JB Carthy: 0:20

Thank you, I can't get on with the new course. Come to it, come to it, Wipe off this gun to it. Come to it, come to it. Wipe off this gun to it. Face the dust. Lose your friends. Why the call of this guy to an end? Fade to dust. Lose your friends. Why the call of this guy to an end?

Austin King: 1:13

I hope it's going to end All the leaves are gone, hey guys, and we have austin, king of omni, joining us in a couple of minutes, so just hold on tight. In another couple of minutes he'll be coming in having a chat. We have Omni Network co-hosting here and whoever's behind the mic, please welcome you on In.

JB Carthy: 1:59

California dreaming. I'm such a what I say. I stepped into a chair, I passed along the way. Well, I got down on my knees and I pretend to pray. You know the preacher. Like the cold California Dreaming, I'm such a winner. Today All the leaves have fallen and the sky is grey.

Austin King: 2:51

While we're waiting for Austin to join us, if anyone who has already tuned in shares, retweets the pinned post, let's get some people in the room and join in this conversation. I'm sure it's going's be super interesting today. Omni and unifying all the fragmented ethereum liquidity and all the fragmented ethereum applications and and really try and bring a more streamlined, streamlined experience back to each user. Austin, hello, how are you? Hello, how are you all doing? Good, good, we put out a couple of tweets trying to get some people in the room. You guys hosting as well, sure to bring a few people in. They always start to filter in as the space goes on. Well, thanks so much for joining us today.

Speaker 2: 4:21

Yeah, likewise I appreciate you having me here.

Austin King: 4:28

No, no, it's a pleasure. I pleasure and big fan of what you guys are building, so just excited to have a chat dive a little bit more into it. I know you guys have some really exciting things going on and and a lot of big kind of news and big developments coming over the next like few weeks. So, yeah, this is Helios Horizons, episode 29. Today we're chatting about unifying ETH roll-ups with Austin King of Omni Network. Thanks so much for joining us. Austin, as I just touched on there, maybe just to kick it all off as people are starting to filter in, maybe a little bit of introduction into yourself and a little bit about Austin.

Speaker 2: 5:11

Yeah, so I'm the co-founder of Omni. I've been working on this company for about yeah, geez what like three and a half years at this point, and so I actually built another company in the crypto industry before this, so really got involved in 2017. Built my first company from 2018 to 2020. Sold that to Ripple, worked at Ripple for a year until I invested. Then I quit to start this company. But, yeah, at large, always been very interested in the like just how the space was going to mature. At large, when I got involved in 2017 2017 it was pretty clear that, uh, we were seeing like a very immature, like early version of these technologies. Uh, so, yeah, always been focused on just kind of like scaling these things up so that we can actually use them for more mainstream use cases now 100 percent um, and we'll definitely delve into a lot of what omni are doing, trying to achieve.

Austin King: 6:05

But even like rewinding a little bit back from that like I actually was having a little look through your LinkedIn to maybe find a little bit about like history and what you got up to before maybe founding Omni and getting this far but I saw you went to Harvard computer science. I'm really interested to understand. Went to Harvard computer science. I'm really interested to understand. So that was probably around like 2016, 2017. Crypto blockchain was just coming into the mainstream and at that moment, were you able to see the potential of where things were going, or had you heard of blockchain and crypto and started to become interested and involved in it?

Speaker 2: 6:48

started to become interested and involved in it.

Speaker 2: 6:49

Yeah, so I actually originally, um, I discovered ethereum really was the first network that I got pretty involved with.

Speaker 2: 6:52

So I had a job at microsoft my junior summer at harvard and I just honestly, they didn't make me like really do anything, and so I had a lot of time to look into other things and I just kind of like fell down the crypto rabbit hole so started like mining ethereum, learning to program solidity and building my first like smart contracts, um, and at that point I was just like, pretty, uh, yeah, I just knew this was a technology that I wanted to contribute to, and so, while I was still studying computer science at this point I had a year left um, I knew I wanted to build a startup after school, so I, yeah, I decided to build a crypto company. So most of my senior year was focused on just identifying where the highest leverage uh areas would be to contribute to the industry, and, and so that's kind of where the origins of my first company came from no sweet and say, like the first company and I was having a look through Strata Labs, am I right?

Austin King: 7:46

Yep, that was the name, and what maybe inspired you or what problem did you see that you kind of wanted to address and solve by founding Strata?

Speaker 2: 7:58

Yeah, so at this point, there was a lot of experimentation around all L1s, and so the network that my first company built was called the Interledger Network, and so it was specifically focused on linking together different blockchains. In many ways, omni can be seen as a successor to the Interledger Network from a technical level. So at this point in time, we had L2s back then, but they were not L2s like today how we think about them, like rollups, like optimism and arbitrum. They're actually state channel implementation.

Speaker 2: 8:28

So the one that people are probably most familiar with is the Lightning Network, and so basically, what this network did was link together L2s across different blockchain networks, and so the thesis here was basically, like we're early in the journey of crypto, but at minimum there's going to be two networks here. There's going to be at least Bitcoin and Ethereum, and so we're going to need to create a network that links together those two independent blockchains. And so, yeah, that was really the main focus of my first company, and now you know, it's interesting to see this kind of happening even within the Ethereum ecosystem itself, you know, know, it's become like pretty front and center that, uh, fragmentation within the ethereum ecosystem is actually like the biggest problem that the ecosystem itself is facing right now no, definitely, and say back in back of that early moment, as you guys um seek to address that problem.

