Intro (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 (00:00:27): So welcome back. As some of you may have noticed there was no episode last week. This is the first episode of 2021. And actually that week off was the first break I took since this podcast started three years ago. And it was pretty good to be honest. Now you may have also noticed that the intro is a little bit different and for anyone who missed the end of year podcast, that we released two weeks ago, there's been a pretty big change here at the zero-knowledge podcast. So Fredrik, my longstanding cohost, and the other voice you are very used to hearing on the show will sadly no longer be joining me on the show every week. In the end of year episode, Fredrik actually shared why he felt he wanted to leave the show. And so if you want to hear more about that, uh, in his own words, you should listen to that episode. Anna (00:01:19): I'll add the link in the show notes, or you can just look at the episode that came before this one, it's been a great run and I'm super proud of the work we did. And it's sad to see him go. But like all change, this also offers up an opportunity to rethink the podcast and maybe take it in a new direction. So during my time off, I was able to spend time reading and learning about new ideas and get inspired. And I, I feel I've come back more inspired for sure than I felt at the end of 2020. So I think this coming year should actually be an exceptional one. And it's clear that the work we are doing in the field of zero-knowledge and decentralized tech is more relevant and valuable than ever. Enjoy this first episode of the year, my guests are Tarun Chitra, James Prestwich and Josh Cincinnati. We chat about where we are at in the field of zero knowledge applications, blockchain, privacy, and DeFi. And we also try to imagine where this could be going in the near future. So hope you enjoy it. If you haven't yet, please do subscribe. Maybe tell a friend who you think might get something out of this. Yeah. So here's my conversation with Tarun, James and Josh. Anna (00:02:38): So today I will be doing a catch-up with some friends you may be familiar with, if you are a regular listener to this show Tarun, James and Josh are here to kick off the new year and set 2021 on its course. So you've all been on, but let's do a quick round of intros so that people know who who's talking and what you're all about. James (00:03:00): Sure. Uh, it's nice to be back on the podcast. My name is James Prestwich. I'm currently a protocol engineer at Celo. We work on these Celo blockchain, which is a proof of stake chain with EVM. Josh (00:03:15): So I'm, I'm Josh Cincinnati. I was previously the executive director of the Zcash foundation. And prior to that, I was the developer advocate at BlockCypher, a Bitcoin and Ethereum API company. And now I am what I like to call gainfully unemployed. Uh, and I'm just doing a bit of advising and some fun stuff on the side. And I've just had my ear to the ground with all things cryptocurrency for quite a while. Anna (00:03:43): Also the co-host of the acclaimed Twodcast, Josh's dumb voice is what it's called? James (00:03:49): Perhaps the only one of its kind. I don't know that there are other Todd casts yet, but yeah, yeah, this is, you know, this is new for me because I'm used to the two minute format constraint, but I'll do my best. Anna (00:04:00): Hopefully there'll be some bangers. Okay. Now Tarun, you have already guest hosted quite often, so people should be pretty familiar with you, but maybe you want to just say a little hello? Tarun (00:04:09): Yeah. Hey, I'm Tarun. I am a founder of a company called Gauntlet. We kind of assess economic attacks and economic security and proof of stake protocols and also in DeFi protocols. Um, and I also do a little investing on the side with Robot Ventures. Anna (00:04:27): Nice. So it's funny. I think Tarun, James, Fredrik and I did do one of these kind of more catch-upy episodes. Do you remember? This was like Stanford, Stanford blockchain conference, right before it all went down, man. Tarun (00:04:47): But do you, do you guys remember how amazing it was that everyone for who was there from Asia was just like WTF Americans, what are you doing? And I've run that, the conference, is like, huh? Anna (00:04:59): Man. I was just thinking about that though. That was sort of the last time we had, I did an episode like this, which was more just kind of casual and catching up with folks. And I think what were we talking about back then? It was the flashloans or something. Yes. Josh (00:05:14): Oh my gosh. Remember flashloans. James (00:05:16): I do. Well, like they're still kind of, they do happen. Yeah. They're huge. Tarun (00:05:21): Yeah. They're, they're like a regular part of the ecosystem. Now they've just become normal. There's sometimes are using attacks. James (00:05:26): We we've seen flashloans really catch on. They're pretty much standard attack vectors now. Um, uh, but we haven't seen FlashMinting yet. Uh, there's a proposal to put it in web version 10, but we'll see if that happens. Anna (00:05:41): What would that mean? What's FlashMinting? James (00:05:45): Uh, it means that you can not just borrow tokens that exist, but create tokens that don't exist as long as you burn them again before the end of the transaction. Anna (00:05:54): But of a certain type of token, like an existing, token? James (00:05:59): As long as the token contract supports it. So the idea of putting Flashminting in wETH is that you could have an infinite amount of, for all intentions purposes of wETH for one transaction. Anna (00:06:09): Is that a good? Tarun (00:06:12): Also also Maker make her actually tried to add this. And ... for MKR and it did, it did not succeed. James (00:06:21): I missed that. Anna (00:06:22): Wait, it did not succeed in being implemented because of the governance? Tarun (00:06:25): It did not succeed in passing governance. Anna (00:06:28): Okay. Okay. It's not that it failed on the ground. Tarun (00:06:30): No, no. The code is out there. Code is out there. It's in the repo. Yeah. Josh (00:06:35): Someone should, if only they could have minted an infinite number of governance tokens. Tarun (00:06:40): There you go. Anna (00:06:42): For that one transaction of voting. Tarun (00:06:44): Yeah. Well that actually also happened by the way. And MKR has a, just maybe a slight beside, has a continuous voting mechanism. So like, imagine if you put up a proposal that says, Hey, um, make Anna like queen of Berlin. Anna (00:07:02): Who says I'm not already? Tarun (00:07:02): And basically people, people vote on that. And uh, you know, any time the, the, the percentage of the vote slips from like below 50 to above 50, then the answer let's say it's like 52% no, initially. And then it flips to like 45% no. Then all of a sudden you will be anointed to queen, but if people remove their votes to that proposal and it falls back down, you lose your queen-ness. So it's like, it's kind of continuous loading... Anna (00:07:29): In order to that, like a flash wouldn't work. Like you'd have to keep it up somehow. Tarun (00:07:34): Yeah. Although there was a bug that like, actually someone found a way to do some, a flash thing from the very last minute. Yeah. Basically they like front runned someone and did a flash. Okay. Anna (00:07:46): At the very last minute to get the vote in, because then you are, you're like, even though it's been going over, it's not like an average of that time. It's just like, whatever it ends up on. Oh, wow. Tarun (00:07:54): Yeah. So they, that, they changed that to have that, but anyway, sorry, sorry. Anna (00:08:01): This is actually the kind of stuff I want to talk about today. Um, there is a little bit of a schedule that, you know, I put together of kind of, uh, a few topics that we can talk about, but this is kind of the purpose of this episode. It's, it's a bit of a checking in where we're at maybe talking about some of the things we expect to see. I don't want to do a big prediction for the year, but maybe like this quarter and, uh, and get some, yeah, some general thoughts about what's up. And also given that it's a zero-knowledge podcast, given that there's this change format. One of my goals is also to start talking about potential topics or ideas that are exciting. Things that we could even cover in future episodes in depth. So first is a quick rundown of where we are at. We are currently recording on what is it, January 9th, what do we, what is going on right now? Josh (00:08:56): It's pretty boring. Not much in nowhere, nothing, nothing interesting. Oh, well, I mean, I guess other than the botched KU in America and crypto assets exceeding a trillion dollars, but... Anna (00:09:09): Yeah. Josh (00:09:10): Is, it is sort of nuts though. I mean, it like, it, it seems like there's a, we seem to be at the beginning of, at least from a pure interest in speculation perspective. Um, it seems like we're in the beginning of another 2017 style run, which may be good or bad, depending on your perspective. Anna (00:09:33): You just said beginning of , really? James (00:09:36): In Bitcoin in 2016, 2017 eclipse it's previous, all time high, it went on to just about 10 X after that. So, you know, if it follows a similar pattern, there's still a 10 X in the future. That seems pretty, pretty crazy to me. Um, I don't think that's actually likely to happen. Josh (00:09:58): I would agree. And I guess by beginning of bull run, I don't know that it's going to match that same, like that same cycle. I mean, I don't know anything about price, to be honest, I'm just feeling just purely based off of the kind of, um, sentiment and interests that you see from people in and outside of our little niche industry. And in that regard, it does feel like we're still somewhat early in this stage. And I don't know if that means, and I very, I agree with James. I think it's very unlikely that Bitcoin is going to breach that insane amount of money this time around my big interest in and focus, I think for the next quarter is going to be really about what the, and this is again, obviously like a US bias from my perspective, but seeing that, um, new proposed rule by FinCEN and the incoming administration and how they might approach, uh, you know, cryptocurrency regulation differently, uh, is going to be something to watch very closely for the next couple of months. Anna (00:11:02): Yeah. Yeah. That's something so far that I haven't covered much on the podcast, but I actually, I'm curious about that a little bit myself. I want to understand a bit more where things are at, because I think the last time I really did any in-depth look at that was in 2018 or something that's quite awhile ago. We've just been sort of, you know, rolling along kind of under the radar. And now all of a sudden, yeah, me too. I think there is this feeling who I was talking to, someone I was talking to you Tarun the other day. And it was like, the bear market was kind of nice. It was like this little, little crew and we'd see each other at conferences. And there was nobody that we didn't have the, the random, like acquaintance pinging us about what do you think about, should I say, should I buy some Bitcoin now? Or should I like, that's a tricky question whenever I get it, I'm just like, I'm always like, "no", Its too high! James (00:11:58): You know how to stop those right? Anna (00:11:58): How? James (00:11:58): Don't have any friends outside of crypto? That's it. That's my approach. Tarun (00:12:01): I mean, the, the best part is, is the relative ones, which are like, Hey, can I like, can I like, can we, can we talk? And, uh, uh, you tell me how I should invest my crypto asset portfolio. I'm like, no, I tell them, or I tell them random coins that are guaranteed to go down. Like, these are definitely going to go down. Like you shouldn't, you should definitely. James (00:12:30): But most of those are going to go up first. Tarun (00:12:34): Yes. But, you know, don't, don't, don't tell people about reality. Tell people about the dream Anna (00:12:39): There then. So I think, I think to define this moment is a little bit like we're in a moment, it feels, you know, there's a change this month than it was three months ago. Even with the DeFi kind of excitement. This is definitely like in a different space. I think another interesting thing that's happening right now though, is there's a lot of projects that I've mentioned this a few times on the podcast, but a lot of the projects that raised in 2017 came out in the last quarter in like Q4 and now going into Q1 of 2021, you have like, cause some of them launched, but they didn't fully launch like Polkadot launched, but it didn't launch pair chains and Cosmos launched, actually it launched a little bit before, but you know, IBC hasn't launched fully yet. So this is where I'm very curious, like, are there any things that, you know, are going to actually happen this quarter that are something for us to pay attention to, um, in blockchain and crypto and zero knowledge Josh (00:13:40): That I, I think will be interesting to look at. Um, and, and, you know, full disclosure, I, I advise these folks a little bit, but I think that it's very likely that the Mina mainnet is going to launch and that I think will be a very interesting test of, uh, well, it's going to be an interesting test for a number of reasons. But the biggest one I think is, is really like the approach of using, you know, their approach to recursive, uh, recursive zero-knowledge proofs, uh, to enable, you know, a more scalable blockchain of sorts. And I think there, you know, that kind of is going to echo throughout a lot of different projects, whether you're talking about like roll-ups is L2, or the stuff that's happening with Halo, uh, on, on the Zcash side, like you're gonna, you're going to see more people approaching it. It's, it's cool to see, but there's also like these, I don't think it's the case that a lot of like the L2 approaches are premature optimization, right? Like it's clear that that's sort of desperately needed on various places, but there is a question of like, whether, you know, these sort of base layer, scalability things for base layers that don't have as much usage or are brand new, whether that is a premature optimization to start. Anna (00:14:49): Mm. What about you Tarun? What do you, what's on horizon for the quarter? Tarun (00:14:52): The interesting thing that I've been thinking about at least, and this goes to Josh's point regarding like privacy, you know, kind of, we saw all this growth in spite of the fact that we have piss poor privacy right now, which is like, what is the ImageNet moment for crypto? So if we look back like 10 years ago, the thing that caused kind of the boom and like AI stuff and facial recognition, and eventually the surveillance capitalism stuff in general was image net, which is like 2010, actually, when people realize that, like you could throw more hardware at neural nets and like actually classified people's cat versus their dog, um, poop. Um, and so, uh, you know, like basically like ImageNet set off this huge kind of boom, and that boom came from the fact that people actually like, saw how this could be useful in practice. Tarun (00:15:49): And like, it set off this thing about like making good developer tools, making like good UX, like hiding things from like, it's, it's shity for privacy, but good UX is like, Alexa, you know, anyone can use Alexa and they have to think about it, but it's actually doing all this stuff behind the scenes. So I kind of feel like the ImageNet that moment has gotta be some combination of privacy plus, you know, I'll call it DeFi in the sense of like, it needs to have more operations than just transfer. Like it needs to have some notion of trading and he says some notion of borrowing, hopefully this boom will like actually push us across the finish line on that. And we'll have that moment. Anna (00:16:28): Do you think, are there any projects that you've noticed like kind of happening right now that are doing that? Or is this something that you foresee for like the year, like a goal almost. Tarun (00:16:37): I think I've noticed a lot of zero-knowledge researchers start looking into actual DeFi applications that are private, which I think like is, to me, that's like the Holy grail, Barry has been on a bunch of forums, like writing about like, how do I make a zero? Like some like approximation to a zero knowledge versus the version of you. There are a lot of reasons you can't directly, but I've just noticed there's the ZK folks who like, sort of, we had the last wave funded, a lot of the ZK innovation, and we're kind of getting to like some of that in production and, you know, James can of course talk about some of that stuff actually. But I have noticed like a bunch of people starting to look more into DeFi. I think like that is the moment we kind of have this switch that really makes it useful. So I don't have a particular project. Like it's some combination of like Aleo, Aztec, maybe StarkWare, I don't know StarkWare it's doing things it's like really hard to say, Anna (00:17:36): Do you think Barry's post in a way, was seen as a challenge to some of the ZK folks? Cause it was, it was pretty much saying you can't do it, right. Like it's DeFi & privacy don't mesh in a way, at least in this particular example. And I know, I know of, at least two projects that are trying to do something