Avril Dutheil, Core Contributor of Neutron, on The Cosmos Ecosystem, DeFi, and the Web3 Entrepreneur Shortage | Ep. 289
In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Avril (Spaydh) Dutheil, Core Contributor of Neutron, talks about the unique value proposition of Cosmos, Cosmos’ money and user problems, and the web3 dev shortage is a fallacy.
About Avril Dutheil
Avril (Spaydh) Dutheil is a Core Contributor of Neutron and is an experienced digital specialist with a background in marketing, community management, digital services, and infrastructure, with a longstanding interest in computing systems and privacy. Starting his crypto journey when he purchased Bitcoin in his high school cafeteria, Avril went on to work for big industry names, including P2P and Lido Finance, growing communities and leading strategic business initiatives. He is now focused on supporting the Cosmos ecosystem, ushering in secure cross-chain DeFi, and creating the next generation of blockchain tech.
Avril Dutheil gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview, which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication, provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.
Highlights Of The Interview
- The unique value proposition of Cosmos
- Cosmos’ money and user problems
- The launch of wstETH; Neutron launched wstETH on Cosmos to bolster the interchain economy by bringing Ethereum’s liquidity to Cosmos
- Neutrality upgrade: Neutron recently announced the integration of Duality into the Neutron network to broaden liquidity choices, improve DeFi infrastructure, and offer developers greater flexibility
- The web3 dev shortage is a fallacy; the web3 entrepreneur shortage is the real issue.
Full Transcript Of The Interview
Matt Zahab
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. We are buzzing as always, still in Mexico. What a treat, very grateful. Coming in hot, Matt Zahab your host here as always, super pumped to have today’s guest on the show, also coming in hot from one of the best countries on the planet, and that is, Le France, coming in hot, absolutely love it. Today we have Avril Spaydh Dutheil, a core contributor of Neutron and an experienced digital specialist with a background in marketing, community management, digital services and infrastructure with a longstanding interest in computing systems and privacy. He started his crypto journey way back in the day when he purchased Bitcoin in his high school cafeteria and went on to work for industry big name including P2P and Lido Finance, growing communities and leading strategic business initiatives. He’s now focused on supporting the Cosmos ecosystem, which I absolutely love, ushering in secure cross-chain DeFi and creating the next gen of blockchain tech. Super pumped to have you on Spaydh. Welcome to the show, my friend.
Avril Dutheil
Thank you very much for having me. It’s a pleasure.
Matt Zahab
Pump to have you on. Let’s go way back in the day here. You have worked for some incredible companies But before we get into that, we got to talk about your Bitcoin inception story I absolutely love this. You were at a high school caf. You bought Bitcoin I mean, this is not a kid friendly pod. You can be honest where you try to buy some weed, rebind drugs. What was going on there? What was your Bitcoin inception story? Give it to us straight up.
Avril Dutheil
I wasn’t even that entertaining to be fair. I guess, especially during my youth, I tended to be somebody that easily opinionated about things. And around the time of the Snowden Revelations and everything, I had grown a sort of distress of the banking system. Although it wasn’t really relevant to me to be fair, I had like maybe 50 bucks a month to play around with. But yeah, around that time, I discovered Bitcoin was a thing. And so like went through the white paper and kind of like just found it fascinating. Also probably at the time understood like maybe, you know, 50% of it. But still, I was like, oh, banking system transfer value, but without banks. That’s exactly what I wanted in the world. So I started basically putting my like 50 bucks a month in Bitcoin. And I think the first app I ever had was like the Coinbase kind of like mobile app at the time. So I would just log into there from my school because there was Wi-Fi there. And I used to live in the countryside where the internet was really shite. And so, you know, that allowed me to connect, drop my 50 bucks in, feel good about myself. And then obviously, I completely care for fault the entire cycle. So I still hold these bitcoins to this day because I never, like by the time I was in the mental model of like selling them and taking profit, they were Down really badly. So, you know, a lot of learning experiences there.
