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- [00:10]
Bryce
All right, everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Crypto 101 podcast. I'm your co host, Bryce, as always, joined by my. My good buddy and my notorious compadre, Mr. Brendan Veeman. How are you doing, Brendan?
- [00:24]
Brendan Veeman
Doing good. Hello. Hello, everyone. Yeah, we got another killer pod. Bryce, excited to be here. And man, what a time for the crypto space. It feels like every time we come back on here, we're like big things are happening and we just keep getting bigger and bigger and higher and higher. And man, what a time to be alive.
- [00:42]
Bryce
It truly is. I'm calling in Brennan. As you know, I'm in my. My in laws house for the holiday and I'm just noticing all this crazy stuff in my background. I'm in the playroom right where I got my makeshift office set up. I got a dinosaur in the background. I don't even have my microphone set up. Apparently the little nieces and nephews, they really like dinosaurs a lot. So there's all sorts of stuff. But apologies for the messy background if anybody's joining us on YouTube. But this was one that I knew that I could not miss. I was like, I don't care where. I mean, if I need to stop and pull over in the parking lot, I'm going to make sure I don't miss this podcast because this is a gentleman who is a real builder in the space, somebody who's been around for a long time and we all have a lot to learn from. So Hart Lambert is the CEO of Across. Hart, thank you so much for joining us here at the Crypto 101 podcast. How are you doing today?
- [01:39]
Hart Lambert
I'm doing great. Like, what a friendly intro. Thank you, guys.
- [01:42]
Bryce
Well, it's dead serious. You know, we're in full disclosure, you know, you know, I have exposure to across. You know, this is a token that.
- [01:52]
Hart Lambert
Let's go.
- [01:53]
Bryce
Actively traded. Everybody who's listening knows, you know, tower 18 is the hedge fund that I run. And, you know, we were big fans of what you guys have been building and you know, we've done a lot of research coverage on ACROSS over the years and so we're really excited. And Uma, back in the day, the protocol that you started before across, but we'll get into all that, but we just want to touch base. How are you doing? You're calling in from. From home. Are you on the road? What's life like for you these days?
- [02:24]
Hart Lambert
I am. I'm pretty nomadic these days, but I am in home of a sense in Big Sur, California. So it's it's pretty nice. Pretty beautiful watching the, the fog roll in right now. So it's pretty cool.
- [02:38]
Bryce
Nice. I went to school up in, in Santa Barbara. UC Santa Barbara and Big Sur was one of the places everybody would go and it's just. Yeah, it's an incredibly scenic town. But yeah. So catch us up. You know, before you even got into crypto, you know, what were you doing? Let's go way back to kind of what pulled you into crypto in the first place.
- [03:01]
Hart Lambert
Yeah, man. So I'm a Canadian that studied computer science in the States. And then like my honest story here is when I graduated, I wanted to live and work in New York City where I went to school. And at that time, because I'm kind of an old man in the crypto space, at that time there was no tech scene in New York and I needed to get a job with a company that gave me a visa and so I got a job in finance. So I was a bond trader. I traded US government bonds and fixed income for eight years at Goldman Sachs, which is actually very relevant to some of the across design and how it works. But yeah, I was in tradfi, like the heart of Trad5 for eight years through the financial crisis before I left to start a fintech business. Fintech business that was in the kind of personal investing space. And I did that for four years before it got acquired. And then I've been building in crypto since early 2018, kind of the start of that bear market. Building UMA first and then across, which we can go into.
- [04:10]
Brendan Veeman
How was it going from trading bonds to the crypto market? Because typically when people think of bonds, it's a little bit more slower and then they think of crypto, which is about as volatile as it can get without being levered up.
- [04:24]
Hart Lambert
You know, it's funny because my job in finance was like the ten year treasury trader. So kind of the benchmark trading point in the yield curve. And you think it's slow, but man, you're dealing with huge sums and like small moves on big. Big numbers are still big numbers. So. And I was doing this through the financial crisis, through quantitative, through all that stuff and it was pretty wild time. I learned a lot. It was not what I expected to be doing at all. I always thought I would be a tech guy, but I learned a ton, worked with smart people, really got a lot of market mechanics under my belt and it's been really fun. It was a cool way to start my career.