in that direction using zero-knowledge proofs and privacy. Tarun (00:17:56): Yeah. I think it just says you can't do something as simple. It doesn't say you can't do it at all. It just says that like something that is really gas efficient, which is the real recent Uniswap is, is good. It's just like simple compared to like a real exchange, uh, is, is hard. But I, I don't think he there's like an impossibility theorum, but to me, I think that's like, that's the thing. I think there's an image that moment for, and so I don't have any particular projects, you know, I can tell you all the DeFi projects, cause I think they're doing a ton of new stuff, but they're not going to be the thing I think that actually crossed the chasm. Right. I think like you actually do need private versions of these for it to be like useful... James (00:18:37): Um, to, to kind of Tarun's point: there's no impossibility theorum for all of this stuff, but we can make it for like, uh, a bunch of specific applications. Like if you're trying to trade, uh, you can't keep the current market price private, uh, because no one will trade if they don't know what the market price is. Uh, there have to be like some kind of bounds on that. There has to be some way you can query and to know what trade you're going to be making before dispatching your trade. Uh, so there's a lot of these like additional constraints on any DeFi application with privacy. There's a bunch of things you can't do. And a bunch of things that get much harder. Uh, but there, there's no reason to believe that it's all impossible. Josh (00:19:21): Im just worried cause like I, I think there is this motivation, uh, there's clearly like a motivated interest, I think from people like us that see a need for that kind of privacy, uh, embedded in DeFi applications. Like I don't know that it's, if it's just a bunch of like very nerdy people who want it, uh, I mean the main example I have here from my own experience is just how, just how hard it was to get people, to use the super efficient Zcash, you know, privacy features. There wasn't as much priority in the Zcash ecosystem to push people, to shielded adoption, as I think that there should have been. And, and I mean, there, there are other things at play there, but I can kind of, I could imagine something similar happening when you have like Uniswap that's super gas efficient, and then you might have some other cool DEX that manages to... Yeah, private one, but it's like, Oh, it's going to cost 10 X gas to do it. Josh (00:20:15): And I got to really, does it matter to me? You know? And, and I, I don't, I don't know. Um, I, I can see like very large, you know, very onchain, hedge fund types wanting that, that privacy, but I don't know that it's going to trickle down to average users if it winds up costing more. But anyway, that all of what you say, um, I'm just sort of curious, like, do you think that there will be a push from protocol developers to figure out ways to encourage that, to be the default? Is there going to be like a UX narrative to try and get people behind it or something else... Anna (00:20:51): Maybe something from the actual, like from the business side that like actually forces it? James (00:20:56): Uh, I think it's a really interesting question because one of the outcomes we've seen from like all of this DeFi summer and yield farming craze is that the blockchain itself does not really trickle down to the average user, uh, with even a moderate amount of usage. Like we're seeing the gas prices are too high for normal people to take advantage of all of this yield farming and the returns. And this fact is what kind of drove the development of YFI and harvest and all of these kinds of Vault things that batch hundreds or thousands of users, uh, into single fee payments. But you can't do that effectively with privacy. There's no like good design for what private YFI vault yet. Anna (00:21:46): And is there a demand for it? It's kind of the question... James (00:21:49): If, uh, if people can make money using it, one of the huge drivers for privacy in traditional markets is making money, unsurprisingly. Tarun (00:21:57): Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I think that when, when you're saying kind of like from the business side, I think these protocols need to somehow have a much more concrete incentive to people producing privacy and spending resources on generating proofs or generating like contributing like hardware to doing that. And I think right now, if you look at most designs and privacy preserving networks, there's not really something that truly actually like rewards the people who actually have to spend extra resources. And so, in some sense, if you, if you actually were able to somehow implicitly or explicitly tax the whales to pay for privacy for the naves, and then somehow like promise the whales, future inflation or something like some, like, I look, I'm not saying there's, I haven't answered, but then there has to be some way of like, forcing kind of like, "Hey look, you whales, you can like collect inflation, but you can only collect it if you somehow are - to use James's favorite phrase - if you're somehow providing privacy for the "rubes" Anna (00:23:10): When have you said that James? James (00:23:13): Uh, I've been using the word rubes a lot lately. Anna (00:23:15): Uh, what is a rube? I don't know this word. James (00:23:19): This is a, this is an old, like a used to mean redneck down where I come from in the South. Okay. Uh, but these days it means like the target of a scam, some naive person that you're going to go take money from. Uh, and you know, just like in 2017, I think a huge amount of the market, this, this, uh, cycle is driven by taking money from rubes. Hmm. Anna (00:23:46): A word, a word that I want to bring back and I actually have been using it all week is calling someone a "yahoo". I don't know if you know, it used to mean something other than a search. James (00:23:58): Yeah. Actually I don't know what it, what was the meaning of "yahoo"? I know rube... Anna (00:24:02): Lazy, rude. Or yeah. Something like, it's a, it's a obnoxious person. See, it's a group of yahoos. I feel like old men used that term, like in the eighties or something, but then they turned it into a search engine and we lost it to, to the world. Um, another thing that is, and I'm curious, you, one of them, one of you might know a bit more about what's going on with that, but like last year, like Libra was like on the radar of everyone like it´s gonna happen. Oh no. Oh, Yay. So Libra is no longer. We no longer... Anna (00:24:38): Libra is Diem. What's up with the project. Is it happening this year? ... Does anyone know? James (00:24:46): Uh, probably not. Probably not. It seems unlikely. I, yeah. Tarun (00:24:50): I, I would say the attrition personnel wise seems to be high. That would be the main thing I would point out. Anna (00:24:56): All right. Yeah. There was also a project that we, it was actually one of the first projects that I ever, I think that I, we ever did a deep technical dive on and that was Dfinity three years ago. What's going on with Dfinity? Tarun (00:25:10): They launched this week. Anna (00:25:13): Really? Oh... James (00:25:14): They, uh, they put scare quotes around the word mainnet in their own blog title. Anna (00:25:19): In the ZK context, the zero knowledge rollup roll outs, like have been happening is, do we know if, is there anything coming up? James (00:25:27): Uh, Zcash just, pre-announced the announcement of their new proving system. Anna (00:25:34): Okay. This is the one based on Halo. James (00:25:36): I believe so. Yeah. Yeah. Anna (00:25:39): There is in terms of the rollup world though. I know like Hermes should be, I mean, I know that there's a trusted setup going on. I think for them as well right now that I want to potentially participate in, and that would be another L2 ZKrollup coming online. Uh, soonish. I'm just trying to think. Are there any other projects, like on the ZK side that we think that, that are like coming. I'm kind of thinking of some of the previous guests and stuff. James (00:26:07): There's a, uh, there's going to be a major upgrade to zkSync at some point, but I'm not sure if it's scheduled yet. Okay. Tarun (00:26:15): Do you mean the addition of their token? James (00:26:16): Um, I'm sure that's going to happen, but they're looking to add some, uh, like scripting or smart contract functionality. Tarun (00:26:28): Yeah. I am actually pretty excited though about zkSync. James (00:26:32): about the token? Tarun (00:26:35): No, no, the code, I mean the token, I don't really understand why ... like at the end of the day, this goes back to the thing I was saying earlier. I, it