Back when we were thinking of NOC Chain in 2023, we said we
want to solve distribution. We want to get more people doing
proofs with the NOC ZKVM than anything else as fast as
possible in a self reinforcing process.
And so we built a zero knowledge proof of work competition, a ZK
proof of work in NOC Chain. The proof of work competition is
to solve and and build ZK proofs.
We wanted to use the consensus mechanism to drive and
incentivize the production at industrial scale of 0 knowledge
proofs. The core economic center of
gravity of North Chain is around a scarce value storage
instrument. And so all of the revenue
generation capabilities that are going to be built over time for
data availability, for programmability are about
increasing the monetary velocity and the usefulness of that
digital goal. So the framing that I that I've
kind of used and that I like is that not chain is programmable
sound money that scales. Welcome to Epicenter, the show
which talks about the technologies, projects and
people that are having decentralisation and production
revolution. I'm Brian Crane and today I'm
speaking with Logan Allen, who is the CEO of ZOR.
SORB is a company that's been working on ZK technology and
they have also launched new proof of work ZK chain called
Knock Chain very recently. So really excited to talk with
Logan today. Just before we get started,
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Cool. Well, thanks so much for coming
on, Logan. Happy to be here.
Yeah, it's been, I think a long time coming.
I mean, I've been aware of Zorb since the very, very beginning,
but maybe you can start here. Like what?
What was your journey like? How did you get into, well,
crypto, I guess Erbit and sort of, yeah.
Tell us a little bit about your journey.
Yeah, absolutely. So I have a software engineering
background, was programming since I was 12, went to Georgia
Tech for computer science. And then I started getting
really into Bitcoin and the whole cryptocurrency thing in
2016 or so. And by 2017, I just, I was in
class, I was thinking, what am I doing here?
Learning, You're learning more math.
Why am I doing this instead of just going out and working in
industry trying to get Bitcoin? And so I was about to start my
senior year and I decided I was going to drop out and just go
move to San Francisco, work in the Bay, grab a job and get
started. Just trying to accumulate
basically. And so I've spent time at Uber
doing product engineering during some of their growth periods,
spent time at Snap. And then eventually I found
myself actually working more directly in adjacent to crypto
at Tuan, which was the research company that built Urban.
And so I spent some time there, ended up as a tech lead on their
product team and there was a lot of fun things going on at Talon
at that time. It's, it's hard to even describe
the energy, but Talon had this very ambitious vision of, of
building a new operating system and a new decentralized Internet
to complement block chains. And, and I really, once I
started interacting a lot with the technology there, I, I
really saw something very transformative because of how
minimal and how tightly defined everything was.
And in a world in which we're increasingly dependent on
computing and these trustless decentralized systems for really
our everyday life, for being able to send money around, for
being able to store value. And in a world where centralized
banking and centralized information stores are
increasingly compromised at an ever increasing rate, I really
find that vision of trying to get more of our data stored and
decentralized and really secure encrypted ways with really
minimal security assumptions to be very compelling.
And so I, I spent a few years there and then I worked on a
product studio for a little while.
And eventually in 2022, I founded Zorp.
And initially the idea with Zorp was we're just going to do a
bunch of research and how we can take one of those technologies
from Urbit, the NOC instruction set, how we can take that and
make a really, really performant ZK VMA0 knowledge virtual
machine that uses that instruction set.
And we, I was able to bring on some amazing math pH, DS, former
professors and things like this to work on it with me.
And then we made some really great research results.
We, we recently published a paper actually that's kind of
the encapsulation of all the research we've done over the
past two years into this in, in June, we published an E print.
And then anyway, in 2023, we looked at what we had built and
we said, how are we going to go to market with this?
Right? And so we decided to build knock
chain. I, I've been in and around
crypto for quite a while. And frankly, you know, not
everyone feels the same way about this, but I've, I've
always really preferred the no pre mind proof of work ethos to
the more pre mind proof of stake ethos.
Just because I, I, I think of these economic protocols as
having these like core economic engines and incentives that they
bring to bear in addition to the actual technological features.
And I, I think that there's a little bit of kind of an,
there's been an emphasis, let's say on, on particular incentives
around basically going to market with pre mind proof of stake
protocols because they're easier to underwrite by private
placement. And I think that what we've seen
over the past seven years or so since that emphasis really took
hold is that there's now a lot of block chains that all have
the exact same incentives and aren't really doing any
innovation on the crypto economics.
But they all have these like different technical flavors.
Basically. You know, there's the AI
blockchain, the fast blockchain, the storage blockchain, you
know, there's so many flavors all marketing to kind of the
same group of developers, all trying to be the next Ethereum,
but they all have the same incentives.
And so we wanted to do something different.
We wanted to, we wanted to build something that, that we could,
that we could really get behind for a very long time.
And So what we decided to do with NOC Chain is, is build it
as a fair launch proof of work project and try to use the proof
of work incentives in a novel way to incentivize real world
behavior that that we wanted to see.
And so of course we had the ZKVM.
And so I imagine you're familiar with VHS, Betamax.
Often, often when there's a new technology, the one that wins is
not necessarily the best one. It's the one that gets the best
distribution. Now of course, we love NOC CKVM,
we think it is the best. We released this wonderful paper
last last month showing formal security soundness bounds and
showing that we see performance about an order of magnitude more
than RISC 5 VMS, which is rather compelling.
But we wanted to solve back when we were thinking of NOC Chain in
2023, we said we want to solve distribution, We want to get
more people doing proofs with the NOC ZKVM than anything else
as fast as possible in a self reinforcing process.
And to do that you need to actually use incentives.
You can't just have these like top down grants or anything like
that. And so we built a zero knowledge
proof of work competition, AZK proof of work.
And so in NOC Chain, the proof of work competition is to solve
and, and build ZK proofs, not, not to build hashes like you see
in, in standard Bitcoin. And so that was where Nachang
was born was we wanted to use the consensus mechanism to drive
and incentivize the production at industrial scale of 0
knowledge proofs. I'm going to pause because you
asked a very simple question. And I really, I really got into
it. But that's, that's the story.
That's that's how we got here. Yeah, I think there's a lot of
things here that I want to dive a little bit deeper into, but
maybe we can start with urban a little bit because I mean, urban
is something I've been involved in since for a long time as
well. And you know, we've, we've done
a bunch of urban podcasts here. Maybe 2 questions here.
