Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Dappcon – Roundtable: The Ethereum Merge

Episode Date: September 14, 2022

In the countdown to the merge, Sebastien and Friederike teamed up with Eduardo Antuña, Co-founder of DappNode, at this year's Dappcon which is back after a 2 year hiatus. Hear as they chat about what the merge means for the broader Ethereum ecosystem.Topics covered in this episode:Update on DappconThe implications of the Tornado Cash sanctions in the wider crypto spaceZK bridging and the mergeThe Gnosis ecosystemThe importance of privacyThe user experience in crypto and how its important for onboardingPOAP distributionEpisode links: DappconThe MergeDappcon on TwitterEduardo on TwitterSponsors: Tally Ho: Tally Ho 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/tallycashThis episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/461

My name is Sibes Sankutchev and I'm here with Federica Ernst and from DabNod. How you doing? Doing well, thank you for having me here. Great. Well, thanks for joining us on such short notice. Always. So this is a bit of a special epicenter episode, not only because we're all here together

at Full Mode Studio, also because we're doing a live stream, which is not something we usually do, But also because we're here in Berlin during DAPCon, which we'll talk about. And, you know, DAPCon has been on a forced hiatus for the last couple of years, obviously because of COVID. And also, we are here on the day, well, in the next hours, the merge will happen. And so it's a very special time to be here in Berlin. Before we get started and chat about everything that's been happening on this week and what's happening in the next couple of days, I'd like to first tell you about our sponsor this week.

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and you can still sign the pledge on the site. They recently just added their first side chain, Polygon. On Tali Ho, Polygon support is now built in automatically and is ready to use without the need to go through any step-by-step manual integration. With Talley Ho, you can enter the Metaverse with a Web3 wallet that is fully community-owned and operated, and it's the first wallet that is also a Dow. Tally-ho's commitment to community ownership and public goods stretched to be on the wallet in January.

became the sponsor of EtherJS.js. And open source JavaScript library helping developers connect to Ethereum. And they recently announced a pledge to commit 2.5% of the total token supply to Gitcoin Aqueduct. So head to tally.cash to redefine your Web3 wallet experience. Let's maybe first talk a little bit about DACCON, which is still going on today over a couple of kilometers from here. So what's DAPCon and what's the significance of DAPCon 2022? DEPCON, it's very much an Ethereum community conference, very much in the spirit of ECC and DEPCON. We've actually had DAPCon twice before in 2018 and 2019.

And then we were going to have it in 2020 and was canceled because of COVID. And so we moved it to 2021. It was canceled again because of COVID. And now it's 2022. finally, we're back. We're in a new venue by the spree. It's great venue. Yeah, I like the venue.

I just renewed for next year. So basically we'll be there again next year. Awesome. So DebConwin happening in 2023. Yeah, so basically it's lots of talks about Ethereum infrastructure and DAPS, and it's very builder heavy. There's not a lot of business development, which I personally really like. Yeah.

And I think one of the. the interesting sort of developments and you know which also is because of this like two-year break is that the last appcon there was no nosis chain yeah there was no nois chain exactly even last abcon there would not have been a nosis chain because nosis chain kind of it it basically noses and x die merged to create nosis chain in november of last year so basically yeah it's it's been it's been a crazy year for us but the really nice thing is that um i mean berlin used to be like this HEP 3 hub. And we lost a little bit of that, you know, during COVID and, you know, in the direction of Lisbon, which I'm still salty about, to be honest. Because I have kids in school.

I'm not going to, you know, pack up and leave. Yeah. But yeah, so basically it used to be like this vibrant place and kind of after COVID is kind of slowly coming back. Basically, full note, our co-working space here is almost fully booked again. So there's like a thing in October. There'd be like one, you know, one, two-person office becoming available. But basically, in principle, it's fully booked. Yeah. And, yeah, so basically this is, you know, DAPCon has historically been part of Berlin Blockchain Week,

and we also bought that back this year. So basically, there's a whole host of conferences in the next couple of days. East Berlin. Yeah, East Berlin is around a half, and then it's JuneCon and Zika have, and like a million side events. there's like too many parties to go to

there's one tonight at a swimming pool which I feel like it's from the cow protocol so really I ought to go but I feel like I am told for this I have a very special feeling with DAPCON because here it was the first time that I can publicly

talk about download so I have this very special memory but I really love this feeling of a small community it's like it's like a family at some point and I really love this kind of confidence in which you feel so comfortable talking with friends sharing ideas sharing new technologies and this vibe is really amazing I totally that I have the feeling that we lost a little this Berlin spirit during the pandemic but I really want to see us a little is Berlin again

Because it was amazing when the Web3 Summit, Datcom, Berlin, then it was Prague the last time. And yeah, I'm really, really happy to see happening again and see that the next year is going to also to happen. It's crazy. I was always a big fan of Datcon and coming to Berlin used to be like a regular thing for me. So I feel sometimes like I know more crypto people in Berlin

than I do in Paris for some reason. But, yeah, it was great and just like seeing everybody again and all these familiar faces that I hadn't seen in three years. And yeah, I'm also like, I'm mostly generally just excited about the Gnosis chain ecosystem. I mean, even though I'm on a day-to-day, more involved in cosmos, I think the Gnosis chain ecosystem is like super interesting, just like lots of great people, lots of people talking and working on things like governance and daps. And so, yeah, I think it's like a really cool ecosystem where like lots of actual stuff is being built. talking to Patricio from Poep yesterday. And this was also his sentiment that at the last APCON, we were talking about these like prospective things that were going to happen,

that were going to come into fruition in the next couple of years. And now they are. People are actually building businesses using notices chain and building actual use cases and actual things that people use. So that's actually pretty cool. Yeah, I totally feel that. And I think basically we've been through, in terms of decentralization and culture, I think we've been through NADIA, so it means value, right?

