1 00:00:00,120 --> 00:00:03,240 Back when we were thinking of NOC Chain in 2023, we said we 2 00:00:03,240 --> 00:00:07,520 want to solve distribution. We want to get more people doing 3 00:00:07,520 --> 00:00:12,520 proofs with the NOC ZKVM than anything else as fast as 4 00:00:12,520 --> 00:00:14,600 possible in a self reinforcing process. 5 00:00:15,080 --> 00:00:18,480 And so we built a zero knowledge proof of work competition, a ZK 6 00:00:18,480 --> 00:00:22,920 proof of work in NOC Chain. The proof of work competition is 7 00:00:23,520 --> 00:00:25,960 to solve and and build ZK proofs. 8 00:00:26,240 --> 00:00:29,920 We wanted to use the consensus mechanism to drive and 9 00:00:29,920 --> 00:00:33,720 incentivize the production at industrial scale of 0 knowledge 10 00:00:33,720 --> 00:00:36,000 proofs. The core economic center of 11 00:00:36,000 --> 00:00:41,160 gravity of North Chain is around a scarce value storage 12 00:00:41,200 --> 00:00:43,720 instrument. And so all of the revenue 13 00:00:43,720 --> 00:00:46,960 generation capabilities that are going to be built over time for 14 00:00:46,960 --> 00:00:50,000 data availability, for programmability are about 15 00:00:50,000 --> 00:00:53,400 increasing the monetary velocity and the usefulness of that 16 00:00:53,400 --> 00:00:55,840 digital goal. So the framing that I that I've 17 00:00:55,840 --> 00:01:00,800 kind of used and that I like is that not chain is programmable 18 00:01:00,800 --> 00:01:04,120 sound money that scales. Welcome to Epicenter, the show 19 00:01:04,120 --> 00:01:06,640 which talks about the technologies, projects and 20 00:01:06,640 --> 00:01:08,760 people that are having decentralisation and production 21 00:01:08,760 --> 00:01:11,240 revolution. I'm Brian Crane and today I'm 22 00:01:11,240 --> 00:01:14,080 speaking with Logan Allen, who is the CEO of ZOR. 23 00:01:14,640 --> 00:01:19,920 SORB is a company that's been working on ZK technology and 24 00:01:19,920 --> 00:01:24,840 they have also launched new proof of work ZK chain called 25 00:01:24,840 --> 00:01:29,000 Knock Chain very recently. So really excited to talk with 26 00:01:29,120 --> 00:01:33,160 Logan today. Just before we get started, 27 00:01:33,160 --> 00:01:35,600 we're like share a few words from our sponsors this week. 28 00:01:37,040 --> 00:01:40,160 If you're looking to stake your crypto with confidence, look no 29 00:01:40,160 --> 00:01:44,000 further than course one. More than 150,000 delegators, 30 00:01:44,000 --> 00:01:47,120 including institutions like Bid Go, Pantera Capital and Ledger 31 00:01:47,120 --> 00:01:49,600 Trust Course One. With their assets, they support 32 00:01:49,600 --> 00:01:52,080 over 50 block chains and their leaders in governance on 33 00:01:52,080 --> 00:01:55,320 networks like Cosmos, ensuring your stake is responsibly 34 00:01:55,320 --> 00:01:57,560 managed. Thanks to the advanced MEV 35 00:01:57,640 --> 00:02:01,200 research, you can also enjoy the highest staking rewards you can 36 00:02:01,200 --> 00:02:03,920 stake directly from your preferred wallet, set up a white 37 00:02:03,920 --> 00:02:07,680 label note, restake your assets on Eigenia or Symbiotic, or use 38 00:02:07,680 --> 00:02:09,960 the SDK for multi chain staking in your app. 39 00:02:10,440 --> 00:02:13,560 Learn more at Chorus .1 and start staking today. 40 00:02:14,920 --> 00:02:18,080 Hey guys, I want to tell you about Nosis, a collective of 41 00:02:18,080 --> 00:02:20,920 builders creating real tools for real people on the open 42 00:02:20,920 --> 00:02:23,080 Internet. Nosis has been around since 43 00:02:23,080 --> 00:02:25,320 2015. In fact, it started as one of 44 00:02:25,320 --> 00:02:28,680 Etherium's very first projects, and today it's grown to a whole 45 00:02:28,680 --> 00:02:31,440 ecosystem designed to make open finance actually work for 46 00:02:31,440 --> 00:02:34,000 everyday people. At the center of it all is Nosis 47 00:02:34,000 --> 00:02:35,840 Chain. It's a low cost, highly 48 00:02:35,840 --> 00:02:38,760 decentralized layer, one that's compatible with Etherium and 49 00:02:38,760 --> 00:02:40,920 secured by over 300,000 validators. 50 00:02:41,360 --> 00:02:44,080 So whether you're building a DAP, experimenting with De Fi, 51 00:02:44,120 --> 00:02:47,880 or working on autonomous agents, Nosis Chain gives you a solid, 52 00:02:47,880 --> 00:02:51,480 neutral foundation to build on. But Nosys is more than just 53 00:02:51,480 --> 00:02:53,880 infrastructure. It's also tools that people can 54 00:02:53,880 --> 00:02:56,120 actually use. Like Circles, for example. 55 00:02:56,120 --> 00:02:58,440 Let's anyone issue their own digital currency through 56 00:02:58,440 --> 00:03:01,840 networks of trust, not banks. And then there's Metri. 57 00:03:01,960 --> 00:03:04,520 It's their smart contract wallet that makes it easy to access 58 00:03:04,520 --> 00:03:07,920 circles, manage group currencies, and even spend 59 00:03:07,920 --> 00:03:11,720 anywhere Visa is accepted thanks to their integration with Nosys 60 00:03:11,720 --> 00:03:14,120 Pay. All this is governed by Nosys 61 00:03:14,120 --> 00:03:18,040 Dow, where anyone can propose, vote and help guide the network. 62 00:03:18,560 --> 00:03:21,280 And if you want to get involved, running a validator is super 63 00:03:21,280 --> 00:03:24,120 easy. All you need is 1 GNO and some 64 00:03:24,120 --> 00:03:26,840 basic hardware. To learn more and start building 65 00:03:26,840 --> 00:03:31,320 on the open Internet, head to nosis dot IO Nosis, Building the 66 00:03:31,320 --> 00:03:32,920 Open Internet one Block at a time. 67 00:03:34,480 --> 00:03:36,080 Cool. Well, thanks so much for coming 68 00:03:36,080 --> 00:03:38,520 on, Logan. Happy to be here. 69 00:03:39,360 --> 00:03:41,560 Yeah, it's been, I think a long time coming. 70 00:03:41,560 --> 00:03:45,480 I mean, I've been aware of Zorb since the very, very beginning, 71 00:03:46,400 --> 00:03:49,520 but maybe you can start here. Like what? 72 00:03:49,520 --> 00:03:53,160 What was your journey like? How did you get into, well, 73 00:03:53,160 --> 00:03:58,160 crypto, I guess Erbit and sort of, yeah. 74 00:03:58,160 --> 00:03:59,600 Tell us a little bit about your journey. 75 00:04:00,280 --> 00:04:02,960 Yeah, absolutely. So I have a software engineering 76 00:04:02,960 --> 00:04:06,360 background, was programming since I was 12, went to Georgia 77 00:04:06,360 --> 00:04:09,880 Tech for computer science. And then I started getting 78 00:04:09,880 --> 00:04:13,160 really into Bitcoin and the whole cryptocurrency thing in 79 00:04:13,160 --> 00:04:18,800 2016 or so. And by 2017, I just, I was in 80 00:04:18,800 --> 00:04:21,560 class, I was thinking, what am I doing here? 81 00:04:22,000 --> 00:04:23,800 Learning, You're learning more math. 82 00:04:23,800 --> 00:04:26,200 Why am I doing this instead of just going out and working in 83 00:04:26,200 --> 00:04:30,680 industry trying to get Bitcoin? And so I was about to start my 84 00:04:30,680 --> 00:04:34,920 senior year and I decided I was going to drop out and just go 85 00:04:35,040 --> 00:04:38,760 move to San Francisco, work in the Bay, grab a job and get 86 00:04:38,760 --> 00:04:40,560 started. Just trying to accumulate 87 00:04:40,560 --> 00:04:45,560 basically. And so I've spent time at Uber 88 00:04:45,560 --> 00:04:48,160 doing product engineering during some of their growth periods, 89 00:04:48,160 --> 00:04:51,960 spent time at Snap. And then eventually I found 90 00:04:51,960 --> 00:04:55,080 myself actually working more directly in adjacent to crypto 91 00:04:55,600 --> 00:04:59,840 at Tuan, which was the research company that built Urban. 92 00:05:00,080 --> 00:05:03,680 And so I spent some time there, ended up as a tech lead on their 93 00:05:03,680 --> 00:05:09,080 product team and there was a lot of fun things going on at Talon 94 00:05:09,080 --> 00:05:10,960 at that time. It's, it's hard to even describe 95 00:05:10,960 --> 00:05:15,800 the energy, but Talon had this very ambitious vision of, of 96 00:05:15,800 --> 00:05:18,560 building a new operating system and a new decentralized Internet 97 00:05:18,560 --> 00:05:23,480 to complement block chains. And, and I really, once I 98 00:05:23,480 --> 00:05:26,320 started interacting a lot with the technology there, I, I 99 00:05:26,320 --> 00:05:28,760 really saw something very transformative because of how 100 00:05:28,800 --> 00:05:32,000 minimal and how tightly defined everything was. 101 00:05:32,240 --> 00:05:36,240 And in a world in which we're increasingly dependent on 102 00:05:36,240 --> 00:05:42,400 computing and these trustless decentralized systems for really 103 00:05:42,400 --> 00:05:46,040 our everyday life, for being able to send money around, for 104 00:05:46,040 --> 00:05:49,680 being able to store value. And in a world where centralized 105 00:05:49,680 --> 00:05:52,000 banking and centralized information stores are 106 00:05:52,000 --> 00:05:56,160 increasingly compromised at an ever increasing rate, I really 107 00:05:56,160 --> 00:05:59,800 find that vision of trying to get more of our data stored and 108 00:05:59,800 --> 00:06:03,200 decentralized and really secure encrypted ways with really 109 00:06:03,200 --> 00:06:06,160 minimal security assumptions to be very compelling. 110 00:06:06,480 --> 00:06:09,840 And so I, I spent a few years there and then I worked on a 111 00:06:09,840 --> 00:06:11,720 product studio for a little while. 112 00:06:12,400 --> 00:06:14,920 And eventually in 2022, I founded Zorp. 113 00:06:15,800 --> 00:06:19,760 And initially the idea with Zorp was we're just going to do a 114 00:06:19,760 --> 00:06:23,600 bunch of research and how we can take one of those technologies 115 00:06:23,600 --> 00:06:27,200 from Urbit, the NOC instruction set, how we can take that and 116 00:06:27,200 --> 00:06:31,360 make a really, really performant ZK VMA0 knowledge virtual 117 00:06:31,360 --> 00:06:33,960 machine that uses that instruction set. 118 00:06:35,000 --> 00:06:42,320 And we, I was able to bring on some amazing math pH, DS, former 119 00:06:42,320 --> 00:06:44,440 professors and things like this to work on it with me. 120 00:06:45,320 --> 00:06:49,200 And then we made some really great research results. 121 00:06:49,200 --> 00:06:52,080 We, we recently published a paper actually that's kind of 122 00:06:52,080 --> 00:06:54,800 the encapsulation of all the research we've done over the 123 00:06:54,800 --> 00:06:59,440 past two years into this in, in June, we published an E print. 124 00:06:59,960 --> 00:07:06,760 And then anyway, in 2023, we looked at what we had built and 125 00:07:06,760 --> 00:07:09,240 we said, how are we going to go to market with this? 126 00:07:09,480 --> 00:07:13,520 Right? And so we decided to build knock 127 00:07:13,520 --> 00:07:16,080 chain. I, I've been in and around 128 00:07:16,080 --> 00:07:19,800 crypto for quite a while. And frankly, you know, not 129 00:07:19,800 --> 00:07:21,840 everyone feels the same way about this, but I've, I've 130 00:07:21,840 --> 00:07:25,360 always really preferred the no pre mind proof of work ethos to 131 00:07:25,360 --> 00:07:27,160 the more pre mind proof of stake ethos. 132 00:07:27,160 --> 00:07:31,280 Just because I, I, I think of these economic protocols as 133 00:07:31,280 --> 00:07:34,960 having these like core economic engines and incentives that they 134 00:07:34,960 --> 00:07:38,120 bring to bear in addition to the actual technological features. 135 00:07:38,800 --> 00:07:42,680 And I, I think that there's a little bit of kind of an, 136 00:07:43,960 --> 00:07:48,400 there's been an emphasis, let's say on, on particular incentives 137 00:07:49,040 --> 00:07:53,640 around basically going to market with pre mind proof of stake 138 00:07:53,640 --> 00:07:56,760 protocols because they're easier to underwrite by private 139 00:07:56,760 --> 00:08:01,440 placement. And I think that what we've seen 140 00:08:01,520 --> 00:08:05,280 over the past seven years or so since that emphasis really took 141 00:08:05,280 --> 00:08:09,720 hold is that there's now a lot of block chains that all have 142 00:08:09,720 --> 00:08:12,720 the exact same incentives and aren't really doing any 143 00:08:12,720 --> 00:08:14,680 innovation on the crypto economics. 144 00:08:15,480 --> 00:08:18,000 But they all have these like different technical flavors. 145 00:08:18,520 --> 00:08:20,440 Basically. You know, there's the AI 146 00:08:20,440 --> 00:08:23,400 blockchain, the fast blockchain, the storage blockchain, you 147 00:08:23,400 --> 00:08:26,000 know, there's so many flavors all marketing to kind of the 148 00:08:26,000 --> 00:08:28,600 same group of developers, all trying to be the next Ethereum, 149 00:08:29,320 --> 00:08:31,600 but they all have the same incentives. 150 00:08:31,960 --> 00:08:33,480 And so we wanted to do something different. 151 00:08:33,480 --> 00:08:37,679 We wanted to, we wanted to build something that, that we could, 152 00:08:38,000 --> 00:08:40,679 that we could really get behind for a very long time. 153 00:08:41,120 --> 00:08:44,120 And So what we decided to do with NOC Chain is, is build it 154 00:08:44,120 --> 00:08:48,000 as a fair launch proof of work project and try to use the proof 155 00:08:48,000 --> 00:08:52,560 of work incentives in a novel way to incentivize real world 156 00:08:52,560 --> 00:08:54,800 behavior that that we wanted to see. 157 00:08:55,320 --> 00:08:57,280 And so of course we had the ZKVM. 158 00:08:57,400 --> 00:09:00,920 And so I imagine you're familiar with VHS, Betamax. 