Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Adrian Brink & Christopher Goes: Anoma – The Blockchain 'Undefining Money'

Episode Date: April 6, 2022

Anoma is a set of protocols that puts privacy front and center. It aims to facilitate “Self-Sovereign Communities” by providing tools that grant increased control to individuals and communities governing their day-to-day interactions and activities. We were joined by co-founders Adrian Brink and Christopher Goes, to help unravel the complex offering that is the Anoma Network. Hear as we chat about why they created Anoma, some use cases to explain how it works, and the roadmap going forward.Topics covered in this episode:What led Adrian and Christopher to starting their own PoS blockchainWhat 'undefining money' actually meansHow Anoma worksThe Namada blockchainMulti asset shielded pools - why aren't they used more often?A deep dive into the technical components of AnomaThe relationship between Anoma and NamadaThoughts on FATF and recent moves to make sending KYC information with transactions mandatoryTimelines for upcoming launchesEpisode links: AnomaDiscordAnoma on TwitterAdrian on TwitterChristopher on TwitterSponsors: Tally: Tally is a new wallet for Web3 and DeFi that sees the wallet as a public good. Think of it like a community-owned alternative to MetaMask. - https://epicenter.rocks/tallycashCowSwap: CowSwap is a Meta-Dex Aggregator built by Gnosis. It taps into all on-chain liquidity - including other dex aggregators such as Paraswap, 1inch and Matcha - offering the best prices on all trades. It provides some UX perks (no gas costs for failed transactions!) and protects traders against MEV. - https://epicenter.rocks/cowswapThis episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/438

Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Brian Crane. And I'm here with Frederica Ernst. Today, we're going to speak with Adrian Brink and Chris Goes. They're the co-founders, so two of the co-founders of Anoma. Anoma is a new proof-of-stake network or proof-of-stake network of networks. There's lots and lots of innovations that they've done on many different dimensions and we look forward to diving into that with them and yeah before we get into that briefly a few words about our sponsors so first of all we have tallyho so tallyho is redefining the wallet as a public good so it's a bit like a community-owned alternative to metamask so you can enter

the metaverse with this wallet that's fully community-owned and it's also kind of Dow governed They became also the first sponsor of Etherr.js.js and open source JavaScript library helping developers connect Ethereum. And they are committing 2.5% of their token supply to some Gitcoin grant. So yeah, go check it out at tally.cash. And then second of all, we have Kioswap. So Kioswop, of course, is a project that comes out of Gnosis. And And cow swaps basically aims to address some of the problem with Dexas. So Dexas are vulnerable to things like front running, MEP, failed transaction, high gas costs. And Cow Swap offers a new kind of trading experience.

So it's basically kind of a Dex aggregator aggregator. It finds overlapping orders. And Cow stands for Queens and the Wands, actually something that's also kind of discussed in the Anoma white paper. and so you know it kind of gets you the best price and they also just did the airdrop so and first cow swap improvement protocols are done are going through so it's kind of like fully live with also the cow token v cow that's trading and swappable so and you know LP program and all that kind of stuff so go to kowswop.exchange and you can start there so with that let's go to our episode so it's really great to have on

you know, Chris and Adrian, I've known both, I've known Adrian for a long time. So this was like in, I guess, early 2017, summer 2017. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, and I was working at Cosmos, or Attendment, and then Adrian joined soon after. And then of course, Chris also kind of, I guess Chris sort of joined Tenement, I think, when I was sort of leaving, a start course, but still, you know, still working in the Cosmos ecosystem. And then, of course, Chris came and did a lot of work on IBC and, you know, a bunch of other stuff. So, yeah, when then, of course, they also started, I guess, in parallel, they started a validated company called Cryptium that then, of course, one, we kind of took over as they discontinued that and

to focus on Anoma, which is, you know, an ambitious and, large sort of attempt at reinventing proof of stake network. So super excited to how you both on. Thanks so much for joining us. Glad to be here. Boy, when you say it like this, Anoma and Kores won't sound like some kind of complicated family history. Right.

Yeah, there's some investment going on. But maybe we can spend like, I don't know where we should. start. I think like history and backgrounds is maybe going a bit too far. I mean, maybe we can just start with like anoma. Like what was what was sort of the impetus that you both decided, okay, you want to, you know, start your own proof of stake blockchain? Yeah, I guess I can quickly take this. Maybe to like quickly give you like a one sentence explanation of what anoma is, right? Because it's not just yet another proof of stake chain. Really high level. You can think of Hanoma's a suite of protocols for privacy preserving human coordination with as much information

density as possible. We can dive more into this, what this means specifically throughout this episode, but this is sort of as an initial statement. Yeah, the idea for a normal actually came out of, I think it was like middle of 2020 when our Chris and I sat down, I think in Berlin, like, You know, we had a lot of these smart contract platforms, and it really wasn't clear. I think to me it's still not super clear what we should be using all these platforms for, because practically speaking with like 15 smart contracts written by 200 people, and we all claimed thousands of smart contracts written by tens of thousands of developers. But practically speaking, right, the set is very small,

and we didn't want to build yet another smart contract platform. And to us, what seemed important is to, one, the privacy, preserving, so provide universal privacy to any asset, really, and to provide as much privacy as possible when users interact with these systems, and when users also discover counterparties, so when they coordinate with other people using the same platform, and also to allow end users to really focus more on human coordination, where when you, sort of how do you discover counterparties with whom you can settle, how do you have thousands of users, So join to a single transaction because you can have these scenarios where IFBDC, you have

ETH and someone else's ETH and Dot, then the third person is Dot and Heath, I guess, I started with. And so how do you, if you have a non-overlapping sets of desires or intents, how do you settle this and how can you have thousands of parties? So you have thousands of unique intents that are individually unsettable, but then you can settle together on chain. really like the end goal is to bring as much information into these human exchanges as possible, right? When you think of something like an election or even like a purchase, it's a very information reductive system

where you have a sort of single binary point where it's like you have an election to buy a choice vote. You buy coffee. You have a purchase price that you're buying this coffee at. None of these systems are very information dense. And with blockchains, we can make all of these interactions a lot more information dense so that we can have all. automatic decentralized compute that sort of enforces my preferences on how I want to interact with the world so that every time I buy coffee, I get carbon neutral coffee and either this coffee is actually carbon neutral down the supply chain or buy at the same time CO2 certificates to offset the cost of carbon of my coffee. For me, part of the thesis for Anoma came from some of my past experience. I worked on a decentralized exchange protocol on Ethereum called Wyburn, which somewhat surprisingly ended up being very popular.

as it was used by OpenC, but even at the time which I wrote it, I thought that that kind of protocol really needed a full-stack architecture in order to work well. I think this is manifest in, for example, that OpenC is kind of this, you know, somewhat central point in the Ethereum ecosystem because the liquidity is held on a database. The only thing that's decentralized settlement and part of Anoma's design is to really approach that problem of exchange from a full-stack design perspective, which means you can decentralize when appropriate to many more things. And you can kind of solve the problem looking at what does the digital system itself need to do in mediating physical exchanges in a physical world through abstractions, which makes sense,

which correspond in the right ways. And I think approaching that as a full stack design problem is really necessary. So Anoma's tagline is undefining money, right? So how does that fit into the, um, this idea of kind of abstracting certain things away? I would say that it fits in and that the problem is that money abstracts too many things away. It's odd that somehow blockchains have ended up creating a lot of more different kinds of money. You know, perhaps that's helpful.

