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Welcome to Epicenter of the show, which talks about the
technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization
and the blockchain revolution. I'm Sebastian Kritio and I'm
here with Brian Crane. Today we're speaking with Gil
Binder and Yair Klepper, Co founders and respectively, CTO
and CEO at Lava Network. Lava is an innovative project
that aims to decentralize data provisioning for blockchains.
I like to call it Uber for blockchain data, and so we're
going to be diving deep into Lava today and understanding how
it works, the different participants of the network, and
what it means for decentralized application development.
Hey, guys. Thanks for joining.
Hey, how are you? Super exciting to be here.
I'm trying to think when was my last podcast with Gil.
I can't, I can't remember pleasure to be here.
Great to be here guys. Cool.
Yeah. Thanks so much for joining us.
Can you guys just walk us through like, what is the high
level vision of lava? What is the problem that you're
trying to solve? Yeah.
Definitely. I think you know every great
solution that started in the war in the world in general,
especially in blockchain, had some thesis behind that and we
jumped into into lava about 2 1/2 years ago, almost three
years it was developing MEVNFT slapping and you know he dragged
me in to jump into the rabbit hole and we explore the the the
gap that there is about the RPC service.
That basically was rubbish and super unreliable.
So we thought that you know the most of the web three is the
core data that at the end of the day there are a few
infrastructure providers there. So this is how Lava began.
It began exactly I was I mentioned before is the Uber for
notes. So building a resilient,
scalable and decentralized RPC network that every developer can
plug into and get service. Today you can get this service
from more under the 300 providers and it's super
reliable and super scalable. But that was two years ago and
we see that there was maybe a handful of different chains back
then and since then the web three evolved.
You know we we've seen many different shaping events kind of
the, you know the the lunar crash and today we have Bitcoin
ETFs, we didn't think about that two years ago.
So it means it meant to us that the the problems that back then
developer has today, they're much more bigger.
It's not only in the larger scale, but today they spread
across of hundreds of different blockchains.
So obviously the key innovation here that enabled that is what
we call the modular blockchain and modular blockchains were
very interesting to me back then, two years ago I think
Mustafa mentioned that in his white paper a lazy Ledger, it
called it pluggable, maybe a less sexy name.
But today everyone talk about modularity, right chain
obstruction and obviously the main thesis for now is building
hundreds and thousands of blockchain.
And this is what modularity will create over the very near
future. And we've seen that there are
three main layers for modular blockchain.
You have the execution, the execution layer, you have the
data availability and consensus layer and you have the
settlement layer. But as we see more and more
blockchain, while Celeste for example made it 100 X time
easier to roll up one, we've think that there is a
convergence in which every every roll up, every L1, every layer
that's going to come up, every bloch that come up will need.
And this is the data access layer.
It started with RPC and indexing.
And you know if for those here who doesn't know what's RPC,
basically communication protocol in order to query data every
time you open the meta mask wallet making a transaction.
Basically it's ARPC request if you check the account balance.
So Madamask is querying the blockchain for that.
And today, in order to scale the apps over blockchain, they need
to get access to data, right? But what's the point?
What's the point of storing the? Yeah, just jumping in a little
bit. I'm curious like, so there's a
lot of, like different things one could do in crypto, right?
A lot of different business models, use cases.
Like, what was it about this particular problem that you know
you found so exciting? Like, why I built this?
Why not something else? It's really a great question.
You know, when I started in web three we were like doing MEV
stuff, you know, writing bots to snipe tokens and to snipe NFTS
and some other really cool stuff.
And it was a huge struggle to just have the nodes right.
So if you were trying back then to get the data to run all these
operations, you needed to either use like centralized providers
like Inferior Alchemy, which sometimes were just very slow.
It's just not fast enough for this type of operation.
But you also weren't sure that the data is up to date like that
you're getting the latest block and this is, you know, what
makes or breaks a trade. It's super critical for for the
bot of the latest data. So we started with that.
So I was running some bots, you know, I was running some notes
here next to me. I had some machines running some
notes, and then I wanted to do the same thing on Polygon,
right. So I was like, OK, now I need to
run Heimdall and you know, I need to run Gore, I need to run
more and more nodes. And then I want to do it on
Avalanche, you know, And he just became such a struggle and I
realized, you know, this is not scalable.
There's no way that I can keep, you know, writing and running
all the services myself in a way that's scalable and performance.