- [05:15]
Brendan Veeman
Well, we've heard a lot of stories of people who have gone through the financial crisis and they were working in tradfi like yourself. And, you know, that was the big reason why bitcoin was created in the first place. And that's also the same reason that we see a lot of people who were in tradfi then kind of switch to crypto now is because they got to see the flaws of that system. They got to kind of see the worst of it, and then they got to see the opportunity that bitcoin and blockchain and crypto had to offer. You know, would you say that that was one of the big kind of turning points for you is going through that and getting to see the entire tradfi perspective and then maybe kind of view this potential solution?
- [05:54]
Hart Lambert
Yeah, totally. Like, there's a lot of that, Brendan, and more nuanced takes too. So it's not just like tradfi is broken, it's like, how's it broken? Like, okay, financial rails, the way the back end systems, the way settlement works in traditional finance, it's just inefficient. Like, you look at it from a tech perspect and you're like, okay, this doesn't make sense. You know, my bear case for crypto, I think your audience will like this. My bear case for crypto is we like reinvent the financial system because just those rails, that settlement system sucks payments, the way you send money, the way you settle bonds, it doesn't make sense in our tech forward world. That's my bear case. The bull case is that the new infrastructure we create allows us to invent a bunch of new things that are not otherwise possible in the same way that, like, I don't know, the Internet let you communicate, but then it let you invent new forms of communication that became really useful and created Instagram and social media and all this other interesting stuff. So that's kind of my take there. And then you also saw how financial services, like traditionally tradfi, it's very localized. Like you build a business, if you want to go and build a fintech business, you can't build it globally. You have to build it in like the US or in Germany or in the uk and that's because like those traditional fintech businesses, they're all localized in the rules and regulations of that jurisdiction. And when you think about that from an Internet centric perspective, it makes no sense. Like you should be able to build global businesses and crypto and defi. I'll let you do that. And I think that's obviously the Future of where this world's going.
- [07:45]
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- [08:40]
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- [09:10]
Bryce
Yeah, it's a great point and it just has me thinking about just you know, kind of the word tokenization and you know, you coming from kind of that tradfi background, you realizing hey, you know, we could tokenize stocks, we could tokenize bonds and have these trading globally and you know, shared liquidity pools all around the world and 24, 7, 365 and all the cost savings with no intermediaries and like you start to actually rack things up and there's substantial savings to all this stuff that we're talking about. And I saw a study from Franklin Templeton which is like for those who haven't heard of them, they're one and a half trillion dollar asset manager. They're like very large institution and they said that they did some study on sending 50,000 sort of transactions, settling 50,000 transactions in a traditional way with all the compliance costs and so on. Cost about $50,000 to clear all that clear and settle that 50,000 separate transactions. They said they did it with an Ethereum layer two. I don't Know if they specified which one and it cost them $1.52, all that together batched up and they said that's like a 30,000 times cost savings. And so just imagine scaling that from just a pilot to just one bank to the whole world eventually running on these blockchains. There's going to be a lot of GDP growth that could kind of get unlocked. And I'm really excited and I kind of wanted to kind of get your perspective because right now I know a lot of the things that across is working on is really primarily, you know, digitally native assets, whether that's Ethereum or crypto tokens. But before we kind of get into that, I'm curious just like, do you see that tokenization world, you know, kind of taking off the real world assets? You know, do you think that that's going to be a big value proposition here?
- [11:02]
Hart Lambert
Yeah, I do. With asterixes. Like, I think again, bear case for my bear case for crypto, we reinvent financial services. But like, what's that mean? Like payments and savings? You know, you go to a lot of the world, I mean Bryce, to your point, just sending 50 bucks between countries. I mean, it's really expensive to do that in traditional means, like slash. Almost impossible. Even having a stable store of value, like having the US currency or something like it that you can hold as a normal everyday person in many parts of the world is very, very difficult in traditional systems and made a hell of a lot easier with crypto. So like, I fully agree, the tokenized real world assets and all that other kind of stuff, that to me is just taking the financial products and services that are available in the developed world, like in the US and making them globally available. That seems so obvious and something that there's such obvious demand for in many parts of the world that it's absolutely going to happen and I think it is going to happen this cycle. So I am excited about that.
