Jill Gunter from Espresso Systems, welcome. Great to be here. Thank you. Let me ask you before we begin, if someone were just tuning in, what are some reasons why they should stay and not leave? in crypto. Oh, into this podcast. Yeah, time is scarce. You've got to really value your time. I would say that they should stick around for some good war stories over the years from the last 10 years that I've been in this space and what almost 10 years or 10 years that you've been in the space too. We were talking, I think we may have met in another life many moons ago at some point. So there should be some entertainment value. Hopefully they'll learn something, whether they're in crypto or not right now, they'll learn something about crypto. If you're not in crypto, maybe you'll get pulled down the rabbit hole. yeah, I hope to give some insights from the trenches of building in this weird, wonderful wild west that is this industry. I think those are good reasons. I agree. I wanna first start out with a question around philosophy and the Roman Empire. I understand you studied classics. One thing I've noticed in our industry is there's happens to be like a lot of like philosophy majors and I actually haven't met any classics other than you. I studied, are there? of us around. Yeah, Mike Ippolito from Blockworks, he was a classics major. Yeah, there's a few folks actually on the technical side as well, who are deep in Latin and Greek history and language. So yeah, we're hanging around. I actually started out as a classics major and then Greek was too hard. Greek and Latin, so I quit and then I moved to philosophy and I doubled majored in philosophy and math. And it turns out there's like a ton of philosophy majors in crypto. Why do you think that is? Before I answer, I'll also just plug Ari Jules. I just had to look up to remember the name of the book, but I read his book. It's called The Oracle. Yeah, Town Crier. nexus of classics and math as well. And yeah, it's a great read that kind of combines blockchain and science fiction and classics. But you're right, there is a lot of us kicking around. I think that many of us got into crypto from an ideological perspective. Certainly I did. I think that as the industry has matured naturally, the industry has moved away from just being about ideology and what freedom means and the power of the individual and all of these things that Bitcoin in particular was founded upon. I think that's good. I think that's healthy. It's become more product focused. It's become more practical and pragmatic. But many of us got crypto-pilled initially because of those ideas. And I think that that lends itself to people who think deeply about these, who enjoy thinking deeply about these things. I guess a lot of people think deeply about these things, whether or not they enjoy it, but people who love to really engage and grapple with those ideas. And it's a lot of the same nerdy kids in college, I guess, who like to take the philosophy classes or the classics courses. and dive down those same ideological rabbit holes. That would be my guess, but it's a great observation. Yeah, my one of my favorite stories and you I don't know if you'll remember this is Phloctetes. What I love about that story and I don't remember all of the details, but really the. Yeah, well, I what I remember, though, is like how it hit me. He was a Phloctetes was like a poet warrior and he had like. Some kind of disability. or he was actually, he was like cursed to have a disability. But then like 10 years later, it turns out that that very disability that he had was the thing that would save like the army, which is like so powerful. And that's kind of what, when I first read about that, I thought, okay, wow, this is really, really cool. And that's kind of what led me into the first day in classics. I think that there's also heavy overlap, and you get at this with that story, between classics and science fiction and fantasy, actually. A lot of science fiction and fantasy are based on things that happened or purportedly happened in the classical era. So whether it's things based on the Odyssey and the Aeneid or Athens and Sparta or you know a lot of Star Wars as an example I think is very much based in the Roman Republic and the transition to the Roman Empire. And so it does check out to me that there is a lot of people who are very enthusiastic about the future and are futurists and like to read Neal Stephenson and Cryptonomicon and also enjoy reading Livy and Tacitus and Homer. And yeah, I think that your example speaks to that as well. One thing I typically do with guests is we go through the homepage of the site that the guest represents, or I guess where the guest works. Yeah, well, or they spend all their time on crypto Twitter and like, assuming no one visits their homepage, but. But as the founder, you like most founders I know do invest quite heavily in what the homepage says and looks like, but no one looks at it. So I love that you bring it up. Well, here's what I love about it is when you read the homepage, like above the fold, it typically tells you kind of like what's top of mind for the founder and for the founding team. And so I want to just do that really quick and then get your thoughts. the headline says, fuel your chain with espresso. And then the sub headline is cross chain composability that makes all chains work together like one. So first question is, Who are you targeting with that messaging right there? Like who's the target customer that you're hoping to really emotionally catch? Yeah, I would say it's threefold for us. would say kind of the the number one persona or customer. Customer is such a weird thing in crypto where everything is open source and Most of these platforms are just kind of openly composable, but yes, customer would be chains themselves. So these are teams that are building app chains, roll-ups, L2s, L3s. Maybe we'll get to L4 someday. But all of these teams that have cropped up primarily in the Ethereum ecosystem. to tackle scaling. And that was kind of the initial impetus, right, for teams who are building applications to build out their own chains. I think it's gone much beyond scaling now in terms of what the motivations look like. I think it's also about being able to have their own kind of cultural domain as their own chain. I think it's about having a real business model around their chain in a way