Supra L1 MultiVM expands DeFi and AI agents

0:00I'm Ashton Addison from the cryptocoin show and today on blockchain interviews we have Jon Jones co-founder of supra John welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time definitely uh great to be here Ashton I know Josh has been here on your show multiple times so I'm happy to be here and to um yeah to to speak to you uh in person and and hear and to

0:22answer any of your questions definitely we've been following Supra for three years on the show go and the evolution of it going from you know an oracle to a full vertically integrated layer one blockchain which I'm sure you can explain all of what that means and what it encompasses uh and it's turning out to be one of the bigger blockchain ecosystems that I'm following and it's

0:46expanding into all of the different decentralized applications and everything now that it's been launching successful launch over the past couple months um I would love to start with a little highle overview on super there's a lot of things that it does and can do if you could give a bit of a paint a bit of a picture for people on what is Supra and what makes it

1:09different to start yeah definitely so if you can imagine um what's like Supra for for most of our community and for most of people know about Supra is we're a high throughput layer one so you have chains like salana s Aptos most of the these modern kind of blockchains are already high throughput enough like they have pretty good um

1:37speed latency and cost but what Supra is actually bringing to the market is having um this idea of vertical integration so vertical integration um with basically having this High throughput layer one but also with Native oracles and so we're talking about um you know oracles as in getting external data on chain like for Price feeds powering defi but also

2:06automation uh cross chain communication like bridging as well as Randomness and other services so what we're doing is creating a system that is great for not only consumers because they can get information fast and cheap but also for developers that they can create applications that have these vertically integrated services so um so for a good example of this is um if you if you want

2:33to create a you know if you want to create a Perpetual protocol or if you let's just call let's just say if you want to create a a DEX you need a high throughput layer one but then most dexes or most Perpetual protocols they need an external Oracle this external protocol to bring in data sources and you need also an exteral protocol to create automation so automation is essentially

2:59an if this than that system so in web 2 automation is very um you know in web 2 uh most applications have automation um but but uh in in in web 3 for for l1's automation is just not uh something that you have um um automatically in a protocol and so with supro what we do is we combine um these different Serv of

3:27High having a high throughput layer one with um with uh oracles which is price feeds automation cross chain communication uh all into one and it so the point that I wanted to make is that it not only is a great user experience but it's a great developer experience um the next thing that is interesting of course AI was a a big hype like web 3 and AI was there was a big hype cycle in

3:552014 uh 20 2024 and also so this year I think it's died down a little bit but it's I think it's about to resurface but the next thing that we need to start thinking about besides developer experience is beyond that almost like agent experience and so having a vertically integrated stack uh that is more easy to use and more efficient um not only for developers but also for agents is is

4:23really important and so we we we uh we as Supra see that the future of a lot of Defi and a lot of transactions on chain will most likely be done by Bots or what we call now as agents and they will Mo they will uh most likely use the most efficient routing to uh to do cross-chain communication uh to to interact with blockchain in many ways

4:51and we believe that a this vertically integrated stack is the most efficient also for the future of uh agents that's really fascinating I'd love to dive into the AI side afterwards because I agree I've seen a lot of AI agents and I think the functionality part is is catching up to the hype in the beginning you know everyone's talking about the future of AI is is agents that will be

5:18able to do things for you but at this point I think a lot of people are you know maybe they're doing inference with chaty BT you get some information but then you actually have to do it yourself still you know and we're getting to that turn the agents are going to be trading for us they're going to be managing the portfolio they're going to be uh do

5:36handling smart contract transactions so I'm excited to see where that goes um but I want to jump back to to part one which of course is the essence of having a great blockchain you mentioned you know I think I think it's standard nowadays that you have to have the high throughput uh decentralized secure chain everyone has that all of the blockchains

