Crosschain Bridging with Across Protocol

GM, GM. Welcome to what's going to be another fantastic episode of DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast held every week allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between a platform to come showcase their product. And today, I'm excited to welcome Kanishk, who's a DevRel at Across Protocol. So if you didn't know, Across is an interoperability protocol powered by intents. It's the only cross-chain intents protocol in production today enabling the fastest and lowest cost way to transfer—value—without security tradeoffs versus traditional bridges. So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll see Kanishk give us a overview of Across Protocol, a discussion around bridging, and how you can get started using it today. All right, let's get into it.

GM, GM. Welcome to the show, Kanishk. I am ecstatic that you are on with us today.

Thank you so much for having me, Narb. It's an absolute pleasure to be here with you today and, you know, be a part of the Developer DAO community.

Awesome, man. And yeah, we are ecstatic to have you on. I know, um, you mentioned it on X a little bit, but there's a nice little history there that we want to get into, and of course, all the good stuff you have packed for us from the Across Protocol. But before we get into all that, would you like to just give a brief introduction about yourself?

For sure. Hi, everyone. My name is Kanishk. I'm a DevRel at Across and UMA. It is my job to make sure that when you start bridging and when you start working in intents and interoperability between blockchains, you win. You get the best toolkits out there, you get the best developer experience out there, you get the easiest and the cleanest docs out there to make sure that you focus on building the core of your protocol, and bridging tokens back and forth is not your worry and we take over that headache and help you win. That's sort of my job here. I also love coding. I kind of started as an engineer. I started as a Web2 Java engineer. I used to make mobile apps back in the day, and then somehow crypto found me, like somehow crypto found most of you. And from there on, everything else sort of became history. So I've dabbled around in a lot of technologies, in a lot of codebases, frameworks, and I just love hanging around developers. It's not my KPI to make developer friends, I just like having developer friends because I learn so much from them. So yeah, that's a little bit about what I do, a little bit about who I am, and why I'm here today.

Yeah, that's amazing, man. I mean, it's great company to keep, of course, you got to attract the best, right? That's what you do.

And that's interesting. I come from a similar background. I also did a bunch of Java development before coming over to the Web3 blockchain side of things. I guess what was your experience kind of going through that? It sounds like a traditional enterprise kind of development environment to, like, let's call it the Wild Wild West in Web3.

No, you're absolutely right. I think for me, so I think I started with Java development through a hackathon itself and I made the worst Android app you could ever see and imagine. But I think back then I was in grade school. So I was pretty early into it. I started developing and coding when I was coding in QBasic when I was in grade five. Started learning a little bit about terminals and shell scripting when I was in grade eight. By the time I got to uni, I was able to—well, I already had a job, and then I already was able to, like, hack around Java and also hack around Python for data science, and you know, had a good hand at, like, Kaggle practices and whatever data science practices they had us doing. It's been five years since I've even looked back at that, so memories faded, but I look back at that with a smile. Then COVID hit, and my dad was pretty deep into, like, the Bored Ape Yacht Club, if you remember that. So the monkeys and the NFTs, and he's like, 'Son, I want one.' And I'm like, 'I don't care. How do you mean you want a monkey?' And then I sort of started looking into it and I realized he does not want a monkey, he wants a token. What is a token? And that sort of kickstarted my journey. Never could get him a Bored Ape NFT, but was able to code one myself down the line, and I think that was something even him and I both were quite happy of. So that's sort of how I went from Java to Python to now Solidity, JavaScript, TypeScript, whatever we use today to make these applications. I'm a big Rust fan. I mean, any day give me a Rust problem and I'll spend hours trying to solve it. And I just feel, well, happiness when I solve these systems-level problems. Don't get me wrong, love frontend, love backend, but I have a soft corner for Rust in my heart as well. That's sort of the history I have. Would you want to mention how you got here as well because I think from Java to Solidity is a big jump and I always want to learn how developers got there.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I guess from my end, it really started when I kind of dabbled into Web3, just reading the Bitcoin whitepaper and Ethereum whitepaper and then I found some YouTube tutorials online from Patrick Collins, actually, who's at Cyfrin now. At the time he was at Chainlink and he was posting all these tutorials around how to build oracles and whatnot and I kind of just started watching that and then started playing with Solidity, made some ERC-20 tokens, some NFT tokens, and I was like, 'Oh, this kind of looks like JavaScript, TypeScript, this isn't too bad.' And then you kind of go—I went into the weeds of like, oh, there's actually like this thing called gas and I have to take that into consideration and it's like, 'Oh, whoops.' And that's kind of how I started. But yeah, it's not a terribly tough language to pick up, usually, like once you have at least one language under your belt, all the other ones kind of just look like—well, the most of them, most of them anyhow. But yeah, that's awesome to hear, man.

