Web3 Galaxy Brain 🌌🧠

Nicholas: Welcome to Web3 Galaxy Brain. My name is Nicholas. Each week I sit down with some of the brightest people building Web3 to talk about what they're working on right now. My guest today is Bunny, aka Conejo Capital, CEO of Dora. Dora is a user-friendly block explorer and blockchain search engine. On this episode, Bunny and I discuss multi-chain block explorers, unified blockchain interaction interfaces, and the challenges of blockchain indexing. We discuss Dora's search product and its data product and its adventures beyond the EVM. It was fun getting to know Bunny and learn about Dora's journey making blockchain transaction auditing easier for consumers. I hope you enjoy the show. As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Bunny: Hello.

Nicholas: Hey, Bunny. How's it going?

Bunny: Good. How are you doing? Good.

Nicholas: Good to meet you.

Bunny: Yeah, great to meet you too.

Nicholas: You're in New York, right?

Bunny: Yes, I am in New York. How about you, actually?

Nicholas: Yeah, of course. I'm in Montreal. I'm in Canada.

Bunny: Oh, cool.

Nicholas: Happy Thanksgiving. Awesome.

Bunny: Yeah, happy Thanksgiving, I guess.

Nicholas: Not really.

Bunny: Happy Thanksgiving for a Canadian on your end. Yeah, it's been like two, three weeks.

Nicholas: Yeah, I think that's about right. I forget exactly when it is. A month ago, something like that.

Bunny: Yeah, yeah. Something of the sort. I also didn't keep track much of them. I spent like seven years in Vancouver. But I never really got around the difference between the Canadian and American Thanksgiving.

Nicholas: Yeah, I see here it's October 14th, I think it was. Or no, that's next year. Maybe it's the same. It's not as big a deal here.

Bunny: Yeah, no, I don't think it is as much. Yeah, I feel like I remember a lot of my... I went to a primarily international university. I feel like half the population there were like, okay, yeah, it's another party. Okay, let's celebrate. And then the other one was like, no, I need to go home. Like, I need to see my family. And I cannot fathom not seeing my family in this holiday.

Nicholas: Yeah, it's big. It's an important value. It's kind of heartwarming to see it, at least from my comfy position on the internet for this Thanksgiving, at least.

Bunny: Yeah, no, it is. It is. It's very sweet.

Nicholas: Yeah, yeah. It's very sweet. So we're going to talk all about Dora today. I'm excited. I guess the first question I have is, what's missing in Blockchain Explorers that Dora is there to solve?

Bunny: I'd say that's actually the best possible question to begin. The core premise as to, okay, what, first of all, like, what is Dora? And two, as you said, what is missing from Blockchain Explorers that Dora is actually bringing to the table? And one of the quintessential things is honestly that feeling that... I guess for real context, like Dora started almost two years ago at this point. One of the main realizations, like one of the genesis ideas behind, okay, we need to build something that is not necessarily a block explorer only, but also serves as a, even beyond that, just as a tool to serve as on-chain information, also serves as a search engine that can then lead people to start acting on every single on-chain ecosystem that this search engine has been able to integrate. Not only with a focus of, okay, like, it's not necessarily hard to serve as on-chain data, like it is, especially over the past two years, that this has become a lot more simple, a lot more straightforward, despite the fact that now we have roll-ups and we have a couple of dominant SDKs, a few of the SSDKs are still reaching maturity. It's still a bit hard, actually. It's not necessarily trivial, right? And so there's that, there's one, that technology to serve as a block explorer in a world in which we see an insane diversity of roll-ups, all with different SDKs, all with different sequencers, all with different, how to say it, a few more experimental ones that may divert a little bit more from Git. I'm sure also, especially quite a few of your listeners, whoever has any chance to interact with a node knows that not all roll-ups are built the same, and that becomes increasingly more complex. if you want to have something akin to a generalizable block explorer, or even, you know, a generalizable block explorer, or even a generalizable block indexer as well, right? Even something as low level as that. So one, what is our solve? Generalizing a bit, just a little bit of the, not even the indexing infrastructure, because we work with quite a few index data partners as well, and we have some of our index data infrastructure in house as well, but at the very least, the contextualizing layer of every single on-chain data that gets produced, one. Two, we don't necessarily think of a block explorer as a tool. We think of block explorers as a tool. that should be, that are the quintessential, it might sound like a buzzword, honestly, but I very much do believe that block explorers are one of the first human layers that people have whenever they interact with a block, with a chain. I like to have the thought experiment that there's no, how to say, that Ethereum could have stopped producing information years ago, but every single block explorer out there just make sure to keep on faking producing information that no one will notice, right? Like very few people would actually, are actually interacting with the node. On a day-to-day basis, especially when it comes to the consumer side of things. Like if you ask the average bull market user if they've ever spun up a node, and even then, like have they ever even tapped into a node directly, I don't think most people will say yes.

Nicholas: Yeah, even most devs, no.

Bunny: Yeah, no, exactly. It's not necessarily the simplest thing to do sometimes. Sometimes it is. I think people will be surprised of how many ecosystems out there, they're actually making it slightly hard to have a persistent node instance. It's a little bit funny. So then two is actually, oh, sorry, go ahead.

Nicholas: No, I was just going to ask you, what is it about them that makes it difficult just to keep a node alive?

Bunny: Honestly, because I also myself don't interact too much with them. I'm not incredibly familiar with them. One of those things though, is that some ecosystems out there, especially they want to get a little bit more complex with, oh, we're not only, we're even compatible plus something else. They may leverage some of the other systems out there, but they're not necessarily going to be able to get as much of a support for VMs that don't necessarily directly benefit them.

Nicholas: So if there's additional dependencies, if they're not EVM equivalent, there's additional dependencies that maybe are not as reliable.

Bunny: Yes, exactly. It's just that they haven't been able to capture as much of their developer mindshare to allow for a reasonable redistribution. Of resources amongst every single one of the dependencies, which is honestly speaks really big to the fact that, you know, open source is really needed in, in crypto or even in tech in general to keep everything alive the way that we're used to. Right.

Nicholas: Totally. I'm curious. I wanted to dive into one thing you said there. So do you think that Ben accessing information in something like a block explorer, or even if it's a search oriented block explorer, some other simpler UX or different UX, nevertheless, do you think that consumers, if crypto really is to be successful, consumers should be looking at kind of a neutral data provider, not just interacting with apps or interacting via centralized exchanges, they should be, you expect that consumers will have direct exposure

Bunny: to

Nicholas: block data via some kind of clean interface.

Bunny: Yes. So, yes. And there's actually a few things there, especially that you said, correct me if I'm wrong, but you should just say also, like, like a non, like a, not a centralized user, but like a clean interface user to an extent. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So from the standpoint, okay. So that thought experiment of like, Hey, like block explorers could have just like all cartelized and fake producing it during data. Right. There is a future in which crypto becomes a indecisive way that we had a very wallet centric future for the longest time in crypto, which I, I, I was quite, quite frankly, a little bit shocked by just coming into the industry. Now, a little bit more than a couple of years back now, I do think that there's a future in which users become familiar, not with the way block explorers are built today. Um, because I do admit those are quite developer focused and so on and so forth, but the way in which a very simple unified interface that has not completely extrapolate away what it means to leverage on chain technology, but it still gives you a few hints as to, Hey, you may be interacting, you are writing and interacting within an interface that leverages all chains out there. And it's surfacing every single, uh, information that is getting produced across every single ecosystem or across every single ecosystem, your specific wallet or account that manages several wallets across different SDKs is on, um, or you can, you can either choose that path of, okay, just complete, um, extrapolation of any semblance of on, on chain. Uh, activity and just having a unified cross chain account activity or the, oh, you are a power user. You know what the differences are between this SDK, this SDK, um, you know, what are the, you can choose whichever routing mechanism you want. You can choose whatever, uh, yield provider you want, recycling product and whatnot. I think those are the two very different features that we have for crypto. And when we think about, okay, what are, what makes one of those futures different than the other? I think one of the. The tools that sits a little bit in B that can serve a bit of both is just the interface. One of the main interfaces that we're familiar with, honestly, it's just a search engine. Um, and I say a search engine specifically, particularly from the standpoint that due to, um, we, we can talk a little bit more about this later, but just to keep it a little bit short. in a creation theory, you effectively are advocating for, Hey, it's not necessarily the best, um, the best type of tooling that lets itself to actually reach. The end consumer and also creating a quote unquote marketplace for every single provider out there will be an aggregator that can be generalizable enough to then encompass every single order tool for aggregation out there. One of those things, one of those primary toolings that we're very used to interacting on a directly basis is a big search and some big search engines out there like Google Baidu and so on. Um, these are then lend themselves to actually go into more ecosystem or sub niche. Uh, specific aggregators in the exact same way that we could think of like, okay, there's every, every single chain out there is like, it's, especially if you look at the action pieces, right? You can think of every single one of those chains that this sub niche or industry specific aggregator, and then you can have a generalizable search engine that sits on top of that as a way, as a gateway to every single one of these services. that just don't happen.

Nicholas: Oh, go ahead. So, so one of the problems then we might say with blockchain explorers today is that they're very. Chain specific, but given that you're starting or, I mean, you've started already, but you're in the era of, uh, multi-chain present, uh, it means that you can start with a multi-chain interface that aggregates all that data and creates a kind of simpler interface for people such as search on top of an aggregate view of multi-chain, uh, activity rather than chain specific, uh, where you're already kind of in the details. If you know that you're on polygon scan, then you're already kind of in the. Technical details. It's not a simple UI like search over multi-chain data.

Bunny: Exactly. Um, it's not a simple UI that search. It's not a simple UI as, um, being able to tell you technically there's no particular reason why if we have every single bit of data that is open source centralized and we're not, um, just publicly accessible. Why is it that we should have it in such a way that no single tool that every single tool is unaware of things beyond the ecosystem. Um, there are. Some very practical reasons to why one of them is just because it's very expensive. Like, I think that's one of the, like one of the implicit or silent truths, I guess, in crypto, in the crypto ecosystem, that every single bit of a piece of infrastructure piece is just quite expensive. Especially if it has to do anything with storing large on-chain data, large volumes of on-chain data. And especially if the chain is successful. Right. But yeah.

Nicholas: Um, especially for these chain, like POS, L2 type chains that are just gen. Generating tons of data that you have to index and essentially subsidize the indexing and serving of it.

