Today, we are joined by Vishwa from Anera Labs. From setting up a fund of funds to running a fintech company and using ChatGPT to enter crypto hackathons - this is a unique tale. One that captures the soul and spirit of crypto. He joins us today to explain the emerging market for intents and the role they would play for UX in the years to come.
Along the way, he breaks down the economics of MEV, why founders should build goodwill while going from zero to one, and the importance of market-makers in DeFi. Listen for some rich context from an operator on how to break into an emergent sector while being a complete outsider.
Today, we are joined by Vishwa from Anera Labs. From setting up a fund of funds to running a fintech company and using ChatGPT to enter crypto hackathons - this is a unique tale. One that captures the soul and spirit of crypto. He joins us today to explain the emerging market for intents and the role they would play for UX in the years to come.
Along the way, he breaks down the economics of MEV, why founders should build goodwill while going from zero to one, and the importance of market-makers in DeFi. Listen for some rich context from an operator on how to break into an emergent sector while being a complete outsider.
Hello, hello. This is the Deco Podcast. I'm your host, saurabh, and today I'm joined by Vishwa Naik, or as he's popularly known on Twitter as Rojan Tors. He's a co-founder of Anira Labs. They are building infrastructure that democratizes market for cross-chain intent execution. I mean, I don't know what that means. We'll learn about that on this podcast. But yeah, that's what they what they do. He used to run sensho, which was a web3 consulting and development studio. They focused on web3 for for large media and art brands, and some of their consumers were like qatar museum authority and so on. So we'll learn more about what he used to do from vishwa. What's up, vishwa? How are you? Hey, sorry, how's it going? Thank you for having me on this one. Before we move on, I also want to say that we are just two people talking about some things that we enjoy, and none of this is any sort of advice. Vishwa, why don't you introduce yourself for the listeners? Sure, I think you did a pretty good job of it. My name is Sure, I think you did a pretty good job of it. My name is Vishwa. I'm the co-founder of Anira Labs. We do what Saurabh said we do, and maybe we also know just as much as about what we do, as Saurabh does. No, I think we've been following this space for some time, specifically around intent-based execution, the idea that the users can define where they want to go without knowing how they want to get. There was, um, to us, a very powerful ux upgrade for all of crypto, especially within the ethereum and roll-up context. Fundamentally, there's new complexity that gets added once you start to talk about cross-chain intent solving, and so, um, we're trying to build infrastructure that makes it easy to access and levels the playing field on latency, access to inventory and risk management.
Speaker 1:Okay, so, for example, let's say that I, as a user, don't know how to interact with one scene. Let's take an example of Bitcoin, for example. Right, I mean, let's say that I don't have any wallet on Bitcoin. Uh, maybe I hold my btc in some cold storage somewhere and I don't want to access that. So it's, it's in my ledger somewhere and I want to mint something like, say, a quantum cats, right, uh, recently launched collection by taproot wizards. So what you are solving? Well, what you're solving for, can I just assume that I can come to a solution that you are building and tell them that I'm just looking to mint this collection and this is the budget for it. That's it precisely.
Speaker 1:I think there's additional complexity around doing this with bitcoin that I I won't necessarily get to, but from an anecdotal perspective, that's exactly it. You as a user don't really get involved with the net, agrees and the complexity. You have a market of people that love the complexity that will fight over the execution of the order and then that order could be broken down into like different legs and so you can have some potentially entities working together to take you to your end state. But, yeah, that that's the broad strokes of how this would work with you know, intents in general. Okay, I'm going to start at the beginning like what the hell are intents in general and like, why are they? Like, the discourse around intents has popped up, like recently. Yeah, I think the best way to describe intents is that well, aside from being one of the biggest memes in crypto, there's one camp that says that intents are just fundamentally limit orders, which we tend to hold a view. That's in that camp, to be honest, at least at the moment.
Speaker 1:But I think, just to zoom out maybe a little bit, when you talk about intents, the idea here was today, I think, with DeFi and with crypto in general. We're assuming a highly sophisticated user, and as more people have become onboarded to DeFi, we've seen specific instantiations of protocols that have taken away some of the complexity from users, and so example of this is you first had DEXs and then the first level of aggregation was a DEX aggregator in the form of 1inch. Now what 1inch basically did, was it said okay, I know you want to swap asset a for asset b, and there's potentially three dexes with 40 different pools that all give you the same thing. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to aggregate all of those and I'm going to show you the best price. And the assumption here is that the user's desire, the user's intent, was to swap asset A for asset B and get the best price doing it. So, at a very basic and rudimentary level, that's what an intent is.
Speaker 1:It's a user desire for some kind of state transition. It could be a swap, it could be a multi-leg swap, it could be I want to make payroll, it could be some conditional stuff, but it starts at the user. There's a need that needs to be solved, there's some underlying complexity, and that underlying complexity is what the user incentivizes a network of sophisticated actors to basically solve for. Take me to where I want to go. I don't have to figure this out myself. That's where the need for intents came from, and that's what I think intents are Right. I mean, this is a significantly complex problem at this moment, right? So before we jump into how you are trying to solve it and how others are trying to solve it, I want to understand how did you zero in on this particular problem? Because there may be a lot of founders or wanting to be founders who will listen to this. So I just want to understand what the process was to zero in on. Okay, this was the particular problem.
Speaker 1:So it might also help to add context on how your journey started within crypto. Like, what was your transition from traditional job to crypto? Sure, sure, that's a long, long story. From traditional job to crypto Sure, sure, that's a long, long story, and I've been trying to truncate this better, but it's been quite a windy path. So I do my best, but I come from a generation of lawyers before me, multiple generations of lawyers before me, and I was the first one that didn't join the profession, so to speak, always had an inkling for numbers and finance, and so did my first two years in wealth management, and then equity research, and then macro hedging, and this was all across different companies in India.
Speaker 1:I think I discovered crypto when I was in college. I had a friend of mine who told me that I should buy this Bitcoin thing because it's going to be huge, and I was still thinking that, okay, it's all illegal and all of this is nonsense, but ended up buying some anyway on a centralized exchange at the time. Ended up buying some anyway on a centralized exchange at the time. I actually had to use my aunt's card in the us to to do this. I remember distinctly because when I didn't have one of my own, this would have been 2015 okay, okay, still alone. So a very, very long time ago is when I bought crypto. This was even before I started working. I remembered that I bought crypto. This was even before I started working. I remembered that I bought crypto into like at some point in 2017 because it became a significant amount in india.