Austin King: 9:18

Maybe connect bitcoin, connect ethereum? Um, how have you guys noticed? Maybe the building environment? Obviously, so much has happened over the last seven, eight years, but how does the building environment now differ to the building environment back then? I'm sure it was so different, it was such a different scene. It's almost incomparable.

Speaker 2: 9:42

Yeah, yeah, it's definitely changed a lot. The thing is like, um, this past cycle, like the past bear market, was pretty interesting, uh, from my perspective because I think a lot of people weren't really here in the like 2018 to 2020 bear um, and people were wondering what it was like at that point. But the main thing that was different in this past bear market compared to the prior one was it was pretty clear that crypto was here to stay. At that point, you know, depending on how bad things would possibly get after, like FTX and all these different insolvencies, it was pretty clear like, okay, this technology is like early, but there's something here. But in 2018 to 2020, 2020 this was before we even had, uh, defy. Really, you know, the very first defy projects were being built, kind of like in the latter half of this period, but people didn't really think of them as defy. People didn't really like it wasn't, defy wasn't a thing yet, and so it was very different at this point in time where it was like unclear if the industry was going to make it.

Speaker 2: 10:47

I feel like now everybody's very much on the same page like cool, we're gonna hit another bear market and stuff, but like the us president is like actively talking about the price of bitcoin.

Speaker 2: 10:56

You know there's been proposals to create like a us like national strategic reserve of bitcoin. So it's clear that like crypto is here to stay, and I think the other biggest difference in the builder ecosystem honestly is maybe values is not the most precise way to say it, but everybody back then was like people who built through that bear market were definitely here for libertarian values effectively, and it's definitely kind of more of the like og crazier people that like came because they uh really like see what this can do and like remove the need for governments to intermediate commerce. Um, that's changed a lot over the past few years, I think. Uh, while it's really cool to see new builders who are excited about the technology, I do think at large, that the uh kind of like motivation for builders at large is it's shifted away from the more like original, like libertarian efforts no, I think that's, that's something that's.

Austin King: 11:55

It's kind of ironic, you know, in terms of like bitcoin and how it was founded as this kind of like rebellious um, rebellious maybe, like highly independence focused and response to like a failing banking system, and now it is almost like the badge of honor that it has been integrated into the banking system and that they're acquiring it heavily and in force and, as opposed, like and it's just kind of ironic how it's come full circle to that point. But even back in 2017, where you were chatting about and maybe the key thing is people didn't really know the longevity of the technology. If it was here to stay, would it be adopted, and things have obviously changed since then. But for you personally yourself, how was it at that moment, maybe, coming out of college and having done the computer science degree in Harvard and founding the company, not necessarily certain of where the industry was going Did you have the ultimate conviction or were you fully convinced that the technology was here to stay? It would eventually be adopted?

Speaker 2: 13:06

was here today, it would eventually be adopted. Yeah, I mean, at that point in time, uh, I don't think anybody can say with like, or could instead with complete confidence, that they knew crypto was going to make it. But, uh, you know, ever since 2017, I was fully sold on this. Like I, I've always seen it as a way to just increase personal freedoms for people across the world. Um, we kind of live in this like very strange reality where our information systems have reached full globalization and you can just see memes from across the world Like Mudang, some random hippo from Thailand. The entire world can see and participate in this cultural trend in seconds.

Speaker 2: 13:44

But finance is not that way. It's actually still like really hard to move money, even sometimes even to your like neighboring country. And so I think we're living in this like weird reality right now where our information systems have been globalized but our financial systems have not, and I think this like can be seen in a number of different ways across the different like rates of economic development across the world, and definitely having like isolated economic zones contributes to this, and so to me, it was just always like clear that like from a, you know, a human society perspective, this was a key thing to you know, helping us advance and move forward collectively. Um, so I never really lost faith and I always was going to work in this industry until it was, like you know, to zero. But yeah, I don't think in that previous cycle anybody could really say with complete confidence that the industry was going to, like, actually make it.

Austin King: 14:38

No, definitely, and like, let's say, fett, are building the company in those early stages, in the early stages of the industry as well. What lessons maybe did you learn, or maybe give us a little bit of an insight into the process of building the company at that moment, that early and just lessons that you learned and challenges along the way?

Speaker 2: 15:03

Yeah, I think the community was so much smaller at large. I think, you know, there were far less VCs that were interested in it, especially after the 2017 ICO era, I think it was. There was way less VC interest because to a lot of people, it felt like we just had these like scam ICOs that raised a bunch of money and then you really couldn't see any results. A lot of them really struggled with building honestly anything, because the technology at large was just very immature, so it was hard to do anything.

Speaker 2: 15:35

Today, you can spin up an application and create an app that other people can use pretty easily, but back then, there were so many building blocks that were missing that I think it created a lot of cynicism, uh, among investors and just people at large like, wow, this like ico thing pulled in so much money but, uh, you know like what came of it, and so I think there was a lot of cynicism about like crypto at large and like what it was actually going to be useful for. We couldn't even point to like defy as a use case, so it was mostly still like people like talking about payments and stuff. So that's like what my first company was focused around. Yeah, it's changed a ton but, honestly, in many ways, for the better. There's so much more VC interest in the space. Like you know, if you're building something interesting, you can like raise money far more easily today than you could in like 2018 after everything collapsed no, absolutely, and actually it's a nice little maybe segue in.

Austin King: 16:31

You were saying, um, about the first company focusing on, on payments mostly. I actually think it's still not an area that's been fully explored in terms of payments. It's getting better, but it's like the core, the core value proposition of crypto, the core value proposition of blockchain, or the most primary one, is probably that you can send money anywhere to anyone without permission, um, no matter where they are in the world. And it's just incredible and whenever you try and like really get something done with the traditional banking system and it just becomes clear how like inefficient it is that allowing you to like custody and manage your own funds. So I think defi and payments are like going to be huge over the next few years or become so heavily integrated in and value transfer around the world.

