About this episode
In this episode of Bullish on Bitcoin Show, Alexei sits down with Vaibhav Chellani, co-founder of Socket and Bungee — one of the most critical cross-chain routing protocols in crypto, used by Coinbase Wallet and dozens of other leading apps and wallets. With a background spanning early Polygon, ZK roll-ups at the Ethereum Foundation, and $30B+ in cross-chain volume at Socket, Vaibhav brings an unusually deep perspective on where the multi-chain story actually ends up.
The conversation covers the philosophical shift from cross-chain to chain abstraction, the competitive dynamics of the bridge aggregator landscape, why the infra era of crypto may be winding down and the app era is just getting started, and how Bitcoin is finally getting the DeFi rails it deserved — all through the lens of someone who has been building interoperability infrastructure since before most people knew what an L2 was.
In this episode we discuss:
- Vaibhav's journey: reading the Bitcoin white paper on a subway at 17, joining Polygon, building ZK roll-ups with the Ethereum Foundation, and founding Socket
- The origin of Socket's name: one universal travel adapter for a fragmented multi-chain world
- Cross-chain vs chain abstraction: the critical philosophical shift from talking about chains to talking about apps
- Will the multi-chain future have hundreds, dozens, or thousands of chains — and does it even matter?
- Why even top teams like Uniswap struggle to make their own chains succeed, and what that means for app chains
- The two phases of fintech coming on-chain: Phase 1 (replicating TradFi) vs Phase 2 (doing things never before possible)
- Why on-chain-native players like Hyperliquid and Polymarket will outperform centralised exchanges moving to on-chain
- The cross-chain swap market landscape: Socket vs NEAR Intents vs ChainFlip vs SwapKit, and why reliability beats price
- How aggregators eventually launch their own protocols — and why the margins are always with whoever owns the user
- B2B vs B2C in crypto: when to go deep on infrastructure network effects, and when to pivot to owning distribution
- Why AI is collapsing the technological moat — and why trust and user relationships are the new competitive advantage
- BOB's origin: why BOB set out to build the intersection between Bitcoin security and Ethereum composability — and how that led to trading
- The Bitcoin-backed mortgage market and why borrowing against BTC beats going into debt
- Vaibhav's DCA thesis: why he recently started buying Bitcoin again as the AI trend accelerate