And I think this is, I think this is one of the core problems
in Web Three. If you take it out into the
bigger picture in which it's just fragmentation, every single
blockchain, every rollout, they have their own concepts, they
have their own data access. And this creates this huge user
experience problem for everybody.
If it's like, let's say you want to trade on a wallet, you know
you're getting an AirDrop from somebody, You have to get
another wallet, another wallet, You have to figure out what cast
token is being used. And I think this connects with
their longer vision. Yes, you have Celestia, you have
Dimension, and then I think one of the key unlocks is heavy lava
on top of that. And then making everything
connect. All of those chains, they need
access to the data. They're useless without all
these raw OPS on Eigenlayer, on Ethereum.
And this is what we do, right? We're building this
permissionless network that lets anyone showing give service to
any of these blockchains in a very easy way.
So I think the long term vision is like making all web three
like A1A one or two or three, but top three like super usable
experiences. With our PC.
I mean today, right. Like you described, I think the
problem well, right. Like OK, you want to do
something on one chain and then you need to snow and now another
chain, you know and of course this.
Yeah, like a lot of projects applications are struggling with
this and and so they like how like free lava, right.
If you ignore lava like how are people are?
I mean my understanding is right.
They mostly use centralized providers like you know Alchemy,
quick Notes, chain stack, maybe inferior things like that.
How would you rate the quality of those products?
Like what is the What's sort of the weaknesses and problems with
the centralized RPC providers? So I think some of them provide
amazing service, you know, I think they optimized the service
very well. For example Alchemy on an on
Ethereum is really good, you know quick now it is really good
service and Fewer Eyes is a pretty decent service as well.
So I think that there are trade-offs to be to talk about.
But if you look at the numbers of supported chains, they're
very small because it's very hard to optimize for many many
chains and you might be a champion or like provide the
best infrastructure for a single chain and like write your own
layer of caching and optimizations to make very make
it very cost efficient and fast But to scale it up to many
chains and this comes back to the core issue.
You need to be an expert in that specific chain and this is where
Lava is different. First, it's not just one
provider. It can be if you are quick node
and Alchemy all competing. It's like a death match.
Like imagine like all the bots are fighting who's giving the
best service and in the end you have like the few champions are
getting the belts and this is what Lava is like.
It's a competition between the providers to give the best
service. So in every single chain of this
competition and whoever comes up with the brightest, you know,
most unique, most novel way to optimize wins and that
translates to really good user experience for the user and the
most rewards for that provider. So it kind of makes sense.
OK. Yeah.
Thanks so much, Gil. That was very helpful.
So basically is you feel like one of the main value
propositions is that the centralized RPC providers, they
can only cover sort of a limited amount of networks and they're
going to have a hard time scaling that up and maybe
especially if you see like a big increase in number of chains.
And then with Lava you can have a sort of uniform like developer
experience uniform way to integrate RPCS across, you know
like all the different chains. And because then you can have
different providers basically sort of together providing a
service and some focusing on different chains.
So be of course, being way easier to scale to like, you
know, support a much larger number of chains.
Exactly. Lava is like a distribution
channel for these providers. Think about it that way.
They can write the best code, run the best operation and
infrastructure, and then they compete on this battleground and
in the end they get all the users, the best ones.
So they're able to iterate, are able to innovate, they're able
to build the best data access, you know, capabilities and then
they can win and get more rewards.
And this is a real time, so over time they they can get better or
get worse versus their opponents.
I guess the big question that comes up for me here and I think
that maybe Ty serving the next topic, if you actually want to
go a bit deeper in here is I guess one of the, I mean I
understand the downside of the central SRBC providers.
But of course the. Upside is there's like a company
and I can sign an SLA and they're going to have a support
thing and I get to call them up and and and you know I can
probably expect a pretty consistent level of service.
Whereas here if you have like all kinds of different operators
for different chains, different, you know, maybe big companies,
small companies. How?
How does that? Work in terms of the quality of
service being provided. It's a really good question,
right. So, so I'll just say quality of
services like at the core of what we've built at Lava, we
spent so much time and energy and effort into ensuring that
the quality of services is top notch.
And I think it really is on Lava and I think it's only going to
get better. It's got, it's I think it's
going to crush everybody else just because we we designed it
from the ground up in such a way that the users are actually the
ones rating the provider based on their experience.
