Ep.25 [EN]: Bryan Pellegrino: the immense possibilities of omnichains to be unlocked with LayerZero
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You are now listening to Hotlong. I'm the host, Mabel Zhang. This show attempts to shed light on the broader Web3 community. The guests will include Web3 operators, investors, or ecosystem participants of other forms. The show will also have a special focus on the Asia-based Web3 world. Connect East and West. Enjoy the warmest Web3 conversation. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the latest episode of Hotlong. This is your host, Mabel Zhang.

Today, we are super excited to welcome the co-founder and CEO of Layer Zero, Brian Pellegrino, to join us. Welcome, Brian. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me, Mabel. Yes, yes. I'm super excited. It's been a long while. I guess before we jump into this, I'd love you to introduce yourself. You have a very special background, so we'd love you to tell us more about who you are.

- Sure, I guess with that intro, I'll go into the little bit of extended version. Brian grew up in a tiny, tiny town of like 900 people in rural New Hampshire, got a computer when I was about five years old, fell in love with it, mostly just to play video games early on, but like eventually found, you know, found programming. Really fell in love with programming super early, went to school for computer science,

for three years and dropped out to play poker professionally, which was not a very popular decision by my mother or my family, but it worked out okay. So I did that for eight years, did 80 countries during that time, so traveled all over the world, kind of played the highest stakes you could play in poker. But 2011, online poker got shut down.

And when it got shut down, actually, everybody in the poker industry, which is why you'll see so much overlap between poker and crypto, actually, everybody in the poker industry found Bitcoin then because all of the payment processes were banned. So PayPal, Netteller, MoneyBooker, Skrill, all gone. So all of the sites that remain started using Bitcoin as ways to accept payments from U.S. players. And so I had actually found Bitcoin in 2010.

but I ended up not getting involved in 2011 because, uh, because I, I started a company. So I started a company then sold it two years later. It's 2013. Uh, I'm now getting hit up by my brother and my brother-in-law about, uh, about Bitcoin. And so started, uh, in 2013, really diving in. I was running mining rigs in our garage and doing kind of all of this crazy stuff and really got into like the full spectrum of, of, uh, things that existed, uh, back then. Um,

Ended up writing some machine learning models that I sold to some pro baseball teams. Started a company in the Valley with first engineer out of Andreessen Horowitz, couple guys at Google Comma, that company got acquired. Did some academic research that got published by Facebook AI Research, cited by DeepMind, which was like really cool as a college dropout, 'cause DeepMind was the reason I got into AI, so to have them cite my work later was super cool.

And then here building layers are now have been basically full time crypto since towards tail end of 2016. And I would like to think that that

So under what circumstance you started Layer Zero and what is it?

Yeah, sure. Like we didn't we had zero intention to start a company, right? A lot of people get together. So we're going to we're going to build something. It was me and my two closest friends, my two co-founders. We're just like building stuff for fun. We, you know, the first on chain Dex's had just released and we had some trading funds, trading funds reach out to us and basically asked us to build them on chain trading strategies. And so we built it.

because they had no clue what to do or how to deal with any of this stuff. And we were like, "Oh, that's actually pretty fun." We had spent a bunch of time in optimization problems purely for speed and also in networking prior. So we started doing arb and triangle arb in the space

and eventually just started seeing like transactions pop up in blocks with zero gas paid, but perfect block positioning. So we're like, "Oh, like miners are colluding against us. It's a rigged game. Like we actually can't do this anymore." And this is like before Flashbots came in and commoditized the entire process.