And I guess through you kind of, it sounds like you're self-learning and making this Bored Ape replica for your dad. I guess how did that kind of transition into you landing at Across?

For sure. I think you're right, self-learning, staying in the room and just trying to solve problems, easy and hard problems both. Well, when you start you think that's a hard problem. Down the line you realize, 'Oh, all I had to do was just get gas in my wallet and my transaction will go through.' You know, that becomes an easy problem down the line. But I think it started with me just wanting to—okay, let me zoom out. Being in crypto as a developer allows my code to have fastest and easiest access to money as it can. That means the code that I write from the second I deploy it has access to, well, Perp protocols, centralized exchanges—some of them have APIs—decentralized exchanges, lending-borrowing protocols, vaults. So I can do stuff with the net worth that I have from my code itself. I don't have to wait for people to approve it. Don't want to do KYC and I can just move forward. For me, that was a very liberating factor. And after having been in Web2 and having seen how slow the processes have been in that industry for a while, it was refreshing that I can just create money out of thin air and it can do stuff for me. So that was kind of the biggest motivation for me. Down the line I've been at a few protocols, infra protocols, and educational places as well, I've built applications that allow people to learn. I've made a Udemy of Web3. I've done all of that in the past. Fun experiences. And then somehow last year I got an opportunity—well, obviously knew Across, I had been using it for years at that point. I also knew UMA at that point and I knew of PolyMarket. I saw the PolyMarket hype when Trump got elected and I was in like a bar in New York and I was going through that process and I was saying, 'Oh my god, people are going crazy here.' But I feel last year I got reached out and I think it was an instant yes. It is a protocol that I respected, it is built by people that I looked up to, and I genuinely felt that I can move the needle here while learning how do you build a scalable protocol and a scalable company at the same time. I respect Hart a lot, I respect James a lot, I respect Matt a lot, Mel a lot, and I think it's just—it was just a perfect match. So I went really hard for the interviews. I did Foundry again from scratch. I made my own Merkle tree verification processes in Foundry just to revise, you know? Nobody will ask you to do that in the job, but I wanted to revise things because I was a bit out of the loop. And then, and then yeah, sleepless nights turned out into a job offer and I'm more than happy and super grateful to be here. So that's how I started and kind of landed my way all over to Across. And yeah, it's been going great. The challenge does not end. We are about to release something really huge next week, so I really want developers to keep an eye on the docs. And if you have been keeping your eye on the docs, you already know what's coming. But each time we push the frontier of what we've already achieved, we've got to make sure that people who build with us are supported properly. And these are amazing companies, you know, companies like PancakeSwap, Uniswap. We also co-wrote the cross-chain intent ERC-7683 with Uniswap. So we have to make sure that, you know, we stay in touch. And docs play a very important role in it, DevRel plays a very important role in it. So it's a responsibility, and it's a responsibility I love. And now you get the whole picture.

That's amazing, man. Yeah, that's a very inspiring story. It just proves that you're—if you grind and you really want something, you can get it. So for folks watching today, if you're on the fence whether you should go for something, just go for it. You can just do things, right? Exactly. Exactly.

And yeah, I guess you touched on it a bit. PolyMarket has been pretty, pretty big, at least this year. And there was a whole partnership with X as well that came out a couple months ago. And I didn't know this until the folks at UMA started tweeting about it, but it seems like it's powered by UMA. Did you want to just briefly touch on that and, like, the significance on that? Yeah.

