December 8, 2025 • 62 mins
Summary
In this conversation, Jim discusses his journey with Catalyst Systems, the challenges of interoperability in the crypto space, and the importance of customer development. He reflects on the ease of launching Layer 2 solutions, the need for differentiation, and the pivot towards focusing on alternative virtual machines (VMs) to better serve the market. Jim emphasizes the significance of understanding user needs and building products that cater to a broader audience rather than just the crypto enthusiasts. In this conversation, Jim discusses the evolution of Catalyst and its rebranding to focus on alt-VMs, the importance of storytelling in product development, and the personal journey of vulnerability as a founder. He shares insights on the acquisition of Catalyst by LiFi, the dynamics of customer segments in interoperability protocols, and the future directions for both Catalyst and LiFi.
Takeaways
Jim's journey with Catalyst Systems began with a focus on interoperability.
The ease of launching Layer 2 solutions has led to market noise.
Customer development is crucial for understanding user needs.
Building for the lay person can lead to significant market opportunities.
The pivot towards alternative VMs was driven by market research.
Interoperability is often perceived as a solved problem in EVM chains.
Differentiation in the crypto space is challenging due to similar offerings.
Jim emphasizes the importance of self-reflection in entrepreneurship.
The Karen and Darrell effect highlights the gap between enthusiasts and general users.
Understanding the broader market context is essential for product development. The rebranding of Catalyst was essential for market differentiation.
The journey to alt-VMs involved significant learning and adaptation.
Storytelling is a critical component in product marketing and growth.
Vulnerability as a founder can enhance personal and brand authenticity.
The acquisition by LiFi was a strategic move that leveraged Catalyst's strengths.
Understanding customer segments is vital for product success in interoperability.
The future of Catalyst involves innovative solutions for cross-chain connections.
Jim's mindset evolved from a purely intellectual founder to a more pragmatic one.
The importance of community in transitioning to a new brand.
The integration of Catalyst into LiFi aims to solve significant industry challenges.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Jim and LiFi Protocol
01:55 The Journey of Catalyst Systems
05:46 Differentiation in Interoperability
09:54 Market Insights on Layer 2 Launches
13:56 The Shift in Focus for Catalyst
18:08 Customer Development and Market Research
22:13 Building for the Lay Person
25:53 The Pivot to Alt VMs
32:30 Rebranding and Market Positioning
34:49 The Journey to Alt-VMs
39:00 The Importance of Storytelling in Product Development
43:40 Navigating Vulnerability as a Founder
44:10 The Acquisition of Catalyst by LiFi
50:15 Understanding Customer Segments in Interoperability
57:54 Future Directions for Catalyst and LiFi
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See other Episodes Here. And thank you to all our crypto and blockchain guests.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome Jim with LiFi Protocol.
How are you?
I'm good, I'm good.
Thanks for having me on.
Yeah, we were talking before we hit record, hearing the LiFi protocol has got to be kindof surprising, right?
Kind of new.
Yeah.
time ever anyone's introduced me that way.
(00:22):
I'm so used to being called Jim from Catalyst or something of the sort.
Well, we'll definitely talk about the acquisition and the steps that led to that, becausethat's quite exciting.
We don't hear a lot of acquisitions within the crypto space.
And so we'd love to spend some time talking about that to the extent you're willing to andwhat you can talk about.
(00:45):
But.
I'm an open book, so happy to share as much as I can into my lawyers yell at me.
Awesome.
I'm excited about this conversation because you, think, as an entrepreneur, you bringquite a bit of a different point of view, I think, than probably a lot of entrepreneurs.
(01:07):
You spend a lot of time really talking to customers, learning about the market, kind ofthe actual needs of the market, as well as kind of like the...
pluses and minuses of the competitors in the space, especially in the interoperabilityspace, where you spend your time.
And you also bring a level of, I think, clearheadedness that I think a lot ofentrepreneurs get very narrow, which is a positive on the one hand.
(01:36):
On the other hand, they kind of get caught in their echo chamber, whereas you found a wayto kind of escape the echo chamber.
And so I want to spend time on that too.
But if we could go backwards, you announced the acquisition of Catalyst systems by Li-Fi acouple of, I think like two weeks ago, or was it last week?
(01:57):
But I'd love to, two weeks ago, I'd love to go back to the beginning.
Like what inspired you to start Catalyst and the initial focus?
And then I want to spend some time from a post that you wrote on X around October.
and how you guys kind of made a change in kind of your business approach as you learn moreabout the market.
(02:21):
Yeah.
So I'll probably give you a different answer than I've given in all of my previousinterviews, I would say for why starting Catalyst.
So I would say like the, and I think this is a function of me not being a founder anymore.
So I can be slightly more candid and honest about the whole journey, but I would say likethe, founder friendly or the narrative friendly.
(02:48):
Story, which is still true, right?
It's just kind of selective storytelling was that I worked at Ave as their head of newproducts.
And so I was a PM there.
And one of the things that I was in charge of was building Ave chain or rather a series ofchains for Go, their stable coin for Ave, the lending protocol.
(03:11):
then for Lens as well, which is their Web3 decentralized social media platform.
And this was back in 2022 when a lot of these infrastructure projects actually weren'tlive yet.
So there wasn't anything called OPS stack or there wasn't anything known as rollup as aservice.
basically just forked a bunch of stuff to build this new chain as a proof of concept.
(03:35):
And in that I realized that it's actually kind of easy to build a chain.
I think the really hard part is what comes afterwards, right?
What do you do after you click the button?
How do you actually get people that go on there?
And we ended up sun setting or rather pausing the project because of the issues ofconnecting to different chains and getting existing Aave users to that chain.
(04:00):
so that was kind of the aha moment, so to speak.
What I don't share publicly was that that wasn't the reason why I became a founder.
That was just the reason why I wanted to work in interoperability.
And so I left Ave wanting to work in interoperability.
I just wanted to be a PM to work at any major interoperability protocol, whether it belayer zero or wormhole or hyperlain, cetera.
(04:27):
And after the interview process, I was actually really fortunate enough to receive a fewoffers within leading organizations in this space.
And I did kind of a audit of my career and realized that being a PM was just.
doing what I'd already known how to do at Aave and previously at other product roles thatI've had in my career again and again.
(04:51):
Right.
And so the actual functional learnings weren't really there.
Surely there was a lot of domain specific learnings, but not a lot of actual functionallearnings.
And so I wanted to do more than being a PM.
And that's where being a founder,piqued my interest and I decided to take a leap after a series of conversations and of
course meeting my co-founder Alexander along the way.
(05:17):
That's really cool that you had that level of self-reflection that, where should you gonext to help you kind of maximize your learning?
Because you felt like you had learned kind of what you needed to know, at least within theproduct management role.
Now, as you kind of evolved into an entrepreneur and you decided that interoperability wasthe space that you wanted to approach, interoperability is a big kind of word.
(05:44):
And I've interviewed multiple projects already.
I met with Polyhedra last week, Hyperlane a couple of months ago with Axeler, with Sergeyand other kind of cross messaging protocols within the interoperability space.
Catalyst is unique and at least in the beginning, it wasn't necessarily a, it wasn't justa bridge.
(06:10):
There was quite a bit of kind of a differentiation.
Could you maybe talk about, kind of at the beginning, like what the key differentiatorswere and then we can go into the October X-post and how you guys pivoted.
Yeah.
So every new company ideally starts with an insight and an insight is kind of like asecret that you believe to be true, that no one else believes to be true.
(06:39):
And that's kind of the core foundation of how to fundraise for a company, right?
Whether it be in crypto or, or beyond.
And so my insight came from working at Aave.
Where I realized that it was just going to become easier and easier to launch a rollupusing all of these, you know, frameworks that ultimately became these RAS frameworks or
(07:05):
rollup frameworks that we know today.
And there was going to be a huge proliferation of chains.
And now that's of course consensus.
We've had two and a half years plus of a lot of chains being launched.
almost ad nauseum to the point of disgust or at least lethargy from the market.
(07:27):
Uh, but at the time it was incredibly novel, right?
And so what I set out to do was to build a product that solved that issue.
And so I'd like to think that my insight was correct.
It was just a bit of an exploratory journey to identify exactly what the solution for thatproblem would be.
(07:49):
And so our initial iteration for that was an AMM product that basically allowed forindividual pools and different chains to be connected together so that you can swap
between them.
so conceptually really similar to star gate, but built for long tail chains.
so again, the problem that we're trying to solve is lots of chains, easy to launch a chainas in my experience at Aave.
(08:15):
How do you actually connect all these chains?
When after you launched them.
Right.
And so for us, our solution was to basically have an AMM contract that allowed this rollup team to deposit any asset they wanted and to connect to any other pool within the
catalyst network, whether it be on another long tail chain or on a hub like base, or, uh,we also dabbled within the cosmos ecosystem.
(08:39):
So Cosmos hub or osmosis that was basically the initial build.
Which on paper, I think made a lot of sense, but in production we ran into a number ofroadblocks, which I'm happy to talk about.
You mentioned RAS, which is Roll Up as a Service Provider.
Having been involved in a couple of Layer 2 deployments, one thing that's been reallysurprising for me, and this is the insight that you described that you came upon a couple
(09:09):
of, I guess, a while ago now.
But what was surprising to me is exactly how easy it is to launch a Layer 2.
you know, through a layer or conduit, you can launch a layer two literally in like five to10 minutes and then be able to choose from a host of services on the the roll up as a
service provider, like which, you know, which, you know, what other services you want,whether it be Celestia or anything else.
(09:36):
Super surprising.
And you're right.
I mean, there's been a huge proliferation of layer twos.
I'm curious about youryour perspective from a kind of market wide perspective, the ease of launching a layer
two.
Is that a, do you think that's a net negative, net positive?
Yeah, that's a really good question.
So I feel like if you asked me one or two years ago, my answer would be that it's a netpositive because it was ultimately the insight that my project was running on top of.
(10:13):
And so incentive wise, it made a lot of sense for me to be supportive of the proliferationof rollups.
Now, since my company has exited.
I get to be a little bit more candid about how I feel about it.
I still go back and forth on whether it is truly, you know, net positive or net negative.
(10:37):
I do think it has allowed for a lot of noise into the market because any team can launch achain and chains or rollups rather, they have maybe clear tokenomics than non-chains do.
And so that's led to a proliferation of token launches, proliferation of infrastructureand exacerbation of the UX.
(11:01):
do think there are good things about allowing teams to really easily spin up rollups.
You do have a lot more creativity and a lot more surface area as a developer to optimize acertain rollup to fit a specific need.
Right.
I think that's where.
App specific rollups are really interesting.
think abstract has pushed the boundaries slightly on the chain abstraction front forconsumer experiences.
(11:27):
But I will say that the vast majority of rollups that I've seen in the past two and a halfyears launch are general purpose.