But so like then we were like, oh, well, we're going to go do something else. Like this is just, you know, can't do it. And that was about the time Binance Smart Chain was really like blowing up. Like every day I was getting messages like BSC, more volume than Ethereum, more users than Ethereum. Just like everything is happening there. And it was like really unique, right? Like it

eight years in at that point and like a lot of other things existed, but people didn't actually use them. So the fact that people were actually using and things were happening was interesting. And so I had followed NFTs, a big fan of just like gaming in general, had followed NFTs from minting Gen Zero, CryptoKitties and sort of all of that. And so we started to think like, what interesting things could you do with an execution environment that's like fast and cheap and like different than Ethereum? And so we actually built out this toy game just for ourselves that was like,

the gameplay would happen on BSC and everything on there would basically be throw away. Eventually you could earn this status, right? You could like win the game or do something and you would get an NFT minted on Ethereum that would be permanent. And that would be like the thing you get out. That would be the rare thing. So we started to build it and realized very quickly that like you couldn't do it without a central coordinator sitting outside and triggering events on both chains. We're like, well, that sucks. Like, what's the point if you're just gonna have this centralized entity anyways?

And so but we were like bridges exist. So like surely somebody has solved this problem. And then we looked at the bridges that existed and we're just like horrified by the state of bridging at that. You know, there's like no world in which we would trust any significant amount of value to any of the bridges that existed at the time. It was insane. And so then we actually started to build a bridge, which was the precursor to Stargate 20.

And then in building that bridge, realized that we were still inventing kind of the transport layer to allow the bridge to send messages back and forth. And that was the generalizable problem. And so that really became layer zero.

That's very interesting. So yeah, like exactly when you said you were building that game and I was thinking you probably need a message sender. And then I see, I see that makes a lot of sense. So you haven't explained what exactly is layer zero. I mean, I said it already, but we'll love to hear your version. Yeah. So layer zero is it's a messaging version.

It allows you to send messages between blockchains. So the very non-technical description is just that. It just connects blockchains. It allows you to send messages from one to the other. The slightly more technical way, which is the way I frame it to myself, was way back in the day, you had all of these clusters of computers pre-internet, right? You had Stanford, you had DARPA, you had a bunch of groups.

And you could do things in each of those execution environments, but not anywhere else. Like if I wanted to run something in the Stanford lab, I would need to literally fly to Stanford and like do it there with their intranet. Eventually we developed tools, TCP IP and all these standards to allow these things to communicate. We got the internet that we have today, which is like great. But if you think about what the internet is actually doing, it's just a packet. It's basically, you have a computer on one side,

who does some computation, takes a packet, some data, sends it to another computer that ingests it and does something with it. So, you know, create some information, send the information, like interpret the information. Layer Zero does exactly the same thing on blockchain. So it's two...

two smart contracts on each side, you're going to trigger one, take some state data, move it over and trigger another. And like what you can do with layer zero is anything that you can do in a smart contract, you can do over layer zero. So people use it for

swapping DEXs, they use it for bridging, they use it for moving NFTs, they use it for games, they use it for like anything, state share, cross chains, all of these different things. People still surprising me like every day with what they use it for. But the goal is just to create that packet, that ability to move information in a safe manner and make it super easy for people to do that.

It was a very good analogy. And now that you get into how it works, so maybe I can just also ask you a little bit more further about like what are the key parts of Layer 0 and how does each part coordinate with each other? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So Layer 0 at its core, we deploy an endpoint on each chain. The endpoint basically opens up the chain for everything. So we have an endpoint on Ethereum.

and an endpoint on Polygon, let's say. So these two endpoints. Now, any application on Ethereum can communicate with any application on Polygon, even if they're not built on top of Layer 0. So an example might be, you could be in...

quick swap on Polygon and execute a swap into like Curve on Ethereum, even though Curve is not, you know, you can wrap anything. Now the entire chain, the entire world of state becomes composable with any other application, which is super, super, super powerful and super cool. So now some application on chain A wants to communicate with chain B. They do a transaction. So let's say we're going to move an NFT.

you lock your NFT in this contract or you could burn it or whatever, right? So let's say we lock it. We lock in a contract, a message goes across to Chain B, Chain B gets it and they say, you know, mint this NFT or unlock it on Chain B. So now the user has, let's say, burned on Chain A and minted on Chain B. Their NFT has now moved. So little pudgies from pudgy penguins did this. And what's happening behind the scenes there is a transaction is committed on the source chain, let's say Ethereum,

