Movement & Aptos: Making Security Sexy Again | Rushi Manche & Neil Harounian

This episode dives deep into the intersections of blockchain security and scalability, focusing on the pioneering efforts of Aptos and Movement to elevate security measures within the cryptocurrency landscape.

1. Importance of security in blockchain technologies and the efforts of Aptos and Movement to address these through advanced programming languages and frameworks.
2. The role of the Move programming language in enhancing blockchain security and efficiency.
3. The innovative approaches of Aptos in building a scalable infrastructure suitable for mass adoption.
4. Movement's initiative to bridge EVM landscapes with Aptos, leveraging both security and liquidity.
5. Discussion on the broader implications of blockchain security for the future of digital transactions and cryptocurrency adoption.

1: Introduction to Aptos and Movement

Neil Harounian and Rushi Manche discuss their backgrounds and the origins of Aptos and Movement, highlighting the focus on security and scalability in blockchain technology. Neil Harounian: "Aptos's origins started at Facebook pre-2022... aimed at creating a seamless money movement network." Rushi Manche: "Movement decided to build on top of Aptos to bridge both EVM land and Aptos, focusing on security and scalability."

2: Deep Dive into Blockchain Security

A detailed discussion on the security vulnerabilities of current blockchain technologies and the innovative solutions provided by Aptos and Movement. Neil Harounian: "We set out to build something brand new from scratch, not just the blockchain but also the programming language." Rushi Manche: "It doesn't matter if you're doing 10,000 transactions per second if you're getting hacked for billions every year."

3: The Role of the Move Programming Language

Exploration of the Move programming language developed by Facebook for Aptos, designed to enhance security and developer experience. Neil Harounian: "Move was developed to provide the best possible developer experience and user experience on top of that." Rushi Manche: "Move brings a firewall to smart contracts, similar to how web2 firewalls block viruses."

1. For developers interested in blockchain, consider learning the Move programming language to engage with more secure and scalable blockchain technologies.
2. Blockchain projects should prioritize security from the ground up, considering not just performance but also the robustness of their systems against attacks.
3. Evaluate the security protocols and infrastructure of blockchain platforms before engaging in development or investment.
4. Keep abreast of the latest developments in blockchain security to adapt to new threats and solutions quickly.
5. Engage with communities and ecosystems that focus on collaborative growth and security innovations, such as those fostered by Aptos and Movement.

In this episode, Santi is joined by Neil, head of ecosystem at Aptos, and Rushi, founder of Movement Labs, to discuss the Aptos ecosystem and the Move programming language. They dive into the unique features and benefits of Move, the importance of security in blockchain development, and the collaborative efforts to grow the Move ecosystem. Neil and Rushi also share insights on the impressive growth and adoption of Aptos, as well as their focus on empowering builders and democratizing access to Move. Thanks for tuning in!

People

Neil Harounian, Rushi Manche

Companies

Aptos, Movement

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

None

Rushi

Really look at security. I think everyone's over indexing on speed right now. It was like, oh, paralyzed as a hot narrative, but in reality, it's a Lamborghini without breaks. It doesn't matter if you're doing 10,000 tps if you're getting hacked for four and a half billion dollars every year. So I think what we're working on is making security sexy again.

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Santi

Hey everybody, welcome back. For a while I've been wanting to do a podcast on move and finally we're making this happen. We have two people that I consider kind of the experts to come on and talk about not just technical stuff, but more so what does it actually mean? I think most people have heard of different protocols of different companies, but I think it's important to just peel back and just understand the origin story, understand like why it's important. So we're going to get it from both perspectives.

Today we have Neil, who is the head of ecosystem at Aptos, and we have Rushy, who's the founder of movement, which decided to build on top of Aptos and kind of bridge both EvM land and aptos. So I think it's two very interesting perspectives. So why don't we just dive into it? Guys, welcome to the podcast. You want to give quick intros for everyone to understand, and then we can go from there.

Neil

Cool. Thanks for having me, Santi. Yeah, I'll give a quick background and happy to dive right into it. So my background, I started in the world of finance and venture capital. I started investing in crypto before Crypto was cool.

I started out trading things like equities and FX and eventually landed on crypto. But to me, crypto was more than just trading. It was a global community that just did not exist prior to its inception. And so I went really deep in the rabbit hole. I met Mo along the way, co founder of Aptos, and he tried to convince me to join Aptos before it even had a name.

And I was incredibly skeptical on why we needed another layer, one blockchain. But after many months, I ultimately joined Aptos at inception as part of the founding team, and I haven't looked back since. I'm now head of ecosystem, laser focused on growth of our community and the move language globally. A quick background on Aptos. For those that aren't familiar, the origins started at Facebook pre 2022.

Our team was tasked with creating a seamless money movement network on a blockchain for billions of people that required scalable and upgradable infrastructure. And that's where people like Avery, our CTO, came into play, where he spent over ten years at Facebook building out their infrastructure for things like Instagram. Fast forward to today. We have great supporters like a 16 Z, Dragonfly, multicoin, and many others. We launched our mainnet in October of 2022.

We had 30 projects launch on day one with us, and at that time was an unprecedented accomplishment. Even more than that, where 18 months later, an order of magnitude higher in terms of our ecosystem size. And this is just the beginning. We're one of the fastest growing non event blockchains, and for us, we've only just begun.

Rushi

I can take it from there. I'm rushing. Co founder of movement my background was in Ascool. I was engineering since I was 14, was always interested in distributed systems. Cybersecurity was early on in the cosmos.

EQ system actually was like cosmoism and kind of ethereum, solely engineering mostly freelance stuff. I was just in college and early school days, I met my co founder of Vanderbilt, where we were just both taking on APA seek system. I was doing the Dex on Aptos actually, which is one of the protocols that Neil's referring to, Kuberbil Satay, which is the first yield aggregator on Aptos. So we were early grassroots builders post FTX. We really doubled down the thesis like you touched on.

I think for me it was when I stumbled across article that Facebook was building a programming language. It really resonated to me because I was building Cosmos where there was like ten users and then slowly there were so many hacker attacks, it was really difficult to build any kind of consumer focused application. So it's taking a step back and realizing the technology was superior. The system was superior. But we wanted to bring to Ethereum and broader EVM landscapes where we could combine the forces of Ethereum and EVM liquidity and bring it to a novel technology that Facebook, Aptos and other moot based l ones were building.

So that's our movement thesis and led to where we are today. Just announced the series a and collaborating closely with AppDus to bring moot adoption together.

Santi

So maybe, I mean, we have a mix of listeners, we have builders, we have people that are interested in investing in the space or just tracking different ecosystems. Let's double click on of the Facebook idea. When you canvas the existing different blockchains, you guys came much later than Ethereum and some of the other kind of competing alto one, so to speak. What makes Aptos and move unique and special from your perspective. Yes.

Neil

So for us, we set out from day one and even pre day one of Aptos back at Facebook, where we knew we needed to build something brand new from scratch, bottoms up. And not only the actual blockchain and consensus mechanism, but things like the language itself, where things like solidity, to Ruchi's point, are riddled with bugs that allow for exploits and billions of dollars to leave the ecosystem. That was one of the core things meta was focused on when building the Libra blockchain. Our team was part of the original builders and maintainers of the move language and the Libra blockchain itself to make sure that a we can provide the best possible developer experience, but also b the best possible user experience on top of that. But Ruchi, as an early dev, I would love to hear from your perspective what brought you to Aptos and what made you stay within this ecosystem.