More or less just a way to rationalize some sort of token economics.
so why I think in theory, it's still holds for me to be bullish about the technology inpractice.
I've been pretty disappointed with the proof points I've seen.
(11:49):
I agree with you.
know, and launching a roll-up is, while technically easy, the really hard part is makingit like differentiated from other roll-ups.
And I think the problem that I think a lot of entrepreneurs that are launching roll-upsthese days is that they are general purpose.
(12:09):
I think what's unique about abstract is they're really focused on like the end consumer,the retail folks.
actual applications that normal people are gonna use.
And that's pretty unique.
And I think their entry point into games and also streaming is really unique.
I haven't seen that before.
(12:31):
Whereas a lot of roll-ups are really general purpose.
And the problem there is then they have to court applications that are already on otherroll-ups or on Ethereum layer one.
to get them over and then they typically do that with kind of grants and the typicalthings that you normally see that don't really have a lot of staying power.
(12:55):
So you guys start with catalyst systems and then the key differentiator versus otherinteroperability protocols, which was kind of like the pooling of liquidity so that
which became the key differentiator for users as they try to navigate all these differentchains.
(13:19):
They need kind of what underpins them all is the of the shared liquidity.
And that's one of the key pieces that Catalyst provided.
And that was initially in the Ethereum space, right?
Or...
That was one of the key ecosystems that catalysts supported.
(13:40):
then October happened.
Tell us kind of what happened at that point that made you reflect that maybe there areother ecosystems in which catalysts could spend more time and focus on versus Ethereum.
Yeah.
So we actually originally were a Cosmos project because it was basically the same thesis,but more on the app chain side.
(14:06):
And then as we saw kind of the quicker emergence of roll up as a service and rolledframeworks, as opposed to the Cosmos SDK, it made a lot more sense for us to be far more
focused on Ethereum.
And so timeline wise, originally were a Cosmos project.
And then even before our first test net, we decided to focus on Ethereum roll-ups.
(14:27):
And then after we launched our AMM or V1 product, we saw a few months of production, aboutsix months of production volume.
And it was okay, but I think we wanted to explore different opportunities that had ahigher potential for growth.
(14:48):
And so we did two things basically.
One was we, know, meaning my co-founder and I did a very comprehensive audit of thebridging space and had a general takeaway that what we were doing at the moment was not
(15:10):
sufficient from a market perspective, from aproduct differentiation perspective, we were basically focused on Ethereum roll-ups and
there were 20 plus bridges that functionally did the same thing.
know, mechanism wise slightly different, but at the end, at the end of the day for, forthe end user, was the same thing.
And so it was really, really hard for us to differentiate and really hard for us to gainvolume and gain market share as a perspective, right.
(15:36):
Uh, or as a result rather, and this actually goes back to the point that you brought upon.
Undifferentiated general purpose rollups.
I think that's a phenomenon that you can view in all parts of crypto, especially inbridging because it's functionally the same thing that's happening in the rollup space.
have basically the same mechanism and the same user experience that is being brought tomarket with little differentiation.
(16:02):
And therefore it becomes a game of sealing each other's users.
And it's really, really hard to kind of gain market share in that type of markets.
Right.
And so that was kind of the first lens that we took the second lens that we took.
and again, even though we had that takeaway, we didn't really have a clear next step,right.
(16:25):
Outside of just doom and gloom saying like, shit, like the market that we're in is notgood.
But I think that's where the second layer comes in where we started just talking to reallyanyone that would be willing to ask or answer my questions.
And so rollup builders, application developers, bridge users, my friends, even my familyto a certain degree.
(16:53):
And I asked them how they felt about interoperability.
And I think the resolving or the resounding takeaway was that EVM bridging was goodenough.
It certainly can improve on a number of dimensions.
that we're thinking about now as it pertains to the chain abstraction and a better wallexperience.
(17:17):
But if you look at interoperability or bridging as a function, it's effectively solved.
You have these protocols that are able to move between different bridges, or sorry,between different chains within a few seconds for sometimes even a fraction of a cent.
So a truly negligible amount of cost and a more or lessnegligible amount of time.
(17:41):
And so it feels almost instant.
And if that was what's happening on Ethereum, then that's good enough for the end user,right?
They consider that a solved problem.
But I think where there was a ton of opportunity was the ability to do true chainabstraction, right?
(18:01):
And that's connecting all chains, not just EVM chains.
And so the names that were brought up were move chains.
Right.
Sweet.
Apdos and now movement also, um, Solana VM chains.
So not only Solana, but Eclipse and soon and a few others.
Tron is, you know, name that was floated around, course, very popular and from a paymentsperspective and in the global South.
(18:29):
Ton at the time was very popular as well, the telegram ecosystem.
And so there are a lot of chains that actually move a lot of volume.
And, if we step outside the crypto bottle, the crypto bubble, moves a lot of volume in adifferent consumer group, potentially, but it was meaningful enough to be there and it was
quite difficult.
(18:50):
And so those two insights were enough for my co-founder and I to decide to pivot theentire roadmap.
Right.
And we enhanced the product as well to make it more adaptable to across VM context.
And yeah, that was the emergence of.
What we call the time cross cats now, you know, we're just calling it catalyst V2 andyeah, we made the announcement around October and it was very successful.
(19:19):
Maybe I could read your own words from the October Post.
think this shows quite a bit of kind of emotional, the emotions I think that you weregoing through at the time.
And I think it's pretty powerful.
Confidence at an all-time low.
(19:40):
I went back to the drawing board.
I re-read every book that I bought as a bright-eyed college kid dreaming of starting abusiness, the lean startup, zero to one, how Google works, et cetera.
I ignored something that was so obvious that every book on entrepreneurship talked about,but I was too arrogant to heed.
Somehow thinking that crypto is different, I needed to talk to users.
(20:01):
So I did.
I asked everyone who would spare the time what was missing from cross-chain.
So I want to spend a minute talking about that.
You know, now we kind of understand this process to be called customer development, whichis kind of like a formalized kind of approach to marketing research, but from an
entrepreneur's builders perspective, tell us about like who you approach.
(20:23):
mentioned kind of the, the, the different groups that you approach, but what did you ask?
And because this is such a niche within a niche within a niche kind of product, like what,did you ask and tell us about like the learnings that you had that led to, okay, here's
kind of how we need to change.
Yeah.
(20:44):
So, I mean, it's kind of embarrassing to admit, honestly, to miss something that's socrucial to the product development process.
But I think I fell into a lot of bad habits from building in crypto for a very long time,where a lot of it was very much ivory tower research and the builder knows best, right?
(21:12):
It's kind of the.
The saying of the users don't really know what they want, right?
If you were to ask someone in the 1900s, what they want, they'd ask for a faster horse.
And so that was kind of the mantra that I embodied when I didn't really solicit too muchfeedback on what we were building.
Right.
And I think part of it, looking back was a lot of ego, knowing that, or thinking that Iknew exactly what the market wanted.
(21:40):
And also just a little bit of.
Maybe just like different priorities or different incentives where I wanted to be afounder that.
Put out a lot of very innovative research as opposed to a founder that built products thatcould scale and that people wanted.
Right.
So that's just a revelation that I had of, many throughout the whole process of, being afounder and exiting.
(22:08):
Um, and so anyway, that was a bit of a sidebar.
To answer your question, I think I went back to the drawing board of what catalyst wasbuilt for.
And so I think in the heat of trying to launch a product into main nuts and trying to gaintraction and trying to run marketing campaigns, I kind of lost the purpose of why this was
(22:38):
even being built in the first place, right?
The purpose wasn't to build a bridge that moved $50 million a day.
Right.
That was certainly a desirable outcome, but that wasn't the why.
The why, and what I've said before was to help new chains be able to connect to otherchains after they're launched.
(23:02):
Right.
And again, it seems so simple, but in the heat of things, after multiple years offighting fires and prioritizing different features, you kind of lose sight of that, sadly.
And so going back to the drawing board, ultimately catalyst is for chain teams or roll upteams, right?
(23:24):
And not even quite frankly, super successful ones, right?
They're getting wooed by all sorts of other bridges to get connected.
So rather I would reach out to long tail teams, scrappy teams that were building roll-ups.
I'd ask them why, and I asked them what their biggest needs are.
(23:44):
And this was not even involved or related to interoperability quite frankly, butultimately I'd sneak it in as well, right?
Because it's good to get broad customer research just to see kind ofhow people think, especially the, the user group that you're targeting, but ultimately you
want it tied back.
And it's also helpful to see where that stack ranks on a bunch of other priorities.
(24:08):
Right.
And so interesting enough, interoperability, guess interoperability in the sense of, youknow, rollups, connecting with other rollups and bridging other rollups seem to be not a
huge concern in the eyes of these rollup teams.
(24:29):
Right.
They had their native bridge.
So I can always go to Ethereum.
They could use an intent based protocol, mainly like relay in order to connect.
And they always felt found some way to be able to connect other rollups.
But what they were really, really interested in was seeing all the activity on Solana, allthe activity on SWE, all the activity on Ton and Tron and Ripple.
(24:54):
And they wanted a piece of that.
Right.
And so they felt completely sidelined from this parallel crypto ecosystem.
And that was a theme that came up again and again and again.
And I think when you're a ivory tower pie in the sky, crypto researcher turned founder,not that I was a researcher, but the other archetype that I was striving for, you don't
(25:22):
really.
want to be building for those ecosystems because there's a connotation against them,right?
Not necessarily maybe Solana at this point or Swi, but certainly for the other ones Ilisted.
And so it took a little bit of setting aside ego to say, Hey, I'm here to serve problemsand users.
I'm not here to serve my ego.
(25:44):
I'm not here to flex on other people on the crypto Twitter timeline, right?
I'm trying to actually build real products and be a real founder.
And so that was a big mental shift for me to move away from kind of the research andintellectualism and actually move towards building tactical things for people.
(26:06):
I'm glad you mentioned these ecosystems that you know don't get a lot of at least in thecircles that you and I kind of socialize in like ripple and Tron for example, but very few
people know that the stable coin volume on Tron is absolutely massive I think almost everyproject I know of that pays their people and stables they do so on Tron
(26:36):
Yeah.
the USDT version of, USDT on Tron.
So it's like, it's really incredible.
I don't know anything about the Ripple ecosystem other than I think it's pretty large andI'm really curious to know like, why don't I know more?
(26:56):
And why haven't they kind of, I guess expanded and I don't know anything for example aboutDeFi on Ripple but that.
could be really interesting.
And so it makes sense from a builder's perspective, like why you would consider thoseecosystems.
mean, they're legitimate ecosystem that have some negative connotation within the circlesthat we run around in, but there's actual like human beings on those ecosystems, like
(27:24):
using their products.
So it makes sense.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I, I see this phenomenon actually play out in a number of markets.
This isn't just like a crypto specific thing.