But I also want to touch on your question about Slas, you know
signing contracts because I think these are really, really
important. I also support support is
critical. You know we spoke, we speak with
let's hear, I think we spoke with approximately 1000
projects, you know from the apps to change to ecosystems and
getting their feedback on you know what what do they need, You
know how is what whether or not happy right now with their
infrastructure and support is critical for them.
So the way I see it, you know in this, in this world of Web
three, there has to be a way to build a business that also
supports the ecosystem that it serves.
And the way I see it, maybe it's very similar to the Red Hat
Foundation for example, where you have this open source
project or like you have the the Lava network and then you have
this company or multiple companies that basically provide
support for customers the onboarding them through
gateways. So they can use the gateways,
they can pay for these gateways. The clients also pay on chain
for the service, but they get the support package, they get
the Slas and they get all these enterprise features, maybe it's
on SoC certification so that they can operate under the
standards that they need to. So I think these are these are
two answers. And can you explain what?
Gateways are. Yeah, OK.
Sorry, I didn't touch on that. But basically when you use Lava,
and we built it like this because we thought this is the
best way to to provide, you know, really good quality
service to everybody. When you use Lava, you don't
have to go through any central server.
So think about, you know, centralized servers as basically
like a middleman that sits between you and the and the data
that you want. And this middleman is basically
you're going to it and it's going to get the data for you
and then it brings it back to you.
He lava, we build it the own way and such.
You talk directly to the providers, so there's no
middleman. You directly go to them, you get
the data. A gateway is a middleman like
that, only it enables easier access to the data by providing
support and Slas and everything that you mentioned.
It's funny, Brian, when you were asking about whether you know
you could well when you were comparing to to centralized
providers and you were saying that with a centralized provider
you have this SLA and you can call them up and whatever.
I just couldn't help but think, well isn't, I mean that's the
same for your bank and you still use blockchain and crypto,
right? I mean, you know, this, this
extends to the broader, you know, the broader crypto space I
think and and yeah, so it was just like a sort of funny remark
there. You're just using Web two tools
in order to operate in web three and for us it didn't make sense
in the beginning. And in order to scale to cause
the billion daps and people like onboarding on web three, we need
the scalability infra. Yeah, no, I I think that answer
makes sense. I mean, I I guess one thing, the
other thing that comes to my mind here is of course we have
we've also seen some decentralized projects actually
doing like an OK job, my understanding or me maybe maybe
even good job at support. I think osmosis is like an
example, right? Where they're used to community
pool, to like fun teams, to you know, deal with support requests
and generally I've heard like good feedback that seems to be
working pretty well. But yeah, the gateway thing also
makes sense. So basically then I would yeah,
like let's say as. A as an.
Operator or like as someone needing RBC, I signed some
contract and then I can all, you know, always query.
Basically all the requests get routed through that gateway node
and then they can like let's say track up time and if they're
issues they troubleshoot it and maybe I can pay them with
dollars or credit card and they pay cause 'cause in the end the
operators would get paid on chain using lava tokens or like
how do the payments? Work to the operators.
So yeah, so the way it would work and I think you know the
gateway concept is an open gateway.
You know anyone can talk to the foundation put up a governance
proposal and start operating gateway the the but the
important part and this is also touching on Seb's points I think
is which is interesting is that it's it's done in a way that is
also familiar to the customer. I think this is in general a way
that you know web three projects need to be able to to give
answers to web two type customers.
I think it's, I think it's crucial in the end you want to
operate with many, many different companies that want to
use a service and they need some sort of a gateway right, to get
familiar with it because they don't know how to buy tokens and
go on chain and buy a subscription on level.
So maybe it's easier for the first step for them is to pay
this type of gateway operator to buy for them and then give them
the service and then the operator you know goes by
tokens, goes on chain buys it for them with some kind of
referral code. And this is how it works.
And this referral code basically gives that provider a portion
whatever he agreed with the governance.
To now operate this contract. So say you want to buy the
service, you come to this operator, you pay, let's say 100
lava, he goes on chain, he buys it for you and he takes a 20%
cut. And then with this 20% he
operates, You know the servers, he operates the support centre,
he offers Slas, he does audits and gives you the convenience
that you need for Web 2 project. But if you're a fully Web 3
project and don't need any of that crap, you can just go and
change. You can buy the subscription
with tokens and you don't need to talk to anybody or go for any
governance or go for anything else.
Let's go a little bit under the hood here.
