Anna Rose (00:00:05): Welcome to Zero Knowledge. I'm your host, Anna Rose. In this podcast, we'll be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web, as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online. (00:00:27): This week I catch up with Zaki Manian, co-founder of iqlusion and Sommelier. We do a massive recap of the history of Cosmos bringing us up to date since our last interview two years ago. We cover the IBC launch, Osmosis as the catalyst that really got it activated, how the ecosystem grew and accelerated up until the Luna Crash, and what the recovery and prospects of Cosmos have looked like since. We then discussed Sommelier, which offers managed Ethereum DeFi strategies from a Cosmos based chain. Lastly, we explore the concepts of emerging asset classes, such as real world assets and how ZKPs for privacy may finally find a product market fit that could bring real market adoption. Now, before we kick off, I want to quickly let you know about the upcoming zkSummit9 event happening on April 4th in Lisbon. Join us for our 9th edition with all the latest research and most cutting edge implementations in the ZK space. Applications to attend are open. I've added the link to this in the show notes. Hope to see you there. Now Tanya will share a little bit about this week's sponsor. Tanya (00:01:31): Aleo is a new layer one blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup. If you're interested in building private applications, then check out a Aleo's programming language called Leo. Leo enables non cryptographers to harness the power of ZKPs to deploy decentralized exchanges, hidden information games, regulated stable coins, and more. Visit developer.aleo.org to learn more. You can also participate in Aleo's Incentivized testnet3 by downloading and running a snarkOS node. No signup is necessary to participate for questions. Join their Discord at aleo.org/discord. So thanks again, Aleo. And now here's our episode. Anna Rose (00:02:16): So I want to welcome back Zaki to the show. Zaki's the co-founder of iqlusion and Sommelier. He's a wearer of many hats and an advisor to many things. Hi, Zaki. Zaki Manian (00:02:26): It's great to be here. I love this podcast. It's always a pleasure to be on this Anna Rose (00:02:31): You know what's funny? So you've been on, you've been on three times, but your last time on was quite a while ago. It was let me just pull it. March 31st, 2021. It's almost two years. Zaki Manian (00:02:46): Yeah. That was a lifetime ago. So many things have happened. Anna Rose (00:02:49): Yeah, it's weird. As a starting point, it would be really good to catch up with you. That episode 2 years ago was all about the Stargate upgrade. And this got me thinking actually and prepping this, like, what is the timeline of Cosmos? Maybe you can just like do a step by step. I like, for example, I forget if IBC had already launched or not. Yes Zaki Manian (00:03:09): It's very fast. Okay, so, Anna Rose (00:03:11): Okay, cool. Zaki Manian (00:03:12): 2014, Jae Kwon comes up with Tendermint as like an idea and is basically the first person who's like, I can reconcile the differences between like academic, basically useless BFT research and like this weird Satoshi Nakamoto Bitcoin thing and basically Jae gets like all of the key points, right? So I started a company which will become relevant to the later parts of our discussion called Skuchain where we were going to do like supply chain assets on blockchains. Anna Rose (00:03:43): Ooh Zaki Manian (00:03:43): When we started that company, we raised a little money. We were in an office with a project that later became DeFinity. So there used to be this mailing list called Cryptoeconomicon. It was a Google group and that was like back in the day where all the smart people, like, where a lot of the smart people who were kind of like a little bit less maximalist were all hanging out. So we invited that mailing list to our office, and so like Vitalik came, Vlad came, Vlad had a friend from college named Ethan Buckman, just like a lot of people who would go on to be big parts of the crypto industry, all came to this conference. So Jae and Ethan met each other. I think, honestly, I think for Vitalik, I remember talking to him after it, he was like, yeah, I watched Jae's presentation. (00:04:30): It was probably the first, it was like really got him started thinking about Proof-of-stake in a different way. And, you know, so all of that happened. So then Jae and Ethan start working on it. That's 2015. 2016, they decided to do a public chain because they kept trying to find enterprise users of blockchains and at the time, you know, it was all IBM and everybody, and nobody wanted this like tiny little project by two nerds, two weirdos in the mission so they decided to do a public chain. Collectively, we arrive at the Cosmos architecture, which was very inspired by both Jae's work on on-chain light clients and Mark Miller's work on like interoperable sovereign systems. So Mark Miller is one of the founders of Agoric so I didn't know him at the time, but like I'd found his website and stuff and I was like, really into it. (00:05:19): So, okay, that's 2016. So 2017, fundraiser raised $17 million. ETH is like $40. So everything goes up. So like the Interchain Foundation basically gets funded. 2017, 2018, I joined the project full-time. We do Game of Stakes at the end of 2018. We start the validator program. Companies like Figment and Bison Trails all get started in like the Cosmos Validator program. 2019, we launched the Proof-of-stake network on top of Tendermint and the Cosmos SDK. We get early adoption by some projects that later turned out to be significant. Both Binance adopts the Cosmos stack for doing B&B chain, and Terra adopts us. Anna Rose (00:06:05): For better or worse Zaki Manian (00:06:06): You know, for better or worse. So that's 2019. So at that point, Agoric had been founded and so I call up the Agoric guys and I'm like, the plan was always, hey, we're going to like implement your ideas on top of Tendermint. Well, Tendermint is live. I told you I'd call you what it was done. Well, here it is. Come help us implement it. So we design IBC together. Anna Rose (00:06:28): Oh, really? I didn't know the Agoric team was really involved in the IBC design. Zaki Manian (00:06:33): Yeah. If you want to give you my best guess as to like why IBC works as well as it does is it's because Mark and Dean have basically implemented all of their ideas in like enterprise settings, like 2 or 3 times before, and we just implemented them on top of Tendermint and public blockchains and so we got to skip like a lot of, we got to imbibe like 2 to 3 decades worth of like burnt fingers experience. And this is like why IBC, just like you opened the box and it just worked instead of like having to like stumble around in the dark for several years. Right. Anna Rose (00:07:08): Crazy. Wait, so tell me, say, say this again. Design completion of IBC is when? Zaki Manian (00:07:13): 2019 is the design of IBC. So 2020, Jae becomes increasingly unstable and difficult to work with so the entire engineering team basically leaves. I leave to work on iqlusion, Jack goes to Strangelove. The Berlin engineering team splits off into a subsidiary of the ICF. Anna Rose (00:07:35): Oh yeah, that was 2020 spring and this is right before the lockdown and everything. But at that moment Zaki Manian (00:07:43): Yeah, this was right before lockdown Anna Rose (00:07:44): Cosmos was looking Zaki Manian (00:07:46): Oh yeah. Everybody thought we were dead. Anna Rose (00:07:48): It was like super not clear. It was going to be okay. Yeah. Zaki Manian (00:07:51): I don't know. I thought we, I