Perhaps there are many different things we want to be representing and we should represent them with different assets. But I would make the case, at least to some extent, that the problem is money itself. that often, let's say we have some kind of complex supply chain. So when you're making purchase decisions, your decisions have causal ramifications all up and down the supply chain. If you choose to buy a certain kind of coffee, your decisions, not individually, but an aggregate,

are used by producers to determine what they produce. Yet when you make that decision, you're making the decision only on the basis of what information is immediately available to you, which is usually just price. Maybe there's a fair trade label on one of the coffee bags. Maybe there are two fair trade labels, but there's not a lot of information about all of these different production practices which are going on.

Many of these companies or other entities along the supply chain who are involved in producing the choices which you see in front of you are competing with each other, both on the basis of producing cheaper coffee and on the basis of producing propaganda, which is more effective and convincing you to buy the thing. So when you're making decisions based solely on price, then companies which can sacrifice some other value, which you might have, such as, say, impact on the environment companies which can produce coffee, which is slightly cheaper, say, or even producing a coffee bag, which is cheaper by deforesting the Amazon or emitting some pollution into the Sen will win in a competitive market because that externality is not being captured by the system, even though it is, in some sense, at least it seems

valued by the users of that system. So to me, this is a failure in mechanism to sign. And in order to better incorporate the preferences of the people involved in these large complex economic systems, we have two choices. One option is a reduction in complexity, so we could go back and live in tribes and absent some other solution, I think that's kind of the default, but there are some nice things about complex society, maybe it's worth saving. And if we want to save it, I think we need mechanisms for coordination, which are better at capturing the, at the very least, the sort of first parts of the power law of impacts. So we can't measure everything about the causal ramifications of purchasing coffee, right? It's just

immediately computationally and feasible. But maybe we can measure some of the most important things if we have a kind of system that allows us to internalize and computer. So by contrast, let's suppose that you wanted to exhaustively research the impacts of all of your choices on the economy. You would need to, whenever you make a purchasing decision, research all of the suppliers, all of the choices they made to protection practices they're using which go into that thing and you need to perform some kind of causal calculus to determine like, okay, what is the sort of individual impact of your choice on this complex system? Because many of the choices have relations which are non-linear, right? The company, buy seven block. In order to do that, you probably need to

spend like five years of your life. Once I read a thesis, master's thesis, I think, by some three students at UCSD who went through the supply chain for a pair of common sneakers like running shoes. And it took them three years and they managed to trace 50 percent about. half of the organizations involved in that supply chain and what their production practices were like. So we need a fancy spreadsheet. It's very good at doing calculations and it's tamper resistant. And that seems to be the thing which blockchains are good at providing.

Okay. So I kind of, I totally hear a lot of these problems. So I totally agree that there's a lot of externalities that are not priced into things and that basic information is difficult to obtain when you. make consumer choices. 100%. But why kind of attack this from the side of the money? Why can't you just have, say, an attestation server that kind of, for instance,

tells me that the sweater I'm buying was made by people who were paid a livable wage and the cotton was farmed in a sustainable way and so on? So to be clear, I think you also need that. Blockchains don't verify data about the external world. There's nothing the blockchain can do except serve as a kind of censor, a tamper-resistant ledger for maybe some kinds of multi-party Oracle system, which is like, I guess, the attestation server you're talking about. A blockchain can be used as a record, which has some nice properties you might want

for a record, but it can't measure the actual data. Humans or human organizations have to do that. What I think the blockchain can do is make it, uh, provide a canonical. So in some sense, the benefit blockchain brings here is a centralization, not decentralization. It's one spreadsheet. And if you have one spreadsheet that measures production practices, then you can incorporate this into an economic system. So instead of every company or every individual needing to independently audit their supply chain, this is what happens at the moment. Only the really, really large corporations can do this because it requires a lot of time. But

really large corporations can go through and audit their supply chains, and sometimes they have to do so for legal compliance reasons. But right now, mostly this happens by them independently auditing their supply chains because there's no way to track the data at the time the practice of production actually occurs. So it seems at least plausibly that if it were possible to track the data when the practice of production occurs and track it in a way that is also compatible for the companies involved, namely it has to be private. People don't want to reveal all of what they're doing all of the time. Then having a logically centralized, operationally decentralized, letter might provide a way to compute over this data.

So you could reason about impacts. So just to kind of to recap this, so I mean, obviously this is a multi-dimensional problem, right? So basically, obviously, the factors that kind of, the production factors that go into producing whatever can be measured along several dimensions. So for instance, maybe I care about river pollution. Maybe I care about some sort of minimum wage. Maybe I care about not having something produced by children or having something not flown around the world, but, you know, did actually brought on a container ship or even produced locally and so on.

So basically, your idea would be that the sweater I would buy, basically, that would actually come with a register of properties. So for instance, locally hands soon in Brunberg or died only with organic dyes or made without the contributions of slaves or children or whatever. And then basically I could kind of I could choose which ones of the blocks that are not checked to offset manually. Is that kind of the idea? Kind of, but also that you could negotiate by making a commitment. So you could say that you're not going to, it would probably be on the basis of exclusion, like externalities you don't want, since those are fewer to list. And you could maybe make a commitment to say,

I'm just not going to buy products, which contribute to, say, environmental pollution in such and such a fashion and such and some magnitude. And if a bunch of people make those commitments together, corporations or producers can see this, and it changes their incentives for what to produce in the first place. Okay, but then basically this entire thing turns into an Oracle problem, right? So how do I prove that the sweater is river pollution-free? I don't think, I mean, blockchains can serve as a like good ledger

and they can serve as a point of settlement for some kind of shelling point game or multiple people report and their censorship resistant, which is helpful. I think you still need human organizations to solve the Oracle problem. But part of that is a computation over the economic transactions which are happening. And I think blockchain is could be helpful there. Maybe an important point to also note here is that this is an example application, right? This isn't necessarily something that is short-term feasible. I think this is something that sort of becomes feasible over the next 10 years as more and more data becomes available on decentralized systems.