5:56are great and that they're pretty fast and they're pretty cheap uh but that main part about the oracles and the price feeds which I feel like that's something that maybe layer uh version one of blockchains like ethereum they just didn't think that far ahead or um you know it was an afterthought of hey say for example say there's a a decentralized exchange on ethereum uh

6:23and you want to swap two assets well the price you have to use some third party to get the price from the markets how does that make any sense in a decentralized world where it's supposed to be fully decentralized uh functionality between swapping these assets but you require other parties to get the price so I feel like Supra has that part down I I haven't really seen

6:49that a lot in blockchains but I feel like that's something that should be common sense yeah totally um I think even back in 2018 we had these um we had different blockchains talking about a world computer and even considering ethereum as being a world computer but what is a you know what what is the functionality of a computer uh a computer of course

7:15should be able to have a ledger and it should be able to actually speak to the outside world and so from our experience with Supra and also our experience with oracles and getting offchain data on chain we we realize pretty quickly that um you not only need this Ledger but you also need to have this secure communication of data and if you're going to if you're going to have a web 3

7:40uh Native um you know a world computer you're going to need to have high throughput blockchain you're going to need to have secure data and so that that's really where the Oracle comes in and of course like ethereum can use external protocols you can say you you know you can have this layer one you know all these layer TW and all these like external protocol oracles for

8:03different services but it's much more inefficient and slow uh when you when you um bring in all these different external protocols because you no longer have the security of the underlying L1 so you know L1 consensus rarely fails um in history ethereum many different chains uh from the consensus layer uh from the L1 security is very very strong but as soon as you introduce uh an

8:33outside protocol an outside Oracle uh a bridge over here um your application is now as weak as that weakest protocol and also you're introducing all this complexity and all these different uh security assumptions so when you have a vertically integrated L1 that has these n native Services the the validators and the nodes in your ecosystem are offering what we called

9:01shared security um and so all of the validators are kind of um running consensus not only on transactional data but also Oracle data and we find that much more efficient uh to have the shared security and we also um you know we can talk a little bit about containers late later but the three the three pillars is uh shared security shared liquidity and also composability

9:27so with the you know the vertically integrated chain I've also heard a lot about modular blockchains is that are those two opposing ideas and what makes what what are the trade-offs and the benefits of One Versus the other sure so first of all I'd like to Define modular so um you can actually build in most software is built in a modular way where

9:55you have different components in one stack in one like um and and so like building like at Supra we actually do build our layer one and our different protocols in a modular way so that means that you can swap in and out like if you have a faster consensus algorithm you swap that out so for example we have moonshot now which is very high throughput um low latency

10:20cons consensus algorithm but we also have another one called sailfish um that could be a contender and if if if it actually proves to be so we can actually swap that out so when you build software you want to build in a modular way now the the the definition of like in web 3 right now on on crypto Twitter or cry on X uh this mod the modular versus integrated idea is having modular

10:47protocols and so what that means is you have a totally different network of of different validators and nodes that you know that run different protocols and at Super we kind of we we we find that to be very inefficient because that is you don't have the shared security of one ecosystem that has um you know a set number of validators and nodes to run

11:10that ecosystem and so uh these different protocols have their own token they have their own uh security assumptions and they have their own um uh yeah so they have their own token they have their own security assumptions and we find that to be very very inefficient and um it's actually much more less secure to introduce these different protocols in different systems

11:36um so yeah yeah I think that that goes back to the point you made about uh the oracles as well you know the more third parties and the more interchangeable parts uh the more vulnerabilities for the security potentially you know having it right inh house is uh maximum security especially when you are going to have tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of value on the Chain uh I think

12:03security is of utmost importance right and like um so some people would argue having multiple protocols is more distributed and more decentralized the thing is the layer one itself should be the maximum security it should have the it should be distributed and it should be decentralized itself and so if you can if you can focusing if you can focus on scaling the the layer

12:26one and you can have you know you can expand the amount of nodes and validators of your network you can actually have um you know maximum shared Security on the layer one itself and so we think at Supra that you should scale the layer one and that you should provide these vertically integrated Services these Oracle service under one hood and that is still distributed and