was not sure if we were good alive, but like, I was like, Chris Goes and I like had like a blood pact. We said, if there's no money, if there's nothing we will write IBC ourselves. If that's what it comes down to, we will do, like we just like swore to each other that no matter what else happens, we were going to ship IBC. But there was this odd thing that is like way down in the details and nobody really remembers it, where the way we built IBC involved deeper changes with Cosmos SDK that had the unfortunate impact of breaking a lot of our exchange integrations. And so that's what the Stargate episode was about. It was about this massive process Anna Rose (00:08:36): Yeah. Zaki Manian (00:08:36): Of both shipping IBC. So then we ship IBC. So like all of this stuff is done, IBC, everything is done in about late November, 2020. But between the holidays and Chinese New Year, there was just like no reason to launch this. We could not not launch this thing until March. So we launch IBC on the Cosmos hub in March, we do the Stargate upgrade, it's all a success. At that point, I'd already started working on Sommelier, but the honest answer is nobody had a plan for how to, what to do after IBC launched. Anna Rose (00:09:09): Yeah. Zaki Manian (00:09:10): And so kind of IBC just kind of like sat around. Nobody really did anything with it Anna Rose (00:09:15): Although people used it. Like what's crazy now is don't, I mean, think about like when we talked about this, that upgrade and that time two years ago, I mean since then there's been all of these chains launched. There's like Zaki Manian (00:09:30): Yeah. Anna Rose (00:09:31): Exchanges that actually, like the fact that they could have sort of this boom of airdrops 2 years or like last year was because there was some way to move it around this ecosystem all over IBC. But it's funny when I just said that though, I just said like, and since then it's been used a lot, but you're shaking your head Zaki Manian (00:09:48): Okay. So there's like this gap, there's March to July. Okay. Anna Rose (00:09:52): Okay. Okay. Zaki Manian (00:09:53): And then in July, Osmosis comes out. Anna Rose (00:09:57): Ah yeah Zaki Manian (00:09:57): And Osmosis bootstraps IBC, they bootstrap IBC you know, the airdrop is a success. They launch with this amazing sort of Skinnerbox user experience where, you know, you get your rewards, you've got to reinvest it. Like they bootstrap all these liquidity pools and like Osmosis gets off to the races and then, and, and Osmosis suddenly, you know, it establishes this pattern, right? You can launch a chain, you can incentivize a liquidity pool, you can do airdrops, you could bootstrap liquidity. And then by the end of 2021, the UST carry trade is like the dominant thing happening in Cosmos where basically most like the smarter people realize that the best way to get into Anchor was to buy ATOMs, take them Osmosis, swap to UST, go to the Terrachain and deposit into Anchor and in and out. And so billions of dollars are now flowing over IBC and it's like through Osmosis, you know, and it's kind of crazy. Anna Rose (00:11:01): It sounds amazing when you say it, by the way, billions of dollars are flowing over IBC through Osmosis. Zaki Manian (00:11:07): Yeh! Anna Rose (00:11:07): Like, I know we're thinking of the project, but just if you take the words, it's such good branding anyway. Like just in terms of timing, you're talking end of 2021. Zaki Manian (00:11:16): Yeah. Anna Rose (00:11:17): We're going into 2022. Zaki Manian (00:11:19): Yeah. Anna Rose (00:11:20): What happens to Cosmos? Zaki Manian (00:11:23): So in 2022, for the first half of the year, everything is kind of going gangbusters, kind of up only things are going well. Anna Rose (00:11:34): Lots of airdrops Zaki Manian (00:11:35): Lots of airdrops, lots of liquidity, everything. And then Terra collapses in May. And you know, that's a huge blow to the ecosystem. You know, Cosmonauts lose many millions of dollars from, you know, being in the Osmosis liquidity pools and stuff like that, you know, many of us have like six figure plus losses. You know, it's hugely damaging to the ecosystem and everything. On the other hand, like the reality is is that like from a tech point of view, Terra was always very, was very distant. You know, the thing the core Cosmos team was constantly trying to figure out a way to do is like get, go to actually like, fund some technology development and like actually be more involved in building the platform. But like, none of that stuff actually like had happened at that point. Anna Rose (00:12:23): Just, just a question, I want to, I actually want to ask you about that moment. So when that happened, was there an existential crisis in Cosmos? Was there like a moment? Because it was so closely tied, it was running on the Cosmos SDK. It was a zone/a chain connected to IBC. Zaki Manian (00:12:42): It was a zone, it was a chain. It was the largest pool on Osmosis. It was the dominant stablecoin in the IBC ecosystem. It was like frankly a large percentage, you know, just a large, had a large impact in our user base. There was also a lot of concerns about consensus takeover. There was this whole very dramatic thing about where the validators of, of the Terra chain kind of stepped in and took over the chain essentially by freezing staking. Anna Rose (00:13:07): Oh yeah. Yeah. Zaki Manian (00:13:08): It was by far the most chaotic thing that has ever happened. I've ever seen, ever been a part of. It was crazy. Anna Rose (00:13:15): And like to go to zero that fast. Had you ever seen anything like that? Zaki Manian (00:13:19): Yeah, I mean, but the thing, okay, so the thing is, is like I was very well aware of the death spiral risk of Terra. Anna Rose (00:13:26): Okay. Zaki Manian (00:13:27): Right. Every time anyone had asked me about it, you know, investing in Luna, etc. I would say things the same thing. I would say like, probably the best thing about Luna is the mechanism is very simple. Like the code, you could read all of the code to like how does USD work in like an afternoon. Occlusion is actually written in implementation of the Oracle, at one point, because we're, for a while we were actually validators on Terra that we had dropped out of the validator set because we were uncomfortable is like the actual answer. But we still had some Luna exposure, but we had dropped out of the validator set because we were sort of uncomfortable with how things were going there. But, you know, I would always tell people, I'm like, well, there's this thing that'll happen, right? If, if UST de-pegs, which is you know, you could print Infinite Luna and it just destabilizes the whole system. You know, the system has a huge death spiral risk and that totally was a thing. Anna Rose (00:14:22): But was there sort of the sense that it was like it could happen but it won't happen? Like why if that was so well known, did people still continue to, like it was for I guess the first half of the year or maybe even longer, the Stablecoin of Cosmos Zaki Manian (00:14:38): And the largest non-dollar backed Stablecoin in the entire ecosystem, right? Anna Rose (00:14:43): Is was it bigger than Maker do you think? Zaki Manian (00:14:45): Yeah Anna Rose (00:14:45): Bigger than DAI? Zaki Manian (00:14:46): It was bigger than DAI. Anna Rose (00:14:47): Oh Zaki Manian (00:14:47): It was huge at the peak, you know, it was like $30 billion or something like that. What I think about what UST was, it was basically a fairly interesting and novel financial structure. It was like a form of leverage introduced into a system that hadn't, had never existed and would, could never have existed with a kind of without