there was no OP stack, there was no Arbitrum Orbit. We ended up building our own stack, by the way. So we built an Entire implementation, of course, inspired by optimism and Arbitrum. So we built our own stack of optimistic roll up stack that allowed people to spin up these instances. Now we have almost deprecated it simply because now we have OP Stack, Arbitrum, Orbit. But at that time there was nothing, so we had to build our own stack. So that shows you how committed we were in this theory that you will have modularity in the future, even though the term wasn't quite there. But we do believe that will be very different. People will build new kinds of execution layers. And we are really betting on that. **Speaker C:** Totally with you on the vision of like back in 2021 realizing that, okay, well if we see the Cosmos model of app chains, we see what's going on with Arbitrum and optimism and Zksync, like we, there's obviously an opportunity to take the best of both worlds and like make app. So totally hear you on all that vision. Can you just like talk a little bit more about this insight that these like app chains that you might want to spin up and then close down, like, what are the types of use cases that like we're really jumping out to you that would be met by like a temporary chain? **Speaker A:** Yeah, so at that time this was, I think right after, maybe we're a little bit late at that time, but this was right after the NFT hype, you know. You know, so we felt like, hey, look, NFTs always create issues on Ethereum, right? You know, there's always a gas war. And you know, people said, you know, one solution to fix gas war is to do this fancy auction mechanism, you know, Dutch auction and you know, whatever, right? And no one liked that, liked to adopt that model because they felt like, hey, if you're running a restaurant, right, you want a queue in front of your restaurant because if there's no, there are no people waiting, people will feel like the food is not good. So you want to have that cue. And that cue basically gives you marketing. So when we spoke with some of the marketing, some of the NFT project, they said, hey, we want first come first, we do not want all this fancy auction model because all of that happens back end. It dilutes the entire marketing effort. But when people are running for it, people are fighting to click the button first. That is the hype that you want and that's the marketing that you want. So we felt like, hey, NFT could be a good use case. And the good thing about NFTs was that you only need, so you need to solve the Gas war. Like you need something that allows you to prevent gas wars. That was the problem. And the good thing for us was that NFTs don't last. Like sales don't last forever. So you know, you would start selling, let's say today if you are hyped up project, you probably will be sold in seconds, right? Not even minutes. And so it was the first, I would say, the main driver for us. Maybe we were a little bit late for that because, you know, NFTs were starting to dry up. But that was the main motivation because we felt like, hey, if you want to eliminate gas war, if you want to have first come, first serve, the only good way would be to have a dedicated chain that before NFT mint event. So basically your users would come. So we would spin up an instance of roll up. You would do your mint event on that roll up. So you're basically selling all the NFTs. And once all the NFTs have been sold out, we will take down that infrastructure because you won't need that anymore. And the good thing that you had in this model is that all the NFTs that were minted on that roll up will go back to a chain of your choice. So for example, on Ethereum, and this way you could enjoy all the liquidity benefits that comes from let's say using Ethereum. So you can sell that on OpenSea, lend that and borrow money or whatever. So it gives you the benefits of an app chain because it's a chain that is dedicated for the mint event. But once the mint event is over, you get all the liquidity benefits that comes from having these NFTs on Ethereum. So I would say the killer or the initial idea or motivation was NFTs. But you can extend up to anything, right? Anything. Like games, for example. Of course people play games that games like, people play for years and years, like Counter Strike and whatnot. But there are many games, I would say 90% of the games have a certain lifespan, right? You know, people are excited about a game like maybe a year, maybe three months, four months. And after that kind of game dies away, or the there's not enough demand for that game or daily active users drops quite quickly. So basically the idea would be very similar. You would spin up an instance of this roll up, you would host your game on that roll up and once your game has dried up or your user base has dried up, you will take it down. And what you could do is any NFTs that you had on the roll up coming out of the game would go back to Ethereum and then you could go to your drawing board and say, hey, let's go and build a new version of the game. And once you have built a new