How would you describe urban? What inspired you about it?
And and then also I'm curious, what are your biggest learnings
from how you've seen the urban ecosystem evolve that you wanted
to sort of apply when it comes to NOC chain?
Yeah, absolutely. So the things that appealed to
me the most about Urban were the idea that that really this, this
crypto ethos of self sovereignty and decentralization in this
idea that that you should kind of be in charge of your own
destiny. You should custody your own
funds. You should, you should be the
one that's ultimately making the decision about whether the funds
move or not. You don't need custodians.
This, this concept for me, I, I think applies to a lot more than
just money. And, and I saw when I joined
Urban, the thing that really appealed to me the most was that
they had the most expansive vision of how to apply those
principles across the rest of computing.
And I think that I think that that ambition to, to spread the
crypto ethos to a, to a larger set of applicable principles,
let's say, to, to make, to make it more easy to run, say your
own energy grid at home, right? Like do solar and batteries run
your own energy? Don't be dependent that that
kind of almost homesteading vision with computing where you
know, you're growing your own food, you've got some automated
systems helping you grow your own food, you're producing your
own energy. You've got some automated
systems doing that. And you just have these
protocols that run that don't make you more dependent on
everyone else, but make you less dependent and in making you less
dependent, make you more free and more agentic.
That was what really appealed to me about Urbit and I, I still
find that vision very appealing. Not even, even now that I'm I'm
not working on the project directly.
And to me, it's, it's still about how, how do we, how do we
bring those same principles to bear regardless of whether it's
in that form factor? And what are the biggest things
you feel like you want to do different from orbit or your
biggest sort of lessons that you see?
Can we swear on this podcast for sure?
Go ahead. OK, OK, OK, so I wanted to ask
OK, so so Urbit needed to ship a product to users that created a
that basically showed why they would need the infrastructure
that that they that they were producing the vision for.
OK, so let's let's kind of like talk about this from first
principles. If you're building a growth
company and you're selling a big vision, you need to be able to
provide a compelling first use case for that vision.
That's a step towards the vision, OK, as as a
justification for why and, and, and also as a, as a tool to show
where you can go. So when when Elon wants to make
better battery technology, he tells everybody, I'm going to
give you the best car. And then he gets to go invest in
battery technology. When Elon wants to make better
rockets, he tells everyone, Mars is really cool.
Wouldn't you love to live there? Wouldn't that be so cool if we
had this new place that we could go colonize and live?
And then he gets, then he gets to take that vision and turn it
into and turn it into action of building tangible goods, right,
of building and making rockets better, right?
So you start with selling speculative vision, then you
show that you're making real steps towards capturing that
energy and actually turning it into something real.
And so the thing that I think Urban has done the worst job of
overall is they, they have an amazing speculative vision of,
of what can happen with computing.
And they've done a really poor job of showing that they can
actually take real steps towards making that real.
Yeah, certainly that has been a challenge.
I agree with you. Now let's talk about Knock,
right, Because I think Knock is basically the kind of assembly
language of Herbit. And in the beginning I, you
know, I don't think ZK proofs was something that was like
really consideration there. But my understanding is to spend
to occur to spend, you know, five years or something in the
beginning just on Knock to try to make the most simple and
elegant definition of a computer.
And you know, in the orbit thing space you'd have people then
print out the whole knock definition on AT shirt.
And that was kind of one of the price.
Look, it's so simple. It fits on AT shirt.
Like how what's your tell us more about like how do you feel
about knock? Why are you so excited about
Knock? Yeah.
So we love NOC so much that we that we named the whole
blockchain after it. We we literally named the
currency of the blockchain NOC. OK.
We, we are, we are NOC maximalist over here at Zorb and
with Nocchain. And the reason for this is that
NOC is a minimal executable specification of computing in
which you can do any practical thing that you want to do with
the computer and specify it in terms of NOC instructions.
It has built in capabilities for extension instructions.
So for complex arithmetic or cryptography, you can just call
out to an extension instruction in the same way that your CPU
calls out to its ALU, its arithmetic logic unit for fast
edition, like you're not manually calculating in the CPU.
You know, every, every arithmetic instruction.
It's basically calling out a little specialized chip subsets
on on the on the chip. So NOC.
NOC is built in a way that mirrors the way that CPUs are
built where you have a generic flow of logic that's minimal and
can do anything Turing complete computer can do.
And then you can call out to instructions that are
extensions. And NOC is is agnostic to how
many extensions you have or what they do, but only imposes 1
requirement that it's a pure function.
So this is a really, really key component here, which is you
have a minimal Turing complete computer and then you can call
out to extension instructions for any complex arithmetic
etcetera that you need to go really fast.
And so this lets you do hardware acceleration of any complex
logic, but have an extremely consistent specification for
normal computing operations. And so consistency is a really,
really powerful tool when building systems because
consistency and having a really, really minimal surface area of
possible things that can occur allows you to build systems that
you can actually understand. And in understanding them, you
can cover the security holes and vulnerabilities, you can hold a
mental model of what's happening in your head, and you can build
and work a lot more effectively. And so the, the, the real things
about NOC that are distinct, that are really unique is 1,
It's extremely minimal. And the second one is that it
only uses a single data structure.
OK, So these components are going to really, really matter
when we start talking about ZKVMS, OK.
And the extension instruction pieces too.
That's, that's something that is rather unique to NOC, but that
most ZKVMS now use as well. So, but when NOC invented this
and when NOC was introduced in 2008, this idea of these
extension instructions being included was, was very, very
unique. No one else was doing this.
So the, the key point around this is NOC is really minimal,
very few instructions but turned complete.
And 2nd, NOC is built around a single data structure, the
binary tree. And this single data structure
it turns out is, well, First off, it's one of the most
fundamental data structures in computer science, many, many,
many things in computer science or binary trees, efficient
databases, dictionaries, etcetera.
And then second, because everything is one data structure
and there's a really minimal set of instructions, it allows you
to build really very efficient ZKVM circuit for the not ZKVM.
And so that's, that was that was the initial intuition that that
I had had in in 2022 was this is really minimal.
Binary trees are a very well studied data structure with
strong mathematic properties. And so I thought we can probably
build a really efficient ZKVM around this, because ZKVMS as as
a concept are a way to express computation in terms of.
Essentially middle school arithmetic.