For sure, for sure. So let's take a step back, right? UMA, what is UMA? UMA is an optimistic oracle. It helps you take truth on-chain, and then protocols can use that truth to build whatever they want. One of the most prominent use cases that we've seen in this time period has been prediction markets. So you can come and you can say, 'Hey, I think Eagles will win this game,' and then people can say yes or people can say no. But did Eagles actually win the game or not? How do you verifiably put this fact on-chain? You can pull this from a bunch of APIs and then you can come to a consensus and then you can say yes or no. That's kind of how oracles work as well. Or you can have that whole process mitigated to an optimistic oracle, which is where you will get a dispute. Now people need to vote here. Whatever the answer is and whatever the resolution is of this process goes on-chain, and then PolyMarket can just pull that and say, 'Hey, we already see that Eagles won or Eagles lost.' And based on that, people will get whatever they voted for, yes or no, and whatever the amount of money there is. So that's kind of how UMA and PolyMarket work together on a technical level. And this is explained—I went very high level here, but the nitty-gritties of this, Optimistic Oracle V2, Optimistic Oracle V3, because Across also uses UMA in the backend for verification at a point. How all of this works is documented properly in our documentation. So you can go to docs.uma.xyz and you will see this process clearly laid out for you. And yeah, we've seen a bunch of such interesting protocols come to life. We've also seen a lot of AI stuff happening with UMA because you can take inferences from these oracle data and then you can act on it. So there's fun happening all over the industry right now and we're super, super excited for all these teams working with us.

Yeah, yeah, it's certainly a very interesting time to be alive. Everything is kind of like on the bleeding edge of tech. And yeah, it's just there's something new to play with every day it seems like, whether in the AI space or blockchain space or just tech in general. So yeah, very fortunate in that regard to be alive to kind of go through that. And you mentioned it, but the theme of today's show, Across Protocol. Let's get into that a bit. What is Across? Why was it built? Why should people use it?

Absolutely. I'm going to start with the bookish definition so that we get all the buzzwords out of the way right at this second, and then I'm going to dumb it down and I'm going to explain it in the way I was able to understand it when I did not know any of these buzzwords. So simply put, Across is an interoperability protocol powered by intents. That's it. Full stop. Now let's unpack it line by line, word by word. What happens is when a user has funds on chain A, say you have USDC on Base, right? But you know Optimism is running Superchain, and you want to bridge these funds over to Optimism so you can do stuff with them. Or maybe Arbitrum has something fun happening in their ecosystem. Now you have money on chain A, you have money on-chain in a way, but there is no way right now or no fast way right now to get it to another protocol. For sure you can use canonical bridges, you can use traditional bridges, and that will take about seven days for the finality to reach on chain A, the message to get propagated to chain B, funds to be minted there and then you will be able to perform your activity. Very high chances that by then you will lose motivation, you will be tired, you will simply forget and you'll move on with life. So this is the problem that we saw in the space and we were able to solve it. So essentially, now with Across you can bridge your funds over to any chains that we support in like two seconds. And all of that is possible with the help of intents. So what is intent, right? Now we've understood the problem statement, we've understood what Across solves. Now let's understand and unpack how Across actually solves it with the help of intents. Think of intents in the mental model form factor, think of intents as an order ticket. This order ticket simply has some blanks that you need to fill. The chain that you have funds on, the amount of funds that you have or the amount of funds you want to bridge over, the chain that you want to go to, and I think that's about it. And of course, the token, right? Which token do you want to bridge? So once you fill out these four things—chain that you're on, chain that you want to be, the input token and the output token—you're set. From here on, we take over. You give this order ticket to us, you give this intent to us, our protocol makes sure that we get you to your destination in the cheapest, fastest and the most secure way possible. Now under the hood what happens is a user will come to Across, they'll fill this form—and we'll see this in action in just a few minutes right now—and once they fill up this form, the relayers in our system—now these relayers are like the key actors, they take all the risk here and make sure that the user is safe and the user still gets their funds, and the relayer takes all the risk of—risk can be a reorg happening on the origin chain, some kind of problem happening on the origin chain, you know stuff like that. If a user faces that and they have a lot of money at stake, they will lose that money. But in this case we have our heroes, our relayers that take up this risk and they are able to provide this amazing experience where funds can be transferred in like two seconds. So they look at this order ticket, they look at this intent, and they give tokens on the destination chain to the user then and there. And then from there on, Across Protocol listens to these relayers and says, 'Oh wow, you helped this particular person, you gave them this much money.' The user also deposited the money in, so it's not like we're giving free money, right? The first the deposit happens and then the fill happens. So now we're able to repay the relayers from all the deposits that happen and of course, the relayers take a small fee for all of that. And that's how intents help people get to their destination chains in under two seconds.