159 00:09:01,480 --> 00:09:04,720 Often, often when there's a new technology, the one that wins is 160 00:09:04,720 --> 00:09:07,320 not necessarily the best one. It's the one that gets the best 161 00:09:07,320 --> 00:09:10,600 distribution. Now of course, we love NOC CKVM, 162 00:09:10,600 --> 00:09:13,080 we think it is the best. We released this wonderful paper 163 00:09:13,240 --> 00:09:18,520 last last month showing formal security soundness bounds and 164 00:09:18,760 --> 00:09:22,880 showing that we see performance about an order of magnitude more 165 00:09:22,880 --> 00:09:26,280 than RISC 5 VMS, which is rather compelling. 166 00:09:26,880 --> 00:09:30,960 But we wanted to solve back when we were thinking of NOC Chain in 167 00:09:30,960 --> 00:09:35,840 2023, we said we want to solve distribution, We want to get 168 00:09:36,200 --> 00:09:41,040 more people doing proofs with the NOC ZKVM than anything else 169 00:09:42,080 --> 00:09:44,840 as fast as possible in a self reinforcing process. 170 00:09:46,200 --> 00:09:48,720 And to do that you need to actually use incentives. 171 00:09:48,960 --> 00:09:52,960 You can't just have these like top down grants or anything like 172 00:09:52,960 --> 00:09:55,480 that. And so we built a zero knowledge 173 00:09:55,480 --> 00:09:57,520 proof of work competition, AZK proof of work. 174 00:09:58,240 --> 00:10:04,400 And so in NOC Chain, the proof of work competition is to solve 175 00:10:04,400 --> 00:10:08,960 and, and build ZK proofs, not, not to build hashes like you see 176 00:10:08,960 --> 00:10:12,280 in, in standard Bitcoin. And so that was where Nachang 177 00:10:12,280 --> 00:10:16,720 was born was we wanted to use the consensus mechanism to drive 178 00:10:16,720 --> 00:10:20,440 and incentivize the production at industrial scale of 0 179 00:10:20,440 --> 00:10:23,200 knowledge proofs. I'm going to pause because you 180 00:10:23,200 --> 00:10:25,840 asked a very simple question. And I really, I really got into 181 00:10:25,840 --> 00:10:26,800 it. But that's, that's the story. 182 00:10:26,800 --> 00:10:29,720 That's that's how we got here. Yeah, I think there's a lot of 183 00:10:29,720 --> 00:10:33,440 things here that I want to dive a little bit deeper into, but 184 00:10:33,440 --> 00:10:38,440 maybe we can start with urban a little bit because I mean, urban 185 00:10:38,440 --> 00:10:42,480 is something I've been involved in since for a long time as 186 00:10:42,480 --> 00:10:45,720 well. And you know, we've, we've done 187 00:10:45,720 --> 00:10:50,600 a bunch of urban podcasts here. Maybe 2 questions here. 188 00:10:51,240 --> 00:10:54,360 How would you describe urban? What inspired you about it? 189 00:10:55,000 --> 00:10:58,640 And and then also I'm curious, what are your biggest learnings 190 00:10:58,640 --> 00:11:01,720 from how you've seen the urban ecosystem evolve that you wanted 191 00:11:01,720 --> 00:11:05,040 to sort of apply when it comes to NOC chain? 192 00:11:05,800 --> 00:11:10,040 Yeah, absolutely. So the things that appealed to 193 00:11:10,040 --> 00:11:15,880 me the most about Urban were the idea that that really this, this 194 00:11:15,880 --> 00:11:20,720 crypto ethos of self sovereignty and decentralization in this 195 00:11:20,720 --> 00:11:24,200 idea that that you should kind of be in charge of your own 196 00:11:24,200 --> 00:11:25,800 destiny. You should custody your own 197 00:11:25,800 --> 00:11:28,000 funds. You should, you should be the 198 00:11:28,000 --> 00:11:30,640 one that's ultimately making the decision about whether the funds 199 00:11:30,640 --> 00:11:32,840 move or not. You don't need custodians. 200 00:11:33,520 --> 00:11:38,120 This, this concept for me, I, I think applies to a lot more than 201 00:11:38,120 --> 00:11:41,960 just money. And, and I saw when I joined 202 00:11:41,960 --> 00:11:44,400 Urban, the thing that really appealed to me the most was that 203 00:11:44,400 --> 00:11:47,600 they had the most expansive vision of how to apply those 204 00:11:47,600 --> 00:11:50,080 principles across the rest of computing. 205 00:11:51,720 --> 00:11:56,720 And I think that I think that that ambition to, to spread the 206 00:11:56,720 --> 00:12:01,600 crypto ethos to a, to a larger set of applicable principles, 207 00:12:02,080 --> 00:12:07,200 let's say, to, to make, to make it more easy to run, say your 208 00:12:07,200 --> 00:12:11,960 own energy grid at home, right? Like do solar and batteries run 209 00:12:11,960 --> 00:12:14,480 your own energy? Don't be dependent that that 210 00:12:14,480 --> 00:12:18,760 kind of almost homesteading vision with computing where you 211 00:12:18,760 --> 00:12:21,080 know, you're growing your own food, you've got some automated 212 00:12:21,080 --> 00:12:24,280 systems helping you grow your own food, you're producing your 213 00:12:24,280 --> 00:12:25,600 own energy. You've got some automated 214 00:12:25,600 --> 00:12:28,120 systems doing that. And you just have these 215 00:12:28,120 --> 00:12:32,120 protocols that run that don't make you more dependent on 216 00:12:32,120 --> 00:12:35,800 everyone else, but make you less dependent and in making you less 217 00:12:35,800 --> 00:12:38,520 dependent, make you more free and more agentic. 218 00:12:39,000 --> 00:12:43,440 That was what really appealed to me about Urbit and I, I still 219 00:12:43,440 --> 00:12:48,120 find that vision very appealing. Not even, even now that I'm I'm 220 00:12:48,120 --> 00:12:49,760 not working on the project directly. 221 00:12:49,840 --> 00:12:53,880 And to me, it's, it's still about how, how do we, how do we 222 00:12:53,880 --> 00:12:57,000 bring those same principles to bear regardless of whether it's 223 00:12:57,000 --> 00:13:02,800 in that form factor? And what are the biggest things 224 00:13:02,960 --> 00:13:07,480 you feel like you want to do different from orbit or your 225 00:13:07,480 --> 00:13:09,440 biggest sort of lessons that you see? 226 00:13:10,920 --> 00:13:14,400 Can we swear on this podcast for sure? 227 00:13:14,400 --> 00:13:17,720 Go ahead. OK, OK, OK, so I wanted to ask 228 00:13:17,760 --> 00:13:28,960 OK, so so Urbit needed to ship a product to users that created a 229 00:13:29,160 --> 00:13:33,840 that basically showed why they would need the infrastructure 230 00:13:34,120 --> 00:13:37,360 that that they that they were producing the vision for. 231 00:13:38,400 --> 00:13:42,280 OK, so let's let's kind of like talk about this from first 232 00:13:42,280 --> 00:13:44,160 principles. If you're building a growth 233 00:13:44,160 --> 00:13:48,800 company and you're selling a big vision, you need to be able to 234 00:13:48,800 --> 00:13:51,480 provide a compelling first use case for that vision. 235 00:13:51,480 --> 00:13:55,800 That's a step towards the vision, OK, as as a 236 00:13:55,800 --> 00:14:01,880 justification for why and, and, and also as a, as a tool to show 237 00:14:01,880 --> 00:14:05,760 where you can go. So when when Elon wants to make 238 00:14:05,760 --> 00:14:09,800 better battery technology, he tells everybody, I'm going to 239 00:14:09,800 --> 00:14:13,440 give you the best car. And then he gets to go invest in 240 00:14:13,440 --> 00:14:18,200 battery technology. When Elon wants to make better 241 00:14:18,200 --> 00:14:22,000 rockets, he tells everyone, Mars is really cool. 242 00:14:22,000 --> 00:14:25,560 Wouldn't you love to live there? Wouldn't that be so cool if we 243 00:14:25,560 --> 00:14:27,720 had this new place that we could go colonize and live? 244 00:14:28,560 --> 00:14:32,360 And then he gets, then he gets to take that vision and turn it 245 00:14:32,360 --> 00:14:37,320 into and turn it into action of building tangible goods, right, 246 00:14:37,360 --> 00:14:40,000 of building and making rockets better, right? 247 00:14:40,000 --> 00:14:42,480 So you start with selling speculative vision, then you 248 00:14:42,480 --> 00:14:45,320 show that you're making real steps towards capturing that 249 00:14:45,320 --> 00:14:47,080 energy and actually turning it into something real. 250 00:14:48,360 --> 00:14:51,200 And so the thing that I think Urban has done the worst job of 251 00:14:51,280 --> 00:14:55,840 overall is they, they have an amazing speculative vision of, 252 00:14:55,880 --> 00:14:57,800 of what can happen with computing. 253 00:14:58,200 --> 00:15:00,480 And they've done a really poor job of showing that they can 254 00:15:00,480 --> 00:15:02,800 actually take real steps towards making that real. 255 00:15:04,240 --> 00:15:08,520 Yeah, certainly that has been a challenge. 256 00:15:08,520 --> 00:15:13,080 I agree with you. Now let's talk about Knock, 257 00:15:13,080 --> 00:15:17,640 right, Because I think Knock is basically the kind of assembly 258 00:15:17,640 --> 00:15:21,800 language of Herbit. And in the beginning I, you 259 00:15:21,800 --> 00:15:24,440 know, I don't think ZK proofs was something that was like 260 00:15:24,520 --> 00:15:28,800 really consideration there. But my understanding is to spend 261 00:15:28,800 --> 00:15:31,440 to occur to spend, you know, five years or something in the 262 00:15:31,440 --> 00:15:35,960 beginning just on Knock to try to make the most simple and 263 00:15:35,960 --> 00:15:38,880 elegant definition of a computer. 264 00:15:39,520 --> 00:15:44,400 And you know, in the orbit thing space you'd have people then 265 00:15:44,400 --> 00:15:48,080 print out the whole knock definition on AT shirt. 266 00:15:48,080 --> 00:15:49,360 And that was kind of one of the price. 267 00:15:49,360 --> 00:15:51,200 Look, it's so simple. It fits on AT shirt. 268 00:15:51,640 --> 00:15:56,720 Like how what's your tell us more about like how do you feel 269 00:15:56,720 --> 00:15:58,680 about knock? Why are you so excited about 270 00:15:58,680 --> 00:16:00,160 Knock? Yeah. 271 00:16:00,160 --> 00:16:04,280 So we love NOC so much that we that we named the whole 272 00:16:04,280 --> 00:16:07,320 blockchain after it. We we literally named the 273 00:16:07,320 --> 00:16:09,360 currency of the blockchain NOC. OK. 274 00:16:09,680 --> 00:16:13,760 We, we are, we are NOC maximalist over here at Zorb and 275 00:16:13,760 --> 00:16:17,240 with Nocchain. And the reason for this is that 276 00:16:18,040 --> 00:16:24,160 NOC is a minimal executable specification of computing in 277 00:16:24,160 --> 00:16:28,400 which you can do any practical thing that you want to do with 278 00:16:28,400 --> 00:16:31,280 the computer and specify it in terms of NOC instructions. 279 00:16:32,360 --> 00:16:35,840 It has built in capabilities for extension instructions. 280 00:16:35,840 --> 00:16:39,480 So for complex arithmetic or cryptography, you can just call 281 00:16:39,480 --> 00:16:42,520 out to an extension instruction in the same way that your CPU 282 00:16:42,520 --> 00:16:46,840 calls out to its ALU, its arithmetic logic unit for fast 283 00:16:46,840 --> 00:16:50,760 edition, like you're not manually calculating in the CPU. 284 00:16:51,200 --> 00:16:53,960 You know, every, every arithmetic instruction. 285 00:16:53,960 --> 00:16:56,680 It's basically calling out a little specialized chip subsets 286 00:16:57,200 --> 00:16:59,800 on on the on the chip. So NOC. 287 00:16:59,880 --> 00:17:03,480 NOC is built in a way that mirrors the way that CPUs are 288 00:17:03,480 --> 00:17:08,000 built where you have a generic flow of logic that's minimal and 289 00:17:08,000 --> 00:17:10,800 can do anything Turing complete computer can do. 290 00:17:11,119 --> 00:17:13,359 And then you can call out to instructions that are 291 00:17:13,359 --> 00:17:17,599 extensions. And NOC is is agnostic to how 292 00:17:17,599 --> 00:17:22,200 many extensions you have or what they do, but only imposes 1 293 00:17:22,200 --> 00:17:23,800 requirement that it's a pure function. 294 00:17:24,960 --> 00:17:30,080 So this is a really, really key component here, which is you 295 00:17:30,080 --> 00:17:35,320 have a minimal Turing complete computer and then you can call 296 00:17:35,320 --> 00:17:38,400 out to extension instructions for any complex arithmetic 297 00:17:38,400 --> 00:17:40,240 etcetera that you need to go really fast. 298 00:17:41,440 --> 00:17:45,560 And so this lets you do hardware acceleration of any complex 299 00:17:45,560 --> 00:17:51,440 logic, but have an extremely consistent specification for 300 00:17:51,440 --> 00:17:55,120 normal computing operations. And so consistency is a really, 301 00:17:55,120 --> 00:17:59,720 really powerful tool when building systems because 302 00:17:59,720 --> 00:18:03,640 consistency and having a really, really minimal surface area of 303 00:18:03,640 --> 00:18:07,680 possible things that can occur allows you to build systems that 304 00:18:07,680 --> 00:18:11,640 you can actually understand. And in understanding them, you 305 00:18:11,640 --> 00:18:15,960 can cover the security holes and vulnerabilities, you can hold a 306 00:18:15,960 --> 00:18:20,680 mental model of what's happening in your head, and you can build 307 00:18:20,680 --> 00:18:26,160 and work a lot more effectively. And so the, the, the real things 308 00:18:26,160 --> 00:18:29,600 about NOC that are distinct, that are really unique is 1, 309 00:18:29,600 --> 00:18:33,000 It's extremely minimal. And the second one is that it 310 00:18:33,000 --> 00:18:35,160 only uses a single data structure. 