Then that state is taken by what we call an oracle and a relayer. A little bit of a misnomer, but basically systems that break apart this state data. So the oracle takes the block header, the receipt root of the transaction, and moves it over the destination chain.

and the relayer pulls out the transaction proof and moves it over. And then you do a, again, I'm getting a little technical, so you gotta tell me if you want me to be less technical, but we do it, we do an MPT, a Merkle Inclusion Proof on the destination chain to prove that it's a valid transaction. And then that triggers the sort of action on chain B, assuming that was valid. Now, one of the really nice things that LayerZero does is this concept of gas abstraction. So like,

one of the things that was a nightmare for me back in the early bridges were like, if I wanted to go from Solana to Ethereum, I would sign like eight transactions on Solana. I'd finally commit and get my money in. I'd wait a super long time. And then eventually I'd have to switch wallets, get into my Ethereum wallet, go to some centralized exchange to get ETH, put it in my wallet, claim the transaction. And like, that was the process. And I was just like,

There is no world in which your average consumer application is gonna like put this process inside. Like that's just not gonna work for real people. And so one of the really nice things about Layer Zero is this concept of gas abstraction. So if you're going from Polygon to Avalanche, you don't need to have both Matic and AVAX in your wallet, right?

You only ever pay your source gas. So you would only pay Matic and basically layer zero abstracts away the AVAX from you. You never see it. And yet you can still trigger things in there. You can land on Avalanche, even have AVAX dropped in your wallet, but you don't need to start with this. So that allows really cool consumer experiences like building a wallet,

where you can look at 15 farms on eight different chains and have no idea what the underlying gas is, what the underlying chain is, what the gas token is, none of it. You don't need to care. You can simply move your money and stake it on any of these farms anywhere because you no longer need to have the destination gas assets. So full gas abstraction, which I think has been really powerful for people.

This is actually very interesting. May go very well with some of the account abstraction wallet as well. It could become very powerful. Very interesting. You said the Solana version. I remember the same thing for Serum because I think MEV became a very big problem because a lot of the order needs to be done in three different transactions and then that becomes a problem for Serums.

trader or arbitrage or whatever. So I do want to get a little bit more technical on the NFT side. You mentioned that the NFT part, like you talk about the state change and whatnot. How about the metadata? Like, does it directly just link the original metadata with the new chain state? How does that work? Yeah, so...

It really depends on how the contract implementer builds it. So every NFT could do this differently. But basically, you know, most metadata is like some pointer to some blob that sits in IPFS or something, right? And so like you can mint the exact same metadata around. So like in little pudgies, that's how it works, right? It doesn't matter if you're on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon, BNB chain, it doesn't matter. You're going to have the same little pudgy. It's going to point to it. But we've seen people do like really creative things where like,

you move from chain A to chain B. And so like Ghostly Ghost was the first one to do this, where it was like your border was based on, I'm sorry, your background was based on the chain that you were birthed on. So the chain you were minted on and your border was based on the chain that you currently lived on. But then people started doing like, you move to a different chain and you literally like roll a new random trait. They've done all kinds of crazy things. So it really, yeah.

really can be significantly different. We even had a game, which I thought was really cool. It was like, if you, you know, let's say it's a boss, you kill a boss in your game that lives on its own blockchain. Um,

And so now you won, whatever, you killed the boss. That sends a message that mutates the metadata of your NFT that lives on Ethereum or Polygon. And in real time, that syncs with your Twitter or your Instagram hexagon, your profile picture. And like now you have a crown in real time, right? Like progressive achievement in real time without you needing to do anything. So people have gone really deep into like exploring what you can do with it. But ultimately, it's up to the creator and how the contracts are built.

Full flexibility. So what chains have you guys supported thus far? So we're on like 30-ish chains now. Basically, almost every large EVM will be on 40 plus very soon.

Plus Aptos. Solana shortly. We're about to be on Solana, Testnet, and then Mainnet right after. And then we'll do every other non-EVM. We'll probably be five non-EVMs by the end of the year. So what's the mindset behind integrating as many chains as possible? Because it sounds like you guys are doing that. Yeah. I mean, I think most of what we try to do, like part of your...