So far we have been able to, I think we've crossed billions in volume. I don't remember the exact number, we were looking at it yesterday on DeFi Llama, but you can of course go and check it out right now. And super. So we've covered that Across is an intents powered interoperability protocol. It helps you get from origin chain to destination chain in under two seconds and it is a huge, huge step up from what traditional bridges were able to do where they were bridging funds over in like seven days. So yeah, users are happy, we are happy. And from here we can build more fun use cases. As you bridge if you want to swap, you can do that. It's called embedded actions. All of this happens in one transaction. As you bridge, the second you bridge if you want to mint a token—now this is super for people who want to release NFT collections, you can do that. You have money on Base, but the protocol that you want to mint your NFT on lives on like Arbitrum, simply go to that protocol, click on mint, it will bridge your funds over first, then mint in the same transaction. Stuff like that, people love, we love building it as well. And I think we've been live for about three years now. So we've been fairly battle-tested here. And that's about it. Now you know the whole thing.

Amazing, amazing. Yeah, and that was very well explained. And yeah, I mean anything that makes the process of bridging easier for the end user is like godsend. Like just from a developer standpoint, bridging is, in my opinion, one of the more difficult things to deal with at a protocol level just because we're in a age of multichain and cross-chain apps, right? So just the fact that you have to have a token on a parent chain and then have clone copies of that token on any other chain that you want to move these funds around to is a non-trivial thing and you have to kind of really plan and architect—architect your protocols around that. But from a user standpoint, right? If you want an average person to be like, 'Oh, I got USDC on Arbitrum and I got USDC on Optimism,' like a person should be able to move that money pretty easily, right? Not have to go through a bajillion steps, click a bajillion buttons, and it seems like Across, the Across bridge, does that exactly. And I guess that's a nice little segue. I know you have a little demo planned for us so it'd be really interesting to see this in action.

Absolutely. Now this is my favorite part because our engineers have poured in their absolute heart, soul, love, sweat, everything into making these web pages the way they perform and the way the experience is. Also, before we just get to that, shout out to Infinity, who's one of our community members, our mods, they just dropped in the exact value that we've bridged. So that's like 27.5 billion dollars. I think billion with the B is always a huge number and always makes us happy. Michael, super, super cool dude, always helpful. So shout out to all of them. And now with that said, let us continue and let me quickly share my screen. There we go. And folks, as we're going through this demo, if you have any questions, please post them in the chat and we will get them answered for you. Absolutely. There you go. Good to go. Yep. This is what the homepage looks like. As I mentioned, Interoperability Powered By Intents. The cool part is now we understand all of these buzzwords, so we can move forward. And we've also put in some amazing top-tier companies that work with us, and you can check them out later as well. So yeah, let's just go to bridge now. This is where you will land up on app.across.to, which is the application. It has a bunch of cool features. You can bridge, you can put money into the liquidity pools, you can have rewards for bridging, and then of course, the transactions your particular wallet has done. So if I click here, you'll be able to see that my wallet has been kind of active in the past few days and I've bridged fairly small amounts so far. I just want to make sure ETH stays at the all-time high it is on and I can keep making money over and over again. But jokes aside, let's see. So now we have a lot of tokens that we support and these tokens can change with each chain you select. I think I have some funds currently on—which one should I pick? Oh yeah, if anybody has any suggestions what chains that we should bridge to and from, please drop them in the comments. If not, I'm just going to pick—I'm just going to pick like Base, right? And then from Base let's go to, let's go to—hmm. Narb, any suggestions? We've got a bunch of options. Which one do you want to see?

Maybe let's do Hyperliquid.