So basically we've been kind of at a low point. So basically I think kind of when people started building businesses, kind of re-centralizing, you know, is easy in a way, right? So basically kind of like you, you, the easiest way to build things is in a centralized fashion, even if it's on a blockchain. And I think kind of people, at least in my bubble, they've kind of just started kind of becoming wary of that. And kind of trying to head back into the re-decentralized direction. Doubling down.

Yeah, doubling down on decentralization. And I mean, I think, I mean, you've always been like on the, I mean, for everyone who's listening, who's not familiar with So it was building a company called DabNode, which is on the face of it, a hardware company, but really it's a software company. It makes it really easy for you to stake at home. So basically it's kind of geared towards the run your own node, run your own validator at home kind of crowd. And maybe you can tell us kind of how you've seen the last couple of years in terms of centralization and decentralization. Yeah, good topic, to be honest.

Yeah, the thing is, well, in Damnot, we usually have a lemma. We tell people that we decentralize until it hurts and centralize until it works. So that should be the way to work, right? We need to focus on decentralization and then make the things work. Obviously, if you all completely decentralize, there is something that needs to be built. So maybe you are not going to have a product, never. But I think it's important to have this balance. and it's important to focus in the important part.

I have the feeling that we are losing the decentralization at some point. For example, at the very beginning of Davenot, the first proof of content in 2017, we were able to resolve ENS domains with IPFES websites. And people didn't use it at all. So we lost that. And now, seeing all these things that happen and all these censorship things is when people realize that we are losing our path in some way. So I see a lot of business growing and trying to follow the reverse path,

centralize and then make it decentralized, but that's not working. Because at the end, decentralize is not easy. It's a real challenge. And that is why you need to have that in your mind from the very beginning. You need to focus on decentralization, see how it can work, and then if it's needed, try to centralize. but we have the feeling that we are changing our mind. I don't know why.

Maybe new people in the community that doesn't have this feeling of decentralization or maybe they don't realize of the importance of decentralization. So that is why I try to focus on education also, the importance of decentralization, the benefits of censorship resistance networks, the important of privacy, and that is why, yeah, try to educate people on that sense.

Yeah, and I mean, just to kind of spell it out, especially when you move to proof of stake. And basically, lots of people don't really want a stake from home. They just delegate. You end up with a lot of large stakers. And basically, that's not really decentralized network in terms of resilience. So basically, if it's just a number of people you kind of need to call to kind of shut it down, or that's, yeah. Yeah, in terms of of proof of steak, it's also a. Big issue, obviously.

Right now, the top five Staker control the 63% of the network. It's crazy. It's too much. And the thing that we haven't seen is that this number has grown. That means that we are not fishing that problem. The problem is making even worse.

And also, from the point of view of the BPS or cloud providers, for example, Hedner recently ban crypto application on their servers. So that means that we are going to lose 50% of the nodes of the network because of that. Obviously, people are going to move to another provider. But at the moment that we are centralizing our infrastructure in cloud provider or in biggest takers, we are losing all the benefits that we can get from decentralized technology. Yeah, without wanting to kind of, I totally take your point.

I think for HASTDA is only for shared instances, though. Basically, if you have your own server, you can do what you want. Yeah, and they haven't been super. I mean, as far as I know, they haven't been like very explicit and clear about that. It's just been kind of like these hand-wavy statements, right? Or have they come up with something more clear since? And to be honest, I don't know, no one that I started to suffer anything, but they make an statement on the direction and it's risky.

I mean, maybe it's not something that can help us. But my point in view on the Hedzner thing is it's great. I mean, like, so we run validators at Interop. We ran validators on Hetzner just because I used Hetzner and I liked it and it's quite cheap, But when I realized looking at the validator set in a lot of Cosmos blockchains that something like, you know, the high percentage, like in the 50 to 60 percent of nodes on some chains we're running on Hetzner, like we immediately said, like we're moving away from Hetzner, not because they're kicking us out, but because we want to, we want to be on servers that other people are not on. So we're moving to like, you know, French service providers. So I actually think that the fact that Hetsner is kicking off, if it does in fact start closing accounts, that it would probably be a decentralizing factor. Now, the flip side of that is like everybody moves to AWS, like that doesn't make it.

It's even worse. And Google Cloud. Yeah, exactly. I mean, for me, Hedner thing was a wake-up goal to let people know that we are still centralizing in that sense. But I am also running notes in Hesner. and Dubnot. So, I mean, I am not against BPS. It's just to try to balance the situation between providers, stakers.

I think it needs to be space for all of us. Yeah. And I mean, to basically what we've seen recently with the tornado OFAC enforcement action. Yeah. So this is, so we recently had an, I recently had an episode with Peter, Peter from, from Coin Center on the entire tornado thing. And that's where I learned that, it's not actually held in connection with the OFAC thing.

But apparently in the Netherlands, there's a negligent money laundering law, which seems crazy because, I mean, every time you get money, you can't, I mean, if I sell you a chocolate bar,

I shouldn't have to, to query you to kind of ascertain that you have obtained the funds you're using to pay for that chocolate bar, you know, in a legitimate manner. So, yeah, so it seems like,

it seems like, it's very high burden. So I'm not sure whether this will hold up, but apparently they have 100 days to kind of charge him and they haven't yet. Yeah. It's been a month. But you're obviously kind of putting the tornado addresses on the olfact list. That's been shocking because, I mean,

it's never really happened to infrastructure before. I mean, it's happened to individual people or organizations. It's not happened to like technology. So, and I think, I think there's a good chance that this. will be revoked in due time. But I think what's really threatening to us right now is overcompliance. So basically just too many people who just don't care and who don't want to bear the burden

of, you know, carrying the risk of maybe being shut down and like something just because they didn't. So basically just out of an abundance of caution that general counsel say, yeah, you should just, you know, ban these accounts kind of like. And then they do. And I think kind of overcomplying that way. As an ecosystem, as an ecosystem that is meant to be built on kind of permission, as innovation, that's kind of like the core value. That's appalling.