Austin King: 17:21

And even if we take aside kind of those individual, some of those individual benefits of like users being able to transfer low cost, high speed to anywhere in the world, even for companies and banks to start to integrate the technology to make their own transactions faster, cheaper and reduce costs on that end as well and probably make their services a little bit more efficient not have to and give their customers better customer service.

Austin King: 17:54

You know, not having to wait like three to five business days to send money to a different country and we've probably all been in the situation where we've been abroad, you know, and you're trying to go to the Western Union and bring ID and they're only open at a certain time and it's just difficult to manage. But let's say, building those building that payments company, strata Labs, what was the primary problem you guys were trying to solve at that moment, were trying to solve at that moment, and you guys obviously after that had an interesting acquisition which probably gives you a little bit of an insight into the way the markets are going at the moment as well, which we'll touch on yeah, um, yeah, I mean what was the primary problem you guys were maybe looking at solving?

Austin King: 18:40

and, in payments, what was the core inefficiency that strata labs you guys set out to solve?

Speaker 2: 18:45

yeah, ironically it's, it was fragmentation. That was the the core thing that we were trying to back then, and you know, you can almost say that that problem has gotten worse since I built that company because we have so many more blockchain platforms. Now I am very excited about where the space is moving in general. I think these new design paradigms that we have mostly around, like intents and solvers, are going to move us to a place where this will be fully abstracted away from the end user experience. But you know, back in 2018 to 2020, that really was the same problem we were trying to solve. It's like, okay, you know, we're excited about the potential for these systems to be used as money. So, like, how do we drive further adoption of that At this point in time?

Speaker 2: 19:29

One of the core things from a raw performance perspective was cost of a transaction and confirmation time. So how cheap and quick was it to actually send a payment? And building on top of these Layer 2 networks allowed us to get nearly free transaction fees and we could confirm those transactions almost instantaneously. And so the third thing there was like fragmentation. It's like, okay, well, if you can have it quick and cheap within one of these networks. How do we just make it so there's like a general crypto interface, so like, if I want to get paid in crypto, I can just do that and I don't have to think about whether somebody's on bitcoin or ethereum?

Speaker 2: 20:09

So that's really how we were looking at the world at that point. I I still think that a lot of uh, the like fundamentals that we need to build out as an ecosystem are abstraction layers like that, so that people don't have to think about like okay, like I want to pay you USDC, but I'm on Optimism and you hold the rest of your money on Arbitrum. Like, do I bridge or is it good for me to send it to you on Optimism? Do you have gas on Optimism so you can bridge it over to Arbitrum? There's still like a lot of technical expertise required to use this, and so I think we still are going through a stage of just like needing to massively simplify how easy it is for people to engage and, you know, harness the benefits of these systems.

Austin King: 20:50

No, definitely, and I know that's what you guys are trying to solve. I actually saw the video you guys put up I think it was today of using the Symbiotic platform and how it just streamlines the experience of interacting with the app and getting your money onto the platform, no matter where it's coming from, and I'm really excited to see how it plays out on different apps and on a wider level out um on different apps and um on a wider level um. But let's say you were touching on how you think at that moment, you guys set out to solve fragmentation but ironically, over the years, it appears like fragmentation um has got worse. And what do you think is the key reason or the reasons, and with your insight, that it's developed like this, that we have got to this point where there are so many blockchain ecosystems, where users, liquidity and products are all fragmented and all operating in their own isolated silos on in their own isolated islands and for, as a metaphor, yeah, I think you know, generally I shy away from any like internet comparisons.

Speaker 2: 21:57

I think a lot of times people like to reason by analogy and like compare where we're at in crypto to like some stage of the development of the internet, and I think that, honestly, just like tends to lead people astray. But with that like I, I do think one pretty fair comparison to how we're seeing the crypto landscape of all today is actually, uh, the maturation of like computers themselves, not necessarily like the internet, um. So you know, when we first built computers uh, you know, obviously originally there was one, there was like a single computer, um, and then you know, we went through a stage where it's like okay, there's a like you know, maybe like three, okay, there's maybe three computers. These are massive things that take up the size of an entire room. They're like maybe just a few universities across the world have these things. I think that's kind of where we're at with crypto right now.

Speaker 2: 22:51

For the longest time, bitcoiners were like no, it's only the Bitcoin computer, that's the only network that matters. And we're kind of in a world now where we've like, I guess, maybe 2017, 2018, you can draw a parallel it's like okay, maybe there's a few computers in the world. But now, if you think about how computing infrastructure across the world works today, any website that you visit is going to be hosted by potentially like thousands of computers. You know, if you go to googlecom, like for sure, there are like thousands of computers across the world powering that front end and just making it super responsive. So I think that's kind of psychologically what we're transitioning to in crypto and acknowledging like okay, cool, like actually there's going to be a lot of these different networks and like smart contract platforms. So I think, uh, this is healthy in the sense that the space is beginning to accept like, okay, this is how it's going to go.

Speaker 2: 23:49

Um, like, I think one of the most important variables here, honestly, is the ethereum ecosystem, realizing that they themselves could not even scale, uh, ethereum to singular global computer and they needed these subcomputers. And so I think that's helped people think along the right design paradigm so that users won't need to think about all these rollups. When you go to Google, you don't have to think about whether it's being hosted on a server in California, the East Coast or Asia. You just go to googlecom. And so I think we've kind of transitioned our paradigm of how we're looking at designing these systems and focused more on the abstraction there rather than the more in-the-weeds how to build a faster computer in general.

