Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Anoma: Solving Cross-Chain Interoperability Through Intents - Adrian Brink

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

Inspired by Cosmos’ IBC ethos, Anoma takes interoperability a step further, from VM (virtual machine) to IM (intent machine). While traditional dApps that run on virtual machines require step-by-step instructions to achieve a desired outcome, Anoma’s universal intent machine design allows users to simply define their end-results which are then aggregated and an optimal combination of intents is selected - cross-chain, simple, elegant. Moreover, intents also enable on-chain privacy, a concept explored by Namada.Topics covered in this episode:The vision behind AnomaOS for decentralised applicationsWhat is Anoma?Building dApps with AnomaNative generalised intentsAnoma’s L1 blockchainThe importance of decentralisationOn-chain privacyNamadaThe collapse of the banking systemRoadmapEpisode links:Adrian Brink on TwitterAnoma on TwitterNamada on TwitterSponsors:Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.ioChorus One: Chorus One is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.oneThis episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.

Anoma has native generalized intents, which no existing system right now has, or has any clue how to get. Intents are clearly the next level of abstraction, because most users don't actually know which counterparty they want to interact with. For privacy preserving system to work, you need intents. And why is that? Well, privacy preserving systems necessarily push data to edge devices. Right, like now your state lives on your phone, rather than in the big database, in the middle, wherever you can see it. And with intents, you can make statements and sort of updates over your local state, and then you can have solvers that aggregate and sort of compute over this. Certainly right now, like CoinMace and Krakken and finance are the single largest mixers

in the world. Hello and welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Brian Crane, and today I'm speaking with Adrian Brink. He is the co-founder of Anoma. And yeah, before we talk with Adrian, I just want to share a few words for more sponsors this week. If you're looking to stake your crypto with confidence, look no further than Corse 1. More than 150,000 delegators, including institutions like BitGo, Pintera Capital and Ledger trust Coros 1 with their acids. They support over 50 blockchains and are leaders in governance or networks like Cosmos, ensuring your stake, is responsibly managed.

Thanks to their advanced MEV research, you can also enjoy the high. highest staking rewards. You can stake directly from your preferred wallet, set up a white label note, restake your assets on eigenayer or symbiotic, or use their SDK for multi-chain staking in your app. Learn more at chorus.1 and start staking today. This episode is proudly brought to by NOSIS, a collective dedicated to advancing a decentralized future. NOSIS leads innovation with circles, NOSIS pay, and Metri, reshaping, open banking, and money. With Hashi and NOSIS VPN, they're building a more resilient privacy-focused internet. If you're looking for an L1 to launch your project, Nosis Chain offers the same development

environment as Ethereum with lower transaction fees. It's supported by over 200,000 validators making NOSIS chain a reliable and credibly neutral foundation for your applications. NOSIS Dow drives NOSIS governance where every voice matters. Join the NOSIS community in the NOSISDAO forum today. Deploy on the EVM-compatible NOSIS chain or secure the network with just one GNO and affordable hardware. Start your decentralization journey today at NOSIS.I.O. Cool. Thanks so much for coming on, Adrian.

I know you were, I mean, we've known each other since 2017. I guess we were both working at Tenement, sort of at the beginning of the cosmos ecosystem. And of course... Those are wild times. Yes. Where you have learned the right way to build a crypto project. And then you took all these learnings, right?

And then some years later, you started the project in OMA, together with Chris Goes, right? And Ava, right? Chris Goes, who was also one of the key engineers at... I think implemented a lot of IBC. So what was the vision for you guys? Like what is the NOMA? Yeah. I can quickly, I mean, the Cosmos days were interesting.

So I joined like January 2017 just around the time of the fundraiser. We're like seven people I think with like Bucky and Ethan Frye and Vigel back in the day. And I mean, I think Cosmos got a lot. lot of things wrong, but I also got a lot of things right to some extent. Like, it was actually very innovative. And it actually cared deeply about decent realization, right? And so, like, and by the way, I think people don't give enough credit to Chris here. I think the only reason why IBC works and ship just because Chris, like,

spent a year and a half of his life and making sure that actually worked in the end. Like, without Chris, I think we would all be one interoperability standard poor right now. No, but so the vision behind Anoma was always how do we get a unified develop experience? Because, so like historically we looked at this and like, so me, I and Chris, we built a couple of, so we built the validator, Cryptium maps, one of their very first proofs.

Take validators started around the same time as course one. Scaled that up to a ton of assets in retrospect, and then very gladly sold it to you guys because we very quickly realized that like validation is fun for like six months, and I like wrecking service for six months, but afterwards it was like, yeah, I like protocol engineering and research much more

than I like physical infrastructure. And so, like, around the middle of 2020, I sat down, it's like, okay, where is this space going? And everyone seemed to be sort of copy and pasting the same contract to yet another chain or yet named them another name. And somehow this was supposed to be progressed. on actually building the future that we kind of envisioned on,

like a heterogeneous trust world. Everyone uses blockchains all the time. Blockchains become coordination substrate, not only for financial transactions, but for sort of societies as a whole, right? And honestly, no one was really working on this in the middle of 2020, and it felt very depressing at the time, I have to say, that like everyone had abandoned sort of the idea of

we should be building fundamental infrastructure that actually makes people's life better, and instead of like, well, let's copy these. like three solidity contracts to yet another chain, and somehow this is going to make progress, right? And this, I mean, to some extent, we still have this nowadays, but I'm like, everyone is very much focused on this incremental innovation. Like, some people are trying to make a slightly faster consensus.

Some people are trying to make a slightly different proof system. But to Cosmosis and also, like, to Cosmoses credit, actually, at the time, it proposed a new model. And like, we weren't going to live in a single chain world. We were going to live in this multi-chain world. And so with Anoma, this is kind of thinking that through to the end, which is, A, you need privacy guarantees. I thought, like, we figured that this was going to be very fundamental.