Speaker 1:I think we were almost at least my surroundings we were almost kind of shut off from crypto saving, except for when the price action started to move, and I think that was a that was the situation for for most people. And then, when that started to happen, was when I said, okay, I know how to do tradify stuff. I think I fundamentally understand how you make money in traditional finance and it's some sort of asset management thing. So why not become the asset manager and charge wealthy people 2 and 20 to give them exposure to crypto as an asset class? And I think that was my first like this is what I'm going to do in this space. And I didn't know what crypto was. I didn't know what blockchain was, but I was like how hard could it be? I don't even have to be a capital allocator myself. I can just aggregate them. I can just go and talk to a bunch of funds and you know aggregate capital from India, be an LP at a few of them and then do like a, like a fund of fund.
Speaker 1:Strategy was what I was thinking, and this was back in 2017, and so I remember being at my traditional finance job. I was on the Bloomberg terminal and I was drawing. I was trying to establish some correlation between Bitcoin and the semiconductor index, because I was like, okay, if Bitcoin becomes a thing, then people are going to need chips to mine this thing so that's a part of the thematic play here is, if you're bullish on crypto, then you should also buy the semiconductor index. And I tried presenting that to the fund and then they were just like we don't know what Bitcoin is, but this is decent analysis. And then so I started using that analysis as, like some of the materials, I started prepping together, and in Bombay I started hosting some of my you know clients from my wealth management job, and I was just like let me just talk about crypto as an asset class, let me talk about why you must invest in this and let me explain to you why the opportunity cost looks really bad for you if you don't invest in this thing. And you know, one thing led to another and there was enough aggregated demand for people. They were just like yeah, we'll, you know, put some money into this. You seem to have all this stuff figured out. Um, and then so I went. I flew down to the us. I had created an email id, which you know claimed to be a representative of a large family office and scheduled meetings on my behalf with some very large crypto funds in America, especially those that would have me, and then I got a couple of them to agree to take me on as an LP, which was great. So incentives were figured out and I was ready to become a crypto funder, fund manager.
Speaker 1:And then, towards the end of 2017, when I was actually at a wealth management conference in India to do some more fundraising, was when the finance minister of India just made an announcement about how crypto is a scam, it's all illegal and if people are involved with this, there's going to be ramifications. So overnight, all the interest that I really had in the asset class just kind of went away, because everyone's like how are you going to do this? Now? Finance minister said this. So that was the first setback, but I would say, like that represents phase one of my interaction with crypto. Okay, awesome. And I found out when the idea was scrapped, like overnight, because finance minister said yes, okay. And by the way, it was scrapped spectacularly. So I think I should put this on twitter.
Speaker 1:I had someone from z business, which is a regional media news outlet for any international listeners listening to this. She came to my office, she took a 40 minute interview. I helped her get set up with like a couple of exchange wallets. I told her like you know. Buy this like you would buy an SIP. Buy only the amount that you're willing to lose and this should not be the first asset that you ever invest in Like should go through the list of I've got some money in bonds, I've got some money in equities and I've got some money now in crypto, and the proportion should always be at least at this point this was 2017, I said you should not put more than 5% of your portfolio in crypto.
Speaker 1:So I gave really sound advice. I explained to her how it would make sense to have regulated products in the future, like etfs and the likes. It's funny because we're now doing etfs and everybody seems to think that etfs are so good. Like seven years ago, that was my idea to do etfs for, for crypto specifically, and and just make sure that investors have exposure through that. But this 40 minute interview that she took with me and she was like oh my God, this is a great interview. It's going to be prime time tonight, so if you want to gather your folks around a TV, don't worry about it. It's going to air and it's going to be great.
Speaker 1:So 9pm we get on. My whole family's there grandparents my grandfather was a judge of the high court at some point. So you know, legal stuff is really runs in my family's blood. And then, and then the the segment begins and it shows my face and there's about an eight second clip of me saying something about ETFs, about how we would do this in a risk adjusted manner, and the headline is flashing. It says in Hindi beware the scam that is Bitcoin. And then it has my face and then it cuts to some MLA who basically says that every coin is a scam and it's all just Ponzi. And then that was it.
Speaker 1:So a 40 minute interview into 8 to 10 seconds of shame, basically, and my whole family sitting on the sofa being like, well, at least you came on TV You're young, you know gave me a pat on my back, but they were just like what the hell is this? So, yeah, so it did just go up in flames. It went up in flames spectacularly. It did just go up in flames. It went up in flames spectacularly. Okay, so that was the end of it. Was it Like, what did your grandfather have to say about it?
Speaker 1:To be honest, I think he was the nicest about it, which is crazy. He was like yeah, yeah, yeah. He was just like, oh, you know, you're young and you're on TV, he just left it at that. He just didn't bother going beyond. I think, to be honest, like most of them were, they were taken aback with number one, how short it was. Number two, how spectacular it was, because there's, like you know, indian news channels have a lot of like lights flashing and headlines and sponsors, and so you can imagine like the visual of this thing. And then there was me in my family office and so there's actually law books behind me as I'm speaking. It's just, I think the irony of it was just so much that nobody really could do anything other than laugh me. I just saw my whole sort of like venture go up in flames and now I'm thinking you know what next? And so that now it's like phase two of my interaction with with crypto was okay. You know, it seems as though cryptocurrency and public ledgers is frowned upon, but the underlying blockchain technology is interesting, so maybe it's time for us to understand how this could be used.
Speaker 1:And I had a friend of mine his name is Ronak Vesoha. He started this company called Elemental Labs. It was one of India's like first crypto startups really to come out of India to get get venture funding. There was maybe three or four teams, uh, you know a couple of centralized exchanges. It was polygon. Uh, there was some other one which I just still don't know what they do, and then there was elemental, so it was a small group of people and and roddock basically told me he's like we want to hire someone to lead the bd vertical because we're doing effectively enterprise sales style, we're building middleware on top of Hyperledger and we have various use cases. But the National Stock Exchange of India is one of our clients and we need somebody that can manage the relationships and then also drive more use cases. Use cases and I was like, okay, I, um, I've just seen something that you know went up in flames now become an opportunity to leave traditional finance and then go into tech effectively, and I I knew that at some point like I wanted to start my own company. So being able to see firsthand some of the challenges of doing that from a founder who's my age, someone who I know, I said like that itself would be a good opportunity. And plus, the design space is similar, so this will be great. So that was phase two and it was a lot of iteration around. What are we going to do? What are we going to build? We had that middleware platform called Hadron and it was actually used to deploy blockchains. Funny that we're still deploying blockchains today and that seems to be happening. But yeah, you could spin up blockchains for your enterprise use cases.