Austin King: 24:33

No, 100%, and let's say we touch on the Ethereum ecosystem there and obviously there's kind of different approaches to scaling.

Austin King: 24:42

So obviously Ethereum were built and maybe the solution that's been taken to scaling Ethereum is layer twos on top of it and you guys are obviously solving the really important problem of connecting all the fragmentation across all the Layer 2s to help products connect with users easier and to help the users find and connect with the products they want to use or smart contracts they want to use easier as well. Is an either it's an, either are or is it an and um in terms of the scalability of building layer twos on top of ethereum, which already has obviously really strong network effects and really strong liquidity um in its network, or do you think in the future we're going to see um more of a? Do you think, let's say, the sharding approach and some of the newer blockchains being built with scalability in mind before they even handle the first transaction? Do you have a preferred way of building? Do you think if Ethereum were to go back in time to when they created that, they would do things a lot differently?

Speaker 2: 25:51

Yeah, I mean, do I think Ethereum would do things differently in hindsight? You know I'm not part of the Ethereum would do things differently in hindsight? You know I'm not part of the Ethereum Foundation and I haven't worked there myself. But I think the answer here is, if people are being intellectually honest, then the answer is probably yes.

Speaker 2: 26:08

You know, ethereum is facing a lot of scaling difficulties right now. Difficulties right now, you know, I mean just to kind of like outline specifically, there are only two companies that produce 90% of blocks on Ethereum L1. And so we have this like insanely decentralized validator set, but only two companies are producing 90% of the blocks. That is a huge problem that comes downstream of MEV, on top of that roll-ups, I think maybe, like Metis is the only one that has a decentralized sequencer right now. And so, basically, in order to access the Ethereum network, you are either transacting on an L2, which is hosted by a single company, or you are transacting on Ethereum L1, where 90% of use or in 90% of cases it's going to get your transactions can get processed by one of two companies.

Speaker 2: 26:59

And so, yeah, honestly, I think the space has learned a ton since Ethereum was originally built. And the thing is with Ethereum. It's difficult. This network's been running for almost a decade and clearly we've learned so much in that time a decade and clearly we've learned so much in that time. Um, so, yeah, I think, uh, there would probably be many learning lessons that the ethereum team, uh, would go back and apply in hindsight if they were able to see, kind of, how things have played out today no, definitely, but I think that obviously sets the stage for omni and omni to come in.

Austin King: 27:32

And there are these problems, these scaling problems. Obviously we're talking about the layer one not really being scalable, not really able to handle high volumes of transactions and at any great speed or or at a reasonable cost for users. And then the, the next layer of the solution being okay, we're going to build these layer twos like arbitrum, optimism, base and all these siloed islands where people go and there's apps on them and they're, they're fast and they're cheap, but you know, they're not very interoperable and they're all trying to capture the value for themselves. And now there's omni, and omni are trying to change the game. So maybe you'll describe it better than I can, but what? Give us a little bit of an insight and a background into Omni and Omni Network?

Speaker 2: 28:22

Yeah. So Omni actually came from our own experience building in the Ethereum ecosystem. So when I first started this company, we built a DeFi protocol actually, so this was 2021. Built a DeFi protocol actually so this was 2021. We built a DeFi protocol and we launched it, and it had a protocol cap of 50 mil. And we hit it two days after launch.

Speaker 2: 28:45

And this was also right around the time that the first roll-ups, like Arbitrum and Optimism, had been deployed, and so it became pretty clear to anybody that was in the research circles of Ethereum that the future of Ethereum is roll-up it's only roll-ups. If it's not on roll-ups, there is research circles of Ethereum that, like, the future of Ethereum is roll up, like it's only roll ups If it's not on roll ups, there is no future of Ethereum. So we were thinking like, okay, how do we scale our DeFi protocol to work across these different roll ups? Obviously, we want to access all the users and capital in the Ethereum ecosystem. So, like, what does it look like when you, you know, build a protocol that operates across both ETH, l1 and multiple rollups? So we started going down this design path really to solve our own problem of scaling our own protocol.

Speaker 2: 29:24

But in the process we were chatting with a lot of our colleagues and basically anybody that had seen success on Ethereum L1 was thinking about the same problem Like okay, as users and liquidity shifts to L2s, how do we make sure we don't get sidelined? Like, if we're seeing success here, like how do we make sure that we lean into that further, instead of kind of seeing our business decay? And so somewhere along this journey we realized like wow, this actually is going to be like a core problem for the future of Ethereum. You know it's not just us Everybody problem for the future of Ethereum. You know it's not just us.

Speaker 2: 29:59

Everybody else that is doing well on Ethel One is thinking about this right now, and so that's really where Omni came from. So, like our own experiences and just like talking with colleagues across the space, and so Omni at large, really you can think about it as just like an interoperability network built like purpose built, to solve this fragmentation problem. Um, what? Uh? We we've kind of learned more as we've gone though in the design of like how we can actually best solve this for developers.

Austin King: 30:24

I can get into that, but at large, that's kind of like where the idea of omni came from no,

JB Carthy: 30:29

definitely, and I've seen I've seen a couple of demos and action um on on your um twitter and I've obviously read, read a lot about it and, as a user of defy, I can. I'm really excited to see when the solution comes to main net and when I'm able to interact with apps like a little bit more freely, with less friction, and because I just think on a user level, it is going to be like transformational and to how people can can interact and like having a more seamless, quicker and experience using the thing doing the things that they usually do. And but no, I'd love for you to dive a little bit more into how it's going to make things easier for developers and so go ahead, yeah, and that'd be fantastic.