And it's also, in a way, it's also a way to kind of separate the good beans from the bad beans, right? Kind of just see who overcomplies without having to. And the people who don't over comply, those are the people who are actually committed to the values. I think it was, Karan, your general counsel I was speaking with this week, he was pushing for clear guidance on minimum compliance, right? So, yeah, we would love to see that out of Ardan. I mean, Adan has been the most, the most reliable of all the, you know, European lobbying formations, interest groups. Yeah, so I think basically having like some sort of playbook,

Like, what do I actually have to do? And what do other people do just because, you know, they don't care? I think that would actually be super cool. Yeah, absolutely. We had a couple things we wanted to hit on today. So, you know, we've kind of talked about DAPCon a little bit, veered off into some other topics. I mean, I think the merge is something that we should maybe touch on. Although, we had some concerns about when this would come out and whether.

So, yeah, I think for those listening, if this comes out, if you're listening to this after the merge, please keep in mind this was recorded a few hours before the merge. So, yeah, maybe from your perspective, you know, because you run a company that, you know, helps people run their own nose and their own validators. What is the significance of this to you? And how do you see this, like, sort of affecting your business, but, you know, like long-term, the ecosystem. And maybe give us a brief recap of what has happened so far.

Because basically the merge, we've been talking about this for six years, right? Yeah. So basically maybe, and I think it's changed a lot during that time frame, and you were there for all of it. Yeah, more or the way. Yeah, I mean, all the things that have happened to be here today, I mean, the roadmap of zero has changed so many times that it's even hard to think about all the things that had changed. For example, I remember when you need to stake 1,500 ETH to be able to be a validator because of the signature of the validators,

you were not able to aggregate all of them because of the technology and then BLS happened and it changed everything. We moved to 32giv and if I am right, I think Vitalik announced this in Eddcon, Toronto, 2012, 2018, and that changed everything from the proof of stake perspective. Then when we decide to integrate, for example, the execution client into one chart, so we can get the execution client inside the proof of stake chain, that was another big chain because we took all, or we are taking all, and we continue it right now. I think one of the most changing things was the Vitalik boss related to the Ethereum RELAP-centric, touching all the rules, I think, because at the moment it was when

Rolaps started to happen and we realized that the technology of zero knowledge can help a lot to increase the transaction per second. And then we realized also that the sharding with execution is something so complex. that it could lead to having a less performance network. So, yeah, we, it creates a new paradigm in which we can now have that availability on Shardine, and then the RAPs can grow on top of it. And then it's now we need bridges. So we have changing all the, all the ecosystem because of all these, all of these.

New specs, new challenges, yeah. Yeah, I mean, Deng Chardin and the future of that ability is going to be another real challenge. But I think the feeling is that in Cancun, for example, we have that feeling that the merch is going to happen just right the corner. And 40 years later, it is happening. I think that this is something that can change all the rules of everything. I have the feeling that we are part of the history of blockchain and being in Berlin. at that moment, the same place in which Ethereumborn is like magical, right? And also, from the dominant point of view, we have the feeling that our community members feel part of this.

I mean, if you are a home estaker alone, it's like you are alone in your home, but the feeling that we have is the community that all together are in that direction. And it's really important to be part of something. And I think that this is really nice also. Yeah, but the things have changed a lot. I mean, for example, during genesis of Rufus' stake, we even don't know when the withdrawal going to happen, and we don't have that yet.

The ecosystem is growing in terms of technology also, because now we are introducing Berkel-Treez that was a technology that one year ago maybe we don't know how to exploit it, so everything is changing. but I also have the feeling that this is really strong because of the maturity of the technology. We have a ball in during the G's. This is not just a day of six months that just deliver. So, yeah, the feeling is that we are making the roots of something new.

That's really, really nice. Your thoughts? Yeah, I agree. It's been coming for so long. And now it's coming at really inopportune time, like at 6 a.m. tomorrow morning. We'll know it's going to be open all night. There's going to be wall rooms here of kind of people

kind of tracking the merge and making sure the co-clients work and pick up. Is there going to be like a screen? Like when you're going to launch? We should probably do that. We should probably set that up to do. Yeah. I mean, we'll have a long, basically it'll be a long night.

So I think we have time to kind of set up stuff. And then at the merge, So there's this artist, this musician, who kind of synthesized the history of Ethereum into a musical composition. So basically, I may be paraphrasing this wrong because basically my musical knowledge is zero. So basically forgive me if I do. So I think he's kind of taken each block and kind of somehow calculated a musical note from it. So basically there's like the number of blocks are the number of musical notes. It takes about a half hour to perform and will be performed at the merge because obviously this is kind of when when like Ethereum Proof work ends.

And he's performing it live. He's performing it live here in four notes. Basically six six 30 a.m. or something be here or be square. Yeah. So basically it'll it'll happen. It'll all happen despite the very unfortunate timing in this, you know, European time zone. It's like, yeah,

should have been on the West Coast or something. It's like 9 p.m. that's like nice and cozy. Yeah, but yeah, no, it's all happening. And I mean, the office where Ethereum launched,

it's no longer, I mean, basically it's no longer the East Dev office. They moved out a couple of years ago. So basically like the golden office and everything, it's gone. But maybe we can kind of have the merch here.

It'll be nice. Yeah, I think this is a good place to have it. I don't have so many eggs in the Ethereum basket in terms of not building anything on Ethereum. You know, it feels like really kind of nice to be here while it's happening. Yeah, I also remembering all the complexity that we have added to the network also because I still remember at the beginning when you can run a note in just a laptop. And then the chain started to grow.

