1 00:00:00,040 --> 00:00:02,520 Welcome to Epicenter, the show, which talks about the 2 00:00:02,520 --> 00:00:04,960 technologies, projects and people driving geese, 3 00:00:04,960 --> 00:00:07,280 centralization and the blockchain revolution. 4 00:00:07,280 --> 00:00:10,640 And then today I'm speaking with Zach Williamson. 5 00:00:11,000 --> 00:00:15,280 You're not going to launch this thing without decentralization, 6 00:00:15,280 --> 00:00:16,239 right? Kind of like you want a 7 00:00:16,239 --> 00:00:18,600 decentralized sequencer and provers. 8 00:00:18,880 --> 00:00:20,920 We're not doing this out of some moral crusade. 9 00:00:20,920 --> 00:00:22,200 We do it. We're decentralized because we 10 00:00:22,200 --> 00:00:23,600 need to be. We can't be centralized. 11 00:00:23,680 --> 00:00:24,560 We'd have to build in a backdoor. 12 00:00:24,560 --> 00:00:25,640 We don't want to build in a backdoor. 13 00:00:25,640 --> 00:00:28,000 Backdoors are really bad. You want to use things that are 14 00:00:28,000 --> 00:00:30,080 better tested as much as you can, right? 15 00:00:30,080 --> 00:00:34,200 Building novel things kind of means having to build new 16 00:00:34,200 --> 00:00:41,280 systems, but trying to possibly fall back on proven systems. 17 00:00:41,480 --> 00:00:45,320 There's no such thing. We are the first astic will be 18 00:00:45,320 --> 00:00:47,880 the fall back for future generations of private 19 00:00:47,880 --> 00:00:50,320 cryptography. Once we get beta we believe much 20 00:00:50,320 --> 00:00:52,560 more comfortable making claims about its security. 21 00:00:52,560 --> 00:00:54,200 Will be much more comfortable with people putting large 22 00:00:54,200 --> 00:00:56,680 amounts of funds in. But until then, it's it's going 23 00:00:56,680 --> 00:01:04,959 to be a risky protocol. I'm pretty honest, and today I'm 24 00:01:04,959 --> 00:01:09,720 speaking with Zach Williamson, Co founder and CEO of Aztec, a 25 00:01:09,720 --> 00:01:15,920 Layer 2 network building what it calls programmable privacy for 26 00:01:15,920 --> 00:01:19,640 Ethereum. So Aztec was once known for 27 00:01:20,040 --> 00:01:23,880 private transfers, but a couple of years ago, the team did 28 00:01:23,880 --> 00:01:28,040 something that very few projects actually dare to go through with 29 00:01:28,400 --> 00:01:31,680 they shut everything down and rebuild from scratch. 30 00:01:32,800 --> 00:01:36,920 The new Aztec promises fully private smart contracts, not 31 00:01:36,920 --> 00:01:40,280 just private balances, but private logic, computation, 32 00:01:40,280 --> 00:01:43,840 identity, but still remaining compatible with Ethereum's 33 00:01:44,200 --> 00:01:48,080 public ecosystem. We'll dive into all the details 34 00:01:48,080 --> 00:01:50,600 in just a bit. This episode is brought to you 35 00:01:50,600 --> 00:01:53,760 by Nosis, building the open Internet one block at a time. 36 00:01:54,240 --> 00:01:57,800 Nosis was founded in 2015 and it's grown from 1 of Ethereum's 37 00:01:57,800 --> 00:02:01,240 earliest projects into a powerful ecosystem for open user 38 00:02:01,240 --> 00:02:04,080 owned finance. Nosis is also the team behind 39 00:02:04,080 --> 00:02:06,720 products that had become core to my business and that are so many 40 00:02:06,720 --> 00:02:10,880 others like Safe and Cow Swap. At the center is Nosis Chain. 41 00:02:11,360 --> 00:02:15,760 It's a low fee layer one with 0 downtime in seven years and 42 00:02:15,760 --> 00:02:17,760 secured by over 300,000 validators. 43 00:02:18,160 --> 00:02:20,840 It's the foundation for real world financial applications 44 00:02:20,840 --> 00:02:25,000 like Nosis Pay and Circles. All of this is governed by Nosis 45 00:02:25,000 --> 00:02:27,960 Dow, a community run organization where anyone with a 46 00:02:28,160 --> 00:02:32,480 GNO token can vote on updates, fund new projects, and even run 47 00:02:32,480 --> 00:02:35,920 a validator from home. So if you're building a Web 3 or 48 00:02:35,920 --> 00:02:38,240 you're just curious about what financial freedom can look like, 49 00:02:38,440 --> 00:02:43,280 start exploring at nosis dot IO. Zach, thank you so much for 50 00:02:43,280 --> 00:02:46,520 coming on again. Thank you so much for having me 51 00:02:46,520 --> 00:02:47,840 on. It's a pleasure to be back here 52 00:02:47,840 --> 00:02:50,320 after all these years. Yeah, absolutely. 53 00:02:50,560 --> 00:02:54,760 Yeah, you, you were last on Epicentre when Aztec was still 54 00:02:54,760 --> 00:03:00,000 running it's earlier version. Tell us what's happened since. 55 00:03:00,000 --> 00:03:02,280 Yeah. So back then I think we were, we 56 00:03:02,280 --> 00:03:07,480 were on Aztec Connect, which was a continuation of the world's 57 00:03:07,480 --> 00:03:11,560 first fully private roll up. So it was a layer 2 network 58 00:03:11,560 --> 00:03:16,120 where you could send private transactions and use our network 59 00:03:16,400 --> 00:03:19,000 effectively as an anonymous proxy into Ethereum Defy. 60 00:03:19,000 --> 00:03:22,320 So you could talk to something like a Uniswap or an Ave. 61 00:03:22,320 --> 00:03:25,200 contract and have the Aztec smart contract act as your 62 00:03:25,200 --> 00:03:28,040 proxy. Then the result of that Defy 63 00:03:28,040 --> 00:03:30,360 traction would come back into the Aztec network and then you 64 00:03:30,360 --> 00:03:32,920 could take your claim of it privately. 65 00:03:32,920 --> 00:03:35,640 So back then that was the the most advanced thing we could do 66 00:03:35,640 --> 00:03:38,120 with the technology that we had available at the time. 67 00:03:38,880 --> 00:03:43,800 Something we call turboplunk was a was a was an extension of the 68 00:03:43,800 --> 00:03:46,200 original Plunk paper that we put out in 2019. 69 00:03:46,200 --> 00:03:49,520 But that was the Azteca. That was never really the full 70 00:03:49,520 --> 00:03:52,600 aspirations of the network. We built it because we wanted to 71 00:03:52,600 --> 00:03:56,240 demonstrate that privacy was possible and useful and needed. 72 00:03:56,280 --> 00:04:00,040 What we've wanted to do all the long was create a private smart 73 00:04:00,040 --> 00:04:03,440 contract ecosystem. So one where instead of just 74 00:04:03,440 --> 00:04:06,080 doing transfers or talking to defy, you know, you can have a 75 00:04:06,080 --> 00:04:08,640 sharing complete smart card language where you can write 76 00:04:08,640 --> 00:04:12,080 your own states, your own state transition functions and 77 00:04:12,320 --> 00:04:16,800 describe the logic of whatever protocol you desired, but with 78 00:04:16,800 --> 00:04:18,560 private data as a first class primitive. 79 00:04:19,880 --> 00:04:22,560 So yeah, that's what we just, that's what we decided to build, 80 00:04:22,560 --> 00:04:27,360 I think shortly after our first. Conversation, why did you decide 81 00:04:27,360 --> 00:04:31,000 to kind of rebuild this completely instead of just 82 00:04:31,000 --> 00:04:34,360 iterating on the old system? Because I mean, obviously people 83 00:04:34,360 --> 00:04:36,680 were already on there, people were using it that. 84 00:04:36,680 --> 00:04:38,680 Would have been nice. We have, I think it was 60,000 85 00:04:38,680 --> 00:04:41,600 multi active users. It was, it was and growing quite 86 00:04:41,600 --> 00:04:45,320 rapidly. The the challenge was that Essek 87 00:04:45,320 --> 00:04:48,880 Connect was built from scratch with the latest technology we 88 00:04:48,880 --> 00:04:52,080 had at our disposal. No one had really built a fully 89 00:04:52,080 --> 00:04:54,120 private rollout before. So we've been figuring out a lot 90 00:04:54,120 --> 00:04:56,840 from the first time, and in hindsight, we made a lot of 91 00:04:56,840 --> 00:05:01,040 architectural missteps that we wanted to correct that really we 92 00:05:01,040 --> 00:05:04,440 didn't really have a viable path to iteratively upgrading as tech 93 00:05:04,440 --> 00:05:06,400 connects to add programmability into it. 94 00:05:06,760 --> 00:05:10,480 Everything changed. You know, the semantics of how 95 00:05:10,480 --> 00:05:13,960 you, how you call create transactions, the cryptographic 96 00:05:13,960 --> 00:05:17,240 proving system that you need to use the, the Node software and 97 00:05:17,280 --> 00:05:20,560 its interface and its API. We quickly realized it was what 98 00:05:20,560 --> 00:05:22,920 we wanted to build was unrecognizable compared to what 99 00:05:22,920 --> 00:05:25,200 we already had, and that we needed to take those learnings 100 00:05:25,200 --> 00:05:28,280 and that institutional knowledge and and recast it. 101 00:05:28,280 --> 00:05:32,040 But we we didn't see a viable pathway to it's a has to 102 00:05:32,040 --> 00:05:35,200 connect, unfortunately. Tell me about the moment that 103 00:05:35,200 --> 00:05:39,120 you guys realize this. So kind of obviously kind of as 104 00:05:39,280 --> 00:05:43,160 a builder, as a founder, you, you get attached to what you've 105 00:05:43,160 --> 00:05:45,200 built, right? Kind of like it's your baby and 106 00:05:45,200 --> 00:05:50,000 kind of like the users kind of you, you feel close to them even 107 00:05:50,000 --> 00:05:52,680 if you don't actually know them personally. 108 00:05:52,680 --> 00:05:57,000 Kind of you, you, you are somehow indebted to them, right? 109 00:05:57,000 --> 00:06:01,000 So kind of you, you have some sort of so, so tell me how that 110 00:06:01,000 --> 00:06:02,560 went down. Yeah, I still feel like pain of 111 00:06:02,560 --> 00:06:04,160 guilt whenever I talk to somebody and they say, hey, I 112 00:06:04,200 --> 00:06:05,360 use SAS to connect. I'm like I'm. 113 00:06:06,760 --> 00:06:13,640 I use SAS to connect. It was tricky. 114 00:06:13,640 --> 00:06:16,680 You know, it started with we had some internal conversations. 115 00:06:16,880 --> 00:06:19,640 Basically there was, there was this exciting incident where we 116 00:06:19,640 --> 00:06:22,120 made some research breakthroughs that made the full programmable 117 00:06:22,120 --> 00:06:23,920 version possible. And it was, it was an 118 00:06:23,920 --> 00:06:27,000 evolutionary process. You know, a lot of others also 119 00:06:27,000 --> 00:06:28,400 were spent maintaining there's no software. 120 00:06:28,400 --> 00:06:30,960 We didn't really have the ability to really launch this, 121 00:06:30,960 --> 00:06:32,560 what we were calling Aztec Free Project. 122 00:06:33,160 --> 00:06:34,880 You know, some, there were some people we were having 123 00:06:34,880 --> 00:06:37,360 discussions that we were like, hey, like maybe we need to kill 124 00:06:37,360 --> 00:06:40,000 this. Then that started turning into a 125 00:06:40,400 --> 00:06:42,720 internally like quite, quite a quite an active discussion. 126 00:06:42,720 --> 00:06:46,560 And yeah, like eventually it was ended up as me and me and Jonah 127 00:06:46,560 --> 00:06:50,880 in the coffee shop having a very long conversation about about 128 00:06:50,880 --> 00:06:52,480 the future, about what we wanted to do. 129 00:06:52,520 --> 00:06:55,200 We we we came to looking. But yeah, we need to there's no 130 00:06:55,200 --> 00:06:57,880 way that we can serve both asked to connect and asked to three. 131 00:06:58,360 --> 00:07:01,400 One needs to go and and it should be asked to connect. 132 00:07:01,960 --> 00:07:03,760 But it was it was a tough conversation. 133 00:07:03,800 --> 00:07:07,360 Which one of these kids do you think we should kind of put up 134 00:07:07,360 --> 00:07:08,680 for adoption? Sort of. 135 00:07:08,920 --> 00:07:11,200 Yeah, you know, everyone says they love their children 136 00:07:11,200 --> 00:07:14,560 equally, but maybe deep down. Like one of them is air 137 00:07:14,560 --> 00:07:16,360 secretary. Don't want to acknowledge. 138 00:07:17,280 --> 00:07:20,320 And then we're like yeah, OK, 111 of our kids needs to die. 139 00:07:23,200 --> 00:07:26,600 Prepare the sacrificial altar. OK, maybe, maybe let's move into 140 00:07:26,600 --> 00:07:29,440 kind of like more theory territory. 141 00:07:29,440 --> 00:07:33,760 So one of the kids is somewhat alive again. 142 00:07:33,760 --> 00:07:37,160 So tell, tell us kind of like what's what's live now and 143 00:07:37,160 --> 00:07:39,320 what's still being built. We're calling ASIC now, we're 144 00:07:39,320 --> 00:07:41,800 releasing, you know, it's not ASIC free anymore and it is 145 00:07:41,880 --> 00:07:44,040 alive. It's on public test net, it's 146 00:07:44,040 --> 00:07:46,680 fully decentralized. You can deploy contracts to it 147 00:07:46,680 --> 00:07:50,440 today, send transactions to it. I think it's is it play 148 00:07:50,440 --> 00:07:52,600 around.asic.net network I believe. 149 00:07:52,960 --> 00:07:57,640 And we are currently going through a audit process and, you 150 00:07:57,640 --> 00:08:02,560 know, doing some last minute adaptations to it to get it 151 00:08:02,560 --> 00:08:05,600 ready for Mainnet, which should be happening early next year. 152 00:08:06,240 --> 00:08:09,040 Exciting. Very alive kicking, you know, 153 00:08:09,080 --> 00:08:10,920 like now. Now we're the main focus 154 00:08:10,920 --> 00:08:13,640 internally is basically focus on the Dev X. 155 00:08:14,520 --> 00:08:16,400 We, we launched the test net earlier this year. 156 00:08:17,160 --> 00:08:20,040 And you know, we, we've basically transitioning the, the 157 00:08:20,040 --> 00:08:22,760 organization from a place where the goal was just get it 158 00:08:22,760 --> 00:08:26,920 working, whatever's, whatever it takes, just get it working to 1 159 00:08:26,920 --> 00:08:28,720 where a mandate. Now we need to make it good, 160 00:08:29,240 --> 00:08:30,880 easy to use for, easy to develop for. 161 00:08:31,040 --> 00:08:32,080 So that's still a work in progress. 162 00:08:32,080 --> 00:08:35,880 But by the time we we hit hit our launch next year, that 163 00:08:35,880 --> 00:08:38,480 should be all squared away. Fantastic. 164 00:08:39,200 --> 00:08:43,400 So maybe let's talk about the way this thing is architected. 