Austin King: 31:17

Yeah, yeah, sure thing. So I mean, originally, when we started building this, what we had in mind was building cross-chained apps for the Ethereum ecosystem, so like cross-roll-up apps, whatever you want to call it. What we, you know, we built, actually, multiple testnets and got, I think it was like 40 teams building on our test nets. Uh, with this design paradigm, um, and this is the same design paradigm that, like, layer zero and wormhole have pushed like, hey, you know, like, access all the users and liquidity across these platforms, like deploy your smart contracts across all of them. And so it's like, okay, sounds reasonable enough. Um, and you know we were able to see success with this, but, honestly, reasonable enough. And you know we were able to see success with this, but honestly, it hit a point where we're like okay, is this? Like like, why is there? No, we kind of asked ourselves this question like, if Layer Zero and Wormhole have raised half a billion dollars, why can't I name like a single cross-chain dApp that has really taken off? And so, like, even though we were able to see some success on testnet, we had to ask ourselves the question of like, okay, there are these other companies that have raised like an ungodly amount of money. Why are they not driving success here, Like, why are they not able to make this happen? And a lot of it really comes down to just the complexity for developers. So I don't think it's like news to anybody here that most crypto companies don't have product market fit, like that's just the simple reality.

Austin King: 32:40

It's like very early in the industry and so, um, if you want to build a cross-chain dap, uh, what's going to happen is you're going to take like a month to redesign your protocol. You're going to take like two months, you know, actually coding that out and then you're going to take a month to do audits and you're going to spend like a hundred grand in the process. So this just like doesn't make sense for a vast majority of teams. Uh, because if you don't have product market fit, why would you take like a four month engineering detour just to make it a little easier to access your application so that people don't have to bridge it just like is not rational to do it and like that is Layer 0 and Wormhole really have not been able to drive adoption here, and so looking at that, it's like okay, if effectively the dev work is too much to make your application available everywhere by default, can we solve this problem at a different layer, and this really is where we started leaning deeper into the intent and solver paradigm.

Austin King: 33:33

So with Omni, you don't have to build a cross-chained app. What you can do is you can just integrate our front-end SDK and you can get the same outcome of building your app as if it was cross-chained, and by that I mean you access all the users and the liquidity from all these different platforms. And so the key insight here really was like don't make people write new smart contracts, but then just like program and build on a single computer and then source the users and liquidity at a different layer that's higher up in the stack than the smart contract level. So that was really like a huge unlock that we hit in 2024. And yeah, super excited for this, there's some demos out on main right now. Symbiotic, which has like over two bill, and tvls can be the first team using this.

Austin King: 34:17

So yeah, super excited to be pushing this forward in the industry now definitely, and let's say, with your experiences building it so far, and what's been the reaction to of teams, of builders and of projects and as they've integrated into, maybe like in DevNet, or tried it out in the early stages and seen how they can integrate it into their protocol.

Austin King: 34:43

Yeah, it's been pretty exciting because I think this is the first time that people see like a pragmatic path to solving fragmentation. Like, fragmentation is not like something that sprung up a month ago. People in the Ethereum ecosystem have obviously been talking about this for a year. I think it's very top of mind for everybody at this point because they see how much of a problem it is in light of a platform like Solana. But, yeah, I think it's been pretty exciting talking with these dev teams because it's the first pragmatic path that they've seen to solving fragmentation, where they don't have to take a four-month detour to go make it so their app is available everywhere. It literally takes like four days instead.

JB Carthy: 35:25

No, definitely it's great, like it's super exciting, and one of the things you maybe touched on that I'd be interested in hearing a little bit more about is the intent and solver paradigms. I have a very, very basic understanding of them, but I assume, based on how you're chatting, they're forming an important part of the framework of how you guys are solving the problems, of how you guys are solving the problems. So maybe if you could explain a little bit more for those of us who aren't as aware or understand them as much, what the intent and solver paradigms are, yeah, so at a high level.

Austin King: 36:08

this actually very much mirrors how Robinhood is able to provide such a great experience to their users. And so the key idea is, like you have users who just want to do a thing like buy Apple stock, and then it's like okay, cool, they can press the button that says buy Apple stock and then, behind the scenes, robinhood can just take that user like order or intent and they can just give it to Citadel to go do all the complex stuff of like talking to the APIs on all these different stock exchanges to get the user their Apple stock. So it's a very similar design paradigm, just applied to the crypto world, where it's like okay, user wants to buy this coin, you know, they just click a button and say like sign, like, all right, I want this. They don't need to think about like what chain it's happening on, or like making sure they have gas tokens, or maybe they have to bridge over to another chain in order to like use an application for that coin.

Austin King: 37:02

Um, instead, what you have is people like winter mute you know these like citadel type actors in the middle um, who effectively bid to acquire that uh intent and then just go like execute it for the end user handling all the complex steps. So it's kind of like just like, all right, there is a certain amount of complexity with, like, that is just simply necessary when interact, when interacting with any blockchain. Um, that is the case. So, instead of pushing that from uh users to developers, which is kind of the design with cross-chain apps, it's like what, if we push that complexity from users to just some third-party, these solvers? So that's kind of like a TLDR on the design principles there.

Austin King: 37:44

No, I appreciate that it's actually something that I need to maybe do a little bit more reading on and understand, but anything that makes it simpler for developers to build and things quicker and faster and for users to have a better experience is always going to be beneficial. Were obviously touching on a little earlier about like the, the staking or the security problem in ethereum, where there's a huge level of like centralization in how blocks are produced and the companies that produce the blocks, and I know at omni, you guys have a a pretty unique staking model where omni tokens are staked and but it's closely linked to also securing Ethereum, if I'm not wrong, and maybe you will be able to explain a little bit better about how Omni itself, through the staking, is also contributing to the security of Ethereum as well.

