Anna Rose (00:00:05):
Welcome to zero knowledge. I'm your host, Anna Rose. In this podcast, we will 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.

Anna Rose (00:00:27):
In this week's episode, I chat with Illia from Near and Alex from Aurora. We talk a little bit about their histories, how they both got involved in the Near ecosystem and what the connection is between the Aurora project and Near. We give an update on Near since the last time Illia and I spoke, as well as look at what's new in Aurora, looking at Aurora+, how it's evolved the rainbow bridge, as well as some future plans, they have to make better use of nearest sharded system. Before we kick off, I do wanna highlight the ZK Link Tree for you. This is a great place to find out about all of our channels. So if you wanna learn more about the podcast, get to know the community, potentially check out our jobs board. You can find all of the links there. You can also find a link to the ZK Hack discord. ZK Hack is a new project focused primarily on ZK education. If you're looking to dive in as an engineer or researcher, I definitely recommend you check that out. I've added the link to the ZK linktree in the show notes. I hope to see you in one of our channels. Now I wanna invite Tanya to share a little bit about this week's sponsor.

Tanya (00:01:29):
Today's episode is sponsored by Anoma. Anoma is a set of protocols that enable self-sovereign coordination. Their unique architecture facilitates sufficiently the simplest forms of economic coordination, such as two parties transferring an asset to each other as well as more sophisticated ones, like an asset agnostic bartering system involving multiple parties without direct coincidence of wants or even more complex ones, such as N-party collective commitments to solve multipolar traps, where an interaction can be performed with an adjustable zero knowledge privacy. Anoma first fractal instance, Namada is planned for later in 2022, and it focuses on enabling shielded transfers for any assets with a few second transaction latency and near zero fees. Visit anoma.net for more information. So thanks again Anoma. Now here is Anna's interview with Near and Aurora.

Anna Rose (00:02:23):
Today. I am here with Illia from Near and Alex from Aurora. Welcome to the show.

Illia (00:02:28):
Thank you for inviting us.

Alex (00:02:30):
Hello everybody.

Anna Rose (00:02:31):
So Aurora and Near are somewhat distinct projects, but definitely part of the same ecosystem. And I wanted to use this episode to kind of explore what that connection is between these two projects. Quick disclosure, the ZK validator is a validator on Near. So if you have Near tokens, you can always delegate to us. And ZK validator is also an investor in Aurora. Illia you've been on the show before. Alex, you've not been on the show before, but we did do an interview last summer, but it, I think it would be great if you could just quickly introduce yourselves to the audience.

Illia (00:03:02):
Hey yeah, Illia I'm co-founder of Near protocol. My, I would say pre blockchain experience been mostly in AI and I was at Google research, another team working at question answering Google was like translate. And so if you translate stuff or ask questions on Google, some part of my work and my team's work is there. Obviously it's a huge team effort there and yeah, left to start Near the startup with Alex Skidanov different Alex. And we've kind of went through an interesting journey of teaching missions to program until realizing that we need the payment network to pay the real people who are giving us data and starting to explore blockchain as a platform to build some pieces on that until realizing that to build that we need, you know, simple, secure, and scalable blockchain, and we didn't find one, so decided to build our own.

Anna Rose (00:04:01):
Cool. And that's the founding of Near.

Illia (00:04:03):
Exactly.

Anna Rose (00:04:04):
Alex, what about you?

Alex (00:04:05):
That's by the way, that's a great proof of concept project that is lasting for what five years already.

Illia (00:04:13):
Yeah, there's actually a Near crowd on Near that's running that has like, I don't know, 2 or 3000 active users daily that are actually collecting data for machinery.

Anna Rose (00:04:24):
Nice.

Alex (00:04:25):
So about myself I'm Alex from Aurora I'm a PhD, also a technical guy, PhD in applied physics and math. In my pre blockchain career, I was focusing on the massive parallel computations using heterogeneous architectures. So calculations on graphics cards. And then I figured out that blockchain is working on the quite similar questions, how to make sure that many different computers are actually executing something as a single system. So that's why I was transitioning into the blockchain around 2015. So I'm already in the blockchain space for seven years. And from 2020 started to work with Near.

Anna Rose (00:05:16):
Alex, it's the first time you're on the show. I kind of wanna start actually understanding a little bit more like, how do you know each other?

Alex (00:05:24):
This story is pretty long once I was in the sixth year. And then I figured out that just one year below me there is a guy named Illia, and we started to intersect on different math Olympics and different competitions. Okay. And so we knew each other from literally the middle school.

Anna Rose (00:05:44):
Oh,

Alex (00:05:44):
Cool. In 2018, we figured out that we are both working in the blockchain. By that moment in time, I was already in blockchain for like three years. Illia only started his path with, with his new project. Unfortunately we didn't find back then the way how we can cooperate together. Yeah. But later when I finished my previous arrangement and became a free agent, Illia said, okay, just come on board and make sure that the Ethereum part of Near is in the good condition.

Anna Rose (00:06:19):
Got it. What were you doing, Alex? What were you actually doing before?

Alex (00:06:24):
I was working in the company named Bit Fury. Okay. I was one of the first hires there in the software department. I was focusing on the permissioned blockchains and I was built in a project that is called Exonum. It was one of the first projects in crypto who started to use rust as a programming language.

Anna Rose (00:06:41):
Oh, nice.

Alex (00:06:42):
And as far as I understand, some pieces of it are actually reused in Near.

Illia (00:06:47):
Oh yeah. We we've used two libraries for sure. From Exonum.

Anna Rose (00:06:51):
Okay. Illia, do you wanna tell your side of the story?

Illia (00:06:54):
I mean, it, yeah, it's pretty much mirroring this, right. It's yeah. You know, math Olympics and our computer class in school. Yeah. But yeah, kind of kept in touch and, you know, through common friends, like realized working, working in blockchain as well. So I think when we were just starting, we did kind of a, you know, a pretty wide search of who is doing what in the ecosystem. We started doing whiteboard series, but also like we've definitely saw Exonum. And I realized one of my upper classmates, upper schoolmates is from there. So I think we connected, talked about Exon and like, what, what are, what are things happening there? And then yeah. Kind of through 2019 and like toward the end we realized the needs of bridges, I think like way, way earlier. Well, typically, like we actually tried to build first bridge in 2018. So this was San Francisco hackathon. Wow. And our team was trying to build a teleport. We called it back then.

Anna Rose (00:07:55):
Nice. I was the host of that actually. Was it ESF?

Illia (00:07:58):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Anna Rose (00:08:00):
I was, yeah, there on the stage.

Illia (00:08:02):
Cool. Yeah. So we, we started building this actually Anton from One Inch started building the bridge back in 19. And then James started building the EVM, like emulator EVM inside Near, but we kind of did not have a owner for that. Yeah. Like we just had this two, like projects running this tech teams, but not, not somebody who could, you know, take it to like go to market and a product and, and, you know, also push kind of how to, how to make it or less. So this is where, like, I, I was looking for somebody to take on this and yeah, when I was talking with Alex, I was like, Hey, you know, it's a great match for somebody. It was, you know, was your experience building teams, building kind of products, as well as, you know, really technical understanding how all of these pieces work. Cool. And so kind of Alex came in.