165 00:08:43,400 --> 00:08:48,120 So kind of there are a couple of core design choices that you 166 00:08:48,120 --> 00:08:52,280 guys had to make and I think maybe it's easiest if we kind of 167 00:08:52,280 --> 00:08:55,520 walk through them 1 by 1. So kind of the first I noted 168 00:08:55,520 --> 00:09:00,040 down as kind of decision to kind of have a hybrid public and 169 00:09:00,040 --> 00:09:03,200 private execution situation. Tell us about that for. 170 00:09:03,400 --> 00:09:03,760 Sure. Yeah. 171 00:09:03,760 --> 00:09:05,840 Well, that that came out of again, like I think Asterisk 172 00:09:05,840 --> 00:09:08,240 Connect was, was is existentially important for us 173 00:09:08,240 --> 00:09:10,200 because this came out of Asterisk Connect like a learning 174 00:09:10,200 --> 00:09:13,640 that we were like we realized, OK, so with private state the 175 00:09:13,640 --> 00:09:15,520 way currently is, at least if you don't have FHE, we don't 176 00:09:15,520 --> 00:09:18,960 have announced NPC like like TESAO stuff, which we do have, 177 00:09:18,960 --> 00:09:20,520 but it's not yet like critical level. 178 00:09:20,520 --> 00:09:23,720 At the critical level, all private data is encrypted and 179 00:09:23,720 --> 00:09:27,080 you need to use a UTX survey states model to do that. 180 00:09:27,120 --> 00:09:29,560 Like like Bitcoin, where instead of having an account where you 181 00:09:29,560 --> 00:09:32,520 have a like either balances that can be modified, you have 182 00:09:32,520 --> 00:09:36,160 individual discrete like objects of state in your database. 183 00:09:36,160 --> 00:09:39,120 And these things have owners so that your balance, your token 184 00:09:39,120 --> 00:09:41,320 balance is made-up of lots of these different notes in your in 185 00:09:41,320 --> 00:09:42,800 your database. The reason you need this for 186 00:09:42,800 --> 00:09:47,360 privacy is because if I have an encrypted balance and you, you 187 00:09:47,360 --> 00:09:49,160 send a transaction that changes my encrypted balance. 188 00:09:49,160 --> 00:09:52,000 Well, if that's still one, if that balance is just one piece 189 00:09:52,000 --> 00:09:55,440 of data in in in the in the in the network database and you can 190 00:09:55,440 --> 00:09:58,800 see it change and therefore you can see the transaction graph. 191 00:09:58,800 --> 00:10:01,080 You also need the entire state, right? 192 00:10:01,080 --> 00:10:04,400 Because kind of like in an account model, you don't 193 00:10:04,440 --> 00:10:07,760 actually have the account balance noted down anywhere. 194 00:10:07,760 --> 00:10:10,920 Kind of like you actually have to walk through the entire 195 00:10:11,520 --> 00:10:14,280 history of the state in order to kind of arrive at. 196 00:10:14,320 --> 00:10:16,240 You do but but in an account based model. 197 00:10:16,240 --> 00:10:18,400 You stole in this in the state tree you do. 198 00:10:18,400 --> 00:10:19,960 You do have like a state, a variable. 199 00:10:20,080 --> 00:10:22,000 Yeah, a state tree will have your banners. 200 00:10:22,000 --> 00:10:25,200 Finally, it might be tricky, but, and so when a transaction 201 00:10:25,200 --> 00:10:27,080 changes that you can see that. And that's not OK if you're 202 00:10:27,080 --> 00:10:29,160 private. So instead we have a, you know, 203 00:10:29,320 --> 00:10:31,920 we have this, the model that that really Z Cash and Zerocoin 204 00:10:31,960 --> 00:10:34,560 propagated where you have individual bits of state, 205 00:10:34,560 --> 00:10:37,120 they're encrypted by an owner and they can be created or they 206 00:10:37,120 --> 00:10:38,760 can be destroyed. And that's how you modify them. 207 00:10:38,760 --> 00:10:40,720 You, you, you destroy it and then you create something new. 208 00:10:41,040 --> 00:10:43,680 The reason why we do that is that the records have destroyed 209 00:10:43,680 --> 00:10:46,240 notes and the records have created notes who use different 210 00:10:46,240 --> 00:10:48,320 encryption algorithms for them. So you can't, so that an 211 00:10:48,320 --> 00:10:51,360 observer can't link the 2. So if I destroy two of my notes, 212 00:10:51,440 --> 00:10:54,640 create 2 new notes, maybe one of them is earned by you, one of 213 00:10:54,640 --> 00:10:58,160 them is earned by me. Nobody, the everything observer 214 00:10:58,160 --> 00:11:01,560 can see if they look at the network is that tune notes were 215 00:11:01,560 --> 00:11:03,160 created, tune notes were destroyed, but they don't know 216 00:11:03,160 --> 00:11:04,160 what they are. They don't know how they're 217 00:11:04,160 --> 00:11:05,240 linked. Therefore it's private. 218 00:11:05,560 --> 00:11:09,080 However, the problem there is, well, if that's private and it 219 00:11:09,080 --> 00:11:13,280 was encrypted, how do you do global state, as in, you know, 220 00:11:13,280 --> 00:11:16,480 take Unisop as a smart contract. If you have an AMA liquidity 221 00:11:16,480 --> 00:11:19,280 pool, well, you need to know what's in the liquidity pool so 222 00:11:19,280 --> 00:11:23,440 that you can perform your liquidity calculations and like 223 00:11:23,560 --> 00:11:25,280 a, an or a token which has a total supply. 224 00:11:25,280 --> 00:11:27,440 How do you update that? If everything's owned by 225 00:11:27,440 --> 00:11:30,000 somebody who holds, holds a description key? 226 00:11:30,000 --> 00:11:32,720 You can do it via NBC. You can do it, which is very 227 00:11:32,720 --> 00:11:36,240 challenging, or you can kind of skip the problem entirely by 228 00:11:36,240 --> 00:11:38,840 having this hybrid statement where some information you can 229 00:11:38,840 --> 00:11:40,720 make private and some information you can make public. 230 00:11:40,920 --> 00:11:44,200 So in this context, the simplest way on asset to make an AMM is, 231 00:11:44,200 --> 00:11:46,680 well, you make the AMM fully public. 232 00:11:46,680 --> 00:11:49,320 So you can see that the, the token values going into the, 233 00:11:49,320 --> 00:11:51,440 into the market. You can see the trades that are 234 00:11:51,440 --> 00:11:57,120 happening, but you can't see the identities of the of the 235 00:11:57,120 --> 00:12:01,080 participants. So I could put some USDC into an 236 00:12:01,080 --> 00:12:05,520 AM, take out some ETH and people can see what's the, the prices, 237 00:12:05,760 --> 00:12:07,760 but they don't they can't, they don't know it was me in in many 238 00:12:07,760 --> 00:12:10,000 ways, that kind of system can get you the best of both worlds 239 00:12:10,000 --> 00:12:12,600 where you get privacy for the user, but transparency for the 240 00:12:12,760 --> 00:12:15,080 protocol, which often can be very important to understand 241 00:12:15,080 --> 00:12:17,800 that you're not, you've not been, you've not been cheated, 242 00:12:17,800 --> 00:12:19,720 you've not been manipulated, but you can. 243 00:12:19,760 --> 00:12:21,920 Sorry, I'm rambling here a little bit, a little bit of 244 00:12:21,920 --> 00:12:24,040 monologue. You know, with advanced NPC 245 00:12:24,040 --> 00:12:26,120 shared state prematures like Tatsuya, which is present on 246 00:12:26,120 --> 00:12:29,560 Aztec, you can create fully private contracts if you desire 247 00:12:29,560 --> 00:12:32,600 it. It's just right now the the info 248 00:12:32,600 --> 00:12:35,600 to handle that is less built house than it will be in a 249 00:12:35,600 --> 00:12:37,520 couple of years. I understand that there are 250 00:12:37,720 --> 00:12:41,520 public contracts and there are fully private contracts. 251 00:12:42,160 --> 00:12:46,280 Can I build something that's in between so kind of that I can 252 00:12:46,280 --> 00:12:50,040 kind of share with a select group group of people, so kind 253 00:12:50,040 --> 00:12:55,640 of like my own AMM pool that I only allow my besties to kind of 254 00:12:55,640 --> 00:12:59,000 trade on sort of thing the. Code for private contracts does 255 00:12:59,000 --> 00:13:02,280 not have to be published if you. You need the code if you're 256 00:13:02,280 --> 00:13:05,840 going to send a transaction, but it's not published by default. 257 00:13:05,840 --> 00:13:11,560 So if you want, you can just share that code with a selected 258 00:13:11,560 --> 00:13:13,760 group of people, have a whitelist so that you can 259 00:13:13,760 --> 00:13:16,640 basically have this completely isolated suite of smart 260 00:13:16,640 --> 00:13:18,960 contracts within the async network that nobody else knows 261 00:13:18,960 --> 00:13:20,480 about. Can't remember if I did think 262 00:13:20,480 --> 00:13:22,640 we've actually added it as a premise of your in our protocol, 263 00:13:22,640 --> 00:13:25,040 but it will happen in an update where you can encrypt smart 264 00:13:25,040 --> 00:13:26,960 contracts so that you don't just need the code, you need a 265 00:13:26,960 --> 00:13:29,480 description key if you really want to go, go that that 266 00:13:29,480 --> 00:13:31,200 direction. You can also have hybrid systems 267 00:13:31,200 --> 00:13:33,360 in another way where you can have a single smart contract 268 00:13:33,360 --> 00:13:35,640 that has both public and private functions. 269 00:13:35,640 --> 00:13:39,200 So a canonical token contractors like this where you can shield 270 00:13:39,200 --> 00:13:41,040 tokens, but you can also unshield them and you can send 271 00:13:41,040 --> 00:13:43,480 them, send them around publicly. And if you want to go even 272 00:13:43,480 --> 00:13:46,080 further, you could only share the private parts of your 273 00:13:46,080 --> 00:13:48,480 contract with a select few people if you really wanted. 274 00:13:48,480 --> 00:13:54,240 To, OK, walk me through, I mean, so at the face of it's, it's 275 00:13:54,240 --> 00:13:57,960 kind of like, it sounds very sensible, but kind of as an 276 00:13:57,960 --> 00:14:02,600 engineer, it sounds tremendously complicated to kind of construct 277 00:14:02,600 --> 00:14:06,200 something like this. Walk us through kind of the 278 00:14:06,200 --> 00:14:10,000 challenges and the solutions that you found to them. 279 00:14:10,000 --> 00:14:14,760 Oh. So many challenges because it's 280 00:14:14,760 --> 00:14:17,000 it's not just the difficulties of building it, but also it's 281 00:14:17,000 --> 00:14:20,160 creating abstraction layers that allow building on it and for it 282 00:14:20,160 --> 00:14:22,520 to be relatively easy and straightforward. 283 00:14:22,840 --> 00:14:26,800 The goal is that for you know any web three engineer to be 284 00:14:26,800 --> 00:14:28,800 able to to run into play smart contracts, you don't need to 285 00:14:28,800 --> 00:14:32,000 know cryptography or weird, weird complicated semantics 286 00:14:32,000 --> 00:14:34,400 around around privacy. I mean, I guess the very first 287 00:14:34,400 --> 00:14:36,600 problem was just technological was then if you have private 288 00:14:36,600 --> 00:14:38,560 transactions, then each transaction itself is a 0 289 00:14:38,560 --> 00:14:41,360 knowledge proof. And so how do you make that 290 00:14:41,360 --> 00:14:44,000 proof? Because you know, normally if 291 00:14:44,000 --> 00:14:47,280 you look at things like the, the Zexi paper and, and early 292 00:14:47,280 --> 00:14:51,800 attempts at creating private transactions, they, they're very 293 00:14:51,800 --> 00:14:54,080 unintuitive to a developer or engineer. 294 00:14:55,120 --> 00:14:57,600 The idea is there is that instead of having a, instead of 295 00:14:57,600 --> 00:15:03,040 having code that modifies state, you have state that is a that 296 00:15:03,040 --> 00:15:05,440 comes attached with some code which defines how that state 297 00:15:05,440 --> 00:15:06,720 variable is created or destroyed. 298 00:15:07,160 --> 00:15:08,840 As you know how it used to, that's how it used to work. 299 00:15:08,840 --> 00:15:12,560 And it's like it's, it's not intuitive, it's messy. 300 00:15:12,880 --> 00:15:15,200 So we needed to take those models that that existed in the 301 00:15:15,200 --> 00:15:17,160 literature that you could create snark sectors for and actually 302 00:15:17,160 --> 00:15:20,040 go, OK, no, no, no, we want contracts and those contracts 303 00:15:20,040 --> 00:15:22,280 can call other contracts and, and these contracts can 304 00:15:22,280 --> 00:15:24,200 manipulate a database of arbitrary state. 305 00:15:24,200 --> 00:15:25,240 How do we do this? How do we do this? 306 00:15:25,240 --> 00:15:27,400 So we had to, we had to come up with some very noble 307 00:15:27,400 --> 00:15:31,120 cryptography to each and pull this off because if you have a 308 00:15:31,120 --> 00:15:33,040 bunch of contracts all written by different people, they all 309 00:15:33,040 --> 00:15:34,360 have different verification keys. 310 00:15:34,600 --> 00:15:37,040 You basically one transaction that causes lots and lots of 311 00:15:37,040 --> 00:15:39,360 contracts is effectively large numbers of 0 knowledge proofs 312 00:15:39,360 --> 00:15:41,000 that need to be recursively composed together. 313 00:15:41,000 --> 00:15:44,080 You need to hand like to handle large amounts of data transfer 314 00:15:44,080 --> 00:15:46,280 between these zero knowledge proofs effectively. 315 00:15:46,280 --> 00:15:49,000 You know, you've got algebraic circuits that you're trying to 316 00:15:49,000 --> 00:15:53,120 pretend are iterative programs and, and, and creating a AZK 317 00:15:53,120 --> 00:15:55,360 proving technology that can handle that is was very, very 318 00:15:55,360 --> 00:15:57,160 challenging. But that was just the first step 319 00:15:57,160 --> 00:15:59,360 one. Then on top of that, you know, 320 00:15:59,360 --> 00:16:01,400 we needed to cope with an Avi from scratch about how to 321 00:16:01,400 --> 00:16:03,560 interpret this stuff. As in, you know, you have a you 322 00:16:03,560 --> 00:16:05,960 have a private function call. It's got a bunch of public 323 00:16:05,960 --> 00:16:07,600 inputs in New Zealand. Second, you need to interpret 324 00:16:07,600 --> 00:16:10,040 this inputs according to some Avi so that your protocol level 325 00:16:10,040 --> 00:16:12,240 circuits can figure out what to do. 326 00:16:12,960 --> 00:16:15,920 We need to undertake to figure out how our state treats worked, 327 00:16:15,920 --> 00:16:18,360 you know, like even that was non trivial. 328 00:16:18,640 --> 00:16:20,440 How do you do events in an encrypted way? 329 00:16:20,480 --> 00:16:22,560 How do you do state sharing efficiently? 