Bunny: Yeah. For quite a few, quite a bit of it. I, I think it does get it, get into the crux of it. It's essentially a database, uh, cost optimization problem, which is really funny. Um, because, uh, I think it's a little bit circ, uh, circular that, oh, okay. We have these really good databases, really good virtual machine that everyone can interact with. Every, every single person can start deploying applications that do not necessitate the involvement. Of a person or any form of individual to actually maintain it. Right. Uh, like the concept of like having a crypto crypto company application and have it run itself to an extent, or they're maintaining the, the front end for it. And of course, marketing and such, uh, it's very enticing, right. It's very, it's very awesome that this technology does exist. Um, but then it poses the sort of question, okay. This insane database is saying your virtual machine. Um, what is the one thing that you do have to care about is that, oh, okay. If you're trying to surface this. The data that your application produces back to the chain in a clean and a manner, maybe you want to maintain a little bit of that data on you. I need that. And if your application is widely successful, well, you better start looking as to how to optimize that data storage.

Nicholas: Got it. So you mentioned that there are some changes to the infrastructure technology over the last two years that have made it more feasible to index a bunch of different chains. What what's changed over the last two years? What's new. What's better.

Bunny: So I think a few very key points is. It's um, so there's, there's two main things. One of them, and I think we can separate it by saying that there is a search and action based search engine. So for our specific use cases on the search portion of things, one of the very implicit things there is indexing. Um, there's been quite a few companies that have come around, um, over the past two years that have made a product like door. I go from us at the very beginning and spending almost four, six months working on. On a substrate EVM and cosmos, uh, generalizable indexer. Um, this was an insane feed from our, from our CTO Stella, from every single, we, we divide the team on, on chain backend and then, uh, like off chain backend per se. Uh, it's just like API services and such. Um, so creating the generalizable indexer, incredibly hard, something that we really, um, we spend too much time doing. Um, and as I also hinted at a bit earlier, there's a few chains out there. That have not necessarily made this the effort of indexing them the easiest by not maintaining their own auxiliary services. Um, one, those are now we finally seen a bit of a congregation into, okay, these are now the major as the case. We've now seen a lot of the action pieces play out incredibly hard, specifically within EVM land. So from our standpoint, we were already overextended, trying to integrate a bunch of non EVM chains. And then as soon as we. Start talking with a couple of VM chains, it became a matter of not a, oh, I wonder if someone will pay for a little bit of the chain subsidy, but it became a matter of like, oh my God, we actually don't have enough people to serve these EVM chains. Right. Even, even though the infrastructure is quite good at this point, that we can integrate chains in a matter of that. We have a 24 hour guarantee for every single EVM out there, uh, given that it's at least close to get. And for the. Chains that are very close to get, we just integrated in a couple of hours, but even then there's still a few, a few bugs and such that pop up every now and then. So, but it's still, this, um, someone's the, the fact that they're seeing a lot of a coordination and implicit coordination on, okay, we are going to support this SDK. We are going to support these indexing practices. We are going to say, Craig, there's no companies like GoldSky and SimpleHash, some of our closest index data partners. As well as, uh, let's say for specifically in the case of Celestia, um, and some Cosmos index data partners, there's Numia and Modular Cloud as well. Um, we also work quite closely with them, so they make it such that Dora can finally come to become not only an index data company, because we of course still need

Nicholas: to have some of our own

Bunny: indexing solutions in house, uh, for a specific use case, but we can become more so a contextualizing layer. Very much. Focused on the uncredited infrastructure to give meaning back to on-chain data, like surfacing unopinionated on-chain data is not really useful for the consumer as much as it is useful for a developer trying to give meaning back to that information. Right. Uh, so there's that one. And then on the action portion of the search engine, uh, we have, well, we have now, um, very unprecedented, but we have AI agents, we have intents, we have a bunch of, uh, we have, um, MPC. We have a, we have, uh, stuff like privy. It's, it's, it's awesome. Honestly. I think that I especially saw one of your, your episodes on the new, uh, web three, web three front end stack. Um, I mean, there's clearly been a silent revolution in it. And I say silent. No, I think people have been very vocal about it, but I don't think people have been as vocal about the, all of the offerings in tandem that have really changed the way someone does front end. even from like one year ago in crypto. definitely yeah.

Nicholas: just before we get to the actions part which i'm super interested in you mentioned that the infrastructure has gotten easier. so is is a big part of that the kind of shelling point of evm equivalence that has simplified chain integration? or you're saying there's also this sort of maybe maturity of the data provider partners across different ecosystems also.

Bunny: yes so there's it's a it's a twofold thing. one of them is that yes there's three nest and there's been finally some form of congregation in. okay these are the essences that we're working with and every single. uh there there's even like implicit. uh these never properly got approved but there's like eips for block explorers as well. so now we finally have okay these are the things. yeah yeah no they're very much it's. um it's a little bit funny though because i i want to learn a little bit more about the history behind this. but um the block is block esports. apis were supposed to get standardized to whatever major scan is using now which which is a little bit silly because I actually want to know a little bit about the history of whose idea was it? Like it doesn't, it doesn't feel like it wasn't necessarily a open source push for standardizing it back to a tool that wasn't open source. I think it was, I feel like Igor, like one of the founders for Blockscout will know as well.

Nicholas: That would be interesting to have him on to ask about that. Is Dora planning to be open source in the front end?

Bunny: We want to open source a few things actually on the back end because there's a, let's say our semantic tiger, like being able to say, oh, this wasn't actually just a swap. This was actually an NFT sale or, oh, this wasn't just a transfer of tokens. This was specifically a repayment for this loan that someone took on this application. We want to, we are working with Blockscout on a few, on a few things. Actually, the one that I can definitely speak about right now, this, on actually open sourcing the, the label for every single EVM address out there. As of now, as of now, if you register, let's say a tag for a wallet on Dora, it gets recorded on Dora, but it doesn't necessarily get posted anywhere. If you register a tag on Blockscout, okay, you register it just for that Explorer, but you don't necessarily have that tag get populated across every single Blockscout instance out there. We're creating this unified, this unified database and then DocExplorers, uh, data analytics tools and so on and so forth are able to reference every single tag that gets added either to the or of Blockscout and then immediately gets populated across whichever tools are leveraging it.

Nicholas: Is there a system for checking the quality or do you just only trust, uh, annotations from certain sources? Like if it comes from Blockscout or Dora, maybe I trust it, but not some other party that's submitting tags.

Bunny: I think that one will be interesting. I think there is a, um, there's a big if when it comes to filtering, right? Like, um, I said like. there's no real, there's no real strong use case on surfacing just completely opinionated on chain data. I don't think also there's a use case on completely very aggressively filtering out, uh, taggings from every single, from every single person. submission, right? Um, but definitely there is a world in which we have every single label. be, oh, this label was submitted by this person and every single person, everyone can see who submitted it. And then you can potentially create a reputation system on which, okay, if this person has some, this person has submitted a bunch of these tags into Dora, oh, let's give this person a few points because this person has actually been very truthful about it. And if someone is actively trying to civil attack it and just tagging, well, it's one, two, three, four, um, then, you know, it can be somewhat penalized or just not recognized as a valuable contribution.

Nicholas: Do you imagine that being a shared reputation system across everybody who's contributing to this, uh, block scout, open source, or each, uh, block Explorer would have its own reputation system and then somehow aggregate their decisions and submit them to a collective pool?

Bunny: I honestly think it might be a second, um, a second portion of it because you want to, like, as soon as you start talking, as soon as we start talking about points, getting back to the community and so on and so forth, that that's become a segue into, Hey, we're rewarding you with something and you very much want to own the user experience for rewarding your users. You don't necessarily want to tell them, Hey, you're getting rewarded by someone else's work and then have that be a segue for them to go check out on our project.

Nicholas: Might also be a good way to get users in general to, to have, uh, exactly.

Bunny: Exactly. It's, um, it's very much that, but these are, we'll be most likely announcing just the, the open source infrastructure for the tagging system and then tell people, Hey, we'll be taking a look at who is actually submitting stuff. Right. And who is properly engaging with the submissions form label instead of just, um, you know, just civil attacking it or also sending a job applications, which we've also had. It's really, there is one application that I actually found thought he was very sweet. He was just someone, not some submitted a form for a random address and saying, Oh, this is, um, like, I just wanted to say, I love your work. Thank you guys. And I say, okay, that's nice. That is wholesome. Um, it's not a wallet tag, but it's very wholesome. So there's, they're submitting that as a, as an annotation, they submitted that as an annotation to a random wallet address out there.

Nicholas: And you're talking about annotation, but there's also like, I think of the interface dot social app where they're doing,

Bunny: um,

Nicholas: function signature labeling so that you can see nicely in the UI, you know, things beyond ERC 20 and seven 21, et cetera, swaps, but more unique idiosyncratic function calls that they be labeled correctly. I guess you also want to do annotation of that. I assume.

Bunny: So, so one of them is the one thing is the wallet wallet tagging. And then the other one I like to call the semantic label. there, or I guess internally we called semantic label. Um, the semantic label is another thing that I think is, I think it's fascinating, honestly, because it's one of those things that I feel quite a few products have built out there internally, but there wasn't really a need for it for that. I was quite frankly surprised that there was no one single, uh, actually, no, let me, let me take a step back on that one. There is a nopen. There are some open source, uh, semantic tigers in the custom way that there's a couple of open source AI interpreters of on-chain transactions. However, they're not necessarily the best or the way that they've been built so far does imply ingesting a certain number of on-chain data and maintaining it on your own infrastructures such that it's incredibly expensive to run it. And there is no quintessential, uh, value. honestly on providing a various on just providing a simple interface for looking at a, for understanding a transaction is very nice. It's very much something that can get you users. However, there's no way kind of intrinsic economic value that is derived from that. apart from, um, there's a few cases in which it is in which, um, let's say if you are able to properly semantically tag every single, uh, defy interaction out there as a loan repayment and such, if you're indexed around, and you're an asthmatic label or is fast enough, then you should be able to sell these as business analytic type data. Um, but there's a few companies out there that already do that. So from the standpoint, it's something that you want to, so you want the, the par ideally that you want to open source from that is allowing people to actually semantically tag everything to actually submit, Hey, these functions specifically this type of call, like, um, what we, we were working with, uh, we still are actually, uh, but we're working, we're working with a few, um, let's say NFT options, data providers out there. Um, and what we do with them is that we actually semantically tag every single one of their option contracts as, Oh, this way is actually an option creation. And this is an option sale, let's say, right. So being able, but it's still that own that took us a few hours. So honestly, it was very straightforward. However, I do think that this is very much the type of tool that you want to open source on in the long run. Um, I think that, that anyone should be able to go on, just go on whatever explore they want. Um, and just say, Oh, my transaction, uh, doesn't look quite okay. Doesn't seem to represent what I actually want it to be. Um, here as semantic label, specifically for this thing,

Nicholas: there should be no edge in semantic labeling for the long tail of transactions, maybe at the speed of processing it, but everyone should just be able to read, read the transactions of humor readably, uh, without, uh, you know, that, that, that ultimately you're saying that shouldn't be a competitive differentiation.