Job as a founder is like you will always be drowning in opportunities. There's always a million things to do. There's a million people who want your time attention, like spend your engineering resources here. And I think it is your job really to figure out like how to prioritize that. Ultimately, we are a developer tooling company. Our

our developers, we need devs to build interesting things on top. And we try to heavily prioritize just being where developers are. And so like most of, most of our integrations are driven. Like we almost never go to a new chain just to be there. Like, Oh yeah, we're there. Hooray. It's usually because somebody is building something on that chain and they want to go there. Maybe sushi swap or,

you know, who integrates us on all these other chains now is expanding and they want us to be there. No problem. We'll be there day one with you because you asked us in uni, right? And so like most of this is driven by developer demand. But I think like everything that we do is really like through that lens of just like we want to be where activity happens because ultimately that is the model that we're building on. A small question. I noticed it on your website. It says omni-chain instead of multi-chain.

Why is that word choice? So pretty, pretty funny. I actually laugh about this pretty often. So we were actually sitting with J.R. from Multicoin at the time. And we were I remember being in the conversation, me, him and Ryan, where we invented this term Omnichain. So Omnichain is not a term that existed before we launched. And we did it because we were like,

We thought it was very confusing that you had single chain environments and then you had multi-chain, but most of multi-chain was kind of just like point to point. So you might have SushiSwap, which was on 16 different chains, but you can only go from Ethereum to each of them individually. You could not go between each other. So like, what is a mesh network? What is it where you can go any chain to any other chain and they're all connected? So we came up with this concept, Omnichain, and like...

I remember now. I remember now. And so we invented that term. And six months later, I remember being sent the deck of a competitor. And their deck used the word omni-chain 27 times in it. And I was like, I remember inventing this term. And now people are using it as their canonical description of the world. And so I thought it was really, really interesting.

But yeah, that was the original origin. The way multi-chain was being used didn't really clearly illustrate what we wanted because people had this framework of, you know, this is Vitalik's kind of famous multi-chain but not cross-chain, right? Of where like you might be siloed on a bunch of different places but not all connected. So that was the origin of it. Yeah, I remember. When I said I remember it, I also remember at that time, I think like

competitors also renamed themselves. Yep. And that is very confusing. Okay, that's really interesting. No wonder you were saying it's a funny one. So got it. So I guess I want to dive into a little bit more about the use cases. You just mentioned that some of those sometimes still even surprise you. So what are some of the use cases you think worthwhile bringing up for Layer 0 as of today? Yeah, I mean, I think...

Early on, we were like a very, very DeFi skew. Like that is the world that we thought about. And that was kind of the unlock. So we thought about how do you build a better bridge? And then we, you know, we built Stargate basically to facilitate this. How do you do lending and borrowing where like right now, if I have ETH on Ethereum and I want to go do something on some other chain, like early Solana before there were like ETH derivatives there, like...

what do you do, right? I don't necessarily want to sell my ETH. I don't want to take like maybe the tax implication of like having this trade there. Like what people want to do is like collateralize their ETH and then borrow Sol on Solana or USDC or borrow it on some other chain, right? And so like how do you make a lending protocol that allows you to do that functionally across all of these chains and create efficient lending markets?

Like those were use cases we were super interested in. Obviously like DEX and shared liquidity across chains is kind of like global swaps. And so that was like the very early lens was all around that. And then now over the last year, a lot of things has like shaped our opinions of the world. Like 50% plus of our inbound has been gaming and NFTs. So massive amount of interest of just like

Every project ultimately wants to reach the most number of users. At the end of the day, they want to expand their social graph. It's like Facebook launched and was at Harvard, and they never went to any other school. There's only so much that they can win. They either bet on Harvard on being like that, the end all and everything, or they start to expand. And so people want to expand their social graph as rapidly as possible, sort of their customer base.

