Supra expands beyond oracles with 500,000 community members ahead of mainnet

0:01I'm ashon Addison from the cryptocoin show and today on blockchain interviews with Joshua topkin co-founder and CEO of supra Joshua welcome to the show and it is great to see you man yeah it's good to be here thanks for having me again you're very welcome it's been a while uh since you guys have been working on this um it's it's a huge initiative and

0:20you've been working on it for a long time and it's been a while since we updated uh with Supra and there's been so much that's happened um and I'm sure that there's many new people on our Channel as well probably haven't seen the last video I would love to kick off our conversation together by first of all just sort of hearing a a high level up toate on what is Supra what is

0:40everything that the team is building with this huge project and then we can dive into all the latest details yeah sure so most of you may know us as Supra oracles right and we have recently pivoted to drop oracles from our name now I say pivoted but the truth of the matter is we actually always knew that we were going to make this change we bought the domain

1:03super.com maybe two years ago and uh what our vision always has been is actually lay one technology with Next Generation Oracle with kind of other kind of Oracle related services so oracal include price feeds they also include crushing communication they also include Automation and onchain Randomness now we have built a system and a design and architecture where we

1:28can have this all fully vertically inte integrated in fact that is our thesis it's the opposite thesis of the modular thesis meaning where you might use one network for a layer one another Network for um or rather Layer Two another Network for data availability another Network for you know price feeds and so on and so forth and what that does is it creates dist networks that you have to

1:52engage with it increases latency communication costs it increases also the complexity of the system itself and not to mention developer have to handle multiple tokens now imagine on the other hand we had all these things all in one you know that is what we're planning to do and that's what we're designing for and of course you know uh every component itself is custom built so this

2:15is not a fork of any chain this is a uh new Next Generation kind of infrastructure that we think is sorely needed in our ecosystem it's very cool Joshua and congratulations uh that's a huge expansion oracles themselves are a necessity to defi to blockchain price feeds PR data availability overall um but I could understand completely how making a a a vertically integrated chain

2:43of everything is just makes everything probably so much faster cheaper smoother uh especially with the amount of different blockchains that are coming out Bridges compatibility of languages all of these other things uh just making like a super chain so to say uh is is the right step um and I and I also saw on your uh on the Twitter handle it was super Labs now is that a part of a

3:08foundation or is that what Supra is going by on Twitter yeah so that Chang is also to make sure that we are not seen as just an oracle you know there are many things we work on we work on verifiable compute MPC that's multiparty computation uh our team are we have expert cryptographers on our team some of them are very famous like our chief research officer Dr anak

3:31Kate Dr Kate invented kzg commitments kzg commitments are utilized in 4844 for ethereum's kind of data Avil play their um D sharting prot D sharting they rely on Kg commitments that K is K he invented it so Supra is a um you know multifaceted kind of multiple services in one solution and in addition to the other attributes you mentioned including

3:59latency it's faster easier single environment to develop upon we also have shared security meaning we apply L on uh SEC security principles to solve the oral problem in many different ways so remember uh some of these ecosystems are actually you know when you engage Network to netwk to network like that you may actually be breaking your security guarantee of the underlying

4:22layer one so the moment a smart contract uses data from an external party you have lost the smart contracts ler security guarantee and instead have inherited the weaker security guarantee of the external service so it's really important to put it all into one and uh you know technology has a trend towards vertical induration just in general you know the uh the uh iPhone moment that

4:47was the large screen compute storage telecommunication GPS one device and similarly we think the iPhone moment of blockchain is high through L one consensus algorithm which we have called moonshot moonshot is uh very very low latency high throughput and formally verified recently formally verified this this is the Ultimate Security guarantee of safety and on top of the stack we

5:17also plan to have multi virtual machine support so move language like Aptos andu evm like the and other layer twos and eventually cosm WM Salon virtual machine single platform so we have the ability to do execution charting uh moreover when you have native Oracle that means we have free Price feeds built in we also have Crossing communication we also

5:41will be bring the automation it's kind of like uh the altim stack effectively we think that this is the iPhone moment for blockchain wow that's very cool I'm looking forward to diving into the docs because there's so much when you move into a vertical integration trying to Perfect all the pieces and no longer are you just solving an oracle problem you're solving