311 00:18:35,520 --> 00:18:38,760 OK, So these components are going to really, really matter 312 00:18:38,760 --> 00:18:41,000 when we start talking about ZKVMS, OK. 313 00:18:42,240 --> 00:18:44,040 And the extension instruction pieces too. 314 00:18:44,200 --> 00:18:48,680 That's, that's something that is rather unique to NOC, but that 315 00:18:48,680 --> 00:18:55,480 most ZKVMS now use as well. So, but when NOC invented this 316 00:18:55,480 --> 00:18:58,360 and when NOC was introduced in 2008, this idea of these 317 00:18:58,640 --> 00:19:03,800 extension instructions being included was, was very, very 318 00:19:03,800 --> 00:19:05,440 unique. No one else was doing this. 319 00:19:06,040 --> 00:19:11,000 So the, the key point around this is NOC is really minimal, 320 00:19:11,000 --> 00:19:12,800 very few instructions but turned complete. 321 00:19:14,000 --> 00:19:17,400 And 2nd, NOC is built around a single data structure, the 322 00:19:17,400 --> 00:19:21,400 binary tree. And this single data structure 323 00:19:21,880 --> 00:19:24,600 it turns out is, well, First off, it's one of the most 324 00:19:24,600 --> 00:19:27,600 fundamental data structures in computer science, many, many, 325 00:19:27,600 --> 00:19:30,520 many things in computer science or binary trees, efficient 326 00:19:30,520 --> 00:19:33,240 databases, dictionaries, etcetera. 327 00:19:33,800 --> 00:19:37,240 And then second, because everything is one data structure 328 00:19:37,280 --> 00:19:41,040 and there's a really minimal set of instructions, it allows you 329 00:19:41,040 --> 00:19:49,560 to build really very efficient ZKVM circuit for the not ZKVM. 330 00:19:51,080 --> 00:19:54,400 And so that's, that was that was the initial intuition that that 331 00:19:54,400 --> 00:19:58,840 I had had in in 2022 was this is really minimal. 332 00:19:59,080 --> 00:20:02,280 Binary trees are a very well studied data structure with 333 00:20:02,280 --> 00:20:06,320 strong mathematic properties. And so I thought we can probably 334 00:20:06,320 --> 00:20:12,200 build a really efficient ZKVM around this, because ZKVMS as as 335 00:20:12,200 --> 00:20:17,320 a concept are a way to express computation in terms of. 336 00:20:18,480 --> 00:20:20,800 Essentially middle school arithmetic. 337 00:20:22,520 --> 00:20:26,600 You probably remember from from Intermediate School, right? 338 00:20:26,880 --> 00:20:28,880 You have you have these polynomials, right? 339 00:20:28,880 --> 00:20:31,720 F of X is equal to X ^2 + 3 or whatever. 340 00:20:32,120 --> 00:20:38,640 And so AZKVM is a way to take a computation and express it as a 341 00:20:38,640 --> 00:20:41,120 relationship between polynomials. 342 00:20:41,760 --> 00:20:45,920 So the idea is that you constrain the results of what is 343 00:20:45,920 --> 00:20:49,160 going to be computed using the polynomials. 344 00:20:50,160 --> 00:20:53,640 And in practice what you do is you ensure that for any given 345 00:20:53,640 --> 00:20:57,520 pair of rows, so for any given like pair of states in the in 346 00:20:57,520 --> 00:21:02,600 the circuit, you're going to evaluate a polynomial that must 347 00:21:02,600 --> 00:21:06,600 evaluate to 0. So this is getting a little 348 00:21:06,600 --> 00:21:08,960 particular, but the, but in practice, the way it works is 349 00:21:09,480 --> 00:21:12,480 you've got a computation, you record all the steps that you 350 00:21:12,480 --> 00:21:15,680 do, you put them in this big table, and then you apply these 351 00:21:15,680 --> 00:21:19,280 polynomial constraints and the polynomials have to all be 0, 352 00:21:19,280 --> 00:21:20,600 otherwise you did the computation wrong. 353 00:21:21,600 --> 00:21:26,000 And ZK proofs give you a way to to use this these kind of little 354 00:21:26,000 --> 00:21:29,520 primitives and give you a really, really small proof that 355 00:21:29,520 --> 00:21:31,000 the computation was done correctly. 356 00:21:31,280 --> 00:21:35,480 That can be verified extremely quickly, regardless of how 357 00:21:35,480 --> 00:21:39,480 really big the computation was. And the proof's tiny. 358 00:21:40,240 --> 00:21:43,800 So let's say I've got some super huge computation I want to do. 359 00:21:44,280 --> 00:21:48,000 I can do it, make AZK proof of it, send it to you, and you can 360 00:21:48,000 --> 00:21:52,160 verify it on your phone in like 20 milliseconds, no matter how 361 00:21:52,160 --> 00:21:55,400 big the computation was. This is really a powerful 362 00:21:55,400 --> 00:21:59,440 primitive. It's, it's kind of like, so hash 363 00:21:59,440 --> 00:22:02,760 functions let you take a fingerprint of data, no matter 364 00:22:02,760 --> 00:22:05,560 how big the data is and compress it into a little bitty piece 365 00:22:05,560 --> 00:22:07,600 that lets you verify that the data is what it's supposed to 366 00:22:07,600 --> 00:22:10,680 be. And so ZK proofs are kind of 367 00:22:10,680 --> 00:22:13,800 like a hash function, but for computation instead of data. 368 00:22:14,720 --> 00:22:16,520 So it lets you commit to the computation. 369 00:22:18,400 --> 00:22:19,520 What? Do you think are the 370 00:22:19,520 --> 00:22:23,000 implications of CK proofs? Like what are the use cases 371 00:22:23,000 --> 00:22:26,360 you're most excited about and how do you think CK proofs are 372 00:22:26,360 --> 00:22:28,240 going to change the world in the long term? 373 00:22:28,840 --> 00:22:29,520 Yeah. OK. 374 00:22:29,520 --> 00:22:32,440 So the long, the long term ZK proofs, I think we're going to 375 00:22:32,440 --> 00:22:37,880 totally transform finance, compliance, medicine, privacy, 376 00:22:38,280 --> 00:22:40,920 and probably things like voting also. 377 00:22:42,120 --> 00:22:44,280 And we can, we could get into the kind of like speculative 378 00:22:44,280 --> 00:22:46,160 idea of how these things can impact. 379 00:22:46,160 --> 00:22:50,400 But the general heuristic is anytime that you want to be able 380 00:22:50,400 --> 00:22:53,760 to do something privately, but have everyone else be able to 381 00:22:53,760 --> 00:22:57,360 verify that it was done correctly, AZK proof is your 382 00:22:57,360 --> 00:23:00,720 best tool. So we don't really want our 383 00:23:00,720 --> 00:23:03,480 credit scores being leaked all over the Internet every time 384 00:23:03,480 --> 00:23:05,960 Equifax gets hacked, but they do. 385 00:23:07,400 --> 00:23:11,080 And so that type of really sensitive data, that's, that's 386 00:23:11,080 --> 00:23:13,400 the type of thing where ZK proofs would be really, really 387 00:23:13,400 --> 00:23:15,920 useful. Or similarly, your medical 388 00:23:15,920 --> 00:23:22,440 records or how you voted. It would be really, really nice 389 00:23:22,440 --> 00:23:26,160 if every time we have an election, everyone's not all 390 00:23:26,160 --> 00:23:28,160 pointing fingers and saying you cheated, you cheated, da, da, 391 00:23:28,160 --> 00:23:30,200 da. It'd be really nice if we had a 392 00:23:30,200 --> 00:23:34,320 public, transparently verifiable mathematic representation that 393 00:23:34,320 --> 00:23:40,000 says everyone voted once, everyone that voted was supposed 394 00:23:40,000 --> 00:23:43,480 to be able to vote, and we can all verify that, but we don't 395 00:23:43,480 --> 00:23:46,760 know who voted for what. These types of features are 396 00:23:46,760 --> 00:23:49,640 uniquely enabled by ZK in a really efficient way. 397 00:23:50,240 --> 00:23:52,840 Now that's kind of the like long term societal implications. 398 00:23:53,160 --> 00:23:57,080 I guess. There's one more, which is we're 399 00:23:57,080 --> 00:24:01,080 in a, we're in a world where hacking and cyber warfare is 400 00:24:01,080 --> 00:24:05,120 increasingly relevant. 0 day attacks are kind of the new 401 00:24:05,120 --> 00:24:09,280 thing in terms of in terms of warfare, whether whether it's 402 00:24:09,280 --> 00:24:12,240 the actual security zero day attack where they're, you know, 403 00:24:12,240 --> 00:24:14,800 hacking your information or whether it's, you know, them 404 00:24:15,000 --> 00:24:18,880 dropping like a cargo crate full of full of drones next to your 405 00:24:18,880 --> 00:24:20,160 base. And then the drones come out and 406 00:24:20,160 --> 00:24:21,960 bomb everything. These are kind of, these are 407 00:24:21,960 --> 00:24:26,880 like very sudden, very like frankly sophisticated attacks 408 00:24:26,880 --> 00:24:31,120 that involve technology are, are the cutting edge of warfare. 409 00:24:31,120 --> 00:24:35,280 And it really is in many ways impacting critical 410 00:24:35,280 --> 00:24:37,440 infrastructure and critical infrastructure threat modeling. 411 00:24:38,120 --> 00:24:42,560 So the power grid, right, and water treatment facilities, how 412 00:24:42,560 --> 00:24:44,720 do we get clean water? How do we have, how do we have, 413 00:24:44,840 --> 00:24:46,720 you know, good food? How do we have power? 414 00:24:47,080 --> 00:24:50,440 This is these types of questions are obviously in some ways 415 00:24:50,440 --> 00:24:52,440 physical concerns. You actually have to protect 416 00:24:52,440 --> 00:24:55,160 these things. But these systems are 417 00:24:55,160 --> 00:24:58,560 increasingly digital. And so securing these systems 418 00:24:59,000 --> 00:25:02,480 and allowing for introspection into these systems, 419 00:25:03,080 --> 00:25:07,080 verifiability that everything is going correctly, this this is 420 00:25:07,080 --> 00:25:09,920 becoming increasingly important. And 0 knowledge proofs are a 421 00:25:09,920 --> 00:25:13,200 great way to be able to get that verification component. 422 00:25:14,320 --> 00:25:16,880 So that's all the long term stuff. 423 00:25:16,880 --> 00:25:18,760 In terms of the short term stuff, 0 knowledge proofs are 424 00:25:18,760 --> 00:25:22,960 extremely good today for making blockchain steel really, really, 425 00:25:22,960 --> 00:25:25,480 really good. And that's, that's one of the 426 00:25:25,480 --> 00:25:27,640 things that we're using heavily for knock chain. 427 00:25:28,360 --> 00:25:34,000 So one of the things that block chains are kind of one of the 428 00:25:34,000 --> 00:25:38,080 things I'd say is unfortunate about blockchains is today the 429 00:25:38,080 --> 00:25:41,600 way that blockchains achieve verifiability. 430 00:25:41,960 --> 00:25:44,960 Like you know, if we are running a Uniswap smart contract on our 431 00:25:44,960 --> 00:25:47,040 Etherium nodes, you guys run a lot of Etherium nodes. 432 00:25:47,040 --> 00:25:50,760 I know if if you're running Uniswap on it, you have to be 433 00:25:50,760 --> 00:25:54,080 running that smart contract on every single node you're running 434 00:25:54,680 --> 00:25:57,960 in order to actually make the next state transition. 435 00:25:58,400 --> 00:26:01,560 If you want to check the next block, everybody has to run the 436 00:26:01,560 --> 00:26:07,080 same computation and verify you get verifiability through 437 00:26:07,120 --> 00:26:10,920 replication of execution. You just all execute the same 438 00:26:10,920 --> 00:26:12,560 code. That's how you know you all got 439 00:26:12,560 --> 00:26:15,720 the same answer. Well, that's really inefficient 440 00:26:15,720 --> 00:26:18,560 for I don't know how many Ethereum nodes are running 441 00:26:18,560 --> 00:26:19,760 today, do you? You probably do. 442 00:26:21,800 --> 00:26:24,520 I don't know exactly number off the top of my head, but it's 443 00:26:24,520 --> 00:26:26,480 many, yes. Yeah, it's, it's a lot, right? 444 00:26:26,480 --> 00:26:28,240 They're all running the same computation, right? 445 00:26:28,600 --> 00:26:31,920 They, they all have to run the exact same thing every, you 446 00:26:31,920 --> 00:26:34,440 know, every new block. So, you know, you've got, I 447 00:26:34,440 --> 00:26:37,080 don't know, however many 30,000 computers all running the exact 448 00:26:37,080 --> 00:26:40,440 same thing every block. That's kind of inefficient. 449 00:26:40,840 --> 00:26:45,120 So the way the way we see it is and and I mean Justin Drake and 450 00:26:45,120 --> 00:26:47,560 these guys are all starting to starting to pitch some of this 451 00:26:47,560 --> 00:26:49,880 stuff too. And you know, talking about how 452 00:26:49,880 --> 00:26:51,360 Ethereum's going to transform over time. 453 00:26:52,920 --> 00:26:54,520 I think they've got some five year vision. 454 00:26:54,600 --> 00:26:59,080 Well, anyway, the the future of block chains is point blank. 455 00:26:59,080 --> 00:27:01,640 You're you're going to be running the actual computation 456 00:27:01,960 --> 00:27:05,720 on your computer and you're going to be verifying what you 457 00:27:05,720 --> 00:27:08,800 did on the blockchain. You're not going to be actually 458 00:27:08,800 --> 00:27:10,080 doing execution on the blockchain. 459 00:27:10,240 --> 00:27:12,120 That doesn't make that doesn't make very much sense. 460 00:27:12,520 --> 00:27:15,800 What makes a lot of sense is for you to verify a proof that you 461 00:27:15,800 --> 00:27:17,480 did the execution on the blockchain. 462 00:27:18,840 --> 00:27:21,560 And so off chain execution, on chain verification. 463 00:27:21,880 --> 00:27:24,240 So that no matter how much computation you did, no matter 464 00:27:24,240 --> 00:27:27,440 whether you were running AI models or really sophisticated 465 00:27:27,440 --> 00:27:29,960 high frequency trading algorithms or crazy MEV 466 00:27:30,000 --> 00:27:33,800 protection or super sophisticated loan credit checks 467 00:27:33,800 --> 00:27:36,560 or whatever it is you're doing, whether you're running a video 468 00:27:36,560 --> 00:27:39,920 game, you can be doing it on your computer. 