Ep #8 - Michael Silberling - The Dune Goat | Data for an entire L2

Boxer  0:00  

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Weekly Wizard. Today, I am joined by the GOAT — the greatest of all time — on Microsoft willing. Yeah, it's a great pleasure to have you on finally.I can not only talk about you but with you. So yeah, welcome Miko.

Miko  0:20  

Yeah, yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah. Yeah, I like the GOAT title, but yeah, I don't know. I know how much I don't know, too, but I'll take it for now. Yeah, I loved all the episodes so far. So excited to be on it now as well.

Boxer  0:32  

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, this is gonna be great. Um, first of all, can you make a quick introduction for yourself?

Miko  0:40  

Yeah, yeah. I'm Michael, a data analysts at Optimism. I've been there for about four or five months now. What month is it? Yeah, I've been there since about like October or November of last year. Yeah. 

And then just started…I was working at Amazon for a few years before I start working with crypto data. Probably about a little under a year ago now. 

So, things kind of ramped up really quick. Yeah, that's a brief overview. I'm sure. We'll go deeper in there. Yeah.

Boxer  1:12  

Yeah. What made you go into crypto, or what was your first touch point with crypto?

Miko  1:18  

Yeah, so my first touch point. It's like I have tried to rethink what was the first time I actually heard of crypto like what I think is true. But I just remember in like 2013 in college my floormates were just like, oh we bought Bitcoin. I was like, what's that thing? 

They said, oh, it's this Reddit money. I was like, okay, whatever, I don't care. And that was like a chance where I just Googled, what is Bitcoin? Who knows what could have been different there?

And then I think around 2016 or 2017, actually, that was kind of the next run up with things. When I heard about it again, I was like, oh, yeah, I remember what that thing was. Still, at that point, I didn't really know it was going on. 

Like, I couldn't really find any good sources of information. So, it had a similar…it was on my mind for a few months, but I didn't hear about it again. And then actually, I think I said a few things toward the beginning to middle of 2020. 

I was helping work on a team at Amazon that was looking at the next upcoming consumer trends. And I was thinking about something that maybe isn't like super apparent, something we're not thinking of that could be exciting. 

I think around that time 16z put out their crypto startup school video series. So, I remember watching that, and I was like, oh, this could be a thing that maybe is not obvious. That could be a next cool, big thing to look at. So, that was kind of the start of my rediscovering going down the rabbit hole. 

That was very slow at the time. But yeah, it's around like, I don't know…late 2020. I realized all my free time was going toward listening to podcasts, watching videos, and discovering what Ubisoft was. 

So, I missed the DeFi summer in that way. But after discovering what uniswap was, I kept getting deeper and deeper. It was actually interesting that…when Polygons’ liquidity or whatever…they like our van curve…and that PLS chain launched. 

It was my first time really trying out these DeFi apps and using them. Yeah, once I understood how they work, how curve works, how urine builds on top of all these things…that was my big like mind blown moment. Like, oh my god DeFi is super cool moment. 

Remember, even at the time, when I was still at Amazon, I was working on something around consumer trends and finance and payments world. And I got to a point, right…this just whole long appendix at the end of like, yo, this traditional e-commerce stuff and then dairy. 

And I'm compound and all day. Look at all this crazy stuff. So, I became like the weird crypto interested guy. But still, I think around that time, too, I knew I wanted to do something different than being at a large tech company. 

Like it was great for the first few years, going from knowing nothing to having some experience and getting to see. Yeah, are you one of the best, most successful companies in the world, like being into that kind of…I wanted to go toward… 

I just wanted to be more of a building something new startup environment. I was looking for probably a few months, but everything I was looking at. I was like, well, nothing's really interesting to me, like the 500th vertical SAS company. 

And it would have been a good learning experience. But I was feeling like, why am I not interested in anything? And realized, well, I'm spending all my free time doing this crypto stuff. 

Like what if that's potentially a thing to go do? But even then I still didn't really know like, what can I actually do? I'm not a software engineer. I'm not a marketer. I'm not, you know…I don't know. 

And even then I was like, well, I didn't want to do something that was trading related. I was like, well, what are the actual products and businesses and all that stuff here? 

So, I actually remember one podcast I was listening to was like, oh, join all these crypto Discords. See what's going on in there. And I remember from being on some of these app websites, the discord links were there. 

But I was kind of hesitant. I was like, I've only used discord to play, at that time, Among Us with friends from back home. It was like…I don't know…about jumping into a Discord for this stuff. 

But yeah, actually, I remember lingering in the index Discord. I saw some of the dashboards that like JD, like Nana, who JD…that he was putting up. 

I was like, Oh, I've done a dashboard before. So, I was like, oh, let's try this out. And yeah, like made some very basic dashboard. 

That was counting how many Ethereum users there were, which it keeps coming up eventually or keeps coming up time to time, which is weird. Because my first one…and there's…not good VR. 

I remember tweeting that out, and I got some likes. Then uniswap, V3 launched pretty soon after. It was like, you know, I didn't know how to do anything. But I remember seeing DM tweet out like, oh, there's a Stax tray table. 

You can do you know, so I'll be three stuff. I was like, oh, okay, I'll try that. And yeah, then, like, tweeted out that dashboard. made like a small blog post with the two, and my standards blew up on Twitter. 

I got I think 100 likes. And then my followers doubled from like 200 to 300. I was like, well, I'm famous now look at me. But yeah, I mean, from there, I started getting contacted for freelance opportunities. 

I was still, at that point, I do not know what I'm doing. But it's kind of like, well, yeah, we'll try it out. That was like a good kind of forcing function to learn stuff. And yes, because that was the start. Definitely what happened since then I realized I've been rambling about this for a while. 

But yeah, it was a crazy start. And at that point, I was looking around for a while of what would be interesting to me and just getting the immediate good feedback just helped me fall into this as a potential path to go down for me. Yeah, well. That could be a whole podcast episode.

Boxer  6:59  

Like your interview. So, what was your university education? What did you do to finish?

Miko  7:07  

I wound up graduating in industrial engineering, which is all about optimizations. And it was like a lot of friends that I graduated with want to go work in manufacturing or warehouses or a lot when actually it's like medical or hospital fields, just interesting. 

But yeah, I mean, I guess like a general theme with all that, too, is never knowing what I wanted to do. Like I grew up playing sports. So, it never was, you know…that was my whole thing. But yeah, I remember I started in college for electrical engineering. 

So, I thought robots were cool. I started toward a robot lab. And that was cool. So, I did that. Then my roommates, at the time, joked that I watched too many Stephen Hawking documentaries, and I switch to physics. Took one programming class and that was like a very intro level programming. 

I think the hardest that we got was like how a for loop works. I was like, wow, I'm a genius, and especially computer science. And then eventually, it was like, well, this is not my spot to really succeed. 

It’s been…it's interesting, knowing I'm doing a data position now where you and I switched to industrial engineering. It was a thought of well, this is sort of a data issue. It’s related hence why I was drawn to it. 

And just the thought of trying to optimize things or make things as efficient as possible is kind of…I had friends who were in it, and, you know, they really liked it. So yeah, jumps into it there. But yeah, so that's another long answer to that question.

Boxer  8:29  

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a story for a lot of people in crypto. They're like, yeah, man, this is actually something I enjoy. Like is there a school that I can apply to now? This is my dream job. 

Yeah, it's amazing. Jobs create themselves in crypto, which is an amazing witness. So yeah, I understand then you went to Amazon. And did you have any similar analysts role there? Or was it more a general purpose role?

Miko  8:59  

Yeah, it really sucks. My actual first job out I was an aerospace defense contractor company for a year. Yeah, not really doing anything technical. They're just making sure there was a process. I made sure there weren’t any mistakes. Great. 

