Griffin Anderson on Archway protocol heading to mainnet

0:01I'm Ashton Addison from Block West capital for investment pitch media and today on the crypto coin show we have Griffin Anderson the CEO of phylabs and the main contributors to the archway layer one protocol Griffin welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time yeah thanks Ashton thank you for having me here you're very welcome I'm personally very fascinated in a new

0:21layer one networks uh making development of web3 applications easier and making blockchains faster and cheaper to drive more mainstream adoption of blockchain Technology into the real world I'm super fascinated with what your team's working at on Archway as a layer one network so let's just dive straight into it for those who are familiar with the network

0:41maybe you could start with you know what is Archway what makes it unique and what is the project all about yeah um so Archway is a layer one smart Contracting platform uh built on the cosmos technical stack and kind of built into the the cosmos ecosystem it was first incubated uh by by tendermint uh and for your audience tournament was the private software development company

1:06behind the cosmos uh chain Cosmos ecosystem and so the project was incubated first uh with with the software development company and then and then a lot of the Court members have spun out into to a new company uh called called phylabs and with everybody still kind of contributing to to the archway protocol um so archways L1 a smart Contracting chain it uses a web assembly as the as

1:31the virtual machine and what's different though about archery from like every other L1 is um the community is going after a completely different use case than than almost every other L1 out there every hour one right now today is really focus on oftentimes building a faster blockchain processing blocks much faster hitting higher transaction processing thresholds

2:00Etc and Archway Community has a little bit of a different Vision they are focused more on the token economics of the protocol and making sure the incentives are aligned with all the different stakeholders that are involved in the protocol so what makes Archway completely different is Archway actually rewards the developers that are building on top of the protocol through through

2:27the rewards of of the protocol so similar to how we basically reward validators or minors for running a blockchain the archway protocol does that but it also adds that additional stakeholder which is the developers building on top and rewards them as well and this is yeah which is kind of interesting and unique um and so the way this works is it's done through three different ways uh

2:54part of the inflation or emission schedule that normally just goes to validators or minors a proportion of that uh 25 of that actually gets shared with the developers that are building on top of the protocol uh based on usage of their smart contracts the second way developers can earn rewards is through a part of the gas fees so typically like on ethereum the guest fees are burned in

3:20other protocols that goes to like the validators or the miners running the protocol on Archway 50 of the gas fees get burned but then the other 50 percent actually get redirected back to the developers that built the original smart contracts and then the Third Way is through something called like contract premiums it's like an extra fee or reward a developer can set for somebody

3:43using their smart contracts on chain and so what happens is all three rewards uh get accrued at a specific address that the developer sets and it can be a smart contract address it can be a user address and what happens is they can then you basically deploy a smart contract there and use those rewards in whatever way they see fit for their community so they

4:07could use those rewards to basically fund future versions to the protocol and support kind of the core contributors of it they could redirect the rewards to a dow they could use it to boost liquidity pools it's completely configurable and up to the developer to decide you know what's in the best interest of the community and the protocol and what to

4:30do basically with the rewards and so what's so unique and normal about this is now we can start to have dapps where the developers are earning just like a steady stream of rewards based off of usage of their smart contracts it just opens up all kinds of new ideas and use cases that weren't previously possible in other l1s wow that's incredible and yeah it's it's

4:52great to have a blockchain that's you know fast and cheap uh but if there's no actual applications that are utilizing the transactions um you know to actually take advantage of of the technology of the underlying protocol uh then you know it's not very good I feel like there's a huge gap in the amount of developers that are making applications uh bringing them out and

5:13actually having you know hopefully millions of users you know I think that daily active users number is is pretty low on on dapps around all of the blockchains compared to where it could be yeah and so the vision of where this kind of came from and the community kind of came from and you know we were looking at building you know an application on top of the ethereum for

5:34instance and um you know while that's good and great you know the largest and the earliest contributors ethereum uh hold um probably the largest amount of ether um and quite a lot of those folks are no longer contributing to the ecosystem in meaningful ways anymore um a lot of them are hanging out on a quote-unquote on a beach somewhere um and just chilling they're not they're

5:55not actively contributing to the protocol and just seemed wrong or just like the vision just didn't make sense like why we didn't also like reward the developers that were building on top of the protocol and so the idea of Archway is like you know a developer can come three five seven ten years later and if they bring um transactions and activity to the nla

6:16and chain they'll also get rewarded just the same way like a validator or a minor does or somebody who holds a large stake in a specific protocol um and so that's that's kind of where the vision is coming from and you know unfortunately I don't think like Web 2.0 we had like like this problem like the platforms taking a significant amount of the transaction fees you hear about the

6:36Apple apps who are constantly increasing these fees and all these problems around that stuff or YouTube squeezing out margins from um you know basically contributors on their platforms and then we like switch to like these web3 platforms but like the same problem still kind of exists like the largest token holders accrue like the most amount of rewards and like