It is more general. I think the important point is that a nomad doesn't actually know what a carbon price is or what an asset is or what an asset is or what a trade is or even what sort of a settlement prices. It is just, we've built and designed anoma around the premise that people can bring whatever assets they want

and can do incredibly flexible compute over those assets that can be both transparent as well as private. One thing I'm curious about But I remember if I read that or heard it somewhere mentioned, but that, you know, anoma doesn't, you know, there's no asset issuance on noma itself, but only these, you know, the kind of transaction. So in the end, is it fair to kind of characterize anoma as, you know, as sort of an attempt

that creating a very generalized marketplace? I wouldn't say marketplace necessarily. Maybe let me start with asset issuance, so you can theoretically issue assets on anoma. There's nothing preventing people from doing this. You have similar facilities to what, in terms of user programmability, that would allow you to build these kind of,

recalling them validity predicates that allow you to build acid issuance programs. I think our fundamental thesis with Onoma, though, is that there are, tons of places that issue assets already. And nine months ago, the world became interoperable with Chris publishing IBC. Okay, this was kind of, but yeah, so now this is interoperable, and we can just leverage a lot of these assets that exist in the ecosystem to flow in

and out of anoma. And so anoma is just there to not provide asset issuance, but rather to provide really good base layer functionality for assets that already exist. For example, another thing that, has that no one else has at this point in time is an intent incentivized intent gossip and matchmaking system so it like when you think about discovering counterparties right on sort of what happens in unisop or on a theory most Moses actually is that you have the contract being the central counterparty as in i always interact with the contract and the contract is sort of the shelling point where everyone goes to

discover the counterparties what you can do with onoma is you can instead have uh issue an intent which is cryptographically signed. And then you can have sort of 100 million intents floating around this large soup. And there's an economic incentive for people to look at all these intends and see if they're combinable. As in, you can sort of,

someone can look at the soup of 100 million intents and go, oh, these 15, if I combine them and settle them on chain or submit them as a transaction on chain, they will satisfy each one of the criteria. And they don't have to be direct matches. This is sort of the important point, because intents are just programmable.

Like, it's just code. It's not a price. It's not a specific asset. This is not what an intent understands. An intent is just at runtime interpretable code that says whether it's okay with some future state outcome. So you can have one intent that says, I'm happy to have one Bitcoin less if I have 10 more ETH, and the weather in Berlin is nice. And then you can have 14 other intents that sort of combine into this.

And when you submit them on chain, all the validity prep, all these intents return true to whether they are happy with the resulting state. outcome. This is something that you can't build on any existing system and removes the need to have these very centralized counterparty discovery points like a UNISOP AMM contract, which is cool. It doesn't exist at this point. And you combine this with a bunch of front running tech to make this front running resistance and sensitive resistance. So maybe it would make sense because I think it's probably not so easy for people like listening to kind of like wrap their head around like what is that going on so i wonder if you can speak about i don't know like a few use cases like you know like where you think like okay that's sort of

the thing that you know it's going to work best and you know kind of like run through you know what that looks like and maybe the different stakeholders in those in those examples yeah actually we I guess we can start with Amara. So this is sort of, there's no Twitter account yet for this, but we are probably launching a blockchain data this year called Namara to just sort of, which has taken about 20% of mainlandanoma and gone, you know, this works right now. We can put this onto its own chain and launches as the first chain in the Enoma ecosystem.

So, and you can sort of see this as the first use case. So what Namada does is just provide multi-acid privacy, right? just provide acid agnostic privacy guarantees there there is a single shield pool in which all assets can live. So an end user could move and like Cryptopunk from Ethereum over the bridge into Nomada, move it into the shield pool there. And again, and now this Cryptopunk lives on the same privacy set as all the USC, all the dye, all the atoms, all the Osmo, all the NAM. And it's indistinguishable from each other, from all the other assets when you interact with this. And so this is a use case. This will work in.

So the use case, so the example would be like, I have a crypto punk, you know, I want to sell my crypto punk for something, right? This doesn't involve trading it. This is just privacy. Wait, so why do I, why do I want to use, so if I, so I have my crypto punk on Ethereum, so why do I want to move it over there? Because you want privacy for your crypto punk. This also works for saw simple payments. You want to do simple... You mean if I want to, like, if I want to, like, move the crypto prompt to a different

Ethereum address, but I don't want people to be able to link to two addresses, for example. For example, yeah. To be fair, the NFT thing, I should probably not start on this. NFTs are much harder in this regard. This is way easier to understand with fungible tokens. Think of this as you want to have cheap, multi-assad privacy for your USDC or your atoms. You can move them into Nomada, move them to your shield, move them around, hold them into the shield pool because we've come up with a very interesting new circuit design that allows Nomada to incentivize assets that are being held in the shield pool. Because honestly, this is like a shield pool is a public good that we should be sort of incentivizing people to use.

But while they're in the shielded pool, they do they do anything? I mean, let's say, okay, so let's say we don't want a punk example because I guess you can see the punk still afterwards. But so let's say the example of like, I don't know, UST, right? I have a bunch of UST. So I'm going to move the UST into this shielded pool. And I guess one use case would be I want to like take it out, put it into a different address, right? I want to send somebody some UST.

I don't want them to see all my wallet, right? Which is actually, I guess, a pretty common problem today, right? And probably the best solution, ironically, is like the centralized system. where you actually, oh, I'm going to send it from like Binance, right? Because, okay, Binance knows, but at least like not everybody knows. So I can see that example. Is that kind of the example you're talking about? Yes.

This is sort of a very simple use case, which is just multi-asset privacy. Both in order to make your assets private, not because you want to send them to other people, because you want to make your own holdings private that have already been publicized, or you want to send pay your contract. contractor and USDT. And yes, currently we're all using exchanges as mixers effectively. We're all going, oh yeah, everyone gets a unique address and I withdraw from Krak and to my unique addresses and then I pay people from those.

It's not a good model. Like no one can tell me this. And why, so your question was also why should assets within the shill pool actually earn sort of inflationary rewards? In the shillopool, the assets in the shillip pool contribute to the overshould all privacy set. So in the same sense that assets in a liquidity pool contribute to the overall liquidity assets in a shield pool contribute to the overall privacy set. So, and this is something you don't want to have many different privacy sets over time. Ideally, you have one really large one that everyone uses. And this is why we have this incentive design to allow people to hold

assets in the shield pool and earn rewards on them. So let's say like in the UST example, just to say on that. So, I mean, like, let's say today maybe I'm providing liquidity on osmosis also, right? And is it something that like, will it be possible to kind of, you know, provide liquidity on something like osmosis? For example, while having it in the shield approval? I don't think so. No. So it's like these should be binary choices.

as in sort of the same similar with staking right except with private pools and generally zero knowledge proofs this gets way harder than everyone thinks so you generally have to like pick which thing you move your asset into i have several technical questions can i ask them so my first technical question is um multi acid shielded pools why don't we see them more often because i mean if you if you look at things like sea cash and tornado and so on, they're always single acid. Good question. You know, we actually built the multi-acid shield pool a year ago and we released it as open source and no one has launched it yet. So, yeah, I'm not quite sure. Maybe because Ethereum gas fees are very high, maybe because IBC until recently wasn't particularly popular. so there haven't been many interconnected assets on a low-cost transfer protocol.