I'd, I'd love to get a better understanding of like what the
network topology looks like. So you know, we talked about
some of the like the, the, these operators, but what are all of
the roles in the network and how are they interacting with each
other and I think importantly how are they interacting with
applications? So I think one of the core
principles that guided us when thinking about Lava and by the
way we are Lava protocol. So the core contributors to the
Lava network was to keep it simple, right?
We have three different actors, main actors on the chain.
We have the Dapps buying on chain subscription.
We have the providers taking Lava in order to participate and
we have the validators that keeping you know keeping the
service running And down into that we see that note providing
note provider serving data modules that they're called
specs and those specs are being defined by the Champions that
Gil mentioned before. Champion can be anyone from any
chain. Whether it's a small upcoming
roll up or it's a used existing chain doesn't matter but just
coming up with the governor's proposal in order to define this
spec. Actually it's creating this
unique spec that the dapps can afterward use.
So these Dapps in consumer, they using this data and they being
paired off with the off chain peer-to-peer communication
protocol directly to the provider themselves.
So imagine that that from the browser you can get a list of
top providers and receive service.
When Gil mentioned before we were speaking with more than
thousands project this year, they constantly refer back and
told us about the problems that they're having.
They they're using centralized provider and usually not once,
but then they need to come up with node balancing with
disaster recovery with all of these different things that is a
small DAP, they don't need to do so.
Lava taking this burden away from them and implementing that
and give them 99.999 availability of the service.
After the service has been done, the DAP signing the transaction
and sending back all the different parameters about the
service. So availability, the reliability
of the service, the accuracy and this is made, this is being used
for this score to score again the provider for them to get
more and more service. That's in general the different
actors on the chain. So just one thing, you know,
think about the blockchain like a restaurant and think about
specs is like the menu at the restaurant, right?
So the menu of the restaurant tells the people come to eat,
this is what you can have. You can have this type of salad
or this type of soup or entry and this is what specs are.
So for every chain you have these, these different menus,
right. And the way we see it is that
you know any chain that is launching an OP stack, you know,
like BLAST or any other ones or any chain that is launching on
Dimension, for example, any roll up that is launching on
Dimension or Arbiter, they can immediately, this is the vision,
the spur of the launch, you know, propose this back on
chain, this menu that immediately you have all these,
you know, hundreds of providers who this is their job, this is
their bread and butter. They come in and they're like
we're going to run nodes for this.
We think this is going to, you know, give us a lot of rewards.
They go ahead and run nodes. Then you have, you have this
amazing network of node operators giving all these
customers the best service. One thing that you know always
happens and we see it every single time.
I think everybody's going to agree with me.
As soon as there's like an AirDrop or there's like a test
net being launched that people start.
So you know, farming we're playing with, the first thing
that happened is the RPC crashes and collapses.
We see it every single time. So this is where like lava can
completely shine and take over all this usage and scale really
easily. So I want to talk a bit more
about this this spec concept. So a spec is a document or
specification that a a a chain or project will put forth and
then it specifies as a specification does what data to
provide. Does it also specify like how to
in the case of an indexer. For example, let's say we need
to fetch like some time weighted average price like some some
some some price or like some complex data feed that requires
some complex calculations about like pricing data that that is
found on chain. Does the spec also specify how
to arrive at that result so that it can be displayed in the
application in the front end? And I think importantly, what is
the method by which you know this valid?
This data is verified and validated in order to maintain
like accuracy of the data that's provided.
That's really good question because yes, it so the spec, it
defines as you've said what type of data you can get like a
restaurant, like a menu at the restaurant.
OK, you can get the soup, but you want the soup without you
want the salad, but you don't want the dressing you want on
the side, right. So the spec would specify you
can oh, can you get the dressing on the side?
Can you remove the onions? I'm going to have a steak, if
you don't mind. So what's your, you know what
How would you like it cooked? Medium well, So this is what the
spec specifies, right? It does not specify, it does not
go into the kitchen and tells the chef, oh, make it like this
or make it like that, right. This is something the spec does
not. This is the burden of the
developers that are building the chain.
So they're building the way to actually go and get the steak,
Make the steak, where to get it from 1 supplier.
What it does with the menu. It does tell you what the steak
is, right? Is this a Wagyu A5 or are you
getting some you know something you know low rate.
So this does define the the quality, right.
So these are I hope, I hope it explains as well.
I think it's a really cool concept.
