This is epicenter episode 491 with guest Tim lock, myth from
Akbar. Welcome to Epson a to show which
talks about the Technologies projects and people driving
decentralization and the blockchain revolution.
I'm Brian Crane and I'm here today with my hair Roy and
today, we're going to speak. If Tim locked my f f, who is the
founder of Akbar. Akbar is ZK, roll up, any,
theorem, ZK, roll up. That's built on irbid and, you
know, probably a lot of people People are going to be like,
what the hell? So we're going to like uncover
all that and, you know, get to the bottom and hopefully you'll
come away with an understanding of what opens up to it.
Which is pretty exciting. So, thanks so much for joining
us teamwork. Yeah, it's great to be great to
be here. Thanks for having me, guys.
Cool. Well, maybe she'll also make me
a brief disclaimer hair. So my hair and I, of course, our
co-founders, of course, one and we have invested in Akbar.
And also personally and have been sort of involved in
partnership with them as well. So, when I mentioned that, not
much though, so a little bit little bit, you just a minor
minor disclaimer. All right, so let's get into it.
I'm actually one thing I'm curious about is did you first
get involved in crypto or in orbit and what was sort of this
journey that you had into this into this world, okay?
So the answer is actually like a better question even than it
sounds because I think the answer is first into crypto for
sure. So I was like one of the people
who bought Bitcoin near the top in 2013 at the end and was like
sort of into it sort of around and Like I remember actually, in
2016, getting back in and like investing in it then and
actually listening to epicenter at the time.
I remember taking like random walks around, I think it was in
Estonia or something. That's small town.
Listen listening to epicenter trying to sort of boost myself
back up on, where crypto was at then.
And as that year went and threw like the Ico, boom.
I was like, programming in solidity, doing a lot of stuff
there. And I think I actually remember
encountering orbit, then, sort of looking at over.
And doing the thing that I sometimes do, which is something
I try to stop myself from doing, which is sort of dismissing it
too fast for a simple reason or dismissing things too fast for
simple reasons. So I looked at it and I was like
oh this is cool. I see what they're trying to do
in terms of having this, you know, Global peer-to-peer
Network that can coordinate easily.
But I can probably just do that with aetherium like I think this
was at a time before like in 2018.
If you remember, if your am just had all these scaling issues
that were unanticipated, Like with plasma and stuff like that.
And people ran into a lot of challenges there.
And but in 2016, 2017 it was like, okay, probably will figure
this out. This will be great.
I think also at the time, the challenges of kind of stitching
together peer-to-peer apps with lots of pieces weren't known.
So with all that I was like, I get whatever it's going for but
you know, I think if you're am is new it's like seems to be on
track to solve those things. If not it, some other similar
like blockchain system. And so I basically just put her
back to the side to then and did not look.
At it again, until I think it was late, 2019 must have been
October or so. Okay, cool.
And then you joined us and then you join Clon as well.
Like what's the story of how you ended up at long?
Yeah, so I got back into urban or checked it out again, not
even back then, I wasn't it first in late 2019 because one
of my friends who was friends with Rob.
This regular one of the main core developers at Salon was
like, oh yeah, I'm hanging out with, you know, Ted Robin has
Rec far. He's really into orbit and doing
it, but I think it's stupid and it's not going to work.
So then I checked it out again, at that point, just to see where
it Was, I had more free time and I was just like, an outside
Community member. I started, I got really into it
in May 20-22 during like the covid stuff.
When I had a lot of free time, I started first figuring out how
they're sort of Assembly Language, knock worked wrote a
tutorial about that. Then decided like, okay I want
to write a tutorial for how to just write programs on the
system in general because there wasn't anything like that.
So did that on my own as a community?
Member at this time there were probably like 45 Community
programmers, who weren't working for Tuan?
In our bit was very small kept doing that over the summer, then
wallet and late 2020, mid-2020s, something like that.
And after I sort of finished up with that, in the beginning of
2021, I joined what became the, ER, B foundation.
So, it wasn't exactly tan. I was working for like Josh,
who's now the head of the, ER, but Foundation kind of was like,
do you want to come with me and sort of be, I guess, more, or
less technical director? Of this New Foundation, where
you sort of, you know, figure out things in the ecosystem.
Like, help people on board, show them how to program.
It figure out what kind of Technical Resources to make.
And so I did that for most of 20 21 and I think the biggest sort
of achievement of that time was like up until then all the
people who knew how to write orbit practically or most of
them were working for to Lon and it was very much like in order
to programmer, but you had to become a clone employee or very
closely affiliated. And kind of be taught the
secrets. And I think what we did
successfully is we were able to kind of prove the hypothesis
that you could onboard programmers, to Herb.
It fairly straightforwardly. And there wasn't anything overly
complex about it, which people definitely worried about before
then. So yeah, I never worked for
flan, but I guess at that time, the foundation until on, we're
so close in the foundation was just splitting off that, you
know, I may as well have I was on like, they're, you know, all
hands calls and things like that.
But we were very We much trying to make this like outside thing
that would be able to successfully on board people,
without them needing to go and work for tall.
And I think I'm, you know, looking back.
It's just a very proud achievement like it worked like,
you know, the foundation became its own thing.
Soon after I left people keep learning it, there's way more,
you know, net. When I started there were a few
like five orbit programmers, not until on.
Now, there's probably a couple hundred.
So, yeah, that was what I did and I was yeah, pretty happy
with how it all went, like more so than most things go in life.
You know, as if we've done a few podcasts about irbid, the did
the podcast actually long time ago in 2017, I think my hair and
I did a podcast with gaalan which is sort of how we learn
about herb, it and got kind of involved a little bit and then
more recently, we did one, I did one with Josh at that.
You just mentioned, who's the executive director of the
Iroquois nation and then also did one with Till atoll, boss.
And with you mentioned, Ted, who's the technical director of
the foundation. So, with that being said, still
most people write in crypto don't really understand or wait.
They're confused. So, how do you explain irbid
like, There's kind of two directions that you can come at
it from one is sort of taking herb it and saying how this has
good features for crypto and how it works.
Well I actually prefer the other direction which is you take
crypto and you start to say okay why do we not have very rich
like daps, what's standing between us and there and what do
we wish? We had to make better ones and I
think as you do work through that, you almost start to
independently inventor bit. Like you know, leaving it's a
Newton like both doing calculus like on the side.
You can actually sort of reinvent Urban in this way which
is you say, like, okay we don't have great daps.
Why is that? Well, let's look at what kind of
dabs are successful. Definitely like the biggest
successes are things like like swapping and lending by far,
like Ave unit swap. Things like that.
There's nothing those all. We could also look at nft like
training, protocols, like open sea or blur and in all these
cases, almost, all of the interesting action is happening
on chain. Well, you know, swamp is like
amazing because they were actually able to take some of
the people thought, had to be done mostly off chain and get it
all on chain. Similarly with like the lending
protocols and how they handle, you know, liquidations and
things like that. Which is very, very cool.
The thing is in all of this there, trying not to have heavy
off, Shane components. Which I think if you talk to
people in aetherium and crypto in general, like in like the
cosmos ecosystem, like probably seven eight years ago they would
have said, you know what, we all know that like blockchains have
this limited capacity. So expecting going forward that
the will find ways to do lots of action off chain and then settle
the main things on chain and in to some degree.
If you even look at like the sick like successful l2s,
they've done that where they've been able to do that, like do
that somewhat. But in general for applications,
it's very, very hard because the problem at the end of the day is
if you want your application to be decentralized, not even for
like religious reasons or like, you know, privacy reasons.
But just for, you know, if you do a centralized service, it's
easy to shut down. You can't offer all the features
you want. It's iterate on if you want to
do a decentralized app, you now have to distribute this app to
all of your users and keep them up-to-date in the right versions
handle, all this stuff and if you don't do that or it falls
apart at all, it's just kind of gross and so because that's so
hard, I think people thought it's hard like okay some whiny
engineer's need to work harder for three or four months but
it's hard like stuff takes years or just doesn't happen at all
and so if you want to solve that When I say that you would sort
of reinvent, turbot you start to think of things like, okay, I
need to have some kind of operating system that I can
guarantee or some kind of virtual machine that all of
these, you know, spread out peers are running.
So that at least when I deliver them software, I know they're
talking to each other in the right way, they can handle
versions changing. Well, they can get it
distributed cleanly. They can know who the other
peers are and their networking IDs.
Not just there, like crypto IDs, and you start to go sort of
further and further. And you end up basically,
Reinventing Urban, which is a peer-to-peer operating system
that's just trying to make it so that you can.