330 00:16:22,560 --> 00:16:27,240 So if I, you know, technologies like Zcash, I think they've made 331 00:16:27,240 --> 00:16:29,600 improvements recently, but back in the day, same with asked to 332 00:16:29,600 --> 00:16:31,000 connect. If you wanted to sync to the 333 00:16:31,000 --> 00:16:33,600 network, you need to, to download every single piece of 334 00:16:33,600 --> 00:16:35,560 encrypted state and try to decrypt it yourself to see if 335 00:16:35,560 --> 00:16:37,240 you owned it. That doesn't scale. 336 00:16:37,560 --> 00:16:40,680 So how do you, how do you create a, a world where I can send you 337 00:16:40,680 --> 00:16:44,120 a, a note where that note doesn't necessarily represent 338 00:16:44,120 --> 00:16:45,520 tokens. It represents arbitrary state in 339 00:16:45,520 --> 00:16:46,880 a smart contract. And you know that this has 340 00:16:46,880 --> 00:16:50,200 happened and you can decrypt that information without having 341 00:16:50,200 --> 00:16:53,400 to sync to the entire network again like that. 342 00:16:53,400 --> 00:16:57,560 That's that's an open problem. It's until we have much more 343 00:16:57,560 --> 00:16:59,960 advanced FHE solutions. There's always a trade off there 344 00:16:59,960 --> 00:17:03,160 in terms of privacy. So it's figuring out where where 345 00:17:03,160 --> 00:17:04,560 to go on that trade off was very challenging. 346 00:17:05,599 --> 00:17:08,200 Yeah, this is the start of it. You know, then there's how do 347 00:17:08,720 --> 00:17:11,079 you even even basic things not associated with privacy, like 348 00:17:11,079 --> 00:17:13,480 how do you decentralize an L2 network? 349 00:17:14,000 --> 00:17:16,880 That's actually, there's not a huge amount of work on that in 350 00:17:16,880 --> 00:17:18,920 the public domain. We had to figure out all of that 351 00:17:18,920 --> 00:17:20,520 ourselves. You know, eventually we even 352 00:17:20,520 --> 00:17:22,920 realized for our particular needs, we needed to build in a 353 00:17:22,920 --> 00:17:27,200 very small data variability network into our layer 2 to in 354 00:17:27,200 --> 00:17:29,400 order to secure certain light risk guarantees. 355 00:17:29,400 --> 00:17:30,720 Yeah, it's, it's been very challenging. 356 00:17:30,800 --> 00:17:32,560 There's a reason it's taken us so long to build this. 357 00:17:33,880 --> 00:17:36,880 One thing that kind of we haven't yet touched on or you 358 00:17:36,880 --> 00:17:42,240 very briefly kind of glossed over just now is that not only 359 00:17:42,440 --> 00:17:46,320 kind of didn't did you not want to make compromises in the 360 00:17:46,320 --> 00:17:50,320 privacy RAM? You also told me back kind of 361 00:17:50,320 --> 00:17:53,840 like when I last said you on you're not going to launch this 362 00:17:53,840 --> 00:17:56,800 thing without decentralization, right? 363 00:17:56,800 --> 00:17:59,440 Kind of like you want to decentralize sequencer and and 364 00:17:59,440 --> 00:18:03,240 proofers, even if you kind of look at L2 beat now, even the 365 00:18:03,240 --> 00:18:08,280 non encrypted L twos haven't come a very long way there, 366 00:18:08,440 --> 00:18:10,720 right? So tell us what you learned on 367 00:18:10,720 --> 00:18:11,960 that. Again, it's all about 368 00:18:11,960 --> 00:18:13,640 fundamental incentives. You know, we're not doing this 369 00:18:13,800 --> 00:18:16,240 out of some moral crusade. We do it decentralized because 370 00:18:16,240 --> 00:18:18,160 we need to be. For the same reason why if you 371 00:18:18,160 --> 00:18:21,560 take the Internet and HTTPS, you know, where now all, all 372 00:18:21,560 --> 00:18:24,840 requests to, to, to, to website, to a server, they're all made 373 00:18:24,840 --> 00:18:26,480 encrypted. They're all encrypted. 374 00:18:26,480 --> 00:18:28,960 The responses are encrypted if all that traffic flow through 375 00:18:28,960 --> 00:18:32,440 one company and one company's servers, they would be the most 376 00:18:32,720 --> 00:18:35,480 over regulated company in existence. 377 00:18:35,840 --> 00:18:38,320 You know because everybody every every government agency we go to 378 00:18:38,320 --> 00:18:40,400 them going hello, I would like all your information please and 379 00:18:40,400 --> 00:18:42,960 thank you the Easter cryptador the same reason for Aztec we 380 00:18:42,960 --> 00:18:45,480 can't be centralized not without we'd have to build in a backdoor 381 00:18:45,480 --> 00:18:47,160 and we don't want to build in a backdoor Backdoors are really 382 00:18:47,160 --> 00:18:49,400 bad. So we need to be decentralized 383 00:18:49,680 --> 00:18:52,800 where it is a genuine distributed network made-up of 384 00:18:53,040 --> 00:18:55,960 thousands of different participants that that are all 385 00:18:56,000 --> 00:18:57,880 collaboratively participating in this network. 386 00:18:57,880 --> 00:19:00,600 And so one of the few networks that generally has an incentive 387 00:19:00,600 --> 00:19:03,480 to to decentralize most layer twos. 388 00:19:03,480 --> 00:19:05,840 Decentralization is actually corrosive to their interests, 389 00:19:05,840 --> 00:19:10,040 because if you're an EVM, either AZK one or an optimistic one, 390 00:19:10,080 --> 00:19:14,400 your unique value proposition is price and throughput and 391 00:19:14,400 --> 00:19:16,320 latency. Basically cheap transactions, 392 00:19:16,520 --> 00:19:21,200 lots of them, instantly. I would, I would kind of, I 393 00:19:21,200 --> 00:19:24,560 would contest that. I think so kind of in kind of 394 00:19:24,760 --> 00:19:29,640 because in the failure case that kind of kind of like someone, 395 00:19:29,640 --> 00:19:33,200 God forbid compromise the one multi sick that you kind of use 396 00:19:33,200 --> 00:19:38,680 to kind of govern URL to kind of all that value that's kind of 397 00:19:38,680 --> 00:19:42,400 protected and there's is potentially gone right you're. 398 00:19:42,600 --> 00:19:45,400 Talking about security, which is not a value proposition. 399 00:19:45,400 --> 00:19:48,600 It's it's basically it's a protective technology and to be 400 00:19:48,600 --> 00:19:51,040 very cynical from it, if you look into traditional Web 2, 401 00:19:51,040 --> 00:19:55,480 traditional software, how often do companies invest in better 402 00:19:55,480 --> 00:19:57,200 security? Like not, not Barry, if you can 403 00:19:57,200 --> 00:19:59,600 spend money to make money or you can spend money to potentially 404 00:19:59,600 --> 00:20:02,080 not lose money in the future, You know, the, the, the monkey 405 00:20:02,080 --> 00:20:04,920 brain goes, we make the money. We don't, we don't, we don't 406 00:20:04,920 --> 00:20:06,720 protect our, we don't protect the future. 407 00:20:06,720 --> 00:20:07,920 I'm not saying we have this culture. 408 00:20:08,000 --> 00:20:09,480 I'm just saying that this is very common. 409 00:20:09,480 --> 00:20:11,680 So, but you're right that there is there is a desire to 410 00:20:11,680 --> 00:20:13,880 decentralize for that security reason, but it's but it's 411 00:20:13,880 --> 00:20:16,320 corrosive to the bottom line for. 100%, yeah. 412 00:20:16,560 --> 00:20:19,600 I mean, basically best, best business models being AWS, yeah. 413 00:20:22,720 --> 00:20:25,360 Yeah, how do you centralized are you if all your decentralized 414 00:20:25,360 --> 00:20:28,680 nodes are running on AWS, this is a genuine thing we it's 415 00:20:28,680 --> 00:20:31,160 covering and wrestling with but yeah like you know if you're at 416 00:20:31,160 --> 00:20:34,400 ZKL 2, decentralizing makes your costs go up, right? 417 00:20:34,400 --> 00:20:37,200 Your transaction latency increases your the throughput 418 00:20:37,200 --> 00:20:39,800 like the network throughput decreases, the GPS low goes down 419 00:20:39,800 --> 00:20:41,920 and so there's really low design to actually make it happen 420 00:20:41,920 --> 00:20:44,000 whereas for us, we need to make it happen. 421 00:20:44,000 --> 00:20:46,760 We can't survive without it. And so we discovered a few 422 00:20:46,760 --> 00:20:50,600 things like even our it's protocol to select sequences is 423 00:20:50,600 --> 00:20:52,400 somewhat novel. You know, there wasn't anything 424 00:20:52,400 --> 00:20:54,600 off the shuffle that we could take and you'd think you'd do 425 00:20:54,600 --> 00:20:55,560 that wouldn't be figured out by now. 426 00:20:55,560 --> 00:20:58,600 You know, you've got, you have a bunch of LL people who want to 427 00:20:58,680 --> 00:21:01,960 produce blocks on an L2. They're sticking on L1. 428 00:21:02,000 --> 00:21:05,280 You know how they selected you do that, get sorted, but it's 429 00:21:05,280 --> 00:21:08,000 not well, there's many, there's many different views. 430 00:21:08,000 --> 00:21:09,880 Then there's just, you know, we've had to do a lot of work on 431 00:21:09,880 --> 00:21:12,320 the peer-to-peer networking side, which again, it's a bit 432 00:21:12,320 --> 00:21:13,880 surprising we couldn't use anything completely 433 00:21:13,880 --> 00:21:15,440 out-of-the-box, which do a lot ourselves. 434 00:21:15,800 --> 00:21:18,280 But the, the most interesting one for us was a unique 435 00:21:18,280 --> 00:21:21,080 characteristic of a stick, which is that ASIC transactions, an 436 00:21:21,080 --> 00:21:23,520 individual user transaction contains within A to 0 knowledge 437 00:21:23,520 --> 00:21:25,800 proof, right? You have your, your, your 438 00:21:25,800 --> 00:21:28,280 transaction data, which describes what you want to do, 439 00:21:28,640 --> 00:21:30,560 which will it'll be encrypted, but that's, it's fundamentally 440 00:21:30,560 --> 00:21:32,240 still there. But then you have the proof that 441 00:21:32,240 --> 00:21:34,560 comes along with it going, my state transitions are all 442 00:21:34,600 --> 00:21:35,760 correct. I've followed the rules of your 443 00:21:35,760 --> 00:21:38,880 critical and in our roll up blocks, we effectively swallow 444 00:21:38,880 --> 00:21:41,800 that proof data, right. If if you're making a proof of a 445 00:21:42,240 --> 00:21:45,760 Aztec block, you are inside your ZPA circuit, you're verifying 446 00:21:45,760 --> 00:21:47,840 all of the individual transaction proofs, which means 447 00:21:47,840 --> 00:21:50,400 when you publish the roll up block, you don't need the proofs 448 00:21:50,400 --> 00:21:53,160 anymore, but you need the proofs to make the block to make the 449 00:21:53,160 --> 00:21:55,760 block proof. And we had this dilemma because 450 00:21:55,760 --> 00:21:59,320 we did not want to publish the the transaction proof data onto 451 00:21:59,320 --> 00:22:02,160 L1 because it's, it's large and that's expensive. 452 00:22:02,560 --> 00:22:06,720 And I'm thinking, well, we don't need to publish it if every 453 00:22:06,720 --> 00:22:09,000 block comes with proof. The only challenge is you need, 454 00:22:09,000 --> 00:22:11,480 you need your prover. So, so you have a statistic to 455 00:22:11,480 --> 00:22:13,160 read block producers and block prover's right, The block 456 00:22:13,160 --> 00:22:15,040 producers are making the block. If they're not publishing the, 457 00:22:15,200 --> 00:22:18,000 the user transaction data onto L1, you need to guarantee that 458 00:22:18,000 --> 00:22:22,400 data exists for about 20 minutes so that a block prover can still 459 00:22:22,480 --> 00:22:25,200 make that block. And so we're like, oh, oh God, 460 00:22:25,200 --> 00:22:27,200 we need, we need ADA layer to make this happen. 461 00:22:27,200 --> 00:22:28,600 Like we need a 20 minute DA layer. 462 00:22:29,360 --> 00:22:30,680 It's not the most impressive thing in the world. 463 00:22:31,160 --> 00:22:33,560 It uses some basic economic consensus, but we had to build 464 00:22:33,560 --> 00:22:36,160 that out to to make our L2A reality, and that was an 465 00:22:36,160 --> 00:22:38,000 interesting detour we weren't expecting. 466 00:22:38,840 --> 00:22:42,600 So what we've kind of tried to cover and mostly glossed over 467 00:22:42,600 --> 00:22:46,320 because there's a lot of it is incredibly high level, right? 468 00:22:46,320 --> 00:22:49,320 So kind of maybe let's kind of take it down to notches. 469 00:22:49,320 --> 00:22:54,520 So imagine I'm an entrepreneur building on Aztec. 470 00:22:55,160 --> 00:22:59,520 So what choices do I have to make that differ from building 471 00:22:59,520 --> 00:23:04,600 on a more standard roll up like Base or Arbitrum? 472 00:23:04,600 --> 00:23:05,760 Yeah. So if you're building on Aztec, 473 00:23:05,840 --> 00:23:08,400 I think there's going to be an assumption that you desire some 474 00:23:08,400 --> 00:23:11,520 kind of privacy in your app or you want to interact with 475 00:23:11,520 --> 00:23:13,200 private accounts. What different choices are you 476 00:23:13,200 --> 00:23:15,520 going to make? Well, we do have to learn a 477 00:23:15,560 --> 00:23:17,800 different programming language in a different technical stack. 478 00:23:17,800 --> 00:23:22,560 We figured the the semantics around privacy on a blockchain 479 00:23:22,560 --> 00:23:27,080 are sufficiently, I think that we needed to go the route of 480 00:23:27,120 --> 00:23:29,840 creating our own language to make it to basic so that we 481 00:23:29,840 --> 00:23:31,760 could create the abstraction layers that we thought would be 482 00:23:31,760 --> 00:23:34,760 appropriate to, to minimize the complexities of this. 483 00:23:35,080 --> 00:23:39,840 It's called Noir and it's, it's basically it's heavily inspired 484 00:23:39,840 --> 00:23:42,880 by Rust. So if you know Rust, it'll be 485 00:23:42,880 --> 00:23:44,640 very intuitive. If you don't know Rust, it's 486 00:23:44,640 --> 00:23:45,920 still pretty, it's still easy to pick up. 487 00:23:45,920 --> 00:23:48,880 You know, it's, it's, it's like a any, any low level programming 488 00:23:48,880 --> 00:23:50,720 language. There's going to be a certain 489 00:23:51,320 --> 00:23:54,320 custom well, as I said, semantics keywords that you have 490 00:23:54,320 --> 00:23:58,080 to learn in terms of, you know, how this how status, how to how 491 00:23:58,080 --> 00:24:00,000 to create the state right storage slots, how to how to how 492 00:24:00,000 --> 00:24:02,560 to manipulate them when a particular when it comes to 493 00:24:02,560 --> 00:24:04,720 private stuff. But you know our docs are 494 00:24:04,720 --> 00:24:07,000 constantly improving. I think hopefully by the time 495 00:24:07,000 --> 00:24:09,560 that this is broadcast, they'll be our latest docs will be, 496 00:24:09,840 --> 00:24:11,400 we're going through a documentation revamp, so 497 00:24:11,400 --> 00:24:12,680 hopefully it'll be done by then. Yeah. 498 00:24:12,680 --> 00:24:16,080 So, so, you know, but the, the forms of what you're doing 499 00:24:16,080 --> 00:24:18,560 should be very familiar. You know, there is a node that 500 00:24:18,560 --> 00:24:20,600 you can install to send transactions to. 501 00:24:20,600 --> 00:24:23,560 That node has an API that you can interact with. 502 00:24:24,400 --> 00:24:26,480 You know, you can write contracts and there's contracts, 503 00:24:26,520 --> 00:24:29,920 you can define an API that's your node uses to get data and 504 00:24:29,920 --> 00:24:33,160 you can connect this all to you. Can I communicate all of this 505 00:24:33,160 --> 00:24:35,840 with a JavaScript wrapper if you want, so that you can write a 506 00:24:35,840 --> 00:24:38,600 web application. So the, the, the, the forms of 507 00:24:38,600 --> 00:24:41,280 it all are very similar. The the details will be slightly 508 00:24:41,280 --> 00:24:43,920 different because the, the state model is different. 