And so a lot of it has been around that. So a huge amount of influx in gaming and NFTs, huge amount of influx into derivatives of like governance is one, governance, account abstraction are things that we see all the time now, people talking about like how that functionally happens across chains. I think like application specific blockchains and L2s became a huge hot topic from like when we started to where we are now, we're like,

okay, now you're going to have a thousand layer twos, right? Like if you're on Arbitrum, Nova and Nitro and like, okay, great. I've done a deck swap. Now I want to go play this game. Like, are you really going to want to wait like seven days to go back to Ethereum and then go back up? Like you need a horizontal composability, like between these L2s to make them functional. And like, you need the fungibility between assets there. And then application specific chains where every game now is just going to, you know, Axie started this, but now everybody is going to their own chain. Um,

And same thing. Yes, they want a different execution environment for gameplay, but they still want the liquidity of Ethereum or of whatever, right? They want to be able to tap into everything else. And so a huge amount has basically been revolving around that. Like, how do you make that as easy as possible plus the consumer layer on top, right? Like, we've been public that...

We had checks written to us from PayPal, from all these very large, more traditional institutions. How do you enable them to make the consumer product that touches all of this stuff without necessarily needing to expose the user to the complexity of it? So I guess in terms of DeFi, people wouldn't know why people are trying to be on different chains. But I guess you gave some examples.

What additional utilities can people enable or can people unlock when they can be interoperable across different chains? Is it just more like, say you store the asset on one chain that's safer, but you do stuff with the other chain, things like that? So I think there's a couple of different sort of paths there. One, I thought it was very interesting. So Luca from Pudgy Penguins moved over to Little Pudgies.

One of the things that he said, which I thought was really fascinating, was like, basically, overnight, when we moved to these other chains, we became a top 10 project on all three of these chains, right? So it was like you, like, Ethereum kind of has its identity of NFT projects and the sort of community that's coalesced around those and have their kind of zeitgeist, right? And Solana...

like also has that to an extent. It's found it's sort of like group. Almost every other chain doesn't have those canonical assets, right? So part of it is reaching a different audience is definitely part of the impetus around others is again, expand that social graph as much as humanly possible. Reach another million users here, another 100,000 users there, et cetera, and sort of

get that mind share expand more rapidly. Other things are like, I mean, it sucked when you were building NFTs on Terra and Terra died, right? Like you're already underwriting enough risk. And when you're building a project, like you really need to like underwrite the risk of the chain. And now we see like DGODS and Utes, like moving the polygon, all these really big name projects, like

moving around, right? There's a shuffling happening. And so like we have people building on, so we build this standard ONFT and we have people building on ONFT, but not enabling it to any other change. It's building in a way that if this ever dies in the future and we wanna migrate, we can do it without doing anything. Like it's already enabled. You'll never notice it. It's just like built in, just like an ERC20. It's just a thing that you inherit.

And so we've had people do that. So optionality is a big reason. Definitely expanding social graph is like a very big reason. And then for games and some other things that are more built across a bunch of different chains, like by design, then there's cool interactions you can do. But I think that is definitely a very large driving force early on. I'm not sure if this is something that we can discuss in this podcast, but have you guys thought about...

owning your own front end. The reason I thought of this, this is like an absolute impromptu question. And I thought of this because you just mentioned earlier, right? Like people have multiple app specific chains and whatnot. And it's quite impossible that, you know, someone, you

say, like have like multiple wallets to interact with. It's so like the likely the future is going to be people interacting with one wallet. And then, you know, if that wallet have account abstraction and all of these, you know, whatever that layer zero can provide integrated within it,

It would be much, much easier. So I wonder if you guys ever thought about that and how do you decide whether you want to do it or prioritize it or not? Yeah, I think our general stance, our general stance is this. Our general stance is we want to be this sort of like agnostic technology layer. And like we built Stargate not because we wanted to like cannibalize some of the vertical on top of it, but because...

We knew people needed that to basically do the simple functions. If you wanted to have a DEX, if you want to be a yield aggregate array, like unstake 10,000 here and you want to stake it over here, but like you don't have the inventory, right? You have it on chain A, not on chain B. So like Stargate abstracted that away where now all these DeFi protocols could integrate like instantly.

