Bankless - What's going on with Canto?

Episode Date: February 9, 2023

Zak Cole, a core contributor to Canto, joins Bankless to answer: "What's good with Canto?" ------ 📣 MetaMask Learn  https://bankless.cc/metamaskshow  ------  JOIN BANKLESS PREMIUM:  https://new...sletter.banklesshq.com/subscribe  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:  KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/kraken  UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE https://bankless.cc/uniswap  ️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum   EARNIFI | CLAIM YOUR UNCLAIMED AIRDROPS https://bankless.cc/earnifi   ------ Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 7:30 Canto Brings It 9:40 What is Canto? 12:40 Nationalizing Apps 16:00 CSR and Market Forces 20:10 Funding Open Source 22:45 Infrastructure 26:00 Native Apps 29:55 The Stablecoin 33:40 The History of Canto 37:30 Launching on Cosmos 42:10 Botched Ads 44:25 Friction Points 48:00 Founder Culture 54:00 RIP Anon 58:00 Community 1:01:30 Future of Canto 1:03:30 Get Involved 1:04:30 Chatting ------ Resources: Zak on Twitter: https://twitter.com/0xzak  Canto: https://canto.io/  Variant Blog Post: https://variant.fund/articles/canto-a-layer-1-incentive-experiment/  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures 

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:04 Bankless Nation, we are super excited to talk about Kanto today, specifically what is going on with Kanto. David, this is a layer one chain. I know that. I know it's been up about 500% in price over the last 30 days. I know crypto Twitter is talking about it, angry about it, yelling about it. I'm not really sure, but I don't know precisely what it is. What are we going to unpack today? Why is Kanto important? Yeah, Kanto is a brand new layer one blockchain on the scene, which has caused a bunch of hype, as you mentioned, because the price has done a 500% in 30 days, which is insane, even in crypto standards. How did that come to be?
Starting point is 00:00:45 Why? Especially because it's a bear market. Especially because it's a bear market, right? Okay. And so how did the, what stars have aligned to allow for a 500% price appreciation in the Kanto L1 asset? Where did the Kanto community come from? What's so unique about Kanto that is generating this amount of excitement and hubbub?
Starting point is 00:01:04 Is it just a bunch of traders rotating? What's real about Canto? What is perhaps just a trade? There's a bunch of conversations to have here. Canto is experimenting with what's called CSR, which I believe is called contract secured revenue. We will ask Zach about that and make sure I got that acronym right. And this all kind of started when Varian put out a blog post
Starting point is 00:01:27 detailing their philosophy behind Canto and why they think is exciting. Canto is not the first L1 blockchain to experiment with CSR, I believe NIR, and others have worked on this as well. But Canto and the way that it was designed and the way that it was bootstrapped has captured the attention in ways that other layer 1 blockchains have not. So we are bringing on Zach Cole, who is a Canto core contributor. So say that three times fast, Kento core contributor. CCCC. CCC. And while this is Jack's first appearance on bankless, I've actually done three podcasts with Zach.
Starting point is 00:02:02 way back in my POV crypto days. So long-time bankless listeners might remember some very old episodes I did with Zach a very long time ago. Funny guy, been around in the Ethereum ecosystem for a very long time. And that's also another conversation I'd like to have.
Starting point is 00:02:14 A lot of Kanto developers are Ethereum community members, but they have now turned their attention to Kanto. So why has Kanto captured their attention? So many questions to ask. I hope we can get all of these answers today on the show. Including what to call these guys,
Starting point is 00:02:28 Cantonians, Cantonites. There's some working ideas that I have, but I want to hear what Zach has to say about that. And guys, before we get in, I want to tell you about our friends and sponsors at Metamask Learn. So not just Metamask the wallet. There's actually a way you can level up on crypto
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Starting point is 00:03:11 And so this is probably the most engaging way of learning about crypto that I've yet discovered. And to teach you, again, not the ways just to get started in crypto, but the philosophy and the reasons for why we are here. And so if you are interested in that, there is a link in the show notes. You can also go to learn.medamask.io. this is a great place if you are frustrated and onboarding so many of your friends who just don't get it into the world of crypto and you have to explain the same things over and over and over again send them to learn. Metamask.io. This is way better than the university course where you might be taking where you have to pay in order to take their courses. Crypto, as we say so often, pays you to learn about crypto. All right. And this is a fun, engaging, interactive way to do it. So check that out in the show notes. All right, David, got to ask you.
Starting point is 00:03:58 We barely spend any time together since last Thursday. I'm hearing like your voice. So you've been out all the way in Israel. And you've been at Starkware. I want to get the full download about that when we record the roll-up later in the week. But what's up with your voice, man? You're doing okay? Was he like over-speaking?
Starting point is 00:04:16 What's going on? Yeah, I kind of lost my voice. It's actually come back the day before yesterday. So this is better. My days are better now. There was the last day while I was at Starkware sessions in Tel Aviv Friday afternoon, hopped on a plane, landed in Tel Aviv, Saturday morning, went straight over to the hacker house, see what they were hacking on, attended the conference, did nine interviews,
Starting point is 00:04:38 which perhaps why you can tell my voice was spent. So it's hoarse? Yeah. The last day of the conference, I was like literally, like, in my brain was breaking with, I was like pushing air out of my lungs and there was just nothing coming out, man. It was just like, ah. And so it's starting to, it's starting to come back. but it's partly because I did nine goddamn interviews over at Starkware sessions.
Starting point is 00:05:02 Those are currently being put through the Pod Squad, which are a podcast stream at team at bankless, the podcast mill, and those are coming out on the RSS feed. I'm also writing an article, which is almost done coming out on Thursday, which is what I learned over at the Starkware sessions. So a bunch of Starkware content coming your way, but that is why my voice is spent. You know, put my voice on the line for the Bankless Nation. Yeah, it's, look, David's sacrificing his voice in order to bring you content. And we only have like three more podcasts to record this week, so light workload for the rest of the week. All right, guys, we'll be right back with this episode talking all about Canto, what it is, what's going on with Zach Cole.
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Starting point is 00:08:43 I want to introduce you to. Zach Cole is a protocol engineer, co-founder and C-T-O of Slingshot, which is a decentralized exchange, but also, more relevantly, a core contributor to Kanto. new layer one on the scene, dominating headlines lately, in no small part to its crazy price performance of his native asset. And so we are going to dive into all things canto with the guidance of Zach Cole. Zach, welcome to Bankless. Hey, hey, hey, what's up? Thank you for having me on. See a boy, Zach Cole coming in July from Nashville, Tennessee. Beautiful day. How are y'all doing? That's absolutely fantastic. That's been one of the better guest intros I think we've ever seen on
Starting point is 00:09:19 like this. What's up? What's up? Man, is this kind of the Canto energy? Are you guys always like this? I mean, we bring it, you know. We've been known to bring it.