Speaker 1:The one that we worked on was to do the e-voting of, like, shareholder meetings for listed companies, for listed companies. So the way it happens is like normally people vote and then there's a tallying that happens afterwards, but then we had this middleware that reconciled it in real time, basically. So it eliminated that need for that reconciliation and it was the first ever like globally, I think it was the first implementation of e-voting of a shareholders meeting on blockchain, which is funny. I guess now we just call it dao governance, but in an enterprise context. This is what it was and this was phase two. It was cool. We had similar kind of implementations with alibaba cloud. That was like, okay, we want to take this middleware but, like, fundamentally, indian enterprises did not trust alibaba cloud, so that didn't go anywhere. And then we spoke to jpm india as well about some of their reconciliation needs.
Speaker 1:But, um, eventually, I think it was it was starting to look a lot more like a services company, and so I was feeling like a little bit disillusioned, because, you know, crypto is also. 2017 to 2019 was like not a good time, right. Everything was going down. My prevailing thought was like maybe there's just not that much point in this anymore, like Bitcoin prices I don't know what it was, but I think it was closer to like the 2000 from its peak of like 14 or 17 or 19. So I'm like, yeah, this is all over. Let me, I should leave this. I should find some other edge somewhere. And so I decided, okay, you know what, this was 2019.
Speaker 1:I'd been in this thing for about like a year and a half. I was like, maybe a good time for me to go and do a master's degree in the UK. I wanted to be close to FinTech and UK is pretty good for FinTech, so that's when I went there. That got interrupted because of COVID and then I saw an opportunity to start a micro lending company in India. So now I moved completely away from crypto, so crypto has gone out of sight, out of mind.
Speaker 1:I started a micro lending business. It was providing loans to employees of companies by underwriting their attendance, so if they showed up to work, we would give them access to that one day worth of pay and then, similarly, like if it was in the middle of the month they've worked 20 days, they could access 20 days of pay and pay it back from their next paycheck. It was a B2B2C fintech company did pretty well in terms of traction, was difficult to take the decision to shut that down, but I had to because the cost of capital was getting prohibitive and I didn't want to pitch financial wellness but actually make users worse off. And that kind of brought me back to crypto, because I'm like if I could access a global permissionless pool of capital to do this, then this would be fantastic. So that's when I realized, like maybe it's time for me to look at this crypto thing again.
Speaker 1:So I shut down the company towards the end of 2021, beginning of 2022, and that's when that was like I think, the the beginning of sensho, which was the, the accidental crypto venture studio a friend of mine and I started. We just basically did everything because NFTs were taken off and then everybody on the cultural side wanted to get in on the action. So we had some connections in that space that were willing to pay us money to give them advice and, in some situations, build out some of their stuff. So I took my engineering team from the micro-learning startup that I had called Harsil, brought them on board as, like the engineering team of Sensho, we did a bunch of experimentation around like art, culture and UX, and that's when I think that that's sort of like the beginning of how we got to Intents, because we saw firsthand that we had access to millions of users.
Speaker 1:The beginning of how we we got to intense, because we saw firsthand that we had access to millions of users through some of our customers, but just not enough of them were really able to convert and most of them were. Even if they did convert, they were converting through some sort of like semi-custodial solution, like so they were not able to consume the whole wallet experience. They were not able to consume the the wallet experience. They were not able to consume the private key experience. It's just like a broken UX overall for consumer. And that's when I was like crypto UX is a challenge.
Speaker 1:That was the genesis of Anira Labs. It became, it was born out of that and then it was also maybe a good time to stop doing what we were doing with central because there was still some profit in the company. And how much more are you going to? You know, work with large enterprises who feel like they can still make millions of dollars on in an nft collection, like I think it was becoming challenging to manage their expectations. And then we told every, every customer we ever spoke to, we said you should use nfts for things like loyalty. You shouldn't expect to mint millions of dollars on chain. It's a totally different audience, it's totally different technology. Uh, but yeah, it was. It was difficult to do that. So so that that was the, the genesis for unilabs.
Speaker 1:So I think the work we did with some of these larger enterprises that had access to users but users want fundamentally converting, was where we saw there was, you know, ux challenges fundamentally at the wallet layer and there was semi-custodial wallet innovation. We used cross mint to mint collections with uh, with email marketing, which was interesting. And then I think, can you, can you give me an example of how Sensho worked with? Let's say, if you could share details of? Yeah, I can share details of one project only, yeah, sure, others I can't really, because no, no, definitely Just go for what you can share.
Speaker 1:So we did a loyalty activation for patrons of um, the qatar museum authority, during the world cup, there was an email list that they had and it had about 20 000 or so subscribers that were subscribed to their emails and updates about new collections, etc. Etc. So during the world cup they they have this one museum which is like a sports museum and you know they have a lot of money so they collect a bunch of like iconic jerseys. So they had just recently come out as the owners of diego maradona's hand of god jersey, so that that's like a super expensive football shirt, and what they they said was like they wanted to give something to their patrons which is like an NFT, but it should be connected to Maradona. So what we said was let's give them like membership to Qatar museums in the metaverse and let's give them effectively like digital replicas of this jersey. And I think their expectation was that maybe you know they wanted to do it mainly for like building a community and strengthening their existing community, which is great because it's incentive aligned, but I think they were kind of hoping that, because it was on chain, that even some more on chain folks would come in, which I had warned them about that. It doesn't work that way, but that activation actually. So we gave options to their existing users to buy it by connecting their wallet or just use Grossmint's checkout, and then I think we did about like 1300 or 1400, if I'm not mistaken mints.
Speaker 1:How did Grossmint work? Oh yeah, so Grossmint is great, right? So they are a semi-custodial wallet as a service provider that allows folks to mint nfts with their credit card and, effectively, the integration that they do in the back end is they work with stripe, so stripe will give notification to you know, some kind of like on-chain entity that yes, I have received a credit card payment from sorob and once I get this much money, I will give it to you. So, therefore, you pay for the token on chain or the NFT on chain and transfer it to this wallet address. That's the structure of how Crossmint works and it obviously abstracts that the wallet address is banished by Crossmint. I mean, it's all banished, precisely so you can use all that a user does sign in, logs into okay, right, exactly, yeah, so social, sign in, use your email id or use your facebook account or twitter, whatever, and that creates, like the wallet.
Speaker 1:When there's a public and private key associated with that, they insist that you transfer your assets to self-custody wallet, but we were even able to track that. Like literally nobody did that as well, so they just kept it in there and like that browser wallet with Crosswind and that was it. You know, like that was like a non-crypto, native behavior. That was like a non-crypto native behavior Because, fundamentally, the people that bought it they paid $20 for it, but it was more like e-commerce. You can't even say that it was really anything on-chain, because they used their credit card, they bought something. They never looked at it again.