Bunny: Yeah. I don't think tagging or semantic labeling should be a competitive differentiator for now. Um, sorry, even on the long run, admittedly, you know, like we, we're not open source just yet. Uh, and the main reason honestly, it's just because it is a hard task to pull off what we're doing right now. And we don't want to accidentally put a tool out there that, that wrongly tax something. And then instead of that being a bug report from someone's, someone just DMing me, it's a, Oh my God, this messed up someone else's infrastructure. Like I very much, you know, want to do that. There is, um, we've, we've thought of quite a bit about, uh, okay. You're contextualizing on chain data. You're becoming this focal point in which every single, especially people that are not necessarily the heaviest power users. So function data can go to, to untrust the Explorer. we, you don't want, you very much want to be a reliable piece of infrastructure. You don't want to be, you don't want to have too many bugs, right? Like it's not something that, uh, even though immediately, like every single block Explorer, there has quite a few bugs. Some of them are a little bit more quiet and nuanced. as to specifically what those are.

Nicholas: You, you mentioned that, uh, it's both about search and action, uh, for this search engine. So w what do you mean by action?

Bunny: So what I mean by action is if you've had the, it's something that we haven't published. I see. We've publicized the minting aspect of it, but if you go on Dora right now, uh, on Dora.xyz and you search up mint, um, we create these generative UI or for every single, so right now we contextualize every single. Sora created ERC seven 21, and you're able to just mint it within the search application. Oh yeah. I see this. Yeah. That is, if you go in there, you search up mint you, uh, if you did that during a consensus 2023, um, you were able to do that. Uh, quite a few people minted it. And that was also, I think, I believe it's also my pin post on Twitter right now. So that was one of the, those things that one of the very, one of the very beautiful things about on chain applications is that people, anyone can own the front end experience for it. And every single bit of, um, I guess back end contextualizing tool is not something that, um, how to say, you know, something that is a proper thing from the application, right? Like it's like, and if, if let's say a large corporation releases a smart contract, anyone can go and create a better experience for it.

Nicholas: Even if the company chooses to eventually deprecate that good and service, you're saying you can, you can make a, these kind of generative, uh, interfaces for contracts without needing to cooperate directly. You can permissionlessly create like a mint interface within the thing. If people want to check that out, it's on Dora dot X, Y, Z, and you can search mint and the action will come up for the door. consensus, 2023 NFT.

Bunny: Exactly. And what I imagine, in the future to be like, is there say Sunday specifically action portion of it, right? I very much do believe that we will reach a point in which every single smart control there will be. So kind of procedural to an extent, uh, is that the way that we have really good practice, um, development practices for web to such that a unified contextualizing interface can provide a generative UI for the specific concept for the smart country that someone just so happens to be searching on Dora. If you search up, uh, right now, mint, of course you are able to meet the Dora NFT, but if you search up any other NFT within Dora, hopefully not too far away from now, you should be able to also start minting with natively within the search up application. Uh, one other one that we actually haven't promoted that much. If you search up swap on Dora, you're already able to swap on Dora. It's just a slightly buggy widget, uh, for reasons beyond ours, uh, that it's just, it's a working as well as we hope for. But eventually you also want to start being able to perform a very basic suit of actions on chain. Uh, the very basic suit of actions on chain. We believe that is something that will be pulled off by a platter of, um, index data partners, as well as how does it, as well as just aggregators. Uh, when it comes to transfers across chains, when it comes to, uh, swaps across chain, especially any, any 20 type actions, uh, minting cross chain as well, being able to have awareness of the state across every single ecosystem. If someone doesn't have a token on ecosystem a word, I mean, if someone has a token ecosystem, a and minting is happening on ecosystem B immediately, be able to have a sort of, as they have a solver that is able to just, or a router that is able to say, Hey, this person has funds here. Just let the person engage with whatever action they want, regardless of the change of their own. We'll look up their talk and tokens, uh, we'll subsidize the fee for this for this time. And yeah, just let people act on chain instead of having, I think there is very much is still a sort of on ramp off ramp problem. As soon as people start going cross chain. And right now we've come very close to solving the on ramping into the chain ecosystem. And now we need to solve a little bit more of the, um, cross chain on ramping ecosystem.

Nicholas: If anything, it reminds me a little bit of what you're saying, uh, especially with the cross chain focus and having a unified block Explorer, search engine experience of, uh, the way like ether scan has recently integrated hop protocol transactions in. So you can see when you make a cross chain swap, it will be illustrated inside of ether scan, but obviously it's a little bit incomplete because you have to jump to a completely different website to see the kind of consequence of that. But at least they are now showing it. Is that something that you foresee doing these kind of surfacing cross chain swaps, as well as just the aggregate of the separate chain interactions?

Bunny: So that was actually one of the very first, first experiments that we ran on Dora. And I think back then, almost two years ago, the very quintessential need for, so I guess a bit of a difference there is that in order to integrate different types of bridges, you have to either integrate a chain, I guess, chain departure and chain destination, as well as the bridge itself. It is, if they say it's formal sort of validator bridge, then of course you need to also index that bridge itself. If you have, if you want to start, uh, if you want to start doing that, then right now as current economies of Explorer stand, then you have to get chain a chain B and also the bridge to pay you for that integration. Um, if not, then, um, they're just going to run up the database calls of two chains and then one bridge. And that can be quite, quite hefty, right? Um, we can get a way we just integrating the API of the firm preaching providers and then pay them a little bit for that. And then just surfacing, um, a blog for, for just having a blog spur for some of the transactions. I think that for most bridges out there, they build their explorers in house or they've, um, yeah, actually for a lot of them has been in house. Um, there's a few interesting cases in which they build it, like someone else built it for them as an open source project. And eventually they hire them. Um, so from this standpoint, we didn't see that the economies for creating a bridging, a specific Explorer made sense or then it'd be in a very cool technical piece of work. so, but that doesn't mean that now, but now that actually Thor is quite self-sustaining. Now we can get a little bit more, I guess, not necessarily experimental, but we can start pushing the boundaries with, okay, people want to surface this type of information. Uh, what can we do with this information? If we do surface it right now that there is a bit of, um, there is everything turns on like, Oh, what are the, what are the actual events are happening across every single bridge out there? Um, right now we surface, if you go on, let's say it's scroll supposedly on the right. specifically, we do attack quite a few of the L2 transactions. So for example, we are surfacing a little bit part of the going into the L2 or being able to post back information into the L2 on some chains out there. But it's something that we're still trying to, we're still effectively trying to figure out, do people actually care about this information? Right, right, Yeah.

Nicholas: I guess that, that is kind of my, my, I saw that you, when you described the project in on Twitter, you, you have two different Twitter handles for the data side and kind of the search side. I'm curious, what's the difference there? and do they have the same ideal user or is it a different profile?

Bunny: So it's actually very, we had an exercise, um, earlier this week, um, as to brand positioning and also how we want to behave with every single one of the accounts. So at search on Dora is very much the search engine app that is consumer facing. So the ideal user of a search and Dora is one that let's say has been introduced to actually, okay. there's a few ideal users. One of them is then it's a bimodal distribution between the super on chain, heavy on chain power user that has interacted with so many different L2s out there and so many different applications. that is now like, oh my God, I never want to bridge again. I never really want to, uh, onboarding to a new L2. Uh, like it's very messy, especially if you are someone that is very eager, eager to try a new piece of new pieces of tech out there. It's still a bit of a jarring experience, right? Like, um, sending your funds to a random bridge that you've never heard of, of trusting that, okay, this team has not messed up the integration of this one bridge that it can get hacked sometimes. Sorry. Uh, the swapping, um, these decks that has gotten hacked a few times and such. Um, and then the other one is a user that is just getting introduced to blockchains again, or has been a big, pretty curious for some time now and wants to interact with application with all of these different ecosystems through one single interface that makes it trivial to find, or it doesn't even make the differentiation of what chains are on unless the user really wants to write, uh, like the concept of having an chain specific door. And then, and all chains Dora is very much where we are headed in, in my belief. Like you might really, if he's wanting, which, um, like a user is not necessarily, unless they want to be incredibly intentional about it, the user shouldn't know what chain they're on. And even then there's a few features in which every single action that you're partaking on a single interface may be settled back into multiple chains. Let's say if you want to perform a transfer on Dora, maybe you're performing a transfer on that quote unquote transfer, optimized chain. If you're, especially if you're engaging with a stable coin, uh, if you're performing a swap, maybe you're using a decks, a specific app chain out there instead of necessarily adapt that is settled in one single chain.

Nicholas: So maybe I'm going to Dora because it's has everything. I can just trust that everything is going to be there eventually.

Bunny: Eventually. Yes. And that is, it's very much a more, um, grandiose vision. I'd say that, uh, what initially the, what the initial scope of a, Hey, let's build a multi-chain block Explorer was like, uh, but it's still one that very much resonates with quite a few of our users. Um, even internally, like whenever we work with a, with a new L2 or there's fuel to the third game announced, especially in Q1, there's a really big push for L2. think you want is quite, it's quite fascinating. I don't know what compels so many people to actually say, okay, uh, January will be the, the L2, I guess not summer, winter spring wave of new L2 is dropping in Q1, Yes. There's quite a few of them. Um, I think there's a few of, I think there's a few of them in which it will be a bit interesting if you're able to not only have a very, if we're not able to only, Hey, Dora just integrated this L2, but we're able to say, Hey, Dora just integrated this L2. go and bridge into this L2 natively within the search app now, or go mint a L2 passport that just keeps, which the price of it also technically gets bridge into the, into the other chain. And then retroactively gives you some of the funds that you used to make that L2 passport.