maybe they can't as an application. But all of these folks, whether it's folks working on a really kind of well-known, well-established project like... The folks at Uniswap and UniChain, if you're listening, would love to work with you. We have some conversations going on from the research side, but. folks like that all the way down to the individual developer who's tinkering, building, using RoleKit, which is something out of the Celestia ecosystem. So not necessarily Ethereum specific, looking at developing their own chain and just in the earliest stages of that. That's kind of the first archetype. So chain developers, would say, or chain operators. Then there's also app developers and end users. I wouldn't say that our homepage necessarily targets them, but certainly they're top of mind for me as we're building because it's really ultimately their problems that we're working to solve even if we're doing that through partnership with chains themselves. So typically what happens after this is if I'm interested, I'll scroll down to learn more about, what is espresso? So maybe we can get to that now. Like if you were to describe espresso to a couple of different personas, maybe like your target customer or target archetype, and to maybe someone that's not super technical, but knowing about espresso might be an important thing for them if they're a crypto enthusiast, for example. Yeah, yeah, where I would start with this is with a problem statement, right? And the problem statement that we're trying to tackle is the fact that Previously, before we had all of these different chains that are helping to scale Ethereum and scale crypto in general, we had one uniform composable system. And by composability, what I mean is that every application can plug into another application. And that unlocks a lot of things in terms of innovation and creativity, right? All of these different apps can... open seamlessly compose and share liquidity and have contract calls happening between them. It would be as if liquidity could move seamlessly throughout every banking system in the world into and out of each other. It would be as if you had all free and open APIs throughout the entire internet that you didn't need. to go through any hurdles to access. Again, I think that blockchains are the best tools for innovation that humanity has because of composability. The multitude of chains that we now have that scale that has broken that composability. Most of these chains cannot seamlessly compose with each other the way they could when everything was just on the Ethereum L1. And that's a problem. And so that's the problem that we're setting out to fix. You can think of what espresso is. I'll start with the latter persona. You know, perhaps how I would describe this to my mom and dad who are not in crypto whatsoever. I would say that espresso in a way is sort of a chain of chains. We are a layer that can sit across many different chains and help them to more seamlessly. interoperate. Now there's a big caveat that I'll give to the crypto audience, which is you might hear this and say, oh, well, things like this exist, you know, it's like, is it like layer zero, etc. There's many different, I would say, complementary components, we think those folks's message passing layers and so forth as partners or complements what we're building. I would say that all of these things need to come together to really solve composability and interop. But that's, that's where would begin probably again with a more non-technical audience. With a truly kind of non-crypto audience I might also say it's a little bit like the Visa correspondent banking network of crypto. Where Visa, the way it works is you have all of these different correspondent banks all throughout the world that plug into the Visa network. This is separate from like Visa as the credit card company. It's the same company, but just a totally different function that they play. And Visa acts as a hub. It's sort of this hub of liquidity and trust so that all of these banks can enter into a relationship. with one entity that they can all kind of mutually agree upon to read from and write from basically. That's how it works. So that those are kind of my intuitive metaphors. I'll take a breath there before I jump into how I might describe it to someone a little more crypto native and in the weeds. No, I'm glad that you elucidated the problem that Espresso solves. Because the fragmentation or the proliferation of all these layer ones, on the one hand, it's great. It shows just like a burst of creativity. And then on the other hand, it kind of does create some problems, right? For which some solutions that we're seeing is we're seeing these interoperability protocols working as bridges and passing messages in between these chains as a way to solve. Now, having said that, I wonder if when people think of Espresso as kind of solving the composability problem between all of these chains, would they consider Espresso a bridge? Is interoperability message passing, is that part of its kind of feature set? Yeah, no, this is a great question, one that I get all the time because people hear kind of the high level pitch of like, espresso is working on cross chain composability and interop. And they immediately think. as I mentioned, they must be competitive with these message passing protocols or bridges. In fact, in many ways, however, I would say Espresso is working on solving problems for bridges. And so again, we think of those folks more as partners. Specifically, what Espresso is working to solve is something called fast finality. And so in order to have multiple chains being able to interact seamlessly, you need to have a notion of finality or a confirmation. on transactions that are happening amongst all of these different chains. Now the way that a lot of bridges solve for this today is they rely on a component of each chain called the sequencer. And the sequencer's job is to, as it sounds, take the transactions that are coming into it, put them in an order, put them in a sequence, and then broadcast out what that sequence of transactions is. Now at that point in when this sequencer component has done that, that doesn't mean that the transactions are fully executed, that doesn't mean that the transactions, if it's a roll-up on Ethereum, that does not mean that the transactions are fully confirmed and finalized on Ethereum. That