I think multi-asset shielded pools are pretty obvious. Yeah. Single asset shield pools don't make that much sense unless you, I mean, like Zcash has this problem, right? Like the value of ZCash is sort of being tied to having access to the shillow pool. And I think that especially in the Zcash community, there were concerns about if you allow other assets into that chielopool, why would anyone use Zec? because this was sort of the monetary play on the asset. And on Ethereum, I mean, if you've tried all these solutions, they are like horrendously expensive, tornado cash is something like $300 to use, to do a single transaction with it.

And maybe also the other big thing, which for some reason most people haven't done, which I think is because circuit design is very, very hard and way harder than a general public expects, is that you can move assets within the Shillot pool, right? And like Tornado Cash allows you to sort of deposit fixed denominations of assets and withdraw them. It's not actually that there's a shiloh pool for ETH in Ternet Cash. There's a shiloh pool for 0.1Eth and 1Eth and 10th and 100Eth. They actually have four shiloh pools for ETH internayal Cash. And you cannot move them within.

This has changed since. So basically you can actually you can actually deposit arbitrary amounts. And the fees have also gone way down because it's now on Nosis chain. Try it out. It's awesome. I'll try it on. Fantastic. So my second question is, is this UTXOR account-based?

Because basically it sounded like in principle it was account-based, but how do you do this with an account? The short answer is that it's both. So in the private bartering, so in the, the, MASP is UTXO-based as in order to get privacy for using zero-knowledge proofs for some kind of system. Privacy using zero-knowledge proofs is always achieved by having the parties to whom you want the data to be private, hold the data, and make the proofs, which means that you need to have, like, as opposed to public accounts, you need to have the accounts themselves be private and be, like, known only by the users. It's possible in principle to architect an account system using ZKPs, but it requires a different kind of private burglary lookup, which is very tricky. So the MASP uses UTXOs, and the more generalized circuit that we're working on called Taiga for private bartering also has notes, but it has programmable validity predicates attached to the notes. So both assets and users have additional circuits defined as recursive circuits in the TIGA circuit,

which must pass in order for the transaction to validate. These are used for intents and for assets, for example. An asset validity predicate circuit could contain logic around when it's possible to mint or burn assets or who is allowed to transfer assets, even although that's checked in private. and a user validity predicate could contain information about what keys are needed to authorize the transfer for different amounts or how much the user account is allowed to send in a day. And an intent validity predicate could cover like anyone can redeem this note and spend it themselves if they spend me a note of a different cryptocity, something like that.

So the barter which the user wishes to perform. And specifically sort of on the account was U2XO distinction. So the multi-acid fuel pool is just another account both on Namada as well as an Anoma. So it is deployed as a validity predicate where the validity predicate just verifies the proofs against the masked circuit. So Namada and Anoma are both account-based systems to which you can deploy circuits like the MASP. And on Namada, it just happens that the MASP is one of the first circuits that we're deploying. Okay, I have a lot of questions. Maybe I leave most of them out right now.

But so maybe, I mean, you kind of, you keep distinguishing between Anoma and Namada. So basically, Anoma is the ledger and Namada is the blockchain. This is another distinction. No, this is not correct. Okay. I see you're shaking your head. So please set me right here. Both are blockchains.

It just happens that Namada is a sort of, it's called a specific subset of features that initially we wanted to also put into mainot anoma but we saw when you know this is really way earlier let's just put this onto its own chain and launch it and see what people think because we can provide multi-acid privacy alcoholic uncle of anoma yeah i wouldn't put it that way but um i i guess alcoholic uncle who's too drunk to remember what you transferred that's why it's private i guess no but so both are just blockchain And just a nomada happens to be ready earlier, and we can launch this this year to buy multi-assad privacy people, whereas the entire private bartering interface or private bartering applications with main anomal would are still going to take until early 2023. And then like later on, so let's say we have this anoma and then we have this amanda.

Are these like independent blockchains that, you know, they're just going to like interact with IBC, they have their own staking token, their own valid asset? Or like, what is going to be the relationship between these two blockchains? They are fractal instances. So Anoma has a different, you could call it a scaling architecture, which separates two concerns of architectural homogeneity and security model homogeneity. So if you think about, if we look at sort of blockchain scaling architectures writ large, you can kind of classify them in two dimensions. There's architecture like what is the what's the VM system like for Ethereum is the EVM for something like nearer's web assembly, how do key formats work, how do applications interface with their protocol.

That's one dimension. The other dimension is security model, both in theory like what's the proof of stake system? Is it proof of stake at all for proof of work? And also in practice, who's operating it? what are the concrete validators and voting powers, right? And generally, those two dimensions have been designed in parallel. So, like, Ethereum has a, if you want to deploy to Ethereum, you use the Ethereum architecture and you accept the Ethereum security model.

There's like one major instance that supports that architecture and then now some other change which also support the EVM. And if you want to deploy to Pocod, there's sort of Pocodot architecture to Pocodot security model. If you look at the, like, if you look at all. all of the blockchains, which talk via interoperability protocols like IBC or bridges, those have heterogeneous architecture and a heterogeneous security model. So you have different security models based on which chain you're interacting with, and you have different architectures.

The idea of fractal instances is to have a, you know, these are of course broad generalizations, but a more homogenous architecture while having a heterogeneous security model with the idea that there might be a sort of, there's a lot of benefit to standardizing architecture. It's a kind of benevolent monopoly. Everyone can use applications which work with the same technical stack and same serenolid circuits, stuff like this, while security models are something that you might want to vary more based on application, based on what you're actually trying to do with the blockchain, what's the real world value attached, and who do you trust to handle your assets or, you know, settle your

transactions for you. That sounds basically like the cosmos model, though, where you have like Cosmos SDK, which you know, I mean, maybe there's some modification that chains do, but, you know, a lot of the fundamental thing is the same, but then, you know, they have their own validator sets. So how does it differ from that? I think they can all be an interoperable happy family. It's not, not designed as a competitor of cosmos. But I would distinguish maybe which parts of the stack are standardized. So we're not intent, that there's no like state machine framework as part of the Anoma architecture.

The whole application stack is standardized. So, you know, people can pick and choose different components if they want. But when you write an application on the Anoma architecture, you're writing an application which has a part, you know, logic defined for intent gossip and matchmaking and logic defined for settlement. That application could run on, you know, any Anomifractal instance. So it could run on the fractal instance in Berlin or the factual instance for Europe or the fractal instance run in your backyard between four friends or it could run on the global instance.