Anna Rose (00:08:55):
And Alex Shevchenko, Alex, you joined after Near had already formed, like it was already an existing project, but you were brought on, I guess, to work on the bridges to start. Did you build rainbow bridge?

Alex (00:09:07):
Well, I would say that all the fun part of bridge and EVM was already done and only now somebody needed to, you know, clean up the mess, you know, ah, make sure that the technical debt is, is done. Right. make sure that the audits are done and all of this stuff and just just productize it.

Illia (00:09:31):
Well, I think more importantly is actually getting users for all this. Right. So, like actually, how to, how do it go from, we have this, you know, pieces of code sitting at GitHub to this is actually, you know, one of the biggest projects in the ecosystem.

Alex (00:09:45):
That was it. So I joined in September 2020 and then in four months, Illia came to me and said, Hey, super cool stuff. How about making you a CEO of, of bridge and EVM? And I said, whoa, let us release these things first. And then we can go, you know, all in the separating of the company.

Anna Rose (00:10:09):
Nice. Tell me a little bit about Aurora. When does that start in this? Like, is Aurora an extension then of bridge work or was it a different project? Did it kind of have a different purpose?

Alex (00:10:21):
It, it is a different project. It, it was always a different project. So bridge is about moving assets and trying to interconnect the blockchains, while Aurora is some kind of compatibility department of Near because Aurora allows launch the Ethereum applications directly on near, without changing the smart contract code. Yeah. So it were two teams that have been working in at Near back then separate teams. And I was in both of them later. Yeah. In terms of the time for building Aurora, it was taken actually the last iteration. We decided to rebuild everything from scratch, with new learnings, from the, from the previous proofs of concepts. And we built it actually in a very short time frame. It was around four months for the development of Aurora and actually the launch.

Anna Rose (00:11:21):
Cool. Last summer we did this interview. There is a, a video for it. We're gonna link it in the show notes. It's a really fun interview. We actually talked a little bit about the history of Aurora and where it was at. Would you say when you talk about rebuilding, it did have you rebuilt it since that interview since last summer?

Alex (00:11:40):
No. Okay. The only thing that we did since last summer is, is extending, adding new features, making sure that the performance is high because since last summer we've gone from pretty, pretty empty chain into pretty load chain. Nice. At the moment, Aurora is causing around 80% of the load on Near. Cool. And and it is only one single shard. So Aurora cannot, Aurora is a single smart contract, so it cannot run on multiple shards at the moment. So and because of this, we were, we were the first use case in the new ecosystem who started to hit the limit in terms of the performance. And, and we kicked out create a project for increasing the performance of, of both Near and Aurora back in winter. And I believe both teams were moving towards this goal, making sure that there was enough room for everybody here.

Anna Rose (00:12:45):
Cool. I wanna come back to Aurora and kind of what's happened since a little bit more, but first I wanna talk to Illia about what's new with Near, and this I'm gonna throw back to an earlier episode. We spoke, I think a year and a half ago, or almost two years ago at the time Near had just launched period. It was just one shard like launched. But I wanna check in with you about what's happened since just on Near a what kind of developments you've already seen, or if any of the narrative or vision has changed, because back then, and from the interview before your, your goal remained getting a billion users into web3, making it incredibly easy for developers to, so yeah. Tell me a little bit about what's new and Near and yeah. If anything's updated or changed,

Illia (00:13:33):
I mean, the vision's still the same 1 billion users to start. Uh, now that we making progress, you know, it seems maybe 1 billion will be a good start and then we're gonna continue working. Right. We kind of formalize our vision into this, like, you know, to achieve 1 billion users like to achieve kind of mainstream adoption, you need a simple, a secure and scalable infrastructure. Right. And so simple really means like it's easy to use. And so, or plus, and, you know, wallet, web wallets, all of those pieces kind of feed into those, but also the native account model and, and other stuff. And it's also needs to be simple to build, right? So, you know, if people wanna build on solidity, there should be EVM. If people wanna build, you know, an app chain, we have octopus. If people wanna, you know, interact with a chains, we have bridges.

Illia (00:14:21):
If people wanna write in JavaScript, for example, we actually a few weeks ago launched kind of a preview of JavaScript smart contracts. So you can just write any JavaScript you want on chain. And so kind of delivering whatever the experience people want and kind of is the best in class tools is the goal there with security, you know, obviously securing the blockchain, securing the consensus, as well as, you know, making sure like it doesn't break doesn't stop. And then going into users and developer flow, like how do we help secure smart contracts? How do we help secure user funds kind of beyond the cryptography? Right. And so there's a lot of things that, you know, an ecosystem is working toward to making that more usable and to be clear, like security is actually a bottleneck for onboarding users as well. And scalability is a final piece, right? If you have what I have billions users, you know, millions of apps, you probably need, you know, a lot of scalability under the hood and it needs to be simple and secure, right? So again, this is, this is in the order of priorities. Got it. And so, yeah, I mean, obviously continue, continue trading and innovating on that side.

Anna Rose (00:15:26):
Near, I remember when we first talked about it, it was the sort of sharded like constructed from the ground up with sharding in mind. And I remember, I mean, there was obviously at the time, a lot of comparisons to the ETH model of sharding, which ended up changing pretty dramatically. Would you say Near has stuck to that initial vision for a sharded blockchain and at what stage are you at this time?

Illia (00:15:50):
Yeah, good question. We believe, I mean, sharding is the only way to scale simply insecurity, right? Again, like there's ways to scale and add complexity to the user, which is by adding a lot of different chains and then user use to think about them. It also adds, you know, security pushes security to the user right now you need to think is that chain gonna blow up tomorrow? Like, is this bridge secure, et cetera. And so this is kind of, you know, sharding is only way to do this simply and securely. And now within that, you know how to build that. And, you know, our design is pretty different actually from what was suggested by researchers and EF, although they kind of kept and go in some of the similar ideas as well, but yeah, we end up, you know, building it and we've been launching it step by step. And so last November we have re-sharded our network for shards. This had zero impact to the development user. So meaning as a user, you don't need to know that there's more shards as a developer. You don't need to change your applications. Like everything just kinda happened. And Aurora got its own shard. During that process,

Anna Rose (00:16:55):
I wanna actually understand that what you just said. So it had its own shards cause I always understood the shards of Near as being very general purpose. But here you're saying like one application lives on one shard or they have a shard. I don't even know what that means actually. Are they, are they the full shard? Is it only Aurora on that Shard?

Illia (00:17:16):
So, so here is the difference of Nears kind of, I would say approach is that the, each smart contracts on near is actually its own shard virtually. Okay. Each contract is, it's almost like it's on chain, but we package them physically to shards based on the demand and based on the layout that, that currently network needs. And so this is exactly the same as, you know, if you build like in web2, you like each record in a database actually can live on whatever shard, depending on whatever database needs for its indexing and for the, for the load balancing and as a user and as an up like higher level developer, you don't need to care about that. Right. Like Mongodb can be, you know, like splitting records across bunch of replicas and, you know, whatever, you don't need to think about it. And so this is the same idea. So because each app each, each smart contract or contractor account lives on its own virtual shard, they can be moved between physical shards at any point of time. And so what happened was that resharding is that, first of all, we split one shard into four like into three different and then Aurora contract specifically got its own physical shard.