I don't know exactly what to call it, but I kind of call it like the Karen and Darrelleffect where the lay person is not involved in the same stuff as the enthusiasts or the
(27:50):
aficionado.
Right.
And the reason why I call it the Karen Darrell effect isKaren and Darrell's are the main constituents of the Facebook or meta ecosystem.
Right.
And so when Facebook copies Tik TOK and more recently they copied part of all, all theaficionados of Tik TOK or part of full right people who are millennials or gen Z's and
(28:14):
typically live in large cities.
They'd said, wow, I would never use that.
I never use Facebook.
I'll never ever use these features.
Well,Facebook didn't make them for you, right?
They made them for the current and Darrell's and they're actually bigger of a market thanthe aficionados.
Yeah.
And so building for the lay person is very, very powerful.
(28:38):
And that was a big learning for me as a founder.
You know, this reminds me from a, I used to work for an outdoor online retailer,absolutely massive one.
And I was kind of responsible for kind of merchandising operations and like revenue.
And one very big surprising insight that we had was the majority of the revenue actuallycame from what we called the archetype that we considered
(29:10):
kind like moms and dads.
But all of the marketing was focused on professional athletes, mountain climbers andsnowboarders.
And so internally we go through this kind of shift in thinking around, okay, all of ourmarketing, and by the way, we happened to arrive at that marketing just because everyone
(29:36):
else was doing that.
We focused on snowboarders and like professionals.
but the 80 % of the revenue were actually from people aspiring to become theseprofessionals.
So like your moms and dads and really kids.
And so that was a big insight to us.
It sounds really obvious now, but at the time it was kind of a big deal.
(29:58):
It was like a shift in thinking.
It's like, okay, well let's double down and continue to focus on professionals, but weneed to make things.
easier for the actual like people paying us to buy this stuff, which is like moms, dadsand kids.
And that was a big deal.
so they would well, how are they buying?
Well, it turns out a lot of them would call into the call center because they hadadditional questions that a professional might already know.
(30:25):
And then we looked at the, as we segmented like the revenue from like the non-professionalcustomers and it was all like through the call center.
because they needed to know the millimeter of the thread that was being used, themillimeters.
If they were going to go on a big hike, the type of material that this tent was made ofthat most professionals would already know.
(30:49):
So it was just like, it was a mind blowing kind of experience learning all of that.
And it sounds like you went through kind of the same thing within the crypto space.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
It's, it's funny that you said that it seems simple in hindsight.
Doesn't mean it's easy in the moment, right?
It's so easy to just not think very critically about certain actions that you take, right?
(31:17):
You can just copy paste it from a competitor or you read what industry trends arehappening, but that may not be pertinent to your actual context.
Right.
And I'm living proof of that basically.
I think all of us are, I mean, we just kind of get stuck in these, you know, kind of theseways of thinking.
(31:39):
But I think what I find really unique about you is you took the time to reflect, to do thecourageous thing and actually talk to people and customers.
And that then led to a pivot for Catalyst around October, November-ish, where you decidedat that time, maybe you can tell us about that pivot to focus on alt VMs.
(32:02):
Yeah.
So again, after this customer research market research that was kind of being done overthe summer, my co-founder and I arrived at a decision to ultimately pause what we were
doing and completely zag where everyone was zigging.
(32:24):
So we wanted to go to a new category and at the timeIt wasn't even a category, quite frankly, it was just other chains, right?
And so it was a bit of a marketing exercise in order to call it what it is today, which isall VMs and basically build a bit of a mini movement around it.
(32:48):
And so there was product work being done, course, you know, retrofitting or refactoringthe entire protocol for across VM context is very, very difficult.
So that was being done underway.
And at the same time, I think it was the right milestone for us to revisit what it meantto go to market from a marketing branding and even a business development perspective.
(33:15):
And so we completely did a rebrand.
I wanted to be insanely differentiated.
I've spoken a couple of times on how I viewed the brand of CrossCats and Catalyst V2.
built a movement around all VMs with strategic partnerships with movement and fluent andsoon and other non-EVM ecosystem projects.
(33:42):
And we basically push it out in October and November to a ton of success.
Thankfully.
Now, context is everything and then the story, I think, is what's really unique aboutthis.
Like, what if, you know, when you start a catalyst, you initially focus on the alt VMspace versus all the pain that you and your team went through having kind of, you know,
(34:10):
focused in one area and then learned and then changed and then you eventually arrived atthe alt VM space.
Like, tell us...
kind of if you were to, as an observer looking back, what would be the relative kind ofeffectiveness if you had started Catalyst on the alt VM space versus having to go through
(34:33):
all that pain and the story and the amazing storytelling that came with it to now kind ofwhere the pivot actually makes sense to arrive at the alt VM space?
Do you know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
The story I think is really compelling and I'm just curious about what if there was nostory and you just out of day one all the
(35:00):
It's really hard to predict or I guess speculate on what could have been.
I think the market would have been smaller, certainly.
Mind you, when catalyst was an idea, FTX happened.
So I think Alt-VIA mine share was at an all-time low.
(35:24):
So that would have been.
a big macro factor to consider and have to navigate.
I also think I was a very different person at the start where many in many ways, but Ithink in the way that really matters in the context of this conversation was just my
(35:45):
mindset, right?
I want to be a founder to grow.
wanted to be a very intellectual founder.
wanted to make innovative things, publish white papers.
And that's very different than the mindset that I have now, or rather that I had when Ilaunched CrossCats, which was more being a real founder, so to speak, where I wanted to
(36:07):
build things that scaled and help people and got a lot of adoption.
So that would have been very different.
I also think that, well, yeah, I think those are like the main two things.
Well, okay.
So I think the best way to frame it was that.
The market of course was very different, as I mentioned.
(36:29):
I also think the mindsets of people were very different where Ethereum had a lot of mindshare in 2022 when catalyst was first started, especially post FTX, right?
People were dancing on the graves of Solana.
I think that had changed a lot in the next, in the preceding or in the subsequent 1.5years.
(36:54):
where people became a lot more tired of the Ethereum ecosystem, the proliferation ofroll-ups and other infrastructure projects.
And it was ripe for a narrative that was counter Ethereum in many ways.
And that is where, you know, that's an insight that I had and leveraged to make the ideaof alt VMs stick more in people's minds, right?
(37:22):
You have to have someframing of frustration and how to solve that frustration.
I don't think that would have been possible in 2022 post-FTX.
And then the last thing of course, is me being a founder, right?
Not only did I have a different mindset, but I also had a different skillset where Ididn't really value marketing and I didn't know a lot about marketing.
(37:43):
And only was it after I became humbled from launching a product into production, realizingthat marketing was insanely important.
learning, becoming a student, talking to a ton of marketing people, reading a of marketingbooks that I suddenly gained this new skillset that I could leverage through CrossCats.
You mentioned frustration and at the same time, while there was kind of frustration in themarket, people were becoming increasingly frustrated with Ethereum.
(38:09):
You also experienced this personal frustration, right?
That, you know, from as a founder, you were trying to build something that was usefulwithin the Ethereum space, but you encountered your own frustrations.
And so it was kind of like a perfect storm, which led to the story of,maybe we need to do something in a different ecosystem.
(38:36):
like, think, I think my, my, I think the point I want to make is the story that led tokind of the creation of this new category.
don't know if it's even a new category, but I think it is.
I hadn't heard of interoperability in SVM, alt SVM space kind of framed like thatspecifically.
(38:57):
And so I tend to call it a new category.
But the story that you went through and experience that led to the focus on the alt VMspace is like part and parcel of kind of this new category.
It's like, it is so important that the story has to be there.
(39:21):
if you had created catalysts or cross-cats kind of like ex nihilo, just out of nowhere andjust focus on alt VM space, I don't think you'd be as
effective.
know, it's like the frustration that you had as a founder had like is a necessaryingredient.
And, and I think for those listening, I think that's kind of an important thing torecognize is the story as you in product marketing and growth marketing, the story that
(39:51):
you have, as you enter a new category, create a new category is really critical.
because it's that story that becomes memorable for people.
Like people will remember your frustration.
They'll remember this X-pose that you wrote.
Anyway, that's just a quick diatribe.
Any reflection on that?
(40:14):
No, I think you put it very well and poetically even put it well, much, much more cogentof a description than I could have even framed it myself.
I do think, and again, this is a realization that I'm having live here on this podcast isthat I was basically the archetype of someone who would build on an alt VM, right?
(40:36):
Someone who has been in Ethereum has become jaded and frustrated in many ways.
And has decided to join a new movement.
Right.
So that's an interesting parallel.
Um, a second thing that I'll add is I almost didn't even publish that post, which issomething that I've never, uh, admitted publicly before.
(41:01):
I actually had a very different post drafted up.
That was very, how do I say, um, very, uh,Just boring is the word that we use very corporate, very much like, Hey, we're changing
because we're really excited about all VMs, right?
(41:23):
A very standard pivot announcement that any project could say, right?
They're saying, Hey, like we had this observation that we think all VMs are going to popoff and we're going to hop on that wave because we're super smart and we know things
before you know things.
And that's why we're super smart.
And I think that would have been the wrong framing, quite frankly, because I think itwould have been framed in a position of strength and it just didn't feel authentic to
(41:53):
myself.
Quite frankly, it didn't feel like the story that I wanted to tell.
So I had many, many drafts of this blog post of this announcement and a lot of them wereflavors of, I'm very smart and therefore I'm hopping on a new thing and you should join
me.
And it wasn't until I scrapped everything and just wrote what I was feeling at the momentthat this new narrative kind of took shape and it was far more reflective, far more
(42:25):
vulnerable.
I even shared it with my team before him.
like, Hey, I'm going to say these things.
probably have never heard me say this before.
Quite frankly, like this will be the first time you've heard me express thesefrustrations.
Is that okay?
Just a heads up, right?
Because it's going to be different.
And I actually didn't know how people would take it.
(42:46):
And I was surprised that people took it really well.
There were people that didn't take it well.
I had people in my DM saying, Hey, like you're a founder.
You shouldn't be weak.
have investors that believe in you.
have employees that believe in you.
You cannot be weak in the market.
And I just said, Hey, that's just who I am.
(43:07):
I'm not going to change it.
The, well, it takes a lot of courage, I think, to be as vulnerable as you have beenonline.
And I think it's, at least from an outside perspective, it's helped your personal brand,which in turn has helped Catalyst kind of grow its brand presence and awareness.
(43:31):
And probably, and I know, Life, I wrote a kind of a review of Catalyst, I think like lastMay.
And so they're already aware, but my guess is probably like, you know, the acquisition oflife of catalyst by life.
had a lot to do with, you know, you and the team, not just like the technical stuff behindit.
(43:55):
Maybe we can pivot to that.
Tell us about kind of the acquisition.
Like that's a big deal in the crypto space.