- [12:16]
Bryce
I love it. So at what point did you come across Ethereum in particular and think this is the platform that I wanted to work on and be a part of this community?
- [12:28]
Hart Lambert
Yeah, I was fortunate enough to have early exposure to crypto, which maybe we can get into later. But sitting around 2018, like early, early 2018, I wrote a white paper about what it would look like to build derivative transactions, like build financial contracts on a blockchain system. And at that time, first of all, defi didn't exist. It wasn't a term yet. It was kind of like late 2018. There's sort of this discussion about what should we call this thing? But at that time, the smart contract platform that made sense, the only one that really existed was Ethereum. And so that's where I got, got into it. And I liked its ethos, I liked what it stood for. I mean, I think Vitalik, he literally, in his original white paper, he predicted 10 use cases and they're all true now. So I think that made a lot of sense. And again, at that time, this idea of saying, hey, I could write a financial contract that is not enforced by laws and courts and juries, but is it rather enforced by economic incentives and computer programs, that was like a wild idea. It's not anymore, which is kind of cool. But that was a wild idea that was like really fun to sink my teeth into back then.
- [13:54]
Bryce
I love it. And at what point were you kind of thinking, all right, so there's this awesome smart contract platform, Ethereum, but now we're working on a cross chain sort of platform connecting all the different blockchains. The work that you're doing at Acros, at what point did you realize it wasn't just going to be Ethereum, but it was going to be this whole world of blockchains that really needed to get connected to one another?
- [14:20]
Hart Lambert
Yeah, okay, so two points on that. So my first project, uma, we're best known now as being the Oracle that resolves poly markets, prediction markets. So it's an oracle for long tail data. And across emerged two and a half years ago as kind of like an internal hackathon on a way to use the UMA Oracle, frankly to send messages between chains. That was the original idea and it evolved a lot since then. But like, the real driving force here has been the rollup centric roadmap that Ethereum has aligned on over the last four years or so, which was basically saying, okay, we've got this Ethereum thing, it's pretty cool. It doesn't scale. The way we want to scale it is by adding other blockchains that connect to Ethereum. And I actually think as a scaling technique it works really well. Like, as you guys know, and hopefully most of your audience knows, any individual L2 is now very fast and very cheap and you can have a lot of them. Like, you want more scale, just add another L2 or L3 and you got more scale. But what's the problem? Well, the problem is you now go from having like one chain to having a lot of chains, and that includes non EVM or non Ethereum chains like Solana and Aptos. And Sui and, you know, keep going. We have a lot of chains and now it no longer feels like one network anymore. No longer feels like one thing, and we got to fix that. So I look at the across problem and again, we should probably talk about what across is. But across is a bridge between blockchains. I increasingly think the bridge moniker is probably antiquated and not the right one. So it's an interoperability platform that lets you move value between blockchains extremely quickly. We'll talk about how that works, I hope. But it unifies the user experience between all these blockchains by having this ability to move value so quickly between them that it feels like one network again. And I think that that's the goal.
- [16:28]
Bryce
Yeah, I think that's a great place to kind of just jump into. And I haven't heard anybody say, you know, the bridge did not or, you know, moniker or so on is dead. I've heard that about lots of other things. So you heard it here first, folks. Bridging is a thing of the past, but I like it because it's all about interoperability and not really having to think about moving between one network or another, but just making it a seamless experience that could have been also a good name. Seamless instead of across. But just thought of that.
- [17:01]
Hart Lambert
But.
- [17:01]
Bryce
So tell us. Yeah. How does across work? You know, you told us kind of a little bit of the high level, but let's dive into it. How can we have value that's trading or moving between all these different siloed networks? And how is everything reconciled?
