#1304 Jay Jog on Layer One Wars: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Sei & More

Jay Jog is the Co-Founder of Sei Labs. Sei is the fastest Layer 1 blockchain, designed to scale with the industry. In this conversation, we talk about the evolution of the L1 landscape from Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, to Sei, various tradeoffs, use cases, what the L1 landscape looks like in the future, and what Sei does. ======================= This episode is brought to you by Frec — Just as easy as investing in an ETF, Frec Direct Indexing can help you earn more by unlocking tax savings, no matter the market. Done for you, automatically. Check them out at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://frec.com/ ======================= BetOnline.ag is a proud sponsor of the the Pomp Podcast. Use crypto to bet on sports, play poker and enjoy casino games at BetOnline. Visit https://promotions.betonline.ag/pomp and use promo code POMP100 to receive a 100% matching bonus on any crypto deposit. BetOnline boasts no crypto transaction fees, and processing is anonymous, instantaneous and secure. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 250,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Today's conversation is with Jay Jhaag, the co-founder of Say Labs. In this conversation, we talk about the evolution of the L1 landscape, from Bitcoin to Ethereum to Solana to Say and much, much more. We talk about the various trade-offs these different L1s have to make

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

  between security, transaction throughput, and many other decisions that they face. And what exactly does that L1 landscape look like going forward? Is it winner-take-all? Will there be a multi-chain world? Or will there be interoperability that would be incredibly important? Jay gets into it all, including what Say does, how Say V2 is coming out, and what is this thing that everyone keeps talking about called parallelization? I really enjoyed this conversation with Jay, and I think you guys will learn a ton from this episode. Here is my conversation with Jay Jhaag.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:40Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:21Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm a big fan of the product, and I even became an investor in the business. Freck.com. Go check them out today. This episode is brought to you by BetOnline. Do you like making a profit from sports betting? Well, set yourself up to take home the most profit possible using crypto to fund your sports betting, casino and poker account at betonline.ag. You can avoid costly transaction fees, get your payouts lightning fast, and do it all securely and anonymously with the highest deposit and withdrawal limits in the industry. If you want to get in on the action, do it the smart way with crypto at betonline.ag. Head to the website, sign up with promo code POMP100 to get 100% bonus on your crypto deposit today.

• 3:02Anthony Pompliano?

  If you go and you deposit, they'll give you 100% bonus if you use promo code POMP100. BetOnline, the game starts here. BetOnline.ag, go check them out today. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Jay here. Jay, I thought a great place to start this conversation is around the evolution of L1s. If we go all the way back to, you know, 2008, 2009, Bitcoin really was the first layer one. And it came out and it was the idea and promise of becoming electronic money. I think for the most part, people are very excited about Bitcoin. It's still the kind of the king when you look at market cap dominance, et cetera. But Vitalik Buterin and others said, hey, Bitcoin can't do everything. And what if we take the idea of this blockchain layer one and we add in smart contracts? And we got the rise of Ethereum and kind of everything that happened on that platform.

• 3:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Since that day, there's been an explosion of interest and development of L1s. Say, which you are a co-founder of, is one of those kind of L1s that's really going after this. And so can you help us understand, like, how do you look at the L1 landscape and its evolution from the launch of Bitcoin and Ethereum to maybe what it looks like today?

