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2:01

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2:03

and developments in technology behind crypto

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and blockchains. First, please do not

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forget to subscribe to our weekly

2:09

newsletter, the protocol on coin desk

2:11

dot com. And let's dive right

2:14

into it today. Our

2:16

guest Adini Abiodan.

2:18

He is the co-founder

2:20

and chief product officer

2:23

of Mistin Labs, which

2:25

is behind the

2:27

main developer behind the SWE

2:30

blockchain, which is, you know, definitely one

2:32

of the the names that

2:34

we keep hearing more about. And

2:36

I met Adini at ConsenSys a

2:38

couple of weeks ago. We had

2:40

a really good conversation. Welcome

2:43

to the show, Adini. Thank

2:45

you very much for having me. Tell them to be on. Yeah,

2:47

well, you know, I think one of the

2:50

super the things I see I found

2:52

super interesting about that first conversation we

2:54

had a couple of weeks ago at

2:56

ConsenSys on the sidelines was your

2:59

some of your comments about what it

3:01

was like to work in Facebook in

3:04

the early team. And let's get to

3:06

that. But I also was looking at your

3:08

LinkedIn and you actually worked had

3:11

some engineering jobs at JP

3:13

Morgan and HSBC earlier

3:16

in your career in the early 2010s. I'm

3:18

curious, what was that like

3:20

working at the big banks and

3:22

any lessons from that? Yeah, I've

3:24

had the privilege of working

3:27

on trading systems and algos on for

3:29

hedge funds and investment banks for a

3:31

lot of my career. And

3:33

that was a time when I found out

3:35

about Bitcoin. And during that time in JP

3:37

Morgan, I actually realized how convoluted the

3:39

whole financial system is just to do a

3:42

single trade, how many hands it touches and

3:44

how many layers or stacks that information needs

3:46

to flow through. And that

3:48

coordination problem actually resulted in a lot of

3:50

waste, a lot of costs. And

3:53

Bitcoin really, really got me excited because I

3:55

felt, hey, for the first time, we

3:57

can have a single ledger that can help tie things

3:59

together. And that. What got me red-pilled

4:01

into the crypto space to a large extent? I

4:04

think we were just talking a couple weeks

4:06

ago about just how I covered

4:08

city groups efforts to innovate

4:11

and also around that same

4:13

timeframe and it's just impossible

4:15

in that like bureaucratic regulated

4:17

environment. So then

4:19

you went through a series of jobs

4:22

you were at blockchain at Oracle and

4:24

VMware and then in August

4:26

2019 you

4:28

landed Facebook meta. Tell

4:31

us what was your specific role there and

4:33

you know what was that like working on

4:35

that team? I mean the

4:37

job at meta was probably one of my

4:40

most fun career jobs I ever got to

4:42

do beyond working at Mr. and leading our

4:44

product efforts here. At meta

4:46

I got to work on a project called

4:48

Libra. I was leading a lot of the

4:51

work we're doing as a product lead on

4:53

the R&D side so everything related to innovation

4:55

all the bleeding-edge technology and making

4:57

it very applicable to end consumers

4:59

that's what I work on. So

5:01

we're a mad team of multiple

5:03

PhDs working on some

5:06

amazing tech whether it's consensus cryptography programming

5:08

languages that's where I got to meet

5:10

my co-founders I am Evan George and

5:13

Costas and I

5:15

had the idea of building Myths and Labs.

5:17

So Libra was a goal by Facebook to

5:19

build a blockchain that effectively makes the easiest

5:21

sending email as sending make money, sending money

5:24

as easy as sending email and

5:26

of course everybody knows the project didn't

5:28

get to launch but I believe the

5:30

core team behind the inventor of move

5:33

was Sam Blackshear and the inventor of

5:35

the Libra blockchain George Costas Evan. We

5:38

all got together and decided to take our

5:40

skills and build something that was way more

5:42

ambitious than what Facebook actually tried to achieve.

5:45

Facebook was trying to build a layer that makes

5:47

sending money as easy as email. We're at Myths

5:49

and are trying to build technologies

5:52

and protocols to make the internet more

5:54

decentralized because we think solving that coordination

5:56

layer has a multi-trillion dollar market opportunity.