469 00:27:40,040 --> 00:27:41,640 And then the blockchain's just verifying you it's done 470 00:27:41,640 --> 00:27:47,600 correctly and just settling. So you mentioned it, the ZKVM 471 00:27:47,640 --> 00:27:51,240 that you guys wrote based on knock is is much more efficient 472 00:27:51,240 --> 00:27:53,200 than the other ones. Yeah. 473 00:27:53,760 --> 00:27:57,360 Is that particularly relevant because of the cost of 474 00:27:57,360 --> 00:28:00,320 generating proofs? Or like in What's the most 475 00:28:00,320 --> 00:28:03,040 important consideration for efficiency when it comes to 476 00:28:03,040 --> 00:28:05,960 ZKVMS? All right now, yeah, that's, 477 00:28:05,960 --> 00:28:09,000 that's a big question. So yeah, ZKVMS are really good 478 00:28:09,000 --> 00:28:11,320 for scalability, block chains and they're also really good for 479 00:28:11,320 --> 00:28:13,720 privacy. That's one of the other one of 480 00:28:13,720 --> 00:28:16,400 the other big use cases. So in terms of in terms of 481 00:28:16,520 --> 00:28:21,560 efficiency considerations for ZKVMS, So First off, you have to 482 00:28:21,560 --> 00:28:24,680 understand ZKVMS are really two parts, all right? 483 00:28:25,400 --> 00:28:29,800 So they're two parts. The first part is you can think 484 00:28:29,800 --> 00:28:32,400 of it as which circuit are you running, right? 485 00:28:32,400 --> 00:28:35,240 Are you running the Knox circuit or are you running the RISC five 486 00:28:35,240 --> 00:28:37,280 circuit? Are you running the Cairo 487 00:28:37,280 --> 00:28:40,920 circuit from STAR from * Quare? So it's really. 488 00:28:40,920 --> 00:28:45,440 And so that the technical term here is and of course different, 489 00:28:45,440 --> 00:28:50,000 different, different ZKVMS will make different technical 490 00:28:50,000 --> 00:28:51,960 decisions about things. But the technical term here is 491 00:28:51,960 --> 00:28:55,680 going to be that's generic for all of this is the interactive 492 00:28:55,680 --> 00:28:56,800 Oracle proof. OK. 493 00:28:57,360 --> 00:29:01,040 So you're going to have your circuit which is going to be 494 00:29:01,040 --> 00:29:04,760 modeling some interactive Oracle proof for expressing some 495 00:29:04,760 --> 00:29:11,080 particular computation. And so the question is, is so 496 00:29:11,080 --> 00:29:14,040 you've got your first part, which is which circuit are you 497 00:29:14,040 --> 00:29:17,840 running? And for Starks, that's going to 498 00:29:17,840 --> 00:29:21,320 be a randomized arithmetic intermediate representation with 499 00:29:21,320 --> 00:29:25,440 preprocess, which is a crazy acronym, but they shorten it to 500 00:29:25,440 --> 00:29:27,440 wrap. So with the Stark, you've got 501 00:29:27,440 --> 00:29:29,920 your wrap and that's kind of the front end to your ZKVM. 502 00:29:29,920 --> 00:29:31,080 So it's which circuit you're running. 503 00:29:31,840 --> 00:29:36,920 Then on the back end, you're going to feed that circuit into 504 00:29:37,480 --> 00:29:41,080 the the ZKVM back end, which is your polynomial commitment 505 00:29:41,080 --> 00:29:43,600 scheme. So you've probably heard about 506 00:29:43,600 --> 00:29:47,680 Starks, you've probably heard about Snarks, you've probably 507 00:29:47,680 --> 00:29:51,760 seen the term trusted setup. All right, So when people are 508 00:29:51,760 --> 00:29:53,720 talking about that kind of thing, they're talking about the 509 00:29:53,720 --> 00:29:57,160 back end, they're talking about the polynomial commitment 510 00:29:57,160 --> 00:30:00,040 scheme. And so there's really two areas 511 00:30:00,040 --> 00:30:02,000 of optimization. There's the front end and the 512 00:30:02,000 --> 00:30:07,200 back end of the ZK view, and almost all the research has has 513 00:30:07,200 --> 00:30:10,040 gone into optimizing the back end, how to commit to these 514 00:30:10,040 --> 00:30:13,760 polynomials, and that's where most of the trade-offs come in. 515 00:30:14,280 --> 00:30:20,560 So do you have a trusted setup? If you do, then you can get O of 516 00:30:20,560 --> 00:30:22,800 1 verification. You can get these itty bitty 517 00:30:22,800 --> 00:30:24,560 proofs that have O of 1 verification. 518 00:30:25,040 --> 00:30:27,040 Really tiny, really, really efficient. 519 00:30:27,680 --> 00:30:30,000 But you have to trust the setup was done correctly. 520 00:30:30,000 --> 00:30:33,800 Otherwise they can prove arbitrary statements or you can 521 00:30:33,800 --> 00:30:36,320 be a transparent commitment. In other words, there's no 522 00:30:36,320 --> 00:30:38,480 trusted set up. You're only trusting pure math. 523 00:30:38,480 --> 00:30:42,400 And in that case, the most common, the most commonly used 524 00:30:42,400 --> 00:30:48,880 thing on the market is, is, is Fry, which which is what Starks 525 00:30:48,880 --> 00:30:50,520 use. And so that's, that's going to 526 00:30:50,520 --> 00:30:51,960 be a transparent commitment scheme. 527 00:30:51,960 --> 00:30:53,760 You don't have to trust anybody. It's pure math. 528 00:30:54,560 --> 00:30:58,400 And and with those you have larger proof sizes depending on 529 00:30:58,400 --> 00:31:01,080 how large the computation is and how large the circuit is. 530 00:31:02,280 --> 00:31:05,440 So to answer concretely, there's trade-offs. 531 00:31:05,440 --> 00:31:08,480 It depends. But the smaller your circuit is, 532 00:31:08,960 --> 00:31:12,440 the more efficient you're going to be able to do the 533 00:31:12,440 --> 00:31:18,560 computation, which is going to make proving faster and is going 534 00:31:18,560 --> 00:31:23,880 to make this proof smaller. And so those benefits of having 535 00:31:23,880 --> 00:31:28,520 smaller circuits and of having better asymptotics for for 536 00:31:28,520 --> 00:31:33,240 building them are going to matter no matter what, no matter 537 00:31:33,240 --> 00:31:36,320 what back end you're going into. So the work that we've done into 538 00:31:36,320 --> 00:31:39,880 making the knock, the knock CKV and the knock circuit really, 539 00:31:39,880 --> 00:31:43,840 really efficient is kind of timeless in a way, because it's 540 00:31:43,840 --> 00:31:48,920 like the core cryptography that we can then that we can use as a 541 00:31:48,920 --> 00:31:51,280 module and put into whatever back end we want. 542 00:31:52,520 --> 00:31:57,040 So let's say they make this, you know, super new amazing proof 543 00:31:57,040 --> 00:31:59,080 back end. You know, let's let's say 544 00:31:59,080 --> 00:32:02,400 Ligurido. It's like a, it's a funny thing 545 00:32:02,400 --> 00:32:04,920 from Bain Capital where they made like Liguero, which is 546 00:32:04,920 --> 00:32:06,760 another one, like they made it really small. 547 00:32:06,760 --> 00:32:09,360 So they call it Ligurido. Like let's say that's the best 548 00:32:09,360 --> 00:32:11,200 thing. I don't know if that's the best 549 00:32:11,200 --> 00:32:12,560 thing. We can port our circuit right 550 00:32:12,560 --> 00:32:17,400 into it and we get and we get all the same efficiency speed 551 00:32:17,400 --> 00:32:20,760 UPS that we get right now, but in the new back end. 552 00:32:21,760 --> 00:32:25,400 And so we spent all of our time working on this on the actual 553 00:32:25,400 --> 00:32:28,520 circuit definition. OK. 554 00:32:29,080 --> 00:32:34,880 One thing you mentioned as well, which is worth diving into, I 555 00:32:34,880 --> 00:32:39,120 think, is that, you know, NOx chain is a proof of work chain, 556 00:32:40,360 --> 00:32:44,760 but the work are ZK proofs. Now, of course, that is an 557 00:32:44,760 --> 00:32:49,280 interesting idea because in the end, the idea of useful proof of 558 00:32:49,280 --> 00:32:51,240 work has been around for a long time, right? 559 00:32:51,240 --> 00:32:54,480 Like early on, people like, oh, you know, Bitcoin's very cool, 560 00:32:54,920 --> 00:32:58,520 but all people the miners do is to create these hashes and these 561 00:32:58,520 --> 00:33:01,360 hashes we don't have any function except like mining 562 00:33:01,360 --> 00:33:03,840 Bitcoin blocks. And so of course, the idea was 563 00:33:03,840 --> 00:33:08,080 like, well, what if all these miners have to do some work, but 564 00:33:08,080 --> 00:33:11,800 that work has some other external benefit and value 565 00:33:11,800 --> 00:33:16,240 besides just mining blocks. So can you explain a little bit 566 00:33:17,120 --> 00:33:22,640 how are the ZK proofs that are produced by knock chain miners? 567 00:33:23,240 --> 00:33:24,960 How? How can they be useful? 568 00:33:25,600 --> 00:33:27,640 Yeah, that's, that's a great question. 569 00:33:27,960 --> 00:33:31,920 So it's really hard to design A useful proof of work puzzle, 570 00:33:32,040 --> 00:33:35,560 which is why we haven't seen many, many, many attempts at it 571 00:33:35,640 --> 00:33:38,880 really. So the the fundamental traits 572 00:33:38,880 --> 00:33:41,960 that you need for a proof of work puzzle to be a secure proof 573 00:33:41,960 --> 00:33:48,480 of work puzzle are First off, you have to be able to verify 574 00:33:48,840 --> 00:33:53,720 that the puzzle was completed way faster than you can do. 575 00:33:53,720 --> 00:33:55,480 Then you can make the puzzle in the 1st place. 576 00:33:56,320 --> 00:34:01,320 OK, The reason for this is that you want it to be hard to spam 577 00:34:01,600 --> 00:34:04,680 invalid puzzles. OK, so you need to be able to 578 00:34:04,680 --> 00:34:07,080 throw, you need to be able to check that the puzzle was done 579 00:34:07,080 --> 00:34:10,840 properly, really, really fast. That's the first thing. 580 00:34:11,520 --> 00:34:14,880 Then the second trait is you need it to be amortization 581 00:34:14,880 --> 00:34:17,239 resistant. OK, that's a more complicated 582 00:34:17,239 --> 00:34:19,520 phrase, but what it but what it means is, is that you don't want 583 00:34:19,520 --> 00:34:21,719 to be able to reuse work between attempts. 584 00:34:23,080 --> 00:34:25,320 Each time that you do an attempt at the proof of work puzzle, you 585 00:34:25,320 --> 00:34:26,800 want to basically have to start over. 586 00:34:27,880 --> 00:34:30,600 And sometimes you can't get all the way to amortization 587 00:34:30,600 --> 00:34:33,159 resistant, but you want to be as amortization resistant as you 588 00:34:33,159 --> 00:34:37,040 can. And so for instance, when, when, 589 00:34:37,560 --> 00:34:40,800 when the ASIC boost vulnerability was published in 590 00:34:40,800 --> 00:34:46,760 in Bitcoin that was an amortization exploit is that 591 00:34:46,760 --> 00:34:49,440 they were able to reuse some of the work that they that they 592 00:34:49,440 --> 00:34:51,840 were doing between, between attempts. 593 00:34:52,719 --> 00:34:55,840 And so bit main was able to go way faster than they should have 594 00:34:55,840 --> 00:34:58,400 been able to relative to using the standard algorithm. 595 00:34:59,160 --> 00:35:02,080 So you have to be able to check, you have to be able to verify 596 00:35:02,080 --> 00:35:05,680 the puzzle really fast. You have to be amortization 597 00:35:05,680 --> 00:35:11,280 resistant at least enough. And that's what you need for 598 00:35:11,280 --> 00:35:14,000 approval work puzzle. So, so this is one of the 599 00:35:14,000 --> 00:35:17,200 reasons, so the fact that you have to satisfy these traits in 600 00:35:17,200 --> 00:35:20,320 order to make a useful proof of work puzzle at all. 601 00:35:20,440 --> 00:35:22,360 And then of course you need to try to make it useful. 602 00:35:22,840 --> 00:35:24,920 This is one of the reasons why it's been so difficult for 603 00:35:24,920 --> 00:35:28,080 people to kind of do generalizable work and proof of 604 00:35:28,080 --> 00:35:32,120 work. Now, fortunately for us, ZK 605 00:35:32,120 --> 00:35:35,160 proofs actually satisfy a lot of these traits. 606 00:35:35,320 --> 00:35:38,160 OK. So it's a lot more expensive to 607 00:35:38,160 --> 00:35:40,560 make a proof than it is to verify a proof. 608 00:35:40,640 --> 00:35:42,040 OK. So that's one of the first 609 00:35:42,040 --> 00:35:45,680 things that make it viable to make a ZK proof of work protocol 610 00:35:45,680 --> 00:35:48,600 at all. And then the second thing is, is 611 00:35:48,600 --> 00:35:52,480 that if you work really hard, you can constrain down the 612 00:35:52,480 --> 00:35:58,360 circuit of your ZKVM enough so that there's only one valid 613 00:35:58,360 --> 00:36:02,240 circuit, one valid witness for any given computation, which 614 00:36:02,240 --> 00:36:05,760 means that you start with a computation, you can only make 615 00:36:05,760 --> 00:36:08,680 one proof with it. OK. 616 00:36:09,520 --> 00:36:12,360 And if you can only make one proof per computation, it means 617 00:36:12,360 --> 00:36:16,480 that you have to start over again if if your attempt fails 618 00:36:16,600 --> 00:36:18,320 at the puzzle. OK, so that gives you that 619 00:36:18,320 --> 00:36:20,200 amortization resistance. All right. 