Ooh, Hyperliquid is an interesting one. Let's do it. How much money do I have on Base? I have 99 cents on Base. Beautiful. I am rich on Base. Anyway, I'll just swap it to Optimism. So cool. If we can do like five bucks or we can do like seven bucks, I think that should go enough. Yeah, perfect. So yeah, Hyperliquid, right? Beautiful. So when I bridge from Optimism to Hyperliquid, I will be able to bridge in three seconds and I will get 6.751 on Hyperliquid. I think that's beautiful. Let's let me quickly just switch network and confirm this transaction. You guys cannot see it on screen right now, but my MetaMask just popped up. And it's just I just have to confirm the transaction, nothing crazy is happening here. And I confirm my transaction and we move forward. As soon as I confirm it will take me down to a second page and on this second page you should be able to see just like a timer. So we show the deposit time right here and then we'll also show you the fill time. And then you can kind of verify, right? How fast or how slow the process happened. And the fun part is, if from here I open Hyperliquid, I should be able to see this money coming into Hyperliquid as well. Now this shows zero because I think the fill happened instantly. It took two seconds for the deposit to get indexed on-chain, which means we read it on-chain in like two seconds, and then the fill was instant. So yeah, that was pretty cool and it took like 25 cents for everything to happen. Most of the fee was just destination gas fees. Cool. One thing I do want to mention here is that if you're somebody who uses this frontend and you have some feedback for us, please, please click on this button, leave us some feedback. We would love to improve it and make something out of it that all of you like and love. But yeah, you can bridge directly from any chain that we support to Hyperliquid today and go and do perp trading, make your millions of dollars and we are happy to be a small part of your millionaire to billionaire journey. But yeah, that's about it. Now if you head over to the pool section, you can see a bunch of pools that we maintain. Now these are liquidity pools where you can contribute. And you can of course, as you saw, a bunch of pools just appeared here. And you can get a certain portion of, you know, APY earning here as well. You can remove your liquidity as you please as well. Then we've got some rewards happening here. And I suggest most of our community members already know how this works. And yeah, you can just add positions here and you'll keep earning your rewards. And as we already discovered, this is where your transactions are. So yeah, this is primarily how Across works. We saw the whole experience, pretty straightforward, pretty simple. For any developers who are here with us today, if you are interested in learning how to build with Across and have either a similar app experience or build something completely new but have a bridging component to it, in the docs is where you'll find all the answers to your troubles. We've got a bridge integration guide. Literally it takes two steps to integrate Across in your applications. Two functions is all you need to call and you're done. I've also got like template scripts, literally just copy-paste and they'll work. If they don't work, you can ping me at any point in the day and I'll make sure they work. Moving forward, we've got intent deep dive. We've also got like a website on ERC-7683. So if you're interested, please, please check this out and you can read the whole spec right here as well. And yeah, we'll get into intents a little bit later today as well. I just wanted to show, you know, quick references of where people can find information and start bridging like right after this podcast. So yeah, that's about it.

Yeah, that's awesome and I wanted to make a comment actually on that UI you were showing as the bridge—bridging was happening. I think that was really good because the user—you're actually showing the user what's—what's going on and there's a timer and you're not—it's not just like a Etherscan link or something like that that you're dumping on the user. So I think—I think that's already pretty, pretty snazzy. So kudos on you guys for thinking on that. Thank you.

And just a question, if there is a new protocol, L2, L3 that's watching and listening to this podcast today and want to be added to this bridge, what's the process? What does that process look like for them?

Absolutely. The process is pretty streamlined. All you have to do is just ping us, right? It is a permissionless process, we make sure that we do our due diligence whenever we work with a chain or a protocol. We also make sure that we integrate you in the most secure way because Across has never been hacked and we intend to keep it that way. The cool part is, and I want to show it, with Across V4, it makes Across getting to more chains insanely fast. And that makes sure that whatever chain integration requests you have, we can do that in a split second. Or well, the engineering team will tell me it's not a split second, it takes a while, but I do want to stress on the fact that the process now to integrate a chain is much faster than what V3 was. And we are able to do this all with the help of zero-knowledge proofs. So shout out to Succinct and the whole community there for all the help they provided for us to make V4. But yeah, the process is permissionless, just ping us. Our BD team is probably one of the best in the game and we'll make sure that we get your request, we do our due diligence, and we communicate everything that we need for the chain integration as quickly as we can so that your users can come to Across and come to your chain as quickly as they can.

Amazing, amazing. And yeah, we'll have the contact info in the description below if you're a protocol that's looking to integrate with Across today.