12:51decentralized um using the shared security of the layer One MH now earlier on you mentioned about having a good developer experience which is of utmost importance if you're going to make it easy to build applications and to have a lot of great applications on the blockchain and with that also comes the the virtual machine and the programming language that's chosen for the

13:15architecture that the developers get to use when they build the apps and from what I've seen with Supra it's on the Move VM um but there was also the notion of multi-m can you talk about the virtual machine and what that means for Developers ERS and for making apps definitely so we've been watching uh since the early Libra days at Facebook we were watching the team and

13:40we were looking into uh move VM and also move Lang and we were quite impressed um uh Josh specifically was very impressed and we brought it to our developers researchers and they really felt like okay this could be um this could be the future of um where you could actually on board the next you know hundreds of thousands of developers with a programming language similar to rust so

14:06move is is kind of it's a derivative of rust and it's one of the most loved uh web 2 kind of uh programming languages and so move was specifically like I I spoke to the founders of um you founders of s and also Sam who is the uh the original creator of move and I spoke to him and he said that move was created to have um move was specifically created to

14:37um move was specifically created for web 3 to make assets a first class Citizen and so focusing on assets and and things of value being a first class citizen on this on this programming language and so that that inspired me but um but yeah our research team like dug deeper and found that move is just much more secure cure and intuitive language um it's much

15:02more difficult to um to have bugs in move whereas in in solidity um it's very easy it's it's it's it's much more easy to have bugs and issues in um in solidity code and so it's just move is just a it's a language that's easier um to not mess up and to get things wrong and so that's great but uh just in general for developer experience

15:30you want to be able to have uh you want to be able to give your developers multiple programming languages that they might already be used to so for example solidity move um you also have you know you know the the version of rust in in Salon of VM Etc so you want to give developers more options so that optionality is important and um you also like there are many applications already

16:00built in the evm world or applications that spent years building and learning how to build on salana and so the optionality for the developers that want to bring their applications multi-chain I think it's important to have this multi multi-m structure where you can allow them to build on different virtual machines on one shared security layer one and so that's what we're doing at

16:27Supra where where we we launch main net with move and uh move Lang and move VM we're already on uh uh devet for evm and um for for ethereum and later this year salana as well as K km wasm will be live so we'll have four different virtual machines and programming language under one shared security layer one and this gives developers the options to create

16:57and bring their application multi-chain and uh you know to which which which we think is quite powerful and that will that you know when we talked about liquidity being able to uh bring um and tap into these different ecosystems these uh to tap into salana or ethereum is really important to have um the efficient movement of liquidity definitely no that's great to hear

17:27because there's such a network effect on on on ethereum and salana now too of a lot of volume and liquidity and a lot of applications and you know no one wants to rebuild from scratch um it's great that you're coming with move and you know rust similar languages where developers that are you know the the many many developers that aren't in crypto yet there's much more in the

17:51traditional world than there are in crypto they can get started with something that they're familiar with but the ones the apps that are already in crypto to to not isolate them as well and say hey maybe we can Port this over or we can have a common bridge where we don't have to start over with what we've built over the last 5 10 years in crypto I think having The Best of Both Worlds

18:11is is the right choice yeah totally um yeah I agree and with the uh with the evm compatibility is there a bridge that moves assets uh across the chains or how would that work yeah so uh we currently there was a a bridge that launched on Supra just last week and we have more more uh coming shortly and Supra is also creating its own uh Native Bridge which

18:40uh is something to look forward to so we're going to be able to bridge assets from evm to Supra but also from different move chains to Supra Etc so we're we're setting up uh bridging to uh allow you know the movement of assets from these different virtual machines and these different ecosystems uh back back and forth to Supra so we already have some live and we have some natively