- [17:15]
Hart Lambert
Yeah. So without going like too deep on the technical stuff, you guys guide me. Yeah, yeah.
- [17:20]
Bryce
Because we're also. We and our audience are not programmers mostly. So as if you were speaking to a 101 level audience in the name.
- [17:30]
Hart Lambert
Right? Yeah, but no, no, I'm not going to go technical at all. But it's more like the financial concepts here. Right. So the blockchains. Most blockchains today have this like this annoying concept of finality, which means you don't actually know what's happened on that blockchain fully, completely, like without it changing for some period of time. And that period of time varies, but, like it's just not instant. Right. So it takes you a few minutes to longer to know fully and completely that a blockchain has done what it says it's going to do. And so when you're trying to connect them, this becomes a problem where it's like, I have blockchain A and I have blockchain B. And I don't really know for full certainty what's happened on blockchain A for a couple minutes. I know with a really high degree of probability, but I don't know fully and certainly. So when you think of like a traditional bridge, I have to wait for finality on blockchain A, and then I can send a message to blockchain B saying here's what happened, and then I can release the funds on blockchain B. And so it's just slow, just takes time. And that's why people think about bridges, because they're like a bridge. Okay, I got to go drive to the start of one bridge and then drive across it, and then I'm on the other side and it just takes a while. We really want to teleport between these chains. And so how can we do that? Well, what we do, and it's very much a financial concept, is on blockchain A, the user deposits funds into an escrow contract and it says, hey, okay, here's. I have an intent. I want to bridge 11 ETH to blockchain B. And then I have a bunch of third party actors. We call them relayers, you can call them solvers, you can call them fillers, you can call them market makers. But these are like semi professionalized third party actors that for a fee, basically front you money on the destination chain. And they all race to do this and they can take on finality risk. They can actually fill you before blockchain A is fully finalized. And that's basically what across does, is we outsource this desire to move funds between chains to this network of third party actors that race to fill the user with their own funds on the destination chain in exchange for a very small fee. And so doing so, we can have times between these two chains. Like our median fill time right now is 3 seconds between L2s. So you have this like 3 second experience. Going between these two chains feels close to instant. We're going to get faster still. But it feels close to instant because this third party solver network is kind of doing the heavy lifting for you.
- [20:28]
Brendan Veeman
Yeah, you know, I think that this, this whole topic of interoperability is a really good one because I was just talking to a community member the other day and they're like, hey, Brennan, I'm so excited, man. I just started this trade and it was a base token. So the base L2 they said, I went through, I opened up my phantom wallet and I made the swap. And they're like, but I Can't. I don't know why it didn't appear in my wallet. Like, I went into Phantom Wallet, I bought this token. For anybody that's listening, Phantom wallet is a Solana native wallet. And they're talking about how they just bought base native tokens and, you know, had to kind of walk them through this conversation of, you know, hey, these are two separate ecosystems. These are two separate blockchains. They aren't, you know, natively interoperable, where you can buy one token to another. And they understood the idea afterwards, but it sucks. You know, they spent their money, they kind of wasted it. And that's where the swap.
- [21:27]
Bryce
I think Phantom does now offer base. You could toggle it on.
- [21:32]
Brendan Veeman
Now, that was the issue is that they didn't and, you know, unfortunate that they, you know, the swap was done the wrong way. But that's where interoperability comes in. And that's where a lot of this kind of gets offered as a solution is saying, hey, it doesn't have to be this way. In fact, there's ways to. To offer some of these solutions. And, you know, people look at a lot of different ways to do this. But would you say that this approach is safer? Because when we look at, you know, kind of traditional bridges in the past, there's some horror stories attached to it. But would you say that this is a little bit, like, different and probably safer than what we've seen before?