You don't see a lot of that.
I guess what was going through your head when life I reached out and said, Hey, you know,What are you Yeah, you up?
(44:17):
So it was definitely a surprise.
That was the first reaction.
So for context, I've known the LeFi team for a long time.
Arjun and I, Arjun's their head of research and Arjun and I are friends personally outsideof a crypto context and Philip, the CEO of LeFi was an angel investor into catalyst.
(44:42):
So he had actually had a very nice tweet.
for the acquisition announcement, he said, I'm just doubling down on, uh, the foundersthat I love, which was really nice.
I didn't know he was going to post that.
And he always has a very eloquent way of framing things.
So I had a very good relationship with them.
And so the angle that I had for the meeting post pivot was, Hey, let's, let's get Levi tointegrate catalyst, right?
(45:12):
Levi has a ton of order flow.
And I think it's, it's mutually beneficial because catalyst can benefit from that orderflow and you guys can benefit from being on all the EMS, which is something that you guys
are not on right now.
And it became so much of a synergy that they ultimately, after a little bit of diligenceand review of our documentation offered to acquire us.
(45:36):
And that was a huge shock, right?
I was, I was heading into a meeting fully expecting to answer a bunch of technicalquestions.
And the first question was just, we want to buy you.
do you, what do you think?
Uh, and my response was, me think on it and let's meet up at DEF CON.
So that was, I think maybe early, early November, maybe late October.
(45:58):
And so we met a few weeks later at DEF CON through a series of very, very long, veryintense in person meetings.
Um, a few more meetings after that meeting a lot of members of the team and this side justmade a lot of sense.
Uh, for the reasons that I just listed as well as a few more reasons that I'm happy toelaborate on.
Um, but tying back to what we just talked about that offer would not have been possiblewithout the pivot.
(46:28):
Quite frankly.
I think they realize that they were trying to buy a rapidly appreciating asset.
And that allowed us to negotiate from a position of a lot of strength, which was reallygreat.
And that would not have been possible without the pivot and without the announcement andwithout the story.
(46:51):
I'm going to age myself a little bit here, I believe LeFi was a grantee, was a Harmonygrantee, like three plus years ago.
So I led growth at Harmony and I believe like right around, this was like before thebridge hack, which was just a terrible thing.
(47:14):
That was so scary.
I'm not sure how much you know, but a hundred million was exploited fromthe Harmony Bridge, the Horizon Bridge, it was terrible.
But we had, yeah, it really was.
We had a number of kind of online events, hackathons, and I think LeFi was one of thegrantees that we had.
If I remember correctly, I have to double check.
(47:37):
Another thing that will age me too is back in, I wanna say like 2018, 2019, I was at aCosmos conference and Stani and I think Emilio were there.
It was right after they had rebranded Eathland to Ave and literally no one knew how topronounce Ave.
(47:59):
They were at that stage of, I was at a different project at the time and they were at abooth next to us.
And I saw everyone was walking up to their table to ask Emilia how to, I think that's hisname, Emilia how to do this, do that.
(48:19):
And like, no one was coming to our table.
And I'm thinking, what is going on over there?
Like something is happening and they like, no one knew who Ave was at the time.
So I went over there and talked to Stani.
I'm like, what are you guys up to?
Like, what, what is Ave?
And I should have known then, like that was like a signal that something big was about tohappen because this was like before, DeFi Summer, Ave was like nothing.
(48:45):
And then they became like massive.
So.
Note to self, like if you're at a conference and everyone's walking up to you, to yourtable, like something's about to happen that you should pay attention.
And the same thing happened, crazy, the same thing happened in 2017.
I was at a conference, actually East Denver, and I was next to my table.
(49:08):
I was at a different project and my table was next to Chainlink.
the ex-CMO of Chainlink,She was showing me how to fold their t-shirts in this fancy way where you kind of roll it
up and you're able to throw a t-shirt.
Anyway, so she was showing me in between these long lines of people trying to figure outhow to use Chainlink into the application they were building for the hackathon.
(49:39):
And again, no one was coming to my table.
And I'm going, OK, what is happening over there?
What the heck is Chainlink?
And this was like early 2017.
so anyway, again, note the self, like pay attention.
So with the acquisition of, of LeFi or catalysts of LeFi's acquisition of catalysts, likewhat does that look like from a, catalyst didn't have a token yet.
(50:07):
And so I guess like, what is the ins and outs?
Like, what does that look like acquiring a project within the crypto space?
Yeah.
So there's broadly three types of acquisitions, I would say.
So one is an acquisition of people.
So an aqua hire.
(50:29):
I think that is probably the most common form of acquisition, especially in crypto.
We've seen, I mean, Coinbase has bought, forbid, how many, how many projects at thispoint?
The second one is in acquisition of tech.
Alone, is fairly rare, but I've certainly seen it.
(50:50):
And then lastly is an acquisition of both.
So the tech and the people, uh, we are the last bucket.
So the tech has been acquired for this cross VM intent protocol.
actually refactoring it to be more chain abstraction friendly.
And so we're calling it catalyst V3 and the team came along as well.
(51:12):
And so for me, my role has evolved.
I'm now the lead of the leafy intense team.
Marketing speak perspective.
We call it leafy 2.0.
So the next evolution of, of leafy away from an aggregator business to more of a intensemarketplace business.
And yeah, I run a team of six people and.
(51:37):
I mean, functionally, doesn't look too different.
Quite frankly, I think the five is a super.
autonomous team, you can kind of do, you know, whatever within reason and you make yourmark.
And as a founder or as a previous founder, I really, really enjoy that.
So the day to day is honestly not changed too much, which is, I think surprising to a lotof people, but it's surprising to me quite frankly, but it's been nice.
(52:02):
That's great.
A couple of questions around the customer segments of interoperability protocols.
And I find this fascinating.
You've got retail folks or end users that use interoperability protocols.
And then you also have foundations and I'd say institutions is probably the broadcategory.
(52:26):
What typically, at least for LeFi, what drives the volume?
Is that something that you could maybe talk to and share?
Yeah.
And it's public, right?
You can go on Dune and see all the on-chain data.
I'd probably say at this point, it's 50 50 where you have end users and you haveinstitutions.
(52:47):
And so from an end user perspective, LeFi has a sister product called jumper.
So jumper is a UI that uses LeFi for aggregation andIt's, know, it's a, it's a website.
You can go to it, Jumper.exchange.
You can swap between 50 plus chains at this point.
(53:08):
It could be any token, any token.
So it's, it's a, it's a really good experience.
So I'd say that's probably 50 % of, of LeFi's volume.
The other 50 % are enterprise clients or enterprise customers that they have.
And so LeFi services, all the leading wallets in the space.
So MetaMask swaps, Phantom swaps, Robinhood wallet.
(53:31):
You know, if you're swapping in a wallet interface, it's realistically using leaf highunderneath the hood.
That's awesome.
is that, you know, I spoke with Kane at Infinex a couple of weeks ago and they have thisidea of they're branding it as Swidge, which is a swap and a bridge at the same time.
(53:55):
I do too, but I failed to ask him like, what is actually powering the Swidge underneath?
Because Infinex is, they're calling it a super app, but I think initially it's a wallet.
But I'm curious, and I don't know this and I should have asked him, like, what is poweringthat?
But it sounds like LeFi is powering a lot of these kind of swap and bridge at the sametime operations, which is fascinating because it's, I don't think a lot of people know
(54:22):
that, because it's almost white labeled, right?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
You're not going to see, you know, the leafy logo anywhere when you're on metamask orphantom, but yeah, it's, it's, shows the product market fit that leafy is enterprise
product house, right?
They've won a ton of business from leading wallets and, a bunch of other applications,quite frankly.
(54:45):
I mean, it's, very much needed, right?
When you think about bridging as a, as a job to be done where I'd say the ideal bridgingexperience doesn't, it's just one that
doesn't exist at all, right?
It's users don't care about bridging.
They think it's a pain.
They want any asset on any chain.
And that's slightly different from chain abstraction because of course users are stillaware of what chain they're using.
(55:09):
I, you know, would, would claim that users care about what chain they're using at leastfor the next few years, but people don't really care about bridging, right?
People don't want to go to across.
They don't want to go toStargate and move money.
just an extra step for them.
They'd rather just be doing what they want to be doing, uh, whether it's buying a token,selling a token, performing some sort of on chain action and just being on their merry
(55:35):
way, right?
Irrespective of what houses they hold on what chains.
No, I agree with you.
And in this same conversation I had with Kane, and I invoked a of a quote from a collegefriend whose dad was Jeff Raskin, the creator of the Mac.
And he said something really profound.
(55:55):
said like, the best interaction is no interaction.
And his idea is like the reason for customer service as a category, non-sales category,Mm-hmm.
to really fix people's problems that they're having.
And so what if there were no problems in the first place?
(56:17):
You would have no customer service, essentially.
It was his kind of idea.
And I think the same thing could be said with bridging.
It's not just abstracting the complexity from the user, but most people don't wake upwanting to bridge anything.
They really want to...
You know, they care about the outcome of that, which is like, you know, they want to buy Xasset on a different chain.
(56:42):
They just want to get that done.
And kind of the necessarily evil is that, well, you need a bridge to that chain and thencome back to kind of your home chain.
But it still makes bridging like incredibly valuable, you know, as a service.
But to be able to do it kind of underneath andalmost abstract the complexity from the user is really the key.
(57:09):
And it sounds like LeFi's enterprise product is clearly doing that with its massiveintegrations with these big brands, which is really incredible.
That's so awesome.
Well, Jim, this has been so enlightening, and I really appreciate you taking the time totalk.
(57:30):
Well, I guess what's next for you?
You shared a little bit, but whatWhat can the public, I guess, expect from LeFi going forward and kind of your role?
oh, last question.
I'm curious.
So Catalyst, you've been able to build a pretty strong community.
Like, how are you bringing them on to kind of onboarding them to the LeFi community?
(57:54):
So catalyst as it stands right now is still a separate brand because it is so differentfrom the leafy core product, right?
We call it leafy core internally and then catalyst is its own thing.
So our hope is to still foster the same community and to leverage the same socials.
Of course, things will change underneath a larger brand umbrella.
(58:18):
And I think the community might want to move on based on differentYou know, focuses of priorities, right?
Like I said, we've significantly refactored the product to fit more of LeFY's long-termgoals, but that's the plan at the very least.
Um, and the answer to your last question on what's next, uh, I'm really excited for what'snext.
(58:42):
Honestly.
Um, I wouldn't have done this deal if I didn't think it was going to be.
huge for the industry, right?
Lefi's distribution and their, and their strong enterprise product coupled with theinnovation of catalyst and it's, it's cross VM focus is, is really, really big.
(59:02):
And so what I really want to do, just tying it back to the original answer I gave you wasto finally solve the problem that I had at Ave, which is what does a new chain do after it
launches?