If you didn't have a base layer platform that enabled developers and use us to obtain privacy guarantees, where you always had to bolt on the privacy guarantees after the fact that this was never going to work. And I think this is still holding true today. This is why I think sort of this is very challenging for existing ecosystems to really get, mass market traction because fundamentally, like my parents will not want to use them, right? And like for Dijun casino gambling, this is fine. But even if you're a liquid hedge fund, like you need privacy guarantees so that you don't leak your strategies to everyone else.

The other aspect was you needed a, I think we always held the view that the world was going to be heterogeneous trust. It seemed, I mean, it's very unlikely, I think, that there's going to be a single chain to rule them all. And I sometimes like to do this experiment or ask people, I was like, do you like a one world government? And pretty much no one likes that idea.

And yet we are designing for these models right now where we have a single security model to rule them. And so our fundamental thesis was at the time even that the world is going to be heterogeneous trust, but you want to have a unified sort of abstraction that developers and users can work against so that you don't have to rewrite your applications all the time. And I mean, we're seeing this right now

where if you go from Ethereum to Solana as a developer, this is a complete different system. Like you move trust models, but it's a completely separate developer environment that you now have to develop an environment that you have to deal with. And that sort of led to the third component, which is this unified operating system structure

where it's like you want to have a unified operating system API that developers and users can rely on that can work in many heterogeneous trust models where ideally even heterogeneous trust models can interoperate with each other as sort of like as the trust boundaries as the consensus systems allow. And so like the super simple example is

it always struck me as super unlikely that like USDC would be issued globally on Ethereum. Because and like we see it's just a weird model where it's like no national government

is going to give out or like USD, not USC, no national government like Swiss government is never going to give up its monetary sovereignty to like some Ethereum valid, like they will always want their own sovereign system that can issue their own money. And right, so like we need to end up in this world where we have many of these heterogeneous systems, but while still allowing that assets and developers and applications can flow between them. So that as a user, I can just say, well, I have some state on my system A, I call this the

Switzerland system. And now I'd like to use the exactly same application, but I'd like to do some settlement on, I don't know, on global Ethereum. And so Anoma was always designed around this. How do you get heterogeneous trust plus privacy? And then the last part, which I think most people know Anoma for, which is intense, which is really something that, like, to a large extent, we came up with the idea of intense or Chris came up with the idea of intense in 2016, I think, when he built the Yvon-Dex protocol,

which is the back end to open C-pride-C port. Still, to this day, the signal out of gas user on Ethereum, which is this proton-10 system. It was the insight that really most users don't have transactions. They have intents. They have like a partial state transition. They don't have, I would like to just send you my Bitcoin to you. I mean, this exists in the Bitcoin case, but like anything complex doesn't have this. So it's like, I would like just trade A for B.

I don't know whether with one counterparty, with 15 counterparties. And so this is really where the intent angle comes from. And so as a whole, taking together, you get the, is a decentralized operating system for privacy preserving for applications. Like think of it this way. It's a unified operating system abstraction that allows developers to write applications and users to use those applications irrespective in which specific

trust model or heterogeneous trust model they run. That's maybe a super quick, not quick, but an intro. Right. Yeah, I think there's a lot of things here that, you know, I think we'll be, uh, take some time to unpack. I'm just wondering maybe on the last thing. So you said it decentralized, an operating system for decentralized applications. I mean, I've been very involved in, uh, as I'm very curious about this phrase operating system in this context.

Uh, I mean, I know for example, I've been very involved in the urban right, which has this idea of like an operating system. Uh, I guess this has maybe been used in some other ways in crypto as well. this term operating system. I'm curious, like, when you say operating system, what does that mean? Yes, it comes from the specific analogy to traditional computers, where really, like, the way you can currently think of something like the EVM or the SVM is a specific CPU. Think of this as an Intel CPU and an ARM CPU, right? And so at the moment, we're all living in this world where we program directly against the CPUs. And the operating system analogy comes from the fact that anoma as an

operating system can really abstract away the differences in underlying CPU, so an underlying virtual machine, which means it's like an almost not designed to replace the SVM or the EVM. I mean, it's like an almost an intent machine. The intent machine sort of sits on top of existing virtual machines and just allows so developers can build applications against the operating system APIs. And I mean, this was sort of the fundamental unlock with Windows to some extent in the past, where all of a sudden, I could start building applications against Windows, and I didn't have to care which specific CPU that Windows operating system was running on. And the other thing is, the operating system analogy works also quite well because the operating system

like Windows gave you a bunch of system level APIs. For example, like distributed systems. So like in Anoma, you can talk to the operating system of Anoma in terms of figuring out how to like rather than the heterogeneous trust world. So it's not just you operate on a single CPU, on a single operating system, it gives you the APIs to operate on sort of a network set of operating systems, if that makes sense. Okay.

I mean, before you were talking about, right, when you sort of introduced a NOMA, you mentioned some things like, okay, you think privacy is important. You think then there would be like,

you know, kind of like different chains or different environments with different trust assumptions that you want to have this unified API and the intense. Now, I think these are more like, you're not really a description of like what is a NOMA, maybe more some things on like views you have about how, you know, what is important and what should something look like. But then is like is an NOMA, is it like a chain and that also a framework for developing blockchains and that or like how would you?

Yeah, it's an interesting question. What is Anoma? What is Anoma? Anoma is probably the single most sort of modular and composable stack you can have. I mean, you can use Anoma to build your own blockchain. I mean, I'd be very happy with the Swiss government at some point adopts Anoma to run their own sovereign Switzerland chain to issue the digital CHF. You can also, anoma is also, you can deploy Anoma, the operating system directly to a theory. so a nomad can run on Ethereum.

And then sort of like, now you have all these instances, and they may also be a global anoma chain, right? There's going to be most likely a global anoma chain, which is separate from the protocols. Like, it's not directly tied to each other. Like, there's anoma of the protocol specification, and then an anoma... So like the Cosmos SDK and the Cosmos hub.