is just sort of, almost think of it as like moving through an assembly line. That is like the first rubber stamp that they get. It's quite rare, admittedly, that a chain sequencer will have an issue, right? So that's a pretty reliable guarantee that the transactions are gonna happen in this order and in this way. And so this is what most bridges rely upon. when you use a bridge like across, if any of your listeners have used the across bridge to move across multiple chains, it's actually a really great user experience, right? It happens in a couple of seconds. It's usually pretty cheap. You don't feel all of the frictions, but what's going on under the hood there is that you've pushed all of the risk and all of the kind of pain of having to manage liquidity across multiple chains and all of this onto these, uh, they're called They're entities basically that are kind of making markets and again dealing with this risk and dealing with liquidity issues and all of this on the back end. So again, it's great as a user. The solvers that are making the across bridge run, they are however taking this risk of what the sequencer has told them, right? That first kind of rubber stamp of approval. And that's... Again, probably okay in a world where there's like five or six major chains. They're all, you know, one of them is run by Coinbase based. Another one is now run by Kraken. Like these are all kind of entities that we're like, okay, they're, you know, they're regulated and Coinbase is public. Like I feel kind of okay with trusting that they'll do right by me as a customer. It's not really what crypto is about, right? Like crypto is supposed to be about permissionless, open, composable. finance and applications and beyond. So firstly, we're making a compromise to begin with. But even if you say, okay, I can trust basis sequencer, as we scale and as we move towards a world with thousands of chains, that's just not going to be the case. You're not going to be able to scale trust in this way across thousands, maybe millions of chains. Some of the Celestia folks like to talk about there being a million chains someday. And we think that this is a really important problem to solve is how can you make sure that what the sequencer is saying is going to be sufficiently reliable to enable bridges and interop and all of these things to work really quickly, right? Like the beauty of a cross is that it happens, it feels instantaneously within a couple of seconds. while still having a very strong sense of the fact that you're not going to get rug pulled by a sequencer, that the transactions are actually going to go through. That is at the core of what we're solving. You don't want to have to wait for the L1 to finalize transactions because that's going to take several minutes. We're not going to get mainstream users if we're waiting for every interaction across chains to take several minutes. We also can't rely on just centralized sequencing. service for everything. So what Espresso is built is a, again, in many ways, it's a chain. It's a new consensus protocol that makes a different set of trade-offs from Ethereum. It's still highly decentralized. It can eventually scale to thousands of nodes. Today it's running on about a hundred nodes. We're going to move to permissionless proof of stake very soon, which I'm really excited about because that's where we hit kind of true decentralization escape velocity, and it can give finality on whatever the sequencer is saying. It can give a confirmation on that within just a few seconds. So maintaining that really good user experience. So that was a very long winded, but that is at the core of what we're solving. And that's what I would get into for people who have a little bit more context, of course, on crypto and are curious to go down the technical rabbit hole. Now, excuse me, as a developer, I might be considering building my application on multiple chains. Probably the first one is either Ethereum or Solana, because those are kind of the two 800-pound gorillas. But there's other factors that, as a developer, I might be considering as I look at the number of chains, at all the various chains on which I could build. Would Espresso be though it solves the composability problem in like chain fragmentation. don't know if that's even a category that... no, totally. That's exactly how I talk about it. Is it also, and you mentioned it is also a chain on which, is it a general purpose chain on which I could build my application? No. Okay. have, like people talk about the EVM, right? The virtual machine. It's sort of the environment where an app developer would deploy an application. Of course, Solana has their equivalent, the SVM. Espresso does not have a virtual machine. Espresso does not have an environment for deploying applications. It is really a chain purpose-built for providing these confirmations. And I think that we're seeing more and more of this. I think that this is really a trend, actually. People often talk about this as modularity, kind of entering the blockchain ecosystem, right? Where we're no longer dealing with a chain whose job it is to provide all services to all of the applications on top of it, we're looking at a world that now has all of these different chains that are hyper optimized to provide some almost kind of micro service, right, to the applications that are running on them. And so you have things like Celestia, which is really purpose-built for data availability or the ability to make sure that the data of the block is going to be available for other nodes to check and verify against and build new blocks on top of. That's what they've really hyper optimized for. And that's great because they can make different set of trade offs than either Ethereum or Solana can. Espresso is very similar to that in the sense that it's a chain that is not a monolith. We don't expect or want people to try and deploy. a Uniswap equivalent directly on top of it because there is no VM in that way. But it's really optimized for different chains to be able to take advantage of it for their own applications for these really fast, reliable confirmations for cross-chain interaction. Now, since layer 1s, layer 2s, and potentially others are the primary customer, how does that factor into the distribution model and how you get Espresso to the hands of your target customer? I remember I've been part of a couple