Source: Bankless
Compiled by: Odaily Planet Daily Golem
Editor’s Note: Current mainstream exchanges have launched their own blockchains, such as Binance with BNB Chain, and Coinbase with Base, etc. On October 24, the well-known crypto exchange Kraken also announced the launch of the OP Stack-based L2—Ink, and plans to launch the testnet two weeks later. Meanwhile, Bankless co-founders Ryan and David invited Ink founder Andrew Koehler and Optimism co-founder Ben Jones to guest on their podcast, discussing not only the reasons for Ink's creation, ecosystem focus, and future plans with Andrew but also the current core work keys and future development with Ben.
Ink Founder: Ink will focus on DeFi and currently has no plans to issue tokens.
Ryan: First, can Ink's 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 I was walking in Amsterdam with a re-hired old friend. During that 5-hour walk, we were thinking about how to 'move Kraken on-chain.' So various innovative experiments based on this idea began, and at that time, we hadn’t named it yet. Later, we decided to call it Ink, symbolizing writing your future.
We are bringing the good user experience that centralized platforms have 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 focused 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 viewed as an independent entity because we have established various new structures for it. It will integrate with our Kraken wallet and focus on building on-chain DeFi, without centralized order books or KYC requirements.
I think many companies are trying to go on-chain now; this integration is like the merging of the TCP/IP protocol in the 90s. Obviously, centralized exchanges were the first to start doing this, but this trend will not stop with centralized exchanges. In the future, thousands of companies will have their own L2s, and maybe one day NASDAQ will also join Superchain.
David: Ink plans to launch its mainnet in the first quarter of next year. A public chain is a permissionless ecosystem where DeFi and other applications can be built on the platform. From your perspective, what kind of applications do you hope to see in this ecosystem?
Andrew: Initially, Ink will invite developers to build DeFi applications on-chain because they can make the user experience easier, avoiding the hassles that DeFi users face with various bridges and multiple approvals. Once we lay this foundation, we will also incubate some projects that allow other types of developers to participate. We also have a 'hackerspace' where developers can use our tools and collaborate with our partners, and we will fund some projects that may want to build on Ink.
Ryan: So how will Kraken exchange synergize with Ink? What makes Ink different from other chains?
Andrew: This is indeed a difficult question to answer. Because we don't see this as competition; we don't want to compete with Zora, Base, or anyone else, as 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 one able to dominate everything. Of course, we will create a fantastic user experience on our chain. Regarding Kraken, we want to create excellent tools for user experience and then ensure everything in Kraken ultimately exists on-chain.
Ryan: So what is the standard to measure how well Ink is doing? Is it the number of active addresses or TVL, or are there 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 phase. We conducted dozens of testnets and tried every stack, and we are continually experimenting with zero-knowledge proofs, creating our own proof checkers and other tools. In the end, our experiments were successful, and we decided to join Superchain.
David: So why did Ink choose to join Superchain instead of other Stacks?
Andrew: First, there’s no harm in any other Stack, like ZKsync or Arbitrum, running their test networks and everything is fun. But we see many people joining Superchain, and we love its interoperability roadmap, which includes not just interoperability within Superchain itself, so it makes sense to me. OP Stack allows non-developers to operate the Stack in a second, just like using a cursor, and we felt that experience, so we wanted to join in.
Ryan: Kraken recently launched Kraken BTC, so will Kraken BTC be introduced to Ink?
Andrew: Currently, Kraken BTC is still on the OP Mainnet, but we will definitely deploy it on Ink. This is also one of our experimental explorations. We have our own compliance custody solution, so we can at least safely custody the underlying assets. We designed a system that we can plug into Ink, and we are also exploring what other assets can be brought to Superchain, but I cannot specify what they are right now.
Ryan: So, does Ink have plans to issue a governance token? What would this token be called?
Andrew: First, I need to make a disclaimer that Ink does not plan to issue any type of token or similar assets. However, there are people internally who like to speculate on tokens, like kink and such. But what I mean is, there may be many related meme coins, but we don't have similar plans.
David: What are Ink's subsequent plans after launching the testnet?
Andrew: Our ultimate goal is complete decentralization; we don't want to be the only Ink sorter, but for now, we only have a rough outline of this plan. After we launch our mainnet, we will publish a detailed 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 view Ink and its relationship with 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 on-chain and bringing many users in, not just advanced users, but not just those who are willing to like and understand all the crypto mnemonic phrases, network swaps, RPC, and how all these things work.
So one of the very important things for us in Superchain is balancing the standards so that the entire Superchain has a consensus, which Ink does not have to consider, and Ink's users do not have to think about these things; they can just work.
