We're sunsetting PodQuest on 2025-07-28. Thank you for your support!
Export Podcast Subscriptions
cover of episode Ep.71E Supra Approach: Joshua Tobkin’s Blockchain Vision

Ep.71E Supra Approach: Joshua Tobkin’s Blockchain Vision

2025/2/25
logo of podcast Cryptoria | Web3&加密说

Cryptoria | Web3&加密说

AI Deep Dive Transcript
People
J
Joshua Tobkin
Topics
@Joshua Tobkin : 我从12岁开始接触网站开发,之后在SaaS领域工作多年,这些经历让我深刻理解了传统互联网的支付效率低下和信息不透明等问题。2017年,我进入区块链领域,最初致力于扩展以太坊,后来创立了Supra。Supra旨在通过全垂直整合的方式,将Layer 1区块链、Oracle预言机、跨链通信协议等功能集成在一个平台上,从而解决应用需要与多个独立网络交互的低效问题。Supra的技术创新包括"部落和氏族"架构,该架构通过使用节点的随机子委员会来验证数据可用性,无需将数据传播到整个网络,从而提高吞吐量和降低延迟。我们的Moonshot共识机制理论上可以实现500,000 TPS,并在330毫秒内完成区块确认,远快于Solana等竞争对手。未来,Supra将推出自动化功能(类似于Web2中的cron jobs)和自动套利机制,解决MEV问题并创造新的收入来源。Supra容器为应用链提供了一种替代方案,它在保持可组合性和共享流动性的同时,允许应用程序拥有自己的治理和费用结构。Supra的跨链通信包括Supra Nova(用于安全的Layer 1连接)和Hyper Loop(用于Layer 2连接)。在融资方面,我们从小型投资者开始,逐步获得更高层级风投的投资,并在熊市中坚持了两年,这体现了持续创新和坚持的重要性。目前,Supra已有160个dApp在其他链上使用我们的服务,并有512,000名经过KYC验证的代币持有者。未来,我们将通过翻译文档、赞助开发者活动和增加亚洲地区的营销力度来拓展亚洲市场,并继续吸引开发者使用Supra的集成功能构建独特的应用程序。 @Vivienne & @Zhiyang : 我们对Joshua Tobkin及其Supra项目进行了深入的访谈,探讨了Supra的技术创新、发展历程、融资策略以及未来规划。我们了解到Supra在解决区块链领域的一些关键问题上取得了显著进展,例如提高交易吞吐量、降低延迟、增强安全性以及提升DeFi的效率。同时,我们也关注到Supra在市场营销和用户获取方面仍有提升空间。

Deep Dive

Shownotes Transcript

Translations:
中文

Hello everyone, welcome back to Cryptoria. I'm co-host Vivian. This is Xiya. Today's L1 sector is full of competitors. And we have Ethereum today, we have Solana, we have Sui, you name it.

I always respect the leadership of the new layer one protocols who embrace the competitions and bring in the innovation solutions into layer one sectors. So today we invited one of the innovators, Joshua D. Topkin, the co-founder of Supra. Hi, Joshua. Thanks for joining us today. And I'm very glad that we have you today.

Very glad to be here and happy Chinese New Year. Happy Chinese New Year. So, you know, because the hype of Deep Seek, right? So from now on, I actually asked Deep Seek about all the people we interviewed. So I asked Deep Seek about the fun facts of Joshua D. Talking. So there are, let me see, eight fun facts about you. Okay, let's start from this one. So Joshua...

Once you understand the work mechanism of a website at the age of 12, and then at the age of 22, you actually get into the software development. And prior to blockchain, you actually work in SaaS for more than a decade, which you actually participate in content digital copyright management, as well as food supply chain startups.

So Joshua, could you share a little bit more, elaborate a bit more about all this experience you had before you founded Supra? Yeah, well, I'm surprised that DeepSeek has that information on me. And also, I'm a big fan of DeepSeek. I've been using it a lot. I've been using chat a lot for content creation, ideation, creating presentations and such. And I do encourage my organization to... Supra wants to be an AI-enabled organization.

But yeah, my story, yeah, I mean, actually, I was around 12 years old when I first kind of had access to the Internet, had a computer for games before that. But once I had access to the Internet, I was very, very intrigued by it. And the first types of websites I was trying to create were on what's called GeoCities and really, really basic websites. And I was obsessed with it. I would spend hours on it all day trying to figure out how to make my own web page and

It was very simple, just trying to put up photos of my favorite bands or music artists. Back then I was trying to get into skateboarding and I'd have photos of just skateboards and just kind of things like this, stickers and stuff like this. And it was actually becoming a problem because I was so obsessed with it, my parents would yell at me to come down for dinner and I wouldn't want to leave.

I locked my door, you know. And then after that though, my parents thought that, you know, Josh, you're a little bit naughty. And they sent me to boarding school in South Korea.

In South Korea, I was in boarding school for about four years and they didn't have much computer access. They had very limited. I can only do email to communicate with my family. So there was a period there where I actually couldn't access it anymore. And nonetheless, after boarding school, when I went back to high school, I regained access to the Internet. I just always knew that this is going to be very, very important for the world.

And yeah, that was my early exposure to building on the web. Fast forward, after high school, I got a scholarship to study economics in university. And it was virtually a full scholarship, but I wasn't happy. In fact, I would much prefer to play poker. I felt playing online poker...

Yeah, semi-professionally, underage, going to casinos underage and playing at these poker rooms and casinos in the States. And during that time, I actually decided to drop out of college to do this instead. And during this time in my free time, I would try to understand how to build websites, how to make money online, did things on eBay, did things on

affiliate marketing and then I got introduced to something called rate back it's like cash back for poker players where you've played in the poker room you pay the room a rake part of the small fee every hand and

And rakeback is we would go to the poker room, say, hey, we have thousands of players and we can bring them to your room, but we want 50% of the revenue. And then what we would do is take 80% or 9% of that, give it back to the player and the difference with our business model.

So I did that from around 22 to I think around 26, 27. That was a very good experience for me to understand like how to run an online business. We became, I think, top 10 largest rakeback provider back then. It was called VIPRakeback.net.

My co-founder actually continued that business after me. I decided to exit it when online poker became illegal in the United States. So it was called Black Friday. And I felt like I wanted to apply myself to other things, new ideas that can generate value. Poker, there's a winner, there's a loser, it's zero sum. I felt like I wasn't really contributing the most to my potential.

My co-founder, though, at the time, he went on to continue to service the international market. And he did very well. And he was a poker prodigy, actually. I was 21 when I first met him. And he was 16.

and this is yeah and he was playing high stakes poker at levels at 16 years old that even today i've never played like he was playing very high stakes he was he was uh literally a poker prodigy and that was his poker handle his username was poker prodigy and he literally was and um the experience was was amazing uh i'm glad i went through it the poker experience is i don't recommend it in general it's not a

They say it's a hard way to make an easy living. But nonetheless, I learned so much about maintaining websites, international payments, inefficiencies. In fact, one thing eventually when I learned about blockchain that resonated with me was when I realized that there are a lot of middlemen, that there's a lot of opaqueness,

Like, for example, I used to complain to my co-founder at the time, my partner, that I feel like these poker rooms are not paying us out properly because our user base would grow, but our revenue would kind of not grow the same amount. And so I couldn't prove it, but I could sense it. There's like something wrong with the way that they're paying us out.