• 4:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, honestly, I think so far there have just been three major chains that really matter. The first one is obviously Bitcoin, as you mentioned. And I think it was really interesting because that helped kind of unlock this idea of a blockchain. Before then, this kind of like distributed ledger to solve this kind of problem, no one had really thought about solving it in the same way. So I think that was the first kind of major unlock. The second thing that happened was Ethereum introduced this idea of a, basically a Turing complete state machine. Like, people are able to write smart contracts that in theory are able to do anything. The only limitations around that are this component, this concept of gas, which kind of make it a quasi-Turing complete virtual machine.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  And I think that was like a major unlock because it allowed you to build anything that you wanted to on top of the state machine itself. Um. I think since then, there's only been one other major unlock, uh, which is, in my opinion, Solana. Um. And what Solana really did is it helped make crypto accessible for everyone, um, through building really high-performance infrastructure. And the reason that high-performance infrastructure is important is because when you make a lot of the optimization that Solana did, um, for example, by supporting parallelization, it helps do two things. Um. The first is it makes gas fees much cheaper. So it makes it much easier for people, um, to access the state machine during periods of higher congestion.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  Like on Ethereum, if you're spending like a hundred dollars for transaction fees, you end up excluding most of the global population from using it. Um. In Solana's case, it's much cheaper than that. So I think that is one side of it. And the other side of it is just the type of activity, uh, specifically the type of decentralized application that you're able to support. Um, it's very restricted on Ethereum L1. And I think building this high-performance infrastructure, um, really allows you to explore different design spaces, developer. So it allows for fundamentally new types of applications to get built. So that's where we've been so far. Um. The question then is like, what direction is the industry moving in, uh, going forward? So I think there's been a lot of different types of, um, things that people have experimented with.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Uh, I mean, we've seen different experiments with people trying to build these shared security type of L1s. Uh, for example, like Pokédot, uh, Cognos Hub, Cell, um, L1s. Um, I think there's also been people experimenting with different consensus mechanisms while still offering similar types of virtual machines. Um, and there's also been folks that have been trying to just build new virtual machines entirely, uh, for example, the movie ecosystems. Um, in terms of what I'm seeing right now, I think there's essentially a couple of core things. Um, the first is that the EVM is here to stay. Uh, the EVM is what kickstarted a lot of the activity that we're seeing on chain right now. And it's really difficult to, uh, to replace the Ethereum virtual machine.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  And the biggest reason for this is that there's already a ton of login, um, to the EVM because it's not just a piece of technology, it's more of an ecosystem. The builds on top of the EVM, they're essentially not only getting that technology, but they're also getting that entire ecosystem of users, existing applications, other developers, liquidity. So it becomes really difficult to replace that. The question is then like, what is missing from the EVM right now? Well, if you look at Ethereum L1, it's not very scalable. And if you look at like the ecosystem of rollups around it as well, like you're not really able to get more than like thirty to fifty transactions per second, which is really low by the standards of what applications really need.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  So if you kind of look at it that way, there's this pretty big design space where if you're able to scale the EVM, then you're going to really help unlock the kind of things that I talked about to Utsalana, except on a much larger kind of scale. And that's exactly what we're targeting with SeV two right now. We want to build the first parallelized EVM. And by doing this, we're going to be able to get the best of both Ethereum and Solana with support for the EVM while also having this really high performance infrastructure.

• 8:07Anthony Pompliano?

  So there's a couple of things that I think maybe will help for us to clarify for the audience. The first is parallelization. How would you describe that to like a five year old, right? What exactly is it? People keep hearing about it. There's like, oh, this is the new thing that's coming. What is that? And why is it so important in terms of taking the best from some of these other chains for SeV two?

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So perhaps not maybe an ELI five explanation, but maybe like an ELI ten explanation. The way that computers, or so if you look at the Ethereum virtual machine right now, the way that it works is if you have a hundred transactions, let's say, each transaction would be like me trying to send you money and you trying to send someone else money. If you have a hundred transactions, they'll all get run one after the other. So this is really simple. Like it's really easy for software engineers to write software that'll handle this. The issue is that it's not performant. So modern hardware, like the phones that people might be listening to this on, laptops that they're listening to this on, they have multiple cores and they're able to support multiple work streams at the same time.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  So like if someone, I guess, any kind of application that they're using right now, there's going to be multiple things running on their laptop, for example. So I mean, if you think about it, like, there's already this modern hardware that is capable of doing more. So it's kind of silly that we're not making use of that to enable better performance for blockchains. I think Solana is really the most successful example of this so far, of being able to use multiple cores to be able to get better performance.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  The Ethereum virtual machine, like, if you look at the EVM landscape, no one is doing this right now. And I think there's a couple of issues, like, a couple of reasons for that. The first reason is just that it's really complex to build it up. There's also things that, like, trade-offs that come with that in terms of, like, increased state. So then you need to think about how to account for this increased state. But we think these are all solvable problems. So we fundamentally think that the EVM needs to become paralyzed. And when you're able to do that, you're able to get 100x improvement in throughput. So this end up, it really does end up being a sub-function improvement on the EVM.

