[AUDIO] Anthony Broderick on Liquidity, Bridging, Modular Future, and Multi-chain DeFi

Episode is brought to you by Infinex. Experience Crypto designed for humans. 

Get your free account today: https://app.infinex.xyz/?r=B2KSQJ77

-------------------------

Summary

In this episode, Anthony Broderick, co-founder of Lucid Labs, shares how his passion for economics and political transparency led him into crypto. He discusses the foundational ideas behind Lucid—a modular hub designed to streamline multi-chain DeFi by solving fragmentation and bridging challenges, including protocol-owned liquidity. Anthony unpacks the need for better no-code tools, sustainable liquidity through protocol-owned assets, and deeper community involvement. He also reflects on the difficulties of defining Lucid’s place in a fast-moving ecosystem, and the importance of real-world relationships in building long-term value in crypto.

Takeaways

— Anthony’s interest in fiat systems and dark money sparked his move into crypto.

— Lucid is a modular DeFi hub focused on simplifying multi-chain participation.

— Cross-chain bridging remains a critical problem in DeFi.

— No-code tools open the door for a broader range of developers.

— Protocol-owned liquidity can provide more sustainable project financing.

— Community engagement and education are essential to long-term adoption.

— Building human relationships still matters—even in decentralized spaces.

— Lucid aims to offer infrastructure that evolves with the modular blockchain future.

— The project resists traditional categories, reflecting the evolving crypto stack.

Timeline

(00:00) Anthony’s crypto and economics background

(05:59) Challenges of multi-chain DeFi

(11:51) New approaches to liquidity management

(17:53) Community engagement and protocol success

(33:32) Reviving old wisdom in DeFi design

(39:14) Collaboration with Everclear

(44:40) Community building strategies

(52:40) Positioning Lucid in the market

(58:13) Using events to build connections

Follow me @shmula on X for upcoming episodes and to get in touch with me.

See other Episodes Here. And thank you to all our crypto and blockchain guests.

Chapters

• 0:00 Anthony’s crypto and economics background
• 5:59 Challenges of multi-chain DeFi
• 11:51 New approaches to liquidity management
• 17:53 Community engagement and protocol success
• 33:32 Reviving old wisdom in DeFi design
• 39:14 Collaboration with Everclear
• 44:40 Community building strategies
• 52:40 Positioning Lucid in the market
• 58:13 Using events to build connections