Different fractal instances over time will, I mean, Nomada doesn't start supporting the whole in Omaha architecture. And maybe it will remain just focused on shielded transfers, which is nice because it can provide quality of service guarantees that are more difficult to provide if it targets a more general use case. But the idea is, for example, that you could have assets in a wallet. on your phone and as you go around traveling, those assets can automatically roam, almost like cell phone roaming, subject to some of your preferences for safety, to different ANOMA instances as you

need to settle bartering. This is arguably also how humans scale, right? I think one thing we keep forgetting is that so with all the shouting solutions, we have single security models which are single points of failure. To some extent, we probably shouldn't design a world financial system that has single points of failures, even if those single points of failures are decentralized in themselves. What we ideally want is financial systems, which are interoperable decoupled, as in like the financial system in Europe should be able to fail independently of the financial system in the US. And you want to, as a user, be able to take your assets from between those financial systems. And then if your assets happen to be in the US while the US financial system fails, then that's a problem.

But if you ask us within Europe, while the US financial system fails, then you're fine. This is how we've built very resilient civilizations over time. And for some reason, we keep throwing out this idea when we start designing blockchains at this point in time. Does this mean that the ANOMA ecosystem is stateless? I would say that the point of sticky standardization, the thing that's hard to change is the protocol. We're trying to design it so that it's easy to change the instance, so that if you just decide that you don't like your validators anymore, you can fire them and go somewhere else. And you can fire them without necessarily coordinating with everyone else who uses the same instance

because the protocol is interoperable. So if you want to, the cost of secession is low. So if you want to, you know, take a few of your friends and start using another instance, but retain your ability to transact with the quote-unquote main economy, you can do that. that the thing which is sticky and the thing which we think it's beneficial to standardize correspondingly is this architecture. So what the circuits are, how the protocol works, how even to the level of like how applications communicate with it. So that if you really want to, you know, if the validators go berserk and you really

need to change your economy, you can like take a state dump and spin up a new instance. And that will just work. But then so still like these different chains, then. would have their own validator set, their own staking token, and that's still the case. And that's kind of a proof of stake system similar to something like Cosmos? They don't have to be proof of stake. Anoma uses obviously so perhaps a modified version,

but chains can be proof of stake. They can be proof of authority. They can be proof of work with some kind of finality gadget. They can be a proof of some other kind of identity even. Okay, okay. But yes, Namara and Anoma are both proof of stick with separate tokens. So on the token model, I think the closest in existence so far is pretty Krasama in pocket up. It's an imperfect comparison.

But yes, there's separate tokens, separate chains, separate security models. Namada also has an inbuilt governance module, right? Or facilities? I mean, you can vote and signal, right? Yep, that's right. How does that work? And basically, what kind of powers does it give to the token holders? It's quite simple.

The nomadic governance module acts is just a credible proof of stake voting, power backed signaling, so anyone can create a text proposal, and people can vote on that, and everyone can see that a certain amount of stake, such as two-thirds, is backed a particular written text proposal. Nomada governance proposals can also execute code. Namada supports WebAssembly, just not complete user programmability yet, so the governance system can execute code and change parameters or deploy different validity predicates. Maybe it's important point out here as well that there are very few functionalities built into the protocols, as in the protocol is really just a way to have interpretation at runtime.

So, for example, proof of stake is just another validity predicate in the system, the same way that multi-acetyl field is just another validity's predicate in the system. The same applies to governance as well as to IBC. So most functionalities are really just built as validity predicates at the same level as user deployed code. Cool. Maybe let's zoom out. So Namada is

the part of the protocol family that's live now. Let's talk about anoma and what it will add to that. Sure. Just to clarify, Nomada, unfortunately, is not live now.

Hopefully it will be live later this year. There is a test set. Okay. Sorry. We're using gist. Namada is live. I'll take it. I'll take it and run with it. Numata is live. There's a test net.

You could find information about it on the GitHub, and there will be more test nets with more features coming soon. What does a number add to that? Well, the other 80%. So, Nomada already has proof of the state. It already has multi-asset shielded transfers. It already has a governance system, but it doesn't have programmatic private bartering.

It doesn't have a consensus system called Typhon that we're building. And it doesn't have the imposterous system called Typhon that we're building. And it doesn't have the impover intent costs have been matchmaking layer. It also doesn't have Ferbio yet for front training protection. Yes, please absolutely give an example because I think we could all use one. Sure thing. So the example I like to use a private bartering, because I think it's grounded in a kind

of physical scarcity, which is likely to remain a problem that people want bartering systems to solve for a long time, as an example of going to a concert. So let's say that I want to take a train with my friend to a concert in another city in Germany, some kind of a nice festival in the summer where they play on the tech and music featuring interesting artists. I want to get cheap tickets to the concert. I want to go with my friend.

I need to train in a hotel in tickets to be synchronized, but I want it to be as cheap as possible and I want to buy on the secondary market. So I need to buy along with... I don't care which specific weekend this ticket is for the festival as long as it's like one of these four weekends and I can go with my friend.

So using Anoma, I could create an intent in the private bartering system, which expresses these combination constraints that along with my friend and we're going to split the payment, I want to buy two tickets to this festival, two train tickets, and two hotel rooms. They need to be synchronized. They need to be for the same weekend dates. If I have a train for one weekend in a hotel for another weekend in concert tickets for a third weekend, it's not very useful. But otherwise, I'm fine with any of the weekends and I want to get the cheapest price possible. You can use the Enoma intent cost of a matchmaking system along with settlement to both discover counterparties to find people and they could be different people who are selling hotel tickets, train tickets, and concert tickets, and to settle with them, to pay them the money. Maybe there are many counterparties and settle that transaction privately on the ledger, atomically, so that you're insured that you and your friend both get tickets. You can go with each other and you're going on the same weekend, whatever weekend that is.

I understand the problem. I'm intimately familiar with the problem, not because I go to, not because I go to lots of events and book hotels, but because we build something similar named Cow Swap. So basically, if you want to find the cheapest price for everyone or the fairest price for everyone, I can assure you this is an NP-Hart problem. So how do you solve that? Yeah. I mean, the other constraint we're operating under is privacy, as in we don't want users using

the intent gossip system to reveal more than they have to about their identities. So basically, you have five problems that we're trying to solve at the same time. Yeah. So the plan we've come up with this in the private intent gossip system so far is a sort of progressive price discovery, where users broadcast intents that expire. So I start out offering and I start out with kind of the lowest price, a price that is probably not. No one is going to offer for lowest price for these items, which I want, atomically, tickets for hotels, train, and the concert. And I can increase that price successively as soon as my previous intent expires.