Anna Rose (00:18:32):
Okay. So this is interesting, you just mentioned virtual shard and actual shard. So when you say each application has a shard, they have a virtual shard, but in the case of Aurora, they got both a virtual and a real one.

Illia (00:18:45):
Yeah. Their virtual shard fills in the physical shard. Okay. Because there's so has so much kind of demand. Right. And so that's idea of our kind of future vision is that this pro right now this process is governance like technical governance, right. Manually, you know, making decision of how to define a layout of virtual shards to physical sharp mapping.

Anna Rose (00:19:05):
Yep.

Illia (00:19:06):
But in the future, we want to have it dynamically. And so that's what we call dynamic re sharding where depending on the load in the network it actually will decide which kind of accounts should be allocated to which physical shards. And then if some contracts in Near ecosystem need a full shard of capacity, full chain of capacity, they actually get their own chain. And so this is how, you know, a lot of people like, Hey, we'll need a whole chain of capacity. And actually on Near, you can get that, but you only need to pay for what you need, not for, you know, for the whole chain of capacity, if you don't need that,

Anna Rose (00:19:42):
Does the Near, like the sharded Near the physically sharded Near, does it have a single VM, anything that's deployed on it, I'm assuming like on that base part, that is all going to be written in a single language. Right?

Illia (00:19:57):
So it's not single language it's, but it, it compiles to web assembly. Okay. So web assembly is this generic VM that you can compile, for example, EVM to or JavaScript to, and you can compile, you know, Java, Rusts C++,, et cetera, too. And so what we result having is actually like ability to write in many languages already. I think there's already like three or four languages actually people have written on plus we have this other VMs that are compiled to have assembly like EVM, like JavaScript. Okay. That allow to evaluate any, our like code in that language as well.

Anna Rose (00:20:37):
So you're saying there's like, you can write directly with a number of different languages onto the baseline VM. What do you call that by the way? Is it just the Near VM?

Illia (00:20:46):
Well, it's web assembly.

Anna Rose (00:20:47):
It's Web assembly. Okay. So you're writing,

Illia (00:20:48):
It's literally generic web assembly. Okay. It's the same thing you're running like we're running in browser right now probably re like actually recording this podcast.

Anna Rose (00:20:56):
Okay. Okay. So, but then you can also, if you wanted to say deploy solidity you'd then be deploying, solidity onto an EVM, which would compile to web assembly. Yeah. And what part did you have to build in that? Like what was already there and what isn't there?

Alex (00:21:12):
We actually needed to find an implementation of the EVM on one of the supported languages rust was fully okay. And then make sure that this EVM is actually capable of running and executing the smart contracts that are uploaded there. So our candidate for this EVM implementation was Sputnik VM, the virtual machine that was initiated developed by Parity. But now Aurora team is one of the biggest maintainers, all this implementation and having the virtual machine, having the run time there, we needed to implement only very small pieces that are on the boundary of this virtual machine and in between Near run time and, and Aurora run time. So things like ability to move assets from the Near run time to Aurora and back like bridging assets in between near and Aurora. Additional things like management of the Aurora smart contract.

Alex (00:22:20):
And then for example, gas metering and and ability to pay to the layers natively on, on your blockchain. So these are pretty small things that we needed to do. And obviously we were following this path because that is one of the simplest way how you can build and maintain the EVM compatible chain. Just take everything from the other chain. You use it as a utility and take care only about the, the run time. And because of this, we were able to do it quickly. Obviously the drawback there is that we are having some kind, an additional complexity layer, right? Additional yeah. Additional step. But the actual reduction in the, in performance is not more than 30%.

Anna Rose (00:23:13):
I mean, this sounds a little bit like, cuz we've had a number of conversations with ZK teams that are doing like ZK EVM in different ways. So sometimes it'll be like ZK EVM, but based on EVM op codes and other times it'll be ZK EVM that compiles down to whatever language is underneath. So it's, it's actually underneath the hood. Very different. In your case, underneath the hood, it is different. Would you call what Aurora's doing is compiling EVM down into something else?

Alex (00:23:42):
Into web assembly

Anna Rose (00:23:44):
Yeah. Into web assembly. And that's the part that you're talking about, the, these particular cases that you had to write, you had to like code for. Does this introduce any sort of like security stuff? Is this like a fear?

Alex (00:23:57):
Well, obviously because I feel that Aurora is the team who is building the most complicated, smart contracts in the world because literally we are put in EVM the whole EVM in a single smart contract on top of Near blockchain. Yeah. This is a very, very complicated, smart contract. Besides that we also taken care of rainbow bridge that has a Near light client implemented as a solidity smart contract. Right. So again kind of complicated thing

Illia (00:24:27):
And Ethereum light client as well, which is probably the most complicated light client in the world. Yeah.

Anna Rose (00:24:32):
And that does that Ethereum light client live on Aurora or does it live on Ethereum?

Alex (00:24:35):
Oh, it lives on Near

Anna Rose (00:24:37):
Lives. On Near, okay. Yeah.

Alex (00:24:39):
Ethereum light client lives on Near.

Anna Rose (00:24:41):
Okay. This is for the bridge I guess.

Alex (00:24:43):
Yeah. Right. Okay. So, so like we are building very, very complicated, smart contracts. It's probably our specialty and obviously we are pretty worried about this. That's why we have continuous audits. We have a very beefy bug bounty program. Just recently rainbow bridge paid out a 6 million bug bounty, the second largest bug bounty in the world, just because, well, there was a bug there and thanks to white hacker. They found it and reported it, great job for the whole of the community and with a very light heart, we were able to pay quite a lot of money to the hacker. But we know that he, it is he who secured our users. So all is good.

Anna Rose (00:25:32):
When you talk about this deployment of the fully VM as a smart contract, is it not somewhat similar to some of the rollups and maybe not all of them, but I remember like having zkopru on, and this has really stuck with me where one sub told basically said like, well, what is a roll up other than a collection of smart contracts anyways. But then I realized that other certain rollups have like full off chain activity happening or forks of geth or something, but in your case, like, was it in any way inspired by rollups? Is it in any way connected to like roll up construction?

Illia (00:26:08):
Taking a step back, right. There's kind of this whole concept of execution environments and modularity, right. And so modularity this idea that you kind of decouple the consensus and the execution from each other and through that you achieve, you know, whatever, either higher throughput and, and, or, you know, faster innovation. And so in a way, what Near offers is a, an environment which allows, gives you a sharded, you know, consensus mm-hmm with a kind of a box in which you can put whatever environment you want. And so what Aurora is, and, and we have few other environments as well. Now there are execution environment in that sense back, I think whenever it was at like three years ago, I, I remember Vitalik and other folks were talking about it as well. Like, Hey, we can just take EVM and put it in a smart contract.

Illia (00:27:06):
Like as, as an environment on top of the shared blockchain. Now this is kind of in spirit, similar to rollups because rollups are using the Ethereum or whatever layer one as a consensus data availability layer, which, you know, that's what Near is. And then writing kind of the execution environment separately. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> the problem with rollups is that you don't have state available directly on your kind of consensus layer, which means you have latency, you meet you, you by, by splitting this two things from each other, you're introducing latency and like with zero knowledge or optimistic, it doesn't matter. You always will introduce latency between kind of execution and the finality. And if we go back to our philosophy, right. Simple and secure users, don't want to think about it. Right? You send a transaction, you see confirmation, you wanna know it's done, right.