How does it connect to a bunch of other chains?
And I actually think at LeFi, we have the resources to actually make that a reality.
(59:26):
And so it's going to be fully permissionless chain connections, fully permissionless assetissuance using, you know, I don't want to bore you with the details, but basically using
catalysts as the intent protocol says as the bridge.
And then we're also building a solver as a service product called pioneer.
(59:48):
So again, if you have a new bridge, you can, you know, connect via catalyst to bridge,just because you have a bridge doesn't mean people are actually going to be moving funds.
you need pioneer as a solver, as a service.
And then as an extra layer of redundancy, we have a partnership with a company calledGlacis that allows mint and burn cross-chain token standards like layer zero of T to be
(01:00:13):
issued on these new chains.
so again, day zero, your launch, you already have.
A bridge, you have a way to move money and you have a way to also move money.
So a bridge in two ways to move money, basically.
So that's.
again, the original problem we were trying to solve with catalysts.
The AMM had its roadblocks cross cat certainly was a piece of the puzzle, but this is nowan even bigger picture with glazes and pioneer as well.
(01:00:42):
That's awesome.
Well, Jim, thank you so much for taking the time to talk.
Learned a ton from you.
Continue to learn as I follow you on X.
looking forward to seeing what you and the LeFi team do next.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me on.
I had a ton of fun.
Thank you.
Welcome Jim with LiFi Protocol.
How are you?
I'm good, I'm good.
Thanks for having me on.
Yeah, we were talking before we hit record, hearing the LiFi protocol has got to be kindof surprising, right?
Kind of new.
Yeah.
time ever anyone's introduced me that way.
(00:22):
I'm so used to being called Jim from Catalyst or something of the sort.
Well, we'll definitely talk about the acquisition and the steps that led to that, becausethat's quite exciting.
We don't hear a lot of acquisitions within the crypto space.
And so we'd love to spend some time talking about that to the extent you're willing to andwhat you can talk about.
(00:45):
But.
I'm an open book, so happy to share as much as I can into my lawyers yell at me.
Awesome.
I'm excited about this conversation because you, think, as an entrepreneur, you bringquite a bit of a different point of view, I think, than probably a lot of entrepreneurs.
(01:07):
You spend a lot of time really talking to customers, learning about the market, kind ofthe actual needs of the market, as well as kind of like the...
pluses and minuses of the competitors in the space, especially in the interoperabilityspace, where you spend your time.
And you also bring a level of, I think, clearheadedness that I think a lot ofentrepreneurs get very narrow, which is a positive on the one hand.
(01:36):
On the other hand, they kind of get caught in their echo chamber, whereas you found a wayto kind of escape the echo chamber.
And so I want to spend time on that too.
But if we could go backwards, you announced the acquisition of Catalyst systems by Li-Fi acouple of, I think like two weeks ago, or was it last week?
(01:57):
But I'd love to, two weeks ago, I'd love to go back to the beginning.
Like what inspired you to start Catalyst and the initial focus?
And then I want to spend some time from a post that you wrote on X around October.
and how you guys kind of made a change in kind of your business approach as you learn moreabout the market.
(02:21):
Yeah.
So I'll probably give you a different answer than I've given in all of my previousinterviews, I would say for why starting Catalyst.
So I would say like the, and I think this is a function of me not being a founder anymore.
So I can be slightly more candid and honest about the whole journey, but I would say likethe, founder friendly or the narrative friendly.
(02:48):
Story, which is still true, right?
It's just kind of selective storytelling was that I worked at Ave as their head of newproducts.
And so I was a PM there.
And one of the things that I was in charge of was building Ave chain or rather a series ofchains for Go, their stable coin for Ave, the lending protocol.
(03:11):
then for Lens as well, which is their Web3 decentralized social media platform.
And this was back in 2022 when a lot of these infrastructure projects actually weren'tlive yet.
So there wasn't anything called OPS stack or there wasn't anything known as rollup as aservice.
basically just forked a bunch of stuff to build this new chain as a proof of concept.
(03:35):
And in that I realized that it's actually kind of easy to build a chain.
I think the really hard part is what comes afterwards, right?
What do you do after you click the button?
How do you actually get people that go on there?
And we ended up sun setting or rather pausing the project because of the issues ofconnecting to different chains and getting existing Aave users to that chain.
(04:00):
so that was kind of the aha moment, so to speak.
What I don't share publicly was that that wasn't the reason why I became a founder.
That was just the reason why I wanted to work in interoperability.
And so I left Ave wanting to work in interoperability.
I just wanted to be a PM to work at any major interoperability protocol, whether it belayer zero or wormhole or hyperlain, cetera.
(04:27):
And after the interview process, I was actually really fortunate enough to receive a fewoffers within leading organizations in this space.
And I did kind of a audit of my career and realized that being a PM was just.
doing what I'd already known how to do at Aave and previously at other product roles thatI've had in my career again and again.
(04:51):
Right.
And so the actual functional learnings weren't really there.
Surely there was a lot of domain specific learnings, but not a lot of actual functionallearnings.
And so I wanted to do more than being a PM.
And that's where being a founder,piqued my interest and I decided to take a leap after a series of conversations and of
course meeting my co-founder Alexander along the way.
(05:17):
That's really cool that you had that level of self-reflection that, where should you gonext to help you kind of maximize your learning?
Because you felt like you had learned kind of what you needed to know, at least within theproduct management role.
Now, as you kind of evolved into an entrepreneur and you decided that interoperability wasthe space that you wanted to approach, interoperability is a big kind of word.
(05:44):
And I've interviewed multiple projects already.
I met with Polyhedra last week, Hyperlane a couple of months ago with Axeler, with Sergeyand other kind of cross messaging protocols within the interoperability space.
Catalyst is unique and at least in the beginning, it wasn't necessarily a, it wasn't justa bridge.
(06:10):
There was quite a bit of kind of a differentiation.
Could you maybe talk about, kind of at the beginning, like what the key differentiatorswere and then we can go into the October X-post and how you guys pivoted.
Yeah.
So every new company ideally starts with an insight and an insight is kind of like asecret that you believe to be true, that no one else believes to be true.
(06:39):
And that's kind of the core foundation of how to fundraise for a company, right?
Whether it be in crypto or, or beyond.
And so my insight came from working at Aave.
Where I realized that it was just going to become easier and easier to launch a rollupusing all of these, you know, frameworks that ultimately became these RAS frameworks or
(07:05):
rollup frameworks that we know today.
And there was going to be a huge proliferation of chains.
And now that's of course consensus.
We've had two and a half years plus of a lot of chains being launched.
almost ad nauseum to the point of disgust or at least lethargy from the market.
(07:27):
Uh, but at the time it was incredibly novel, right?
And so what I set out to do was to build a product that solved that issue.
And so I'd like to think that my insight was correct.
It was just a bit of an exploratory journey to identify exactly what the solution for thatproblem would be.
(07:49):
And so our initial iteration for that was an AMM product that basically allowed forindividual pools and different chains to be connected together so that you can swap
between them.
so conceptually really similar to star gate, but built for long tail chains.
so again, the problem that we're trying to solve is lots of chains, easy to launch a chainas in my experience at Aave.
(08:15):
How do you actually connect all these chains?
When after you launched them.
Right.
And so for us, our solution was to basically have an AMM contract that allowed this rollup team to deposit any asset they wanted and to connect to any other pool within the
catalyst network, whether it be on another long tail chain or on a hub like base, or, uh,we also dabbled within the cosmos ecosystem.
(08:39):
So Cosmos hub or osmosis that was basically the initial build.
Which on paper, I think made a lot of sense, but in production we ran into a number ofroadblocks, which I'm happy to talk about.
You mentioned RAS, which is Roll Up as a Service Provider.
Having been involved in a couple of Layer 2 deployments, one thing that's been reallysurprising for me, and this is the insight that you described that you came upon a couple
(09:09):
of, I guess, a while ago now.
But what was surprising to me is exactly how easy it is to launch a Layer 2.
you know, through a layer or conduit, you can launch a layer two literally in like five to10 minutes and then be able to choose from a host of services on the the roll up as a
service provider, like which, you know, which, you know, what other services you want,whether it be Celestia or anything else.
(09:36):
Super surprising.
And you're right.
I mean, there's been a huge proliferation of layer twos.
I'm curious about youryour perspective from a kind of market wide perspective, the ease of launching a layer
two.
Is that a, do you think that's a net negative, net positive?
Yeah, that's a really good question.
So I feel like if you asked me one or two years ago, my answer would be that it's a netpositive because it was ultimately the insight that my project was running on top of.
(10:13):
And so incentive wise, it made a lot of sense for me to be supportive of the proliferationof rollups.
Now, since my company has exited.
I get to be a little bit more candid about how I feel about it.
I still go back and forth on whether it is truly, you know, net positive or net negative.
(10:37):
I do think it has allowed for a lot of noise into the market because any team can launch achain and chains or rollups rather, they have maybe clear tokenomics than non-chains do.
And so that's led to a proliferation of token launches, proliferation of infrastructureand exacerbation of the UX.
(11:01):
do think there are good things about allowing teams to really easily spin up rollups.
You do have a lot more creativity and a lot more surface area as a developer to optimize acertain rollup to fit a specific need.
Right.
I think that's where.
App specific rollups are really interesting.
think abstract has pushed the boundaries slightly on the chain abstraction front forconsumer experiences.
(11:27):
But I will say that the vast majority of rollups that I've seen in the past two and a halfyears launch are general purpose.
More or less just a way to rationalize some sort of token economics.
so why I think in theory, it's still holds for me to be bullish about the technology inpractice.
I've been pretty disappointed with the proof points I've seen.
(11:49):
I agree with you.
know, and launching a roll-up is, while technically easy, the really hard part is makingit like differentiated from other roll-ups.
And I think the problem that I think a lot of entrepreneurs that are launching roll-upsthese days is that they are general purpose.
(12:09):
I think what's unique about abstract is they're really focused on like the end consumer,the retail folks.
actual applications that normal people are gonna use.
And that's pretty unique.
And I think their entry point into games and also streaming is really unique.
I haven't seen that before.
(12:31):
Whereas a lot of roll-ups are really general purpose.
And the problem there is then they have to court applications that are already on otherroll-ups or on Ethereum layer one.
to get them over and then they typically do that with kind of grants and the typicalthings that you normally see that don't really have a lot of staying power.
(12:55):
So you guys start with catalyst systems and then the key differentiator versus otherinteroperability protocols, which was kind of like the pooling of liquidity so that
which became the key differentiator for users as they try to navigate all these differentchains.
(13:19):
They need kind of what underpins them all is the of the shared liquidity.
And that's one of the key pieces that Catalyst provided.
And that was initially in the Ethereum space, right?
Or...
That was one of the key ecosystems that catalysts supported.