Matt Zahab
Hey, I’m the exact same as you. I have never sold. So not a big trader. Just, you know, if you believe in something, hold it long term. The rest will take care of itself. But I absolutely love that. Before we get into, obviously, everything Neutron and Cosmos related, what else about crypto really got you going? You said it was sort of unbanking yourself rather, which is huge. But you got in at a young age, which is pretty uncommon. Most people don’t get in that young, right? A lot of people who got in are much older than us and were much more mature than us, had more experience than us, and then got in at a later age. You got in how young. Was there any other reasons just beside sort of, you know, the peer to peer ability to transact actual value, to participate in a decentralized economy, Bitcoin as a whole? What else got you going about crypto?
Avril Dutheil
Yeah, I mean, I think the technology itself was really interesting, right? It was complex. I don’t think I fully grasp exactly how it worked at the time, but it was kind of like an interactual challenge, which is a piece of actually this industry that has been one of the most attractive aspects to it ever. Like to my personality type, I like a good challenge basically, and I like having to sort of like work to understand how something works, which is certainly a challenge for general adoption. But like to me, it was a motivating factor of like, this looks interesting. And I have to put in some effort to actually crack it DAOn. So there was this like this element of like, hey, transfer the value without banks, that was kind of like the initial thing. And then when Ethereum kind of like came around, or at least I picked up on it, that kind of like blew my mind because now it was, hey, let’s do what Bitcoin did to transfer the value, but now let’s apply this to anything you can put on a computer, which is, you know, a good chunk of our modern life. And so, you know, this combination of like, sending a piece of technology, which I was very fond of, like I was building computers and such for myself, like just to be gaming, basically. I was like looking into how the technology worked. And there was this kind of like, philosophical, political, kind of like complex that was also appealing. So it was kind of like a really good combo for me to get, I guess, interested in the field.
Matt Zahab
So cool. And then present day, you are a core contributor at Neutron. This is a good opportunity to introduce Neutron and we’ll get into the nitty-gritty. But before we do that, give us the TLDR, give us the elevator pitch. What exactly is Neutron and what are you and the team working on there?
Avril Dutheil
Yeah, for sure. So Neutron is a smart contract platform that has a few crucial differences from any other platform. The first one is that, like, first it’s highly secure for a technology called replicated security, which allows it to actually be one of the first blockchains to be secured by restaking. But more importantly, it’s a blockchain that allows you to develop smart contracts that you can deploy once and three Neutrons cross infrastructure expand across, you know, 50 plus blockchains today to onboard users and provide them a seamless experience, but also to expand the reach of your protocol so that it can grow to its full potential without having to maintain multiple instances. And finally, it’s a blockchain that sort of like leverages Cosmos’s unique value proposition of being able to customize really deep into the blockchain and make that available to application builders to build better applications that you wouldn’t be able to build anywhere else like on Ethereum or other shared environments, essentially. So to recap, Neutron is a highly secure, cross-chain smart contracting platform that makes application specific infrastructure available to developers so that they can build better products and onboard users from anywhere, basically.
Matt Zahab
Very interesting. And to my knowledge, it’s all about sort of broadening liquidity choices, improving DeFi infrastructure. And like you said, and the reason why you guys choose to build on and with Cosmos is to offer developers greater flexibility. We’ve heard it so many times in crypto, whether it’s Twitter, other podcasts, my podcast, whatever the case may be, but without more use cases, we’re hooped. And the way to get use cases is to bring devs in. You need really smart guys and gals to come in and build really cool shit on Web3 Tech in order for the masses, you know, the everyday Joe’s and Josephine’s to start actually using crypto and Web3. And that’s what you guys are doing. And we’d love to see that.
Avril Dutheil
I actually have a bit of a counter take here. So I agree with most of the conclusions here. There’s just one difference that would make regarding Cosmos and what we actually need to progress. This is largely inspired by Simon Warda from Confio. He makes a really good point, which is that we always say we need more devs, but especially in Cosmos and Cosmosm, we actually have a lot of devs. There’s enough talent here to actually build a number of really great applications. One of the things that we’re missing and that’s bottles that are necking us is not just the devs, it’s the entrepreneurs that have a product vision, that have an application that can lead these devs to actually ship products that are meaningfully differentiated, that solve real problems, that will onboard these people. There’s a separation of concerns here. There’s a lot of people who can write really good code, and sure, Blockchain technology is a bit more obscure. I guess it does take some onboarding, but if you have a really good team, you have a very strong vision and you just need somebody to write the code, you’ll find that person with some efforts, because there is a lot of talent actually. I agree with most of the conclusions, but there’s also a thing that it’s not just devs, actually, it’s also entrepreneurs themselves.