blockchains and without, probably without the Cosmos SDK it would be relatively hard to build a kind of leveraged in a form of leverage like this. But then, you know, the people who were really drawn into that ecosystem right, were people who were really good at leverage and momentum, Jump, Galaxy, all of those things. I continue to talk to those teams on a regular basis. I talked to those teams on a regular basis there. I talk to them about the depeg risk on a, also on a regular basis. And, you know, it seemed like there was enough financial firepower to sustain the system at that level. And like sort of the general vision of Luna was like, use this extreme form of leverage to, like this form of leverage that was built into the system to grow really fast, get big, and then sort of buy your way back to solvency. Anna Rose (00:15:59): Almost like become too big to fail Zaki Manian (00:16:01): Become too big to fail and then buy your way back to solvency. Anna Rose (00:16:04): Yeah. because I guess like there was sort of almost a dependency on like people buying back or like, and you sort of saw that in the exact moment of the fall where there was talk of like trying to get some backstops, some big groups to come in and kind of like keep the peg. Zaki Manian (00:16:22): Because it had happened at smaller scales. Anna Rose (00:16:23): Yeah Zaki Manian (00:16:23): At smaller scales. People had stepped in, in previous times when the peg had been tested. I don't think the full story of like what happened is known still right now. I think it's going to be really interesting as you kind of like, the Alameda and Genesis bankruptcy filings kind of get worked through how much information about the fall of Terra. But like these actors were like very, without a doubt, you know, and it's like publicly, like right, like the, the UST for Bitcoin trade that set up the stability fund for, was the counterparty was Genesis. Right. Anna Rose (00:17:04): Whoa. Zaki Manian (00:17:05): And so, you know, that's public knowledge and I think it's going to be really interesting to see like, well know how much of the financial history of this period of time comes down Anna Rose (00:17:15): I mean this sounds like a book, like the things happening behind the scenes to cause Luna, which was obviously like built badly and had that vulnerability, but then to see the cascade and all of the ways that people tried to sort of escape it and it just sort of bulldozing over everyone involved in a way. Wow. Zaki Manian (00:17:38): I would say that like a lot of the people were heavily invested in Luna knew what it was. I don't, the question of whether or not it was built badly is like, represents like an interesting question because it's really more about what do you think is an ethical level of risk in a product, right? Like the code was there, anyone could read it. I do not think that there's, that like, ultimately this is a story that is primarily about fraud. I think this, it's ultimately a story around like the code was there, the people who backed it were super familiar with how it worked. The depeg risk was well understood in terms of like what it, like what would happen. And the question is, was this a product that exposes too many people to too much risk of loss to like ethically build the product? (00:18:26): Which is an interesting question. Like a question that, like I have feelings about, I work on Stablecoin all the time. I build stuff on top of Stablecoin on Sommelier, I work on theoric Stablecoin, USDC. I think a lot about what is the ethical level of risk. If you build a decentralized Stablecoin of any kind, there is some amount of risk. And the question is like, what is the ethical level of risk to expose people to? And I think that is a more interesting and more nuanced question that I think has largely been lost in the whole. Anna Rose (00:18:59): Hmm. I also think, I do think at the same time, like when you say that, I mean one of the faults of the Luna ecosystem I think you can pin on them is like the marketing around how it worked and how safe it was. Zaki Manian (00:19:12): Sure. Anna Rose (00:19:12): And like, it wasn't that they were going, hey, this is very high risk, but could have great reward. That wasn't the marketing and a lot of people who couldn't read the code, like yes the code is there, but like they wouldn't understand what, they're not looking into the code, were kind of taken in. Zaki Manian (00:19:28): There's a weird thing though about the culpability there because the people who were most aggressively marketing it as safe, as far as I can tell, were the exchanges themselves. Anna Rose (00:19:41): Mm. Zaki Manian (00:19:41): I think it's hard exactly to find something from like, I mean, because everybody's looking like, like that would be, that would be your like smoking gun fraud claim right there. Like they said it was safe, they didn't disclose how it worked or its risks everything. And so far, I mean, and from what I've seen, I think I haven't seen anything where somebody is a actually able to like pin TFL down on that work. Where you find the misleading stuff is on the exchanges, on the docks around that, where it's like, oh, this is a Stablecoin blah, blah blah, blah blah. It's always going to be redeemable for a dollar, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. I think the Luna story has a lot of nuance to it. There's definitely a lot to be learned from it. So anyways, that was the collapse of Luna. Biggest story of Cosmos in 2022. The contagion spread far larger than anyone would've really imagined. Anna Rose (00:20:34): I wonder actually, don't you feel like after that like drop though Cosmos as an ecosystem, it continued to be affected by the general market, but like that was its shock and it then sort of leveled out it almost, whereas other ecosystems just tumbled one after another month to month it feels like. Zaki Manian (00:20:54): It was a very strange experience in general for me because one of the things though that happened is it was like Terra collapsed and I remember just kind of like, you know, I was like in a hotel room for a conference in Croatia, kind of like in the validator chat, like trying to help people out and just like, you know, kind of shell shocked by the scale of the collapse. And then I like was like went down and like floated in the ocean for a while and was like, I wonder if Cosmos is going to come back from this. Is it all over? Like, this is pretty bad. And then like bizarrely the phone was ringing off the hook. I think the other thing that has to be recognized though as a true statement of Cosmos, is Cosmos has not come back yet. (00:21:39): Is what is a thing I would very much say about the truth of Cosmos. Is we have not come back from the Luna situation. We have, there's a lot of green shoots, there's a lot of things that potentially might represent a true restoration of momentum, but the actual reality of Cosmos right now is liquidity sucks. DEX volume is a pale shadow of what it once was. Developer numbers are pretty good. There's a lot of people building, but we have not hit a product market fit moment. But I would say the thing I'm most excited about is DYDX chain, other than, you know, I'm very excited about Sommelier but the things that we're doing with DYDX, the things we're doing with bringing USDC natively to Cosmos and like what's generally happening in like the modular celestia rollup ecosystem represent to me like a bunch of things that are very going to be exciting for 2023. (00:22:38): There's a number of kind of dark horses like Canto and Berachain and stuff like that. So Cosmos continues to stay weird, interesting stuff continues to