Transcript

0:01

Okay, looks like we're rolling. Anthony Broderick, welcome. Thank you very much for having me. It's great to be here. Yeah, I failed to mention you're the co-founder of Lucid Labs and Lucid Labs has created a platform called Lucid. We'd love to hear about that and all the cool things you guys are doing. Prior, before we do that though, we'd love to hear how you got into crypto. So, yeah, so it's been a few years now. Originally I got in in 2014. I was studying economics at school and I liked learning how to piece things together. Like not just what exists, but why. And like kind of understanding the cogs of the economy and piecing that was starting to become a bit of a passion for me until one of my economics teachers pulled me to one side and said, Look, I know you're spending a lot of time outside of class researching this, but just so you know, a lot of what I'm teaching you isn't actually representative, isn't actually true of what's going on in the real world. And he went through and broke down a few of the different metrics that we use, you know, whether it's how the inflation rate changes to basically allow for more flexibility on behalf of the government, the government in power to give a better reflection or even in the UK. that if you're looking for a job for more than two years, then you're discounted from the unemployment statistics, even though you are actually looking for a job and they can prove it. But because you are considered to be unemployable, because it's taking you two years, they discount you and it massively skews the unemployment numbers. And he went through and just kind of broke down all of these different metrics and really kind of made me question the state of the state of play. play and what is actually going on and what is going on in the real world compared to what I thought before. And so that's why I researching alternative economics which obviously brought me to the point of Austrian economics, gold and then eventually Bitcoin through Max Kaiser, the reporter from Russian Today, he used to have YouTube show where he would take to be bankers and all that kind Very interesting guy. Anyway, in 2014, I stumbled across Bitcoin and I started to play around with it. bought some and just started sending it and it just blew my mind. It was one of those moments that I can just remember the light bulb going off in my head and thinking, wow, this is more significant than people realize. So I bought a bit more Bitcoin as like an investment, let's say. But back then, it wasn't obvious that it was going to go up in price. It was actually very counterintuitive that it would because it had recently been through the biggest bubble of its existence where it topped out at a thousand dollars and then crashed down 90%. So for me, what it was, it was actually more of a political statement because I'd been spending a lot of time researching institutions, the global economy, and I'd become more more skeptical, but, you become more and more aware of corruption. But what do you do when you become aware of corruption? What can you actually practically do in your life? It's very, very difficult. You're fully embedded in these networks and these systems of control. And it just felt like Bitcoin at the time was a symbolic gesture that I was actually putting my money where my mouth is, that I do want to not only commentate on the sidelines, but I also want to be involved in some way in building a new world, let's say. And so I invested in... What in real terms was not much money, but to me back then was most of my savings. And from there, continued to research until I got to final year at university where I wrote my dissertation on Bitcoin, trying to answer the question, is Bitcoin money? So that's where it all started. start? That's cool. In the United States, everyone is very interested in following what Elon and Doge is doing and kind of uncovering a lot of the corruption. They're following the money. How is that? Does that? does what's happening now with Doge kind of, it sounds like it would resonate with kind of your journey and as you learn about money and really economics in general. Yeah, absolutely. mean, following the money, think is the most pragmatic way to find corruption. Because ultimately, when I was doing my analysis of society, there was two problems. The two core most problems that if you could change two things, these would have the biggest higher order impacts. One of them was fiat. And you should not have a fiat based currency. You should have a hard money as the baseline, which should be, you know, paid to something real. That's the first thing. But secondly, it was just dark money in politics. What you needed is public funding of public elections, not private funding of public elections, because the people with enough money to buy politicians are the ones that are going to be investing for a return. They're not doing it because of the moral supremacy of a certain party. Maybe they are to a very small degree, know, 5%, 10%, it's because they agree philosophically with a certain politician. But these are business people that look at the world in a very mathematical way in terms of risk, investment, returns, and politicians are a very steep investment for a very large return. And that was one of the things that I discovered, which was also very depressing, is how cheap democracy is. And so, yeah, I think if you can find ways to remove dark money from the political system and return the integrity of the election to the people, then I think we can solve a lot of the problems today that we seemingly are not able to on the surface. So we've talked about how you got into crypto and so you're now in crypto you're a founder of a project we'd love to hear about that and And it in maybe if there's some of the values that you kind of brought in with you into crypto or that led you to crypto Do you know have some of those values? found their way into what you're building. Yeah, absolutely. So Lucid is what we call a modular hub to enable multi-chain DeFi. I was speaking to DeFi founders who wanted to be able to grow to all the emerging Ethereum ecosystems because as you know, there's a lot of fragmentation across L2s, soon to be L3s, alternative L1s. And as a DeFi team, if you're successful on one chain or maybe even two, there's really no reason why you wouldn't be on five, six, seven, eight different chains. And these chains are basically economies or countries in the traditional sense of the word. And they want to grow, but because of all the complexity and uncertainty involved in that journey, they were tending not to make it, or at least not as fast as they wanted to, or they were struggling to manage across the different ecosystems. So what I'm trying to do with Lucid is bring together various solutions in the form of modules that can abstract away that complexity, minimize uncertainty, help the teams grow faster. and help them manage at scale. So we recently launched our first two modules, which are our bridging modules, the multi-bridge and bridge portals. So they're now currently live on eight main nets, securing about $250 million in TVL, thanks to our launch partners Everclear and ZeroLens. We will be launching our liquidity management module called VEOs or Vested Emission Offerings in March. And then later on down the road, we'll be launching our governance module, is called multi vote, which allows you, which allows a token holders to vote on chain from any chain with