version, you can break that new version of the game on a roll up. And then you would bring all the NFTs back from Ethereum to this roll up. So it also kind of gives you a little bit of composability as well in your own setting. But yeah, NFTs, games, airdrops for instance, voting, anything that is short term, that drives a huge transaction volume in a short span of time would be ideal. **Speaker C:** Wow, you just like really unlocked like a new like, paradigm or way for me to think about rollups. Because yes, everything that we all talk about, about, you know, like removing execution from the expense of L1 keeping like the settlement guarantees, crypto, economic security, like all that stuff. But a thought just occurred to me that what rollups do is allow you to create a business or a protocol or something. And like users can know that even when this business is like no longer supporting this thing. I keep my ownership in perpetuity. And maybe that ownership is not going to be worth much in the future. But I guess there's something for me profound when I use my Google account and I like to track my location history, like, there's part of me in the back of my head that knows that I am only privileged to access this data as long as Google's interested in like, allowing me to. And I guess what rollups do is allow people to get just as invested as they want into like, new projects that may or may not be around in a couple of years, but without a surety that like, well, even if the business fails, like, I can still take away what I earned doing it. **Speaker A:** By the way, not every, like, there's a reason why disposable as a term exists in the real world as well. You have disposable cups, you have disposable plates. And what. And that applies in the world, in this world as well, because not everything is persistent even maybe we'll talk about data availability, right? The data availability layers like Celestia and even Ethereum in the dark shotting that's coming up. Data doesn't stay there forever, Right? So I think there are a lot of things in the real world and also in the digital world which are not persistent in the true sense of it. Right. And there are use cases which don't even require that. Right. So. And you rightly mentioned destination layers when you move it out of Ethereum. You can imagine different things. And this is exactly what we're seeing where people are building, for example, Eclipse is building Solana VM attached with him. You couldn't have done that before because in a completely, let's say monolithic world, you only see what the L1 offers you, right? And you are offered a certain VM and you're stuck with that, you're offered a certain gas model, you're stuck with that today. It's ridiculous, to be honest with you. When I transact on Ethereum today, or any L1 for that matter, I pay a fee to the validators and I pay a fee to the underlying app. So for example, if I'm trading on Uniswap, I have to pay a fee to Uniswap and also pay a fee to the validator. This is kind of like saying in the, in the Web2world that if I send a, if I send a, let's say tweet on, on Twitter, I have to pay Twitter, but also have to pay the Internet service provider every single time I do that. Which is, which doesn't make sense, right? So I think this, this idea that you could have a model of rollup where gas is completely free. There's no notion of gas. You could do that. For example, you could say, hey, my rollup has zero gas. What I mean by zero gas is not that the fee is zero, it's like there's no notion of gas at all. And basically you would send a transaction to this roll up and the sequencer will take your transaction, will process them, and if there's any fee that has to go on Ethereum or Celestia or some other third party network, the sequencer will bear that cost on behalf of user. So there would be a fee of using the application, but there won't be two fees, there won't be a fee that goes to network and the one fee that goes to the app. And then somehow the user has to deal with all of that mumbo jumbo, right? So I think all of that goes away if you abstract some of these things. And it becomes much easier if you do that on the roll up side. **Speaker C:** Man, that's like so exciting. And I think we can go for the rest of this conversation on a tangent on like how the design space opens up, but I'll try to keep us focused here. So like totally hear you on where the insight was, what the thinking was in 2021. But let's fast forward to 2024. Like can you Just at a super high level. Like walk us through what is the alt layer product today And I guess like maybe first start with just the rollup as a service, just packaging everything we've been talking about. But then I really want to like dig into what modularity means and what the different kind of like choices are and what we can build from that. **Speaker A:** Yeah. So autolay as a base, it's a rollup as service. So we make it easier for people to deploy rollups because you could imagine having a game builder that who doesn't understand how sequencer works. They do not understand how to pick and choose, let's say different