was like, as if you could somehow make the whales subsidized privacy then like, that's like the ideal privacy token, but I have yet to see anything that looks like that. James (00:26:52): Uh, what do you think of the, uh, tornado cash token? Tarun (00:26:56): Uh, I guess mixers are a little bit like that in the sense that like the whales are contributing, at least if they're contributing the most liquidity, it's it mixers make a little more sense for this than ZK stuff right now, although there is this weird thing with, um, like for instance, like Nym has a token for, for their mixer, but there's something weird about it because if the distribution of the token gets really concentrated, you can identify who the main mixers are. Anna (00:27:24): Oh my gosh. True. James (00:27:27): Nym is the, uh, mixnet one, right? Tarun (00:27:29): Yeah. Which is like really there's like some trade off, like someone actually does have to quantify those tradeoff of like, if it's too concentrated, you actually can never really have too much privacy. And this gets to what Josh was talking about. Like there, there there's some trade offs surface, but I do really think that somehow you got to get the whales to subsidize privacy for the rubes, but like... Anna (00:27:50): The idea that like, by participating a lot in the network and then being rewarded after the fact with these governance tokens, kind of the model that was popularized by Uniswap, that potentially that would actually undermine a private system because then somehow the identity of the most active users would be revealed by the balances in the wallets, unless those two were done in private setting, I guess. Tarun (00:28:14): Yeah, I mean, I think the UX is also annoying because you would basically be forcing the users to constantly be splitting their assets if you're going to try to like, make it look like it's not concentrated, but then they're paying fees for that. Yeah. Anna (00:28:26): A question to all of you, and this is another kind of topic for, this is a little bit thinking more about this podcast and actually any listeners who have additional ideas, please do get in touch about this, but it's, it's ideas that you personally want to explore this year. Things that are exciting to you. James (00:28:44): Well, uh, you know I mentioned this earlier. I'm really interested in all of the kind of user end fee batching and pooling that's going on recently. Uh, so a lot of these like DeFi projects are pooling users and splitting up the pool to get the highest return for everybody. Uh, I think that that kinda model can have a bunch of applications. Um, so maybe trying to at the lowest interest rate on borrowing for a large pool of users, um, or, you know, kind of other things in that area, this way that we're saying, okay, the layer 1 is not scaling. It doesn't serve all users needs. So we're providing a way to batch users and fill all of their needs together. And that's more efficient for everyone. Anna (00:29:32): Yeah. And I guess examples, like, would you put zkRollups in that category or would you think more on the like DeFi Yearn kind of... James (00:29:40): Uh, you know, I've been thinking more about the DeFi, yearn, harvest kind of thing, but, uh, you know, roll-ups also fit that bill is you're letting users opt-in to this other system with different trust assumptions, um, in order to get group benefits. Rollups, also do this nice thing where the allow people who aren't part of that system to avoid paying for it. Anna (00:30:04): What about you Tarun what's in your mind? What are the ideas that you want to explore? Tarun (00:30:09): Well, I guess I, I, uh, as I would say, Alpha leaked to my, my top thing, I wrote in my little notes, which was how do you finance privacy, Anna (00:30:20): Alpha leaked it earlier in this show? It's not, not a big wide Alpha, there is there. Tarun (00:30:31): Yeah, exactly. Um, I think like kind of a, uh, a related question, uh, to, to what James was thinking about. And it's something that I started thinking about, like around SBC with some people I met at Stanford, and then of course the world blew up and then like, somehow it got lost in March. And like, I don't know if it's coming back, but was, is kind of like pre-yearn there, there was this idea of like, okay, if L2s that are optimistic or like not ZK, force validators to place collateral, and then they're validating many people's transactions, they're effectively doing the same, uh, batching thing, right? Like everyone who's using the L2, all their transactions are getting approved by the L1 in a batch, like on every little like infrequent, right to the main chain, whether it's during a challenge or whether or not right. Tarun (00:31:26): There's some way you can view that, like validate our main chain, or batching all the L2 users. And, and so the question was like, what does the transaction fee market look like when you, if you say like x percent of transactions are L2 and you vary x from 0 to 100. Like at some point when it's all L2s, it's like, the competition is quite different versus like it all being individual users. Um, and so that, that was like kind of something I was thinking a lot about because the zero knowledge proof generation market is quite different. And I couldn't exactly put my, like, we couldn't put our finger on exactly why, but there's some like quantitative difference between batching many L2s competing for blockspace versus like zkp Rollups. Anna (00:32:13): But, but it is an L2, like, wouldn't, it also need to be batch in what you described? Like, it's, it's just one of what is batched. No? Tarun (00:32:22): It is. But the security model is weird. Like, theoretically it really doesn't even need a token. It like could just be someone relaying a single ZKPs for like a sequence of state updates versus like optimistic style stuff. You actually have to lock up collateral almost in the same way that when you deposit to Yearn, you've given them your collateral. So like, there's like less of this like finance game and more of like a like timing game and to like somehow quantifying that spectrum. And that includes these Yearn type of things. There's kind of this, like, you know, simplex triangle of like these three things. And I don't know exactly how you described them, but there's probably some way to describe all three of them. And each of them are limits of like that. So anyway, I was thinking, I was thinking a little about that in March, but then kind of got recked. And so maybe now I'll think about it again... Josh (00:33:15): In a sense, like in that, in that framing, it would make a lot of the L2 collateral lock-upscompeting with the staking lockups for L1 in, in those systems, which would, is that sort of what you're alluding to, Tarun, that there would be this like new unknown, currently unknown equilibria between those economic actors? Or is it something else? Tarun (00:33:38): Yeah. Yeah. It's exactly that it's that. Plus if you add in something like a Yearn, then it's like, I have the same capital that's theoretically fungible over all three. How do I allocate it? James (00:33:49): Um, there's a bunch of like really non-obvious engineering details around this too, that are gonna come into play. Uh, so like for an example, a zkRollup that can't pay for L1 gas just stops making new blocks, an optimistic rollup that can't pay for L1 gas probably gets everything stolen after a while and, uh, you know, a kind of Yearn or Vault, like thing that can't pay for gas, the funds are tied up and, uh, getting a suboptimal rate. Tarun (00:34:24): I mean, also actually, if they're levered, there's potentially losses. James (00:34:28): Oh yeah. Right. If they're levered, there's huge losses potentially. Right. Anna (00:34:33): This is a topic. Is there any project or anyone that you think is actually working on this right now? Like have... Tarun (00:34:39): Well, I mean, I did say it was something I was thinking, Anna (00:34:43): I'm wondering there's no project, right? You don't know of anyone who's actually doing anything like this. Do you? Tarun (00:34:48): I think we got, we have to see a couple more of these things come online. I think DeFi, the DeFi data actually is the best data set for trying to predict this because, you know, we had Yearn and it grew, and then there was like a million copy pasta clones, and the L2 Wars are probably going to look kind of similar. It's just that, because there's so much engineering effort. We don't think of, like, we don't think of like off-chain labs as a copy pasta version of optimism, but to validators, to miners economically, they're there, they're just, you know, wow, auction bidders who are all competing with each other. And so like, it's this Harvest