The original text is from Bankless

Translation | Odaily Planet Daily Golem (@web3golem)_

Editor’s note: Currently, mainstream exchanges have launched their own blockchains, such as Binance with BNB Chain and Coinbase with Base. On October 24, the well-known crypto exchange Kraken also announced the launch of its OP Stack-based L2—Ink, with plans to launch a testnet in two weeks. Meanwhile, Bankless co-founders Ryan and David invited Ink founder Andrew Koehler and Optimism co-founder Ben Jones to join their podcast, discussing not only the reasons behind Ink's creation, its ecological focus, and future plans with Andrew, but also the current core work and future development of Superchain with Ben.

To give readers an intuitive understanding of Ink and Superchain, Odaily Planet Daily has specially compiled the key content from this podcast episode. Enjoy!

Ink Founder: Ink will focus on DeFi, no plans for token issuance yet

Ryan: First, could Ink's founder Andrew Koehler briefly introduce what Ink is?

Andrew: Ink is a new on-chain unit of Kraken. The idea for Ink was born a year ago when I was walking in Amsterdam with an old friend who was re-hired. During our five-hour walk, we thought about how to "move Kraken on-chain." Thus, various innovative experiments based on this idea began, and at that time, we hadn't named it yet. Later, we decided to call it Ink, symbolizing writing your future.

We are bringing the good user experience that centralized platforms have to the chain. So Ink is the evolution of all our ideas and experiments, and we are collaborating with Optimism to launch our own Superchain, which is DeFi-centric.

David: Is Ink just an internal business unit of Kraken, like the relationship between Base and Coinbase, or is it an independent entity?

Andrew: Ink is indeed an internal business unit of Kraken, but it can also be seen as an independent entity because we have set up various new structures for it. It will integrate with our Kraken wallet and will focus on building on-chain DeFi, without centralized order books or KYC requirements.

I think many companies are trying to go on-chain now, and this integration is similar to the merging of TCP/IP protocols in the 90s. Clearly, centralized exchanges were the first to start doing this, but this trend will not stop at centralized exchanges. In the future, thousands of companies will have their own L2s, and perhaps one day Nasdaq will also join Superchain.

David: Ink plans to launch its mainnet in the first quarter of next year. Public chains are a permissionless ecosystem where DeFi and other applications can be built on the platform. From your perspective, what kind of applications do you hope to see in this ecosystem?

Andrew: Initially, Ink will invite developers to build DeFi applications on-chain because they can make the user experience easier, avoiding the various bridges and multiple approvals that DeFi users currently have to endure. Once this foundation is laid, we will also incubate some other things to allow other types of developers to participate. We also have a "hackerspace" where developers can use our tools and collaborate with our partners, and we will fund some projects that may want to build on Ink.

Ryan: How will Kraken exchange synergize with Ink, and what makes Ink different from other chains?

Andrew: This is indeed a difficult question to answer. Because we don't see this as competition; we don't want to compete with Zora, Base, or anyone else, as everyone is part of the Superchain ecosystem. We are joining this ecosystem, which is fully interoperable, and liquidity will ultimately be shared everywhere, so there is no one who can monopolize everything. Of course, we will create a fantastic user experience on our chain. For Kraken, we want to build very good tools in terms of user experience and then ensure that everything in Kraken eventually goes on-chain.

Ryan: So what are the metrics for measuring Ink's success? Is it the number of active addresses, TVL, or other indicators?

Andrew: Simply put, I think the standard is the number of trading users. We want to leverage our easy-to-use experience to promote it as much as possible in DeFi. This was decided a year ago when Ink was still in the experimental stage. We did dozens of testnets and tried every stack, and we have been continuously experimenting with zero-knowledge proofs, creating our own proof checkers and other things. So ultimately, our experiments succeeded, and we decided to join Superchain.

David: So why did Ink choose to join Superchain instead of other Stacks?

Andrew: First of all, there is nothing wrong with any other Stack, like ZKsync, Arbitrum, etc. Running their test networks and everything is very interesting. But we see many people joining Superchain, and we really like its interoperability roadmap, which includes not just interoperability within Superchain, so it makes sense to me. The OP Stack allows non-developers to run operations on the Stack in a second, like using a cursor, and we felt that experience, so we wanted to join in.

Ryan: Kraken recently launched Kraken BTC, so will Kraken BTC be introduced to Ink?

Andrew: Currently, Kraken BTC is still on the OP Mainnet, but we will definitely deploy it on Ink. This is also one of our experimental explorations. We have our own compliant custody solution, so we can at least safely custody the underlying assets. We have designed a system that we can plug into Ink, and we are also exploring what other assets can be brought to Superchain, but I can't specify what they are at the moment.

Ryan: Does Ink have plans to issue a governance token? What would that token be called?

Andrew: First, I need to make a disclaimer that Ink has no plans to issue any type of token or similar assets. But internally, some people like to make guesses about tokens, like "kink" or something. But I mean, there may be many related meme coins, but we have no such plans.

David: After launching the testnet, what are Ink's subsequent plans?

Andrew: Our ultimate goal is complete decentralization. We don't want to be the only Ink sequencer, but currently, we only have a rough outline for this plan. Once our mainnet is launched, we will release a specific roadmap and how we hope to decentralize, which is a daunting task.

Optimism Co-founder: Standardization is key to Superchain

Ryan: First, how do you view Ink and its relationship with Superchain?