But yeah, then at the time, I was looking for what I always had…similar to when I was at Amazon looking for a startup role. I always had this vision of trying to do something that was like really inventing or building something new, however, even as vague as that sounds like that general idea. 

So yeah, I got to Amazon, and I was…I would say…it's probably a role that I was very much more qualitative. I was on my whole time. There isn't the same organization. 

But we were a central research team that worked with other products or retail. I was on the consumer side. I did not touch AWS on the consumer buying and shopping stuff or buying and selling stuff. 

So yes, we would work with other product teams on Amazon, do some customer research, help them whether it was like tracking how they're doing versus competitors, or if they had a new product launch coming out with some insight into what they should be considering we did that. 

It was a lot of qualitative, just physically going through these shopping experiences writing customer surveys. So yeah, it was not really a data role. I did find opportunities for myself too so it's interesting looking back and seeing stuff that I did that kind of leads to where I am now. 

We had some data sources we use that no one is really using. And I was like, oh, this is for what we're doing…this could be a huge win for us. It is a huge opportunity to actually figure out what's going on. 

And we had a AWS dashboard tool called Quick Sight. I was like all this load data into here make some visuals and shared it out. Here's like a thing. And that became, for a short period of time, I was like the quick site guy or the dashboard guy. 

And then I mean, like my last year there, I really did nothing data related. I remember even probably about this time last year, I was interviewing for a non-crypto startup thing. And I was like, oh, man, I gotta reteach myself SQL. 

So, it's nuts. I was like, wait, what order does from Groupbuy go into? Like that kind of stuff. But uh, yeah, I don't know.

Boxer  11:28  

Yeah, well, I am looking at your dashboard. In your work today, I would have expected that you'd be one of the masterminds at Amazon, like analyzing terabytes of data. 

But yeah, that even shows you how a diverse path can lead to a job in Web3, just following your interests.

Miko  11:48  

Yeah, I did have some SQL projects early in Amazon. And I actually jogged my memory. I do remember now, sitting down with some of our very good business analysts. 

And they're giving you the whole rundown of how to do things that make it faster. Here's what a lot of those things were very unique to how Amazon’s whole back end (whatever you call it) database works. Yeah, definitely things you need to for each dataset and each database. We know as well. Yeah.

Boxer  12:16  

Yeah. So, what was the first thought that went through your mind when you discovered Dune?

Miko  12:24  

One thought was like, wow, there's a lot of these coffee tables on the left. I don't know what they mean. So, that's the first one still. Yeah. But I guess it was kind of…yeah, I just go back…I mean, one. I assumed everyone else knew more than I did. 

So, I assumed there were some secrets that I didn't know that everyone else knew or even my early discord questions were like, hey, what's a good way to read contracts and how do they become data tables? 

I think you replied where it's case-by-case. You’ve got to figure it out yourself. But yeah, I remember like, I think overall tuition, and it is very cool that all this data is just available. 

And it's like  anyone can do anything with it. Or even in the past to any other. Yeah, I would expect like most, especially as I'm trying to get out. If I'm one DeFi app, I want to know how another DeFi app is doing like in traditional Web2 data worlds like, well, all the data is locked in these companies. 

So you can there's some data providers that will charge you a lot of money for some approximations of the data. But then, yeah, for crypto is just like, you can look at everything. And it's all there. And it's all like there's no approximations it is correct. 

Like, this is what is happening. This is what the transaction says. That is it. Yeah, I mean, that's really cool, too. And I do like how I mean, at least from my perspective. I have one skill really, which is just like, I can do SQL. I can make dash. I can make charts and stuff. I don't know how to do any data engineering stuff. 

I don't want to. I mean, I've tried picked up some of that. But yeah, I definitely liked it. I can just write a query, make a visual, share it out done, like no extra work.

Boxer  14:05  

Yeah, plug and play. Yeah, very, very simple. So first, you start to contributing to index call, but never contributed to index.

Miko  14:14  

I was just lingering in their discord. Actually, I remember that when I first started, I was considering like, oh, do I just message in this group and say, hey, like, how can I help out and stuff, but I've done that a few times in not crypto things but other things before. 

I say, oh, I'd love to help, and they give me a bunch of things and like nevermind, not really what I wanted. 

So, I was like let me just see if I actually want to do this and try to pick stuff up, and so actually when I first jogged my memory a bunch now, I started testing out in Dune. I was like, oh, let me try to pick stuff up pick some stuff up so that I can then potentially contribute to like index in that way but then yeah, the second dashboard I made got contacted for a freelance role. 

At one point, I tweeted out something like when you're in launch there with the token. He's just a silly dog token. I tweeted out something about one of their developers liked it. 

And I was like, well, I'll make this one next. And you know, it was kind of like in all these urine contributor groups for a month or two, then got contacted by other Dows we're looking to do some governance proposals. He did some data work to help out with that. And that led into other work there too. 

So yeah, I was very quickly gotten to just having people come to me whereas I didn't have to really go and seek out anything. It was just people coming to me and which was like really, really awesome. But yeah, never got back to my original goal of let me just get good at doing, so I can then message in this Discord and offer my help. Things kind of took off. 

Boxer  15:42  

Yeah, demand is too high. So, you just got off the market, basically. Yeah.

Miko  15:47  

And even those days I used to…I was contributing to before they're always asking me to know any other good DM people to bring in? Oh, it's like everyone is so booked up. There's definitely a lot of requests for good data people.

Boxer  15:59  

Yeah, yeah, I still get that today. Like people ask me who is a good Dune wizard. I'm like, there's so many. Yeah. Like, I know that this guy is busy. And this guy's busy. And like, I don't really have personal connections to all of them anymore as well. 

So, I don't really know this guy so. Yeah, that seems to be very, very much a shared experience between all good young creators. They are like…I have so much work that I could literally hire three people. Yeah, I can make a company. It’s pretty crazy.

Miko  16:35  

We are hiring at Optimism now.

Boxer  16:38  

Yeah, yes. One last Dune wizard for the community. Yeah, we can talk about that at the end, if you want to. So, I was gonna ask you, was it a thought out strategy to like engagement farm on Twitter to generate new opportunities to freelance or not really?

Miko  17:03  

I don't know, I guess like, even though I mentioned before, I tweeted out these dashes and got some likes, and that's how I got some notoriety and stuff. But at the time, I had like 200 followers. 

So, I was…for a while…it's like tweeting out…like shouting into the Ether. And no one was listening to me at all. Like mostly sports stuff anyway, but I was just talking to myself on Twitter. 

It’s surprising that way, but I do think maybe it's not like engagement farming, but I think things that I've done that have become like, engagement sucks, or just gotten a ton of likes and retweets and stuff. 

It's kind a combination of the following things that I'm just curious in, but also what's in the cultural zeitgeist at the time. So, like uniswap V3 dashboard, that was my first thing that blew up. 

That was like four days after they launched there was really besides the uniswap info page. There was not a lot else out there. So, I was curious about it. There was demand for it. It was the thing at the time. 

So, that took off similarly like a urine dashboard made as well. Even the Ukraine crypto donations that was I was curious about it. And it was definitely top of mind so that one went crazy as well. 

So yeah, I never was intentionally looking for engagement, but I think just having curiosity aligned with what other people are curious about at the time helps with that.

Boxer  18:24  

Yeah, yeah, just being plugged into the Zeitgeist and recognizing what are people interested in. What are stats that are not available anywhere else? And can I like visualize them in a nice way? 

Yeah, if their student was out there thinking how can I engagement farm whether you want to or not. There's definitely was a cold cow AirDrop like couple days ago and I haven't seen any great dashboards about it it's probably too late now, but yeah Hilda will be Mrs. Yeah, it's like usually a natural…no yeah, he didn't get that.