Predictably say what all these different nodes in your network
are running and how you can deliver software to them.
And so I think kind of the proof of that is it took us a while
but as we build out with require this kind of crypto layer on top
of her bit, where you can start to like actually realize this
and be like, okay we're you know, we're having applications,
we're delivering them. He's easily to people, we're
letting them compose off chain and then do their high-value
things on chain and actually is working like better even maybe
then we would have thought. So the what if we kind of Step
all the way back and say, how I would explain it to people it's
that if you actually want to have cool Rich daps, that kind
of Drive the new meta of crypto, like the new narratives that
push people in. You need to take a step back and
engineer, something a lot like a peer-to-peer operating system.
So if someone in the last five or six years, Yours had built
something like herb it in another language or in a sort of
another stack. I actually probably would be
looking at it and we will probably be hedging our bets, a
nuke bar and like, developing on that thing as well or making
sure we knew it. The thing is no one's like, no
one's done it, it's like a daunting project, that's hard to
do. And at the point where someone
does starts doing it, I will take it very, very seriously.
I just don't think it will happen until Urban and nuke bar,
proof-of-concept enough. That that becomes like
economically. Desirable like where investors
are think. Okay.
We just saw that. Work.
Now, we're going to you know throat we're fine to throw money
at you. I'm actually curious.
If you could take a practical example of what you're saying,
like let's imagine like it that that does X.
And then you put something on the blockchain and be like,
okay, what are the constraints that emerge and why do we need a
sort of an off chain operating system?
Is that possible? Yeah, absolutely.
So I'll take An example that I don't think is super Advanced or
exciting or just like the the start of what we can do.
But when we were playing around in November December and wanted
to be like okay what can we show people for what this is doing?
We're like okay, let's make a poker game and what does that
involve practically? If you want to make it
peer-to-peer you need to have. Let's leave aside mental poker
for now or some Advanced algorithm.
Let's say you want to have a server that kind of decides
timeouts in the game who won Etc.
Want, you know, at least two players who connect to that
server, you want them to be able to put money in escrow before
you know each match and you wanted to get paid out
appropriately. So suddenly you're looking at
all these operations that sound easy.
But everything I said their hides a lot of complexity which
is first deploy the server, right?
If your if you want it to be running all the time you would
have to maybe deploy it to like a cloud service or something
like that, configure it, make sure it's running, then have
that connect to a blockchain be able to Take events coming in
from people who say here's like the money that I want to put up
in like lock it until the end have, like, those people read
those events and this is all doable in, you know, a basic web
three format. But when you start putting all
the pieces together, the friction gets quite bad, both
from. Okay, This Server isn't working.
I want to make my own, let's go deploy that.
Oh, now, I'm following all these instructions for how to deploy
it in the cloud. That's actually quite
complicated with herb. It it was lit.
It's Like, you know, push a button to say, install, the
hosting software, push another button, and now it's running.
And so, when we actually had one go down and I wanted to start up
another one for our test games, it was actually like remarkably
easy and just sort of slots in, then you go to everything about,
you know, we want to deliver updates easily, orbit, lets us
handle that to all the peers so they can stay, they can stay
synced and then we can even start doing and then even the
wallet interactions where you're like.
Okay, I need to send Send money to the escrow then have it?
Be detected have that come back. That's like something that you
want to have done like pretty seamlessly and by putting it
inside irbid, we're able to have that happening all, you know, on
our back end when the action happens, you can spit it out.
And the end result at the end of the day is you have something
that just works. Now, we're expanding that a lot
to actually use case that I think is much more practical and
close to home, which is we wrote We have chat and we're expanding
it now too. I guess something that is it on
it basically becomes dou tooling, but in a very
full-featured way, where you're like, when you say, what is a
group of people, excuse me, in orbit is traditionally been.
Okay, I have one server and that server keeps a list of who's in
the group and you do that, but there's no reason that can't be
a non chain entity that it couldn't be like a dow or some
kind of group that records its various permissions or members.
Things like that, you know, on chain the only thing is you have
to be able to easily query that you have to be able to update
it. Let all that stuff happen, and
we're going to release that pretty soon.
But in a format where you can basically say, my dad was a non
chain thing. But all of this off chain stuff
like chat, documents, like blogs people are sharing sending money
doing applications that involve assets.
Sort of just works based on the permissions of that Dow.
So I think it's those are some of the concrete examples, but I
think the coolest thing about it is that all of them extend very,
very easily and it's almost like all the stuff that as either a
sort of a programmer who hasn't done web 3 and think stuff
should be doable. Now, it is stuff that you
intuitively think or is a user where users will often think
this stuff about. Okay, I have all these things.
Why can't I combine them? Like, I have a chain that could
store this dou state. Why can't that also integrate
easily with they would think like, you know, my telegram
groups And manage permissions their do things like that or and
now it can. So I think that that's really
the main answer is all the like we can keep giving these
concrete examples, but they extend easily and all the stuff
you think you should be able to do kind of naively.
You can So, you know, you have a personal story, you don't about
a time when you dismissed orbit and then, then you revisit it
again, work with orbit foundation.
And then how did you end up at the idea for Oak bar?
And yeah, how did you end up? Finding the team for it?
Yes. So this part is the idea was
actually very straightforward because all of 2021 I was
dealing with people coming to Urban and saying I want to learn
how to build the system and I want to try to do this kind of
project. Like actually I was just
describing the poker game that we did a nuke bar that was
actually The Apprentice project of the guy who is now our lead
developer he came and was like okay I want to see if I can
quickly make a poker game on Urban and just taking that as an
example, what happened is he was able to do it very quickly,
handling, all those pure aspects, I talked about but you
know, poker is kind of boring without real money and the kind
of Step that he got You was, how do I have there be real?
Like, you know, real money in here and the answer was you have
to do all this kind of gross stuff in her awping with you
know announce them outside Block Chain and that was not an
isolated case. I would I would say like
probably 90% of the projects people did when they came to
Urban sort of spiritually wanted to be crypto projects.
They wanted to have especially because when you're dealing with
these like decentralized applications, you very, very
often want them to be able to To coordinate on some piece of
state or have some kind of economically, meaningful thing,
update, something like that. And so people over and over
again, wanted that. And the answer was always, you
could do it. But we've kind of sold you on
this, like amazing operating system that integrates
everything inside it except for crypto that's not like
integrated. You have to kind of go through
this sort of gross process all over again.
And so it became very, very clear that herb.
It needed a in also like an integrated cryptosystem and the
Was I think it was obviously desirable, there were questions
over how to achieve it, but we basically started the project by
finding everyone in irbid who was interested in that idea and
was good at stuff and saying, you know, we probably have a job
for you if we can raise money against this idea.
And because I think a lot of the people who were in orbit at the
time, got that, it was this very almost like funding of early e
thing where a lot of people sort of saw the desirability of this
This. We're in like a community and
decided to, you know, get in on it.
And so we were able to fund it based on them sort of
understanding orbit and what it would need and then there were a
number of people around we hired like I'm trying to think how
many on our team. Like most of our Dev team is
people who I was working with as like sort of new programmers to
err. But during that year or who I
on-boarded and same with people on our like business team, were
people who got interested in it from.
Are, you know, from the like something is going on here and I
want to be in on the community aspect so and then we had some
really great people who had been heavily involved, like working
at tan like like tack, right? So crepe like Logan Allen, who
worked with us like part-time to on board, all of our people and
kind of get them really up to speed in writing hoon and
writing her. But programs he did a great job
and has since gone on to sort of take the crypto side and The,
that's not even farther by starting a ZK oriented orbit
company that's doing really well.
Zorp. And yeah, it was just this like
I think we kind of collected everyone who was talented
interested in crypto, just getting into orbit and want to
just like sort of be in on that. And we at that point we were
like okay we have some team, we have some money now, we should
have to figure out how all this will work and that was sort of
its own, we've gone through a lot of different sort of changes
and idea since it started Well let's get a little bit into
details here, right. So because you're basically
saying like, Okay in irbid, right?
You have a lot of things such as part of the stack, right?
So you have, you know, identity messaging, a lot of things are
just like in their software distribution and I was saying,
okay, the goal goal of work by making crypto part of the stack,
as well, like what does it mean? Because it because in the end,
right? These other things are actually
part of the core orbit like operating system.
Where's Akbar is something that's building on top?
So what does it mean to sort of you know make crypto this like
yeah this part of the urban stack with his like fundamental
primitive that's like easily available for people building
irbid applications. I've thought about that a lot
because you definitely ask yourself while you're doing a
project, like, like is what I'm doing.