And that was a big frustration. But when I that's when I came across blockchain several years later, I was like, oh, OK, there is a problem in the world with middleman. And then blockchain can solve that. So along the way, yes, I did other startups in SAS. I did a lot of experimentation. I've had some projects that actually grew and kind of went viral. But I didn't have a business model. I didn't know how to sustain it. It was costing me too much to keep the service online.

but I did experiment a lot, got into digital rights management and got, you know, where it's about copyright registration. This is before I knew about blockchain though. And this is something I'm still passionate about and we'll probably continue to pursue on Supra. But yeah,

Also, in that time, I had a couple of SaaS products. One of them actually exists to today that still has customers, even though I don't pay any attention to it. And that's the power of product market fit, to have something that even though like seven years I have not been active on it, it still exists. It still earns revenue. Not a lot, but it still survives on its own.

And yeah, I mean, there's a lot of experimentation and eventually at this time in San Francisco, early 2017, hearing about Ethereum, I will admit when I first heard about Ethereum, I was not sold. I was like, this is a very slow database. You know, like, you know, when you're working in SaaS, you're focused on centralized control, single place to do everything, speed and high performance matters.

So I couldn't understand why you'd do anything with Ethereum until later I realized actually, oh, there is a middleman problem. There is, you know, there's a trust issue on the web, actually. And then at that stage, I actually put my startup, my SaaS products on automation. I hired teammates to run it. And then I went full time blockchain in 2017.

Wow. So how would you think those, you know, diverse experiences shape your vision for Supra? Since, you know, you already said that the first thing that drags you to blockchain is Ethereum, right? But after all, Supra is not built on solidity, right? It's using a different language to move, right? So actually, how would you think about those experiences shape your vision for Supra?

Yeah, I mean, 2017, I was determined to figure out how to scale Ethereum. It wasn't really part of my own thinking to start a blockchain. And I had some very interesting ideas that I got lucky about, which actually became the foundation for Supra today, seven years ago.

But I was just pretty much just trying to understand how to scale Ethereum. I knew that we were transitioning from proof of work to proof of stake. That was going to be happening. Back then, you know, Ethereum did not think about Layer 2s. They were thinking about a sharded protocol, a sharded blockchain protocol.

And that seemed like it could work. But anyways, I felt that there are different approaches to scaling blockchain. I studied it a lot. Pretty much every time my waking life between... I did consulting work just to kind of pay the bills. But any time between that, most of my focus was on trying to understand how to scale blockchain. And the inspiration back then was...

on-chain randomness to random sample nodes to do different tasks simultaneously. And that was the beginning of what we call the tribes and clans architecture.

Oh, I see. So remember last time when we met each other, we actually asked you because the first impression we had about Supra is you guys building Oracle, right? So now actually you're doing the L1, you actually explained to us what's the transition from the Oracle to L1, right? So if Joshua, we want you to explain Supra to someone completely different

no tech background or some newbie to blockchain. How would you explain? The simplest way to explain it to someone that has been in blockchain just a little bit of time but knows a little bit about the industry is to say imagine like Solana with Chainlink and then like Layer0 all in one. That's effectively what we're doing. Supra, our value proposition, our thesis is full vertical integration.

So layer one with Oracle price feeds, with the cross-chain communication protocol, single stack. And I mean, if you think about it, we talk about these world computers, right? These blockchains are supposed to be world computers, but these blockchains don't speak to the outside world. You need Oracles for that. And, you know, similarly, a blockchain is supposed to be a world computer, yet they don't communicate with other blockchains. You need cross-chain communication protocols for that.

So we envision a single blockchain that can do all that stuff. We think that a world computer needs to communicate with the world. It needs to communicate with other blockchains as well. And that's our point of view.

So I just grabbed some sites from the Sopras website, and I just find that you guys have the huge research team, really the huge research team. And for yourself, you also publish some research papers on the consensus and Oracle systems. And those papers are lead to the several Sopras innovations. So what are the innovations?

One question is why you guys have such a huge research team and how did those academic investigations influence Supra's architectures?

Yeah, no, definitely. We invest a lot in research because innovation comes from research. It comes from understanding what's been done. And also, you know, if you apply creativity to what's been done as well, you can actually innovate. You don't have to recreate, you know, all the research from scratch. It's actually important to study what the kind of academic literature since the 1980s

have already proved right and um the uh you know the what we've done here is uh

We talked about DeepSeek, for example. We talked about AI, ChatGPT, et cetera. These organizations are actually very much research-oriented first because then you can think through first principles and you have to have creativity to take the existing ideas further. So we think that in order to innovate, you do need to have a very strong research team. You need to study your competitors and you also have to know what's been done before,

because frankly, it's very unlikely that you can develop something that's better than what's been done before on very fundamental things like communication over the internet, which has been studied deeply by very smart people for decades. But still, there's always room for innovation, but that requires creativity. Supra's point of view, and you asked me about oracles. Well, I knew even in 2017 that blockchain with oracles was necessary. And in fact,

The original insight for us was, okay, I want to get randomness on the blockchain so we can randomly sample the nodes to do some work.

and do computation in parallel. But how do I get randomness on a blockchain in the first place? And I was like, back then I was very naive. I was like, okay, I need oracles. I need to pull in weather data. I need to pull in stock prices. I need to pull in all this information to create random, you know, on chain. So that was like, it was like, okay, I focus a lot on how do I build a blockchain with oracles so I can get randomness to achieve this random selection process.

And naturally, I also knew that, well, with Oracle, you can get price feeds. With Oracle, you can get randomness, but also automation. And then, you know, a couple of years later, it wasn't super obvious immediately that we needed cross-chain communication. But once it was becoming clear that we were going to be more than just Ethereum, that we were going to be entering a multi-chain world, cross-chain communication became the focus of ours as well.

And yeah, I mean, our point of view is it's really important to think through first principles and it's almost like the physics of nodes. Like there's nodes around the world. It's and you have to understand that nodes have to communicate

in a certain manner where messages are not dropped, you don't have what's called equivocation that you have, you know, these are distributed network problems that have been thought about and researched into for a long time. So it was very natural for us to think about studying what's been done before, understand these ideas from first principles, and use that as a basis on which we make our decisions.

meaning we were very clear about measuring every single hop of a protocol, like how many steps does this protocol take to finish finality? How fast can we do this in a distributed network while maintaining security? And that requires first principles thinking.

Cool. So you just talked about technology things. So let's dive in about technology innovation with Supra. Supra is quite different with other traditional blockchains. You guys innovated some concepts like the intra layers and some tribe claims architectures. So could you explain how this improved upon the traditional blockchain technologies or blockchain models?