Ben: Ink is trying to build a huge centralized exchange on-chain. As an industry, what we need to do is move away from these low-level innovations and focus on building great products, as Andrew said, bringing the world on-chain and bringing many users on-chain, not just advanced users, not just those who are willing to like, understand all the crypto mnemonic phrases, network exchanges, RPCs, and how all these things work.

So one of the very important things for us in Superchain is balancing standards so that there is a consensus across the entire Superchain, and Ink doesn't have to worry about this, and Ink's users don't have to worry about this; they just need to work. Superchain will introduce a large number of chains by 2025; this is not a large-scale one-time artificial process, but an effort across the industry for all chains that benefit from shared standards in Superchain.

Another very important balance is to leave space for chain managers to make decisions on things like sequencing because there is no one-size-fits-all standard here. But when I hear that we hope our chain has high throughput and great decentralization, I think anything that Andrew and everyone running chains in Superchain wants can be achieved.

Ryan: Superchain has a universal upgrade mechanism, allowing all OP chains to seamlessly upgrade simultaneously, reducing security fragmentation. But from the user's perspective, when will user experience fragmentation disappear? Since the announcement of Superchain, this has been one of its core commitments. Since you are here, can you give us some insight into any secret plans you have to reduce fragmentation in Superchain and make it truly a seamless experience?

Ben: There is no secret in this because everything OP Stack and Optimism do is public. If you go back and look at the protocol reference specifications, codebase, or go to the Discord protocol development channel, you will see that all development is public. We believe standardization is key. Therefore, our goal is to make it easier for developers like Andrew to build infrastructure so they can focus on bringing users on-chain and solving other more important issues, like making it very seamless for my mom to use cryptocurrency.

Standardization can achieve stronger interoperability. When you try to build a seamless chain network, the primary concern must be security issues. So if you have a common standard that everyone follows, it will be jointly managed and adhere to a shared security model, preventing security fragmentation. There are many great initiatives on Ethereum that allow Ethereum chains to interoperate. Of course, we are working to ensure that all these elements are integrated into Ethereum and Superchain in a way that is compatible with other parts of the ecosystem. But fundamentally, I believe that a seamless user experience ultimately boils down to one thing: allowing developers to focus on bringing great products to market rather than dealing with a bunch of infrastructure.

For example, ERC20 is a standard within Superchain that enables zero slippage trading, allowing tokens to move between different chains within Superchain. Only within a cohesive and secure model can you truly achieve economic efficiency and have a real experience without slippage and bridging.

So the key is to provide people with a unified security model. Once you have that, you can build stronger interoperability on top of it, which is the core of the Superchain interoperability roadmap. This is how we have reduced the time for developers to transfer assets across chains and send messages from seven days to a few seconds, while also ensuring that we do not make significant security mistakes in the process.

David: If I stand from the user's perspective, I don't care about the issues of standardization. As more and more chains join Superchain, such as Unichain, Base, Zora, and Worldchain, as a user, I want to experience dozens of chains on Superchain as if they were on a single chain by the end of 2025; everything should be seamless and abstract. How far do you think we are from this vision by the end of 2025?

Ben: It's difficult to estimate a specific timeline, so I don't want to make any promises here. The core of our current work is the ongoing interoperability efforts. If all these chains—Worldchain, Base, Ink, Unichain—adopt shared standards, then I could even say it feels like a single chain, or users might not even perceive it as multiple chains.

But the goal is to allow these assets to flow here with a delay of about two blocks, so it all depends on block time. If you take a close look at the specifications, you'll find that on GitHub, you can see the situation you described, and you can enter the local Superchain test environment, where you can simulate multiple chains on your computer. You can use the ERC20 standard on Superchain and quickly move these assets between chains.

But clearly, there is still a long way to go in establishing these standards and ensuring they are beneficial for application developers, and we are confident we can release them to the mainnet.

David: Many chains on Superchain have their specialties, such as Zora focusing on the creator economy and Uniswap around liquidity, swaps, and DeFi. Previously, we proposed a prediction for the Superchain economic zone, where a chain specializes in a specific field. What are your thoughts on this? Where do you think the Superchain economic zone will ultimately head?

Ben: The term Superchain economic zone is interesting; I have never heard it before. Composability is a key attribute of Ethereum that sets it apart, and perhaps I have been repeating this story because it might be forgotten before we truly scale blockchain. But in reality, I think if you compare how Web 2 architecture works with how Web 3 architecture works, the superiority of composability is undeniable. Anyone can write any application and interact with any other application; they can all follow their own rules and connect together. If you compare the difficulty of integrating two websites that provide different services on Web 2, it is a world of difference; everyone can innovate without permission on top of others.

So to answer your question, will there be some applications that encompass all functions or focus only on one area? I think it will be a hybrid. Undoubtedly, some applications will integrate on top of other ecosystems and applications, which may be distributed across different chains, and the best way to serve users and customers is to span these chains. At the same time, I believe that cultural aspects and specific use cases will also be tailored to different areas of Superchain.

An analogy we previously proposed internally is the highway system. I remember many years ago, when discussing the birth of the optimism collective, there was only one chain, which was OP Mainnet. One way to think about interoperability at that time was to compare it to the birth of the interstate highway system, where people could travel longer distances in a shorter time. A major city might worry about people leaving, with increasing competition from other cities, and so on. But in fact, every city in the U.S. has developed after connecting to the interstate highway system, and the development of Superchain has the same impact on the chains within the ecosystem.

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