19:04that will be live um from from supra's bridge uh very very soon within the next um let's just say within the next month very very cool that's awesome and you know with the with the super token I I've tested it out in the star key wallet it's you know whenever there's a new wallet there's one extra step for people to they're like okay I already have have Phantom I have metamask or

19:31whatever um now there's star key for the move ecosystem can you talk about the wallet and did the team build that specifically for for Supra and you know is it a lot different than what people are used to yeah so what we did is initially we we found a team that were um we found a very strong wallet team that we wanted to help kind of incubate and we kind of

19:57wanted to help them launched you know at least a good solid wallet um on day one on suos after tge and at mainnet and so yeah Starkey wallet is a team that we've been really working close very closely with we even um even Josh is you know oftentimes in in the telegram chat and communicating directly to people so we wanted to make sure that the first

20:21wallet that launched on Supra had amazing support um that was really key we also really found that it was a good opportunity to bring a lot of our uh project blastoff users which is a kind of our Learn to Earn program that we did for Supra by the way project blastoff 2.0 is coming up and maybe we can talk about that afterwards but we wanted to bring a lot of our project blastoff um

20:47participants and kind of funnel them into a good wallet experience um and we wanted to make sure that there wasn't a um you know the that the first wallet on Supra wasn't um you know didn't just have basic functionality and I guess the idea is that um that uh the star key wallet will be a multi-chain wallet and will also be able to do cross-chain swaps and do a lot of different

21:14functionality within that wallet but that being said um even though we did put a lot of focus into making sure that we had this supera wallet on day one that was um functional and that can do cross chain um cross chain wallet functionality uh we we do want to bring different wallets from different ecosystems that people are already using to Supra so for example for example you

21:40me mentioned Phantom wallet um it would I think um in the next couple months I think it would be important for our ecosystem te team to really be uh communicating with yeah these different wallets to see how we can get integrated in more places to be where um other a lot of different users are already are um I think that's important for liquidity uh getting more liquidity on

22:08Supra it's important for just user experience because most people let's just say if they use phantom um or they use um metamask that's what they're used to and um of course we want to give a good user experience for web through users to join the super ecosystem definitely no I think it's a great experience from the what I've tested out a little bit so far uh the

22:32ability to do staking uh of supra in there and you know there's vesting schedules and and the cross chain compatibility sounds like a great Next Step um I'm looking forward to seeing it and and you mentioned there about the blastoff uh I saw the numbers on the site there was like over 500,000 fully kyc participants leading up to the main net and you know I

22:57participated in the first rounded the blast off a little bit there was like a a a year or two years worth of like educational documents cuz there's so much with with Supra chain you know it's hard to encapsulate it in a 30 minute discussion but like there was like years of like documentation and and it's not just like a basic little learn and earn it was like here's like a whole chapter

23:21and then there's multiple choice there was a lot that I learned about Supra and it's still growing but it was just amazing to see how many people actually got involved in kyc so they unique people were involved before the mainnet launch yeah it's I I think well for one I think we're we were lucky that we were I think the one of it maybe even the first point system that did this Learn

23:48to Earn kind of point system um so I know that these Point systems are not as hot these days but at least back then um being one of the first and having that early mover advantage of creating project blastoff having this point system and kind of having this time to educate our community was really quite special and I know it was a very long time and we had

24:12to stretch it out a little bit because of of of um we had to wait to tge and mainnet going live but um yeah it's just it turned out to be very successful 550,000 people real people kyc joined and participated and um yeah I think that was a huge huge success but we're in a different market now it's a different time per so project blastoff 2.0 is going to be different

24:41it's not just going to be this point system or Learn to Earn we actually want to upgrade our users um to the next level so it's not just learning now about Supra or blockchain it's like okay go from learning to implementation right so the next stage of BL project BL off is uh what um is going to be aligned with something that we're coming up with shortly and that you'll see on our