Now we have execution, consensus. We have a lot of pieces in the ecosystem. Now, also the MEPB boost is also a new piece, a proposal of separation. So from the point of view of a user, it has increased the difficulty to be part of the network. And that is why we run down mainly, to try to remove that complexity from the users

to allow anyone to run a node. I think it's important that because otherwise, we are only going to have technical people around this and this is not decentralization either. So trying to more as much as possible people, I think is something very important for the future of Therian.

And the thing is we are making so changes, making the network with a lot of things, not new cryptography is making even harder, but it's worth it obviously. Yeah, let's talk about the new cryptography. So

the new Quill kit on the block obviously, is ZK-based trustless bridges, and you're involved in them too, because you have your fingers in everything you do. That's true. Yeah, totally. Yeah, for me, bridges have been always

a problem in the ecosystem, because you need to have operators, you need to have trust on them. It's always the weak piece of the network. We have seen several hacks in the last years because of that, because the bridge

are not safe. I mean, I really would like to have this trash-elect solution happening. And I have the feeling that with this technology, we can start to create this bridge between different networks, for example, between NOSIS and Ethereum, because since we are sharing technology,

sharing cryptography, is even possible to create these bridges. So, for example, the thing is the consensus client, according to the design is able to have the state on smart contracts so being able to have the state of other

blockchain allows you to create proof of the state in other blockchain using technology and that is game changing because you don't depend on no ones, you only depend to someone publishing proofs and this allows to create

the Tradles Bridge that is Yeah, I mean maybe maybe to give some background on this I mean, we've had trustless bridges in the past, but they were all optimistic, right? So basically it kind of, they relied on people monitoring them and challenging the state if they think the transition was invalid. So basically in a way, it was trustless, but in a game theoretical kind of way, whereas the new type of bridges, the ZK like client bridges, they are trustless in, you know, in mathematical cryptographic way. And I mean, that is, it is a game changer. Yeah, totally.

I have that feeling. I mean, yeah, but going back to the centralization and the centralized health, centralized and it makes sense to have these bridges because they are needed. But we have saw that the current ones is hard to maintain. It has a lot of risks. And this is a game challenge for sure because you remove all these stress, all these insecurity. and you add a connection between networks. And seeing the future of Ethereum to be able to support several roll-ups and several

DK-EBMs, it's even more important to create this bridge in a Trashless because we are going to have a lot of connection between them and that's a critical infertitude point. So seeing how this neutrality allows us to create these kind of things is really amazing. I am really excited about all of this and really... To be honest, I've been talking about this trialless bridge with Jordi, four years ago, three years ago, how we can create a general proof of Bitcoin inside Ethereum, validate the proof of work.

It was crazy, but I mean, we have been thinking about that from several years, and this is going to change everything, or that is my feeling. There's also going to be a panel I'm looking forward to very much this afternoon on, you know, zero knowledge bridges with Hardy and Alex. from Matter Labs and Uma. And originally Vittalik was also slated to be on the panel, but unfortunately he's sick. So he called out.

But I'm still very much looking forward to that because I feel like this is the real new thing this year. So I mean, basically everything else that's kind of around, we've in principle had this for a long time. So for instance, I know, I mean, if you look at the house, how much are proliferating and it warms my heart. It's fantastic. But basically, Dau is in the grand scheme of things. They're not new, right? So basically, we all knew this was going to come at some point. There would be DOWs and basically, there would be large-scale coordination.

But basically, yeah, ZK bridges, super cool, so bullish. I mean, coming from the, more than the cosmos side, where we have IBC, which is potentially a protocol to send messages between chains. And, you know, IBC is made possible because every chain uses the same consensus algorithm. And so chains were able to validate the consensus of other chains. And so therefore, like, there's this trust minimized aspect there. I think the thing that that I'm really hoping for is to have some sort of like shared standards across like these different ecosystem. And so I understand that like from the point of view of Ethereum, it's difficult to, and EVM chains, it's difficult to implement IVC type consensus between, between all the different role ops because they might have different assumptions about finality and things like that.

But, yeah, I'm like really, really quite hopeful that protocols like things like Composable Finance and, you know, these cross-domain layers that allow liquidity to flow between ecosystems, but also allow instructions to flow with ecosystems is going to be really, really important in the next couple of years. And ZKBridges, like, is part of the types of solutions that can kind of flow into these more broad interoperability. networks. Totally. The thing is, or the feeling I have is this technology is evolving a lot, things that we thought that were impossible one year ago now are reality. The ZKBM, be able to have recursive stocks and be able to generate, reproduce the state of Ethereum. I mean, we are just discovering this technology. And imagine that in the future, you can user terminology truth to validate the state of two different networks, just using the technology to connect them and in a secure manner.

And the thing is, there is a lot of projects working on this duration, technology, Xerox, Park, midden. A lot of people are interested in this technology because it's a game-changing technology. It's not just because of the breaches. You can think farther. You can think about privacy. You can think about identity. be able to pass a KWC with a technology proof.

These kind of things can change everything. Can change the world as we know. That is my feeling. I am totally bullies on the K technology. And I think maybe we don't realize yet about all the potential that this can have, not just for Ethereum, just for users. So really well is in that. Is it correct to assume that with these?

I was talking to someone last week who was building like a ZK layer for introbability, And looking at it from the user's perspective, what that would allow is essentially, like, you know, you could go on OpenC and pay with any currency. Like, you could pay with Dot or Adam or whatever. And, like, the user wouldn't know the difference because the ZKVM would, the ZKBridge would be making those transactions sort of in the background and, like, doing all the swaps and everything in order for, like, OpenC to finally receive, like, ether or whatever, like, that it needs. Is that like the goal in the user experience on the user's being said? Yeah, I think maybe I'm wrong, but I have the feeling that right now we are not thinking too much in users. Because if you start to think about now, we have several chains, we have no-sys chain, we have XI, we have Havans, we have lots of chains with different addresses in different networks for the user.