Miko  19:06  

Automated bots listen for new air drops dashboard automatically. Yeah, even on that is…even early on some of the opportunities I got were just the Dune uniswap V3 guy which I just made like one or two dashboards. 

So, whenever anyone was like oh, we need someone for us off the three dashboards that yeah….became me as he healed obvious comment now that he slacked. 

Yeah, but even then…another angle on that is just…there's a ton of opportunities to just be like the main person for a certain type of niche, which I'll of course pitch that there's now a bunch of the LT world is now wide open as well. 

I don't know how many people have actually worked with Optimism data or stuff on dealing with probably just a handful, so tons of opportunity there and definitely trying to make that Optimism database as easy to use as possible. So yeah, good spot to go.

Boxer  20:01  

Very good way to go…yeah, I think it's the best database today. 

Miko  20:08  

Yeah, that is a goal. Yeah.

Boxer  20:11  

Do you have an FTD or tradesave on there?

Miko  20:15  

Not yet. I have a view that I managed myself. Well, right now most of our volume is on Quixotic. So, it's all concentrated on one marketplace now.

Boxer  20:24  

But yeah, you will create it. If it isn't, yeah, I'm very sure of that.

Miko  20:30  

And if two marketplaces come to Optimism, I will make all the set of all the data for you. Yeah, that's a bit of Optimism. I'll make data for you.

Boxer  20:38  

Yeah, it's a great value, to be honest, for all these projects that you're just taking care of this. So, how did you actually end up at Optimism? So, I'm sure at the time you must have had like shutdown of options for joining…maybe you can talk about that experience of what it's like to be the….Yeah, I don't find that the good.

Miko  21:02  

Start talking. Yeah. Yeah, it's actually a good transition, too. Because I remember I first heard of Optimism, I think even a 16z. First invested in them or…is like Series A. I think they put out some posts about why investing in Optimism…read about it. 

And I was like, I've used the Ethereum. Yes, I think it can be expensive. So, okay, this thing's trying to make it cheaper. Great, in on that. But the time I saw I was like…I was a very technical…just like building a rollup chain. Not a software engineer. It's like nothing, not a block. 

Especially not a blockchain engineers. There's like nothing I can do. They're just a side interest. I remember when uniswap V3 launch, there's the announcement of like, hey, we're gonna deploy Optimism as well. 

So, another thing in the back of my mind that was excited for that. Batch. Remember, I was like, on a hike, just checking my phone. And I saw a tweet, saying oh, uniswap V3 live on Optimism. I was like, oh my god, I gotta go try this out. So, I did. 

And I was like, wow, transactions instantly like super cool. You paid like super cheap fees. Wow, this is what I was thinking of like, what's the thing that's gonna make using crypto applications very easy or much easier for the everyday consumer. 

This was coming from the Amazon world where I was all about the consumer experience. And yeah, I don't know. It's one of the going off tangent here. But there's some of these like Jeff Bezos sayings that some of them did that resonate with me. And one of them was just like, customers will never ask you for stuff to be more expensive. 

They'll never ask for you stuff to be slower. So, it's like, yeah, very obviously, cheaper and faster is good, especially in the crypto world It’s the same ethereal bird, you know, building off your insecurities is useful. Otherwise that launched? I remember one day or maybe a couple days later, I was just on Dune poking around, and I opened up the schema tab, and I saw Optimism. 

I was like, who thinks before y'all announced it was like, what's this? But even then, the database was so bare, there was no ERC 20 transfers. There was nothing. 

So actually, it was one of your dashboards or your tracking how many tokens we’re getting. It bridged over something like that. Oh, this is what logs mean. This is how I figured all this stuff out. 

So still, yeah, another theme of just like always being surprised how much I don't know and just figuring it out. But yeah, I made like a dashboard that was a side-by0side of yourself on a theory on versus yourself on Optimism. 

Yeah, that's kind of…I was kind of curious. Just is my…no idea what a launch or growth trajectory looks like. I was like, well, this just overtook volume today, or will it tomorrow? Or what? How much? 

How much usage actually is there? See, I mean, that's side by side and that Ember tweeting that out? I shared it the Optimism Discord. I guess I'm back on my mind. I was just a fan of Optimism. So, I was like…this would be cool to do some stuff with them. 

And yeah, some of the Optimism team reached out to me on Twitter and was like, hey, we'd love to talk about maybe doing some work with us. It's like, yep. So yeah, and actually at the time, I'd only done freelance work before where it was just like make one dashboard. 

And they're done. So, I came in expecting. But they're like, well, we just want someone to work part-time, look at our data, and dive deep, and not just like a one off dashboard. 

But help us understand what our users are doing and what we need to grow all these kinds of data questions. You would have to grow an ecosystem. So yeah, I started working there part-time for a little bit. Kind of. Yeah, so at that time, I was probably part-time for about a month. 

I was contributing to a few Dows. I got to a point where I I knew doing crypto stuff was my future. I was still at Amazon at that point. So, I actually decided it was interesting timeline wise, but it was a big, emotional, mental decision to say I'm gonna quit Amazon. 

I'm was just going to do this part-time crypto stuff. Yeah, I don't know. I'm gonna do full-time yet or what I want to do full-time. But you know, I'm in a spot where I can survive off of this. 

And I'm like, let's go do it. So, I quit Amazon, then the next week afterwards, they were like, you want to interview for full-time? I was like, yep. My big decision of like, oh, go do this part-time, bounce around though data contributor stuff. 

I was like, man, if I do it for a few months, I guess…how would you like…health insurance? I'm going to do that. And then that was two weeks, and I was at Optimism. Full time. So, it's nuts. Nuts story. So, people don't know that I quit Amazon before. But I did this for two weeks.

Boxer  25:38  

Yeah, yeah. I remember at the time, you made so many great dashboards. And you were everywhere. Even you created dashboards on accounts, which were not yours. 

And I only found out through, I don't know, random interactions. And yeah, it was like, holy shit. This guy is working full-time. And he's doing all these dashboards. Like, how the hell do you do that now?

Miko  26:06  

There are some people now even that. I never do this stuff part-time. I'm just surprised. But yeah, it’s kind of a common theme about people that, yeah, I don't know. If you enjoy it and used to do it…but yeah.

Boxer  26:17  

Yeah. Eat panda is a big one where I'm also like…how does he do this? It's incredible. But yeah, if you're really interested in something, you enjoy it, then it doesn't really feel like you're just doing it because it's an hour. It's fun.

Miko  26:33  

Yeah. And that was actually part of a slight concern that I had going into crypto too. I mentioned it before, but growing up playing sports, I played baseball. It was my entire life. 

And then, when I was in college, I interned at Major League Baseball, like the professional league headquarters. And after that summer, I was just like…I am not a fan anymore. Like I was too deep into it, and I was burnt out from it. 

So, I was concerned abou turning your hobby into a job. What if you just get burned out? Or if you don't like it? Yeah, it's different that…like I said, interest. 

Maybe the difference here is interest. We are all trying to build something. So, it's not just an entertainment thing. But yeah, I mean, I haven't felt that. 

It's been good turning an interest into a full-time job in this sense. But yeah, that was another interesting. Thought I have as well out of others have had that thought too. But…

Boxer  27:27  

Yeah, but I guess it's a bit different because the Major League thing…that's one specific thing. Of course, it's illegal, but in the end, everyone's playing baseball, and in crypto, we like doing everything. NFTs are like auction platforms.

There's Dexus, there's Lending Club. So, it's such a broad area of interest in so many things. You can really engage with it. I don't feel like…this can ever get boring because new rails for all things…you can still engage with like 1000 things.

Miko  28:04  

Yeah, yeah. I've not felt that. Yeah. And even yeah, you still have the same giddy excitement when something new launches. We had a new protocol on top. It wasn't today. And I'm like, ooh, excited.

Boxer  28:15  

How are other contracts verified?

