Solving native asset issuance in a modular ecosystem - Jelena Djuric | Noble

everyone and thank you uh for coming to the last talk of this uh amazing conference so we're going to get into it uh we're going to talk about Noble and what we're solving for and that's uh Native acid issuance in a modular context so that's a lot of words we'll we'll we'll get into it before we do I did want to say a big thank you to the organizers the volunteers um everyone the sponsors for for making this event happen actually let's give a quick Round of Applause for them uh yeah awesome yeah because this is really really hard to do and um yeah thank you for having me okay let's get into it so what is noble noble is a purpose-built blockchain for stable coin issuance in the modular ecosystem we're currently uh facilitating about $500 million of transaction volume per month uh this has fluctuated over the months and we'll talk about how we got here so our success so far we launched as a cosmos chain to solve a very very specific problem which is how do we onboard stable coin issuers um that want sort of distribution onchain distribution to uh an ecosystem like Cosmos that up until Noble's existence was highly fragmented and uh highly uh complicated to navigate we launched Cosmos native usdc in September of 2023 we've since gotten to about 222 million of native usdc and we are interoperable with 37 plus Cosmos blockchains leveraging the inner blockchain communication protocol this is the native interoperability solution to the cosmos ecosystem one thing to emphasize is that unlike many Cosmos uh sorry unlike many app chains uh in general we are highly highly incentivized to be a proliferator of stable coin liquidity to the entire Cosmos ecosystem uh typically if you're building an app chain and you're looking at your go to market plan you want to figure out ways to sort of maintain uh a liquidity Mo obviously retain users and uh make sure that you know ideally your users don't leave your platform uh not so for Noble we are highly highly incentivized to proliferate stable coins to you know 40 plus chains to uh many ecosystems and to effectively be a router of liquidity and solve for a fundamental challenge that we have in the um in the app chain ecosystem and that's liquidity fragmentation so we started with Native usdc we've gone initial traction but one thing to note is that Noble is a generalized uh platform we're onboarding many Native assets to our our blockchain including uh yield bearing stable coins like usdy uh tokenized treasury bills that are highly kind compliant and regulated like usyc and so on and so forth so by onboarding these assets having a very minimalistic uh chain architecture were able to uh very very simply very um uh simply proliferate these table coins to to the entire ecosystem so I talked a lot about app chains and the fact that Noble is one such app chain but how are we uh different than what currently exists one thing that we are very very cognizant of is that the app chain vision is currently being realized in the uh broader uh ecosystem so in the cosmos ecosystem we've been very familiar with the apch thesis since day one uh the entire premise of the cosmos vision is interop interoperable sovereignty this means that every application or many applications should run on a dedicated blockchain with their own validator set and so we have many chains like anoma Saga and others sort of launching with this thesis in mind also in the ethereum space which uh others have talked about uh during this event uh obviously app chains are becoming more and more common you have l2s l3s even l4s and really at the end of the day these are app chains and really what the original Cosmos thesis of8 years ago put forward um another thing that Noble is very conc concerned with is the cosmos SDK we see this is a very flexible toolkit to build custom modules one of which I'll go into some detail on uh in a few slides and we see IBC as a standard for uh interchain communication so we we see custodial bridging as uh inadequate and we see something like IBC where at the end of the day you're trusting the validator sets on either side to verify transactions as a much more optimal uh interoperability solution so Noble was born from the cosmos EOS system and we've taken uh a big sort of bet and we're very very convinced that app chains are here to stay but what does this mean in practice it means that uh a lot of the sort of additional blockchain stack things like execution things like data availability um things like issuance are actually becoming fragmented and they're actually starting to uh run on their own dedicated infrastructure which is why there is now this concept of modularity so this is uh one very nice comprehensive uh ecosystem map of different uh projects that are building in this modular context this is definitely not exhausted uh this also includes things like rollup development Frameworks and of course uh Noble is uh included here uh under liquidity because we are very much see ourselves as servicing this modular ecosystem so again taking a very different approach to your traditional app chain that sort of wants to retain users uh retain liquidity retain mind share on their dedicated app chain we're looking to service a much um bigger ecosystem which is this very fragmented environment of many rollups many app chains you know multiple data availability layers things like this so this is the interchain economy as it looks today this is specifically the cosmos ecosystem and I do want to emphasize the uh 30-day IBC volume of about a billion dollars which has fluctuated between 1 and 3 billion of monthly volume over the past few months this is the uh really the most exciting part of the cosmos