You probably remember from from Intermediate School, right?
You have you have these polynomials, right?
F of X is equal to X ^2 + 3 or whatever.
And so AZKVM is a way to take a computation and express it as a
relationship between polynomials.
So the idea is that you constrain the results of what is
going to be computed using the polynomials.
And in practice what you do is you ensure that for any given
pair of rows, so for any given like pair of states in the in
the circuit, you're going to evaluate a polynomial that must
evaluate to 0. So this is getting a little
particular, but the, but in practice, the way it works is
you've got a computation, you record all the steps that you
do, you put them in this big table, and then you apply these
polynomial constraints and the polynomials have to all be 0,
otherwise you did the computation wrong.
And ZK proofs give you a way to to use this these kind of little
primitives and give you a really, really small proof that
the computation was done correctly.
That can be verified extremely quickly, regardless of how
really big the computation was. And the proof's tiny.
So let's say I've got some super huge computation I want to do.
I can do it, make AZK proof of it, send it to you, and you can
verify it on your phone in like 20 milliseconds, no matter how
big the computation was. This is really a powerful
primitive. It's, it's kind of like, so hash
functions let you take a fingerprint of data, no matter
how big the data is and compress it into a little bitty piece
that lets you verify that the data is what it's supposed to
be. And so ZK proofs are kind of
like a hash function, but for computation instead of data.
So it lets you commit to the computation.
What? Do you think are the
implications of CK proofs? Like what are the use cases
you're most excited about and how do you think CK proofs are
going to change the world in the long term?
Yeah. OK.
So the long, the long term ZK proofs, I think we're going to
totally transform finance, compliance, medicine, privacy,
and probably things like voting also.
And we can, we could get into the kind of like speculative
idea of how these things can impact.
But the general heuristic is anytime that you want to be able
to do something privately, but have everyone else be able to
verify that it was done correctly, AZK proof is your
best tool. So we don't really want our
credit scores being leaked all over the Internet every time
Equifax gets hacked, but they do.
And so that type of really sensitive data, that's, that's
the type of thing where ZK proofs would be really, really
useful. Or similarly, your medical
records or how you voted. It would be really, really nice
if every time we have an election, everyone's not all
pointing fingers and saying you cheated, you cheated, da, da,
da. It'd be really nice if we had a
public, transparently verifiable mathematic representation that
says everyone voted once, everyone that voted was supposed
to be able to vote, and we can all verify that, but we don't
know who voted for what. These types of features are
uniquely enabled by ZK in a really efficient way.
Now that's kind of the like long term societal implications.
I guess. There's one more, which is we're
in a, we're in a world where hacking and cyber warfare is
increasingly relevant. 0 day attacks are kind of the new
thing in terms of in terms of warfare, whether whether it's
the actual security zero day attack where they're, you know,
hacking your information or whether it's, you know, them
dropping like a cargo crate full of full of drones next to your
base. And then the drones come out and
bomb everything. These are kind of, these are
like very sudden, very like frankly sophisticated attacks
that involve technology are, are the cutting edge of warfare.
And it really is in many ways impacting critical
infrastructure and critical infrastructure threat modeling.
So the power grid, right, and water treatment facilities, how
do we get clean water? How do we have, how do we have,
you know, good food? How do we have power?
This is these types of questions are obviously in some ways
physical concerns. You actually have to protect
these things. But these systems are
increasingly digital. And so securing these systems
and allowing for introspection into these systems,
verifiability that everything is going correctly, this this is
becoming increasingly important. And 0 knowledge proofs are a
great way to be able to get that verification component.
So that's all the long term stuff.
In terms of the short term stuff, 0 knowledge proofs are
extremely good today for making blockchain steel really, really,
really good. And that's, that's one of the
things that we're using heavily for knock chain.
So one of the things that block chains are kind of one of the
things I'd say is unfortunate about blockchains is today the
way that blockchains achieve verifiability.
Like you know, if we are running a Uniswap smart contract on our
Etherium nodes, you guys run a lot of Etherium nodes.
I know if if you're running Uniswap on it, you have to be
running that smart contract on every single node you're running
in order to actually make the next state transition.
If you want to check the next block, everybody has to run the
same computation and verify you get verifiability through
replication of execution. You just all execute the same
code. That's how you know you all got
the same answer. Well, that's really inefficient
for I don't know how many Ethereum nodes are running
today, do you? You probably do.
I don't know exactly number off the top of my head, but it's
many, yes. Yeah, it's, it's a lot, right?
They're all running the same computation, right?
They, they all have to run the exact same thing every, you
know, every new block. So, you know, you've got, I
don't know, however many 30,000 computers all running the exact
same thing every block. That's kind of inefficient.
So the way the way we see it is and and I mean Justin Drake and
these guys are all starting to starting to pitch some of this
stuff too. And you know, talking about how
Ethereum's going to transform over time.
I think they've got some five year vision.
Well, anyway, the the future of block chains is point blank.
You're you're going to be running the actual computation
on your computer and you're going to be verifying what you
did on the blockchain. You're not going to be actually
doing execution on the blockchain.
That doesn't make that doesn't make very much sense.
What makes a lot of sense is for you to verify a proof that you
did the execution on the blockchain.
And so off chain execution, on chain verification.
So that no matter how much computation you did, no matter
whether you were running AI models or really sophisticated
high frequency trading algorithms or crazy MEV
protection or super sophisticated loan credit checks
or whatever it is you're doing, whether you're running a video
game, you can be doing it on your computer.
And then the blockchain's just verifying you it's done
correctly and just settling. So you mentioned it, the ZKVM
that you guys wrote based on knock is is much more efficient
than the other ones. Yeah.
Is that particularly relevant because of the cost of
generating proofs? Or like in What's the most
important consideration for efficiency when it comes to
ZKVMS? All right now, yeah, that's,
that's a big question. So yeah, ZKVMS are really good
for scalability, block chains and they're also really good for
privacy. That's one of the other one of
the other big use cases. So in terms of in terms of
efficiency considerations for ZKVMS, So First off, you have to
understand ZKVMS are really two parts, all right?
So they're two parts. The first part is you can think
of it as which circuit are you running, right?
Are you running the Knox circuit or are you running the RISC five
circuit? Are you running the Cairo
circuit from STAR from * Quare? So it's really.