Miko  28:18  

Yeah, remember, they're verified on Etherscan? That's my big thumbs on…very great when they're verified. Yeah.

Boxer  28:26  

Otherwise, it's hard to work on Dune or in general. With this contract. Yeah. Cool. Um, did you have any other job offers at the time? Or was Optimism the only one who reach out to you? Yeah.

Miko  28:37  

Other. I mean, other people reached out to me. Yeah. That's a good call. Yeah, people. Probably for about two months before people start to reach out. And yeah, it started as general questions asking, like, Oh, what are you interested in? 

Like, what are you looking to do next? I'll just kind of get into conversations. But I thought I had, at the time…it's both sides. Some VC type of people and some more product protocol people. 

But the thought that I kind of had…yeah, I think it was more since what I mentioned before I was at Amazon was doing kind of like a research team. And I always felt like I was jealous of the people that would be on the product side that would take our research and then go do something I wanted to be on the name. It's like a drastic way to put it, but I didn't want to do another research role. 

So, Lent skewed more toward the product protocol world. But even then, I think altruism is a perfect landing spot for me in the sense that I'm just like…my interests were how do you make something that people use? 

I'm not a financial engineering sci-fi kind of person. I don't do research stuff either. So, it’s a whole world that I throw my hands up at…like other people are looking at the analysts. 

What is it? 7.1? I'm kidding about that. But yeah, I think it was just a good landing spot for my… it was a good. It was a very lucky position that I could be kind of picky about what direction I wanted to go to. Yeah, glad worked out. There's no other…definitely the best landing spot for me.

Boxer  30:18  

Yeah, that's great to hear. It's a very common story in crypto that everyone is like, yeah, I found the spot where I want to be. And that kind of…yeah, I think that stems from people pretty much onboarding themselves. 

And you're not like, I'm gonna apply for this job. And then I'll see what people do with me. But there's this one specific role, which is things I enjoy. And let's just apply for that. 

This is the skill set that I have, that I can bring to the table and just keep doing this. There's nothing else I will do. So, that's pretty interesting. Yeah, cool. 

So, you're an optimist now. So, what's your role there? Yeah, what is your day-to-day business?

Miko  31:04  

Yeah, so our data team is me right now. Like I was joking there, but we're kind of like bundled in with our finance people too. But yeah, my day-to-day is just like anything that is related to on-chain data and Optimism. 

I am personally involved in that somehow. So, that spans from just in-general, like, what are the apps people are using. Even in general, my top-level stuff is just how our transactions are trending? 

How are our users trending? Kind of a measure of how much values on Optimism like in our bridges and things like that? And then yeah, on a level deeper, are people saying what they actually use? 

Yeah, what are things that drive growth? And trying to answer some of those strategic questions. And also even enjoined? I was kind of unsure. I know, from outside anything, I was like, okay, I like to OpSec roll up. What does that mean? Like, I had some idea? 

I thought my little distraction was just like, what do people actually use? But since I've gotten in, I've even, especially now, gone into how much gas does the transaction use? 

How much gas are we using on LTE versus what we spent on that one? Which is a whole other one of the dashboards I can go into. It kind of goes into that a bit more, actually getting into the weeds of the economics of running a roll up. I had a realization that it's similar to my whole industrial engineering optimization background just to make the process efficient and reduce costs as much as possible. 

It's kind of similar to our job as a roll up. It takes the ML to pass it down to one the cheapest most efficient way possible. Yes, an interesting parallel there. 

Yeah, and then otherwise, I think it's been really cool for me to work on. Our forward looking or future plans got help scope out things and touch on strategy, but before, working on that stuff has been really cool as well. But yeah, touching everything.

Boxer  33:05  

We need to uncover…yeah, maybe if you want to quickly introduce. Make a call for that.

Miko  33:15  

Oh, so we put up a job posting a few days ago to grow our data team at Optimism. It’s for another data analyst position, which is same thing that I'm doing now. Yeah. And then…the main reason for putting up that role really is that I'm spread super thin covering everything. 

So, just more people going down the rabbit hole. So yeah, I think if you're someone who is just diving into an entire blockchain worth of data, and you're interested in how do you make a thing grow? 

Even some technicals of how does a rollup actually work? Yeah, I mean, it's been super exciting for me to dive in and cover everything in our team. I'm just showing now, but I've never been like so confident in a team that I’ve worked with, especially our engineering protocol systems group.

 Whenever they present something or say, hey, we have this new design philosophy or strategy for that. Like yep, we trust you, you go for it. 

Yeah, it's cool. I think to a lot of people at Optimism to wear multiple hats…even for me, I mentioned before….yeah, I do data work. But then that just covers everything, like just project usage and actual gas, economic stuff, but we have software engineers who turned into community leads. 

People who are half software engineer, half-building the sales funnel of our sales funnel, but this like, methodology of how we reach out to projects or how we figured out who are the biggest part of people to get on to Optimism, or to try to get on to Optimism. 

So yeah, a lot of it's not just like one thing, a lot of different kinds of stuff. It's covered there, but we're fun.

Boxer  35:03  

Yeah, yeah. Sounds like a great job. And if anyone can teach you how to be a good human wizard, it's probably this man right here. So, I guess you won't take a total novice. But if I were to work next to you, I've learned so much. I think that’s a good way to put it. 

Yeah, cool. So, I think we haven't really touched upon Optimism cheaper. But yeah. Can you go a bit deeper into what Optimism actually is and how it works?

Miko  35:38  

Yeah, yeah. So, Layer 2 builds on top of Ethereum. Which means that we are our own blockchain in a way. You make your transactions Optimism, rather than making them on Ethereum. 

But we use a theorem for security, meaning that you do transaction on Optimism. It'll be like instant confirmation and way cheaper. When we take the data of your transaction, rather than doing our own consensus Optimism, you send that to Ethereum. Ethereum is all the consensus, all that stuff. 

And yeah, as a user, you get cheap fast transactions. You get to build on top of the security of Ethereum. For developers, one of the big things that we pushed was EVM equivalents. 

So, any code or developer tools or any of that works on Ethereum. It works the exact same on Optimism, trying to make that as easy as possible and trying to produce the difference between these two systems as much as possible. 

The things just work, and it's a good foundation for us to go build on top of. So even for analysts, one thing that was very useful for me is the amount of gas and getting more technical to the gas part here. 

But I found a gas that a transaction uses on Layer 2. It is like the exact same amount of gas that we use on Layer 1. So, it lets us do these things. Like how much cheaper would a transaction be to do that predictably? So yeah, all those things kind of there.

Boxer  37:05  

Right, interesting. So, how is Optimism doing today? Can we maybe look at some dashboards? Kind of take a look and compare? See what's happening on the chain? I guess? You’re screen sharing? 

We're in the right format already. That's nice. Yeah, so how many? How many daily active users, for example, does Optimism currently have?

Miko  37:37  

So, yesterday is almost 4,000 moving averages….about 3000 per day for the past week. That's what this is measuring air within what hasn't quit. It is just seeing and having more contracts deployed on Optimism. 

So, one hypothesis of what's going to grow is just having apps and things for people to do on Layer 2. So, to see data here, you actually scroll down to usage. Like in March, about double of what our previous ones of the total number of contracts deployed. 

I think it's been kind of cool to just have some of these building blocks that are being deployed on Optimism. And now, we're at the point we're starting to see. Okay, these other apps are now building on top of these building blocks. 

So, I mentioned before, one protocol that launched today, it's called polynomial where they're building options and types of strategies on top of Lyra, which is an Optimism native protocol that does options. 

So yeah, it's cool. Seeing those kinds of things start to come together. It’s just exciting to see this contract growth there as well.

Boxer  38:48  

Yeah, the contract growth is really impressive. Just to see any reason why specifically in March this is so high. I see. There's like one big bar and contracts deployed per day. Is that the new protocol launching?