- [22:09]
Hart Lambert
Yes, I would. And it also. There's a lot you can go into around the nuances of security design here, but at a really high level, if you get filled in three seconds or two seconds, it also feels safer. You're like, okay, wait, I just got my thing on the other side. I waited to close my eyes, open them again. It was there. That feels way better than waiting 15 or 20 minutes hoping your funds show up. That's not a user experience that scales that we're going to onboard the next billion users doing that. Brendan, I think it is safer because, like, your funds are at risk. Well, they're not at risk. They're escrowed. And there's not this, like, honeypot concept. The big bridge hacks come from these crazy honeypots of value that were, like, locked in one spot that got drained, and that was, like, awful. Those designs are. I'm really against them. Probably out of scope to go into the detail there, but they're really horrific. From a user security perspective across does not do that. Rather, your origin chain funds are held in escrow, and you're filled on the other side in a couple seconds. And so it is safer and it feels safer. It feels like a user experience that a normal person can use.
- [23:28]
Brendan Veeman
I think that's also super valuable because one of the other kind of drawbacks that people have about interoperability and bridging is that they go, oh, it's complicated. I don't understand it. Um, especially when you look at how it was done a couple of years ago, it wasn't the simplest process and it was easy for people who just were not crypto natives. You know, people who are used to just doing all their transactions on Coinbase. Right. It's easy for them to understand that. Then you tell them to go, bridge something through a wallet and it's just a foreign language. And so I think what you're saying there is just making the process a little bit simpler and more user friendly is also a huge help for adoption as a whole.
- [24:09]
Hart Lambert
Yeah.
- [24:09]
Bryce
And I think that, like, to that point, it kind of gets to the heart of the debate, like the monolithic versus modular blockchain approach. It's like people like Solana because they don't have to bridge back and forth between Ethereum or Base and so on. You know, there's, there's different, you know, technical sort of reasons why that might not be the right approach and all that kind of stuff. But from a user standpoint, sometimes it is easier because you don't, you know, you don't have to bridge back and forth. But do you ever, you know, do you kind of foresee a world in which all the bridging is obfuscated away, like with, with Ethereum, so that it feels like even though you're on layer two or layer three, it's just one seamless experience.
- [24:52]
Hart Lambert
Yeah, that's 100% what, like, has to happen.
- [24:56]
Bryce
It has to happen.
- [24:57]
Hart Lambert
It has to happen and it's going to. Right. And so, like, and I think today it is, right, Like Solana being one chain. If you just live within the Solana ecosystem, it is easier. You go there, you have one chain, do your things, and that's, like, conceptually simple. Ethereum now, with all of its L2s, it's become more complicated. It's got this more scale. It's got more scale, has great scalability. It has the advantages maybe of, like, projects and companies can launch their own chain, which many want to, and seems kind of like a cool feature, but you now have to navigate between them with pretty janky infrastructure. Right. And so this is what I think 2025 is going to all be about. It's like on the Ethereum side it's going to be unifying Ethereum. So it feels like one chain, like Solana, which Across is a very important piece to like. Part of it feeling like one chain is it has to be fast. Right. And so that's really what we're focused on. But then a lot of other UX things are also required around like just the way the wallets work and the DAPP experience and all that kind of stuff too. And I think that's all going to get solved in this coming year or two.
- [26:17]
Brendan Veeman
Yeah. You know one of the other cool things that we've seen here recently is the addition of Uni chain. Right. This kind of extension of Uniswap. What role do you think that across could play in this new Uni chain that's being proposed?
- [26:33]
Hart Lambert
Yes, so we work very closely with Uniswap team. Answer your question. We'll get back into this like standard we've, we've developed with the Uniswap team. But okay, what is the point of Unichain? Well, Uniswap wants to have a cheap place, like cheap low gas fee place for people to do swaps and for people to like interact, trade exchange kind of within the own Uniswap ecosystem. And that seems all well and good provided that people can get to Unichain and get off it quickly and easily. So across is deeply integrated with these types of L2s like Unichain which is launching next year, early next year. And so we offer this like again very quick 2 second user experience to get to Unichain and get back off it. And you know, again we've worked very closely with Uniswap, Dave. Uniswap has integrated across directly into their application today. So this is pre Uni chain. Uniswap has integrated across to be able to bridge between different Ethereum networks. If your users or your audience goes and goes to Uniswap right now, you'll see like a swap, swap eth between chains that's powered by a cross and that has our quick, you know, three second median fill time experience. And once Unichain comes online it's going to be front and center to that too where you're going to have hey, here's Unichain, let's go there. There's going to be lots of cheap trading and deep markets. Go there quickly, do what you want to do, come back off whenever you want. Make this thing feel like one experience, one unified network.