And so that the technical term here is and of course different,
different, different ZKVMS will make different technical
decisions about things. But the technical term here is
going to be that's generic for all of this is the interactive
Oracle proof. OK.
So you're going to have your circuit which is going to be
modeling some interactive Oracle proof for expressing some
particular computation. And so the question is, is so
you've got your first part, which is which circuit are you
running? And for Starks, that's going to
be a randomized arithmetic intermediate representation with
preprocess, which is a crazy acronym, but they shorten it to
wrap. So with the Stark, you've got
your wrap and that's kind of the front end to your ZKVM.
So it's which circuit you're running.
Then on the back end, you're going to feed that circuit into
the the ZKVM back end, which is your polynomial commitment
scheme. So you've probably heard about
Starks, you've probably heard about Snarks, you've probably
seen the term trusted setup. All right, So when people are
talking about that kind of thing, they're talking about the
back end, they're talking about the polynomial commitment
scheme. And so there's really two areas
of optimization. There's the front end and the
back end of the ZK view, and almost all the research has has
gone into optimizing the back end, how to commit to these
polynomials, and that's where most of the trade-offs come in.
So do you have a trusted setup? If you do, then you can get O of
1 verification. You can get these itty bitty
proofs that have O of 1 verification.
Really tiny, really, really efficient.
But you have to trust the setup was done correctly.
Otherwise they can prove arbitrary statements or you can
be a transparent commitment. In other words, there's no
trusted set up. You're only trusting pure math.
And in that case, the most common, the most commonly used
thing on the market is, is, is Fry, which which is what Starks
use. And so that's, that's going to
be a transparent commitment scheme.
You don't have to trust anybody. It's pure math.
And and with those you have larger proof sizes depending on
how large the computation is and how large the circuit is.
So to answer concretely, there's trade-offs.
It depends. But the smaller your circuit is,
the more efficient you're going to be able to do the
computation, which is going to make proving faster and is going
to make this proof smaller. And so those benefits of having
smaller circuits and of having better asymptotics for for
building them are going to matter no matter what, no matter
what back end you're going into. So the work that we've done into
making the knock, the knock CKV and the knock circuit really,
really efficient is kind of timeless in a way, because it's
like the core cryptography that we can then that we can use as a
module and put into whatever back end we want.
So let's say they make this, you know, super new amazing proof
back end. You know, let's let's say
Ligurido. It's like a, it's a funny thing
from Bain Capital where they made like Liguero, which is
another one, like they made it really small.
So they call it Ligurido. Like let's say that's the best
thing. I don't know if that's the best
thing. We can port our circuit right
into it and we get and we get all the same efficiency speed
UPS that we get right now, but in the new back end.
And so we spent all of our time working on this on the actual
circuit definition. OK.
One thing you mentioned as well, which is worth diving into, I
think, is that, you know, NOx chain is a proof of work chain,
but the work are ZK proofs. Now, of course, that is an
interesting idea because in the end, the idea of useful proof of
work has been around for a long time, right?
Like early on, people like, oh, you know, Bitcoin's very cool,
but all people the miners do is to create these hashes and these
hashes we don't have any function except like mining
Bitcoin blocks. And so of course, the idea was
like, well, what if all these miners have to do some work, but
that work has some other external benefit and value
besides just mining blocks. So can you explain a little bit
how are the ZK proofs that are produced by knock chain miners?
How? How can they be useful?
Yeah, that's, that's a great question.
So it's really hard to design A useful proof of work puzzle,
which is why we haven't seen many, many, many attempts at it
really. So the the fundamental traits
that you need for a proof of work puzzle to be a secure proof
of work puzzle are First off, you have to be able to verify
that the puzzle was completed way faster than you can do.
Then you can make the puzzle in the 1st place.
OK, The reason for this is that you want it to be hard to spam
invalid puzzles. OK, so you need to be able to
throw, you need to be able to check that the puzzle was done
properly, really, really fast. That's the first thing.
Then the second trait is you need it to be amortization
resistant. OK, that's a more complicated
phrase, but what it but what it means is, is that you don't want
to be able to reuse work between attempts.
Each time that you do an attempt at the proof of work puzzle, you
want to basically have to start over.
And sometimes you can't get all the way to amortization
resistant, but you want to be as amortization resistant as you
can. And so for instance, when, when,
when the ASIC boost vulnerability was published in
in Bitcoin that was an amortization exploit is that
they were able to reuse some of the work that they that they
were doing between, between attempts.
And so bit main was able to go way faster than they should have
been able to relative to using the standard algorithm.
So you have to be able to check, you have to be able to verify
the puzzle really fast. You have to be amortization
resistant at least enough. And that's what you need for
approval work puzzle. So, so this is one of the
reasons, so the fact that you have to satisfy these traits in
order to make a useful proof of work puzzle at all.
And then of course you need to try to make it useful.
This is one of the reasons why it's been so difficult for
people to kind of do generalizable work and proof of
work. Now, fortunately for us, ZK
proofs actually satisfy a lot of these traits.
OK. So it's a lot more expensive to
make a proof than it is to verify a proof.
OK. So that's one of the first
things that make it viable to make a ZK proof of work protocol
at all. And then the second thing is, is
that if you work really hard, you can constrain down the
circuit of your ZKVM enough so that there's only one valid
circuit, one valid witness for any given computation, which
means that you start with a computation, you can only make
one proof with it. OK.
And if you can only make one proof per computation, it means
that you have to start over again if if your attempt fails
at the puzzle. OK, so that gives you that
amortization resistance. All right.
So ZK proofs can can be made into valid proof of work
puzzles. And so then the question
becomes, which is exactly what you're saying, can we make that
useful for something other than just the proof of work
competition? Well, luckily the answer is yes,
you can make that useful. So as I mentioned, NOC is a
Turing complete VM. You can compute anything with
it, right? And so the important point here
is, is that because you can compute anything with it and the
algorithm for verifying the proof of work puzzle is just
verifying the proof, you would be able to to theoretically
provide any type of verifiable work as a proof of work puzzle
result. Now in notching today, in the
first version that we launched, we Tony and Cheek called it
Dumbnet because it was kind of like a minimal shippable
protocol, but it's, it is a useless proof of work puzzle
right now. It's only used to incentivize
increased proof of capacity and the and the global performance
competition around optimizing the NOD CTV, which I think is
very useful background incentivizing people to make ZK
proofs faster, which is useful for the whole industry.