Miko  39:03  

Yeah, this bar wasn't the new protocol launching, but there's one contributor, but there's some of these other projects. I see some of these things, and there’s seasonality in these bars here. 

There's one protocol called fail, and they do like binary options, so you say they have an option. Like will price of ETH be above or below 3000 on a certain day? You can pick the long side or the short side on it. 

But since they do these like every week or so, they'll put out their new options there. So, that is a mini contract. This spike, I remember exactly what it was. I remember it was just like one contract or one address to point a bunch of contracts. 

So, that's what that was as well. I’m still waiting to see what that exactly was, but yeah, something like…

I’ll look at what I think is very important. I try to probably show on other ones…other dashboards that it didn't. The Optimism database was just trying to make the Cotler contract address to contract or project name mapping as tight as possible. 

So, it was very easy to see a contract and what project contract is allocated to which project and doing the most transactions with the most users since that mapping is very tight together.

Boxer  40:22  

Yeah. Yeah. Can you just quickly walk us through the…I think this is probably the dashboard. Your team would check this on a daily basis, right? Just like a weekly basis? Whatever time interval? But this seems to be very much the North…very hard metric. Yeah.

Miko  40:41  

Yeah. So, for example, it's mentioned before, here at CEO transactions kind of increase a little bit. So yeah, next up after that, you find where I have this dashboard open to. Yeah, so then switch over and say key transactions were up? 

Like, what is the thing driving that? So this year, as mentioned before, I've tried to keep a very good mapping of contract addresses to projects. So, it lets me create things like this at a very high data quality. 

So, see here, just in general, this table on the left is just overall a 30-day summary of how many transactions, how many addresses, how many event logs, total fees that have been generated by project there, etc. This table here on the right gives more of a localized view into what things are growing. 

This here is just average per day over the last seven days. These deltas here are versus the prior 30 days here. So, for example, professional protocol year is like a monster 27.7 thousand transactions per day. 

And that's grown about 37% versus the prior 30 day period. Similarly, here, it’s channeling ton of usage uniswap or a lot of our apps on Optimism will use channeling price Oracles. So, they have a lot of transactions. There are some of these bigger ones. Like pica is a similar perpetual type of swap and Rubicon is an order book Dex. 

She bridges here with hop Stargate was a new one that came out. 0x actually tweeted today they had this increased usage on Optimism. Oh, yeah, that's like a big table here. But further down, it's going a little more visual. 

Seeing what things are actually driving these transactions. See, like this blue bar here is perpetual. And that's definitely climbing up here. And then yeah, trying to keep contracts mapped. 

Well, these two unmapped contracts are glaring at me. I gotta figure out what those are, so I can map them to a name. Yeah, it's all figured out, too, as well. Even transacting addresses, there's this big purple thing up here. Synthetics. That's interesting. 

So, synthetics actually does have a filter out. Some of the other big ones, they have their weekly staking claims or the weekly stake, and you can claim your weekly rewards on Wednesdays, I think. 

So, that's what this bar is. But this is much higher than previous ones. So interesting. Another small one peeking up? Yep. So, this database name is…what is this little spike? Okay. It's interesting. Yeah. And yeah, return trends down here as well.

Boxer  43:23  

Yeah, I'm speaking to perpetual protocol. Is that maybe if I interact with the contracts, I just need to do a lot of transactions? Or is it really that? So is it really that much more usage than the other protocols? Or is it just that I need to do more transactions to do a single grouped action?

Miko  43:45  

Yeah, so I think what popped out to me for this really just thinking of who are the different kinds of users for a certain kind of product. So, professional protocols, one where it's like essentially taking out leverage and doing these fancy trading things. 

They were primarily on X diagnosis chain before, which had zero fees. So, this all kind of came out to me and separately looked at because these are obviously high frequency users. These are a lot of just market making kind of bots or trading bots and things like that. So different types of users. 

It was interesting for me thinking like, yes, I think a goal or what I'm very interested in is just what are things that regular people would use. But interesting here is the discovery of like, oh, wait, there's this whole other type of user that at least I personally had not considered before. 

And I see some, other apps, other chains, as well have this kind of behavior as well. And I've been very successful with that. So just interesting as far as like, who are all the various types of market participants when you have this kind of big D photocycle. You do? Yeah. See Rubicon in the comments to the shout out. Yeah.

Boxer  44:56  

Yeah, interesting. Did you so…I don't think we have to Ableton Optimism. So, are you kind of…do you have a dashboard breaking that down manually? User Groups or something like that?

Miko  45:08  

Let me find it. Well, not specifically like this. Yeah, there's a thought…some kind of user groups I thought about are how frequently are they being used actually in? 

I didn't make a professional protocol dashboard that was more around how new some of these users were. So, I think I just find this not trying to talk at the same time tickets. I'm getting myself in danger. 

Yeah. Yeah, so this one doesn't have who I gotta move on. Okay. I'm not in my own logins. We can't move these things around. Yeah, so I guess there's one group or one idea like how frequently are these users operating? 

Another one is how old or new are these users? Professional protocols? Interesting one, and we we just talked about them as well. But then, yeah, around the end of December and January here they ran a promotion where it's like, have you traded a certain amount and you get some NFTs? 

So, it's a general number of traders here. Splits by token but going down to not have that on here.

Boxer  46:21  

Don't worry…we don't need to search. It would have found it. 

Miko  46:25  

But yeah, I scroll too fast. But you see in general…okay…spike of users here. We're all mostly less than one day.

Boxer  46:35  

Okay. Wow, that's a big impact. Like 500 users edit, and then also reactivating a lot of old users. Yeah, yeah. That's a pretty interesting tool. 

Miko  46:48  

Yeah. Usually, they're mostly less than three months old. Three years a split here. Mentally, that climb over time. But yeah, I think things like this that are kind of going beyond just…what's the total volume of something…we need to just like…how's it being used? 

And that stuff, I find super interesting. So, it's kind of what I've…he's very interested…that whole world of stuff.

Boxer  47:10  

Yeah, I think it's definitely something that the whole industry is very much under appreciating. Labeling addresses and kind of making sense of what type of user group is this? And what kind…is this a whale? 

Or is this somebody who is very new to DeFi? If all my users are only DeFi power users, could I somehow make better introduction videos or education material to onboard more of newer addresses? 

Because it's kind of interesting. We assume that addresses don't stay constant. But if I look at myself, my addresses have been the same thing since forever. 

Miko  47:52  

And yeah, I think that there's a caveat for everything. But yeah, there's no way around it, I guess.

Boxer  47:56  

Yeah. Yeah. And I think we are under utilizing basically. This constant has addresses because we all think like, oh, people switch their wallets every five weeks. And we can't trick anyone. 

But like, if you really look at it, most of the people really stay on addresses for a long time and kind of utilize that more. It would be very interesting. Yeah.

Miko  48:18  

Yeah, I was playing out… just to wrap this up. They're just similarly…another one…that's going kind of a level beyond. I took a list of just a random list of a certain day. I just picked a group of Altruistic users. 

I port that list over to the L1 database and just looked at what they use on Layer 1. I'm getting a sense of like…we know what apps they use and Optimism, but that is kind of limited to just what's available. 

They can't use everything there. So, taking what is on Layer 1 can be a good example of what they want or what users we have. So, even just briefly going through, there's this table here. 

I call it….I want to found affinity, but essentially, taking from this options and user list what share of them that made a transaction on Layer 1 in the last 30 days using this app, what the difference of that is versus not Altruism users, and then just index that 200. So, still kind of finding the best way to get some signal out of this. 

But some kind of early takeaways here. There's a lot of overlap with using other kind of LTE bridges here. You see someone just like the total most popular apps on the Etherium show up there as well. 