flexible bridging options. So as you can see, there's different ways in which we're trying to streamline the multi chain process and journey both for the founders, but also for the community themselves and trying to build a more holistic feeling of theory, which I think we're all. we're all seeing the necessity for, especially in the age of Solana, where they've kind of come in and they've taken the monolithic thesis of blockchain scaling and they've done a great job of proving that it is valid. know, like there was a lot of people in the Ethereum ecosystem came to the conclusion that the blockchain scaling trilemma, security, speed and throughput couldn't be solved simultaneously. So we needed the the layer two scaling model, which is also a totally valid approach, but it's much more long-term than we were led to believe. And there are many more issues surrounding interoperability that I was at least aware of when this was coming to fruition. And now seeing the Solano monolithic approach working with such ease, it really does mean and show that Ethereum they're able to grow and evolve. Yeah. So we got into a little bit about what inspired you to build Lucid. And you mentioned something that I want to explore a little bit more. You mentioned about abstracting complexity from the user. And Lucid as a solution to for all the complexity, maybe walk us through from a user's perspective, like what it's like right now to participate in some of these DeFi protocols that are cross-chain and having to cross bridges and then deposit. mean, what does that sound like? What does that look like? And feel free to get as ugly as you can. Yeah, no, fair enough. So right now I think the problem is a large part of the problem is bridge selection for a team because the team is looking at the landscape and saying, okay, we need to have bridging infrastructure, but there's at least eight viable bridging solutions out there, each of which have their own trade off. Which one are we going to go for? They need to spend months doing due diligence and research and comparative analysis on all of these solutions just to figure out, which one they want to integrate. And then they need to actually go and integrate it, which in itself is a whole project and requires a lot of time and consideration and ultimately security protocols to be implemented. so for projects, just going multi-chain is a very difficult process. And once you go multi-chain with a lot of these bridges, if you tie into their technical token standard, which you would like a layer zero, for example, which has the OFT standard, you are stuck with that standard. Like you can't just leave. these are proprietary technologies. You have signed lifelong contracts and a lot of projects don't realize that they're tied in until they do try to leave and realize that they get threatened with prosecution. So these are all considerations that projects must take just to go from one to two, and that's a lot to put on the shoulders of very busy people. As well as that, as I'm sure you're aware, a lot of these bridges have been hacked. For now, nearly in total, $3 billion has been hacked from bridges in total over the last few years. Now, this is obviously a huge problem and is something that that we are improving at the space, and we are doing incremental changes to improve the security and learn from the lessons of each other. But ultimately, it's too slow. It really is taking too long. so one of the solutions that we've tried to propose at Lucid is being able to stack multiple bridges into single transactions. So by building on top of something called the X ERC-20 standard, which is an open standard invented by Kinect for minting and burning across chain. We allow projects to burn tokens natively on chain A, mint those tokens natively on chain B, but actually use multiple bridges to send the message that regulates between the mint and burn function. And only if more than one of those bridges, let's say two out of three, agree that everything is safe, will it execute. Right? So you're removing that single bridge point of failure from your ecosystem. If you want to. Now, this isn't totally practical for small value transactions. Obviously, if you're moving $10 of funds, you don't want to pay three bridge fees, but it's there for, for community members, foundation that want to move large volumes of tokens, want to remove the possibility of being exploited. Then we have the multi-bridge, is our contribution to the space. And it is the most secure way of doing large volumes of asset transfers. If you want to move one or five or $10 million, there is nothing more safe than the multi-bridge. So that's one way at which we can solve a lot of the bridging insecurities in the ecosystem. And that's the institutional solution. That's the project-facing, foundation-facing side of what we've released at Lucid. at Lucid. On the flip side, we also have a community-based module called the Bridge Quartiles, because we realized, hang on, we're enabling up to eight bridges on the Hulti Bridge for the team, the foundation, that can do these very safe, secure, two out of three bridge quartiles. transactions. But now that we have a token that's activated and compatible with eight bridges, well, now we need to make a community bridging portal whereby the community have access as well. And so that's where the bridge portal's idea came from, where now we have a bridge aggregator, an XCLC20 bridge aggregator, where the community can route transactions either based on the cheapest or the fastest and it's ranked in those orders. So now the community have unbelievable choice where they can see the trade-off where they go, this one's really cheap, but it takes 20 minutes to confirm. or this one's quite expensive, but I get confirmation in 15 seconds. And so the community can make informed decisions for the first time around their own bridge infrastructure, because ultimately every bridge has a trade-off. There is no perfect bridge in the same way there is no perfect blockchain. And so we're really just trying to empower the community to make those decisions for themselves, as well as empower the team to have the maximum security to tie together all of the... the risk models from their multi-chain ecosystem. And we think that this is a very powerful way to expedite the multi-chain process and then consider that all of this is tied behind a no code UI. So a project can come in and they can set up on Lucid in under five minutes, including activating eight different bridges. They deploy all those contracts through the Lucid UI. And then all they need to do is a multi-sig transaction on each chain. allowing them into burn rights for their token. And then suddenly, wow, in half an hour, you have access to eight separate bridges. You can come in again and turn them off. If you change your mind and say, actually, we just want to have five, you can come in, no code UI, flick the switches, the transaction, you're down to five. If a new one comes along next week, which is just better in every way, we will add it, we will audit it. And then again, it's just a very simple on and off switch. So what we're trying to do is just remove all of that complexity, streamline the journey and really empower founders, teams and communities to build a more cohesive Ethereum ecosystem. It sounds like the you guys have really found a niche, a clear product improvement to kind of a user, a really important user problem. I mean, as a user of bridges, I've