That is crazy to understand what is happening. We saw in the past people sending funds to an address in another network. And I mean, we need to fix that for sure. Us usability should be another thing to start to work hard because I have a feeling that every day, since we are adding more technology, we are adding breaches, we are in networks, we are making even harder for users. And try to abstract that complexity also from the user perspective

and usage of the network is critically important. The same critical that is technology is that users can use it. Otherwise, it makes no sense that have technology. I 100% agree. So I was, I moderated a panel last night about how to actually make blockchain improve the life of the many. And basically, I think the number one takeaway was we have to ship this to the nominees. We have basically, basically it's like if we, if we're building technology for the same one million people, worldwide, this is not going to, this is not going to cut it. It's not going to cut it. We kind of,

we need to make it easy to use. And basically it starts with the onboarding experience, right? I mean, you open a wallet and it says, yeah, these are the 12 words. Never share them with anyone. Don't lose them or you'll actually lose access to all of you. Before you've even done a single thing. It's like, what the fuck is this? I mean, it's been like, it's been 10 years. Why do we still have this? It's like, yeah, I mean, we need account abstraction. We kind of, we need to abstract. everything away from the user. And I mean, if you look at the internet, it's a mess. You know, in the backhand, it's a complete mess.

It's a miracle that the internet actually usually works. And we don't ask anyone to understand TCPIP. It's like no one knows how it works. It just works. And this is kind of, this is where we need to get. This is where we kind of, we need to make it, you know, you know, ship it to the nominees. This is like, I don't know if you remember, but at the last appcon, I think I was monitoring the panel.

You were on the panel. but we did a panel together about this very topic, about user experience. And it was, I think, I don't remember. But I think that, yeah, we've been talking about this for years. And I mean, it's getting a little bit better. I think the thing I used to say was, you know, we need to look at the metric of like monthly active non-crypto nerds joining, right? And I think from the wallet side, like, there has been some advancements.

I'm a big fan of Zengo and like what they're doing with thrust. threshold signature. And I think, you know, cryptography is making it a lot easier for users to onboard. And of course, there's not like full custody, but it is better than like, it's much better than like being on an exchange. And then on the other side, it's much better than having like worry about your seed phrase. So like cryptography is making it easier for people to, for people to build, you know, products that make it easier for people to end up using the, you know, the final, like, you know, crypto in general. And then, you know, I think like looking at, uh, ZK Bridges and ZKVMs and how they're going to allow a lot of this,

they're going to allow like this to be abstracted away. I think, yeah, I think like in the end, like cryptographies is actually a catalyst for a lot of great user experiences implemented properly and, you know, with the right, with the right sort of like interfaces. Did I tell you that on nose chain there's going to be, basically there's currently a pilot with 2000 credit cards. They have their real visa credit cards.

They have credit card numbers. They're backed with X-Di on Nosis chain. And you can pay, basically, you hold them yourself. So basically the credit card is also a key. So it's also a hardware wallet. And you hold them yourself. No one has custody. So you know those crypto-back credit cards.

Usually the person who issues them, they always have custody. But basically with this credit card, you have custody. you have custody and you tap it on the visa terminal. And there's a payment provider in between who kind of takes your ex-di, who converts it to U.S. dollars or euros or whatever and pays and enters it into the visa payment network. This is, I mean, basically, this is, this is cool enough. But if the person you're paying also has one of those accounts or noses chain, you would actually bypass the visa system.

So basically you would tap your credit card, which is also your hardware wallet, and it would automatically just send it from one account to the other. And this is the kind of user experience that we need. This is what we need. It's like augmentative user experience. Basically, it's kind of like you don't need to know how it works. So for instance, I don't know.

So for instance, GPS, you know, sat nav on your phone. You use it all the time. Do you know how special relativity kind of impacts the way that kind of, the satellites kind of determine where you are. No, you're freaking don't. It's like, and it just works. And this is kind of how I see Trusters Bridges. So basically, you shouldn't have to know about the Trusted Bridges.

They should just be there. Basically, it should just work. And that should be the general user experience. Totally, totally. I don't know what you remember in Prague. I don't know what, right, made a video, a parody of the current situation. How is the process to more people?

It's called a Lemon Coin. I really recommend that because it's a parody of the process that you need to pass to... We linked to it in the show notes. I think I remember this. It wasn't BRAC and it's like the full process that you need to follow, to be able to use projects. And it was so fun, but the sad part is that we are in the same place.

We have not improved anything of that, or that is the feeling, that we are still asking users for hold their keys, they lose them. People doesn't realize that if you, tell this word to someone he can stole you. Even we have seen, we have so in our channels, people telling other ones that they are damno support and they stole money from them. So people are, it's not just spirituality, it's education also

because, I mean, I think in general, people that are outside these are not used to control keys to be responsible of that. And we need to educate And it's not just also usability. This happens to me. This still happens to me where, for instance, in POAP, asked for an ENS name.

I put my Argent ENS name, but Argent doesn't support NOS chain. I didn't think about it. I was like, here, this is my NES name. Like, the one that I use on my phone. And then I was talking to Patricia and he says, well, getting those back is going to be hard. Yeah. I mean, for example, I just remember at the very beginning,

I used the Nosis Multisicic. and it was very good at the moment, really secure, and then NOSIS SAFE happened. And now the usability of a multi-signature wallet has improved a lot. Also the gas. So basically, when we first created the multi-sig, like basically gas was not a thing. Basically, it was super cheap anyways.

So basically, you didn't pay any attention to it. And I know that basically just probably about a year ago or something, I emptied our last multi-sigs. and then basically it was so freaking expensive. I paid just to get the funds out, I paid like $2,000 in gas or something, just to get the funds out, you know, too modern safe. It's like, oh, fuck.