Necessary is definitely a big thing.
And so I, when I was giving the stories earlier about people
wanting crypto in their apps, but not having it, that was sort
of to motivate that but practically how you make it.
A part of it is you make sure that everything bar does as a
chain. And I'll explain this in sort of
high-level technical where it's easy to understand.
But just at the even without technical to Everything it does
is like sherbet native. So let's say you have a, I think
most people in your audience would be familiar with like, L
to sequencers. So you have this machine sitting
there, that's taking, you know, transactions and then settles
them with whatever chain. It's a rolling up to, right?
So we're part has a sequencer. We have it set up actually, so
you can have multiple sequencers.
It's actually pretty similar to, you know, how our beat drum has
proposed doing multiple, you know, multiple chains that
interop. So it has it sequencer and that
sequencer has to interact with a theory.
Mm but No one else. Inside the urban network has to
interact with ethereal everything that that sequencer
does is like you know, an airlock that sealed off tight
and you can send it in ER and all the interactions you do with
it sort of produce, Urban native data, Urban native events that
are easy for urban programs to handle.
So that doesn't mean that we're exclusive like someone else
could go and make something like bar.
We're not exclusive in the way that something in the colonel if
you can actually Imagine a version of orbit where they
basically built far as like a core part of the operating
system. I don't think that would be the
best design because you may as well, there's no technical
reason for it. And so you may as well compete
on that layer, but we do have to compete with anyone who wants to
do the exact same thing as us in their own thing.
Although we do have like, you know, business licensing on the
code. So they wouldn't be able to just
copy Us. In most cases, they could try to
make a really good layer for calling out to like, you know, a
theory mm or Cosmo. Sori player 2's or something
like That they absolutely could do that.
It's hard. It's like a lot of engineering.
So I think what makes us Crypto honor bit, is that we're the
only people who are doing it particularly seriously right now
and you have anything remotely well-engineered there.
And we're also doing all the engineering such that from a
developer's perspective. You don't have to think about
how it interacts with like, let's say like a theorem or
anything like that. Everything is like fully
contained Insider bit in this model.
Right. So basically, a developer can
write their application right in its own in in irbid as a
programming language called Hoon.
I choose this sort of the the main development languages is
functional language. So and you can build your Urban
application in hoon. And so basically what you guys
are then offering is that as I'm writing this application, I can
write some sort of smart contract logic in that
application in hoon and then it will sort of like, you know, can
like Like create a transaction, it can and it will send that
transaction to the sequencer which is again just irbid.
It should honor bit, right? So just sending a message to
basically a particular ship owner between urban in urban
note. Yeah.
And then that would be note, kind of sequences it and in the
end it said, let's do it here, IAM.
So you have sort of the security of etherium and at the same
time, yeah, yeah. You can kind of access that
smartphone type functionality from within normal.
Herb adapt. That's right.
And we could get more into the urban tap side because there is
this question of why are you doing all this work?
So that you can let's say right, smart contracts and hoon and
integrate them with orbit apps? Like what's the win there?
I think we've sort of, we've sort of touched on that, but
that's, that's another big part of the story.
Where, I guess what the way I would say it is right now, when
you develop, let's say, if you're in contracts, are evm in
general, you use something like hard hat or something like that,
and you get this full environment that lets you do,
all this testing and stuff for your on chain application.
So we talked like, you know, maybe 20 minutes ago, about how,
for just on chain, stuff are the current Paradigm works pretty
well. You can make some pretty some
pretty cool apps that work that work.
Well, and I guess the one way you can think about what we're
doing is trying to extend that feeling of being in inside, you
know, hard hat, or found Russell Russell, I'm like Foundry, like
something like that, and extending that to your entire
application. So that when you want to test
your, you know, full application and say it's getting, you know,
events coming in from other peers or starting them up.
Having the blockchain events coming into is also part of
that. So, really, trying to unify
everything into this hole and we wouldn't be able to do that if
we weren't writing it. You know, as one orbit
application, if you didn't have that, If it was just the Akbar
chain and then you were writing with all in JavaScript or
something that would be very hard and if it was just Urban
apps and you were had to interface with them in like you
know, native evm form. That would also be very hard and
the way we the reason we know that's hard is that Urban people
have wanted to do this for a while and like they haven't and
blockchain people have one of these kind of, you know very
much apps for a while and also have had a very hard time doing
them. Whereas worse trying to find
this like intersection to be like a lot easier and sort of
you know more fun to write. Dig into this a little bit.
So our story starts off with kind of just observing that.
For example, if we wanted a poker poker app, the hard thing
about building a poker a pond is helium is.
Well, if Financial logic, there's a natural house for that
Financial logic. But poker also requires is this
a game of incomplete information?
I need to have some secrets from you and secrets are not
naturally. Portrait in on the blockchain.
So I need something with privacy and lacking and what might be
something with privacy. Well, you might say that, okay,
the users browser is something that has privacy so we could
have the application run on two users browsers and then they
settle on it here. Maybe somebody could imagine
something like that and yeah, I think I think even, you know,
virtue poker or true poker pretty much He's doing things
like this. Like I don't want the people in
our audience to scream at us. Like, I know what mental poker
is, you absolutely. There are ways to solve it.
I think mayor's point is more about the logistics.
Yeah. Yeah.
But of course like menu and you start to do that.
You come to the United Nation that you are almost trying to
use the browser as kind of like a computer, right?
You try to do peer-to-peer networking between users with
between two browsers. And then what if you had a
persistent long-lived computer rather than a browser to
represent the user? And like that's kind of that's
kind of herb b or B jump. In fact, if we go back to the
beginning of the discussion where we said you almost We
reinvent orbit your about like you know 10% of the way to
Reinventing irbid already because you start to say, yeah,
this would be great. Okay.
I'm going to put like, you know, the applications living in my
users browser, okay? Now they need ways to talk to
each other. Okay, we'll make like, you know,
a stack for that. They also need to be able to
know like the identity of the other one and then like
encrypted and make sure they're doing that man.
My app also might have some like software updates over time.
Like I better make sure they're running the same version of the
operating system. And and what you do is I'm not
Not saying this in a bad way you actually absolutely could make
sort of a version of something like Urban tour.
An OS that lived in browsers. This is basically what people
want to do with Waze. Mm it's just that no one's done
it and so like sherbet is the only thing out there that is in
a form that can be used but you're absolutely right that you
start to go down this road of needing to maintain the software
deploy. It somewhere have places that
can talk to to handle identity networking between the things
and that's all the stuff that turbot is giving us for free.
E. And then what we need to make
sure we can do is in that model. Also, have it be as clean as
possible for those. Let's say in-browser programs,
to talk to the blockchain and do that cleanly, because right now,
orbit is the sort of sealed off thing, where it can do, all of
that stuff and solve all those problems.
But it doesn't have like without it bar, particularly clean ways
to talk to talk to the blockchain.
And so, that's been a barrier for, you know, on the urban
side, it's been logistically difficult to develop those kinds
of programs. Yeah.
And then nothing Next Step, you're you're taking is really
that the development environment that works to develop
applications in natively in orbit.
Should be the same as the development and environment that
you use to build your smart contracts running on a
blockchain on Earth. The guy like that's the that's
the that's the unification you're trying to do because in
the end, what you want is for the developer to to have very
little difference between something that is on blockchain
and like something that is that is exactly and we can even go
further. Which is in terms of what we're
developing internally which is we we want the blockchain to be
inside orbit. We want the program to be an
urban native program and we even want the testing and
orchestration of those. Like let's say if you're testing
and you want to your testing a poker game, you need to have
three or four different fake peers running fake nodes running
to test it and keep doing them. We also want to get that running
inside orbit so right now it's run.
If you're actually building an herb, it program the way it
looks is maybe you fire up for different terminal windows and
each of them is one of your nodes, you know, your sort of
fake notes that you're testing with and you have to cut and
paste commands into them to get them into the right States as
you develop it. And so one in sight we had which
is not unique to Austin had started some work on this a
while but never took it that far was what if we put all of that
inside our but what if we have in you know, in irbid program
that can Create four five, whatever different orbit like
nodes. And in orbit blockchain Hoop Bar
blockchain inside and run, you know, sort of run all this stuff
and let you sort of automate that app development process.
So again, it actually feels very much like, you know, for any of
our evm developers here, if you use something like hard hat
where you fire up, a local node, and run stuff against it and
then reset it, it feels like that.