• 10:14Anthony Pompliano?

  So before we get deeper into kind of what Say and Say V2 is, one of the narratives, which I think are very important across the crypto ecosystem that has been becoming more prevalent, is that all of the altcoins and other chains are R and D for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is going to create L2s, sidechains, a variety of different approaches. But you're going to be able to issue some of the coins, do many of the same tasks, et cetera, on top of Bitcoin in some form or fashion.

• 10:46Anthony Pompliano?

  It looks like there is at least developers that are trying to do it. What is the big difference in your mind as to why things like this can't be built on top of a Bitcoin, regardless of L2, sidechain, et cetera, versus having to go build something that's new, whether it is Solana, say, or some other approach?

• 11:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, that is definitely an interesting question. I mean...

• 11:10Speaker 02

  So I think the most fundamental reason is that each piece of technology is created for a very specific type of use case. And trying to add a new functionality on top of that. It's essentially trying to fit, like, I forget the phrase over here, fitting a square peg into a round hole. You can make it work. It might be functional from an engineering standpoint. But it's not going to be the best type of product that gets built. It's also not going to be offering the best type of user experience. So I mean, if you kind of take a step back, we're Silicon Valley team, like me and my co-founder, we both grew up in the Bay Area. And one of the core ethos of Silicon Valley is to build things that customers want, to solve problems that customers have.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  And something that we tried to stay away from is over engineering for the sake of building cool technology. Which I think is like really common in crypto, interestingly. There's a lot of projects out there that are building cool tech for the sake of building cool tech. I'm sure you can probably think of probably a half dozen off the top of your head. And yeah, I mean, it just seems like it's the problem that you really want to solve is what are the existing problems with the user experience right now? And how do you improve those? And the most clear problem that we're seeing from the UX right now is everyone is using the EVM. There's these limitations in the EVM in terms of gas costs and in terms of the design space developers have. So let's really focus on improving that, because that's what's going to cause the biggest tech function change for improving the EVM.

• 12:37Anthony Pompliano?

  So when we then go, when we look at what Say is doing, there's a lot of technical trade offs, right? And we can almost evaluate this maybe as to like, what do you think Ethereum got right, got wrong? What do you think Solana got right, got wrong? And then what are you all doing in terms of these decisions? And how are you thinking about trade offs around security, transaction throughput, et cetera? To come up with what you think is kind of the the best, you know, mix of the ingredients, if you will, to really serve users?

• 13:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. So in terms of what Ethereum did, right? As I was mentioning before, they like introduced this idea of a turn complete virtual machine. So I mean, that's a really complicated way of saying that like you're able to build stuff on top of the virtual machine. And you can build it however you want to. There's not going to be any limitations in terms of the types of functionality that you're able to support. So this really, I think, was a major, major kind of new introduction. Because being able to try smart contracts in this decentralized way. It really expands the design space of what people are able to do. Um. The thing that I don't think Ethereum got right was they didn't really build it with scaling in mind.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  From the get go, like, the focus was not to support much higher amounts of activity happening on the network. I think they had long term plans for like, okay, we're going to be supporting execution charting. Right now they're looking into a roll up centric future, but when they were initially launching, I think that wasn't really a core focus point of theirs. Which, I mean, to be fair, I think that is definitely the right way of building. Because when they initially launched, there was not really an example of a train complete virtual machine either. That was used on a blockchain. So I think they were really trying to focus on that initially. What I think Solana did right is they were able to help scale a blockchain to be able to support greater throughput. What I don't think that they, like, what I think they should have done instead of supporting the SVM