versus Yearn versus like Rari versus like, I mean, there's like 500 of these things they're not even named after food anymore. So it's hard to just call them food coin. James (00:35:32): I know it's terrible. Go back to food. Tarun (00:35:36): Yeah. Food was easy. Josh (00:35:38): They ran out of food emojis. That's fair. I keep, I mean, and I don't understand that that realm nearly as, or not even in the same magnitude, the way that, that Tarun, you and you and James do,, but it does like w the way that you start to describe it, my head just immediately starts wandering into, "Oh God, this is an overly complex system where no one has full visibility into what's going on and there's going to be some catastrophic tail event at some point." And I just, that's just what winds up. So it's like big, you know, red alarm bells without any real, like, I can't back that up, you know, beyond just gut feeling. But that's what it feels like. Right. Uh, yeah. James (00:36:26): Are we going to see the rise of systemically important food coins? Tarun (00:36:32): Um, I, I will say another thing you're seeing a lot of is insurance funds, um, in DeFi protocols and I think L2s. Okay. This is a crazy prediction because all the L2s very, like, they're all fighting with each other, like PSYOPs-wise for mindshare, but I think they're going to actually have to pool together an insurance fund. Like all, like for the reasons James is mentioning, they're basically like, they're going to realize it's cheaper for them to socialize an insurance fund over multiple L2s for potentially losing blockspace versus like trying to always compete again. Anna (00:37:08): Wow. Yeah. How many insurance funds are there? I am only aware of like one, I think, but are there quite a few now? Tarun (00:37:15): Uh, I still like each DeFi protocol that has the leverage right now basically has one. So like, okay. Like Aave and Synthetix? Have it explicitly, Anna (00:37:23): Internally they have their own or the, did they outsource that? Like, is it, is it within their protocol? They have, when you say, when you say insurance fund, you mean like a pool of funds for in train insurance? Yeah. Okay. Not like an insurer, like an external insurance... Josh (00:37:42): The same way that, uh, there's the SaFu fund or whatever. Tarun (00:37:47): Or like the BitMEX insurance. Exactly. Got it. Yeah. Like an on chain, visible insurance fund. So, so to Josh's point, there is a little more transparency to these insurance events versus like financial crisis where I think like one kind of benefit of the current technology is... In the financial crisis, all these homes were underwater in like 2005 or six, but like, it takes forever for like the mortgage payment person to like, not collect, like maybe they didn't collect for six months and then they have to go tell the person above them. And there's this whole bureaucracy that made it not clear. Whereas in DeFi, if everything collapses, it's like - Oh, it collapses on like five transactions- Right. So at least like in the market, the market gets the information faster rather than like having these kinds of like actors who are kind of taking forever to figure out whether they want to tell the world everything's blowing up or not. James (00:38:40): You know, the, the root of that problem is all of this hidden information in the bureaucracy is you have the mortgage, which has been sold to someone else. And some, you know, a third party is collecting the payments and it takes time for information to like become public through that process. Whereas if it's happening on-chain, it is immediately public. Exactly. When you miss your payment, uh, all we need is people watching for that information. They have access to it. Whereas previously they didn't... Tarun (00:39:08): On purpose. It was like purposefully obfuscated. James (00:39:11): It was obfuscated so that they could create these incredibly profitable instruments. Anna (00:39:17): Yeah. I wanted to share one of the new ideas that I want to explore, which was, this is, this is something I actually will hopefully find a way to explore on this podcast, but it's, um, the zkga.me episode I found just really fun to do. And that project I find super fun. And it's, this is like moving a little bit, maybe even away from blockchain necessarily, but it's this idea of zero knowledge. Procedural generation and the fog of war and that the connection between those things and, and were zero knowledge proofs could potentially actually lead to a decentralized gaming experience without like no need for a central server and yet a kind of a trusted truth. And maybe you do need a blockchain in there, but I'm not sure, like, I think the most exciting part here is that idea that the zero-knowledge could provide the privacy to the fog of war, but having like truth be underneath it and shared truth among different participants. Anna (00:40:11): Um, so that's, uh, that's a, just a topic that I am curious about and want to explore. I don't know if you have any ideas for people who I should invite on. I mean, I think ZK, the folks that did ZK game are awesome, but I would love to see more people doing zero knowledge proof, or too to be playing with zero knowledge proofs in games. So I, I was thinking even of like inviting some game expert and seeing if I could convince them to use it, or like getting some ZK expert and a game person together so that they can like start to brainstorm that - that was one of my to-dos this year and things that I'm thinking about. Another one that I'm thinking about exploring further is the Flashbots and MEV stuff James (00:40:54): Oh, I was going to bring this up. Anna (00:40:55): Perfect. James (00:40:57): One of the, one of the things I'm kind of excited about is accelerationism like that, you know, the goal of Flashbots is to kind of accelerate this MEV system so that we don't build up a huge DeFi infrastructure, assuming miners are your friends, so that we start designing much earlier for the adversarial world that we will eventually end up with, you know, this kind of ties back to what we were talking about earlier about this equilibrium developing between on chain Vaults, zkRollups, optimistic roll-ups and other end state chain users is we should probably be trying as much as possible to accelerate these things, get there faster so that it is less of a, a shock when it happens. Anna (00:41:41): When you find out about it, cause it had been happening for a while. Right. But like, it was just more recently where it was discovered how bad it was. James (00:41:50): Um, I think the, the thing that brought it to most people's attention was the, uh, Phil Daian's paper from Oh, wow. Anna (00:41:59): Yeah. It's actually 2017 or yeah. Oh my God. It's been so long. Flashboys was the paper, yeah. James (00:42:04): Flashboys 2.0, yeah. Tarun (00:42:06): We are old James. Its okay. We're just, just get, just get used to getting used to it. Josh (00:42:12): Yep. Yeah. We're ancient. James (00:42:15): Um, so it's, uh, it's really great to kind of see a concrete accelerationist project for that. Um, and the work like Georgios has been doing on MEV GETH is really interesting. Tarun (00:42:27): I think the only thing I would add to that is there's a, there's a, a fallacy that I think other chains may run into. It's just that they may try to overoptimize for this before they have usage. And I actually think you should there's this, you should be, accelerationist like, assume it's going to happen, but you shouldn't do it "cart before the horse" style before you have any transactions. Cause you're just going to make the UX terrible for your end-users Anna (00:42:56): Is like, is, is the Flashbots actually, I haven't talked with them. So I don't know what the exact project is, but is that like a research project or is that like designing new L1s to not have this? Tarun (00:43:08): It´s a revenue sharing model with miners and transaction submitters, Anna (00:43:13): But so it would need to be implemented into a, like, it doesn't exist. New Speaker (00:43:18): It does exist. It is implemented. Anna (00:43:19): It is an L1? James (00:43:21): Uh, no, no. Um, this is a modified version of geth. So it's an Ethereum full node software for miners. And what it does is it accepts transactions without transaction fees, checks if the transaction will pay the miner and then executes them, if it does. There's a lot more complexity there and a lot of interesting things you can do with it, but essentially, you know, what it's doing is it's checking transactions for MEV and optimizing based on MEV. And it's a normal Ethereum node that runs on the network today and at least one pool is running. Anna (00:43:59): And so, okay. So if a mining pool