Austin King: 38:52

Yeah, so it's actually it's inverted actually. Yeah, so it's actually inverted actually. So, basically, omni is a network specialized in abstracting away all of this complexity from the end user experience so that people can access all of the Ethereum ecosystem without having to worry about which roll-up or whatever anything is happening.

Austin King: 39:11

Yeah 100%.

Austin King: 39:13

Yeah, and so, in order to increase the security of Omni, what it can do is it can actually pull in security from restaked ETH. So, instead of increasing the security of the Ethereum network, it's actually that the Ethereum network feeds into Omni, to increase the security of Omni network.

JB Carthy: 39:32

Yeah, no, and how does that work? So maybe a little bit of a step-by-step, or what's the design behind it?

Austin King: 39:43

Yeah, so at large. Basically, the idea here is that, in order to secure the Ethereum L1 network, you stake your ETH, and the reason this helps secure it is because you can actually lose your ETH if you are staking that to a validator that doesn't behave properly, and so with any other network, you know any proof of stake network. It uses this similar principle, and so Omni is unique in the sense that not only does it allow people to stake Omni to contribute to the security budget, they can also stake Ethereum, and so, effectively, what this allows is, like Ethereum has a market cap of what? Like 400 billion, something like that, so there's a massive crypto economic security budget that can be drawn upon from this much larger network to help really boost the security of smaller networks.

Austin King: 40:41

And they can do that by essentially drawing on the Ethereum liquidity through restaking, and then they are also benefiting from that activity.

Austin King: 41:00

Yeah, so there's two main protocols. So there's Eigenlayer and there's Symbiotic, croc is a third and there might be others at this point, but teams specifically are spinning up protocols that make it easier for networks to kind of like perform this activity where they pull in youth to help secure the network as well no for sure.

Austin King: 41:21

And now I appreciate and the explanation there genuinely and I saw you guys are on the road to mainnet and like I see the countdown tickers always going on x and the percentage countdowns up in the the 90 percent now of um at the private main net ticking towards main net. What's the timeline do you think for you guys to be launching or to maybe for people to be able to use the first apps and that utilize Omni on mainnet? Yep.

Austin King: 41:56

So usually it's best practices to not like drop a date in advance. But you know we have actually published when it's going live, so we got a week left. December 17th is when public mainnet is going to be available. There'll be like a small application ready day one just to help us load test the network. But yeah, we're less than a week away at this point no, I actually saw the.

JB Carthy: 42:20

I saw the video. Sorry, I actually thought I didn't realize that was the date of the full launch, but I saw the video and it's motivating, it's exciting. Um, and do you guys have, um, what protocols? Protocols are you able to maybe chat about that?

Austin King: 42:38

We'll be integrating it from day one yeah, so the main team that we're building with at this point uh, is symbiotic. Uh, what we're doing instead of building a like generalized v1 here this is just something that I think, uh, the industry tends to do frequently, um and honestly we have done it in the past as well is, when you build something people tend to like, try to build, build the perfect protocol and build it so that every team can use it in the way that they want. What we're doing instead is taking an approach to product development that's far closer to Web2, where you iterate pretty rapidly. So Symbiotic is the main team that we're going to be rolling out, the layer on top of the core interop protocol. We're calling it SolverNet. That's the main team that we're going to be releasing with first, and then we're working with a couple other teams as build partners on top of that initial release.

Austin King: 43:40

But Symbiotic really is the core team that we're working pretty closely with at this point in time and I suppose they're probably excited about the opportunity to use it and the opportunity to maybe connect with more users easier as well.

Austin King: 43:54

Yeah, I think especially for them it's big because these restaking projects like Symbiotic and EigenLayer obviously are very deeply Ethereum aligned. But the issue is that both of these protocols only exist on Ethereum L1 today, so they haven't been able to engage as much in the L2 ecosystem. But using Omni they can do that, and they can do that without taking on any greater security risks to their core protocol.

JB Carthy: 44:22

No, definitely, definitely. Just if this is kind of getting to the stage now, the space where we have about 15 minutes left. If anyone in the audience wants to maybe pop up on the mic, ask a question, feel free and we'll get you up here. Chat to Austin, but for yourself, austin, just maybe on a more personal level, and some of your own personal feelings around things that are going on in the space, what are you most excited about, apart from, obviously, omni, unifying all the Ethereum liquidity and what you guys are launching? But on a wider level, what are you excited about? Um in web 3 at the moment? What other kind of developments, what other things do you see that kind of catch your eye?

Austin King: 45:14

yeah, so the thing that I'm most excited about right now is really where we're going. I think we kind of went through a stage over the past three years where we um in many ways unbundled the crypto infrastructure stack, so usually people use the word modular when they talk about this. We basically thought from first principles, like okay, what does it mean to run a blockchain network? And we kind of pulled that apart and built specialized and more optimized networks like Celestia for data availability. Where we're at, though, is we're kind of in the era where everybody has to have a Netflix and an HBO and a Hulu account, and it's messy to maintain accounts across all these different platforms. Where we're going next, though, is we're just going to bundle it all back together and abstract that all away from the user experience. So you know me talking about like OK, this is cool, because Symbiotic can source user deposits from across the entire Ethereum ecosystem, across all these rollups, even though their protocol is just on Ethereum L1. That's like a nice functional output of what's going to be available when Solve the Layer is released on mainnet. But, like, where is this going?