So I'm curious so I I mean in the case of IPC then that maybe
it's like slightly less relevant I imagine no because like you
have like a chain has this like RP spec or or like maybe but
it's like you know it's it's basically like RPC node for like
a particular chain is I imagine going to be pretty uniform.
But I guess I wonder is that where this sort of API concept
comes in as well, where someone can make you know a spec for
something like you know that you cannot get from a normal RPC
node. And yeah, maybe can you talk a
little bit about sort of beyond RBCS and especially like how
Lava can be used to provide AP? Is yes.
So first, it's not uniform at all at all Ryan.
It's completely any. Every single Cosmos chain for
example has like a different variations and add-ons and every
one of them has a different versions of of Cosmos SDK.
OK, so every version has a different spec, so it's not,
it's super fragmented. This is why RPC is difficult,
that's why it's tough to get right.
This is why we've built it in such a modular way.
The second thing that is important before I get to API is
that the spec also allows you to specify validations, which is
like how many blocks are you expected to get.
Because a lot of our customers, they want to get, you know, they
want to index the whole blockchain from from block 0.
For that you need to store on many chains, you know, 10
terabytes, 1220 terabytes, maybe even more.
On some chains. This is a huge burden.
Obviously not all every operator can could do that, right?
So This is why we have these types of validations and
extensions. So an extension allows you to
say, you know, I'm offering you know, the latest data for the
last two weeks, whatever however many blocks it is.
Or you could say I'm an archive node, you know I have the
storage and capabilities, but I expect to get paid five times
for archive data because I am taking a bigger burden to touch
on APIs. So yes, the way we've built
specs is a way that allows anyone to write spec in a way
that is supporting of APIs like indexing, like sub graphs, any
types of APIs. So you can go and write a spec
that gives you access. And we're working on
partnerships with different indexing projects like Subsequid
for example that that you basically you know copy paste a
subgraph run it on faster infrastructure, faster indexing
using Lava and subsequent and still get all the the many
providers quality of service and the the data reliability.
So we we touched briefly on the quality of service aspect which
is like very important in the context of RPC and and data
provisioning. How can you go into detail about
how the quality of service algorithm works and how to do
users that are, you know, pinging RPCS know that they're
going to get a good quality RPC provider or indexer?
Yeah, you know, we went to great lengths to make sure that the
the service is really top notch. We really did and it starts from
the from the beginning. Basically, how do you choose the
provider? So you choose the provider based
on how much money, how much stake they have in the system.
So the more stake they have, the more likely that they will be in
your pairing list. Pairing list is the list of
providers that you can use. Once you have this list, you can
talk to any of these providers. So we've written this very
complex engineering feat we call the the provider optimizer.
It's it's by the way, everything is seamless for you, just like
using a regular RPC. So the RPC, the provider
optimizer is basically like a friend that goes and checks
every provider, Give me the latest block.
Give me the latest block. Whoever is the fastest and has
the most relevant fresh information like the latest
block, so that you're not looking at all data.
It basically saves them at the top of the list and then when
you get the data, you're talking to them.
So let's say you have all these providers, you're in Europe,
right? So someone in, you know, Central
Europe has a server, and he's really, really fast.
You're gonna be talking to them. So this is what the RPC, the
provider optimizer does. Now, as you talk to him, you
start writing down, OK, this guy, OK, it's giving me, you
know, it's fast. It's slow.
Oh, here he was, you know, he was not as fast as I expected.
You know move to somebody else, you write his report cards, you
save them and then you send them and then they get on chain from
these providers. There's a process I won't get
into it. These report cards go on chain
and they affect the providers payout basically.
So the provider has an incentive to always provide really good
service. So but it doesn't affect the
whole payout. On top of that, we have what we
call excellence, quality of service.
And this is the same report cards.
Over time, they accumulate on chain and they are saved in
this, this provider's profile. So this is like a way to build
reputation for a provider on chain.
And then the last step, not too much the excellence, quality of
service score. Their reputation for this
provider is also one of the factors that affects its pairing
list. So go back to the first step,
it's how much money is taking because if he takes a lot of
money saying I'm serious, I'm here, I can handle your
requests. And then over time, how good
were you? And we have all these customers
that are paying and they're using their, you know, payouts
basically to score. If you go back to the menu
example, it's like you have TripAdvisor connected directly
with the with the menu itself. So it gives you constant
feedbacks for the meal you just ate.