But for everything in your application where you're almost
simulating this, you know, Galaxy of different peers who
you put into whatever States, you want and one through a
program and then the next obvious step after that, that
we've just started to look into is sort of further powering that
up at the next level will be to like, you know, integrate like
AI assistance with it is like a very obvious Next Step, because
the thing we haven't, you haven't asked me yet is, but
isn't sort of Hoon weird. And how will you get developers
to use it? And so there are some answers to
that even without that. But we're seeing some really
promising. The Avenues with, you know,
training like LMS to know, basically to know who and better
and kind of let people do it. The lazy way rather than having
to take this sort of religious journey into a new programming
language. Okay, great.
I did exactly. I wanted to ask about that
question, right? So because food is something
that when people see it first, it looks really weird.
It doesn't look like any other programming language.
So a lot of people, you know, including, let's let's say, of
course one, Right. But basically who looks like
very strange and four people, it one of the most common
objections, you know, we get is that people see that it's like
well People are not going to want to learn this thing, right?
So you really have to do something that's more close to
programming languages. That develops already know,
that's the only way to get like mainstream adoption and get
like, you know, hundreds of thousands of developers building
on it. And of course, you have like
solidity, which is kind of like JavaScript similar.
And so that's a very common objection.
And then, of course, you have a lot of people in irbid that are
like know, who owns the way. And like once you learn it,
there's no going back. And it is the one, you know,
they won't Roofing even if in orbit, right.
There's a little bit of like division where you had like I
guess a project holy mm right. Is now been trying to get more
like JavaScript into orbit so what's was your fault on hoon
and sort of its suitability for application development
mainstream adoption and smart contract development, okay?
So this is what we can but we can use the stuff.
We've talked about already to kind of frame this.
So, first of all, I'm Of an herb.
It atheist. I'm not religious about it.
I'm doing this in a very sort of 20th century.
Empirical scientific sense where I'm using it because it has
specific properties that I want and to the if there's principles
I sort of like them because they helped me develop better.
I'm not, you know, religiously intellectually married to like
having to have weird characters on the screen that doesn't, you
know, it's like sort of it's a fun thing but it doesn't matter
to me that much. So if we start out like, why are
we using Hoon? The first reason is that like
practically right now? That's the only way to get
access to the urban operating system.
And as we said earlier, the urban operating system is the
only thing that has these properties that we need in order
to cleanly build these systems. But then, as Brian said, that
leads into the next question of. Ok, you can have all your
reasons but will people use it. So I think there's two angles to
come here from that are very like, we have a lot of empirical
evidence as to how this goes. The first angle we can go from
is have people become more likely to learn Hoon over time.
And as I said, I think people don't really appreciate this who
are in orbit, but because a lot of them are either have come in
the last two years or when they were there earlier, sort of
weren't directly involved with education, but I can tell you
for a fact that if we were talking about like, June 2020, I
would have long conversations with people.
And the subject of those conversations was, is it
possible to teach, Normal developers to use hoon or is it
just too hard and too weird? And my hypothesis was it's not
too hard. It's just being taught badly and
some people thought it was sort of, you know, too hard and they
had to go through the secret like Cults, like initiation to
want to in the first place. And the it's not too hard.
People have won hands down convincingly.
So we now have like you know when the foundation runs people
through whom school there will be like 100 to 200 people doing
that a pop. There's way more you know who in
Repose on. There were there's far more,
Hoon programmers. Like then there were there's not
even enough jobs for them. Like necessarily is probably not
as many companies as there are them.
And the biggest issue people have now is like I think because
it's missing stuff like crypto. It's almost like okay what do
they build once they have this? That's one angle is that I think
I'm hoon is not particularly hard to learn but you are
correct that it's still a new language and what's the point of
learning a new language? You have to convince Developers.
To do it. So I think there's again two
aspects there. The first one is, if we think
about right now, for sort of non e VM L to stuff or even L ones,
there's a couple projects and they're very very successful if
we take like obviously, like you have Solana which uses Rost
been. Now that's already an existing
language. They get to onboard people who
know that, but then you have Stark Nur, which has is probably
sort of the most Nerd sniping developer attracting like
project like you know in crypto it's like they're like they get
a lot of developers and sort of organic attention and people
wanting to do it even though the language is way harder than Hoon
especially to reason about doesn't look like they've made
it some superficial things to make it look different but it's
very hard to think about and people still use it and they
still will do it because it lets them do something that they want
to do. And I think bar is very much in
that vein of if we can. Let you do the types of apps
that we think we can, you'll go through the work of using Hoon
that said. So that would have been my
answer until about, you know, March 15th or 20th or something
like that. And now because we're living in
like the singularity like GPT for came out, everyone's on what
it can do and can see how this is going to head for other like
you know, LMS and people have been making a ton of progress in
you know, training, non GPT LMS and doing it legit like
launching. And things like that and it's
very, very obvious that if we put the work in we will be able
to have computers that make it much much easier for you to
write in hoon and let you get in, like, sort of have a
superficial understanding of it, but be like, do this for me or
show me how this is done and things like that.
And I think so, we start basically start with this thing
of can you learn Hoon? Yes, it's possible to learn
Hoon. It's not particularly hard as
languages. Go do you have desire to we've
seen? That if there's enough like
economic reason there's like because we're providing enough
applications that you can build, that will be there and then can
we make that as easy as possible and the main worry now?
Is that like, you know, I guess it's interesting.
I think, actually, the main competitor of sort of bar type
stuff now is actually super powerful LMS that let you take
all the stuff that mayor was saying is hard and like, gluing
together. Things are putting their browser
and just make it like a Essentially I think the only way
to sort of make that stuff go really well as like maybe maybe
even a GI or something like close to it and we can see a
path to that now. But you know before the computer
is kill us, all there will be this beautiful moment of being
able to use hoon like very very easily.
And I think we're sort of explicitly targeting like I
guess 2024 should be the year and then 2025 will all be dead.
So it'll be fun, though will be programming and hoon and Rich
but then dead soon after. So this is one thing I didn't
think I was going to. This has not actually been on my
mind for a while but I have thought about it a little bit in
the past. So the topic of like Ai and if
you have like AI becoming like super powerful I'm to me, it
feels like because in irbid you know you are kind of like owning
your own like Network identity. And because you have this sort
of like a governance structure because, you know, but you have
to send it right. Basically, you have a bunch of
notes like 256 nodes that make up this Galactic Senate.
And they are basically like a doll like governance Council,
right? And these are people who own
baby is cryptographic identity and then can make some
decisions. So, 1/4 I've had with regards to
AI. Is that this Feels like
something that could be a, pretty resilient structure that
like, you know, human beings could keep control of even in
the face of like AI becoming like super powerful.
So, I'm just curious, like, what are your thoughts with like a?
I becoming, you know, a GI, and those kind of things and like,
how that will sort of, like, interplay with herb it.
As a, as a network and as an alternative to the internet So
there's so many possible Futures there that it's hard to catalog
them. I think the only thing that's
clear now is that absent maybe massive government or
self-imposed like private restriction AI is going to get
very powerful. I would end like already
especially in the area of programming.
Is much more than people thought.
So then you sort of play that out and I think there's like
these different Futures where You know, maybe very powerful
models are out there but they're only owned by a few corporations
in the US and so then maybe irbid plus crypto becomes this
platform for people who want to you know, access powerful AI
models outside of that or have them like you know interact in
that way and run sort of these alternative economy's like
outside of that. If you know, AI is restricted
heavily which is very possible in terms of like, you know, size
of training runs like gpus being Stricted in some ways, not, not
at all inconceivable, you know, then I think herb.
It has this and it was, especially if bar has this
massive role to play where because in that, if AI is
restricted, it's very hard to make all these systems work
together. A, I enabled bar would be one of
the best ways to have a large computer system that does work
together, you know, for economic purposes, Rich applications easy
for developers to make all of that stuff.
And, you know, then you do have like, we sort of these weird
Futures, like, where I get super powerful models are out there
for everyone. You know, in that, in those
cases, I don't even know how, like, if Humanity survives, we'd
have to, you know, we have to see but I think there's a broad
range of outcomes where a I assisted orbit is very, very
powerful for letting people I guess like access the, you know,
the products of the products of models to assist their
programming and also to Like make throwaway programs that
operate like in their orbits and orchestrate, their stuff related
to, you know, crypto applications things like that.
And then possibly things like training.
But it's when there's this much uncertainty.
I think the main thing you have to do is make sure that your you
kind of lean into the power and make sure you can do enough in
all of those scenarios. And so, I do know, like, a too
far. We're taking this very, very
seriously, as a kind of bull case for urban in general.