dlls and whatnot. So our goal is to run and manage those rollups for them. And the benefit is three. One is it saves takes away all the complexity from you so you don't have to deal with all of that, number one. Number two is it helps you focus on your core expertise. So for example, if you're a game builder you would focus on game building. You won't have run in like Incident for example where you are still also building Infra but also building app and then you don't know what Infra does and then you are stuck because your bridge got hacked and whatnot. Right. So it allows you to focus on your which is your core expertise and then saves you money because you would have to go and hire people who understand the right things. You have to hire DevOps, all of that goes away. And then lastly I would say is it allows you to get some extra services. So for example, if, let's say you're building a game you may want or a defi project you may want to have an Oracle service. Now you would want to go to Chainlink and say hey Chainlink guys, can you support us? And it will take you maybe six months to realize that it's not going to happen. So it also seems to BD work. Right? Because what Oracle service can do is they have been speaking with these third party services and providers and they would say hey these guys would be the one you should talk to and we can hook you up with them. Or maybe we have already integrated that service into our offering as a package and come to us, we'll serve them. So roll up a service basically offers you that. And so as a service you. And by the way, before I said, As I said 2021 it would have been just Ethereum or Arbitrum or Optimism, things like that. But nowadays now you can pick and choose different things. So you can pick and choose. Okay, which stack you want to pick. So you have choices for OP Stack, Arbitrary, Morbid, Polygon, cdk, ZK Sync, ZK Stack and a bunch of other ones will come. For example, scroll will probably have their own stack, maybe Tyco will have its own stack. So you basically pick. The first thing to pick is your stack that you want to have. Then you pick your DA layer. So you could use Ethereum, you could use Velladium Mode. So basically your own set of nodes that will serve and host the data. You could pick Celestia or alternative delays. You could also pick, for example, it's not a core component, but I think it will become core component very soon, which is interoperability layer. So once you have this roll up, how do you connect with some other rollup? If you go back maybe two years ago, it was basically called a bridge. The way you would, the way bridges would add a new chain is that you have to go to a governance portal and you say, hey guys, here's my fancy new chain. Could you support my chain in your bridge service? And then there will be a governance process maybe last for two weeks. You have to go and convince people and lobby people to support your chain. And then once your chain is supported, maybe at some time you have to actually then do a voting for the asset that you want to support. So it could be, oh, now that I've supported Polygon, now let's go and see which asset on Polygon will be supported on the bridge. It was a painful process. And so nowadays people are building these permissionless modular bridges as well. So that can automatically connect with any chain and you have the service that you can run yourself. So I'd say that's also a component that's becoming much more interesting. So it's not just about rollup Stack, but also these middleware services that be useful. Right. We for example also building this serviceway which you would have around decentralized sequencing or shared sequencing. Right. Also now pick, okay, I don't want to just run a sequencer, a single node sequencer. I would also like to pick maybe between Espresso or Astri or some of the other projects that are out there. I would say at a high level there are two main, I would say layers of modularity. One is your roll up stack and the other one is the DA layer. But I think there are other services that are attached, for example shared sequences, bridge providers and so on. **Speaker C:** Yeah, and we didn't even talk about just like some of the basic stuff, but even like Block Explorers are one of those things where it's just like day one, if you go build it yourself, like good luck, maybe call Etherscan and hope that you can get their code. **Speaker A:** But I mean you might get, you have to pay a huge sum of money to get them to support you. And so I think this is also something, you may not know this as a DAPP builder, you'd probably spend maybe three, four months talking to all these vendors and then you realize that Etherscan is not the right thing because it's designed or the business model surrounds around bigger projects and you may not be the right fit for them. So yeah, you could imagine indexes, you could imagine nowadays people are building new, I won't say modeler, but new UIs for bridges. So you may want to go and build your own UI which may have some issues or the design may not be good. So now people are offering Bridge UI