Speaker 1:So that was, I think, the nature of the activation we had, which led us to believe that maybe working on this customer right now doesn't make sense. Right, like, how much are you going to try to obsess over a customer that really doesn't want to be there? It was feeling a bit fruitless, and so, you know, we wanted to come back to core crypto stuff, um, and then no, but what? I mean? We're doing fine, right? I mean, if cut the museum, like if they, if they are one of your customers, then you're doing all right. Yeah, so we were doing okay. I think that, like, if you want to, if you want to scale a services business, you've gotta really love that and I don't. Uh, I okay, I think we accidentally started sensual, which became a services business, and it was great. As long as the margin was great, it was good. We made a lot of money really quickly.
Speaker 1:And then it dried up really fast because the demand for large ticket enterprise stuff was not there. And this was different during 2022, right, which means things were crazy and like deleveraging was happening. Yeah, all of that stuff was happening and I mean, to be honest, like it's funny because demand side went away, because then the normie enterprise was like crypto's dead again, you know. So then they were like, yeah, we're not gonna sign consulting agreements for, you know, high five digits, six digit or even seven digits anymore. We're just gonna go back to doing what we do and, um, and then when that started happening, then you're just like you have to work a lot harder to originate real flow and that was our niche, right, like the niche was nfts and metaverse and film and media and culture. We were not going to be able to make the shift to another niche which, in hindsight, was like I mean, if we were in the game and if I, how would I have done things differently?
Speaker 1:I think delphi have done a phenomenal job of proving that a business model like this can work on on, you know, with a services slash consulting approach. But they target crypto natives, they target folks that give a shit and, yeah, exactly, I think that's like like, my takeaway from that was that you want to fundamentally make sure that your customer or a services person, their customers, care about this stuff. You know they're, they're native, right. If they're not native, like if, if my customer is coca-cola, for example, I think, I think the the agency that we were looking at was the gary vaynerchuk's agency v3 vayner 3 is what it was called. So we looked at them as, like you know, that's a pretty good business model, like that's the one that we want to try to emulate.
Speaker 1:But I think, even for them, I think that business started out like really quickly, I think between 2021 and 2022, they had some success with a couple of mints, right, and then nothing. So, yeah, so that was the lesson for us. So there was like let's uh, let's call it what we can that was a customer. Yeah, essentially, that was a customer base that would show up like around peak bull markets, right, I mean, you'll get probably by the friends, a few right right, a few high ticket assignments let's call them uh. And then there's nothing. There's a drought period, so failed, dead on arrival fund of funds.
Speaker 1:Then you did BD, then you ran like NFT campaigns for some folks and now you are in search of a highly technical problem to solve. Technical problem to solve, yeah. So now take me through. Yeah, take me through. What happens after you decided okay, the customer base is, you know it's it's very cyclical and you don't want to run sensho for longer. Yeah, like, what do you do now? Yeah, I took about six months to, you know, effectively finish all my obligations on existing projects at sensho.
Speaker 1:But, but towards the end of April 2023 was when I was able to switch off the DAP and the DAP here being payroll All my existing team members had. We'd made sure to position them in new positions so they didn't have any cash flow lag in their lives. And then it gave me some time to think. So took the month of may off, uh, completely off. No laptop, no crypto, no work, nothing.
Speaker 1:I was just, I needed some time because I, my brain, was not really able to see things clearly at that moment and I needed some time off slowly but steadily, like started to indulge the my investment brain again, because I think prices just look juicy at that point. So I'm like I was on token terminal. I'm just like playing around seeing you know what. What's, what's interesting. Let's take a few positions, let's look at some rwa stuff. That's interesting.
Speaker 1:And I was just like being consistently nerd snipe by curiosity. That that was like my objective. I was really not doing anything to found a company at that point, but I also didn't want to go and jump into a job immediately because I was. I was like I have no leverage at the moment to just ask for employment. Plus, I have some money, so I don't need the job immediately. So let me just let curiosity flow and see where that takes me.
Speaker 1:The immediate things that I wanted to do were start a newsletter because I'm like, okay, if curiosity is flowing, let me channel this into some funnel that brings attention back to me, which is funny, because I started a newsletter I think I did like five editions and then I never posted again. But that's, I think, the story of like most newsletters other than you guys. And then the other thing I wanted to do was I wanted to be around smart people to see what like smart people are thinking. And it's tough to do that because when you've been surrounded by like film and nft people for so long, you haven't really seen like smart people on the technical side. So I was like I'm gonna do every online hackathon there is, even though I'm like a non-technical guy and I don't deserve to be on any hackathon team I will just show up. I will show up with a friend who can code and I will try to attract team members who I think are smart from discords of these hackathons and see where that goes. So I think around July was the first one I did like like a hackathon, and I think again because crypto UX was interesting, account abstraction was interesting and I thought, like all these Telegram bots that people are using, like why can't there be an account abstraction wallet? Why does it have to be a TG bot that has access to your keys? So the hackathon that I met my co-founder at Nira Labs was Optimism Superhack and we built a you know, trust minimized Telegram bot for the hackathon, using account abstraction to basically do TG bot sniping.
Speaker 1:Do you have any sort of coding background before this? Did you have any? No, I've never studied it. I have an understanding of it so I can do things like build training strategies in Pinescript. So I have a shell understanding of Python, but nothing super sophisticated. So how do you go and build something at a hackathon, chat, gpt? The thing is I didn't have to do too much of the coding myself. I would take on like a very, very small task and just work on that and I'm grateful. And how did you meet your co-founder? What's his name? His name is Conrad Conrad Strachan. He has serious experience in the space, also comes from like a traditional finance and exchanges background, but on the technical side. And then was last the CTO of RhinoFi, which is a pretty large DeFi aggregator, and now Bridge. So he is the brains behind the operation at Anira Labs when it comes to actually figuring out how to do this stuff.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you built a trust-minimized bot. Yeah, that's what we built and we were just like we didn't win. But I think what we found was Conrad and myself, we liked working alongside each other. We had my friend who was also, you know, our founding engineer, sharath like the three of us were the ones that actually built it. There were two other teammates, but they were slightly harder to access during the hackathon.
Speaker 1:So it kind of got this group of three now that are interested around things around crypto, ux and we're open to just keep a conversation flowing. And so we, between July and August, we just kept a flowing conversation around what's interesting? Account abstraction is interesting, I remember. Second, how does the conversation work? And then once we started to get more into like account abstraction stuff, we were just like there's, this is like a pretty cool UX unlock for the user. Like I think a user can now easily create a wallet without really having, you know, private keys. You can have 2FA and stuff like that. So this is a good unlock for UX and this is an interesting place for us to spend some time and attention reading up and focusing.