We're very open to talking about the things that we think are interesting in the hopes that somebody else will come and build it. So I will tell you all the things I think are cool. I hope other people build it. If people don't build it, we will build it ourselves at some point in time, right? So things that we think are like needed within the space. I already told you like money markets, a lending protocol that's natively across a bunch of different chains. Like I've been talking about it for two years now. Absolutely will happen. Yield aggregator across a bunch of different chains absolutely will happen.

A wallet, that's exactly like you're talking about where basically you don't need to switch RPCs, you don't need to necessarily do all of these things. Even where like you could have, if I was making a yield aggregated wallet farming product, I would just have it completely denominated in USDC and be 100% gasless. You only have dollars in the account, you never see gas, you don't even think about blockchains and all of that is basically subsidized in the transaction because you can build that on top of layer zero right now super easily. The ability to do like a namespace, right? So,

Effectively now we have .eth and .sol and all these others, but like really complex when you go from like EVM to non-EVM to keep address mapping the same, right? So there's like, that's a problem where really you just want like, just give me an app, like a Venmo or PayPal or something, right? Give me something that verifiably ties me to each of these things and allows you to send on any chain and me to receive it as long as I've like registered that there, reserved it.

Yeah, a bunch of other tooling like that. So I think there are a ton of things that we will build eventually if other people don't, just because our goal is to build things that like make people's lives easier, make it easier to build on top. But the goal is that people come in and start to build these things and own these individual pieces. But I think there's tons, tons, tons of problems to be solved there, including just like unified front end, exactly like you said. You know,

The product that I'm most excited about, it doesn't exist yet, but I think at some point it will. I think some ZK roll-up can actually leverage what Layer 0 built and then try to do the virtual liquidity on one single layer of Layer 2. Obviously, you don't have to always pull the liquidity out of Layer 1, but then if people pull it in on Layer 2, then it will be aggregated liquidity and it will be much, much easier to build an order book

exchange there. I'm laughing because the literal conversation that I ran five minutes over prior to joining this call was about that exact concept. So people are thinking about that. I think it is a very, very, very good idea. We've seen some other people think about it in like a little bit of a different lens, but yes, absolutely. You can build that, you know, something where effectively you have one set

set of order, one execution environment for order book matching and all of that, but you can accept deposits, collateral, everything from anywhere, right? And then execution happens in one and then you can resolve out. So yes, can be built, should definitely be built. And I know of some people working on it, but this...

you know, needs to be built. That's exciting. Yeah. I want to switch gear a little bit, ask you a bit of an interesting story. So how did it happen to you guys when it comes to working with Pudgy Penguin? Because like they probably are the first one that I was very out loud talking about going across different chains and whatnot. And I know like the whole team of Layer Zero likes Penguin, but we'd still love to hear the story. Yeah, I mean, I think it really is that, right? So like,

What happened, so what got us into Penguins was that I had bought me and my two co-founders, Punks, when they were very cheap. And we basically were just like, oh, you know, we're never going to sell these. These are great, hilarious, amazing. And then all of a sudden, X months later, Punks were worth just infinite. It was like this crazy run up. And I was like, I think we need to sell them. And they were vehemently against it.

But I managed sort of all of our trading. And so I ended up selling all of them and they just did not forgive me. And we found penguins like within a couple of weeks after, and we bought them when they were nothing, 0.03 to 0.08. And they were just like, I think we bought 50 of them. And they were just like, we are never, like, I don't care. We're never selling these ever under any circumstance. And so like after that, we just became like diehard penguin maxis. And then...

the space just sort of started to like really pick up around loving penguins i mean when we bought them there was like nobody was like elmo and jebus and like that was it and then like all of this has happened and luca bought the brand and then um you know we we just we started talking to him we actually had considered buying uh pudgy penguins back then but i was like you know we we could never afford it like don't even bother and when i saw luca and what he bought it for i was like oh my god that was such an amazing opportunity um i think he's done a

thousand times better job than what we ever could have done with it. But, you know, we just basically became close after that. Huge, huge fans and supporters. And then obviously, as they were thinking about their strategy moving forward, became equally supportive. So Luca has been amazing. I remember when I got to know you, I was like, oh, this is another wizard head that I've encountered because I also own one. So it's cool.