620 00:36:20,920 --> 00:36:25,480 So ZK proofs can can be made into valid proof of work 621 00:36:25,480 --> 00:36:27,560 puzzles. And so then the question 622 00:36:27,560 --> 00:36:30,640 becomes, which is exactly what you're saying, can we make that 623 00:36:30,640 --> 00:36:32,840 useful for something other than just the proof of work 624 00:36:32,840 --> 00:36:36,040 competition? Well, luckily the answer is yes, 625 00:36:36,040 --> 00:36:40,600 you can make that useful. So as I mentioned, NOC is a 626 00:36:40,600 --> 00:36:43,840 Turing complete VM. You can compute anything with 627 00:36:43,840 --> 00:36:48,200 it, right? And so the important point here 628 00:36:48,200 --> 00:36:54,360 is, is that because you can compute anything with it and the 629 00:36:54,360 --> 00:36:57,440 algorithm for verifying the proof of work puzzle is just 630 00:36:57,440 --> 00:37:02,280 verifying the proof, you would be able to to theoretically 631 00:37:03,600 --> 00:37:07,400 provide any type of verifiable work as a proof of work puzzle 632 00:37:07,400 --> 00:37:10,600 result. Now in notching today, in the 633 00:37:10,600 --> 00:37:14,440 first version that we launched, we Tony and Cheek called it 634 00:37:14,440 --> 00:37:18,040 Dumbnet because it was kind of like a minimal shippable 635 00:37:18,440 --> 00:37:21,880 protocol, but it's, it is a useless proof of work puzzle 636 00:37:21,880 --> 00:37:24,680 right now. It's only used to incentivize 637 00:37:24,680 --> 00:37:28,320 increased proof of capacity and the and the global performance 638 00:37:28,320 --> 00:37:31,320 competition around optimizing the NOD CTV, which I think is 639 00:37:31,320 --> 00:37:34,120 very useful background incentivizing people to make ZK 640 00:37:34,120 --> 00:37:36,600 proofs faster, which is useful for the whole industry. 641 00:37:38,600 --> 00:37:44,560 But in making the actual proofs useful individually, it's it's 642 00:37:44,560 --> 00:37:48,280 actually not that big of an upgrade because. 643 00:37:48,280 --> 00:37:51,440 Currently they're they're. Making one proof per attempt, 644 00:37:51,920 --> 00:37:54,880 but they're making, they're making a proof of basically a 645 00:37:54,880 --> 00:37:59,680 fixed computation. Now you can imagine that that it 646 00:37:59,680 --> 00:38:03,760 sure would be nice if instead say they were data availability 647 00:38:03,760 --> 00:38:07,560 sampling proofs. Like, let's say they're 648 00:38:07,560 --> 00:38:09,840 providing some useful. Service of data availability 649 00:38:09,840 --> 00:38:13,040 sampling, or let's say they're providing a proof of transaction 650 00:38:13,040 --> 00:38:16,280 inclusion in the blockchain. Well, luckily, there's a whole 651 00:38:17,080 --> 00:38:27,320 area of research by, by a, by a wonderful cryptography PhD Aki 652 00:38:27,320 --> 00:38:32,920 katas researching exactly this. How can you make ZK proof of 653 00:38:32,920 --> 00:38:38,520 work useful and, and how can you understand and bound the 654 00:38:38,520 --> 00:38:42,000 security characteristics of it? And so there's, there's some 655 00:38:42,000 --> 00:38:43,840 wonderful papers on this that he's published. 656 00:38:44,360 --> 00:38:48,800 We, we were really pleased to, to, to collaborate with him 657 00:38:48,800 --> 00:38:52,280 actually on getting, getting our research paper published on the 658 00:38:52,280 --> 00:38:56,120 NORCKVM last month. But he, he's spent a lot of time 659 00:38:57,680 --> 00:39:01,680 over, over the past, you know, many years publishing papers on 660 00:39:01,680 --> 00:39:03,960 exactly this. How can you make ZK proof of 661 00:39:03,960 --> 00:39:07,320 work useful? And so he's got a proof of 662 00:39:07,320 --> 00:39:10,640 necessary work paper that describes how you can, once you 663 00:39:10,640 --> 00:39:15,920 have a AZK proof of work that's secure in a Nakamoto consensus 664 00:39:15,920 --> 00:39:22,960 model, how you can actually use it to provide proofs of 665 00:39:22,960 --> 00:39:25,960 transaction inclusion and actually use that to power the 666 00:39:25,960 --> 00:39:28,160 chain itself. So you could imagine in that 667 00:39:28,160 --> 00:39:32,040 model what the the chain, every proof that you're doing as a 668 00:39:32,040 --> 00:39:35,920 part of the proof of work is actually a proof that you 669 00:39:35,920 --> 00:39:39,600 included a transaction in a block and. 670 00:39:39,600 --> 00:39:42,800 So the transaction processing. Is the thing being proven in the 671 00:39:42,800 --> 00:39:44,960 proof of work? And so the idea behind proof of 672 00:39:44,960 --> 00:39:50,680 necessary work is that you actually scale the chain with 673 00:39:50,680 --> 00:39:53,880 the proof of work competition. So the more. 674 00:39:53,880 --> 00:39:56,880 Compute power that's going. Into the chain for securing it 675 00:39:57,080 --> 00:40:01,920 it's also powering transaction processing so of course you know 676 00:40:01,920 --> 00:40:04,880 how much compute power has gone into Bitcoin that's a lot of 677 00:40:04,880 --> 00:40:08,320 compute that's a lot of energy imagine if you were able to take 678 00:40:08,320 --> 00:40:12,000 that energy and. The speed that. 679 00:40:12,000 --> 00:40:14,600 And the speed and thorough put of your chain was proportional 680 00:40:15,240 --> 00:40:17,320 to the amount of energy going into the proof work competition. 681 00:40:17,960 --> 00:40:21,560 So do you think the demand? For because I, I guess I can see 682 00:40:21,560 --> 00:40:27,720 different avenues where this DCK proofs could be used. 683 00:40:27,720 --> 00:40:30,480 I mean, one of course would be to basically say like, hey, look 684 00:40:31,320 --> 00:40:34,720 in the blockchain space, there are people using ZK proofs, you 685 00:40:34,720 --> 00:40:36,040 know, kind of all over the place. 686 00:40:36,040 --> 00:40:39,920 You could go to them like, hey, you should use knock ZK proofs 687 00:40:40,320 --> 00:40:47,800 because then you can basically earn some revenues in the form 688 00:40:47,800 --> 00:40:51,760 of knock tokens and, and you know, maybe they're also more 689 00:40:51,760 --> 00:40:53,600 efficient and faster and stuff like that. 690 00:40:53,600 --> 00:40:55,600 But you know, especially you have a sort of, you know, 691 00:40:55,640 --> 00:41:00,080 economic interest in adopting Knock ZK proof. 692 00:41:00,080 --> 00:41:02,920 So I guess that's one. The other one would be more 693 00:41:02,920 --> 00:41:06,760 focused on ZK proofs to power. Knock chain. 694 00:41:06,760 --> 00:41:11,680 Itself, like do you feel one of those directions did do both 695 00:41:11,680 --> 00:41:15,080 those directions exist and are you more bullish on one versus 696 00:41:15,080 --> 00:41:16,800 the other? Yeah. 697 00:41:16,800 --> 00:41:19,200 So I, I. Would say I'm more bullish on 698 00:41:19,200 --> 00:41:23,360 using the ZK proofs to actually power specific capabilities of 699 00:41:23,360 --> 00:41:26,240 Nachain itself. So. 700 00:41:26,240 --> 00:41:29,200 For instance, proofs. Of transaction inclusion so that 701 00:41:29,200 --> 00:41:35,400 transaction processing scales up with with the with the security 702 00:41:35,400 --> 00:41:39,080 budget proofs of data availability so that you can 703 00:41:39,080 --> 00:41:43,640 provide basically data availability sampling at scale 704 00:41:43,680 --> 00:41:45,800 through the proof of work competition for something like a 705 00:41:45,800 --> 00:41:49,480 temporary BLOB store like you'd see from Etherium I I'm really 706 00:41:49,480 --> 00:41:55,520 bullish on these use cases and I think that I think that the 707 00:41:55,520 --> 00:42:01,600 ideal situation is that you end up where knock proofs have have 708 00:42:01,600 --> 00:42:04,400 the competition to generate knock proofs from the ZK proof 709 00:42:04,400 --> 00:42:07,520 of work has generated such a massive amount of prover 710 00:42:07,520 --> 00:42:11,040 capacity that individual knock proofs are extremely cheap and 711 00:42:11,040 --> 00:42:14,800 efficient. And so there there would be no 712 00:42:14,800 --> 00:42:16,560 reason to. Even pay the protocol for the 713 00:42:16,560 --> 00:42:20,600 knock proofs you. See and so the the service 714 00:42:20,600 --> 00:42:22,080 would. Be actually the proofs are just 715 00:42:22,080 --> 00:42:25,120 powering the protocol and you're really paying for settlement, 716 00:42:25,120 --> 00:42:28,160 you're paying for data availability, etcetera. 717 00:42:29,800 --> 00:42:36,320 So you guys launched? Nog chain in May, How did it 718 00:42:36,320 --> 00:42:39,000 launch go? Yeah, launch, launch was. 719 00:42:39,000 --> 00:42:42,360 Crazy man. So let's see yeah, that was, 720 00:42:42,360 --> 00:42:44,400 that was such a crazy time. So many sleepless nights. 721 00:42:45,400 --> 00:42:47,720 So yeah, we, we launched Nog chain. 722 00:42:47,800 --> 00:42:50,400 We, we wanted to get it out the door as fast as we could. 723 00:42:50,400 --> 00:42:52,920 We've been, we've been trying to get it out the door for, I don't 724 00:42:52,920 --> 00:42:57,080 know, like a year. And so we finally had had tested 725 00:42:57,080 --> 00:42:59,160 it enough that we were like, look, the whole thing works. 726 00:42:59,480 --> 00:43:01,600 We just got to get this shipped, get it out the door. 727 00:43:01,600 --> 00:43:04,360 We can keep iterating on this forever if we want to, but we're 728 00:43:04,360 --> 00:43:08,040 just going to get it out and, and, and do it for real. 729 00:43:08,480 --> 00:43:11,000 And, and So what, what we intended to do, as I mentioned 730 00:43:11,000 --> 00:43:14,000 is, is we didn't do a pre mine. So we, we launched it to the 731 00:43:14,000 --> 00:43:17,680 public and we want Nochain to stimulate a global performance 732 00:43:17,680 --> 00:43:19,800 competition around optimizing ZK proofs. 733 00:43:20,720 --> 00:43:23,840 And so the way that we kicked this off was we had published in 734 00:43:23,840 --> 00:43:25,520 multiple, multiple of our pieces. 735 00:43:25,760 --> 00:43:29,200 Hey, you know, the, the, the first Bitcoin reference clients, 736 00:43:29,200 --> 00:43:30,920 they, they weren't optimized either. 737 00:43:31,480 --> 00:43:34,040 People, people quickly came on the scene with GPU's. 738 00:43:34,040 --> 00:43:37,480 People, people did this optimization privately and there 739 00:43:37,480 --> 00:43:41,120 became this big competition and almost like war around around 740 00:43:41,120 --> 00:43:43,960 optimizing and and doing better in the proof of work 741 00:43:43,960 --> 00:43:46,520 competition. And so it's of course. 742 00:43:46,520 --> 00:43:49,480 It's 2025. Now, right, very, very different 743 00:43:49,680 --> 00:43:52,120 from when Bitcoin launched, when Bitcoin launched, only a few 744 00:43:52,120 --> 00:43:57,640 people even knew what hash cash was right and now everybody 745 00:43:57,640 --> 00:44:00,600 knows what cryptocurrencies are. Everybody knows what mining is 746 00:44:00,920 --> 00:44:05,520 and there's actually entire like massive server farms that all 747 00:44:05,520 --> 00:44:07,840 they do is they just wait for new proof of work coins to 748 00:44:07,840 --> 00:44:11,520 launch and then they just go mine the heck out of them and 749 00:44:11,520 --> 00:44:15,800 then dump everything, right. And, and so we, we thought to 750 00:44:15,800 --> 00:44:18,240 ourselves, how can we make the fairest proof of work 751 00:44:18,240 --> 00:44:22,400 competition? We, that we possibly can in 2025 752 00:44:22,760 --> 00:44:26,000 when there's all this like hostile sophisticated compute 753 00:44:26,000 --> 00:44:29,840 ready to be deployed and just like, you know, be mercenary and 754 00:44:29,840 --> 00:44:31,320 take everything in the dump, right? 755 00:44:31,720 --> 00:44:33,680 What, how, how can we, how do we do this right? 756 00:44:34,160 --> 00:44:40,240 And So what we decided to do is we decided to launch, basically 757 00:44:40,280 --> 00:44:44,200 we decided to open source a few weeks ahead of launch A and, and 758 00:44:44,200 --> 00:44:46,920 we published and talked about this in Twitter Spaces for, for 759 00:44:46,920 --> 00:44:49,200 like, I don't know, like a year before we launched. 760 00:44:49,800 --> 00:44:52,880 So we've been talking about this for a year and, and we've put 761 00:44:52,880 --> 00:44:56,080 out there what our business model is going to be everything. 762 00:44:56,080 --> 00:44:59,520 So what we ended up doing is we, we launched a slow reference 763 00:44:59,520 --> 00:45:01,320 client. So it's like a faithful 764 00:45:01,320 --> 00:45:02,600 implementation of all the algorithms. 765 00:45:02,640 --> 00:45:05,840 It's like, you know, if if you take this reference client and 766 00:45:05,840 --> 00:45:08,640 you optimize it and you write them and you make the code go 767 00:45:08,640 --> 00:45:11,280 faster, it will mine you a bunch of knock. 768 00:45:12,200 --> 00:45:15,480 And so we published this a couple weeks in advance of 769 00:45:15,480 --> 00:45:19,040 launch and we said, hey guys, start optimizing this. 770 00:45:20,080 --> 00:45:23,840 And then we published a, A blog post and said, listen, like just 771 00:45:23,840 --> 00:45:27,280 to be super explicit, our business model, because we 772 00:45:27,280 --> 00:45:31,000 didn't do a pre mine, our business model is we're doing 773 00:45:31,600 --> 00:45:34,960 acceleration on this. Like we're, we're making this go 774 00:45:34,960 --> 00:45:38,600 faster and we're going to be mining this with a fast client 775 00:45:38,600 --> 00:45:41,040 from day one. So if you want to get tokens, if 776 00:45:41,040 --> 00:45:44,720 you want to get knocked, you you need to optimize yours too, so 777 00:45:44,720 --> 00:45:48,920 you can be competitive and. And so then we launched on. 778 00:45:48,920 --> 00:45:54,520 May 21 and we had this insane flood of user I mean there was 779 00:45:54,520 --> 00:45:57,640 there were 10,000 nodes join the network in like 30 minutes. 