(13:40):
then October happened.
Tell us kind of what happened at that point that made you reflect that maybe there areother ecosystems in which catalysts could spend more time and focus on versus Ethereum.
Yeah.
So we actually originally were a Cosmos project because it was basically the same thesis,but more on the app chain side.
(14:06):
And then as we saw kind of the quicker emergence of roll up as a service and rolledframeworks, as opposed to the Cosmos SDK, it made a lot more sense for us to be far more
focused on Ethereum.
And so timeline wise, originally were a Cosmos project.
And then even before our first test net, we decided to focus on Ethereum roll-ups.
(14:27):
And then after we launched our AMM or V1 product, we saw a few months of production, aboutsix months of production volume.
And it was okay, but I think we wanted to explore different opportunities that had ahigher potential for growth.
(14:48):
And so we did two things basically.
One was we, know, meaning my co-founder and I did a very comprehensive audit of thebridging space and had a general takeaway that what we were doing at the moment was not
(15:10):
sufficient from a market perspective, from aproduct differentiation perspective, we were basically focused on Ethereum roll-ups and
there were 20 plus bridges that functionally did the same thing.
know, mechanism wise slightly different, but at the end, at the end of the day for, forthe end user, was the same thing.
And so it was really, really hard for us to differentiate and really hard for us to gainvolume and gain market share as a perspective, right.
(15:36):
Uh, or as a result rather, and this actually goes back to the point that you brought upon.
Undifferentiated general purpose rollups.
I think that's a phenomenon that you can view in all parts of crypto, especially inbridging because it's functionally the same thing that's happening in the rollup space.
have basically the same mechanism and the same user experience that is being brought tomarket with little differentiation.
(16:02):
And therefore it becomes a game of sealing each other's users.
And it's really, really hard to kind of gain market share in that type of markets.
Right.
And so that was kind of the first lens that we took the second lens that we took.
and again, even though we had that takeaway, we didn't really have a clear next step,right.
(16:25):
Outside of just doom and gloom saying like, shit, like the market that we're in is notgood.
But I think that's where the second layer comes in where we started just talking to reallyanyone that would be willing to ask or answer my questions.
And so rollup builders, application developers, bridge users, my friends, even my familyto a certain degree.
(16:53):
And I asked them how they felt about interoperability.
And I think the resolving or the resounding takeaway was that EVM bridging was goodenough.
It certainly can improve on a number of dimensions.
that we're thinking about now as it pertains to the chain abstraction and a better wallexperience.
(17:17):
But if you look at interoperability or bridging as a function, it's effectively solved.
You have these protocols that are able to move between different bridges, or sorry,between different chains within a few seconds for sometimes even a fraction of a cent.
So a truly negligible amount of cost and a more or lessnegligible amount of time.
(17:41):
And so it feels almost instant.
And if that was what's happening on Ethereum, then that's good enough for the end user,right?
They consider that a solved problem.
But I think where there was a ton of opportunity was the ability to do true chainabstraction, right?
(18:01):
And that's connecting all chains, not just EVM chains.
And so the names that were brought up were move chains.
Right.
Sweet.
Apdos and now movement also, um, Solana VM chains.
So not only Solana, but Eclipse and soon and a few others.
Tron is, you know, name that was floated around, course, very popular and from a paymentsperspective and in the global South.
(18:29):
Ton at the time was very popular as well, the telegram ecosystem.
And so there are a lot of chains that actually move a lot of volume.
And, if we step outside the crypto bottle, the crypto bubble, moves a lot of volume in adifferent consumer group, potentially, but it was meaningful enough to be there and it was
quite difficult.
(18:50):
And so those two insights were enough for my co-founder and I to decide to pivot theentire roadmap.
Right.
And we enhanced the product as well to make it more adaptable to across VM context.
And yeah, that was the emergence of.
What we call the time cross cats now, you know, we're just calling it catalyst V2 andyeah, we made the announcement around October and it was very successful.
(19:19):
Maybe I could read your own words from the October Post.
think this shows quite a bit of kind of emotional, the emotions I think that you weregoing through at the time.
And I think it's pretty powerful.
Confidence at an all-time low.
(19:40):
I went back to the drawing board.
I re-read every book that I bought as a bright-eyed college kid dreaming of starting abusiness, the lean startup, zero to one, how Google works, et cetera.
I ignored something that was so obvious that every book on entrepreneurship talked about,but I was too arrogant to heed.
Somehow thinking that crypto is different, I needed to talk to users.
(20:01):
So I did.
I asked everyone who would spare the time what was missing from cross-chain.
So I want to spend a minute talking about that.
You know, now we kind of understand this process to be called customer development, whichis kind of like a formalized kind of approach to marketing research, but from an
entrepreneur's builders perspective, tell us about like who you approach.
(20:23):
mentioned kind of the, the, the different groups that you approach, but what did you ask?
And because this is such a niche within a niche within a niche kind of product, like what,did you ask and tell us about like the learnings that you had that led to, okay, here's
kind of how we need to change.
Yeah.
(20:44):
So, I mean, it's kind of embarrassing to admit, honestly, to miss something that's socrucial to the product development process.
But I think I fell into a lot of bad habits from building in crypto for a very long time,where a lot of it was very much ivory tower research and the builder knows best, right?
(21:12):
It's kind of the.
The saying of the users don't really know what they want, right?
If you were to ask someone in the 1900s, what they want, they'd ask for a faster horse.
And so that was kind of the mantra that I embodied when I didn't really solicit too muchfeedback on what we were building.
Right.
And I think part of it, looking back was a lot of ego, knowing that, or thinking that Iknew exactly what the market wanted.
(21:40):
And also just a little bit of.
Maybe just like different priorities or different incentives where I wanted to be afounder that.
Put out a lot of very innovative research as opposed to a founder that built products thatcould scale and that people wanted.
Right.
So that's just a revelation that I had of, many throughout the whole process of, being afounder and exiting.
(22:08):
Um, and so anyway, that was a bit of a sidebar.
To answer your question, I think I went back to the drawing board of what catalyst wasbuilt for.
And so I think in the heat of trying to launch a product into main nuts and trying to gaintraction and trying to run marketing campaigns, I kind of lost the purpose of why this was
(22:38):
even being built in the first place, right?
The purpose wasn't to build a bridge that moved $50 million a day.
Right.
That was certainly a desirable outcome, but that wasn't the why.
The why, and what I've said before was to help new chains be able to connect to otherchains after they're launched.
(23:02):
Right.
And again, it seems so simple, but in the heat of things, after multiple years offighting fires and prioritizing different features, you kind of lose sight of that, sadly.
And so going back to the drawing board, ultimately catalyst is for chain teams or roll upteams, right?
(23:24):
And not even quite frankly, super successful ones, right?
They're getting wooed by all sorts of other bridges to get connected.
So rather I would reach out to long tail teams, scrappy teams that were building roll-ups.
I'd ask them why, and I asked them what their biggest needs are.
(23:44):
And this was not even involved or related to interoperability quite frankly, butultimately I'd sneak it in as well, right?
Because it's good to get broad customer research just to see kind ofhow people think, especially the, the user group that you're targeting, but ultimately you
want it tied back.
And it's also helpful to see where that stack ranks on a bunch of other priorities.
(24:08):
Right.
And so interesting enough, interoperability, guess interoperability in the sense of, youknow, rollups, connecting with other rollups and bridging other rollups seem to be not a
huge concern in the eyes of these rollup teams.
(24:29):
Right.
They had their native bridge.
So I can always go to Ethereum.
They could use an intent based protocol, mainly like relay in order to connect.
And they always felt found some way to be able to connect other rollups.
But what they were really, really interested in was seeing all the activity on Solana, allthe activity on SWE, all the activity on Ton and Tron and Ripple.
(24:54):
And they wanted a piece of that.
Right.
And so they felt completely sidelined from this parallel crypto ecosystem.
And that was a theme that came up again and again and again.
And I think when you're a ivory tower pie in the sky, crypto researcher turned founder,not that I was a researcher, but the other archetype that I was striving for, you don't
(25:22):
really.
want to be building for those ecosystems because there's a connotation against them,right?
Not necessarily maybe Solana at this point or Swi, but certainly for the other ones Ilisted.
And so it took a little bit of setting aside ego to say, Hey, I'm here to serve problemsand users.
I'm not here to serve my ego.
(25:44):
I'm not here to flex on other people on the crypto Twitter timeline, right?
I'm trying to actually build real products and be a real founder.
And so that was a big mental shift for me to move away from kind of the research andintellectualism and actually move towards building tactical things for people.
(26:06):
I'm glad you mentioned these ecosystems that you know don't get a lot of at least in thecircles that you and I kind of socialize in like ripple and Tron for example, but very few
people know that the stable coin volume on Tron is absolutely massive I think almost everyproject I know of that pays their people and stables they do so on Tron
(26:36):
Yeah.
the USDT version of, USDT on Tron.
So it's like, it's really incredible.
I don't know anything about the Ripple ecosystem other than I think it's pretty large andI'm really curious to know like, why don't I know more?
(26:56):
And why haven't they kind of, I guess expanded and I don't know anything for example aboutDeFi on Ripple but that.
could be really interesting.
And so it makes sense from a builder's perspective, like why you would consider thoseecosystems.
mean, they're legitimate ecosystem that have some negative connotation within the circlesthat we run around in, but there's actual like human beings on those ecosystems, like
(27:24):
using their products.
So it makes sense.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I, I see this phenomenon actually play out in a number of markets.
This isn't just like a crypto specific thing.
I don't know exactly what to call it, but I kind of call it like the Karen and Darrelleffect where the lay person is not involved in the same stuff as the enthusiasts or the
(27:50):
aficionado.
Right.
And the reason why I call it the Karen Darrell effect isKaren and Darrell's are the main constituents of the Facebook or meta ecosystem.
Right.
And so when Facebook copies Tik TOK and more recently they copied part of all, all theaficionados of Tik TOK or part of full right people who are millennials or gen Z's and
(28:14):
typically live in large cities.
They'd said, wow, I would never use that.
I never use Facebook.
I'll never ever use these features.
Well,Facebook didn't make them for you, right?
They made them for the current and Darrell's and they're actually bigger of a market thanthe aficionados.
Yeah.
And so building for the lay person is very, very powerful.
(28:38):
And that was a big learning for me as a founder.
You know, this reminds me from a, I used to work for an outdoor online retailer,absolutely massive one.
And I was kind of responsible for kind of merchandising operations and like revenue.
And one very big surprising insight that we had was the majority of the revenue actuallycame from what we called the archetype that we considered
(29:10):
kind like moms and dads.
But all of the marketing was focused on professional athletes, mountain climbers andsnowboarders.
And so internally we go through this kind of shift in thinking around, okay, all of ourmarketing, and by the way, we happened to arrive at that marketing just because everyone
(29:36):
else was doing that.