as a service as well. Right? People are offering wallets as a service, account abstraction as a service. So many of these things are also part of this broader modular service and RAAS services help you pick and choose between these services for you. **Speaker C:** Yeah, and I really like what you said is that the abstraction of rollup as a service or maybe ALT layer allows your team to focus on building your app. Right. It abstracts away all of this blockchain nonsense so that you can worry about providing the service that your users want to use. And like that's definitely like the step towards making blockchain like a core part of technology and not just this like weird little side project for people like you and me. **Speaker A:** Indeed, indeed. **Speaker C:** So okay, two things I really want to make sure we hit on. One is about in this like multi roll up world where there's thousands of roll ups, you can spin them up on your like with ease. I want to talk about like the fragmentation of liquidity and like how going to solve that. And then the other thing I want to talk about is more about data availability and some of the longer term stuff with that. But let's stick with fragmented liquidity for a moment. So before we really get into what some of the rollup, something like a polygon or Arbitrum or ZK Sync with their supernets, how they're looking at how this is all going to play out. Can you speak a little bit on what's your personal thoughts? Is a multi roll up world a fragmented world and if yes, then what are the types of things we need to build to fix that? And if not, what is the fundamental misunderstanding? **Speaker A:** I think so. I would say that yes, it's a fragmented world, right? Yes, you could say that everything is on Ethereum if you are attaching to Ethereum. But now that your DA layers could be non ethereum, your settlement layer could be non ethereum, people are building sovereign rollups. I think it definitely is a fragmented world. And so there is a need and people are actually building it. There's a need to build better bridges, better liquidity mechanism where there's a shared liquidity that can be tapped into different roll ups. I think each one of the rollup stack builders are actually doing it. So as you mentioned, you know, hyperchain or super chain or LXL vibration polygon, cdk, they all are focusing on a common layer or common middleware that would serve the roll ups that are attached to them to share liquidity. Right. And what is still not being done right now is in a more generic way is, let's say, for example, optimism. It's building its own superchain thing, right? Which will have, let's say, sequence of potentially maybe liquidity provisioning. Again, CK saying it's building its own thing, CDK is building your own thing. I mean, there's no common thing that connects all of them in one way, right? People, you have options like hyperlink, you have options like XLR and some of the other things. But I think there's a lot more design thing that needs to go to connect these. Otherwise it'd be kind of like Cosmos but in a weird Ethereum way of things, which is, oh, here's the cluster of all CDK chains or here's the cluster of all the OP stacks chains or here's the cluster of ZK chains. You don't want that. Yes, it'd be easier for you if you're OP stack roll up. It'd be easier for you to talk to other OP stack rollups, but it won't be so easy if you want to connect to let's say CDK roll up from an OP stack roller perspective. So I think it's still early and many of things are still not built yet. People are still. Most of the stack builders are building some of these liquidity systems. There are people building systems that would do these cross domain or cross roll up stack ecosystem liquidity provisioning. But I think there has to be something that needs to be built and again not in a model where people have to go and bridge RSS from one place to other. We have gone through that process painful. There have been a number of hacks we have seen and something else needs to be done using maybe ZK clients. **Speaker C:** You probably know better than me, so correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding of what the model that is emerging as the way this is going to get solved is, whether it's Polygon cdk, whether it's Arbitrum Orbit I guess or the OP stack like it, it sounds to me like the solution is, is that if you're building one of these chains on base layer Ethereum, what it's going to look like is even though you're your own sovereign roll up, you're all settling to the same smart contract and that will allow like the, this, the virtual accounting which like isn't, doesn't require expensive like gas transactions on Mainnet. So like yes you're in your sovereign CDK roll up but you can bridge over to Polygon ZK EVM without actually triggering an on chain mainnet like transaction. And then like that's what solves the problem. And so I'm wondering if like as you say that there, there needs to be some sort of solution that bridges all of these like let's call them like hyper pools together. Like is that an opportunity for someone like