780 00:45:57,640 --> 00:46:04,960 It was crazy and, and, and we, we got, we got started and what 781 00:46:04,960 --> 00:46:10,320 we discovered was very, very quickly was there's a massive 782 00:46:10,320 --> 00:46:17,280 community, particularly in Southeast Asia of, of minors 783 00:46:18,320 --> 00:46:20,120 that. Try to join. 784 00:46:21,040 --> 00:46:23,960 You know, proof of proof of work projects, particularly fair 785 00:46:23,960 --> 00:46:29,440 launch projects have that have a lot of interest in them and that 786 00:46:29,720 --> 00:46:35,640 our communication around our strategy had not gotten to them 787 00:46:35,680 --> 00:46:39,960 either through the language barrier or because they mostly 788 00:46:40,960 --> 00:46:43,640 were listening to YouTube tutorials about how to set up 789 00:46:43,640 --> 00:46:46,160 the note or or whatever. Like they basically weren't 790 00:46:46,160 --> 00:46:49,120 engaging with our material. And so they had no idea that 791 00:46:49,120 --> 00:46:53,680 they needed to optimize the minor to be competitive and so. 792 00:46:53,680 --> 00:46:55,120 We were, we were kind of floored. 793 00:46:55,120 --> 00:46:57,840 Because we got like this massive burst of attention just in the 794 00:46:57,840 --> 00:47:01,640 week or two coming up to launch and we kind of had no idea that 795 00:47:01,640 --> 00:47:03,280 it was going to be the way it was. 796 00:47:03,800 --> 00:47:06,520 So we got out in front of it to the best of our ability. 797 00:47:06,520 --> 00:47:08,920 We said, hey, guys, listen, listen, if you're, if you're 798 00:47:08,920 --> 00:47:11,080 just running the slow code, you're not going to mind any 799 00:47:11,080 --> 00:47:13,320 blocks. You should, you should like go 800 00:47:13,320 --> 00:47:17,200 get some Rust guys and write some faster code so you can be 801 00:47:17,200 --> 00:47:20,680 competitive. And, and honestly, it pissed a 802 00:47:20,680 --> 00:47:24,520 lot of those people off, but, but the strategy worked. 803 00:47:24,520 --> 00:47:31,040 So we, we got a bunch of really amazing developers and a bunch 804 00:47:31,080 --> 00:47:35,320 of like really dedicated and like interested guys from early 805 00:47:35,320 --> 00:47:39,080 bit tenser. We got some people from, from 806 00:47:39,280 --> 00:47:41,440 who kind of came over and started a company who were 807 00:47:41,680 --> 00:47:45,200 exurbit people. We, we got, we got these various 808 00:47:45,200 --> 00:47:49,080 groups of people who who kind of like came to the call to 809 00:47:49,080 --> 00:47:52,520 adventure, if you will, and they optimized their miner and they 810 00:47:52,520 --> 00:47:56,000 got competitive really fast. The first block mined by a third 811 00:47:56,000 --> 00:48:00,520 party miner was block 11/23. And since then, you know, like 812 00:48:00,520 --> 00:48:03,720 right now on the network, we're only mining 30% of blocks and 813 00:48:03,720 --> 00:48:07,480 the other 70% are totally unaffiliated competitive miners. 814 00:48:07,880 --> 00:48:09,880 And we're only like 40 days into the protocol. 815 00:48:09,880 --> 00:48:13,320 So like basically it decentralized super fast. 816 00:48:13,680 --> 00:48:16,240 And there's these different companies that are competing on 817 00:48:16,240 --> 00:48:18,840 the protocol and I've talked to a lot of them and a lot of them 818 00:48:18,840 --> 00:48:22,560 I guess I haven't talked to too. But basically, people optimize 819 00:48:22,560 --> 00:48:27,480 the code and we were able to use this as a strategy to get a 820 00:48:27,480 --> 00:48:32,680 bunch of really useful values, aligned people to join and gives 821 00:48:32,680 --> 00:48:36,240 and basically direct all of the early token rewards to people 822 00:48:36,240 --> 00:48:38,720 that are actually going to work for it and not people that are 823 00:48:38,720 --> 00:48:40,640 just kind of coming in trying to get an air drop. 824 00:48:40,640 --> 00:48:42,680 And then like, you know, they don't care. 825 00:48:42,680 --> 00:48:44,720 They're just like here to because they think they're going 826 00:48:44,720 --> 00:48:46,600 to get rich quick and they're going to jump out, you know? 827 00:48:47,120 --> 00:48:49,560 And so, yeah, launch was crazy, man. 828 00:48:49,640 --> 00:48:53,200 I had no idea what to expect. Yeah, it's definitely very cool. 829 00:48:53,200 --> 00:48:55,720 How? That ecosystem has emerged so 830 00:48:55,720 --> 00:48:59,600 quickly there and how you know these different companies and I 831 00:48:59,720 --> 00:49:02,720 know some of them as well are are involved there. 832 00:49:03,440 --> 00:49:07,480 So you mentioned that, you know, right now it's in this kind of 833 00:49:07,480 --> 00:49:11,120 dumb net phase. The the the proofs of work are 834 00:49:11,120 --> 00:49:15,320 not useful yet. What are the next stages in the 835 00:49:15,320 --> 00:49:18,240 evolution of the network? Yeah, absolutely. 836 00:49:18,240 --> 00:49:20,560 So. I mean, one of the big things is 837 00:49:20,560 --> 00:49:23,840 just getting, getting an E bridge, you know, getting an E 838 00:49:23,840 --> 00:49:27,440 bridge set up so that so that, you know, we can actually be 839 00:49:27,440 --> 00:49:31,040 connected to Internet capital markets and, and, you know, get 840 00:49:31,040 --> 00:49:33,560 early price discovery. I mean, at, at the end of the 841 00:49:33,560 --> 00:49:37,000 day, right, there's kind of this like old, old, I mean, I, it 842 00:49:37,080 --> 00:49:41,120 feels funny saying it's the old meta, but everybody in the past 843 00:49:41,120 --> 00:49:43,240 few years has just been doing this thing where they like try 844 00:49:43,240 --> 00:49:48,120 to get like super hyped up super high private valuations, you 845 00:49:48,120 --> 00:49:51,920 know, the Super high FTV private valuations pre launch, then they 846 00:49:51,920 --> 00:49:55,560 launch and list on an exchange and then it's down forever. 847 00:49:56,120 --> 00:49:59,280 You know, it's like they, they try to like keep liquidity low 848 00:49:59,280 --> 00:50:01,560 so they can like manipulate the market and do all this like 849 00:50:01,560 --> 00:50:04,280 shady crap. And that, I don't know, like, I 850 00:50:04,280 --> 00:50:05,280 don't know why everybody's doing that. 851 00:50:05,280 --> 00:50:07,480 It sucks. Everybody's sick of it. 852 00:50:07,480 --> 00:50:11,320 Nobody wants, nobody wants that. And, and so we tried to do the 853 00:50:11,320 --> 00:50:15,560 exact opposite, basically like, you know, fair launch proof of 854 00:50:15,560 --> 00:50:19,240 work and we want price discovery to be happening as fast as 855 00:50:19,240 --> 00:50:21,640 possible. Because at the end of the day, 856 00:50:21,640 --> 00:50:24,240 like, you know, you live and die by the incentives. 857 00:50:24,240 --> 00:50:25,720 You can't like cheat the incentives. 858 00:50:26,200 --> 00:50:29,400 You know, if your protocol sucks, you know, no amount of 859 00:50:29,400 --> 00:50:33,160 like high FTV, low float shenanigans is going to help. 860 00:50:33,640 --> 00:50:35,840 And so, you know, we believe in what we're doing. 861 00:50:35,840 --> 00:50:37,960 We're, we're aligned around, not chain long term. 862 00:50:38,400 --> 00:50:43,360 And basically we want early, we want, we want to see what the 863 00:50:43,360 --> 00:50:46,560 community does and we want to see what happens when you 864 00:50:46,560 --> 00:50:49,880 connect, when you connect to, to broader Internet capital 865 00:50:49,880 --> 00:50:51,720 markets. And so that's one of the, that's 866 00:50:51,720 --> 00:50:53,840 one of the first steps is just like, you know, getting, getting 867 00:50:53,840 --> 00:50:57,120 connected to, to the rest of, to the rest of the market. 868 00:50:57,520 --> 00:51:00,800 And then from there, we're, we're going to be adding hash 869 00:51:00,800 --> 00:51:04,880 time locks to support atomic swaps rather shortly. 870 00:51:05,520 --> 00:51:08,880 We were currently working on temporary BLOB storage so that 871 00:51:08,880 --> 00:51:12,320 we can have knock chain start providing data availability 872 00:51:12,800 --> 00:51:15,360 services. Ideally what we want to do is, 873 00:51:15,360 --> 00:51:19,840 as I mentioned, we want to move towards off chain execution and 874 00:51:19,840 --> 00:51:24,240 on chain verification in an app roll up model where applications 875 00:51:24,240 --> 00:51:28,360 are issuing tokens on chain and they're they're able to perform 876 00:51:28,360 --> 00:51:33,240 logic and, and do a lot of work off chain and use BLOB storage 877 00:51:33,240 --> 00:51:37,760 on on the chain and, and, and use the lock scripts and 878 00:51:37,760 --> 00:51:41,480 composability through intents to interact with other app roll 879 00:51:41,480 --> 00:51:43,280 ups. So you didn't have your game or 880 00:51:43,280 --> 00:51:47,840 your or your club or whatever executing off chain and then and 881 00:51:47,840 --> 00:51:50,160 then interacting with assets on chain. 882 00:51:51,680 --> 00:51:53,040 So that's that's. Where we're, that's where we're 883 00:51:53,040 --> 00:51:55,600 headed. One one way to think about this 884 00:51:55,600 --> 00:52:00,280 is it's basically. It doesn't really make sense to 885 00:52:00,280 --> 00:52:03,120 try. To like scale your blockchain by 886 00:52:03,120 --> 00:52:06,880 just centralizing and having it like do more and more replicated 887 00:52:06,880 --> 00:52:09,560 wasteful execution. What makes the most sense is to 888 00:52:09,560 --> 00:52:13,400 have as much execution happening off the chain as possible, but 889 00:52:13,400 --> 00:52:16,920 have the chain acting as a central coordination layer for 890 00:52:16,920 --> 00:52:19,440 all of that off chain execution and providing composability 891 00:52:19,440 --> 00:52:20,960 between all those off chain institutions. 892 00:52:21,560 --> 00:52:23,280 And so we're doing that through intents. 893 00:52:24,640 --> 00:52:27,400 And luckily we're in the UTHO note model. 894 00:52:27,840 --> 00:52:30,360 And so that's, that's how you do intents. 895 00:52:30,360 --> 00:52:34,800 Basically is is is by having these individual notes be able 896 00:52:34,800 --> 00:52:36,800 to be interacted with independently and then be able 897 00:52:36,800 --> 00:52:39,520 to compose atomically. And So what? 898 00:52:39,520 --> 00:52:40,920 We're moving. Toward is. 899 00:52:41,240 --> 00:52:44,000 Towards providing data availability to the chain, 900 00:52:44,720 --> 00:52:47,520 starting to provide these like very basic D5 primitives like 901 00:52:47,520 --> 00:52:51,960 atomic swaps and and then moving towards programmability. 902 00:52:53,960 --> 00:52:57,680 OK, OK, so. This is another topic I wanted 903 00:52:57,680 --> 00:53:01,320 to talk about. So what is it going to look like 904 00:53:01,320 --> 00:53:04,760 to build applications on top of NOC Chain? 905 00:53:04,760 --> 00:53:08,400 And how does it differ from, let's say the Ethereum paradigm 906 00:53:08,400 --> 00:53:11,600 of how, you know, you create like utility smart contract, 907 00:53:11,600 --> 00:53:14,200 then people can send transactions to interact with 908 00:53:14,200 --> 00:53:16,560 these smart contracts. Like how is it going to be 909 00:53:16,560 --> 00:53:18,960 different for NOC Chain? Yeah, absolutely. 910 00:53:18,960 --> 00:53:21,320 So. As I mentioned, NOC chain uses 911 00:53:21,320 --> 00:53:25,360 the Note model, so UTFOS and So what that means is that every 912 00:53:25,360 --> 00:53:28,840 note has a lock on it and so you. 913 00:53:28,840 --> 00:53:30,640 Can spin the note if you. Can unlock it. 914 00:53:31,200 --> 00:53:35,080 So the most common way to think of this is if you sign if you 915 00:53:35,080 --> 00:53:38,920 sign it then then you can spend it if your key matches right. 916 00:53:39,520 --> 00:53:41,800 That's the most simple possible lock script. 917 00:53:42,080 --> 00:53:45,960 Now another lock script is a time lock and. 918 00:53:45,960 --> 00:53:47,680 So that's another one. It's like you can. 919 00:53:47,680 --> 00:53:49,920 Spin it after ever however so many blocks. 920 00:53:50,000 --> 00:53:54,880 That's another kind of simple lock script, but the the idea 921 00:53:54,880 --> 00:54:01,200 behind intents is that you can build more complex and more. 922 00:54:04,000 --> 00:54:07,640 More semantically meaningful. Conditions for spending points. 923 00:54:08,520 --> 00:54:14,080 So for instance, I could say I'm willing to spend these coins if 924 00:54:14,520 --> 00:54:20,360 you trade me 100 USDC for them. That's a pretty complex 925 00:54:20,360 --> 00:54:24,400 condition and if you have these like swap. 926 00:54:24,520 --> 00:54:27,080 Conditions as an example, that would be, you know, I'm willing 927 00:54:27,080 --> 00:54:28,960 to swap these coins for 100 USDC. 928 00:54:30,000 --> 00:54:35,000 Then you can have solvers be going through all of the, all 929 00:54:35,000 --> 00:54:37,640 the notes on the chain and saying, wait a second, I can, I 930 00:54:37,640 --> 00:54:43,120 can make money by unlocking by unlocking these coins and giving 931 00:54:43,120 --> 00:54:44,880 these guys their hundred USDC, right? 