Jon Kol from Hyperlane. Welcome. Thanks for having me, it's a pleasure to be here. Yeah, really appreciate you. I know you guys are really busy, which is a good thing. So I appreciate you taking the time to speak. Absolutely, it's always fun to do stuff like this, know, so I'm making the time. Amazing. Well, I wanted to go maybe start with a little bit of your background. You served in the Israeli Defense Forces, the IDF. I'd love to hear from you what lessons you learned that is helping you as an entrepreneur. That's a great, great question to start with. There's a few, I guess, know, I'll say, so in tech, a lot of folks are familiar with like Israelis that have worked in like the cybersecurity side. Not at all what I did, I worked at what they call like the engineering core or handasa in Hebrew. And it is nothing to do with like, engineering of software or of machines, it is much more about how do we get infantry forces from one place to the other. So you can imagine there's lots of obstacles in the way. Sometimes those obstacles are offensive and meant to harm you in the way of, you know, like, satchel charges, bombs, mines, all sorts of things like that. Sometimes it is like an actual logistical hurdle. So, you know, my father... He was in the proto version of this unit back in the early 70s and they had to get over the canal in the Sinai desert. They had to get over that. So that's the type of things this unit does and it's called generally path paving and you work very closely with other infantry brigades. So it's more like, guess, a combat experience, not that I did too much of that. So wanted to lay that context out there. But think the most important things that I learned and the real lessons that you can take away from directly to entrepreneurship is you have to be able to just deal with the adversity, right? You know, when you're in training and like you train to do like a stakeout, which might be 48, 72, 96 hours, and you're just there and it doesn't matter what the weather is like, it doesn't matter if you've run out of water, if you've run out of food, and you can imagine what the like logistics of, know, going to the bathroom are and they're very unpleasant. You just have to deal with it. And entrepreneurship is a lot like that in a way, right? you have a lot of circumstances that are out of your control and you just have to deal with them and you have to persist. You know, the unit's motto was striving for contact. And I find that like effective entrepreneurship is very much like you have to strive for contact. You have to like go out and be action oriented and find what is the action that is going to, you know, lead my organization in the right direction. And a few other ones that are like maybe worth mentioning are we, so the organization here, right? Like the core team behind Hyperlane, the development company that I run is a much smaller organization relative to the other major players that we play around with. And like today Hyperlane is, by any metric you look at is like one of the top two to three interoperability protocols. And it has raised less than one-tenth the funding of the other two players. It has a team that is, you know, at best less than one-fourth of the other teams, and in some other cases is like less than one-eighth. And being being scrappy and getting a lot done with a little, that's basically like what the IDF has been since inception, right? Like it's a tiny country, you are always outmanned. You always deal with resource constraints. I remember when American servicemen would train with us, they would be shocked at how we do things. So, if you don't throw away your magazines, you see an action movie and they're shooting and then, okay, cool, they're replacing, they throw away their old magazine. We never do that. You reuse it. You don't throw anything. And so learning how to do a lot with a little is definitely something I learned there. And like the, I don't know, maybe a sense of discipline, because I was definitely an undisciplined kind of shitty kid. And I was a lot, you know, I was very much that during my time in the service, but I developed a lot of appreciation for that later on and certainly try to bring it to the environment with the team here. That's really cool. You mentioned about obstacles that just pop up that are not in your control. Can you share one that maybe an obstacle that's not confidential, but just one that maybe you've had to deal with at Hyperlane? Ooh, let me think about which ones I could share. You know, I guess a common one, a common one is when, so we work very closely with partners. Like we build this thing, hyperlinks, an open framework for interoperability. anyone can take it anywhere and do whatever they want with it. But a lot of people, very much in the same way that you and I, if we wanted to launch some service on the internet, of course we can host it at home. We can have our own bare metal servers. But chances are, we're going to rely on a cloud service platform. And so in that sense, our development company offers a lot of services for people who are looking to use HyperLane. do it free of charge, we're very happy to help. So a lot of the chains that Hyperlane is on, we play a role in their operations, we help get it live. And so what's very common is to be in a situation where the partner has given you a set of instructions or has given you some information about what it's going to take to launch. And in that is, of course, a timeline. And so one of the things we do at this Developing Hub is we try to plan ahead so that we're on time for everybody. And a very, very common challenge is the changing, both shortening and lengthening of those timelines, sometimes leading to them overlapping. And of course, right, like... Well, you don't want that to happen because your resources are like trying to plan ahead to minimize, like to reduce the impact of that uncertainty. But like, okay, so you think this big partner is about to launch on the 25th and then they let you know, actually, sorry, we totally forgot or like something happened. We need to go tomorrow. And it's like, fuck, how do we deal with that? Or the opposite can be true where they're pushing it back, but now you have other people that are already scheduled for those dates. How do you deal with