Originally from Bankless
Compiled by Odaily Planet Daily Golem（@web3_golem）
Editor's Note: The mainstream exchanges have all launched their own blockchains, such as Binance launching the BNB Chain and Coinbase launching Base.On October 24, the well-known crypto exchange Kraken also announced the launch of Ink, an L2 based on the OP Stack, and plans to launch the testnet in 2 weeks. At the same time, Bankless co-founders Ryan and David invited Ink founder Andrew Koehler and Optimism co-founder Ben Jones to their podcast, where they not only discussed withAndrew the reasons for the birth of Ink, the focus of the ecosystem and future plans, but also discussed with Ben the current key work and future development of the Superchain.
To give readers a direct understanding of the full picture of Ink and Superchain, Odaily Planet Daily has carefully edited the key content from this podcast, enjoy~
Ink Founder: Ink Will Focus on DeFi, No Plans to Issue Tokens
Ryan: First, let Ink founder Andrew Koehler briefly introduce what Ink is?
Andrew:Ink is a new on-chain unit of Kraken. The idea of Ink was born a year ago, when my old friend who was rehired and I were walking in Amsterdam, and in the 5 hours of walking we were thinking about how to "move Kraken onto the chain". So the various innovative experiments based on this idea began, and at the time we hadn't named it yet, later we decided to call it Ink, meaning to write your future.
We are bringing the good user experience of centralized platforms to the chain. So Ink is the evolution of all our ideas and experiments, and we are collaborating with Optimism to launch our own Superchain, which is centered on DeFi.
David:Is Ink just a business unit within Kraken, like the relationship between Base and Coinbase, or is it an independent entity?
Andrew:Ink is indeed a business unit within Kraken, but it can also be seen as an independent entity, as we have set up various new structures for it. It will be integrated with our Kraken wallet and will focus on building on-chain DeFi, without centralized order books or KYC authentication.
I think many companies are now trying to go on-chain, and this integration is like the integration of the TCP/IP protocol in the 90s. Obviously, centralized exchanges are the first to start doing this, but this trend will not stop at centralized exchanges. In the future, thousands of companies will have their own L2, and perhaps one day even Nasdaq will join the Superchain.
David:Ink plans to launch the mainnet in the first quarter of next year, public chains are permissionless ecosystems where DeFi and other applications can be built on the platform. So from your perspective, what kind of applications would you like to see emerge in this ecosystem?
Andrew:Initially, Ink will invite developers to build DeFi applications on the chain, because they can provide a better user experience, without having to deal with the various bridges and multi-approvals that DeFi users have to endure. Once we have laid this foundation, we will also incubate some other things to allow other types of developers to participate. We also have a "hacker house" where developers can use our tools, collaborate with our partners, and we will fund some projects that may want to build on Ink.
Ryan:So how will the Kraken exchange work in synergy with Ink, and how is Ink different from other chains?
Andrew:This is indeed a difficult question to answer.Because we don't think this is a competition, we don't want to compete with Zora, Base or anyone else, because everyone is in the Superchain ecosystem.We are joining this ecosystem, which is fully interoperable, and liquidity will ultimately be shared everywhere, so there is no way for anyone to monopolize it.Of course, we will create a very good user experience on our chain. As for Kraken, we hope to build very good tools in terms of user experience, and then ensure that everything in Kraken ultimately ends up on the chain.
Ryan:So what are the standards for measuring Ink's success, active addresses or TVL, or other metrics?
Andrew:Simply put,I think the standard is trading users, we want to leverage our easy-to-use experience to promote it as much as possible in DeFi.This was decided a year ago when Ink was still in the experimental stage, we did dozens of testnets and tried every stack, we also kept experimenting with zero-knowledge proofs, making our own proof verifiers and other things. So finally, our experiments succeeded and we decided to join the Superchain.
David:So why did Ink choose to join the Superchain rather than other Stacks?
Andrew:First of all, there's nothing wrong with any other Stack, running their testnets and everything is interesting, whether it's ZKsync, Arbitrum, etc.But we saw a lot of people joining the Superchain, and we really like its roadmap for interoperability, which is not just about interoperability within the Superchain, so it makes sense to me.The OP Stack makes it possible for non-developers to run the Stack operations in a second like using a cursor, we felt this experience, so we wanted to join it.
Ryan:Kraken recently launched Kraken BTC, will Kraken BTC be introduced to Ink?
Andrew:Kraken BTC is still on the OP Mainnet for now, but we will definitely deploy it to Ink as well. This is also one of our experimental explorations, we have our own compliant custody solution, so we can at least custody the underlying assets very securely.We've designed a system that we can plug into Ink, and we're also exploring what other assets we can bring to the Superchain, but I can't say specifically what they are at the moment.
Ryan:So does Ink have plans to issue a governance token? What would the token be called?
Andrew:First of all, I need to disclaim that Ink has no plans to issue any type of token or similar asset.But we do have people internally who like to speculate on tokens, like kink or something. But I mean, there may be a lot of related meme coins, but we don't have any such plans.
David:After the launch of the testnet, what are Ink's subsequent plans?
Andrew:Our ultimate goal is to be fully decentralized, we don't want to be the only Ink sequencer, but this plan is just a rough outline for us at the moment. When we launch the mainnet, we will release a specific roadmap and how we hope to decentralize, which is a daunting task.
Optimism Co-founder: Standardization is Key to Superchain
Ryan:First, how do you see Ink and its relationship with the Superchain?