Kind of similar, actually. I was thinking about this earlier today as well. It's like... And I think, honestly, Cosmos is actually a good example of like the model really worked, like, of like this general framework to build many different things. The other thing that also is anoma is the fact that all these systems have a common P2P stack. So like if you have anoma on Ethereum and you have global anoma, as a user, you interact with the unified P2P stack. Like you encode, you specify,

and like in your application, in your intent you specify whether you would like to be settled on global Ethereum or global anoma. This is not like you have to modify to like point to a different RPC endpoint. There's just one unified P2P stack. There's not many separate P2P networks. So that's basically like, okay, I'm somebody developing an application and then, you know, I sort of like create transaction and then that's sort of unified regardless of where it goes. I mean, because then in, you know.

Yes. you as a developer as a user effectively get a unified API here where you describe in code rather than sort of like in physical infrastructure where you want your state to live right and I think so if the important because the important thing is you need to figure out as

a user as a developer where do you want your state to live? I mean this is actually this is the hard question. State is fundamentally the hard question of these systems. It is not about sort of like specific execution environments or ZK proves it's like who controls which part of state And so with intense, you can specify, like, I would like the state to live on Ethereum.

I would like to use Ethereum, for example, as my ordering machine. So in that case, the ordering is done by the Ethereum validators. Or you say, you know, I would like my ordering of my intense transactions to be done by, like, Brian, and I would like my state to then be settled to Ethereum. So you get all this flexibility along the stack without having to all the time, like, cherry-pick. like monkey patch your own components together. Like anoma is a lot of things because it tries to sort of make application development and usage of these systems and order of magnet easier.

I mean, I know I was saying this in the beginning here on the universe part, right? I think everyone else is like... It sounds much more confusing. I mean, like, if you go to it, right, if you go to someone who's like, hey, I just want to build some kind of decentralized app, right? And be like, oh, I can build it on like Solana. easy to understand, right? Even I'm going to build my own

cosmos chain, pretty easy, you know, maybe slightly more hard, but still pretty easy understand. But now this kind of thing of I can, you know, shard it up, have some part here, their execution. I mean, I would just be confused. Let me say, you can, I'm explaining

the complex path, you can just have the simple path. If you just want to deploy your application to Ethereum using anoma and get all the privacy guarantees, for example, and the intent, like, generalized intents, you can just do this, deploy the, like, you write an application in Juvix, you click deploy to Ethereum, it's deployed to Ethereum. Now you have a decentralized application on Ethereum. So, okay, so, but decentralized application on Ethereum, what does that mean?

I mean, because the transactions don't happen on Ethereum, I presume. So these are like normally Ethereum transactions then. This looks much more like a plasma construction where specifically how this works is you have a settlement contract on Ethereum. You have the Anoma Resource Machine implementation on Ethereum. And then you have users that want to send intents. They send those intents. For example, you have a simple orderbook exchange with privacy guarantees, which is something that you can't currently build in any existing system. Users send these intents to the Anoma P2P stack.

Solvers pick them up. Solvers compose them together. if there's an overlap, then this transaction gets settled to Ethereum. That's sort of the simple case here. This is actually very important to understand because people keep asking you this all the time. There's no specific anoma chain that you must send your thing to. Everyone else is presenting these like abstractive frameworks

that all affect essentially boiled down to, like for example, the chain abstraction folks are kind of like this. It's like, oh, let's just build this yet another chain. to solve all our abstraction problems and then users only need to interact with one chain that then orders and sequences everything and then sort of we reach out from there. Anoma's taking a very different approach on like, users, like there's no online chain, users can directly use the operating system to whoever they want to use it. So in the case of Ethereum, this be really just an Ethereum contract,

some state that you deployed to the Anoma resource machine on Ethereum, that state now lives on Ethereum. on Ethereum, you send your transactions on P-D-P stack, and then those get settled to Ethereum. And so you guys, like, I presume one of your areas, or one of your goals is to get people to build decentralized applications on, you know, the Anoma stack. Yes, broadly speaking. Build against the Enorma resource machine. This is how it's correct.

Build against the operating system. honestly where a user specifically wants to run the operating system that is going to be up to them but i mean i'm not a developer right i'm not i'm not a may i'm not quite your target audience but you know i've sort of been in crypto for a while as a as a someone who you know can try to put myself into the shoes of someone wanting to build some some decentralized application i'm i'm a big confused because when you say build against the anoma resource machine i'm i have like no idea what that means or why somebody would want to do it. Maybe to make it very simple.

Imagine you build an application against a normal resource machine. What does that mean? It's, I mean, you build against, when you build an application against the EVM, right, you build against a specific instruction set against a specific state model. Again, you mean, you solidity. Or Viper, right? Like, there are many things that target the underlying. Right.

So, like, think of it, you build against some system codes. like you built an application and then at runtime you decide well today I like the Ethereum folks better so you deploy to Ethereum and tomorrow you decide well turns out they didn't like the thing I had and then you just deploy it to Solana

and you don't have to rewrite your application this is sort of like the fundamental point or you deploy this to your local community chain if that ever gets set up and you don't have to rewrite your application So as a developer, it's honestly just like a lot easier because it's kind of like, I guess in the past people argued, well, we should all be building against Intel CPUs

and then Windows came along and people started building against Windows and all of a sudden developers realized, holy crap, it's way easier to build against Windows because now can run my application whenever Windows runs. Okay, but so I get that that's in it, I get that there's some value in that, but that seems to be something that's actually pretty, well covered by the EVM, no?

Because I mean, in the end, we have now seen, right? You have like EVM Ethereum. You have EVM roll-ups. You have COSMO. EVM on Cosmos, EVM and Avalanche. EVMs everywhere, right? So, like, that kind of thing of like, oh, I build my application in solidity.

And, you know, I have a lot of benefits because, whatever, it's, like, very popular. And I can deploy it somewhere else. Because if you guys building, like, a completely new stack, then, Well, you actually... I mean, I get that maybe it is a stack that... Yeah, in principle, it can be used in many different places.