932 00:54:44,880 --> 00:54:50,240 Like I'll, I'll make that swap. And and so the idea of course 933 00:54:50,240 --> 00:54:54,440 here is that you can actually use the locked scripts as the 934 00:54:54,440 --> 00:54:57,920 contracts. And so the way to the way to 935 00:54:57,920 --> 00:55:02,160 kind of understand how this relates to notchain is notchain 936 00:55:02,640 --> 00:55:07,120 allows assets to to compose with each other through locked 937 00:55:07,120 --> 00:55:10,080 scripts. So you can have assets interact 938 00:55:10,080 --> 00:55:13,360 with each other through locked scripts, but the execution is 939 00:55:13,360 --> 00:55:15,760 happening off chain and being submitted to the chain. 940 00:55:16,920 --> 00:55:22,040 And because notchain is a ZK native chain, we expect. 941 00:55:22,040 --> 00:55:25,040 That for all these. Like complicated lock scripts, 942 00:55:25,040 --> 00:55:27,760 instead of having to like execute these complex 943 00:55:27,760 --> 00:55:30,560 computations on chain, what you're going to be doing is 944 00:55:30,560 --> 00:55:34,880 you're going to be verifying a proof of the lock condition on 945 00:55:34,880 --> 00:55:37,080 chain. So for. 946 00:55:37,080 --> 00:55:38,440 Instance does that. Does that make sense? 947 00:55:39,160 --> 00:55:41,000 Yeah, it does make sense. I mean one. 948 00:55:41,000 --> 00:55:47,600 Thing I'm curious about here is in terms of the capabilities is 949 00:55:47,600 --> 00:55:51,240 that, you know, on Ethereum, you know, of course have like, you 950 00:55:51,240 --> 00:55:55,800 know, lending markets, things like unit swap, you have dolls, 951 00:55:55,800 --> 00:55:57,960 you have a lot of different types of smart contract 952 00:55:57,960 --> 00:56:02,960 applications. Do you think that this approach 953 00:56:03,040 --> 00:56:06,960 that Noxane is taking, is that going to be like as powerful? 954 00:56:08,440 --> 00:56:10,400 Yeah. It's going to be as powerful. 955 00:56:11,080 --> 00:56:15,880 And what what we're seeing a lot of today is particularly for 956 00:56:15,880 --> 00:56:21,920 complex applications, a lot of a lot of a lot of complex 957 00:56:21,920 --> 00:56:25,200 applications are actually moving on to their own custom stacks 958 00:56:26,640 --> 00:56:27,480 and. You. 959 00:56:27,480 --> 00:56:29,640 You and I both know that. A lot of those customs custom 960 00:56:29,640 --> 00:56:34,600 stacks are just Cosmos. But but, but look, a lot of 961 00:56:34,600 --> 00:56:36,920 these, a lot of people are moving over to app chains. 962 00:56:37,280 --> 00:56:40,280 When when people first started pitching app chains, app chains 963 00:56:40,280 --> 00:56:43,080 were not far along enough. Like basically, app chains were 964 00:56:43,080 --> 00:56:46,640 hyped before app chains were ready, but app chains are how 965 00:56:46,640 --> 00:56:49,600 these large applications are going to scale, period. 966 00:56:50,040 --> 00:56:52,280 And regardless of what chain you're talking about, whether 967 00:56:52,280 --> 00:56:55,440 it's pumped up fun on Solana doing their own chain or, or, 968 00:56:55,440 --> 00:56:58,560 or, you know, Robin Hood deciding to do their own chain, 969 00:56:58,560 --> 00:57:03,440 whatever specific products that are going to do really, really 970 00:57:03,440 --> 00:57:06,360 large amounts of, of transactions, large amounts of 971 00:57:06,360 --> 00:57:11,160 data moving through them are going to be executing on their 972 00:57:11,160 --> 00:57:12,360 own. Whether we call them a chain, 973 00:57:12,360 --> 00:57:14,520 whether we call them an app, it doesn't really matter. 974 00:57:14,800 --> 00:57:16,560 They're not going to be executing in the main chain 975 00:57:16,560 --> 00:57:20,560 state machine. And So what we're doing with 976 00:57:20,560 --> 00:57:23,360 Knock? Chain is we have knock apps. 977 00:57:23,560 --> 00:57:27,800 Knock apps execute off chain. OK, if you want a central limit 978 00:57:27,800 --> 00:57:30,360 order book, you're going to run, you're going to run it as a 979 00:57:30,360 --> 00:57:32,960 knock app. If you want your AMM, you're 980 00:57:32,960 --> 00:57:36,840 going to run it as a knock app. If you want a lending protocol, 981 00:57:36,840 --> 00:57:38,040 you're going to run it as a knock app. 982 00:57:38,080 --> 00:57:42,800 It's going to execute off chain, but it's going to have locks on 983 00:57:42,800 --> 00:57:47,040 assets on chain. And so you're going to 984 00:57:47,040 --> 00:57:50,160 basically. Post proofs to the chain and 985 00:57:50,160 --> 00:57:52,360 those proofs can unlock and move funds around. 986 00:57:54,440 --> 00:57:57,320 And those and these. Different apps are going to 987 00:57:57,320 --> 00:58:01,440 compose on chain. OK, so all. 988 00:58:01,440 --> 00:58:06,000 Of the actual assets are on chain, and so as apps post 989 00:58:06,000 --> 00:58:09,000 proofs, they're going to be interacting with each other 990 00:58:09,000 --> 00:58:12,560 through the chain as a central coordinator, but the chain's not 991 00:58:12,560 --> 00:58:13,680 doing the. Execution it's just. 992 00:58:13,680 --> 00:58:17,280 Coordinating and composing the intent matching. 993 00:58:18,480 --> 00:58:20,440 Very cool. Yeah, I think that is a very. 994 00:58:20,440 --> 00:58:24,960 Powerful approach, you mentioned that you guys are building, I 995 00:58:24,960 --> 00:58:27,680 think decentralized exchange. Are there any other products 996 00:58:27,680 --> 00:58:29,400 that you guys are planning on building? 997 00:58:30,280 --> 00:58:33,200 Well, so far we've seen the. Community's been building a 998 00:58:33,200 --> 00:58:36,400 bunch of products. So I'm aware of another company, 999 00:58:36,400 --> 00:58:39,600 Southwest Pool Supply that I, I love the name. 1000 00:58:39,600 --> 00:58:42,720 It's so funny, but Southwest Pool supply, they're making, 1001 00:58:42,760 --> 00:58:45,120 they're making a mining pool on, on NOC. 1002 00:58:45,120 --> 00:58:49,320 They call it NOC Pool and and they've made an explorer. 1003 00:58:49,320 --> 00:58:51,000 It's beautiful. You should look at it. 1004 00:58:51,000 --> 00:58:54,840 NOC blocks.com, I got to say, it's not amazing metrics on it, 1005 00:58:54,840 --> 00:58:58,240 showing minor decentralization, showing the supply schedule. 1006 00:58:58,600 --> 00:59:00,720 I mean, these guys probably did a better job than I would have 1007 00:59:00,720 --> 00:59:02,280 done. I mean, it's, it's beautiful. 1008 00:59:02,280 --> 00:59:05,080 It looks great. I, we've been seeing a massive 1009 00:59:05,080 --> 00:59:10,960 amount of, of, of work starting to go in from companies that, 1010 00:59:11,120 --> 00:59:13,680 that just sprang up basically like, you know, we're like, 1011 00:59:13,680 --> 00:59:16,560 we're not paying these guys, these, these guys, these guys 1012 00:59:16,560 --> 00:59:19,160 are just doing, doing the work because they believe in the 1013 00:59:19,160 --> 00:59:20,760 vision that they want to participate. 1014 00:59:21,120 --> 00:59:24,080 And the proof of work protocol incentivizes them to get their 1015 00:59:24,080 --> 00:59:26,840 hands dirty and actually work to, to create value. 1016 00:59:27,120 --> 00:59:30,000 And so for now, we're, we're focused on building up the 1017 00:59:30,000 --> 00:59:33,680 protocol. We're focused on on, you know, 1018 00:59:33,680 --> 00:59:36,840 building bridging on building and we're going to be working on 1019 00:59:37,120 --> 00:59:41,560 doing a decentralized exchange probably probably starting in 1020 00:59:41,680 --> 00:59:46,280 the first half of 2026. And, and yeah, we're not, we're 1021 00:59:46,280 --> 00:59:48,520 not doing, we're not going to try to do like every possible 1022 00:59:48,520 --> 00:59:49,720 product all at once or something. 1023 00:59:49,720 --> 00:59:54,120 We want we want to like basically what? 1024 00:59:54,120 --> 00:59:57,120 Is it we want to? Pick our shots, you know what 1025 00:59:57,120 --> 01:00:00,200 I'm saying? Yeah, Yeah. 1026 01:00:00,760 --> 01:00:07,240 You sent me a document where you talked a bit about L1 tokens and 1027 01:00:07,240 --> 01:00:09,720 what makes them valuable and you sort of put them into two 1028 01:00:09,720 --> 01:00:12,480 categories. 1 is the store value asset. 1029 01:00:12,480 --> 01:00:16,840 The other thing, revenue generating asset, you know, I 1030 01:00:16,840 --> 01:00:21,480 guess Ethereum would be one that you know, I mean it kind of 1031 01:00:21,520 --> 01:00:24,560 maybe fits into both pockets as well, but like it has that 1032 01:00:24,560 --> 01:00:26,880 revenue generating component too. 1033 01:00:27,280 --> 01:00:30,680 So where do you see knock fit in in this framework? 1034 01:00:31,440 --> 01:00:36,000 Yeah, absolutely so. I, I've been, I've been writing 1035 01:00:36,000 --> 01:00:39,440 about this and thinking about this for for a while now about 1036 01:00:39,520 --> 01:00:43,000 how to understand and and create a valuation model for L1 assets 1037 01:00:43,440 --> 01:00:47,400 and placeholder conveniently scooped me a little bit. 1038 01:00:47,400 --> 01:00:51,240 They, they published something yesterday on where they actually 1039 01:00:51,240 --> 01:00:54,800 talk about, they don't the, the, the, the thrust of their essay 1040 01:00:54,800 --> 01:00:57,000 is a little bit different than than what I've been thinking 1041 01:00:57,000 --> 01:00:59,760 about, but they, but they make the same dichotomy that, that 1042 01:00:59,760 --> 01:01:03,360 I've been looking at. And so I was like, I was like, 1043 01:01:03,360 --> 01:01:05,880 damn, I got to publish this Then, you know, I, I got to get 1044 01:01:05,880 --> 01:01:07,280 this out of here. Like this is crazy. 1045 01:01:07,680 --> 01:01:11,440 So the, the idea is that you can understand blockchain protocols 1046 01:01:11,440 --> 01:01:15,720 as being either primarily value storage protocols or revenue 1047 01:01:15,720 --> 01:01:19,120 generation protocols. And it's not that you can't be 1048 01:01:19,120 --> 01:01:22,720 both, it's that often you're optimized more toward one than 1049 01:01:22,720 --> 01:01:25,840 the other. And so the way to think about 1050 01:01:25,840 --> 01:01:28,560 this is a value storage protocol is a digital gold. 1051 01:01:28,640 --> 01:01:32,080 It's like Bitcoin. And it, the idea is it's a 1052 01:01:32,080 --> 01:01:36,680 neutral store of value there. You're a credibly neutral 1053 01:01:36,680 --> 01:01:38,680 protocol. You're not doing things like 1054 01:01:38,880 --> 01:01:41,520 reversing hacks and giving people their money back. 1055 01:01:41,800 --> 01:01:43,440 You're very censorship resistant. 1056 01:01:43,440 --> 01:01:48,440 It's very difficult to, to change your social consensus. 1057 01:01:48,880 --> 01:01:52,240 You have an immutable supply schedule and if someone buys the 1058 01:01:52,240 --> 01:01:55,520 asset that it's provably scarce and they know what's, they know 1059 01:01:55,520 --> 01:01:58,680 what they're getting into. And so they know that they can 1060 01:01:58,680 --> 01:02:04,240 buy it and that basically it's going to be a, a, a hard store 1061 01:02:04,240 --> 01:02:06,280 of value. It may fluctuate and be 1062 01:02:06,280 --> 01:02:10,880 volatile, but it's going to be scarce forever, period and so. 1063 01:02:10,880 --> 01:02:14,000 Bitcoin is is the best. Example of of the digital gold 1064 01:02:14,000 --> 01:02:16,400 that we have today and of course we see we see a lot of the 1065 01:02:16,400 --> 01:02:19,760 narrative around sound money resonating and and pitching this 1066 01:02:19,760 --> 01:02:24,080 exact thing and and so Bitcoin is kind of the preeminent value 1067 01:02:24,080 --> 01:02:27,760 storage protocol today and one of the things that makes this 1068 01:02:27,760 --> 01:02:31,320 dichotomy really useful is well the way that. 1069 01:02:31,320 --> 01:02:33,840 You would value. Something like a digital gold or 1070 01:02:33,840 --> 01:02:37,600 a sound money is just fundamentally different than the 1071 01:02:37,600 --> 01:02:44,280 way that you would value say like Tesla stock, OK, Like Tesla 1072 01:02:44,280 --> 01:02:47,600 stock is valuable, right? Or I don't know. 1073 01:02:47,640 --> 01:02:50,080 Like Google stock. Or open AI stock like these 1074 01:02:50,080 --> 01:02:51,400 things are, these things are valuable. 1075 01:02:51,400 --> 01:02:53,000 We agree they're valuable, Everybody thinks they're 1076 01:02:53,000 --> 01:02:57,920 valuable, people want them, but but that's not a store of value. 1077 01:02:58,640 --> 01:03:00,480 Just as something's valuable doesn't mean it's a store of 1078 01:03:00,480 --> 01:03:01,240 value. OK. 1079 01:03:01,840 --> 01:03:04,600 So this is where I kind of bring in the the differentiation 1080 01:03:04,600 --> 01:03:06,360 around a revenue generation protocol. 