alt layer to like walk in, create large accounts at each of these smart contracts and then create your own virtual like accounting system to you know, do a kind of similar thing but across ecosystem? **Speaker A:** Yes, we are thinking about it. We have not built that to be honest with you, but we are thinking about it. I think in the next two, three months or maybe six months you would see something built, you know, either by us or someone else because there's a problem that you, you will see. And at the moment there are some OP stack chains, there are some arbitrary chains that are live, but many of them are still on Testnet. So I think in the next six, eight months you would see many of these testnets will go live and more will come, which means that you will have to build something like this. And you don't want to touch Ethereum, right? You know, I mean you want to touch Ethereum in the sense that you don't want to send every transaction through Ethereum and then come back to the roll up site. As you said, there has to be something that stays on the roll up side because it makes it easier, cheaper. So yeah, we do see this as an opportunity and we are working on this, but we don't have a concrete design quite yet. What we are doing at the moment is this idea of what we call a layer. So basically using Eigenlayer's evs Mechanism. So basically the idea is we'll build a network, kind of like a middleware that takes any roll up. So for example, you could have CDK or you could have OP Stack, or you could have Arbitram Orbit. They all post data or something on the CD on this Mac layer and the AVS operators will then check and verify that the data looks correct, the state commitment looks correct across all these things, and then you would have liquidity mechanism built in there on that system. Maybe that's not the ideal design, Maybe we need to refine it, maybe someone else will come up with a better design. But I feel like there has to be a common framework that allows the CDK chains to connect with other chains, including Sovereign rollups for that matter. **Speaker C:** Yeah, the kind of Master Pool style roll up as a service that's clearly a good step forward, but it's really just taking the same problem we have and consolidating it into just smaller, bigger pools. **Speaker A:** And it's also not so straightforward because this is, by the way, one of the problems with modularity. Right? Which is sometimes the system becomes so heterogeneous that you will have to think about n number of things, which is, for example, Orbit doesn't work in the same way as optimism, even though at a high level the design is the same, but when you go into the details of it, it's not the same thing. Similarly, Zksync doesn't work in the same way as cdk. Eigen DA will not work in the same way as Celestia. So I think there are a lot of these finite details that makes it a little bit more complicated because in the end what you're building is kind of like a universal system that takes heterogeneous systems and kind of builds a more homogeneous system. And in principle, in theory, it looks good and it looks easy, but when you start going into the weeds of things, it's rather painful and not so straightforward. **Speaker C:** No, it makes a lot of sense. So I want to pivot over to the data availability side of the conversation. And so we have to caveat. Everything that we're saying with data availability is so new as a concept that I guess Celestia is live, but other than that, Eigenda is not live. Even Ethereum Dank sharding or Proto Dank sharding is not live. So the paradigm is obviously completely up in the air. But earlier you even touched on this, that once we are in this DA world, we are looking at a world where the data that is posted to these layers does fall off after a certain amount of time with dank sharding I think it's supposed to be about a month. I'm sure with the private solutions it's going to be more configurable. But my first question to you is how do you see the market shaping up to service all the needs in this new expiring transaction paradigm? So for example, yes I understand the transactions are going to expire from these decentralized networks, but what happens when I need that data post expiry that would. **Speaker A:** Still be available but that'd be through let's say external full nodes or other providers. For example, let's say you might have a roll up using Celestia. Celestia might delete the data eventually but you may have Etherscan that is incentivized to offer that service because they are offering this Etherscan like service where you can search. So data will still be there but it will be hosted and I guess saved for eternity by other providers. But Celestia and the delayers and Ethereum for example will not store that for you. And the reason mill is you want the data to be available during the time you could challenge. For example if let's say for optimistic roll up you want to make sure that while the challenge period is over is still on, you have the data to be able to go and use that to challenge. As long as your deletion period is longer to cover that buffer, you're