Yeah, yeah, definitely. So once again, if you have, it's maybe useful to talk about the current status quo. The current status quo is a layer one for consensus, a different network for Oracle price feeds, a different network for automation, a different network for bridge, a different network for verifiable compute or encryption decryption, and a different network for storage.

So your application that may need to use those different services has to communicate with multiple different

disparate different networks, which actually adds latency. It's slower because you have to communicate with them. You have to wait for them to acknowledge that they saw your request. They have to compute their answer and just turn it back to you. And then it's also less secure because if your application relies on multiple different components that are different networks, your security is now the security of the weakest component.

And it's also cost more because now I have to manage multiple tokens and those tokens are fluctuating in value. And so we feel that a single network that can do all of these services is cheaper because one token only. It's faster because it's a single network and it's more secure because of the shared security.

So this is kind of our philosophy, and this will enable new use cases that you can't do elsewhere. So the combination especially of the following, which Super is making some major updates in the next couple of weeks here, but we already have Layer 1 smart contract platform with Oracle. The other updates we're bringing in are automation. I'm very excited about automation. In the Web2 space, it's called cronjobs, but blockchains don't have these cronjobs.

You know, they don't have this, you know, decentralized if this or that network and execute this periodically. And when you combine layer one with Oracle data, so smart contracts with Oracle and automation, you can enable new use cases you can't really do elsewhere. And there's a lot of exciting things, for example, automated liquidations. So if you have a perpetual protocol or some sort of DEX that uses Oracle data, you

and then you have a position that needs to be liquidated in order to keep the protocol solvent. Automation can deterministically determine

automatically liquidate in a transparent manner. So it's guaranteed execution and it's faster and it keeps the DeFi solvent. This is a combination of smart contracts with Oracle price feeds and automation. Another one, which I'm happy to share with you guys that we're exploring, we've never made this public really yet, which is this idea of auto arbitrage.

So, you know, we've heard of MEV, right? MEV, Maximally Structural Value. And there's toxic MEV and there's also healthy MEV.

Toxic MEV is when the node operators are colluding with other participants to reorganize the transactions or allowing for transactions to be front-run or sandwich attack. That can actually result in worse execution for the end consumer. That's what's called toxic MEV, and we have a solution for that. I'll talk about that just a bit here. Basically, the answer to that, our approach, is since Supra has on-chain randomness,

we can randomly execute those transaction order. So the execution order is unpredictable. And then, you know, it'd be kind of observer will say, well, if you're going to randomize the execution, then I'm just going to spam your block to increase the probability that my transaction lands where I want it to be. So we also have to add in a second component, which is localized fee markets. So if you spam, it gets very expensive.

So randomized execution with localized fee markets actually we believe will handle many toxic MEV use cases.

But there's also good MEV where you're going to do basically arbitrage and liquidations. You want to have timely liquidations. So to keep the protocol solvent, to keep DeFi balanced, you want to make sure that liquidations happen on time. So the auto liquidation fulfills that good MEV component. But the auto arbitrage is also important as well because the system itself,

at the end of every single block can search for opportunities where there's imbalances in these DeFi pools. And we have a design that we're working on right now where we have a decentralized treasury, right? We call it network-owned liquidity. It means the treasury is owned by the network.

that you can borrow from at the end of every single block and automatically rebalance the positions. But this can also be fee generating. So this is a fee revenue stream for the treasury. But what's really cool is what we will do, what we plan to do at least, is to revenue share. If this arbitrage opportunity was from your particular DAP, route some of that fee back to the DAP so the DAP has another revenue stream.

In addition to transaction fees, the automatic liquidations, which are also fee generating, as well as auto arbitrage through the automation network, is actually going to enable the network itself to have a new revenue stream that doesn't rely on MEV, toxic MEV. And we can revenue share with the dApps where this opportunity came from, as well as the node operators who execute it.

So node operators don't have to be focused on toxic MZ. This is another example of a wide vertical integration, a single layer one with automation, with Oracle price feeds, with smart contracts, cross-chain communication can enable new revenue streams and opportunities. And it's more fair, it's better execution, and it's better DeFi. So this is actually what I'm sharing with you right now is not really publicly known. And we're planning to roll this out in the next several months, just FYI.

Thank you for your insights. Yes, so Joshua, you know, most people in blockchain, they hear many things, right? Decentralization, security, and also speed, which in other words, EPS.

and in Supra's consensus mechanism is called Moonshot. So you guys claim that theoretically you can achieve 500,000 TPS. So I did some research now the fastest one is Solana, right? So 65,000 theoretical TPS and in reality I think they can only do like more than a thousand something like that around that number. So what

technological breakthroughs that make this super fast as possible in Supra. Right. So there's a couple of components that we have to digest and talk about. So first of all, actually Solana is considered slow. For Supra, for SWE, Aptos, we think Solana is slow.

So for example, Solana talks about 400 millisecond block times, but that's not finality. Supra routinely finalizes blocks under 330 milliseconds finality. Solana finality is actually closer to 10 seconds. And we can produce blocks much faster than that. So we view Solana to be actually slow. Aptos and SWE would also say the same thing.

So the AppSource Suite and Suprose, we actually have taken a very, very much a deep technical research oriented point of view on how to achieve these things. Now, how do we do it? It turns out, this is not obvious, but it turns out that the most expensive component for end-to-end latency is data dissemination. The speed of light limitations of distributing information, the payload to many nodes around the world,

There's limitations to this. This is why I'm talking about the physics of nodes, nodal physics, right? Because there's limitations there. So the data dissemination component is like 60% of the latency. Now, with the tribes and clans architecture, we realized that we can do the following. We can disseminate the data to the subcommittee, the random subsample of the network called the clan.

Okay, so the tribe is the whole network. A clan is a small random subcommittee. We can disseminate the data only to a subcommittee and require 51% of those nodes in the subcommittee to come to an agreement that the data is available. So we can achieve data availability proofs on the order of 150 milliseconds.

you have to prove that the data is available first before you can run consensus on it. Otherwise, you order the transaction through consensus. But if you can't have the data, that's a very big problem. You have to guarantee the data is available first.

So we can have several different clans simultaneously running. In the test that we ran, we had five clans running our data availability protocol. So the data gets disseminated to those clans first. We produce the data availability proof. Then we anchor it into a blockchain. The blockchain now is just the hash of the batch of information. So the data, every single, by the way, I should mention, every single node on Supra can propose a batch of transactions.

And then that you choose to create a data availability proof. Let's suppose the entire network is 300 nodes, for example. We only need 51% of say 60 or 80 nodes. So 31 to 40 nodes are enough as long as random sample to guarantee with high probability the data is available. Okay. Which means the whole system doesn't have to get the data propagated to each other in order to prove that the data is available.

We proved the data is available on the clan level and these multiple clans are running simultaneously and every single node can be proposing a payload. So Ethereum and Solana are talking about multi-leader designs. We're already doing this, you know, it's effectively the same thing. So how do we have these ideas? Once again, you have to do your research and study it and come up with some creative solutions.