that? How do you shift into gear and dealing with that form of uncertainty, which basically requires you to pull through a lot more than you did? That is exactly the type of thing that military service will very much prepare you for. because that's like day to day if you're in any sort of like combat zone. There's just a lot of this type of uncertainty and like you can't take anything for granted. No, that's a really common one. I appreciate you sharing that. And with working with clients, I imagine there's the end-to-end, there's the integration piece, which takes a lot of development time and just hand-holding. then post-development or post-integration, there's a lot of the public relations, the marketing, all of that, which is probably just as important. Actually, maybe we can back up. we've got Hanukkah coming up and I imagine you'll be with family when your family members ask you, hey, Jon, like, what is, what are you doing at hyperlane? Tell us about hyperlane. How do you explain? you've asked so far. It's funny because like, know, obviously this also happened a lot like with Thanksgiving where it's like, you know, we're in year three, give or take of doing this and family members see him all the time. It's like my sister-in-law, brother-in-law. And they're like, so what does it do again? And I was like, well, so depending on how much they want to hear, my answer goes from, well, like, You know, at this most basic form, we build software that is like open source and then developers who, developers use it to like simplify their lives. That's like my most basic answer. And then they're like, okay, cool. Like maybe I know a few things and I want to learn a little bit more. And then it's like, okay, so, you know, there's these blockchains. Think of them as like permissionless servers where anyone can like go and build software on and do whatever they want with. And by virtue of... how they are constructed, they don't talk to each other. And so it's like, you if they're old enough, they're like my age or older, like, know, maybe 35 in a few months. If you remember early days of the internet, we all had a portal through our internet service provider and that was the only place we could go to. And if you and I were on different ones, we might not be able to see the same things. That's kind of like the state of crypto today. So our software helps connect those two things. I usually don't go deeper than that if they're not in the industry or not from a tech background. Boy do people get confused. So it was just funny that you mentioned this, because two of my aunts actually are here from Israel, and they're gonna be at our house next week, and inevitably this is gonna come up, and I have no idea how. And they're very curious, they're wonderful, wonderful ladies, love them to death. and they'll like wanna know everything and then there's zero chance they'll be like, okay, cool, that's super cool. It's kind of a good litmus test to, you know, be able to explain in simple terms what you do or what hyperlane is, but it's also really hard, right? And so I've thought about like, how do you explain bridges or interoperability protocols? the most common, one common way is to, know, there's these blockchains that are kind of like cities, et cetera. Now, Kyle Samani from MultiCoin, he, for some reason, he hates that analogy. But it's actually, I found it to be really, really helpful. And I'm not really sure. Yeah. like I guess our paths first crossed, we're both, so before I started Harpin Lane, I was a crypto investor and I used run the team at Galaxy and was like at a previous one before. our paths first really crossed after the first firm that I was working for. And, we met for dinner and shortly after that dinner, both of us became investors in like the first Solana. And I'll say he's like, he's definitely one of the most brilliant investors. in our industry. I didn't know that he didn't like that analogy. It's a shame because I really like it. And I think specifically for what we do, it is incredibly apt because it explains so much of not only, it doesn't only just help you make sense. of why this is necessary. It also kind of paints the picture for how things could develop. And so if chains are like population centers, you know, sometimes I use cities, sometimes continent countries, let's say let's stick to cities. So if Ethereum is a city, let's call it, it's New York City, it's the most populous single metropolitan area in the United States in this like crypto space. Well, at some point, because it has very, very meaningful physical constraints. There is only so much space on the island of Manhattan. There is only so much space between the five boroughs. And so at some point, if the city is engaging enough, if the culture and the commerce are so engaging that that population density increases, Well, you're going to get a lot of congestion. The same way blockchains are, you know, they by design constrain digital resources. We don't like the source of their innovation. think why they're so impactful is because they take what were, you know, plentiful and kind of like easily dispensed digital resources. And now they constrain them. They put providence on them. They put defined ownership on them. and they fix the supply. There's only so much room in a block, right? And that's kind of like the amount of land that's available or the vacancy in buildings. And so as you exceed that, well, now you need to do something about it, because people are still gonna want to deal with New York City. So what do they do? Suburbs and other areas around New York City become much more viable. And let's say in that Ethereum analogy, okay, if Ethereum is New York City, well, I actually live in Greenwich, Connecticut. Greenwich, Connecticut is sort of like, generally speaking, it's a New York City layer too. Half of the people who live there work in New York City in some capacity and do a lot of business in New York City. A lot of the culture that they consume is in New York City. The same is true for large parts of Jersey, especially on the parts that are close to the city. And so that congestion, just like unavoidable fact because of the constraints that are involved with this physical geography map very well in my view to blockchains. And so why did we make