Rushi

Yeah, the easy example I was having, it was like account checks and like the EVM took forever. I was building, I think it was like some kind of social trading app. And it took me, I think, two months to finish all my account checks that need to write. And the auditor wanted to charge me 50 grand, and I had like $1,000 in my bank account. So I was like, this is going to end well for me.

And I couldn't really scale the project and deploy and main net. Right. And then when I stumble across, move the account checks, it took like 20 lines, 30 lines, I could do it in about 510 minutes. And then auditing costs are pretty much next to zero because it was pre seamless for that. So I think that's like a small story of what got me into the new space.

I think we're always thinking about how do we build this next consumer map on chain? And Zuckerberg, when he was in web two days, he was available deploy social app and just get feedback. Early in the Harvard days, that same social consumer app couldn't exist on web three, because if you want to launch something like your dorm room, or if you don't have high profile engineers, it's really difficult to deploy on Mainnet. Get auditing, get all production, because it's a very finance oriented culture. If you deploy an app, it gets hacked the next day, you pretty much lose all your consumer base.

While web two, if you get hacked, you lose a few usernames and no one really cares. So realizing that security is probably the most important thing in crypto. But most crypto people have been burned constantly like this, $50 million a hack every other day, and people are kind of used to it. But from the outside angle, it's really critical to actually adoption. Right.

I'm sure Neil touched on this more in the enterprise angle, but what gets me up and going is like, how do I get my family use crypto? How do I get normally to use crypto? And right now everyone's saying, oh, it's going to get hacked. It's like a scam. If I put any kind of money on it, it's not going to last more than three months.

And to an extent, they're right. Even the most flagship blue chip EVM protocols, like Curve Kyber, aren't formally verified. Even if you publish new code, there's a good risk of getting attacked. I think the number is like 92% of all EVM protocols or at risk of being hacked, because move is formally verified, which I can get more into as well. And with move prover, the DM project pioneered, we're actually able to formally verify apps at runtime.

So if there's, like, integer overflows or memory mishaps, we're able to essentially put a check of that. My analogy is like, move brings a firewall to smart contracts. In web two, you have firewall to block against viruses, which creates a kind of a novel security environment for oss that doesn't exist in web three right now. But move is like the first firewall that can essentially come at runtime to stop attack vectors.

Neil

I think that's for the tech side, that everyone comes for, the tech of move and Aptos. But from what I'm seeing now, people are staying not only because of the tech, but because of the community itself, where you have, for the first time in a while, a brand new programming language that brings a brand new ecosystem with it, that is more inclusive, that wants to help each other and wants to collaborate. Our goal at Aptos is we're not here just to build it and let people figure it out on their own. We're hands on, deep in the ecosystem. I'm in our New York office, where I'm looking out at our pod, and I see ecosystem projects sitting alongside our Aptos labs team members.

For us, it's a lot deeper than just the tech. It's the actual community itself. And we're continuing to go deeper on how we can be more supportive and more collaborative than others before us and even others after us, too. Yeah, I think that's a really good perspective, Rushi, particularly on security drives. All.

Santi

I think we'd all be kidding ourselves if we didn't appreciate that when you go talk to normal people, even institutions or users are like, come back to me when, you know, the headlines of hacks stop happening. Right? That's unfortunate. But Ruche, even a great evangelist, you know, every. You're kind of always on top every time there's a hack, which is every other day, rather unfortunately.

Like, you're like, well, this is. Why move? I'm curious. Like, in your both interactions with, like, teams that want to build, they have an idea what. What is stopping them from.

Like, they come to the realization, which I would assume is obvious, that, like, maybe move is, like, far easier. Like, your experience, Ruchi. But why wouldn't, like, why haven't they? Or why wouldn't they today? Are there particular reasons that, like, common denominators that you're hearing, like, hey, you know, I want to build on maybe Solana or maybe another ecosystem because of XYZ that you guys can't deliver on.

I'm curious if you've heard of. Yeah, I think, like also like playing like, the other side here. Like the kind of word this get the words they throw out is like, move is dead. And like, the community, the ecosystem isn't vibrant because this TVL is still stagnant. But I think when we look back at early Solana days, right, like the first year to Solana wasn't what it is today.

Rushi

You didn't have all the Kols, you didn't have all the on chain trading, all the volume. That takes time for it to actually mature. So I think the main pushback, especially when we were building early on, especially post FTX, was like absence. We both stuck at like 50 million TVL for a while. It was really difficult to garner organic TVL because there wasn't much volume in crypto in general.

Right. Most l two s besides, like Arbitrum were really kind of struggling. And pretty much all the volume, if any, was on EVM, Solana was trading at $8. So people were like, Solana is dead too. I think one thing that the movie system can work on, something that we're trying to do is like, bring more of like, the mind shared to it.

There isn't much limelight on the movie system or wasn't compared to the August of 2022 days. Everything's kind of focused on Solana meme coins and Solana Kolsky. So I think there's a few answers to the question. A, I think the. I hate the word kol, but, like, there isn't like, the meme coin shillers and traders talking about it every day, which probably was like, originating from captable.

Because ultimately what comes down to is like, people will show what they have bags in. Maybe Neil can touch more on the fundraising side. But like, obviously the bigger CTL traders didn't get exposure to early app does in sweet days, which is why they're not constantly showing it. And then b, I would say, like, the vibe islana is very degen trading meme coin that brings in organic use cases and new novel use cases. I think that opposite and general move chains are still early in the stage where in the first year of Solana you weren't seeing this kind of activity.

So they can still need some time mature. But I think we're on the way up. Yeah, we're starting to see some of the early signs that we're getting through. Right. I think some of the biggest hurdles are probably just maxis that don't want to leave their own special safe place.

Neil

But for us. Once we see a developer get their hands on move, it's very hard for them to go off of it. And I think Rush is a perfect example of this in Coop, too, one of the earliest builders building on move. And here they are a year or two later, continuing that development on move. And so even when you look at the electric capital report, you're seeing the retention of move developers much higher than solidity or rust.

And we believe that once people get their hands on move, there's no switching back to what they were using before.

Santi

No, I think that's a really good observation, Ruchi, particularly on Solana. The apps that were built on Solana pre, like, during the FTX days, versus what you see now. Like, Jupiter tensor is wildly different, which is also part of the reason why a lot of people are still stuck on that vision. But it's certainly not like a linear path. I guess you can think about, like, okay, what was the inflection point for Solana?

Or what was maybe bonk, maybe a couple other, like, Jupiter tensor. I think, like, backpack, like mad labs. Like, there's like, certain key defining moments, I think, of particular chains. But when I think of, like. And why, partially why I want to do this podcast, because when I look at you guys, obviously I've invested in both of your companies and protocols.

So, you know, obviously there's bias. But what I see coming from my experience in defi, particularly, like, you're sweating it even to your point, Richie. Like, when you're deploying on even like, the most Lindy protocols compound Aave, you know, maker, there's still this element of you just, you just know it's quite risky. And for me, that was like the, the thing that got me over the line. It's like when you hear people say, okay, I'm gonna build on particular chain, most of the argument is the users and the liquidity currently exist in EVM land.