Especially for like bar with crypto being on her butt and
just trying to make sure that I guess there's this thing you
could do of like making excuses where your where you say, like
where people fall back into a sort of urban pure, like Purity
thing of like, okay, we're orbit, we don't use Ai.
And to me, that's why we just, you know, do handcrafted
artisanal programming, like, you know, ourselves there's
something great to me. That's a lot less interesting
than saying we have this really powerful.
Integrated system. The biggest barrier to its
adoption was that the programming language is a little
bit weird. Now we have machines that can
just knock that out for us and so that's a little bit scary
because you're definitely going in the direction of making some
very powerful systems. But, you know, I don't think
there's sort of any other way to go.
From your description. It feels a lot like the Oak bar
system can be thought of in the best case as similar to Apple,
right? All of us have this experience
that when you bite into the Apple ecosystem, you get one
device and then the next device becomes apple and then you're
kind of Trapped into like 10 devices inside the Apple
ecosystem and if God forbid you ever need an Android device and
interoperability is going to be really bad.
So, the sick you think that scanner in future for bar when
it's successful that, if I am an obit user, and I'm an upper
user, I'll have a very good experience when I am interacting
with just two bar having on my finances, their Exciter, but if
you consider the other cases, which is like a developer that's
kind of I don't know, building on the cosmos SDK.
And trying to ship to a, trying to ship the cosmos, SDK
application to a user that is on irbid that interoperability may
be very weak. Okay, so there's a few different
cases embedded in your question. And so we should like one is
don't like sort of done if you are successful.
Does it sort of takeover lots of computing and then the other one
is If there's stuff outside of bars exact settlement system,
how does it work in that? And so those are, those are
pretty different. Let's start with the second one,
which is the cosmos SDK developer, who has, I don't
know, maybe like an evm compatible app, or something
like that, done on it using like their own consensus system,
right? I think in that scenario, what
happens is because they're only building the consensus portion,
and the blockchain portion on Cosmos a world in which Bar was
very successful would be one in which developers were very used
to developing these Urban applications in which users were
very used to like installing and using them and we could try to
imagine. Let's imagine that like for
whatever reason that developers Cosmos SDK application has
become very popular like running outside of that.
I think it's very likely that someone will, which might even
be us will make a very strong. Let's say evm compatibility
layer where if One has substantial assets and or like,
interactions, they need to do with an outside and outside
chain that they can do it, actually.
In a similar way to how far does which is, you know, you have
some kind of like, you know, node reading that chain.
You can do read and write or some kind of like graph style
indexing through there, and I think there would be a lot of
economic incentive for that to get built.
But I do think that it is the case.
That in that world, unless the developer was like, deploying
something that really needed its own consensus, or that was like
a legacy application that needed to get deployed there in that
world where we part was that successful.
They would probably deploy it on, you know, in a bar town that
said, I do think that, like, sort of already written an
audited, evm type code will be with us for a while.
And so I would expect at some point there will be some like
compatibility layers that make that ingestible an But where
maybe you're not writing new contracts and deploying them but
you are getting other ones. Now, the other one though you
correctly, you know got our goals which is if you are a
successful it will accrue. Lots of network effects like
sort of apple style. We try to mostly have in terms
of our economics have the way that we monetize that most be
them like, people transaction on the Google, like, you know,
using the uke bar chain and we try to make everything else like
Reopen like the application. So, you know, while I lead a
while, becoming Apple would be a great outcome financially.
I think we do have a bit of a different ethos, because we have
a different way to monetize. And so everything we've done so
far in terms of like, you know, chat stuff.
The things we're doing with Dows, social groupings, things,
like, social applications coming out, we've made all that open
because the entire goal is just for people to use bar in a way
that like, and also, you know, I guess it's just To some degree
that would also too if we were settling on and then like flow
through to aetherium somewhat as well, we'd see which assets were
used on the thing but we are trying to build very, very
strong Network effects in far. And have that be the place where
you go and have that also maker but apps like sort of the go to
apps. And this is why I sort of
mentioned the AI angle because I think without that to assist
developers and also to make it easy for like, really easy for
users to make these Art of throw away programs that can just
operate on all these, you know, bar Urban apis and the life.
I think it's a little bit. It's harder to imagine that
future happening, obviously, until recently, we were trying
to make that future happen, but I think AI really increases the
odds that we can, you know, that we can do such a thing.
So I've always imagined right at the way Urban would work is that
irbid as a whole would be this sort of like apple like system,
right? Because you have this
fundamental thing like a networking identity stuff that's
like unified and everything will kind of work together like that.
But then I I think what we have seen interestingly, is that
actually in? I don't well, so you have like
some companies that now have built.
More and I think pursuing a more of a philosophy of this kind of
like, you know, vertically integrated stack that like all
works? Well yeah.
Other and and you know for example there's a whole bunch of
different chat apps on honor bit now and they're like, you know,
separate apps, right? So if I'm like messaging, you
know, with you do Mark, right? And then on one app, then it's
going to end. And I'm messaging.
Same username, right? Like you on another app and it's
like separate. Relations.
So where do I think that's going or how do I want it to?
How do I wanted to go? I mean, my actually I would say,
sort of say that like my impression of work bar is much
more. That is much more trying.
You'd be this like thin transaction layer or like you
know, basically covering like the smart contract portion and
then sort of, you know, because I think that's the other.
That's so a little bit. The other approach where we can
say like, okay, I'm going to try to build like Some some
component and then you know lots of other people can build and
stuff versus like being this building this kind of vertically
integrated full-stack thing that it did enter being is sort of
like Walled Garden a little. Yeah.
So we're very uninterested in the Walled Garden.
We very much like that vision of urban as this like open system
that a lot of, you know, that a lot of different applications
can build on and compose and one reason we're sort of We try to
make our own programs. That maybe look a little bit
vertically integrated when we sort of, don't see something out
there that does what we want. So like we did do our own chat
that we use just because there wasn't anything else like that.
Good out there and I think when we drop the next version of like
we're includes groups like on chain, Dow type structures, I
think people will see that but our goal is not to be like you
know, a vertically integrated chat company.
We're mostly just trying to, I think we see this moment in our
beds life where a lot of these Primitives and protocols haven't
been made and instead of like trying to round people up and
make a standard and tell them, they all have to follow our
standard. We've just been like, okay,
let's try to get the best thing out there that we can.
If people start using it and we can build on an easily, that's
great. We do try to leave them so that
they're very very open. So actually a great example of
this is we have like multiple other projects now building With
our chat, Primitives with some of our social graph and like
grouping Primitives. And we actually do work to sort
of support them and make those happen, because it's not, again,
it's not really interesting to us to have that, Be in there.
It's just that we think that that base layer of Primitives
extends Beyond just the chain and we have to do a little bit
of work to get other stuff out there which actually it makes
sense. If you think about what we've
been saying this whole time, which is what we just want
Richard apps to, if they're not, there we have to show people
then, and we're seeing a lot of people get interested,
specifically, because of things that we've made and then want to
build Richard apps and that's mostly what we want.
But in the, that's the short term and maybe medium.
Term in the medium to long-term. I want, you know, herb it to be
its own, kind of Walled Garden. But for that, inside, that
Walled Garden to be very very open.
And for that to be this like, you know, Universal Computing
system, which isn't, it's not that crazy to think about,
because everything else is so centralized and hard to build
on, and compose, which is sort of another topic we could hit if
necessary. Yeah I mean did the the
fascinating thing in a way is that you can have both right?
You can have people built like involved Garden type system
honor bit which is is going to happen and then you can have
others build kind of open system and everything runs on the same
OS. I think the walled Gardens,
they'll be under pressure. Including the ones that like,
know things were making that are internal.
I think, at some point some of them will get popular, they'll
become Open Standards. People will fit like build their
own like let's say front. Ends for accessing, you know,
the chat apps that are dominant. The those and we're just so
early that people in urban have tried to do it, like, for a
while was like the social thing where someone would start
building, maybe a new app like in chat and people are like, oh
but don't, you know, Tom is making that or this other group
is or something like that. And after a while we're like
this is stupid. We're so early.
It's just people like, you know, a couple hundred people fighting
over this, let's just like build it and still like let that
process happen. So let's let's talk about
another topic. So it's kind of like another big
topic, so you guys decided to build a rollup, I guess another
path would have been to build basically like a sort of layer 1
irbid chain. What was the reason why you guys
decided to go the roll-up path and not to build L1?
To pump my if bugs. Now, the the reason was It lets
us when we understood our core value proposition better, which
is about this, like, being able to enable these like very rich
applications better experiences for developers and users, you
start wanting to focus everything on that as long as
possible. And if we did our own chain with
our own consensus, initially we would have a couple issues right
off the bat which are fine and other chains kind of validly
want to do those. Right off the bat before us.