Matt Zahab
I love that. That’s going right in the show notes. And honestly, that’s the first time we’ve heard that on the show. So you think there’s an entrepreneur shortage over a dev shortage? Any specific areas of sort of Web3 that you think are really lacking? If you were to put yourself in these Steve Jobs and the Elon Musk and the Bill Gates Grade A entrepreneur boots, what areas of crypto would you be attacking so these really talented devs can work some magic and ship some really good products?
Avril Dutheil
I mean, if I had 15 great ideas, I would probably be building them somehow. I mean, I don’t have to depend with, but I think there’s a bunch of stuff. I think what we’re seeing is that there’s definitely demand for something that combines elements of DeFi, or say, gambling, depending on where in the spectrum these are, and social interactions. FriendTech and such demonstrated this, but I don’t think anybody has actually produced something that was sustainable. I think there is a very wide unexplored area of using blockchain technologies to effectively replace governments to enable essentially like various forms of democracy and social organizations that are more decentralized. If you look at ant colonies, they have this ability to coordinate at the very low level between themselves without having necessarily this very vertical hierarchy that we have. Potentially, we can get closer to a model like this using these technologies. So I think that’s an interesting application. But what I mean is that there’s a lot of very far-fetched things that we could be doing with this technology. But whether or not there is something that can be venture-backed, for example, is a big question. Not everything is necessarily something that we make money. And so getting the funding to build these things can be harder. On the flip side, though, with all of the DeFi rails that we’ve built, we actually have what it takes to actually build pretty good funding systems. And so combining these things together, we could have a really good gambling ecosystem and a really good DeFi ecosystem, potentially something that could take over some of the functions that are currently handled by the traditional financial system, but also provide other services to humanity. But I think that’s more of a long-term thing, to be fair. I think the one thing that has product market fed right now is DeFi. DeFi is what crypto does best because it’s high value and it’s coordination between a number of actors that don’t necessarily know each other. And so it does so by removing trusts. All of these properties are basically ideal for this use case.
Matt Zahab
Well said. Let’s jump back into Cosmos for a sec. And again, you guys are building on the Cosmos ecosystem. Cosmos last year, the Terra collapse left a massive liquidity vacuum and burned a massive user race in Cosmos. I want to say end of 2021, early 2022, the Cosmos sort of narrative was one of the hottest narratives in all of crypto. I know tons of people, myself included, who sort of aped into ATOM. And then obviously it fell off a cliff. Does it really so? You’ve got to do your research beforehand. And again, c’est la vie could have happened to anyone else. But what can the Cosmos ecosystem do to really get to that next level? It’s just like you talked about about five minutes ago. There’s so many talented devs. There’s so many incredibly smart and talented and driven and hardworking people in the ecosystem. But it still seems like there’s not really any sort of front of mind consumer friendly product that we could use every single day. What’s the issue there? And how can this be fixed?