But in making the actual proofs useful individually, it's it's
actually not that big of an upgrade because.
Currently they're they're. Making one proof per attempt,
but they're making, they're making a proof of basically a
fixed computation. Now you can imagine that that it
sure would be nice if instead say they were data availability
sampling proofs. Like, let's say they're
providing some useful. Service of data availability
sampling, or let's say they're providing a proof of transaction
inclusion in the blockchain. Well, luckily, there's a whole
area of research by, by a, by a wonderful cryptography PhD Aki
katas researching exactly this. How can you make ZK proof of
work useful and, and how can you understand and bound the
security characteristics of it? And so there's, there's some
wonderful papers on this that he's published.
We, we were really pleased to, to, to collaborate with him
actually on getting, getting our research paper published on the
NORCKVM last month. But he, he's spent a lot of time
over, over the past, you know, many years publishing papers on
exactly this. How can you make ZK proof of
work useful? And so he's got a proof of
necessary work paper that describes how you can, once you
have a AZK proof of work that's secure in a Nakamoto consensus
model, how you can actually use it to provide proofs of
transaction inclusion and actually use that to power the
chain itself. So you could imagine in that
model what the the chain, every proof that you're doing as a
part of the proof of work is actually a proof that you
included a transaction in a block and.
So the transaction processing. Is the thing being proven in the
proof of work? And so the idea behind proof of
necessary work is that you actually scale the chain with
the proof of work competition. So the more.
Compute power that's going. Into the chain for securing it
it's also powering transaction processing so of course you know
how much compute power has gone into Bitcoin that's a lot of
compute that's a lot of energy imagine if you were able to take
that energy and. The speed that.
And the speed and thorough put of your chain was proportional
to the amount of energy going into the proof work competition.
So do you think the demand? For because I, I guess I can see
different avenues where this DCK proofs could be used.
I mean, one of course would be to basically say like, hey, look
in the blockchain space, there are people using ZK proofs, you
know, kind of all over the place.
You could go to them like, hey, you should use knock ZK proofs
because then you can basically earn some revenues in the form
of knock tokens and, and you know, maybe they're also more
efficient and faster and stuff like that.
But you know, especially you have a sort of, you know,
economic interest in adopting Knock ZK proof.
So I guess that's one. The other one would be more
focused on ZK proofs to power. Knock chain.
Itself, like do you feel one of those directions did do both
those directions exist and are you more bullish on one versus
the other? Yeah.
So I, I. Would say I'm more bullish on
using the ZK proofs to actually power specific capabilities of
Nachain itself. So.
For instance, proofs. Of transaction inclusion so that
transaction processing scales up with with the with the security
budget proofs of data availability so that you can
provide basically data availability sampling at scale
through the proof of work competition for something like a
temporary BLOB store like you'd see from Etherium I I'm really
bullish on these use cases and I think that I think that the
ideal situation is that you end up where knock proofs have have
the competition to generate knock proofs from the ZK proof
of work has generated such a massive amount of prover
capacity that individual knock proofs are extremely cheap and
efficient. And so there there would be no
reason to. Even pay the protocol for the
knock proofs you. See and so the the service
would. Be actually the proofs are just
powering the protocol and you're really paying for settlement,
you're paying for data availability, etcetera.
So you guys launched? Nog chain in May, How did it
launch go? Yeah, launch, launch was.
Crazy man. So let's see yeah, that was,
that was such a crazy time. So many sleepless nights.
So yeah, we, we launched Nog chain.
We, we wanted to get it out the door as fast as we could.
We've been, we've been trying to get it out the door for, I don't
know, like a year. And so we finally had had tested
it enough that we were like, look, the whole thing works.
We just got to get this shipped, get it out the door.
We can keep iterating on this forever if we want to, but we're
just going to get it out and, and, and do it for real.
And, and So what, what we intended to do, as I mentioned
is, is we didn't do a pre mine. So we, we launched it to the
public and we want Nochain to stimulate a global performance
competition around optimizing ZK proofs.
And so the way that we kicked this off was we had published in
multiple, multiple of our pieces.
Hey, you know, the, the, the first Bitcoin reference clients,
they, they weren't optimized either.
People, people quickly came on the scene with GPU's.
People, people did this optimization privately and there
became this big competition and almost like war around around
optimizing and and doing better in the proof of work
competition. And so it's of course.
It's 2025. Now, right, very, very different
from when Bitcoin launched, when Bitcoin launched, only a few
people even knew what hash cash was right and now everybody
knows what cryptocurrencies are. Everybody knows what mining is
and there's actually entire like massive server farms that all
they do is they just wait for new proof of work coins to
launch and then they just go mine the heck out of them and
then dump everything, right. And, and so we, we thought to
ourselves, how can we make the fairest proof of work
competition? We, that we possibly can in 2025
when there's all this like hostile sophisticated compute
ready to be deployed and just like, you know, be mercenary and
take everything in the dump, right?
What, how, how can we, how do we do this right?
And So what we decided to do is we decided to launch, basically
we decided to open source a few weeks ahead of launch A and, and
we published and talked about this in Twitter Spaces for, for
like, I don't know, like a year before we launched.
So we've been talking about this for a year and, and we've put
out there what our business model is going to be everything.
So what we ended up doing is we, we launched a slow reference
client. So it's like a faithful
implementation of all the algorithms.
It's like, you know, if if you take this reference client and
you optimize it and you write them and you make the code go
faster, it will mine you a bunch of knock.
And so we published this a couple weeks in advance of
launch and we said, hey guys, start optimizing this.
And then we published a, A blog post and said, listen, like just
to be super explicit, our business model, because we
didn't do a pre mine, our business model is we're doing
acceleration on this. Like we're, we're making this go
faster and we're going to be mining this with a fast client
from day one. So if you want to get tokens, if
you want to get knocked, you you need to optimize yours too, so
you can be competitive and. And so then we launched on.
May 21 and we had this insane flood of user I mean there was
there were 10,000 nodes join the network in like 30 minutes.
It was crazy and, and, and we, we got, we got started and what
we discovered was very, very quickly was there's a massive
community, particularly in Southeast Asia of, of minors
that. Try to join.