509 00:24:43,920 --> 00:24:46,360 You know, like we have public and private keywords in our 510 00:24:46,360 --> 00:24:49,240 contracts, which mean they're not visibility specifiers like 511 00:24:49,240 --> 00:24:50,760 normal in a regular programming language. 512 00:24:50,760 --> 00:24:53,240 They really mean like this. This can be, this can be seen by 513 00:24:53,240 --> 00:24:55,160 the by observers, or it can't be seen. 514 00:24:55,920 --> 00:24:57,640 And then, you know, these cut functions can call other 515 00:24:57,640 --> 00:25:00,240 functions and you commit events. You can, you know, do do all the 516 00:25:00,240 --> 00:25:02,840 similar stuff you you expect from a contract ecosystem. 517 00:25:02,840 --> 00:25:05,160 This is a few more, a few more keywords that you have to think 518 00:25:05,160 --> 00:25:06,880 about because of the public, private thing. 519 00:25:07,080 --> 00:25:09,000 OK. But so kind of the way that I 520 00:25:09,000 --> 00:25:14,680 should think about contracts and gas and wallets and user 521 00:25:14,680 --> 00:25:17,760 interactions and so on, that doesn't really change. 522 00:25:18,160 --> 00:25:19,320 That doesn't change at all, okay. 523 00:25:19,320 --> 00:25:21,880 It's all the same. We have Delta gas, recall it's a 524 00:25:22,000 --> 00:25:25,200 the juice. Yeah, we have wallets in 525 00:25:25,200 --> 00:25:27,600 production. The idea is to basically mirror 526 00:25:27,840 --> 00:25:30,280 all of the concepts one would be familiar with already in Web 3. 527 00:25:30,320 --> 00:25:35,360 Seeing that kind of I have to learn a new contract language 528 00:25:35,360 --> 00:25:37,320 that doesn't particularly dawn me. 529 00:25:37,320 --> 00:25:40,040 So I'm a physicist by training, which means kind of I'm a 530 00:25:40,040 --> 00:25:43,040 terrible programmer, but I'm a terrible programmer in many 531 00:25:43,040 --> 00:25:46,960 languages so that I'm I'm not put up, put off by this. 532 00:25:46,960 --> 00:25:51,960 What kind of application do you think it would make sense for me 533 00:25:51,960 --> 00:25:55,560 to build first? So kind of which ones do you see 534 00:25:55,560 --> 00:26:01,480 where kind of privacy is actually a cool feature rather 535 00:26:01,480 --> 00:26:04,200 than an afterthought and kind of I think what, what I'd like to 536 00:26:04,200 --> 00:26:06,040 talk about next is kind of performance. 537 00:26:06,040 --> 00:26:08,800 So kind of like the trade-offs you kind of make for this. 538 00:26:09,120 --> 00:26:12,200 So yeah, I'm I'm also I'm also an ex physicist so I can relate. 539 00:26:12,840 --> 00:26:15,840 Hopefully over the years I've become better at certain briga. 540 00:26:15,960 --> 00:26:19,120 Maybe when licensing it cope for Aztec. 541 00:26:19,480 --> 00:26:21,320 What do you mean I can't do this in Python? 542 00:26:21,560 --> 00:26:27,000 Can do everything in Python. Yeah, well, my case. 543 00:26:27,040 --> 00:26:27,840 Fortran. Oh my God. 544 00:26:29,640 --> 00:26:31,080 You don't look old enough for this. 545 00:26:31,440 --> 00:26:33,960 OK this. Is going to be kind of 546 00:26:33,960 --> 00:26:35,320 backwards, you know? This is true. 547 00:26:35,400 --> 00:26:37,320 This is true. We can be very backwards. 548 00:26:37,320 --> 00:26:40,600 The applications that make sense are varied, but generally they 549 00:26:40,600 --> 00:26:43,800 will revolve around two things. Either you will need an 550 00:26:43,800 --> 00:26:46,200 understanding of a person's identity that requires 551 00:26:46,200 --> 00:26:50,000 disclosure of sensitive information, or you want to more 552 00:26:50,000 --> 00:26:52,200 broadly, you, you, you want to create an application that's 553 00:26:52,280 --> 00:26:54,400 based around information asymmetries. 554 00:26:54,400 --> 00:26:56,800 You want an application where you're interacting with somebody 555 00:26:56,800 --> 00:27:00,280 at that, like a counterparty and your counterpart in this stuff 556 00:27:00,280 --> 00:27:02,400 you don't and you know, stuff your counterparty doesn't and 557 00:27:02,400 --> 00:27:04,560 you don't want to disclose it. I know that's very vague. 558 00:27:04,560 --> 00:27:06,800 One of the some of the low hanging fruit for that is games. 559 00:27:06,800 --> 00:27:11,720 To give an example, the original breakout NFT from 2018, I think 560 00:27:11,720 --> 00:27:14,800 was Crypto Kitties, which was all about, you know, you have 561 00:27:14,800 --> 00:27:16,680 these cats and you can breed them. 562 00:27:16,680 --> 00:27:19,360 You can combine other cats to great new cats with different 563 00:27:19,440 --> 00:27:21,840 traits. And back then what they relied 564 00:27:21,840 --> 00:27:23,880 on was code obfuscation. Basically, they didn't publish 565 00:27:23,880 --> 00:27:27,560 their source code and so it was hard to figure out ahead of time 566 00:27:27,560 --> 00:27:30,600 what how to breed cats get the optimal side effects. 567 00:27:31,000 --> 00:27:33,560 Nowadays that won't work. That kind of stuff gets 568 00:27:33,560 --> 00:27:36,080 instantly reversed engineered because the overall skill level 569 00:27:36,080 --> 00:27:38,880 is much higher. But you could use privacy to 570 00:27:39,560 --> 00:27:41,200 actually make sure that you couldn't. 571 00:27:41,400 --> 00:27:43,080 You could. You could use things like 572 00:27:43,080 --> 00:27:46,480 Randall and some randomness to to basically make it so that 573 00:27:46,920 --> 00:27:50,000 only at the conclusion of your transaction, when you understand 574 00:27:50,000 --> 00:27:52,640 exactly what traits you're getting, what algorithm was run. 575 00:27:52,680 --> 00:27:54,080 I, I like where you're going with this. 576 00:27:54,080 --> 00:27:57,120 So kind of like when I ask you, So what do you think is the most 577 00:27:57,120 --> 00:28:00,960 pressing application to, to put it on top of this? 578 00:28:01,280 --> 00:28:05,440 Oh, but we can, we can write, we can, we can, we can breed 579 00:28:05,680 --> 00:28:07,960 private. This is fantastic. 580 00:28:07,960 --> 00:28:09,760 Did not say most. Pressing sorry, sorry. 581 00:28:10,160 --> 00:28:12,160 Is this going to solve all the society's problems? 582 00:28:12,160 --> 00:28:16,960 Absolutely. Yeah, it's relevance and and 583 00:28:17,000 --> 00:28:19,560 this will be, there's no demand for that kind of thing on chain. 584 00:28:20,480 --> 00:28:23,120 No, I think I think kind of like games in principle, kind of like 585 00:28:23,120 --> 00:28:25,040 old school games. I think they're actually pretty 586 00:28:25,040 --> 00:28:27,920 good examples because they actually use very little state. 587 00:28:27,920 --> 00:28:30,520 I kind of like if you look at kind of like these 80s arcade 588 00:28:30,520 --> 00:28:32,960 games, kind of like they're tiny. 589 00:28:33,640 --> 00:28:38,000 So kind of running them in this kind of environment, kind of I, 590 00:28:38,000 --> 00:28:39,600 I totally see where you're coming from. 591 00:28:39,720 --> 00:28:43,040 More more useful stuff would be for web free native utility 592 00:28:43,560 --> 00:28:46,760 would be some basic identity protocols to protect against 593 00:28:46,760 --> 00:28:48,840 civil to make for civil resistance. 594 00:28:48,840 --> 00:28:53,520 Basically prove a uniqueness so that you can do things like air 595 00:28:53,520 --> 00:28:57,560 drops that can't be, you know, farmed by somebody pretend to be 596 00:28:57,600 --> 00:29:00,640 1000 different people. Or if you want to do a sale of 597 00:29:00,760 --> 00:29:03,040 tokens, for example, and you want to ensure that it's only 598 00:29:03,040 --> 00:29:05,800 one person coming purchase or governance. 599 00:29:05,800 --> 00:29:08,720 So let's say you want to do a vote on the Dow, but you want to 600 00:29:08,720 --> 00:29:11,920 use quadratic voting where the more tokens you have, like the 601 00:29:11,920 --> 00:29:15,440 less some marginal like voting power of your additional tokens. 602 00:29:15,840 --> 00:29:18,080 There you again, you need some versus you need to ensure that 603 00:29:18,080 --> 00:29:21,880 one voter like that Kelly Devet wants instead of pretending to 604 00:29:21,880 --> 00:29:24,360 be 100 different people with smaller imbalances because then 605 00:29:24,440 --> 00:29:26,280 because otherwise you can gain quadratic voting. 606 00:29:26,280 --> 00:29:28,920 And so civil protection, basic identity protocols, I think will 607 00:29:28,920 --> 00:29:31,400 be very, very valuable things like Zika passport, then that 608 00:29:31,400 --> 00:29:35,840 can be expanded to do finance that is existing in in regulated 609 00:29:35,840 --> 00:29:37,720 spaces. So if you need to prove 610 00:29:37,720 --> 00:29:40,160 somebody's not on a sanctions list, for example, or maybe you 611 00:29:40,160 --> 00:29:42,720 need to approved transaction limits so that somebody is not 612 00:29:42,720 --> 00:29:48,040 transacted like above a certain thresholds in a time period or 613 00:29:48,040 --> 00:29:50,240 you need to know that somebody's residence in a certain country. 614 00:29:50,240 --> 00:29:53,520 Things like that, where you can basically add in identity 615 00:29:53,520 --> 00:29:56,760 credentials to build out D5 protocols that interact with 616 00:29:57,080 --> 00:29:59,080 assets that are more originating in the real world. 617 00:29:59,120 --> 00:30:02,480 And again, I think this is also one of the reasons why the one 618 00:30:02,480 --> 00:30:04,920 of the original use cases of NFTS didn't take off NFTS 619 00:30:04,920 --> 00:30:06,680 originally. People were like, why is this 620 00:30:06,680 --> 00:30:10,160 for tickets? You know, because decade master 621 00:30:10,160 --> 00:30:13,560 is is charges very high fees to get technicians to attack. 622 00:30:13,560 --> 00:30:15,000 It's like, why can't I get rid of them? 623 00:30:15,000 --> 00:30:19,480 Well, because one of the reasons is that to make that work, you 624 00:30:19,480 --> 00:30:22,080 need to link an identity to a cryptocurrency accounts in a 625 00:30:22,080 --> 00:30:24,040 transparent world. If you have identity protocols, 626 00:30:24,040 --> 00:30:25,960 that's no other such a challenging. 627 00:30:25,960 --> 00:30:29,040 Thing to do. I 100% concur that that would be 628 00:30:29,040 --> 00:30:33,120 incredibly useful and kind of like barring kind of like all 629 00:30:34,320 --> 00:30:38,680 potential attributes of your person to kind of like who 630 00:30:38,680 --> 00:30:42,560 whoever kind of like you want to buy bottle of wine from 631 00:30:42,800 --> 00:30:47,440 obviously doesn't make sense. But if you look at the way that 632 00:30:47,440 --> 00:30:52,960 these regulations are drafted and typically proving that you 633 00:30:52,960 --> 00:30:57,280 are above 18 doesn't cut it. So typically you kind of 634 00:30:57,280 --> 00:31:02,360 actually as the person selling the bottle of wine, you actually 635 00:31:02,360 --> 00:31:06,640 have to have some sort of copy. So how do you how do you get 636 00:31:06,640 --> 00:31:07,280 around that? Well. 637 00:31:08,200 --> 00:31:11,480 A couple of things here. First of all, there's very, 638 00:31:11,480 --> 00:31:14,080 there's, there's a lot of value in adding identity to things 639 00:31:14,080 --> 00:31:16,360 that are not, it's for functionality, not regulatory 640 00:31:16,920 --> 00:31:19,200 clients, things like, you know, civil resistance for air drops. 641 00:31:19,240 --> 00:31:21,400 Then there's basically there's, I think the more, the more 642 00:31:21,400 --> 00:31:25,680 mainstream your use case, the more unnecessarily regulated it 643 00:31:25,680 --> 00:31:27,760 becomes. To be fair, like, you know, 644 00:31:27,760 --> 00:31:30,040 these regulations were not drafted by people that 645 00:31:30,040 --> 00:31:31,680 understand that knew about 0 knowledge proofs. 646 00:31:32,280 --> 00:31:35,760 So the idea, you know, when people were drafting here, like 647 00:31:36,320 --> 00:31:39,520 proof of age laws, you know, God knows when 1950s, right? 648 00:31:39,520 --> 00:31:43,040 Like the idea that you could prove your age without seeing 649 00:31:43,160 --> 00:31:46,120 like I, I as I, as I, me, I'm selling wine. 650 00:31:46,120 --> 00:31:48,400 I know somebody's 18 without actually seeing some identity 651 00:31:48,400 --> 00:31:49,600 that was just inconceivable to them. 652 00:31:50,080 --> 00:31:53,120 So I do think there's a, you know, there's some active 653 00:31:53,120 --> 00:31:56,200 accuracy work that we're doing. I do think that legislators, 654 00:31:56,200 --> 00:31:59,160 politicians are, they are actually like becoming more 655 00:31:59,160 --> 00:32:01,880 aware of 0 knowledge proofs and that this will change. 656 00:32:02,320 --> 00:32:04,240 I do think there's plenty of regulations that are actually 657 00:32:04,240 --> 00:32:06,200 very amenable to 0 knowledge proofs already. 