25:07social soon is our defi campaign so we're going to launch project blastoff with our defi campaign and almost guide people to participate and to learn how to what what is the next stage of learning about distributed systems the next stage blockch uh a project BL off is to actually learn how to participate in Defi and um so we're really excited

25:36about that uh we have different ways uh we're going to incentivize users to kind of participate in staking and swapping and different things we really want to uplift supra's defi ecosystem we want to um you know bring a lot of value to the projects and the developers that are launching on Supra at the same time we want to reward ecosystem and users so

26:00that's project blast this is Project Blast Off 2.0 this is really going from educ from education to actually implementation and action and uh teaching through through doing so yeah that's coming up we'll have you know more announcements on that later but this is I guess a sneak peek to what is to come for project Blast Off 2.0 and this defi campaign yeah that sounds

26:27great John the I I'm sure uh now that the chain is live there's more onchain activities how you can actually get involved in uh staking the staking is already live as well uh on on Starkey but um more liquidity pools and getting involved borrowing lending other Financial based things that I'm going to check out I'll watch for the announcements on X as that comes out and

26:51uh and because I I really thought that the blastoff part one was very well done and you're right it's it's sort of overdone but but in a sort of short cuted way by other projects um but you guys really put out a lot of educational material it was like reading it was like it was like being forced to read through all the docs that everyone wants to skip

27:09over um you know to learn how the blockchain actually works you guys yeah because no one into it because no one's really reading white papers anymore right so how do you how do you educate how do you kind of like get your how do we get the thesis out there about vertical integration like um you know the modular thesis was so strong in 2024 MH and how how can we kind of not

27:33combat that but how do we really get it into people's minds that vertical integration that most technology Trends towards vertical integration and that the system that we're builting building has this um from day one so we're we had this idea from day one to really build a shared security uh system with you know vertically integrating native oracles

28:01bridging Randomness Etc under under one under one hood and so getting that out there getting this narrative that vertical integration is the way to go was an uphill battle and so we felt like we had to do that through education and of course through social media and through through our uh through X and through our community but I think we're getting there and um of course salana is

28:26a great example um of you know Salon is a great example of some sort of vertical integration um and focusing on user experience High throughput chain low latency so we've really we've seen that we've seen that consumers and users they do like salana and so that's interesting um and I think in in 2025 we're going to see I I believe we're going to see

28:55people that that protocols like super or Aptos Oru are trending towards vertical integration so for example S I think is launching their own Bridge so they're also seeing okay we have to vertically integrate Aptos is also deploying their own Randomness and I'm I'm sure the next thing you'll hear is aptus is going to deploy their own Bridge so um yeah I think in general

29:202025 could be the year that we see that vertical integration becomes a bigger uh thesis and um hopefully you know it can kind of um rival the the modular the modular um Camp yeah I think it will and I think that a lot of the smart people have realized that these move VM ecosystem blockchains uh are are getting it right and uh I'm looking forward to seeing where Supra goes with

29:48it and you know earlier on John we hinted about sort of the future of AI and agents and actually bringing functionality to the world and not just hype that you know AI is taking over how can it actually benefit us uh in the blockchain world in the financial World um do you have any insights or you thought on how AI agents might fit into Supra in the future and and how it might

30:14help us in the web 3 world sure um whenever I think about AI agents I tend to I I tend to think too far ahead and think about the possibilities of what really is going to happen because I I I almost like I kind of think that everything that we imagine is going to happen and more and uh but I I have to ground myself so you know when when

30:41speaking with Josh and the team we are really trying to like for we haven't really put a lot of AI information or AI agent on on our socials or on X or in in our content um but we will be shortly but I think I think what we're like you mentioned we're probably going instead of focusing on the far-fetched ideas we're going to talk about a lot of what

31:05what we can do today and kind of the real world applications of how we can use AI agents so we we recently um are working very closely with a project there's going to be an announcement soon on socials for this so I shouldn't mention the project name but it's an indexing product that um we're we're going to be working very closely with with and we're going to implement an AI