So if it gets adoption, then maybe you would have a similar kind of benefit that people have today in building on top of solidity. Which we really shouldn't underestimate. Anoma has native generalized intents, which no existing system right now has, or has any clue how to get. And it has... Why is that valuable?

well. Because fundamentally like your application if you built them directly against the EVM or the SVM for example, I mean those applications fundamentally rely on transactions so you need to build a bunch of extra moving pieces in order to actually model the domain that your users

are going to have because most users don't have transactions anymore. They have like I would like to trade A for B and I actually don't care against whom. Like this is not a transaction you can build. I mean like you have sort of the poor man's version of this which is an AMM but the AMM only works for assets.

It doesn't work for NFTs, for example. So, like, just you want generalized intents, I think, as a long-term goal here, and even a short-term goal. So generalized intense, like, the, so I get, I mean, right, so if we talk about intents, right, so I guess the simple example of intent would be something like a limit order, you know, where I'm like, hey, I am willing to, you know, sell whatever, E4E for USDC and, you know, give me the best price and I'm

willing to pay up to this, something like that. And then I saw in the AMM case, it's pretty clear. But like, so the argument is here that it makes it easier for an application developer to allow people to sort of, you know, more express desire about the end state they want to get to as opposed to, you know, a specific transaction. Yes. And that that's valuable for, important for a lot of use cases. So you, for example, get like nice benefits such as you get composed with liquidity. Currently, you have to make specific choices on do you interact with this AMM or that AMM.

I mean, there's like some aggregation that can happen as well. but generally with generalized intends, you can have the thing like, well, I'd like to sell like one NFT, again, like two green cryptocities against some eth, and maybe there's no direct match because the person that sort of wants to buy the two green cryptocities only wants to take USTC, right? And so you can do these multi-party compote,

like multi-intent composing. I think that's one very huge benefit. The other benefit is, as a user, you can also say things like, I would like to trade A for B, and I actually don't care whether settle on optimism, arbitrarum or theorem. Just give me whatever as quick as or fastest. This is something that you just can't express right now.

This is sort of where the heterogeneous trust component or a heterogeneous trust model component can say. You can really think of this as defragmenting a lot of the state. But even just in a single sort of like state model in like a single chain world, we can compose like intense can just compose, across every, like, however many cases you want to have, which means, for example, even for like simple things like limit orders, you aren't limited to settle them against an AMM. You can say, well, I'd like to do A for B, and maybe it's an AIM,

or maybe it's Brian, or maybe it's only these five people on a white list, or maybe it's not anyone on this blacklist, or it's just 50 people that I've never met and I've never coordinated with, right? like you have this full flexibility, which is just going to give you deeper liquidity, if I'm honest, because intents can match against all of it. And I think this is sort of the fundamental thing where it's like intents are clearly the next level of abstraction because most users don't actually know which counterpart they want to interact with. Like when we came up with the sort of transaction-centric model in the Bitcoin world was always,

well, I'll go to a store and I'll buy some milk and then I'll send some Bitcoin to the store. but it turns out that the reality of the applications you end up building is mostly around like internet-based coordination when it's like I have A for B

who wants to do the other side of the thing and I don't really want to have to figure out how to do manual counterpart discovery right and I think this is why you also see that everyone is starting to think and move towards intense and like this was actually very validating because like when we start a nomad in the end of

the beginning of 2021, people thought we were nuts. Like, we kept talking about these intents and, like, why intents were going to matter. And now everyone is like, oh, we should, like, start thinking about intense and, like, most of the defy-application are starting to, like, think on how to move towards intense.

And, I mean, everyone is starting to, like, move to, like, application-specific intents. But I know that's the only generalized intense framework out there where you just get generalized intense. And, like, you don't have to build the stack yourself anymore. You don't have to hand-roll a bunch of B-Infer. You can just go, here are intents. Let me build my application and I get like all this like very annoying networking code to like do counterpire discovery for free.

Right, right. So basic, I mean, I kind of get that argument where you say like, okay, there are like applications, right? So basically defy applications or similar types of application. I mean, probably all defy and training related realistically. where, you know, this is relevant. And I guess often is this also often around trying to minimize MEP, maybe. This is the other huge component of Intense. And by the way, this is not just Defi.

I can give you an example in a sec on like where this, where you have Intense as a non-Defi example. But so we, I think three years ago or four years ago, made a mistake where we when like instead of trying to actually come up with a technical solution to this rising crop of MEV we sort of like engineered it and called it a feature not a buck Intents at the base layer mostly solved this because all of a sudden you can say well I have the specific state transition and like you have to sign over like I'm willing to trade one Heath against I don't know 2000 USDC and this can be ordered in whatever sort of like

it can be included in a block in whatever order you want, because you signed over a specific thing. Like, one of the big problems with transactions is that transactions don't specify state outcomes, they just specify like compute steps. So you end up like you have some starting state, then you apply some run, some like compute, and then you get into some resulting state outcomes.

Well, now depending on how you interleave these computational traces, you get to different state outcomes. And intends mostly solved this. because it intents you just specify specific state outcomes, and it doesn't matter how you interleave them. And the other interesting example of an intent-centric system is actually two. One is NOSIS safe. Most people don't realize this, but if you have a partial multisic,

like we're in a one or two out of two multisic, and we're using NOSIS save, what actually happens is I create my partial signature, it gets sent to the central server. You then create your partial signature, pull my partial signature, from the central server, then submit both together. I mean, this is a prototypical example of an intent-centric system, where right now we're relying on very centralized infrastructure. In anoma with generalized intents,

you don't have to rely on the centralized servers anymore. The other really good example is roll-ups. I mean, when you think of what a roll-up does, you have a user that has an individual state transition and then many users, and then the roll-up does some compute to collapse all these things together. honestly that's just a number of intents that you collapse into one to settle then as a state transition function

on some underlying base layer. So like, for example, with Anoma, you just get roll-ups of free to some extent. You don't have to build all your own components for your own roll-ups. It just happens to fall out of this generalized infrastructure that intends are just to better abstraction to also represent things like roll-ups.