6:56a lot of the other folks that are contributing the protocol get left out of the equation Asia and so we hope that it's not just like the developers that earn the rewards we hope they are also like redirect those rewards back to their user bases to their communities in a meaningful way and we just hopefully took it like basically all the other stakeholders that are involved also

7:15involved in the protocol as well you know I think it's a great alignment of incentives and hopefully more developers move in from the traditional world as well I feel like it's there's a lot of millions and millions of developers that have yet to touch web3 for one reason or another um you know being involved in sort of the early stages of layer one

7:36development what are your insights into web 3 developers and where they're at and you know how many there are in the world right now and how many there should be or could be once the web 2 developers sort of catch up and start working on this area of the internet yeah I don't have the latest numbers on some of this especially from the web 3 space I mean I can talk to the

7:58cosmospace more specifically like within the cost space there's probably like 30 or 40 core contributors to the actual like core SDK base it's really not in that are actually contributing in meaningful ways and then you know at the dab side there's a little bit more but you know it's probably no more than you know maybe like a hundred developers that are significantly contributing um

8:20you know the ethereum space is probably closer to like 50 000 maybe active developer community that might be pushing what else is that a guesstimate but that's a really insignificant compared to you know Web 2.0 developer communities um and so I think we just have a really really long way to go um uh to supporting you know all these third-party developers that are kind of

8:42coming into the web 3 system and we hope um you know the archway community and the archway protocol uh um uh does that exactly yeah no it it's a it's a great alignment of incentives that I they I feel like they should have thought of that earlier you know not just rewarding the people that helped at the beginning but uh that that problem where you know these app

9:03stores in web 2 and these networks they're taking a huge cut and the app creators aren't really getting a lot um you know maybe they have their own business model inside of it but in terms of the transactions on the network you know they're the ones who are actually contributing to the growth of the network there should be some you know on-chain integration for for those dapps

9:20to to reward for helping grow the network yep um I would say that's definitely the actually communities like uh point of view and envision on all this yeah well I'm looking forward to seeing how it grows and obviously creating a layer one network itself uh never mind all the decentralized applications on top of it is a huge uh initiative where exactly is Archway at with you know the

9:44growth and the stages of the release yeah um the community has made tremendous progress um so the community launched an incentivized testnet last summer uh it went really really well there were um I think close to 9 000 participants around that that test net so they um and it stayed up the whole time so it went really really well the community recently got the code base uh audited by

10:10um uh a security firm recently in November and December so got kind of through that that process of things um the the next stage for the archway Community is basically to to launch the protocol um I think there's talk right now around like doing one more public sale um and then and then possibly releasing the the protocol based on a vote um in Q2 of this year

10:33um so it's just kind of right around the corner here um in the final stages of launch well that's very exciting and great to hear that the the test note is going well I think that's a very important stage you know testing uh these protocols that will have millions and potentially billions of dollars of value locked into them uh to make sure that you're not rushing to conclusions just

10:55to you know get it out quickly yeah yeah it's uh it's it's really important that um you know a lot more Engineers kind of go through these out it's insecurity updates um we've seen a lot of hacks happen across a bunch of these protocols while it's not a um Silver Spoon that completely solves the problem uh you know it's it's one one step to to getting some assurances

11:19around the code base definitely Griffin and I'm curious on you know the underlying underlying technology of the cosmos ecosystem you know myself uh having been around since you know before Cosmos and ethereum a lot more people are familiar with it and Cosmos it seems like a great ecosystem especially with this IBC interoperability of multiple blockchains

11:43which I think is part of the future um can you attest to you know the decision of Archway building under the cosmos technology and how you see that growing in the coming years yeah so um it's all around this this narrative in this theme of like going multi-chain and having like you know each networking Community running its own self-sovereign chain and Cosmos was

12:06one of the first folks that kind of started on this Vision um sometimes I I say ethereum is like a um uh like a platform as a service it's really simple to deploy apps on top and get access to that Community uh cosmos had like a little bit of a different Vision which was to go out and basically build your own custom self-sovereign blockchain and um their Archway Community Fields that's

12:31like a really really important message and in a lot of use cases are going to need their own custom blockchains but not but not all use cases are going to need their custom chain and so Archway serves that need between like how do you access the cosmos ecosystem without having to spin up your own custom blockchain so if you're looking for like um an L1 similar to like a Solana or

12:54ethereum or something like that and you quickly want to build your app and get to Market real quickly you can deploy it on top of Archway and then via IBC access all the other assets and liquidity throughout the cosmos ecosystem you can even do like cross-chain contract calls interchange queries things like that and so you can access the self-solving or app specific

13:17chains that might be building just a one use case kind of blockchain and it can all be plugged in directly and accessible via the smart contracts on top of the archway protocol which is kind of cool um that's kind of the fun and the vision of all this stuff and so as a developer if you're thinking about okay I'm interested in building another project

