The Pomp Podcast - Bitcoin & Crypto Is An Intelligence Tool?! | Robert Viglione

Episode Date: October 1, 2025

Robert Viglione is the Co-Founder & CEO at Horizen Labs, and the Founder of zkVerify . In this conversation we talk about zero-knowledge proofs, why they are critical for U.S. national security, how this technology allows machines to share information without revealing data, Rob’s experience as a military intelligence officer in Afghanistan, how he discovered the value of Bitcoin, and why ZKPs are one of the most underrated technologies shaping the future.======================Check out my NEW show for daily bite-sized breakdowns of the biggest stories in finance, technology, and politics: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://pompdesk.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠======================Bitizenship helps Bitcoin-forward investors gain EU residency and a path to Portuguese citizenship in five years while maintaining exposure to Bitcoin. Their regulated fund qualifies you for the Golden Visa through an operating company focused on Bitcoin-native innovation. Book a free strategy call at https://bitizenship.com/pomp.======================Bitwise is one of the largest and fastest-growing crypto asset managers, with more than $15 billion in client assets across an expanding suite of investment solutions—including the world’s largest crypto index fund—plus products spanning Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, and crypto equities. In addition to managing assets, Bitwise helps investors stay informed about the fast-moving crypto market. Every week, CIO Matt Hougan breaks down what’s happening in crypto in five minutes or less. Read the latest at https://experts.bitwiseinvestments.com/cio-memos. Certain Bitwise investment products may be subject to the extreme risks associated with investing in crypto assets. Visit https://bitwiseinvestments.com/disclosures to learn more.======================Timestamps: 0:00 - Intro 2:28 - ZK proofs and bitcoin & crypto in Afghanistan 7:25 - National security use cases 10:42 - Biggest areas for opportunity 14:45 - AI, proof of human & machine 20:25 - Why blockchain is so valuable 24:44 - What are some technical obstacles? 27:17 - How to cut costs and improve efficiency 30:33 - Bitcoin integration & future tech

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat

any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Satellites need to communicate with each other. They need communicate in secure ways they do today but i think today more than ever we have to worry about adversarial operations that could take down networks or interfere with networks or spoof networks or inject false information into those networks so using cryptographic tools like zero knowledge proofs are just fundamental for sharing information because finance runs the world and bitcoin pioneered and opened the door for all kinds of like massive digital financial innovations

that are happening now, that we need to link this ultimately to real human beings in real countries that are subject to actual laws. What's going on, guys? Today, we've got a great episode. Rob Viglione. He is the founder of Horizon Labs, and he's also the founder of ZK Verify. In this conversation, we are going to talk about something that is very important. It's a piece of technology that is imperative for U.S. national security. We know we're going into a digital world, and there's everything from artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and much more. But we need to be able to pass information between all these machines without actually revealing the information. That's where something called zero knowledge proofs comes into.

This is something you've probably heard about, but nobody actually knows. What is it? How does it work? And why is it so important for U.S. national security? Well, I went and I found Rob and Rob's got a great understanding of the technology. They've been building a ton of this. And he also happens to have been an intelligence officer in the military. He was in Afghanistan when he realized the value of Bitcoin. And he's got a ton of stories and understanding of where the world is going and why this specific technology is so underrated.

Here's my conversation with Rob Viglione. All right, Rob, I'm super excited to talk to you today because I think that ZK proofs are probably one of the most important technologies, but not for what people think. Most people think of this as, you know, kind of some weird science project, but I've been doing a bunch of research on national security.

And I found a DARPA paper from 2019 where they're talking about the fact that this technology is going to be critical for national security moving forward. Before we start talking, though, I know a lot of people in the audience are thinking to themselves, what the heck is a ZK proof? I've heard that term. I don't know what it is. So the best way I can describe it to people is the following. When you go and you show up to a bar, the bouncer asks you for your ID. And what they really want to understand is, are you 21 years old or not? They don't care where you live. They don't care what your actual date of birth is. They don't care about whether

you're an organ donor or not. They just want to know, are you 21 and should I let you in or not? But to prove that, an individual pulls out their wallet and they show an identification card. That ID card has all of their personal information on it. Their driver's license number, their address, their organ donors, their date of birth, all that kind of stuff. And so in order to simply answer the question, are you 21 or older, you have to reveal all this public information. That's a pretty low risk situation because the bouncer probably doesn't have a photographic memory. They're not going to do anything with that information. But the idea of a ZK proof is that you would be able to simply prove to the bouncer that you are 21 or older,