Austin King: 46:27

Longer term, we're going to get to a point where using crypto looks like just using the internet. People aren't going to have to think about seed phrases, they're not going to think about gas, they're not going to think about chains. What they're going to notice is just as they start browsing the web. They're just going to accumulate assets as they go and they aren't going to be forced to think about any of the technical complexities there. So, for me, I think 2025 is going to be the year A lot of people are talking about this as chain abstraction. I think this is going to be the main thing that drives forward the industry over the year of 2025. And it's really just all the complexity that we deal with today. Uh will be abstracted away. We don't need any like zero to one crazy like zk innovation to make this happen.

Austin King: 47:14

like all the pieces are out there, it's more about sewing them back together at this point no, actually it's something that I think about a good bit is, like, I, I haven't been in space for a while. Um, it's clear that, like, as the years have gone on, as we've literally chatted about during the course of the space, there's so much technology now. There's so many blockchains. They've all competed and optimized and we have lots of environments that offer good user experience, low transaction costs, good speeds of transactions. You guys are obviously contributing to this, but it's now getting to the point where, like, we have to make it more appealing for the users to interact with the technology. So it's like, the user experience and the user journey has to be, um, understandable enough, has to be simple enough, has to bring them in in a way that, like, they can interact with the products that are built on top of and the blockchain, without needing to understand like things about, like you were saying, seed phrases, gas and, oh, I, I want to go from here to here, but I, I don't have gas. Oh, how do I get gas? And some of the things that people would just have absolutely like no idea of, um, if they weren't, like, hadn't done at least a few hours of reading on, like crypto or blockchains.

JB Carthy: 48:40

How far away do you think we are? You were saying like 2025. You think it'll be like a pretty big year. How far away do you think we are from? Like, let's say, you just tell your mother or your father or someone who has like very, very little prior experience of blockchain oh, just download this app and you're immediately going to be able to understand almost everything that's going on with the apps that you interact with. Oh, you're going to be able to understand almost everything that's going on. And with the apps that you interact with, oh, you can. You're going to be able to take your hundred dollars and you're going to be able to go and find a way to earn like five percent apr and some in some lending protocol and through the user experience. Do you think we're we're getting closer to a place where it's going to be that simple, where people who have no prior experience can get to grips with what's going on and what's being built and interacting with the protocols in a very, very short period of time?

Austin King: 49:34

yeah, I think, uh, q3 and q4 of 2025 is when that's going to happen. Um, and it's exciting because I can just like literally see in my head the technical things that need to happen. Um, the roadmap is pretty clear to me at this point.

Austin King: 49:49

No, for sure.

JB Carthy: 49:50

And is there anything particularly that makes you feel like that's the timeline, or yeah, Primarily, Honestly, I mean the answer is just because I think we're going to play a huge role in it and that's our internal timeline. I just like, yeah, I love.

Austin King: 50:07

The answer is just because I think we're going to play a huge role in it and that's our internal timeline, I just like, yeah, I love that.

Austin King: 50:12

I love that. Yeah, yeah, that's my honest answer.

JB Carthy: 50:14

No, sweet Unreal. I have Mikhail here request the mic so I'm going to bring him up to ask a question as he comes up. But yeah, for you guys, as you look ahead um omni into 2025, obviously talking about having um thinking you guys are poised to play like a big role in terms of simplifying the user experience, making it easier for people to come on chain, interact with all the the apps they want to use. What are kind of the big events or things you have in your roadmap after MayNet launch?

Austin King: 50:55

Yes, we have a staking upgrade that will be shipped. I believe it'll be in Q1. I don't know if it's January or February, but there's going to be an exciting staking upgrade that will affect the tokenomics that will ship in Q1. And other than that, really you're going to see the first versions of SolverNet in prod that's built on top of the Omnicore network. That's going to be shipped here on December 17th. So those are the two most proximate things that I'm super excited about.

Austin King: 51:27

I think both are going to make a big impact.

JB Carthy: 51:29

And then it's probably just about trying to get developers, get builders, get teams, and trying to get them to build on top of the tech or to integrate the technology and reach as many users as possible yeah, I mean, uh like.

Austin King: 51:39

yes, that is obviously always going to be a priority, but on top of that, it's more kind of like layering in, uh, like building on top of that. It's more kind of like layering in, like building on top. Yeah, it's building layers on top of what is already there to reach this future. That is, more chain abstracted, and so we're going to be driving progress, obviously in terms of adoption, on every one of these layers as we're going. But from an engineering perspective, the main focus is going to be like continuing to to build abstractions on top of the network that is out there, so it becomes easier and easier to use the Ethereum ecosystem, to a point that you just won't have to think about anything like gas connecting to a chain chains at all.

Austin King: 52:23

You just get on, decide the app that you want to use and it's. It's super easy People. People won't have to worry about anything except the thing that they want to do.

Austin King: 52:35

Yep, yeah, which, like, is how the internet works today. Right, you just go to a website and you do the thing that you want. You don't think about whether it's AWS, gcp, linux or Microsoft, you just like use the app.

Austin King: 52:50

Yeah, 100%, michal. I'm just offering you to come up here and ask a question. If you want to unmute yourself, maybe not? And P Daddy, I see you requested to speak. Speak as well, if you want to come up and maybe ask a question you guys um hi austin, best regards from digimon um hello to ask you um, since I see many projects that do um a big marketing campaign, although they are not the best projects.

X Spaces Guest: 53:30

I'm just wondering if, after the mainnet launch, omni is trying or will do stronger marketing than we have seen before.