658 00:32:06,200 --> 00:32:10,280 Things like using ZK passport a particular passport proofs 659 00:32:10,280 --> 00:32:15,120 because E passports already thing there's already precedent 660 00:32:15,120 --> 00:32:17,320 that that for them to be used and things like passport gates 661 00:32:17,600 --> 00:32:20,280 that's there's already a well established understanding that 662 00:32:20,280 --> 00:32:22,000 these are very strong credentials. 663 00:32:22,400 --> 00:32:25,480 You also have a lot of precedent from the document signing worlds 664 00:32:25,480 --> 00:32:28,760 where digital signatures on documents can be as good as the 665 00:32:28,760 --> 00:32:31,040 real thing as you can start. You can kind of combine these 666 00:32:31,040 --> 00:32:33,720 precedents to make claims that some of these on check that some 667 00:32:33,720 --> 00:32:36,760 of these ZK based identity solutions are good enough 668 00:32:37,720 --> 00:32:38,160 obviously. Yeah. 669 00:32:38,160 --> 00:32:42,360 I mean, if DocuSign can kind of check that box, then obviously I 670 00:32:42,360 --> 00:32:46,440 mean kind of like that there was some, some impressive lobbying 671 00:32:46,440 --> 00:32:51,080 going on there to kind of make anyone, anyone agree that this 672 00:32:51,080 --> 00:32:53,880 is kind of definitely the same thing as signing something in 673 00:32:53,880 --> 00:32:56,640 wet ink like clicking, yes, this is my name. 674 00:32:56,720 --> 00:32:58,720 Yeah, I think, I mean different jurisdictions will progress at 675 00:32:58,720 --> 00:33:01,280 different speeds. You know, for example, the US is 676 00:33:01,280 --> 00:33:04,200 already in the in the presence of passing several crypto 677 00:33:04,200 --> 00:33:07,600 regulations, the DDS acts, there's the Crypto Markets Act. 678 00:33:08,200 --> 00:33:09,640 It's got a fancy name, a cover for what it is. 679 00:33:09,640 --> 00:33:12,680 Europe will be much slower to to be very blunt, we're not really 680 00:33:12,760 --> 00:33:14,720 like. We are always as slow if. 681 00:33:15,000 --> 00:33:16,960 You want to do some advanced enterprise privacy stuff. 682 00:33:17,320 --> 00:33:20,280 We're not talking with the people right now because Europe 683 00:33:20,280 --> 00:33:22,240 will be very slow. Nevertheless, there is value 684 00:33:22,240 --> 00:33:23,720 there, there, there, there's that you can. 685 00:33:23,840 --> 00:33:25,960 There's some things you can do within the existing frameworks, 686 00:33:25,960 --> 00:33:27,840 but really it's America's taking the lead. 687 00:33:27,840 --> 00:33:30,200 There was an opportunity for other countries to take 688 00:33:30,200 --> 00:33:33,880 advantage of America's conservatism under the Biden 689 00:33:33,880 --> 00:33:36,200 administration, my country among them. 690 00:33:36,200 --> 00:33:39,400 There are many voices advocating for what could be done and the 691 00:33:39,400 --> 00:33:42,920 value that can be generated and and so now these countries will 692 00:33:42,920 --> 00:33:45,320 pay like will deal with the consequences of inaction. 693 00:33:45,480 --> 00:33:49,800 The the economic central gravity of crypto will be America, and 694 00:33:49,800 --> 00:33:52,520 that's just the way it is. Tell me about the performance 695 00:33:52,520 --> 00:33:55,600 trade-offs for programmable privacy. 696 00:33:55,600 --> 00:34:02,320 So it's kind of like what's the bottleneck right now for 697 00:34:02,320 --> 00:34:05,800 performance? Is it is it the proving or what 698 00:34:05,800 --> 00:34:10,280 kind of constraints me? Trimming is Trimming is more the 699 00:34:10,280 --> 00:34:12,320 user experience bottleneck than the performance bottleneck 700 00:34:12,320 --> 00:34:15,520 because your user makes the proof and then they send it to 701 00:34:15,520 --> 00:34:17,440 the network. But the when it comes to 702 00:34:17,440 --> 00:34:19,679 transaction throughputs, the amount of time it takes for the 703 00:34:19,679 --> 00:34:21,440 user to make the proof doesn't really matter because you can 704 00:34:22,480 --> 00:34:24,280 you can have large numbers of people making increase at the 705 00:34:24,280 --> 00:34:25,800 same time for network throughputs. 706 00:34:26,679 --> 00:34:31,480 Right now we are targeting for our very first release on the 707 00:34:31,480 --> 00:34:33,520 three main net. We're targeting whopping 2 TPS, 708 00:34:34,400 --> 00:34:36,719 which that doesn't sound like much. 709 00:34:36,800 --> 00:34:39,800 However, if you look at the throughput of existing L twos 710 00:34:39,800 --> 00:34:43,920 and how much they're being used, 2 TPS is actually quite more 711 00:34:43,920 --> 00:34:47,560 than it's fine. And over the next 12 months of 712 00:34:47,560 --> 00:34:50,000 post launch, we'll be scaling it up to 100 TPS. 713 00:34:50,840 --> 00:34:54,239 Some of the bottlenecks are, well, there's a lot to prove in 714 00:34:54,239 --> 00:34:57,800 a roll up, in a Zika roll up, particularly because we have 715 00:34:57,880 --> 00:35:01,560 something I didn't even mention until now, we have a, a public 716 00:35:01,560 --> 00:35:04,640 virtual machine, AZKVM. So for all the, all the public 717 00:35:04,920 --> 00:35:06,920 things that you're doing like public functions, public trade 718 00:35:06,920 --> 00:35:10,600 transfers, they're all proved via AZKVM. 719 00:35:10,600 --> 00:35:13,440 That's that's proven server side either there's some performance 720 00:35:13,440 --> 00:35:16,040 challenges there, particularly with like how much can be 721 00:35:16,040 --> 00:35:18,360 paralyzed, how much can be serialized, how much is serial? 722 00:35:18,360 --> 00:35:21,920 We have issues with our peer-to-peer network throughput, 723 00:35:21,920 --> 00:35:25,040 Bammoth throughput because every user transaction is compared by 724 00:35:25,040 --> 00:35:27,000 Zero's proof. And so in your peer-to-peer 725 00:35:27,000 --> 00:35:29,960 network to get that transaction into the mempool that you need 726 00:35:29,960 --> 00:35:33,840 to propagate this information and your peer-to-peer network 727 00:35:33,840 --> 00:35:36,960 throughput will be substantially lower than the bandwidth of of 728 00:35:36,960 --> 00:35:40,280 your node operators. And so the Zero's proof size 729 00:35:40,280 --> 00:35:41,840 there actually is quite important. 730 00:35:42,320 --> 00:35:45,160 So right now it's about 50 kilobytes and you know we have 731 00:35:45,160 --> 00:35:47,800 some work scheduled post launch to get that down to four. 732 00:35:48,280 --> 00:35:50,960 So that's what that needs to. Be to 4 kilobytes, yeah. 733 00:35:52,600 --> 00:35:54,200 It's not, it's not a hard problem, it's just time 734 00:35:54,200 --> 00:35:55,480 consuming. So we haven't done it yet. 735 00:35:56,840 --> 00:36:00,680 The using multi, multi polynomial basically instead of 736 00:36:01,280 --> 00:36:05,040 committing to 1 polynomial, like one commit per polynomial, you 737 00:36:05,040 --> 00:36:06,720 just have one commitment for lots of polynomials. 738 00:36:06,720 --> 00:36:08,800 And then this is generally our nerd software because we built 739 00:36:08,800 --> 00:36:11,080 everything from scratch, you know, because we had this, the 740 00:36:11,080 --> 00:36:12,760 semantics from private state was so different. 741 00:36:12,760 --> 00:36:14,280 You know, we have this thing called the private execution 742 00:36:14,280 --> 00:36:17,760 environment, which doesn't even exist in other networks, which 743 00:36:17,760 --> 00:36:20,480 handles, you know, state privacy sinking state retrievable as it 744 00:36:20,480 --> 00:36:23,840 was proving we wrote this all, all of our node software and 745 00:36:23,840 --> 00:36:25,520 TypeScript so we could rapidly prototype. 746 00:36:25,520 --> 00:36:27,040 But this is not a performance language. 747 00:36:27,040 --> 00:36:31,000 So there's, there's huge amounts of engineering work to do search 748 00:36:31,000 --> 00:36:34,000 to improve our performance, like to get from TTPS to 100 TPS. 749 00:36:34,000 --> 00:36:36,320 Most of it's just pure engineering, taking something 750 00:36:36,320 --> 00:36:40,040 which is brass backing you and just applying traditional 751 00:36:40,040 --> 00:36:41,480 software engineering optimizations to it. 752 00:36:41,520 --> 00:36:46,480 One rule of cryptography or applied cryptography is you 753 00:36:46,480 --> 00:36:48,520 never build your own systems, right? 754 00:36:48,760 --> 00:36:53,600 And it seems like you you've built all the systems. 755 00:36:53,960 --> 00:36:56,200 Are you worried about that? What rule? 756 00:36:56,360 --> 00:36:59,600 No, I'm not. That's that's a stupid that's a 757 00:36:59,600 --> 00:37:00,800 stupid rule. In my opinion. 758 00:37:01,040 --> 00:37:02,760 The rule is don't roll your own crypto, right? 759 00:37:02,800 --> 00:37:05,040 Well then who rolls crypto if if nobody does it? 760 00:37:05,040 --> 00:37:06,960 Oh experts? Who the hell are the experts? 761 00:37:07,040 --> 00:37:08,640 Self appointed. That's that's who they are. 762 00:37:08,920 --> 00:37:11,480 Well, I mean everything that's kind of like you, you want to 763 00:37:11,480 --> 00:37:13,960 use things that are better tested as much as you can, 764 00:37:14,040 --> 00:37:14,640 right? Kind of. 765 00:37:14,800 --> 00:37:19,520 And I understand that kind of like sometimes entering building 766 00:37:19,520 --> 00:37:25,480 novel things kind of means having to build new systems, but 767 00:37:25,680 --> 00:37:30,400 trying to possibly fall back on proven systems. 768 00:37:30,400 --> 00:37:34,240 There's no such thing. We are the first Astic will be 769 00:37:34,240 --> 00:37:36,800 the fullback for future generations of private 770 00:37:36,800 --> 00:37:38,240 cryptography. There is nothing else. 771 00:37:38,800 --> 00:37:41,360 So we didn't have that option. If you are building your own 772 00:37:41,360 --> 00:37:43,880 cryptography, there's dangerous there. 773 00:37:44,800 --> 00:37:47,360 The typical canonical business of doing your own crypto is 774 00:37:47,360 --> 00:37:49,360 targeted towards software engineers that don't understand 775 00:37:49,360 --> 00:37:53,120 cryptography. They're not like so, so, OK, so 776 00:37:53,120 --> 00:37:55,000 what's the barrier if you want to roll your own crypto? 777 00:37:55,000 --> 00:37:57,840 Well, step one, you need to do your own original research. 778 00:37:57,920 --> 00:38:00,560 You need to publish it. It needs to be peer reviewed by 779 00:38:00,560 --> 00:38:02,280 cryptographic experts. You need to secure it. 780 00:38:02,280 --> 00:38:04,240 You need proofs of soundness, you need proofs of completeness. 781 00:38:04,480 --> 00:38:06,840 You need proofs of 0 knowledge. They need to be widely accepted 782 00:38:07,080 --> 00:38:09,560 and understood. And they need to use security 783 00:38:09,560 --> 00:38:11,480 assumptions that are like widely accepted. 784 00:38:11,480 --> 00:38:13,440 So you go, you could probably get away with the algebraic 785 00:38:13,440 --> 00:38:16,000 group model just about that, Nothing, nothing weaker than 786 00:38:16,000 --> 00:38:18,080 that. And then you need to once, OK, 787 00:38:18,080 --> 00:38:20,160 so then then you have the theory down, then it's implemented in 788 00:38:20,160 --> 00:38:22,320 software and now software needs to be audited internally and 789 00:38:22,480 --> 00:38:24,680 externally. Then what you have out of that 790 00:38:24,880 --> 00:38:26,800 is you have an insecure system, which might work. 791 00:38:27,200 --> 00:38:29,600 This is a real work because as you said, the only thing that 792 00:38:29,600 --> 00:38:32,560 really guarantees the strength of the security of cryptographic 793 00:38:32,560 --> 00:38:35,520 technology is time. The the fundamental assumptions 794 00:38:35,520 --> 00:38:38,000 that we are base our security crease around are actually not 795 00:38:38,560 --> 00:38:41,120 known to be true yet. We do not know that the discrete 796 00:38:41,120 --> 00:38:43,360 logarithm problem is hard. We just assume it is because no 797 00:38:43,360 --> 00:38:46,320 one's figured it out yet. And so we are taking a very 798 00:38:46,320 --> 00:38:49,320 security conscious approach to our launch. 799 00:38:49,320 --> 00:38:51,760 You know, I, I say we're going to be launching on the three 800 00:38:51,760 --> 00:38:55,320 minute early next year. What that is going to be is 801 00:38:55,560 --> 00:39:00,000 we're calling it the Aztec alpha because we will not be under any 802 00:39:00,000 --> 00:39:01,360 illusions that this will be secure. 803 00:39:01,640 --> 00:39:03,080 We will have done our best efforts. 804 00:39:03,760 --> 00:39:05,880 We would have gone beyond gone beyond all reasonable doubt 805 00:39:05,880 --> 00:39:09,600 attempts to to to to secure this network with our internal 806 00:39:09,600 --> 00:39:12,440 external audits. But that's, you know, any 807 00:39:12,760 --> 00:39:14,920 software engineer will tell you it's not possible to write 808 00:39:14,920 --> 00:39:17,320 secure code. It's just not in these two 809 00:39:17,320 --> 00:39:18,440 battle tested. There will be bugs. 810 00:39:18,440 --> 00:39:22,360 This bug will be found hopefully by white hats because of our 811 00:39:22,360 --> 00:39:23,840 generous bug Bouncy. We will fix them. 812 00:39:24,320 --> 00:39:27,640 But the messaging when we launch will very much be security 813 00:39:27,640 --> 00:39:29,000 conscious. It'll it'll the message will say 814 00:39:29,000 --> 00:39:31,640 this is not secure. Do not put too much money 815 00:39:31,640 --> 00:39:32,880 through this. Don't put money, don't put in 816 00:39:32,880 --> 00:39:34,280 any money you're not prepared to lose. 817 00:39:34,960 --> 00:39:37,600 And we're going to, we're going to have a checklist of things 818 00:39:37,600 --> 00:39:40,640 that need to happen before we're willing to consider the network 819 00:39:40,640 --> 00:39:43,240 more secure. We're going to need to not have 820 00:39:43,240 --> 00:39:45,480 any serious or critical bug reports for three months. 