6:00

I mean, I guess we shouldn't go too

6:02

far down the Facebook rabbit hole. But I

6:04

mean, the big the high profile project was

6:06

DM the stable coin, but they were also

6:09

building a blockchain. That's

6:12

correct. So we had looked at multiple blockchains

6:14

at the time. One idea

6:16

was should we just launch a coin and an existing

6:18

blockchain? That didn't work because

6:20

Facebook scale did not was not amenable to

6:23

anything anyone in crypto had built. Everything is

6:25

very low bandwidth, can't handle a lot of

6:27

users. And they all preach high scale, but

6:29

they don't have scale. And

6:31

also safety was a big concern. Most program

6:33

languages or platforms had a lot of hacks.

6:37

And if we were going to go

6:39

up to regulators and preach the mission of

6:41

like solving financial services for the world, we

6:43

had to have something with a lot of

6:46

weight in terms of security and privacy. So

6:48

building our own chain that can handle Facebook

6:50

scale was the goal, although we went halfway

6:52

towards that. And I feel at SWE, we've

6:54

managed to fully realize that the goal was

6:57

to have a blockchain that everybody can use

6:59

and easy to effectively onboard billions of users

7:01

that Facebook already had. Facebook

7:03

has over three billion users across its

7:05

family of apps, and you can't

7:07

throw that on ETH, Solano or any other

7:10

platform. So our goal was to build that

7:12

in house to solve that problem. I

7:14

wanted to also ask because, you know, one

7:16

of the other big famous projects that came

7:19

out of this Facebook Libra DM team is

7:21

Aptos. And SWE and Aptos are sort of

7:23

always pitted against each other because you guys

7:25

were all part of the same team at

7:28

Facebook. And both of you guys use this

7:30

move language. I wonder if you can sort

7:32

of describe to us like how like a

7:34

user would go about like, you know, picking

7:37

a SWE or an Aptos. What are

7:39

sort of the differences? Because like it's sort of

7:42

interesting to see this team where, you know, you

7:44

were originally collaborators and it was a group effort

7:46

and all of a sudden now your

7:49

competitors, right, sort of your group to compete against

7:51

each other. So how do you sort of like

7:53

one of the big differentiators? I

7:55

can go towards a bit of background.

7:57

George Denizis, our chief scientist, his. company,

7:59

we actually acquired at Facebook to come

8:01

and build Libra. So here's the brains

8:03

behind all the Argo that we were

8:05

doing to build a large

8:08

scale system at Facebook for Libra.

8:10

Sam, our CTO, was inventor of

8:12

move programming language. And Evan effectively

8:14

ran the whole research and development org. Costas

8:17

ran all the cryptography for everything we built

8:19

on Libra, including all of them on WhatsApp

8:21

and Messenger and everything else. So the large

8:24

brains behind what happened at Libra and Facebook

8:26

to build the infrastructure is at Miston. When

8:29

we left Facebook, we made a decision not

8:31

to use the work we've done at Facebook.

8:34

So SWE is nothing like

8:36

Libra. We had other colleagues

8:38

who left and decided to use that as a

8:40

stack. We chose not to do that because in

8:43

our minds, we built it to get to market

8:45

really quickly. It was not going to be as

8:47

scalable as where we wanted to go for Facebook

8:49

scale or global scale. So if you look at

8:51

the stacks between what we've built at SWE or

8:54

any other move chain, such as

8:57

Aptos, they're entirely different. For example,

8:59

SWE is an object-based system. It's

9:01

not an account-based system. So everything

9:04

you do in SWE is an object. So if

9:06

you're a traditional programming language developer, you understand objects

9:08

and you can onboard with SWE very quickly. We

9:11

just had a hackathon recently of over 2000 devs.

9:13

They picked up move in days, object-based

9:17

move in days. Separately

9:19

from that, SWE, unlike other blockchains, has

9:21

no maximum throughput. We think

9:23

the idea of having a max throughput is actually

9:25

a red flag for lack of scale. Nobody asks

9:27

Google, how many searches can you handle per second?