layer 2 deployments and working with roll-up as a service providers. And I remember Espresso is always in one of the options for a decentralized sequencer. for Conduit as well as with AltLayer. In fact, I interviewed Amrit from AltLayer a couple of weeks ago. So I could see that as being very effective distribution model for Espresso. How, yeah, how is that going? I call, yeah, I call the model kind of we're a B2B chain. I think, you know, business to business. I think Celestia in many ways was the first major B2B chain in the sense that they are again, kind of a chain of chains. They are really optimized to provide data availability to other chains. They're not built for people to deploy applications directly on top of them as a chain. And I feel very fortunate to be friends or friendly with a lot of the folks at Celestia and learned a lot from them in terms of the way they went about it. Um, which is really a combination of things. There is the B2B model, right? So you're literally kind of doing enterprise sales. It's like a very weird thing to be building a decentralized crypto protocol. And yet you have a team that is doing more or less enterprise sales. Talking to these teams again, whether they're well established or whether they're just new upstart companies, um, or even, I mean, some of the projects we work with aren't even really companies. Tezi is a wonderful ecosystem of L2 chains that are being built on kind of like a Linux based system. And they don't even have like a company org. They're like all kind of like independent contributors. So it's very weird doing this B2B protocol sales thing in this crypto environment where it's just really not set up for. an enterprise sales process. But that's part of the joy of it, right? As you get to sort of make up what the playbook is. But there is an element of that. We have prioritized working with a few ecosystems to begin with. Really because it's just, it's a huge lift to get an integration to be in a state where it's really easy and fast to deploy with any given stack. And a big part of the goal with espresso is to be totally stack agnostic. So you can be building an OP chain with Eigen DA, you can be building an Arbitrum orbit chain with Celestia DA, and you can all use espresso. Again, that's a lot of work to do. So to begin with, we've prioritized the arbitrary ecosystem. We've been very fortunate to work really closely with off-chain labs and a number of other entities within the arbitrary ecosystem. That's again, just really a matter of pragmatism. We're going to have our OP stack integration ready to go in May. So that'll be kind of the second stack that we're rolling out support with. Anyone can come along and based on our docs build their own integration, but we're trying to make all of this as easy as possible. In fact, Cartesi, who I mentioned a few minutes ago, this is exactly what they did. I'll never forget. They just kind of showed up in our discord one day and they were like, we built this integration with you guys for our chains to take advantage of. And now we've got three of their chains deploying on testnet and moving to mainnet here shortly, which is really exciting. But yeah, there's that B2B element. Rollup as a service partners, Caldera has worked really closely with us from the very beginning. They were the first ones to deploy on our testnets. This is going back two years ago. Altlayer has been right there in the trenches with us. Conduit, Gelato. all of the Roll Up as a Service partners have been amazing, not just channel partners, of course, that there's that kind of like traditional enterprise oriented view of what the relationship is. They are channel partners, right? You know, they have their customers of all of these Roll Up teams and there's that kind of symbiotic relationship, but it's been such a joy to work with all of them because they... think about all of this stuff that we do too all day long. And they have been just in it giving us feedback, coming up with new ideas for us and often being the first ones to really properly test the product outside of our own internal environment. That's been the bulk of our effort. I'm really excited. We're going to just kick off a new direction of effort here in the next couple of weeks with a developer oriented go to market as well. We've been doing the enterprise thing. There's this huge wide world of developers who are experimenting with building app chains. They're much earlier stage, right? Than any of the projects that I just mentioned. And we're actually launching, I'm just going to plug it. I'm going to show for a second. We are launching a hackathon in the next couple of weeks. Signups just opened for it yesterday with a pretty big prize pool for folks like that to come in and deploy an app chain with Espresso. So really excited to be expanding again beyond kind of the B2B chain model into a little bit more of a developer ecosystem as well. Thank you. Now, layer ones, I think they're aware that composability is an issue and for users to be able to use their chain and potentially go cross-chain, they're gonna need a service and a partner like Espresso. But developers on the other hand, they may not even know that that's a problem. Yeah. How are you tackling that gap in education that there is a problem and that espresso is a solution to that problem that you will eventually face? That's exactly that you will eventually face. Developers don't know it's a problem until it's a problem. I listened to a talk that was given by a guy named Eric Wall, who's very prominent, well-known, long track record builder, I think first in Bitcoin, now in Ethereum, maybe now in Solana, based on his talk. I think during the bear market, he changed his name to like Erica Wall for a while. I don't know if you remember that. Yes, that's part of what he's known for. Got to experience the joy of being a woman online. He's hilarious. He gave this talk at DevCon this past year at the Bankless Summit about, I think it was titled, How My Project Went Bankrupt on Ethereum. And it was about this failed experiment that he ran of running his startup. It was called orbs. think or or blabs that the product was called orbs and I won't go into all of the details. Everyone should go watch his talk. It's absolutely brilliant, but he talks about how He started out. I think they initially deployed on the Ethereum L1 and the whole idea