- [28:17]
Bryce
Yeah. And it makes me Think that it might obviate the need or get rid of the need for other swap facilities. Not to like bring anybody down across the space, but there's like a million other sort of swaps. You know, Uniswap was the first and then there's X swap, Y swap, Z swap or whatever. Do you think that, you know, what you guys are doing with Unichain will make it so that all the liquidity then kind of comes back from all those other swap facilities and kind of just comes and lives on Unichain, all the EVM based ones maybe.
- [28:54]
Hart Lambert
Like I'm, I'm, I'm a big fan of the Uniswap team. I've known them a long time. I like what they do. We work closely with them and I think they are building great products. I think that it's still unclear to me where the layer of abstraction exists even for swapping. Like, you know, we have aggregators, Dex aggregators right now and we have Binance. Like you still have too many sources of where you trade things. Yeah, I think the end game should be just like there's just a place I go where I get the best price and I get the best execution. And Uniswap is also doing that with something called Uniswap X too, which is intent based swapping. It's actually very similar to across in some ways which. Sorry, it's similar to like a trading experience where across is bridging. But I think that there's still lots of room for innovation about how we make it easy for users to go to one spot and trade A for B and know they're getting the best execution and also know that it's a really seamless and easy experience. So I think we're going to keep evolving there and it's ultimately great for the end user.
- [30:12]
Bryce
Yeah. And to kind of just piggyback off that are like when you talk about the solvers as well with people who are kind of almost like the market makers for this, like who, who are they? Are they like actually like just big funds? Are there like individuals that are able to kind of provide liquidity for these intents? How does that work?
- [30:34]
Hart Lambert
Yeah, this is the part that's so cool about crypto. Right? Like, okay, so let's go back to Tradfi. In Tradfi, if you want to be a market maker, like you gotta have 100 million bucks and spend, you know, 5 million bucks on lawyers to get your like licenses and all set up and da da da da da.
- [30:51]
Bryce
It's just A mess and have all this fancy software to run it and Totally.
- [30:56]
Hart Lambert
Right, yeah. Whereas what crypto can do is they can say, hey, here's a blockchain. Here are the rules of the game. They're encoded in a smart contract. Anyone can go play, like just go at it. Right. And so that's what across has done with our solver network that provides this like fast interop, this fast bridging experience between chains. And it's very cool because the across solver network, most of these people are not like big funds. Most of our solvers are individuals in their basement. We don't really know who they are. We know them by discord handles. There are a few larger players that are beginning to get involved. But like across does. We did $80 million of volume yesterday. It keeps going up. But that's being processed by individual actors mainly, which I think is like super cool.
- [31:58]
Bryce
That is wild. And so the incentive for somebody, you know at home who maybe has tokens to get involved. Is there a fee that people earn in order to do this? Do they get ACX tokens for doing this? How does it all kind of back out?
- [32:14]
Hart Lambert
Yeah, I mean it's purely paid by the fee the user is paying to move value between blockchains. So there's no inorganic incentivization. We're not like paying them across tokens to do this. It's purely. The economics of it are actually pretty cool. So yeah, like, and just to be clear, if the audience is listening to this, like it does take some work. You got to know how to set up some infrastructure to be a solver and a cross. But it's tractable for reasonably technical people. And they go and do this because they make money. It's as simple as that. And the money they make, it's very small. Like you go and you use a cross and the fees are average fee on all transactions sub $10,000 is 4 cents. It's very cheap. But when you earn 4 cents on a lot of volume, it adds up. And so it's a pretty cool example of reducing the bloat and the costs of financial services and products. It's like Bryce, what you were talking about earlier, the Franklin Templeton 50,000 transactions, like do 50,000 transactions for pennies but then do 500,000 or 5 million transactions and it adds up to real money. And the cost of being a solver is pretty low and the fee is non zero. And so across can charge low fees that are still economical for our solver network to go and fill.