The other component, you mentioned moonshot consensus. This consensus algorithm for its type of consensus algorithm, like the classical BFT algorithm, we believe that this is the absolute maximum you can take this while maintaining safety guarantees. And we have formally verified this, and we've also been accepted to top academic venues. So it's been peer-reviewed. So this is a very fast consensus algorithm.

But our blocks for consensus are small. Remember, consensus has to run on the tribe. Everyone has to, super majority is required of the network for consensus. But the block is small because the block only contains the hash of the batch of transactions and the data availability proof. So maybe it's only several hundred or maybe up to a couple hundred batches in data availability proofs. But the batches themselves, where the data is continuously being propagated throughout the network,

the batches, they can contain thousands of transactions. So, you know, every single node is producing batches of transactions, which can consist of thousands of transactions. That data availability proof only has to be, you know, created from like, let's just say 10 to, you know, like let's say 12 to 15% of the entire network nodes. Only a random subsample are required to guarantee with high probability the data is available. Then the block producer packs those data availability proofs and they hash the batch and

to everyone and we agree on the consensus thereafter and consensus is very fast. So just to be clear, when we talk about 500,000 transactions per second, that's throughput. Like how much can the system propagate data? And then consensus finality is how fast is the block reaching full ordering completion?

Okay. So this is how we talk about this. This is like in the academic setting, this is the way we talk about it. There's more to it, including execution, right? And you have maybe heard of other projects focused on parallel execution, which is great. And we do too. And we're going to, we actually have a major paper coming out soon on this. And we have some remarkable results for both EVM as well as move language, move VM. We have some great advantages in our approach for parallel execution that

The thing, though, is parallel execution from the end-to-end lifecycle of a transaction is maybe actually only 15%.

The bulk of the latency is from data dissemination. So we focus a lot on data dissemination protocols first, have every single node propagate the data to the subcommittees. And this is where the advantages come from. And I'm very confident that when you go to larger networks, 300, 400, 500 nodes, this approach and this technique, you're going to have extreme throughput and lower latency. There are other chains.

that are running DAGs, direct acyclic graphs, that are very very high throughput, low latency also. However, they suffer with performance after 150 nodes.

they don't go bigger than that. Not really. So this is why, and you know, you mentioned decentralization. We think the middle point, the nexus of high throughput, low latency with a lot of decentralization, aka more nodes, that's what we think is the sweet spot, which we're doing. So yes, there are other chains that do very extreme throughput performance and low latency very fast, but you're going to see it's 108 nodes, 148 nodes. There's not

They don't go bigger than that because the performance drops off very quickly. The latency goes up very fast after that. But we think our design allows for more nodes, more decentralization, while having more throughput and also still remaining fast. This is kind of what makes Super different.

I see. Yeah, actually, I read papers about this because all those theoretical TPS, like the reason why it's called theoretical is when it comes to practical, when the traffic gets busier, you can't or the train can't maintain the same speed. So actually, that's what you just talk about. That makes completely sense.

Yeah, it is theoretical, but we are moving towards to making sure our engineering and in practice is matching the theoretical. And the data that we produce are actually run on 300 nodes globally distributed. This test can be replicated, you know, so it's not just like, oh, it's just some random, you know, it's like, no, no, no, our PhDs ran the test. We can submit this to academic venues. They can check it. They can peer review it. They can confirm that this is true. So another innovation about the Supra is

that's make me very interested in because currently we know a lot of the chains especially layer ones they are launching the app chains a lot of the chains they call them app chains and for the Supras Supra use something called Supra containers and offers an alternative to app specific chains

So, Mano, what inspired this innovation and what's the problem is really so? What's the difference with the other chains called the AppChain? So Ethereum is going for this layer two strategy, right? And you have the Cosmos ecosystem doing Cosmos zones.

These are app chains. And then you have the Avalanche ecosystem doing subnets. And you have Polkadot doing pair chains. Now, in those worlds, you don't have composability. You break composability. And therefore, you also break shared liquidity. You don't have shared liquidity because they're different systems, different networks.

Yeah, that is why all the Ethereum ecosystem have been blamed by those. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm not a fan of the Layer 2 strategy. Remember, Ethereum was going for a sharded protocol and they pivoted to the Layer 2 strategy. It was an emergency pivot because Solana came out with high throughput and they needed to figure out how to scale Ethereum. So, you know, back in 2017, 2018, Layer 2 strategies were not a thing.

It was more like 2019 period where they started to discuss layer twos because they had to answer to the fact that Avalanche, Solana, these other high throughput phantom, they're coming out with a much more performance. The problem with layer twos and app chains also is that you break composability and therefore you break shared liquidity. In Supra's case, we're like, well, we scaled the layer one. We focused on scaling the layer one first. And these containers are almost like app chain experience.

where you can have your own gas token, you can set your own form of decentralized governance, you can set your own fees, your own gas fees, right? So for example, maybe this is a container where it's regulated DeFi, and super is so fast and so cheap that the transactions may be half a penny. But in your container, you can say this is going to be five cents

But that's actually 10 times markup. That difference is a revenue stream for your container. So a lot of folks want to have their own ecosystem. They want to have their own gas token. They want to set their own rules, right? And we provide that. But since these containers exist on our layer one, we can actually set access policies so containers can interact with other containers. But if you want to allow them to compose with each other and to have a composability, then you also have shared liquidity.

because it all exists on the same infrastructure. So this is as if it's a logical partition of the blockchain itself. It's still one blockchain, but you have your own container execution quota, meaning you have a certain amount of execution space that you can reserve for your container. And because they all exist on the same shared infrastructure, we have shared composability and shared liquidity. But you also, as the app developer, you can set your own rules, have your own cash token,

Set your own gas fees. You know, in the example I gave, that was a 10 times markup. So it costs super, you have to pay super's micro fee, half a penny, but you charge 5 cents, which is still cheaper than Ethereum significantly. And, but that's still 10X markup. That difference is your container's revenue stream.

So we have a big focus on sustainability, economic systems, and also revenue streams for these dApp builders. They can take that 10x markup, redistribute it to their token holders, they can keep it for their own treasury, whatever it is. But we think that this is strictly better than AppChains or Layer 2s because we have composability share liquidity. Moreover,

Supra has a singular fully integrated stack, layer one with Oracle, with automation, cross-chain communication, on-chain randomness. All the containers can tap into that capability as well.

Right now, if you're launching a layer to a sub chain or a subnet or a Cosmos zone, for example, you have to bootstrap a different external Oracle provider, a different bridge, a different automation service. And to get them to come to your chain is expensive. And the integration is, you know, it takes time. And also you have to bootstrap your own set of node operators, right? Which is, is also a kind of a challenge because,

But on Supra, you don't have to bootstrap other operators. You're using existing infrastructure. But you can still have your own gas token, set your own fees, have your own decentralized governance, decide who and what kind of applications are deploying in your container and who that liquidity can be shared with.

across the single layer one. So this is why we're convinced that super containers, which are going to still be, we're still working on it, maybe in about four to six months we'll be going live with them. But super containers, we believe, are definitely better than an AppChain or a Layer 2. Okay.