Yeah, even going through some things that popped out to me, I see mirrors their compound as they're always there. But then there's some of that getting down to, especially if I sort by this affinity index, which is just kind of saying how much more likely people are to use it on Optimism. Or how much more likely your Oxygen users are to use it and not Optimism users? 

This is 100 base though. This means like 250 times more likely. Yeah, but there's kind of figuring out the best way to do it. But what kinda came out to me though is that there's this like Euler here…yield elements up there as well…synthetics. 

So, there's this…through doing some work into this one…goes into as much detail as I can. But we did some realization like, oh, are our users right now? Are these heavier DeFi users like? 

Yeah. Other things maybe more NFT-driven. But yeah, we have this big serious DeFi group. Yes, that goes into strategy…like do you just build for those users? 

Do you try to acquire a new set of users? Yeah. All interesting insights there that go beyond how many users are there?

Boxer  50:43  

Yeah, that's actually exactly what I was talking about earlier. I guess it's kind of limited because we don't have cross string queries on unit. And once we enable that, then it's going to be field day for a lot of people out there who are interested in this data. 

Yeah, it's going to be an amazing unlock of lakes data. And currently, the data is so…it's split so radically that the friction is trying to do cross chain querying. It is just way too high. 

So yeah, really excited. What you've built with cross strength varies. Hopefully, it’s coming to Dune soon. Yeah. Cool. We looked at what Optimism users are doing. What do you think would be based on this data if you can share it? 

What's will make users adopt and foster Optimism? Is there anything that you did like? What are the findings that your team has?

Miko  51:49  

Yeah, I just fuse one similar to the dashboard…I just went through it…just like, what? Yeah, it's like who? What are things that users want? I guess it's like a big, very vague question. 

So, if we do take our seats, there's one side of heavy take our users today and kind of expand what they want. Understanding that's who's had adoption so far. And it's kind of keeps hitting that group. 

That would lead you to say, like, okay, let's get all of these more kind of DeFi apps up. There's another side, actually, which other dashboard is pulled up. If you can put that screen up, just showing how much a certain transaction type could save on Optimism. 

So, this one here is saying a compound could save 34 bucks on Optimism. So, there's another thought…just take some of these projects that have really gas intensive transactions and say, like, oh, they could have the most to gain by going to Layer 2. 

But even myself, personally, I thought, there's definitely a lot of inertia to stay on Layer 1, or it's a lot of effort. It's very difficult or not difficult, but yeah, it's hard to change, I guess. 

So, it's there? Like, is it harder to get something? Or is it harder for a doubt to migrate from Layer 1 to Layer 2, or these like new things that are coming up that haven't launched anywhere yet? 

Those launched natively on a Layer 2. We've seen a lot of usage from some of those like Lyra as an example with a lot natively on Optimism and really successful there. So yeah, always kind of getting more questions and actual answers, but I guess that's also kind of what's exciting, too. 

It's like we're also kind of looking for what is the thing that really make Layer 2s just explode?

Boxer  53:41  

Yeah, l 220…22. Hasn't really happened yet. But we're on the way there. We're on the way there. Yeah, certainly the metrics like trending up across the board. Very happy to see that. 

Yeah, yeah, I think we've covered everything regarding Optimism, maybe. No, no, I got everything. So maybe, zooming out a bit and just talking about the Web3 space in general.

I guess you've talked a bit about what you really enjoy working on with Optimism, but maybe if you can comment on the general working with three even outside of Optimism. I think it's always interesting to hear from people about that regard.

Miko  54:34  

Yeah, it’s just been interesting to me…I didn't expect going through this is just like…how much community there is in a way. OrI think it's just maybe the nature of everything being so open, but yeah, I feel like when I was with previous companies, I've never really talked to anyone from other companies really ever. 

And even then, I don't even know where to find them or where to look and stuff. But yeah, I think just like the nature of everything being on Twitter. I think being on Discord like I am now to group chats with other analysts, groups, and other places. 

It is cool. It's like a good sense of community even though most of us are now like me, especially working remote, not having an office…just kind of logging onto my little machine every day and hitting buttons and seeing if I hit them in the right order. So, that's been really cool from that standpoint, as well.

And yeah, I kind of feel like even thinking myself to like…at this point a year ago, I was just like, some random person at a tech company. There's no reason for anyone…no opportunity for me really to be anything more than just like a person at a desk. 

I guess. I think it is cool. I don't know if it's because I just been surprised of how much attention and value there is encrypted in Web3 and how few people there actually are in it. As far as like, like, valuing attention to actual people. Oh, did I drop it? Did you drop? You froze.

Boxer  56:03  

I can…oh my god.

Miko  56:04  

Did I freeze, or do you freeze? Well, it's just the me show now. Yes. Here we go. We're back. I thought I'd have to just host. Welcome to my TED talk. 

Boxer  56:20  

I know you've lost for me though. This is a bit unfortunate. But you can hear me.

Miko  56:27  

I can hear you. Okay.

Boxer  56:29  

Okay, well, we'll just keep rolling. Let's hope nothing happens. Yeah. Yeah, you were you would? I am. What were you gonna say? 

Miko  56:38  

I think it wa… I cannot put the point of just there's like way. Now I'm gone. Now back. There's way fewer people than actual…there's way fewer people than I expected. 

So, it was very quick going from knowing nobody to knowing data people and all these other kinds of companies, or all the other kinds of protocols, organizations, and things. 

So yeah, it's felt like even in this like remote first world, it’s felt way more connected to everybody. And you know, it’s a slightly notable person, I guess going from nothing to…I don't know…having some kind of standing. Whatever that means.

Boxer  57:20  

Yeah, you got the gold man. Don't undersell yourself. Yeah, I guess. It's not really the fame. 

Miko  57:35  

It's more that people appreciate your value kind of things of consequence. I know that things that I do day-to-day matter. 

And it's like thinking how big and important Optimism is…I'm one of 35, I think, right now. So, it's just like there's a lot of just consequence to everything, which is exciting.

Boxer  57:51  

Yeah, there's so much leverage in your work. It’s pretty much the work you're producing really, really has impact on important decisions. Can you quickly restart your camera? 

Do I move for you? Like, this is a bit? It's a bit weird. You're frozen for me? Oh, yeah, I don't know how the YouTube stream looks.

Miko  58:14  

So, I don't know. I was clicking on and off. Okay. Well, I should have…this is what PFPs are for.

Boxer  58:22  

How are you frozen for yourself?

Miko  58:25  

I see myself. I see you moving. Oh, chat help us. 

Boxer  58:28  

So, I always wanted to talk to chat. Oh, maybe it's just me. Yeah. I think Boxer was having trouble. Okay, so it was good, Boxer. No back. Okay, so maybe it's just you are frozen for me. But that's good. As long as it's appearing. Right.

Miko  58:45  

I promise. I'm moving.

Boxer  58:47  

Yeah, the editors are gonna have fun with this for the podcast. 

Miko  58:51  

I just want to ask questions now. Like we have so many. Cool.

Boxer  58:56  

Okay, YouTube is fine. Okay, cool. Yeah. I think we've talked about Web3 data, but earlier in your incoming statement, you pretty much talked about that. But yeah, I don't know. 

Maybe can you add some meat to that? Let's double click on the topic basically. What makes you like it? What’s the cool thing about Web3 data for you?

Miko  59:22  

Yeah, it's a good question. I guess the first answer. Well, I stole something more, but I think it's almost like the immediacy of things is one as well where a new product launches, and you can look at it that second. 

There's no reporting quarterly. There's no waiting and saying, oh, let's see what happens six months from now to see what the actual numbers look like or anything like that. 

I think even someone in my previous episode mentioned, but you can see just on the Dune trending leaderboard, things will pop up there, and I've never heard of this thing. There's already this hole down scored built for it, and this analysis and all this stuff, too. 