Austin King: 53:41

I love this because Chase on our marketing team is also here. So, yeah, some context on Omni Chase is our only full-time person on the marketing team, so I think we operate in a very scrappy, lean way compared to most teams. But yeah, honestly, I think we Right now I'm really excited about the Unfuck Ethereum campaign that we're running for Mainnet. I think it's a big level up compared to the marketing that we've run previously, and Chase and I actually synced about this today Very excited for the initiatives that we're going to be driving as we're stepping into the new year. Here, I feel like our team at large is just getting a ton of clarity around how to drive the highest leverage results. So, yeah, I'm super excited for what's to come on the marketing front in like q1, q2 of next year.

X Spaces Guest: 54:29

Oh, thanks for the answer, for sure what have you guys found to be?

JB Carthy: 54:35

some of the it's actually one of like the eternal questions of like web3 and of this space is like community marketing and like all these sorts of things. What have your guys experiences been of like building a community and doing marketing and, as you're saying, obviously you're a startup as well, so trying to keep things lean, not not like overspend, and what are the secrets you guys have found to like growing?

Austin King: 55:04

yeah, um, I mean, one thing that we really this was kind of like something that I think we iterated on a lot like q3, q4 of this year was just clarity of messaging. So if you look at like omni's tweets over time, uh, they there was, like you know, we would talk generally about the same things, but there wasn't as much consistency as there could have been. And so one thing that we've gotten better at recently we still have room to improve, for sure, but just consistently, like reaffirming the core key messaging in the same ways, and this, I think, is just kind of like the foundation of everything else but that's something we've gotten better at in Q4 here and yeah, and just honestly, that's something we've gotten better at in Q4 here and yeah, and just honestly, that's kind of the foundation of it. If there's one thing that I would say in response to that, it's that and just tying all campaigns back to that key messaging.

JB Carthy: 55:56

So it's just being super clear about the problem you're going to solve for users and why people should care and making sure that people know about it as clearly as possible yeah,

Austin King: 56:09

actually I take that back.

Austin King: 56:10

I'll nuance it a little. Uh, you gotta know your audience as well. Um, you have to be like super specific about like who you are communicating to, because I think a lot of teams just like don't really think about that and then they end up in a situation where like well, we're telling people about our like new intent, solver agent abstracted thing and they don't care. And it's like because people don't really care about I mean, this might be heresy, but like people don't care about the tech, at least right now. Um, people care about results and so making sure that you are like you know what you're putting out there is easy to understand. You don't necessarily need to understand technology to understand that like it is doing something valuable. That is super important and I think a lot of companies miss that.

Austin King: 56:59

No, that's actually really interesting. And let's say for you guys, who do you think when you think of who you're talking to? What's your kind of avatar? Who are you imagining when you're like saying unfocus here?

Austin King: 57:10

yeah, I mean we were definitely. I mean this largely comes from me just having been in the ethereum ecosystem since 2017. But, like, speaking to like the core ethereum uh community that has been here through the bear market and is really excited about the future of ethereum but, like, very understandably, like sees the problems that are out there and sees that there is somehow a worse user experience today than there was three years ago and, in the meantime, solana has uh done a fantastic job uh and kind of like has provided, honestly, a really a really nice like competitive uh foil, so that, like it calls clarity to the ethereum ecosystem that we need to focus uh on these key issues so it's just from being having been like, so ingrained in the culture, having experienced, maybe, the frustrations that people had, you just kind of intuitively know maybe how to, how to speak to people and like how to resonate with some of their frustrations.

Austin King: 58:12

I would say that there's empathy there, for sure, but honestly it's something that we've had to iterate on a lot and we've gotten way better at marketing than we were a year ago, and a lot of it comes from just executing and doing things and making sure that you're learning from the things that you're doing no, definitely, definitely um.

JB Carthy: 58:33

Look, I I think that we're coming up on the hour and really appreciate you hopping on, really appreciate you having a chat. I think anyone who tuned in will have had, will have got great insight into Omni, into yourself, and we didn't even touch on um your time at Ripple, and we didn't even touch on um recently being um listed in the Forbes 30 for 30 and how was that actually? Was that nice? Was that a nice surprise? I mean?

Austin King: 59:02

honestly, I just thought it was funny, like uh, yeah, like I don't know, to me it's just kind of like a funny thing rather than like a huge dumb. You I mean, yeah, that's my honest take on it yeah, well, look, it's a, it's a.

JB Carthy: 59:19

It's a nice recognition for sure. I know you're probably just super focused on what you're building and not worried about, like, the recognition, because it comes. It comes for the work you're doing. So just keep focusing on the work you're doing and the recognition will come. But I think, man, like you, you deserve to give yourself a little pat on the back for um getting recognitions like that. And if you, if, if yourself and if omni continue to um do the great work you guys are doing and pushing forward the innovations you guys are building, there's no doubt that more recognitions will come in the future. But I have to say, like, thank you very much for coming on and I'm really excited to try out Symbiotic when it goes, when the main net goes live, or Omni goes live on the mainnet on the 17th, just to try to see what the user experience is like. And then I'm excited, as you are, for 2025 and to see what's coming. Yeah, thank you so much for joining, really, really appreciate it.

Austin King: 1:00:23

Cool yeah, thank you, man, I appreciate you having me.

JB Carthy: 1:00:26

No problem at all. No problem at all, no problem at all. And this was Helios Horizons, episode 29. And today we chatted to Austin King of Omni Network and they are building an incredible solution to help unify all the fragmented liquidity across Ethereum rollups. And thank you everyone for joining and talk to you again next week.

Austin King: 1:00:50

Thanks, everybody, have a good one.

Austin King: 1:00:55

Bye, bye, thank you.