Avril Dutheil
Yeah, I think that’s a fundamental question. So my assessment of the ecosystem is that the Cosmos is well in advance when it comes to technology. Like the infrastructure that exists in Cosmos in terms of how easily it allows you to do things you wouldn’t be able to do anywhere else is just unmatched. The tech is here. Now, on the technical side, the only thing that’s missing or not fully there is tying these components well together so that it all fits nicely into a product. That has been, I think, one of the challenges whereby the IBC on its own is awesome, Cosmos is awesome, Cosmosm is awesome, but tying these up together so that there’s no UX issues, for example, or such has been a challenge, although it’s getting a lot better. I’m really not concerned about the tech. What I think we’ve sort of lacked in the ecosystem is distribution. We have really good applications that benefit from this very good tech, but we have lacked a few elements to really get these kind of like flagship applications that just like boom and achieve really large scale. I think one of them is applications in Cosmos have a bit of a disadvantage to start with because of a lower discoverability. Since this stack is different from like EVM and such, a lot of the most visible, most used kind of like resources to search for opportunities. Either don’t support Cosmos or take longer to integrate. And so it requires more effort comparatively to get like the same, you know, in front of the same number of eyes, essentially. That’s one. So like discoverability. The second is onboarding, right? Like once you know that there’s an opportunity, you need to be able to get there and use it, right? And I think this is probably one of the most like in one of the areas where there has been the most pain in the ecosystem whereby until a couple of months ago, the experience was you would have to bridge funds, it would be slow, it would be costly, you would have to DAOnload a new wallet, create a seed phrase, save it on a piece of paper somewhere. Then you would have to sort of like bridge into one chain. Like after bridging to Cosmos, you would have to bridge to another chain, swap and then bridge to the chain you wanted to use and search. And so this kind of like sequence of action was one, not super intuitive and was a lot longer than what you would have on just like a shared environment, like just Ethereum, right? Or by you would have other constraints like gas fees and such. But at least you would understand how to do it. And the reality is that like IBC was very difficult to use to a number of people. Now that has improved tremendously, there are solutions that calculate all of the routes for you. So that is essentially one transaction you get from point A to wherever you want to go in just one transaction. Like all of this has gone a long way, but there’s still more that we can do. Like for example, we still need like different wallets to use Cosmos today than we would on other ecosystems. The bridging to the ecosystem, like inside of the ecosystem, bridging is largely sells like IBC is like probably one of the most secure bridging frameworks. And it’s built such that you can really use it as an, like you can abstract a lot of that. These operations away from the user. And so like now we’re seeing this sort of like manifests itself. But there’s still like a lot of work to be done on bridging into the ecosystem or into applications ready, because that’s what should matter. Like what I think is the future is you shouldn’t even know that like, well, I mean, you should know if you want to, but you shouldn’t have to care that you’re bridging. Because instead of like looking for networks and then applications on these networks, you should look for applications like what am I trying to do, right? I have an objective as a user. I want this objective to be met. Where is the, what is the best place to do that? Right? If I want to get exposure to X token, the only thing I should care about is like, Hey, where can I do that? And so I shouldn’t have to like think about, okay, so I’ll have the sequence of like bridging to X chain and then this other and then doing the swap and then bridging to another. No, like there’s this app. I have fun somewhere. I connected the app. The app does all of the heavy lifting of bringing the funds like processing the swap and then returning me what I actually go.
Matt Zahab
So it’s gotta be clean.
Avril Dutheil
Yeah, exactly. So that’s that’s one of our big focus. So, you know, we said like discoverability was an issue. The second one was sort of like onboarding friction. And the third one, I think is Cosmos has a stack that is unique because it allows you to build something that you couldn’t build elsewhere. But the problem is that we haven’t had that many teams. Like certainly there are, right? Like dYdX is probably one of the latest teams to actually do so, right? To leverage this unique tech to build a unique product. It’s, you know, one of the most performant perps out there and it relies on purely decentralized infrastructure. There’s no centralize sequencer anymore, which is, you know, technical achievement and a product achievement as well. But, you know, beyond dYdX and a few others, it’s not really like every application in Cosmos is that meaningfully differentiated for applications you would find on other ecosystems. And I think that’s something that as an ecosystem, we need to realize that our strength is building things others just can’t build. Right? It’s not just, you know, marginal improvements, right? Because marginal improvements won’t motivate radical changes in behavior, right? If you have two Dexes, one is on Ethereum and you can just click and use it. And the other one requires you to bridge and whatever. the other Dex want to be meaningfully better for you to actually jump to that product essentially. And so as an ecosystem, we need to focus on like really differentiated product. And so this is kind of like these three things are kind of like, I think the three fundamental problems that we’re laser focused on solving essentially for Neutron, but also for the ecosystem as a whole right now. And to be fair, to developers outside of solving for Neutron and the ecosystem, but also really to solve for like developers in the industry as a whole. Like one of the, I think one of the stories that exemplifies this like the best is Neutron recently merged with another blockchain, acquired merged with it essentially. And that blockchain was developed by a very talented team called Duality, which actually started out in the Ethereum ecosystem. And they did a bunch of work around Uniswap and other kind of like leading protocols. And that experience has eventually led them to design sort of like a new generation of a Dex that is a hybrid between an order book and an AMM and has the best of both worlds essentially. But the problems that when trying to actually build it, they were, they started like facing the limitations of what you can do in the VM essentially. And trying to break free from these constraints is what led them to Cosmos and eventually to join Neutron. But I think this is like, this is the best example of like, if we’re successful with our mission, both Neutron and you know, Cosmos as a whole, what we’ll end up doing is like unleashing people who have a strong vision of something they want to build something doesn’t exist today that can’t be built and will enable them to actually bring it to the market. And I think that’s where we can probably bring the most value to the industry and perhaps the world as a whole.