fine. After that it's mostly on storage providers or data storage providers to take over and say hey now if you pay me for long enough I will keep that data forever. And this is kind of the incentive for the likes of Etherscan indexers and other third party services out there. So you could still your data is not going away but someone has to store that data and these people have to have incentive to do so. So as a roll up builder you have to incentivize the likes of Etherscan, the likes of I don't know, graph to make sure that the data is there forever for you. **Speaker C:** Well I guess to me like this is one of those moments where like the, the technology and the design is like so cool but sometimes I worry if it gets like a little bit ahead of the overall system and it just seems like almost counter Ethereum to me to say like this like fundamental part of like making this system works like the, the data that is in data availability layers. Like we're just gonna hope that like the market creates some sort of incentive to make sure that it's available when it's needed. And I feel like part of the mechanism design of Ethereum is like we're never hoping anything if it's needed, we're kind of controlling it. And so I think this is one. **Speaker A:** Of the problems of modularity, right? So I would say there are two things. One is, I think Sriram from Eigend was, or Eigenlayer was expressing this quite vocally that from Ethereum's perspective, every DA layer is a dac. Which is a valid point because in the end Ethereum cannot verify what goes on this alt DA layer. So someone else has to basically attest that, okay, I have checked something and that something looks good to me and here is my signatures. And Ethereum will only check that signature because Ethereum has no capability to actually check external systems. Which means that when you're using, let's say Celestia and some of the other modular components, you are kind of trusting some of that component, which. So for example, you do not get the same guarantees as Ethereum when you use an external network, right? So one is this modularity brings that you have to understand the different components that you're using and what security entails, right? That's one thing. The second thing is that it's complex, right? Previously as from a developer perspective, you are just looking at, hey, Ethereum offers me everything, let's put my stamp on it. Now you have to worry about, okay, I have to analyze what does Celeste give me. For example, if you're looking at latency, for example, right, you could say, hey, I want to use my shared sequencer, I want to use DA layer. But when you actually look at the transaction lifecycle, it has to go through Shared Sequencer first, then go to the executor, then the executable, then execute your transaction, then it'll put the data on some DA layer. If you add up all that latency, it's going to add up. It will probably become the worst roll up in the market. So you don't want that, right? So I think there's certain aspects that I think people need to consider and that's one of the, I guess other disadvantage of having a modular system because if you don't pick them correctly, you will end up with a not so performant system at least. **Speaker C:** And on the one side, right, this is like just straight up a business opportunity, like within the realm of ALT layer. Like you guys could very easily create a paid service that is like we will be the cold storage for data availability on XYZ Network and That's great. But I do wonder if the way we architect this is to get as modular as possible and at each realm of modularity is a business opportunity. Are we just leeching value out of the system and we're basically forcing the user to, to, to pay for all of this modularity? **Speaker A:** I would say so. And so as I said, latency is one component, the other one is fee because every single layer that comes into play you have to pay a fee. You could argue maybe that's cheaper than if paying to Ethereum in the, if you add them up, but we don't know that yet. You know, maybe initially some of these DLAers will, will subsidize the cost in different ways. Maybe the, you know, the demand will be cheaper and so sorry, the cost will be cheaper. So you. Maybe in the end, initially at least the cost will probably be lower than Ethereum. But it does add a cost to it, right? It doesn't come from eventually. So there's definitely a cost to it that again will come from a user side. There's only a certain period of time and you could say, okay fine, I have enough money or it's VC funded, so it will come from the investments that we have gotten and that will be our user acquisition cost. But at some point it has to go, it has to go to some of these, you know, you know, some of these third party vendors that will have to take, take some of the cutout. So yes, there's a cost to it. We don't see that quite yet because again, you know, it's all subsidized but at some point you will. **Speaker C:** Yeah, got it. So with the last few minutes here, I want to just kind of shift the conversation to this new era we're entering