was that they were minting sort of an NFT on a per person basis and if you had my NFT You could ask me a question, I had to answer the question. There's this sort of mechanism like this. And then at some point they wanted to introduce the idea that I would have to put up collateral if I didn't answer the question, you would get my collateral, right? So I could lock an NFT in this contract. If I failed to meet my obligations to you, you would get that NFT. And, you know, he said, okay, running this on the Ethereum L1 was just not going to be tenable. It doesn't scale. It was way too expensive for people to actually use. So then he's looking around, okay, I want to move this to a roll up. But all of the collateral in these NFTs that I want people to be able to lock, like they're all on the main chain or they're all on some other chain. You know, if I deploy this on Arbitrum and they're on base, like that's going to be a problem. And he goes through the whole thing of this headache and eventually shut down the company after his devs were asking him for this long period, why don't we just do this on Solana? It looks way easier over there. And I think that through people like him, think that developers are becoming really aware that this is a problem. I actually would even go so far as to say that this is why Ethereum is losing the battle for new developers as of this year to Solana. The first year since Ethereum launched that Ethereum has not onboarded the most new developers as a chain. Solana beat them on that target. And I really do think that it comes down to this fragmentation, this broken composability, which isn't to say that I don't still have to do a lot of education about that, certainly, especially for folks coming in from web2, but I think that a lot of the developer experiences now speak for themselves and you have folks like Eric kind of doing that education for me and for us. So yeah, Eric, if you're listening to this, we should talk and you gave a great talk at Bankless Summit. The developer experience is something that's pretty near and dear to my heart. I spent a lot of time courting developers, spending tons of time at hackathons, and I've learned a thing or two about kind of like what they're looking for. And one of the things that is kind of an unsaid need, and you won't hear this from them necessarily, is this idea of complexity. And not just complexity in the number of steps it takes to do a thing. or accomplish a thing, but kind of like the cognitive load that comes with it, like having to go to multiple websites, docs, et cetera, to do something simple. And one of the challenges in a decentralized permissionless system like Ethereum, in a lot of ways, you're kind of on your own, whereas on Solana, it feels like there's a lot more handholding. Yeah. I think the handholding speaks to some developers better, whereas it may not be, some developers may not like that, but I think a lot do, which kind of speaks to the point of a lot of developers are kind of onboarding to Solana. How do you think we fix that on the Ethereum side? I don't know if we do, actually. I have this notion in my head that I actually think Ethereum is living in every other chain's future. It's been around the longest, it's the most mature, it has been through every battle. I think that there is one way to frame that and say, okay, well, you know, there's maybe a second mover advantage here. Actually, it's not always the case that the first mover has the advantage. Maybe Solana can watch all of the mistakes Ethereum makes, given that Ethereum is living in its future and do things differently. you know, I hope, I'm very positive some in this, I think, and I hope that Solana will learn some lessons along the way, but I also think that Solano will reach. points in its own roadmap and its own growth and development where it will need to scale to many different chains. I don't know if it'll look exactly, I don't think it will look exactly like the roll up centric roadmap, but we already see this to some degree with network extensions on Solana. I also think that Solana will reach a point in its maturity where it will need to be a little bit more decentralized in its governance and the way that it runs itself. But today I, I came across this book on my bookshelf the other day that I hadn't read in a long time called The Cathedral in the Bazaar by Eric Raymond. I suspect you're familiar with it, probably much of your audiences as well. But the brief synopsis is that it's about open source development and specifically through a Linux oriented perspective on it. And he talks about how in a lot of software development, particularly not not open source software development, particularly kind of enterprise oriented software development. It's akin to building a cathedral where there's a big master plan and folks can go off and specialize and build their own part of it, but always coming back to the set milestones that are very top down kind of according to the master plan of what this cathedral is going to look like. Or you can go about building things like it's a bazaar, like it's this big open marketplace where just anyone can come by and pop up a stall and okay, you still have to agree on some basic standards, but it's really this kind of emergent ecosystem. And Solana, of course, is open source and it's not a perfect kind of match and metaphor, but I think both in terms of the monolithic chain that Solana is building and also in terms of its approach to governance and go to market strategy and all of that, Solana is really building a cathedral. Whereas Ethereum is very much at the stage that it's in of maturity, it's building a bazaar. And I think that there's benefits to both. Again, I think in the short term, it has clearly benefited Solana to be building that cathedral and to have that amount of central planning. But I think that in the limit and in the long term, there's a huge amount of power that comes from building in such an open, emergent way that Ethereum is and that Eric Raymond advocates in the bazaar model. Part of that comes down to just sort of free markets. It's kind of ironic to me that there was this whole conversation and consternation in Ethereum a couple of weeks ago where Vitalik tweeted something about communism and everyone got really worried about it because if I look at it, I think Ethereum is a hyper capital realistic chain in the