And I think you mentioned it, was there something you wanted to get into around intents?

Oh for sure, for sure. So intents, we've sort of made our mental model around intents, right? You have tokens on chain A, you want to go to chain B, you fill the order ticket, you give it to Across. Order ticket is the intent and Across takes care of all the bridging processes here. But in this whole, you know, in this whole dance, a funny thing that happens is we abstract away all the intricacies of the process. And we intend to keep it that way so that when you are building a protocol and you are trying to, you know, add intents to your system, there is a way where you can just integrate ERC-7683, these contracts are currently live on Base and Arbitrum. There are more chains as well, I think Optimism is also supported. But you just need to integrate these contracts, send the intent there, you don't even have to go through all this at all if you don't want to use the SDK, you are tired, you know you are in a hackathon or you have a product deadline. Just integrate the origin settler contracts. Right here is where you'll find the information. And this works in the exact same way. Think of origin settler contracts as translators. They take requests from wherever you are, whatever chain you're on, you send it to the origin settler, the origin settler contract will send it to Across for you. So you don't—if you don't want to talk to Across directly, whatever constraints you may have, this is probably the easiest way to move forward. Use intents, use the exact Ethereum spec ERC-7683 and you're good to go. So we co-authored ERC-7683 or the standard for cross-chain intents with Uniswap. And we just wanted to make sure that people are able to go from chain A to chain B faster. Most of the process remains the same, there are still spoke pools and hub pools in this process. But as you can see, you have a script that is literally this short and you're done. So this is kind of what we wanted to stress on. And that's where intents are and that's how you can learn more about them. If you are interested, again I'd like to stress that this is the website you can go to: erc7683.org. You can learn what we are focusing on, which is essentially unifying Ethereum, but now it's kind of expanded to unifying crypto because we've noticed that there are important chains beyond just Ethereum and there are important ecosystems beyond just Ethereum and I cannot drop more hints, I will get fired. So for people who have been in the community, you know what's coming. Just keep an eye out for Across next week is the biggest alpha I can give right now. And here are all the supporters of intents and who have been helping us push this narrative forward. You'll see all the major chains, all the major protocols. And if you have any questions, doubts or you want to talk about stuff, ping us. And we'd love to help you and get you onboarded as quickly as we can.

Amazing and yeah, folks keep your—keep your eyes peeled on Across for all those major announcements that will be coming. And we will also be linking these docs for you to go explore all this great content that Kanishk mentioned in the description below. And I guess as we're closing into time, I know we wanted to get into a little bit of discussion around just the state of communities and—and—and the state of Web3 in general. And I think—I think you—you tweeted about this a few days—a few days ago, but it's—I think it'll be good for listeners to kind of hear the story of you kind of taking in some of these podcasts and just seeing your friends succeed and you coming to this point. So did you want to just briefly mention that?