Illia (00:27:59):
Not, not figure out like, you know, is this gonna settle for seven days? Or, you know, are we gonna run fraud proofs? You know, is, do we need data sampling? Like all that should be handled by the protocol. Mm. And so what Aurora is, it is a rollup, but it's a realistic roll up, right. It's actually final right away. And so every single transaction is going directly to near settles on near right away and gets finality. And so you have the state directly available from the same validators. You would get any other state of near

Anna Rose (00:28:28):
Right now, my, my mind is now gone to like Polkadot with the Relay chain and the Parachains. And I'm trying to remember what their relationship is in terms of execution. So like, is there any influence there?

Illia (00:28:39):
So we did this whiteboard series with everyone, right? Yeah. So we definitely learned the data availability module with Polkadot. That was interesting. Like, I don't, I don't think we've realized we can use it in that way before that white word. So yeah. I mean, I would say like Polkadot, like it's, it's definitely like in, in a way, right. I mean, all we, all, all of us are kind of exploring what is the setup that works, right? Yeah. But we, we approaching it from kind of this set of philosophies and focus on user and developer. Yeah. Versus trying to focus on, you know, kind of infrastructures with like, Hey, you have your, you can run your own chain. Right? Yeah. Although we have this octopus offers you a way to run your own chain and connect it to near and kind of lead security, but overall, right. It's like, how do we make it, like, as transparent as the user, as fast as, you know, as flexible to use all of this.

Anna Rose (00:29:36):
Right. That's interesting. Yeah. So I like, you're trying to solve a similar problem. You're doing it in very different ways. Like your execution environments that you just talked about, they're not parachains and that you're not go, you're not vine for a slot in the same way. There's no payment in order to be, to have access to that. And at the same time, it's deeply connected to the consensus of a base chain, which is different from something like Cosmos where you, you always have your own chain running everything.

Illia (00:30:02):
Yeah. The simple thing is like, if, if you took all the rollups and just like smashed them onto Ethereum, right. Or took all the, all the Parachain and smashed them into Relay chain or took is a Cosmos and just smashed them all into one. Okay. Right. And that, and then shaked it until experience got good.

Anna Rose (00:30:22):
I like this metaphor. This is Near basically somebody,

Alex (00:30:25):
Somebody called it Etherreum 3.0. But yeah, in our zone, we call it just Near.

Anna Rose (00:30:30):
Okay. You just mentioned Octopus. I've never heard of this. So can you share a little bit more about what that, is that still in concept phase? Or is that like a thing?

Illia (00:30:41):
No, it's live, there's like, I don't know, maybe a dozen networks where you're running on it. Yeah. So Octopus is actually is, is a separate project as well. And so the way they work is they allow you to launch a existing, like your code from Polkadot and potentially from Cosmo SDK as well. So like substrate code or Cosmo SDK code, and you can lease security. So you can actually, instead of, instead of getting for a slot or getting on validators, you can kind of pay a little bit percentage of your tokens of your net, of your chain to lead security from,ufrom their network. So you can think of it as like just, you know, a network of validators who offer security to others, but is, and so it's kind of

Anna Rose (00:31:29):
Is the base here Near?

Illia (00:31:30):
Yeah. Yeah. So this, this whole thing is smart contract on Near. Okay. And so it, it, it facilitates all this interactions, as well as by connecting to this, you automatically are bridge to near, so all of the assets, everything is bridge to Near, and they have like pallets in substrate to connect to Near wallet. So you kind of get like both directions into, into connectivity.

Anna Rose (00:31:54):
I mean, this is a narrative switch that we're just seeing kind of play out in the last month, or so this sort of like app chain, people who had been deploying on rollups or on different systems now wanting their own chain or in, in certain cases, just feeling like instead of it, yeah. Existing somewhere else, they'll just deploy their own. That's very interconnected. So they can still do the same things that they wanted to, maybe that narrative actually stretch stretches back longer than this. But do you feel like, is it a response to that or is like, what's the vision you see long term for something like this?

Illia (00:32:26):
For sure. Yeah. Well, so our vision always been a progressive set of environments. Right. And so, although like we started kind of as this like more monolithic structure, it makes sense that, you know, potentially some, some things like, for example, the main Aurora potentially needs a beefier machines, right. To run because you know, it doesn't scale, it needs a synchronous environment. And then some things you just cannot put on kind of environments, like sometimes, you know, web assembly will be limiting if you're trying to do like GPU computation or whatever. And so there is a progression, right? You need to start somewhere and you need to have this core consensus, core agreement and core set of kind of components to offer to users the singular experience. So from this perspective, like, I mean the, the vision will be like this, you know, threshold.

Illia (00:33:17):
And we actually have another project called Calimero which is offers a private shards, like a shard that you can run within your internal, like behind firewall network, you know, in your company, in your even government. And so the data does not get exposed, but you have still a lot of the cross chain, cross shard communication available to you because all those hashes are checked in and there is some, the availability provided and some other features. Mm. And so like, this is, you know, sliding all the way to like a different world. Right? Yeah. So this is kind of like, you know, a threshold of things and, and, and, you know, it depends on application what you're actually achieving. And so, yeah, like for example, Calimero can actually run Aurora inside of private shards. So you can have your, you know, whatever company running, for example, a DEX that's internal to their own needs and then settle into public blockchain because it's still a private shard, right.

Illia (00:34:10):
That still can communicate as a public chain. So I would say like, our vision always been this kind of, not very monotonic, but a monotonic experience. Right. You can, you know, your wallet should show you your private shard balances, right. And you should be interacting with private shards applications. If you, if you have your permissions for that, so monotonic experience. And so to achieve that you need a lot more integration in a way that at least from my perspective, many other folks are kind of trying to do those in the rollup world and in a customer's world. And, you know, customers is kind of also, you know, working toward that with all the integrations and other stuff, but kind of starting from singular experience and then building in different directions is, is just faster and easier.

Anna Rose (00:34:55):
I wanna go back to the Aurora shard because you just mentioned like the, to work on the Aurora shard you'd need beefy machines, but like the role of the validator in Near, and the role of validator with the shards and the role of the validator in response to Aurora, I think this is what I wanna, I wanna understand this distinction.

Illia (00:35:14):
So right now, all the validators the same, right? Yeah. So all the, like, kind of this rotation, but, you know, given Aurora is already running a separate shard and so like, there's a way to create a, a marketplace for, you know, different capabilities of validators as well, going forward.

Anna Rose (00:35:30):
Okay. Like, would you have a validator choose to only run the Aurora shard? Is that actually like something that would be on the roadmap or would they always run all of them somehow?

Illia (00:35:39):
So, well, you cannot run all of them. Well, you, you can say like you will rotate, right. But then depending on your capability, potentially it'll not get selected into some shards. Right. And so the computational requirements can be different as well. And so like, pretty much we can have marketplaces of, you know, computation and demand kind of facilitated by consensus. And so right now, right now, this there's no marketplace. It's very like, you know, one to one mapping and like, everybody's kind of the same, but, you know, over time we can like, and rethinking of how to evolve that.