So I start with an intent that's valid for 30 seconds at this price. Then I can, as long as I'm willing to keep going up, keep increasing the price until I see it settled. that provides a kind of private price discovery and that you don't reveal the maximum price you're willing to pay immediately. And you also don't need to reveal your individual identity. You're just like revealing that you want programmatically these kinds of tickets and you're willing to pay in this asset.

And maybe also the important thing to add here is that none of this happens necessarily on chain, right? This isn't that you're deploying, that you're sort of sending transactions with an increasing price. it is that you have intents of which you can have sort of you can issue intense at half a second intervals it doesn't matter this is a non non cohesive global gossip network so you can have a hundred billion intents and not all people need to have the same view of what intents are available but their economic incentives for a role called a matchmaker to look at all these intents and go which ones are combined a long chain so you don't have the problem that you have to run all this computer on which ones are combinable on chain and in consensus. Rather, matchmakers pay fees. Of course, if they submit something that's actually not settleable,

then they lose the fees they've paid, but you aren't trying to settle every single combination on chain. Okay, so basically the matchmakers, they try to find suckers, right? So, but basically what? And then they basically, they get a percentage of the fee, right? But are the intense, are they, encrypted or are they plain text?

The what is plain text but the who is encrypted. So basically you would send, I don't know, pink for 50 euros, pink for 55 euros, pink for 60 euros and someone, we would know that someone wants to go to a pink concert but we wouldn't know it's you.

That's right. So I have some addition here. Intents don't know like they're not, because I think a lot of people, when they hear these kind of explanations, think, like, there's a sort of table you fill in as, like, I want to buy this asset. I want to sell that asset. I want to sell it for that price. This is not what Intents are. Intents are just effectively code that gets run, that gets executed at runtime when these get settled on chain to say whether someone accepts it. So you can do arbitrary things. Like you can do, say, I want to sell Bitcoin for Eith, only if it's sunny in Berlin. And if I can all. to buy a flight to San Francisco. As in the limitation is gas at this point.

It's not what is expressable. So you're going to express anything here. So one question that comes to my mind on this. So I mean if the intent is basically okay, it's not a transaction, but it's something that can be taken to like execute on chain.

And I mean, let's say my private key is, I mean in this example, right? I mean, I mean, Okay, I'm increasing the concert ticket price. You know, I mean, how do that transaction signing work? I mean, let's say, for example, my key is on a ledger. Do you then have to, like, go and sign, like, 60 transaction and accuse them and sense them, like, one by one?

So, Noma handles this by, you can think of it as splitting the authorization logic into part that's in the intent and parts that's on the ledger. And the part that's on the ledger acts as an outer. bound. So it says something like, you know, don't allow this, don't allow more than a thousand euros a day to be spent by this particular account and less authorized by my letter. But for anything under that, it's fine to use this key, which is some, you know, metamask key or even something automated run by your wallet to authorize specific intents. Those, that key would be used. the more ephemeral key would be used to assigning successfully increasing prices in that case.

And this also, of course, means that you only pay gas when something is actually matched and executed. Actually, the person paying the gas here would be the matchmaker, right? So if you take 15 different intents, the intents themselves aren't paying for gas, but the person that says that these are settled on chain pays for the gas. Okay, and the person who matchmax gets a percentage of whatever each person, person is giving or do they have to pay, do they have to pay the matchmaker? Yes, that's in the validity predicate, no, that. So, Brian already knows the answer.

It's just a guess. It is in, it is in a validity predicate. I think it's worth one, one thing I would note is that when we talk about the matchmaker here, the matchmaker is a role. It's not a designated entity like a validator. A matchmaker doesn't need a specific key. So anyone could be a matchmaker at any time. And by default, the Anoma node, when you run it, act as a participant in the intent gossip

network and as a matchmaker. So hopefully there will be a pretty decentralized set of matchmakers. To try and encourage such a decentralized set of intent gossip participants and matchmakers, we've designed an incentive system for the intent gossip network, whereby when you broadcast intents to another node, who might be a matchmaker, you can choose. choose a portion of the fee that you will get if those intents are settled. So when, and whatever fee there is remaining, which is sent by the person who initially creates it, will go to the matchmaker.

So if I am sending some intents, many of the things being bartered aren't even fungible tokens anyways. So charging a percentage is not very straightforward. If I'm just buying concert tickets, you know, I can't give the matchmaker like a quarter of the concert ticket. So to my intent, I would attach a little like, you know, if you facilitate this trade for me, and if I'm paying in dollars, it can be incorporated. But if you facilitate this trade for me, I'm willing to pay you a dollar, right? Then the next node in the intent

gossip network can look at that and say, okay, can I settle this. And if he can settle it or she can settle it, that node can directly claim the fee. But if they can't, then we have this like incentive design question where if we don't give them any way to benefit from rebroadcasting that intent, they'll probably just keep it until they get an intent, which they could settle. Why would they send it away to someone else for free. It's valuable data as liquidity. So in the NUMA architecture, when they send the intent onwards, they can basically add their signature to a signature chain and say, I will take this part of the fee. And they can actually choose how much of the fee they will take. But if the next node doesn't like that, they'll probably just project the intent, so it won't eventually be subtle.

There's this multi, multi round game going on between nodes to figure out what fees they should use on pieces of liquidity where individual nodes, which are acting rationally, will act to maximize their expected like fees times the likelihood that some piece of liquidity will be settled. So basically, you're trying to disincentivize rent seeking by any individual, but the rent seeking of the protocol itself is not minimized, right? So basically, if I'm willing to pay a dollar for a trade to be settled, I will pay that dollar, even if it costs way less. That's right, although that can be progressively discovered by broadcasting intents with different fees.

I mean, one thing that, it's maybe not so much a question as like an observation, and I'd be curious for your thoughts on that. But one thing that stood out to me, you know, was that in the white paper, you know, it talks about the, you know, P-D-P electronic cash system, you know, so of course, referencing, you know, the Bitcoin white paper and sort of the original Bitcoin, you know, the sort of regional thing that Bitcoin was, you know, kind of promoted for and envisioned for, right? Of course, over time it kind of changed. It became more of this digital gold type store value asset. But what's interesting is, I guess, normally it seems like that was thought of more in terms

of, you know, the currency, like some sort of, you know, cryptocurrency or blockchain, you know, but, you know, particular currency with maybe particular characteristics, you know. So, of course, you had like Bitcoin and then, well, I guess, let's say C-cash was like, oh, no, it's important to have, like, privacy if you have. that and and then here it's i guess you're trying to solve the same problem in some way but in like completely approaching it from a completely different angle right not not looking at in terms of a currency but looking at in terms of sort of you know how do people come to some kind of agreement right on on some kind of transaction does that make sense or that's broadly true i mean

this is also a little bit where the tagline underfinding money comes from. It's really the idea that there are lots of currencies potentially and there can be solved hundreds of millions of different currencies and every user can end up wanting to hold their own currency, right? Like if I only want to hold tokenized beanie bini babies, that's my prerogative. I can and I should be allowed to. But the big question is so once everyone can hold their own currencies, for one, how do you make those transactions private. So how do you build asset-agnostic privacy-preserving systems where you can use arbitrary currencies, where you can

sort of do private transfers with tokenized BD babies? And the other question is, if we're starting to see this explosion in currencies, which I guess at this moment we see, how do you enable bartering between different currencies very effectively without requiring sort of centralized order books? Because one other way to look at the Anoma Intent System is as user-defined runtime order books, right?