Speaker 1:And specifically, the Telegram bot was like was critical because the naive assumption we had was like, if you did account abstraction plus Telegram bot was critical because the naive assumption we had was like, if you did account abstraction plus Telegram bot, it should do better than, let's say, banana Gun or it should do better than Maestro, it should do better than Unibot. But I think, as I started to sit with that assumption a little bit and I started to play around with the function of these Telegram bots a little bit. Then I was like I think there's something about this MEV thing that everybody is using these bots for and I don't think it's like a trust assumption. I think there's something here that we know. Maybe I'm not fully seeing, but I think that, beginning of like what the hell is mev in the context of telegram bots, getting to a juicy, juicy part here, uh, tell us about mev, yeah, yeah. I think I was just like why do? Why do I need a telegram bot to hold my keys, especially like these sniping bots and all of that stuff. Right, and the goal is, if I'm trying to make money on this like sniping strategies for everybody that's listening.
Speaker 1:Sniping means you fight really hard to be the first transaction when a new token drops on uniswap. The reason is that it's just going to go to the moon in the beginning and then, if you ever see like the wicks of these meme coins, at least in the beginning, like that, first couple of minutes, depending on how long until it rugs or if it actually has escape velocity you can make a lot of money by just like being able to buy and being able to sell. Sell now. So the order in which your transaction actually interacts with that pool is super important. And now the way you can sort of guarantee orders around your transactions is by effectively paying more for your transaction. So if you're able to pay more for your transaction, you can actually influence ordering, because there's markets around this on ethereum l1.
Speaker 1:And this was like the beginning and this was like okay, this is, this is interesting because if I can snipe this consistently, I can actually make a lot of money. And so you see people that have, you know, huge bribes that they would put to influence the ordering of their transactions on some of these sniping pools. And that's when I was just like, okay, hang on, a second UX aside, serious stuff happening in the mempool around transaction execution which seems to be really interesting. I don't know what it is and I don't know. I'm starting to piece it together, but, like, let me start to understand MEV better. So fundamentally, like that's what MEV is right the ability to influence ordering over transactions is where there is the ability to extract some value.
Speaker 1:Like I described over here, if you're the first transaction to touch a Uniswap pool for a meme, coin the chances that from that transaction to the next 10 transactions, you would have effectively 10x'd your position, and so when people are trying to snipe, they're like this is the calculation in their mind if I'm first, I will 10x. So how much am I willing to give as a bribe to be first? This is mev in a nutshell, and this was kind of like one of those, I think, seminal moments in in the last nine months or so of like actually understanding how crypto works for the first time, despite being exposed to it for the last nine years or so. Okay, so before you move on, like, let me take a stab at it and make sure that I got it and I think whoever is listening also gets it right. So not just for a pool that has just come online, but for any transaction where there might be a material impact on a token's price, right. So, for example, what I mean is let's say that a pool that doesn't have too deep a liquidity, and let's say that liquidity is around $2 to $5 million range, and if someone is trying to execute, let's say, a $500,000 or $1 million transaction, let's say the pool is TokenX and USDC and someone is buying a million dollars worth of TokenX. Now it's very likely that, because the pool is not very deep, the price of TokenX will get materially impacted due to this transaction. So because when a user signs this transaction, the transaction goes to a mempool which can be seen by these so-called searchers who are looking for such transactions that will have material impact on tokens prices. Now the searcher's job is to buy this token before this million dollar transaction and sell it right after. So that is sandwiching.
Speaker 1:Second thing is something like what Vishwawa mentioned. If there is an anticipated token and the pool gets deployed, typically there is a few minutes or few seconds lag between the teams announcing it on their socials etc. That hey, we have deployed this pool and you can start trading this token at like. And this is the pool contract. There are smarter folks who identify these pools before these announcements are live, and I mean as soon as these pools are deployed. And if you are the first one to buy these tokens, you can materially benefit from the speed of execution and the way to make sure that this happens.
Speaker 1:So whenever you initiate a transaction on MetaMask or any other wallet that you use, there is a way to adjust the fees that you pay. Essentially, this is the fees that you're paying to whoever is producing that block to make sure that they include your transaction into that block. So Ethereum block will have n number of transactions and yours should be one of that n and yours should be one of that end, and essentially this is a bidding war. Whoever bids the highest, their transaction will sort of get included into a block, and, yeah, so that's where the concept of bribes comes around, and I think this is where we struck or fascinated with with the world of mev. Am I like more or less correct here? No, spawn on for sure, I think, yeah, you did a good job of explaining in like different examples and contexts as well. So, yeah, exactly so now you've sort of familiarizing yourself with mev, right you're, you're understanding the nooks and corners of what mev is and and so on.
Speaker 1:So how do you stumble upon intents from here? Yeah, so, from the, the Telegram bot that we built for the hackathon, we saw, I think, like one of the things that we were another online hackathon that we were doing was an AI crypto hackathon. So we said, okay, if we're participating in like an AI crypto hackathon, let's just do the like natural language wallet thing. People express their intents with natural language, and that was like the naive interaction with what intents could be, because it's I mean, it's, it's rudimentary, but it's basically you say very, very simply, here's what I want to do, in natural language, and then you're able to execute those transactions. So that's, that was the first interaction with the world of intents, because I think that's when the word was being used quite a lot, perhaps we were using it from an intent expressivity context. Uh, we still don't understand the execution ramifications.
Speaker 1:But, like I said, I had my first little bit of understanding of mev. So I figured out, like you know, once these transactions like if I had an intent to snipe every new token that comes, and I say it in natural language how do I actually execute this in a way that this works? Like you know, I want this strategy to work and so this was the beginning of understanding what goes on beyond the expressivity layer. But I would say we definitely started off at the expressivity layer because we wanted to do something which was like using natural language expressivity layer, I mean exactly to break the. Yeah, expressing your intents is the expressivity there, and you can do it in many different ways, you know. You can do it in the form of a limit order. You can do it through natural language, you can do it through whatever.
Speaker 1:At the end of the day, it needs to be something that can be executed and it needs to be something that can be executed by a sophisticated third actor because, like I said in an, in an intent architecture, the idea here is is a user, you describe your preference over end state, and the end state means that the conditions that you had, you know, listed are satisfied, and if they're not, then the transaction will revert. So now it's just like okay, you can do all of this expressivity stuff which is in natural language. Hey, I want to swap 1000 usdc for every token that has a market cap less than this much. Then you're like okay, now I need to construct the actual transactions that do this and, and not only that, I need to give guarantees around execution, because otherwise then every intent is just failing. Before you move ahead, I want to understand how you arrive at a scope of whatever this thing will do.