hyperlain the way that we made it is specifically because we see that these constraints are like what make blockchains interesting in the first place. So you can't really change them. You can't eliminate them without eliminating the key value proposition. And so all of us who work in this industry, we're spending like all of our life energy to increase the demand for systems that by design fix the supply. And so you have to have some form of horizontal scaling. And that's why we anticipated there's going to be an effectively uncountable. number of chains in the same way that is basically uncountable to count all the apps that exist in the world today, all the websites. And so we, to make any sense of that, you needed a way to connect between those cities, between those centers of commerce. Right? Like if you're building a new chain, you're effectively creating a new city and it needs connectivity to the other cities. Like if you're going to encourage people to move there or like conduct commerce there or like bring culture there, how do they get there? How do they do that? And so hyperlane is this connective tissue and was designed specifically for this world of an increasingly large number of chains, increasingly large number of cities that just meant to be like the easiest way to transport between them. No, that makes, I like the analogy. think it makes a lot of sense. Extending that analogy, you mentioned on X recently that hyperlane has connected 107 chains. Is that correct? Even higher today. No, how many today? I want to say it's like one sorry it's one so the 114 or 116 I have to have to check with the squad here That's amazing. Congratulations on that. Now, tell us from a growth perspective, why is that important to you in hyperlane? And how else do you think about growth? It's a great question. Maybe because the answer is not intuitive. That number in a vacuum is not important. It's only important insofar as there are people who are building these cities and that they want to have a way to connect with someone else. And so it is fairly trivial now. You're right, like with all the services that are available. Right, like all the amazing roll-up providers, like folks like Caltera and Gelato, right, like they make it trivial. Like you could go and you press a few buttons and you put in a credit card and you could have a chain running in minutes. So if that number in a vacuum was important, well, someone could just spin up all those chains and like, hyperlinks is permissionless so they could just deploy there. And that would make this number of chains connected, it would make it just go sky high. If there is no real effort to build something around those cities, to bring population there, to create some type of activity where it's commercial activity or just like cultural activity, like I want to go because I like the people. I want to go because I can get a job there. Then it doesn't matter. And so there's no perfect way to estimate this, but that number is again, you know, it's like it's a cool number. because no one else has done it at that scale. yeah, that's cool. But the cooler thing, the thing that we really think about more as like jamming growth will be probably a number that looks more like how much activity is between that 107, that 114, that what is soon will continually becoming a higher number. And there are kind of two ways to think about that. One is just like. There are messages that don't carry a value transfer, but they are still doing something important. Maybe they're minting an asset. Maybe they are like, we have an app that helps people earn yield between chains. That doesn't actually move money, but it moves information. And so either like the count of the messages or like to the extent that those messages are actually leading to some value exchange or value transfer, how much of that value is moving around? So those would be two like better numbers for us to assess how is this thing growing? Now, does hyperlane, does it distinguish between the types of messages, whether it's just a message without a value versus message with some kind of transactional value? Sort of, it sort of does that. It was kind of like an emergent thing. So initially we like, yeah, don't, we didn't seek to have that something that is like easily discernible. But then what's emerged is that folks wanted to move their assets between chains. And you know, like they could have done that without any type of abstraction from like hyperlink. They could have just used hyperlain out of the box and figure out how to do it themselves, but that is cumbersome, right? Like, why would you want something to be more cumbersome? And so then we built this like token transfer abstraction, which we've called warp routes. know, layer zero, you know, calls it like their, you know, OFT construction. So they're fairly, fairly similar, like pretty minor distinctions between them. And so now because of that abstraction, it becomes easier to see which transfers are like either of the warp kind and which are not. And it's not like super comprehensive because someone could still do what I outlined before where like they could say, okay, cool abstraction you got, but I'm smarter, I'm better. I can do this in a more like gas optimized way or maybe I have some like secret sauce that I wanna put into it. And so they wouldn't use that abstraction, in which case it would make it harder to delineate. But for the general case, we feel pretty fine with our ability to delineate. I think that's really cool. And it gives kind of a sense of the types of metrics and growth, how you view growth. Not only is it the number of chains and apps that you support or Hyperlane supports, but it's also the types of messages because not all messages are equal. Diggs, so glad you said that. That's so true, right? You could have someone, like, we see this every so often. There are people who test the system. And so they're like, OK, before I build my app on this, let me just try stuff. And so what they'll do a lot of times is they'll actually just send text. And some people think they're really funny. put funny stuff in there. And so I forget, basically someone like, there was one developer who clearly like was testing his thing. And every few, like he said, his system said like, every