Matt Zahab
Well said. Spaydh, you’re on a roll here, mate. We got to take a quick break and give a huge shout out to our sponsor, of the show that is PrimeXBT. And when we get back, we are going to dive a little bit more into the neutrality upgrade and we have some breaking news as this episode is going to air next week. And that is early December. And that is the strategic acquiring of 25% of Confio. Can’t wait to get into that as well. Until then, huge shout out to PrimeXBT, longtime friends and sponsors of the cryptonews.com podcast. PrimeXBT offers a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a vet, you can easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style. PrimeXBT is also offering innovative products and professional trading conditions to all customers and a huge exclusive promo code that is CRYPTONEWS50 to take advantage of this offer and receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading accounts. Again, the promo code is CRYPTONEWS50 all one word to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Now back to the show with Spaydh. Let’s jump into the neutrality upgrade. You just spoke about the integration of duality and how that helps just sort of bolster and beef up the Cosmos ecosystem. How exactly does that improve the DeFi infrastructure? I tried to really understand this. I took a, not I wouldn’t say a deep dive, but sort of skimmed over some notes regarding this, couldn’t really get into it. I love if you could explain that. I’m sure the listeners are super curious as well in regards to how the integration of duality really helps improve DeFi infrastructure for the whole ecosystem.
Avril Dutheil
I think there’s a few aspects to it. The first one is it allows smart contract developers to leverage infrastructure that’s tremendously flexible and that is capable of doing things that wouldn’t be just natively possible as just a set of smart contract, because it can leverage the blockchain, like the metal essentially itself to essentially execute certain functions, provide better execution as a result and such. And so one, it’s a very strong, very flexible piece of infrastructure for any developers building or looking to leverage it. Two, it’s much better, much more expressive venue for traders and users to engage with because it allows you to have an actual order book, like limit orders, fill or kill, good and tell canceled and other functionalities that you would find on the sacks, but not really on a dex, customary. So it’s a better place to trade as well. And then from a more meta point of view, it’s a way to resolve competition within the ecosystem. So that instead of competing for shares of the same pie, we can essentially align the interests of everyone and allow everyone to benefit by basically aggregating order flow and liquidity, so supply and demand effectively into the same place so that instead of having fragmented strands of order flow, which then get re-rendered together by aggregators and routers like third party services who will take a fee for that service, you can essentially have this out the box so that the order flow just, as much healthy order flow basically gets in front of the applications and their LPs, e.g. their users, as possible without these commissions and such on the way.
Matt Zahab
I love it. And we just got some breaking news as well. Always love some breaking news on the Cryptonews Pod. You and the team strategically acquired 25% of Confio. Again, by the time this episode airs, the news will go out. I understand it’s currently under embargo, but no one else besides our incredible editor, Justas will have access to this and neither of us will be doing anything with this news. But nonetheless, you guys acquired 25% of Confio. Absolutely massive. This will increase performance security and integration to the Cosm-Wasm ecosystem. I’d love if you could give us the TLDR on why you acquired them and what this means for the future.