ecosystem this is the uh token transfers the sort of communication of arbitrary data but mostly token transfers happening between uh Cosmos chains and so we really see this uh economy growing and many more uh projects sort of building in this ecosystem this is uh another very uh useful overview of uh the ecosystem every kind of connection between two uh two circles which is representative of of a of a cosmos blockchain uh is an IBC connection and so here you can really see this interchain economy sort of evolving In This Very U natural organic sort of uh kind of mesh topology type structure which is something that um as cosmos Builders we're always uh emphasizing that really every IBC connection is uh opt in so simply run a relayer on either side and you can now establish this trustless uh path towards uh sending different types of data most of which are token transfers so you can see here Noble uh facilitating a few hundred million dollars of uh native usdc to the rest of the cosmos ecosystem and uh we're super excited to again continue servicing this ecosystem with many more uh stable coins and real world assets so one thing to emphasize uh is this idea of ux and this is something that is becoming more and more of a concern as app chains uh proliferate uh both in the ethereum ecosystem in the cosmos ecosystem and elsewhere uh typically these are the ux concerns that every sort of roll up app chain should be concerned with things like uh you know gas token friction um you know how do you abstract away the complexity for the user from a uh oneclick perspective uh and how do you actually uh ensure fast finality even as you are interoperating with uh different types of execution environments uh you know different uh block times Etc and so really at the end of the day we see ourselves as this ux layer for Cosmos chains when it comes to the stable coin issuance so it's pretty cool uh this is you know something that kind of sounds simple but you can actually pay gas in Native usdc when you interact with the noble chain uh in Cosmos this is uh something that you know sounds simple but we're still so far behind this simple sort of uux and there are many many projects also the ethereum ecosystem that are trying to you know solve for this things like smart wallets gas abstraction and so on but really this is only now coming to the Forefront so ensuring that there is a seamless X and this kind of unified experience even as you're as a user are interacting with multiple uh blockchain architectures is extremely important so I'll talk about uh one module that we built on the noble chain that sort of emphasizes the flexibility of the cosmos SDK as a toolkit uh and this is something that's actually live in production right now uh which uh you know if you're interested uh happy to you know take you through the ux kind of one-on-one as as a user but what it uh what this is is um automated interchain accounts so in Cosmos we have uh an interchange an IBC standard called interchain accounts this effectively allows you to remote control a account on a destination chain from An Origin chain so you know typically if you're uh interacting with kind of multiple uh blockchains you need to obviously keep track of many different uh addresses in your wallet um this actually allows you to remote operate an account on a destination and this sort of um ability uh unlocks many different use cases one of which is uh forwarding so in this case we had a uh Team come to us uh so this is something we didn't sort of invent uh kind of on our own in isolation we had feedback from a project called stilus uh stilus is is a team uh it's a spin out from a company called Crafton Crafton is a well-known uh South Korean gaming development company they're most well known for pubg which is one of the most widely played games in the world and they're building a cosmos chain to do Creator payouts um on chain in usdc for their various games both web two and web 3 games so they came to us with a whole host of requirements you know in one click how do we have an experience where I as a gaming Creator can um take uh usdc that is sort of paid out for me uh maybe it's through the sale of some in-game asset like a sword that I created and how do I actually withdraw that usdc into my bank account in one click so here you have multiple stakeholders I mean you have Circle the issuer you have sellus the uh blockchain built by Crafton to facilitate these Creator Rewards and you have Noble as the onchain uh infrastructure to facilitate the US issuance itself and you have a stripe uh stripe is the mechanism to withdraw to a bank account so four stakeholders one problem uh one objective and this is what we came up with so uh I I won't necessarily go into detail in every step uh this is also open source software so it's there for anybody to use But ultimately it facilitates this uh one-click experience where you know you register a packet on a uh On An Origin chain like sellus you then create an interchain account on Noble it calls into the forwarding module on the back end and then you can sort of complete the transaction from there so this is one again one simple example of the type of uh kind of infrastructure that we're building on Noble uh leveraging the cosmos SDK again a highly highly highly flexible um development toolkit to create these highly custom workflows that doesn't uh bork other parts of the noble chain or other assets these um modules can sort of exist uh kind of in isolation uh on on the noble chain this is uh the front end that we're putting out in the next couple of weeks which uh takes advantage of the forwarding module which is already live in production and here I'm actually going between ethereum with my usdc that I already