They weren't is interesting which is one you have to build
your validator set and like get that you know get that all going
and another is that you do have to bridge if you want to get in
assets from other ecosystems and so which again it's fine.
It's a valid choice, I have there have been a number of
issues with security of that in there, so there's challenges and
doing it. But it's you know, people do it.
And it was just we didn't want to, if we don't do it as a
rollup, initially then we have to spend more A money and like,
take longer because we have to do all that stuff.
We have to set up like things facilities for bridging, we have
to set up and be confident sort of the game theory and security
there. We have to like build validator
sets and figure out like you know the economics of that plus
like you know finding them and the valid like the validator
approach. Lets us start the the role of
approach. Lets us just focus on.
Okay let's have this sequencer or set of sequencers that are
running and that And sort of just keep out of our mind while
we're doing it, which has been great the last few months to be
able to sort of, hold that steady as we iterate on other
things. And I guess also, I did have
this kind of feeling back in early 2022.
That Roll-Ups, we're going to get hotter and all tell ones.
We're going to lose some of their premium just for purely.
Sort of technical economic reasons, which I think is like
most to look at the, you know, No, the fully diluted valuations
of the top, like, l2s or things that try to pretend they're LTS,
like polygon, you know, they've generally been better than
Solana effects like, you know, Luna Rest In Peace.
So yeah. And I think in terms of the base
layer and getting that, right, I do think, like if you rem is
doing really, really good work there and I don't want to, you
know, mess with that for the moment.
Now, of course, Is the moment that will come along and every
successful l2s life, like down the road which is okay.
Now you do have a lot of money on here, you are very successful
you very easily could build, you know, a validator set out of,
you know, what your token is. Does it make sense for you to
keep rolling up to aetherium? And I think anyone who says they
can answer that like, you know, one way or another right now is
lying and I think we absolutely could see, for example, like,
you know, our btrim or our optimism has their own stuff for
their Folly. Wouldn't But, like, you could
use on Stark not have that decision down the road and make
that in that direction, we're, it would be an, it will be a
nice problem to have to think about where I think we would be
doing really, really well. And the first goal is just to
get maximal like bar and urban adoption without distractions.
So I'm actually really happy that the sort of Base roll-up
architecture has been I guess like worked out enough now that
it's kind of boring and there isn't my I know I've gone over
the various, you know, the literature seeing what people
are doing and there's nothing very new or interesting in most
cases which is great. It's like somewhat commoditized
and we can sort of just go to it slowly while knowing that'll be
there as an option. And then if we're super
successful, we can have those discussions down the road as
will. Everyone else who is, you know,
very successful with an L2. So, in, in going down the role
of path, of course, the massive Branch point is between
optimistic Roll-Ups, which ensure our security through Game
Theory and ZK Roll-Ups, which ensure their security through
zero, knowledge, cryptographic proofs, and you've chosen these
EK roll up part so sort of sort of okay.
So so yes it does. It's like what path you have
chosen and kind of what are the major technical decisions of
business decisions. You have if taken on that path,
ZK. Roll-Ups in my opinion, are
obviously desirable in the long run because as you said, you
don't have to secure anything with Game Theory, which gives
you a lot more options for things like data availability.
It's a lot safer to do. Various let's say like the
lidium type schemes, where you're not writing the data to
layer one of helium or whatever layer one you're doing.
If you're using ZK, because now you have, like, sort of two
pieces of Game Theory to get right there.
If you're trying to an optimistic roll up that uses the
lydians, it's very Bard and generally it hasn't been, you
know, hasn't been taught that said, ZK stuff is advancing very
fast and if you put too much work into getting it, all right,
right now, you can put in a lot of work and then find out that
like one year later you wouldn't have had to put in nearly as
much work for the same result. And so you've basically wasted a
lot of time and money for something which isn't really our
core value proposition, which is, you know, creating this like
developer user ecosystem. Natively on Urban.
So the best balance we found for that.
So far is to have a progression. That's kind of as rapid as we
can make it. So first part of the progression
is you know what? Our value proposition is making
this like sherbet developer user.
Ecosystem will start our roll up on test.
Net in proof of authority mode. Like we just say, this is the
state and this was the state transition then but while we're
architecting that it's not like a dumb proof of authority where
you just Like right, the new state and that's it.
You also make sure to implement data availability at the same
time and also, you know, the various sort of mechanics,
making sure that, you know, deposits and withdrawals work,
right? And can be proven and so that
you can switch that to in optimistic mode.
Now if you go to an optimistic mode then you have the question
of like do you turn your fraud proofs on like optimism still
hasn't done that are Beach from has but with permissioning but
optimism is still proof of authority.
Like just trust me bro. But just the billions of dollars
which is, which is fine, actually, get their reasoning,
which is that their main value proposition is being this thing
that can become an optimistic roll up and that like people
trust it enough to be like, it's basically, you know, if you re
m-- side chain that people like the tooling on and that's good.
That's it's working for them. The thing we can do next though.
A lot of progress being made on sort of urban native, ZK proofs,
we did that internally in a bar and then some of the guys doing
that, spun out to form zorp, which is a separate.
Russian doing ZK, proofs of like, knocking Hoon code and
their stuff is going really, really well.
And we talk to them a lot. We work with them closely and
will probably be able to jump from instead of going from proof
of authority to optimistic. It's very likely will be able to
jump straight to, I guess, I would say optimistic, ZK, where
it's optimistic, but instead of having a long challenge
procedure for resolving a fraud proof, you just submit a ZK
proof for the fraud proof. The reason, You can do that when
ZK might not be ready yet. Is that for if you're doing a
typical ZK, roll up, you have to prove every transaction and so
you need some, they need to be fast if you need to be doing
those in like, whatever it is like a second per transaction of
tenth of a second per transaction, proving them fast
enough. If you do this optimistic, ZK
thing you only need to prove the batch when there's a problem.
And so in that case like if someone Flags it and there's a
problem, you actually could take like three hours to prove the
batch of like let's say a Your transactions are thousand
transactions and it's totally fine.
In fact it's a lot better from the game theory perspective
because you then only need one on chain transaction to prove
it. So it's very, very likely that
when we launch week bar on Main net, it will probably be proof
of authority but ready to turn immediately to a ZK optimistic
system? And then from there, it's
literally just a matter of marching through the
optimizations to get regular ZK fast enough which were pretty
pretty optimistic on. On but we're extremely
optimistic on optimistic, CK. So this is all very pragmatic
and it's just focused on how fast can we get people
interacting with our core value proposition, which is the sort
of, er, 'but ecosystem where you're doing stuff on it for
real money and we're probably more limited even by audits then
by ZK or optimistic. And so what we'll probably do is
that system I was talking about throwing out on maenette,
probably Leave this summer will probably have a deposit limited.
We're can only take a certain amount of ether ERC 20s, just so
that, you know, people don't put in hundreds of millions or
billions of dollars of tvl and then something happens.
And then GG, U Bar. I think we'll, you know, try to
have it be like, okay, you should be responsibly putting on
like, you know, a couple thousand dollars or something or
whatever, you can afford to lose.
But yeah, that's that's sort of the way that we think about that
and the either way to sum it all up is You have the technology
and The Game Theory, plus technical Primitives.
And you want to make that sort of maximally accelerate your
core value proposition. And so when I see other l2s that
are making decisions like we said, with optimism of not
enabling for all proofs yet, I actually don't hate on it at all
and I get exactly what they're doing, which is they can kind of
see where things are going. They've also thought of, you
know, going from optimistic optimistic ZK, which makes
sense, and they're just trying to, like, you know, have that
make sure they do have a plan at least in the long run to have it
in. Sect.
So, you know, our situation is very similar, it's just we'll
probably get to something secure.
Maybe faster - its I have a question here in terms of like
the finality. So if this optimistic, CK, if
let's say in you examples, okay? Maybe you can take three.
I mean, I guess there's like some time needed for somebody,
say, hey, that was an issue of this transaction and then some
time needed for like someone to create the approve and submit
it. And then, that is kind of like,
whatever window you have to sort of be able to live Viv that
until you have finality or like how do you think of this sort of
like you know, the the finality time that guarantees of
obviously the pure ZK is the best because you can just be
final. Once you're on within whatever
the batch time is that you're doing it for optimistic.
People usually have done a week. The reason is that you often
have to do multiple challenges like the way our be trimmed.
Does it is like a bisection thing.
Where tldr Are you could maybe have to do 15 30 different
transactions to sort of complete the fraud proof.