And maybe then the last thing, because people really forget about this when they think about privacy, is one of the big things well everyone wants privacy preserving systems and sort of my fundamental thesis is, like, and this is just true, that like for privacy preserving system

to work, you need intents. And why is that? Well, privacy preserving systems necessarily push data to edge devices, right? Like, now your state lives on your phone rather than in the big database in the middle wherever I can see it. And with intents, you can make statements

and sort of updates over your local state, send them to someone and then have sort of the other person or like have many of those intense flow into the center of the network and then you can have solvers that aggregate and sort of compute over this. Whereas right now we just all compute over this like global known state in a privacy preserving world, you go to need intense because the state just lives on edge devices at that point and you need to be able to make statements over like local state that doesn't live in the middle. Right. You're not trying to replace, you know, EVM or SVM.

or something like that. So basically it means I as a, so let's say I'm building some application on Salana and I'm using the SVM then I would use sort of like anoma

as almost as like layer in between. This really depends on where you are in your stack. I mean if you already have an existing application running on the EVM for example on Ethereum, you may just want move tiny parts of your state, of your application to anoma. That just means you rebuild this against your normal resource machine. But the important thing is you don't have to move all your

state at once. Like I think one of the reasons that I was always very skeptical and sort of just yet another L1 or yet another L2 was always like you had to force all this valuable state to move to this new L2 or this new L1, right? Like you had this like massive bootstrapping problem. And so with anomas of the architecture, the operating system comes to where the valuable state already lives. And so then over time, as you might want to migrate more and more of your application to ANOA, you can do this over time. But users don't have to actually move the assets from Solana, from Ethereum to yet another L1. They can just move within the system into sort of the Anoma operating system, operating the annual protocol adapter on Solana on Ethereum. Now you mentioned you guys are creating another L1.

What does the Anoma chain do? Very fundamentally, I mean, Anoma, the L1 is really designed as a, it's a global consensus mechanism, but they can also be deployed into local instances. So you want to have some Anoma native consensus effectively that can really leverage the operating system to its fullest. Like maybe one good analogy you can think of is it's a hyper-optimized CPU. for Anoma the operating system. Generally speaking, most functionality of the operating system should be available on most other virtual machines.

On the anoma chain is just going to be more optimized. The other thing is there is a, it's the obvious place. Sorry, I totally did not understand this at all. So basically, anoma L1 would be like a chain that I, I as an application developer, if I want to build like an app, I can now say, hey, I go to Solana or I create a Cosmos chain

or I build on this a normal L1. Is that what? Yes. In the end, it's going to come down to whether users, which chain users want to like have their state level. I think currently we live in this like very... Users do not care. Like, I mean, users, like,

if you ask any users, like, any user the question of like where do you want you stay to live on they will just be confused yes but eventually users will need to care for simple latency reasons i mean like one of the very fundamental things is like an normal will always be faster like local anomal will always be faster in solana um because it's like it's just like solana is limited by speed of light and like it has to run like two consensus rounds on over the global fiber network um if the two of us want to trade and we're in the same room, we should do this on a local system.

There's just like no way around this. Like in the local system will always just be faster, right? I agree that right now users may not fundamentally cares much, but I think it's also mostly because our industry has kind of designed a bunch of infrastructure that's

very targeted towards casino use cases. Whether this is like going to survive long term, is very questionable to me. And for example, I mean, like, the other interesting thing to consider here is, I think if you'd ask people, I know, four years ago,

whether multi-chain was going to be a thing, everyone would have said no. People were at least very skeptical about this. It's very clear that the multi-chain world played out between, like, all the L-2 chains as well as all the L-1 chains. I mean, the world is clearly going to be multi-chain. So users,

clearly have preferences on which chain they are and where their state lives. Users care. I don't know about that conclusion. I mean, you could, I think it's like primarily the application developers know who make that those decisions. I mean, obviously users care about things like, I want like faster transactions, right? Or I want cheaper fees. And then, of course, that may mean, okay, they now like, uh, arbitrar, more.

than either one because it's cheaper. But like, I mean, no one's going to be, oh, I rather use, I mean, very, very few people are going to be like, oh, I rather use arbitram than I think optimism.

Like, who does that? I don't know. I mean, I certainly do. Because I, like, fundamentally affect the security model and your latency model. I mean, this is just like something that you shouldn't underestimate. And I am, I think if users really like long term don't care, honestly the best answer to like how to build a hyper optimized system is like we should do DFINITY and just live in a bunch of like centralized data centers because users don't care where the state lives, right?

And so like, I mean, this is, if users don't care where the state lives, I think it's a very strong argument that users don't care about decentralization. And I think with our normal, we've always taken the approach that decentplization. actually matters because otherwise we're just building very slow expensive databases here. And yeah, if decentralization doesn't matter in the end, I have questions on like what our industry has been doing in the last couple of years. But my point to this is like I think decentralization really fundamentally matters because users care about this privacy, their security model. Why does decentralization matter?

As a whole, why does decentralization matter? Yeah. I think this comes really down to if decentralization doesn't matter we've spent a couple like ten years building probably the single slowest database implementations that for some reason keep like multiplying all the state across hundreds and thousands of nodes

across the globe for no particular reason like if decentralization doesn't matter we should just all be running on a single server run by I know I guess based Like, let's say, like, what are some things that to me feel like important, right? So one is that people anywhere in the world can just use these blockchain networks, right? That's like open access. I think that's like, and then some kind of censorship resistance.

You know, people can like transact in whatever way they want and their transaction doesn't get censored. And then if you don't have decentization, you don't have any of those properties. Maybe, maybe not, right? But still, they're not an end in of itself, but it's like it means to an end. Yes, I agree with that. Sorry. I mean, I think we want censorship resistance. We want global, I mean, we want World War III resilience to some extent.