I see. So actually, I think, you know, when I read the documents, you guys there, there are loads of new that you guys created. So the last group of new terms I really want you to share with our audience, Hyperloop and Hypernova.

So I know these two terms represent a new approach to cross-chain communication. So Joshua, could you explain to us how do they differ from those traditional bridges in terms of security and efficiency?

Yeah. So, and this will also tie in nicely into your question earlier about intro layer. And so I'll address that in a second. So Hypernova, which we're going to actually rebrand it to Supra Nova. So Supra Nova, its cross-chain communication protocol is cryptographically secure. So right now, bridges are different network of nodes.

Our realization, it's super simple once you see it, is well, in the proof of stake world, to register your node, you have to put up the stake. So your public address for your node is known. And anytime you have an epoch change and you have new nodes joining or new nodes leaving, you have to have consensus on who are the active validators. If Supra has awareness of who the active validators are of the chains we interact with, we can just recompute and verify their consensus.

So we just check their consensus and therefore actually it's layer one to layer one communication. There's no bridge in between. It's layer one to layer one communication because we just recompute the consensus of the chains we interact with. So this is a very simple idea but very powerful because the security assumptions are not on a small set of nodes for bridge. The security is now cryptographically secure.

This is the hypernova approach. Now, in the world of layer 2s, though, where you don't really have the active validator set, there's some restrictions. So hyperloop is a different design that addresses mostly layer 2s, bridging to layer 2s.

That's a little bit closer to the existing kind of bridging designs. However, we have proven and we have a strategy that is what's called game theoretically secure. So it's not worth it for the bridge nodes to collude or cheat. So Hyperloop is a game theoretically secure bridge. Hyper or Supra Nova is a cryptographically secure cross-chain communication protocol, layer one to layer one, no bridge protocol.

Now, Supra has this intro layer. This naturally allows Supra to be this middle network. Intro means within, so a network within other networks. And with layer one smart contracts, with automation,

cross-chain communication and Oracle price sheets, we can actually facilitate cross-chain DeFi. We can have awareness of what's going on in other chains. We can have cryptographically secure communication and we can have automation to decide to implement different strategies based off of various conditions. So Supra becomes this middle hub coordination layer across multiple layer ones and layer twos over time. So that's the vision for Supra's intro layer.

Wow. So we just go through a lot of the details about the technology details, that's including the auto arbitrage that's of the MEV problems. And we also talk about the intra layers and all the crushing the super looped and also the super containers. And let's move to the vision sectors.

So we know Supra has been backed by the high profile VCs like Coinbase Ventures and the Galaxies, all of the big names. And definitely you, Supra definitely will solve some layer one problems. Otherwise you won't convince them. So would you mind explain what's currently real challenge addressed to the Ethereum or the Solanas and how the Supra is going to address those challenges?

So Supra is a new type of blockchain that has more functionality. And this enables new use cases that you can't natively get on Ethereum or Solana. So first of all, the blockchain itself, the algorithms are faster. But in addition to that, we have very fast protocols for Oracle as well, so price feeds. So we can have Oracle data every single block. Right now,

If there's congestion on Solana or Ethereum, Oracle data price updates don't necessarily land. They don't necessarily get included in the blocks because it's a different system. You have to submit it like a transaction. If there's a lot of congestion, that Oracle update might not make it in. But we are enshrining this so that data always makes it in. This is important for DeFi so that things are always fresh. The data is always fresh.

Big problem actually in Ethereum and Solana for toxic MEV. We have MEV resistance strategies. And then also in addition to that, using the automation network for automatic deterministic transparent liquidations, as well as auto arbitrage keeps DeFi very well balanced and healthy. So we think that this is ultimately going to result in better execution quality.

which means the end users consumers actually get what they think they're going to get. Right now, that's not the case on like these other chains. And so we think that this will be very beneficial for the end consumer.

Now the Dapps also, we think, especially through this revenue share model that we discussed, through revenue sharing, the liquidation fee, revenue share, the auto arbitrage, and of course just their normal transaction fees and these Dapps can have their own token as well. We will open up new business models for them so that they can do, just have more revenue sources. But also the Dapps can do more things with Oracle data and automation and cross-chain communication.

So it's going to open up a new type of application. Like today, we call them Frankenstein. Internally, we call them Frankenstein DApps. It's Frankenstein because you have a DApp on this layer one, layer two. It has to communicate with an external network for Oracle, a different network for bridge, different network for automation. It's slower, not as secure, multiple components versus what we call super DApps. A super DApp is a single chain DApp.

our dApp that's on a single chain that leverages the internal capabilities of that chain for those price feeds, cross-chain communication, automation, on-chain randomness.

And this would just enable a better user experience for the end consumer in the end. But also the dApp developers are going to be thinking of new things that are just not possible elsewhere. So Supra at large is a general purpose blockchain. We are going for the vision of an actual world computer. Remember, these other blockchains don't communicate with the world. They don't communicate with each other. They don't have automation. These are obvious things that these blockchains need to have.

It's obvious in retrospect, like everyone's going to in the future, everyone's going to be like, of course, these blockchains should be able to do this stuff. But the last era, like actually Ethereum and Suwana, they're considered previous generation blockchain. And we're doing something that no one has done before. And it's also very obvious that this makes sense.

So we talk with some founders about how they get funding. And some of the founders, they just think, okay, I'm in this industry for a long while, and I see some pain points from this industry. And I got a team. I got some talent.

So when I pitch to the investors, it's quite easy because the investors know that you are solving the emergent and the heat and the firm problems of this industry. What about you? So they got funding very easier. When they pitch in their project and the VC always say, yes, that is good. That's that talk about deals. So what about you? So what's your experience about convincing those big names to invest in Supra?

Yeah, I mean, I think to be completely transparent, it's not easy. You know, it hasn't been easy for us. I mean, yes, we got some wonderful names like FTX and 3AC also invested in us, which we're working to refund them. But, you know, you actually, I'll tell you my experience or our experience. So first of all, you will get a lot of no's. A lot of people will say no's.

Still, and you just have to say, well, you know, keep it respectful because they may want to change their mind later. I have had VCs change their mind later. So it's important to not be rude to them and to say, I understand maybe the VC doesn't have money right now, but they cannot say that by the way, right?

Right. They will never say that. Or maybe the VC, you know, are still raising their next fund. Right. For example, they're just they haven't closed yet. Maybe they didn't think that you guys were capable and you prove yourself over time to be capable. Or maybe they just had the wrong impression or they didn't realize that this is so important. And then later they find out, oh, actually, this is a segment that is important. It's emerging. Let's revisit that conversation. So, first of all, we got a lot of no's.

Now, what we did, so my co-founder, John, the current co-founder of Supra, we set up a crypto lab in 2018. So I actually set it up in San Francisco in late 2017, and we became partners after we met at San Francisco Blockchain Week in 2018.