Like traditionally, when you look at centralized exchanges or at something like Uniswarp and AMM, you have protocol-defined orderbooks, right? There is like a U.S.TC-E-Eth pair, or there is an ETH-Bitcoin pair. With Anoma, there isn't any pair because the protocol doesn't know what a pair is. Rather, a user writing an intent creates this own pair, which is settable, not with a specific inverse to this. But with anything that can effectively eventually form a ring, whether this is one other party or a thousand other parties. So you can have someone that wants to trade like, I want to trade Bitcoin for Beanie Babies. Someone wants to trade Beanie babies for concert tickets

and concert tickets for chickens and chickens for cows and cows for Bitcoin. And as long as this exists, you can settle all of this. So you allow everyone to hold arbitrary different currencies and still be able to interact with each other in the financial world privately using anoma. Right. So that I can kind of, so that does seem like a nice thing, right? Because, okay, I'm going to the cafe, right? And I guess the cafe could be like, okay, I'm willing to sell like coffee for, you know, USC, for example.

Like, and then I can be, and I'm going as the person buying coffee and I'm like, oh, I want to buy coffee and I'm happy to pay, you know, Bitcoin or something else that's kind of like connected to the normal system. And then it would be like, yeah, like, I know, Frederica are running some sort of, you know, trading business on the side that is like, I'm, you know, I'm always making a market between Bitcoin and you. ACC, right? And then it's kind of that would get settled, right? So that that transaction would happen. Yeah. I mean, so that does seem like, that seems quite elegant to me. This is probably the single simplest example, right? Like what I wanted to also get out of the space when I joined. It's like I want to be able to use my phone instead of my credit card to pay in San Francisco. And if I use cash, I have all the privacy guarantees, but I have a lot of the income. of I have to physically exchange

Swiss francs for USD and then pay in the store and now I have excess USB that I don't know what to do with anymore and I can't do this digitally. With a system like Anoma I can tap my phone in San Francisco to buy coffee. The merchant can say, well, I only accept USTC

I say, well, I only want to spend digitized Swiss francs. The entire interaction can be fully private and I sort of get a mid-market rate. At the time when I tap my phone, I spent my digitized first rank and the merchant receives his USGC. And I think no one has built this for some reason, which I'm very surprised by, because

honestly, this is arguably one of the most obvious use cases for decentralized tech. But yeah, the tech wasn't there like until nine months ago with interoperability and zero knowledge groups. So we're getting there now. But yeah, this is sort of a super simple example of what you can do with something like a normal. one other topic that comes to mind you know when you talk about this

and maybe it's like going to a little bit in a different direction you know one thing we're seeing at the moment is you know this like seemingly pretty rapid attempts by governments to sort of you know enforce this basically passing KYC information right with crypto transaction right I think in Europe, they have this unhoted wallet thing. I saw the thing in Canada, right? It's a similar thing.

It's probably going to happen in like U.S., I expect, you know, like many countries. Where do you think this is going in general? And then how is that going to play in the kind of anoma architecture and system? Yeah, so, I mean, okay, I can start with the general answer. I think regulation, regulators are kind of screwed. not because they're bad at that job, but because they're too slow. As in, I think the tech is evolving way faster than regulators can understand new tech, which means that sort of this gap between what they understand and what's currently happening

keeps widening. We saw a similar thing happening with the internet, from honest, where the internet and everything built on top of it evolved way fast and regulators could understand how it works. So due to this, I'm actually fairly optimistic that it seems very unlikely that regulators will ever catch up to some of the latest cutting. edge. Specifically on this K-Y-C-A-ML side,

though, this is not an un-nomer-specific problem. This is a problem for everything that's programmable. Like, everything that's end-user programmable has this problem because you can imagine if, because you effectively need a white-listed system if you really want to enforce this.

Like, if you want to enforce that U-SDC can only be spent between authorized wallets or wallets that have been whitelisted, you would need to restrict who can interact with U-S-D-C You can't allow USC to be deposited into arbitrary contracts, because any arbitrary contract could wrap this USC and do another arbitrary computation on top of this. So as a result, if we think that regulators will catch up,

then we're effectively betting that the decentralized space will go away, because nothing can, because everything would have to be whitelisted by some sort of regulator to be able to interact with the system. like we can't combine user programmability on Ethereum and USC is only able to be used in white-distance contract with each other. They're like fundamentally incompatible. We can say USC can only use and wide-listed things, but that makes USC pointless, because all of a sudden, nothing will support this. It respects all of the interoperability aspects that contracts currently have. So I think this is sort of the more general point that regulators are probably not aware of yet, that

you can't like put a little bit of compliance on top of it. If you have full programmability and interoperability between these systems, you can always escape the regulatory environment. And so I think honestly, probably the better bet is to regulate at the edge point. So like when you go into the traditional fiat banking system, similar to our cash works nowadays because it's doable and doesn't break the entire system. I'm not sure I agree with this 100% because basically, currently if you look at how cash works, I mean, cash is regulated if you say pay in cash for something that's worth more than depending on where you are,

a thousand euros or 10,000 euros or basically the person who takes the cash or the notary who facilitates the transactions, they actually have to do KYC. And basically you have to, you don't have to show every single transaction. that led you having the money, but basically you have to make it plausible that you would come to have, I don't know, quote of a million to buy a house, right? And so basically, this is something that could conceivably be tacked onto this, just like basically if you have five euros and you go and buy a coffee, obviously no one's going to do KYC. But if you take a half a million and buy a house in cash, then yes, absolutely, you will be subject to KYC. Yeah, that works. I agree.

but what I was more referring to is sort of a blanket KYC on every transaction that's enforced at sort of a smart contract level. Like if you have counter parties with whom you need to interact to buy a house, absolutely. This also works in the existing system. This will work in the blockchain system because there are two known counterparties to this, which I think is also the right model to do, by the way. It's like a very nicely decentralized KYC AML system. Yeah.

