Why Only 3 Builders Control All of Ethereum

**Friederike Ernst** (0:00)
Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralization in the blockchain revolution. I'm Friederike Ernst, and today I'm speaking with Kubi Mensah, who is the CEO and co-founder of Gattaca. Gattaca builds the Titan Builder.

**Kubi Mensah** (0:15)
A lot of the edge that you actually get as a trading firm comes from understanding how things work under the hood. So then we had to really go deep into the EVM, the P2P layer, how nodes work, how consensus work and all of that. That actually unleashed even more fascination around like, oh, this is actually how this all gets put together and how it all works. It took us a little bit of time to get full conviction in terms of the sustainability or the business durability of that venture. But once we did that, we basically burned our boats, we stopped all trading activities, and we went full on into block building.
Yeah, I guess the rest is really history.

**Friederike Ernst** (0:57)
Thank you so much for coming on.

**Kubi Mensah** (0:59)
Hey, good to be here.

**Friederike Ernst** (1:02)
Cool. Maybe give us a little bit of backstory because Gattaca and Titan are very much projects that don't dominate the discourse a lot. So people who are deep in the stack, they know who you are.
But maybe talk about how Gattaca got started and how Titan emerged and so on.

**Kubi Mensah** (1:23)
Yeah, sounds good. So Gattaca has been in the space for a while and we have our origins in trading actually. So we started off as a proprietary trading firm initially on centralized exchanges. So this was in the early days when it wasn't as competitive and the professional traders from TradFi hadn't at least moved in that scale yet. They were there to some degree. And then we moved some of our resources from proprietary trading on centralized exchanges such as market making, just the standard stuff, arbitrage, liquidity provisioning, and moved some of those resources on chain when we started seeing more activity on decentralized exchanges. And the thinking basically was, you know, the market structure might be a little bit different in crypto on centralized exchanges, but it's still very close to the traditional system. So most people will probably just be able to move over their playbook and then just dominate. And so probably not an ecosystem where we would have sustainable modes. But then when you look at decentralized exchanges, that was just like a new world that had never existed before. So those both sort of strategic reasoning of, okay, this is actually something new and novel that hasn't existed before. So being one of the early adopters or firms to move into the space can give you an edge, but also just a bit of a fascination around the technology and what was possible. And then over time, we basically shifted more and more resources fully on chain versus centralized exchanges. And a lot of the edge that you actually get as a trading firm comes from understanding how things work under the hood. So then we had to really go deep into the EVM, like the P2P layer, how nodes work, how consensus work and all of that.
That actually unleashed even more fascination around like, oh, this is actually how this all gets put together and how it all works. There was almost a little bit of an element of FOMO, so to speak, that we were participants outside of the cool stuff that is actually being built and almost this new industry. And we weren't actually part of that. We were just sort of on the sidelines, sort of trading on the layer, but not actually being part of the layer itself. Then I remember a few months ahead of the merge, and that was 2022
And I think it was MEV Day or something, and PBS was discussed and the role of the Block Builder. I think that was the first time where we were aware of, oh, there's a potential for this new infrastructure player that's actually gonna be part of the underlying fabric of this ecosystem. But at the same time, we're also recognizing that a lot of the things that we are good at or the capabilities that we sort of build up in house by becoming competitive traders were very much applicable to this problem set. But it's not just purely an optimization problem. There's also this service layer to it. And so I think that made it really, really interesting. And so when the merge happened and obviously PBS and the block building market emerged from there, it took us a little bit of time to get full conviction in terms of the sustainability or the business durability of that venture. But once we did that, we basically burned our boats. We stopped all trading activities and we went full on into block building. And yeah, I guess the rest is really history.