You know, proof of proof of work projects, particularly fair
launch projects have that have a lot of interest in them and that
our communication around our strategy had not gotten to them
either through the language barrier or because they mostly
were listening to YouTube tutorials about how to set up
the note or or whatever. Like they basically weren't
engaging with our material. And so they had no idea that
they needed to optimize the minor to be competitive and so.
We were, we were kind of floored.
Because we got like this massive burst of attention just in the
week or two coming up to launch and we kind of had no idea that
it was going to be the way it was.
So we got out in front of it to the best of our ability.
We said, hey, guys, listen, listen, if you're, if you're
just running the slow code, you're not going to mind any
blocks. You should, you should like go
get some Rust guys and write some faster code so you can be
competitive. And, and honestly, it pissed a
lot of those people off, but, but the strategy worked.
So we, we got a bunch of really amazing developers and a bunch
of like really dedicated and like interested guys from early
bit tenser. We got some people from, from
who kind of came over and started a company who were
exurbit people. We, we got, we got these various
groups of people who who kind of like came to the call to
adventure, if you will, and they optimized their miner and they
got competitive really fast. The first block mined by a third
party miner was block 11/23. And since then, you know, like
right now on the network, we're only mining 30% of blocks and
the other 70% are totally unaffiliated competitive miners.
And we're only like 40 days into the protocol.
So like basically it decentralized super fast.
And there's these different companies that are competing on
the protocol and I've talked to a lot of them and a lot of them
I guess I haven't talked to too. But basically, people optimize
the code and we were able to use this as a strategy to get a
bunch of really useful values, aligned people to join and gives
and basically direct all of the early token rewards to people
that are actually going to work for it and not people that are
just kind of coming in trying to get an air drop.
And then like, you know, they don't care.
They're just like here to because they think they're going
to get rich quick and they're going to jump out, you know?
And so, yeah, launch was crazy, man.
I had no idea what to expect. Yeah, it's definitely very cool.
How? That ecosystem has emerged so
quickly there and how you know these different companies and I
know some of them as well are are involved there.
So you mentioned that, you know, right now it's in this kind of
dumb net phase. The the the proofs of work are
not useful yet. What are the next stages in the
evolution of the network? Yeah, absolutely.
So. I mean, one of the big things is
just getting, getting an E bridge, you know, getting an E
bridge set up so that so that, you know, we can actually be
connected to Internet capital markets and, and, you know, get
early price discovery. I mean, at, at the end of the
day, right, there's kind of this like old, old, I mean, I, it
feels funny saying it's the old meta, but everybody in the past
few years has just been doing this thing where they like try
to get like super hyped up super high private valuations, you
know, the Super high FTV private valuations pre launch, then they
launch and list on an exchange and then it's down forever.
You know, it's like they, they try to like keep liquidity low
so they can like manipulate the market and do all this like
shady crap. And that, I don't know, like, I
don't know why everybody's doing that.
It sucks. Everybody's sick of it.
Nobody wants, nobody wants that. And, and so we tried to do the
exact opposite, basically like, you know, fair launch proof of
work and we want price discovery to be happening as fast as
possible. Because at the end of the day,
like, you know, you live and die by the incentives.
You can't like cheat the incentives.
You know, if your protocol sucks, you know, no amount of
like high FTV, low float shenanigans is going to help.
And so, you know, we believe in what we're doing.
We're, we're aligned around, not chain long term.
And basically we want early, we want, we want to see what the
community does and we want to see what happens when you
connect, when you connect to, to broader Internet capital
markets. And so that's one of the, that's
one of the first steps is just like, you know, getting, getting
connected to, to the rest of, to the rest of the market.
And then from there, we're, we're going to be adding hash
time locks to support atomic swaps rather shortly.
We were currently working on temporary BLOB storage so that
we can have knock chain start providing data availability
services. Ideally what we want to do is,
as I mentioned, we want to move towards off chain execution and
on chain verification in an app roll up model where applications
are issuing tokens on chain and they're they're able to perform
logic and, and do a lot of work off chain and use BLOB storage
on on the chain and, and, and use the lock scripts and
composability through intents to interact with other app roll
ups. So you didn't have your game or
your or your club or whatever executing off chain and then and
then interacting with assets on chain.
So that's that's. Where we're, that's where we're
headed. One one way to think about this
is it's basically. It doesn't really make sense to
try. To like scale your blockchain by
just centralizing and having it like do more and more replicated
wasteful execution. What makes the most sense is to
have as much execution happening off the chain as possible, but
have the chain acting as a central coordination layer for
all of that off chain execution and providing composability
between all those off chain institutions.
And so we're doing that through intents.
And luckily we're in the UTHO note model.
And so that's, that's how you do intents.
Basically is is is by having these individual notes be able
to be interacted with independently and then be able
to compose atomically. And So what?
We're moving. Toward is.
Towards providing data availability to the chain,
starting to provide these like very basic D5 primitives like
atomic swaps and and then moving towards programmability.
OK, OK, so. This is another topic I wanted
to talk about. So what is it going to look like
to build applications on top of NOC Chain?
And how does it differ from, let's say the Ethereum paradigm
of how, you know, you create like utility smart contract,
then people can send transactions to interact with
these smart contracts. Like how is it going to be
different for NOC Chain? Yeah, absolutely.
So. As I mentioned, NOC chain uses
the Note model, so UTFOS and So what that means is that every
note has a lock on it and so you.
Can spin the note if you. Can unlock it.
So the most common way to think of this is if you sign if you
sign it then then you can spend it if your key matches right.
That's the most simple possible lock script.
Now another lock script is a time lock and.
So that's another one. It's like you can.
Spin it after ever however so many blocks.
That's another kind of simple lock script, but the the idea
behind intents is that you can build more complex and more.
More semantically meaningful. Conditions for spending points.
So for instance, I could say I'm willing to spend these coins if
you trade me 100 USDC for them. That's a pretty complex
condition and if you have these like swap.
Conditions as an example, that would be, you know, I'm willing
to swap these coins for 100 USDC.
Then you can have solvers be going through all of the, all
the notes on the chain and saying, wait a second, I can, I
can make money by unlocking by unlocking these coins and giving
these guys their hundred USDC, right?
Like I'll, I'll make that swap. And and so the idea of course
here is that you can actually use the locked scripts as the
contracts. And so the way to the way to
kind of understand how this relates to notchain is notchain
allows assets to to compose with each other through locked
scripts. So you can have assets interact
with each other through locked scripts, but the execution is
happening off chain and being submitted to the chain.