But it's built in, you don't need afterwards to get
something. Everything is happening on
chain. OK, and so users are rating the
the service providers, it is the end user like the guy who's
doing the transaction in meta mask, you know on Uniswap or
whatever application is using Lava that is doing this rating
or is it the developers? Yeah, it's it's when you say
doing that's that's an interesting way with everything
is happening automatically, right.
So during the transaction we are aggregating all the different
parameters, all the scalability, the freshness of the data.
So those are being used in order to score the existing
transaction, the existing session with the provider and
during during the lifespan, obviously the scoring change
according to the service they they give.
So how does that work if if the actual service is provided like
peer-to-peer without some node in between like, how would you?
How do you even have that information?
That's that's really good question.
I think it's and it's a a bit complex just because of how the
protocol is working and I think you know this is where the
gateways come in and this is where the SDK comes in.
So as I've said in the beginning, you know you can use
Lava without any central middleman to do that.
You can use the SDK or you can run your own gateway right?
And this is all open source. The other way is if you use a
gateway. If you use a gateway then the
gateway basically scores for you.
OK, so this is how it works. Now the spec.
That we talked. About, which is like one of the
core components of Lava, is basically defining the
communication between the consumer and the and the
provider. So actually there's a, there's a
protocol, there's a network protocol that wraps the actual
RPC query. With everything we just spoke
about, this is like a channel between the consumer and the
provider with everything, the rating, the quality of service,
the conflict detection, which we didn't talk about.
It's a way to ensure that the data is accurate as well.
Cool. And how does the pricing work
here? How is it determined you know
how much these services cost? You know the beginning.
We were always giving this answer that, you know, ask us
how. How come you were coming up with
this good service and basically we said we took all the top
centralized provider pricing list, put it into the ChatGPT
came up with a better price. But the thing behind Lava is the
that is a real economy, right. It's a real market that going to
balance between the supply and demand.
So if you start with a certain price it can goes up and down
based on the demand. So I it can give you an example.
If there is a you know a service, an NFT drop that's
being given in like a place that there are not many supply,
obviously the price is going to go up and going to going to
invite more and more providers. Let's say you know suddenly
there there is you know NFT drop and a need in Africa or South
Africa or something and you have only two providers there.
So obviously the the demand upon the drop going to be higher and
higher again and this is how we balancing the, the protocol is
automatically balancing the supply and demand mechanism.
I'll just add that even though we're you know we've been
running in test net with we've already signed contracts with
ecosystems and these ecosystems have distributed 10s of
thousands of dollars to providers.
This has already been done and there's hundreds of thousands
more that are going to sign and distributed in this year.
So I think you know it's already showing, it's lava's already
showing instability to really support different blockchains
and to touch on the pricing. As I said for for ecosystems
today, you know the way it works is they go to let's say one of
the big centralized providers and they sign a contract.
This contract can be for a whole year, can be for multiple years
and this contracts locks them in to a certain price.
And one of the complaints we've heard from them is that they
don't want to be locked in because sometimes the market is
not active and sometimes the market is really active.
So they want to be able to balance the payouts to these
node drivers based on the demand.
And I think it makes complete sense, right.
Second pay as you go. So it is the most, the most
efficient way to to to pay providers.
So this is what is built in love.
So these ecosystems like Efmos, like XLR, like Near and and many
others that are signing and have signed already, they are able to
set their own budget. They're saying this month or
next three months I'm going to put let's say 10,000 lava tokens
in the in the pool, on chain, in this, on the spec, on the menu
and then all the providers know this month you get it 10,000.
So they can decide is this worth enough there OK, there's 1000
providers. Does it make sense for me to
join? Maybe not.
OK, there's 20 providers. Does it make sense From Yes.
Hell yeah. You know, if I'm good, I can get
a really good share of the pie. And This is why it's a dynamic
market. Interesting.
Yeah. So, so there is this kind of
like market equilibrium that you know you hope to achieve here
depending on like demand and you know how well networks are being
served. Is this something you've already
demonstrated with the networks on which you've been, you've
been working with like that data providers rearrange and
reposition themselves on particular networks when demand
is higher and retract when demand is lower?
We've been able to demonstrate that using Lava you you're able
to give an excellent top notch service of RPC and attract many
providers, but the payout has been constant.
In the near future as we launch Mainnet, I believe this is going
to change and it's going to be much more dynamic, but it's a
process that will happen over time.