Speaker 1:What is it that I can say in natural language will get executed, and how does a user know, like, what is the scope of these executions? Yes, yeah, you have to do a. It's pretty, it's not super scalable. Like, you have to build a repository of this manually. It's your, your, your most you know crude version of this is you're mapping a bunch of interactions and you tell the users in your Git book that this is all the things that it can support. It can support so it can support swaps, it can support staking, it can support find me the highest yield, but here are the constraints. Like, we've only so far mapped pools or vaults on Ethereum L1, so it won't be able to do anything on arbitrage. So you actually have to, like, manually create a repository of data to map these natural language things to.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you need to define the scope of yeah, correct, what you can execute. Yeah, okay, like open ai or llama 2 at that time, like they don't, they don't know what we're saying. Basically, um, they're not exactly. You use the, the llm, to basically like, allow users to say whatever they want to say, but then you have to have your database mapped to what it's what's being said and so you have to pass it. It's not open ai really passing it. You just give that because the users at that point seemed like they wanted it and there was a lot of marketing around natural language expression of user intents, we saw very quickly that it doesn't become very scalable. Um, and then, so you know, because you have to keep doing like physical mapping and then, furthermore, like, was it really that much of a upgrade on UX?
Speaker 1:You know, when we launched the product, like internally, when we were playing around with a very naive version of it, we were just like, yeah, this is not really going to be interesting to people. And this was around September Token 2049 is when we were working on this product really. So, from the Optimism hackathon in August to September, we got ready this natural language account, abstraction-based TG bot which was allowing users to express their intents, and so we called it an intent-centric bot because it was good marketing. But we were still I think we were still naive in our understanding of how some of this stuff would work, and I decided at that point, like it maybe makes sense to go deeper in the rabbit hole of like understanding this design space more, because this is just like a, it's like a first stab at something and it's like a hackathon project, but like really allowing yourself to be open to the execution stuff. So I actually took a break.
Speaker 1:By the way, I also launched, like this notion dashboard, which was every project involved within tents. I just mapped it out in one place and that got me a little bit of goodwill with people that were actually building in this space. So I'm I'm grateful that I built that, because it then got me connected to people who actually explained to me, like the, the nuance around intent execution. So that was definitely a cool thing. If there's any founders that are thinking about starting something that don't even know anything about the space that they're thinking of operating within, make a notion dashboard or make, make some public code type of thing, put it out there. And it does a great job of, like, allowing you to bring your network really close to you. Nice, I think this is super good advice.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so now, like, okay, you thought of building the trust minimized telegram bot. You built that out and, yeah, now you understand intents. But now the next question is what are the gaps that you see in current cross-chain environment and how do you think intents will solve it? And, yeah, what is anira labs doing in this space? Yeah, so we were working within a couple of constraints with the, the account abstraction, tg pod.
Speaker 1:Number one was the fact that, like, you actually have to deploy a smart contract wallet on on every chain. And so when, in a world of like a million roll-ups, I think that becomes a little bit tricky because you know we are in a roll-up centric roadmap. So it just becomes a little bit harder to have to keep deploying smart contract wallets every time you want to go to a new chain and then that kind of limited like what you could do between chains with this, with this telegram bot, because then just a second, when you say you want to deploy smart contract wallets, how does that work and how frequently do you have to do it? I mean, if you look at, if I want to create like a 4337 wallet, I have to create it for every chain. I want to create user ops on, at least at that point, every user.
Speaker 1:You have to deploy that, that account on every chain that you are serving precisely, precisely, okay, and then so far, so, so as a as a wallet manager, potentially like it starts to get expensive if the users just deploy something on l1 and then never do a transaction. If you're, if you want to provide them with that UX of like, yeah, you don't have to pay to deploy the wallet, because that's one way to potentially make it easier for users to run. Then you're just like you're left with the bill for a lot of people deploying smart contract wallets but not doing anything with it. And, by the way, if you look at Ko-i's dashboard on 4337 UserOps, you will see like there's a large number of people that have a between like that one to two UserOps limit and those one to two UserOps is what it takes to actually deploy the wallet. So, yeah, they're doing exactly this. They're deploying stuff and not doing anything with it.
Speaker 1:And how expensive. That scared us off a little bit. Can you tell me how expensive is it at this moment to deploy this wallet on L1? It's the cost of deploying a smart contract on L1. So it's the same. It would be could be anywhere from like a couple of hundred bucks or higher, depending on, like ingestion, the gas prices, yeah. So that was where we were just like okay, this is interesting now because if a user has, like, if a user wants to do stuff, cross-chain, I will find it difficult to scale with an account abstraction model.
Speaker 1:And again, I would say like the beauty for us with the insights that we created so far is that we started at the user, like we didn't start at at a different level. So so you know, it was not like a purely technical nerd snipe. It was actually born out of like problems that we found in a consumer product and that brought us to an infrastructure level, because we just kept unlocking technical challenges that we wanted to address and then there was obviously a large element of being nerd sniped by MEV. But we do have a sense of the customer need, so we didn't just go at this blindly from an infrastructure approach. Right, makes a sense of the customer need, so we didn't just go at this blindly from a from an infrastructure approach. Right, makes sense. And now, yeah, where you are right now, how far along is the product and so on, yeah, um, so.
Speaker 1:So again, like I said, we know we we had a very natural progression towards understanding that there's going to be issues with crypto ux, even with improvements like account obstruction, specifically when you're starting to do cross-chain stuff. Intents are an upgrade where users can express it, but intents are only as good as execution, and execution is largely governed by the mev games that are being played and specifically around like those are the. That's where the guarantees come from around execution, right. So so it's fundamentally like how well you understand what you need to do to get your transaction that appeals to either a searcher or directly to a block builder that determine like execution of these intents. And then, from a cross-chain context, what we saw early as an externality being born out of this was that it's way more centralizing than just intents on L1, because it requires you to have inventory on both chains, many chains in fact. So then the hurdle number one is like you need money. If you don't have money, then you can't really be that solver, that executor of user intents in a cross-chain context. So I think that was like the first thing that we saw as like potentially being problem, that we we were thinking we want to spend time, you know, investing our energies and in figuring out how to solve this, because we were just like if users are going to need to go cross-chain and if they are going to want to do the thing that's like easy to do uxy's then we should make it such that the market underlying that execution is actually competitive and it's not just like completely centralized. So that was the problem that we set out to solve. It was around solver, centralization in cross-chain intents and, you know, creating markets that enable that equilibrium to shift. Now, if one solver still wins all the order flow in an auction where there's 14 participants and they're all competing really hard and that's fine and that's good for the user because there's good competitive dynamics, you need to break down what a solver is and what an order flow auction is.
Speaker 1:Okay, let me do it this way. I will give a quick one and a half minutes on the anatomy of an intent. Okay, from a user. Right, how it starts and how it reaches execution execution, fair, fair enough, yeah, so so let's do this just right now, assuming that there's just one chain. Let's talk about l1. I'm a user. My desire is that I want to swap 1000 usdc for as much eth as possible, but this is the minimum that I'm willing to accept. All right, so the minimum I'm willing to accept is 0.19 eth.