For sure, for sure. When I got into crypto, I was just a low-life dev. I had no friends and I just wanted to make sure that code was all I had and I wanted to be a good developer. But the problem was I didn't have enough ideas. I had hackathons and I knew I could go to any platform. I don't want to take names, but there were a lot of platforms that unfortunately don't exist now or they became very scammy now. But a lot of platforms where they would host hackathons and I could just stay at my house and hack all weekend. The problem again: don't know ideas, don't know where to find the right documentation. If they introduce a new language, I am absolutely rekt. So I just randomly started Googling, hey, how do I like build and what is Solidity and how do I build something that makes sense. CryptoZombies, shout out to them. Probably one of the first sources that came to my eyes and I still, still love the fact that it was a community movement, CryptoZombies. I don't know where they are today but they made me who I am, a part of my journey was just CryptoZombies all weekend. Then, that's when I was just on YouTube and I found this thing called Developer DAO and they had podcasts, they also had people just coming and explaining their protocol architectures. That's something I love to do as an engineer even today. Just sit in these engineering calls and just see what somebody has been cooking up and try to challenge them and see if I can build something better or build on top of the architecture they already have. It was splendid for me that Developer DAO was doing that already. So I would just listen to these podcasts and from there I'd get hackathon ideas and I'd just build simple protocols and win hackathons that I'd go to. I already knew how to build frontends, already knew how to build backends. That was not the challenge. The challenge was to just stand out because online hackathons have like 300, 400 project submissions on an average, probably more if you're a hyped protocol. I'm pretty sure if Base does a hackathon this year, they will have above 500 project submissions for sure. Same for Solana, same for ETH. So anyway, that is how I used to win and that's how I used to get side income, just bounty hunting all weekend. It's funny how today I sit on the DevRel chair and I look at all these bounty hunters and I'm like, 'No, you should stick to my—my community and my ecosystem.' But back then I was one of them. Then two years down—so this is three years down the line, I'm trying to just, you know, become a good developer. Two years down the line, I now have some friends, you know, I've met these people at hackathons, I've met them at ETHGlobal hackathons and stuff like that, and I see them on these podcasts and now they're just like sharing life stories. I would just listen in because they were my friends. The problem with, like, the remote work culture we have is you don't get to meet your friends every day. So this was my way of staying in touch. And then I would either text them after the podcast, 'Hey Manny,' or, you know, 'Hey Nader, great podcast, loved it. Thank you so much for sharing all those things. It was really inspirational.' And then now I sit here and I yap about my life and I share these stories only as an inspiration like we initially said, because I feel every developer who's now currently thinking, hey, should I go all-in on crypto? Should I go all-in on Web3? Should I learn these blockchains? The answer is a clear yes. And even if you're not a developer and you're listening, the answer is a clear yes. Like most things in life, just put your head down—no, keep your head down, work hard and the result will come on its own. I'm not saying I'm too great, I'm not saying I've killed it in life. I'm saying I was somewhere where I did not want to be five years, six years ago and today I'm at a happier place and I've found like the formula that works for me and a big part of that formula was just staying in crypto, staying in blockchain. And of course thanks to Developer DAO for curating a big, big part of it. Cause if I did not win those bounties I would probably quit and go back to Java coding and hate my life again. So anyway, that's like a short story of how I'm here finally.