Starting point is 00:09:30 Okay, so the name. All right, we're talking about Cantonites. What else? Cantalopes, I think, maybe some on the YouTube chat said. People refer to it as that, yeah. What does the
Starting point is 00:09:43 canto tribe call itself? Yeah, I don't know. I think cantalops is pretty cool. Cantonites is good, too. It sounds like that. old testament, but yeah, I think, I think that's a good one, too. I don't know. I mean, I guess it's whatever people choose to identify as, you know? Can we ask, can I ask what this canto thing is at the highest level? So I feel like, you know, people are talking about
Starting point is 00:10:07 canto mostly because of price lately. And so people are like, well, Cantos coming on bankless must be a top signal. I can't say that you're wrong. I don't know. I have no idea. But also So, Canto is doing something pretty unique. It's sort of a unique experiment. And it was a unique experiment even before the last 30 days of sort of a 500% increase in price explosion. So how would you explain this? I know, Zach, you're a longtime member of the Ethereum community. So explain it to the average bankless listener.
Starting point is 00:10:39 What is Canto? Yeah. So Canto is kind of like a novel L1 where we kind of like experiment as a network with different economic primitives, the primary one being CSR, which is contract secured revenue, and that's kind of like a fee sharing mechanism. So things like this haven't really existed in the way that we present them. And what we do essentially is like similar to 1559 where all of the fees for a block are burned and sent to the zero address. What we're doing is taking 20% of those fees that would otherwise be burned. And we're distributing them to the people that launch or deploy those
Starting point is 00:11:18 contracts on the network. So that kind of provides a subsidy essentially for developers and incentivizes people to kind of build without having to be concerned so much about how are we going to generate revenue, how are we going to monetize, what are we going to do? Because I think a big problem with people that build is that they're passionate about building. We like to build stuff, put things out there. I like to do that with my friends. But it's not always entirely clear, like how are we going to support ourselves? How am I going to keep the lights on? How am I going to pay rent? What am I going to do? Like I build this cool stuff. I'm not really getting paid to do it. Like, what am I going to do? So this network kind of allows you to just like focus on your passion,
Starting point is 00:12:00 build what you want to build and we provide a subsidy. So if you build a, like if you deploy a contract and you build a product that a lot of people use, you're going to be rewarded that's baked into the core protocol of Kanto. And I think that's kind of like what we're going for primarily. Granted, this is an experiment, completely experimental. Here today, Gondamara. It could go to zero. It could go to a billion. I have no idea.
Starting point is 00:12:24 We're one tweet away from either. As we always say on bankless, crypto's risky, you could lose what you put in. That is multiply that by 10 and apply that to Kanto, guys, as you're listening to this. But let me ask you about this experiment in a little bit more detailed. So, Zach, so this is a layer one. So this is not a layer two, right?
Starting point is 00:12:44 I believe it uses some of the Cosmos tendermint stack, I should say, for a kind of consensus. But it is EVM is a smart contract chain. Is that right? Yeah, so there's EVM functionality on top of the Cosmos SDK that was used to like build the underlying protocol itself. We chose that because, well, first of all,
Starting point is 00:13:05 Canto is like a fork of EVMOS and then we built on top of that. Evmos uses the Cosmos SDK and implements EVM functionality. The reason we did all of that is because the Cosmos SDK is pretty easy to kind of just define your blockchain, not have to worry about building all that stuff necessarily and then just get it going. And then, of course, we have EVM functionality because I'm an EVM maxi myself. Okay, so a full EVM capability then, and that's pretty conducive to the builder community that you're hoping to attract. Now, the big point of difference, aside from sort of, you know, people recognize, you know, EVMOs and other cosmos chains that have EVM support.
Starting point is 00:13:50 Like that's sort of been done before. But what Canto is doing is this kind of unique public goods funding mechanism, right? And so whenever we've in the past described even like things like gas fees, for example, or EIP 1559, these sorts of things are mental model for it. And when I say ours, I mean banklesses. basically like it's kind of a tax to pay for public goods and the public good that ethereum provides is settlement assurances and so all of this this public good goes into like national defense the defense fund for the chain right and so that is the only public good that ethereum provides right
Starting point is 00:14:34 it's just chain defense maximum security all of the transaction fees all of the the the burning goes into the value of ETH, and ultimately that ends up increasing the economic value of the chain and the cost to attack the chain. So it all goes into the military and security budget. What you're saying is with Canto, that's part of it because you're obviously compensating validators, right? So you have a military budget, but then you also have a budget for bridges and schools and hospitals. And of course, I'm not talking about these things literally. I'm talking about other chain infrastructure types of things. And I believe the chain infrastructure from what I see in cryptos, like a Dex.
Starting point is 00:15:19 And what? And what else? Lending market. Okay. So a decentralized exchange and a lending market. And what you're saying is the protocol fees that Kanto generates goes towards the taxes, go towards funding these applications. And so, like, these are private applications almost on the Ethereum network.
Starting point is 00:15:42 But for Canto, they're kind of like government provided. They're like part of the public good and recipients of the taxes. And that's the unique flavor of the model. I think what I'm curious about. Are you sure you don't know anything about Canto? Well, I just, it just seems like, look, it just seems like a logical thing that you'd go try to do. What I'm curious about, if that articulation was like in the, in the, the ballpark.
Starting point is 00:16:10 So here's the problem with doing that with Ethereum, is how do you determine which projects to distribute the tax revenue to and the public goods? And by how much? Yeah. And how much? How does Kanto solve that problem? Yeah, that's a really good question. So anybody that takes part in that network, anybody that deploys an application is contributing
Starting point is 00:16:31 to the overall growth of the network. So they receive a portion of that subsidy and 20% of what would be burned using a an EIP 1559 type of pattern, right? So 20% of the burn fee or the base fee goes to the person that has deployed that contract. So we're not really deciding. It's more like the market is deciding. If you have an application that's getting a lot of traction and seeing a lot of traffic, then you are going to receive a portion of that base fee. So you get 20% of what would be burnt otherwise. So one critique of CSR, which again, like I said in the intro, CSR is a model that Kanto is applying, not creating.
Starting point is 00:17:10 We have talked about CSR as an industry in many different respects. And like I said, other other blockchains are also working on this. I believe for a moment in time, Ethereum was also interested in this. But one of the reasons why the CSR model has been critiqued is that when you take 20% of the gas fees for a specific contract and give that to the contract devs, you add in a new game theory. And that is about with, well, now a contract dev, isn't actually incentivized to make the best contract possible. They're actually incentivized to make perhaps an overly complicated, overly inefficient contract because then they get a higher subsidy.
Starting point is 00:17:52 What's Cantos philosophy on this? Yeah, so I totally agree with you. It seems like that at face value, but would you use an overly complicated and overly an overly expensive contract yourself, David? Well, only if it's the only game in town, I don't really have a choice. Okay, but as soon as somebody else to, deploy something that does it more efficiently, you're going to start using that one, right? Sure.