Anna Rose (00:36:12):
Hmm, cool. There's one project that we haven't mentioned yet, which is like very antithetical to the sharding narrative, which is Solana. And I just wonder, like, when you look at that model, is there anything you're taking from them or do you feel like that's just sort of the wrong approach to just like, make the chain as like basically making the chain is so strong that it can like handle all of this flow? You know, they, they basically have come out being very clearly anti shard.

Illia (00:36:41):
Yeah. So, I mean, this is what I meant by, you know, there's like two sides of their approach. One is that, Hey, we're gonna run really beefy machines and they're gonna optimize the hell out of the, all, all of the things to make, you know, use every bit of a computation on them, which, you know, is a reasonable approach. You know, if you really start optimizing and kind of throw away some of the stuff that, you know, we consider part of the blockchain like state authentication, but that approach makes sense. Right. And that's what I meant, like, as we move further, we can actually have a more kind of sophisticated matching between applications and hardware. Mm. Right now this mapping is, you know, again, like very manually hardware, like manual governance of like, you know, technical experts, like which, which sharded, which apps, and then shards all the same. But, you know, over time we can, we can make that more powerful and more sophisticated, like, Hey, who has, you know, machines that are matching these requirements, if you, if you're not able you getting downgraded like, and stuff like this, right.

Anna Rose (00:37:42):
By this logic, just heres a quick question. Is the Aurora shard, like the salon of near in a way, cuz if it needs beefy, like

Illia (00:37:52):
Well, it can, it can become one. Yes. Okay. I think the, the approach of Solana of like optimizing the kind of, you know, they threw away the VM and they replaced it and this is where it gets like there's some philosophical disagreement around like we believe in simplicity and they believe in like in optimizing everything, which in result means their stuff is very complex. The developers, you know, their motto is eating glass, right. Yeah. For their developers. And so we, that is very antithetical to kind of our approach, but at the same time, you know, if, if we can hundred X the performance of Aurora by creating a more sophisticated marketplace for hardware. And then offer that to other applications as well, that are willing, you know, and need to pay for that. And, and we have validators that went on board into that kind of capabilities, you know, that's a way to go forward as well. But you know, it is still under the same kind of common consensus model, which then still, you know, offers you a normal capabilities, you know, general hardware and can replicate the data and everything.

Anna Rose (00:38:53):
You just mentioned this term, eating glass is that actually from Anatolia, is that like Solana statement? So this is as far as I understood it was the idea that like the it's so hard to use, but if you go through it you'll stick around or something like that. Is that roughly what, what it means?

Illia (00:39:09):
Well, no eating glass is like this, this idea that, I mean, we should hear it from their mouths. Yeah. But like the way I understand it, it's like, it's, it's so hard to, to do, but, but what you get in result is like this highly optimized, you know okay. High performance system. Right. And so they compare it to building, you know, high frequency trading systems. Like it start simple, right. It's, it's, it's not gonna be, but you know, when you do it, you get, you know, you make all the money versus we believe, you know, in, in opening up, you know, millions of developers to, to build on, on this infrastructure. And so to do that, we want to lower the barrier as low as possible.

Anna Rose (00:39:47):
Okay. So I wanna go back to Aurora tell, tell me what like Aurora + is actually, because that's a product that came out pretty recently. It's very slick. It's very nice to use. It's not the same as Aurora. That's like, I guess it lives on Aurora. Just tell me what that relationship is?

Alex (00:40:04):
Yeah. Thanks for the question. Indeed Aurora + is an additional product. The goal of Aurora + is to simplify the user experience when working with blockchains at the moment, if you would think about the user experience that he needs to install, exchange, install maybe some additional pass KYC, maybe install some additional applications like wallets, move the assets across the blockchains, pay the gas fees in different blockchains, in different tokens and take care of the stake transactions, replaying it, making sure that it has enough gas, gas attached and so on. It is super, super complicated and it is not going to work with zoomers that are playing their casual games on, on the mobile phones. Right. And, and unfortunately, technically deep people who are capable of thinking of all of these complexities, they are not constituent a billion of people in the world. Right.

Anna Rose (00:41:11):
Yeah. Okay.

Alex (00:41:12):
Yeah. However zoomers are actually, you know, probably several billions by this moment in time. So so we need to optimize for these people and there is no bad things in this. It's not like a betrayal of the concepts of, of the blockchain. It's just the evolution that needs to come in place. We need to make sure that the user experience is better. And it is not that bad as it was, you know, five years ago. Right. So Aurora plus, this is the product from implementing the better user experience at the moment. We are allowing for one simple idea, which is the personalized user experience when working with the blockchain and what I'm saying personalized, I mean, for example, personalized gas prices for people we offer to all of the users of Aurora +, 50 free transactions per month. And while I can have, I still can have this quota, if somebody else reached or already maxed out his quota, he starts to pay on a per transaction basis.

Alex (00:42:27):
This is achieved through very specific configuration of the wallet. So our RPC is capable of understanding who is the user that is communicating with the blockchain at the moment. Later on, we are going to migrate into the subscriptions for the blockchain. So at the moment, we are a little bit like in, in the end of nineties when we are paying per second on our mobile calls and it is not very good because we constantly need to think of this, but we are going to, into do quantum leap from nineties to twenties and actually have subscription plans for our mobile data that you get 10 gigabytes of internet and that's it, you stop thinking of it. And actually you are able to click a button or automatic renewal, right? So this is something that we would like to implement.

Anna Rose (00:43:23):
But this would be on transaction fees. This is on gas.

Alex (00:43:27):
This is, this is for, for transaction fees, but like in general, you can think of this in general, the access of, to the blockchain, right? This, these are the transactions. These are read requests for the RPC, maybe some additional features that, that you are going to unlock there. But besides that, we also would like to give an ability for third parties to pay on behalf of the users. This is a very, very simple feature once the previous steps are done, but it is extremely powerful. Here is an example for you. I'm a user of a YouTube. I know the business model of the YouTube. I either need to pay subscription fee or I need to watch ads. Do I need to pay to their content delivery network CDN every time when I'm watching the, the video, right? And this is their kind of base thing, this is their protocol. I am not interacting it. The business model of the YouTube is not showing this to me. Because YouTube is paying on behalf of myself to the CDN and why people that are using applications on the blockchain need to pay to the blockchain.

Anna Rose (00:44:39):
Yeah. It's wild. By the way, your example speaks to me cuz years before this, I had a video startup and we were talking about pricing and this is exactly the issue. How do you price per view when we, our costs were to CDN, it's making me remember that.

Alex (00:44:55):
Right. Right. So, so our idea is that, well, we just need to give an ability for depths to pay for the users and for their users of the blockchain. And that will be okay. Then the business models will become simpler, sleek and you know, sticky with the users. That's it, that's it. And last but not least, there is only one ingredient left in this cocktail. And this is the incorporation of web2 user authentication methods on the blockchain in case a third party is paying for your transactions. Then the only thing that you need to do as a user is just to authenticate actions and make sure that, you know, the actions are authenticated in a good way. And there are lots of actions that we are authenticated at the moment. We even stop thinking about it. We are doing it in a very simple and straightforward way. We are just looking at our phone and then here, the action is authenticated, that's it? Our goal for Aurora + is to integrate touch ad face ad and other web2 a means of interaction with web2 applications into the web3.

