LightLink is an Ethereum Layer-2 solution that offers gasless transactions. In an interview with LightLink’s Co-founder and CEO, Roy Hui, and Varuni Trivedi, The Coin Republic’s Editor-in-Chief delves deep across various relevant topics, including abstraction, L2s, NFTs, and mass adoption, among others.
Hui has transitioned from web1 to web3, all while accumulating over 25 years of experience in the tech industry. In this interview, he explains how LightLink sets itself apart in crypto’s rapidly growing Layer 2 segment. Hui has an interesting perspective on the AI-web3-blockchain intersection; therefore, stick around untill the end for his take on the same.
Roy built a social network for video gamers in 2005. That same year, he learned about Bitcoin, and 5 years later, he founded LightLink. LightLink is a Layer-2 scalability solution designed specifically for enterprises. It’s an Optimistic roll-up that offers gasless transactions.
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How LightLink Offers Gasless Transactions
From an economics POV, gasless transactions for enterprises is a trickle-down approach where the investment is in businesses. The businesses, in turn, attract customers, thereby driving overall adoption. Layer-1 networks continue to suffer from high gas fees. The latter is the cost of the cryptocurrency transaction that the user needs to bear. LightLink’s whitepaper notes:
“End users who are not familiar with cryptocurrency may find it (native gas token) confusing or intimidating to purchase and manage native gas tokens to pay transaction fees and use the network. The volatility profile of most cryptocurrencies also forms a sense of transactional cost unpredictability, further impeding the usability of a network.”
How does LightLink achieve gasless transactions? Roy explains:
“We achieve gasless (transactions) for the user by shifting the economics to contract deployers or project owners.”
Using LightLink’s flagship innovation – Enterprise Mode – enterprises can subsidize the transaction cost for their customers.
“Enterprise Mode operates like a subscription model for gas, allowing enterprises to whitelist their applications to provide gas-free transactions to their users,” the LightLink whitepaper reads.
Essentially, users don’t pay any gas fee when interacting with applications on the LightLink network. The enterprises behind those applications subscribe to LightLink just like businesses purchase Amazon Web Services (AWS) subscriptions. LightLink uses the amount generated from subscriptions to pay the gas fees.
Roy emphasized how making the model similar to AWS makes it convenient for enterprises to adopt blockchain. That convenience consequently can boost new-user blockchain adoption.
“Traditionally, these gas fees are difficult to calculate… but if you’re using enterprise mode with gas abstraction capability like what we have at LightLink the calculation is substantially easier. It’s more like AWS (Amazon Web Service). There’s a monthly subscription, you can forecast that it will cost twelve months into the future.”
“Users don’t really care about that (whether the transaction is gasless or not). Users care about the usability,” Roy said.
“So for example, if you run a cafe, and you want to do a loyalty program, you want the customer to come to your cafe, scan a QR code using the mobile app, and collect points, you know, maybe every time they have the 6th coffee or the tenth coffee, that’s on us.”
“You don’t really want the user to have the native token for that transaction to happen, you want that experience to be gasless.”
Ether (ETH) and LightLink’s native token, LightLink (LL), can be used to pay transaction fees. Per the whitepaper, gas payments in LL were discontinued for enterprise protocols post the token-generation event. However, for non-enterprise protocols, both ETH and LL are open for gas payments.
LightLink counts among the top 10 networks in the Ethereum Layer 2 ecosystem. The LightLink network can handle up to 10,000 Transactions Per Second (TPS) at $0.01. Roy noted that the network is recording over 100,000 transactions per day.
Abstraction is the Path to Mass Adoption
Taking the example of the gaming sector when talking about mass adoption, Roy explained that bringing game ecosystems on-chain could become easier with abstraction.
“You can issue achievements, build in-game assets, all those things, much easier than otherwise. and that’s abstraction…” he noted.
“… we’ve done 18 Million NFTs in this (gaming) space. Those are not NFTs in the traditional sense of a JPEG of an animal. They are significant game records that might be relevant for the game studio, for the gamers. It can be looked up much easier in the future.”
Hui isn’t referring to video games alone. At the start of the year, LightLink issued commemorative NFTs for the 2024 edition of the Australian Open, a major (one of the four slams) Tennis tournament. That’s just one among many partnerships with entities with traditional or on-chain backgrounds.
The Ethereum-based Layer 2 ecosystem is a burgeoning space with multiple established infrastructure options.“If you are using an existing architecture, you’re bound by some of the restrictions within the architecture,” Hui noted.
LightLink’s gas-abstraction technology is proprietary. The intention was to innovate and create something different from existing tech (referring to Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base). Hui says that creating value for economies is a long-term driver of mass adoption.
“It’s really about what real-world economies can we integrate with. Can we be a part of smart cities, can we work with financial institutions to experiment with cutting-edge financial technology?”
Roy expects significant growth in aggregation technology. The future will be ‘multi-chain,’ he said. He emphasized that LightLink is focused on its original vision of working on abstraction technology.
Latest Partnerships – LayerZero, Motoverse
LightLink announced its integration with Motorverse, a gaming ecosystem project by Animoca Brands. Motorverse is an ecosystem for racing game enthusiasts. Animoca Brands is driving the digital ownership movement with a focus on gaming.
Motorverse will issue digital licenses on LightLink. The Licenses will work across platforms, demonstrating LightLink’s interoperability feature.
On October 21st, a day before the Motorverse partnership announcement, LightLink announced an integration with LayerZero, an omnichain interoperability protocol. This partnership will build cross-chain capabilities. Hui said liquidity fragmentation is a major industry roadblock, and LayerZero is dedicated to addressing that.
The team operates out of Asia, the Middle East, and Australia; it has a footprint in 30 geographies.
NFTs, Outlook on Regulatory Environment
A few years ago, the NFT market was in the spotlight every day. While talking about NFTs, Hui pointed out how the NFT market had become a fraction of what it was in 2021.
“I think it’s healthy but also a bit disappointing at the same time.”
Hui remarked that the present dip could be healthy, as it could act as a correction phase and ‘remove speculation’. However, he noted that the NFT market required more attention since attention could drive development. NFTs and fungible technology (cryptocurrency) are two sides of the same coin. NFTs can be used for distributing loyalty points, for marriage records and various other real-world cases.
“From a conceptual perspective, NFTs are such a blessing because now we have a new standard that can be applied to the other side of that coin.”
With respect to regulations, Hui feels more clarity was required. LightLink isn’t associated with financial assets and, therefore, isn’t directly affected by financial regulators.
“From our perspective, we are pure infrastructure, we are a computation network. But at the same time, operating in different geographies, we just don’t have that clarity even from an infrastructure perspective.”
Roy: The Blockchain-web3-AI Integration Doesn’t Make Sense
Roy is fascinated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Quantum Computing and looks forward to the advancements in these technologies. He expects fundamental changes in the world due to AI. What doesn’t make sense to him is the integration of Blockchain and AI.
“I see projects that try to explore the intersection of blockchain, web3 and AI. That’s a space which I don’t really understand, and can’t think of such a great overlap which utilizes the best of the three sides,” Hui noted.
AI is a means to achieving infinite productivity, while Blockchain merely facilitates authentication, he added.
“The two things are polar opposite of each other.” The combination of the two seems ‘brute-forced’ according to Roy.“So I’m interested to see how things work from that perspective, in terms of their natural fit rather than something because I can use these buzzwords.”
Official Twitter: https://twitter.com/LightLinkChain
Roy Hui
Co-Founder & CEO
LightLink