Starting point is 00:18:12 Okay. So you're relying on just market competition to produce efficiencies. Yeah. Yeah. So if you don't do something well, the person that does it better is going to come along and they're going to eat your lunch. So you should be the best you can be. You should deploy the best contracts you can because that's going to ensure that you have
Starting point is 00:18:28 a place at the table for as long as possible. So someone comes along and does it better? Is it because you're saving gas fees in a more efficient smart contract? Or is it just better use it? Yeah, users are going to default to whatever provides the better user experience, whatever is cheaper, whatever is the, you know, more convenient to use. And that's true in any market. You can look at like complicated smart contracts on Ethereum. Like most people are going to do things that are like cheaper.
Starting point is 00:18:54 They're going to do things that are more efficient. They're going to use things that provide a better experience for them. And that's just how it works, you know. So, so can't have this pool of public goods, but it doesn't. select the winners. It more kind of like creates a mechanism for this pool of money to be distributed and the market forces are the ones that are selecting the winners. So it's almost like the government protocol of Kanto creates like this bidding process and this healthy game of competition. They're like, we've got this pot of money and all of the private smart contract
Starting point is 00:19:34 developers are the ones competing for that pot of money. But really, it's kind of market forces and that it's users that are determining the outcomes of which smart contracts end up winning. Is that correct? Yeah. So when we talk about the market, like the market, it's not like this ominous like figure that we can't really understand. The market are people like me. They're people like you. They're participants within the network. They're all of those users. Everybody that takes part within this community has a say in what is going to succeed and what is going to fail. And the projects that they deem worthy of success are going to be the ones that do better than the others. I mean, that's just that's just that's not worth.
Starting point is 00:20:17 And so just getting in the details, Zach, of how the funds are distributed. So is it based on how much, I guess, like, I don't know if the right word is compute, but how much of the EVM resources or how much block space every smart contract is using? And if you're using more block space, then you get partitioned to more of the subsidy for this. Yeah, essentially. That makes sense. Yeah. And you would receive 20% of that.
Starting point is 00:20:44 And David, you call this thing CSR. And I'm a little wary of like, you know, crypto loves its acronyms. And so here's another one, CSR. But all that means, all CSR is just what we just described. It's kind of that public goods funding to almost like the application layer of the ecosystem. Is that what we mean by CSR? Yeah, and it was one of the acronyms that we could definitely have picked a better one for, a better name for. And this philosophy has been embedded in crypto.
Starting point is 00:21:13 I'd say pretty damn close to its very, very coarse roots about like how do we provide a business model to open source? That's really like goes to the heart of crypto, like open source. How do we fund it? How do we fund open source developers? And optimism has their retroactive public goods funding. they initially had some sort of philosophy about that was highly synonymous with CSR, which is why actually how the show came to be as I tweeted out, oh, CS, Kanto is just doing the optimism thing.
Starting point is 00:21:43 And then Zach was like, actually, wait, there's nuances. Yes and no. And then, boom, this is how we have a show today. But, but Zach, I want to ask, like I mentioned, excuse me, other layer ones also have CSR in them. Like I said, I think NIR has, has this and other trains have also experimented with this. How would you say Kanto's CSR is different in any particular way? What's unique about it? I think it's just the simplicity.
Starting point is 00:22:09 Like the amount of base fee that your contract consumes, you receive a dividend from that. Most of the other ones have like retroactive type methodologies. They're like a little bit different. Not like a, I don't know. I don't know how much different they are. I haven't partake. I haven't really taken part in the near ecosystem enough to like be able to say that. All I know is, like, what we're doing is different because we're sharing 20% of the block base fee.
Starting point is 00:22:38 What's nice about this is there's no, like, subjective human governance of, like, let's all vote to see who receives the 20% pot. It's based on. Yeah. So this is in real time. Like, you can, you're, like, as it's being burnt, that's going toward this into a pot that you can then claim. And that's just for our tax purposes, but it's essentially streamed. So one question I have, Zach, and just to really just plant this in the ground, this is the thing about Kanto. It's CSR. It's not like CSR. It's not like CSR and another thing. It's like CSR is kind of the big flagship of the Kanto chain.
Starting point is 00:23:17 Yeah, I think so for now. I mean, of course, like everyone's going to be like our community is great and we have a lot of fun. But like from a technical perspective, that's like that's what we have right now. And that's what we're experimenting with. When I read the variant blog post, they talked about nationalizing infrastructure. And then there was like a Dex that is maybe enshrines not the right word, but perhaps it also is. Can you talk about this angle? Like what are what are these things that are like enshrined into into Canto? Yeah. So it's the lending market and it's the decks.
Starting point is 00:23:54 And by providing these protocols as primitives that are like baked into the protocol itself as opposed to application layer, we can kind of like have like what would be equivalent of like a post office, right, or a fire department or what you need for like a community to function like in its bare essence, right? So with Ethereum, with Bitcoin, with a lot of that other stuff, all you're providing is like you said, security. Whereas we're providing some additional things that are more economically focused and financially aligned. So whereas like Ethereum, you know, it's pretty much just security. We're also making sure that, you know, trying to make sure that people get fed. And I'm not saying that Ethereum doesn't do that. Like, I am an Ethereum.
Starting point is 00:24:36 I helped build Ethereum. Like, but right now, we can't really experiment in the same way that we could like five years ago. Just because Ethereum has become an institution. So how are we going to test these economic primitives in a way that actually makes sense and drives like good, valuable data? We can't really do that on Ethereum anymore. It's changed. It's like we're a big myth. It's an institution.
Starting point is 00:25:00 If you tried to do that on Ethereum, honestly, Zach, I'd say we try to drive you out, honestly. It's too big to run these sorts of experiments. We can't just say, yeah, let's experimentally take a huge, like a huge portion of gas transaction fees and distribute it somewhere. Like that doesn't work at the scale. We want to leave Ethereum more credibly neutral. So you're running this nationalization experiment here. There has been talk about nationalizing other things across the, like, chains, different chains,
Starting point is 00:25:29 Like even in the theorem, I know Justin Drake has brought up the idea of like having an oracle that is enshrined in the chain. Are there other things that Canton might add like some sort of price oracle? So a price oracle would be really, really useful, but designing a price oracle in an efficient way that can actually be kind of baked into a protocol means that we need something that's kind of tried and tested. And they're just like a lot of different versions of a price oracle. One thing that, like, so when you ask like what kind of things are going to be baked into the protocol as like we create this like infrastructure, like think about the things that you need in a city, right?
Starting point is 00:26:09 You're building like this city. You need a bank. You need a lending market. What else do we do? Well, NFT trading is pretty good. So maybe we'll include an NFT market, you know, all of these like basic goods that people like to have within a protocol. We should figure out how we can subsidize all of them. So I'm not saying that we're going to build an NFT market into it or like an Oracle,
Starting point is 00:26:32 for example. Those are things that are really great and that we should build. And I have different plans myself as to what I would like to build into the protocol, but I'm also just a participant in this community. I'm not really like anyone special. Anybody can do what I'm doing. So I'm not like dictating the roadmap of Kanto. I'm just like a guy who likes to build stuff, you know.