uses this node software, then it is actually already implemented. Yeah. But it's not a hard fork and it's not through it's, it didn't have to do any of the Ethereum governance stuff. James (00:44:11): Yeah. It's not a hard fork. It's not a change to Ethereum. Uh, it is a change to the software to recognize this extractable value and extract it. Anna (00:44:22): Interesting. Tarun (00:44:22): And then do a revenue share between the submitter and the miner. But this has already existed in Bitcoin land forever. Like transaction acceleration has sort like, I mean, I don't mean to disabuse the kind of idealist notion that "Oh, like miners, non-consensus part things they have. Of course they follow whatever Bitcoin Core does." Absolutely not. Right. Like, like the mempool in transaction ordering is kind of the, the thing in general that like is never in consensus because too expensive to ever be in consensus. I just don't until we have some crazy ZK world where I can ZK snapshot my mempool ordering as I get transactions or something. There's really no way that you're ever going to put that in. James (00:45:04): There's a really intuitive way to say that, which is the mempool is what you're going to come to consensus on. If you want to come to consensus on the mempool, you need a mempool mempool to do that. Tarun (00:45:17): And it's turtles all the way down. Anna (00:45:21): All right. I want to continue on with some of the topics that I wanted to cover in this. And this is a, there was basically three, three terms I threw out to you kind of in some notes, in preparation for this, it was the "highest potential". So that's like highest potential outcome this year in zero knowledge, blockchain, whatever in that category, "highest potential" "stretch dream", something that could happen, but it would be unlikely, but might be interesting or awesome. And then what Black Swan possibility do you think people might want to look out for? So let's start with highest potential. This is, this could be kind of anything. Josh, do you have, do you have a "highest potential" idea? Josh (00:46:03): What I think would be interesting to see as something that would be the most, like the highest value that we could all bring this year, see this year is if I actually like that some of those chains that are built with like a, you know, the multi blockchain blockchains that allow a great deal of interoperability actually, uh, have some privacy focus chains on them. Um, and that it kind of that the, the inclusion of that might accelerate more, uh, private versions of DeFi, maybe not in the way that we were talking about earlier, but you know, a lot of that is like it's incumbent on the, you know, those, those chains launching and being successful and getting enough usage and, uh, to be, to be meaningful. I would love to see that. I don't know if it's going to happen. Craziest low probability event that could happen is just, you know, uh, we follow the same cycle as the rainbow chart predicts and all assets rise in tandem. And we wind up with a $10 trillion market cap for this funny money that we all have. Anna (00:47:12): Should that be - is that your "stretch dream"? Josh (00:47:15): Yeah. Why not? Sure, I just wanna see what all of like people, there are a lot of, I, you know, just to be blunt, there are a lot of terrible people in our industry, but there are a lot of like really wonderful people who nI think we do amazing things with life changing wealth and I would love to see what they do. So that would be, that would be great. And then, Black Swan... Anna (00:47:37): Actually hold your black Swan. Let's do I want to do everyone's highest potential stretch dream, and then we'll go into the darkness. No worries. I want to, I'm just changing courses. We're going through it. Yeah. Tarun what's your highest, highest, potential likely thing to happen and a stretch dream. Tarun (00:47:57): Um, the highest likelihood isn the gentrification of Ethereum, um, due to L2s. Anna (00:48:05): All the normies move in? Tarun (00:48:07): No, no, no. As in like the protocol, the protocol start clustering to different L2s on you in this fragmented ecosystem. It's like you have the DeFi L2 neighborhood, which is like the, you know, upper crust neighborhood. And you have the like crypto kitties NFT neighborhoods, which is kind of like trying to be cool, but it's kind of like, Anna (00:48:27): is it like LA? Tarun (00:48:27): you know, it's like Williamsburg. It's like, it's like, it's like, it, it like once was cool, but it kind of just is filled with sycophants who don't realize they're and then you have the, like, you know, the remainder, which is, I don't know, just different, different, different neighborhoods. I feel like the L2s are basically turning a single chain into a city. Anna (00:48:52): Okay. What's your stretch dream. This would be like, crazy that could happen. That would be kind of awesome. Tarun (00:48:59): Uh, private DEX Anna (00:49:01): Now that you think of that as a stretch dream and not a possibility? Tarun (00:49:05): I think a lot of the people are doing it are very smart, but I also think they're, you kind of need to, you need to have a little bit of the delusion that you've already solved the problem before you realize all of the pitfalls. Anna (00:49:15): Okay. James, throwing the ball to you, James (00:49:19): You know, kind of in the same vein as Tarun. Thing I'm excited about and think is likely to happen is a bit of, uh, this disaggregation of DeFi and all of the Ethereum L1 stuff. Um, we had Compound announced their app chain. Uh, we're having these L2s come online that won't be directly interoperable and composable the way L1 is. We're going to have to kind of completely change the way we think about dAPPs and DeFi and the way they all fit together to account for this. And I think it's going to be really fun and interesting. Uh, the stretch goal that I think won't happen in the timeframe is a cheap, simple standard for connecting these layers. Uh, I think that we're going to have a bunch of bespoke bridges that don't work together with no standards around them, for the foreseeable future. Uh, and we're going to have all of these bridges to Ethereum, which is an extremely inefficient bad environment for running a bridge and a huge amount of effort and resources is going to be spent bridging to Ethereum, uh, unfortunately. Tarun (00:50:33): I'm excited for this to be called "project to come on narrows". James (00:50:41): Yup. Yup. Yeah. I think my, I'm predicting desegregation and what I would like to see is, uh, efficient connections between all of these different neighborhoods in the city. But I don't think it's likely that we built a good subway system anytime soon. Anna (00:50:54): All right. Let's now talk about Black Swans... dum dum dum.... I think the whole, the definition of Black Swan is like, you're not supposed to be able to predict it or something. Right? It's your slate. It's the most unlikely, bad thing... New Speaker (00:51:08): It´s something we all pretend is impossible. Anna (00:51:10): So what do you, what do you have in mind as a "Black Swan"? Tarun (00:51:14): A nation state attack. Anna (00:51:16): Ooh. On a chain. Tarun (00:51:18): Yeah. Cause I feel like everyone's kind of getting complacent now. They're like, Oh yeah. Oh yeah. PayPal is buying a ton of Bitcoin and GBTC is buying a ton of Bitcoin. And like, I dunno, at some point I feel like on, on the march to 10 trillion I guess is, is, is, is eventually, you know, surpassing the GDP of Germany and France. So, you know, stuff starts to seem a little bit like, Hmm. I think there might be, uh, some, some, some likelihood for that, the other two things I think that are Black Swan's or the end of the Moore's Law is, or a zero knowledge proof stuff. Whether if you think of it in terms of pure algorithmic or whether it's like in terms of the coding, like the actual implementations, um, kind of like if that peters out and we kind of are stuck with what we have. Tarun (00:52:06): And the last thing is, uh, the, the, the ultra rug pool, which is like somehow DeFi collapses due to like insurance cascades, Oracle failure. And, you know, as much as I love how chain-link has somehow vacuumed researchers, like in a way that I've, I'm kind of still shocked at how many people, no one predicted that like two years ago, um. If chain-link somehow fails, there's a lot of, there's a lot of blood in the streets or a lot of blood in that L2 whatever. Do you know? I don't know. What's the equivalent of street? Blood in the blocks Anna (00:52:46): Blood in the chains, blood in the mempool. I don't know. Tarun (00:52:52): Blood in the mempool already being splattered. I mean, the menpool, the mempool, mempool