few hours, like send the messages to see like how reliable it is. And it was like snippets of, you know, like. a bad joke. Snippets of a bad joke. And it was like in five parts and by chance, like our developer was looking, one of our developers was looking like through the explorer to figure something out and he caught one of them and he's like, what's this? And then he's like, let's see what else is this, was this address sending through hyperlane? And then this is like a year and half ago. And then he was like, guys, you have to see this. And someone sent the raunchy bad joke. No is definitely very different than someone doing something really substantive. And one thing I should say on your point on metrics, one metric that I have become really, really interested in, it's like how many contracts, how many distinct contracts are interfacing with Hyperlane at any given time? And again, it's not perfect, right? Because within it, it would capture the people who are in production. but it would also capture the ones who are testing. And so I like think of it as it's not a comprehensive growth metric, but I think of it as it might be a leading indicator where seeing that metric rise might hint at growth in the other key metrics, which is either the volume of assets transferred or the amount of messages transferred. Gotcha. That makes sense. Now, speaking of these messages, does Hyperlane prioritize just an empty message like that raunchy joke, or if there's a message with a value attached to it, like I'm bridging 100 USDC versus a million USDC, does Hyperlane have some kind of prioritization approach to that kind of message? It does have some way to, so I there's no formally defined way to reason about like what is and isn't important. Because the parts of the system that actually do the message transport, what we call a relayer, which you could think of as just like a dumb bot. that looks at what we call the mailbox contract. That's the thing that you as a developer interact with. It's the thing that sends and receives messages between chains. And so once the mailbox, the relayer is kind of like the delivery truck. That relayer is really dumb. doesn't even know, not only is he prevented from opening the letters, whereas in the mail system, there's some legal recourse to say, don't open people's mail. Our delivery couldn't even open them if he tried. He's too dumb to do that. And so he doesn't know anything about what you're doing unless you create some type of standardization. It's the things on, it's the mailboxes that have like. more of a ability to intuit something about what you're doing. But it can think of who to process first and who to process later. And it does that through a fee system. so basically, if you did not put in any fee, you're going to be at the bottom of the queue, and you might not ever get processed. Because it has to pay. Same way that like the delivery car has to pay for gas and I go, it's funny. It's I didn't even think of that. Like literally the delivery car in this case has to pay for the gas on the other chain to process your message. So if you're not giving it anything, it's just not going to bother. That sense. that's, that's, it's really based on the user and what they're willing to pay to make the transaction go through faster or if it goes at the end of the queue or at the bottom of the queue. speaking, Hyperlane doesn't force the ordering. By default, it doesn't really force the ordering of the message. We kind of let the destination chain handle that. And it does not think about, OK, well, Peter's message seems super duper important and Jon's message is really dumb. So it doesn't put the priority system on that. kind of lets you, if I'm being really dumb with my message, but I want to pay a lot to get it through, it'll still get treated. So it's the value that you attach to it as the sender. So the user decides, that makes sense. Now in terms of hyperlain growth, I imagine chains are its primary customer. Yeah, we kind of have like two forms of what we think of as like the primary audiences. For Hyperlane, they very much evolved through time because if you roll back the clock three years ago and you're like, who's going to be the primary customer for something like Hyperlane? The answer I would have given you then is different than the one I would give you today and really for the past like year and a half. And so two primary variants, the first are of course, as you I think nailed it on the head, chains. The others are a specific subset of applications, what we generally refer to as asset issuers. These are applications where part of their product is a token. So think of a stablecoin issuer like Circle. Think of someone like one of the staking derivative or some of the decentralized stablecoin protocols. Those are applications where the product very much is a token, not in like the cynical way of like, the product is a token. It's, they literally have their product to be some type of token that is meant to be used by others. And because of that, they might have a desire for that product to be accessible on multiple venues, multiple chains. And so those two are the primaries. And a secondary is, in an application that has a direct need to access state and impact state on other chains. But three years ago, we totally thought that was going to be the primary. And the truth is there is just not nearly as many of those as people think. Yeah. I led growth at Harmony many years ago. And one of the, we had one specific application. So first of all, we, my focus was on growing developers. And, and so part of my work was in growth was also business development. And so I was able to speak with a specific application that's actually local to where I live to build on Harmony. It was DeFi Kingdoms. In DeFi Kingdoms, nobody knew at the... Yeah, nobody knew. be, that might be, I'll tell you, the, I don't know, even now, almost four years later, that might still be the MVP get in terms of one app changing the trajectory of one chain and the industry-wide impact that that had had. That's wild, I didn't. I'll tell you, nobody knew at the time. Like literally nobody knew. no one always, that's the thing I think that is so tricky about business development is you never know at the time. If you did know, something's