Starting point is 00:26:51 How the team formed and how that, I definitely want to get into that conversation. but first I want to still tie off this like nationalization of contracts. So like just to reiterate, there's a Dex, there is an on-chain lending market, and there's a stable coin, and those are the three main bits of nationalized infrastructure. What does that mean for that at a technical level? So how are those systems treated differently than applications on top of Kanto? And are there plans for those, the number of nationalized bits of infrastructure, to grow? Like what would be the fourth or fifth thing?
Starting point is 00:27:28 So they're not necessarily treated different. It's just like their use is contingent on the Kanto token itself. They don't really, the governance is dictated through Kanto itself. So it kind of like accrues all of that value to Kanto and the community rather than like these rent seeking or value extractive governance tokens, right? Like for every single protocol. if it's something that's actually needed on like a network-wide level, let's just build it into the protocol so that value accrues to Kanto and to that token, to the base token as opposed to like some sort of governance token that's pretty rent-seeking, right? It's trying to extract additional value from its user base.
Starting point is 00:28:09 And that kind of fragments liquidity. It also like kind of breaks up like users into these kind of like sub-tribs essentially like, oh, I'm a uniswap guy. That's how I identify when I engage with this with the with the network and like on chain or I'm a compound guy or whatever. It doesn't matter like we're all canto folks right now. So this is like if Ethereum had its uniswap and its Avey and its MakerDAO and its die stable coin as like official core Ethereum applications and said like this is this is what we use. And the idea is that all of the. fees generated by these various protocols, the fees generated by Unswap, the fees generated by Maker,
Starting point is 00:28:54 the fees generated by AVE, actually would actually go to Ether rather than the AVEA token, the MKR token, the Uni token. Exactly. Yeah. So think about all of that value that has accrued within each one of those protocols individually, as well as Ethereum itself. Like that's a massive amount of value. If you look at Coin Gecko, you look at the top 100, it's safe to say that 98% of that is built
Starting point is 00:29:15 on Ethereum, right? So who should be rewarded for that? I think that everyone within that community should be rewarded just because we're all participants. We've all made it what it is now. And so just to put myself into the mind philosophy of the Kanto blockchain, the Kanto chain, it's just like, okay, we are going to make the most used, most primitive applications, and we're going to claim this for the Kanto layer one and let the rest of the whatever gets built on Kanto to be up to the free market.
Starting point is 00:29:47 And so, like, there's, like, a capitalism versus socialism versus communism conversation here where, like, the canto blockchain is, like, the authority over the land. And they're saying, hey, the free market is free, except for we make the stable coin. The government makes the stable coin. The government makes the lending market. The government makes the money market. But the rest is up to the free market. And so, you know, putting this into Ethereum words,
Starting point is 00:30:17 Ethereum is like free market absolutely everywhere. There's literally nothing that's enshrined in Ethereum. Everything is the free market. And Kanto is like, three applications that are public utilities provided by the government for the government. Would this you say this is a fair articulation? Yeah, I suppose. So although I'm not like a huge political type guy, so I'm not like really like I'm an engineer. So I'm not going to have like any hot, spicy takes in regard to that.
Starting point is 00:30:43 But what you said, you said it with confidence, and it sounds right. Well, that's the key, Zach, is as long as you say it with confidence, it's definitely the right answer. But so this is the idea of like chain nationalism, which is like chain central planning. Yeah, it's like only a little bit. Only three things. Three things are centrally planned. Kanto is like Sweden or something like this.
Starting point is 00:31:05 We're going to like have more public goods. But it's also in some ways it's not. care of the people that take care of us. Everybody's building on top of on top of a network. I think that they should receive some sort of subsidy for that participation. Yeah, but in some ways it's also not. So what you just said is kind of, David, this conversation of socialism versus capitalism, too. There are strong elements of the free market.
Starting point is 00:31:32 So even though there is public goods funding, Canto also distributes this in a way that lets sort of the free market decide, right? It's as if like there's a whole bunch of contractors bidding for the government's pot of money. It's almost like if you think if you think of like why I know this is congealed and we have a military industrial industry in the U.S. But you could imagine a more like free market in the U.S. where you would outsource and contract a whole bunch of private companies to do your defense. It's not actually the government doing all of the work. It's kind of these private companies that that are getting better and fulfilling the obligations of the government. That's what we're doing here.
Starting point is 00:32:16 One question, Zach, though, about the stable coin. So is this like, you said it was like die almost. Dyes, of course, can be backed by ETH, but also some other collateral assets. Is it like that? Or is the stable coin, is it all backed by the Kanto coin? Yeah, it's over-collateralized. So it like enters circulation when users borrow it from the lending, market. So it's not like a Tara Luna type setup, is it? No. Because that was like, I hope no one ever
Starting point is 00:32:48 says yes to that question. That was like, that was interesting, right? One thing about Tara Luna is they did nationalize the stable coin, didn't they? Well, they needed to control its value. So they had to. Yeah. And then it kind of like, there was an element of, um, uh, nationalizing the Algo Stable coin and making the value the base chain. Uh, and, uh, you know, UST and Luna kind of interlocked. That's not what, that's not what Canto is doing, though. It's a different model. The whole reason that Tara, like the whole thing collapsed
Starting point is 00:33:20 was because it wasn't over collateralized. They were trying to do something that would be kind of under collateralized, right? And people are taking advantage of that system and kind of abusing it because the governance wasn't actually decentralized, right? So if we're working on an over collateralized system, And we don't have access to any of those assets. Like no one individual has actual access to those assets. Then there's no real threat of it being under collateralized.
Starting point is 00:33:49 We didn't. And Canto launched without any VC backing. There was like no, like the initial distribution was like really, really fair. There were over 40 people that helped launch canto. I was one of those people. I just contributed. And we received like a small amount for like compensation for our participation. But it wasn't crazy.
Starting point is 00:34:09 It was and that's it. That's all there's going to be for the rest of the history of the chain. And there's no real, like, force that has more control over this asset than anyone else. Anybody can come in and market buy and do whatever they want to do. Or they could take part in any of the CSR, like, initiatives, and they can earn Kanto that way. But there's no foundation. There aren't any VCs. There's no, like, private interest here.
Starting point is 00:34:36 Yeah, so I think that brings us to the question about how Kanto got bootstrapped. So, Zach, if you can just walk us back through history and give us the rundown about how Canto went from zero to one. And I think also embedded into this question will be open up the conversation about why Canto is on Cosmos rather than being an Ethereum layer two. So we'll end there and let's start with like how did Cosmos or excuse me, how did Canto get started? And how did it get bootstrapped? Yeah, for sure. So like to take it way, way, way back, I was working on ETH too. I mean, you remember when I was working at White Block, and we're doing a lot of ETH II research and development, and I was like sitting at a bar with the guy that I was working with at the time, and we're kind of like, you know, pitching about like, oh, this is kind of inefficient. This is what this is a, they should do this. They should do that. This is blah, blah, blah. And it's like, well, rather than bitching about it, let's kind of like draw out our own diagram of what we think Ethereum would look like at scale. And we came up with this sort of protocol-based system.