13:37what do I build next um you know you you kind of have like this design decision you have to you can you can choose um you can come to um uh Cosmos ecosystem and you can build a self-sovereign or custom chain um you're going to get like full customization over how your chain works and how it's designed but in the process of building that custom chain it's going

14:00to be kind of expensive and take some time to get to Market but if you're building a really custom solution maybe it's around a trading use case or something like that maybe it makes sense to do that conversely if you're trying to just get to Market as quickly as possible build a community and then possibly some time down the line migrate to your own self-sovereign custom chain

14:21Archway is really a great entry point into the cosma space because you can quickly just build an app get to Market build your community and then migrate to your own custom chain and we've seen that already kind of play out um like in other ecosystems for instance like the Dapper Labs team that built cryptokitties on top of ethereum did this and then once the community kind of

14:41blew up and did really really well they had to move to their own uh chain which they built which was called which was called flow um and so it's kind of the same thing it's like you start off build your community and then as you grow if you need that like customization down the line you can always move to your own custom self-suffering chain and in our

14:58case kind of like your entry path into the cosmos if you want to access it yeah no that's a great uh sort of uh example an analogy that makes me think of you mentioned there's a lot of blockchain developers most of them are on the ethereum ecosystem and there's a lot of dapps and D5 applications being built there would they take advantage of these incentives for their app to grow by

15:23duplicating it or moving it into Archway when it launches yeah definitely so if you want to access uh you know just the assets of liquidity in the cosmo space um in in the ecosystem as a whole including the user base um you know Archway is a great way to do that because it's just natively will be plugged into uh you know all the Tooling in the infrastructure and all the other

15:43protocols um out of the box and so you can quickly build a version of your app uh and deploy a tapa Archway and basically start earning the rewards and accessing you know the assets and the users and and the ecosystem of Cosmos so we're definitely thinking about going multi-chain and deploying your DAP in your application to another ecosystem Archway is a great way for you to come

16:08in and do that amazing and as blockchain development continues to grow hopefully with this aligned developer incentives it it grows drastically what do you see in terms of this year and the next year sort of catalysts like this that will help more people start actually using blockchain applications do you think something in in web 2 is people are going to get fed off of it or

16:35is it things like this that it's like we're actually going to help incentivize and bring Capital to the developers that create applications you know what's going to be that Catalyst for mainstream adoption yeah I I think it's around um this is me speaking personally I think it's around the the use cases of of around these steps in the protocols like D5 blew up and partly supported by

16:56by the launch of governance tokens uh nfts was was through selling advantages I I think it's going to be around the same thing um around new Festival um use cases where a developer can earn a significant amount of rewards um there's uh the archway Community is sharing a bunch of like online calculators and like you can basically plug in a transactions you think your

17:16smart contract is going to have and then you can get a pretty good guesstimation of how much rewards you're actually receiving from Archway um and it's it's quite it's quite um significant um you know it's it's like different than running like a large Bitcoin mining operation you know it's these can be pretty substantial stuff and and so um uh but it obviously is going to be

17:41dependent on a number of factors including just you know the usage of a developers individual contracts but what's so exciting about all this is just just the opportunities that it starts to unlock because now you can really focus in on just like building a really really good dap and not having to to to worry about um you know onto the governance token um

18:03so for instance like there's a lot of dapps that are building on top of Archway right now and they're not planning to launch a governance token at all they just really want to focus on building good products and good at that that people use and then maybe down the line they they launched a governance token or it's supported by that but they're really just focused on building

18:19stuff that that that users and communities are actually going to use and and that's where the focus is that's beautiful Griffin I think uh it's a it's a great turning point where all these projects don't have to focus on you know their token and and raising it individually to sort of align the incentives of the platform uh if the underlying uh you know governance coins

18:42that are in the protocol there's that align incentive it just solves like a lot of problems so I'm really looking forward to the mainnet launch and checking out the applications when they go live and things like that um what are sort of the next steps for uh for Archway to get to that point in the coming months um yeah it's just around the the corner

19:03here so I think uh one of the things is getting through uh the public sale that the community is going to launch here pretty soon um and that would be kind of one of the the last Milestones um look this is a great opportunity to get involved in the community um I know mainnet is is just right around the corner in Q2 so it's a good opportunity to kind of come in and start

19:25um you know reading up on the documentation joining the community joining Discord getting involved and learning about the protocol a little bit more and the opportunities for developers and and end users and so this is a great time to just like get in and get access um and and um maybe maybe an idea will be sparked love it and I can leave the links to to

19:48Archway and your socials as well and the Twitter and Discord in the description box below so that the viewers can join in there and check it out I really appreciate you coming on Griffin and giving your insights into Archway and just aligning the incentives of the blockchain ecosystem to continue to grow so thank you for what your team is working on and looking forward to seeing

20:09the mainnet launch so let's definitely follow up in the near future yeah absolutely thanks action for having me on