6:04hopefully all of the problems and hindrances of blockchain and there's a lot more when you dive into all these other areas um this is sort of an open question because there's so many different ways that you could be solving Solutions when you add in all of these other things into Supra but what do you think are or is the main hindrance of blockchain adoption uh further massive

6:28adoption and how is Will Supra help get to the next stage for that yeah so hindrances include uh you know uh transaction fees right if they're expensive then people can't afford to interact on a blockchain uh that's why High throughput charant chains you know like Supra uh when you have a lot of capacity the fees are generally really low right so we think

6:53that's going to be huge one uh for the developers also uh By Us providing these native Oracle Services into the kind of layer one infrastructure itself directly the smart contracts can do and developers can do a lot more interesting things than they otherwise could do and this is going to open up just like the iPhone by vertically integrating it you

7:13could have Uber Instagram WhatsApp Etc that those applications didn't really exist before the iPhone moment similarly we think there's going to be next Generation daps that can leverage our infrastructure stack to do new things and in a very low latency cheap when I say cheap like transaction fees cheap um environments so we think that this will open the world up to uh just more use

7:37cases uh more people can afford to interact on blockchains and I think this will probably uh yeah I think this can usher in a lot more folks to the industry that's great to hear and with the 4844 update that you mentioned earlier I've noticed already some other blockchains are also uh lowering the cost which is great because uh as the excitement comes back into to crypto um

8:02the the network congestion comes in and it's like putting mainstream adoption to the test you know it it all of a sudden costs are going up and uh the you know the the test net environments in which blockchains are checking whether uh their their blockchain is actually capable of handling millions of transactions uh are now becoming reality so it's great to actually see that

8:24adoption um but yeah if we're going to have mainstream uh and retail it needs to be very cheap uh with cents or less hopefully um so that's very exciting and you know I want to ask a little bit more about the Oracle part because obviously that's very important without oracles there would be no prices uh on on the blockchain you know the blockchain can't

8:48need some way to read external data I saw that uh with Supra the oral part is using something called Dora and there's other Advanced Technologies that make it you know efficient there are other oracles out there can you talk a little bit about the Oracle part uh what makes the technology that super has built in the oracal part so special and and why

9:09is it important for blockchain yeah definitely you know blockchains just like out of the box are closed loop systems you know as you mentioned they don't have natively have this type of price information they don't communicate with the outside world and they don't communicate with each other and they also don't have Automation and they also don't have

9:28generally they don't have onchain randomness you know because they're deterministic Clos Loop systems so basically blockchains today are kind of like ancs you know anyc is like that first computer like size of a room could barely do anything or could do like one thing very slowly and that's kind of what blockchain has been now what we're moving towards with kind of vertically

9:48integrating these Oracle Services is a blockchain can now start to act like an actual computer like an actual World computer you need to have these abilities to communicate with the outside world and the oracle component is making sure that we uh run a protocol that is very secure so that any data that enters a blockchain itself has these layer One Security guarantees now

10:11do stands for decentralized Oracle agreement and the way our protocol works is we randomize our noes into subcommittees called Clans and the Clans right the tribe we have it's the architecture is called tribes and clans so we have the network that a tribe and we have a randomized subcommittee called Clans these these Clan nodes will be connected also through a random

10:33assignment to multiple data sources like exchanges uh and other kind of data aggregators and what they will do is they will individually be say let's just suppose that there's you know 25 different data sources available for this particular data pair like Bitcoin to USD um each Clan node might be assigned to eight of these different data sources at random so everyone does

10:56have the full coverage and each of them what they do is they report their median value now we send out their median value their midle value to an aggregator node the aggregator node waits for enough responses from the the clan it's actually 51% of the responses that form What's called the coherent cluster meaning the values are all within a certain agreement distance from each

11:18other and then from there we can average the price and this is a really great representative value of the current asset it's like a global snapshot because remember the price of Bitcoin One Market it's going to be different than another right so assets like Bitcoin are traded around the world right so there's no single venue in which this asset is traded so what you

11:38need to do is you need to get a global snapshot for that current moment and door captures this into a single singular representative value uh moreover the things that really matter in the Oracle problem when it comes to price feeds there's two things it's security meaning data accuracy it has to be correct number two is latency speed now when I'm talk about speed I'm

11:59talking about the actual Delta the time difference between the the time this this value has been calculated or you can also call this data freshness now we are very much convinced that you cannot beat our design that uh for the number of nodes that we will be using uh the way that door works is very very low latency our Target is actually 600 to 900 millisecond data