I'm like, well, are you really building for that set of users, or are you building for like, billions of users? Because, like, and if you are building for billions, like, you invert and you say, okay, where's that going to happen? And if you take a 510 year view, then particularly around Defi, I have much more conviction that move is just a better, safer language to deploy a Defi application. So sort of, sort of like a matter of time. But yeah, you're right.

Like, sometimes these things take years and the attention is elsewhere. And, you know, maybe to that point like this, what are some of the things that you guys are doing to kind of incentivize. Neil, you mentioned the electric capital report that shows developer activity where you guys launched. You were farther ahead than perhaps some of the other ecosystems, but, like, you're ultimately competing for attention. Like, how hard is that?

What are some of the things that you guys are trying to do to kind of overcome that resistance, so to speak? Yeah, building ecosystems is really, really hard work, and I have major appreciation for everyone that has done it before because you don't realize it when you're looking from the outside. But it is one of the most difficult things about building a protocol or successful blockchain. But from us on our side, grants and funding, that's easy. Engineering support from our big area engineers, that's also for us.

Neil

Table stakes. But we usually take it a step farther. We want to show that our current ecosystem will achieve PMF and product market fit faster on Aptos than any other protocol out there. We want to give an unfair advantage to all of those that are building with us and on top of the network. Now, a good example of this is our January summit that we had in the Bay Area.

We flew out 30 of the top projects in our ecosystem from all over the world to come into Palo Alto for a week, come into our office, have engineering workshops, marketing workshops, one on one, tailored sessions to build out your roadmap for 2024, understand where your priorities are and what you need help with, where are the gaps? And we heard their feedback. And one of the things that we did on the last day was we brought together all of those developers and builders with our investor base. We had 50 investors join us for a closing event, and we just put everyone in the same room together, got them some drinks, got them some food. And at the end of it, we're now sitting several months after that.

We're seeing multiple teams that were funded specifically from that week and are continuing to grow, launch their tokens and grow faster than those that potentially were not able to make it. And so for us, it goes much deeper than just funding or engineering support. We're alongside you for the entire ride. Yeah, I'm looking over. I mean, there's a couple of things that I want to talk about, like aptos Ascend, for instance.

Santi

I think it's pretty interesting. I don't know if you guys want to talk about that. I mean, if we go back to the early announcement of Libra, there was a whole ecosystem of pretty impressive partners that kind of committed, but then, unfortunately, that had to wind wasn't unwound, but maybe on the institutional side, we'd like to get your perspective. Maybe it's aptos, Ascend, or other things, but if you could just maybe give us a flavor of what type of institutions are getting interested in aptos. Yeah.

Neil

So from the institutional side, I think we've. It's been quite easy for us, relatively, just because we built this blockchain for billions of users with the tech and infrastructure that people can trust and rely upon. Right? This same tech that a celebrity uses to live stream to their millions of followers around the world is the same thing that's powering this money movement network that we call Aptos. And so the institutions that we talk to, the enterprises that we talk to, they're all familiar with the pedigree and the quality of work that went into building the infrastructure.

And so for them, conversations are easy. They understand it, they're comfortable with it, and it's more. So how do we think about the vision of where this space is today and where it can be next year or five years or ten years from now? And for those institutions, they're laser focused on how can we maximize distribution? How can we get a higher top line?

How can we save on expenses? And so with Aptos itself, it allows them to scale all of their use cases far beyond what Ethereum or some of the other blockchains out there can offer. That's where Aptos ascend came into play, where we spoke to all of the largest financial institutions. We heard what their use cases were, what they wanted to accomplish. So we built this suite on Aptos that targeted those financial institutions that gave them permissions for whether it's tokenization, real time settlement, whatever use cases they had, but on the permissionless network, something that many have not gotten comfortable with until today.

And so we released that two weeks ago with folks like Brevin Howard, Microsoft, BCG, and South Korea, telco. And that's only the beginning. Our goal is to onboard more and more institutions, and we'll come out with more of these use cases over time, of why people are finally starting to look at crypto and deploy on permissionless networks. And to rush his earlier point, it has a large part to do with move and the safety that comes with the tech that we built. Yeah, Rushi, maybe I want to get your take on the rationale to kind of build movement and connect both Ethereum and, you know, Aptos.

Santi

And how's that journey been? Do you ultimately envision, like, not like a vampire attack, but a lot of users moving over once? Because, I mean, like, I'm looking at some stats there's just like our network like newsletter just came out. And like the retention the TVL growth in app does this year has been pretty impressive. Like it's still, you know, number wise, like not like as a more developed, like Ethereum, but you know, the growth in TVL, the growth in certain apps has been very encouraging natively.

But also, Rushi, from your standpoint, like, how do you envision connecting these two worlds, EVM world and aptos? And because you guys have announced a number of partnerships with companies. And so what is the thesis there? I think we're generally not going towards caring towards the moon market as much. I think we really see, okay, you had arbitration optimism last cycle that were the main Ethereum security solutions, and this cycle you'll have a few of next generation robs coming Ethereum.

Rushi

And that's kind of where the market is, right? There's a clear PMF of people who want to stay in Ethereum, use Ethereum liquidity, be Ethereum online, which is completely a meme, but as a go to market strategy, right? If I'm a theorem user, I'm often too tribalistic to even leave the current chain. But I'll use optimism arbitrage, because inevitably the tech is better, the user experience slightly better. But even look at base today, like base had some success of meme coins, but still it was like pretty, not great user experience.

The chain got congested, sequencer went down, sometimes with inscriptions. So the current l two scaling solutions are kind of not even scaling properly. So this kind of next wave of Ethereum scaling solutions focused on, okay, how do you bring this parallelized execution environment, this high throughput execution environment, while still leveraging Ethereum flow query and security? So I think that's kind of where our third PMF and motto is. Whereas we believe in Ethereum, we believe that the current best way for a builder to deploy capital and deploy a defi app is still leveraging Ethereum security.

Most of the volume today in DeFi is done on Ethereum arbitrum optimism in any l two solution. And I foresee that staying for the next six to twelve months. You can argue that l one s have better user experience and better kind of end to end experience, but the fact is that a lot of the volume is happening today on Ethereum. So when we take a step back and kind of looked at that, we're like, there's a few main factors here. Unfortunately, the current state of crypto comes down to wealth creation, right?

The best tech, unfortunately, doesn't always win out. It matters. How can you get people community making money, how you get teams funded with novel use cases, and how you bring liquidity on chain. And quite frankly, looking back on our app days, that was kind of a struggle post FTX, because there's little to no liquidity in non evms. And like any capital deployer, didn't feel comfortable deploying anything that wasn't Ethereum.

I think with the bull market, we're seeing that kind of change with Solana. But what happens in six months when the market takes a downturn, then those same office and liquid funds that didn't feel comfortable deploying on top of any l one will still turn to Ethereum. So looking at that, we're saying, okay, we want to provide as much short term solvency for this Ethereum scaling solution. L two s can scale. Today we believe in a paralyzed, formally verified environment for apps to deploy.