821 00:39:45,480 --> 00:39:47,840 We're going to need to have something like 99% network 822 00:39:47,840 --> 00:39:51,720 uptime for three months. And once we pass these criteria, 823 00:39:52,400 --> 00:39:54,400 then we will consider the network to be in beta. 824 00:39:54,960 --> 00:39:58,960 And once we get beta, we believe much more comfortable making 825 00:39:59,040 --> 00:40:01,120 claims about it's security, will be much more comfortable with 826 00:40:01,120 --> 00:40:02,440 people putting large amounts of funds in. 827 00:40:02,720 --> 00:40:05,840 But until then, it's it's going to be a risky protocol just 828 00:40:05,840 --> 00:40:07,640 because of the nature of what we're doing and because it's 829 00:40:07,640 --> 00:40:09,640 decentralized. There's a lot of fests here. 830 00:40:10,000 --> 00:40:13,240 You, you already kind of talked about this a little bit earlier, 831 00:40:13,240 --> 00:40:18,560 kind of the bandwidth issue with kind of submitting the proofs as 832 00:40:18,560 --> 00:40:22,280 well as kind of the generating the proofs. 833 00:40:23,400 --> 00:40:27,280 How much do you worry about lace latency for use cases? 834 00:40:27,280 --> 00:40:30,440 So kind of like when, when you kind of say this is great for 835 00:40:30,440 --> 00:40:37,320 games, kind of obviously a lot of games rely on fairly low 836 00:40:37,320 --> 00:40:38,640 latency, right? You don't. 837 00:40:38,640 --> 00:40:42,600 You don't want to wait for an hour for your opponent to kind 838 00:40:42,600 --> 00:40:44,640 of make their move. The latency will be good for 839 00:40:44,640 --> 00:40:48,160 large variety of use cases. We are targeting 12 second 840 00:40:48,560 --> 00:40:51,680 latency, so we're not producing blocks every 12 seconds, but 841 00:40:51,680 --> 00:40:54,360 because of our previous state network and the fact that we 842 00:40:54,360 --> 00:40:56,280 have our own little DA layer and things like that use, we can 843 00:40:56,280 --> 00:40:58,600 guarantee fairly with fairly fairly strong guarantees. 844 00:40:58,640 --> 00:41:02,240 You can get finality on 12 seconds time limit where at that 845 00:41:02,240 --> 00:41:05,280 point that is a line I'll get, I'll get slashed. 846 00:41:05,280 --> 00:41:08,680 And so there's a few, there'll be a few $1,000,000 of value 847 00:41:08,800 --> 00:41:10,240 backing that claim. Is that good enough for 848 00:41:10,240 --> 00:41:11,000 everything? No. 849 00:41:11,920 --> 00:41:15,720 Similarly, but at a fundamental level, the problem is that if 850 00:41:15,720 --> 00:41:19,160 you're sending a transaction across a layer 2, you're paying 851 00:41:19,160 --> 00:41:21,720 for the highest security guarantees, you're paying for 852 00:41:21,720 --> 00:41:24,880 the highest like liveness, sensitive resistance guarantees 853 00:41:25,400 --> 00:41:27,760 and there's no market for security. 854 00:41:28,160 --> 00:41:30,080 It's not like you can choose to payless if you don't care so 855 00:41:30,080 --> 00:41:33,000 much. And so the solution to this, in 856 00:41:33,000 --> 00:41:37,480 my opinion, is the, the L3 thesis, application specific 857 00:41:37,480 --> 00:41:39,600 rollout thesis, something that we are post launched, we will be 858 00:41:39,600 --> 00:41:42,760 aggressively building out via the Aztec stack. 859 00:41:43,000 --> 00:41:46,800 Basically, imagine the scenario where you can write an Astec 860 00:41:46,800 --> 00:41:50,040 smart contract and it's, it's all the same as a regular Astec 861 00:41:50,040 --> 00:41:51,480 smart contract. But when you, when you go to 862 00:41:51,480 --> 00:41:54,080 deploy it, you're not deploying it to the Astec network. 863 00:41:54,080 --> 00:41:57,680 You're deploying it to a roll up that's hosted locally or hosted 864 00:41:57,680 --> 00:42:00,760 on an S in, in, in AWS. But basically it's a network 865 00:42:00,760 --> 00:42:02,440 where there's only one sequencer. 866 00:42:02,440 --> 00:42:04,240 It's not decentralized, there's no data variable. 867 00:42:04,240 --> 00:42:08,160 There's a guarantee as you just trust a sequencer and in that 868 00:42:08,160 --> 00:42:11,480 kind of model you can get very far, honest throughput, very low 869 00:42:11,480 --> 00:42:14,200 latency, particularly if your transactions are all private, 870 00:42:14,360 --> 00:42:16,560 because if they're all private, you're not modifying any shared 871 00:42:16,560 --> 00:42:18,120 state. So your transactions don't have 872 00:42:18,120 --> 00:42:20,400 any race conditions. And the only serial part of the 873 00:42:20,400 --> 00:42:23,640 transaction is recomputing your state trace. 874 00:42:23,640 --> 00:42:26,080 But everything else is fully parallelizable. 875 00:42:26,080 --> 00:42:27,640 So you can make box very quickly. 876 00:42:28,840 --> 00:42:32,520 And this, this L3 component will be very, very valuable for low, 877 00:42:32,560 --> 00:42:35,680 low value High Street. But use cases, things like micro 878 00:42:35,680 --> 00:42:38,840 payments, things like gaming, that's that's how we plan to 879 00:42:38,840 --> 00:42:39,680 solve the problem. OK. 880 00:42:39,680 --> 00:42:43,480 That, that also kind of solves your two transactions per second 881 00:42:44,040 --> 00:42:48,360 dilemma to some extent. How do you think about state 882 00:42:48,360 --> 00:42:52,360 growth and storage in a word of encrypted data? 883 00:42:53,000 --> 00:42:55,040 Yeah, it's challenging. You've got to shot it. 884 00:42:55,080 --> 00:42:58,840 Basically, the state only ever grows in a private network, 885 00:42:59,000 --> 00:43:01,120 right? Because when you delete a 886 00:43:01,120 --> 00:43:02,520 record, you're not actually deleting it. 887 00:43:02,520 --> 00:43:04,880 You're just creating another record that says this old thing 888 00:43:04,880 --> 00:43:07,040 has been deleted. And you do it in a way that you 889 00:43:07,040 --> 00:43:11,040 can't link the 2. So data proliferates much more 890 00:43:11,040 --> 00:43:13,200 rapidly on a private network than a public network. 891 00:43:13,360 --> 00:43:17,680 And there's a really great solution for this right now 892 00:43:17,720 --> 00:43:21,240 other than basically you, you do shouting, you have state epochs 893 00:43:21,240 --> 00:43:24,280 where, let's say, I don't know, like maybe a GB terabytes of 894 00:43:24,280 --> 00:43:26,760 states per epoch. And whenever you're performing 895 00:43:26,760 --> 00:43:28,960 state transitions, you're specifying the epoch of your 896 00:43:28,960 --> 00:43:31,440 note. And so this leaks a little bit 897 00:43:31,440 --> 00:43:35,000 of information because if you're modifying a really old note, 898 00:43:35,320 --> 00:43:36,720 people know you're modifying a really old note. 899 00:43:37,800 --> 00:43:41,880 But it's kind of the best we can do right now without having, 900 00:43:42,440 --> 00:43:45,480 without requiring nodes to consume enormous, enormous 901 00:43:45,480 --> 00:43:47,200 amounts of data. You know, there's obviously, OK, 902 00:43:47,640 --> 00:43:50,040 so there's sharding you could do like the full Etherium 903 00:43:50,040 --> 00:43:54,840 foundation sharding desire, but that's, I mean, that's 904 00:43:54,840 --> 00:43:57,160 challenging. I'd prefer if somebody else does 905 00:43:57,160 --> 00:43:58,400 it, the prefer if Etherium does it. 906 00:43:59,360 --> 00:44:01,960 But right now, yeah, it's a bit, it's a bit beyond us to build 907 00:44:01,960 --> 00:44:03,120 that all out from scratch. Course. 908 00:44:03,120 --> 00:44:05,240 So kind of like, yeah, no, I hear that. 909 00:44:05,240 --> 00:44:08,880 I think kind of like not not building everything is often 910 00:44:08,880 --> 00:44:10,920 good advice. Sorry, can I be annoying and 911 00:44:10,920 --> 00:44:12,480 interrupt another thing? So I just realized sharding 912 00:44:12,480 --> 00:44:15,480 doesn't work for us because if you have just one giant 913 00:44:15,480 --> 00:44:19,480 database, even do Shard it up. If I want to prove that my note 914 00:44:19,480 --> 00:44:21,880 exists in that database or prove it doesn't exist, I need to 915 00:44:21,880 --> 00:44:24,920 create a medical proof which requires knowledge of the entire 916 00:44:24,920 --> 00:44:26,400 data set. And that's the problem. 917 00:44:27,280 --> 00:44:29,160 You need to be able to do inclusion and non inclusion 918 00:44:29,160 --> 00:44:30,840 proofs of the subsets of your data. 919 00:44:31,440 --> 00:44:35,080 And that requires what like what I call Charlie, like splitting, 920 00:44:35,080 --> 00:44:37,880 splitting your stake into ebooks and revealing a small amount of 921 00:44:37,880 --> 00:44:40,920 information about about your notes, the age of your notes as 922 00:44:40,920 --> 00:44:43,440 a result. There are a couple of competing 923 00:44:43,440 --> 00:44:48,680 privacy based chains. So kind of if you look at 924 00:44:48,680 --> 00:44:55,280 systems like Alio on Armada or ZK Singh's privacy layer, how do 925 00:44:55,280 --> 00:44:59,360 you mentally categorize them with respect to Aztec? 926 00:44:59,360 --> 00:45:01,200 Privacy is a hot narrative right now. 927 00:45:01,440 --> 00:45:04,200 And so, and it's also a very poorly defined word. 928 00:45:05,200 --> 00:45:08,160 And So what people say, what they mean when they say privacy 929 00:45:08,160 --> 00:45:10,120 varies. And so obviously I have my own 930 00:45:10,120 --> 00:45:12,600 biases here. I don't and I don't want to 931 00:45:12,600 --> 00:45:15,880 throw like, I don't want to throw shape around things like 932 00:45:15,880 --> 00:45:18,600 the model. We'll see about like about them. 933 00:45:18,600 --> 00:45:21,960 I think that they have a very ambitious goal in mind. 934 00:45:22,160 --> 00:45:25,320 They're really they're the ones that use FHE to fully like to 935 00:45:25,320 --> 00:45:26,840 create like a fully encrypted Ethereum. 936 00:45:28,880 --> 00:45:32,520 There are certain challenges with FHE that are yet to be 937 00:45:32,520 --> 00:45:35,920 satisfactorily solved. Otherwise we've used it. 938 00:45:36,520 --> 00:45:44,360 So one of them is so if with FHE you can so OK with ZKI can prove 939 00:45:44,360 --> 00:45:48,640 anything about my data. With FHE you, I can give you my 940 00:45:48,640 --> 00:45:51,160 encrypted data and you can run a program on that data and you 941 00:45:51,160 --> 00:45:54,120 don't know what's going on. You can't do that with CK. 942 00:45:54,120 --> 00:45:56,360 So it's much more powerful in that context. 943 00:45:56,640 --> 00:45:59,360 However, it has 22 very big flaws that need to be resolved. 944 00:45:59,360 --> 00:46:01,720 One of them is the data is also encrypted. 945 00:46:02,200 --> 00:46:06,920 And so if you want to just take a regular EVM and make it all 946 00:46:07,120 --> 00:46:10,560 encrypt all the data, then use FHE, then the problem is who 947 00:46:11,120 --> 00:46:14,400 owns those decryption keys? You need a basically you need a 948 00:46:14,400 --> 00:46:18,720 multi part computation network to hold that, to hold part like 949 00:46:19,120 --> 00:46:21,280 shit like partial decryption keys for your state. 950 00:46:21,600 --> 00:46:24,560 If you have that MPC network, then you can also use that MPC 951 00:46:24,560 --> 00:46:27,320 network to do 0 knowledge proving in via secret sharing. 952 00:46:27,600 --> 00:46:30,280 This is what TESAO do. You get very similar outcomes 953 00:46:30,400 --> 00:46:32,840 both, both ways. The whole like who holds the 954 00:46:32,840 --> 00:46:35,560 decryption keys? How do you do key rotation make 955 00:46:35,560 --> 00:46:38,280 that secure is very challenging. And, and we'll, we'll, we'll 956 00:46:38,280 --> 00:46:40,400 see, we'll see how they, how they, how they execute on that. 957 00:46:40,800 --> 00:46:42,440 I do. I do hope they are successful. 958 00:46:42,640 --> 00:46:45,960 I think that right now any privacy solutions that offer 959 00:46:45,960 --> 00:46:49,120 genuine privacy, like it would be good to start if any of them 960 00:46:49,120 --> 00:46:52,280 were successful. You have things like Zika sync. 961 00:46:52,480 --> 00:46:53,800 What they're doing is very different. 962 00:46:53,880 --> 00:46:56,720 I would not call what they're doing privacy by any like 963 00:46:56,720 --> 00:46:59,320 meaningful standard. What the way that they get 964 00:46:59,320 --> 00:47:06,720 privacy is that you run so so you run an L3 and people send 965 00:47:06,720 --> 00:47:11,360 transactions to you and you don't broadcast anything about 966 00:47:11,360 --> 00:47:11,880 that. L 3. 967 00:47:11,880 --> 00:47:14,080 So so the way that you get your transactions is not through a 968 00:47:14,080 --> 00:47:15,160 public network. It's through private 969 00:47:15,160 --> 00:47:19,080 information, private messages. And then when you make your roll 970 00:47:19,080 --> 00:47:22,920 up proof, you basically discard all of the information around 971 00:47:22,920 --> 00:47:25,920 the the data in your in your roll up and then you put that 972 00:47:25,920 --> 00:47:28,560 roll up proof on Shane. Is that private? 973 00:47:28,720 --> 00:47:30,360 Yes, it's the same with a private server. 974 00:47:30,360 --> 00:47:32,040 It's private. It's not a great way of creating 975 00:47:32,040 --> 00:47:33,880 a composable ecosystem. Like the thing about the thing 976 00:47:33,880 --> 00:47:36,440 that I think is most valuable at privacy is composable privacy. 977 00:47:36,440 --> 00:47:38,760 The idea is you can write a private smart contract. 978 00:47:38,800 --> 00:47:42,360 I can write a private smart contract and these things can 979 00:47:42,480 --> 00:47:44,920 talk to each other, they can, they can call each other and 980 00:47:45,440 --> 00:47:49,120 that's like we don't have to share any information with with 981 00:47:49,360 --> 00:47:50,800 like with each other. Our users don't have to share 982 00:47:50,800 --> 00:47:52,520 any information. It all just works out-of-the-box 983 00:47:52,520 --> 00:47:54,600 on a public network, you start getting into some very, very 984 00:47:54,600 --> 00:47:57,760 naive trust assumptions. If you want composable privacy 985 00:47:58,200 --> 00:48:00,440 on a network like Zika Sync is building where everything is run 986 00:48:00,440 --> 00:48:03,480 by 1 server and that one entity sees everything and nobody else 987 00:48:03,480 --> 00:48:05,760 does, it's a huge amount of trust you're placing in that 988 00:48:05,920 --> 00:48:07,800 person. But it is useful for certain use 989 00:48:07,800 --> 00:48:08,880 cases. It's useful for enterprise. 