And so you have to make sure there's enough time not just to
find the fraud but to get through all the transactions, in
an adversarial environment where someone might be doing the
calculation of, I'm fine to das. The etherium network, would diss
many transactions and pay this much money, because I'll be able
to withdraw more than that from the roll-up.
If it gets through, in that window, if you have this like
optimistic, ZK, you only Need one proof and so that should
reduce the finality window by a decent amount because you don't
have to calculate it. So like that you don't have to
worry about them dosing it for like 15 to you know
transactions. You only need one transaction to
get through but you know, off the top of my head it would
probably be more in like, you know, one to three-day range for
find out for finality on it. But even that would be a little
bit of a stopgap while we go to full.
ZK because I just, I don't really like the, you know, sort
of multiple time finality that said within each bar.
If you're talking about transferring from one hookah
bar, like let's call him Shard, we call them towns to another.
You can get faster like as long as you sort of trust that the
main thing on chain won't get rolled back.
You can let those shards talk to each other pretty rapidly
because you don't have to worry about if one gets rolled back.
They all like they all get rolled back but Again, another
good reason to get to ZK as soon as possible but also worth
keeping in mind that even if we got there tomorrow and had a
full ZK system, we would still have to audit the rest of the
system. So it's not sort of worth it.
We're trying to like make everything go together a little
bit later in the year or early next year.
So we can stitch a few things that you have mentioned
together. earlier in the episode, you talked about how
the developer experience of Hookah bar, and irbid will be
the same or similar which means people will be able to write
smart contracts in Horn and deploy them to bookmark.
And then later you mentioned that eventually you would like
Akbar to be a z Carolla and in the short run and optimistic
seek a role of where If something goes wrong or Oak Bar,
it can be proven on is helium. That something went wrong.
So if you put the two things together, it feels like the
essential primitive that you need is for a developer to be
able to write a program in hoon and then have that program be
executed somewhere and then generate a zero, knowledge proof
for the results of of that program's execution.
Because absent, that primitive. Cooper, cooper could neither be
an optimistic. ZK, roll-up.
Now be a full zekiel. Not in the jealous.
So how and this is like an oven challenge, right?
Like you have you have the whole language.
So you want to program in home for execute it somewhere.
You need to generate a zero knowledge proof that the
program's execution resulted in this particular result.
So, how are you solving that problem?
That primitive? So specifically like just
executing the zero knowledge proof.
So you have a transaction in each bar and you need to do it.
Meaning any, how do you generate the proof and how do you verify
the proof and how are you attacking the problem of, you
know, depth building or developing a proof generator?
Yeah. This is the answer is sort of
boring unfortunately, which is for verifying the proof.
There's pretty standard stuff that you can roll on with
whatever system you're using to put it on to deploy it on a
theorem and have it verified that for generating the proof.
This is where we did a lot of sort of initial feasible.
Bility research and then have some of that internally but
zorp. This other orbit company has
made such fast progress on specifically proving orbit
programs of actually, any kind, not just our transactions, but
since we part transactions, are Urban programs.
They get those and they've made such fast progress on that, that
we actually can just, we've been negotiating, a deal with them
contingent on them getting it working.
Which seems We're going to be demoing the first version on
this Wednesday, I guess, on Friday, but literally you throw
in an urban program. It spits out a proof.
You throw in, you know, a thousand bar transactions.
It spits out a proof of those that you can use for this
validation. And so, while that answer is
boring, the implications of it are really interesting which is
that not only Will Herb it. Be this like place where you can
write these rich applications that interact.
With the blockchain. There's one other thing that's
sort of catnip Barnard snipey to blockchain programmers.
And people around that which is the ability to zero like easy,
zero-knowledge proofs and we will likely have the ability to
eat, not just for your on chain bar transactions.
But even stuff that happens off chain that you want to prove,
you know, make these proofs that something was done, right?
So an example of that off chain would be and also you can vary
Loop bar so we can deploy not just Program on a theory on that
can verify proofs. We can deploy a program on
hookah bar that can verify these zero-knowledge proofs.
And so, what that would look like is imagine, I don't know,
you have like a game world that someone enters and puts in
Assets, in order to like, do fights, or something like that.
And at the end of it, they just they need to, like, run a proof
run approver on all of the actions, they took and the code
that happened and proved they followed the rules of that game
world. And then they can, you know,
withdraw more assets, potentially or lose some, you
know. Depending on how it went, and I
think there's this whole world of verifying Computing
completely off chain stuff that happens.
And then using that, to trigger on chain of events, but having
that be at consumer scale that we're really, really excited
about. So we went this actually these
like to the blockchain aspect is actually maybe the most basic
and simple which is literally we license, you know, I think from
them we probably do some kind of license where it's open for
people to use. Long as they just use it for
require so they don't have the you know, Stark where problem of
not being able to access the provers.
But then they have this whole other world of, you know they
can go and you know license proving or do proving that lets
them do. All of these arbitrary off chain
interactions, they can prove on chain that they followed some
set of rules in order to unlike in order to unlock things and so
we're very excited about that. It's definitely something we
want to mark it really heavily as this additional T government
programs, but it was sort of just, we didn't know until very
recently that it would happen. Basically, the timeline was, it
must have been March, maybe 13th 14th.
We have the conversations with zorp, where we saw, how far
stuff was getting and how this would be a thing that we could
also offer to loop our developers.
You know, then we're thinking about that.
Then all of the GPT for Stuff hit and we had to also think
about AI at the same time and figure out like that strategy,
but I don't want to downplay the ZK side.
It's Like one of the most interesting things happening on
orbit and like in bar and we think that, you know, kind of,
if you liked Stark what like Stark net like you'll love.
You'll love this. Because you can everything you
learn in terms of writing Hoon programs for having a computer.
Right for you, you will soon be able to just proven ZK and it's
really wild and people aren't don't really know about it yet,
and we'll probably just have to show them in order for them to
believe it because it's kind of a wild claim.
So, indeed, in the rest of this ecosystem, there's broadly
broadly, like, I'm not talking about Akbar or sore, this
broadly to two, approaches to the building.
No smart contract capable, ZK system.
So one approach is That you develop your own virtual
machine, which is different from.
The ethereum virtual machine has a different set of instructions.
But you architect, those instructions in a way that
Creating zero knowledge proof is easier and then you have some
kind of domain-specific language built to utilize that virtual
machine. So most famous example of this
approach is Startin it which virtual machine is different,
and then the domain-specific language on top of it is Cairo,
which is different from from solidity, and then, so that's
kind of one approach. And then the second second kind
of approach is All of these projects that are trying to
build a zeeky zeeky evm of sorts o.
So this would this would be polygons.
But then there are there are other projects as well maybe
three or four of them that are trying to build is ETA e VM in
which the virtual machine, the instructions of the virtual
machine are the same as as etherium and you're trying to
develop a kind of approval that can kind of reuse those
instructions and And and, and build the proofs.
So Given that there are these two approaches.
And you're just by, you may just end up buying the technology of
Zorb. What camp, do you belong in?
And what kind of constraints does that imply for the future?
We're very were very, obviously in the old VM, like start NAT
type approach, where we're not like making our smart contracts
evm because we have a good reason not to, which is that, we
want them to be maximally integrated in orbit.
So that's that decision sort of already.
Made for us. And then the fact that, you
know, parties legs or per making a lot of progress on improving,
those native Urban transactions makes everything pretty smooth
in terms of ZK e VM. I think it's important to just
say how I think about the evm in general because it's been very
successful. It's very widespread, there's a
lot of audited code that runs on it for like large amounts of
money, and I think it's going to sound - if I say this, but I
mean, it in a very positive way. It's a lot like COBOL where you
have like, Lots of unfortunate and we have like a lot of code
that runs billions trillions of dollars that runs on kobol.
Still like four Banks. They know it works, they use it,
it's hard to find, you know, people who want to like program
on it or do it but you know, it's there and that's going to
be with us for some amount of time.
And I think that the evm is very similar and so I think that
steps towards having given that that we're going to have evm
code with us for some time managing billions of dollars.
Whether it's on, you know, Cerium, cause most obviously
Avalanche did that like heavily. But everyone who uses the evm
wants access to those programs given that we need.
ZK, V, Ms, because this is better than the optimistic setup
and those projects are all making great progress there and
I think it will eventually work. I think we couldn't.
We could see things even, like, successful or wealthy optimistic
projects, like optimism or abuse from switch to ZK because I
think it's getting very commoditized.
I would actually Spect to see that polygon sort of leading the
way there in terms of just trying to go directly to that.