but not reveal any of your information. And so that idea going into a bar seems kind of low stakes and probably overkill. But that's what we're talking about with these zero knowledge proofs is this idea of being able to prove a piece of information, but not actually have to reveal it to the person who is verifying. And going back to this idea of the military and national security, there are massive implications for this. And so you have a background in the military and in national security and the intelligence world that I think is maybe kind of the foundation for you getting into all of this. So tell us about your time in Afghanistan and what you saw in terms of maybe our intelligence apparatus, using things like Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies

while you were there in Afghanistan? Yeah, well, thank you for having me on the show, first of all. And you're absolutely right. So in your example with the bartender, I would prefer that either my gray hairs or a piece of cryptography proves my age versus giving my address away. But yeah, I stumbled into Bitcoin while I was still working with the National Defense Establishment. I was in Afghanistan for a couple of years. I worked with a variety of organizations out there, especially on the intelligence side. And so my role there had nothing to do with Bitcoin, but I was a big Bitcoin enthusiast. And you can think that these were the years 2013, 2014.

So it was really just getting started. And the way I was contributing to the community was basically setting up seminars and teaching people how to download wallets, giving GIs Bitcoin. And I wish I can get it back, but actually, I'm happy to have it. But I think what I realized back then was this is a game changer. It's a game changer for the world. It's definitely a game changer for national security.

It's a ton of implications, but probably the way that I describe ZKPs or zero knowledge proofs is literally it's a piece of cryptography. You could do a lot with it. Now, I went down to the White House earlier this year and I sat down with the deputy director of the CIA, the second in command, the big boss. And when I was talking to Mike, I asked him, look, obviously, stable coins and Bitcoin, they are much more efficient. They are in times have this pseudonymity to them.

They can be much faster in terms of payments, whether people realize it or not, the intelligence apparatus, they move a lot of money around, right? And he explicitly told me in that interview that they see these technologies as tools that they do use. They also understand that their adversaries are using these same tools. And so it's a little bit of a kind of a cat and mouse game of you want to be able to use the tool for yourself to achieve your objectives, but you kind of want to disrupt the ability for your adversaries to use the same tools.

Is that kind of what you were seeing in Afghanistan in 2013, 2014? So back then, it was kind of early. But yes, national security was aware of cryptocurrencies back then. But I would say the tools and the tracking and the kind of deciphering what's going on chain has become so much more sophisticated these days. Plus, the stablecoins, the pieces of infrastructure and products that we have in the industry are literally programmatic money. And this was the whole allure of Bitcoin back then was you can actually take money, digitize

it and make a piece of software that is actually scarce. So these days, I think it's actually really a dominant form of money. And I'm not just talking about Bitcoin. I'm talking about the entire industry and the products that we're spinning off, like the stable coins, like the USDCs, the USDTs that are out there. We can actually use cryptography and smart contracts and rules to specify who is allowed to have access, who is able to see who has access, who's restricted from access and so forth. So the tools are just way better. And you're definitely going to see a big proliferation in national security now when we start thinking about the applications of this stuff in national security uh you have talked previously about

artificial intelligence semiconductors right these are things that i think are kind of tangential to bitcoin and crypto uh in this like tech enabled economic boom that we're living through but it seems like the zk proofs are able to actually help us from a national position in terms of protecting on the artificial intelligence, the semiconductor side, et cetera. Explain what some of the national security applications are for this type of technology. So many. So we can go down potential use cases, but it could be as simple as satellites need to communicate with each other.

They need to communicate in secure ways. They do today. But I think today, more than ever, we have to worry about adversarial operations that could take down networks or interfere with networks or spoof networks or inject false information to those networks. So using cryptographic tools like zero-knowledge proofs are just fundamental for sharing information. But then you can go to the opposite side of the spectrum, still relevant to national security. And we do this now with our network.