1081 01:03:06,360 --> 01:03:10,000 So on crypto Twitter, we see a lot of talk about the the 1082 01:03:10,000 --> 01:03:13,240 revenue meta and this idea that we should kind of value 1083 01:03:13,240 --> 01:03:15,440 protocols in terms of their ability to generate revenue 1084 01:03:15,440 --> 01:03:18,600 through protocol services. And so the idea here is that 1085 01:03:18,600 --> 01:03:21,120 there's kind of this dichotomy of these two different centers 1086 01:03:21,120 --> 01:03:25,000 of gravity that protocols are naturally attracted to of 1087 01:03:25,000 --> 01:03:27,400 whether they whether they're primarily a value storage 1088 01:03:27,400 --> 01:03:30,280 protocol or whether they're primarily just providing 1089 01:03:30,280 --> 01:03:32,640 services as a protocol that they're generating revenue 1090 01:03:32,640 --> 01:03:35,000 through. So as you. 1091 01:03:35,000 --> 01:03:38,720 As you mentioned. Ethereum, right it it does do 1092 01:03:38,720 --> 01:03:43,200 some of both it it serves as a medium of exchange and a unit of 1093 01:03:43,200 --> 01:03:47,880 account for the L twos and for the applications that use it and 1094 01:03:47,880 --> 01:03:53,160 and and does does rather well for it in relation to the actual 1095 01:03:53,560 --> 01:03:55,960 or I should say that the valuation of Ethereum is rather 1096 01:03:55,960 --> 01:03:58,400 high as a multiple of the revenue it generates. 1097 01:03:58,800 --> 01:04:00,800 And part of this is because of the network effects are on the 1098 01:04:00,800 --> 01:04:03,080 way that it's used as a medium of exchange in a unit of 1099 01:04:03,080 --> 01:04:05,120 account. We can look at it kind of an 1100 01:04:05,120 --> 01:04:08,440 alternative example of a revenue generation protocol of Celestia. 1101 01:04:09,680 --> 01:04:12,120 If we look at Celestia as a revenue generation protocol, 1102 01:04:12,120 --> 01:04:16,080 well, they really don't have any value storage capability. 1103 01:04:16,400 --> 01:04:19,080 They only really are valued in terms of their revenue 1104 01:04:19,080 --> 01:04:21,560 generation. There's not some big. 1105 01:04:21,560 --> 01:04:28,480 Network. Of applications that are built 1106 01:04:28,480 --> 01:04:33,040 on top of Celestia and using Tia, their token as a medium of 1107 01:04:33,040 --> 01:04:36,960 exchange or or otherwise treating it as a store of value. 1108 01:04:37,400 --> 01:04:42,080 And they basically like people basically only value Celestia in 1109 01:04:42,080 --> 01:04:43,800 terms of the revenue that it generates. 1110 01:04:45,080 --> 01:04:47,880 And so you can see the actual value of Celestia and the value 1111 01:04:47,880 --> 01:04:50,680 of Etherium make a lot more sense when you start to 1112 01:04:50,680 --> 01:04:53,640 understand the difference between valuing something in 1113 01:04:53,640 --> 01:04:56,440 terms of revenue generation versus valuing it in terms of 1114 01:04:56,440 --> 01:04:59,960 value storage capability. So as you mentioned. 1115 01:04:59,960 --> 01:05:02,640 Ethereum does have some of both. It does have some value storage, 1116 01:05:02,960 --> 01:05:06,920 but it is primarily a revenue generation through its data 1117 01:05:06,920 --> 01:05:09,640 availability services, through its smart contract execution, 1118 01:05:10,480 --> 01:05:12,560 etcetera. So and of course it was the 1119 01:05:12,560 --> 01:05:17,160 first programmable koi. And so as a result, of course, 1120 01:05:17,160 --> 01:05:19,640 it was able to develop an A wonderful network effect and 1121 01:05:19,640 --> 01:05:21,720 it's widely considered the you know #2 asset. 1122 01:05:22,360 --> 01:05:25,760 So the idea of, of course. Behind this is not. 1123 01:05:25,760 --> 01:05:29,160 To say value storage or revenue generation that that either 1 is 1124 01:05:29,680 --> 01:05:32,120 good or bad, it's to it's to have a mental framework for 1125 01:05:32,120 --> 01:05:35,240 being able to value these assets appropriately. 1126 01:05:36,600 --> 01:05:39,280 So I'm going to pause. Does does that make sense? 1127 01:05:40,360 --> 01:05:43,440 Yeah, absolutely then. Nice SO. 1128 01:05:44,040 --> 01:05:47,760 In terms in terms of NOD chain, NOD chain is primarily a value 1129 01:05:47,760 --> 01:05:50,640 storage protocol. NOD chain had no pre mine. 1130 01:05:51,080 --> 01:05:53,160 Nod chain has an immutable supply schedule. 1131 01:05:53,640 --> 01:05:57,360 NOC chain is scarce. The only way to get it, at least 1132 01:05:57,360 --> 01:06:01,880 right now is, is through mining it and taking part in this, in 1133 01:06:01,880 --> 01:06:05,480 this hard competition. And so NOC chain is going to 1134 01:06:05,480 --> 01:06:09,000 market not not as yet another general purpose application 1135 01:06:09,000 --> 01:06:12,360 layer where we're going to like where the whole focus of NOC 1136 01:06:12,360 --> 01:06:17,160 chain is on bringing developers onto the ecosystem, right? 1137 01:06:18,320 --> 01:06:21,360 The the NOC chain is going to market as a store of value. 1138 01:06:21,800 --> 01:06:27,160 NOC chain is going to market as a digital gold and. 1139 01:06:27,520 --> 01:06:29,880 So the way to understand. This is not that we are against 1140 01:06:29,880 --> 01:06:31,840 revenue generation. As I mentioned, we're building 1141 01:06:31,840 --> 01:06:34,320 out data availability services. We want you to be able to do 1142 01:06:35,440 --> 01:06:38,320 programmability. But the way to understand it is 1143 01:06:38,320 --> 01:06:43,480 that the the frame for for the core economic center of gravity 1144 01:06:43,480 --> 01:06:49,080 of NOC chain is around a scarce value storage instrument. 1145 01:06:50,040 --> 01:06:53,000 And so all of the revenue generation capabilities that are 1146 01:06:53,000 --> 01:06:56,200 going to be built over time for data availability for 1147 01:06:56,200 --> 01:06:59,960 programmability are about increasing the monetary velocity 1148 01:06:59,960 --> 01:07:02,000 and the usefulness of that digital gold. 1149 01:07:03,160 --> 01:07:06,080 So the framing that I that I've kind of used and that I like is 1150 01:07:06,440 --> 01:07:12,600 that notchain is programmable sound money that scales so with. 1151 01:07:12,600 --> 01:07:14,640 Bitcoin it has. Practically no revenue 1152 01:07:14,640 --> 01:07:16,320 generation capability whatsoever. 1153 01:07:16,560 --> 01:07:18,760 It's only a value storage instrument. 1154 01:07:19,800 --> 01:07:23,320 The blockchain fees from moving transactions on Bitcoin are so 1155 01:07:23,320 --> 01:07:28,720 minuscule as as as a percentage or as as even like just any 1156 01:07:28,720 --> 01:07:33,080 yield that of course people hypothesize at times about the 1157 01:07:33,080 --> 01:07:36,560 idea that Bitcoin if it's if it's price doesn't go up at a 1158 01:07:36,560 --> 01:07:40,480 fast enough rate that eventually the the block rewards will go so 1159 01:07:40,480 --> 01:07:43,800 low that they won't actually serve and justify securing the 1160 01:07:43,800 --> 01:07:47,600 protocol because. It doesn't have any revenue 1161 01:07:47,600 --> 01:07:50,240 generation. Capability as a protocol. 1162 01:07:50,800 --> 01:07:55,080 And so the way to understand this, I think, is that it all 1163 01:07:55,080 --> 01:07:56,080 the. Protocols that have been 1164 01:07:56,080 --> 01:07:57,560 launched. Over the past seven or eight 1165 01:07:57,560 --> 01:08:01,560 years have as I mentioned been really focused on being proof of 1166 01:08:01,560 --> 01:08:04,280 stake, pre mined coins that are marketing to developers saying 1167 01:08:04,280 --> 01:08:07,880 we're a better Ethereum. They're all revenue generation 1168 01:08:07,880 --> 01:08:12,080 protocols. Primarily and. 1169 01:08:12,080 --> 01:08:17,439 So Bitcoin is really the value storage protocol today and I 1170 01:08:17,439 --> 01:08:20,000 think it's silly to think that there can't be others 1171 01:08:20,080 --> 01:08:22,520 particularly that have differentiated characteristics 1172 01:08:23,560 --> 01:08:25,279 and so not chain. Is a value storage. 1173 01:08:25,279 --> 01:08:28,840 Protocol that we intend to build in revenue generation 1174 01:08:28,840 --> 01:08:31,680 capabilities over time. OK, cool. 1175 01:08:32,640 --> 01:08:41,439 I have. 11 more question here. So quantum computing is 1176 01:08:41,439 --> 01:08:45,479 something that's, you know, coming at some point and, you 1177 01:08:45,479 --> 01:08:49,120 know, there's some concern about, well, I mean, expected to 1178 01:08:49,120 --> 01:08:54,680 break a lot of encryption. What do you think is going to be 1179 01:08:54,680 --> 01:09:02,200 the effect of quantum computing on ZK and on maybe knock chain 1180 01:09:02,200 --> 01:09:03,880 in particular? Yeah. 1181 01:09:03,880 --> 01:09:06,479 So quantum computing's an. Interesting topic because it's 1182 01:09:06,600 --> 01:09:10,640 it's one of those things where every like everybody wants to be 1183 01:09:10,640 --> 01:09:13,560 safe against quantum computers, kind of like how you want to be 1184 01:09:13,560 --> 01:09:16,960 safe against natural disasters in earthquakes, but. 1185 01:09:17,319 --> 01:09:20,880 There there is an open. Question of how, how you know, 1186 01:09:21,680 --> 01:09:27,240 let, let's say you don't live near any center of geological 1187 01:09:27,240 --> 01:09:30,800 activity, how, how likely is it that that you're going to be 1188 01:09:31,200 --> 01:09:34,520 struck by an earthquake, right? Like probably pretty unlikely. 1189 01:09:35,080 --> 01:09:39,000 So I think in a similar way, quantum computing, I think 1190 01:09:39,000 --> 01:09:41,640 quantum computing is becoming more practical over time. 1191 01:09:42,160 --> 01:09:44,479 I, I think that over time it's probably going to be able to do 1192 01:09:44,479 --> 01:09:47,319 more stuff. Some of the breakthroughs and, 1193 01:09:47,359 --> 01:09:51,040 and being able to use quantum topological techniques to get 1194 01:09:51,600 --> 01:09:54,960 more and more stable configurations of qubits are, 1195 01:09:55,040 --> 01:09:58,440 are rather interesting. But we're pretty far from being 1196 01:09:58,440 --> 01:10:01,240 able to implement Shore's algorithm and actually get a 1197 01:10:01,240 --> 01:10:06,800 speed up, you know, practical implementation of, of any of 1198 01:10:06,800 --> 01:10:08,960 these attacks. That being said, of course, it 1199 01:10:08,960 --> 01:10:11,400 takes time to upgrade protocols and it makes sense to plan in 1200 01:10:11,400 --> 01:10:17,600 advance just in case, right? So Starks, depending on the the 1201 01:10:17,600 --> 01:10:21,480 hash function that you're using for your random Oracle, are 1202 01:10:21,480 --> 01:10:28,280 already plausibly post quantum secure and and so algebraic 1203 01:10:28,280 --> 01:10:34,080 hashes vary in in their in their security against these types of 1204 01:10:34,080 --> 01:10:36,280 attacks. And algebraic hashes are the 1205 01:10:36,280 --> 01:10:42,480 ones commonly used for for securing and and making ZKVMS go 1206 01:10:42,480 --> 01:10:44,000 fast. So the reason is, is that 1207 01:10:44,000 --> 01:10:46,760 because they're algebraic, you can model the relationships 1208 01:10:46,760 --> 01:10:49,200 between the hash functions more easily in terms of polynomials, 1209 01:10:49,200 --> 01:10:54,840 etcetera. So Starks are plausibly post 1210 01:10:54,840 --> 01:10:58,200 quantum secure depending on the hash function you use. 1211 01:11:00,120 --> 01:11:02,680 And of course you can switch out the hash function reasonably 1212 01:11:02,680 --> 01:11:05,480 easily for something like Blake three if you really need to. 1213 01:11:06,000 --> 01:11:10,520 So there's a pretty easy path to taking to taking notching to be 1214 01:11:10,520 --> 01:11:12,960 post quantum secure because we have built on stars. 1215 01:11:14,080 --> 01:11:17,280 The the main piece to think about would be the signature 1216 01:11:17,280 --> 01:11:23,360 scheme. So signatures and and making 1217 01:11:23,360 --> 01:11:26,280 making sure that we have an upgrade path to a post quantum 1218 01:11:26,280 --> 01:11:29,480 signature scheme. So notching is not currently 1219 01:11:32,240 --> 01:11:33,880 secure. Against quantum attacks if. 1220 01:11:34,000 --> 01:11:38,360 Something just popped on the market, but we'd be able to 1221 01:11:38,360 --> 01:11:39,840 upgrade. We're we're not using any. 1222 01:11:40,040 --> 01:11:44,360 So if we were using a trusted setup as an example, it would be 1223 01:11:44,360 --> 01:11:48,160 a lot harder to to be able to like it would be an open 1224 01:11:48,160 --> 01:11:52,120 research question as per how to make it secure. 1225 01:11:52,240 --> 01:11:55,120 But we're not we're we're in a transparent scheme using very 1226 01:11:55,120 --> 01:12:00,360 battle tested cryptography. And so the the path to the path 1227 01:12:00,360 --> 01:12:04,840 to being totally post quantum would is a is a lot clearer, 1228 01:12:05,480 --> 01:12:08,600 particularly on the timelines that that we would need to be 1229 01:12:08,600 --> 01:12:11,240 thinking about, which is like a decade. 1230 01:12:12,440 --> 01:12:13,280 Cool. Well. 1231 01:12:13,280 --> 01:12:15,360 Thank you so much for coming. On Logan, that was super 1232 01:12:15,360 --> 01:12:17,360 fascinating. I do think you guys have 1233 01:12:17,360 --> 01:12:21,200 launched one of the most original and unusual networks 1234 01:12:21,720 --> 01:12:25,400 that has a lot of like, you know, radical design decisions 1235 01:12:25,400 --> 01:12:27,960 you guys have made. And and it's it's just like it's 1236 01:12:27,960 --> 01:12:31,360 certainly one of the most novel things in crypto right now. 1237 01:12:31,360 --> 01:12:35,400 So I'm really excited about seeing the Nocturne ecosystem 1238 01:12:35,400 --> 01:12:39,840 evolve and it feels like it's off to a great start. 1239 01:12:39,840 --> 01:12:41,680 So thank you so much for coming on. 1240 01:12:42,240 --> 01:12:43,640 Thanks for the time, Brian. I appreciate it.