• 14:29Speaker 02

  is trying to use the EVM and then making it backwards compatible. So people can take existing L one smart contracts from Ethereum, deploy them to Solana with no code changes. And if they had done something like that, I think it would have resulted in a much more seamless developer experience, much more seamless user experience, and it would have resulted in kind of a much

• 14:50Speaker 02

  easier time for people to both build and use Solana. So that's why I think that opportunity in the middle of being able to take the EVM and helping scale it in the same way that Solana did. That is quite significant. So in terms of the trade offs with an approach like that.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  I think the biggest issue that comes up with parallelization is it leads to increased state. So what is state, right? State is all of the balances that are there for both normal accounts. So this would be like, I have 10 say, you have 20 say. And this would also be all smart contract balances. So all smart contract state. So like this Unswapped smart contract has these pools and this is the kind of information types of those pools. So there's like this idea of a state tree, which is used to compute the state hash. And you basically need to keep this. Entire state tree on each of these validator nodes to be able to compute the state hash.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  And when you have more transactions that are coming in, this leads to more state that gets created, which then leads to a couple of different issues. The first is state storage. Like it just becomes much more difficult to store the state, especially if you want to have lower node requirements. And then the second issue that comes up is it becomes quite difficult to start running a new node. Because if you're trying to sync like 100 gigabytes worth of data while there's new blocks that are being processed at the same time, it adds an additional complexity. So there's a ton of work we needed to do from the state side to be able to better support easier state syncs and better state storage as well.

• 16:32Anthony Pompliano?

  And so what is now going to be possible? Talking about applications or use cases that you all see really kind of driving. So I'm a developer, I'm looking at all of these different opportunities to go build on top of, what could I possibly be doing that would make me lean more towards building on say versus maybe somewhere else?

• 16:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, if you look at developers out there right now, they're basically all EVM developers. And anecdotally speaking, like I've been through this process before of like talking to EVM developers and just seeing what their thoughts are about moving to new ecosystems. EVM developers do not want to go to new ecosystems. One reason for that is there's like this idea of Ethereum alignment where they don't really want to go to a new ecosystem because of that. But there's also this idea that like new ecosystems have their own quirks. I'm already familiar with the EVM. And if I try to build something in a new ecosystem, let's say I write something and move, and I make even a small bug, then my entire contract can just get drained. My entire project can just die because of this one small bug.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  So it's a really scary kind of proposition for them to move somewhere else. So EVMs or developers, they're primarily attached to EVM right now. And if you think about it that way, like these engineers, they Are basically limited by what the EVM is offering them. So as I was mentioning before, if you look at the landscape of EVM chains, Ethereum L1, rollups as well, you can't really get more than 50 TPS. So this leads to anti-patterns that developers need to use to build applications on the EVM. One example of this would be an automated market maker. If you look at traditional financial markets, there's not really a concept of an AMM, because it's not as capital efficient and it has a bunch of other downsides as well.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  In traditional financial markets, you would see people using order book exchanges, right? The reason that people can't build order book exchanges is because you can't really support that on the EVM. So what Safe fundamentally unlocks is any type of use case beyond 50 TPS. Right now, the entire Ethereum landscape is quite small in terms of what it can support. If you're able to remove that 50 TPS bottleneck and expand it to be 100x higher, the design space for developers just changes fundamentally. A few examples that I can think of off the top of my head right now of applications that you can start to see. One of them would be like just fully on-chain order book-based exchanges. Another example would be a game where you have every single action that's happening getting written on-chain,

• 19:07Speaker 02

  instead of only having some kind of token movement that ends up occurring on-chain. Another example would be some kind of social application where every single activity that the user engages in, like every single like, comment, whatever, retweet, all of that and all of their metadata also getting stored on-chain. So I think it really results in a lot of different things that you can actually have be verifiable on-chain, instead of needing to have most of it just be stored off-chain and then trying to really just store like maybe token transfers or something on-chain.