Obviously we're doing some webinar guerrilla tactics with airdrop mechanisms and whatnot, but we're kind of seeing that meta, especially the last few weeks, kind of get oversaturated. And we can also delve into that and how we go into tokenomics. But it is a tricky line because you don't want to air drop your entire supply and then like your vampire tactic three days later, right? But you want to make sure that people are having value creation effects. So I think our general go to market is realizing that most builders today, defi builders, want to live on Ethereum.

They want better user experience. And we're kind of bridging the gap of bringing kind of the benefits of app dots and move in general and bring that to Ethereum. So I would say generally more of our comp is like arbitrary optimism and l two solutions and not competing with l one itself. Have other of you guys looked at like user behavior and activity? So for instance, like a wallet on Ethereum, say the user starts in Ethereum or starts another ecosystem, he does x amount of transactions in a particular protocol.

Santi

And then once he moves over, no pun intended, but once he moves over to aptos, like, what kind of unlock are you seeing? Like, for instance, in Solana, it was very clear, right? You may be in Ethereum because of fees. You were priced out. You go to Solana, you can use Jupyter DCA, and all of a sudden you have a spike in meme activity, because all of a sudden you don't think about fees.

And so it does a huge unlock, particularly for a segment of the market that was priced out.

I'm curious, in the different dapps that you have in app DOS today, are you seeing maybe user feedback or just anecdotally from teams? Adam's a good example. He worked at parafy, so he knows how the EVM land works. And then he obviously developed Thela and I spoke with him. But I'm just curious, anecdotally, what is the unlock?

When users move over, do they really appreciate? Do they leave? Do they stay? What kind of metrics or insights can you offer there? Yeah, so we did a deep dive here, and what we found was usually a user starts out by bridging a small amount of assets from whether it's Solana via wormhole or non EVM network there, or EVM from something like layer zero.

Neil

They start with a small amount, they test around a few products, maybe they start with Thela and then go to different protocol. But what we found was the velocity of transactions are higher and then they always come back and bridge more funds after their first bridge. And so we're seeing not only retention is there, but also increased engagement over time. To your point, there is a massive unlock when people experience this network for the first time. Something that I just started doing is when I travel to conferences, I have someone pull up their phone, download the petrol wallet and send them an apt, and they're blown away by how quickly they're able to get the funds in their account and how fast they're able to send it to whoever they want or transact with the network.

And so for us, we just want to get people's hands on the network to see for themselves how amazing it is. And so we're seeing that retention continuing to tick up, and not only that, but engagement overall. Yeah, so, like following that thread, like from both of your perspective, like, what does the rest of the next twelve to 18 months look like? What are you most focused on in terms of types of applications being built, type of initiatives? From both of your perspective?

Rushi

I think from the Ethereum lane, like, there's a clear fatigue of the EVML two s, there's like a 50 EVM L two s have no clear user experience difference. There's a whole ZK EVM craze. And then people realize there's fundamentally no user experience from ability proof to fraud proof, and in the case absence of fraud proofs. So I think in the past, when you look at Ethereum scaling, it hasn't always been not user focused, it's always been like, what's Ethereum aligned? What does Vitalik say and what does consensus want to push and then in the reality, when the user experience comes down to it, users don't care.

Users really care about, okay, how can I have like low gas fees? How can I not get hacked? Even like, security itself isn't really a narrative. Security is a lot like privacy, where it's like everyone agrees that's kind of needed and it's important, but it's not sexy, right? You can't create memes about security and privacy.

And like, if you look at price action, there's been no security or privacy coins that have actually made it. So that becomes, from like private market point of view, really difficult to validate the security thesis. But I think the way we're approaching it is we recognize that people want better user experience. So focusing on the high through capacities. We envision the world when you launch mainnet, that trading is going to be very active on our l two, because you have all those user experiences like Slana, while leveraging ethereum for liquidity and security.

So kind of meshing the both, we are fully even compatible. So a lot of our go to market is targeting the existing arbitrum optimism avalanche protocols that kind of saturated their chain, looking for their next step, and now they can build novel trading experiences. We've seen a lot of order books rise from arbitrum having gas fee spikes, because when GMX goes to the roof, it kind of affects the user experience. So doing fully on chain order books with us. So I think from a defi point of view, we're seeing migration from existing l two s to better novel user experiences, because traders ultimately want low gas fees, localized fee markets.

And I think there's a whole angle of using the shared sequencer that we can get into. Existing centralized sequencers are pretty broken and honestly flawed. They pretty much tap at 100 gps. So a lot of these games and even on chain consumer apps are looking at, okay, how do I keep up time? But again, these are very small things.

It's mostly on how you distribute, how to keep value creation, and that's when the tech gets actually actualized. Yeah, from our side, we think about a few different verticals. Right now, my focus is on three of them. The first is finance, inclusive of Defi and payments. The second is AI, and the third is social.

Neil

I'll go into each of them a little bit. But on the finance side, both our traditional finance partners as well as Defi, have been taking off quite a bit this year and will continue to do so. But not only that, I think payments, the original use case of crypto for peer to peer payments we still think is relatively untouched. And so we have a few things in the works that are going to come out this year where we're going to take that to the next level, where you think about money movement more broadly, where it started off with something like Swift and ach, then ethereum, it's still, it's still not where it should be. And for us, what we're achieving essentially is a dollar can move faster on Aptos than any other payments rail in the world.

That's something that we're excited about and a lot of our partners are, and something that we're going to incorporate into Defi and our trad five partners, AI. Once we came out with our announcement that we're working with Microsoft, we just had an influx of builders that wanted to partner with us or work with us, not necessarily looking for funding, but wanted to be part of the ecosystem where they think AI has a special place. And then final is social. Just given our team's background, coming from Facebook and Instagram, we think we know a thing or two about building social applications. And so we have a few things coming out, Q three, Q four that we'll touch on this vertical.

Rushi

Yeah, I kind of push asking you the question. I think the question I get a lot is how's different sauna? Right. How's SVM, how's Slana l one different than aptos? L one.

And the answer I'll give is security. And they're like, okay, I don't really care about security. Now what? So when you're approaching these institutions, or even your general go market, what is the three bullet point thesis of how the move experience is different than SPM experience? Yeah, I mean, it depends who your audience is, right?

Neil

If you're talking about institutions, they do care about security a lot. They love it. And so, rushy, your tweets are probably circulating in all the institutional rope chats, but from what we've seen, they really care about security. They don't think that solidity will be the end game for DeFi or real world assets on chain. It doesn't make sense and it's just not feasible.

And so they love move for that reason. When you talk to developers, on the other hand, what they care about is how do they go from zero to one faster than anywhere else? How can they get their product in the hands of millions of users without potential scalability issues or performance issues? And so they've done that really, really well. Where our first hackathon that we ever had, there was basically no documentation on Aptos, no documentation on move.

We had 50 builders in our Palo Alto office in May 2022, and these developers turned around within three days, building full fledged applications. It was not possible anywhere else. And so we're starting to see that amplified now with all of the additional resources and tutorials where they have what they need to go from zero to one on aptos faster than anywhere else. And they absolutely love that.