We are seeing that and this is already live on test net that
these rewards they make sense for providers to run and give
really good service. We've, we've received a lot of
praise for the different services we're offering to these
ecosystems and we're seeing inbound from other chains that
have recently launched test Nets and has been struggling.
They're reaching out to us asking can we use the same
incentivization model to bring in more providers for our
network. So we're definitely seeing it
taking off. Yeah, and I think it bears
reminding people that Lava has been in test net for a while,
but that it it's actually like working with live chains.
So even though the network is in test net, all of the data
providers are actually providing like real data and there's
something like 30 or 35 networks currently live on Lava, correct?
Yeah, it's a production grade system, right, Right now, like
for for one year. And I just want to touch upon
the previous, you know what brought us to ecosystem because
Lava started as a decentralized service and today everyone is
talking about decentralized RPC service.
But then we got approaches by ecosystem to solve and take away
the burden of public RPC. Because public RPC is the first
stop of every dev into the ecosystem.
So if the ecosystem is able to provide a scalable service RPC
and then APIs and solve these you know headaches of how do
they accessing data for different apps, It goes without
saying. So ecosystem came back to us and
told us can Lava actually provide this public RPC, can
they give, can you give us insight into the ecosystem And
obviously we jumped into that and we presented in October 1st
time that incentivize public RPC when the ecosystem put in
incentives for different provider to join
permissionlessly and get reward for the service they give.
And we started doing that in Ivmos and afterwards in Axel R
we just announced near and all of this distribution of the
different rewards being being done only in the last few
months. So working on three different
chains. So in the pipeline we have now
from 5 core and Starknetcoy Agoric and more are coming to
level. OK, very cool.
One thing I wanted to inquire about as well is relayers.
So one of the issues, you know, particularly in cosmos chains is
that like realays are not incentivized for their work.
Does Lava facilitate the matching of, you know, chains
and relayers as well, or is that completely outside of the scope?
Yeah. I think that you know we're
seeing a lot of discussions around IBC and it's fundamental
design and I think you know IBC has been an incredible protocol
that really puts you know cosmos lights here ahead of any other
ecosystem. But in at its core there's a
core issue with payments for real layers and I think that we
will definitely be able to see Lava help with that.
Right now our focus is launching mainnet, you know bringing the
power of of you know the modular unlocked as we can do with lava
to to chains and roll ups. You know they're built on Eigen
layer on Ethereum, on dimension. But for sure, you know once
we're, you know we're more, we're done with that, we're
definitely be able to help with relayers and and try to solve
core issues like that in the Cosmos ecosystem as well.
So you mentioned model again. Yeah, you mentioned it earlier.
So of course I understand that you know for also modular chains
roll ups, well you still need RPC, you still need this thing.
So I understand how like you know the you know lava stack is
still is still relevant in that kind of modular world.
But I'm curious is, is there more to this or?
What do you see? As sort of the connection
between lava and modular chains. If you look at you know Web 3,
right, if you look at what's happening today, I think that
everyone's coming to the same conclusion, right.
There's going to be an explosion of chains, but how many chains
are going to be like the full purpose, not specific purpose,
Like if you're on full purpose, you know you can run anything
you want, smart contract or you have application specific ones
on Cosmos or roll ups. So I think, I think it's pretty
obvious that in the future we're going to have all these chains,
they're going to explode, they're going to be super
successful, but how do you weave one path through all of them?
It's super difficult. And it sucks.
I mean, it sucks today trying to use all these chains.
It sucks. It's really, it's really
difficult even for, you know, I'm a tech user and consider
myself a power user. It's difficult for me to keep
track of all the chains and all of my assets across all of them
and to interact with them and and bridge tokens and make sure
I'm using the right bridge and don't get hacked.
Until we solve this core issues, we're not going to have a good,
a good system. And one of the things that we're
seeing prop up and I've been thinking about it a lot is how
do you like imagine the future Web Three, you have one wallet
and it has access to all of the chains and it shows you the
assets on all of your chains And you don't care where your assets
are. You don't care if they're you
know on on you know Cosmos, Habi don't care if the the assets are
on Ethereum Arbitrum, you don't care where they are.
They're just there and you want to move them somewhere.
No problem. You don't need to think about
wait, do I have Osmosis OSMO token to perform the trade to do
to move the tokens or do I have this token or that token or
start thinking about the gas, you know, so I think the future
of Web Three is some kind of system that allows, you know,
for full chain obstruction. So you don't even think, you
don't know what a bridge is, you don't want gases.