found myself in the same position of, I to bridge to this chain, which bridges are available? I've never heard of any of these bridges. I don't feel safe. And to have an option of a bridge aggregator, I think would be a huge value add. Tell us about the bridges that Lucid has integrated with and the process it took to integrate those. Because on the one hand, Lucid is kind of a competitor to these bridges. On the other hand, it's really kind of a, it feeds the downstream bridges to allow customers to be able to, and how do you prioritize? guess that's another question is, as a user, do I choose which bridge I end up using? or do you choose that for them? Yeah, good question. So in terms of the bridges, right now we have Wormhole, Layer 0, CCIP, XLR, Connext, Hyperlane, Optimism Superbridge, and Across as well is the most latest one. they're the eight bridges that we have. The way that we vet them is that we speak to users first and foremost, what do they want? Because again, we're not trying to dictate to any any founder that they should be using this, we just say, how can we help? And they usually say, you know, I'm already using layer zero or I'm already using CCIP or wormhole. So that's the first way that we filtered. Secondly, it's through research. Like there was a report that Li-Fi did this year or last year, where they did a comparative analysis over the different architectures, different approaches. And then also the Uniswap Foundation actually released their own research report from the end of 2023 where they had selected their own bridges and the reasoning for that. And so we're kind of bringing these together to understand, okay, how do we bring the most value to our users and remove as much friction as we can in the onboarding process? Because if someone really likes using a bridge we don't have and it's a big client that we respect, then of course we want to accommodate that. So we add all of those eight bridges and then it's up to the project when they onboard, which ones they activate. So they can... only activate two, they can activate one or they can activate eight. And again, because of the flexibility of the infrastructure, they can change that moment by moment effectively. If they come in and say, Hey, I just want to start with two and test out Lucid. But then, actually these are quite expensive compared to what's available. And I want my community to save some money. They can come in and turn on the two cheapest ones or, whatever. fully flexible. In terms of how we actually built this, like the kind of secret source is that we didn't want to take a proprietary technology and force it into the space. There's enough proprietary technologies that's not interesting to us at all. We wanted to take an open standard and then to leverage that to build this most advanced bridging infrastructure. And for us, that standard was the XCLC-20. It was something that was invented by Kinect before they pivoted to be Everclear. Evercliff. And the idea was that it's a safe way to do native burns and native paints across different chains without having to lock funds inside of an equity bridge which quickly becomes a honey pot for a tank. And on top of that, it it possible to break attraction. It has projects like Renzo, for example, which is a multi-billion dollar E5 protocol. And the XOSC20 was underpinning that. And so based on those reasons and also that I've been working closely with the Connect team, it made sense that we would take this open standard and then we augmented it and made it compatible with every other bridge. And the way we did that is by leveraging every other bridge's messaging protocol, because normally the bridges are split into two. They have the asset transfer side of the protocol, and then they have the general messaging layer. And the general messaging layer is not necessarily meant for asset transfers. But because of the nature of XCLC 20, what you're sending is actually just a message to say, burn this, mint this, right? So ultimately we found it relatively straightforward to take the XCLC 20 from connects, implement it into the messaging layer of the seven other bridges that weren't by default meant to have XCLC 20. And now suddenly our clients and our users have access to all eight bridges in the most secure way possible and have the that full flexibility that they just wouldn't get elsewhere. Tell us about the no code drag and drop feature. that meant for normies or developers? Tell us about the development of that. Yeah, so the approach behind Lucid is B2B2C. So we're finding big projects, we're bringing them in, we're helping the onboarding of them, and then they bring in their users for certain operations. The operations might be bridging, it might be liquidity provision, but that's it. So it's B2B2C, so it's kind of a full service. The idea behind the drag and drop, no code side of it was that we were talking about all of this infrastructure and these dev teams are already snowed under. They have huge integration roadmaps, they're doing smart contract development, they're trying to build and innovate. trying to contribute something important to this space. They want the best infrastructure to go multi-chain, but they don't have the bandwidth to build it. And so in my opinion, the best way to bring adoption of this technology once you've actually developed it. is to remove all the friction from adding it. And that's what we've done. Because a lot of the time I'd speak to these teams and they go, look, this sounds great, but I won't be able to get you into the integration roadmap for the next six months. And I said, no, no, no, no, Literally you don't need to do a line of code. They literally not at all. I will sit with you. We will configure everything. We will deploy your contracts. Then once the contracts are deployed, you go through and do a multi-stake transaction on each chain to activate those contracts. everything's ready. Like, you know, we can do it in 30 minutes, everything. And then I mean everything. And they're like, oh, really? And that's when they go, okay. Well, then let me push it really hard because we actually could do it straight away. So it was a hunch that I had that we needed better UX, more abstraction of the complexities generally in the space. so combining the leading bridge infra with a very simple network, why this is really beyond the limit. I think that's a really good design principle in crypto is, know, how it because you see two things you see founders, technical founders, they really lean into the complexity because They feel that talking about, you know, using jargon, buzzwords and technical terms is sexy. And it, what it, but the truth of it is it's actually just confuses people and people get turned off by that. And so I think leaning into the design principle of, you know, what complexity exists and what can I abstract from the user? I think it's just, just good design. And I think I, you know, kudos for doing that. Tell us more about the features of Lucid. We've talked about the, and I don't know if you've called it a bridge aggregator as a category, but there's clearly the bridge aggregator piece. What other features does Lucid provide that you're currently offering? Yeah, so in terms of the two modules that are already deployed, we have the multi-bridge, which is the institutional facing products, which is like layering bridges into single transactions for the extra security. Then you have the bridge portals, which is the community facing