It's kind of like, yeah, I think it’s definitely underrated how once the contracts live…most of these transactions are on it. That's all you need. There's nothing else there or anything else that you need. Yeah, I see what else I think you already kind of touched on…just everything's open. 

There's no…you don't need to get approximations. It's all there exactly as you have what it is. But definitely, I think it'll be interesting to see…I think right now the skills required to be a good crypto three data person is just can you recognize how the app or the contract works. Can you recognize what the data fields already need? 

And just show the information for it. I think it will be interesting. And what goes beyond my skill set right now is once you kind of get like the bare bones of we can pull data, we know that we are calculating things correctly, we know how much volume and all that stuff…there are things that I've thought about as an example like user clustering…kind of anecdotally… 

There's DeFi users and Optimism but are there other questions we can do? I know others have done these network graph types of things as well. 

So, I think it'll be an interesting next step of going into the more traditional data science stuff once you get beyond just can we get data? Yes or no?

Boxer  1:01:22  

Yeah, it can very much resonate with that. I think we are slowly getting there. We are looking beyond like, hey, this is the volume. And this is the daily users. And I think we were slowly, as a community, basically upgrading our methods of salt. 

And there's also people coming in from way different backgrounds. So, traditional Quan people and stuff look at the pizza traits and whatever the dress is about. And I think over time, we'll just bundle all of our energy. 

And in our collective brain, we level up the ideas that we're utilizing. Yeah. And I sustaita, which I'm going to share with you now. But I think it's a really amazing feature about doing that. 

Everything is open. Everything's public. Yeah, like not only the data but also the methods of getting the data, which really helps to level up your own data analysis game. And I'm learning something. Every time I try to understand one of your dashboards, now I even have to unroll a bunch of views of us. It's getting more complicated. 

But the composability you bring you to this dashboard. It's just something that I know. It's possible, but I'm not really sure how to implement it. I can learn from a grandmaster like you and just be like, hey, I can copy these lines of code. 

And I can easily fork this in five minutes, or let it be half an hour or something. And it's just an amazing level up. It's an amazing like social learning ability that we can utilize. And yeah, I just love it.

Miko  1:03:04  

That's how I learned it first as well. I was just like, yeah, clicking into queries and seeing how people did stuff. And even now, if I'm looking at a new protocol I know nothing about, there's already a dashboard for it. 

Like, cool. How did someone pull this data? What tables do I need? Yeah, this is awesome. Yeah.

Boxer  1:03:20  

Yeah, it's also analyzing data. And space gives you a really deep understanding of how the systems actually work. So, that's also like…I don't know…it's a very interesting thing to do, just to see how many contracts are involved and kind of understand the systems and the states that are changing and everything like that. It's just great.

Miko  1:03:41  

Yeah, yeah. Even a few months ago, I made this Ave dashboard, and I thought I understood how I worked before. And then I realized, once I have to actually figure out how interest rates…where they come from…I'm like, oh, man. Now, I really understand how it works.

Boxer  1:03:54  

Yeah, yeah. Others recently tried to uncover what the other does. It's complicated.

Miko  1:04:02  

Extraction tables coming soon.

Boxer  1:04:04  

Yeah, hopefully. Yeah. So, what are if you could just make a wish list? What kind of new data or coordination mechanisms would make your life easier as a data analyst doing prep today?

Miko  1:04:27  

I think what I said my two biggest struggles always are, and I think you've probably seen them in the Optimism repo for abstractions, too, but getting prices for things is always like the biggest. Like alright, let's figure this out. 

I haven't only had a theory and database. I have this whole structure of like, alright, I'm gonna join to the prices table. If there's nothing there, I'm adjoined to the decks approximation table. Nothing there. I'm gonna do this instead. 

So yeah, I think prices are difficult or some are just…it's hard because it doesn’t have an inherent price. It's all kind of approximation, I guess. And then I am excited to see the new database and get a new database structure expanded to everything. 

I definitely spend a lot of time…just saying…it's a lot of things that I do. I'm not looking at one project and looking at the entire chain. So, often my queries are like…how do I make this thing run in time? Even if it runs in time? 

How do I make it run in a minute versus five minutes? Which even some of that, as I'm sure, there's a lot of Postgres secrets that I just don't know, or maybe new database will help with that as well. I think as well, just having all the positives of crypto data. It's all open. The negative is that it's all hashed. 

So, having the big contract decoding is like the most helpful thing in the world. And I think even beyond that, I kind of touched on a little bit with what I tried to build on the Optimism database. But just working in it from day one, I'm kind of trying to curate it to be as easy for me to use as possible. 

So, being able to say this to address this contract, which is this project, you'll map that all together. But anytime I go to the Ethereum database or polygon database, I'm like, well, hopefully it's decoded. If not, there's way too much for me to ever possibly go through. 

So, even to some canonical registry, maybe not even a doom thing but a total crypto thing. Etherscan helps a lot with this contract name. To find out like okay, I don't know, like, Master Chef. 

Okay, is that sushi? Is that a fork? What is this? Yeah, there's a ton of stuff like that, too. So, it's almost data labeling stuff. And then last one is pulling in other data like DeFi llama use a lot for TBL. 

LGBT is great as well for that kind of stuff. And those are things where you just like TVL. It is definitely more complex. And just transactions just count them, and you're good. 

But TVL probably got a custom build. It’s something for every app. How does it work? And all that. So, it's nice when some of these sources already exist that do that and are kind of similarly community driven. 

So yeah, I want to eliminate the export and use Google Sheets for my workflow.

Boxer  1:07:18  

Yeah. It would be nice. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I guess we can either, as a community, come together and kind of build these things ourselves. So, a Llama kind of thing. If you just had a bunch of us that pretty much do the TBL for you, then you could easily have this natively on us as well. 

But I guess if we just import the data from NEMA Llama, it would be easier because it's already done. I guess both approaches are valid in the end. But obviously, we could even be faster than llama of integrating new stuff. 

Because we'd have…I don't know how many people are working on llama. But we always have a million analysts against their set team, or I don't know how Llama works…actually did they say?

Miko  1:08:08  

Yeah, there's like a GitHub repo. So, at one point, I added a missing contract to it. Yeah, I thought I had off of that team. It was just…what is the just ideal? I mean, ideally, you don't want to rebuild what already exists somewhere. 

So, how do you just have this big composable thing of everyone building on top of each other? And I guess that was like another going way, way back? That was very exciting to me. I guess when I realized how yarn builds on top of the curve…I was like, you don't have to rebuild everything. 

It’s just…you just use stuff. It's all there. You build it once. And it works, since they're just…how much more that could unlock versus every company rebuilding the same exact thing that everyone else builds?

Boxer  1:08:45  

Yeah, totally. Yeah, I think we, in the Dune community, do kind of a bad job of this. I think, in general, we should kind of utilize abstractions more. But it's on us to improve this on a product level.

Miko  1:09:04  

Yeah. And there's another point of how do you ensure that everything's correct? Which is another thing as well. Yeah. I saw someone in the comments mentioning metrics down, which is good that they kind of have built that correctness check into their whole workflow as well. Yeah.

Boxer  1:09:18  

Yeah. All right. This was a great conversation. I think we'll open it up to questions from the chat that have been asked over the whole episode, and I'll just bring Thomas into here. Hello, Thomas.

Thomas  1:09:36  

Hey, guys, how you doing? Pretty good. Good.

Miko  1:09:39  

Any water? Nice talking to you?

Thomas  1:09:43  

Well, just a little bit left now. Yeah, we have a pretty engaged audience tonight. Quite a lot of questions. So, let's start it off question by given. How is data querying from L TOS different from querying the main chain?