is like, you know, flight club. Anna (00:53:00): Yeah. James. James (00:53:02): Black Swan events. Um, so Tarun brought up "nation state attacks". Uh, you know, back when I started working on this, everyone was afraid of FinCEN. This was back in like 2013, 2014. We've gone through phases where everyone's afraid of the SEC and everyone's afraid of the CFTC. And now we're kind of back to FinCEN and the SEC, I think that, you know, a Black Swan could be a new administration with a aggressive regulation policy. I don't think that's very likely, but it would kind of knock the wind out of the sails for most of DeFi. What we saw like last cycle was this innovation in token sales, we saw a bunch of different models of token sales. Of like direct on chain, smart contract sales, moving into these long-term auctions, moving into SAFTs and other off-chain instruments. We, we saw a lot of experimentation around how do we sell these tokens directly to customers? What we're seeing this cycle is a lot of innovation around Airdrops is how do we distribute these tokens without doing a sale? I think, uh, one of the other Black Swans I have in mind is that we kind of settle on this like standard for distribution that is retrospective and it causes a lot of, uh, problematic and unhealthy behavior that attracts attention or attracts regulators. Anna (00:54:35): Interesting. Yeah. There's one new mechanism that I just recently learned about for that. I mean, I think it goes into this category, but it's like these worklocks, air- like the lockdrops. There's, uh, on the Kusama network. There's a, I think this changes names sometimes, but it's like the "crowdloan" because you have to secure pair of chain slots with a certain amount of KSM and participants could help you, James (00:55:03): Uh, the progression from, you know, these, uh, worklocks and lockdrops and stakedrops. And, uh, through like the, uh, SNX rewards contracts and the YFI rewards has really been like this fascinating amount of experimentation with how can we unfairly distribute tokens and call it a "fair distribution"? Um, you know, and we've seen some amazing innovation on that out of the Merkledrops and the retrospective distributions. And I think we're going to keep seeing innovation until some sort of Black Swan happens. Anna (00:55:45): Oi. All right, Josh, what's your Black Swan. Josh (00:55:48): It was, uh, I was actually going to approach it from the regulatory side as well. Um, but the, the specific, just to get us to drill down and maybe suggest another horrifying scenario involving privacy is that, uh, let's say something, maybe not the current FinCEN rules but other rules like it pass. And all of a sudden, every single centralized exchange is required to basically document the second or even third order and, and acquire those people's identity. Um, th the, the big maybe Black Swan that I think could have tremendous negative impact. It's not so much that they're doing that data collection, but that the data collection itself, because -let's get real- Uh, if it's done by banks and exchanges, what are the track records of banks and exchanges at securing this kind of data. It's not great. And, um, I like can foresee if there's ever any kind of hack that doesn't actually result in people losing monetary value, but instead results in like a complete. Anna (00:56:59): data release. Josh (00:57:00): yea like complete data release of, of all of these and effectively fills in the gaps and makes it possible for anyone to be, you know, Chainanalysis for a minute. Josh (00:57:11): I don't know. I, I kind of worry, like if that, if that happens and then all of that becomes very public, I think that people will, there will be this illusion that people had about the privacy of these systems that just get shattered, even though we all know that it works, it works that way now, um... Tarun (00:57:29): To take the, maybe a Leninist view on this. Maybe you need that to actually have the revolution. Josh (00:57:36): Yes. Yeah, yeah. That is, that is totally fair, actually. I mean, that's the other, that is the silver lining of that Black Swan. It's like, okay, well, all this is out. Why were we not building these systems with this in mind to begin with? Yeah. But yeah. Yeah. I think that's like, that's my, the craziest, Oh, and the other one, of course being like on the nation state side. Uh, what if there's, what if there's some sweet quantum computer somewhere that someone's running and just decides to like, spend all the early Bitcoin, what would that do? I just, I want to kind of, I kind of want to see that happen. Um, even, you know, a non nascent nation state, just Satoshi showing up again with all this Bitcoin would be a pretty interesting Black Swan hasn't happened yet though. Whoa. Anna (00:58:21): Yeah. When I thought of Black Swans, it's interesting. Mine, mine was much more focused on like the narrative crashing and crumbling and burning... Josh (00:58:30): That's perfectly predictable, you know, that's 100% going to happen. Anna (00:58:35): The idea that like some, you know, like in a polarized place, some side gravitate so heavily to this technology, that it becomes a virtuous thing to really try to stamp it out across the world that like governments across the world agree that this is a, not only is it dangerous to the infrastructure, but it's run by dangerous people. And I know there's pins of that obviously, but so far, it's, it's been, you know, it's, it's a, it's a wide range of people who are a part of it. There's a lot of different actors kinds of, you know, politically it's very broad, but my, my concern, or this is like a Black Swan, is that it becomes too much with one of the, the sides or quadrants or what have you. Um, I hope it continues to be something that people are open to and not that it becomes sort of a close, like the world closes their mind to it. Tarun (00:59:38): Actually, I want to add one positive, a more positive Black Swan. Cause I feel like we're all focusing on like the nation state one, but I think there's a lot of people who are, are in the neck this year in particular, but between this year and next year who have been extremely oppressed by technological progress, um, people in like shin Jong, uh, especially, I would say COVID kind of actually made it worse, significantly worse as far as we can tell in terms of like the like internment camps, like can't use money freely. Um, and I actually feel like those people will drive usage for real life usage. Um, that's like a Black Swan that like the response to kind of the AI technocracy repression of like certain people actually leads to, to like real payment such. That'd be awesome to see. Anna (01:00:34): I think we've reached the, I mean, we've, we've actually covered a lot of ground and we have some fantastic ideas to explore further in the coming episodes. And, um, I do want to ask each of you just kind of a quick, like, if you want to, I don't know if you have something to share, but what's, what's next for you? Like you personally, what, what are you excited about? What are you going to do this quarter? Do you have any projects or anything you want to, you can also shell. I showed in the last, in the last, uh, podcast episode. So I feel like now we know we can do that. New Speaker (01:01:07): Now that Fredrik's gone, anything goes... Anna (01:01:09): No. Yeah, the shackles are off. I'm going to be a crypto trading podcast. YouTube. All right. What, what is new, what's next for you? Which one of you wants to start Josh? He's the mystery, right? What's next for you, Josh? Josh (01:01:30): I guess, I guess it's just, it's uh, you know, I, I, I am, I am taking it a little easier than I have in the past. And so I'm, uh, I'm advising a few folks, um, uh, here or there, but the, my actually my main output is I, I, and I think I speak for a lot of people where I'm sort of disappointed with the quality of, of troll, uh, and, and the lack of highbrow satire and our industry. Um, and so I, I, I don't know. I really love doing that as many of you who might follow the, the twodcast on my Twitter account. Now, it's really funny Anna (01:02:13): Who saw you present, uh, at Zcon 1. Oh yeah. With a black turtleneck, full Apple, Apple gear. Yeah. Channeled Steve Jobs right there on stage. It was amazing. Josh (01:02:28): Uh, yeah. And I, and I super shat on, on Libra, it felt great. Funny sort of an easy target, but yeah, it was a, that was fun. That was fun. And I love doing that sort of stuff. That's very good. Thank you. Yeah, it was a great time, but I I'm going to be doing more of that in a long form context. And I'm, I'm really, you know, my personal stretch goal. Uh, once I get that, that site out, um, uh, is going to be