Anna Rose (00:46:12):
Mm. Just to recap the way I've understood it though, Aurora +, is it written in solidity? Is it like the example, like application that can live on Aurora environment?

Illia (00:46:23):
Probably the better explain it is is, is a type of a wallet, but it works with other wallets, right? So it's more of a like wallet service that other wallets can use. And so instead of sending a transaction to nodes directly, you send it to aurora + and then aurora + sends it on your behalf and then either pays for it or get somebody else pay for it. And so that's why, you know, what was useful for Aurora. They built the whole relayer network to power that for Aurora already. And so in result, they were, it was easy for them kind of to extend into allowing this custom kind of interaction between the user and the network. But this, like, that's what I was saying. This will extend to near apps as well, because we, we are working on the, on the standards for matter transactions, allowing this layers as well to work. And then the question will be like, yeah, how do you prove to the network, right. That the user is originated this transaction. And so, you know, that can be a signature, but it can be also your face ID or whatever. That be right and, you know, potentially still gets remapped to some formal signature.

Anna Rose (00:47:34):
So when I look at this, when I look at the, the dashboard, I mean, you can see that you can interface with a lot of different apps and that does speak to it being like a wallet service, but is it itself also kind of a place for people to earn or trade? Like, does it have a bit of like DEX properties or liquidity pools or anything like that built into it, or is it purely this, this sort of place where other things are connected to it?

Alex (00:47:58):
The reason has taken a mechanism inside of,Aurora +. And the main reason for it is actually to implement the governance of the Aurora protocol. You can think of this, like you are taken in a proof of stake type of network, right? The only difference is that this token is implemented as a smart contract on Aurora instead of on the protocol level, like on Near. So staken there. The main reason for it is actually to implement the governance and Aurora token is the governance token, the main, the main idea behind it is actually making sure that the protocol is governed as decentrally as possible,

Anna Rose (00:48:41):
But every other interaction, like any sort of like lending or trading, that's gonna be using a third party application.

Alex (00:48:47):
Oh yeah. There is no plans to incorporate this functionality inside of Aurora+ only through the extensions of the use cases on top of Aurora.

Anna Rose (00:48:59):
Cool. I wanna talk a little bit about the bridges. We'd sort of started this conversation, talking about your work, Alex, on the rainbow bridge at this moment, I've used it and you actually do go between like near and Aurora and Ethereum potentially. Maybe there's more now since I last used it, but like, what is the rainbow bridge today? And is there a, is there a separate Aurora bridge that you have planned like directly like Aurora to all of the other EVM compatible chains or something like that?

Alex (00:49:30):
So rainbow bridge is the bridge in between Near and Ethereum. Yeah. That's the most important thing that, that it does. It is quite complicated because it has this light client architecture, but also is a small part of it. It has an ability to move assets in between Near run time and Aurora run time. We naturally explain this to our users, that it is the extension of the bridge. However, it has nothing in common with the bridge itself more. It is about the some specific methods of the Aurora smart contract, but there are also some additional methods that, that allow the interaction in between the Rainbow bridge and the Aurora smart contract. So for example, users that are not having near wallets are capable of transferring their assets directly from Ethereum to Aurora.

Anna Rose (00:50:28):
Mm. What about from Aurora to other EVM compatible though? How would they do that?

Alex (00:50:33):
At the moment? Rainbow bridge is not is not capable of moving the assets from Aurora to, to other networks except for Near and Ethereum. The reason, a very strong reason for this this reason is user experience. Again, we are, we are prioritizing this, like we do not want to complicate user experience for people because nowadays there are lots of bridges that are launched and then you are bridging your BTC to one network to, from one network to another network. And then you see that on this target network, there are five different BTCs whether you are owning the right one in order to stake here or provide liquidity here, you don't know super complicated, right? Yes. And the reason why it happens, why this confusion is there is that because money in our, you know, usual world does not have the traces of the history where this money have been printed and through which countries they were going into your wallet. Yeah. While in our interconnected world, the blockchain world, it, it makes a difference. So something needs to be developed. There are, there are several ideas how this can be faced. So we are not rush out,uadditional networks, you know, not to confuse our users.

Anna Rose (00:51:49):
Okay. But what if somebody, like, what if one of the bridge protocols or interoperability protocols, like if it's EVM, couldn't they just deploy on your, on Aurora? Like they could bridge to somewhere else?

Alex (00:52:01):
Oh yeah, absolutely. There are multiple bridge protocols that are already working, I

Illia (00:52:07):
Think at least six, six protocols that are live.

Alex (00:52:10):
Yeah. Right. So Multichain, All bridge, Deep bridge Wormhole. All of them are already deployed on Aurora and working.

Anna Rose (00:52:19):
Okay. Doesn't that kind of cause the same problem though, this fragmentation of like single token liquidity?

Alex (00:52:26):
It causes yes. But like this is the, this is the permissionless and decentralized world, right? Yeah. our idea of taking care of the users, maybe not in the heads of other people. Right. So

Anna Rose (00:52:40):
Fair. Do you actually imagine also like an implementation of, IBC or something like that, anywhere in the stack to be able to interact with like other IBC enabled chains?

Alex (00:52:52):
There were discussions happening like half a year ago. And as far as understand some team that is outside of our Aurora team should start doing this. But unfortunately I, I do not know what is the result?

Anna Rose (00:53:05):
Where would it live? Where would an IBC like, would it be in, near in the bridge or in Aurora? Because it's not, it's not EVM specific IBC, but I guess there are I, there are EVM implementations.

Illia (00:53:19):
So we actually have drafted out the design of connecting rainbow and IBC together. And so although they're a little bit different designs, but their spirit is actually very similar of having light client verification and kind of communication on top of it. And so there, there was ideas and, and I think, you know, there was few teams that were exploring kind of to build that. And I think like with the light client zero knowledge proofs maturing that probably will make it easier because we can just leverage the proof instead of rebuilding the whole, light client verification every time. And so we can just use a, you know, proof fire on the other side and then build on top.

Anna Rose (00:54:04):
Very cool. So what's maybe the future of Aurora +, like where does it go from here?

Alex (00:54:11):
So Aurora + has a very straightforward goal, which is fully aligned with, with the goal of Near onboard, in insane amount of people to the blockchain. And this is it, its future. I hope that Aurora + will become a default way for people to interact with Aurora as well as Near. Okay. and who knows maybe some of the ideas of Aurora + are going to be adapted by the other blockchain and then it'll become a standard way of interaction with the blockchains as a whole.

Anna Rose (00:54:50):
Let's chat a little bit about ZK stuff. You'd sort of mentioned ZK in a light client context, but what is happening in ZK research ZK projects like is Aurora actually looking into using ZK anywhere in its stack?

Alex (00:55:05):
Yeah, well obviously all of the ZK science and all of the research that is happening in the ZK space is super interesting just because, well, we are tech people and we love all of this nerd stuff. Right. but besides that, besides that it actually can bring some good properties, especially to rainbow bridge. So at the moment because of the limitations of the Ethereum mainnet Near cryptography is not able to be validated there at the moment when we are committing a new Near blocks to the light client it just going to take too much gas for the computations. And in order to overcome this issue, the bridging from Near to Ethereum right now is implemented as optimistic. So we are checking everything except for the signatures of the validators. And then we are given four hours to our watch dogs to, to commit the challenge in case something is, is fabricated.