Nicholas: Yeah. So, so what, what are the, um, challenges in indexing that you're facing now? And, and how are you, you working with these partners? I know you mentioned a bunch of them, um, which one's gold sky, simple hash, uh, new Mia Celestia is modular cloud. What, what is it that they provide to you? And I guess you implied it before, but you're focused on the context part rather than the, the raw indexing from what I understand. Yes.

Bunny: I think, um, a lot of our focus is specifically on the, Hey, people don't, um, just very, very blatantly, no one out there really cares about an opinionary on ching. Data. They only care of on-chain data in so far as to how much their contextualization infrastructure, um, label city labels, a transformative decoded, whatever, in a way that is actually useful to them. Right. Um, very few people actually care about what the fee in the, from the L one L two to the L one means. as much as it is that, Hey, it's a chain that's a four BC is Jim profitable, right? It's a chain actually, uh, has a sort of a commissive scale that will allow this chain to actually run itself. Um, it's as a way that, um, let's say for liquid fund tracers, they don't necessarily care about, um, all defectivity on L to say care about, okay, how many of these are, uh, loans, repayments, how many, how much people are swapping, uh, what is the piece that they take on the subs? and So to go back to the question specifically on, okay, how do we operate? We index data providers. is, uh, one of the main ones is that we try to now only do the extra. Um, let's say the last mile of indexing. Um, originally we were doing a lot more of the indexing in house and maintaining your own app, especially if you were very early on crypto. I think the feeling of your team doubling as an infrastructure teams resonates. Um, and I, I don't think that's the way applications should be built. Um, I think it's, it's a bit jarring if you're every, every single team out there has to maintain their own infrastructure. If every single team has to spin up their own notes, maintain their own indexer, make sure that they are, and beyond that, make sure that their own databases also don't go down, that their own APIs are reliable and such exact same thing with the chain development team. Um, I don't think every single chain development team should be building all of their own developer, um, experience ecosystem, right? Like they should very much be leveraging stuff that is open source. They should very much be, should be giving back to those tools as opposed to trying to create something complete, a new stack completely from scratch. Unless of course it does serve them a very specific purpose. Right? So we don't index data providers and they handle a lot of the very, what I guess what I call like raw data indexing. And then just by the sheer fact that we've worked primarily with simple hash and gold sky, um, as a simple hashtag, um, I think, how do you have them on the show? Actually, I think there will actually be, I can connect you with Ollie. I think he's, he's amazing as well, but they handle quite a bit of, um, empty data indexing, which is very much its own problem. Um, if you've chatted with a couple other empty Peter for reservoir on who deal with that. Yeah, no, it's, it's very much his own problem. I, I think a lot of people very much underestimated how much indexing a random JPEG on a chain. It was going to be like how much work was going to be to do it consistently.

Nicholas: Um, especially with all the, uh, metadata caching problems and shared contracts. Like the open seat contract is a nightmare.

Bunny: Yeah. Yeah. The open seat contract is one that not many people are actually really looking forward to work with or which is kind of funny. They have a lot of the raw data indexing and then our own index data solution.

Nicholas: Oh, go ahead. And they're looking for customers too. I mean, there's enough of them out there that they would be happy to provide services to somebody who's adding that contextual layer. that they're not going to do, especially for cross chain.

Bunny: Especially, especially for cross chain, especially from, from the standpoint that, you know, they, they very much just want to focus on NFT indexing is his own J like gigantic problem. Um, maybe they want someone else to do that. He's able to actually semantically tag some of their NFT actions that are specifically, let's say defy actions, right? Um, not every single NFT, some NFT sales are, there are more defy esque or let's say borrowing against your NFT. That feels a little bit, a little bit more defy than just as an quote unquote NFT action.

Nicholas: Right, right. So do you think that, um, maybe you can touch a little bit on how specifically search or maybe even like LLM inspired chat style interactions will affect the default way that we interact with blockchains. Do you, do you foresee a kind of movement away from, uh, protocol specific front ends towards something more like this search or chat style interface, or is that just an experiment and still figuring it out?

Bunny: So I think this is where I, I have my somewhat, uh, maybe not, not too controversial. I think some people have poised them, but I do think that there's, so one of the key things that, um, I don't think as many people in the critical system really comprehend is just how much brand has to say over the way that we use applications. And we think some goods and services in general, right? Like whenever someone starts thinking of a deck state, think first and foremost, unit swap, whenever now, whenever people think of, of an empty marketplace, now it's a little bit of a, Oh, okay. Who will it be? Will it be blur? Will it be, um, blur on top of blast? Will it be a open sea? Will it be Sora? There's very much this reflexivity into whatever the dominant app is, is the one that eventually grandfathers the UX for these interactions, right? Um, I do think, however, there's a very basic level of on-chain actions that any user can, that users should be able to find, find on a generalizable UX, right? Um, we don't necessarily go to, unless you're a power user of these tools, whenever we want to engage with a new type of ecosystem or a new type of goods and service, we go to a generalizable search engine to then find a bit more of a specific, um, solution for whatever good and service we want to engage on. Right. Uh, if you're looking for flights, maybe you and you're a power user, you go to Expedia, you go to Africa, Potter, I'm ready for that. I've already used that one, but, um, yeah, I guess there are a few, but you still begin your act, your primary search query on top of something like Google, right? Um, it's the same thing with, I believe that we're seeing a very similar future play out on the, these new cell twos L twos. Um, I don't know if I say whenever a new L2 launches, one of the first questions I see pop up in several chats is, Oh, what's the decks for this L2? And I don't think that certainly anyone, anyone particularly cares, um, as to what is like, who is the team deploying on a new L2 up until it is, uh, one of the key players for their specific, let's say, uh, niche in the case for Dexos, let's say someone like Uniswap actually deployed some, let's say scroll, right. Which was also a very big deal. Um, so there's a very, there's a set of very basic actions that I think people care are able to engage on in a general, generalizable UX. And that is very much where we want, where we are, position ourselves. I'd say, um, that's one. then two, when it comes to LLM inspire interfaces, I think something very fascinating is that even though, uh, over the past two or two years now, we've had a lot of competitors show, show off on Twitter by saying, Oh, we are an AI inspire, uh, search engine or Explorer and whatnot. And they've always had really nice designs. As to how their technology may work. Um, but then we, at least what we've seen in practice is just that people think it's a very cool idea and then they get no usage. Um, and I don't necessarily think that is, um, result of, Oh, the team is bad. The technology is really bad. You say, no, actually, the thing is it's all right. It's not, um, it's not like insane. Um, but you can very much get to the point of, Oh, people are familiar with, ux that already. people just want to find a simplified view of whatever happened on chain. they don't necessarily care that is powered by ai other than oh. that's a very cool thing to do right.

Nicholas: they just want the capabilities and so far the capabilities are pretty weak as far as anything i've tested yeah and they are not necessarily incredibly reliable.

Bunny: and that's also you know we're still early to those types of interfaces. in my opinion i think when it comes to um ai agents there is a world in which um um i remember chatting about this with a few people that were very pilled on the idea of oh everyone is going to start controlling their. everyone is going to give their private keys to a telegram bot right um i i think that uh that form of ux did have a. at some point you have like 12 percent of the volume over like one month or something of the sort. but um i don't know how that has sustained after that. um something that i do think it's a little bit more interesting is i'm actually being able to use ai agents for stuff that people truly just couldn't care any less about like let's say automating yield farming on a new l2 like. i think that type of stuff will be something straightforward um. but i think the ux of actually owning the user experience and walking down a user the path of hey do you want to register an ens? this is how you go about it. or do you want? you can either go to the ens application or you honestly by being able to. uh. but the ui that they created for registering their ens within the rainbow app it's i'm sure it's one of their most used uh apps actually sorry features.

Nicholas: they also rainbow app. it's i'm sure it's one of their most used uh apps actually sorry features.

Bunny: they also have a very nice cross-chain. uh swap ux. they they do now. yeah no it's it's quite nice now.

Nicholas: so so basically the lm uh future nothing uh nothing concrete yet but maybe influential for i mean it sounds like you're positioning or interested in positioning dora as um a convenient place to get to uh sensible defaults and survey information across chains. so for example that might be integrating different l2s and having you can also do it within. i think it is one of the most beautiful things that rainbow has done.

Bunny: rainbow app it's i'm sure it's one of their most used uh apps actually sorry features. they also sounds like you're positioning or interested in positioning dora as um a convenient place to get have a very nice cross-chain uh swap ux. they they do now. yeah no it's it's quite nice now. so so basically the lm uh future nothing uh nothing concrete yet but maybe influential for i mean it sounds like you're positioning or interested in positioning dora as um a convenient place to get have a very nice cross-chain uh swap ux. they they do now. yeah no it's it's quite nice now. so so have a very nice cross-chain uh swap ux. they they do now. yeah no it's it's quite nice now. so so basically the lm uh future nothing. uh nothing concrete yet but maybe influential for i mean it sounds like you're positioning or interested in positioning dora as um a convenient place to get. but that's primarily our own. um sorry our our main one right now. and yeah people still very much like to use sublock explorer not only as as a data insights tool. but i say hey can i check my wallet address? or hey you integrate this l2 that i'm very excited about. can i see my tokens there? can i see my different transactions there? um like that is very much where we've found a lot of our accidental i guess very needed product market fit. um that people very much care about a search tool as it pertains to themselves.

Nicholas: i guess it's also it's hard to know what is available in a search. you know google one knows that it kind of indexes web pages. so if you search information that will be on web pages google will probably have something. but it's not clear what a search uh block explorer with search would be able to surface or not be able to surface. and i guess one thing especially in block or blockchain application is the search is often limited to addresses and not uh sort of natural language inputs or even the titles of things you know open c. still it still feels like relatively at the front of the curve despite it not being that exciting of a feature just being able to search a collection's name for example or you know relative to like ether scan for example. i don't know if you search. if you put uniswap into ether scan i have no idea what comes up but i wouldn't trust it. i would prefer to specify there's a sense that like name collisions are unsafe in search contexts and blockchains.

Bunny: have you tried searching uniswap on dora?

Nicholas: i'm gonna try right now.

Bunny: yeah give it a. give it a try then tell me what you what you think of the uh of the results there.