We focused on snowboarders and like professionals.
but the 80 % of the revenue were actually from people aspiring to become theseprofessionals.
So like your moms and dads and really kids.
And so that was a big insight to us.
It sounds really obvious now, but at the time it was kind of a big deal.
(29:58):
It was like a shift in thinking.
It's like, okay, well let's double down and continue to focus on professionals, but weneed to make things.
easier for the actual like people paying us to buy this stuff, which is like moms, dadsand kids.
And that was a big deal.
so they would well, how are they buying?
Well, it turns out a lot of them would call into the call center because they hadadditional questions that a professional might already know.
(30:25):
And then we looked at the, as we segmented like the revenue from like the non-professionalcustomers and it was all like through the call center.
because they needed to know the millimeter of the thread that was being used, themillimeters.
If they were going to go on a big hike, the type of material that this tent was made ofthat most professionals would already know.
(30:49):
So it was just like, it was a mind blowing kind of experience learning all of that.
And it sounds like you went through kind of the same thing within the crypto space.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
It's, it's funny that you said that it seems simple in hindsight.
Doesn't mean it's easy in the moment, right?
It's so easy to just not think very critically about certain actions that you take, right?
(31:17):
You can just copy paste it from a competitor or you read what industry trends arehappening, but that may not be pertinent to your actual context.
Right.
And I'm living proof of that basically.
I think all of us are, I mean, we just kind of get stuck in these, you know, kind of theseways of thinking.
(31:39):
But I think what I find really unique about you is you took the time to reflect, to do thecourageous thing and actually talk to people and customers.
And that then led to a pivot for Catalyst around October, November-ish, where you decidedat that time, maybe you can tell us about that pivot to focus on alt VMs.
(32:02):
Yeah.
So again, after this customer research market research that was kind of being done overthe summer, my co-founder and I arrived at a decision to ultimately pause what we were
doing and completely zag where everyone was zigging.
(32:24):
So we wanted to go to a new category and at the timeIt wasn't even a category, quite frankly, it was just other chains, right?
And so it was a bit of a marketing exercise in order to call it what it is today, which isall VMs and basically build a bit of a mini movement around it.
(32:48):
And so there was product work being done, course, you know, retrofitting or refactoringthe entire protocol for across VM context is very, very difficult.
So that was being done underway.
And at the same time, I think it was the right milestone for us to revisit what it meantto go to market from a marketing branding and even a business development perspective.
(33:15):
And so we completely did a rebrand.
I wanted to be insanely differentiated.
I've spoken a couple of times on how I viewed the brand of CrossCats and Catalyst V2.
built a movement around all VMs with strategic partnerships with movement and fluent andsoon and other non-EVM ecosystem projects.
(33:42):
And we basically push it out in October and November to a ton of success.
Thankfully.
Now, context is everything and then the story, I think, is what's really unique aboutthis.
Like, what if, you know, when you start a catalyst, you initially focus on the alt VMspace versus all the pain that you and your team went through having kind of, you know,
(34:10):
focused in one area and then learned and then changed and then you eventually arrived atthe alt VM space.
Like, tell us...
kind of if you were to, as an observer looking back, what would be the relative kind ofeffectiveness if you had started Catalyst on the alt VM space versus having to go through
(34:33):
all that pain and the story and the amazing storytelling that came with it to now kind ofwhere the pivot actually makes sense to arrive at the alt VM space?
Do you know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
The story I think is really compelling and I'm just curious about what if there was nostory and you just out of day one all the
(35:00):
It's really hard to predict or I guess speculate on what could have been.
I think the market would have been smaller, certainly.
Mind you, when catalyst was an idea, FTX happened.
So I think Alt-VIA mine share was at an all-time low.
(35:24):
So that would have been.
a big macro factor to consider and have to navigate.
I also think I was a very different person at the start where many in many ways, but Ithink in the way that really matters in the context of this conversation was just my
(35:45):
mindset, right?
I want to be a founder to grow.
wanted to be a very intellectual founder.
wanted to make innovative things, publish white papers.
And that's very different than the mindset that I have now, or rather that I had when Ilaunched CrossCats, which was more being a real founder, so to speak, where I wanted to
(36:07):
build things that scaled and help people and got a lot of adoption.
So that would have been very different.
I also think that, well, yeah, I think those are like the main two things.
Well, okay.
So I think the best way to frame it was that.
The market of course was very different, as I mentioned.
(36:29):
I also think the mindsets of people were very different where Ethereum had a lot of mindshare in 2022 when catalyst was first started, especially post FTX, right?
People were dancing on the graves of Solana.
I think that had changed a lot in the next, in the preceding or in the subsequent 1.5years.
(36:54):
where people became a lot more tired of the Ethereum ecosystem, the proliferation ofroll-ups and other infrastructure projects.
And it was ripe for a narrative that was counter Ethereum in many ways.
And that is where, you know, that's an insight that I had and leveraged to make the ideaof alt VMs stick more in people's minds, right?
(37:22):
You have to have someframing of frustration and how to solve that frustration.
I don't think that would have been possible in 2022 post-FTX.
And then the last thing of course, is me being a founder, right?
Not only did I have a different mindset, but I also had a different skillset where Ididn't really value marketing and I didn't know a lot about marketing.
(37:43):
And only was it after I became humbled from launching a product into production, realizingthat marketing was insanely important.
learning, becoming a student, talking to a ton of marketing people, reading a of marketingbooks that I suddenly gained this new skillset that I could leverage through CrossCats.
You mentioned frustration and at the same time, while there was kind of frustration in themarket, people were becoming increasingly frustrated with Ethereum.
(38:09):
You also experienced this personal frustration, right?
That, you know, from as a founder, you were trying to build something that was usefulwithin the Ethereum space, but you encountered your own frustrations.
And so it was kind of like a perfect storm, which led to the story of,maybe we need to do something in a different ecosystem.
(38:36):
like, think, I think my, my, I think the point I want to make is the story that led tokind of the creation of this new category.
don't know if it's even a new category, but I think it is.
I hadn't heard of interoperability in SVM, alt SVM space kind of framed like thatspecifically.
(38:57):
And so I tend to call it a new category.
But the story that you went through and experience that led to the focus on the alt VMspace is like part and parcel of kind of this new category.
It's like, it is so important that the story has to be there.
(39:21):
if you had created catalysts or cross-cats kind of like ex nihilo, just out of nowhere andjust focus on alt VM space, I don't think you'd be as
effective.
know, it's like the frustration that you had as a founder had like is a necessaryingredient.
And, and I think for those listening, I think that's kind of an important thing torecognize is the story as you in product marketing and growth marketing, the story that
(39:51):
you have, as you enter a new category, create a new category is really critical.
because it's that story that becomes memorable for people.
Like people will remember your frustration.
They'll remember this X-pose that you wrote.
Anyway, that's just a quick diatribe.
Any reflection on that?
(40:14):
No, I think you put it very well and poetically even put it well, much, much more cogentof a description than I could have even framed it myself.
I do think, and again, this is a realization that I'm having live here on this podcast isthat I was basically the archetype of someone who would build on an alt VM, right?
(40:36):
Someone who has been in Ethereum has become jaded and frustrated in many ways.
And has decided to join a new movement.
Right.
So that's an interesting parallel.
Um, a second thing that I'll add is I almost didn't even publish that post, which issomething that I've never, uh, admitted publicly before.
(41:01):
I actually had a very different post drafted up.
That was very, how do I say, um, very, uh,Just boring is the word that we use very corporate, very much like, Hey, we're changing
because we're really excited about all VMs, right?
(41:23):
A very standard pivot announcement that any project could say, right?
They're saying, Hey, like we had this observation that we think all VMs are going to popoff and we're going to hop on that wave because we're super smart and we know things
before you know things.
And that's why we're super smart.
And I think that would have been the wrong framing, quite frankly, because I think itwould have been framed in a position of strength and it just didn't feel authentic to
(41:53):
myself.
Quite frankly, it didn't feel like the story that I wanted to tell.
So I had many, many drafts of this blog post of this announcement and a lot of them wereflavors of, I'm very smart and therefore I'm hopping on a new thing and you should join
me.
And it wasn't until I scrapped everything and just wrote what I was feeling at the momentthat this new narrative kind of took shape and it was far more reflective, far more
(42:25):
vulnerable.
I even shared it with my team before him.
like, Hey, I'm going to say these things.
probably have never heard me say this before.
Quite frankly, like this will be the first time you've heard me express thesefrustrations.
Is that okay?
Just a heads up, right?
Because it's going to be different.
And I actually didn't know how people would take it.
(42:46):
And I was surprised that people took it really well.
There were people that didn't take it well.
I had people in my DM saying, Hey, like you're a founder.
You shouldn't be weak.
have investors that believe in you.
have employees that believe in you.
You cannot be weak in the market.
And I just said, Hey, that's just who I am.
(43:07):
I'm not going to change it.
The, well, it takes a lot of courage, I think, to be as vulnerable as you have beenonline.
And I think it's, at least from an outside perspective, it's helped your personal brand,which in turn has helped Catalyst kind of grow its brand presence and awareness.
(43:31):
And probably, and I know, Life, I wrote a kind of a review of Catalyst, I think like lastMay.
And so they're already aware, but my guess is probably like, you know, the acquisition oflife of catalyst by life.
had a lot to do with, you know, you and the team, not just like the technical stuff behindit.
(43:55):
Maybe we can pivot to that.
Tell us about kind of the acquisition.
Like that's a big deal in the crypto space.
You don't see a lot of that.
I guess what was going through your head when life I reached out and said, Hey, you know,What are you Yeah, you up?
(44:17):
So it was definitely a surprise.
That was the first reaction.
So for context, I've known the LeFi team for a long time.
Arjun and I, Arjun's their head of research and Arjun and I are friends personally outsideof a crypto context and Philip, the CEO of LeFi was an angel investor into catalyst.
(44:42):
So he had actually had a very nice tweet.
for the acquisition announcement, he said, I'm just doubling down on, uh, the foundersthat I love, which was really nice.
I didn't know he was going to post that.
And he always has a very eloquent way of framing things.
So I had a very good relationship with them.
And so the angle that I had for the meeting post pivot was, Hey, let's, let's get Levi tointegrate catalyst, right?
(45:12):
Levi has a ton of order flow.
And I think it's, it's mutually beneficial because catalyst can benefit from that orderflow and you guys can benefit from being on all the EMS, which is something that you guys
are not on right now.
And it became so much of a synergy that they ultimately, after a little bit of diligenceand review of our documentation offered to acquire us.
(45:36):
And that was a huge shock, right?
I was, I was heading into a meeting fully expecting to answer a bunch of technicalquestions.
And the first question was just, we want to buy you.
do you, what do you think?
Uh, and my response was, me think on it and let's meet up at DEF CON.