happen to be really satisfied. We need to get, we need to truly move beyond what happened with Luna in 2023. I think we have about this year to do it. And if, if it doesn't happen in this year, I think we have a like I think most likely what will happen is the app chain thesis will have been right, but the Cosmo stack will not be the dominant app chain stack. Anna Rose (00:23:12): What will be though? What could be? Zaki Manian (00:23:14): You know, there's so many other players in the app chain thesis world, the Optimism stack, which both like Optimism, like they call it the OP stack is becoming a thing. Starkware is building their own sort of app, like Starkware, Arbitrum, Optimism, all have app chain SDKs essentially that are, Anna Rose (00:23:40): I see Zaki Manian (00:23:41): Much less mature than the Cosmos SDK. Our OG peer Polkadot is also starting to, you know, is finally the pieces are starting to fall together. So I think that there's a lot of stuff, great stuff going on in Cosmos. There's a lot of momentum. You know, I'm on this thing called the Technical Advisory Board, which is, we're trying to contribute a new strategic focus for Cosmos and we've dodged some bullets. Like we had this really bad vulnerability called Dragonberry in October that like was never exploited and all got patched. (00:24:11): My role in this whole story right, is, and like my honest take on Cosmos is, the app chain thesis is starting to make more and more sense to more and more people. The, you know, it's great to be right eight years later. There is a lot of stuff, there's a lot more things being built, but there is this need for like really a strategic focus this year and I think things are pretty well aligned to come together. Like all, a lot of the pieces are in place and I'm excited. I'm bullish. I'm working really hard and it's kind of great to see all of these pieces coming together, but we're not there yet. We haven't recovered from Terra yet and we won't until and unless some of these pieces really hit. Anna Rose (00:25:00): Can you tell us a little bit about like kind of ATOM 2.0? Because I know that was an attempt to actually do that, right? This was a manifesto or something. Zaki Manian (00:25:09): ATOM 2.0 was a manifesto. One of the things that happened with the whole Terra story, right, is ATOM really got displaced. So ATOM is this token that was launched. It was the first, it was like one of the first chain launched with Cosmos SDK, but like B&B chain, ATOM and Iris all launched like roughly at the same time. Anna Rose (00:25:30): It was also one of the first Proof-of-stake generally. Like I think Tezos was maybe out before, but there were Zaki Manian (00:25:35): Tezos was before us. Anna Rose (00:25:36): Yeah. Zaki Manian (00:25:36): Like Tezos was probably the only really legit Proof-of-stake chain to launch before us. But now, but like Tezos eventually is now running a variant of Tendermint. So, you know. Anna Rose (00:25:46): Oh funny. Zaki Manian (00:25:48): Like Anna Rose (00:25:50): All paths lead to the Cosmos SDK Zaki Manian (00:25:52): I guess all paths lead to Cosmos, right? So the the question that like comes down to it is I'm sure Arthur's going to yell at me about this too, but like yes, it's true, it's true. You know Tezos is running a variant of Tendermint today. So like ATOM is this token, it was launched for a variety of reasons. Like we never really had a strong story about what ATOM was for in the Cosmos ecosystem. It was just like, hey, you participate in the fundraiser, you got this token, you run this network. Hopefully you guys will figure out what to do with it. Anna Rose (00:26:29): Yeah. And maybe just to note this for, for listeners like IBC and transfers over IBC while part of sort of the Cosmos effort, none of that is funded. There's no like fee associated with, that's in ATOM. ATOM as itself still just lives in the hub. Although I mean it is one of the main trading partners I think over on Osmosis too, right? Like there is it's pool, it's used for pooling and stuff Zaki Manian (00:26:52): So I mean, it's amazing to me that, you know, you have Axelar, which is a Cosmos SDK chain that enables this bridging and it bridges between Ethereum, all of the, almost every L2, Avalanche, Polkadot. Collective flow through Osmosis on Axelar is equal to the amount of flow between ATOM and Axelar and Osmosis. Anna Rose (00:27:16): Oh wow. Zaki Manian (00:27:16): So like what ATOM 2.0 is really about trying to create this idea around is what we call the ATOM Economic zone which is a subset of Cosmos where ATOM is used for security, where liquid staked ATOM is a major store of value. And the unfortunate, like, so like the main thing that happened with ATOM 2.0 is you, like Jae sort of resurfaced after having kind of been pretty inactive in the Cosmos community. And right after Cosmoverse and the announcement of ATOM 2.0, he led this like sort of veto campaign in Cosmos governance against the ATOM 2.0. Now at the end of the day, like the ATOM 2.0 proposal was just a signaling proposal, if it had passed, nothing would've happened. If it had been failed, nothing would've happened. So like the whole story of it was nothing happened. Anna Rose (00:28:14): Mmm. I think what it definitely did do is it framed the problem, which I think had maybe been ignored a little bit. Like I felt like it really brought that to the forefront that like, what is this asset really for? And how do you actually make sure that it still has, you know, some purpose beyond just living within the hub. Zaki Manian (00:28:36): Yeah. And so, you know, I think ATOM was a little bit tabular rasa. It was like this blank slate that like various influencers and other people could like input be like, oh, ATOM will be this and tell a story. ATOM will be that and tell a story. And I'm glad we did this. I think in the long run it was the, it's going to have been the right thing to do, which is to basically go out and say like, look, Cosmos can succeed without ATOM if ATOM-holders are just happy with this world that they are in because yes, you know, ATOM ended up being an important part of like the anchor carry trade. Yes. It is currently a big part of the Osmosis trading sort of ecosystem but it seems like only a matter of time before that reality is eliminated. (00:29:25): Native USDC was announced at the same time, at the same event as ATOM 2.0. I think it's like without a doubt it is only a matter of time before like the current role of ATOM in the ecosystem is displaced. And if that happens, you know, again, the network can succeed, the technologies can succeed, IBC can succeed. But what it was basically a bunch of people who decided, you know, we are going to frame the problem of and like propose a solution. But the thing that it has sort of created is this, there is like sort of a sense of warring camps right now in Cosmos. I would say most of the people who worked on ATOM 2.0 have shifted their attention elsewhere. But there are, but like, so one thing that then happened is the Cosmos hub has always had a very small community pool relative to the other Cosmos chains. (00:30:23): Many Cosmos chains have, you know, 10%/20%/30% of the token supply in this governance controlled treasury. And the ATOM Treasury was, you know, it's a $3.5 billion chain. And at the time it had to you know, typically as a treasury around like $10 or $15 million. Right. So like not enough money to actually like really do anything. Anna Rose (00:30:44): Yeah. Zaki Manian (00:30:45): And so one thing that did happen is a governance proposal was passed to redirect more emissions to the community pool and now there are some governance proposals out about like