Nicholas: okay so the first thing i get is swap action which i guess will take me to the swap application. uh would that make sense? uh yeah token names uniswap uniswap v3 governance rights uniswap v2. i mean i guess it's like what is the. you know i can imagine typing this in as as an alternative to typing in my own addresses to see but i'm not even sure like what what i'm. i guess the swap action is the one that makes the most sense because why why do i even care about searching uniswap for its contracts? it's not really relevant i don't. i don't know the addresses of the the router or the various tokens.

Bunny: yeah i think uh after this is very much where. when i realized no this is very much mental illness like i do know the uniswap we've had to interact with them so much. when it comes to oh there's this tiny bug that affects uniswap. but because it affects uniswap it affects every single dex fork that is uh that is out there in every single chain that we've integrated right. uh so now i now i know which ones are the units of smart contracts. but um i just i should point out yeah like there there is no reason why someone should be able to search everything on chain just to see it right. um if you want to look at smart contracts i think that there is a. there was a very exciting project that i'm so mad. it didn't play out but there was a smart contract specific search engine and i was so excited to actually integrate them within dora. i i really wanted to uh just tell them hey imagine if someone searches a smart contract or we didn't have the semantic label for it. uh what if you're able to actually search every single let's say within within the search engine itself search every single smart contract that contains these function links right. or give me a filter list of all of the different dexes that are forks of uniswap b2 across every single chain and we can reliably say hey the source code is the exact same say same like the bike rank by popularity on some other l2 or something.

Nicholas: i know there is code. i don't know how to pronounce it code slaw. i think it is code slaw.app that has something i don't know if it has search exactly um but also reminds me of um prior guest on the show backseats has this project contract reader and yeah i think he's working on i don't know. i've encouraged him to work on. uh making um you know kind of genius.com style annotation. let people like actually contribute to some kind of collective database of information auditing publicly audit you know you can imagine someone people i've done it myself but lots of people do these kind of twitter threads explaining how frentech or some other contract works but that information is ultimately lost to whatever. uh you know x.com dark patterns over time and it would be better if it was somewhere where people could build a reputation for doing public audits of things or just explaining how they function. at the very least uh and maybe that's kind of the problem like. if i search uniswap maybe i want to search. i want to swap i should say uh. but if i don't want to swap then you know seeing the contract is not that interesting. maybe i want to understand. i don't know which uh tokens are the most popular. you know which token pairs are the most popular or something like that.

Bunny: yes i think that is where that is where the differentiation between uniswap sorry uniswap uh search on dora and then dora data comes. um dora data is the. i like to joke that uh search on dora data is the most popular. token pair is the one that you is the the account that you want to crack a beer with and then dora data is the one that you sip on whiskey with. uh they have a very very refined infrastructure conversation about the future of uh multi the multi-chain ecosystem. but um yeah i think that being able to and actually i find that to be a very fascinating idea it would be very interesting if you had a youtube like interface for searching smart contracts and you have a lot of people just explaining you how the smart contract works um or even just publicly contributed docs back to the smart contract.

Nicholas: yeah i feel i feel often so much of the diligence of whether or not you should use something is based on even amongst intelligent knowledgeable people is based on what they read in some twitter thread. uh rather than looking at it themselves. so it would be good if at least there was some closer connection between those kinds of audits and the code itself or at least some kind of reddit style ranking system of those explanations maybe pointing out holes accumulating information in some place where people can actually find it. if there was that with the search on top of it then i might go search for uniswap and see. or as you say like you know some uh i don't know palm network. what's the dex on palm? well maybe i don't know but maybe dora can tell me exactly.

Bunny: yeah so that is where. so that is one of the you know. people often ask about the becoming the discoverability layer for different networks for webtree and whatnot. um i do think that just by the sheer way explorers apposition themselves as a single source of the the quote-unquote best source of truth for every single chain out there. um i do think that they serve that function that as a quintessential function right that uh to give validity back to the information being surfaced on the chain which is also a little bit silly because apparently explorer should be unopinionated. i think they should be very opinionated but yeah i think the um i'm saying. but there is one thing to point out on the on the concept of okay being able to surface a smart contracts out there like just a source code or just verify ability of whether or not you should use smart contract there. um the functional use case of that is for a developer. it's very possible much okay learning how the smart contract works right um and giving. can you give me the feedback on like? hey this is a very interesting optimization. safety here and there um like people make tweet uh towards threats on that. the very functional the very pragmatic use case for that for the consumer uh for just an everyday every user that doesn't necessarily want to try with um application too much. in the exact same way that when you go to a not so great website or when you go to a safe website google has this little lock thing to view site information right and if you look at your current are using chrome firefox any browser out there you are able to see that the lock that says hey this website is safe is so ubiquitous. that is very much not the centerpiece of the experience.

Nicholas: yeah i believe that i wonder how many people. i wonder how it really affects people. i mean can you trust it? i don't know. i mean i. yes it's like ssl or what have you? but like regular people have no idea. i guess you just notice if it has an x on it and rather than maybe i mean it's pretty easy for people. i remember there was a video when chrome first came out google hit the streets in new york and asked people what's a web browser something like that? and essentially nobody knows what a web browser is. they don't know the difference between search the address bar and the browser itself. it's a very foggy concept for lots of people. so i wonder how these ux things like the little lock really how much i mean? could it not just be in the top you know 40 pixels of the website and convince most people just as much?

Bunny: i wonder yeah no i think it's very much one of those things that um we have. um anyone that has ever got to rugged crypto will never trust that they just blindly ever again. right and sadly a lot of people have gotten rugged in crypto in various shapes and forms or economically i guess financially the concept of just giving people one key portion of actually being able to make a seamless interface for anyone to anyone truly anyone on the street like coming up to someone on no random industry because that'd be weird. but maybe like someone that you just met and telling them hey i'm not working on like oh what are you working on? and say oh this project is a search engine. look go go look search whatever you want right and giving them maybe in the exact. That's the way that Google did early on with the I'm feeling lucky button, giving them a few prompts as to, oh, you can search this thing, right? Having them click on that and then feeling, oh, I feel safe in this interface. I don't feel that I'm scared. I don't think something bad is going to happen to me. I don't think that if I want to start interacting with this application, I don't think anything wrong will stem from that, right? Being able to recreate that experience and instead of giving people reasons to doubt the user journey is something that is very undervalued, even though we do want verifiability without a centralizing entity. But the way in which, I don't know if we have just yet a decentralized entity that we can all trust other than, let's say, Ethereum, which is a little bit interesting. I think the introduction of Ethereum as an entity that we can all trust is still like that. That's supposed to be the. Cool, really reconceptualizing groundwork, world shattering realization of blockchains, right?

Nicholas: Yeah, actually, this this kind of leads to a separate question, and maybe we should talk a little bit about Femboy Capital, too. Can you explain what that is, how it came together?

Bunny: Sure. So Femboy Capital, actually, OK, really funny thing. Someone when we did our fun fundraise that we haven't announced just yet, but during Diligent, someone was asking me about Femboy something else. I don't. But it was a group that was in no way, shape or form linked to us. But there during their diligence, they were like, hey, we heard of like. this entity throws insane raves, like there's a lot of abuse of different substances. Are you partaking on that? And I was like, look, like. I actually have never heard the name that you just mentioned.

Nicholas: But if you have an invite.

Bunny: Yeah, exactly. But it's like. but these these sound insane. They sound crazy. Like and also your. this was after like, I don't know, like maybe like after three weeks of Diligent and they were like and bringing like this, this random organization that I had no idea of into it was just hilarious. It was very much a breeze, a breeze of fresh air, I guess, during Diligent. But but yeah, so how it came about, I honestly joined quite, quite late into it. And it was primarily a start. It was a start by quite a few tour anons. Amongst one of them, we actually hire eventually Nymph, Crypto Nymphy. I think her new handle is Rhizo Nymph or something of the sort. I remember she wanted to make a call out to Rhizo Nymph. She wanted to make a call out to to Rhizomatic Thinking and Deleuze and Guattari. Yeah, it just started as a collective of anons that are interested on on-chain stuff in general. No particular thing that we are all, how to say it. Yeah. Enticed by, but it was very much a research collective, this core people just hanging out there, chatting up a bunch.

Nicholas: What era did it get started in?

Bunny: I think it started early. Yeah. So like August, August 2018, I joined a little bit early 2019, so sorry, mid, like early 2020 to it. But yeah, no, they've been around for a bit.

Nicholas: And and so why did you join? What is it? I mean, is it like individuals who get deal flow for investments together? Or is there an institution itself as well?

Bunny: Oh, okay. So that is actually a little bit of the funny misconceptions about Femboy Capital. Femboy Capital was never supposed to be a proper investment fund thing. Femboy Capital is primarily just a research collective. At some point at the very end of it, I guess not at the end of it, but like at the end of the height of engagement within the the score, someone, some find out there did give an LP allocation. So some people to like a multi stake of some people that were part of Femboy Capital, so then that became a little bit more of, okay, let's allocate this to other people. But that was not necessarily the main focus of it. If anything, yeah, like it's not like a proper fund fund. It was just a, hey, it's just a silly name for this research collective.

Nicholas: But it does. I mean, you know, the reason I mention it aside from just because it's interesting and I'd love to hear more about it is just, you know, you sort of point about brand driving consumer behavior. But at the same time. There's very few legitimate decentralized institutions or organizations or entities of whatever type, you know, Bitcoin and Ethereum or something come to mind. and yet brand and obviously with the news recently of Blur's Blast L2 and, you know, reaching near parity or maybe by the time this comes out, exceeding the TVL of base, despite being just a multi-sig at this stage, you know, but at the same time, I feel people are critical of Blast for, you know, some very legitimate reasons. But also maybe. You missed the point, which is that there's some fantastic technology out there in like, for example, the ZK roll up space that has very little adoption, whereas what Blast is able to bring to the table is, is distribution, is publicity and engagement. And that's, I think, easy for technical purists to treat as pure Ponzi BS. But the fact of the matter is that if you can get people to pay attention and participate and even bridge to your project, then you're quite a bit further along in terms of actual adoption. And maybe some of the technical details. You can be sorted out later or improved upon over time, as long as you have that kind of active community of habitual users, which, which is really important. At the same time, you can take it too far and have, you know, something that is just pure brand and really has no substance underneath it, which ultimately either hurts a lot of people or disappears as, you know, the reality of its lack of substance is made apparent. So I'm curious if, you know, Femboy Capital seems to me like something where it does have this, you know, very strong brand. And very strong memetic distribution. So I'm curious, like, what is it that the researchers there, what is it that brought them together? Like, what is it about this meme that worked? And then what is the kind of substance of the research? Like, what, you know, what do people talk about?