and like how I kind of demark this new era is let's say like the release on mainnet or whatever, but it is Eigen layer. And I think that Eigen layer was this, like we can talk about how this happened, but it was the moment that the market realized that there's going to be this huge opportunity for basically compute that is augmenting Ethereum. And so since then we've just seen so much hype and so many points and so many restaking services and I think like a lot of the, like the vision and like the, the impact behind why this is such a meteoric has been lost in the conversation. But I guess my question for you to walk us out on is can you reflect a little bit on why eigenlayer has what it means for the ecosystem, how it's transforming things and how you foresee Ethereum changing because of this new resource of I guess almost tradable or movable trust. **Speaker A:** Yes, I think movable trust is really. Or borrowed trust is really the right term for it. Right. And again you can look at it from a simple perspective. So imagine I want to do my own chain, okay? That chain hosts some defi, or maybe that chain is Oracle for you know, offers, you know, chain link like service, whatever. You're building some peer to peer system and you want to have nodes in your system that offers and offers that service. One usual way that we have been doing so far is to say, hey, I'm going to give you my tokens. You stake those tokens and you'll get more tokens and then you have the incentive to run that. What happens when that token goes down? Now no one has the incentive because the incentives that you're providing is not good enough. That's number one. And when that token goes down, the security goes down because in the end everything is secured by the dollar collateral that's sitting there in the form of tokens. I think Eigenlay basically says that hey, you could use Ethereum because Ethereum is one of the most, let's say stable asset in some sense. Stable in the sense that you know it's not going to go down tomorrow to zero. And it's a network that exists and you have providers there in the market that can offer these services. So for example you have validators in Ethereum network which are huge in number by the way at the moment. They could come and offer extra services, right, Secured by Ethereum. So this idea of borrowing security from Ethereum to bootstrap external networks, I think that's powerful, right? So what I has done is they're building or that's kind of the vision, right? You build a marketplace where you have these stakers that can bring their staked assets, they provide the stake status and those staked assets then get reused for security. So that's the first stakeholder. The second one is the validator that are serving Ethereum at the moment. They could be the one that could do other services. And third one are these builders that are building new systems and new middleware services and they would say hey I want to secure my system and can you connect together? Can you bring your assets together and your services together to secure this? So I would say it's a kind of a three party kind of model that brings these three parties together and allows you to Secure your system. So I'm definitely very excited about Eigenlayer. Of course there are certain risks to it and I think we have debated, and I think foundation have debated all on that. I'm not saying there is no risk to it. Of course there's a risk to it. I think eigenlayer is also very careful about this. They're thinking about one to roll out in a model in a phased manner where for example, you won't have slashing initially. Right. So imagine if there's a big AVS tomorrow. Let's say Uniswap becomes its own network. Let's say their AVS gets hacked or whatever, someone gets slashed and then Uniswap, because it's Uniswap, they may have the right power or the authority or the people behind it will basically at the social level, they would like to push and say, hey guys, can you save me? Like the way you saved when the DAO hack happened? And that's dangerous. And so there's certain risks associated with it. And I think this is what I can lay our careful, I can lead team is very careful about. So for example, initially, most likely there won't be any slashing conditions. So even if there's a misbehavior, you as an AVS operator, you will be blocked and frozen. So you won't be able to operate anymore. But your assets will not go down, so your assets will not be seized, basically. So they're taking precautions. But again, we have to see how some of these things unfold when we open on the Pandora's Box in a much more open and permissionless way. **Speaker C:** Yeah. And so to me, the magic insight of Eigenlayer is I'm a node operator. I'm sure many people are node operators. We're all running computers that are so much more powerful than needed for Ethereum, right? Like on purpose. Ethereum is supposed to have low requirements. And the idea is like, okay, I have this computer, it has extra resources. Like why don't I like offer them to people who need these computational resources and like that is a match made in heaven. Like that is so