setting up grants programs and how to spend them. There's a lot of discussion around ATOM economic zone and it continues and it remains to be seen. The ATOM token can overcome its problems or whether or not, you know, another thing in Cosmos displaces it. But I think like the best outcome, obviously it would be some effective piece of the ATOM economic zone thesis gets realized. ATOM becomes like a more effective means of carrying the message of Cosmos out in the community and like ATOM can be like a sort of foundational asset that like bootstraps all of our other ecosystem players, Injective and Secret and Agoric and all of these other things to success. Anna Rose (00:31:43): Cool. Well this is a great recap. Zaki Manian (00:31:46): That has been, that's been the drama of my life for the last two years since I was last on, you know, a collapse of a $40 billion ecosystem, a few billion dollar vulnerabilities mitigated. You know, it's just another day in my life. Anna Rose (00:32:03): Just chilling. Let's talk now about the project that you co-founded Sommelier and how that's going. Because the last episode you were on was all about the Stargate upgrade. The one before that was all about Sommelier. You've changed a lot, that project has pivoted quite a bit as well, so Zaki Manian (00:32:22): Yeah, well, so in many ways Sommelier is a system by which we offer actively managed DeFi strategies. And what we do is we do this through a combination of a Cosmos chain and Ethereum smart contracts. Anna Rose (00:32:39): Would you say it was inspired by Yearn? Was it like, when you talk about strategies and vaults, is it similar? Zaki Manian (00:32:46): Okay. So like as we kind of pivot this conversation, we're talking like kind of reference the first episode of the year, which was you, Tarun, Kobi, Guillermo talking about the sort of different kinds of asset classes and all of this stuff. So we are definitely, you know, we definitely stand on the shoulders of giants like Yearn, but one of the things that Yearn has never been able to figure out how to do is to have a truly dynamic strategy. I.E. a strategy that adapts to market conditions because the thing that happens with all financial strategies and DeFi strategies in general is they work and then markets change and then they don't produce good returns anymore. What the design of Sommelier that I came up with my co-founders with is we basically use the Cosmos chain as like a coordination and governance layer to basically say, hey, like you can have an actively managed strategy, but there's actually a mechanism by which someone else can step in if that strategist like disappears. (00:33:48): The vision of this was always to like really enable complex DeFi applications. But so we launched the first Sommelier strategy right after Terra blew up. So Anna Rose (00:34:04): Oh man Zaki Manian (00:34:04): That was annoying. We've had a tough time with strategies, right? Like so it was a stablecoin yield product on top of Aave. So that was the first thing. Then we launched these portfolio management strategies later in the year, but then FTX blew up and the markets were down only. So today we are recording this on January 26th, so January 25th we launched a new Stablecoin yield strategy, which I'm honestly, hopefully nothing else will explode. Anna Rose (00:34:39): It's like how if Tarun's in Mexico something crashes, for you it's if Sommelier is about to release a strategy, hopefully not this time around Zaki Manian (00:34:47): But yeah, I mean it's actually been good if you actually look at the data for Sommelier. So, you know, TVLs have been not what we've been hoping for to be like very straightforward. You know, there's about $2 million being managed by Sommelier. It doesn't really, it's not super great, but if you look at our strategies, our ETH bitcoin strategies are, you know, up by like 20%/30% now, like we have, like all of our portfolio management strategy is starting to be really profitable. This new yield strategy that we just launched is the first strategy that composes Aave lending, compound lending and Uniswap, UniV3LP into a single vault. Anna Rose (00:35:30): Interesting Zaki Manian (00:35:30): We're the first people to do that and like what our, you know, numerical analysis and totally validated by the first day in production is, is like more than 50% of the available stablecoin yield on Ethereum is optimizing your UniV3 positions. (00:35:47): And no one else is doing that in a decentralized setting. And that's built on top of a technology that has taken us almost a year to build, which hats off to Chris Goes and Kevin Kennis from our smart contract team for like dreaming all of this into existence. What Sommelier has built on is one is we built this governance layer on top of Cosmos, which right allows for off-chain strategists who have proprietary alpha to communicate with the decentralized network and get decentralized execution of these trades. But we also have built like, essentially like a full blown fund accounting platform essentially in an Ethereum smart contract. So you can enter in withdrawals, we do NAV computations, like net asset value computations. We like figure out the asset. And now with this latest platform that the new yield product is built up, we can combine any DeFi protocols on Ethereum into that NAV calculation system. (00:36:43): It's honestly super exciting. I really believe that we call it real yield USD is the most state of the art yield protocol on Ethereum. And so I'm super excited about it. About a half a million dollars came in over the last 24 hours. People don't really know about it, but I'm really hoping we're going to be able to like really flex some numbers. My like tiny preview of flexing that number was that we, like our UniV3 fees on the first day we're so large that like if you annualized them over the year, it would've been an 8% yield. It's real cool. I think we're, I'm excited about being able to flex this stuff. It's really exciting and like this kind of loops back to the Cosmos thing, which is Cosmos was really driven in 2022 by airdrops hyperinflationary stake rewards. (00:37:32): Like lots of just like money printing, like everywhere you go, every just like money printing everywhere. And that's another like, big problem in Cosmos that we have to get past. So, you know, Sommelier is a fixed supply token. There's only 500 million, we're launching non-inflationary staking rewards soon I'm like hoping for like, it's like a week or two out. Yeah. So we're going to be powering our staking rewards both fees from like, things like real yield USD and then we're also going to be pulling from the community pool, but we're not printing tokens out of thin air. There's 500 million SOMM, and that's how much SOMM there is. Anna Rose (00:38:08): Just to kind of like recap though, when I had first heard about it, I always thought of it as very Cosmos native. It's like built on the Cosmos SDK in the Cosmos ecosystem tradable within like IBC and IBC enabled token. But all of these strategies live on Ethereum, right? Or it seems like you're pointing at Ethereum more. Zaki Manian (00:38:29): The next chains that we're going to launch on our like alt other EVMs. So Arbitrum, February. Sometime in February we'll be on Arbitrum and Avalanche as well. I would say that like the biggest reason for this is, and like all of these things are related, right? Is like Cosmos DeFi has been very immature relative to the EVM and Solana DeFi ecosystems. Like Cosmos DeFi has basically meant DEXs. Like that's what what it's meant. Anna Rose (00:38:59): Yeah. Zaki Manian (00:38:59): We've had a lot of DEXs and we have more Dexus coming and we have a lot