sense that you have all of these competing developer teams competing to make it as good as it can be. Now, of course, the problem comes from kind of a free rider problem, you know, are all of these chains and all of these projects building on Ethereum, are they maybe not returning enough to the main chain and the main project, the main ecosystem that is legitimate concern that That's how I think about and characterize the two different approaches, both again to the technology and also to governance and go to market. I think that's pretty insightful. The cathedral and the bazaar and I think that frame of mind certainly helps me think about kind of where we are. And I like that, you your viewpoint on it's positive some. I mean, it's like we're all here to grow the pie. Yeah, you know, absolutely. And I do think that... I use this phrase like white glove support for developers. I think Solana in a lot of ways provides that. And I think that speaks to some developers. Other developers, they may not care so much. then Ethereum might be the home for them because they're autonomous, they want to work on their own, they don't need white glove support. In that case, that's totally okay. And so it just might be that there are some class of developers for which Ethereum is better than Solana. And then just kind of drawing a line in the sand and that's okay. That's totally okay. And I think that it's notable, right, that the metric on which Solana for 2024 beat out Ethereum was new developers. Because I think new developers do want more of that, right? They want a really solid community that they're joining where they're getting some of this help along the way and the kind of white glove service. And there's like one main point of contact, whether it's support from the Solana Foundation or they have an amazing incubator program Colosseum or Super Team, course, is on the ground local in regions like India and Southeast Asia. They have these sort of central points of contact that you don't have in Ethereum. I think, though, that in the lifecycle of every crypto application, there comes a point It's pretty far along, right? The app has to be quite mature, but there comes a point where the app asks themselves, should we be our own chain? And in the past, the only choice for that was to go build your own L1. Speaking as someone who's worked for the last two years on developing a new proof of stake mechanism and deploying that, that's a lot of work, okay? There's a long lead time. And I think that that is the power of rollups. That is the power of... being able to scale Ethereum with many chains. It's not just about the scaling. It's really putting that power into the hands of developers and not having it be as heavy of a lift. mean, Unichain, the Uniswap now AppChain, they deployed within a couple of months after they initially announced it. Now it's not feature complete, but you would not be able to do that with a brand new L1. And so I really think that that's the future. And I think that it's teams like Uniswap who are either at that point of maturity where it just makes sense for them to evolve into a chain for a host of reasons that we can get into, or it's app developers who just have studied enough history, I guess, who know that this is what they're going to ultimately want and just want to go straight to that end game. That's why I think, again, Ethereum is really living in Solana and everybody else's future. Let's go back to distribution and channel marketing for Espresso. You shared that the B2B side, and I think Espresso is growing quite very healthily in that space. then you will be, Espresso is going to have a hackathon in a couple of weeks, I think you said. Tell us more about that. Yeah, tell us more about that. Because that's quite interesting. And why should developers get involved? Yeah, absolutely. So, um, we, on the B2B side, yeah, we have 20 something chains who are committed to use us. We just had the first chain go live a week and a half or a couple of weeks ago, Rari chain, which is related to, uh, Rarible, um, the NFT platform that a lot of folks might be familiar with. Um, Caldera helped us get them up and running and live. on on espresso. So they're the first chain getting espresso confirmations. We've got a bunch more who are going to be going live with us in the next couple of weeks. And then my hope exactly with this developer oriented approach with the hackathon, the build and brew hackathon that we'll be running starting in two weeks time is that we can just explode that number, explode the number of chains. And look, you know, the chains coming out of that hackathon, I hope a few of them are. a bit more mature and you know have teams behind them that have been working and hacking away for some time. But my expectation is not at all that they will be at the level of maturity that Rari chain is at, of course, which has been around for over a year and again is related to an NFT project that's been around for many years. My expectation out of the hackathon is that it will be many teams who maybe it's even their first time building in web3. Certainly I expect for many of them it'll be their first time building and deploying an app chain. and that they will be able to do this on espresso and not feel that concern of what I described Eric talking about of his project going bankrupt on Ethereum, that they won't have that same concerning consternation of if I deploy over here, if I deploy my own app chain. Will I not have composability and shared liquidity in all of this with the rest of Ethereum? I hope that deploying with Espresso, they'll have that confidence to go build the app chain. that they want to Again, maybe it's through foresight, knowing that that's what the end game is going to be anyway, or maybe it makes sense for them to start as an app chain for whatever reason. And yeah, I think and I hope that several real things will come out of that. We're cooking up ideas around an incubator program for the espresso community in general to hopefully be able to. take some of these chains fully off the ground and help them achieve their goals of attracting users, of course, in order to get their funding, marketing, support with all types of these things. Do you have any prompts or challenges for the developers that you could maybe tell us about? Yeah, so a lot of these will necessarily involve deploying more than one