So that was, I think maybe early, early November, maybe late October.
(45:58):
And so we met a few weeks later at DEF CON through a series of very, very long, veryintense in person meetings.
Um, a few more meetings after that meeting a lot of members of the team and this side justmade a lot of sense.
Uh, for the reasons that I just listed as well as a few more reasons that I'm happy toelaborate on.
Um, but tying back to what we just talked about that offer would not have been possiblewithout the pivot.
(46:28):
Quite frankly.
I think they realize that they were trying to buy a rapidly appreciating asset.
And that allowed us to negotiate from a position of a lot of strength, which was reallygreat.
And that would not have been possible without the pivot and without the announcement andwithout the story.
(46:51):
I'm going to age myself a little bit here, I believe LeFi was a grantee, was a Harmonygrantee, like three plus years ago.
So I led growth at Harmony and I believe like right around, this was like before thebridge hack, which was just a terrible thing.
(47:14):
That was so scary.
I'm not sure how much you know, but a hundred million was exploited fromthe Harmony Bridge, the Horizon Bridge, it was terrible.
But we had, yeah, it really was.
We had a number of kind of online events, hackathons, and I think LeFi was one of thegrantees that we had.
If I remember correctly, I have to double check.
(47:37):
Another thing that will age me too is back in, I wanna say like 2018, 2019, I was at aCosmos conference and Stani and I think Emilio were there.
It was right after they had rebranded Eathland to Ave and literally no one knew how topronounce Ave.
(47:59):
They were at that stage of, I was at a different project at the time and they were at abooth next to us.
And I saw everyone was walking up to their table to ask Emilia how to, I think that's hisname, Emilia how to do this, do that.
(48:19):
And like, no one was coming to our table.
And I'm thinking, what is going on over there?
Like something is happening and they like, no one knew who Ave was at the time.
So I went over there and talked to Stani.
I'm like, what are you guys up to?
Like, what, what is Ave?
And I should have known then, like that was like a signal that something big was about tohappen because this was like before, DeFi Summer, Ave was like nothing.
(48:45):
And then they became like massive.
So.
Note to self, like if you're at a conference and everyone's walking up to you, to yourtable, like something's about to happen that you should pay attention.
And the same thing happened, crazy, the same thing happened in 2017.
I was at a conference, actually East Denver, and I was next to my table.
(49:08):
I was at a different project and my table was next to Chainlink.
the ex-CMO of Chainlink,She was showing me how to fold their t-shirts in this fancy way where you kind of roll it
up and you're able to throw a t-shirt.
Anyway, so she was showing me in between these long lines of people trying to figure outhow to use Chainlink into the application they were building for the hackathon.
(49:39):
And again, no one was coming to my table.
And I'm going, OK, what is happening over there?
What the heck is Chainlink?
And this was like early 2017.
so anyway, again, note the self, like pay attention.
So with the acquisition of, of LeFi or catalysts of LeFi's acquisition of catalysts, likewhat does that look like from a, catalyst didn't have a token yet.
(50:07):
And so I guess like, what is the ins and outs?
Like, what does that look like acquiring a project within the crypto space?
Yeah.
So there's broadly three types of acquisitions, I would say.
So one is an acquisition of people.
So an aqua hire.
(50:29):
I think that is probably the most common form of acquisition, especially in crypto.
We've seen, I mean, Coinbase has bought, forbid, how many, how many projects at thispoint?
The second one is in acquisition of tech.
Alone, is fairly rare, but I've certainly seen it.
(50:50):
And then lastly is an acquisition of both.
So the tech and the people, uh, we are the last bucket.
So the tech has been acquired for this cross VM intent protocol.
actually refactoring it to be more chain abstraction friendly.
And so we're calling it catalyst V3 and the team came along as well.
(51:12):
And so for me, my role has evolved.
I'm now the lead of the leafy intense team.
Marketing speak perspective.
We call it leafy 2.0.
So the next evolution of, of leafy away from an aggregator business to more of a intensemarketplace business.
And yeah, I run a team of six people and.
(51:37):
I mean, functionally, doesn't look too different.
Quite frankly, I think the five is a super.
autonomous team, you can kind of do, you know, whatever within reason and you make yourmark.
And as a founder or as a previous founder, I really, really enjoy that.
So the day to day is honestly not changed too much, which is, I think surprising to a lotof people, but it's surprising to me quite frankly, but it's been nice.
(52:02):
That's great.
A couple of questions around the customer segments of interoperability protocols.
And I find this fascinating.
You've got retail folks or end users that use interoperability protocols.
And then you also have foundations and I'd say institutions is probably the broadcategory.
(52:26):
What typically, at least for LeFi, what drives the volume?
Is that something that you could maybe talk to and share?
Yeah.
And it's public, right?
You can go on Dune and see all the on-chain data.
I'd probably say at this point, it's 50 50 where you have end users and you haveinstitutions.
(52:47):
And so from an end user perspective, LeFi has a sister product called jumper.
So jumper is a UI that uses LeFi for aggregation andIt's, know, it's a, it's a website.
You can go to it, Jumper.exchange.
You can swap between 50 plus chains at this point.
(53:08):
It could be any token, any token.
So it's, it's a, it's a really good experience.
So I'd say that's probably 50 % of, of LeFi's volume.
The other 50 % are enterprise clients or enterprise customers that they have.
And so LeFi services, all the leading wallets in the space.
So MetaMask swaps, Phantom swaps, Robinhood wallet.
(53:31):
You know, if you're swapping in a wallet interface, it's realistically using leaf highunderneath the hood.
That's awesome.
is that, you know, I spoke with Kane at Infinex a couple of weeks ago and they have thisidea of they're branding it as Swidge, which is a swap and a bridge at the same time.
(53:55):
I do too, but I failed to ask him like, what is actually powering the Swidge underneath?
Because Infinex is, they're calling it a super app, but I think initially it's a wallet.
But I'm curious, and I don't know this and I should have asked him, like, what is poweringthat?
But it sounds like LeFi is powering a lot of these kind of swap and bridge at the sametime operations, which is fascinating because it's, I don't think a lot of people know
(54:22):
that, because it's almost white labeled, right?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
You're not going to see, you know, the leafy logo anywhere when you're on metamask orphantom, but yeah, it's, it's, shows the product market fit that leafy is enterprise
product house, right?
They've won a ton of business from leading wallets and, a bunch of other applications,quite frankly.
(54:45):
I mean, it's, very much needed, right?
When you think about bridging as a, as a job to be done where I'd say the ideal bridgingexperience doesn't, it's just one that
doesn't exist at all, right?
It's users don't care about bridging.
They think it's a pain.
They want any asset on any chain.
And that's slightly different from chain abstraction because of course users are stillaware of what chain they're using.
(55:09):
I, you know, would, would claim that users care about what chain they're using at leastfor the next few years, but people don't really care about bridging, right?
People don't want to go to across.
They don't want to go toStargate and move money.
just an extra step for them.
They'd rather just be doing what they want to be doing, uh, whether it's buying a token,selling a token, performing some sort of on chain action and just being on their merry
(55:35):
way, right?
Irrespective of what houses they hold on what chains.
No, I agree with you.
And in this same conversation I had with Kane, and I invoked a of a quote from a collegefriend whose dad was Jeff Raskin, the creator of the Mac.
And he said something really profound.
(55:55):
said like, the best interaction is no interaction.
And his idea is like the reason for customer service as a category, non-sales category,Mm-hmm.
to really fix people's problems that they're having.
And so what if there were no problems in the first place?
(56:17):
You would have no customer service, essentially.
It was his kind of idea.
And I think the same thing could be said with bridging.
It's not just abstracting the complexity from the user, but most people don't wake upwanting to bridge anything.
They really want to...
You know, they care about the outcome of that, which is like, you know, they want to buy Xasset on a different chain.
(56:42):
They just want to get that done.
And kind of the necessarily evil is that, well, you need a bridge to that chain and thencome back to kind of your home chain.
But it still makes bridging like incredibly valuable, you know, as a service.
But to be able to do it kind of underneath andalmost abstract the complexity from the user is really the key.
(57:09):
And it sounds like LeFi's enterprise product is clearly doing that with its massiveintegrations with these big brands, which is really incredible.
That's so awesome.
Well, Jim, this has been so enlightening, and I really appreciate you taking the time totalk.
(57:30):
Well, I guess what's next for you?
You shared a little bit, but whatWhat can the public, I guess, expect from LeFi going forward and kind of your role?
oh, last question.
I'm curious.
So Catalyst, you've been able to build a pretty strong community.
Like, how are you bringing them on to kind of onboarding them to the LeFi community?
(57:54):
So catalyst as it stands right now is still a separate brand because it is so differentfrom the leafy core product, right?
We call it leafy core internally and then catalyst is its own thing.
So our hope is to still foster the same community and to leverage the same socials.
Of course, things will change underneath a larger brand umbrella.
(58:18):
And I think the community might want to move on based on differentYou know, focuses of priorities, right?
Like I said, we've significantly refactored the product to fit more of LeFY's long-termgoals, but that's the plan at the very least.
Um, and the answer to your last question on what's next, uh, I'm really excited for what'snext.
(58:42):
Honestly.
Um, I wouldn't have done this deal if I didn't think it was going to be.
huge for the industry, right?
Lefi's distribution and their, and their strong enterprise product coupled with theinnovation of catalyst and it's, it's cross VM focus is, is really, really big.
(59:02):
And so what I really want to do, just tying it back to the original answer I gave you wasto finally solve the problem that I had at Ave, which is what does a new chain do after it
launches?
How does it connect to a bunch of other chains?
And I actually think at LeFi, we have the resources to actually make that a reality.
(59:26):
And so it's going to be fully permissionless chain connections, fully permissionless assetissuance using, you know, I don't want to bore you with the details, but basically using
catalysts as the intent protocol says as the bridge.
And then we're also building a solver as a service product called pioneer.
(59:48):
So again, if you have a new bridge, you can, you know, connect via catalyst to bridge,just because you have a bridge doesn't mean people are actually going to be moving funds.
you need pioneer as a solver, as a service.
And then as an extra layer of redundancy, we have a partnership with a company calledGlacis that allows mint and burn cross-chain token standards like layer zero of T to be
(01:00:13):
issued on these new chains.
so again, day zero, your launch, you already have.
A bridge, you have a way to move money and you have a way to also move money.
So a bridge in two ways to move money, basically.
So that's.
again, the original problem we were trying to solve with catalysts.
The AMM had its roadblocks cross cat certainly was a piece of the puzzle, but this is nowan even bigger picture with glazes and pioneer as well.
(01:00:42):
That's awesome.
Well, Jim, thank you so much for taking the time to talk.
Learned a ton from you.
Continue to learn as I follow you on X.
looking forward to seeing what you and the LeFi team do next.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me on.
I had a ton of fun.
Thank you.
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