990 00:48:08,880 --> 00:48:11,080 It could be useful for gaming. It's useful for where the trust 991 00:48:11,080 --> 00:48:12,080 assumptions are very low. But yeah. 992 00:48:12,080 --> 00:48:16,360 And then you have other other teams like Alio and Mina that 993 00:48:16,360 --> 00:48:18,360 are basically doing the ZK route that we are there. 994 00:48:18,360 --> 00:48:21,880 It's it's it's an execution play about whether it can this stuff 995 00:48:21,880 --> 00:48:24,240 can be made performant enough, easy to use, whether you can 996 00:48:24,240 --> 00:48:25,480 create the right abstraction layers. 997 00:48:25,480 --> 00:48:28,320 And right now no one's really cracked that problem. 998 00:48:28,400 --> 00:48:30,240 And I, I, I can't claim that Aztecs cracked it. 999 00:48:30,240 --> 00:48:33,320 We're not even launched yet. I hope we will, but nobody has 1000 00:48:33,320 --> 00:48:36,440 yet. I I'm convinced as a matter of 1001 00:48:36,440 --> 00:48:39,840 faith that's privacy is useful, that is needed. 1002 00:48:39,840 --> 00:48:42,760 That's if if you make it easy enough, it people will. 1003 00:48:42,760 --> 00:48:45,640 People will build on it. Not because users care about 1004 00:48:45,640 --> 00:48:48,160 privacy as a feature, but because it's a required property 1005 00:48:48,160 --> 00:48:49,680 for a lot of valuable applications. 1006 00:48:49,680 --> 00:48:52,680 It's a question about building a building a technological base 1007 00:48:52,680 --> 00:48:56,880 layer that's competent enough to provide the developer user 1008 00:48:56,880 --> 00:49:00,400 experience that people require. Aztec is an L2 on top of 1009 00:49:00,400 --> 00:49:05,640 Ethereum and kind of the decentralized world has shifted 1010 00:49:05,880 --> 00:49:09,680 since you decommissioned the last version of Aztec. 1011 00:49:10,960 --> 00:49:17,640 How do you think about the benefits of being L2 on top of 1012 00:49:17,640 --> 00:49:21,200 Ethereum rather than say a stand alone L1? 1013 00:49:21,200 --> 00:49:25,320 I mean you already have the decentralized sequences set, you 1014 00:49:25,320 --> 00:49:30,080 could just be an L1 and kind of like not pay for living on top 1015 00:49:30,080 --> 00:49:31,560 of Ethereum. No, it could. 1016 00:49:31,560 --> 00:49:33,520 But then there are other problems with that. 1017 00:49:33,520 --> 00:49:36,640 Specifically, privacy doesn't matter if you don't have any 1018 00:49:36,640 --> 00:49:38,600 value you want to make keep private. 1019 00:49:38,600 --> 00:49:40,120 Nobody cares how many magic beans you have. 1020 00:49:40,360 --> 00:49:43,080 They care about how many U.S. dollars you have or your 1021 00:49:43,080 --> 00:49:46,920 property or like who you are. And so you have a very big 1022 00:49:47,040 --> 00:49:49,640 chicken and an egg problem if you're running as an L1, Whereas 1023 00:49:49,640 --> 00:49:51,120 how do you get value with your ecosystem? 1024 00:49:52,000 --> 00:49:54,360 Because it's completely, we knew it's up from scratch. 1025 00:49:54,360 --> 00:49:57,840 Like obviously you can do bridges, but bridging is still a 1026 00:49:57,840 --> 00:50:01,560 fairly complicated process with an unpleasant user experience. 1027 00:50:01,560 --> 00:50:05,000 And ultimately, yeah, it's, it's we, we thought the costs, the 1028 00:50:05,000 --> 00:50:09,120 risks would be too great. And also we did gain a lot from 1029 00:50:09,120 --> 00:50:11,360 building a software Ethereum. Like we don't have to re roll 1030 00:50:11,360 --> 00:50:13,000 our own consensus network from scratch. 1031 00:50:13,440 --> 00:50:16,920 There is a slightly lower maintenance overheads to our 1032 00:50:16,920 --> 00:50:20,280 software because of that. I was hoping at the start 1033 00:50:20,280 --> 00:50:21,440 they'll be much lower than they are. 1034 00:50:22,120 --> 00:50:23,680 But yeah, we've had to build a lot ourselves. 1035 00:50:23,760 --> 00:50:26,120 Etherium is still the canonical source of assets on Chen. 1036 00:50:27,120 --> 00:50:31,320 If you want to issue an asset, OK, you can do Solana and things 1037 00:50:31,320 --> 00:50:32,880 like that. But but if it's if it's a chunky 1038 00:50:32,880 --> 00:50:34,880 asset with a lot of value in it, you put it on Etherium. 1039 00:50:35,240 --> 00:50:37,560 And we wanted to be able to make it so you could very trustlessly 1040 00:50:38,240 --> 00:50:42,160 bring your assets into asset from Etherium because just in 1041 00:50:42,160 --> 00:50:44,960 the same way that Etherium is the canonical source of assets, 1042 00:50:45,720 --> 00:50:48,600 our goal for Aztec is to make Aztec the canonical source of 1043 00:50:48,720 --> 00:50:50,760 credentials. Effectively, if you have a token 1044 00:50:50,760 --> 00:50:52,840 or an attestation that says something about you or what 1045 00:50:52,840 --> 00:50:55,120 you've done or what you want to do, the natural place to issue 1046 00:50:55,120 --> 00:50:57,960 that is on Aztec, where it's encrypted by default and you can 1047 00:50:57,960 --> 00:51:01,560 selectively disclose parts like that, that that credential to 1048 00:51:01,920 --> 00:51:03,640 either people or to smart contracts. 1049 00:51:03,640 --> 00:51:05,320 And yeah, we felt we felt Ethereum was the right place to 1050 00:51:05,320 --> 00:51:07,880 do it because it's where the money is and privacy is not 1051 00:51:07,880 --> 00:51:10,680 useful without money. More generally, we do think that 1052 00:51:10,680 --> 00:51:13,840 bridging like creating a very, making it very easy to get 1053 00:51:13,960 --> 00:51:16,520 transactions into an out of a stick from any other network for 1054 00:51:16,520 --> 00:51:19,200 us is extremely important. We don't want to just be tied to 1055 00:51:19,440 --> 00:51:23,240 Etherium because there's a very unique value proposition for 1056 00:51:23,240 --> 00:51:26,720 Aztec that no other L2 faces. It's, it's not a secret that 1057 00:51:26,720 --> 00:51:30,040 most L twos are somewhat parasitic to their host networks 1058 00:51:30,720 --> 00:51:34,520 because the L2 wants its own set of liquidity, its own tokens so 1059 00:51:34,520 --> 00:51:37,200 that you can build applications on the L2 and that liquidity 1060 00:51:37,200 --> 00:51:39,360 comes to the cost of taking it out of the L1. 1061 00:51:39,400 --> 00:51:43,640 With Aztec it's very different because there is unique value in 1062 00:51:43,640 --> 00:51:48,120 bridging not tokens, but information between Aztec and 1063 00:51:48,120 --> 00:51:50,640 other networks. For example, imagine you're 1064 00:51:50,640 --> 00:51:56,280 building some kind of trading marketplace on slot, but you 1065 00:51:56,280 --> 00:51:59,160 need a level of compliance, maybe the assets you need to 1066 00:51:59,160 --> 00:52:01,840 know that people are not on a central system Iranian. 1067 00:52:01,840 --> 00:52:04,480 Maybe you need, you need to understand if someone's American 1068 00:52:04,480 --> 00:52:06,000 or not things like that, some basic compliance. 1069 00:52:06,400 --> 00:52:10,160 Well, So what you can do is you could print, you could send a 1070 00:52:10,160 --> 00:52:13,640 request into Aztec where that request will check some 1071 00:52:13,640 --> 00:52:16,080 encrypted credentials on that, on that person and the request 1072 00:52:16,080 --> 00:52:18,720 responds with either true or false, like yes, like flying or 1073 00:52:18,720 --> 00:52:21,920 no, they're not Solana. That application Solana has 1074 00:52:21,920 --> 00:52:24,680 gained something of value from interacting with Aztec and the 1075 00:52:24,680 --> 00:52:26,200 Solana network has not lost any tokens. 1076 00:52:26,320 --> 00:52:28,880 Effectively you get a privacy shield for free at well for a 1077 00:52:28,880 --> 00:52:31,560 very low cost. And that's, that's the direction 1078 00:52:31,560 --> 00:52:33,400 we want Aztec travel in, in the in the future. 1079 00:52:33,400 --> 00:52:37,560 We want it to be the, the, the universal privacy layer for all 1080 00:52:37,560 --> 00:52:40,560 of blockchain. And we want to execute on that 1081 00:52:40,560 --> 00:52:43,800 in a very positive some way where the canonical method of 1082 00:52:43,800 --> 00:52:46,240 interaction with Aztec from other networks is not you bridge 1083 00:52:46,240 --> 00:52:49,440 assets, assets and Aztec and then they stay there is you 1084 00:52:49,440 --> 00:52:52,800 bridge identity information in into and out of Aztec or maybe 1085 00:52:52,800 --> 00:52:56,320 you put tokens into Aztec so that you can create so that you 1086 00:52:56,320 --> 00:52:58,080 can perform private interactions with them. 1087 00:52:58,360 --> 00:53:00,560 But then very quickly they they go out back into the parent 1088 00:53:00,560 --> 00:53:02,520 network. We think that's a much more kind 1089 00:53:02,520 --> 00:53:05,840 of a positive sum way of interacting with the ecosystem 1090 00:53:05,840 --> 00:53:10,120 where everybody wins. I 100% concur on the message 1091 00:53:10,120 --> 00:53:12,160 passing use case. So kind of like if you were to 1092 00:53:12,160 --> 00:53:20,240 kind of use it as a an identity layer. 100% agree with 1093 00:53:20,240 --> 00:53:24,680 everything you said. If you look at how assets are 1094 00:53:24,680 --> 00:53:30,200 actually issued in the Ethereum ecosystem today, I know that 1095 00:53:30,200 --> 00:53:35,560 kind of like back in the day we talked about assets natively 1096 00:53:35,560 --> 00:53:39,680 being minted on Ethereum main net and then kind of being 1097 00:53:39,680 --> 00:53:46,600 bridged into L twos and and then kind of things happen on L twos. 1098 00:53:46,600 --> 00:53:49,840 They get rolled up and then kind of like you bridge out of the L2 1099 00:53:50,480 --> 00:53:54,920 onto main net. Again, what we effectively is 1100 00:53:55,160 --> 00:54:01,040 see is that kind of like acids are born on L twos, they live on 1101 00:54:01,040 --> 00:54:05,160 L twos and they die on L twos. And you know, ideally they're 1102 00:54:05,160 --> 00:54:08,080 happy on L twos, but kind of they don't. 1103 00:54:08,240 --> 00:54:11,560 And kind of like for anything that is natively minted on an 1104 00:54:11,560 --> 00:54:16,560 L2, the L1 doesn't actually give you any secure security 1105 00:54:16,560 --> 00:54:19,760 guarantees whatsoever, right? So kind of like all the, all the 1106 00:54:19,760 --> 00:54:27,080 security you inherit from being an L2, you only inherit for for 1107 00:54:27,400 --> 00:54:32,280 bridged assets from main net, right? 1108 00:54:32,560 --> 00:54:36,600 And I think to to some extent, we've seen that play out 1109 00:54:37,080 --> 00:54:38,880 differently. When when you say that you don't 1110 00:54:38,880 --> 00:54:41,600 get any security from the L1, I think this is largely because 1111 00:54:41,600 --> 00:54:44,320 these L TS are centralized. And so you you have this kind of 1112 00:54:44,320 --> 00:54:48,080 the weakest, the weakest point of failure is some some 1113 00:54:48,080 --> 00:54:49,760 something in the Lt. like a multi sequel or something. 1114 00:54:50,000 --> 00:54:52,200 It's a bit different for Aztec where you know, you have user, 1115 00:54:52,200 --> 00:54:58,000 you have, you have sequences sticking on on a 3ML1 to be a 1116 00:54:58,000 --> 00:55:00,440 block producer. And once a block is being 1117 00:55:00,440 --> 00:55:02,960 produced and it's and it and you've updated your state route, 1118 00:55:03,520 --> 00:55:05,760 then you're, you're, you are very much relying on Etherium's 1119 00:55:05,760 --> 00:55:09,480 consensus to define what the canonical version of Aztec is. 1120 00:55:10,000 --> 00:55:13,600 And so I do slightly disagree with the idea that you don't 1121 00:55:13,600 --> 00:55:15,880 inherit anything from any security from Etherium. 1122 00:55:15,880 --> 00:55:19,760 I mean we are targeting to be a stage 2 roll up on launch where 1123 00:55:20,160 --> 00:55:21,720 that kind of that is kind of the points. 1124 00:55:21,720 --> 00:55:26,680 But say, say I kind of deploy some sort of token on Aztec 1125 00:55:26,680 --> 00:55:32,360 directly, right? I can't force exit to a theorem, 1126 00:55:32,360 --> 00:55:36,120 right? I can't but that that asset that 1127 00:55:36,120 --> 00:55:38,800 kind of like Ethereum knows nothing about. 1128 00:55:39,040 --> 00:55:41,440 So the way we do it is we, we call that an escape hatch, but 1129 00:55:41,440 --> 00:55:44,680 basically for a certain fixed amount of time for every block 1130 00:55:44,680 --> 00:55:47,400 production epoch, anybody can send a lot of transactions. 1131 00:55:47,400 --> 00:55:49,360 It's not just a sequence, it's basically a free full. 1132 00:55:49,360 --> 00:55:52,520 The idea is we don't intend for this to be used, but it can be 1133 00:55:52,520 --> 00:55:53,800 used. If you're getting sensitive for 1134 00:55:53,800 --> 00:55:56,680 some reason, you can use that window to make your own asset 1135 00:55:57,040 --> 00:56:00,440 transactions to exit. If for some reason there's 1136 00:56:00,440 --> 00:56:02,640 something catastrophic failure States and like no one's 1137 00:56:02,640 --> 00:56:04,880 producing blocks, then you could use that to produce your own 1138 00:56:04,880 --> 00:56:09,000 blocks and get out of Aztec. So no, you can force exit onto 1139 00:56:09,000 --> 00:56:12,480 onto Ethereum. But can I force exit an acid 1140 00:56:12,600 --> 00:56:17,280 that was not minted on Ethereum? It wasn't minted on Ethereum OH. 1141 00:56:17,520 --> 00:56:19,160 It's minted on Aztec, yeah. Yeah, Yeah. 1142 00:56:19,600 --> 00:56:21,080 OK. In that case, in that case, 1143 00:56:21,080 --> 00:56:23,640 yeah, if you invented on Aztec, then you can't force exit. 1144 00:56:24,080 --> 00:56:27,480 Yeah, because it's like an exit. So I get, I get what you're 1145 00:56:27,480 --> 00:56:30,240 saying that the the security guarantees you get a kind of 1146 00:56:30,240 --> 00:56:32,720 it's still it's a combination of Aztec and Ethereum where like 1147 00:56:32,720 --> 00:56:34,800 the weakest gap like seriously holds. 1148 00:56:34,880 --> 00:56:38,520 And the way that users behave is all kind of the way that, and 1149 00:56:38,520 --> 00:56:42,160 when I say users, I kind of mean application developers kind of 1150 00:56:42,160 --> 00:56:47,440 is assets get natively minted on L twos all the time now. 1151 00:56:47,440 --> 00:56:50,760 So kind of like if you look at the values that kind of get 1152 00:56:50,760 --> 00:56:55,040 transferred on L twos, kind of the minority of them have 1153 00:56:55,040 --> 00:56:57,480 actually been bridged in from L1. 