chain, and so we're looking to make the chain deployment, app chain deployment process as simple and seamless as possible. Because the most exciting things for Espresso, right, is to see the confirmations in action and the power of them really comes through when you're moving a cross chain. So we have a bunch of ideas about cross chain decentralized exchange that we'd love to see get built, cross chain gaming. actually has a lot of potential, I think, whether it's through two chains interacting close to synchronously. So, you know, a player on one chain, player on another chain, being able to interact with each other. Again, maybe not fully synchronously, that would involve sort of shared blocks, but very close, you know, very low latency interactions. or even being able to move items between two games that are maybe domiciled sort of on two different chains. These are the types of things that I'm really excited to see that really show that you can compose seamlessly once again across these chains without introducing new trust assumptions as you have to with most bridges today. I a while ago listening to or reading something around moving NFTs from like one game to another game. And that was like the holy grail like five to eight years ago or something. is it something like that possible for me to move my sword from one game on one chain to the same game in another chain? That's amazing. I will say, you know, that's not something that espresso can out of the box deliver. I had this insight the other day that part of the challenge of talking about interop and composability on Ethereum is that there are so many different pieces to the problem. And there's thankfully so many projects building solutions to these different pieces of the problem. And so it's not that we're all building the same thing. It's not that there's a hundred projects who are all competing to solve interop on Ethereum. We're all building, I would say, different components of one unified product, right? And so what you just described, it might not be the case that Espresso can deliver that on its own, but Espresso plus layer zero plus like live five for chain abstraction or, you know, these types of combinations of projects certainly can. And I think the challenge for us as founders and as builders is how can we partner and work together in ways to not add that mental burden. to developers, but to just have it work for developers. so that's part of the joy, honestly, of building this company is you get to work with all of these different teams. I'll often say to my husband, I'm meeting up with a colleague and he'll say like, oh, that person works at Espresso. I'm like, no, but like we're all kind of working on the same thing. That's very much how it feels. It's also, I will admit a challenge though, right? Because we all have different roles. maps, different priorities, and so it takes a lot of coordination. But that Holy Grail vision I really think is going to be achievable I hope by the end of 2025. That would be a North Star goal that I would give. Going back to the idea of complexity, in the Web2 space, we've seen situations where there is lots of modularity, and then to reduce the complexity, there's often kind of like a bundling of services. Do you ever envision a time where Espresso might be bundled, let's say, with layer zero or Li-Fi, like you mentioned, and... And so the developer just has to use that bundle or that package. And it's, get a bridge and I get a decentralized sequencer all in one bang. Okay. Exactly. And I think... Look, I think that there's many different parties who will play an important role in this future. think RAS providers. again, Caldera, Altlayer, Gelato, these types of folks are gonna be critical to that because they are the ones today who all of these roll up operators are interfacing with. And so the more that they can package up these services, that's why again, they're such important partners to us. The better, I think also, the different roll-up stacks and ecosystems are going to play an important role in this. We're already seeing some of this work get done. in an Ethereum wide basis. This isn't quite packaging it up into a developer experience, but the work being done on cross chain intents that Josh Rudolph at the Ethereum Foundation has been stewarding. They just put a new website live yesterday. This is around ERC 7683, which is going to be a new set of standards for these solvers that support bridges like across. to make it really easy for chains to interact and standardize what those deployments look like. I think all of that type of work is going to be absolutely critical to this. So again, a lot of different parties, I think that we're really lucky in Ethereum to have amazing leaders like Josh at the EF, stewarding a lot of this work in kind of a... humble and neutral way, which is exactly what it takes to build an effective bazaar. Yeah. You mentioned you've been at Espresso for two years or so? We've been building this product for two years. The team has been together and we've been working on things in this space for a little bit longer than that, closer to three, three and a half. A little bit of fun lore for you is that we actually started out building an L1. We started out building a privacy oriented L1 and we took a hard look at the market in 2022. And we said, you know what? We don't actually want to compete with Ethereum on this. The future is going to be modular. The future is going to be roll-ups and app chains. And actually, if we look at what we've been building so far, it's broken into parts, actually, and repurposed to support them. So the same consensus that now underpins the espresso fast confirmations was initially just going to be the proof of state consensus of this new really scalable fast chain that we've been building. So that's a little bit of the kind of fun fact background. in the last two years, as you guys have been heads down building Espresso that we now know today, I guess, did you have times in your mind that maybe you thought to yourself, is this all worth it? And what made you decide, it is, and why you're still in crypto and still heads down building? Yeah, I mean, me personally, I, maybe some of your listeners follow me on Twitter, in which case they know this, but I really, on a personal kind of motivation level, I did not love the meme coin mania happening in crypto. I felt very