• 19:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's talk a little bit about kind of the organization building on top of the technology, right? You can build great technology, but you still have to do some other things. How are you all thinking about going and educating people in terms of developers and explaining to them how they can use this? What's been working so far? And are there one or two things maybe that people are building on top of it that you're like, yeah, this is a perfect example and we would love to, you know, just get 100 more or 200 more of these types of projects on top of the chain?

• 20:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I mean, say V1 went live on August of 2023. So this was around six months ago. Um, and initially, there wasn't actually that much activity that was happening on the chain. Um, then afterwards, the Save V2 proposal got put out in November of 2023, so a couple of months ago. Um, and I think that really stuck a chord with the community. And since then, on Save V1, there's been a ton of activity that has started to happen. Um, if you look at the stuff that's already happening on Save V1, um, I think it falls under largely three buckets. Um, one of these buckets was inscriptions. So initially, there started to be a ton of inscriptions activity on set. Um, and I think this is true for all other ecosystems, but in the case of say, there was no outage or like downtime that happened.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Um, because the chain was just able to handle that kind of throughput that we're seeing. Um, since then, I think inscriptions activity has largely died down. And now we're starting to see more NFT activity, um, and more kind of token projects that are launching, um, and more trading activity that's happening. So right now on Save V1, a lot of the activity is tied to, um, people that are trading on chain. Um, in terms of Save V2, the kind of developer, so I mean, first of all, in terms of like the value proposition for developers. I think it's very straightforward, like every single developer that I've talked to has basically just understood it. Uh, the idea of being able to offer greater throughput, um, with EVM. It makes sense to developers for multiple reasons, like especially EVM developers.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  They've gone through the process of like using Eth1 and paying gas fees over there. So from more of the normal user standpoint, it is just fundamentally different and it's a 10x improvement over there. Um, and also from the actual, uh, building standpoint, you're able to support, um, as I was mentioning, different types of applications. So developers become excited about that idea as well. Um, in terms of new projects that are going to get built on, say, as a result of this, um, we're seeing two things happening. One is blue chip projects from Ethereum. Or actually just straight up reaching out to us about deploying instances on Sei. So this would be like a project on Ethereum that's already launched on Ethereum 0.1 and is also going to be launching an instance on Sei.

• 22:13Speaker 02

  I think that's definitely exciting because it results in existing Ethereum applications being able to get cheaper gas fees and allowing different types of activities for their users. And we're also starting to see more homegrown applications. Homegrown in the sense of people that are just dedicated completely to Sei. They're launching their own in-house kind of applications.

• 22:33Anthony Pompliano?

  So maybe we could talk a little bit in terms of the financing. Like you guys raised some money, token goes live. How do you think about value accrual, right? In terms of private markets, public markets? And the holder base, obviously with the Bitcoin ETF getting approved, people are excited because institutions and kind of bigger funds are coming into the space. Just talk a little bit as to like how you thought about funding the business until now. And then who do you think is actually holding the token, et cetera, in the market?

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So in terms of, I'm associated with Sei Labs. Sei Labs is the open source development company. In terms of, I mean, how we raised money, we initially raised money, we had our seed round in, that we announced in August of 2022. This was led by MultiPoint Capital and this was honestly right after the Terra collapse happened. So it was definitely not an easy time to be raising back then, as I'm sure you can kind of empathize with. But we were super happy to get MultiPoint around the table. I think they've been offering a ton of very thoughtful advice in terms of just building infrastructure. Since then, we raised a Series A that was announced in April of 2023.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  So some of the biggest checks in that round were Jump, Distributed Global, and there are several other partners that were around the table there as well.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  Afterwards, August of 2023 is when Sei Foundation helped have the distributed launch for the Sei Network. And yes, Sei Network, so Sei is an O1 blockchain. It's a proof of state blockchain, so there's a token that is associated with that. And similar to like Solana or Ethereum, the types of use cases would be largely the same. So one of them would be to help secure the network, to be able to stake it with the network. Another example would be for governance, so to be able to vote on any proposals to come in. Another use case would be for transaction fees. But I think one thing that's really interesting about a chain like Sei, where there's a lot of trading activity that's happening, is there ends up being a lot of MEV.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  Like, I was looking at a flipside dashboard for MEV recently, like MEV on Sei, and there's already been millions of dollars of MEV on Sei, which is kind of wild. Like, there's just a ton of, whenever there's a ton of trading volume, it results in a lot of opportunities for MEV. And, I mean, for any listeners that might not be familiar, MEV is the value you can accrue by chaining the ordering of transactions within a block. So either by having one transaction go before another, having a transaction go after another, or potentially including or excluding transactions from a block. So, I mean, there's several different types of MEV, but the core idea is that there is some value that gets created. And if you're able to set up a redistribution framework,