Speaker 1:Okay, okay, I send this. Uh, this is a message that I signed now. So it's not. I'm not signing a transaction, but I'm signing a message right now. So, no gas, no, nothing, just a signature from your wallet. Yeah, right now. Now what happens is you have this message which reaches a bulletin board. Let's call this bulletin board the mempool and then you have right participants in the ecosystem. You know they are looking for okay, cool, like, let's look for messages so we can basically solve these messages and they get exactly and the reward is usually. So here's the, the interesting part, right? So the reward is usually in the intent message itself and that message.
Speaker 1:When a user says like this is the minimum I'm willing to accept, that effectively sets the minimum benchmark for bread or a solver, because then whatever more you can extract, that is yours exactly. So if I, if the solver, is like okay, cool, this guy wants like 0.198, then he's willing to give 1000 usdc. I have access to 0.28 for that same price, but I'm going to give him 0.19 because he's asked for 0.28 for that same price. But I'm going to give him 0.19 because he's asked for 0.19 and now I get to keep 0.01. So that's the incentive game for a solver and this is what a solver does. Now when you have another solver that's also seeing the same message and that says like okay, you know what, he's asking for 0.19. The other guy is doing 0.2. Let me do 0.195 because I'm okay to keep 0.05 on this transaction.
Speaker 1:Then that starts to create a competitive market, which is as I now begin to describe this. You can. You can see in real time that the execution quality has now improved for the user, because they were first only getting 0.19, now they're getting 0.195, so that's good for the user. Um, and now what happens is like whoever wins that, so the guy who bids 0.195 will will end up winning this transaction because they offer the user the better price. And, fundamentally, all of this interaction is happening off-chain. It's not happening on-chain, right, right. So it's not constrained by the externalities of mev that come with putting these transactions into a public mempool. It's happening off chain. User signs, message, people compete, the competing bid is then clearly identified as and wins the right to execute. You know this solved intent.
Speaker 1:Now, the intent that's now been solved is like okay, sorab is gonna get 0.195 and the solver for this is joel. Okay, now joel wins the right to execute this transaction. He creates a bundle that involves, you know, whatever it might be maybe joel is using an on-chain pool to give you the money and so that those transactions are included in now a bundle of transactions. But this bundle of transactions represents the underlying complexity behind a simple expression of startup saying I want to swap 1000 USDC for as much ETH as possible, and the minimum I'm willing to accept was 0.19. So now you can see like there's some sophistication that's happened to actually make this a reality, and it involves off-chain elements, it involves off-chain actors and it involves a comparative auction In a nutshell, how a user's expressed intent is now created into something that can actually be consumed and solved.
Speaker 1:Now, this is the point at which this bundle has been created as the first instantiation of your user intent actually coming on chain. Because now this bundle is sent to the entities that can guarantee inclusion here, and these entities are usually block builders, because the block builders will be the ones that make blocks and in the context of how blocks are built and how blocks are created on ethereum today, most of it happens through another auction called mev boost. I don't know how much you want to get into it, but the broad strokes are this the block which sequences transactions in a manner that presents the most profit and makes that profit available to the entity that proposes the block. Let's call that the proposer or the validator. Uh, usually is the block that will be included on chain. So you as as that bundle now that has been created with with your user intent, it's now sent to all the block builders and and hopefully it's sent in a manner that has sufficient tip to incentivize every block builder to include it, and and that's actually not super complicated and you know it's complicated for the user listening to this but for a solver entity it's just like it's it's part of the business. Like they understand inclusion, so they understand how much they should have as that tip and they've already included as a part of, like, the execution price they've given you, so that you don't have to worry about this stuff. Like it's not an additional cost to the user, it's all a part of the, the execution process, right and so. So then finally, this, this bundle is included in the block and it's sent to the proposer. The proposer proposes it and within 12 seconds, some magic happens and startup gets 0.195 ETH in his wallet for a thousand USDC. So that's actually the anatomy of an intent on L1.
Speaker 1:As we start to go towards multiple chains is when a lot more complexity happens. Is this where what you were saying that you have to manage inventory on on both right? So I mean, this is precisely right, right, and who takes guarantees of transaction executions? Here are these? Is it done by solvers? Yes, so let me just quickly cover like one concept here. In our chain example, the solver actually never put their own money in. What they did was they had a bundle of transactions, right. So the bundle of transactions could be something as like 1000 USDC from store up to this address and then from that address, do a swap on this pool and then, once that happens, do this and so so they actually just like manage the routing of the transaction. It was never that they took on any inventory risk here. They actually didn't have. They don't have any inventory themselves. They're just really good at routing.
Speaker 1:So so that's what you can do when you're just solving user intents on a single chain, because in your bundle you can start to include like atomic stuff. You know you can. You can include things um easily. This becomes difficult to do between two chains because you don't have atomic execution guarantees. In fact, you don't have any execution guarantees, right, like it's two different entities that are responsible for the actual uh sequencing of transactions, and so you don't have any guarantees around it. So you can't do anything other than have inventory.
Speaker 1:And so the most naive intent-based stuff you see in crypto today is around bridging right, like if you use a bridge like across, or if you use a bridge like dBridge, what you do as a user is you deposit some money on source chain and then, on destination chain, somebody is actually advancing liquidity to you. This solver now requires inventory to be able to fulfill your intentions or your intents. So the game has kind of shifted away from, like, being good at routing to just having money and being good at inventory management and I think, like I guess that's pretty apparent from the conversation we've probably had over the last few minutes that transition as we've moved is an important one and like sort of what is the inspiration for what we do? Right, so now will market makers be the new cross-chain intent solvers? Well, yes, at least for now, it's fundamentally hard to. Yeah, yes, I don't want to make a very long answer, but in the short run, at least for the next 12 to 18 months, it's going to be market makers, even if it's not just the market makers, like there will be very strong candidates to solve or to be solvers. Yes, and market makers are strong candidates for most things, as you would even see with block building. On ethereum, two of the three largest block builders are also market makers, so that there is a skill set overlap between being an intent solver and being a market maker for sure, right.
Speaker 1:So now I want to get to a part where what exactly is Anira Labs building to facilitate this, and how will it be better than D-Bridge or across the world? Right? So I would say like? A couple of things that I will put on here is that we look at D-B, dbridge and Across and all of the folks working in the bridge spaces collaborators, not competitors. Here we're not building another bridge, we are building infrastructure that makes that underlying execution for the user's order more competitive, and I think there are phases in which we're doing this from a product perspective.