- [33:45]
Bryce
Yeah, I love it. And yeah, like you said, that's one of those things that is so cool with crypto is that you could just make your money work hard for you even while you're sleeping and like, you know, in a sense earning interest or whatever. But you don't need the huge, huge upfront sort of lump sums basically in order to, to participate. That or the illiquidity from locking up a CD or some kind of bond that doesn't pay out for a while. So yeah, really cool stuff with what you're doing. And before I kind of ask a couple closing questions, I just want to know, is there anything that we didn't touch on with across that maybe we should have or even some exciting things that are coming out within the next few weeks to months?
- [34:29]
Hart Lambert
Yeah, I think one thing that Across. So going back to Uniswap, we co authored a standard for so our architecture. This thing that I described of having these solver networks front funds, we call this intent based bridging. This intent term, it's a little bit of a nerdy buzzword on crypto Twitter right now, but it is this architecture where the user articulates the intent of what they want to do and then third party actors go and fill it. So across is the leading intent based bridge. We're frankly the leading bridge right now. And this intent architecture is what enables really fast fills. And we put together a standard with Uniswap, we co authored it with Uniswap, it has a very difficult to Remember name of ERC7683. So this is an Ethereum improvement proposal, but we co authored that and we've gotten really great buy in from the Ethereum community at devcon. Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of doing a panel with Vitalik and some other heads of the Ethereum ecosystems, but we have all of the major Ethereum L2s, so arbitrum, optimism, Polygon, Zksync, Scroll Linear, a bunch of others that are all supportive of the standard. And it looks like we're getting real traction around this concept and this idea of becoming a means to unify Ethereum, which we're really proud of. So I want to share that because that'd be huge.
- [36:00]
Bryce
It's going. How do we know if that's for sure going to happen or what's that process? Is there some kind of vote?
- [36:08]
Hart Lambert
It's adoption. So we got their buy in. All these teams have signaled their support and so it means that we can move towards saying, hey, this is a reasonably good idea. And this standard defines a mechanism, an interface, a way of doing this that makes it much bigger than Across. It makes it a common standard where it's not about using across to unify these chains, it's about using this architecture of which across. I hope across will be the best provider of this service. So I think that's very cool. But I do want to add that it's not like we're Ethereum only. So I'm actually like Ethereum is where I started. But I'm pretty bullish on Solana and some other ecosystems too. And across, we're not quite announcing this yet, but always share like a little alpha. But we are actively working on adding other ecosystems like Solana. So I think that's also going to be very cool.
- [37:12]
Brendan Veeman
I think that's great. And you get to talk to so many cool names. You mentioned all the L2s. You mentioned Uniswap. You know, what's it like working with all of them? And you know, I guess what have you noticed because you're probably, you probably have some of the closest relations to a lot of these projects. You know, what has it been like getting to work with them? And also just like what stood out to you? Because we've had this long builders market, now we're starting to go back into euphoria. Everything's exploding again. Regulatory or regular, excuse me, regulations look like they're kind of easing up. And now we're starting to see a lot of projects push down on the gas pedal and accelerate and put out new things. So has there been anything that, that you've seen or maybe that you're excited about that is kind of coming to the market here.
- [38:00]
Hart Lambert
You know, to the first part. Brendan, like a lot of these teams I have known for a long time and there's some signal in that, like the teams that have been around through multiple cycles, like they didn't give up, they didn't go away, they kept building. And it's cool to see like the. I know the Uniswap team from when Hayden was the only employee.
- [38:26]
Bryce
Right.