Avril Dutheil
Yeah, sure. I mean, Confio is kind of like one of the most important companies in the entire ecosystem because they are building, they developed the, you know, one of the leading virtual machines. Last time I checked, it was the third largest VM by developers or by developer activity. I don’t remember exactly, but it’s a very significant piece of open source software that like more than 50 blockchains rely on today in production. And it’s one that’s like very critical to neutral itself, right? Because small contracts on neutral are run in Cosmosm. Just to unpack this a little bit more, it’s a virtual machine that functions on the principle of like Web Assembly, which is what browsers today use to run very complex, heavy in resources, pieces of software like games in browsers with a high degree of performance essentially. And you have the same properties for small contracts, you have a very high degree of performance, and you also have better security over other implementations. For example, like Cosmosm resists to most of the attack vectors that are commonly used against solidity-based applications, like range transparency is not an issue in Cosmosm, it’s not possible to have essentially. And so making sure that this very important piece of software is not just maintained, but really thrives and has the ability to pursue very strategic directions in its development so that it becomes the best version of itself and continues to do so and continues to be open source for the long term is like very important to us both because Neutron depends on it, but also because this is like a critical piece of the ecosystem and that since Neutron is a cross chain small contracting platform, a good chunk of its power is actually enabling users and applications to interact deeply with applications and users and user base that are on other networks to connect very directly with them. And so like Neutron strives when the ecosystem as a whole strives essentially, and so like the strategic investment was basically a step in that direction.
Matt Zahab
Very true. Also appreciate the breaking news. Always love that on the pod. Spaydh, we are getting a little tight for time here mate. A couple more questions, and then we will wrap up. One of the things that you guys did a couple of months ago was the launch of wstETH. And this was back in September along with XLR and Wormhole. What exactly is wstETH?
Avril Dutheil
I mean, so I think there was a couple of objectives that we wanted to meet with this initiative, which was like today is, you know, you could say almost the backbone of the DeFi ecosystem. And for a good reason, it’s an asset that represents a, you know, long exposure, I guess, to one of the most important, largest networks in the industry. It’s yield bearing, it contributes to securing and decentralizing the validator set and stake of the Ethereum network. So you know, it’s a very appealing asset and it’s one that makes for a very good collateral as well. And so you, you know, you see today like 50% of AVIS, I don’t remember which version, but I think it was V2. CVL, when I checked like a couple of weeks ago, and so on the one hand, bringing this asset into Cosmos was important because there was strong demand locally for it. And because it’s an asset that would allow like more diversified treasuries and exposures for users. And on the Lido side, on the DAO side, there was this, like Lido has historically been fairly conservative when it comes to bridging. It’s, you know, the main bridges that it had were initially like bridges to Ethereum L2s, validating bridges. And so to like enable the DAO to accept bridging to other ecosystem were validating bridges were not available. The framework for doing so needed to be very robust, but at the same time, there was some pressure to do so because not dealing with the situation would have resulted in a situation where multiple different denominations would have been bridged to the ecosystem. And when compounded with IBC, e .g., you know, like even for example, like Axelar Bridge wrap stake ETH on Injective and Osmosis would not be the same token. Wormhole Bridge Axelar, like Wormhole Bridge wrap stake ETH bridge to Neutron or, you know, another chain would also not be fungible together. And so to avoid the situation and enable the bridge to eventually be updated, like continuously built into something that resembles the more long-term vision of the DAO when it comes to the control of its asset, basically to like a new solution was required. And so that’s why we moved into the direction of bridge aggregation. We’ve partnered with, like Lido has selected Neutron and Axelar as the initial bridge system, but the bridge is being developed into a bridge aggregation solution, which will rely on Axelar, Wormhole and potentially other bridges like CCIP or others in the future so that the asset is resistant to the failure of any given bridge provides like, you know, message passing so that a crushing governance and other things and, you know, is sort of like under the direct control of the DAO. Essentially, the DAO will own all of the bridges architecture, even though actual bridge providers are used as relayers, but it will as a result be able to control the asset that’s locked, that’s bridged away, recover it in case something goes wrong, but also update it and shape it over time as it sees fit rather than sort of being at the wings of like third-party providers essentially. And so this was kind of like a win-win situation whereby this allowed Cosmos to gain a very valuable asset that can serve as collateral, bolster the DeFi ecosystem, while also enabling to set sort of like a good precedent for what very robust and functional bridging to other like between ecosystems can look like in the absence of some things like some framework like IDC basically. So yeah, the idea was to really open this channel between Ethereum and the Cosmos ecosystem, bring assets and users closer there as well. And I think, you know, since September it has grown really nicely. I think that’s a trend that we’ll continue to see essentially.