12:24freshness now you know one hop from one node to another is generally let's just call it roughly 100 milliseconds so our protocol you know depending on the network uh you know latency just in general in the world the the asynchronous internet um we think that we can complete the protocol in a reliable manner between 600 to 900 milliseconds we're not running it at

12:45that level at this moment but our next version door 2.0 is coming out in like a week or two and these are the targets we're going for so once again the truth is sometimes you might see other competitors updating their Oracle feed and it looks like it's happening like very quickly like maybe every 500 milliseconds or something like this but the truth is that data

13:05freshness is actually older than ours because they will go through multiple you know they'll go through their own blockchain then they'll have to use an external service network to to deliver to another ecosystem and to sign off on it even though it looks like it's refreshing every like 500 milliseconds in practice that day is probably three to five seconds old now that is an

13:25opportunity unfortunately for something called oracal extractable value so people do see the kind of the what do you call it the superficial changes of these values but the oldness the freshness of this data is actually maybe much more um stale than they realize whereas at Su what we're going for is 300 sorry 600 to 900 millisecond uh data freshness guarantees

13:50so um once again security is first but the next is latency and our design is such that we believe this is be the limit in terms of kind of de centralized system um moreover the thing that makes super very interesting and different than our other competitors are that we randomize our nodes our nodes are shuffled and changing there's no fixed set of nodes that uh you know are always

14:12the same nodes that are doing this and we have full provenance we know exactly which node was assigned to which data sources and what the report was so you can actually see the full transparency of how every single s value we call it Super Value these s values are calculated so that's that's what makes Supra kind of a Next Generation Oracle we did also get accepted to a top

14:31academic venue last year icdcs through a double blinded peer review process uh which also effectively puts our protocol as the state-ofthe-art wow very cool Joshua and there's so much that goes into uh the the Oracle that people just there's too much to think about when you go to the def platform and you see oh this is the price of ether but how was that calculated

14:56there's so many variables the accuracy the freshness of it the security the randomness decentralization um so it sounds like you and your team have have really put a lot of thought and and years of work I know because I've been speaking to you guys for years uh on uh making the best Oracle so that's very cool and I appreciate it as defi continues to grow

15:18uh it will only be something that will be absolutely needed more um and especially now in this in this newer cycle there's more defi going on on more blockchains and you know since 21 there was there was a couple blockchains that had a lot of tvl but now that there's so many and not just on the evm chains there's other chains and there's new chains that have new languages uh as

15:43well is there a component to making this work on all blockchains and moving forward as well as more blockchains come out you know there's like 50 to 100 blockchains now it's crazy with different programming languages how does Super keep up with trying to service the best ones and you know as many as they can yeah so our team once again has in you know uh we have expert

16:08cryptographers on our team and the answer is pretty simple so super does a lot of the work on our end right and when these nodes these Clans they reach a majority agreement they can threshold sign they they have one signature that can update hundreds of data pairs like 500 now what we do is what we have to do is deploy our smart contract on each of these destination chains what they're

16:31checking for effectively is our threshold signatures if the singular threshold signature verifies and uh we also include what called Merkle Roots Merk proofs rather uh with the thres signature and the Merkle proofs verify you can actually update an entire payload of up to 400 500 data pairs now the key is that does this blockchain have the ability to verify our

16:55cryptography most of them do you know so and we also do sign in multiple um signature schemes so a bottom line is it's actually very scalable we're actually on I think over 55 networks now you know the proliferation of layer 2os uh subnets pair chains C zones these they all need Oracle they all want Oracle and we're able to move faster to deploy there once again most of the work

17:18is done on Supra the verification is done on the destination chain so uh yeah that's how we handle it and it is a scalable model that's very cool and yeah it's it's it's a lot to keep up so um it's nice to hear that super sort of done it in an easy way um and one other thing about having all these blockchains is right now it's not a perfect picture of unified liquidity

17:42even the same assets you know ethereum and stable coin on one blockchain you can't combine that liquidity to other chains and then the apys are different and people are moving assets back and forth I feel like if we're going to be as big as traditional Finance then there needs to be more of a un ified liquidity solution where the pools are bigger the

18:02spreads and the costs are lower and we don't have to do extra tasks to bridge between blockchains what do you think of the current state of of Defi and more unifying the liquidity and can super help with that yeah definitely so I think this is the biggest problem in my opinion of defi the fragmented liquidity across these V and other networks and that's