of DEXs. Anna Rose (00:39:03): Is it just like years like, it launched long after Ethereum launched and Ethereum just needed X amount of years to start getting the sort of confidence where more, you know, more money could be put into it by larger players? Like is that possibly why it feels immature? Zaki Manian (00:39:21): There are a couple of missing pieces. One missing piece is the liquidity piece, lack of on-ramps, lack of easy way to get funds in and out of Cosmos. And that's definitely a challenge. Well, you take the example of sommelier. So we do these nev calculations when people are adding funds by being on single chain. And even when we do Arbitrum and Osmosis or Arbitrum and Avalanche, we're still going to be single chain on those two. It's just going to be, we're going to have products, we're going to have sellers on multiple chains, but each seller will be self-contained because you can do all of the nav computations atomically on Ethereum as people add funds and remove funds, right? So you can do all that accounting, it all happens atomically in a smart contract. When you build these things in a sort of multi-chain world whether it's Cosmos or anything else, now you're introducing like these cues because you can't instant atomically calculate NAV because you're so, you're like, you would like to add money, okay. (00:40:26): At like this time we will like finish our NAV calculations and then give you your LP shares based on our NAV computations. And like the same thing will be true when we exit. So why is Sommelier so focused on Ethereum DeFi? Two things. One is I really, really truly believe that active management is like decentralized active management and on-chain asset managers are like a key primitive that we have to get right? Because right now the DeFi version of be your own bank is like really legit. Be your own bank. ie. like be the back office, be the front office, be a bank, like, you know, do everything yourself and nobody will. This is not oh, sustainable strategy, right? You know, sitting there and hand optimizing your tick ranges on UniV3 is just like not a thing that, like anyone should be doing. (00:41:24): This is like, you need a professional, but how do we do that without centralization? Right? So that's the problem with Sommelier and like the primitives that we see in Ethereum are showing up all over Cosmos now we're starting to see money markets, we're starting to see liquid staking, concentrated liquidities coming to Osmosis. Like all of these pieces are coming and, you know, I believe that if we can find product market fit on Ethereum, like I'm starting to, you know, get excited about the idea. But the UX that we have focused on building in type of Sommelier, which is this like instantaneously put your liquidity instantaneously take your liquidity out, you know, the instant you put your money in it's earning yield when you go into real yield USD, it's like the same transaction. You're like funds are already in of it, like earning yield and like it might get allocated into a tick on UniV3 or it might get allocated somewhere else. (00:42:19): But you know, like this experience whereas like in the multichain world, you are definitely entering in this world where there are like, I put my money into a thing, I might not get my, like what LP share for hours. I want to take my money out of the thing, I'm not going to get my money for hours. And so that world is a very, very different world than the world that we've built for the Sommelier user experience on EVMs. And I think that world is the world that the Cosmos world is inevitable. I don't think that we're going to, you know, this idea that like all of DeFi is going to live on one chain and like liquidity isn't going to move around and all this stuff seems pretty unlikely at this point. So, you know, we're all going to have to build this stuff, but like, I want to show the power of active management. I want to show what it can do. It's going to be a lot easier to convince people to put money into these things once the single chain primitive though we have, you know, there are people like Quasar who are basically building Sommelier type strategies for Cosmos today and it's going to be like interesting to see how that goes. Anna Rose (00:43:27): Do you see yourself switching over though? Like, do you imagine that you would also include if there is like, I mean obviously if there are compelling cases you probably would, but like, would you even try to like instigate compelling cases over in Cosmos? Do you still want to? Zaki Manian (00:43:42): Yeah, yeah, yeah, we do. Anna Rose (00:43:44): Okay. Zaki Manian (00:43:45): We think a lot about it, but it's like there's still a lot of pieces, right? If we wanted to, we could launch a thing on top of Osmosis for instance, like later in the year, once like concentrated liquidity and all are sort of implemented that looks a lot like the kinds of sellers that we're running on Ethereum, but it wouldn't be multichain. So it's like, it's tricky to like figure out exactly how we want to do it. The other thing that's like absolutely true is just like the Cosmos, it matures, it matures slowly and unexpectedly. Like Sommelier, we had to build our own bridge because there wasn't any bridge we could use. But there are multiple protocols that are building bridging products for Cosmos that would've allowed Sommelier to exist without building our own bridge. Anna Rose (00:44:30): But you didn't have have it at the time, so you had to kind of build and now it's catching up Zaki Manian (00:44:34): It's two years later and this stuff is still in testnet. So, you know, it honestly takes some time for these and like maybe these things move more slowly because of just sort of how uncoordinated Cosmos can be. But yeah, these pieces are coming together, but like I said, like how to get the like user experience right and stuff like that are still big challenges. Anna Rose (00:44:57): I want to shift a little bit to another topic that I wanted to cover in this episode and that's kind of revisiting. You sort of mentioned that episode, the first episode of the year. In that episode we talked about these like asset types and Tarun had this really nice like kind of history and year by year on what kind of asset types were important. And the funny thing is after that episode came out, like for me at least, literally the day after everyone around me was like real world asset and I had not actually been in conversations before that moment hearing about it and we didn't mention it was sort of like missing from that part of our conversation. You and I have chatted since then and you mentioned it and then I was like, oh man, like I think we need to bring it up on the show. So maybe we should define this for folks when we hear people talking about this, what is it? Is it the same thing we saw in 2017? Zaki Manian (00:45:55): Okay. So just to like sort of summarize a little bit about like, what I remember from the first episode of the year was Tarun was making this point where he was like every kind of sort of bear market era of crypto always gets defined by like, so like first there was Bitcoin, then there was the alt, the Bitcoin fork era, then there was the ERC-20 era in the 2017 ICO boom. Then there was like the alt L1 staking coin era kind of around like Cosmos, Polkadot, Tezos, all launching. Then there was like Uniswap LP shares, Anna Rose (00:46:29): NFTs get introduced somewhere in there Zaki Manian (00:46:32): NFTs, which hang around like are around even in 2017 suddenly find their moment. Anna Rose (00:46:37): Yeah. Zaki Manian (00:46:38): And so two things that are kind of true right? Is like every time an