Alex (00:56:19):
Actually we automatically resisted one of the attack that was finally tuned to check, probably to check whether we have any watch dogs running in this case. So, so bad guy was was, was constructing the wrong block with wrong signatures and he was committing this to the rainbow bridge and our systems automatically responded to this attack. Now the approach is okay. But obviously it can be it can be better because the biggest drawback from this approach is that the user needs to wait at least four hours for, for this challenge period. And in case we are capable of packaging, all of the signatures into something simple, something like a recursive ZK scheme that is packing all of the verification of all of the signatures into something that is constant in time on Ethereum blockchain in terms of checking it, then it is going to be great.

Alex (00:57:21):
And it means that the transactions from near to Ethereum can become almost instant dependent only on the time of the generation of the scheme. So we are working right now with the company named Electron Labs on packing the signatures. And once the code is reviewed, because that's, that's an additional problem. When you have a bridge with hundreds of millions in locked in the smart contracts, obviously you do not want to what we would like to make sure that everything is going to be good. So it is real ZK research that we are planning to put in production. And for this, it is not that simple to find very qualified security companies that will be able to do security audit there because this is on the edge. Yeah. Yeah. Of the science,

Anna Rose (00:58:15):
What other ZK projects would you say are happening around Near?

Illia (00:58:18):
I would say one side is continuously going down the architecture of Near right. And actually compressing more and more stuff. Right. And so I think like a lot of people have focused, like how do we build, you know, zero knowledge VM, that's the hardest part. And it'll take the longest time to build, to do research, to figure out how to do it, to make sure it's Bulletproof, you know, nobody can exercise it. And so we kind of been more pragmatically starting, well, how do we do like line? Right. So kind of the top of the, of the part. And then we can actually go down and start compressing. For example, signatures on transactions in a block are actually taking sometimes more than half of the block size, right? So if you can compress it, you can actually increase your throughput of, of the data to X, right?

Illia (00:59:07):
You can start compressing a lot of other pieces, right. Verification of signatures on the chunks and stuff like this. So like there's a lot of pieces that you can do kind of even before you get to the VM to improve your whole infrastructure. Right. And that, and that in turn actually transfers into like better connectivity as a chains and, and other things, and like faster syncs as well, because you don't need to reverify, you need less storage needed to store all this information on this for node. On the flip side of this is we already have put one chain on Near, right? As a smart contract, we can put more chains. The, the other chain to put is Zcash, right? So putting the sapling type of privacy pool as a smart contract and Near is also possible. And now embedding that directly into wallets, allowing all of your balances to be shielded kind of as you are interacting with other smart contracts and they, you know, that get unshielded when you go going, and this is where like Aurora + and meta transactions and other pieces actually come in as well, because you need to be able to pay or not pay for transaction fees when you're sending private transactions.

Illia (01:00:18):
So, so there's kind of a lot of pieces like across the whole stack that need to come in to deliver really truly, you know, private on one side private experience on like hiding balances without, you know, you needing a separate wallet with different cryptography with different pieces. And so there's like few, few parties that are working on that kind of privacy pool approach.

Anna Rose (01:00:38):
Does this exist almost like I'm trying to figure out where on the stack it is. Does it live on Aurora? Does it live on Near and also would it need to be on a single shard that's separate? Like, would it need some sort of special shard in order to retain its privacy

Illia (01:00:56):
So it can live on Aurora? Right? It depends on the implementation part. Okay. and then it can also live outside of Aurora, like as you know, if it's implemented directly on native, Near, I think right now, the way one implementation is doing it is inside Aurora. Just because they have written EVM code for that. But at the same time, if you do want to live on, on many shards and be able to scale, then they probably will need to over time move to native Near.

Anna Rose (01:01:24):
Long ago. In one of our early episodes, we talked about like the gas fee model, this idea that like part of the gas fees actually went to maintainers of smart contracts. And I actually, Alex, I think I asked you this last year too, about like, does that flow up to Aurora or does it stay only at the Near level? And this was the idea that like part of the gas fee would go or transaction. I, I forget if it was like the general emission or if it was gas fee, but there'd basically be a pool there for like anyone who deployed an application on Near would actually and maintained it, that it, if it had users, they'd basically be able to get a piece of these rewards. I guess the first question is like, is that still happening? The second question is, does that actually flow up? So maybe first is that still the model?

Alex (01:02:11):
So this thing is happening on the level of Near okay. That's why the Aurora DAO at the moment is, is getting 30% of the gas cost of all of the transactions that have flow through Aurora or like this near is accessible to the Aurora. Now I see unfortunately at the moment it is not propagating further down inside of Aurora. Okay. but from my point of view, this is a great thing to do. And at some point in time when we are going to have a little bit more time to, to work on this and in case DAO, would have a desire to implement this in this feature then we would be gladly implementing this also on the level.

Anna Rose (01:02:54):
And going back to your conversation about like governance in Aurora + or Aurora period, like that's what those tokens could eventually be used for, I guess, for like voting what to do with the Aurora DAO or is it separate?

Alex (01:03:08):
Yeah, it is separate. So the voting voting is happening according to the Aurora token is a separate token, separate ERC-20 on Aurora, but this additional kind of cashback payments to the creators of the smart contract, I do believe some people would be capable of creating sustainable business models also of these mechanics, things that, that we see at the moment with the open source software there are companies that are building open source software and they living just because of the donations of the people and companies who are actually using this software. So implement in this, you know, 30% gas fee that is allocated to the creators of the software or the deploy deployers of the smart contract. This is literally implementing this business model for the open source software live on the blockchain. From my point of view, this is one of the greatest ideas out there implementing the Near protocol. Unfortunately it is not, you know, picking up that fast though. Somebody is going to discover it and make a big splash with it.

Anna Rose (01:04:24):
Hmm, cool. One thing I did wanna talk about before we sign off is basically the connection between Near and Ukraine. Both of you are from Ukraine. I know a lot of your team is based there. Can you tell me a little bit about what the last six months have been like and also maybe how the project interfaces, or like interacts with the conflict over there, if there's been any sort of connection points or yeah. Anything on that front?

Illia (01:04:51):
Yeah, for sure. I mean, Alex has his own story, but from my side kind of when the war started, we've tried to get and to help everyone to get to safety who was in the harms way. And that was a pretty complicated operation. At the same time, we try to figure out how to help. And I think like all of the crypto community in Ukraine kind of band together to figure out how to help with everything from, you know, doing supplies to providing information, to, you know, helping government in various things. And the thing we realized very quickly is that most of the NGOs don't have a crypto at donation addresses. And a lot of people from outside of Ukraine in crypto were like, Hey, where do we donate? And so we started a on-chain fund and it took like, you know, 20 minutes to start pretty much a nonprofit and then, you know, $1 million in first 24 hours.

Illia (01:05:49):
And so that allows to kind of quickly start collecting donations and then distributing them. So we had like 5,000 people network of volunteers on the ground who were, you know, sometimes having like a hundred dollars to buy some supplies and distributed to, to people around them. And some was like, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars of medication of like insulin antibiotics sending to different places. I mean, that was impactful and a lot, and kind of gave almost gave time for like NGOs and, you know, governments and to pick it up, pick up steam and then government actually Institute a crypto donation system as well, which we've participated. And there's actually a account on Near called Ukraine that you can donate to. And so, yeah, I think like overall, I think crypto played a very powerful role, especially in the first weeks before kind of, I would say the regular systems got up and it was very unclear if the regular banking system would work, if it would be bombed out honestly in the first days. And so crypto was like something that actually will be operational even during this kind of terrible times.