like trying to become a little bit more like a Matt Levine of the cryptocurrency industry. Uh, so that's my, that's my, that's my little project. Um, but yeah, Tarun (01:03:03): Well you have text, like what media are you thinking? Josh (01:03:07): Yeah, it's going to be, it's just going to be like a real bare bones. I'm not even used JavaScript, honestly. Uh, it's just going to be like text, text, uh, and, and an audio file of my voice, reading the text. That's pretty good. It that's, it that's all. Yes. Josh (01:03:24): You don't RSS feed so you can plug it into your sub stack if you want. You're doing RSS readers now. James (01:03:29): what year is it? Josh (01:03:29): I know, I know the future is in the past. We just have to go back, return it until... James (01:03:38): can we get the Josh Cincinnati VR experience? Anna (01:03:42): That's the future Josh (01:03:43): That's V2. I'm going, I'm going to go from text and audio files into full VR. It's going to be immersive. James (01:03:51): Full immersive VR text, Josh (01:03:53): Full Immersive. Yeah, absolutely. It's just gonna be like Microsoft word art, but you need a valve index to see it properly. Anna (01:04:03): All right. Throw it to you to you Tarun what's next for you? Tarun (01:04:06): Uh, well, you know, working on building a product also, uh, really just, you know, I think otherwise I have a bunch of papers to write, but I, I feel like I do miss conferences. Um, unfortunately, unfortunately it has been less inspired lately. Anna (01:04:24): Do you want to, I don't know if you've ever said anything about the product on the podcast. Do you want to say something about it? Tarun (01:04:29): Yeah. I mean, so we're, we're building kind of like a prediction engine / risk engine for, uh, DeFi protocols that we're calling "automated governance". So what it does is we read a bunch on chain data and market data, run simulations, you know, every few minutes and then kind of make some prediction. And if, if some like something is going wrong in your protocol, we'll submit a proposal automatically that's like, Hey, here's the statistical reasons. Like this thing is out of whack and here's the before and after, uh, this is why we chose this parameter. Um, and then people can vote on it. Anna (01:05:05): Like, would it, would it provide the resolution to that issue as well? Like the exact change needed? Tarun (01:05:13): Yeah. I mean, it would generate the code, right? Like it, it would generate like the solidity code needed to do that. And then it would basically submit it. Um, a lot of the changes aren't even actually deploying a new contract, a lot of them will be like change the interest rates, slope to 0.8 and look at the results for why it's kind of like people aren't really monitoring this stuff, but, you know, if there's going to actually be this $10 trillion thing, Anna (01:05:39): Stretch Dream! Tarun (01:05:39): then someone needs to actually like pay attention to being the fed black book or whatever. So. Cool. That's very cool. Anna (01:05:47): All right, James, what's next for you? James (01:05:50): Uh, you know, a lot of my time for the last few months has been spent, uh, prepping for the upcoming Celo Hard Fork. So that's going to be out in March and then I'll have a lot more free time and a little less stress. I think what, what I'm looking to work on for the next six months or more is trying to build that, you know, cross chain connection layer that I want to see in the world. We have some interesting designs for this and a new approach. And I think like we can make something compelling and try to get people to use it. So I'm going to be spending a lot of time working on that at Celo. Anna (01:06:26): Cool. Tarun (01:06:26): "James, the ethical Robert Moses of the blockchain." James (01:06:31): I want, I want to take that like 1950s, 1960s, New York city analogy to the fullest. Tarun (01:06:37): Yeah. You need to make a subway map of blockchains James. You don't need to have that iconic subway map, like feel, James (01:06:44): You know, I, I think the one, one of the nice things here is that I think I can maybe obsolete that pattern of these point to point connections and not need the subway map. I think that we have finally a good model for single producer multi-consumer channels. So we could maybe like eliminate the need for that multi-hop subway transfer, routing map. Josh (01:07:09): Anna what's what's next for you in 2021? Anna (01:07:13): So I guess 2021, I actually spent some time over the last two weeks, taking that week off, thinking about what the show can be like, what kind of ideas to pursue, what formats to look at. Going forward, I will be returning to a weekly. I think it's a really good routine for me. I will be inviting all three of you to be guest hosts on various episodes on various topics. There's also going to be a ZK podcast blog where it's, hopefully I will actually write some of these, but we're also going to get really smart guest writers to start writing deeper, deep dives on some of the topics that are covered in the show or have been covered. We might also look back to some older episodes where, you know, we did this really great podcast, but then never produced anything else with it. Anna (01:08:04): And it actually could use some extra reference material and all of that. So we're going to be playing around with that. I have Alex Pruden, who's helping me on the blog and he's going to be, you know, working with coordinating new authors and all of that. James (01:08:16): I love Alex. Anna (01:08:17): Yeah. And ZK, the ZK summit currently I'm thinking of actually doing it one time per year and a bit later in the year. And hopefully when we can actually do it in person. But I also think there's something worthwhile in having us get together around these topics more like in a meetup setting. Um, and so actually I'm planning on doing a monthly zkSessions event, quote unquote, an online event, kind of like a meetup, kind of like a mini summit. And I want to do that. I want to kind of try to link that a little bit closer together with some of the podcast topics. It's going to be a work in progress, like the blog. And so this'll be sort of coming out regularly. The first few might be a little awkward cause we don't know what they are yet, but, um, yeah, that's the plan. And then that would lead up to a new zkSummit. The zkSummit has been awesome and I did two online ones last time, but I like it, you know, the online is it doesn't quite get that feeling of the in-person and it's sort of heartbreaking in a way because everyone's there and you want to chat with everyone and the way you would have normally done in a live event, but you can't. And so that's why I'm going to push that back a little bit. I also think that online events like we, I did two days of six hours, which was like a lot. Anna (01:09:39): And I think a three hour, once a month might be a little bit easier. We can all get together and stuff like that. So look out for those. I'm actually going to be releasing a blog post with like the whole spectrum of things that we're going to do around the podcast. But I'm pretty excited about it. I feel like this year, like I want to be a little bit more thoughtful in the programming and work a little bit more on having series, like, you know, episodes that really grow off the other ones, like our previous ones. So that's the current plan. I am so excited that you all came on this first episode of the year with me really looking forward to, uh, yeah, like co-hosting and likewise digging into new topics with you. Josh (01:10:21): No, I'm just, I'm, I'm tremendously excited this year. Uh, just for it being, not just a new year and it not being 2020, but also for zero-knowledge in particular and zero knowledge - the podcast as well as the research, uh, space, but, uh, I'm, I'm, I'm excited to, to help where I can to. So thank, thank you. Thank you for hosting and having all of us on Anna. Anna (01:10:45): Cool. Tarun (01:10:46): I would be remiss without giving you at least one dumb math fact, which is, uh, 2021 is, is, is it has a nice quadratic structure as its prime factor as 43 times 47. Ooh, very nice. 45 plus two times 45 minus two. So if you've ever had to go to interviews where they ask you to multiply numbers, that one is a, it's a nice fit. Anna (01:11:10): We'll never forget that 2021. Josh (01:11:14): Beautiful. James (01:11:15): Well, uh, I'm, I'm really excited to be, you know, part of the show more often this year. And I also have a math fact, which is that, uh, seven is not divisible by three wish it was. Anna (01:11:30): All right. So thank you all again for joining for this first episode of the year and to our listeners. Thanks for listening.