Bunny: Yeah. So I think, I guess a really quick comment. I think when it comes to Blast, some people do forget about how quite a few of the very large projects in crypto did begin as a form of a fantasy. A whitelisting, right? Like a very fancy, no, sorry, no whitelisting, waitlist. Like, even until recently, there are a few very large projects out there that launched and they were essentially a glorified waitlist for the application that was quote unquote coming soon. But some people didn't seem to mind because apparently their yield was quite good, right? So there's that. Two, when it comes to the memetic power of institutions like this. I mean, capital and such, I think a lot of this is very much a implicit or in this case, a very explicit reputation system in which, and I was actually talking about this with a, with a friend of mine yesterday, Kwasi Muth.

Nicholas: Oh yeah, he's got a great Twitter account.

Bunny: Yeah, no, he's awesome. It's one of my closest friends, one of my best friends, actually. There's very few crypto projects that have been either stem or actually they don't necessarily need to stem from this inner circle of crypto, I guess, quote unquote influencers. Or early day crypto adopters. Or that eventually maybe the same genesis idea does stem out of this inner circle and then eventually find its way into the global crypto consciousness by being approved from this inner circle of crypto early adopters, developers, whales and whatnot to actually reflexively give meaning back to the project and give it its stomach. And then comes up and say, hey, your product does fit under the vision that we have for the larger EVM ecosystem. Right. So I do think there is a there is something that is missed when it comes to just make the inner circle of different applications, a proof of all different, honestly, tech stacks, a proof of your idea in the exact same way that every single company that was had a name, any form, form, of angel check by um by sama like it was. it was insane right like it's that's only pretty. an immediate goal for a lot of people. every single uh crypto application out there that has an angel check from vitalik is also an immediate goal for the broader ecosystem. um we're not i guess. adoption in the end um i think that it's more so a matter of how much they're able to market their product. of course right um that is one. and then when it comes to just address the question okay like what do people discuss? well in front of capital it was a lot of um just like hey day-to-day life like hey how are you doing? oh you're doing great awesome great glad to hear. and then the other one was like oh there's this new application i just launched. i think people are there's this hour of opportunity that just presented. uh because of the way they because of the way they uh their vm works because of the way uh the different indexes that are currently deployed on that application work. because they were able they're using this oracle provider this or other oracle provider. uh or oh liquidity seems low here. maybe um and this or sex just integrated. maybe if you're able to impact liquidity on this dex and then you will change significantly the equity on another dex. i i mean even cl like cat cat talk very openly about how early days crypto. uh you could very easily just place a couple of i guess test traits on some sexes out there um and measure how like the latency of price updates across every single sex and you were able to create this this matrix of okay you place let's say you go long on a perp on sex a and then you just long spot bitcoin on sex b. uh sorry on sex d and then you wait for b and c to get updated and that eventually creates this higher like beta move on sex d. so that kind of stuff we discussed or at least that that was just like that i was primarily interested on. because uh before um it's not something i talked about that much but before before joining crypto i was writing a quantitative ask um on the statistics portion of it and then eventually come my way into maybe a bunch of bankers coming up with my own tcds for like hey let's see if these kids work in of in public markets and they they socialenanute time or did seem to work and that eventually eventually i found my way to crypto through that fascinating.

Nicholas: so that's that's that's the kind of research that was uh drew you in.

Bunny: yes i very much was fascinated by the fund that i was running was very much based in market structure like completely zero care as to what you're actually trading. uh trading but truly caring about what is the net basis expression of oh there's all of these. um investment thesis there's all of these like investment practices. more probably theory tells you to uh have a balanced exposure to all the different factors. um let's say you create a multi. i i just realized that. uh also we're on a podcast. it's quite funny. i this feels more like a call. uh but uh which is nice it's very nice. actually i was a bit nervous. you were hopping on. but yeah yeah no it's very very reassuring. uh very very nice and easy. but um let's say getting the looking at multi-factor approach of how much liquidity is behind every single factor that people that motor portfolio theory dictates or i guess suggests such dictates a lot of very large institutions deploy their capital on see how much money is behind every single one of these factors and how much liquidity they will dry up out of every the resulting basket of um let's say equities stocks whatever and the results if you were to apply these different lenses of investments analysis right um. and then just looking at liquidity impact not looking at oh what is the valuation what is their thing what is the value of that? just looking at will be will a lot of people be buying or not? and at the only industry that at the time i thought were the only the only cohorts of people that were very honest about that were uh international finance were like market makers uh or like quantitative traders and such like or. but at a very a group that was incredibly honest about that well way beyond um traditional finance was uh crypto researchers and that is how i i met tarun actually from gauntlet and he's the one that eventually did get me to crypto because we were like hey i was like hey like market structure is crazy it's sick uh. and he was like have you heard of the uh decentralized market makers? i was like no what's that? and that's the uh. that's how it all uh played out well.

Nicholas: and uh just to finish up on femboy is femboy capital still active? are you still hanging around there? what's the status?

Bunny: i mean i think people uh from femboy capital are actively each other. um i think people are actively each other. um i think people are let's say like nymph. nymph works with us right and she's amazing. so in that sense we are active but we're not active as a collective. i believe the last post by was by suzuha and that was about it and now we just like reply to each other whenever we see each other out there.

Nicholas: um i'm curious if given your perspective with all the indexing context generation if you have any interesting insights you've observed about l2 adoption or what kinds of applications are popular or where user retention is and is not or how maybe chain data might violate some of the expectations of people who only really know what surfaced on twitter and aren't looking at the raw data. is there? is there anything underlying that you've noticed that's interesting to people?

Bunny: i think there's quite a few interesting things that were very overlooked with the thesis of let's have every single application be its own chain right amongst one of them let's say like they're the very existence of door data which we we haven't publicized too much as to like. okay what is the difference between? uh search on the run door data? um but door data stems out of the sheer need from a lot of institutions data analytics platforms and so on so forth that don't want to do their own indexing and just want a reliable contextualized data provider to go to them and tell them hey this l2 just popped up. do you have data on it? can you tell us what type of actions are happening there? and they don't necessarily want to look at a super technical tool or a tool an open source tool out there. that then they have to maintain themselves. uh traditionally people were more okay with that because a lot of investment funds are intelligence. uh arms of um different. um i guess production production houses like other like anyone producing intelligence reporting swear more okay with hiring heavy infrastructure people to run these things in-house. uh so i think that's a really important thing to look at and i think now it's more so. uh hey do you have a proper vendor for this data? right? and now we're getting into finally a little bit more of the data brokers side of uh development as a as a whole tech tech industry. sorry as a whole uh part of the uh tech sub-niche in which people are finally becoming data vendors people are finally getting to realize okay you don't. maybe there's the appropriate proxy for measuring success of an l2 is not how much money was breached but how much money is actively getting used after you've done that. so i think that's a really important thing to bridged and the big player of the grid is being breached right like maybe tools like like. right now we have d5 d5 llama and l2 beats for defy tbl and just like bridge cbl. but maybe there's a bit of more nuance that people want out of that right. uh like being able to look at um you can very clearly tell which actions on a chain are bought in and which ones are not. and i think um a very So. we generate these profile pics for every single user, for every single EVM address out there, right? You can see when, you can very easily tell whenever it's a power user just like moving size and whenever it's the exact same bot engaging with the exact same smart contract out there.

Nicholas: So there's basically a lot more, because I experienced this when looking at the L2s or, you know, I spent some time looking at NFT applications that live across chains. And, you know, it's always like some out of date Dune dash that maybe it's a bit dubious whether or not it's accurate. And there's really not, it doesn't seem, even though all this open data, it doesn't seem like there's really been a successful, you know, you just, you search on Dune and you see what you can find. And maybe there's something that was updated three months ago or eight months ago, or is actually kept up to date by someone who's paid a salary to create it. But it's always a little bit unclear. It's unclear if what you're looking at is really quality data. And then oftentimes the way that it's framed in the analysis that they provide in their charts and graphs is maybe suboptimal. Like I was looking at something earlier about Zora protocol rewards, for example, and they have a very nice, one of the most sort of actively maintained looking dashes that I've seen recently. However, it breaks things down by week. There's no daily view in the dashboards. And so you get a little, or, you know, they don't maybe break it down by the referrers in the way that I would be curious to understand. Or I was trying to see how Mint.fun is doing and the Mint.fun dashboard is not very informative. So there is this, I wonder if that's something that you think the Dora consumer product would ever face, or is that something even that maybe the more intelligence product would try to solve for?

Bunny: So we have, I can give you a sneak peek that we have, how to say it, light analytics on Dora have been achieved internally. We are achieving it sometime very soon. But as I, as the name suggests, it's not a big deal. But as I mentioned, it's very light. We don't necessarily want to be a Dune competitor. There is one thing that we point out that there's a lot of, you can easily tell which applications out there were built with the multi-chain feature in mind and which ones were not, right? Like, I don't, this is not, not to speak ill of Dune. I find Dune fascinating. I think it's an amazing product, but their infrastructure was not built to integrate a chain a day. Right. And there's many applications out there that were not built for that. Who would have thought that we will have many. Since there's so many Ethereums popping up everywhere, all with different, uh, optimizations for their one specific use case. Like I didn't think that was going to be a thing when I joined, I, I feel like, I feel like when I, when I joined, I was like, okay, I can see how that may happen, but I don't necessarily think that would be the, like, I wasn't sold on it. Um, after a few months. then I was like, okay, no, I think this needs to happen. Um, especially as soon as finding out about Celestea barrier, I'll be honest as well. So give me one second. Go ahead. Yeah, sure.

Nicholas: Yeah, no, I was just gonna ask a more general question. So how many people are working on Dora these days?

Bunny: Now we, we just hired one more person. Now we're around like 10 people. Hmm.

Nicholas: Nice. And yeah, I guess I, I'm curious. just more generally, what are you excited about right now? What's, uh, what's sort of keeping you up at night related to crypto?