Ben:Ink is trying to build a huge centralized exchange on-chain. As an industry, what we need to do is move away from these low-level innovations and towards building great products, as Andrew said, bringing the world into the chain, bringing many users into the chain, not just advanced users, not just those who are willing to like, understand all the crypto mnemonics, network swaps and RPC and how all these things work.
So one of the very important things for our Superchain is to balance standards, so that the entire Superchain has a consensus, Ink doesn't have to worry about it, Ink's users don't have to worry about it, they just need to work. The Superchain will bring in a lot of chains in 2025, this is not a large-scale one-time manual process, but an effort across the entire industry to work for all chains that benefit from the shared standards of the Superchain.
There is another very important balance, which is that we need to give space to the chain managers to make decisions on things like sorting, because there is no universal standard that applies here. But when I hear the desire for our chain to have very high throughput, the desire for our chain to be highly decentralized, I believe that anything that Andrew and everyone running chains on Superchain wants to achieve can be achieved.
Ryan:Superchain has a universal upgrade mechanism, where all OP chains can be seamlessly upgraded simultaneously, reducing security fragmentation. But from the user's perspective, when will the fragmentation of the user experience disappear? This has been one of the core promises of Superchain since its announcement. Since you are here, can you let us know what secret plans you have to reduce the fragmentation of Superchain and make Superchain truly a seamless experience.
Ben:There is no secret here, because everything that OP Stack and Optimism are doing is public. If you look through the protocol reference specifications, code repositories, or the discord protocol development channels, you will see that all the development is public.We believe that standardization is the key.Therefore, our goal is to make it easier for developers like Andrew to build infrastructure, so they can focus on onboarding users to the chain and solving other more important things, like making it very seamless for my mom to use cryptocurrency.
Standardization can achieve stronger interoperability. When you're trying to build a seamless chain network, the primary concern has to be security. So if you have a common standard that everyone follows, it will be jointly managed and follow a shared security model, and there won't be security fragmentation.There are a lot of great initiatives on Ethereum that allow Ethereum chains to be interoperable. Of course, we are working to ensure that all of these things make their way into Ethereum and Superchain in a way that is compatible with the rest of the ecosystem.But fundamentally, I think a seamless user experience ultimately comes down to one thing, which is allowing developers to focus on bringing great products to market, rather than dealing with a bunch of infrastructure.
For example, ERC 20 is a standard within Superchain, where transactions can achieve zero slippage, and tokens can move between different chains within Superchain. It is only within a cohesive and secure model that you can truly achieve economic efficiency, truly have a seamless, no-slippage, no-bridging experience.
So the key is to give people a unified security model. Once you have that, you can build stronger interoperability on top of it, and that is the core of the Superchain interoperability roadmap. That is how we can take the time for developers to transfer assets and send messages across chains from seven days down to a few seconds, and that is how we can do that without introducing major security vulnerabilities in the process.
David:If I were to stand in the shoes of a user, I wouldn't care about the issues of standardization. As more and more chains join Superchain, such as Unichain, Base, Zora, and Worldchain, as a user, I hope that by the end of 2025, the experience on the dozens of chains in Superchain will be like being on a single chain, everything should be seamless and abstracted. How close do you think we are to this vision by the end of 2025?
Ben:It's difficult to estimate specific timelines, so I don't want to promise anything here. The core we are working on right now is the ongoing interoperability work. If all of these chains, Worldchain, Base, Ink, Unichain, adopt shared standards, then I can even say that it already feels like a single chain, or the user may not even perceive it as multiple chains.
But the goal is to have these assets flowing here with around two block latency, so it all comes down to block times.If you look closely at the specifications, you'll see on Github the ability to spin up a local Superchain test environment, where you can simulate multiple chains on your computer. You can use the ERC 20 standard on Superchain and quickly move those assets between chains.
But obviously there is still a long way to go in establishing these standards and ensuring they are beneficial for application developers, and we are confident we can get them deployed to mainnet.
David:On Superchain, many chains have specialties, like Zora often focuses on the creator economy, Uniswap is around liquidity, swaps, and DeFi. Previously we proposed the concept of Superchain economic zones, where each chain specializes in one area. How do you see this, where will the Superchain economic zones ultimately go?
Ben:The concept of Superchain economic zones is an interesting one, I've never heard of that before. Composability is a key property of Ethereum that makes it unique, and maybe I've been repeating this story because it will be forgotten before we truly scale blockchains.But in reality, I think if you compare the way Web 2 architecture and Web 3 architecture work, the superiority of composability is undeniable, where anyone can write any application and interact with any other application, they can all follow their own rules and connect together. Compared to the difficulty of integrating two websites providing different services on Web2, it's a world of difference, where everyone can innovate permissionlessly on top of each other.
So to answer your question, will there be some applications that encompass all functionalities or only focus on one area? I think it will be a hybrid.Undoubtedly, some applications will integrate on top of other ecosystems and other applications, which may be distributed across different chains, and the best way for them to serve users and customers is to span these chains. At the same time, I think things like culture and specific use cases will also specialize in different domains of Superchain.
A analogy we've used internally before is the interstate highway system. I remember when we were discussing the birth of the Optimism collective many years ago, there was only one chain, the OP Mainnet. At the time, one way of thinking about interoperability was to analogize it to the birth of the interstate highway system, where people could travel longer distances in a shorter time. A big city might have worried about people leaving, and the increasing competition with other cities, etc. But in fact, every city in the US has developed after being connected to the interstate highway system, and the development of Superchain will have the same effect on the chains in the ecosystem.