have to a cosmos uh Dex in this case osmosis in one click uh so this leverages a few modules including the forwarding module I um just described it also leverages uh circle's native Bridge which is the cross chain transfer protocol and it leverages I DC as the um uh the protocol that uh facilitates the forwarding uh with the forwarding module so regardless uh these again are the types of experiences we should be promoting uh not a manually wrapping unwrapping having to reason about the security properties of each chain feeling uncomfortable about sending tokens between ecosystems um so this is just one example that facilitates that yeah so really this is what we're looking to achieve uh there are many uh asset issuers that are constantly being um kind you know coming uh out from stealth uh these are uh mainly in the stable coin space but there's also this Emerging Market of real world assets and ultimately um these asset ises are uh you know unable really at the end of the day to have to reason about the security properties of e every appap chain you know every rollup deployment environment Etc so really we're looking for Noble to be that landing spot for the issuer where they don't have to have a bunch of angry customers come their way because they can't you know the user can't find their asset on uh any such chain or you know the ux is too complicated so really being an ambassador for the asset issuers on chain creating those um distribution mechanisms because at the end of the day we very much align ourselves with the entire app chain ecosystem whether in ethereum or Cosmos that more and more activity uh will move onchain for your average user over the coming uh years and decades yeah these are just users and happy paths uh we really like our users we really like uh getting this feedback we have a bit of an addiction to to uh to uh user feedback and so this is these are just some examples um you can actually spend usdc from from Noble in stores all around the world with a MasterCard debit card there's a photo of that debit card um here on the slide um so really again on boarding you know the next millions billions of people to to crypto and blockchains will require these happy paths and this uh you know highly streamlined uh ux so that's the end of my presentation um I don't know how long I have but I'm happy to take questions and um chat thank you yes yeah thanks for the talk unfortunately I came in the middle of oh check check I can hear you yeah sorry thanks for the talk uh but for me I came at the middle of your presentation so I have a quick question for the last slide you've shown that there are some implementation of payments and I just curious so how do IBC transfers work with with offrs because most of the products that are on the market it's even I use uh ethereum layer Tru and they use ethereum ler Tru for Ops for for offrs sorry yeah yeah it's a great question we're uh very oh and for those that didn't hear uh so the question was how does does IBC work uh as an offramp mechanism yeah as offramp yeah yeah yeah so how does IBC work uh to offramp uh assets so we're very much in the early days of using IBC kind of to offramp the only um or even on ramp but the only uh one kind of example in production um is coinbase so coinbase uh where Noble is uh fully integrated they actually support um sort of off- ramping with IBC so right now you can actually well soon you'll be able to um withdraw usdc from any Cosmos chain that would automatically um kind of forward coinbase when you want to withdraw so let's say I have usdc on dydx um at a certain point that obviously was an IBC token transfer you know to dyx and now I want to withdraw that usdc from dydx through coinbase um there is a way to do that uh with IBC um really it's not a technical problem it's actually more of an integration and like a business development exercise because you can imagine you know um a situation where you know centralized exchanges don't necessarily want to support these workflows for decentralized exchanges but really all coinbase would have to do in this situation is um you know run a noble like client and a dydx like client and make sure that they're um you know using a stable IBC relayer path which you know already exists so it's really just running the necessary um you know kind of developer infrastructure um so that's the only one that currently exists in production but with the stripe example that I kind of touched on um for the game Gamers uh that uh will be able to uh withdraw their rewards through usdc um through the sellus chain um that that will actually be kind of a workflow that we'll have to figure out with stripe because every kind of off-ramp on-ramp provider whether it's a centralized exchange or a payment provider like um stripe they have their own uh regulatory requirements so again it's not really a technical issue it's more of a business development you know operational concern um so yeah we're pushing forward those types of workflows and hopefully there'll be more than just coinbase in in the near future thank you any other questions no okay we're good all right thank you first of all what a what a session guys and honestly what a way to close off this event today there any other questions for yena while while she's here while you've got her we have got everybody coming into the hall right now for the closing ceremony but I just want to say a big thank you from our side for really giving dropping the alpha there and for those of you did you share your your your handles and everything with everybody uh no but I'm yelling uh 3 A's 4ore on Twitter so you'll find me on Twitter I'm like the only yena that yeah crypto amazing thank you so much big round of applause for you Elena guys