Bunny: So there's quite a few projects, uh, related to crypto. So I, I'm, I try to be very intentional of actually developing features that, uh, into Dora and also pushing for infrastructure that will eventually get. Lead to more users, not only on Dora, but on a net basis to on-chain stuff in general, right? A few things that keep me up at night on that end. One of them is honestly just unification of multi-chain accounts. I think even though it's a very somewhat niche infrastructure thing, uh, not too niche because we have a lot of wallets out there, but there are a lot of discussions amongst like, oh, it's technically yes. Every single time you create an EVM address, that address gets some luck across every single EVM out there, uh, with some exceptions and such. But, uh, it's still technically one EVM address on chain A is different from EVM, exact same EVM address on chain B. And technically what, uh, what those two together are is just a cross-chain account instead of an address itself. But still being able to get that UX right very much keeps me up at night, especially because we are going to, we're giving it our own go at how to do that, uh, in a few, not even a few weeks, but in a few days, uh, depending on how much our, our, our products are. Our engineer is able to pump out that feature. Um, but yeah, we're giving it a go on that, um, to, I think on ramps, off ramps kept me up at night for a while, but then after seeing freebie actually coming to fruition, I feel a lot more safe on that. Uh, I feel a lot more, uh, reassured on like, okay, this is going to be a no brainer. Right. Um, so, um, my major, uh, quite frankly, my major, one of my major concerns on Dora was okay. I like I. I've shown. I've shown Dora to quite a few users that, uh, had no idea what crypto was about. And they've actually become like, they become recurring users, uh, which I was quite happy about. I will say, okay, that I thought they weren't just being nice at first. Right. Um, like when you show them, you show someone what you're working on, they're like, oh, this is nice. And then they, they text you like weeks after. And then they're like, Hey, like I saw this thing happening. Like, uh, on Dora, like, uh, like if it's working, if it's not working, they're like, oh, wow, you're still using the app. So, but one of my major concerns was okay. We can put every single bit of a suit of essential actions on, on Dora. But how do people actually get to take them? Like where do they own ramp? I think that, um, having something like previous is a very much something that makes it a lot more simple, right? How do they actually get to have any funds on chain and even beyond that, create any semblance of an account on chain? Um, that's two, I guess. And then the third one is the, honestly, the, the actual portions of it. Which is something that, um, I do. ultimately, I guess, uh, can, do you want to guess how many searches there are across search engines in the world every single month?

Nicholas: Across all search engines in the world? Yeah. Uh, how many times, so how many times people hit enter people or search, whatever tap the search button?

Bunny: Yes. Yes.

Nicholas: Oh, that's a great question. Um, let's say there's about 5 billion people with a phone. They're all searching. Maybe on Apple. On average, let's say three, five, 10, maybe five times a day on average, 10 times a day on average. I don't know. Let's say, or you said per month.

Bunny: Per month. Yeah.

Nicholas: So what is that? 15 or 1 trillion, 500 billion. Is that possible?

Bunny: So there's a, there it's closer to like, at least across some of your search engines. Um, there's like 36 billion searches month on a monthly basis.

Nicholas: Oh, that doesn't seem so bad.

Bunny: It doesn't seem so bad. Yeah. Um, I think, I think it's actually really, really nice that you gave a, that you were one of the first people to point out that, okay, there's these many people with phones. Right. Um, I think something a little bit funny is that not everyone with a phone actually uses the phones that they have on a daily basis as well.

Nicholas: Or they might not search that much. Yeah.

Bunny: They might not search that much, as much as they just use the applications. But the average person does search like 2.5 times a day, which is also funny because it's like, how do you search half a time? Right. But, um, but, uh, half a search, I guess, maybe type ahead. Um, but out of those 36 billion searches on a monthly basis, um, by the way, just, just, just to be transparent, this number differs a lot on depending on who you ask. I think that the data for this is not public, so it'd be silly as well. Right. Um, yeah. But, um, out of those, all of those searches, how many do you think actually end up in economic action?

Nicholas: Does viewing something, does viewing, you mean something where they, they pay money, the person searching pays for something directly?

Bunny: Okay. So very good, uh, nuance there. So an economic action, we mean by any type, sort of form of like someone searching for something and then engaging in economic action within the browser, or then going to the place that they just searched to engage in economic action. So let's say you search for coffee, you buy coffee through your browser, or you go to a coffee shop. Okay.

Nicholas: So I guess the amount of SEO farmed, uh, search results would suggest that quite a few of those, uh, searches result in purchase actions, such that it's worth doing all the SEO spam blog posts. Um, but I wonder, I mean, a lot are also like, I don't know, some kids searching something in TikTok and then watching a TikTok. Maybe they're not gonna, they're not gonna transact, but maybe they do generate a view, which generates some kind of creator revenue potentially. I'm not sure. But you're saying what percentage are leading to like actual conversions? Yeah. Of some kind? Yeah. I don't know. Maybe, maybe 10%? Wow. That's a lot.

Bunny: It is a lot. It's an insane number. And I think, um, it's something very overlooked, especially when it comes to the fact that the search engine is not the one particularly capturing that economic action that occurs through its browser. The only way that they capture it right now is, as you pointed out, um, some firms capture it through SEO, some other firms capture it through marketing. Um, on Indora, we don't have that. We don't necessarily, we, we often get, get asked about this. Uh, are you gonna put ads on Dora? Uh, I can tell you that after speaking with quite a few, uh, blog explorers out there, like the, the big ones, uh, they are all, they all admit that marketing revenue for blog explorers is tiny. Even though they may get users, even though people may look into it, um, no one clicks on it. Like when is the last time that you've. Like ads. Like ads. Ads. No one really clicks on an ad on a blog explorer. Oh yeah.

Nicholas: I, I, you block, uh, removed the element from ether scan sometime in 2020. Yeah. Yeah.

Bunny: Um, I, um, I haven't seen an ad on a lot of pages because I have my ad blocker up and that, that is not to be anti-ad. I, I very much think that some ads are actually useful. Right. Um, but the, um, something that I do find a little bit fascinating is the idea that you don't want to necessarily, you don't want to necessarily capture economic activity just by. Uh, referrals, but it might be more interesting if you are actually able to capture some of that economic activity by allowing people to partake on the good and service. They just so happy to be searching on.

Nicholas: Mm-hmm. Something more like metamask swaps.

Bunny: Uh, metamask swaps, but also I think, so something that I tried really hard to do is to not necessarily go back to, okay, this is an implementation that exists in this application today. Right. But also just thinking, think of it as. Imagine if you were able to actually search your coffee within Google and then just buy it through Google in just one simple click, uh, without having to download the Starbucks application without having to download anything, just being able to, there's a shopping section on Google now. Right. And that's, of course, like people still go to an ad, um, the specific aggregator for direction that they were looking for. But if we see the world actually coming on chain, like if we truly internalize what it means to have every single industry beyond finance arts, uh, any. And I see it's any form of IP generation. Uh, industry, which is quite frankly, most industries out there. Um, if we see them come on chain, imagine just the platitude of good and services that we can, that people are gonna be searching for. And I don't think even a tool like Google is properly built to contextualize that information. And even more like they're not built to actually let you engage with that information in a way that they actually facilitate a transaction.

Nicholas: Right. Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, I see people moving there. At least the, the, the, the rumor is I don't have data backing it up, but that people like, uh, the, the youngest generation of internet users are doing their search primarily inside of YouTube and especially TikTok. And not resorting to Google at all, which is interesting. It is interesting.

Bunny: I think it's, I think, uh, the disintermediation of search engines is something that is a little bit is out there as well. Um, I, I do know some people that are very much like, oh, I don't use a search engine. I just only use a, um, how to say it. I only use chat GPT and such. Um, we'll see if that plays out over the long run. Um, I don't know if the text chatbot interface is something that people resonate with. I, I guess that engagement number says that they do, uh, engagement numbers with posts about them says they do. engagement numbers with the features themselves says that they don't. And that's also a little bit interesting, you know, for itself. But yeah, I guess we'll, we'll see how people, how comfortable do people feel actually searching for, you know, maybe you, you're searching for an application on Google and you're like, okay. Um, I don't know. if like, would you go on Google to search swaps on L2 that, uh, a random L2 that just launched? Maybe not. Right. Maybe, maybe you'll first learn about the L2, then go on Twitter, then go on their discord, then go on their docs, see who they're working with and whatnot. Um, imagine being as simple as searching the network. That just launched or having even a banner on the search engine that you use every day, or one of the applications that you use every day saying like, we just integrated this, this chain, uh, come check it out. And yeah, you get into the chain, uh, main network interface, and then you're able to engage with as many applications as you want there.

Nicholas: Right. Um, you mentioned that you have, uh, recently or closing, uh, uh, funding round. I don't know if there's anything you can say about that.

Bunny: We, we are, we're quite quiet about it. Right. So what we can say is that up to, up to now, like on early stage funding, we've raised 5.5 mil. Um, I think people are still very much interested on, uh, on the vision of, okay, what, what if a block explorer, it sounds a bit silly, but what if a block explorer actually cared about mass adoption instead of just, uh, power users? Right. Which I think makes sense. Like, um, I think it's a little bit, uh, you know, I, I often made fun of, uh, how to say it? What is this word? Oh, contrarians. At least, uh. Uh, within traditional finance, you don't necessarily see contrarians playing out really well. You see contrarians that's actually lagging, whatever major missing out on the main biggest trend out there. But there is a truth to sometimes we just gotta really think as to whether or not the tech tree or the user journey tree that we're on is actually the right one. Mm-hmm.

Nicholas: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Interesting. Well, I'm, I'm looking forward to seeing how it plays out. I I've reached the end of my list of questions. Is there anything that we should talk about related to Dora or crypto or the state of affairs? Or what you're interested in? Anything that we left out that you think we should cover?

Bunny: Um, let me think. Um, actually, I guess I, I wonder, okay, I guess I have two questions. One, out of every single, um, people that you've had on the shows, every single one of their projects, how many of them do you think are truly set up to handle? I don't know. Let's say one. And I know this, that sounds like maybe like a bit of a high number. Some people may say like a thousand, 10,000, whatever. Right. Um, but how many projects do you think are, are set up to handle that many chains?

Nicholas: A million chains, you said?

Bunny: Uh, maybe let's start with a hundred, honestly.

Nicholas: Um, I think there are, it's hard to think in aggregate. Not everybody is maybe thinking that way exactly. But, um, I talked to the most recent episode to drop was a first mate who do, uh, create her own secondaries and they rely on.

Bunny: Yeah.