bridge aggregator. So that's what's already done. The third main module, which is a very cool one, if I say so myself, is called VEOs or Vested Emission Offerings. And this came about because I was considering the multi-chain process for these DeFi teams and I trying to figure out what are the pain points. Obviously, the first thing is getting there, getting your assets there, having reliability, security. So that was the first consideration. The second consideration is, hang on, if I bridge my token to a new ecosystem, I need liquidity. I need depths within at least one, preferably two pools on the major decks on every chain that I go to. Otherwise you're risking someone else spinning up a liquidity pool, very illiquid liquidity pool, people overly dumping into it, affecting your negative, affecting your price shot very negatively and just generally making you look weak as a presence in that ecosystem. And so I was thinking, damn, like you need liquidity ASAP and you don't want to just scream into the void on Twitter, hoping that people pay attention enough to allocate hundreds of thousands of dollars within hours of of arriving on a chain. So that was, like a hair and fly problem that I identified and I spoke to people about. And for me, I was thinking, OK, we need liquidity guarantees, community source, very quick timelines. What is the best solution? And I started to think back on the different approaches to liquidity management that we've had in this space. One thing that I think was massively underappreciated was the contribution of ProSport-owned liquidity and bonding back in the OHM games. Back in the Olympus DAO games. Olympus DAO had two, innovations. One was the 3-3 token economics, which obviously didn't end so well. But the other one was ProSport-owned The idea that instead of doing yield farming, where you're renting liquidity from the market, hoping that people remain once you end the incentives. And then ultimately you end incentives. People have been dumping your token the whole time. So your price shot looks terrible. Your supply is terrible. And then people take that liquidity and go elsewhere. That was liquidity provisioning 1.0. Liquidity provisioning 2.0 was protocol-owned liquidity whereby they were saying, instead of renting the liquidity from the market, why don't we offer an incentive where we actually buy the liquidity from the market, keep those assets in our treasury indefinitely, which is diversifying the treasury, which is giving us revenues because obviously these are revenue generating assets, which gives us operational revenues and therefore we become much more stable. And it was so effective that even though that that was a 2021 innovation and 2021 projects that ended badly, they serve one of the healthiest treasuries in all of web three, because they were taking the initiative that whilst they were in that hype cycle, they were able to convert attention into a fully diversified training group through pro... and guaranteed themselves sustainable liquidity into the future through this approach. And so when Olympus Dow collapsed in the bear market, I feel that people threw the baby out with the bath water that anytime anyone mentioned bonds or protocol and liquidity, was intrinsically tied to Olympus Dow, which was which was intrinsically tied to the bond that they could reach to the common-sense work out. it was a massive miscalculation in my opinion, because the problems that existed back then exist today, where if you look at a DeFi protocol or even many chains, they will do these elaborate and very generous liquidity mining programs. where they say, okay, if you add liquidity to this debt or this lending market, we will boost that yield by 15%, whatever, let's say. And then once those incentives dry up, people have been selling those tokens on the open market. So your price shot's been massively depressed. Your supply has been massively increased. And then people take that capital and go elsewhere. The mercenary capital of 2021 is still the same mercenary capital of 2025. And the solution that worked in 2021, protocol and liquidity, can yet again be used today. Obviously you wanna be leveraging the best of technologies that are available, but as a principle, should work, it could work, it should work and it will work. So what we have done is we're revitalizing that model, the protocol liquidity model. We've built a whole new tech stack surrounding it so that we have the most efficient market that we can build. But the basic premise is that a project will say, say, I'm going to put up a million dollars of liquidity incentives and in those incentives we're to give them 5 % discount on our governance token. So that 5 % discount serves as the incentive to get the community to bridge to that certain chain, to add liquidity to those certain pools or those certain contracts. They then get back the LP token representing their share in that pool. They then come to Lucid and sell those LP positions. the discount to governance token, which is then vested to them over time. The community are happy because they get discounts on the governance token and the project's happy because now it gets that liquidity, but it's liquidity that will be there forever because they own it. Literally they own that. And so what you're looking at is, you're offering a 5 % discount on your governance token, so by the time the program's over, which let's say takes six weeks, you have already returned 95 % of your capital, right? Okay, so at the end of the program, you have retained 95%, right? Normally, these programs retain somewhere around 10 % in the short term, which dwindles down to, it trends toward zero, because people are going to go elsewhere and hunts liquidity in other ways. So immediately after they have 95%, that's the minimum they will ever have. Then consider that these are revenue generating assets, which are going to be topping up the treasury and eating away at that discount. So within six months, we forecast that projects will be break even. And then from then on, it's pure profit. They have guaranteed themselves liquidity forever. They have no cost of capital anymore because that eight, eight away through the yield on the tokens. And this is going to be trending into profit indefinitely. So this is like a really really important piece of the puzzle that people have been overlooking for many years now. And so what we're doing is coming in and saying, we're going to revitalize this. We're going to do it with the best technology at our disposal. And we're going to go in with an institutional attitude that we want to help successful DeFi protocols scale across chains so that once they arrive at these new ecosystems, they can guarantee certain levels of liquidity in very short periods of time. So that's on the DeFi protocol side, but we've also realized the power of this with like layer two blockchains alternative layer ones because they face the same problem as the DeFi teams with this mercenary capital and So we're actually looking to launch in March with an L2 that's gonna put up a million dollars of their tokens as a pilot project to launch this prove that it works and then scale from there I think that's brilliant. speaking my language, because I was one of the early OMIs. I remember towards the end of, I believe, 2021, maybe early 2022, Olympus was looking at doing something called the protocol-only quiddity as a service, because many projects were approaching Olympus asking, hey, could we also