1154 00:56:57,840 --> 00:57:02,240 The the majority of them are natively L2 assets and then you 1155 00:57:02,240 --> 00:57:06,000 have no security guarantees. But the, but the majority of 1156 00:57:06,000 --> 00:57:08,080 value is not on L twos is in LL twos. 1157 00:57:08,080 --> 00:57:09,960 Most LTS don't really have product market fit. 1158 00:57:10,120 --> 00:57:13,080 And so most of what's going on is, is synthetic, it's liquidity 1159 00:57:13,080 --> 00:57:15,880 farming, it's incentive based. It's basically nonsense. 1160 00:57:15,920 --> 00:57:19,360 And so I don't think it sets a very useful precedent for, for, 1161 00:57:19,480 --> 00:57:22,520 for a network that has the useful economic activity on it. 1162 00:57:22,920 --> 00:57:25,480 You're right that OK, yes. So, So what happens in LTS is 1163 00:57:25,480 --> 00:57:27,600 you get these synthetic new coins that get produced and 1164 00:57:29,480 --> 00:57:32,720 yeah, it's, it's all on L twos. Does it matter? 1165 00:57:32,920 --> 00:57:36,800 I mean, do you need ironclad security for, for a mean coin? 1166 00:57:37,280 --> 00:57:40,240 No, So, so I don't see this as a problem. 1167 00:57:40,560 --> 00:57:44,360 I think that for for us, it's fairly clear, I think how things 1168 00:57:44,360 --> 00:57:47,760 are going to play out. If you have and an asset that 1169 00:57:47,760 --> 00:57:50,920 requires identity checks, regulated checks, it's going to 1170 00:57:50,920 --> 00:57:52,640 it's going to turn off on a stick as a native asset. 1171 00:57:52,680 --> 00:57:56,040 Is that secure? Yes, because we, we're fully 1172 00:57:56,040 --> 00:57:57,440 decentralized. We have a very willing, we're 1173 00:57:57,440 --> 00:58:00,800 going to have an enormous amount of stake backing the, the 1174 00:58:00,800 --> 00:58:02,480 network. The more economic activity the 1175 00:58:02,480 --> 00:58:04,280 network generates, the higher the fees, the more incentive 1176 00:58:04,280 --> 00:58:05,720 there is to put more stake onto the network. 1177 00:58:05,720 --> 00:58:09,000 So I'm not worried at all about its security. 1178 00:58:09,000 --> 00:58:13,200 What I what I don't want to see happen is that Aztec starts 1179 00:58:13,200 --> 00:58:15,600 becoming like very parasitic to Ethereum. 1180 00:58:15,840 --> 00:58:18,160 Yeah, I, I, I hear that. I and I think that's 1181 00:58:18,160 --> 00:58:19,840 commendable. Because I think that the value 1182 00:58:19,840 --> 00:58:21,840 proposition really is with bridging information. 1183 00:58:22,440 --> 00:58:26,120 I think that's ideally the only time an Aztec is natively mitted 1184 00:58:26,120 --> 00:58:29,400 on Aztec is if you can't put it anywhere else because it 1185 00:58:29,400 --> 00:58:32,240 requires privacy checks, composable privacy checks that 1186 00:58:32,240 --> 00:58:35,360 you get on Aztec. I, I don't see Aztec as being a 1187 00:58:35,360 --> 00:58:38,120 very popular home for like relations to move on trading 1188 00:58:38,120 --> 00:58:41,600 because it's going to be more expensive and slower than fully 1189 00:58:41,600 --> 00:58:43,600 transparent networks. So I do think that there's, 1190 00:58:43,680 --> 00:58:45,800 there's always going to be, I mean, obviously there'll be some 1191 00:58:45,800 --> 00:58:47,440 of it. You can't stop it, it'll happen. 1192 00:58:47,480 --> 00:58:50,440 I don't see that as being a particularly dominant use case 1193 00:58:50,440 --> 00:58:54,480 on Aztec unless we've completely failed to execute on any of our 1194 00:58:55,640 --> 00:58:57,920 privacy. Unless all of my thoughts about 1195 00:58:57,920 --> 00:59:01,760 privacy I was wrong, then that's the only way that world will 1196 00:59:01,760 --> 00:59:04,280 happen. Maybe let's zoom all the way out 1197 00:59:04,320 --> 00:59:06,760 to kind of like pass all the crypto stuff. 1198 00:59:08,040 --> 00:59:11,040 If you kind of look at the world right now, kind of we're dealing 1199 00:59:11,040 --> 00:59:15,520 with declining expectations of privacy and kind of like you see 1200 00:59:15,520 --> 00:59:19,120 that in in in the UK, you also see it in Europe. 1201 00:59:19,120 --> 00:59:21,760 So kind of like chat control or something that only recently 1202 00:59:21,760 --> 00:59:23,880 failed. How do you see that shift? 1203 00:59:23,880 --> 00:59:29,240 And do you think kind of that level of cryptographic privacy 1204 00:59:29,760 --> 00:59:33,440 can play some sort of role in reversing it? 1205 00:59:33,480 --> 00:59:38,400 Yeah, it's a tricky 1. I noticed 2 trends which utterly 1206 00:59:38,400 --> 00:59:41,000 confound me because they seem to be, they seem to be at work, 1207 00:59:41,040 --> 00:59:42,520 like they seem to be mutually incompatible. 1208 00:59:42,520 --> 00:59:44,880 Which is that Western societies are becoming more and more 1209 00:59:44,880 --> 00:59:47,920 distrustful of their governments and like less confidence in 1210 00:59:47,920 --> 00:59:50,200 their ability to execute on implementing effective state 1211 00:59:50,200 --> 00:59:52,560 policy. Yet at the same time seem to be 1212 00:59:52,560 --> 00:59:56,240 more and more willing to give those government's powers and 1213 00:59:56,240 --> 00:59:58,280 control over over their private data. 1214 00:59:58,280 --> 01:00:01,360 Part of this is a lack is, is like, how do I put this? 1215 01:00:01,360 --> 01:00:04,600 Privacy is not a mainstream narrative and people don't think 1216 01:00:04,600 --> 01:00:07,240 very much about it. I don't think this means 1217 01:00:07,240 --> 01:00:09,200 necessarily people don't care about privacy. 1218 01:00:09,200 --> 01:00:10,480 They don't care about government overreach. 1219 01:00:10,480 --> 01:00:13,040 It's just that they that it's not part of the kind of the 1220 01:00:13,040 --> 01:00:16,840 Canon of, of, of ideas that they they consider important or 1221 01:00:16,840 --> 01:00:18,960 contentious. To give an example about this 1222 01:00:18,960 --> 01:00:21,720 right, the UK has recently passed a very unpleasant 1223 01:00:21,720 --> 01:00:24,560 surveillance bill called the online Safety Act extensively to 1224 01:00:24,560 --> 01:00:27,960 protect children. But in reality is I would argue 1225 01:00:28,000 --> 01:00:31,200 is a a massive curtailment of of free speech online. 1226 01:00:32,120 --> 01:00:34,400 This is mean people don't care about government leverage. 1227 01:00:34,400 --> 01:00:36,800 They don't care about privacy. Well, maybe, maybe not because 1228 01:00:36,800 --> 01:00:38,360 at the same time, the UK government is trying to 1229 01:00:38,360 --> 01:00:41,480 introduce identity cards, which is met with overwhelming 1230 01:00:41,480 --> 01:00:43,640 opposite popular opposition. People hate that because 1231 01:00:44,240 --> 01:00:46,400 identity cards are more they're more familiar with that as part 1232 01:00:46,400 --> 01:00:49,400 of the that like the the concept of ideas they have right. 1233 01:00:49,400 --> 01:00:52,120 They think identity cards they're familiar with to Teltro 1234 01:00:52,120 --> 01:00:54,200 instances using those to restrict people's movements 1235 01:00:54,440 --> 01:00:57,040 exchange of ideas, information and they don't like it. 1236 01:00:57,600 --> 01:01:00,520 They're not familiar with how governments use online 1237 01:01:00,520 --> 01:01:04,960 surveillance laws to repress free speech or limits free 1238 01:01:04,960 --> 01:01:07,800 exchange of ideas or make their personal is more secure and more 1239 01:01:07,800 --> 01:01:10,080 likely to be leaked. This will change in time. 1240 01:01:10,120 --> 01:01:12,160 I think that's what's going to happen is more and more 1241 01:01:12,160 --> 01:01:14,640 oppressive, so the decision is going to get passed and it's 1242 01:01:14,640 --> 01:01:17,840 going to be abused and manipulated more and more and 1243 01:01:18,280 --> 01:01:20,120 eventually we might see some kind of backlash. 1244 01:01:20,200 --> 01:01:22,480 I think that there's always my hopes here when it comes to 1245 01:01:22,640 --> 01:01:24,600 these things that lies with America. 1246 01:01:24,600 --> 01:01:27,400 I don't think whilst you're getting some annoying age 1247 01:01:27,400 --> 01:01:30,240 restriction laws at the state level, they're not the same as 1248 01:01:30,440 --> 01:01:33,400 chat control, for example, where it's just a very, very clear 1249 01:01:33,400 --> 01:01:36,360 power grab by the state bureaucracy. 1250 01:01:36,960 --> 01:01:39,480 I, I think it basically America will always be basically 1251 01:01:39,480 --> 01:01:42,320 demonstrating what's what like the the alternative of if you 1252 01:01:42,320 --> 01:01:45,280 don't have controls over over speech, eventually it'll just 1253 01:01:45,280 --> 01:01:46,960 become a very compelling differential. 1254 01:01:47,080 --> 01:01:50,160 I think, I hope. But but I mean just to push back 1255 01:01:50,160 --> 01:01:56,520 here. So kind of in some way the US, a 1256 01:01:56,520 --> 01:02:02,760 nation that is most advanced in surveilling their own subjects 1257 01:02:03,080 --> 01:02:09,640 and it's also currently a state where you can lose your visa for 1258 01:02:09,640 --> 01:02:17,320 kind of being have holding a non majority opinion, right? 1259 01:02:17,520 --> 01:02:22,560 So kind of like it is very kind of anti free speech in some 1260 01:02:22,560 --> 01:02:24,680 sense. No, I'm not going to hold 1261 01:02:24,720 --> 01:02:27,400 America as a bastion of liberal values anymore. 1262 01:02:27,800 --> 01:02:30,520 For sure like it that there is this there is an element of 1263 01:02:30,520 --> 01:02:34,520 capricious state policy. I think you've also seen in 1264 01:02:34,520 --> 01:02:38,360 America the degradation of the rule of law. 1265 01:02:38,400 --> 01:02:40,560 We've even seen that with crypto, right where it under the 1266 01:02:40,560 --> 01:02:44,560 guy against the regime, crypto was based as a criminalized 1267 01:02:44,560 --> 01:02:46,480 crypto without passing legislation to do so. 1268 01:02:47,160 --> 01:02:49,120 And then under the Trump regime, it's all it's a free for all. 1269 01:02:49,160 --> 01:02:52,360 However, I do think that part of America's strength lies in its 1270 01:02:52,360 --> 01:02:56,360 decentralization, as in you don't have a particularly strong 1271 01:02:56,360 --> 01:02:59,920 unitary authority that can exert massive amounts of controlling 1272 01:02:59,920 --> 01:03:02,240 the people's lives like you do in most European states. 1273 01:03:02,240 --> 01:03:03,840 I know Germany is slightly different with this federal 1274 01:03:03,840 --> 01:03:05,800 structure, but most European states are unitary entities 1275 01:03:05,800 --> 01:03:09,240 where the government says, hey, we're going to surveil you like 1276 01:03:09,320 --> 01:03:11,480 and and and look at them create an unwarranted financial 1277 01:03:11,480 --> 01:03:13,120 surveillance regime and there's something you can do about it. 1278 01:03:13,280 --> 01:03:16,680 And if you think that we're, and if you complain, we're going to 1279 01:03:16,680 --> 01:03:20,800 just call you a child molester. This, this is hard to do in 1280 01:03:20,800 --> 01:03:23,400 America because you have state governments that's generally 1281 01:03:23,400 --> 01:03:25,320 have political incentives to push back against the federal 1282 01:03:25,320 --> 01:03:28,000 government when it comes to things like online surveillance. 1283 01:03:28,240 --> 01:03:29,840 It's actually the state governments that are the ones 1284 01:03:29,840 --> 01:03:33,960 pushing it to, to perform age checks and other content. 1285 01:03:33,960 --> 01:03:36,280 It's a very mixed landscape. But as a, as a core cultural 1286 01:03:36,280 --> 01:03:38,920 value, America does value free speech. 1287 01:03:38,920 --> 01:03:40,800 Regardless of what the rules say, the laws say they value 1288 01:03:40,800 --> 01:03:43,520 free speech. You'll see that getting eroded 1289 01:03:43,520 --> 01:03:46,520 for people in out groups, immigrants, people on visas. 1290 01:03:46,560 --> 01:03:50,760 But I don't think you'll ever see a world where American, the 1291 01:03:50,760 --> 01:03:52,800 American people as a culture will will say, yes, we were 1292 01:03:52,800 --> 01:03:55,680 willing to take we we're willing to curtail free speech to, to, 1293 01:03:55,680 --> 01:03:57,360 to gain safety. That's not going to happen. 1294 01:03:57,400 --> 01:04:01,320 Whereas I think in Europe and in the UK that is that is currently 1295 01:04:01,320 --> 01:04:03,520 a debate that's happening and you have very powerful factions 1296 01:04:03,880 --> 01:04:08,000 pushing for less acceptance of free speech and more acceptance 1297 01:04:08,000 --> 01:04:10,960 of governments oversight over what people are saying. 1298 01:04:11,160 --> 01:04:13,000 And I think that that is very, very concerning. 1299 01:04:13,000 --> 01:04:15,400 Cool. Thank you for coming on again, 1300 01:04:15,400 --> 01:04:20,440 Zach. I, I, I hope, I hope you're 1301 01:04:20,440 --> 01:04:22,520 right. I mean, I, I share your 1302 01:04:22,520 --> 01:04:25,720 pessimism with respect to Europe. 1303 01:04:26,200 --> 01:04:31,200 I don't share your optimism on on the other side of of the 1304 01:04:31,200 --> 01:04:34,760 Atlantic, but yeah, your word and God's ear. 1305 01:04:35,880 --> 01:04:38,680 Thank you. Just just to be clear, I mean, 1306 01:04:38,680 --> 01:04:41,280 I'm not based in the UK, North America, and I wouldn't say I'm 1307 01:04:41,280 --> 01:04:43,320 optimistic on America. It's just that I think that 1308 01:04:43,320 --> 01:04:46,120 it's, it's more likely to preserve like it's not moving in 1309 01:04:46,120 --> 01:04:47,480 the right direction. It's just moving in the wrong 1310 01:04:47,480 --> 01:04:49,880 direction at a much slower pace than the rest of the world, if 1311 01:04:49,880 --> 01:04:51,240 that makes any sense. I'm not sure I call that 1312 01:04:51,240 --> 01:04:54,000 optimism. Cool. 1313 01:04:54,720 --> 01:04:56,400 Thank you, Zach. Thanks a lot.