Nicholas: Yeah. They're great. It was a great conversation too. And it reminds me, they rely a lot on reservoir. Peter was on the show previously. I think both of those are very set up for spinning up chains. And I think the way first mate described it was, uh, Jacob says, you know, whenever, when somebody asks for it, that's when we do it. But as long as it's kind of a one, one EVM equivalent chain, it's, it's actually quite easy. Other recent guests have been very involved in, uh, AA, uh, infrastructure, uh, by economy, um, a lot of wallet providers, capsule others. And I think for those people, I'm not sure there's, there's a big question in that world about cross domain pass key based signers on AA wallets and, or AA accounts. And actually I was interacting with, uh, Pedro Gomez recently about this because he feels that, um, if the account is on a different chain, then it's a completely separate account, which I think in a lot of ways is technically a hundred percent accurate. Uh, and that we shouldn't rely on. Being able to deploy the same smart contract account to, to the same address on different chains because of differences between the chains and differences between the, uh, deployers, maybe there will be computing there, create two address differently. And so you can't rely on the address being the same, but it kind of draws into question what the sort of, uh, benefits of having a smart contract account in a cross chain world are, if every single chain is going to be managed, you know, the state of its permissions and even the address to which it's deployed is completely different. Um, yeah. If they're just sharing a signer. So it's sort of, uh, cuts into the kind of cross chain UX improvement that some of this smart contract account thinking at 437 thinking has been pushing towards. So I think the group of people who are building today who are more this class of 2021 or later are very all in on the multi-chain future, but it seems like the UX still has a lot to be figured out. And as far as I can tell, I think personally that there's going to be a big difference between applications that attempt to be, for example, wallets that are really cross-chain compatible and surface, you know, maybe aggregate your ETH across all these different chains into like a single line item in your portfolio. And then I think there's going to be on the other end of the spectrum applications that really hide the fact that you're on a specific chain at all. And your experience lives entirely on one app chain or some L2. But you don't really have to. Think about the like FriendPet, for example, comes to mind or FriendTech or any of these where, you know, cross-chain is not really a factor. It's the application lives on a specific chain. And so they don't need to do things like aggregate ETH across different chains. So for them, maybe they don't need to, you know, deal with a thousand chains all at the same time.

Bunny: Yeah, no, I think that is honestly one of the particularly interesting things, whether or not the chain UX, if the a thousand chains thesis plays out in such a way that every single application, It's a user journey for their specific chain and they don't have to care about every other chain out there. But then there's also the question of does that also imply that this application also doubles as an infrastructure piece or has an infrastructure writer that does have to care about being able to support one thousand chains? Right. I think there is a there is a bit of a differentiator there. And also I saw the thread, by the way, on a day you had with Pedro Gomez, right? It was interesting. I think it was also interesting. I think it was also interesting because I was just chatting about the exact same thing with someone else one day before on Slack and because we were going to make we were going to make an announcement. And someone was like, wait, can we actually say that every single EVM address is the exact same one across every single chain? And I was like, depends on who you ask, especially when it comes to smart contract wallet addresses. Yeah, that's one. Yeah, that was honestly my my major question, like which ones, which infrastructure providers do you think? I think our position out there to actually handle integrating 100 chains next year and which ones are, yeah, which ones are not. I think we'll see something interesting.

Nicholas: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I kind of wonder, I think as long as you're able to transact, that will be the difference. Like if I let's say I let's say there's some new privy based app that's on some chain. I don't even care which chain, maybe a chain that doesn't even exist yet. As long as I can play and have fun. And I mean, I think the biggest. The biggest reason is, you know, get some kind of financial upside. I think that's what motivates people most frequently. And then take that financial upside and exit it to somewhere where I feel more comfortable. Maybe that's L1, maybe it's Polygon or Optimism or some sort of more base, maybe even some chain that I spend more time interacting on that. I'm not sure that I need like universal access from a single entry point wallet on all these different chains. If the experiences are self-contained, then as long as I can. Exit to somewhere where I spend more time or feel more comfortable or a cold wallet or something, then I think that's, that's okay. So I wonder if everybody is going to need to be as maximally multi-chain as possible, but certainly the infrastructure providers, you know, the indexers, the like NFT secondary aggregators like Reservoir, I feel those, it is, it does seem like the scale of L2 proliferation through EVM equivalents will just further magnify EVM dominance. Yeah. Because it is just, you know, I see, I see like you have Palm integrated on Dora, but Palm is a different VM, correct? Or it's, it's at least it's not one, one EVM equivalent.

Bunny: So I think I like to segment EVMs by whether or not they're using now, at least they're using Opstack, Arbitrum, Orbit, or they're using Polygon CDK. The Palm right now, up until recently, it was based on Hyperledger Basis by ConsenSys. Now they've actually migrated their chain into Polygon CDK. Specifically, they migrated to, oh my God. I'm going to blank on the name Hermes, but they're transitioning into Polygon CKVM later on as well. So they're doing technically two migrations, but it's still part of the, we actually helped with the migration a little bit as well.

Nicholas: Primarily led by- But going forward, if they were coming, if they came out today, it would be harder to convince you to integrate them, I imagine, than some existing EVM, you know, some L2 EVM.

Bunny: If they came out today as a Polygon CKVM or as Hyperledger Basis?

Nicholas: Even just as anything that isn't an EVM. Like I presume that there's going to just be- There's going to be so much more easy adoption of things that are shipping 1.1 EVM equivalents in terms of getting distribution to the infrastructure providers that it will just encourage more and more people to go that way. I don't think that the long-term EVM equivalents is going to be the dominant thing, but at least in the short term with this proliferation of L2s, convincing, you know, some kind of app like DORA to support something like ZK, Polygon ZK, there better be a grant or something behind it, right?

Bunny: So from their standpoint, I think- I try to think of infrastructure as being very much the enabler of, the reflexive enabler of future technology, right? Which I guess is a bit self-describing when it comes to laying down the infrastructure for the future to be built on top of it. But yeah, I think, I'll put it this way. We're chatting with a few chains that are non-EVM equivalent to actually build a block explorer for them because they also care about- They're now starting to think about the, oh, we're not getting too many users. How do we actually go about solving this? How- Who do we know that has a strong relationship with the user, is actually able to tell them to, let's say, help them, even help localize on-chain data? We have DORA in English, Spanish, Korean, and also Mandarin. And some people care about that. Some people care about how they are actually able to distribute their networks across not only infrastructure, but just to their users, right? So yes, there may be some economic incentives to integrate some non-EVM chains out there, as well as the EVM ones. But definitely, of course, it becomes a no-brainer if it's an EVM chain out there. And that's just purely because there's so much infrastructure has been built for us there already. And we're incredibly familiar with the infrastructure, right? And when it comes to every single role out there, we're also familiar with- Again, we put it on our website as well. We work with Optimism, Arbitrum, and Polygon specifically on their SDKs, right? Like, whatever SDK you use, if it was written by them, by these three entities, we'll- We'll integrate it in, like, a few hours. Right. Yeah. So we'll see whether or not a couple other SDKs are there. I know of a few that are making a big push, especially on the roll-up offering. We'll see when they announce it, maybe in, like, Q1, of whether or not they'll actually be able to hold enough of the- How do I say it? Of the developer mindshare to actually add support for it, and then eventually allow more developers to actually develop applications on top of them.

Nicholas: Mm-hmm. Well, this is- This has been a great conversation, very wide-ranging, and exciting to hear about all the DORA, especially the differentiation between the consumer-focused stuff as well as the insights that you'll be selling to other kinds of consumers, more B2B kind of consumers. It's interesting to see the project evolving over time, and I'm excited to hear about your fundraising announcement whenever that does come out.

Bunny: You know, we've gone now to fundraisers that we haven't announced.

Nicholas: Oh, really? Wow, okay.

Bunny: Yeah, no, I think- Yeah, no, we have backlog for various reasons. Amongst one of them, for better or for worse, just perfectionism. I don't want to tell people, hey, we raised for this product, but it's still a bit early days. But I feel like maybe, you know, I think people are very understanding of that in crypto. Like, no one really cares if you have, like, a few bucks, right?

Nicholas: But I do think- And also, fundraising shouldn't really be that relevant to the success of a product. It seems like, for some people, the reputational boost of certain kinds of investors can be legitimizing for speculative purposes. But overall, I mean, who cares who put money into something? It's whether the thing is interesting or not that counts.

Bunny: Exactly. But if I can speak to usage numbers, one of our biggest spikes on usage was when we announced support for a chain. And this chain had a lot of clout. And then we got to the point that actually Estella was like, why do we have so many of these AWS instances spun up just all of a sudden? And our API lead, Rachel, was like- It was like, just auto-scaling. Like, we're just getting a lot more searches right now. And then she was like, oh, okay. But it was a little bit scary. It was like, okay, nothing broke. Okay, that's awesome. But also, wow, this was a lot more users than we were anticipating right now.

Nicholas: I guess the challenge then is to sort of retain those people.

Bunny: We retain quite a few of them. And I think it's a bit interesting that a multi-chain block explorer is also a proxy of every single- The usage of it is also a proxy of- Of just activity on a chain, right? And the popularity. Yeah. Especially when it comes to a few of the chains that we integrate out there that didn't have as much buy-in immediately from other applications. We become a very good proxy of, okay, what are people actually searching for? And what kind of interactions people may want to engage on or have engaged on, right? Yeah.

Nicholas: Awesome. Bunny, thank you so much for coming and chatting today. This was a great conversation. And it's great to get to know you a little bit better.

Bunny: Yeah, no, great to know. And getting to know you too as well. Hopefully we can chat some other time. Hope you have a wonderful-.

Nicholas: Maybe in the future when there's new products or something from Dora, it'd be great to get to know you back.

Bunny: Yeah, of course. Always happy to chat. Awesome. Have a good one. Awesome.

Nicholas: You too. Thank you. And thank you everybody for coming to listen. See you next week. Same time, same place. All right. Bye-bye.

Bunny: Bye-bye. Cheers.

Nicholas: Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of Web3 Galaxy Brain. To keep up with everything Web3, follow me on Twitter at Nicholas with four leading Ns. You can find links to the topics discussed on Twitter. Today's episode in the show notes. Podcast feed links are available at web3galaxybrain.com. Web3 Galaxy Brain airs live most Friday afternoons at 5 p.m. Eastern time, 2200 UTC on Twitter spaces. I look forward to seeing you there.