asset class takes off in the crypto ecosystem, there's something that ran, like looks a lot like it that existed before that didn't take off. I think is like one thing. So like ERC-20 has had their preexisting things called Color Coins, which no one was interested in. ERC-20 takes off and then like ERC-20 blows up. So that has been a pattern, but there's also, there's this like, you know, it's just like everybody like says this time is different and groans, right? Like the groan is heard throughout the universe reverberates because you know, I started trying to put real world assets in blockchain in 2014 and I tried real hard at it for three years. Anna Rose (00:47:24): This is going back to your story, right? This is the beginning of the story. Zaki Manian (00:47:28): Yeah. Anna Rose (00:47:28): What was the name of the project? Zaki Manian (00:47:30): Skuchain. Anna Rose (00:47:31): Okay. Zaki Manian (00:47:31): Still around. Anna Rose (00:47:32): Okay. Zaki Manian (00:47:33): Still around, still in business. Hasn't died. Actually has like high profile customers like Apple and stuff like that who use parts of its stack. But let's first talk about what we mean by real world assets. So one, there's a form of real world asset that has had enormous success, which is dollar backed stablecoin. So Tether and USDC and the Paxos family of Stablecoin, BUSD are all in the real world asset family and like collectively, you know, represent, you know, probably the like the third largest asset in crypto, right? So when we say real world assets, it's like, well they exist, they're a thing, they're a thing, they're hugely valuable, useful, have achieved enormous product market fit. But basically you kind of have crypto native assets. Crypto native assets are assets that have no reference to the real world and their value is just what people are willing to buy and sell. (00:48:32): Then you have real world assets which have different properties where they are redeemable, for instance, in some way for assets that exist off-chain. And there is like an implicit, there's a contract that exists between the holder of that asset and some off-chain entity that is sort of represented by the on-chain asset. So if you hold USDC, it's you have a contractual relationship with Center and Circle and you are able to like redeem that USDC or like you are able to potentially trade to someone who can redeem with that. The same thing's true with Tether. Anna Rose (00:49:06): Would you add things like the supply chain management projects into the real world asset class? By the way, I stumble on this one. Real world assets. Ah, there said it. Zaki Manian (00:49:18): Yeah. I don't, and again, it's again, we like, we continue to be as a blockchain as a community, terrible at naming our thing, you know Anna Rose (00:49:29): RWA Zaki Manian (00:49:30): Now we're calling them RWAs which like, you know, is just going to be endlessly confusing too. What I would describe it is crypto native assets are counterparty list assets. They're assets where your only counterparty is the decentralized blockchain system. So you're both like settling and trading sometimes and like lending and borrowing in DeFi, which like makes the intermediary native to the blockchain. But then your only counterparty is the blockchain itself. NFTs have definitely blurred this line already because like, you know, you get a Bored Ape and you get invited to parties and stuff like that, like there's Anna Rose (00:50:09): You get experiences Zaki Manian (00:50:11): Experiences and contractual rights and stuff like that that get wrapped up in it already. Anna Rose (00:50:16): Yeah. Zaki Manian (00:50:17): And RWAs are a more explicit form of that where the thing that you have formatted and are trading in a blockchain, there is a defined, there's a counterparty that is off-chain that your thing you are trading on a blockchain represents a right to that's real world assets and like supply chain, off-chain lending debt protocols. So, so one thing that is cool and like the best argument for this time is different is previous generations of real world asset products all, were basically living in like highly self-contained sandboxed ecosystems. Like Skuchain did the first cross-border trade on a blockchain. Anna Rose (00:50:58): There was like real estate where there would be like, you'd have tokenized portion of a house. I remember that being like an earlier one Zaki Manian (00:51:06): But all of the stuff tended to exist in like very minuscule pilot projects or highly sandboxed environments. Like not in DeFi interacting with like all of the stuff that's happened in smart contracts couldn't build strategies around it, all of the stuff Anna Rose (00:51:22): You couldn't really get return on it. Could you? Like, you were still sort of hoping that the price would go up or the return was really only from that real, like the RWA, right? So it would've been from, in the real estate case, it would've been like the rent or the increase in price of the actual physical real estate. So the yield didn't look very exciting in a way. Zaki Manian (00:51:45): Yeah. Maker has this like large treasury of billions of dollars of USDC and Gemini USDE like Stablecoin basically. Because of the way the way the parody stability module works and you actually have debt like real world debt agreements where they are, you know, loaning money out of the PSM to go out and interact with off-chain counterparties like actual banks. You know, Société Générale has taken like, I think a $9 million loan out of the PSM and facilitated that. So you have that, there's another protocol called Ondo Finance, which is making a representation of treasury bonds available on-chain so they can be held in smart contracts, etc. You have Maple, you know, they just announced a supply chain finance play, Centrifuge has about $150 million of real world assets in their ecosystem. (00:52:42): So, you know, it's like actual money is moving, actual smart contracts are being used, it's happening on actual public chains. And so that's the argument for that this time is different. It's a very common thing that everyone's saying, right, is like when treasuries were 1%/2% right? And, you know, DeFi yields were 8%/10%/12%/20%. Everyone's like, why do you need real world assets? Like all we want is crypto native. Now you are having, like Sommelier is throwing like an enormous amount of advanced technology at Ethereum, we think we can get 4% to 6% which is like 1% better at best. We think about 1% better than like holding a treasury ETF, right? Which are like 3.5% right now. If you're crypto native, it's like not bad, but it's like, oh, okay. I could see why someone might want to, in this interest led environment, somebody like built an ETF on top of treasury bonds that like you could participate in in on-chain. (00:53:49): So you like, kind of like a hybrid of like what Sommelier is and like a traditional exchange traded fund. Like that would be a kind of thing you could build with our tech, with the Sommelier tech and Ondo or the Sommelier tech and Maple. Like you could build essentially like ETFs type things or like hedge fund type things, but are like very crypto native. But like have these off-chain counterparties. This is the kind of technology that we're like trying to enable. This is the Zero Knowledge podcast. Anna Rose (00:54:19): Yes. Zaki Manian (00:54:19): And one of the questions, one of the things that has been out there is like, what are the use cases of ZK? And the thing that I would observe about ZK is like the succinctness property of ZK has been like super successful and super dominant and has, you know, facilitated trillions of dollars of