We had the same situation. Same situation in the association to move the funds from the old one to the new one was so expensive. But now, for example, you have not safe in different networks with the same address. Oh, no, no. So there was something, yeah.

So generally the assumption should be, and this is something that basically is a big no-s-safe usability problem, that basically on EOAs you can kind of force that you can get the same address on different networks, and with a safe you can't. So basically there are some networks, you can brute force it,

but even then it's not easy, and there are some networks where basically if you send it to the same address, it's just gone. And we've actually had this that basically large amount of funds, like seriously, like stupid amounts of funds, like tens of millions were sent to the wrong network,

because the person wasn't paying attention and didn't do a test transaction. It's like, I mean, it's on them for not doing a test transaction, but it's also on us a little bit because it shouldn't be this easy to make a mistake. It's like... That's usability at the end. If you have different others in different networks, it's crazy sometimes to use it. And also, for example, we only have DNS in one network, unless you use centralized providers to translate it.

And that's also another problem of your usability, because you cannot tell someone you, a DNS name in one network. It's not going to be the same in the other one, or it's, who knows? Oh, you have to decide where the registry is, where you can update it and so on. We're having an ENS bridge built, who knows is chain with the gateway. It would be nice, but yeah, I mean, it's, it's, all of it. I think there are so many usability questions, but yeah, but I think kind of onboarding people and kind of seeing where they go wrong and then fixing that,

This is what we need to do. Yeah, going back to the point, we need to improve the usability to get more people involved in both of this and to increase the centralization. At the end, this is all about decentralization. This is also something that POAP does really well. I mean, they've minted 5 million power apps. I mean, that's adoption. That's like, I mean, it's not quite like, I mean, it's not like Google, but, I mean, it's not five billion people, but five million people in times of your, you know, for a web three project, that is massive. Yeah, and looking at the list, it's super easy to make.

Looking at the list of poaps that people create, it's not all web stuff. It's like, hey, Jim's birthday or what, you know, like there's people using poap that are not, probably not like native crypto people or like people who come to conferences like this. And you can make it on your, so I was, I mean, I was at a dinner last night and we made a poep for the people, you know, just sitting there like between main course and he said, we made a poep and we distributed it for the people out there, you know, and like 50 people redeemed it. And so basically, you know, it's like all the 50 people who were at that dinner and have a POAP from that dinner. And basically it was on the phone, like, it was, yeah, it was super easy

to make. Yeah. And they have these, they were selling these nice, nice POAP cards here, NFC. And so you can put your POAP in here. And you guys want my POAP? Yeah. I want a POA. I met Sebastian in, in Berlin.

Live stream Po-up distribution here This is cool Anyway Yeah so this is a cool thing too Like being able to have your NFC thing inside Yeah

Now it'll take me To the we are minting your Po app Yeah Nice You've met Sep 3.0 In Berlin in September 2022 Here you go

Yeah And what's nice about this too It tells you how many people Met you before me Yeah but you can also put Like your telegram handle In the description and so you can kind of like, oh, it's like a good way to share your telling,

Graham, Hans. I mean, this was a hard box, but. So, Zaki, he met you. Yes. It was his first po-up, too. But he has two now. Yeah, he has two now, but it was his first one. And he met Prochiseo, so basically it's like the golden two.

Yeah, it's kind of, it's a way of kind of displaying and curating your own, like, life experience. I think this is also something that would benefit. it from a layer of ZK stuff on top, right? So basically, I mean, maybe I don't want everyone to see this, this is a fictitious example because I'm, you know, I'm a boring mom, but say, I check into like kit cut or something. Like maybe I don't want everyone to see that, but, you know,

just, you know, the Kit Cut crowd. So it's kind of like, yeah, I mean, it's like, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that sort of thing will come. And it's, I mean, for things like Poabs, but also for things just like, your general financial privacy and transfers. What do you guys expect is going to happen tonight? I don't have fun.

I think they're just going to happen. Yeah. Just, you know, I mean, so basically they've tested it so many times. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's going to be okay. I mean, there's still so many different, you know, combinations of clients. I mean, because now you have.

two clients, right? So basically you have like the consensus layer and the execution layer. And in principle, they should work in any combination. And I think basically... Just for context here, there's two clients. So it's a consensus and execution. And for each of those, there's like three or four clients. Exactly.

Yeah. So the combinations are... You get like 20 combinations. And so basically, I think the worst that will happen is that one of these combinations will fail. I think, I mean, what, do you think it's not going to? I don't think so. Well, I mean, who knows, bro?

Maybe, maybe tomorrow I can answer that question. But I have the feeling that this has been testing several times in different networks. So, I mean, I have a good vibe on that. Obviously, so next case, this can happen. But even the test run, so basically, like, there were always some more things that kind of didn't go exactly according to plan. So basically, I would be, I mean, we'll see. I think basically all in all, it's going to be fine. It'll be completely fine, but basically, yeah, is it going to be without hiccups, I do?

Yeah, I mean, obviously, I remember during the Genesis, for example, I remember that I think it was pretty. We're not able to propose blocks or something like that. They release a fix in a couple of hours. We publish it and everything starts to work perfectly. The network works, but was this kind of fix that you need to do the night of the answer? Yeah, so I think in due time, all combinations will work. I just think that basically, maybe not on block one.

So it's... Yeah, maybe suddenly you realize that one client's not working, but this doesn't mean that the network is not working. It means nothing bad for the network, but basically this is kind of the level of hiccup that I would expect. I wouldn't expect for Ethereum to go down. Yeah, so, but yeah, it's...

I mean, it's a real challenge. Maybe not all the people are realizing how hard is it. And the thing is so many pieces, it's so many technology. so many clients, so many implementations, standards. I mean, it has been a lot, but it's a lot of work. But I have a very good feeling, obviously. I totally trust on the development that has been done.