This episode is brought to you by, say, se's belief about the world I think is a good one. They believe that the EVM is here to stay. Agree with that. They believe that the EVM is going to look kind of like what JavaScript ended up looking like in the web two world. Agree with that.

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Big thanks to mantle for sponsoring empire. Yeah, that's quite interesting. Documentation is something that I think a lot of developers complain about moving to another ecosystem, but it's great to see that. It's just really good. I want to offer some interesting stats because unfortunately, a lot of times people are stuck on certain, like, it's like, oh, the UX is terrible.

Santi

I'm like, is it like, have you used, like, when's the last time you use, like, Jupiter? I was like, I don't know. No, like, fees are really high. I'm like, okay, have you used. And so unfortunately, you have like two camps of people that are very opinionated but are not using this stuff or just simply stop paying attention.

And the space moves like incredibly fast. So, like, if you were to like, focus on Aptos maybe last year versus this year, radically different, just, just by virtue of number of apps or metrics. So I'm just going to offer some stuff and then I'll let you guys comment. But things that just jumped at me and it was really time because our network, which is Spencer's, like, newsletter, is like really, really good. And it just came out with the Aptos mega issue like literally like 15 minutes ago.

So I'm just kind of reading this live and I will link to the show notes. But like, for instance, there's been like, there's been a lot of activity. I think you guys did a campaign with Starbridge or Stargate and there's been over 1.4 billion of inflows and it really spiked. That was earlier this year, and there's been more inflows and outflows. So that is a good proxy for retention.

To your point, 53 of bridge volume has stayed and there's been 47% outbound. So there's still net inflows. So that's one stat. Stablecoin supply, like stable coins, I think are just a killer Trojan horse that has crossed 100 million. That's 27% of all TvL that has grown three x year to date, so to speak.

Let me know if this is not accurate. I'm just kind of going off of the newsletters. Keep going. I love this because I think a. Lot of the conversations just like opinions, but let's just put hard numbers on it.

I appreciate it's not a billion maybe that is locked in or 15 billion slacked in Eigen, but it's not change either. This is really interesting to your point around consumer. There are 20 games set to launch this year. And when you look at the share of users in Aptos, there's this interesting chart. 42% are interacting with Dexs, which makes sense.

Dex is the first killer landing spot. 30% is going to Dapps, 12% are nfts, eight to 9% are bridging. So maybe they just kind of bridge and didn't do much and then the rest is kind of defi. But what's really interesting is this DAP category, a lot of it is like you look at Dao growth from it says your thirty six k to eighty k dows. In three months.

And a lot of it's just like interacting with like nfts and social or gaming, which is, you know, compelling. I'd say there's some interesting collections on the NFT side. I don't know if you guys have a particular NFT collection or artists that are kind of going on there, but you know, every, every ecosystem like Solana had mad lads and then has others, but like, I don't know if there's like a Hallmark collection in. There are, yeah, there are definitely a couple. I was out in Dubai for a token 2049 and it was actually awesome to see.

Neil

We didn't host an event. We let our community run that. And a bunch of NFT projects actually came together to host their own side event, which we attended. And those are the same NFT founders, by the way, that were live with us before mainnet even launched. They've been around for about two years.

And these guys are some of the most dedicated builders in our ecosystem. Fisher from Apt Domingo's or Smith from Aptos monkeys. These are the guys that are day in and day out dedicated to helping expand all of those metrics that you just mentioned. And so I want to. Thanks for offering the shout out to them.

I think that's. Be happy to hear that. Yeah, I mean, for instance, it says here Aptos counts over 28.8, like 29,000 collections, I assume like unique collections out there you can collect and then 4 million holders. That's pretty impressive. Yeah, this report is actually really good.

Rushi

I'm actually running through right now. It's like, it's like the best sponsor. Our network is like the best and they come out with it. Like, here's another one that's really interesting. Merkel trade, I assume it's like a, it's a, the first ever gamma fied perpetual.

Santi

Dex. Yeah. Okay, let's talk. Perpetuals are interesting because they actually have not been able to thrive in l one ethereum, because it's just like when you think about the frequency of updating this stuff, it's very expensive to do so. So they've gained some traction, like in l two s, like, you know, of like GMX and a few others.

You have drift and, but like here, merkel trade, it blends gaming with crypto, forex and commodities trading. And it does so in sort of a gamified way. And you can earn certain nfts. The more interesting stat is it has over 100,000 traders and has generated 7.8 billion in trading volume just four months since inception. All the all of that just in the last four months.

That's, that's pretty wild. I've seen some crazy shit my day, but, you know, that's, that's, that's good stuff. I mean, yeah, I think it's really the TVL thing because like, I like the comparison. So it took to reach 3 million TVL to 89 days. AppDus took five or five days that by, when you look at like launch dates, appdos hit main net or Solana hit main net March 16, 2020.

Rushi

And that went into the bull market, obviously, and that's around the bull market. So like Solana launched like peak bull market area and carry into bull market took three, nine days. Aptos launched post FTX in like the worst crypto crash of all time and still nearly, basically hit the same, um, 300 tv. 300 million tv on milestone. A month before FTX went down.

Neil

So think, think about that. We, you know, market was, was very calm and everything was going well and then a month after went live. Everything. Yeah, I mean, someone that is like pretends to like, I'm going to mess right now, but I'm paying attention. But like, there is just impossible to like keep track of everything that's going on.

Santi

For instance, like, I'll keep going. Like Merkel, for instance, like the Christmas of 2023. Here's the interesting. The volume of the cumulative position size delta has been constantly growing. So the average trading volume is on any given day between 60 and 100 million.

And the cumulative size position delta has been like 250 million. Like, that's, that's pretty impressive. I'm just blown away. I mean, they, they were part of our first hackathon in Korea just about twelve or 13 months ago. They've been building ever since.

Neil

And you're right, I think close to $8 billion in volume. And I think that's on a crazy low TVL. And I think they have less than 5 million of TVL.

Santi

Yeah, but I think what people are starting to realize is TVL is not the important barometer. When you think about, like, even when you look at something like uniswap, it doesn't matter. What you need to look at is the turnover. Turnover is what generates fees. You can have a ton of, you can have a ton of TVL, but no trading, there's no trains, no fees, so it doesn't really matter.

Look at the efficiency of the capital. And that's what you're starting to see in these like higher throughput blockchains, like the velocity of that and the unlock and user activity is really important is really what you should be focusing on. So when I look at that, it's not so much. I don't necessarily care how many users, user growth is interesting, like how many? Like wallet growth and retention, but it's really like the daily trading volume.

That's pretty impressive.

I mentioned a few protocols here. I just went scrolling down, but I've seen you guys focus a lot in Korea, and you just mentioned it. It's obviously a very degen market. It likes crypto. The penetration rate is really high.

Is that the thesis, or is there a particular. And you just mentioned, I guess, an institutional partner, right? Yeah, I think it's a mix of a few things. Right. I think there's high crypto penetration there from retail, there's high adoption from enterprises.

Neil

And then I think the third one is consumer behavior. There you can find virality in Korea faster than most places around the world. And so for us, it was very intentional. When we, when we were starting up and even through our first fundraise, we made sure that we wanted to have local partners with us from day one. And so we have four investors that are on our cap table, based in Korea.