Anna Rose (01:06:58):
Did it become for a period like the currency, could people actually, like, would people be accepting that as payment for things like, were, was there actual, like on the ground folks using it in, in a way that we hadn't seen before?

Illia (01:07:10):
Some, I would say like, cash was still was still very popular, but okay. I think crypto became very, very desired as well. USDT was trading like 15%, like higher in Kiev. So like, you would need 1.15 dollar in cash to buy a 1 dollar of USDT.

Anna Rose (01:07:31):
Did you also see places where it's like, if only we were like a few years ahead, it would've been better. Could you almost see then like real need that maybe you hadn't noticed before, or you hadn't like quite real realized tools that were missing?

Illia (01:07:45):
For sure. Yeah. I think the reputation kind of more like social, like on chain, social reputation, being able to just like distinguish, you know, and identify and kind of propagate information across like kind of DAO tooling was, you know, and, and a lot of just like accounting tooling that wasn't there. Like, you know, even though we had everything on chain, we did not able to like produce reports we needed and stuff like this. And so I think like disaster relief and, and kind of this kind of large coordination problem is what blockchain is built for. We have load the pieces, we just don't have kind of a it's all together. The problem is there's no motivation to build that. Like there's no disaster, whether there's disasters, there's no time to build it. And so you kind of need to build it when there's no, like, when everything is fine with the design that it will be used when things will be really bad.

Illia (01:08:35):
And so this is kind, I'm like one of the projects I'm really excited to work with some folks is, is kind of productionizing what we've end up kind of cobbling together in a chain for next time. Hopefully we can, you know, roll it out in, you know, in hours instead of days or weeks. Right. And being able to like hit ground running right away and then give it to like NGOs and, and even governments who do disaster leaves themself to be a lot more efficient. Like, I mean, honestly, like sadly, there are still a bunch of scam and like people are stealing staff, et cetera. And so this is where, like, we need the reputation, we need a lot more traceability. We need like authentication there's folks who are doing IOT devices who are putting stuff on chain as well, who like we can actually package all that in a very kind of coherent solution.

Anna Rose (01:09:22):
What about you, Alex?

Alex (01:09:24):
For me, all of the situation is is extremely painful. My wife and the child were in Kiev at the moment when,when the attack happened and,they need to evacuate from there and,is just extremely stressful. Uliterally we started our life,with, with the blank page just because of this. Wow. And I'm, and I'm a big,a big patriot country of, of my country. I, I wanted to live in Ukraine though. I have been in many different countries all over the, the world, especially, and especially my city. It was,a tremendous city, great city,almost everybody who, who were coming there for the first time, they were saying that this is one of the best cities in the world. So unfortunately it is no longer the case and,everything changed, everything changed. Uand obviously it influenced the operations.

Alex (01:10:23):
So for our labs a lot too. So within the first, first month we have been focusing almost solely on the matters that are connected with the war, making sure that that our employees, their families are in the safe place. And yeah, it was multiplied by the fog of war, the absence of the information and in general super, super scary situation, but we've gone through it. Upeople are in, in the safest places that they're capable of getting to, or,or they are willing to get to, because some of the, we have some people that are working at Aurora,uwomen who are capable of living in Ukraine, but they are not willing to do it. So they they're staying in the Ukraine. So at the moment, I can say that,uon the business side,all of the operations have normalized and,uwe're just progressing forward. And,umy attitude towards it,uis following my country is suffering. I know that the most efficient thing that I can do for my country is do business, produce value, pay taxes, donate on top of this taxes, and then qualified people who are knowing what to do with this money. Uthey will actually do their job. So that's that's my attitude. And that's what I'm continues to do.

Anna Rose (01:11:57):
Thanks for sharing that. I mean, I'm so happy that you are both safe and that your team is in a good place. Like what's kind of next for the project. And also maybe your, you just mentioned this kind of, you know, work that you actually wanna do. Do you feel like is Near more focused on this now going forward? Has that changed a little bit, like the trajectory of the project?

Illia (01:12:19):
Well, I, I think it was definitely, you know, from a priorities where I could invest time and efforts for me. Right. You know, looking at more for projects, which are one benefiting Ukraine, right? So for example, we also partnered with some folks who are gonna do digitalization of all of the works of art in Ukraine, because some of them are getting destroyed by bombs, by, you know, tanks, et cetera. And so trying to bring them on chain, making them kind of, you know, living forever instead of you know, in the physical world as we see. And so, you know, we partner with that. We partner with there's a team that's working on recording all the war crimes in Ukraine as well, and using blockchain again and, and using kind that as proof of the blockchain is a tool to, to be used in course, as well as a backup.

Illia (01:13:14):
And then as I mentioned, like this kind of disaster relief so, and, and chain is continue operating it, actually working on UBI style program, where women with children under six who either their had a husband or has been transcribed or sadly dead, they actually receiving 25 EURO per week, directly on a card, so they can actually spend it. And so you have a kind of full transparency of the flow of money. And a lot of governments have some types of programs like this, but this allows to actually, you know, prototype this in, in a very kind of blockchain native environment and have analytics and everything to, to showcase the value of this. And, you know, for people who are check it out, go to Instagram and Unchain fund there's a lot of stories of those women who are part of this program.

Illia (01:14:04):
And so kind of, there's a lot of efforts and like, you know, trying to promote and help the efforts that are, are, bring, bring things to Ukraine. At the same time, thinking more about like, what is an social reputation systems like this kind look like going forward, because I do think it's not, I mean, part of it is this kind of thing, but also I think it is a future anyway. And you know, this is the reason why we started kind of in many ways how, you know, some of this like centralized players kind of monopolize data and close off the APIs allow anyone to build on it. And so this kind of gives us even more motivation to kind of keep pushing for this. Right. I think like a few of our community and projects that could be presenting at UCC and some stuff as well, so cool. Kind of overall, like there's a lot of efforts already happening. And so kind of now it's more, you know, how do we help them? How do we invest in them and promote them more as they mature,

Alex (01:15:04):
I would like to second area last thought here that this conflict is a clear representation of a very centralized decision that was made. And because of this, lots of people are suffering. And from my point of view, it proves that we are doing something great for the humanity, working on the decentralized technologies, working on something that brings more transparency, more trust in the equation. So this is exactly one of the reasons or like the main reason why we are doing this. And, and from my point of view, it just, unfortunately an extremely sad example for the world. And for me personally but this thing just gives me assurance that the things that we are working onthey are not in vain. They are for the good,

Anna Rose (01:16:01):
Got it. I wanna say a big, thank you to both of you for coming on for sharing, obviously updates on the project, but also updates on the team and what you guys have gone through. So yeah. Thanks so much for coming on.

Alex (01:16:14):
Really appreciate the conversation.

Illia (01:16:15):
Yeah. Thank you.

Anna Rose (01:16:17):
I wanna say thank you to the ZK podcast team, Henrik, Tanya and Chris for putting together this episode with me and to our listeners. Thanks for listening.