18:26not a great user experience you end up with a lot of slippage you don't have cap effective abuse of capital um there's there's cross-chain communication bridging risks Etc and uh what we do in our our thinking is that you know uh what we're trying to position ourselves is almost like a network in which you can we call it an intro layer a layer between layer ones

18:48and layer twos now how do we handle this this is kind of a little bit of a um this will require a little bit of an explanation but let's put it this way we have two Crossing communication protocols why do we have two one of them is more suitable for layer one to layer one but the layer twos they have their own kind of challenges let's put it this way so we have a second type of bridge

19:11for that so the first one which we call hypernova su's hypernova cross chain communication protocol is actually Bridge less there's no Bridge how does that work how does a one layer one and one layer one communicate with each other the only way to do that is through cryptography so the Insight is the following let's suppose you know ethereum once they move away from proof

19:32of work to proof of stake uh we actually know the validator sets you know same thing with aosu these other layer ones em merging new ecosystems in proof of stake uh if we have awareness of their validator set our Insight it's very simple once you see it can't we just recalculate and verify their consensus right so basically in ethereum they have something called a sync committee it's a

19:55512 nodes out of like I think a million nodes available that are randomly selected that sign off on ethereum blocks as well we can take that signature it's a BLS signature that can be aggregated to one single signature we can have we just need someone or something to give that information to our Network then we check if this verifies against our knowledge of the

20:17sync committee's uh node operator set and if it verifies then that's effectively ethereum layer One Security then Supra itself right so that's that's an ethereum to Supra so that's that's what we mean by bridg but Supra will also connect to other chains so you can go from ethereum to Supra Supra verifies the consensus of the chain that we're interacting with and then we can also

20:39you know we have to reach our own consensus on this and then deliver the payload to the destination chain so we can do things like uh multi-chain interactions not just one one to one we could do one to many actually which is quite interesting and this type of solution will help to some degree unify the liquidity across these ecosystems super can have knowledge of the balances

21:03of different vaults or you know assets across different ecosystems in fact Supra wants to be this this the intra Ledger like a ledger in the beginning an INT layer where we keep track of acid movements across layer ones and layer twos now the last thing I want to mention about the layer two bridging so we have hypernova that's more suitable for layer one to layer one we have

21:22something called hyperloop which is more suitable foray Layer Two to Layer Two and they are fundamentally different but the hyperloop is the first processing communication protocol that is is also uh what do you call it um game theoretically secure we've proven the game theory that is not profitable to collude so we have collusion resistance and we have some very interesting kind

21:44of insights here as well our papers and our research are on our website sua.com research uh they're hypernova and hyperloop are very different but they are low latency they're they're inexpensive and they're very secure so this will be a step in the right direction to provide more crushing liquidity uh unification and uh we're we're we we we think that this is one of

22:06the most important things to solve wow I completely agree and that sounds really cool it sounds like you guys have thought of mostly everything uh I'm looking forward to seeing how it all plays out and speaking of sort of the road map and leaning towards the main net I know this is a huge initiative uh over many years of hard work from what I understand the main net launch is coming

22:29closer can you talk about where your team's at right now and what's coming up in the near future yeah yeah so it's been three years and two months since super started uh so it's been a hell of a journey you know um and of course building through the bear is not always easy it's always difficult but this wasn't the first time I've been through a bear I've been

22:50working in this industry full times since 2017 and um where we're at is we're very close uh in terms of our main launch and going on exchanges Etc I know our backers are very excited to hear that uh there are some things that just to kind of provide some insight for folks that might not know we work with market makers from around the world some of them are huge publicly traded

23:12organizations that are getting into blockchain with a very high high reputation organization and in order you know they only work with very legitimate projects uh also we're talking to the top exchanges around the world you know um all of them basically these conversations are also underway they've been well underway for months and we're coordinating on a you a launch date

23:34moreover our test net is growing so we have been onboarding some of the top brands in terms of node operators into our Network and we're we're we have a series of stress tests we want to complete first before we go into main net so all I can say is it's around the corner we're going to go to market with a high through layer one consensus algorithm with our door protocol with

23:55our onchain Randomness solution VF VR F air random function is very good for onchain gaming for you know uh these games of chance or loot boxes or randomized nfts or just any any onchain game usually needs Randomness um and then what we're going to layer up on that is a couple more things including multiv virtual machine support uh and then