disillusioned by it. I felt very sort of just like, is this, is this all we've built? I've been building in crypto since 20 I guess full-time since 2015 2016 and like if this is all we have to show for it then what am I doing what have I done with my life here like I have a kid now, like I want to be able to say to my kids someday that, you know, this was all worthwhile. And it just does not feel, when I look at the meme coin mania and just the pump fun casino, it does not feel like that is worthwhile to me personally. I don't think that that ever, I wouldn't say that that ever impacted my motivation with Espresso because I feel privileged to have been through a number of these cycles in crypto. And so I sort of kept reminding myself to just stay heads down building and to trust that there is a longer term vision here, that there really is a future for blockchains that goes past the casino. I really do think that composability makes blockchains the best tool for innovation that we have. And so I kept kind of coming back to that as my touchstone, but. Crypto is weird. It has ups and downs in a very public way, in a way that even in tech, most other sectors don't. Working in crypto makes Thanksgiving family dinner conversations awkward at times. And it's just a different dynamic psychologically that you have to deal with. Whether you're a founder or a developer, or a venture capitalist or someone working in media in this space, whoever you are, it's a challenge that we all face together. And yeah, I think you just gotta keep the faith that there's gonna be more to it and we'll come out of whatever part of the cycle we're in. Well, certainly a lot of your viewpoint and tweet around kind of your position in regards to meme coins and building has inspired me. I have not enjoyed the meme coin craze. In fact, what the meme coin craze for me kind of elucidated or I guess uncovered was the how centralized exchanges are so complicit in kind of the greed. Which we all kind of know, but it's disheartening is what it is. And so I am inspired by builders that are trying to build and tackle hard problems. And certainly tackling composability across multiple, like fragmented chains and is a hard technical problem that you guys have sought to solve. so kudos to you and the team for doing so. Thank you, that means a lot. For me, I just have kept coming back in the last few weeks to this catchphrase that keeps echoing in my head of just build something real. Just keep your head down, just build something real that is not purely speculative and everything else will follow. And I think that it can be really hard. If you're someone who's building in crypto and you see all of these people getting rich off of rug pulls and you have been toiling away on some hard technical problem for two years, it's really psychologically challenging to stick with it and to maintain your own version of integrity and internal consistency. But I just encourage anyone who's been feeling that way, if you are working in those trenches to build something real. Just keep your head down, stay focused and don't get distracted by the noise and... everybody's seemingly getting rich around you. There was a great article that came out in the New York Times, the very tippity top of the 2017-2018 hype cycle, you'll remember this, that said, everybody's getting hilariously rich and you're not. That was the title of this New York Times piece. And of course, that was the top of the market, as it always is. But that is something that I think of all the time is just what time horizon are we talking about here, right? And I really think that if you have a long time horizon, you can build in this market with integrity and you can build something real and get rewarded for it. And I don't know, but I have to believe that that feels a lot better at the end of the day than doing a rug pull on punk fun. No, I agree. Jill Gunter, thank you so much. This has been so fun to talk with you. I've looked up to you for a while and yeah, for sure. And best of luck with Espresso Systems. one last thing. Espresso Foundation made an announcement the other day. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. So the espresso foundation just announced itself. This is marking kind of the next phase of further decentralizing the project, further decentralizing development. Many crypto projects, would venture to say most crypto projects that are building infrastructure and protocols go this route where eventually it makes sense to really formalize the fact that it's not just one company stewarding this project and this mission, that there is going to be many entities contributing to it. And so the Espresso Foundation, again, is really just a formalization of that. I am still with Espresso Systems at this time. But I'm really excited for the existence of the foundation. I'm really excited for them to be really the main driving force, I think, going forward in terms of decentralizing, not just literally decentralizing the network, although they will be the ones who hit the button to deploy proof of stake on our main net, which will enter in this new era of permissionless participation in our chain and in our network. So again, decentralizing the development of it. We're moving, I like to think that we've always been building in this kind of bazaar Linux style model. I think that that's an apt comparison here. And this is an even greater movement in that direction. People often, I think, think of these foundations as this weird kind of unique crypto thing, but I... I always come back to the fact that the Linux Foundation exists and the Linux Foundation has many contributors and many core development shops and they have Red Hat, who's of course commercializing one of the main forces in commercializing Linux. And so that's how I tend to explain this and talk about it to people is it's as though sort of, you know, the espresso equivalent, I guess, of the Linux Foundation getting off the ground and coming out of the shadows. which is awesome. Well, it's an exciting milestone. mean, it's kind of en route to full decentralization and having a foundation is really exciting. And best of luck with a main net, like full main net coming out. know mainnet now means many different things. We called the initial deployment, is permissioned mainnet zero. Exactly. So mainnet one, the real deal. Yeah. Thank you so much. Awesome. Okay.