Speaker 1:I'm not going to give away too much alpha, because I think we are doing this pretty stealthily, but I will say this for now, what we're able to do is think of us as the entity that's able to manage that auction better for this bridging intent in a way that aggregates quotes from multiple entities. So it's more of a providing an auction and making sure that user execution is happening more around price quality, not on speed, which is where the dynamic is today. Like today, if you want to win the execution. For, you know, saurabh is bridging from, let's say, ethereum to Solana on dBridge. It's all on speed, right? So so long as you meet that minimum threshold of price, you will win the order flow auction if you're fast enough, and so, again, it incentivizes certain like latency level games that people play. So what we're saying is, instead of the auction being specifically limited to speed, let's also incorporate execution quality, where it doesn't necessarily reduce the speed of the intent fulfillment, but also now allows that entity that was willing to give you 0.195 to come into the forward too. So that this is phase one and it's it's more like a like an auction here for existing participants.
Speaker 1:We still don't have the infrastructure that can open this up to more people that don't have inventory, and I think that fundamentally comes down to how sequencing is happening between chains today. But I'll just leave it at this that phase two of what we're doing will involve a lot more accessibility of this opportunity to solve cross-chain intents, as we see some innovation around shared sequencing, right? So currently, you said it's about the speed, it's about the price and not about the speed. It's the other way around. Actually, users are getting the worst possible price of execution that they've expressed. So if you remember my intent expression, it was I want to swap 1000 USDC for as much ETH as possible. The minimum I'm willing to accept is this much. So what users are getting right now is the minimum they're willing to accept. What I mean is the phase one of an era is that the users will get a better price Correct, Right, okay, and then you'll solve for speed, and that is where incentivizing like different solvers comes into the picture. So not so much for speed, actually, I think what we'll be able to do is I think today, the entities that can compete to give better price to users are still entities that have inventory, but when there's innovation around shared sequencing, that doesn't have to be the case, and so, even without inventory, folks that are just doing routing can become very relevant in this space, and that's where our infrastructure will be very powerful to help them become relevant in this.
Speaker 1:How does shared sequencing solve this? Before you answer, shared sequencing is so, for example, for L2s, like they are quite centralized at the moment. Typically, there's one operator who is producing all the blocks and posting either the data or the proof, or both, on L1. Shared sequencing is where this sort of gets shared between multiple operators Exactly, and just imagine this in our context of two rollups that have the same sequencer in common. Effectively, there's now better inclusion guarantees for transactions on two domains, which is exactly the problem that exists today around this centralization externality, which is exactly the problem that exists today around this centralization externality which we described. It exists because you don't have the ability to have any inclusion guarantees or execution guarantees between two different chains. When you have that, then you can start to create bundles that just include transactions that go from domain A to domain B and then back to domain A, and then, when you can do that, you don't necessarily need to have your own inventory as much as you do today. Okay, makes sense when you are in terms of building right now.
Speaker 1:I mean, are you raising funds? Are you hiring? What's happening on that? So we are pretty lucky to have been admitted as like the first entrepreneurs in residence at Anagram's EIR program. So we are pretty lucky to have been admitted as like the first entrepreneurs in residence at Anagram's EIR program. So we are working closely with the Anagram team. I'm currently in the New York office and we're going to do a bunch of whiteboarding and stuff like that today around product. But we're in the fellowship and EIR phase of our fundraising, which will start to move in towards a round that will conclude around April. So we're not doing the fundraising immediately now, but we will begin that towards the end of March and then close that out hopefully in a couple of weeks after.
Speaker 1:And how's your engineering or hiring situation at the moment? So what's great is like we have my co-founder and one engineer in-house, but then we also have support from two gigabrain engineers in the Anagram team. So for now, we're all good. We're going to be looking towards hiring roles around data science and data engineering pretty soon. So if anybody out there is interested in just like that data side of these things, we'd love to talk. I think we'll be in a good position around hiring by April.
Speaker 1:So if anybody's listening and if anybody finds this space interesting, yeah, definitely reach out to me on Twitter or Telegram. My handle is the same, it's Rojan Tors, always looking to talk to talent, especially on the engineering side. Is there anything that I missed and you want to talk about? No, I think this has been great Also. Fortunately, I was not able to go in too deep on what we're doing, and I think that's also fair enough, because we are a pre-seed company and we're also figuring things out as we do it, but we'll have a better sense of where the product is soon enough. Overall, I think we did a good job covering indents broadly and I think the complexity and the externality of when you go cross-chain with user indents that was also covered. So I think we did a good job and I'm glad we did this. I look forward to doing more of these with you.
Speaker 1:Saurabh, yeah, like, do you have any message to for the people who will listen to this? Yeah, follow me on twitter. Follow me on twitter. Try to get my numbers up. I'm here for clout, so please give me it. And if you're as nerd sniped by intense mev order flow, auctions, sequencing, consensus, any of this stuff as I am, feel free to message me. I am hopelessly nerd sniped and always ready to talk about it. Yeah, that's how we met, right? I remember the. Remember the Delphi event where, yeah, where I mean it's pretty much us talking almost throughout the evening and, yeah, a few nerds joining us in the process.
Speaker 1:Yes, I'll tell you what was interesting for me the fact that you know you wanted to manage Bunny for HNI's in India from there to trying to solve cross-chain intents. I mean that arc has been crazy right who continue to start new ventures despite facing either setbacks or not arriving at product market fit for the previous ventures that they. That's it right and the hustle is real in your case and that's always admirable. And, yeah, pretty much excited to see what an era labs puts across. Hopefully we will have bridges where we don't have to pay 300 gas and, yeah, we get better prices, right. Uh, hopefully that happens soon and we don't have to care about, like, going and you know, claiming funds on the other side on the destination scene and so on. So I just hope that this all whole experience around cross-scene bridging just gets significantly better than where we are at the moment. It's quite frustrating as a user and I hope you guys play a role in changing that. I think so. I think, in fact, just honing in on that a little bit, I think I expect us to play a critical role in that and, if not, then expect us to die trying.
Speaker 1:And that takes me back to the, the earlier point about what you said about like the arc. I think the the one thing that I'll say to anyone. That's like thinking about starting up someone mentioned this but the ability for people to take extraordinary risk in their life and and the number of people that continue to do that is only reducing with time. So, if you're an entrepreneur that's actually like not quite succeeded the way you would have expected, you should keep going, just because, from a competition standpoint, there are going to be more people that are going to keep dropping out. So keep taking your lessons, taking the time off when you need it, but like fundamentally, know that as long as you're incorporating those lessons and you're getting better and you keep going on, time is actually on your side, because few people have the ability to just keep chewing glass. So just do that and like that's how I approach entrepreneurship. I think I'll be doing this for the rest of my life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, hopefully that is remotely inspiring to someone thinking about how to look at failure. All right, vishwa, thanks a lot, man. Thanks for spending time with me. This was interesting and pretty much I mean, once your product is close to getting finished, you've raised money. We'll probably do this again.