Starting point is 00:35:38 that essentially looks a lot like what kind of Polygon and Avalanche are doing with their subnets and is what also kind of what Ethereum looks like with a lot of L2s, but this was back in 2017 or 18. And we called it Canto. And I came up with the name Canto because Canto was like a small subsect of a larger poem. I thought that was pretty. And that's what we came up with. We started building it and, you know, a lot of other stuff came about because I was working on White Block and all this other. crap, but that was my idea for how we would scale Ethereum. By the time I got back around to revisiting Canto, people were already launching L2s. All this stuff was already coming out. So the idea that we had in 2018 was no longer applicable to help scale Ethereum because Ethereum was already
Starting point is 00:36:25 scaling. It was scaling technologically. I think that we can say we did it, right? Like we can say a two ship, like the vision that we set off with a few years ago is kind of come to fruition. So what's the next thing that we need to scale. And when I was here in Nashville, I started working with Scott Lewis. And yeah, he came up with a lot of these ideas for like economic mechanisms and financial mechanisms and it made a lot of sense to me. It was like, all right. So it seems like we can't really, like there's not really much need to scale things technically now, but there's a lot of need to scale things from an economic perspective. And what he presented and thought about made a whole lot of like a whole lot of sense to me. So that's kind of what we focused on. And, and
Starting point is 00:37:07 And we just used the name Kanto because I have the domain name still. Oh my God. That's hilarious. Okay. So that was the inception moment. But how did Kanto go from the brainchild of you and Scott and a few others to an actual like community to whatever extent. The community has been generated?
Starting point is 00:37:26 Yeah. So we were just, you know, we like to talk about all of these problems and what the solutions are. I mean, I think we're kind of solutions architects, really. and like put together a team of like really great people like Plex, which is about eight people. They like did a lot of the building on the initial protocol for Canto. And we kind of like had a lot of like other work we were doing. So it was like, all right, well, let's do something like fun as a side project and like let's see what happens. And one thing led to another and it just like picked up more steam.
Starting point is 00:37:59 And now we have like people participating in Canto community, the people that launched it. Like we have Johnny Ray, Joseph the Long, Preston Van Loon. Those are a lot of the people that I brought in, who are a lot of OG kind of protocol developers that helped ship ETH too as well. And yeah, now we're just going to see where it goes. I mean, we do have like kind of a roadmap, like, you know, but it's not really like up to me to decide. So I'm just a participant within a larger collaborative ecosystem.
Starting point is 00:38:29 But yeah. So with this like, oh, there's a, it seems to be like, like there's a bunch of ungovernance vibes about canto that's kind of like the main point and so i think that's why you're saying like i don't have any control over the roadmap it is what it is right and i think that's why canto chose cosmos because in kind of in the same way that d y dx moved from stark x onto cosmos yeah uh the whole sort of permissionless network building doesn't really isn't ready on the aetherium land because there's a district complex yeah that's exactly what it is so like the thing is is like the reason we chose cosmos i think is
Starting point is 00:39:04 because Cosmos was available and it worked. I don't think anybody would have thought twice about launching an L2 on Ethereum had, like if there existed an SDK similar to what Cosmos has, that allows me to quickly and efficiently launch in L2. So I'm sure there are people out there thinking about this problem and thinking about the solutions to that problem. And if there are, please reach out to me
Starting point is 00:39:28 because I'd like to talk to you. I think that that's something that the Ethereum ecosystem desperately needs in order to scale. But I think that we're on the way, and we're really figuring all that stuff out. And that's why projects like Arbitrum and optimism are so important for us as a community, because then that will allow us to experiment in a way that doesn't have an effect or kind of like, I guess just doesn't have an effect on the L1, on ETH.
Starting point is 00:39:56 Like I said, we can't really experiment on ETH. We can't do it. So the reason that we launched on Cosmos was because that provided us with a we needed to quickly build something out without having to think about it too much, to kind of like provide ourselves with the playground we need for these financial experiments. So, Zach, I mean, there could be in the future you guys maybe move to an L2 or something like that or change up the architecture as a possibility. Potentially. I mean, nothing's out of the question.
Starting point is 00:40:23 Is that possible? How would governance move in a cosmos app chain to an Ethereum, what would be a layer three, I believe? Is that even technically feasible? I mean, it is feasible. I have no idea exactly how it would work, but that's a problem that I would love to come up with a solution for. So, Zach, David mentioned this term ungovernance, but I'm actually not sure that there is ungovernance. I think there's elements of it that are ungovernance. But I'm seeing here like there is a way to participate in governance. And this looks like a cosmos app chain.
Starting point is 00:40:58 People are familiar with it, kind of governance mechanisms, which is sort of, of token-weighted voting. Is that what's in play here? It's not really ungovernance. It's like Dow-style token-weighted governance. Is that right? Definitely. Yeah, yeah. So there is. I mean, you can participate in governance as a token holder. Anybody can and they are welcome to come in and vote on different initiatives because it's a community. I think that rather than what we're trying to stress as much as possible is decentralization. There is no one entity that's in control. I am but a participant in a much broader community. Everybody else who wants to participate within this community is welcome to do so, you just need to like, you just need some tokens and there's plenty of
Starting point is 00:41:35 ways to do it. And there are plenty of ways to do it in a way that doesn't require you to like buy it. Like you can participate in this community by building stuff. And that allows you to like participate. That allows you to be a participant essentially. But presumably like I think of like Bitcoin's governance layers as more on governance, right? I mean, or yeah, it's squishy governance. Ethereum is as well. Yeah, whoever's loud. It's kind of like this layer one social thing, squishy governance. With Canto, it's more similar to like a uniswap, or it's more similar to a Cosmos app chain, and that it is token-weighted voting or Tezos, basically. And so somebody with the majority of all of the tokens can actually push the decisions in one direction or another. And I guess
Starting point is 00:42:19 if the community, this is what Tezos has always argued, the community doesn't like it, they can fork off. But there is this token-weighted governance that's in play. And so you could accrue power in this network by just getting a lot of tokens delegated to you or buying them yourself. Yeah, if it's a liquid market and you can afford it. But then why would you want a disproportionate amount of something that's going to kind of ruin the game for everyone else? Zach, there's a bunch of questions that I have. I want to ask about the details of the yield farming bootstrapping mechanism.
Starting point is 00:42:50 I want to talk about the culture around Canto. There's a very specific, sometimes kind of, grungy, perhaps meme culture around the Cosmo, Canto founders and a few other topics as well. But first we have to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that makes the show possible. Uniswap is the largest on-chain marketplace for self-custody digital assets.
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Starting point is 00:46:26 The audio for the ad. Well, all. Okay. Ryan, you want to take it away? Wow, David. Welcome back, man. It was a little rusty there. Okay, so we all just went and got drinks,
Starting point is 00:46:42 so you see the behind the scenes. We took a quick break. We are back with Zach. We're talking about Canto, the Y of Canto. And as you probably heard, I was saying to David during break, that where I'd like to start, Zach, is with the elephant in the room.