So, I mean, from my point of view, even, I mean, we are in the middle, from the point of view of that, not because we are waiting if something happens. So we are nervous because of that. But in deep, the feeling is that everything is going to be, well, maybe some fix. except but the normal things that are. Yeah, I agree. So what's next for, what's next for Nosis chain ecosystem and,

except for this amazing credit card thing? It's cool, right? This is pretty cool. So how does that work where, how does the credit card also turn? How is the credit card also a hardware wallet? It's from a company named Tangam. And basically it's,

it's like a key in a credit card. I mean, basically, they've been around forever. So basically status made them for a while. And so basically have like, you know, like, you know, card-shaped private keys? As far as you know, they integrate the key on the chip, and they use the visa protocol,

and it seems that the visa protocol has an empty payload. So they take benefit of that. They put the signature on that payload. So when you send to the reseller, if you are able to protect the crypto one, you present the crypto one, otherwise you use the regular visa. But I'm not...

Super cool. I'm not an expert on that. Yeah, I don't know anything about the visa protocol, but that's... Me neither. So basically, I learned a lot about payment providers in the last half years since we've kind of been working on this. And the payment stack, it's a mess. It's like a complete mess.

There's like 20 companies you go through on regular basis for whatever reason. And then basically, yeah, so basically the way that it's actually handled is basically the point-of-sale software. So basically there's companies who kind of handle the point-of-sale software. So basically there's companies who kind of handle the point-of-sale. the company we're working with, they have a million point-of-sale terminals in Europe. So basically when you tap your credit card,

I don't know, your bakery or something, they may run this software. And this can be updated remotely. So basically that's kind of their part of the payment stack. And this is who we integrated. Okay, but they're building software that's like standardized across with like other payment software. Yes.

Terminal. Yeah. So like Ingenico or any of these other. ones like they all run by the same standards. I assume they would have like the same standards, but obviously I don't I don't know. It's like it's like to me it's all you know like payment back end. Yeah. I think the the payment stack, even though it's a mess, it's probably decently standard.

Like if you go to a place like Indonesia, they always have like six terminals. Yeah. And I think nothing works. But yeah. So coming back to Gnosis and the nosis chain ecosystem, what's really, what's really exciting and like what are you most excited about coming? I'm excited about many things. So basically one of the things I'm excited about is Maker V3 is coming to NOSIS chain very shortly.

We still owe them some back-end support. It's like, yeah, but it's happening. I mean, it's a general purpose chain. So basically all the Defi primitives and so are there very much not a D5 first chain. So basically it's very much like a human-centric chain. So basically the circles is on no sustain. UBI project. It's UBI project like a decentralized web of trust-based UBI project.

I think fundamentally UBI is something that we'll need in the next couple of years. If you want society to kind of keep existing in a nice fashion without, you know, like escalating inequality. And so kind of baking it into the protocol. that's not baked in, but it's kind of one of the cool pillars of the things that are on nosus chain. So currently there's 200,000 accounts. And then, yeah, PowerUp is on nosis chain. That obviously also pertains to individual people. So basically it's kind of your individual curated experiences.

And lots of DAO's on nose chain. There's like 1,500 DAO. And DowTooling. And Dowell. Lots of Dow tooling. Lots of Dowel tooling. It's kind of one of the things we kind of made sure to build. So basically make it as as nice a place.

as possible for Daos. Because basically you have Daos, you have people, that kind of ties, you know, well into each other. You can have things like, you know, the things we've talked about forever, like joint stakeholdership in ventures and so on. You can distribute funds from Daos to people by kind of having like group currencies

with their web of trust issued circles and so on. So basically there's really good ways to integrate all of these. things. I am so basically I currently we are obviously I mean obviously you guys know so basically we merged with X-I and X-Day was very much proof of authority so there's like 21 you know authorities that kind of validate the network and we have launched the proof-of-stake beacon chain exactly the same as the the Ethereum beacon chain and that beacon chain now has over 100,000 validators so basically we will also have the merge just like Ethereum just it's I mean it's

it's a mess because it's the different consensus. It'll have a slight difference between Ethereum and Nosis that makes a little hard to make it harder. But we'll get there in the next weeks. So basically then it will be the most decentralized network after Ethereum. So basically, Ethereum has 400,000 validators.

Noses chain has 100,000 and where we think that this stake at home movement, it's important. I mean, this is also why we've partnered with I do just because it's, I mean, for true, for claiming credible neutrality and permissionless innovation,

you need to have a network that belongs to everyone. And something that belongs to everyone belongs to no one. It's like the credible neutrality of the base layer. I think this is kind of a virtue that we have lost over the last couple of years when people kind of scramble to just build stuff. And I think this is something that we need to

to reclaim like the cyphepunk 2022 movement. Yeah. And I mean, basically this vibes really well with, you know, like the tornado issues. We think privacy is the human right. So basically we think kind of if you look at how much privacy

has been taken from us over the last 30 or 40 years and it's only getting worse. So basically all your payment data. It's like banks are allowing people access to like the synthesized data of, you know, you're spending and that's atrocious.

I don't think this should be happening. So basically you should be able to kind of, you know, opt out of that. Opt out. And basically, and I mean, cash, which is kind of the untrackable form of money currently, this is being phased out. There's many places you can't pay with cash anymore. Crazy. Somehow it's been happening slowly.

You know the story about Frog who kind of sits in a pot of water. And, you know, you apparently turn. out it's bullshit. It's not true. But I think it's a good, it's a good simile. So basically this, this frog, it sits in a pot of water. And basically if, if the water boils, it's obviously, you know, you put it in and it jumps out. But if you put it in the water and it's like nice, nice and cozy room temperature and then you slowly increase the temperature, the frogs, it sits and it's it and it sits until it's dead. And this is kind of, this is, this is how I, it turns out it's bullshit. Apparently, the frogs I mean, this is something that Greenpeace apparently made out to kind of...