do this for our projects? And so there was an initiative internally to, okay, how do we kind of make this permission list so that people could use Olympus as a native, as part of the stack in their own application. And I don't know whatever happened to that, but you're right. I protocol owned liquidity was a clear unlock that adds so much value and it's great that you guys are applying that into your own protocol. Tell us about, well, As you approach projects with this idea of protocol and liquidity, how I guess what's the response from them? feedback has honestly been fantastic. And again, I think this is just in this case, it really is just wisdom that we forgot. Like it really is because when I explain it in the terms I just have to founders, they go, Oh, really? Like, you can actually do this and I go, yes, you can. mean, people have forgotten that they can do it and there isn't really a viable venue to do it. But we will be bringing that back and we'll be doing it properly this time. And for us, we just want to keep this space evolving and to be able to take one step forward and two steps back like we have with the liquidity space, liquidity management space, really, for me, it's disappointing. And so in that disappointment, I I started thinking about how we can innovate, how I can actually help move things forward. And this is that this is that this is the best contribution that I could make to this specific space. And this space is fundamental. It's absolutely fundamental to every aspect of the cryptocurrency. know, anywhere you have a token, you need liquidity, which means you need liquidity to management, which means you need liquidity management strategy, which means that if you don't do it well, you're going to cripple your project forever. How many projects have been crippled over poor quality liquidity management strategy when they just didn't have to. And these are the things that I consider all the time that makes me excited to bring this back to life, bring it to the market and really see the impacts. Yeah, no, that's great. That's that's really exciting The so you've told us about the the bridge aggregator piece which which allows users to bridge assets over to other chains you've shared with us which chains are currently supported or integrated with Lucid. We haven't talked about yet the other chains. Other than EVM, which other chains are you currently supporting asset transfers on? So right now it's only EVM, but we will be expanding to Solana this year. And because we'll be at that point proficient in Rust, we can make the decision to expand to the other Rust-based chains. We also, I'm also aware that the Move programming language is based on like a Rust model. And so it's actually quite a small step from Rust into the Movement programming language. So if they're getting traction later in the year, we may end up going there as well. We just want to bring value to the space. one thing that, going back to what saying earlier, I've been very impressed by Solana. Like truly, I was very dismissive of it as most in the Ethereum space were. And I missed out financially from dismissing it too early, but I also... I also feel that it exists. being a valuable contribution outside of Ethereum because most of, in most of my life, like there was a lot of narrative and hype outside of Ethereum, but there was very little done on the engineering level or the application level. So it's nice now to see that there is something to bridge to. For lack of a better term, know, like what's the point of having a bridge to nowhere? Which is what would have happened basically without Solana. So we're gonna be adding Solana. They've earned my respect if that means anything to them, but I don't give it out very easily and from there we'll see whatever whatever else is is awaiting in 2025. time. Yeah, absolutely. So for us, it's what's quite exciting is that we're, as I said earlier, a B2B2C product. So we don't really need to scream into the void on Twitter, trying to convince people to use our products. What I do is I do relationship building. I find founders that are facing problems and I try to solve those problems. And when I do so successfully, that means that that that project is for you and that community that they work for. build. And so it's not a one-to-one relationship. It's a one-to-end in terms of the size of the community. And so for us, it's very exciting. Like for example, we're going live with Everclear. So Everclear deployed the contracts through Lucid already. They will be activating those contracts this week, the latest next week. And at that point, all of the asset transfers for Everclear will be coming through us. us. And the reason that's a big deal is that Everclear used to be connected to the X-Bus 20 standards. And now we're building in that standard. have been selected by that same team to do all of their asset transfers with the technology they invented. So that's super exciting for us. It really is like a quite symbolic pass in my opinion, like kind of passing of the mantle because they've shifted their attention, their focus. And we want to be there to pick up where they left off. And so that's very exciting. So we're working very closely with the Everclear community and the Everclear team have been very, very, very helpful. Um, as well as that, we're working with ZeroLens and the multi-bridge module that I described earlier was actually requested by the founder of ZeroLens, which is a guy called Riker. Uh, it's actually quite a funny story about how we met. If you, if you want me to jump into that. into that? Yeah, would love to. So I was actually at East Denver last year. I had just arrived at the airport. I was waiting for my luggage, which was in the front of the vehicle. And I was stood there, and the guy behind me was also dressed. And he said, well, I didn't need any more money, but they wanted to give it me. So I raised an extra $2 million. I was like, whoa, I was like, who is this guy? So I just turned around and I was like, hey, are you guys here for the conference? friends. He was like, yeah. meet you. So we started talking and I was like, what do you do? And he's like, I'm the founder of ZeroLend. It's the biggest lending market at VK Sync. And I thought, okay, perfect. There might be something we can do together. So I put one of my caps on his head, took a selfie and sent him out the airport wearing my merch. that was that. So I reached out and we kind of lost contact for a couple of months, to be honest. Like I think he was just busy building. And then suddenly one day I got a message out of the blue saying, Hey, can we jump on a call? So I jumped on a call with him and I say, Hey, like what's up? And he said, look, we're in RVV three fork and we have a great product, but we want to remain competitive with RVV four. And they just released their architecture and they have this amazing new innovation called the communication abstraction layer, which I want to use, but I don't want to build it just internally for myself. I've seen you have a modular platform. see you want to support multi-chain DeFi. If you could build this bridging infrastructure, I would invest in you right now and I will launch with you and you can launch with all of our assets secured. And I'm thinking, wow, this is a hell of a deal because at the time we, we had a general direction, but we had no client saying we need this thing and we'll invest in you and we'll launch with you. And so, you know, I, know, I kind