Hashed is one of them, Iron Gray, which is a family office, and then Hybe and YG, which are the managers for BTS and Blackbank. And for us, we want it to be spread throughout, not only through enterprises, institutions, but all the way down to consumer applications, behavior, and pop culture and k pop. And we did a really good job of that. And our investors did a really amazing job just getting us deeply ingrained in the ecosystem. And we were there four or five times last year, probably on track for the same this year, going very deep with the partners there that understand deeply some of the use cases that can be brought to life with, with Web three.

And not only that, I think the developers there get it, too. And that's where we found Merkel and a handful of other developers building in our ecosystem there. It's definitely a country that's very special to us, and we plan on spending a lot more time there. Yeah. Rishi, you've been quiet there for a minute.

Santi

I want to maybe switch it over to you. And just what are you most focused on? I mean, every other day it sounds like you guys come up with an announcement of just whether. It's just seems like the ecosystem within movement is ever expanding.

So upon launch, I would assume, what's the experience from a user standpoint? So say that I originate in Ethereum or I originate somewhere else.

Offer us maybe some insight into what is it going to mean for the user to go through movement. What are some of the things that they were going to be able to do? Like, day one. Yeah, they had tweet about this, like, since we announced we haven't seen an inbound since November 2022 ecosystem, which I'm very excited for the ecosystem in general. Like, there's like, ethereum.

Rushi

People who, like, never even, like, looked at the non evms that reached out say, I want to build a movement. And they deployed smart contracts in the last, like, 72 hours. So our video team is like, over there, like, sweating balls. But I think what we've seen is like, yes, you have the moving system, but really, our value captures from the EVM system. You have these arbitrum optimism protocols that really can't differentiate themselves because if you're the fifth prep decks and optimism, like, you're not really accomplishing much.

There's not much of a different business model there, but there's a world where you can develop novel use cases on Ethereum without needing to kind of leave your current system. So we're seeing, like, fully on chain or books that on optimism, were impossible be deployed. We're actually seeing some movie Abs's now. So, like, we're working Eigen team around formal verification. How can we create, essentially watchtower for mempools to enable, essentially, form verification running at one time?

So I think we're doing a lot of work. Like you have, like, the defi side as well. But we're unlocking some use cases on, like, Ethereum mempool security and form verification security, because this team, for example, use firewall that has raised capital and they're really focused on, okay, when there are transactions coming into the mempool, how do we make sure that there's a way for you to revert transactions in case of the hacker attack coming? If you look at, like, l two s right now, no one's really focused on security. No one's really focused on performance.

They're all doing the same thing of, okay, how can I incentivize mercenary capital? Mercenary developers give them the airdrop they want, and then they'll probably leave the next chain in about six to twelve months. What we're looking at is, okay, this, we're one of the leading chains in space that's actually focused on high throughput parallelization, a novel user experience compared to other four year chains. So let's say, for example, I'm a game arbitram right now. I'm probably not getting any kind of performance.

I'm really getting all my compute off chain and maybe having NFT marketplace on chain. And that's my web three gaming experience, which doesn't accomplish much. You're not actually doing anything innovative. Blockchain. We're now seeing the same games, especially in the last hundred hours or so, saying, okay, your environment allows me to do much higher throughput, not be burdened by gas fees.

I can actually do it fully on chain gaming. So that's a big study. On the defi side, we're doing a lot of work at analyzing insurance because in the past insurance on Ethereum has been broken, essentially because smart contract rates are so high, there's no way to get actual insurance models to backup investments. So in my family office, I wasn't comfortable employing ETH on one of these EVM zero two s because the smart contract risk was so high, if I went to an insurance provider, they couldn't give me accurate risk profiles, so there wasn't actually good insurance policy make sense now? We actually have accurate risk models based on form verified applications, and we're presenting that to family office and look at funds.

I mean, look, we're cutting down attack vectors by up to 90% if you're deploying ETH on chain. This is the most secure way on Ethereum to deploy ETH on any other ether masses. You don't have to use a third party bridge, which is another concern of a lot of people looking at L one, you can use our trust minimized bridge from main Ethereum to our layer too. So we're actually seeing a lot of capital pours come from arbitrum, optimism and other layer twos. Looking at our stack and saying, okay, the user experience is better.

If I want to move capital around, it's going to cost me a fraction of what it costs on EVM. And B is actually risk models that make sense. So I think we have an opportunity to be a leader in the most secure way to deploy ETH and DeFi on Ethereum through the work we're doing insurance through the work we're doing Abs's. And I think that's particularly exciting. In the next four or six weeks.

Santi

I'm going to ask a pretty basic question I think our listeners would appreciate, but just even for my identification, like so. So when you're sitting at this intersection between EVM, land and aptos, you are maybe taking like the weakest chain this idea when you're connecting two chains, I guess, unless you're doing it through IBC, but maybe I would love to be enlightened here, but, like, you're still in some capacity, like, beholden to the limitations or like, the issues that have existed in EVM land when you're connecting these two worlds. Right. So how do you, I don't know if that's true, but how do you mitigate, like, the surface area of ATT and CK vectors if you're interacting in these two worlds? Like, are you still, aren't you like, beholden to, like, the weakest link here, which is EVM land?

Rushi

Yeah. So it's a layer too. So you have, like the movie and for execution, ethereum for settlement. So you don't have, like, the formal verification happens at the move per overload with the execution level. So when you have even smart contracts deployed, we clearly market that it's not going to be as secure, not going to be high performance.

The way we look at EVM contract deployments is as legacy code. In the perfect world, we have every EVM app deploying and writing move code, and then me and Neil will be very happy builders. Best of the true case, if you're a solar developer, it costs a lot to hire move developers. It costs a lot to hire us developers. There's only finite amount.

So the question is how you do bd for the next four to six weeks. And oftentimes what we found is a cold start. Problem is providing EVM compatibility. Where you market that, look, it's a move EVM, your best performance will be on the move side. But if you're going to be annoying and be stubborn, but we still want to support you, we still support even smart contracts.

And what we see is actually a turnover where they'll deploy. Even contracts realize their counterparts are doing much better throughput, have better security metrics, and then themselves will learn move and onboarding. So I think the main bottom line here would be Ethereum settlement. Ethereum obviously is slower than at engine, Ethereum obviously slower than SwE and Solana. We're not marketing that we're going to be faster than them.

In fact, I would contend if you want to build like a payments app, or if you want to build an x ray gaming app, it probably makes sense to use it. Layer one, just better throughput. And anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. We're really focused on, okay, how do we bring liquidity to these move apps and EVM apps? How do you bring a better user experience to Ethereum?

The trade offs of Ethereum is obviously, it's slow, it's clunky, but it still has so much financial volume, it still has Lindy effect. And people today aren't comfortable leaving Ethereum in a six to seven year lens. Maybe that changes in aptos. We other blockchains are able to encompass Ethereum as a global settlement layer, but for today, Ethereum is a global settlement layer. So the question is, how do we scale that?