- [38:26]
Hart Lambert
And we know the optimism team from early on, the arbitrary team. These teams have been around. These are all five plus year teams building in the space and that matters and it shows. And these are people that actually like crypto. They like what it stands for and they like their jobs. They like building in the space, even with the like cycle of euphoria and dismay which seems to be part of crypto. Right. So I think one thing I'd notice is like I Think it's cool to look for those people that stick around and aren't in it just for, you know, the hype part of the cycle. They're in it for the, the long haul. And in terms of all the tech that has come online, four years ago, Ethereum had a major scalability problem and it has scaled in a big way. It now has an interoperability problem, which is what we're trying to solve. But the scale has been huge. And all of the ZK tech stuff, I don't know how much you've gone in with your audience on this stuff, but the ZK stuff is really real and it's here now, today, and it's scaling and growing and there's all sorts of amazing technologies that people have spent years and years building and are now being turned into actual consumer products that people can use and touch, even if they're infrastructure that's kind of behind the scenes. We have just this amazing substrate to build crypto and web3 applications on top of.
- [40:00]
Bryce
Wow. Yeah, that's a perfect way to kind of close things. In summary, I mean, 2025, to me it just seems like it's going to be not only the, just the year of, you know, we had, you know, Matt Hogan on from Bitwise the other day and he was talking about 2025 going to be bigger inflows into the ETFs than 2024. And so we're like, oh my God, 2024 was historic. He goes, no, like these things take time. So you have that institutional side of capital flowing in and everybody launching their own tokenization projects. But then like from your side, like the hardcore developers, like the true builders that are building the infrastructure, you're like, oh, we're going to have like another sort of Goldilocks period where all this stuff is going to become much more usable and easy. So we're setting up, I mean, not to like throw like the super cycle out there easily or whatever, but like, it really is like, it seems like so many things are lining up. Plus, you know, the, it's the year after the bitcoin having, and every year after every bitcoin having in the past, there's like a really big bubble. So it could be the everything bubble in 2025. We'll see. But we're definitely going to keep tabs on, on across and everything that you guys got going on and you guys are building over there.
- [41:08]
Hart Lambert
Thanks, man. Yeah, and I agree.
- [41:12]
Bryce
Well, hey, where can people kind of follow along on your journey? You know, Are you Guys active on Discord. Twitter substack.
- [41:21]
Hart Lambert
Yeah, Discord gives me anxiety. But do not reach out to him on Discord.
- [41:27]
Brendan Veeman
Everybody.
- [41:27]
Bryce
Do not do that.
- [41:29]
Hart Lambert
But I am active. Or try to be a little bit more active recently on Twitter or X. My handle there is HAL 2001. And of course you can follow across protocol on Twitter too.
- [41:41]
Bryce
Awesome. And I've always wanted to ask you this because I have seen you on X and so on. Eric, you must be a big fan of 2001 Space Odyssey, is that right?
- [41:51]
Hart Lambert
It's literally like my computer generated email when I entered college was HAL 2001. Which is so. Yeah, for the audience. HAL is the computer in 2001 A Space Odyssey. Bryce, do you know why it's called hal? Do you know where they got the name from?
- [42:10]
Bryce
I don't actually. Maybe it's an acronym. I don't know.
- [42:12]
Hart Lambert
IBM. Take IBM and transcribe it back one digit. It's hal. Right. So that's how it comes from. And my computer science professors in college thought it was amazing that my computer generated email was HAL2001.
- [42:25]
Bryce
So you were quite literally the chosen one. You hear the chosen one and you realize your name is Hart Lambert, too. H A, L. Yeah, right. Oh, that's why it was automatically generated. Okay. I'm like.
- [42:40]
Hart Lambert
This is.
- [42:40]
Bryce
I'm like. Feel like I'm in the Matrix right now.
- [42:43]
Hart Lambert
It's all a simulation, man. It's all one simulation.
- [42:47]
Bryce
I love it. Well, hey, look, heart. Hal. I'll call you Hal from now on. We appreciate you coming on. We really would like to invite you back whenever time. You know, whenever the time's right when you. Whenever you guys got some more updates or some things that are exciting you, please let us know. You always got a homo here over at crypto101podcast.
- [43:07]
Hart Lambert
Appreciate it, guys. Thank you for having me.
- [43:20]
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