9:29

Nobody asks Google Cloud, how many applications

9:32

can you run in concurrent fashion? You

9:34

just build infrastructure to scale horizontally. So the

9:36

same people at Google who build search, who

9:38

build Spanner, who build infrared at Facebook are

9:41

the same people building that kind of stuff

9:43

at MIST. So our DNA is being able

9:45

to build highly scalable systems at scale. And

9:48

photography and innovation, if you think about what

9:50

we've invented with ZK login, the ability

9:52

to use your email address to effectively privately

9:54

sign transactions without Google or anybody knowing

9:56

what your online engagement is, it's a innovation

9:59

that nobody else has ever been able to

10:01

do. So our teams have really, really

10:03

built differently. We don't have a block. Our

10:05

blockchain doesn't have a max throughput. It

10:07

scales infinitely. It basically

10:10

has the ability to process transactions

10:12

in parallel. You can do thousands

10:14

of trades per second without any

10:16

restriction. We actually have benchmark

10:19

with lowest hardware configuration. So we had 297,000

10:21

transactions per second. And if you double, if

10:23

you add eight times the hardware, you get

10:25

eight times the throughput. So we don't have

10:27

the same restrictions as other blockchains. And our

10:29

innovations speak to that as well. So if

10:31

you want to compare SWE and Aftos or

10:33

the chains, you look at the team and

10:36

the brains behind the team and look at

10:38

the efforts. I think SWE right now is

10:40

the fastest growing non-EVM chain. We've been on

10:42

the market for less time than other

10:44

chains. And we're in the top two non-EVM.

10:46

So it speaks more to our aspirations as

10:48

a team. Yeah, that's really

10:50

interesting. And you mentioned that there were,

10:52

I forget the time frame you're talking about, but you

10:54

had developers were able to pick up and move very

10:57

quickly. And I wonder, so

10:59

I cover the Ethereum protocol and Solidity

11:01

is at the heart of Ethereum. And

11:03

so maybe you can get to a

11:05

little bit, why create a move programming

11:07

language when I think a lot

11:09

of people or a lot of people

11:12

in the industry sort of lean on Solidity

11:14

as the way, because a lot

11:16

of programs are built on Ethereum and are sort of put

11:20

over to other ecosystems. So from running through

11:22

a little bit like high level, the

11:24

differences between like a move and a

11:26

Solidity and why

11:28

a new programming language. Absolutely. If we

11:30

want to talk about when we say all, if

11:32

you look at how big really is the dev

11:34

community around Web3, there are at most 20,000 developers

11:37

in Web3 as a whole. That's

11:39

if you count SWE, Aftos, Solidity, Solana,

11:43

you name it, 20,000 active

11:46

devs. If you compare

11:48

that with number of JavaScript developers, that's 9

11:50

million. So we're not even early.

11:52

Separately, if you're going

11:54

to build a blockchain or you're going to build

11:56

a programming language that you want to onboard the

11:58

next 9 million developers. who are already building

12:00

in JavaScript, C++ or other languages. You want

12:03

to build it in a way where they

12:05

can understand and build really, really quickly. So

12:07

the semantics around Solidity and the underlying need

12:09

to know the faults of

12:12

like the underlying framework is a barrier

12:14

to adoption. And we see that because

12:16

we see constant hacks that develop actually

12:18

really good in the e-community by the

12:20

way, but it's hard for them to

12:22

write safe code. So our thought process

12:24

was we want to build a financial

12:27

language that allows anyone to model assets as quickly

12:29

as possible and not have to worry about the

12:31

safety aspect. So is why SWE

12:33

move has been very, very widely adopted and

12:35

we think it's going to continually grow. While

12:38

we're Facebook, we're actually looking at ways to

12:40

use move to rebuild accounting systems in the

12:42

company, for example. It's just a great language.

12:45

If you speak to devs who have built

12:47

in a Solana space, for example, Ruta who

12:49

built Solend at Solana and is building SWE

12:51

Land and SWE, his point was SWE's dev

12:54

experience is 10x that of Solana's. So the

12:56

focus on dev experience is very important because

12:58

if you're going to bring in web

13:01

to devs who want to build in the space, give them

13:03

something they can get up to speed with very, very quickly.

13:05

And I think the Solidity

13:08

language is a very hard language for people

13:10

to grok. And that's why I think adoption

13:12

is being slow relatively to

13:14

think about that with respect to

13:17

web 2. There are more developers

13:19

in Facebook than there are in web 3 as

13:21

a whole. Yeah, that's

13:24

really interesting because I

13:26

guess, is your pitch then that SWE is the

13:33

blockchain for developers to build on who

13:35

are not necessarily web 3 native? Is

13:37

that how you view your gateway? Because

13:39

I think a lot of people when

13:41

you mentioned your rabbit hole story and

13:43

you thought about, yes, I

13:46

don't know, maybe you were coding on

13:48

Bitcoin. But you started with

13:50

Bitcoin, right? And then I'm sure your next thing

13:52

that you were maybe I'm not sure, but I'm

13:54

positive that Ethereum was the next thing you heard

13:56

about. Right. So like, so part of that story

13:59

is sort of you start somewhere. somewhere and Ethereum

14:01

is like the main building blockchain, right? So

14:04

I guess, you know,

14:06

I'm not entirely sure what the

14:08

question is here, but it

14:10

sounds like your pitch is that like

14:12

SWE is for building for a web

14:14

to like a non web three native.