We can actually verify cryptographic proofs on national identities. So the U.S. isn't doing kind of cryptographic digital identities yet, but other countries are. Our allies are doing that. And to be able to actually prove that this human being is a citizen, they're not a criminal, they're not on some OFAC-restricted list, And then participate in the digital economy. That's also foundational for national security, because finance runs the world and Bitcoin pioneered and opened the door for all kinds of like massive digital financial innovations that are happening now. And we need to link this ultimately to real human beings in real countries that are subject to actual laws. Now, when you talk about, let's say, that national identity, right, is that essentially a situation where I go online, I want to use some service and they basically want to KYC me. but right now i give them all my information i mean how many people have taken out their you

know id card taking a little picture or i hate when they're like you look at the camera look left look right and doesn't work or you gotta do like 10 times um so they've got a picture of me they've got my identification they've got all my personal information using this technology of zk proofs you could essentially just say hey i am cleared based on all these different uh kind of perspectives or um you know criteria i am cleared to use this product or this technology but i don't actually have to give you any of this information so if you the product gets hacked my information is no longer at risk 100 and can you imagine that all that information being distilled to like a hash that is completely undesirable no one will be able to glean any information from

the hash other than what you want to disclose to them and i literally went through a kyc process last night where i'm kind of awkwardly trying to take a snapshot with my phone of my driver's license. It was annoying. I've done this a thousand times or maybe not that many, but it's a kind of a rinse and repeat thing that is way better handled with cryptography and automation. It's exactly what we're talking about here. But importantly, we're talking about not spoofing these identities and making sure that adversaries can't set up things like clandestine telecommunication networks in our cities like they did last week in New York City. So it's like we can actually prove that people are really human beings that belong here and the systems

that they're interacting with, whether they're fringe systems, comm systems, and so forth, they actually have legitimate rights and privileges to access. Now, when you think about this technology, it's been around for a while, I mean, DARPA article in 2019, right?

There's many other articles that are out there beforehand where people are saying, there's this problem. We think this is a potential solution. If you go and you look in these open source communities, people have been trying to figure this out

for quite a while. I think that there have been many different iterations of people who have actually come up with solutions, but then there's improvement on top of that. where do you see the biggest areas of opportunity in terms of improving or kind of making these things more efficient, lower cost, and kind of easier to use? So you said it, we're standing on the shoulders of giants. And just to reference some of those giants, Zcash was the pioneer of

bringing ZK proofs into the world of Web3. So we're building on that. And what's happened over the years and kind of like how we got to where we are today was these proof systems have become increasingly sophisticated over time and much more performant and critically performant at the math level that's only part of the story from now we need to layer in the business level so you need to take these things and scale them massively like i like my big pitch point these days to everyone who will listen to me is pretty soon every device even the one sitting in your pocket will be spitting off zk proofs and they'll be doing this for a variety of reasons because when you interact with the digital world you need to prove a lot of different things let alone your

identity so now we need specialized systems and networks and layers that candle actually like chunks of this value chain. So that's what we're doing. We're tackling one chunk of this value chain. There are others that do generating proofs because it used to be your computer would generate a cryptographic proof. It takes a long time with the more sophisticated proof systems and it's non-performance with actual products in the world. Now we're in that stage where we're finding product market fit, not just with what we're doing, but other chunks of the industry tackling very specific specialized parts of the value chain. We bring them together. Now we have products that should work in in the real world and when you're doing this how much of this is like uh we need to

go and actually do uh research and development like like there is no solution out there we've got to go and figure this out we're trying to you know use computer science and a bunch of other disciplines to like make technical breakthroughs versus no people understand like what needs to be done we're just going to go and actually build it it's more of kind of like an execution game than it is a technical breakthrough game yeah so it's mixed so rnd is always going on as a company we're always investing in R&D at the base math and theory level to building the software. But I would say the composition of that, the mix between R&D to actual applications that are out there in the wild is completely flipped. So it used to be maybe 80% R&D, 20% application

experimentation. Now it's the opposite. Now it's probably 20% R&D and 80% getting stuff out there into the market. Hey everyone, Matt Hogan here, the Chief Investment Officer for Bitwise Asset management. Each week, I write a brief five-minute memo on the most important topic in crypto. And this week, I tackle one of the biggest mistakes I see crypto skeptics make, underestimating the size of the markets that crypto aims to disrupt. To learn why crypto market sizing is the key to evaluating the space properly, check out my memo at bitwiseinvestments.com slash CIO memo. That's bitwiseinvestments.com slash CIO memo. Got it. And talk me through kind of what you guys have built right now,