Another very important balance is to leave space for chain managers to make decisions on things like ordering, as there is no one-size-fits-all standard here. But when hearing the hope that our chain has a high throughput and a high level of decentralization, I believe that anything Andrew and everyone running chains in Superchain wants can be achieved.
Ryan: Superchain has a universal upgrade mechanism, allowing all OP chains to upgrade seamlessly at the same time, reducing security fragmentation. But from a user perspective, when will user experience fragmentation disappear? This has been one of Superchain's core commitments since its announcement. Since you're here, can you share any secret plans to reduce fragmentation in Superchain and make it a truly seamless experience?
Ben: There’s no secret here since everything OP Stack and Optimism are doing is public. If you go back through the protocol, check the specifications, the codebase, or visit the discord protocol development channel, you'll see that all development is public. We believe standardization is key. Therefore, our goal is to make it easier for developers like Andrew to build infrastructure so they can focus on bringing users onto the chain and solving other, more important issues, like making it very seamless for my mom to use cryptocurrency.
Standardization can achieve stronger interoperability. When you try to build a seamless chain network, your primary concern must be security issues. So if you have a common standard that everyone follows, it will be jointly governed and follow a shared security model, preventing security fragmentation. There are many great initiatives on Ethereum that allow Ethereum chains to interoperate. Of course, we are working to ensure all these things integrate into Ethereum and Superchain in a way that is compatible with other parts of the ecosystem. But fundamentally, I believe that seamless user experience ultimately boils down to one thing: letting developers focus on bringing great products to market rather than dealing with a pile of infrastructure.
For example, ERC20 is a standard within Superchain, allowing trades to achieve zero slippage and tokens to move between different chains in Superchain. Only in a cohesive and secure model can you truly achieve economic efficiency and have a real zero-slippage, no bridging experience.
So the key is to give people a unified security model. Once you have these, you can build stronger interoperability on this basis, which is the core of the Superchain interoperability roadmap. This is how we reduce the time for developers to transfer assets and send messages across chains from seven days to a few seconds, while ensuring that we do not make significant mistakes in security while doing so.
David: If I stand in the user's perspective, I don't care about the standardization issues. As more chains join Superchain, like Unichain, Base, Zora, and Worldchain, as a user, I hope to experience dozens of chains on Superchain as if it were a single chain by the end of 2025. How far do you think we are from this vision by the end of 2025?
Ben: It’s hard to estimate a specific timeline, so I don’t want to commit to anything here. The core of our current work is on ongoing interoperability aspects. If all these chains—Worldchain, Base, Ink, Unichain—adopt shared standards, then I can even say it feels like one chain, or users may not even perceive it as multiple chains.
But the goal is to let these assets flow here with a delay of about two blocks, so it all depends on block time. If you look closely at the specifications, you will find that on GitHub you can see what you’ve described, and you can enter the local Superchain test environment, which simulates multiple chains on your computer. You can use the ERC20 standard on Superchain and quickly move these assets between chains.
But clearly, there is still a long way to go in setting these standards and ensuring they are favorable to application developers. We are confident that we can release them to the mainnet.
David: Many chains on Superchain have specialties, such as Zora focusing on creator economies and Uniswap around liquidity, swaps, and DeFi. Previously, we proposed a prediction for the Superchain economic zone where a chain specializes in one domain. What are your thoughts on this? Where do you think the Superchain economic zone will ultimately head?
Ben: The term Superchain economic zone is interesting; I have never heard of it. Composability is a key attribute of Ethereum that makes it stand out. Perhaps I've been repeating this story because it may be forgotten before we really scale the blockchain. But in reality, I think the superiority of composability is undeniable when you compare how Web 2 architecture works with Web 3 architecture. Anyone can write any application and interact with any other application, and they can follow their own rules and connect together. The difficulty of integrating two different service-providing websites on Web 2 is vastly different; everyone can innovate permissionlessly on top of others.
So to answer your question, will there be some applications that encompass all functions or focus solely on one area? I think it will be a hybrid. Undoubtedly, some applications will integrate on top of other ecosystems and applications that may be spread across different chains, and the best way to serve users and customers is to bridge these chains. At the same time, I think things like culture and specific use cases will also be tailored to different domains within Superchain.
One analogy we've previously proposed internally is that of highways. I remember many years ago, when discussing the birth of the optimism collective, there was only one chain, which was the OP Mainnet. One way to think about interoperability was to compare it to the emergence of the interstate highway system, where people could travel longer distances in shorter time. As a major city, there might be concerns that people would leave, and competition with other cities would intensify, etc. But in fact, every city in the U.S. has developed after connecting to the interstate highway system, and the development of Superchain has the same impact on the chains in the ecosystem.