Santi

Yeah, I think when I first met you, I asked you the question, so like, what's the end game for movement in a world where the say that like we're all kind of beta testers right now, but if like the vast majority of users, developers, partners, are going to join the next ten years and drive a lot of the activity, what happens if they just go direct to. Because this idea of chain branding is something that I think goes away over time, ultimately either through aggregators. If you believe that kind of evolves, then no one will really care if you're using Ethereum or Solana or Apdos. Like, you just want things to work. So like what is the, that's at least my view.

But like what is the end game for? Like some, like your place and the utility of movement connecting these two worlds in a state of the world where most people may just go direct and build on aptos. Well, I think you look at the Ethereum and other EVM chains, right? You can argue that every evm l one l two is a vamp attack on Ethereum, but that's clearly not been the case, right? Like arbor trying to clear GMX use case optimus and synthetics.

Rushi

So what happens with these kind of l two s and non evms is usually there's one or two apps that really make it or break it. While ethereum you have a slew of apps. So in the way we see it is like works complimentary to app to us, at least for the next three to four years, where if you want to deploy like a defi app, we probably, and bring Ethereum liquidity, it probably makes sense to movement. If you wanted to have your own novel l one issues app dots. In many cases going cross chain is actually plentiful and we're seeing a lot of that activity happen.

So I think in the short term we're not even concerned about that. We're really more focused on attacking the evm land. Ethereum land. And like many l two s often only have one or two apps that really prove the defi experience on that. And then a long term, we'll see how that plays out.

Right? I think like no EvM l one or l two has vamp attacked ethereum so far. Like, even BnB has its own virulent system and does, like, the second most EVM volume is not taking away from Ethereum. Like, pancakeswap is like pretty much a native bnb app. So no one in the evm.

Santi

Pancakeswap is still actually in aptos. I just realized pancakeswap exist in aptos and it does, like, you know, has like 13. Not the TVL is the most important metric, but has like 14 of TVL. Anyways, go ahead. I think each, like, the vision is like, I think everyone here is a move is a standard.

Rushi

Like, there's multiple move l one s, multiple move l two s. Everyone's really adopting move as a framework. And then each kind of l one l two has its own app specific use case, vertical specific use case. Maybe in ten years. App dress is a consumer focused l one and with a defile one.

Or maybe it's all the way around, like Apus with a defile one and with consumer l one. I think if you look at it from short term point of view, and honestly, this is one of the frustrations coming into moving system is like, I was a college kid and I had to choose between apples and Sui and I didn't know which one was better or didn't really know what's going on, and they were fighting each other, which neil probably won't go into. But that was honestly a concern. Right. It was like, there's ten developers and two major l one s are competing with the ten developers.

And then it led to a lot of issues starting off and probably turned off most of the existing, whereas I think now I think activists movement really recognizing that's not the way to go about the real villain here is the EVM and other next Gen L one s. And I think it's a very collaborative environment. Yeah, let's actually go there. Go ahead. Yeah, I want to double click on this, but I think the point that Rushu brings up is really important.

Neil

I mean, it's think about where we are. Move is brand new relative to things like solidity or even rust, and who knows where we'll be in 510 years from now. But I think right now the focus is how do we collaborate to grow move together? We're not seeing movement as, hey, we don't want to work with you. You're another move chain.

This is someone we want to work with to grow the pie together. And I think that's why all of us at Aptos are really excited to work with Rushi Coop movement and bringing move to really, the masses and overtake, I guess, the legacy languages. Yeah, no, that's a good point, Rushi. I want to also double click on this idea you mentioned when you come and there's different move based chains. How was that?

Santi

Maybe offers some insight into what was your decision process of, like, something that stood out from Aptos or stood out from Sui or say, you know, Neil, I'm gonna have to mute him. You might just like, yeah, I mean. Like, I think everyone kind of knows, like, this track history, but it was, like, obviously not the best vibes if you were looking to come to exist on. It was like a guerrilla war. There was exclusivity contracts that were back and forth.

Rushi

There was, like, Twitter beef. So, like, from newcomer and, like, a college kid, I was like, what is going on here? And I think that's, like, the common experience that it was back then. It was like, okay, I can either choose between two fighting systems or build on Solana. And a lot of the builders ended up building on Solana.

But I think hopefully, the narrative is kind of distilling down. We're able to kind of meet, like, watch those tensions. Hopefully that gets better over the next few months. But again, like, it is competitive environment. We've seen it in EVM lan.

It's nothing new. You have, like, arbors from optimism beefing each other. You have multiple EVM l ones beefing each other. But again, it's early system. So I think, like, Solana didn't have, like, beef when it started off.

It was just Solana new l one. They launched a fair price and had a lot of kols make a lot of money. So there wasn't, like, a tribalistic matter. It was pretty open arms, whereas move kind of had a more fragmented approach, which turned off a lot of people. But I think in the last three months, we've seen a app has kind of stepped up the plane, recognized that it's not as zero sum games.

Hats off to Neil and crew, but really, like, people are coming to the ecosystem realizing that, hey, there's actually unified effort here. We have movement, which is kind of this DJN built by community of effort, and focus on Ethereum. You have appdos, which has a clear PMF and institutional adoption, and they're actually not competing with each other. Working together. We have some great initiatives we're going to be announcing in a few weeks to really incentivize builders.

And from our point of view, we win if move has ecosystem win if there's more app desk, move developers that's more mind share for us. And I think it goes vice versa. If there's more Ethereum people, especially you've seen the last few weeks chilling move and talking about move, especially in context, movement that brings apt us up in general because there's more appdust move developers coming to exist. So I think what we, the metric that we look on is move market share. The number that we bring internally is like move market share is probably three to 5% right now.

Developer count, our goal by end of this year is around 10% and the two to three year goal is 15% to 25% market share, which is very ambitious and very driven, but we can't do that by ourselves. And if us after, since we keep fighting each other, we're never going to accomplish and move is going to die. So the main metric we're looking at is move market share. Right now it's like 60% EVM, like 20% sauna, and the rest distributed about l one s the key. And then you touched on is growing the move developer market share.

And then if it, whoever boils down to like, oh, you get this developer, you get this app, it really doesn't matter, we're just trying to like increase that percentage. That's fair. When you mentioned those figures, are you referencing the electric capital developer report? Yeah. Don't quote me the numbers.

Santi

Just like, I mean, within this automatic, it's ballparkish, but it's like less than 5% of all developers today. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So the main initiative for any growth market or any developer relations is increasing that percentage developers. Because if you're just taking away the three developers from each different move l one or non EVM l one, you're actually not making any forward progress.

Rushi

You're just creating vampire attacks and creating no net new development. I think that's what EVm kind of stuck with, where it's like, it's the same defi app that's like bridging between different chains and asking which chain will give them more of a grant. And then like, there wasn't actually much innovation happening. Solana did a better job because they were the only SVM and we saw like net new innovation coming. And I think move has a chance to really take it the next step because there is a security aspect.

You have the ability to verify and hide through apps that you can't do any elsewhere. So the main metric that we're looking at internally is how do we grow that percentage? Yeah, but Neil, in the conversation, you and I were both in Dubai and for me, there's clear narratives or actual use cases that are going to take off. And as much as Defi is not sexy, it's sort of in the backseat. It is the thing.

Santi

It powers everything.