• 25:15Speaker 02

  where that value gets redistributed to the chain itself, so for example, to people that are staking on the network, then it becomes a very effective way to long-time monetize the network, instead of needing to have inflation for the network. Because inflation isn't really the best approach necessarily. Like, you want there to be some amount of inflation, but trying to subsidize every single validator, every single node operator on the network through inflation isn't necessarily the best approach. But if you have some kind of more sustainable value pool mechanism such as MEV, then that does result in a much more long-term, sustainable network.

• 25:50Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you think about the future? In terms of, say, you know, you guys have V2, what does this look like in five or 10 years? Is it a winner-take-all and say is the king of, you know, kind of smart contracts and EVM, et cetera? Is it winner-take-most and maybe there's three or four winners? Or do we have this like plethora and there's, you know, 5,000 different platforms that people are all building on top of? And maybe in each one of those scenarios, like, where does Sei fit in?

• 26:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I mean, first of all, in terms of what we have, how we think about Sei. Right now, we think there's some massive disconnect between Web 2 and Web 3. Like, if you go and try to do something in Web 2, it's really simple from user experience standpoint, and every single part of the process is largely even optimized so far. If you try to do something on Web 3, that is definitely not the case. It's a much more cumbersome process. So the world we imagine in a few years ideally is one where, as a developer, if you try to build something on Sei, it'll offer the same type of developer experience as building it in a Web 2 fashion. And from user standpoint, we ideally want the user experience to be identical to that of building in Web 2.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  So, I mean, we want to just completely bridge that gap. In terms of how we see the landscape kind of moving in the longer term, I do think it's going to be a winner-take-most market. And I think there's going to be two different types of infrastructure that ends up existing in the future. There's going to be a small number of general-purpose chains that end up having a lion's share of the activity. Currently, these are chains like Ethereum, L1, and Solana. In the future, if we're able to see a lot of the stuff that I mentioned playing out in terms of more developer activity happening as a result of Sei V2, one of these bigger chains could definitely be Sei.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  So I think it'll be a winner-take-most market for these general-purpose chains. I think there will also be some application-specific chains, depending on the use case. But I think it's really difficult to make an application-specific chain work, both from the actual product standpoint and also from the community building standpoint. So I think there's only going to be a handful of those that are successful. And the amount of activity happening there is going to be much lower than the activity happening on these general-purpose chains.

• 28:11Anthony Pompliano?

  So another interesting idea is like, maybe this difference between digital native assets and then kind of real-world assets, and this comes up every couple of years. Right now, it seems like most of the success has been coalescing around natively digital assets.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Real-world assets, is that a thing? Can it happen on Sei? Is that interesting to you all? Is it something that you want to happen on top of Sei? How do you think about those?

• 28:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's definitely something that can happen on C. It's something that I think should happen on C. Um, in particular, like say it's going to be a better place for any type of I mean, honestly, any type of token based activity to happen. Um, because it's just a much more scalable network. So, uh, there's, there are projects in the pipeline that are building, um, real world assets. Um, the question of whether it's interesting and whether blockchains in general are the place for that activity to happen. Um, I think that's something that's still kind of up in the air. Um, especially if yields are low. I, there, there's like a lot of stuff that doesn't really need to be built on chain. And I think oftentimes people try to force it to happen on chain through, uh, real world assets. Um, I think right now that interest rates are high.