And because notchain is a ZK native chain, we expect.
That for all these. Like complicated lock scripts,
instead of having to like execute these complex
computations on chain, what you're going to be doing is
you're going to be verifying a proof of the lock condition on
chain. So for.
Instance does that. Does that make sense?
Yeah, it does make sense. I mean one.
Thing I'm curious about here is in terms of the capabilities is
that, you know, on Ethereum, you know, of course have like, you
know, lending markets, things like unit swap, you have dolls,
you have a lot of different types of smart contract
applications. Do you think that this approach
that Noxane is taking, is that going to be like as powerful?
Yeah. It's going to be as powerful.
And what what we're seeing a lot of today is particularly for
complex applications, a lot of a lot of a lot of complex
applications are actually moving on to their own custom stacks
and. You.
You and I both know that. A lot of those customs custom
stacks are just Cosmos. But but, but look, a lot of
these, a lot of people are moving over to app chains.
When when people first started pitching app chains, app chains
were not far along enough. Like basically, app chains were
hyped before app chains were ready, but app chains are how
these large applications are going to scale, period.
And regardless of what chain you're talking about, whether
it's pumped up fun on Solana doing their own chain or, or,
or, you know, Robin Hood deciding to do their own chain,
whatever specific products that are going to do really, really
large amounts of, of transactions, large amounts of
data moving through them are going to be executing on their
own. Whether we call them a chain,
whether we call them an app, it doesn't really matter.
They're not going to be executing in the main chain
state machine. And So what we're doing with
Knock? Chain is we have knock apps.
Knock apps execute off chain. OK, if you want a central limit
order book, you're going to run, you're going to run it as a
knock app. If you want your AMM, you're
going to run it as a knock app. If you want a lending protocol,
you're going to run it as a knock app.
It's going to execute off chain, but it's going to have locks on
assets on chain. And so you're going to
basically. Post proofs to the chain and
those proofs can unlock and move funds around.
And those and these. Different apps are going to
compose on chain. OK, so all.
Of the actual assets are on chain, and so as apps post
proofs, they're going to be interacting with each other
through the chain as a central coordinator, but the chain's not
doing the. Execution it's just.
Coordinating and composing the intent matching.
Very cool. Yeah, I think that is a very.
Powerful approach, you mentioned that you guys are building, I
think decentralized exchange. Are there any other products
that you guys are planning on building?
Well, so far we've seen the. Community's been building a
bunch of products. So I'm aware of another company,
Southwest Pool Supply that I, I love the name.
It's so funny, but Southwest Pool supply, they're making,
they're making a mining pool on, on NOC.
They call it NOC Pool and and they've made an explorer.
It's beautiful. You should look at it.
NOC blocks.com, I got to say, it's not amazing metrics on it,
showing minor decentralization, showing the supply schedule.
I mean, these guys probably did a better job than I would have
done. I mean, it's, it's beautiful.
It looks great. I, we've been seeing a massive
amount of, of, of work starting to go in from companies that,
that just sprang up basically like, you know, we're like,
we're not paying these guys, these, these guys, these guys
are just doing, doing the work because they believe in the
vision that they want to participate.
And the proof of work protocol incentivizes them to get their
hands dirty and actually work to, to create value.
And so for now, we're, we're focused on building up the
protocol. We're focused on on, you know,
building bridging on building and we're going to be working on
doing a decentralized exchange probably probably starting in
the first half of 2026. And, and yeah, we're not, we're
not doing, we're not going to try to do like every possible
product all at once or something.
We want we want to like basically what?
Is it we want to? Pick our shots, you know what
I'm saying? Yeah, Yeah.
You sent me a document where you talked a bit about L1 tokens and
what makes them valuable and you sort of put them into two
categories. 1 is the store value asset.
The other thing, revenue generating asset, you know, I
guess Ethereum would be one that you know, I mean it kind of
maybe fits into both pockets as well, but like it has that
revenue generating component too.
So where do you see knock fit in in this framework?
Yeah, absolutely so. I, I've been, I've been writing
about this and thinking about this for for a while now about
how to understand and and create a valuation model for L1 assets
and placeholder conveniently scooped me a little bit.
They, they published something yesterday on where they actually
talk about, they don't the, the, the, the thrust of their essay
is a little bit different than than what I've been thinking
about, but they, but they make the same dichotomy that, that
I've been looking at. And so I was like, I was like,
damn, I got to publish this Then, you know, I, I got to get
this out of here. Like this is crazy.
So the, the idea is that you can understand blockchain protocols
as being either primarily value storage protocols or revenue
generation protocols. And it's not that you can't be
both, it's that often you're optimized more toward one than
the other. And so the way to think about
this is a value storage protocol is a digital gold.
It's like Bitcoin. And it, the idea is it's a
neutral store of value there. You're a credibly neutral
protocol. You're not doing things like
reversing hacks and giving people their money back.
You're very censorship resistant.
It's very difficult to, to change your social consensus.
You have an immutable supply schedule and if someone buys the
asset that it's provably scarce and they know what's, they know
what they're getting into. And so they know that they can
buy it and that basically it's going to be a, a, a hard store
of value. It may fluctuate and be
volatile, but it's going to be scarce forever, period and so.
Bitcoin is is the best. Example of of the digital gold
that we have today and of course we see we see a lot of the
narrative around sound money resonating and and pitching this
exact thing and and so Bitcoin is kind of the preeminent value
storage protocol today and one of the things that makes this
dichotomy really useful is well the way that.
You would value. Something like a digital gold or
a sound money is just fundamentally different than the
way that you would value say like Tesla stock, OK, Like Tesla
stock is valuable, right? Or I don't know.
Like Google stock. Or open AI stock like these
things are, these things are valuable.
We agree they're valuable, Everybody thinks they're
valuable, people want them, but but that's not a store of value.
Just as something's valuable doesn't mean it's a store of
value. OK.
So this is where I kind of bring in the the differentiation
around a revenue generation protocol.
So on crypto Twitter, we see a lot of talk about the the
revenue meta and this idea that we should kind of value
protocols in terms of their ability to generate revenue
through protocol services. And so the idea here is that
there's kind of this dichotomy of these two different centers
of gravity that protocols are naturally attracted to of
whether they whether they're primarily a value storage
protocol or whether they're primarily just providing
services as a protocol that they're generating revenue
through. So as you.