wonky. And what I could tell you is I think there's a very good corollary for this in the work of people who are venture investors. It's almost never the case that the deal that everyone is chasing, that doesn't have any receipts is the thing that is actually going to do incredibly, incredibly well. It tends to be the one that almost, you know, that goes under people's radar and like you don't know, but you have a feeling, right? Like there's something about it. There has to be something there to give you that reason for you to believe, but there usually is enough there for everyone else to be like, I don't know. Yeah, no, exactly. It was really interesting because when DeFi Kingdoms came onto Harmony, we started seeing just lots of messages going across the Harmony bridge. And this was the locally built bridge that the Harmony team built. It was crazy. we, at first, we thought, is this like a lot of spam? What's happening? And... We were just overwhelmed. mean, people were just bridging their assets because they wanted to play DeFi Kingdoms. And we could it was just really, really a wild like six months. I really, can't, I, so like I've been in crypto since, I guess like, you know, it's been consuming all of my time since 2017. And in all of that time, I can't remember one, one app that was not, you know, like some form of an exchange that had as much. of the collective mind-share as DeFi Kingdoms had. It's pretty wild. Just thinking about it, somewhere in the order of 60, maybe two-thirds percent of the people I associated with at the time and still do today played around with DeFi Kingdom. It's remarkable. And really at the time we didn't appreciate how massive it was. looking back now, it's not doing so well now, but at the time, it, yeah. I, you know, think if you you were at Harmony, you've probably been in crypto as long as, as long as anybody. And how many sticky products can you count? And by sticky, would say four years of it being in like some leading position. I think you could count those, you know, on one hand, maybe two hands. There's not that many. Layer ones for sure. Applications would be, I can think of a couple, you know. right? Like it's basically, you know, like five, six, and like, yeah, it's very, very difficult. Like can say, okay, Uniswap, Aave. Short list. Yeah, exactly. Speaking of that short list, know, there's, know, interoperability is a, it's a burgeoning space, right? Everyone is recognizing that, you know, there's applications on other chains and assets and other chains that would be really beneficial if it were on our chain too. And so now these chains are looking at creating bridges or interoperability protocols in between. to incentivize activity from that app to their app or to their chain. How do you view customer or not customers, competitors, since there's a couple of kind of big interoperability players. I think, well, I guess we have great respect for everybody, right? For everybody we consider a competitor. I think the folks at Layers Zero have done a remarkable, remarkable job. And it's not a coincidence that they are currently in that top spot. A lot to learn from what they did. You know, for us, it's how do I say that without sounding like I'm dismissive? Because I'm very not dismissive at all, right? Like I think the folks at LayerZ, the folks at Wormhole, like, it's very difficult to have immense success that lasts more than like a couple months without you doing something right, right? Like, so I don't think it's coincidence. I think there is clearly like very talented, very driven, very hardworking people. I think of just like, know, in the sense of a world of many chains, like that's one thing that we kind of hit on. And I think the reason we were able to come from kind of like relative obscurity, right? Like our market share, you know, 14 months ago was zero, zero percent. And because there was some activity, but it was so small that if you charted it, you wouldn't see it on the map. You know, in that sense, it's very much like, you Very much like Israel, such a small country, it's fucking impossible to see it on the map. But, I guess, I guess, much like Israel, because of certain things about that place, it kind of got on the map. made a far, an impact that far outweighed, you know, it's like geographical command, or in our case, like... You know, we only raised about 20 million bucks. Compare that to the other two who raised like well over 250 each. We have a team, you know, the core team here is about 24, where like, again, both cases, substantially higher numbers. And I think what we've done is like, we're just, not to say that they aren't, but like here, very, very, very crypto native people, like I left Morgan Stanley years ago to dive into this industry and like, I believe in it, I put my entire life into it. And I was only gonna build something that is very, very much like crypto native. And what is crypto native to me? It means it's open source completely, and it's permissionless. You can do whatever the hell you want with it. And that means a lot of times doing not great things with it. And I think we were able to grow with respect to the competition because of that approach. So today HyperLane's live and in production on multiple virtual machines and with four or five more coming in the next few months. And almost all of those efforts are taken to near production. by a team that isn't the core team here. Why is that? Because those people know that with HyperLens, if they take the time to do that work, they can run it and operate it themselves. Because HyperLens is very much in open systems and that comes with disadvantages. There's a ton of disadvantages. for operating a closed system. One of the world's most valuable companies, Apple, operates an extremely closed system and that has worked incredibly well for them. And so I think of like, as our approach being a much more like Google-like Android-based one and the others taking a much more like, you know, Apple. iOS approach which is like everything needs to be controlled everything needs to be curated we're like fuck it let's crypto is messy and we'll have it open and anyone can do whatever they want and it's gonna create confusion sometimes gonna create a lot of discomfort sometimes but on net this is kind of like