31:30agent to help craft trading strategies using historical data and also our Oracle Network we're going to be able to uh craft trading strategies for you users so users will be able to communicate with a agent or a bot and it'll be able to craft uh strategies for for them to trade or for them to to do this or that and um not only just crafted in in

31:58the idea phase but also at the end being able to you know hit a button start or go and actually Implement that strategy in the real world and you can really only do that if you have a combination of services a vertically integrated Services um you need it you know of course you need the layer one you need the oracles um you also need Automation and you need historical index data so

32:25you need the data so having a combining these four things together with AI agents uh we can be able to do real world uh for for the end user but also agents can agents can be able to use other agents to to perform these tasks and so that's something that's coming up where you know we're going to be we have this relationship with this company that uh we're creating this dashboard where

32:52you're going to be able to communicate with an agent and craft trading strategies specific to you you and hit start or go and it'll be able to actually Implement that uh across many different uh many different chains so I think the end ver like the um what I'd like to see for this version uh for version one is to be able to interact with Supra maybe ethereum and salana but

33:19in the end like we would want this trading strategy to go multi-chain to be able to interacts interact in almost every single decks on every single chain because you want to give that freedom you want to interconnect the AI agent should be able to interconnect everywhere and it should have like really great data and historical data and so that's that's

33:45what really what we're seeing for uh 2025 in the the interaction of AI agents and blockchain historical data and oracles is having uh agents being being able to craft different trading strategies and and then to be able to implement that's exciting that's very exciting uh I'm looking forward to to that and I hope it comes out uh for and it can change yeah dexes and and trading

34:13on all chains um and I feel like that will be the aha moment where everyone realized how important Ai and blockchain are as a Synergy together so I'm looking forward to to seeing that come out and is great insights John on all of the these topics I appreciate you teaching me a little bit more about the move ecosystem uh the AI agents um and I'm looking forward to checking out the next

34:38part of the blastoff campaign because I do want to get further involved and keep learning about Supra as it's growing you guys are really still at the beginning the main chain is there but defi is coming all of the other apps of all of the other parts of industries that are not so techy but can also be disrupted by blockchain uh the Poss abilities are

34:58endless once the developers take hold and start building even more daps on Supra I know that there's already dozens and dozens being built uh but I I would expect thousands in in the future so I feel like we're pretty early on um do you have any last words on uh you've gave a lot of great hints on what's coming in 2025 is there anything else that is worth mentioning as well yeah

35:23so so just I mean I guess on the EV event on the event uh front we have consensus coming up there's a lot of things happening um you know we'll be at consensus in Hong Kong we have eth Denver coming up we got token in Dubai then we have um we're we're going to be the title sponsor of permission list in New York this is going to be a very busy year uh we have a fullon schedule for

35:51for events and um and not only physical events we have a lot of appearances on on on public uh podcasts coming up that are scheduled and so there's going to be a lot more um media and um content that we're going to be producing but I mean this is like that's kind of on the marketing event side but um in the next like week we have automation that's going to be

36:18live we're going to have our um we're going to have our native Bridges coming live we have so many of these uh uh defi applications launching so I would just say uh I I'm really excited about our defi campaign um launching uh project uh blastoff 2.0 and actually having users to have um going from like the education part of project Blast Off 2.0 to this

36:45defy version uh that's really exciting um yeah I'm I'm I'm I'm having a blank right now but uh sorry about that I think all that's great and I I can leave a link to the the Supra x uh any more information on the blastoff campaign when it comes out uh I can leave that in the show notes as well and I'll leave a link to the super platform

37:12and any other ways that people can get connected into it uh I really do appreciate all of your insights John I'm wishing you and the Supra Team all the best moving forward maybe I'll catch you at some of those events on the marketing side uh or I'll be there on the blastoff campaign so thank you so much for taking the time and let's follow up in the near

37:32future let's do it always great Ashton thank you