So for us like it's just a different Universe, I think the
most likely Universe if you bar wins and if evm code is still
running is that we'll have we'll probably sponsor or work with
some projects to make a clean interface for ingesting evm data
from the most popular l2s or l1's into orbit, like bar
programs. And you know, then people you
know, if they have some multi, With like, you know, tens of
millions of dollars that they just for what they want to have
on gnosis, you know, they can they can do that.
But as far as we go, there's no reason for us to it would be it
would be a lot more work to make our thing.
Evm compatible and ZK provable in the evm.
And at the end of it, our payoff would be that people had to
write, you know, solidity or similar programs Insider but
which we don't really want it also, you know, we want to have
our own thing. Get maximum adoption for our old
VM settling to a theorem. And then later on do the work to
be, you know, be able to ingest and right to evm contracts on
other chains for sure which I guess also sort of addresses
your question from earlier about the poor, you know Cosmos SDK
developer with a popular chain. Who has this thing?
That that sort of the answer for him is that if it's evm
compatible, we would likely do the work to make it, you know,
ingestible from his as long as you use, like standard tooling.
And so this aren't alt VM that your stack is based on.
Is it, is it the same or to be MSS star player or a?
No, we are no, no, no. So that's a turbot no, it's
Urban. Yeah.
It's just like a normal rvm is inner bit program.
It's like maybe a thousand lines of code.
It's not very big. It's like it's there.
It takes in transactions that are orbit data in the normal
form, it processes them within In written in orbit and it spits
out, orbit data on the other end that we can, then serialize for
posting data, availability on of Olivia Moore to aetherium.
And because of that, we're, that's why we're able to take,
let's say, a ZK, proving solution that wasn't developed
for bar, in particular legs orbs, which is just for proving
Urban code in general and say we have our B code prove this and
it shows, you know, should just work the only for people who
want to get Get really Technical and put, don't wanna bore your
listeners, but orbit has these things called Jets.
Which basically, if you have some piece of code, it processes
them faster using may be essentially in a foreign
function interface and in those cases, you have to make you have
to decide on what your set of jets is for the ZK approver of
like beforehand and sort of say I'm proving a transaction,
assuming the existence of these Jets.
But I don't want to go too far in there.
The basic message is you, Of, you know, we are engine rvm.
Is just a turbot code and we proved our bit code when we were
using Stark where's products back in the summer, what we were
doing was using them to essentially, write Urban
interpreters. So we would write a program in
Cairo in Stark where's language that would take in orbit code
and prove and generate proofs that it was done, right,
according to Urban schools but you know, cutting out the
middleman to some degree and having a more native system for
it is probably going to be beneficial well, if we had to go
back to that, you know we could But it's unlikely at this point.
Cool. So one question set of as as you
get to a c and so one question I'm curious about when it comes
to use cases that you want to see people build and that like
you know you most excited about and that you think would be, you
know, the things that will really leverage or and Herb, its
capabilities, you know, the best and that that are kind of going
to be the things that can really like take off in the next year.
Two years. Are there particular things you
have in mind, you have a sort of list of like things I want to
see built. Yes, I want to say that we need
to see them. Develop still I kind of make our
imagination, go further. But I think everything in the
world of social but social meaning, everything like related
to, you know, networks where you're posting information and
having stuff come in and communicating with people.
Dowels are an example discords, everything in there.
We want to ingest everything like then that can in the social
plus like game type world. I think is really is really
interesting like and um and we're actually talking with some
like game projects to onboard them because one of the best
things that we can provide is this like, you know, just sort
of full crypto plus social plus, you know, chatting Etc
integration into their, I guess one way I would say it is that
right now a lot of herb it people just for coordinating
their development, use stuff like Other dot town, where they
can go on and like chat with each other and have like, you
know, some environments to like go play with.
I'd like to see stuff like that. But much much richer.
I'd like to see things like what people use, Twitter Discord,
other social for, but much much like much, much richer, and DOW
like in it. The thing that we're not going
for As Much from the start is the typical thing that people do
when they launched a chain which is try to you know, copy like
you No, make some amm clones and don't want to look good today.
Yeah, he's loved it. And like does it and we have one
guy who's like has closed like made an AFM just like you know,
for the hell of it because like we can and it's on there.
But we're exactly interested in getting people doing these much,
more social type game type applications, seeing how those
actually integrate integrate with crypto in like a mature
environment. And then once there's demand for
it, doing the liquidity type stuff, Because I think it's yeah
it's on our it's a thing we want to be doing eventually but it's
not the new interesting thing in crypto.
The other way of saying that is that everyone in crypto sort of
knows that just doing unique swap.
Clones is kind of a dead end and not very interesting.
And we're trying to create, you know, this new, this new meta
like this like just much much richer set of things that you
can do. We don't even know fully what
that looks like, but we have. It's also not just a blank
slate. So we're like okay, I wish we
had chat so that we can do these things and see where it goes.
Then once we had chat, we're like, oh, now we actually can do
basically groups Dows discords, like things like, much more like
that with crypto and then I think we'll see what the, you
know, what the next thing is after, but there's a some other
projects that were working with that will, you know?
You add those, I think on one that we were interested in was
like what portal was doing, which is trying to make like a
discoverability thing for everything in all the content in
orbit and that has a lot of obvious crypto Integrations.
And so I think like, in terms of incentivizing people to do stuff
for it, you know, limit, you know, limiting things in various
ways. Let me people collect assets and
so I'm interested to see how that goes.
But just in general, like I guess the idea of Making those
applications, but then letting people extend them easily is
something we haven't seen a lot since the, I don't know.
Probably since the late 2000 like Facebook like Twitter, open
API apis phase. When people could just sort of
build whatever applications they want integrated into those.
And we want to bring that back to some like, to some degree.
Cool, fantastic. Maybe like final question.
What's the, what did what did the timeline is look like where
you at right now. What are the main Milestones
coming up right now? We are in the process of
finishing, our main engine, integrating it with ZK, at least
for optimistic, ZK and doing the basic version of the roll-up.
We have a very basic version on test net, but even need to add
stuff like withdrawals. We also we Talked about little
bit about which we call ziggurat, which was basically
the thing that's going to let you pull together.
All of, you know, developing for lots of, er, bit nodes at once
checking that against the ubar chain, doing all of that, that
will be out in users hands probably later this month or in
May and then we'll start iterating it fast based on that.
We would like to then go to main net.
Probably in June or July where you're sort of doing stuff for
real money but deposit limited and start doing, you know,
audits of our code. And then having people get
familiar Auditors, get familiar with our Hoon engine.
Also the on shame, the on chain portion.
And as the summer, you know, as the summer goes, will be doing
more experiments with AI to like in a balloon programming.
But and in terms of having like the actual chain launched would
like sort of full tools and everything working that'll be
like probably the alpha beta version over the summer.
And then as the year goes on and we do audits.
It will get closer to doing stuff like potentially lifting,
any caps on the amount of deposits.
Really, going after developers very hard, things like that.
So I would look for some action If you're sort of really into.
If you're into urban development already, or want to get into it,
this spring like around May and then the real, you know,
hardcore lots of apps are coming out and we're moving closer and
closer to you know, no training wheels over the summer and fall.
All. Cool.
That's exciting. Yeah, I mean I think a lot of
things going. Yeah, a lot of things going on
in irbid, lot of things going on in Oak, Park things, moving
fast. So I think it's going to be
pretty mind-blowing. I think this sort of experience,
the user experience is people are going to be able to like
enjoy in this world. You know, in sort of, I think,
you know, next year, maybe towards the end of this year,
some things but I think definitely next year it's going
to be something. We're having a lot of 50 people
will go and be like that's That's what I expected.
It should work like and that's, that's what I've been kind of
waiting. For one thing we say internally
that's it's very much like a bar can make ico's great again in
the sense of like when people were saying all these things
over, you know, 2016-2017 it was based on this idea that we have
this Global consensus engine. We can do all these crazy things
with it and for a variety of reasons, obviously, there were
like, you know, the issues with, you know, scams and things like
that. But also, So there were like
people who are trying to do ambitious things and they were
just too hard then and I think they're now finally in reach and
so you know ideally we could make another Ico, boom happen
and everyone will be happy with us, don't like that.
This kind of this kind of the vibe Perfect.
Cool. Well, thanks so much for joining
us Tim lock. It was really great to have you
on. It was great to talk about bar,
super excited about the project and where it's going to go.
Yeah, thanks for having me guys. Really fun, great questions and
thanks for listening for tuning in.
If you're going to be back next week and have a great week.
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