So let's talk about, I mean, we've talked about a lot of things that you guys envisage. So kind of can you give us an idea of what's currently life, what will be live soon, and what's going to, what you think is going to take however long to build? Because it's an enormously complex undertaking, right? What's live now and what will be live soon? So the specification and prototype test net from the Mata, there is a test net. There's not yet a coordinated testnet, but those are all live on GitHub. You can find the software.

You can download it. You can play around with it. There are also prototypes of the intent gossip system and matchmaking system, along with architectural spec for TIGA, the private bordering circuit, and an architectural spec for Typhon, which is our consensus algorithm. Those I would expect will be, hopefully the private bordering circuit will be ready. later this year, along with intent-dossom and matchmaking, working with private bordering, which is pretty involved, just it has to involve a CKB generation during the Intent Gossip and Matchmaking

Phase. Typhon will probably take at least another year. But I would also say that, like, we're trying to come up with a sequence of both technological development and product deployment that makes sense. Even if we launch the full Onoma tomorrow, it probably does too many things for it to be a useful test as a kind of independent hypothesis, which is one reason why we're trying to launch a nomada is a just simpler network that can provide clear quality of service guarantees, run multi-acid shilted transfers, and hopefully pretty incentive-compatible incentive design for

giving users a pretty good shielded privacy set. We're launching that soon, and that can at least be integrated, hopefully, with a product stack, including interfaces, which can create zero knowledge proofs and a product stack which solves. I mean, there are a lot of just really awful UX problems. Tornado Cash is I think pretty decent now, but with a sort of full shielded note blockchain like Zcash, you still have to scan the whole blockchain to figure out which notes are yours. We can do something slightly better with a like a payment request system where you include a special tag on the note so you don't have to scan on your phone all of the new blocks to see if you received payment.

These UX questions sound kind of trivial, but they sometimes require changing the architecture of the blockchain or would require hardworking existing systems or changing the circuit. So we're trying to think about that on a whole architecture level so we can make sure the end product is appealing.

So no matter should probably August, September, somewhere around this October. So around this, like late summer, Namara should go live. I mean, what does this mean? Test nets, the internal testants have started. We'll probably start rolling out private test nets with a handful of people in the coming weeks. And then probably in six to eight weeks, we'll start having public testants for anyone can participate,

followed by incentivized testaments that eventually lead to decentralized launch of Namada late summer. I think at the same time, we are also going to start a trusted setup ceremony. for Planckup and our circuits, probably also in the next couple of weeks, so there's going to be downsments around there. I would expect that Mainot Anoma will probably start having test nets after Nomada launch,

gearing up for a early 2020-3 launch. It probably includes Tiger, so private battering circuits, it probably won't include Typhon. So if the consensus upgrade is probably something that happens post-a-Noma main-net launch, right the other thing that comes with an armada is also bridges so we're also launched with an ethereum bridge

it's an iBC adapter for ethereum as well as iBC adapters to a bunch of other chains and i think at that point the scaling factor will become how can you quickly write ibc adapters for every modern bfd system because there's really no reason why like nia and parkerot shouldn't communicate to each other via ibc um like the protocol doesn't matter to these people it's just how you encode data between uh like client capable blockchains.

I think that's all coming up. That sounds like, I mean, that's a very impressive technical roadmap. What about ecosystem adoption? Do you guys have an ecosystem fund to kind of foster building on Enoma? Not yet. We haven't yet made the move that every other major blockchain for some reason has made and became a VC. It seemed very strange.

I didn't expect this to happen in 2017 that every major blockchain would also become a VC at the same time. Maybe later this year. We'll see. No, I don't think so. It's the inevitable course of things. Yeah, everything becomes a VC.

Everything is not fun. No, but I mean, if people are, the first couple of people that started playing with the codebase, starting to see how intense work, how content gossip works, our matchmaking works. If you're interested,

reach out to us. We're very happy to support early prototypes. No formal structures around being a fund yet, though. You know, we could do retroactive public goods funding. If you make a Git commit now, that's permanent history. It's like a potential future air drop target. Never know. Don't say that on air.

People are going to try to rig that. I didn't say anything. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Don't complain about this later. Cool. So if people want to get in touch with you guys, how do they best reach out to you? Yeah, you can join on.

on Discord. Discord.g. slash Anoma. You can also find more information on the websites. I'll wait. We're revamping them right now on Anoma.net and nomada.net. Also in Telegram slash Anoma. Twitter, it's Anoma network, actually. Yeah. And if you just want to reach out, you can also email me, Adrian atan.an atan.coma.network, I think. No, at telex.dev actually. Adrian at heliex.com. please don't spam me now you're going to get 50 recruiters to email you about promising blockchain developers that you can hire yeah all of emails just spam at this point yeah cool well thanks so much for coming on guys so yeah i think totally it is like a pretty daring kind of crazy roadmap, you know, sort of reinventing or modifying a lot of different stuff, but I'm excited to

see, you know, how it plays out. I mean, at some point we got to like try Derek things. Just building like another layer of defy on top of the previous layer of defy to get some new derivatives going. At some point, it's very old and looks very much like a Ponzi scheme. I think not enough people do this, by the way. I think not enough people try to look like fundamentally new things in order to really see where we can take the space. This was like very different sort of like when cosmos came around, right? Like people try to still build censorship resistant tech and make proof of stake work. And I think we should go back more to this model where we try to do cool things instead of writing

like three-end lines of solidity to do a crypto NFT. But yeah. Also I would one, I think it's easy to draw the conclusion that blockchain security architectures have worked far too early. Even something like proof of stake, I think the jury is still out on whether proof of stake will work long term as a way of securing blockchains. And so that we can hopefully have some architectures which survive the test of time, I think we should really be sweeping the design space.

Proof of stake design seems to have ended with Cosmos and Near and Pocod. And I'm not quite sure why, because I don't think it's really been battledested yet. In another episode, we can talk about cubic slashing. Yeah, there's a lot of things we haven't talked about. And I have to say that I was confused when we started this episode. And I'm still confused, but maybe on a slightly higher level. So I may go back to read the docs now. Higher level of confusion.

That's a good outcome. Yeah, I do apologize. Boy, when we try to explain this becomes clear that it's like there are many different spiraling threads in some speculative plan for how they will coalesce, and that plan has yet to materialize in concrete lines of code in all of its aspects. Yeah. I also think this tagline on defining money is confusing. Yeah, to me, the one thing that would have made everything, I think, easier to understand

is more diagrams. So I usually go from diagram to diagram and kind of, if I don't get something, I just read the text in the middle. Literally, there are no pictures. You just have to read. It's like very unusual. 40-page vision papers. All right.

So that's it. To do for Chris, add pictures to the papers. More diagrams. Exactly, yeah. Cool. Thank you guys for coming on. This was a pleasure. And we'll have you back soon to talk about slashing and stuff.

Thank you very much for having us. Thank you so much. Cool. Thanks so much. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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