24:21automation now once we have those components in we have one last really interesting um protocol that that will kind of put everything together which is what what we call a dynamic function Market maker so instead of an amm you know where like Unis swap which actually does have some issues in terms of uh Premier loss and also slippage Etc the dynamic function Market maker can be

24:47more precise and we're able to do this in a cross-chain environment so it's like a cross-chain DEX enshrined into Supra for cross uh basically cross Network coordination so these are all being worked on in parallel right and uh you know there there's also some really oh you know I should mention this this is really exciting there's no no information on our website and we'll be

25:08publishing this in the next weeks to come we have a parallel execution strategy a very novel uh smart contract parallel execution strategy that has potential some of our folks the phds on my team and we study our competitors think that this might be the limit in terms of the the high performance in terms of parallel execution so when when you stack very efficient data

25:30dissemination and data availability with low latency High throughput moonshot consensus algorithm then stack it with this final like parallel execution you have a high performing machine and then you have the native Oracle native Crossing communication and Native automation this is what we do view is the future of the technology we think that we're building the ultimate chain

25:52and we think this going to be very valuable not only to us to the ecosystems we service so uh you know we're very excited about this and yeah it is a hell of a build you know it's a lot to do it's be rolled out in stages but it's looking very good and I want I want you guys to know that in general um Supra does not promote something unless we prove it you know our team is very

26:11serious and uh you know we like to do peer review We like to you know have all the data and then we like to talk about it so there are some things that we're rolling out soon that're very exciting that might take the World by surprise because they wouldn't expect this to come out of supra uh more on that soon uh it's going to be a matter of weeks maybe maybe four more weeks or so where

26:32we can have all the data collected and share it but there's there's a chance that we may be on par or exceeding the state-of-the-art for consensus for parallel execution for Oracle you know and imagine that all that in one you know so this is what we aspire to do and we're actually quite close to uh cracking cracking this and and bring it to Market that's incredible Joshua and it's

26:56very exciting there's so many pieces um I have been using the uh on the Supra platform there's also the the community blastoff which gives you a lot of Education about all these functions there's so many things you could spend a whole university course learning about all of the different parts of this huge machine so I know there's over 5 almost 500,000 people that are also doing that

27:20which is incredible to see a community that's been going on for for quite a while now I can also leave a link to that in the show notes is there any other place that is the best place for people to follow along with the road to the main net or to learn about these other updates as they come out yeah I would say uh you know our project blast off uh it's kind of

27:40interesting that um blast the Slayer 2 came out they use the word blast they also had a point system actually supr has had a point system since uh over two years ago or a year and a half ago rather and uh and uh we have grown our Blast Off program to 500,000 we're almost at we're at like 490,000 right now these are verified individual users like we kyc them now we don't care so

28:03much about the kyc component but we needed to have a very robust uh civil prevention mechanism now when super launches uh you know we're about to hit the 500k goal uh we're going to let this run probably till like you know a little extra of time so I would say you know everyone that's listening if they want to learn more click your link that you'll be sharing and sign up through

28:22your link and um you can earn tokens Etc uh but what's really really cool is that we think that we will set a world record for a layer one launch with that many verified account holders token holders uh it might be on the order of 600,000 token holders now we have worldcoin you know they had like a million they also had like 10 times more money than us but

28:44they're a to this is the first time for layer one to have these kind of numbers and what I'd like to tell people is that does this directly correlate to success maybe I don't know the full answer but it I definitely does improve our implied odds of creating long-term Network effects so uh we're excited about this uh we're we're glad to see that our tokens will be held by many many people

29:08um I would not be surprised that we're we have over you know a million people with super tokens uh within six months from now it's very very possible yeah wow that's incredible and yeah I I I'm continuing to follow on there's like weekly lessons of all these different pieces that un your team are building there's so much to learn to keep up with they say if you're not struggling to

29:30keep up in blockchain then you're not paying attention because uh there's just so much innovation in rebuilding both the internet and finance uh it's an incredible time and I thank you for sharing your time with us Joshua I appreciate all the insights into what's coming up for Supra all the best with the road to the main net launch and hitting 500,000 m a million Supra token

29:52holders it's it's very exciting times for blockchain and and web 3 overall so really do appre appreciate you taking the time today thanks so much Ashton good to be here