I think the move language is very well suited for that, but also stuff like real world assets. I think if you're an institution, you really do value security. You really do value the language and the ability for internal teams within your organization maybe to easily deploy and really value the security aspect of it. Is there anything that actually, just going back to Ruchi's point, like you would add in terms of your focus, when you think about, like, you have two other competitors, does it compute? Are you more focused on like, how do you, how do you think about differentiation in the lens of developers, users?

Neil

Yeah, I mean, for us, it's exactly what Rushi said. We want to grow the pie. We want more developers getting their hands on move. And so to us, we're not, maybe we're move Maxis a little bit, but we're not Aptos maximalists. We're here to really grow everything together.

And so that doesn't stop at grants or funding or engineering support. It goes much, much deeper than that. Ruchi and I hosted a happy hour in New York last week. I think Ruchi's out in SF right now. He's about to go lace up and play ball with Mo and Avery on Thursday.

We're here to enjoy what we do, not keep our heads down and try and compete and take incremental wins. We're here to grow the space and have fun while we're doing it. And so I think both Aptos and movement have embodied that really well together. Yeah, I guess as we think about wrapping up the pod one. Anything else that you guys want to touch on?

Santi

One question that I have is, I think certain ecosystems at some point struggle from certain misconceptions or under appreciate in certain way until they kind of blow up and are in the limelight. I don't know if there's something that you would attribute to or something in particular that you think hasn't really, we haven't talked about, but you'd like to emphasize when you, you know, we talked obviously, a bunch of these protocols that are getting traction in a very impressive manner over the last, like, you know, couple of months. But, yeah, I don't know if there's anything in particular you think is specifically underappreciated or that you want to touch on as we wrap up the segment. Yeah, I'll say that our entire team is, is here and recognize that we're not going to be successful unless our ecosystem is successful. And so you'll find that anybody that you reach out to Aptos is ready and available to help you get to where you need to be.

Neil

Whether you're in Palo Alto for the weekend and you want to come hang out at the office, or if you're in New York and you want a spot to work at it for the next couple of weeks, we'll almost never say no. Ask us the most ridiculous asks, and we'll probably say yes. We're here to see developers and users succeed. That's our focus now.

Rushi

Yeah, I think from our side, something we talked about is like this year's and last year's part of our thesis experimentation Ethereum, right? In the past it was like, use Ethereum l one, maybe use l two, and that's pretty much it. But now with risotta layers and different execution environments, we're finally seeing the experimentation on Ethereum that we wanted for a while. And people are like, it's kind of a short horse where like people who never would touch these technologies are now opening up to it because it's Ethereum aligned. Right.

It's using a theme at some capacity. So almost like alignment is a marketing strategy where you're able to penetrate new markets and have experimentation. Users, like people are trying move apps on Ethereum that wouldn't go to l one traditionally. And that's kind of the way we're focusing on. Right.

Like we want experimentation infrastructure level. We want people to launch their own custom move l two s and have part be part of the stack. We believe that you want essentially network and move chains where it's not just going to be build rl two, otherwise grew up. It's like you can have your custom block space, run your own nodes, run your own independent software environment, because that's what market values the market price is, appreciates much higher than prices applications, which is unfortunate truth. So the question is, okay, how can we empower those builders, enable to launch their own chains and still incentivize the foundation?

So that's what we're working on, a few big high profile candidates. But in general, it's just like, I think in the past it was like I touched on very tribalistic. And now over the next few weeks and months, we really want to democratize access to move in the software beyond just the traditional vector that, oh, it's Silicon Valley soon tie thing. It's for the people, by the people. With the people richie on that point.

Santi

Because I think like modularity is the thing that is like the integrated versus modular kind of approach is something that we didn't touch on. But now that you bring it up. So what you're saying is like developers might get the opportunity to use like move, move based. Like develop a chain that uses move as a programming language for execution. All the benefits of like parallelization and high throughput and whatnot.

You're still. You use da celestia or Eigen Da or whatever. And then you use maybe even ethereum for sediment. Like you could use all those three different components. Yeah, we really focus execution layer, compatibility.

Rushi

So in the past you had op stack, arbitrum, stack, CDK, whatever role framework, whatever dealer. But everyone's like build reverend and use the EVM, which often is a bottleneck for smart contract development. We're uniquely focused execution layer. Where you can use our vm with even compatibility. You can use whatever role framework, use whatever dealer.

And have your custom block space. Which we found through like a builders and through research. Is that the high profile teams, they really want their own custom chains. Because that's what the market demands. You're able to demand a much higher valuation.

And you'd be much more attractive in private markets if you have your own infrastructure stack. So we actually have like four flagship chains, Henry, which is a consumer focused chain. Kind of like honey on chain. We have gaming, which is like a coin market cap incubated gaming chain. And two other big profile candidates we're announcing over the next few weeks that are launching on custom environments with move using whatever old framework, op stack, original stack, whatever.

Using our daily. And we have a unique edge of the market where we're uniquely focused execution on Ethereum and everyone else can be on anything else. That's pretty novel. Yeah, it's really exciting. I think ultimately, the takeaway for me is once people.

Santi

It seems that it's clicking once people start using it. And the user experience is actually pretty good. It's starting to show up in the apps and the retention numbers and the growth in TVL and the volume that is posted daily. I think that's really encouraging. And ultimately, I think like it's very synergistic what you guys are doing with just allowing people to just be that trojan horse, be that gateway to appreciate move if.

Even if you have resistance. Right. It's sort of like an intermediate step to ultimately then just kind of appreciate all the. All the good stuff of move as a programming language. This has been a good discussion, guys.

Any parting thoughts? Anything else you want to focus on before we go? Get your hands on move. Get your hands on aptos in the future. Get your hands on movement.

Neil

Come hang out in New York, the Bay Area, Korea. We're having our Aptos conference. The Aptos experience in Korea in Seoul in September. So come by if you want a free ticket. Just dm me and I got you.

Rushi

I think for us, we look at security. I think everyone's over indexing on speed right now. It was all paralyzed as a hot narrative, but in reality, it's a Lamborghini without breaks. It doesn't matter if you're doing 10,000 tps if you're getting hacked for four and a half billion dollars every year. So I think what we're working on is making security sexy again.

Santi

Hello. There's nothing that I could say that would beat that analogy. We should have just started there, guys. Lamborghini without breaks. Really good.

Well, guys, thanks so much for coming on. I hope this people can tune into this podcast and make it like they're, they want to learn about move, they want to learn about the different, like, development approaches. And as a starter pack like this hopefully can be it. We'll link a bunch of the resources where to find you. Both of you guys are hiring.

There's a lot of, you know, grants potentially for builders and whatnot. So, yeah, I think it's been a good discussion, guys. Thanks so much for, for coming on and, yeah, let's get moving. Thanks, auntie. Really appreciate it.

Rushi

Thanks, Dale. All right, you heard about say a couple times. Just want to give them one last shout out. Big thanks to say for sponsoring this episode of Empire. There are a ton of reasons to build on.

Say, if you want to get in touch with them, you can reach out to me. I'll put you in touch directly with the team. You can also get in touch with them on Twitter, a network. You can follow the journey at say network. They are currently live.

They've got save you two on public Devnet today. Mainnet goes live later in Q two. Really excited to have, say, sponsoring and partnering with us on this episode of Empire.