how we want to do things Yeah. Now you mentioned, so chains are one customer segment, apps are another, and then a subset of apps. These are applications with a token like stable coins. What other customer segments are there for hyperlane that we haven't talked about yet? Or maybe it's out there, but you haven't thought about it yet. Well, so I think the one that I guess, hmm, there are, I guess we increasingly think about end users because when we first started this, we were thinking, we are people who build for developers and we build for the developer's customer. So we have our customer, the developer, and then we are highly, highly, highly concerned with the developer's customer because they're our customer's customer. And what we have discovered since is that kind of by accident, and certainly I would say by accident because we did not do very well to try and like create the situation, we have obtained people who like are directly using, you know, hyperlinks as end users where like... They are just interface. So we are almost forced into creating this interface that combines a lot of hyperlane routes because affording that convenience to people is something that they've asked for repeatedly. So it's like by accident, we've developed a customer segment that is end users, which we certainly did not initially think that we would have. Three years ago, we definitely did not think we would have that. But I think there's a whole class of applications that doesn't yet exist in any meaningful scale that will, you know. I guess become more prolific in the next few years. Because if it doesn't become more prolific, it probably means the industry is not growing in the way that we want it to. And that is people who are basically building apps that don't really think of having a home on any given chain. And they don't want to have an affiliation with like, any given trade and they really are like what I used to call like shared state applications or like cross-chain applications. Those just generally do not exist today in any capacity. just, or maybe they do and I just don't know about it, but like we're not seeing that and I think a big reason for that. is because if crypto is now old enough and chains like Ethereum are old enough that you could have a five plus year long career as a software developer and have it all be in crypto. And that is a very fundamentally different environment for software than like just the broader internet because on a single chain, everything is synchronous and everything is atomic. And of course, the way the internet that you and I use is built is like almost nothing is synchronous and certainly almost nothing is atomic. And so if you've only been accustomed to that environment, like everyone was telling us like, yeah, we want to build an app that does this. And then when it comes to actually building it, like, hmm, this is really difficult. And so they've kind of given up on doing it. Yeah. And so if the industry grows and it attracts new talent that is not crypto native in the least, then I have to expect that these things will change and they'll bring their kind of know-how of how to build in completely asynchronous environments. So that's kind of why I say if this doesn't change, it probably means the industry did not grow enough because like... At a certain point, we're going to exhaust the pool of crypto natives to be more engaged and we'll have to get new blood that has no real interest in some of our crypto native motivations. And so I expect that will change. I think you answered this next question, but I'm curious what you think. A couple of competitors like Axelor, for example, they have a couple of proof of concepts with large banks, I think with JP Morgan and you with your background in investment banking. I'm curious what your thoughts are with these types of proof of concepts with large enterprises. Very dubious. I'm very dubious of them because I guess for multiple reasons. A lot of times organizations like that do things because they have the resources and they just kind of want to see is it worth doing. They want to be able to show and especially like these almost, know, almost 100 % of these types of enterprises are publicly listed companies and of course it's very useful for your c-suite to be able to hop on the next earning call and when presented with a question from some analysts is like Hello, mr. CEO There is a big craze right now in insert current thing in the tech sector You know, it could be today. It's AI 2021 it was crypto or you they called blockchain And it's very useful for them to be able to answer candidly and say, well, look, we are not, I can't tell you that we're betting the farm on this, but we think there's something there. And actually I can point you to this work that we're doing with this, you know, industry leader to show that my company, know, random fortune 500 company, random company listed on the Dow Jones, we, We are not being left behind in this wave of innovation. so I've been exposed to enough of these to know that like nine times out of 10, that's the motivation is to basically allow the C-suite to demonstrate to the public markets that they are not a bunch of Luddites and that they do experiment and that they are open to new things and they're open to new technologies. And because we live in a world now in 20th century, everyone's read the innovator's dilemma. There's no one in these companies who doesn't know who Clayton Christensen is. These people are aware. And so on account of that, I'm quite dubious. I would say to me, the first time where some of these POCs might turn into anything useful is really starting in the next year. And I think it'll come in the form of, we saw an announcement today about Deutsche Bank launching their own chain. like that to me feels substantive, right? Like what BlackRock's been doing with on-chain issuance, that's substantive. But a lot of what we've seen other than those are like, you know, it's awesome. I'm sure that there's like good intentions all around, but you know, for the time being, I think like HyperLang will continue to focus more on like crypto natives because the tough part about like expanding outside of it is that our industry is extremely cyclical. And the only people who don't leave are the ones who really