Like, we want the ability to have many separate systems that can fail independently of each other. We want to have privacy guarantees at these base layers. And I think self-decentrization is an easy way to describe all of these things because if we don't have decentization, we're not going to have any of these. And for example, actually, this is an interesting point on, like, what do we want from these systems? Like, what I personally think is actually a very important feature of them is like, on the eve of World War III kind of thing, global fiber will go down. And so, like, you can't rely on these global consensus systems to remain up. And so, like, Anoma is also designed around this failure case. I'm like, if you don't have global connectivity anymore, you're not going to run Bitcoin or Ethereum, you're more solar.

That's going to hold almost immediately. And so you want to have infrastructure that people can use locally to coordinate locally. And this is really like what I think of as World War III resilience of actual decentralization. It's not about like having a single global decentralized system. It's about having many systems independently of each other that sort of like when the habit path exists can coordinate and like interoperate with each other. But when the sort of unhappy path comes to be, the local infrastructure still works. and I always use an example of Switzerland

the Swiss financial system will collapse immediately as soon as like North Atlantic fiber goes down like that none of these systems are set up in a way in which it can handle like global network outages and I know what it's always designed as like almost like a drop in replacement for local coordination infrastructure so that there's a coordination substrate

that people can run locally then as sort of connectivity recovers again you can coordinate with people further away. But then, like, for example, the enumont L1 is going to be a proof of sake chain, no, with, like, something like tendament,

like consensus or something similar? It's heterogeneous paxos plus heterogeneous now. I mean, so, realistically speaking, we are all children of tenement at this point. Like, Ecerium consensus, polka-odal consensus,

even Solana looks a lot like PBFT. Aptos sweet, definitely PBFT. So I roll the settings of Tenement at this point. Because that, again, will be a system right. Where you're going to have validator across the world. There's going to be token stakes with the validators. And they are communicating with each other, right? There's any blocks around.

They're saying, okay, this block is valid. This block is fine. So that system, if you now have, okay no more fiber because World War III any global consensus system is going to have tremendous problems in sort of a globally global world's three scenario including Bitcoin this is just going to be

I think like I think people really always Bitcoin with like Starlink and stuff should probably be pretty okay no the satellites are the first things to go like there's no you mean because they're shut down yes or how are they or because bandwidth is going to be heavily restricted to military use cases.

I mean, like, I just don't see a world in which, like, we enter a bunch of centralized global conflict, and we go like, ah, but the mean coins must keep going on global consensus. Like, I mean, I hold the pessimistic view. Hopefully I'm wrong, I have to say. But, I mean, actually, so Bitcoin, if slow block times, may actually be helpful here. Because you're very little... For sure. Slow block down.

Definitely. Very little banter with requirements for global consensus. But like something... I think Bitcoin will be fine. If I had my vote for Bitcoin, you should slow it on blocks like an hour. Then we definitely be fine, I think. I mean, it probably could may well have some kind of issues, right? Like, let's say Bitcoin would be...

Because some of the hash rates cut off and now all of a sudden, basically, the hash rate like temporarily goes from like you know 100% to 20% now a block time goes up to like an hour two hours every block and and then slowly gets long line again and then we may have a problem that like so if global stabilization time is ever more than 10 minutes bitcoin just never converges this is sort of just a like the fundamental lifeness or the safety tradeoff that most of these systems have made like tenement made the other trips right tenement will stop will halt block production but for example if it takes on average 11 minutes to gossip a Bitcoin block around the

globe, there will always just be multiple chains that convert from each other because no one sees sort of like their next tip prior to them having mine their own chain. No, I don't think that's true. It's a fundamental property of the street systems. I mean, this is like, this is why Tenement was so

controversial at the time, because Tenement took the opposite approach, which is Tenement decided to halt rather than sort of like fork. I have a time. I have a talk about this from like 2017 I think. But anyway, it seems to be it's a little different topic.

This is very much out there and we've kind of like lost the track here, but... Although important to think about. Yeah. So I mean like my entire thing is like outside of like specific infrastructure, like we should be thinking on how to design like we should be designing protocols

that can actually be resilient. And like you want to think about the worst case scenario. And so you want to have systems that A are hard to capture sort of politically and B, that can interoper with each other quite easily so that we don't have sort of like these because even a single decentralized network is still very centralized. It's a single failure point.

I'd much rather have like a thousand decentralized systems, but it's super easy for users to switch between any 500 of them. Because that means that no individual system gets a tremendous amount of power. And like, an almost fundamentally designed around this goal. I mean, one of the things I do really like about an Omar, And, you know, I think I remember having some, maybe some podcasts, some discussions in the last years. You know, I was like asked about like, okay, how do we feel about crypto? What are some things that, you know, concern me?

And probably the biggest thing is the privacy thing, right? We're like in the beginning, we were always like, oh, you know, there was even an assumption right in Bitcoin of, hey, it's private, right? Because, you know, you have a different. Now, of course, very quickly, it was like, yeah, not that private actually. But then with time, I think what we've had is, of course, you know, services like genealysis, you know, where they're really good at de-anonymizing transaction, linking them together. And then I think the other thing we've had is that exchanges, that are obviously regulators, they don't seem to like privacy because they want to control and they want to have transparent data. And so the privacy coins that do exist. and the private projects that do exist seem to have a hard time getting listed on exchanges. And of course, if you don't get listed on exchanges, no trading, no money, it's very hard to go anywhere. So I do really appreciate that you guys have always been kind of strong proponents of privacy and of the importance of it.

But what does that look like? Are you also like you worried about like, for example, exchange listings for like anoma and... The super nice thing about, so Anoma is not a privacy coin or privacy chain. It just happens to have the facilities for developers to build privacy preserving applications. And interesting enough, it's not even developers necessarily deciding whether something is privacy preserving. Right, like on Ethereum or on Solana, you have to make this choice on like, do I write it? Like, is my entire application privacy preserving or not? In Anoma, it's much more of a user choice.