And at that stage, we set up the crypto lab. And this is like 2018 bear market. No VCs wanted to even take a meeting. But we kept on going because we thought this was important technology. We were very excited about it. But it was very difficult. And we had to survive on our own. So we survived by doing consulting for other projects, writing white papers for other projects, building prototypes for other projects.

We also did a collaboration with a food supply chain company. There's an IoT company in Taiwan called Adventek. They were cloud experts. They were IoT experts, but they had no experience with Web3. And we taught them about Web3. We built the first prototype to get IoT data onto blockchains. That experience also opened us up to becoming better at understanding the Oracle problem.

So we kept on grinding. We did prototypes for other things and we had these kind of early pilots with larger organizations, step by step by step. It took years. We didn't really get any funding for three years. So we had like two small angel investors.

And I didn't take a salary for that period. And John barely took a salary. He just had to take what he needed for his family. At least I was single and living on my own while I had a girlfriend, but I didn't have many expenses. And I also had the SAS products. I had some revenue, but I didn't really take a salary for three years. You got to, it was that, it was that kind of difficulty. Now, when we started to, you know, um,

like really have the breakthrough in the concept behind our Oracle. And just so you know, when we pitched these investors, we told them actually we're a layer one, but we're going to market as Oracle because at the time there's really only Chainlink. There's less competition. We're a layer one with Oracle, but we're going to focus on Oracle.

And we focused on Oracle for three years. But we told investors we're going to be a layer one before TGE, Token Generation Event. We're going to tell the world we're a layer one, actually, with Oracle. So the way it worked was we started smaller. You can call it tier C, not tier B, or tier three investors, like angel investors. And we said, OK, we will consider your investment. This is also starting to be DeFi summer and bull market again.

So we got introductions to some smaller investors. We said, we will consider your investment, but we want you to introduce us to X, Y, and Z. So your tier three, introduce us to like five tier twos, you know? And then if you make the introduction, we'll let you write a check-in, you know, at the early rounds.

And then we kept on doing that from tier three to tier two, tier two to tier one. And that's how it worked. So some of our earliest investors, they got angel checks in at very early valuations, the seed valuation, same valuation as the bigger names, but they had smaller checks once I got after season. Yeah. So basically though, that was the process. It was along the way still, even a lot of angels said no. But it did help that our collaboration with

AdvenTech actually led us to be entered into a cold chain logistics program. So cold chain is like food supply chain for food, right? With Walmart. So Walmart China invited us in to participate in a competition there and we were finalists.

So that gave us some credibility. And then we started talking to angel investors, many nos, many yeses actually as well. And then from there, ask them for introductions. And from there, ask those guys for introductions until we got to the tier ones. So that was our process because actually we were not well connected in ministry. I didn't know any top VCs. They wouldn't even take a meeting in 2018, 2019.

So yeah, that was our story. And basically the answer is we are not one of those stories where it just was just like that. So easy. We just walked in and then here's a check. It was only towards the end. Like, um,

I have one story. It was actually 3AC that got a little bit angry or agitated with us because we kept everyone in our seat around the maximum they can invest a certain amount. And they were a little bit agitated. This is like a small check for them. They're like, can we get more? We want more. And we're like, I'm sorry, we can't. But other than that, most of the time it wasn't like, take my money. But once you go and get one decent name,

The other tier start to say, okay, let me take a look at it. Once you get a tier one, and then it starts to get a lot faster to get the rest. But then remember in a bull market, the startup and the founder has leverage. In a bear market, the VC has leverage. And one of the things that we did was we didn't accept too much too soon. So no single investor has more than 0.9% of our total supply.

So we don't have a single investor that has 5%. No, no, no. So we capped them off. Now, I'm glad we did it, but also it comes with trade-offs. The trade-offs are in the bear market when we needed funds because we didn't know exactly how long the bear market was going to run. They didn't want to invest anymore.

Because they're like, no one was really investing. It's really hard to invest, get investment. So even after we already had big names on it. So be careful with that. Don't accept too much from certain parties because you can get really in balance, but also don't raise too little. So I would say this industry is so cyclical, ups and downs, right? Ups and downs, ups and downs. When there is money on the table, accept it from the right partners. Don't accept it from everyone.

Don't accept too little. Don't accept too much. The game is about survival. You have to continue to grind. Actually, during the last bear market in the last couple of years, the last few years were really tough. And it was very much touch and go. There was many times where we had less than three months of runway.

It was like constantly for the last two years, only three months of runway, you know, and it was just, but you have to be able to handle it. You have to stay calm. You have to be clear. You have to focus. You have to deliver. You have to execute. I don't recommend taking the path we took, but at the same time, I'm happy we did. But yeah, that was our story. It's so pressure though.

It's a lot of pressure. Oh, yes. A lot of pressure. And that's why you actually have to believe what you're doing. You can't handle the pressure otherwise. So we totally believe this. So it was very stressful. But at the same time, we made it through because of belief.

You believe and then you push on forward and you have a breakthrough. Then you can talk about the breakthrough, showcase it. For example, our Oracle data today is finalizing 600 to 900 milliseconds. We believe for this type of decentralized Oracle, this is the limit. You can't go faster. We actually believe this. But our first version was two seconds.

That was pretty good, better than our competitors. But we've optimized it since then. So you got to keep on shipping and make a breakthrough. And then you still struggle, but you have good ideas. And that's the thing. We were fueled by our creativity and our ideas. And we knew that this should work theoretically. Let's just make it. Let's prove it. You prove it. They can have another conversation. It gets more interesting to VCs. They see that you're still alive. And many times I've had some of our VCs says, you guys are still alive because a lot of their projects didn't make it. They didn't make it right.

And that's why I would say the number one trait in a founder and a team is persistence and ability to handle the pressure. And I'm glad that I've gone through that. I'm glad that I don't have to do that again. It's one of those things I'm glad I went through, but I don't want to do it ever again.

Yeah. Last time we talked with the 1inch co-founder Sergey and he just said before he founded this 1inch because the idea of the 1inch is when he doing the hackathon hackathon that's right yeah hack

and he just said before he funded the one inch and they just keep competing on the hackathons and just for the bonus just for survive and they just keep doing it for the hackathons and for the revenues for the living and until the one inch has been really the product that a lot of people using it so i think that is that is how entrepreneur doing that is entrepreneurship though

That is. And, you know, to pull the strength to do it, you actually have to believe. That's why, like, the folks that struggle a lot, you know, even Suwanna. Back then, I remember I was in San Francisco with a meeting, and I was meeting someone well-known in the tech community in San Francisco. And the meeting right before my meeting was with – he was meeting Anatoly.

So I got to say hello to Anatoly and many folks don't know this, but Suwano was very close to not making it. No one wanted to invest anymore. Even Multicoin was like, we're done writing checks. Right. And I saw his stress and I was surprised. Like, really, you guys were like, you know, I could just see his stress and

And so the story of Solano was actually a very close call. They had a very difficult journey also. And I think, however, that's how the best founders are made. You don't just get everything on a silver platter, you know, because then you start to think, I deserve this. I don't have to work so hard. Like, I want you to just give it to me, you know, versus like, no, you push, you keep on making innovations. You know, you do whatever you have to do to survive.