care about this. Like the ones who are like, I am not leaving this industry until it dies. Yeah, I think that makes sense. Having been part of a couple of business development conversations with Fortune 500s and also proof of concept efforts, I can tell you that the sales cycles for those are extremely long and the actual proof of concept work will require tremendous resources from the project and not an equal amount of resources from the Fortune 500. And so it will suck resources from you and the upside may not be huge other than you could have some public relations announcement saying that Hyperlane is now partnered with XYZ, but the actual outcome may not be very substantive. Right, because again, so the way to think about this is like back to the earlier part of our conversation, you were like, that 107 chain number, like, it's pretty cool. And so like for most of these POCs, we basically get to increase that number. But I shared as well. That's, you know, that number is nice, but it only is interesting insofar as it impacts some of the other numbers, right? Like the... number of unique contracts that are interfacing with hyperlane, the message counts, the volumes. And so the vast majority, not all, certainly, right? again, what BlackRock is doing is very, very real. And I think it's very hard to argue against that. If that POC is only going to lead to a one-up and the chain counter, but not many one-ups in the other counters, it becomes less compelling. probably time, this next year feels like the time where you want to re-examine that, because if crypto remains strong by now, it might like... You're, you know, you are like innovation lab director at company XYZ. Well, you've been, you're probably like more senior crypto has like come and gone from your public consciousness at least three times in the last, you know, eight something years. You're like, third time's a charm. I'll give it a, give it a real shot now. Well, on that point, know, with the market seems to be heating up. Does that change hyperlane's priorities at all? No. Yeah, certainly not product priorities. So your North Star stays the same. Yep, because the thing that we really, just really, really care about, why did I leave a awesome, awesome situation at Galaxy working with people that I really liked? I loved working with Novogratz, still talk to him often. I'm going to see him on Monday, so like... I just felt like, okay, I'm putting my entire life into crypto. And at this point, it feels like the big bottleneck that's going to prevent crypto from scaling is like, we do all this work to increase demand, then we increase demand, and then the chains basically become non-usable for the stated purpose that we are telling this new demand that's coming. And so it seems very, very inevitable that we're going to need a vast number of chains, massive chain expansion. has to be a form of horizontal scaling, like how the internet's not built on just one server in someone's basement or somewhere underground. It's like a trillion small ones. And so it seemed like this is the only way to advance crypto forward. And I wanted to help in that advancement. And I wanted to accelerate that advancement. And so yeah, we are, that's all we care about is basically like how do we grow the crypto pie? And it feels like expanding from the center is the right way. Yeah, along that point or on that point, know, your priorities, you guys are steadfast, you still have a North Star, regardless of what the market does, bear or bull, you're still doing the same thing, you wanna grow steadily. How do you think about growth channels for hyperlane? Now, a lot of things in crypto is based on mindshare. Excuse me. And so when people are thinking of an Oracle, they typically think of, you know, probably chain link is my guess, but there's multiple Oracles that are probably just as good, right? And so how do you build mind share in your potential customer's mind? Because when I think of interoperability bridges or interoperability protocols slash bridges, there's probably, you know, maybe a handful that come to mind. And so how do you get more mind share so that these devs choose you? versus another one. That is the best question that you've asked me and perhaps one of the best questions that I've been asked in any setting like this. Surprisingly, guess, now that I think of it, it's shocking that it does not get asked more. You get a lot of the same questions all the time. So I'm now disadvantaged, right? Because I know what I think. but I don't know anyone who doesn't know it, I don't want them to know that. Fuck them, right? Like there's no benefit to me from them knowing that. That is like strictly bad for me for them to know that. So I guess I answer this unfortunately like cryptically. think, or sorry, okay so here's the thing that everybody knows and so like I don't think I'm disadvantaging me or HyperLin anyway by saying it. You have to basically think in kind of like terms of a network. And so like you've ever seen a network graph, it's full of edges and nodes. And some nodes are more influential than others. But getting those to care about you is much harder. The barrier to entry is much harder. Think of our conversation just a few minutes ago. Of course, you could pursue one of these enterprises. It's a massively long sales cycle. It tends to really only lead to some form of PR. Sometimes it leads to more than that. So there you have an example of like, okay, it's a large, large node. If it cared about you, it would make a lot of people care about you more. And you have to balance like, how much do you wanna spend after it? is how much you want to spend going after this thing and balance that against what do think you'll get out of it? Is it worth it versus the other opportunities you can pursue? so certainly one way to increase mindshare is basically get big notes to care about you. And there are many strategies for doing that. The one that everyone knows is you should just talk to them and see what you can do. And so that always works. I guess it works in the sense of if you are successful in convincing them, getting a large note to care about who's tried and true, it has never failed in helping accumulate more mind cheer. The other thing that everyone knows about, you just got to build