Starting point is 00:46:56 still feel like there is some economic disalignment between what I would say is the Ethereum community which I know you're part of and Scott Luce is a part of and many others are a part of and the rest of the Ethereum community and I'm wondering if this represents a friction point or if you think like the Ethereum community just needs to get over it or like what your take is here but let me sort of throw the take from maybe an Ethmaxie type of position. that I hold. I'm not familiar. I'm not familiar with this position. You don't know these people? No, no. I met them on Twitter. Let's see. Bring it. I don't know a single leaf maxi.
Starting point is 00:47:35 Okay. So the position is this. Basically, a lot of L-1s have screwed us over. And like, it just go through that, like, the history of like pump and dumps, of exit scams, either the fast exit or the slow exit or like downright frauds. I'm like, whatever Doe Kwan was doing, like, that was pretty messed up, wasn't it? I know that this isn't VC raised, but right, like, there are a lot of people that will get wealthy as a result of canto price go up. I mean, that's undeniable. When you go up 500% in a month, we all know how crypto works.
Starting point is 00:48:11 And so the question is, with this economic disalignment from the rest of the Ethereum community, like, why is it necessary to produce kind of a net new token on this? And do you think that this will further drive a wedge and drive tribalism between the Kanto community and the Ethereum community? And are we already seeing evidence of this? We also know, you remember 2022, even if it's not the intent of the founders, oftentimes it is. But even if it's not the intent of the founders, communities that rally around token price end up getting very loud and tribal. and they go on attack campaigns as well. And this can be almost like a token populism that is unleashed.
Starting point is 00:49:00 We've seen this with many communities in the past, whenever you have big token price runups. It's like there's this corrosive corrupting force of price appreciation. So I'm wondering what you see in that. Is this going to cause an increasing fracture between the Kanto community who's just saying, hey, we're just running this experiment. We love Ethereum. We're just running this experiment.
Starting point is 00:49:21 And the rest of the Ethereum community who's just like, well, you're not helping our ETH bags and you're pumping your token. And you get in fights on Twitter and then it escalates. And then, you know, there's tribalism. I call it layer one psychosis. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Well, what's your interpretation of all of this? Yeah, I mean, I would hope that it doesn't create a wedge between the ETH community, which I identify as being a part of and Kanto community, which I also obviously identify as being a part of. I think that the work that we do on blockchain in general should present a net positive to everybody within the blockchain community, right?
Starting point is 00:50:03 Because any of the experiments that we run can be easily applied to Ethereum, should it work, or any L2 model, or any other blockchain that launches in the future. Like, we're all building on the back of giants. So I would hope that our experiments would just become standards. So are you just basically, is your posture, I'm just going to ignore the noise and keep building? That's mine. That's what I do. I mean, I've been doing this. I've been in blockchain since 2012. I've been full time on Ethereum since 2015, and that's always been my stance. And I feel like I've always produced pretty good products for the space. So I don't see I'm 35 years old man.
Starting point is 00:50:49 I'm like not going to change my tune anytime soon. It's super old in crypto too, isn't I know. This is like I've been doing this since like I got out of college. Like I can't imagine like doing anything differently. And I'm sure a lot of people think I'm just a complete psychopath. But like, you know, this is what I love to do. And I'm going to keep doing it with people that enjoy doing it with me. and that's kind of my place in life right now.
Starting point is 00:51:17 So what would you say to those who are like, take the skeptical approach and are like, you know, all that aside, right? So you're going to keep building. But like, is this just a pump type of project? Are people doing this in order to just get rich on their bags? Would you just say like, yeah, and shouldn't they? I mean, we're protocol devs working real hard. I think we should get wealthy from this type of thing.
Starting point is 00:51:41 Or like, what would be your response to the cynic who's just like, anyone launches a layer one is to get real quick no i don't think so i think my response would be you should be cynical and you should be you should question everything around you and you should also especially question the people who kind of put themselves in positions as like founders or kind of being figureheads within a community those are the people that we should those are the people that should fall under the greatest group so i welcome any type of like critique just because I think that's what we need in order to kind of self-regulate. That's it. So I guess my answer is like, yeah, good, good for you. Keep doing that. Keep asking
Starting point is 00:52:27 those questions, like the tough questions. Like those are what's necessary. And as far as like getting rich quick, I don't subscribe to those beliefs because I identify as a crypto anarchist. I believe in taking care of the people around me and taking care of my community and doing just being a good person to the people that I love. And those are the people that support me and the people that are around me in my community. So the Kanto founders aren't going to become like, you know, layer one demagogues and the archetypes that we've seen so many times in the past. Well, there are no Kanto. I mean, there are, I guess there are Kanto founders, but there's like 50 of them, like a hundred of them, right? So like, I think that's a large enough population that we can say that there aren't really any founders.
Starting point is 00:53:13 Like anybody that wants to participate in the early days is essentially, I mean, and this is kind of what happened with Ethereum too. Like there were like, how many Ethereum founders are there? There's like a Jillian. Texture is an Ethereum founder? There's eight. There's eight and seven of them are sub, leave it. Okay. So there's eight founders, but that's like what consensus.
Starting point is 00:53:36 has dictated to be eight founders after like six years or something like that. At the beginning, there were literally like 40 founders. There's a lot of claimants for the title. That's for sure. Anybody that was in the orbit of the launch is a founder. You see what I'm saying? But this is also in some sort of way, like decentralization theater in a way. And this is just human ascribed titles.
Starting point is 00:53:55 There are people who started this thing. And when the idea was incepted by like you and Scott, and I'm assuming at least a few others, is kind of where it started. And now there's also the details of, okay, the idea was incepted in a few central people. Does the code actually reflect that? And I think my, well, I don't know how to interpret code. I'm going to guess that the actual way that the Kanto blockchain was incepted on a technical level is perhaps more decentralized than the way that the ideas were incepted in the brains of like you and Scott. And I don't think we've totally parsed out those details.
Starting point is 00:54:32 How did the blockchain start? Like how did blocks start propagating and how did Kanto token start proliferating? Yeah. So there was like a Genesis block. Within that Genesis block, it was distributed between everybody that contributed. And that includes like a lot of people. That's like Preston Van Loon, Johnny Ray, Joseph DeLong, myself. There were at least there are at least 30 other people like KB from Plex.
Starting point is 00:54:59 Now he's from Headwater. Then there's the Plex team, which is about five or six different people. Robin Whitney. There's like a lot of people. There was like, I can't even list all of them. And I'm sorry if I forgot anybody. I love all of you. I'm just like, these are these are not things that I really prepared for necessarily. But yeah. And then it was just a general Genesis ceremony with all of the initial validators. And that was like a population of like 30 to 40. So this actually starts to feel more or less like a Dow of sorts. This is like a Dow that's starting a change. with also no walls up about who can join that down. I consider what I consider it more of like a collective as opposed to like a Dow strictly just because Dow carries certain connotations with it and certain like you know stipulations but I consider it more of like a loose-based kind of collective. Okay understood.