Matt Zahab
Oh yeah, that’s been very nice indeed. Spaydh, you’ve been on fire here mate. Last question and then we’ll wrap up. Give me some hot takes before we let you go today. Doesn’t have to be crypto related, can be health, wealth, happiness, AI, aliens, you name it, food, whatever. But give me a couple Spaydh hot takes before you let us go today.
Avril Dutheil
That’s a hard one. Coming up with a hot take on the fly. So I think 2023, you could say, has been like the year of modularity, right? It has culminated with the launch of Celestia. There’s a bunch of roll-ups being built on Celestia, on Neutron connecting with Celestia. We launched bridges to Celestia. There’s a number of other solutions to provide data availability and such, and other modular components like Avail and others that are launching left and right. So I think really modularity has been the theme of this year. I think in next year, what we’ll see is sort of like monolithic architecture being reframed because monolithic is arguably connotated a bit negatively, but there are some benefits to it, right? Like Solana, for example, and I’ll totally have been explaining why for them it’s the best architecture for what they’re trying to do. And so I think what we’re going to see is we’re going to see monolithic architecture being reframed with a focus on integratedness, e.g. there are some benefits, and in fact, Neutron is kind of like the cross between those two worlds, like the modular world and the monolithic world, whereby one of the key features actually value propositions, a feature, not a bug, is that because the stack between the virtual machine and the application layer of the blockchain itself is very closely integrated, we’re able to provide services to that builders that other platforms just couldn’t essentially, right? We can expose securely very core functions of the blockchain and make them available to developers to build better applications, right? So things like shaping the block production, shaping the liquidity in the market itself, recapturing a EVM and getting automation without relying on third-party bots and such, and all of this is possible for integratedness, right? And so what I think we’ll see is modularity is going to remain something that’s extremely relevant, and the projects that are working on this, I think are going to continue growing and be very defining parts of the industry, but I think other types of architectures will sort of start being reframed into something more positive that has its own benefits and advantages, and I think we’ll see a strong focus on integratedness and the benefits that it can bring when used correctly, right? Like integrating composability, interoperability, and application specific infrastructure into one package to build an application that’s able to reach further and to provide a better experience and a better product overall. That would be my hot take, I guess.
Matt Zahab
I love it. Spaydh, you were absolutely dropping knowledge bombs all pod long. Thank you so much for coming on my man. This was truly a treat and I have a lot of homework to do. I’ll definitely be relistening to this one on a walk and taking notes because again, you made my head spin in the best of ways possible and can’t wait to have you on for round two in the near future. But until we let you go, can you please let our listeners know where they can find you and Neutron online and on socials?
Avril Dutheil
Yeah, for sure. I mean, me personally, I don’t know that that’ll be so interesting to folks out there, but I’m on Twitter. I’m @0xSpaydh, S-P-A-Y-D-H. And then Neutron, you can find everything about neutron.org. On Twitter @Neutron_org. And, you know, we have a Telegram community, a Discord community. Feel free to join these. That’s where we’ll be able to, like, really engage with you, get your questions, answer them, discuss about all of the things that you think about the crypto and how we make the world better. And yeah, we’re looking forward to hearing from everyone.
Matt Zahab
Unreal. Spaydh, thank you so much, mate. Appreciate it. And wishing you the team all the best. Can’t wait for round 2.
Avril Dutheil
Likewise. Take care.
Matt Zahab
Folks, what an episode with Spaydh, core contributor of Neutron. He was absolutely on fire today. Dropping knowledge bombs left, right and center. We’d love to see that. If you guys enjoyed this one and I hope you did, please do subscribe. It would mean the world to my team and I. Speaking of the team, love you guys. Thank you so much for everything, especially Justas. You are the GOAT of editing. The best sound editor out there. Thank you for everything, my man. Also, the listeners, back to you guys. Keep on growing those bags. Keep on staying healthy, wealthy and happy. Bye for now and we’ll talk soon.