This is the only way to reach mass adoption, which I think is
the goal of what we're doing. And when we were thinking about
lava, we think about modularity. We're thinking how can lava be
one of these core key unlocks in this, in this stack.
And we see that, you know, OK, there's RPC, we can talk about
RPC all day, but it's really, really boring.
But you have to do it really well, but then you have to be
able to launch it really fast for all these chains.
But what if you could, on top of the RPC and on top of the APIs
use this now network that has basically stakes from every
single ecosystem and all these providers are now staked to
verify the data is correct on lava.
What if you're able to use that to build song chain abstraction
that enables you to, you know, more freely, move assets around,
you know, access all the different blocks without even
known and still trusting that the data is correct, still have
everything decentralized. So this is what we're trying to
think of, of the grander vision of of chain abstraction and how
long it fits in and unlocks this.
If I had on top of that you know what you said before when
describing like doesn't matter if you take the monolithic path
thesis right the the modular blockchain or if you go to the
roll up centric all of them need the data access layer.
If you give devs devs the the right tools to build the the
infrastructure, if you build them with you take the burden
away from them from whatever they building.
This will scale the industry and Seb you mentioned before the the
banks right? So if there is a 2 providers
that you go for them for the data and and two of them is
down, how are you going to get access to your meta mask, How
you can promise your users as a wallet that they can make
transactions, all of that we believe with this modular layer,
it's something that Lava is able able to save and we call it
build whatever, wherever, build whatever it's you build it
whatever you want, whatever adapts, not focusing on the
infra and wherever is in the multi chain.
So can you guys talk about Magma?
Yes, of course. Magma is a super exciting
confidential project that's not anymore gonna lie.
Sorry, but it's not live right. So we're gonna, yeah, it's gonna
we're gonna announce it on the 15th of of February and this is
basically brings in non-technical users, all of us
that have a wallet to share the the Lava vision to share the web
three values. The magma is the point system
that Lava is presenting. It allows any user to use the
Lava endpoints chain that at the back end of the wallet in order
to get access that is super available.
It's decentralized and obviously it's it's scalable.
So basically jumping quickly into the magma.
Magma is the phase coming always before the lava and we already
announced that the minute is going to come up soon.
Magma Point system is a signing. It's a program that every every
use every user that has a wallet can sign up and start receiving
points for the the usage you do with the wallet.
For transaction you get scores for just watching the wallet.
It also create creates points and because all of them is at
the core that making RPC request and every RPC request is being
scored for you as a as a as a user and you can watch it over
the lead port. Cool.
And so, which brings me to my next question, when mainnet.
Mainnet, you know our engineers working around the clock in
order to address the mainnet, we're trying to push for end of
Q1 and yeah, this is a super exciting time.
So, you know, stay tuned for that.
Very cool. And so where where should people
go if? Well, I guess it's a couple
things right? If you're building application
and want to integrate Lava to provide RPC to your users, like
there's like one category of people that should check out
Lava. But also, if you're an
infrastructure provider and want to provide infrastructure for
the Lava network, where should these categories of listeners go
to? So I think the team did a great
job writing the, the, the documentation.
We have an amazing discord channel with thousands of
member, very vibrant and always asking questions, getting
getting them answered by the community themselves for the new
users. So start with our website lava
net dot XYZ. You can see there are a lot of
documentation and jumping over this court.
We call also the non crypto non tech users to amplify and bring
more of the values of of lava. In the upcoming months, the
foundation will reach out and, you know, present different
programs and we all start tomorrow or the 15th of of
February with the Magma with the Magma program.
Cool. Well, thank you.
So thank you so much for coming on.
Actually we just wanted to mention one thing which I think
we you should have mentioned the start but we forgot.
So you know as most of you know my main thing is running course
one. And with course one we did
invest in Lava and we're running Validator and I think Seb Rip
his fund also invested in Lava. So we just wanted to mention
that. Yes, Interrupt Ventures are also
investors in LAVA, so Full disclosure and running
validators. Cool.
Well, thanks so much guys for coming on.
That was super interesting. I think it's definitely
something that I could see getting a lot of traction right.
And it will be really great to see how this sort of things
evolve once a minute is live and you know over the next year.
So thanks so much for coming on guys.
Thank you so much. Pleasure being here.
Cheers. Thank you for joining us on this
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