Don't read that home. Yeah, it's a Greenpeace made this up for like an advert against climate change in the 90s. So basically this is like... Of all people. Of all people, Greenpeace. Yeah. So, yeah. So, but apparently it's not true, but for us, it's true.

So basically for us, basically, we are the frogs. We are the frogs. And basically, privacy has been stripped from us like one bit at a time. So basically like, I mean, it used to be funny, right? Basically, like, people used to say. say, don't say this on the phone. Otherwise, you know, people will be listening. We now know, you know, everything was being monitored.

And somehow, somehow Ed Snowden is still the bad guy who is, you know, in exile and in Russia. And we're making it like, this is no big deal. It's like, this is a freaking big deal. It's like your privacy is yours. And yes, I mean, tornado cash was used by some bad guys. But it's a tool. It's a tool. We should all be using it.

And basically, in a way, maybe integrating it so deeply into the protocol that everyone uses it, this will kind of remove the problem of kind of helping the terrorists, because basically terrorists will be like 0.1 of a percent or something. They won't be at 50 percent, whatever. So, yeah. Yeah, but I mean, in the, okay, I mean, I don't know the actual numbers of tornado cash and how many criminals are actually using it. But this idea that crypto has been used by criminals and terrorists

and is primarily used by criminals and terrorists is like a totally, it's a false idea and it's a debunked idea. But basically, Tornado Cash did actually see quite. Yeah, basically, if you looked at the numbers, so basically it was greatly exaggerated in the media. And I think in CoinDest, just a means that 80%. And basically there was a chain analysis report that said like 30%. of something. So I probably trust

the chain analysis report, but basically at some point, basically if it's like, if it's like 99% bad guys and Vittalik, I mean, we kind of, we have to ask ourselves, are we the baddies? And I think, no, we're not the baddies. So I think we just build technology where

you know, there's a very obvious first adopter because their, you know, their need for obfuscation is larger. But, you know, there's a very legitimate reason for obfuscating. And I I've used tornado cash in the past, basically. It's like, I mean, I've used it mostly for the use case that I wanted a fresh address and I wanted to fund it with gas money.

This is kind of, this is, and I think this is what most people use it for. Totally. If you want to send money to a friend without revealing what, how much you have, you need to use this kind of tooling. Otherwise, it's easy to track. So at the end. Or an exchange. I mean. Yeah, like, you know, a centralized layer of application.

I mean, people use, I mean, I know lots of people, and I have done this too. I've used Krakken that way, kind of less pay. Me too, yeah. I think they've removed that use case largely because basically now you only have one pay-in address. You used to be able to generate as many pay-in addresses as you wanted, and now they no longer have that. So basically, that's kind of like gone. But, yeah, in principle, I think privacy tooling, we need this. The skeleton technology here, everything is public.

everything should not be public. It's like everything should be trustless, yes. Should everything be public? Absolutely not. So. Totally. And for me, the problem is not the technology. The problem, obviously is the people. For example, imagine that a terrorist use a mobile phone to put a bomb. Should we buy mobile phones because of that?

Makes no sense, right? So at the end, the problem is not the technology is how we use it. It's security theater. It's kind of like, I mean, I'm, I probably end up on a no-fly list, for saying this, but it's like the TSA, right? So basically it's like, I could think of so many ways of kind of smuggling, like, contraband and, you know, dangerous things on board, you know, bypassing the TSA because, you know, they're looking for bombs and shoes.

I mean, it's like, yeah. And I mean, if you look at how much time it costs us and how unpleasant it makes the experience of, I think, yeah, I mean, but it gives people the illusion of security. Exactly. And it gives control to the state. And somehow this is... Yeah, we want to talk about illusion of security? You know that big lever on the escape hatch in the plane?

Yeah. Yeah. One way to take over a plane, I guess, pull that big lever. It's right there in front of everyone. I have one more point. And it's admittedly, you know, seeing what we've talked about, you know, in the past, you know,

hour or so. It's on the lighter side. But I want to start a movement for like more age-appropriate swag. So I feel like I've, I've been aged out of the swag. So basically I pass all of these boots and, you know, like, it's like

neon colored hats that glow in the dark that basically you would wear to a rave. Like, you know, just bring back the regular t-shirts, the tote bags. Yeah, we want, yeah, these kinds of this kind of swag. You want, we want,

we won that swag pack. You're probably looking for like some, like mommy swag. Like massive like like a like that node pacifier or a kid bottle. You will laugh. So basically no, noses, employees and friends who actually,

who have kids, we send them a, a onesy with an hour with a pacifier, you know, in the beak. Yeah. And everyone loves it. Yeah.

Yeah. No, I don't want that. But basically, I don't want a fanny pack either. I mean, it's kind of like, I know that the cool kids wear them. I know this. I see it at the time. Makes me feel very old. But to me, a fanny pack is something that, you know, my grandma said you needed to take on a holiday.

So you weren't robbed, you know, on the dangerous Italian streets or something. Now it's going to be, I think, 10 years next year that I've been in crypto. And I definitely feel like a lot of times I'm the oldest person in the room. and ugly, right? Well, I mean, I don't think of it that way. It's like, now there's those people who are like

younger than I was when I came into crypto who were like just getting into crypto and yeah, there is a generational gap, I think. And also that shows you're like, you know, the people who listen to Epicenter. Like nobody under 30 is listening to Epicenter. It's true. If you're under 30 and you're listening to this,

let us know on Twitter. Yeah. We'll get tweets saying, like, my dad makes me listen to this. Thank you. Thank you both for taking part in this. And yeah, thanks for listening. Thanks for being part of this live stream. And we'll see you again next week.

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