of thought to myself, is this actually real? Way too good of an opportunity. at some point I thought, okay, I'll give it a try. Put together the contracts, send it over. And then suddenly he actually signed the contracts. And then one day he actually sent the money. And I thought, wow, this is crazy. Because it meant we had a very clear direction of where we needed to go. And it meant that we could have a big launch. Because if you're... Pure. And Zero Lens, their TBL moves between 200 and 350 million dollars. We can credibly claim to be securing all of that. one of our beta launch, I was like, wow, this is crazy. So that's how I got the original direction for the multi-bridge. And then from the multi-bridge, we extended the XCLC-20. And then from the XCLC-20, we created the bridge portals. And then alongside that, the liquidity management module just kind of pieced everything together. I can't remember the original question, but that's just a fun side story. No, that's a great story. That also highlights one of the big advantages of going to these conferences, right? It's like meeting people face to face. Nothing beats face to face. You're able to build rapport, trust, business development works great in person. So that's amazing. You just have to throw yourself into the situation. And there's a great saying that Naval has about luck. And he says, there's two types of luck. There's the type of luck where someone accidentally sends $100,000 to your bank account without realizing it. You check your bank out one day. Wow, I have $100,000. This is the luckiest thing that's ever happened. That's one type of luck. There's another type of luck where you just do so you You go in with such an energy, with such an intention of just finding opportunity, exploring opportunity, and basically building up this kind of like a cyclone of opportunity and interest. And through that cyclone, you're going to be dragged into directions of incredible opportunity and an incredible luck. But it's a luck that you have curated. It's an environment that you've created. And that's really the type of luck that you want to be pursuing as a founder. Yeah, so it sounds like based on what you've shared Lucid is your target customers or other projects other foundations And then, you also have an aspect where it's, I guess, you know, individuals that wish to use a bridge and also participate in DeFi. On the foundation and application side, is that, that sounds like primarily a business development kind of out, kind of either inbound requests or outbound. Is that correct? Yeah, it's kind of traditional BD where I'm going to conferences or I've got friends who are connecting me to teams or even other teams are connecting me to other teams. And honestly, I much prefer it because the problem with trying to build a community the traditional way in crypto, is basically tweeting, it's that you really, the consistency is very difficult because the hype cycles move very quickly. And you might be super relevant one month, but then the next year not. mean, that's almost certainly going to happen. And then even through no fault of your own, even if you're the category winner in your respective part of the industry, it's just not interesting anymore compared to, you know, meme coins or AI agents or whatever. And like the lack of attention or lack of sustained attention in the space is something that I would think I would find very, very difficult. Like trying to And that's why you see projects being so schizophrenic with their narratives and with their roadmap, because they're constantly trying to stay relevant. So they're constantly saying, hey, you know, we're an Oracle based slide lab, but then they're going to add an AI agent in there. then, you know, the AI agents become meme coins when the meme coins become relevant. And then, you you know, it's just a nightmare. So for me, I much prefer the fact that the way that I keep the communities close. is by keeping the founders close, which means that I solve problems with them and then basically make myself comfortable. Like as long as that's the case, I'm kind of insulated from the rest of it. Obviously we will be building out our community on a more one-to-one basis, but now it's more of like traditional just relationship building. And I'm a people person, I much prefer that. Yeah. We're seeing kind of a trend of super apps and kind of vertical integration that's happening in our industry. One example of this is I spoke with Kane from Infinex and they have a feature inside of Infinex called Swidge. I don't know if you're familiar with it. Swidge So switch is a it's the combination of swap and bridge and so they're there so they're their approach to abstracting complexity from the user is to for the user to focus on what they want to trade or swap and The question of whether or not they need to bridge almost doesn't matter Because it happens in the background and so the user focuses on the swap itself if the swap needs a bridge, then it happens in the background without even them knowing or they don't need to know. And so it's a piece of complexity that you abstract from the user so that it doesn't give them cognitive load. And I'm seeing this in like that type of approach more and more. And Infinex is kind of like a super wallet or a super app, but it happens inside of the wallet. And so I'm curious to your thoughts on that trend. because I think Lucid is following a similar trend of there's all these bridges. Well, it's confusing. So let's create an aggregator for all these bridges. And then once the asset's bridged over, well, now what do you do with it? It's like these assets are gonna need liquidity, et cetera. And then you find a solution for that. And so it feels like it's like, as the industry matures, we're seeing a level of kind of consolidation a little bit. and a recognition that there's just user problems. In the user journey, there's a lot of complexity that needs to be solved. And one way to solve it is to kind of combine steps. What do you think about that? Yeah, I, I agree completely. I think that that's a, that's a very important contribution to the space. Like for example, I've been doing some bridging to and from Solana, for example, I was using wormhole and honestly, it's even though you do know you're using a bridge, you just select your asset on chain A, select the asset you want on chain B doesn't need to be the same asset. You do this, you do the swap. It takes 20 minutes and then you have everything done. Like you don't have to do the two-step process. And I think the more that we can do that, absolutely I'm all for it. And I think that that's more on like the consumer application level, which I think is a very valuable place to do this consolidation, do this abstraction of the complexities in the kind of approach that we have with Lucid. It's more so when I, when I think about an analogy, it's more like in the early internet where you had a lot of people building different websites and different solutions. And there was a lot of fragmentation, right? Which, which you're going to see some parallels to today. There's a lot of people were trying different things and there's a lot of movement outwards where there's a lot of people in silos kind of building their own thing. There was very little consolidation and that was the trajectory. for the first few years of the internet until people started to realize, on, this thing makes all of these things become much more powerful in total when