As you mentioned. Ethereum, right it it does do
some of both it it serves as a medium of exchange and a unit of
account for the L twos and for the applications that use it and
and and does does rather well for it in relation to the actual
or I should say that the valuation of Ethereum is rather
high as a multiple of the revenue it generates.
And part of this is because of the network effects are on the
way that it's used as a medium of exchange in a unit of
account. We can look at it kind of an
alternative example of a revenue generation protocol of Celestia.
If we look at Celestia as a revenue generation protocol,
well, they really don't have any value storage capability.
They only really are valued in terms of their revenue
generation. There's not some big.
Network. Of applications that are built
on top of Celestia and using Tia, their token as a medium of
exchange or or otherwise treating it as a store of value.
And they basically like people basically only value Celestia in
terms of the revenue that it generates.
And so you can see the actual value of Celestia and the value
of Etherium make a lot more sense when you start to
understand the difference between valuing something in
terms of revenue generation versus valuing it in terms of
value storage capability. So as you mentioned.
Ethereum does have some of both. It does have some value storage,
but it is primarily a revenue generation through its data
availability services, through its smart contract execution,
etcetera. So and of course it was the
first programmable koi. And so as a result, of course,
it was able to develop an A wonderful network effect and
it's widely considered the you know #2 asset.
So the idea of, of course. Behind this is not.
To say value storage or revenue generation that that either 1 is
good or bad, it's to it's to have a mental framework for
being able to value these assets appropriately.
So I'm going to pause. Does does that make sense?
Yeah, absolutely then. Nice SO.
In terms in terms of NOD chain, NOD chain is primarily a value
storage protocol. NOD chain had no pre mine.
Nod chain has an immutable supply schedule.
NOC chain is scarce. The only way to get it, at least
right now is, is through mining it and taking part in this, in
this hard competition. And so NOC chain is going to
market not not as yet another general purpose application
layer where we're going to like where the whole focus of NOC
chain is on bringing developers onto the ecosystem, right?
The the NOC chain is going to market as a store of value.
NOC chain is going to market as a digital gold and.
So the way to understand. This is not that we are against
revenue generation. As I mentioned, we're building
out data availability services. We want you to be able to do
programmability. But the way to understand it is
that the the frame for for the core economic center of gravity
of NOC chain is around a scarce value storage instrument.
And so all of the revenue generation capabilities that are
going to be built over time for data availability for
programmability are about increasing the monetary velocity
and the usefulness of that digital gold.
So the framing that I that I've kind of used and that I like is
that notchain is programmable sound money that scales so with.
Bitcoin it has. Practically no revenue
generation capability whatsoever.
It's only a value storage instrument.
The blockchain fees from moving transactions on Bitcoin are so
minuscule as as as a percentage or as as even like just any
yield that of course people hypothesize at times about the
idea that Bitcoin if it's if it's price doesn't go up at a
fast enough rate that eventually the the block rewards will go so
low that they won't actually serve and justify securing the
protocol because. It doesn't have any revenue
generation. Capability as a protocol.
And so the way to understand this, I think, is that it all
the. Protocols that have been
launched. Over the past seven or eight
years have as I mentioned been really focused on being proof of
stake, pre mined coins that are marketing to developers saying
we're a better Ethereum. They're all revenue generation
protocols. Primarily and.
So Bitcoin is really the value storage protocol today and I
think it's silly to think that there can't be others
particularly that have differentiated characteristics
and so not chain. Is a value storage.
Protocol that we intend to build in revenue generation
capabilities over time. OK, cool.
I have. 11 more question here. So quantum computing is
something that's, you know, coming at some point and, you
know, there's some concern about, well, I mean, expected to
break a lot of encryption. What do you think is going to be
the effect of quantum computing on ZK and on maybe knock chain
in particular? Yeah.
So quantum computing's an. Interesting topic because it's
it's one of those things where every like everybody wants to be
safe against quantum computers, kind of like how you want to be
safe against natural disasters in earthquakes, but.
There there is an open. Question of how, how you know,
let, let's say you don't live near any center of geological
activity, how, how likely is it that that you're going to be
struck by an earthquake, right? Like probably pretty unlikely.
So I think in a similar way, quantum computing, I think
quantum computing is becoming more practical over time.
I, I think that over time it's probably going to be able to do
more stuff. Some of the breakthroughs and,
and being able to use quantum topological techniques to get
more and more stable configurations of qubits are,
are rather interesting. But we're pretty far from being
able to implement Shore's algorithm and actually get a
speed up, you know, practical implementation of, of any of
these attacks. That being said, of course, it
takes time to upgrade protocols and it makes sense to plan in
advance just in case, right? So Starks, depending on the the
hash function that you're using for your random Oracle, are
already plausibly post quantum secure and and so algebraic
hashes vary in in their in their security against these types of
attacks. And algebraic hashes are the
ones commonly used for for securing and and making ZKVMS go
fast. So the reason is, is that
because they're algebraic, you can model the relationships
between the hash functions more easily in terms of polynomials,
etcetera. So Starks are plausibly post
quantum secure depending on the hash function you use.
And of course you can switch out the hash function reasonably
easily for something like Blake three if you really need to.
So there's a pretty easy path to taking to taking notching to be
post quantum secure because we have built on stars.
The the main piece to think about would be the signature
scheme. So signatures and and making
making sure that we have an upgrade path to a post quantum
signature scheme. So notching is not currently
secure. Against quantum attacks if.
Something just popped on the market, but we'd be able to
upgrade. We're we're not using any.
So if we were using a trusted setup as an example, it would be
a lot harder to to be able to like it would be an open
research question as per how to make it secure.
But we're not we're we're in a transparent scheme using very
battle tested cryptography. And so the the path to the path
to being totally post quantum would is a is a lot clearer,
particularly on the timelines that that we would need to be
thinking about, which is like a decade.
Cool. Well.
Thank you so much for coming. On Logan, that was super
fascinating. I do think you guys have
launched one of the most original and unusual networks
that has a lot of like, you know, radical design decisions
you guys have made. And and it's it's just like it's
certainly one of the most novel things in crypto right now.
So I'm really excited about seeing the Nocturne ecosystem
evolve and it feels like it's off to a great start.
So thank you so much for coming on.
Thanks for the time, Brian. I appreciate it.