• 29:21Speaker 02

  There's a lot of projects that are trying to offer, um, essentially like higher interest rate, um, stuff on chain. Um, but as soon as those yields start to go down, I think it's going to be interesting to see, um, what happens with a lot of these hardware projects. Um, but yeah, I mean, in terms of experimentation in the design space, I definitely think folks should experiment there. Um, and I do think C is going to end up being one of those places where that experimentation is much easier to facilitate.

• 29:46Anthony Pompliano?

  If you had 30 seconds with a developer and they asked you, you know, why should they build on top of C? What, what is, uh, kind of your pitch to them?

• 29:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the biggest thing that stands out, uh, is you're able to have a much bigger design space as a developer. Um, you're no longer limited by 50 TPS. So you're able to build much more, um, elegant applications where you don't need to have any anti-patterns that you make use of to fit the constraints of Ethereum 0.1. And I mean, this honestly is something that has resonated with a lot of developers. Um, just being able to explore this bigger design space makes their lives easier and allows them to build, uh, potentially much more interesting types of applications for users.

• 30:25Anthony Pompliano?

  That, um, that makes sense. And so when you look at, um, maybe what you guys are, uh, doing today, what is the biggest risk or where is the potential biggest like pothole in the road? Right? A lot of times we talk about all the positive things, but as the founder of an organization, you think a lot about how do I kill the risk? How do I mitigate that risk to, to ensure success? What are Those things that you're most worried about or trying to mitigate.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I mean, for any type of L1, I would say crypto infrastructure more broadly. There ends up being a couple of different things that matter. The first is the technology. The second is the ecosystem, so developers. And the third is the community, so like end users of this technology. From Sa's standpoint right now, I don't think technology is really that big of a risk at this point. Like, there's already a core like SAVY1 that is live and SAVY2. There's been a ton of progress happening towards that. So that's definitely not something that keeps me up at night. The biggest things are just ecosystem and community. I mean, I think community is honestly the thing that's most difficult to basically acquire or to create. Because there's so many different types of infrastructure.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  Having your infrastructure be the one that people actually care about. It's really tough to set that up. I think in Sa's case, we actually had a really wild kind of journey in December. So around a month and a half ago, where there was the Saiyan meme that took off. And for any listeners that might not have been following on crypto Twitter back then.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  Saiyan is from Dragon Ball Z. It is the kind of alien race that like Goku and all the other main characters are. And it sounds really similar to Sai. So folks started just memeing about that and it really started taking off. And then since then, there's just been a much stronger community that's been emerging on Sai. I think one example of activity started seeing with the stronger community is NFT activity. Because NFTs tend to be things that people have much more of an emotional tie to. And you start to see a lot more NFT activity happening in these ecosystems where there is like legit communities that are forming. NFTs also tend to be a lot cheaper to trade. And they require a lot less sophistication to be able to trade compared to potentially token, token-based projects.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  So yeah, like, or fundable token-based projects. But yeah, I think that's been super interesting to see come together. And once you start having an organic community, then it really incentivizes ecosystem to get formed. So more developers coming in. But yeah, I mean, if Sa does not end up succeeding in a three-year timeframe, I think it'll be a combination of not enough developers to come on and not enough community that's able to get formed.

• 33:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Where can we send people to find you online or find out more about Sa?

• 33:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, to learn more about SEI, you can go to SEI's Twitter. So S E I N E T W O R K. And in my case, you can just follow me on Twitter as well. So J A Y E N D R A underscore J O G.

• 33:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. Jay, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. It's obvious that you guys have been pretty thoughtful about what you're building here. And it looks like lots of developers are starting to pay attention. So best of luck in the future. We'll definitely do it again.

• 33:34Speaker 02

  Cool. Thank you, man.