they're able to be used together. And that's when people started to build widget libraries or plugin libraries. or modules, modular platforms, that kind of thing. And that was like the grand evolutionary arc of the early internet, which is where we are today. Like if you look at like a Wix or a Squarespace or... a website builder or anything like that. It's all got a plugin based approach where teams can add their own solution and the user gets to have access to it, but they don't have to learn a whole new technology and a new way of piecing things together. It's all kind of consolidated. So when I look at the evolution of the early internet and I make inferences to the early evolution of blockchain, I think we are going to see that same evolutionary path whereby there's been increasing fragmentation both on the infrastructure layers. and also on the application layers, but we're going to see that fragmentation start to consolidate, start to become more seamless. And one of the ways that you can do that, even just by looking at the internet as a, the early as an example, is by having these plugin libraries, by having these modular libraries. And that's where Lucid steps in. Like I want to begin the conversation surrounding modularity, modular aggregation, because that's really the next step for us as a space. And the best way to do that is obviously to build the best version of it, because you could take the most mediocre of anything and bring them all together. And then you can say, Hey, look, we're evolving the space, but that's not going to convince anyone. What you need is the best of each respective category with the most stringent security protocols being utilized, brought together, and therefore empowering each other in a way that just wouldn't be possible before. And so that's kind of my, my thesis for Lucid's and these first two modules we've launched third module coming down the Queen in March. then where it goes from there, we will see, but whatever gets added to the platform, needs to work with everything else. It needs to, it needs to work in combination, empowering the whole of the Two final questions one question on category We started out talking about lucid as a platform and then we talked about the bridge aggregator and then the second piece is around liquidity provisioning and protocol-owned liquidity. And then you've talked about this third module. So it sounds like, well, I guess it makes me wonder what category is Lucid in? Because it's part DeFi, it's part interoperability. I guess what category would you, if you were to create a category, if there isn't one that exists, what would that be? It's honestly a great question and it's one that we have struggled with, to be honest, because... Like for example, the space and specifically investors work on reference. You know, they, oh, you're, you're a chain link, but you're cheaper or you're a, you're a ZK sync, but you're faster, whatever. Um, but when there is no notable comparison in your industry, it does become a little bit complicated. So we kind of carved out our own narrative, which is we are enabling multi-chain DeFi. So. We're not multi-chain DeFi, but we're enabling the multi-chain DeFi. And when people say, you, the first question we say is, are you a bridge? We say, no, we're not a bridge. We're built on top of bridges, but we leverage them where it's appropriate. And then it kind of opens the conversation. And so there isn't really a good answer to that. say that we're a DeFi protocol because I love DeFi. And for me, it's the killer use case of blockchain technology, but you could very easily. So I'll tell you why that the category question is important. When investors look at a project and they think about the category in which it fits, it immediately helps them to anchor on what's the potential valuation of this thing. Right. Yes. kind of what's driving. So as a marketer, I look at it differently, but from an investor perspective, that's what's driving their question is, okay, you're like a kind of like an app chain, but I'm making this up, but you're like an app chain, but you're a layer one. So maybe they're like hyper liquid. And then they start to kind of create a story in their mind of, it's potentially could be valued at this much. Okay, let's talk. But when it's a brand new service that's really unique, there is no category that exists, and you create your own category, that's actually quite exciting. Because if you're the first in the category, that is better than, being the first in a category is better than anything. You know, it's... can get launch done correctly, then yes, but the problem is being the first to launch in a new category can have its challenges. Yeah, for sure. And the, you know, from a marketer's perspective, you know, we always think about like, you know, who was the, you can think of many first, you know, many firsts eventually becomes kind of a generic term. Like when we think of, you know, making a Xerox copy, you know, it's cause Xerox was the first in the category of copiers or Kleenex was the first in the category of, tissues. And so, but we use it generically now. And so that's the power of being first. It's like, That's a great point. become eventually, or Coca-Cola was the first in sodas. And so everything's a Coke, even though you're drinking a Sprite, right? So that's kind of the power of being first in a category. And you never hear about, okay, who's the second in a category? And again, on the marketing piece, when... when you see layer ones kind of have a pissing contest between, who's faster, who has better security. At the end of the day, a lot of people kind of don't care about that, but they do care about themselves and how it affects them. so I have these conversations with founders all the time, and I had a founder one time who's incredibly technical. mean, the guy was just off the charts bright, right? And it turns out that you know, all the technical kind of jargon was really there to impress his peers, but not necessarily his users. And so helping him see that was an important piece. I'm getting off on a tangent now, but being the first in a category, and it sounds like you guys are building something quite unique. And I don't know what's right for, you know, what the approach that you plan on taking, but The modular approach has definitely a lot of legs to it. And if you're building these kind of like DeFi primitives that anyone can use, I think that could be quite powerful. Yeah, that's the hope. Let's see, we'll find out soon enough. Yeah. Well, let's end with event marketing. you have, ETH Denver is next week or next week and a half. Tell us you guys are planning, Lucid is planning on having a presence there, correct? Yes. So we're co-hosting a happy hour with Halbourne and we are also co-hosting a DeFi Founders Club. So if you're a DeFi founder, please do sign up to the DeFi Founders Club event. It's in a very nice three-floor villa where we have caterers and bar. And I think it'll be a really nice networking event. It's a very close community. So I really recommend coming along. And then for anyone who isn't a DeFi founder, then I will see you at the Howlborn happy hour. Awesome. Well, we'll share on our show notes all the links. Anthony Broderick, thank you so much and best of luck with Lucid. You guys are doing great and thank you for taking the time to speak with us. Thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure and I hope we can do it again. You got it. That's