Starting point is 00:55:54 Zach I'll take your point that calling people founders might not be right. I'll take that point, especially when it's incepted at the technical level of the chain. At the same time, I want to take the inverse perspective, the opposite perspective, and say that, okay, people that really kickstart this whole movement do set in the culture of what is going to be created around this blockchain, the culture, the memes, the vibes. And that makes them maybe not capital F founders, but, you know, when you're instilling the vibes, you have an outsized role. And one concern I have, I'm going to put on my eth-maxy hat here. I've been doing my canto-curious hat all throughout this podcast.
Starting point is 00:56:38 I'm going to put on my eth-maxy hat. I'm going to pull up and I'm going to ask Ryan, sorry? Are you ready for it? David's Heath-Mexie hat? I thought you never take that off, David. No, people assume I have it on all the time, but I don't actually. I think I would consider myself an Heath-Maxie. Am I not in East Maxi?
Starting point is 00:56:54 And so I'm going to pull up a tweet that I'm going to charge you with Zach, a Zach Cole tweet. and Ryan is going to put it up on the stream here. And this is an Oregon Trail meme, Cantoronia Trail. And this is when, like, I think, Canto price like skyrocketed from like 40 cents to like 60 cents. And the meme here is,
Starting point is 00:57:14 you have died of shorting. The reference here being like, you've died of dysentery. And this is you tweeting this and you're just saying rip anon. And something that I've kept in my brain is that I don't enjoy founders who tweet about price. I consider that inappropriate, as in you've created a decentralized system that is supposed to be an internet native protocol. Don't talk about the price of your asset.
Starting point is 00:57:37 I think that that imbues certain negative cultures. And I don't think you are the only person doing this. I actually see this by a number of people who have started the Canto movement. Can I ask before Zach answers that, David? So I just want to make sure that you're applying the rule fairly. So would you say that to like the layer two? founders too or like all the defy app founders with with the token as well it's like don't talk about the price of uni don't talk about the price of maddox i generally would apply that yes founders
Starting point is 00:58:08 of all things i think it's pro inappropriate for them to promote the price of their asset so you're not cutting out specifically a layer one yes i i guess that's right i guess that's right yeah okay all right no but but i understand what you're saying and it makes sense i don't i think that like it's less about like talking about the price of an asset necessarily and more about kind of being like pompous or like having too much pride, I suppose. Maybe that's a thing. I don't know. That's the way that I would interpret it.
Starting point is 00:58:37 But I don't really think that tweet is necessarily about price. I use the term the term shorting is in that. But that's because a lot of us are traders. And when I think of like shorting, I think of like kind of like making a bet against a community. And if you make a bet against my community, you're likely going to lose because I'm a winner. and my friends are winners. We're all winners. That's the Keto.
Starting point is 00:58:59 I think that's actually a fair response. It's like when you short something, you're actually shorting against what you believe in. There you go. And I believe what I believe. And I'm proud of what I believe. And I'm proud of my friends. I'm proud of you guys.
Starting point is 00:59:09 Like, look, man, David, I've known even for like forever. Look at you now. You got like a fancy ass camera, dude. My biggest claim to fame is my fancy camera. We all came up. Dude, we came up. We got older.
Starting point is 00:59:20 We became more professional. We understand what we're doing now. And like, if you're going to make a bet against, me, that's probably a bad thing for you to do. Just as a rule of thumb, because I'm going to keep doing what's in my path. And if you want to bet against that tenacity of a 35-year-old man, then go for it. I can't say that I don't like the disposition. People should believe in themselves. And the price aside, whether it's one cent, whether it's zero and like 18, like,
Starting point is 00:59:52 whether it's 17 zeros and a one, it doesn't matter. Let me ask you, Zach, so this confidence, right, this kind of vibe that you're imbueing, right, it's pretty cool. It's right. Don't bet against the canto community because don't bet against the devs is another way to sort of express this, right? Can I ask you, like back to sort of David's point, though, would you be one to sort of shut down too much emphasis in cantaloupe culture, cantonite culture,
Starting point is 01:00:22 on like price. There are times where we've seen sort of leaders and other ecosystems do this few and far between. I remember the famous 2017 tweet and you remember this is like Vitalik being like, yeah, have we earned it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just wondering your approach to kind of like the early stages of the community and setting the culture.
Starting point is 01:00:43 And the only thing I'm just asking about is because, you know, we've all seen so many token communities go off the rails and like get kind of. of toxic around price. And I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on best practices on not letting the canto community fall prey to that and to stick to the confidence, but it's like the confidence of what we're building. Yeah. So it's not.
Starting point is 01:01:05 So when you think of when you talk about a community and what you're talking about people and when you think about like people working as a group, you can talk about people acting as individuals as well. When people make a lot of money, sometimes they just fucking lose their minds. I've seen it. Yes. You've seen it. We've all seen it.
Starting point is 01:01:20 Right. Like people just lose it. Like they become. who they actually are. Right. Because they don't have to like keep up appearances anymore. They don't have to give a shit about anybody but themselves. Yep.
Starting point is 01:01:29 So that's when you see people for who they really are. So let me say that price is a function of economics. Economics are the way, are a measure of a community to work together to coordinate and to collaborate in a way that results in a net success. So there's nothing wrong with being proud and excited of the price of an asset. What's wrong is saying, I've made this. You're worthless. Your community sucks compared to mine.
Starting point is 01:01:59 That's stupid. That's like a bad way to look. So just be real. And like we all like make money. We all do whatever we do. Just be nice and cool to the people around you. I think that's what turns people off about price talk. It's not saying like my token's doing well.
Starting point is 01:02:14 And that means that your token will never do well. It's like that's just dumb. Like don't don't be like that. Be like a cool dude. Be like, be somebody that people like to be. around. Like, you know, like nobody wants to be around somebody that's like constantly bragging about what they have. Like, it's not, if you're coming from a place of like that, then then that sucks and you suck. I'm sorry. But like, you know, just like be cool. Like that's it. I don't know. I don't know how
Starting point is 01:02:38 else to explain it. I'm not like a big brain guy. I just like put numbers on a screen. No, I, the bluntness is something I've always appreciated about you, Zach. You and there's a certain cohort like you and a mean and a few other people could just like call it for what it is. and I don't think enough people in crypto do that. And so I definitely appreciate that disposition. I'm not here to like, if I'm not here to like, I don't know, I don't know what you expect for me. I'm just like, I'm doing what I enjoy with the people I like.
Starting point is 01:03:05 I like you guys. I like everybody. Like, you know, I work with anybody. I like, you know, and if you're a dick, I don't want to work with you. I'm sorry. So we've made a community. That's it. Like in the economics of that community are like how well we can all work together.