It's like, does user A want to interact with the system, with this, application privately or not. It is not a system level choice. Anoma can be fully used as a fully transparent system. If no one ever cares about this, they don't have to worry about it. But if individual users care, they can make a choice on like, well, instead of attaching a plain tech signature, I attach as their knowledge proof. And I think sort of like the industry has largely failed at making this like relatively nuanced thing. understandable to the outside world, but like, to me, ether is a privacy coin. I mean, like, there is

pools, like, there is, like, ether is clearly privacy. So is used to see, by the way. Like, anything, because any, like, permissionless asset I can put into a contract on Ethereum that, like, provides me strong privacy guarantees. Like, this, like notion of privacy coins is really, like, a Bitcoin era thing where, like, acids were tied to fundamental state machines. And like this distinction is like, I mean, we can pretend it exists.

It just doesn't exist in reality. Because these assets can flow across many different state machines. They can flow across bridges to other systems that have different properties that they provide over these assets. And so in Anoma, it's really like it's not a system level choice. So Anoma is not a privacy chain. Anoma just happens to have the right primitives to our developers to build useful privacy preserving applications that end users can then use. And the nice thing is you can even have like an intent that's privacy preserving and an intent that's transparent. And both of them can be matched together.

Like you aren't splitting your liquidity or you aren't splitting your state across private versus non-private, which I think is actually... But let's say there's like something like a uniswap or something like that. And now I want to trade with this system and I have, you know, let's say I have Eiff and I want USC. then I can, Anoma allows me to do that in a private way? If you built an app, I mean, many caveats. Anoma is a

very fundamental, basically, like if someone builds an application that allows you to do this, yes. With a one caveat. So it is a concern of the application developed that the person has to worry about that. So it is a concern of, like, privacy comes with many nuances. very quickly, which is like, if you want to trade A for B, you must tell someone about your

desire to trade A for B. This is just always going to be true. You must reveal at least your state changes to someone. Now, with an OMA, you can sign an intent that says, I'd like, that just like authorizes A for B privately, and you only reveal the fact that you're willing to do A for B to one specific solver. This is generally true for like everything, and like you can structure, and you can't do better than this. I mean, this is a fundamental limitation. Even with FHE, you aren't going to go, you aren't going to do better than this. You could imagine that I, I have one if and I can basically say, hey, I can prove one if is willing to trade for, you know, USC at this price. And someone can get that, you know, that intent without knowing whose Eve it is. Yes, this is exactly so of the

simple case of an omar, of like, how you, like, as a user authorize a private intent. But even there, I mean, you leak some data. So if you want to go, like, you don't even want to leak that, like, there's an intent to trade A for B. You'd have to, like, figure out only to which specific counterparties you want to reveal your desire to trade A4B. And the other thing is, I think we always think of as, like, regulators don't like privacy. But the other thing, like, and I think it's because like Bitcoin started as this like counter government movement.

Like I am much more concerned on the flip side which is like I want privacy for national defense. Like I like Switzerland but I also have no illusion so the Swiss financial system is going to like be resilient against a like dedicated nation state attack and like so as a result we're currently creating these like massive honey pots

and like I'm worried on like how do I do local like how do we build infrastructure that allows us to do like national defense, community defense, where individual communities can actually run this infrastructure to be resilient against hostile actors. And like this is much for the frame

from which I'm thinking about privacy guarantees. It's not like I'm trying to hide something. It's more like, I'm really worried about North Korea like getting access to all my financial data. Or like this, all the Swiss financial data. And so like I want to build good infrastructure so the Swiss government can kind of run with it. Yeah.

I don't. I think the crypto space is, doing itself a huge disservice here on like and how we phrase a little bit like our desires of privacy because it's like I trust my local community I like my local community I'm actually really fine with it and like I'm worried about how do we build systems

that can help defend my local community because like I think the fastest way to get Ethereum killed tomorrow is we move over the US financial system into Ethereum and then like tomorrow the NSA will wake up and go that's a terrible idea. North Korea's data mining the fuck out of our financial information and then we're done here.

Right, like this is sort of like a very practical concern which is yeah, I don't know. This is like my, it's privacy for national defense. I think we're not going to get away, especially in this multipolar world order which we're going to go into right now. You need to have resilient systems as individual entities in order for you to prosper.

survive long term, I think. So you guys, so, you know, we've talked about Enoma so far. Now, there is actually a chain that you guys are launching, or that is being launched, which is called Namada, which,

so can you, can you share, like, what is a namada and what's the relationship between anoma and namada? Yeah, so you can really think of Namada to be the crazy people in the Anoma community in the Noma ecosystem that want to

try privacy preserving guarantees really quickly in a simple fashion that's NAMADA. And so Nomada is a sovereign L1 or I guess we could frame it as an L2. I mean, like the distinction between what is an L1 and what is an L2 is kind of

it's very irrelevant and it's mostly memetic at this point. There's no reasonable technical distinction at like a distributed systems level for this. But so Namada is just a subset of the Anoma community of people that read a deep decay out privacy guarantees and that, like, want to try this out. And so what Namada does is it provides a multi-acid shielded pool or multi-acet shielded set. So you can move any asset into it, including NFTs, and you get uniform privacy guarantees for all of these assets. And this is generally true.

This is generally also true. This is not just assets. It's generally data. Like, the fact that we ascribe meaning to these bits, like that we ascribe financial meaning to like these bits floating around in like some global state on Ethereum is really arbitrary. I mean, in the end, it's just data messages. So with Amari, just get very good data protection guarantees for whatever data you want to have. I mean, your data could represent financial assets, represent messages. You pick your choice kind of thing.

So, so one, I mean, for example, one, one place where, for example, let's say me personally, or, I mean, I think a lot of users will probably try to get some privacy on chain is let's say you have like, you know, some Ethereum wallets or some Ethereum accounts. Now you want to buy, I don't own an NFT somewhere. And then you want to, you don't want to have that in like, I don't know, your main wallet. that's like linked with all your, you know, stable coins and other, you know, whatever you have in there. And then like, I mean, I guess the main way people do this today is that basically are going to use a centralized exchange, right? They're going to say, hey, I'm going to create a new EF address.