14:17

But how do you sort of

14:19

make them hear about, you

14:21

know, SWE when maybe their first dip

14:24

into blockchain and crypto is a Bitcoin

14:26

or is an Ethereum? So

14:28

I think we've done a really good

14:30

job in encouraging ETH devs and

14:32

Solana devs to build on SWE, even though that was

14:34

our first target. And quite frankly, it was our first

14:37

target. Our target is to win the 9 million devs

14:39

in JavaScript, because we think move will be the JavaScript

14:41

for assets in web three in web two. That's

14:44

our goal, right? We want move to

14:46

be everywhere. So the more chains adopting move, the better

14:48

it is for the world and less, less faults, hopefully,

14:51

and less hacks. If

14:53

you think about like the adoption, we have a lot

14:55

of ETH builders building on SWE who announced very successful

14:57

Solana builders build on SWE are very successful. TVL

15:00

on SWE grew literally as a result of

15:02

the efforts of these developers, because they've tried

15:04

Solidity and they tried building on SWE and

15:06

they've realized how fun it is not

15:08

to have to chew glass or how fun it is not have

15:10

to worry about re-entrancy bugs

15:12

that can cause all sorts of losses,

15:14

right? So we've built, we've tailored a

15:16

program language for everybody. But at the

15:18

same time, we do recognize there is

15:20

an incumbent ETH ecosystem. And we've

15:22

done a great job in winning them, but we still need to do a better

15:24

job in, and at

15:27

least like evangelizing move as a language.

15:29

We've only been live for a year

15:31

and in a year we're already number

15:33

two, right? Yeah. So we're

15:35

not doing too badly, but we want to be

15:37

a lot further ahead than we are now. It's

15:39

just a matter of time. I think the function

15:41

we need is time for people to know more

15:43

about it. But we're already seeing apps doing a

15:46

lot more transactions per second than other chains on

15:48

SWE. Just for quite frankly, you can onboard users

15:50

on SWE very, very quickly. There is no need

15:52

to know that blockchain is there. A

15:55

lot of the apps in SWE allow you

15:57

to log in with web-based wallets or social

15:59

log in. And it's all

16:01

done privately without the concept of wallets. And I

16:03

think that's really our goal.

16:05

We want to win the mass market into

16:07

this space rather than focusing on the same

16:10

small market that WebTosons do. Adi, just to

16:12

step back, this is super interesting. I mean,

16:15

I wrote down JavaScript

16:17

for assets. And, you

16:20

know, I mean, at a higher level,

16:23

sometimes y'all are classified

16:25

as a smart contract

16:27

blockchain. But maybe

16:29

just, you know, in in

16:31

SWE's endgame, what is SWE

16:33

doing? What is SWE? What

16:37

in the traditional world is SWE replacing?

16:39

Or maybe what are the vision

16:41

for the use cases that will be happening on

16:43

top of SWE? Yeah, it's a

16:46

very, very good question. Glad you asked. So

16:49

our vision for the reason

16:51

why we got into this business in the first place

16:53

is not that we're trying to build a blockchain, right?

16:56

If you think about just blockchains, right? What are

16:58

they doing? They're trying to create new net new

17:00

assets, DeFi and things like that. That's interesting. And

17:02

that's novel. And I think that as a place

17:04

and that would grow over time. We

17:07

want to be we are our goal for

17:09

SWE is to be a global coordinate coordination

17:11

layer for intelligent assets. Right. And

17:14

I will take multiple forms. We've

17:16

built something highly scalable that

17:18

allows billions of users to interact with it all

17:20

of a sudden. Now the idea of interacting

17:23

with assets or using assets across

17:26

different applications is normalized within SWE.

17:30

We recently launched today something called

17:32

Walrus, which is a decentralized storage.

17:35

Walrus itself is more

17:38

distributed than AWS, cheaper

17:40

than AWS S3, more

17:43

decentralized, of course, allows you to store petabytes

17:45

and petabytes of data in a globally decentralized

17:47

layer. Now we think

17:49

that is a great use case for blockchains.