So a lot of respect to Anatoly and Tawana. But the truth is, my understanding is they almost didn't make it. In fact, their node operators, the validators had to pitch in to make it through their last funding round to get to their token generation event. So yeah, I mean, I see a lot of parallels for us. We did not have it easy, you know, and at the same time,

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. So talk about the survive and the fall all the chains. We all know the layer one sector is full of competitors and it's really high competition. But currently we have the layer twos and we have the old app chains and we all have the one scenarios. That is a lot of the block space over there, but no one use it. A lot of the cheap block space over there, but no one use it.

If no one uses it, then we don't need to talk about the speed or the space or sort of the things. That is all off the table. So how do you think that currently everybody talks about mass adoptions and we want to bring everybody outsiders on chain? So what's Supra's next step? So Supra has a...

integrated i can see everything's and they and the supra want to put everything's into the supra chain but how the supra going to bring in the real users into the supra ecosystem well it's going to be about attracting developers who create great products now these developers are going to be able to build things on supra you can't build elsewhere so for example there's a project we

We already have over 200 projects that have signed MOUs that express interest to deploy on Super when they're ready. Right now, we have about, I think, actively about 40 projects about to deploy in the next... This month is a big month for us in March and April also. Some of them are just finishing their audits right now.

So they are doing things on super that they can't do elsewhere because they need high throughput. They need low latency. They need Oracle data. They need cross-communication. They need automation. So, for example, one project is trying to be a Stripe competitor, Stripe, right? So payments. Now, blockchain is really good for payments because fees are very cheap. You know, Visa is like 30 cents plus 1% or 2%, right? So there's a whole world that's sub 30 pennies, 30 cents worldwide.

that blockchains can facilitate. And to do subscription management and invoices, you may need automation for this as well. So that's why they're choosing Supra because they want to do payments, but with automation, they can do subscription. They can compete with Stripe and be much cheaper and faster for settlement than Stripe. This is an instance of where this technology stack can out-compete the Web2 opportunities. There's also a...

This is really cool too. So, Supra is with our layer one smart contract platform, price to Oracle data as well as automation. And allow folks to create almost like on-chain bots. Meaning, here are the various conditions, automatically trade and execute on a block to block basis this strategy.

Taking inputs from the Oracle data feed. We're talking about, you know, getting things like technical indicators through our Oracle onto on-chain. So your automation strategy can say, for example, if the interest rate cuts from the Fed are this high, do this. Or if they're below this, do that. You know, if it's too high, convert my assets into stablecoin. And then later, if another technical indicator is saying it's some other signal or maybe even sentiment analysis,

is a certain level, buy back my asset. And this can be done through almost like launching bots. These exchanges have bots for these strategies, but no one has this for decentralized infrastructure. This is going to be really exciting because retail can create their own strategies, deploy it through automation network,

and do on-chain deterministic low latency strategies, trading strategies. So it's almost like on-chain bots. It's the closest thing you can get to on-chain AI. You know, it's not actually AI, but it's automation using Oracle data for triggers for your strategies. That's something that we're really inspired by recently. And we hope that this can be rolled out in the next year

Let's say automation is going to be rolled out on test that in about a week, actually about a week or 10 days to mature and to allow more sophisticated strategies. We're very excited about this. Our version two of automation is going to be profound. And what's really cool is that these types of strategies are continuous. They continuously run, which means that they have to continuously burn super gas. We actually think automation transactions may be more than just natural organic transactions because these are continuously running every single block continuously.

So we think this is going to be interesting. So our answer is Supra stack is actually going to enable new things you couldn't do elsewhere. And we think that with also better execution quality and less MEV, retail over time is going to prefer to do their DeFi on Supra. And of course, Supra being high throughput, low latency, access to Oracle data, on-chain randomness, cross-chain communication, this is still good for every category. DeFi sure gains

GameFi, SocialFi, they can all these categories benefit from a fast change with Oracle data, cross-chain communication, you know, very cheap fees.

So I'm excited about this space. I think obviously the low hanging fruit are like payments, you know, stable coins. But there's going to be a lot of really, really cool things that are going to be done on Supra. The Dapps builders are going to create these new things. They'll bring the retail users. So I'm very excited about what's coming up here. This year is going to be a big year for us.

Right, actually I got a follow-up question. I need to be honest, I'm sure it may be a bit spicy. I need to tell you two things, right? So the other day when we talked with our mentors and we

We tell him that, oh, you know, actually we will have an interview with Joshua, the co-founder of Zubra. And our mentor, like pretty surprised, and he asked us, has the project focused on Oracle? Are they still active in the market? You know, that's the first things I want to share with you. Other thing is, because at that day we participated in the MoveCon, right, in Shenzhen. We were invited by the Sui community. And, you know, the Sui are there to support.

movements there, they just raised a big round and a super high exposure now in APEC. And I can hear some people say, what's Supra? What is this guy doing? L1? What kind of L1? So I just want to ask you because Vivian just mentioned that you get big names, so you receive checks from big names. Are those just misconceptions from the retail investors or normal people that you didn't do much

in terms of your marketing strategy, or actually you're preparing something big that you want to make a big blow to the market that can let every single one remember Supra.

Yeah. So who is the person you mentioned in the beginning? Mentors? What is this? Who is this? Our mentor. So our mentor. Mentor. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So he knows exactly your guys at the first place doing the oracles. So that's the thing. Yes. He's a British, yeah.

Got it, got it. Yeah, well, there's about 160 dApps on other chains using our services right now in mainnets. We're not focused on Oracle, we're focused on Layer 1. But we also do have like 160 dApps on other Layer 1s and Layer 2s using our services right now on mainnets. We are not trying to focus on Oracle because it's a smaller segment. But actually, us servicing all these chains is actually a way for new dApp developers to get exposure to Supra.

A lot of folks are coming to Supra because they're using our Oracle on some other Layer 1 or Layer 2. So this is a quiet strategy, but it's working. The other things that folks might not know is we actually KYC'd half a million people for our airdrop program.

512,000 verified KYC users are part of our airdrop program. So it's like a lot of people know about us. They're just not loud on crypto Twitter. So it's like there you can look at our on-chain metrics for a launch. This is actually a world record for a layer one launch of that many verified token holders. Right. You know, the good news is that if no one knows about us and we're doing OK already,

you know, then what happens when everyone knows about us? And what's really going to be happening very soon is we're rolling out the automation and crossing communication like next week and within the next two weeks on test nets at least, then another 30 to 45 days before we go to main net. But we have something that you can't do anywhere else. Then that's where folks are going to be like, well, actually,

I mean, I'm not trying to say anything bad about movement, but like what's special about movement? There's nothing there. I mean, don't get me wrong. They're very important for the move ecosystem. We're actually the third move chain to ever launch. It was Aptos, Sweden, and Supra. They're one.