and then where is it being used at the moment? Yeah, so it comes to the value chain. So the whole point, again, is generating cryptography to prove something. And kind of the list of things, of the somethings that I'm talking about vary. Everything from high national security priorities to digital identities to provable gaming and so forth have been going to use cases. But there's a value chain. First, to generate a cryptographic proof, then you could do things with it, proliferate it. You can add them together. We call that aggregating them. At the end of the day, you have to verify them somehow. In a way, this cryptographic is secure and can spread that information anywhere in the

world or any system in Web3 like Bitcoin or Ethereum. That's what we do. So we tackle the verification layer. So we are just hands down the world's best at verifying at scale, fast, and magnitude cryptographic proofs. The system is called Ziki Verify, and we're pumped to be launching the network next week now when you think about this um artificial intelligence like one of the big promises is what i call like the age of automation right to me uh being able to stream payments whether stable coins bitcoin anything back and forth that seems like a big deal the ability for a car to drive itself like obviously it's an automated car that seems like a big deal um as you just go through society it looks like we are getting more and more automated

over time a big reason is because software is becoming much more um understanding intelligent and can start to think for itself and act and so you get this like rise of quote-unquote digital workers where are you seeing the applications here in terms of if there's a world where essentially humans are being somewhat removed you now get this kind of weird dynamic of it doesn't require a human to verify a human you now almost have like machines verifying machines machines verifying software. And this becomes pervasive throughout society. So it's interesting you say that. So conversations we have internally about strategy are we should be building this thing for machines. We should not be building this for humans. Now, the use

cases that we can talk about today that are operating are kind of a blend, where you've got human applications and you've got AI applications. We do things like automated payments for AI in verifiable ways, right, in private environments. So I think one big divergence of all this AI stuff that we're seeing today, and we probably all love and use on a daily basis has been built on the public internet and public information. There's an even bigger world of private siloed information sitting in corporate databases, sitting in government databases and so forth or healthcare databases that are just by definition not out there for AI to train on. So there's a bit of a split now

and we're starting to see this in our AI customers where they need private execution environments to actually run their algorithms, to train data, to do a variety of processes to get to market. And they need to do this privately. They can't be sharing this information publicly. So we do things in secure enclaves, and not to go into too much of the detail there, but we're talking about private, secure hardware environments where they're running data privately, ultimately, so that their AI can get smarter and get out there and make the world better for whatever customers they have. Now, cryptography is a big part of that. So we actually have a variety of customers and applications that are verifying cryptographic proofs of private information that we'll never see the light of day publicly, but we can prove that it was actually real. That AI was trained on the right data set, the output isn't a hiccup, it's real, and we can prove a variety of other things with the underlying data without revealing it.

So it's actually kind of a massive revolution just ticking off right now. I mean, it's pretty interesting as soon as you start getting into this world of being able to prove a machine or prove where it came from or prove how it was trained, etc. There's a parallel world where the Sam Altmans of the world are trying to figure out how do you prove that something's human? Like how do you, you know, like the proof of human and the proof of machine are two problems that are intertwined, but kind of separate as we move into this world where just machines and software are so much more dominant. They really are. And I say this is going to be a big thing. So actually, we're looking at this, again, two ways. And one, the proof of human thing.

You've got projects like Rollcoin that are out there that are literally enrolling people in real stores. You'll get a Tienda somewhere in the world with a camera and they're enrolling someone to have their digital credential. we're actually working with a company that aggregates all those things. It's probably our biggest customer, to be frank, because the world of digital identity is sort of foundational to proving that you're a human being. You know, you can, whether you're participating in a DAO or you're doing some financial transaction and you need to prove you're not an OFAC, you know, on some OFAC restricted list, you need that digital credential. But then there's the other side of it, which is we literally need to prove that, you know, we, like I shouldn't talk about this like