something that helps people with a real problem. The main reason that anyone cares about hyperlane today is not because like... I tell funny jokes or because I'm an awesome dinner guest as I've heard many times or I make for a fun addition to a panel as the moderators like to text me afterwards. It's only, it's not because any of those things, none of those things matter. It's solely because there are people who have no other option but something like hyperlens. And that is only true because of the market dynamic that we were first to identify. So everyone knew there were going to be more than one chain. Not everyone anticipated. There's going to be, right? Like today, there's at least 300 chains of, call it, above marginal consequence. And that is way higher than what someone would have estimated in 2021. And on this trajectory, that number is going to be 10x within a few years. And no one else who was in the interoperability space was building for that type of market reality, except for us. Maybe another time I could tell you why I had that insight. And I remember even coming back to the team and telling them, this is exactly what we have to do. This was a few months after we formed the company. And that was not the path that we were on. The path we were on was much more for these cross-chain applications. And I just came in, I was like, hey, we have to do this. I'm telling you, I feel it in my bones. And they're like, this is, are you sure? This is kind of dumb. And what ended up happening is that I was kind of right about that. And then those people, like, it's very difficult to serve in a very large number of chains. That's why there's not that many other protocols who are even close to the 100 chain number, even though the number of chains is much larger than 100. And so. continuously providing something that gives value to someone else who has no other, they must have that type of value and there's no other way for them to get it, that's the best way to increase your market share. It's the one that should be the most known and the most intuitive, but it is not. Yeah. No, I, I, I distinguish between mind share versus market share because mine share is, you know, you can think of some projects out there with a lot of mind share, but, but they don't really have a product. And so all they have is mind share and maybe a token. guess the token is their product, but hyperlane is an actual product that is useful to both applications as well as to chains, as well as to end users. And so while hyperlane could theoretically have a lot of market share, the mind share piece is a different one that has more to do with kind of storytelling narrative. When you think of interoperability protocols, like, what do you think about first? Like, yeah. that sense, I'm not too concerned. I guess I'm lucky that my people are naturally good storytellers. And I think that we have told better stories than everyone, and that has certainly been an integral part of how we've of grown this thing. I'll give you an example, right? We were some of the first to mention this concept of permissionless interoperability. Now, HyperLin is also really the only system where this is a true statement about, but everyone has adopted this term of permissionless interoperability. In fact, some of our competitors actually put it front and center on their websites for a while. And so I think if you have a vision of the, call it, not super near, not like next week's future, but also not too far, right? Like if you can tell a compelling story of the next six to 36 months, and you tell it repeatedly enough in such a way that through the passage of time, people can start understanding that actually you were right, right? That like by three, six months in, they start saying, this, this. seems to be happening. That's an excellent way to get my attention. There's of course other ways, but again, disadvantage to me to share that type of information with others because there is no reason to help the others do that. Yeah. And please, please keep it, keep it proprietary. It's your secret sauce. So that's, that's great. right there inside. It's just like, this is what I would put in the realm of, there's a great book on the discipline of marketing called Alchemy by Rory. I forget his last name. And some people call it tribal knowledge. Some people call it alchemy. None of it's proprietary, it just tends to be non-intuitive for most people. And so those are things that I think everyone is able to surmise and figure out. But when you think of positioning, there's no reason to help them. Jesus helps those who help themselves. That makes sense. Let's jump to the hyperlane brand and then we can end. It's the space motif, planets, stars, astronauts. I love it. Yeah, well, how did that come to be? What were those conversations in your team to come up with that branding? I love space. It's think of, know, when you ask me like four years old, what do you want to be? Astronaut. I always like been enamored with going to space, you know, asked my wife what I talked to her about in the first date. And I was like, well, I in my lifetime, I'm to go to space, even though I'm, you know, not going to be an astronaut probably anytime soon. And, you know, the name hyperlane, I guess is like a, I, One thing I'll say, it's a Star Wars term. I'm not like the biggest Star Wars fan. I enjoy the older movies. I think they're awesome. I think the world is really cool. I do not appreciate what the franchise has become in recent years. And a hyperlane in the Star Wars universe is basically like the safest, fastest way to travel between star systems. And... You know, I very much, you know, like when we talked about the city analogy and I said like, well, I have different ways, but it all relates to like, where do people want to live and do things? And so also like, like thinking about like galaxies and planets and, and you know, solar systems. And so it was going to be very, very space themed. And once we decided that I just saw the mic. I want it fun. I want it space themed and I did not want it to look like anything else. I didn't even care if it looked good, it could not look like anything else. I am fucking sick of the exact same website design that you see everywhere, like those stupid gradients and the boring