beautiful to me that you know me as a can support future Uniswap chain by like all that stuff makes sense, I think where things like are a little bit make less sense to me. And I wonder if it's much more about just like the casino of crypto than it is about like hard economic principles. But like I feel like when, when we're talking about people with stake delegating to other people that are going to be actually operating the compute. We have taken a crypto economic system that where the whole point is to remove trust and directly introduce trust. And the trust is not between the AVs and the operator, it's between the operator and the person providing stake. And so like point is, is that if the operator screws something up, like guess who suffers? It's the person who gave stake. And reputation. Right? And reputation, that's just trust. So I don't know if you have any thoughts on that or reflections on that. **Speaker A:** I mean, we will have to see how these, let's say LRT providers are going to select the AVs, right? You could say, hey, we are going to take ABSs or support ABSs that are not risky at all. Then someone say it's not risky, there won't be enough incentive because historically, and we have seen that the more riskier the asset, the more upside you potentially have. And so I think there's again going to be a balance where we have to see how these AVs or at least LRT providers are going to pick the ABS that they're going to support. Because in the end, as you said, it boils down to users assets. So if I'm taking your asset and I'm picking up a certain avs, in a way we are taking that. LRT provider is also taking risk. They need to know. And again, this risk modeling, incentive modeling is something that I guess it has just started. I haven't seen any real work quite yet. So I think it's going to take at least a couple of evses to go live. And then you would see people coming up, okay, now that this ABS is live, here are the risks that you're taking. Here's what could happen potentially and how to mitigate them. At the moment there's nothing live. So you're kind of speculating without actually going deeper into, okay, what's the real risk? Because the risk would depend on the abs. Right? Risk could depend on what these ABS operators actually do. And we don't quite have that on mainnet quite yet. So I think it's still quite a bit early. So I think once, once Eigenlayer goes a minute after that, maybe three months after that we'll start to see a little bit more activity on. Okay, yeah, there is a story with this abs. You should do this, you should not do that. It's not quite clear. **Speaker C:** Yeah, and I think that's like the game we play when we're like dancing literally on the bleeding edge of technology. **Speaker A:** That's true. That's true. That's true. **Speaker C:** Cool. Well, Amrit, I could go literally four more hours. I want to do one on Eigen layer. I want to do like two more just on alt layer. I want to talk about, like, the. The new design space that's opening up, but I think for the sake of all of us, I will wrap us up here. So first of all, I just want to say thank you so much. Thank you for your generosity and thank you for, for speaking with us. Incredible conversation. **Speaker A:** Thank you very much. **Speaker C:** Of course. And before I let you go, can you just share with the audience, like, where they can find you, where they can find alt layer, and if they're interested in figuring out if, you know, customized modular roll up as a service is right for them, like, what's the best place to start? **Speaker A:** Yeah. So do follow us on Twitter. So Twitter is, I guess, the central place where we push out updates. And also Twitter basically retweets. Our account officially retweets some of the. So you could also find me there. And mostly if you're building in the space and if you're thinking about even a thought of, hey, maybe I should think about building my own roll up, come and talk to us, just DM us and we'd be happy to hop on a call. Even if you do not want to have a roll up, you'd actually have an understanding of, do I even want it? Right. Because I believe that, you know, BD in the crypto world is more about doing consulting rather than doing sales. You know, you have to understand if you're just selling, it's not going to work. You have to come and understand people's problems and see if what you're offering is the ideal solution for them. So if you're building the space and if you're thinking about having an app specific rollup or not thinking about it and you want to say, okay, can someone help me out? Come and come and talk to us. We'd be happy to have a chat and hopefully we'll be able to help you out. **Speaker C:** Awesome, man. And everyone, like, please take that gem that he just gave us that was so incredible that in crypto, but probably in life, business development is much more about, like, consulting than it is as sales. And I think that's beautiful and something I'll definitely take with me. So, Amrit, thank you so much. Thanks for the time and have a good rest of your day. **Speaker A:** Thank you very much. You too.