17:51

And that's all powered by SWE. SWE coordinates

17:53

the movement of packets of data. It

17:56

coordinates the buying and selling and trading of data

17:58

as an asset in itself. but

18:00

it's a coordination layer. And I think over

18:02

time you'll see more stack built on top

18:05

of SWE. We have smart contracts that let

18:07

you coordinate finance with DeFi. We have a

18:09

walrus that essentially is using SWE as a

18:11

way to allow you to store entire websites,

18:13

video, 4K images, 4K video

18:15

directly on a chain in a very cheap

18:18

way that you don't need a centralized server

18:20

to run. And over time we're

18:22

going to add more things. We actually have ideas

18:24

on how you do that with bandwidth, a global

18:27

bandwidth layer for the internet as a whole. So

18:29

our mission at Miston is to effectively build a

18:31

web stack that is entirely decentralized from when you

18:33

publish a website to when you run an app

18:36

to when you run APIs. We started out with

18:38

SWE, which is a layer that's going to underpin

18:40

everything. We have a storage layer. Over

18:42

time we're going to add other layers on top

18:44

of that. And we think that's where the world

18:47

needs to be. That opportunity itself is a multi,

18:49

multi-trillion dollar opportunity. And we're not just playing a

18:51

blockchain game. So we've taken it a lot further

18:53

than that. And to do that, you can't just

18:55

use the tools that exist today. You

18:58

need to really, really innovate. If you

19:00

look at what we've released, everything has

19:02

been highly vetted by the top scientific

19:05

communities in the world. So we've hired some of the

19:07

best experts in the world that can turn really,

19:10

really high value or high quality

19:12

research into something engineering can implement

19:14

and make a product. We're not

19:16

interested in writing papers, just publishing

19:18

papers. We're interested

19:20

in actually shipping stuff that consumers can

19:22

use day in, day out. So that's

19:24

what really makes us exciting. The top

19:27

level is suite is a global coordination

19:29

layer for intelligent assets. And

19:31

it happens to do blockchains better than every

19:33

other blockchain in the market as a result.

19:36

And this AWS, how did

19:38

you describe it? So we

19:40

have a storage layer called Warus. Warus

19:44

effectively is the first global

19:46

storage layer. That is proof

19:49

of stake. It's a fully decentralized

19:52

storage layer that gives you more replication

19:54

than Amazon would give you if you're

19:56

using S3 or GCP, will give you

19:58

more replication. And it would

20:00

also split your data across hundreds, if not

20:02

thousands of nodes. And you

20:04

get the benefit of actually having very, very,

20:07

very low cost storage as well. So you

20:09

could choose if it's a DAP now, do

20:11

I store on Amazon? Or do I store

20:13

on a global decentralized layer that has very

20:15

strong sensitivity and resistance that you would have

20:18

on other infrastructure? So we think that's going

20:20

to eat the world of apps who

20:23

want to build on a full piece of

20:25

infrastructure is fully decentralized. So now you have

20:27

a DEX that's fully decentralized, unstoppable, or you

20:30

have a website that's fully decentralized, unstoppable. The

20:32

additional benefit is the code that the site

20:34

is running is now verified. So you are

20:37

no longer in a place where DNS can

20:39

be, your domain name system can be stolen

20:42

and then you're dealing with a fraudulent app and

20:44

funds lost. There's a lot of

20:47

benefits out of that. In fact, also how do you

20:49

hack such a system? The only attacking vector is you

20:51

steal keys. We now have to do key management much

20:53

better than having someone pay someone

20:55

to serve as a, you know, at some

20:57

company that can effectively hack a server, give

20:59

access or go underneath a BIOS and find

21:01

a way to steal files, right? So we

21:03

think this is a much safer way and

21:05

actually a better way to give open systems

21:07

a call. We'd love to have

21:09

the likes of Wikipedia running off this infrastructure.

21:12

You could run a WikiLeaks office infrastructure. I

21:14

think there are multiple multitude of use cases

21:16

that this could really appeal to, but

21:19

I think it's making web two more, web three

21:21

more real to web two people and a blockchain

21:23

is powering this entire thing. And

21:25

is this something you're really going to be

21:27

pushing or is this just kind of, you

21:29

know, ancillary to a SWE's

21:32

roadmap? It's absolutely something we'll

21:34

be pushing. We already have companies looking to

21:36

build rollups and L2s directly

21:38

on top of Walrus and try

21:41

and tie multiple ZK

21:43

layers directly onto SWE. So it's very applicable.

21:46

I think you could take the entire Solana

21:48

history, store on Walrus now and not have

21:50

to worry about central entity. You

21:53

could take all Ethereum history, store on Walrus. You

21:55

could take a rollup and roll it directly onto

21:57

Walrus. It's going to empower the entire web three

21:59

industry.