And but so they are excellent at bringing attention to move. But under the hood, I mean, I think they even launched without a network, you know, so does this make sense? You know, I mean, is there any innovation here? I don't know. You know, I think maybe they'll just borrow ideas directly from Apple's.

But nonetheless, I do agree that our marketing can be better. And this is part of the reason why we're speaking to you. We're about to be sponsoring some major events and conferences in the United States. I'll be in Hong Kong for Consensus presenting Super as well. And we'll be hitting the podcast circuit soon. But the thing that I'm mostly focused on is not just hype. That will come. But that will come when we can prove there's things you can do on Super you can't do elsewhere.

So, yeah, I mean, a couple of stats. We have 512,000 KYC token holders, right? In addition to our great VC names, we actually paid Web2 on Fido for this. You know, like we paid them like, you know, 80, 90 cents per person. We actually paid for this because we wanted to make sure our token was distributed to many, many people.

And we have folks from over 60 countries holding our token. And we capped no single country like Vietnam, Indonesia, India. There are caps to like 50,000 people maximum. So we have a nice distribution as well. We have around 160 dApps today using one of our services on their respective layer ones or layer twos.

Behind the scenes, we're powering it like it wouldn't work without our Oracle price feed or on-chain randomness. And then we also have over 200 dApps that are looking to deploy on Supra step by step. Now, I guess we didn't mention this, but we are multi-VM support. So we went to market with Move Language. EVM is about to go on to staging net next week as well. So we have a lot of things we've been pushing for step by step.

So, I mean, I would say that the best is still yet to come for us. You know, imagine what happens when everyone knows about us and they realize, oh, wow, I can't do this thing without Supra. I need Supra to do this particular functionality, at least in a unified manner. Lower latency, faster, cheaper, more secure. Yeah. You know, actually, like I'll go to events in Japan.

Thailand, in Hong Kong, in United States. People know us. We're just not part of the cool kid club yet. But it'll happen. I feel very confident that it'll happen because there are some incredible things that we're about to enable and bring to market very soon that people are going to be like, oh my gosh.

That makes sense. And one last thing I want to mention, this trend towards vertical integration. We're the first to do this and see this, and we designed our system for this. But EigenLayer, they're bringing in vertical integration on top of Ethereum through restaking. Restaking can work on SuperEd. We have some good connections at EigenLayer, by the way. The founder is a good friend of our chief research officer. Oh, yeah, yeah. The founder of EigenLayer is a good friend of our chief research officer from like six years ago.

Yeah, because they're both professors, right? So they know each other from academia. So we have good relations with them. Of course, their use cases are like Oracle, on-chain randomness, bridge, right? But this is still not necessarily a unified network. But still, through restaking, it's a vertical integration of these services on top of Ethereum. Now, SWE is rolling out the bridge.

Aptos is rolling out their on-chain randomness. Everyone's going to start to see, oh wow, if there's enough compute and bandwidth available, the singular shared network for shared security should do more than one thing.

So we're actually the leader in this. And by the end of this year, it'll be obvious that vertical integration makes sense. Technology generally goes towards vertical integration. The iPhone moment, right, is a vertical integration of large screen, GPS, compute, storage, Wi-Fi, one device. That's an instance of vertical integration. And the same thing is going to happen with blockchain. It's just going to take a little bit of time. So, yeah, I mean, look, I want to be careful about what I said about movement.

I'm very impressed with what they've shared, but under the hood, I just don't know what it is. But it's important for the Move ecosystem. Move is important for Web3. And so for that, I'm grateful for their contributions. But, you know, I would say...

the Aptos suite and Supra were the only ones that I know of that have been able to get accepted to top academic venues through peer review process. I don't think movement has anything there. And, uh, this is the benefit though of, um, this is the benefit of taking a first principle approach to solving these very difficult problems. So, uh, I would say the future is bright for us still. It's just the beginning. We've only been on mainnet for about two and a half months, you know, and, uh, uh,

We will be investing in marketing, and I think folks will hear a lot about us soon enough.

Yeah, I do believe that a team, the team like you can survive in the bearish market. And you definitely, and I believe 2025 is definitely the big year for the Supra. And we hopefully we can have you like in the quarter or in six months that you can update us about how the Supra is going and the Supras. And yeah, what was the Supra's update?

So I do have the last questions for today's interview because our audiences, we have the builders and we have the investors and most of them are in Asian. And so, and I met Supra team actually in Shenzhen on the last movement con. So,

Can I say, and I believe your colleague just said this is Supra's first time to participate in the Asian event. So is that means that Supra going to have some marketing or event or the activities that happens in the Asia? So what's your expectations for Supra's growth in Asia and what opportunities that our audiences like the Asian builders and Asian communities can have with Supra's?

Yeah, definitely. So we actually did events in Korea Blockchain Week, Hong Kong Blockchain Week, Singapore Blockchain Week. And we've had in the United States last year with permissionless. So we're slowly but surely getting, you know, entering the kind of marketing scene. We have primarily focused on

R&D, research and development, because that's the foundation anyways, ultimately. And, you know, but moving forward, we are very excited about China. We're very excited about Asia, you know, Vietnam, you know, other regions here. We will be making sure that we are seeing more and we'll do more events and we'll do hackathons.

Builders, our website, we have it translated into many languages, Mandarin, Chinese, even Cantonese, whatever else we have.

Russian and French, I think Spanish. So we do, we have just pushed out these translations, uh, on our website and developers can take a look there. Uh, blockchain is a global international phenomenon. Uh, China is an important market and we do want to make sure we support builders there as well. Absolutely. So, um,

expect us to for example you asked us maybe in six months I would love to come back in six months to share updates with you guys and you know if you guys have events that you're looking for sponsors let us know especially if they're focused on developers we would love to sponsor them so connect us and you know I'll tell you this much we will do better with marketing but you know

At the same time, please help, especially in this region. But at the same time, I do want to mention that we're kind of like a quiet giant. We're there, we're just not loud. We have the most token holders of any Layer 1 launch ever in the world. It's a world record. Verified users. So yeah, there's a lot more to come. Yeah, you need to tell the story. Mark it like the numbers.

Yeah, yeah, we'll do that. We'll do that. Cool. Thank you so much, Joshua, to join us today. And I believe, wow, we took almost one hour and a half. So thank you so much to spending your precious time with us today.

Yeah, thanks a lot. And I believe our audience learned a lot from Supra because we mentioned Supra when we did the wrap-up after the movement con. But we never thought we can get you in our episode. And I believe this is a surprise of our audiences.

Happy to be here. Yeah. So thank you so much, everybody. And I think that's it. And thank you, Joshua. And have a great day. Bye. You too. Bye-bye. My head's swaying side to side. My lungs, they holler high to high. It brings the people out tonight. I need that swinging rhythm.

We're sunsetting PodQuest on 2025-07-28. Thank you for your support!

Export Podcast Subscriptions