Miko  1:10:02  

I mean, I guess I'd say the same. There are, at least like within doing, some differences where some tables don't exist. But that's kind of some of the work I've tried to do with abstractions. Okay, there was not a native prices table. 

So, building that native price a table in there. But otherwise, yeah, I mean, just from general traces…the same logs are the same Unicode contracts. Is the difference that it's a different transaction history than you would have on main net?

But yeah, everything is and even the point I made…even equivalents before…even things to our transaction fees are a little different since it involves like submitting data to L one. But how much gas a transaction uses is the same. 

So, that's one of the means for Optimism. Like Optimism is Ethereum. So, in general, with everything as close or the same as main net as possible. So, trying to do that with our database as well.

Thomas  1:10:57  

So, no real meaningful differences. All right. Awesome.

Miko  1:11:00  

Yes, just transaction fees. Yeah.

Thomas  1:11:04  

How much? There's a basic knowledge of statistics in being a Dune wizard. I'm currently doing a project where I'm supposed to know how to calculate correlations in token prices.

Miko  1:11:20  

Yeah, I mean, I took stats classes in college, but my actual stats knowledge is very limited. Like I remember, even when I first started Optimism, I was doing a CT basic correlation thing. 

I was like, alright, how do you correlate….there's your Google Sheets as a correlation functions….use that I guess. But at least so far, I point to before where is the main use or the main thing that's needed now? Can you go down the right rabbit holes? 

And can you pull data correctly? In the future, maybe we'll get more into these like crazy stats types of things, but hasn't come up for me so far. But I also haven't gotten super deep into the DeFi worlds like that. 

But I've kind of found that working for other organizations or people was a good forcing function to learn stuff. Cuz like, if I had to do something that was like…do this fancy stats thing, I don't know how to do it. That would make me figure out how to learn it and figure out how to do it.

Boxer  1:12:16  

I think, yeah. If I can quickly…Conan's as well. Statistics are very useful, but they're not like…you don't need to have steps three or something to be able to work in crypto. We're not on that level yet. 

And as we talked about earlier, I think we are still on the way to leveling up to these very complex or complicated….I don't always but yeah…it's not as complex yet that you would need to know like deep statistics. We're still on the level where we're just happy if we can actually serve surface the data. 

Yeah, we like display them in a nice way. And we're on a very base level of of metrics, and we're not beyond that, where we work a lot with the data that we've been pulled.

Thomas  1:13:07  

Great. Another question from sport jacking tin. Could Michael speak to the broader adoption of crypto? What brings new users in is a CB, dB, KPI that would suggest mainstream acceptance.

Miko  1:13:27  

Does that translate CB DC I think?

Thomas  1:13:29  

Maybe it's CB DC. And maybe there's a follow-up question here as well. From the same view, we often joke that this is all a Ponzi right now it feels like crypto people are trading with each other. Market caps are up beside new wallets. What else would you look to to suggest new users or adoption?

Miko  1:13:53  

Yeah, I guess that's like the trillion dollar question. What's going to be the thing that brings in the mass world of people into crypto but just speaking of what I've seen so far. The new application seems to be like the biggest driver for more usage more TVL things like that. 

So, I guess a hypothesis for that is like figuring out some app that is just far better than everything else. Therefore, people will use it maybe as a thing I say it's a very vague but ya know, I just kind of think about like…I don't know…what is something that would make a mainstream world want to jump to crypto and want to understand it and kind of see through, you know, all the other crazy stuff that exists.

That's fun now, and it's like the product market fit of crypto, but I think it's excited about Optimism too. It's just kind of trying to go and build something that this is a thing that people will use and make people's lives better. Everything like that.

Thomas  1:15:01  

Okay, great.

Miko  1:15:02  

So weird. Yeah, maybe not a great answer to that question. 

Thomas  1:15:05  

But no, I think it's a question. Yeah. Do you have any thoughts? 

Boxer  1:15:11  

Logbooks are not really very complex and very complicated. I won't add to the confusion.

Miko  1:15:18  

Yeah. Verbal shrug. Yeah.

Thomas  1:15:22  

Another question by demystify crypto. How difficult would it be for you guys to adopt? Zed K tech as another client? If so, k tech becomes powerful enough to support EVM equivalents.

Miko  1:15:36  

Yeah, so as far as like difficulty to do that would be like engineering, I have no idea. Everything seems difficult to me. But that is for the engineering protocol team to figure out there. But I think it was a good point. 

That question asked if doing a ZK rollup does become EVM equivalent? I think that’s from a, like, we had a recent blog post about the path to decentralization to kind of mention what our thoughts on GK are there, but I think it is similarly there. 

Like if there is a world or we get to a certain point where a ZK role could be even equivalent. I think that's kind of the design, or the core design philosophy for Optimism is find something that is even equivalent. 

So, all this stuff just works. You know, all the other things that we talked about there. But yeah, I have no idea how hard or easy that would be. My guess is it'd be hard.

Thomas  1:16:31  

Yeah. Sounds hard. Yeah. All right. So, next question. This is from David. He'd like to ask for tips on how to find addresses and to distinguish the types of addresses from each other. It gets very confusing when you see a contract only and no exchange of value.

Miko  1:16:53  

Yeah, that's if you see a contract address, how do you kind of figure out what it is? Yeah, so some things that I've tried to do. I mean, at some point, you can only go so far before. You just kind of throw your hands up at, I guess. 

But I usually looked at who the contract deployer was? Did they deployed other contracts that are easy to know who they are? Or are the contracts put on other chains? And is it verified there, or is there any indication of what it is from other chains? 

Or finding the right address could be like…I usually go to like…if I know I'm looking for a certain protocol or something like go to their docks and see if they have them listed? Otherwise, yeah, it's not easy to find addresses, and it's difficult.

Thomas  1:17:40  

Okay, cool. And this is a little bit more of a, I guess, personal question from given. Now that you work for Optimism, do you find it limiting compared to being a data freelancer working with any protocol?

Miko  1:17:57  

Yeah, I think it depends kind of on what you want in a way. Because I felt like when I was freelancing, I like yeah, I got to touch a bunch of different things but kind of very surface level. I would just do one thing or one or two things and then, you know, never had full context for anything or for everything. 

You know, just as an introvert, you're just doing a one-off job in a way. But if you want to just bounce around between a bunch of things, that's great. I wanted to…I found that I was more drawn to going super deep on something and having full context and kind of obsessing over one thing. 

So, that's why I kind of liked being full-time somewhere versus being a freelancer, but I think it depends on why people enjoy being freelance. It’s what you enjoy doing there. Yeah, I think it's great that we have the option to pick what we want versus kind of being forced to one or the other.

Thomas  1:18:55  

Okay, great. And that's pretty much it so far for questions, unless anybody wants to add any others. Yeah, I think that's it. So yeah, great stuff. Awesome.

Boxer  1:19:13  

Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on. Michael. This has been amazing to finally get to see the wizards who was behind all these great dashboards

Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on. If you want to leave us with anything, of course. Optimism is hiring. We can drop the post link in the chat, I guess. Yeah, shared under the recording that will be live. Yeah, if you want to work with Michael, go for it. I can certainly recommend.

Miko  1:19:51  

Yeah, and even then we have an analytic and autism Discord. We have an analytics channel as well that pick a developer role in our Discord. You kind of gave behind there, but yeah analytics channel on our Discord. 

I'm usually sharing any new tables in there where people are sharing any things that they build. We have some data analysts from other projects on Optimism. So we have a failures analyst and a liar analyst in there as well. 

So, yeah, good group. Definitely very high signal right now. So, I recommend joining there as well. And if you want to make a new dashboard, try out the autism database. Hopefully, it's very easy. Yeah. And stay optimistic.

Boxer  1:20:29  

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on. Great work. And see you in the sequel.

Miko  1:20:39  

Yep, see the sequel.

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