trades and stuff like this. Anna Rose (00:54:42): Maybe it's been super impactful as well. Like the amount of people who touch that part of it is much, much bigger than say the privacy part. Zaki Manian (00:54:50): Yeah. The privacy part doesn't get touched and I think like one thing I just like probably would be a good thing to discuss is so like there's some possibility that this real world asset thing might scale now. And I think for the reasons that we have, because like you could have things like on-chain asset managers and stuff like that, which makes on-chain assets in general more interesting. But one question that really I think is a plausible scenario is that like ZK and the like privacy properties of ZK suddenly find their like moment of like actual relevance and impact in the presence of real world assets. Anna Rose (00:55:30): Hmm. Why is that? Do you think? Zaki Manian (00:55:33): Things that you need a lot more when you're dealing with real world assets is, you are representing a contractual, right? And you need to like, kind of know your transaction, know your counterparty. You kind of need to bring a little bit more to the interaction with your counterparty where you're like, I can prove more things about me. So, you know, if real world assets are going to start to scale. The other thing that you care about with the real world asset is you care about some of the properties of that real world asset. So you're like, you know, if I'm like buying a portion of the house, like what are the houses that, like what does this represent if I'm buying an invoice, like who are the parties of this invoice and stuff like this Anna Rose (00:56:13): And you start to get deep into business stuff, then, like, this is business practice. Zaki Manian (00:56:17): You get deep into this business stuff. Anna Rose (00:56:19): Yeah. Zaki Manian (00:56:19): But like, you want to represent some of these things on-chain and you don't want to disclose all of the details of your business. Anna Rose (00:56:26): Yeah. Zaki Manian (00:56:26): Like this is always a objection at Skuchain. Right? If the system operated at scale, why would I want to put like all of like how much I'm paying my suppliers on-chain, right? And different counterparties are going to want a different level of diligence and all of this stuff. And you do have a garbage-in, garbage-out problem, which is like, ZK is never going to solve your problem of like, is the thing I'm making a ZKProof; is the underlying data fraudulent? Which has been a tricky problem to solve, but it doesn't strike me as impossible. That we might be able to end up in an ecosystem where there are places that attest and like agree on the sound. You know, counterparties agree on like large amounts of data that are, they're like this amount of data. Like we all agree that this matches our internal systems which is like what's happening on Skuchain systems today. And then when you trade this asset on-chain, it comes with like a zero knowledge proof. It's like, here's the executive summary. Anna Rose (00:57:30): Yeah. Zaki Manian (00:57:30): And like, here's the zero knowledge proofs Anna Rose (00:57:32): With the RWAs that you're hearing about, do they tend to be kind of like the NFT model where they are one-to-one and they're non-fungible? Or are they like fungible? Like you have a percentage of something that's owned as a whole? Zaki Manian (00:57:48): So the Maple pools as I understand them, are sort of fungible systems. They are fungible systems that you have that like you have tradable rights to and like you have like a credit delegate who's kind of managing the pool. But everybody is, it is a collective endeavor. Like Ondo finance, like treasury bonds are at least like for the kind of treasury bond are fungible with each other. So that's like you have classes of assets, you've yet to see, I think like really like a financialized real world asset NFT thing really take off yet, but it seems like a thing that could happen at any moment. Those pieces of the puzzle are I think are coming together and like the ZK tooling is definitely getting to the point now where like, I want to attach proofs to an NFT, I want to, instead of some counterparty permissioning me into the pool, there's some list of people and if they give me a zero knowledge proof, I can like enter and like start trading against these counterparties. Like that world is kind of a thing that is the pieces are there. Anna Rose (00:58:52): Yeah. I'd say it's still in this fun experimental phase in a lot of ways where there's no, it doesn't seem like businesses have been built around them. I mean, businesses have been built to build those tools, but you're not getting, like, they're not necessarily yet being incorporated into like true business practice. Zaki Manian (00:59:10): I think that is represents probably the like frontier that like, it just like, seems like it's a honestly about to break down. And like, I don't know, when I decided that public chains and crypto native assets were where I wanted to focus in 2017, it wasn't because I believed that the real world asset thesis that I'd start out with was wrong. I believed it was wrong. I just realized that the public chain technology had to mature a whole bunch and then it would be compelling. That it, like starting with real world assets was not the right place to start. Immediately after the FTX meltdown, I was very surprised to hear like, smart people start telling me real world assets. And I was like, my initial reaction was groan, I can't believe we're doing this again like Anna Rose (01:00:00): Yeah Zaki Manian (01:00:00): I don't want this. I remember how much it sucked (01:00:03): But then I'm like, keep talking to people, keep having conversations that go places. Peoples keep showing to get real world transactions, actual legal structures, actual money moving. And I start seeing how all the pieces will fit together. And I'm like, wait, we have the pieces now. Like we have scalable, fast interoperable public blockchains. We have DeFi primitives that are actually battle tested. We have, you know, on-chain asset management primitives, we have custody, we have all of the things to actually make this work. And like, you know, the speculative fervor has died down. So, you know, people are like, what? Well, we have to build things that are actually useful and that, that may have that we might be at the cusp of something transformative. I remember, you know, the first time Eran and Eli presented Zerocash at my like tiny little meetup in Mountain View. (01:01:03): That was kind of what I was thinking when I saw that. I was like, okay, you know, we are trying to build this supply chain blockchain thing. People have like enormous concerns about revealing all of their data on-chain. They don't, that makes them very nervous. But like, these people have shown me this like magic math that lets you have both, you know, soundness of like computation and privacy. And it seems like we could do it, but now it's all, you know, you have programming languages for it and all of this stuff is coming together. So maybe this time is different. Anna Rose (01:01:36): Maybe that's a good point to wrap on. I feel like your story has come sort of full circle with it, so yeah. Thanks. Zaki Manian (01:01:44): Yeah. I was not expecting to tell the story of the last two years of my life on this podcast but it was in incredibly enjoyable. It all does fit together. Right? Anna Rose (01:01:56): Yeah. It's quite a narrative. I like that. Thank you so much for sharing this with us and I want to say a big thank you to the podcast team, Tanya, Henrik, Rachel, Adam, and to our listeners, thanks for listening.