So I guess let's talk about the year ahead. Any exciting plans, like any strategies you want to deploy to attract more builders building with Layer Zero? Yeah, I mean, I think and then we're pretty happy with how things have been going so far. Right. We have about 30,000 contracts on testnet, about 3000 on mainnet and about a thousand unique projects. Right. We're at

a couple billion in TVL, a couple billion, almost 10 billion in transactional volume. We just rolled over 2 million overall messages and that's been like accelerating really rapidly. And so like overall pretty happy with things, but a huge amount more to do. So I think like the next six months, next six months will probably be the busiest time for us in terms of like

technical rollouts and just broad everything that we've had probably since launch, maybe ever. Um,

Yeah, I mean, there's just so much stuff we will have to talk about in the near future once it's once it's no longer behind the scenes. But yeah, I mean, I think everything really is just, you know, all of our calculus always is just how can we do things that enable people to build better products or more people to build on top of us? And I think the fruits of that will be will be coming out.

Like, that will be the thesis of the year, for sure. Have you considered anything like a hackathon? Yeah, so we've done a bunch of hackathons. I, to be honest, have been reasonably unimpressed with, like, general hackathon outcomes. I don't think we've had... If we've had any, it's been only one or two projects that have spun out of it. Most of them have been, like, even...

we're almost always offering the highest prize in the hackathon. We're always like giving incentives. We have great turnouts, but a lot of the people that I talk to when I'm at the hackathon, they're like, yeah, we go to every hackathon and are just like living off the prizes, right? And like their goal isn't to build a company. And so like if there was a hackathon that was designed that was more like...

Y Combinator. So there's more like, listen, we're going to start something and we want to be exposed to awesome technologies. Amazing. We'd definitely do it. As of now, the current hackathons are like pretty bright people who are mostly wasting their talents, just like shipping little toy products over and over again for like $3,000 prizes at a time. And so I have been, you know, we've done a bunch, some better than others, but I've been relatively unimpressed with it. I would rather spend the time like

you know we're going to put a week into making a great hackathon or a month into making a great or i'd rather spend the week just making like our docs 5x better with like really good examples to walk people through right things that are evergreen things that are typically higher leverage and so i'm not not a huge fan in general very good take i do think usually if a hackathon wants to be very successful and i was able to incubate good projects they need to line up good investors afterwards because and or like you know just general supporters because otherwise

Um,

the projects won't take it seriously either to your exact point. And I think that's usually the problem that I've seen over the past few years, like when you eat NYC or whatever other, like it's usually for those people, open source builders and whatnot. I felt like, definitely not biased, but I felt like what I've seen a good example is the Solana ones because they did line up with the projects with the good investors and then they provide initial help. So I'm excited to see more and more happening.

But great to know that you actually have a very strong opinion on this. So it's interesting.

Cool. I think that's it for today, but definitely would love our audience to follow you guys and also your personal Twitter. What's the best Twitter handle or any social that people should follow you? Yeah, I mean, you can follow me personally at PrimordialAA, so a little bit tricky, but P-R-I-M-O-R-D-I-A-L-A-A, or the company account on LayerZero underscore labs. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I think those are definitely the best two ways to keep up with everything. Definitely working on ways to make it like a little bit better for everybody to just like be apprised. But if you cover those two, you'll see 98% of everything that we do. So it'll be pretty good. Yeah, I usually don't ask people for their handles or whatever, but because of the upcoming plans that you weren't able to reveal. So I think people should definitely keep up to that. Yeah, it'll be good for sure. Thank you again for joining.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me and pleasure as always. It's been too long. Exactly. Thank you. I'm going to pause.