Yeah, like I said man, it's really inspirational and thank you so much for sharing that story with us. And I guess in today's landscape, do you—do you kind of still see that same vibe in—in Web3 communities? I know personally, it seems like—well, this might be a little bit spicy of a take, but it seems the at least crypto Twitter side of things, like a lot of—a lot of stuff is—is driven by speculation and I mean to be fair a lot of people who get started with crypto and Web3 start on the speculation side of the spectrum. A lot of S-S-A. And then they get interested in a particular technology, whether it's a particular chain or a company or something, and they kind of go down that rabbit hole. And then it seems like a lot of—like after the initial TGE and token drop, a lot of—a lot of these communities kind of disband because—like the—you got—you got your airdrop and then you kind of just move on to the—to the next thing. Like do you—do you feel the same kind of vibe, kind of same thing kind of happening or yeah, just interested to hear what—what your perspective is. I think yes, and I think it's super important to discuss this because if you put these things out in the open that is how they'll get solved. Your protocol XYZ, you tell people you're going to give away free money for yapping on a Discord server and putting 10 dollars in the protocol—most people assume if I put 10 dollars I'll get a 100 back. In most cases they get more than a 100 back, so it's obviously a profitable activity. The problem for the ecosystem is when these people don't have anything to do once the TGE happens. And it is such a weird position to be in. You have the tokens, you have the governance tokens of that particular protocol, they gave it to you. And now you dump all of them and you move on. This is a protocol problem, it's an ecosystem problem personally is what I feel. You did not provide enough incentive for them to stay, you did not provide enough apps for them to use. They saw they can make free money. Were there more things to do with that money once you gave it to them? If you are unable to curate it right as you TGE, it's going to be a problem. Or right as you airdrop, it's going to be a problem. So many ecosystems—and I have a huge article that I'm working on, I just need to lock in, chug a bunch of white monsters and finish it. Which is where, you know, I look at DeFi or I look at crypto as a waterfall. People come in through centralized exchanges, they try and make sure that they stay relevant or they become part of these communities. But then as the waterfall falls and as you go from an ocean to a river, which is a centralized exchange to probably a protocol you bridged over, there's not much to do there. So what do you do now? You're stuck with your money in an ecosystem where you don't want to be and there's not much happening. So you go back, then you find another river to go to. And you keep doing that till A you either exhaust yourself, B you make life-changing money on a perp DEX or something. But I feel it's on the ecosystem and it's on the protocol. Give enough incentive, write a better story, incentivize long-term builders and don't give grants to people who are scammy. So accelerators play a huge role here and I genuinely—I almost work for an accelerator so I know the process very closely. Diligence needs to be done. And who is getting the airdrop is a very, very, very important factor here. Sybil protections and all will come and go, but if the right builders don't get the airdrop, you are dead on arrival. And that's—that's it is—it is a spicy take, yes, but I feel it's an important spicy take. And hey, I'm Indian, I can handle spicy. So yeah, that's it. What—what do you think? What do you think? Any counters or any thoughts there? Yeah, no, I—I think you hit the nail right on the head. I think for me the is kind of just taking that token and kind of going beyond governance, right? It's like it's already hard to get people to vote for things in real life, right? Getting to election polls and whatnot, so like I don't know how you expect people to kind of change—change their behavior doing that basically the same thing on-chain. I think a good app—a good application of—of tokens is kind of turning them into true utility tokens. Interesting thing that some of these AI-cross-crypto infra plays have kind of done, like the Morpheus's and the Venice AI's of the world is they—they have a token, but what they want you to do with the token is to stake it so that you can access like inference, right? So it's like you have tokens and then you can go the traditional route of like paying for inference, or you can stake these tokens and because of you staking these tokens you gain access to inference capabilities on their networks. Which is like—that's pretty cool, right? It's like, 'Oh, okay cool, I stuck around in this community, I got these tokens, now it's not just money, right? It's like I can go and I can call these big AI models that I can't run on my machines on these decentralized infrastructure networks,' which is—which is kind of cool. Or you can kind of take it a step further and build like—like usable apps, right? It's like you need an app instead of paying like a monthly subscription fee, like you if you hold X amount of tokens you get like this like in-between tier of like free and like pro, right? And it—it like invites—invites people to like normal people to—to use apps as long as it's not like you don't need like crazy crypto knowledge to kind of get the tokens and then stake them in the app. But yeah, I think there's—there's like a missing step where like you mentioned, it's like when people get the airdrop, now there's kind of nothing else to do with that other than to sell it. So that's kind of where we—we've come to this stage of things. So um if there's any builders—and we know there's builders watching the show—take that initiative, take that next step. Get people to use apps without—without having them to go through the big loopholes or the big loops of just onboarding in crypto in general. But yeah, that's kind of my take and kind of what I—what I've been seeing at least lately. But I think we'll get there, we'll get there. Hopefully, this cycle, maybe the next one. We—we're going to stick around for both of them and we'll see what happens. Or maybe we can do another one of these and just discuss that. Sure. Yeah. I'd be down. I'd be down. And yeah, with that, we've unfortunately come to time. But Kanishk, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day—to—to come on the podcast today. It was a pleasure having you. And just a quick endnote, if people want to reach out to you in particular or somebody on the Across team, what's the best way for them to do that? I think the best way is just to ping us. All of us are super active on Twitter. I'm @kanishkkhurana_ that's like my full name. You'll see it on the tag when we put it out. I'll retweet this and everybody will be there as well from the Across team. Anybody with like the UMA affiliate badge on Twitter, just ping them. Just ping them. Everybody's super responsive. Or just ping me and I'll make sure that they respond to you in case, you know, there's a delay. But there's more ways to reach out. We have an integrator chat as well on Telegram, which is super open. Link of that is will also be available in the docs and link of that will be available on my Twitter as well. Or just come to our Discord. So if you come to our Discord, that is where we'll make sure that all your technical questions are answered, all your community questions are answered. If you're bridging and you suddenly see the bridge not functioning properly and you get a refund, why did that happen? Let's dive into that. And the cool part is, on our Discord, there's like insane Solidity engineers sitting all the time. So you can get your queries resolved as well and that is how I got into the Across community. So that's like a small Easter egg for all of you. But yeah, just ping us. That's the easiest way to get in touch and we'll make sure that we respond. There you go. There you go folks. And yeah, and with that, I just want to wish everybody a very happy Friday, happy weekend wherever you may be and we will catch you back here next week for another great episode of DevNTell. Till then, have a good one folks. Bye-bye. Thank you.