And then I send there, you know, maybe the EF or staple corn or something. And then I buy, I buy the asset from there. Now, of course, in that case, you still have maybe Binance or Cracken or someone who will be able to connect these different addresses. But it's like, for example, one of the use cases now for Nomada that, like, I could do something like that. And like, let's say, move Eve in there and then move Eve out of there to, like, a new wallet. And now somebody's not going to be able to link those two wallets. I think that's a very possible use case. So certainly right now, like Coinbase and.

Krakken and Binance are the single largest mixers in the world. I mean, this is just like practically true at the moment. And we can talk. And the big problem is like, I think we really underestimate how useful, like, for example, like some of the kind of KOC policy that Binance does are. Because especially in the age of generative AI, all of these things are just going to be toast. I think we really have to come up with a different model here anyway but generally speaking there the single address makes us in the world and yes most people use it like this

I did this earlier today I think this is one option like something that the nomadic community could pursue is sort of I mean this is like what I would like to use it for for on us I would like to buy this NFT I don't necessarily want to have to link all my sort of like activity across all these chains I think the other thing is also around I would like to participate in governance votes, but on other systems, but without leaking all my data.

And so like with Amara, you can also do something called Chilid Actions, which just gives you the ability to sort of remain shield it while also executing something, for example, on osmosis or participating in governance vote. So it just gives you this ability to not only for your trading, but also for just your general other data to actually remain shielded at all times yeah I think honestly this is sort of

like the nicest thing for an armada at the moment I think we really want to see like where the community ends like I'm very curious on like where the community ends up taking it because like to this extent like the community is launching the thing

I have no idea that things happening on the forum it may come up come online at some point in the next couple of weeks from a forum post, it seems. So I'd really like to see where, so they're going to take it. The thing is, I think we really haven't tried this in practice a lot yet on how these systems can actually be utilized.

And, yeah, I am very excited for it. What else do you think we should cover? I mean, we could talk about the collapse of the banking system. I find this quite curious. Let's do it, let's do it. That sounds fun. So basic thesis here, which is, so every year we add more regulatory pressure to banks, right? And so every year, the marginal cost of an extra customer or of existing customers becomes higher. And at some point, and like these regulatory pressures generally never go away, right?

Like it just keeps being added. And so like my bold case for crypto is sort of like banks will start off banking normal people very soon. Like if you do like three transvers above 15k a year, your bank is go to ask questions, at least in Germany. And so like at this point... Well, if you do three transfers above 15K. So I mean, I have this very specific use case. Someone tried to send me money from Germany to Switzerland.

Apparently Switzerland is a high-risk jurisdiction. This cost an entire thing where there was an entire day involved three people look in compliance. because it's an unusual mountain, it's an unusual country. And so my entire, sort of my basic thesis is like these pressure points

on banks keep going up and banks don't like them because it increases their cost of compliance, but it means that large parts of their customer base are just going to become unprofitable. And so these people

have nowhere else to go. Where do they go? Well, to this return to financial system. And so I think, honestly, banking regulation, to some extent, is like the bull case for crypto because every new banking regulation

just drives more customers to use DC. No, I mean, I think it's obviously the case already, right? Like, within crypto, let's say, if you take the example of making investments in other projects, right, like you make an angel investment somewhere or, you know, course one, we invest in something. I mean, all of these payments are with stable coins, right? And it's just like nobody would use, want to use a bank wire for it because it's just like

so inferior. And if you try to do it, then you have some personal. person calling you up and they want to like, you know, get the documentation and it's a bunch of hassle and it takes longer and it's more expensive. So I think that is like very, very clear that there's a lot of advantage here for crypto. Yeah. And I think this will push a surprising amount of people into crypto. Right. Quite you actually. I mean, like in the West, I think we have less the pressure points, but especially if we live like in middling developed countries, these pressure points are just going to keep increasing for you.

The other thing is I think also like Neobanks are toast due to generative AI. I think like the first lot, I think self-custodies go to become inevitable because at some point someone is going to generate 100,000 like realistic looking generative AI videos

to like recover Revolute account access and a bunch of accounts will be drained. And I don't see anyone proposing realistic solutions outside of self-custody where you must own your own keys that you aren't than trained to give to scammers because my passport data is clearly going to be in some leak somewhere. And it's not going to be difficult to generate realistic-looking videos to like re-KYC me with banks or exchanges. Definitely not in five years from now.

And the same is going to be true for like 90% of the listeners of every episode, I think. Like, it's an actual risk we should be thinking about. It is, I think, very underappreciated. And I think these two things are probably the single largest driver in terms of like, what is crypto's use case right now. Cool. So time nine, I think you mentioned, Namada is, you know, probably sometime soon. and then imminent. I think imminent.

Last to check the forum, it seems that the Genesis transaction, like pre-genesis transactions, I think they're going to close end of next week or something like this. So by the time this comes out, may already be live.

No, no, no, no. And then like a couple of weeks I think of the values, one to do a law of testing. So probably shortly around the time this goes out. Yeah. And then we have,

anoma which is like sometime next year probably no this is um first private devnet um coming this year uh so we'll start the builders program this year so keep a lookout for that and then targeting public chest and starting early next year and then mainly towards uh something middle of next year yeah it's super exciting on the anoma front it it's going to be i mean like it's the first time where like we're trying to propose something radically new. And it's going to be cool. And it's going to allow us to do new things that we couldn't do before. And I remember when Ethereum started becoming a thing and I could do new things that I could do on Bitcoin and they became easier.

And I think we're going to see a similar moment. So I'm pretty bullish. I'm very excited for that. I would love to, you know, try some new things and see some new types of use cases and capabilities enabled. So I'm super excited to see that. Thanks so much, Adrian. Thank you very much.