Starting point is 01:03:21 Are these the vibes? of the community right now? How would you describe the the vibes, the culture of my vibes and those are the vibes of the people that I think I attract just because like I kind of like have like simple resistance mechanisms that kind of filter out the lanes. Like you know, so yeah, I suppose so. I think so. Those are the people that I'm around. I mean, we're all pretty cool guys that I would hope you'd like to get a beer with sometime. Zach, I'm curious what the what the future is for canto. This is a really early experiment still, right remind listeners again when canto was launched and how like how far you've come and then like
Starting point is 01:03:57 I know the roadmap is not yours to determine fully but what are some directions you're seeing social consensus lead in in terms of canto and what do you hope it accomplishes yeah so I mean I think we well we launched in September so what is that five months it's been about five months of building and working on things. And I think in the future, what we want to do is just figure out how we can scale economically in a way that makes sense for all the participants, kind of like building cool games. I'm really interested in gaming and like playing games with my friends, kind of like MMOs. Like I used to play Elder Scrolls online a lot, but I've kind of like replaced all the time I spend
Starting point is 01:04:40 playing those video games with like building out blockchain promotives and kind of like economic infrastructure and that's a lot more rewarding to me just because the XP can actually be translated to real world value for some reason. That's the world that we've, that's a world we built. So I think like building out that regard and kind of experimenting in those ways is something that I want to do, kind of like building online games and like doing stuff like that. So yeah, things that are entertaining. Like we're about to launch like some of my friends are about to launch the first, the world's first fully on chain DMV line simulator.
Starting point is 01:05:17 That's going to be really fun. Wait, what? What is it? D&D what do you do? A DMV line simulator. It's dumb. You're going to have to see it to get it. It's not really that.
Starting point is 01:05:28 It's not really that. Like you're talking about DMV department of motor vehicles. Yeah, yeah. You're trying to simulate the line, like the queuing mechanism for like the most hellish place on our own. Imagine that's actually relatively simple. And you're calling this a game? Yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 01:05:40 It's a game. I mean, you play a truck driving simulator, right? Yeah, that's true. So those are the kinds of things that we're like playing around with. Zach, if listeners have been piqued by what we've been talking about today, where should they go to learn more about Kanto? Well, so the entry point to the Kanto community is on the Slingshot application. So you could go to Slingshot.finance to get involved. canto.io is kind of like the next place that you would go to kind of like bridge, stake assets, lend.
Starting point is 01:06:13 Canto. Tools is a pretty good website that kind of has a directory of places and DAPs that exist on chain. So checking that out would be good. And all of the other underbelly of the canto community kind of exists within a bunch of disparate telegram groups and across Canto Twitter. Canto Twitter. That's great. The other CT. Jack, thank you so much for joining us and helping us explain the world of Canto. I feel like I figured it out.
Starting point is 01:06:45 Thank you so much, Zach. Oh, one thing before, I probably should ask this earlier in the episode. So the way this works is there are validators, right? It's like any cosmos? Yeah, validated. 100 to 150 or so validators on the chain as well. Yeah, there's 100. And anybody can join by staking the necessary amount to get into that validator set.
Starting point is 01:07:06 It uses tendermint consensus. Very cool. Well, thanks for explaining this experiment. and for hanging with us today, Zach, we appreciate it. Yeah, thanks a lot for having me on. Are you all going to be in Denver or what? Absolutely. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:07:20 Yeah. All right. Yeah. Yeah. There's also that music festival in Nashville, Zach. That's not too far away that I'm coming for. Come through, man. You're welcome to crash here.
Starting point is 01:07:29 Christians here too. We should all go out. Yeah. Yeah. This is some old POV crypto days that we're never talking about right now. We should have another POV, one for the time. I wonder what Christian thinks of Kanto, David. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:07:40 I'm sure it's the same. Bitcoin Maxi take that. He knows all about it. He knows all about it. I hang out of them all the time. He knows all about it. That's awesome. For Bankless Sisters, I don't know what we're talking about.
Starting point is 01:07:51 Again, I've sent this a few times. I used to do an old podcast called POV Crypto podcast, which was me and my very Bitcoinser co-host, and who is now at Bitcoin Media, Bitcoin Magazine. And so people, I'll defend myself against the Ethereum Maxi label over and over and over again. My Genesis was in having a podcast with a podcast with a business. Bitcoiners, Zach was on there a number of times. And so this is why I'm able to speak.
Starting point is 01:08:17 What did you say on this podcast, Zach? Were you arguing with Christian too? Well, it's funny because I got started in blockchain through Bitcoin. And then I found Ethereum in 2015. So I like identify with like as both a Bitcoin maximalist and in ETH Max. Yeah, both tribes. I don't really like, I'm not really extreme on either one. I know where both groups are coming from.
Starting point is 01:08:39 And then like as people have joined like they take these different states. I tend to be kind of agnostic. Like, I understand Bitcoin because that's what got me into blockchain. I love it. And Ethereum just like made more sense when it came out because applying business logic to transactions is like, duh. Like, you know? So I don't know.
Starting point is 01:08:56 Yeah. So I would just kind of like talk about, well, at White Block, I kind of made a name for myself on calling out a bunch of like bullshit. EOS. EOS. YOS, made the report about EOS's networking capabilities. Wow. That was White Block back in the day.
Starting point is 01:09:09 And it was like EOS's transact, boasted transaction. throughput is like 10,000 times its actual amount. This was 2018, you guys published this, right? Yeah, yeah, it's 2018. Yeah, that was my early research. And so like I can't like what I what I'm good at is figuring out complicated systems and reducing them to very simple things. Like you know, it's like most things are just hit the button. This is what happens. And, uh, you know, like a lot of people are kind of coming out during that ICO wave and promising the world to everybody. It's like, we can do this, we can do that. But it was mostly bullshit and it was mostly scammers, you know,
Starting point is 01:09:46 that aren't even around anymore. So, like, you know. Ryan, this is the report that, like, all the Ethereum people used to, like, show, like, a lot of people, like, kind of felt the EOS wasn't legitimate and their claims were ridiculous. And then this report came out. I remember. And then it's like, look at this guy.
Starting point is 01:10:02 This is what we've been telling you. And then it also led into, like, all the Ethereum. crowd being like, oh, multi-coin had rotated out of their EOS narrative, but they're going to try it again, and then they did it again with so long. Yeah. So these people have been doing the same thing over and over and over again throughout the history of this industry. So, yeah, it's nothing new, you know, but that's kind of like how I like broke into the East
Starting point is 01:10:27 scene was kind of by saying, calling people out on this bullshit, you know? It's just like way too, like, we need to use our powers for good, you know? There you go. We'll end it there. I need to use our powers for good. I know that was a fake close of the show, but we just had to talk to Zach about a little bit longer. So we appreciate you coming on, man.
Starting point is 01:10:45 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks a lot, dudes. Cheers. Cheers. Risk and disclaimers. Of course, I got to let you know that Canto is risky. So is all of crypto. So is DFI.
Starting point is 01:10:54 All this stuff is, you could lose what you put in. Let me repeat. You could lose what you put in. We're headed West. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.
Starting point is 01:11:07 Thank you.

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