I'm part of it, but that a machine is the right machine, you know, authorized to do the right thing it's interacting in the right way and it's not a hiccup thing it's not like going off off off the rails um so being able to to like digital identity for machines is going to be a massive category and from our perspective they're kind of two like two different sides of the same coin you know what's funny is um i always uh was very fond in movies of you know some sort of like action uh type movie as a kid and in those movies almost always there's like a checkpoint set up to get into a building or to get into an event or whatever and the uh the hero of the story somehow figures out how to get around uh that right so they put on a disguise they somehow figure out

a side door you know whatever um one of the things that i was talking with a friend recently is like if you have a factory full of these humanoid robots they are going to persistently be able to check are all the robots that are in this building supposed to be in this building right now right and not necessarily just from like a nefarious purpose standpoint but if like you have multiple buildings you kind of don't want your robot from building a going rogue and ending up in building c but doing some activity that's not supposed to be doing and so there is this like persistence that all of a sudden is now going to enter into our lives persistence in terms of streaming payments persistence in terms of constantly checking you know people or machines

are where they're supposed to be like all of that stuff feels like it is hitting closer to where you guys are going so so that's exactly it our vision is like today you have tens of billions of zero knowledge proofs or cryptographic proofs that are hitting kind of public networks we're going to see trillions soon we're going to see trillions just because devices are becoming intelligent because machines are proliferating everywhere and because humans are actually you know at scale hitting the digital world where all of a sudden credential verifiable credentials are absolutely critical so in a world of trillions of these types of cryptographic transactions that are happening you need dedicated infrastructure so this was the thing you know 18 months ago when we started

building this maybe we were a little early but we saw the problem because we've been building in this space of cryptography for the last eight years and we just knew that this was coming now i've been very um skeptical maybe you can call me a uh a pleasant uh optimistic skeptic if one such thing exists uh as to the technology is amazing it's obvious why something like this would exist and there's many examples of this throughout crypto where like the technology uh from a use case standpoint duh no brainer you gotta you know be be an idiot not to believe that that's going to be something that's valuable to the world why do you need to do it on a blockchain right and i think that you guys have like a pretty interesting way of looking through why a

blockchain may be valuable here so it's really about coordinating information and sharing it with the world and again like a secure verifiable way so like there were many systems today that verify cryptography like on your computer in a silo system on a corporate database and so forth and it's fine but the moment that you need to intersect and share with another organization outside of the bounds of your org or with another human being or whatever, whether it's for a payment, whether it's for coordinating some supply chain or whatever, that point of intersection, we strongly believe, needs to be on a piece of public infrastructure. It's not manipulatable by anyone, if that's a word, or it isn't owned by anyone in particular. It's owned by kind of

the world. It's literally a public good. So that's the difference. Not every piece of cryptography needs to be verified publicly, but there's a big coordination problem around the world, especially for digital finance and for payments and for identity credentials and so forth where you literally just need to just go in and do a public check on a piece of public good like a blockchain to verify some piece of information i don't want to go to you know oracle's database for everything and their competitors for sure won now um if you make the information public not in the sense of you can see it but it is publicly available to be hit um take identity as an example? Like, okay, most people are like, well, I don't want a government identity, you

know, database. We already have that, but people will say, I don't want that. Right. Is it better or worse if it's all of a sudden like a global public identity, you know, verification database and like, yes, the information might necessarily not be able to be exposed, but how do you think through, you know, this idea of sometimes like a silo actually may give some people more comfort than it being public or is the zk proof kind of mitigate that risk in terms of it being publicly available so i i'm a bit of an anomaly in that yes i came into the same industry from the national security military officer perspective but i was also a cypherpunk wannabe so to me it's absolutely critical that strong guarantees of privacy and security are fundamental here and to me that's

why these public data these public pieces of infrastructure like web3 is absolutely necessary and what we all need as a society, and let alone for businesses to actually bring information into the public domain. Now, the key here is in a privacy-preserving way, and that's why the cryptography

is so important. So it's important for my identity credential to be in a public database that anyone can access when I want them to, but in some weird cryptographic hash that no one's going to be able to decipher until the moment I want them to decipher it

in the specific party that I want to decipher it. That's why it's critical, I guess. We need to put this public infrastructure in the decentralized domain of Web3. Today's episode is brought to you by Bitcoin OS. They're the ultimate upgrade to Bitcoin. Bitcoiners can now experience the magic of the entire crypto world,

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Follow Bitcoin OS on Twitter at btc underscore os and be early to bitcoin again follow bitcoin os on twitter today at btc underscore os i see and then what are like the big technical uh obstacles that still exist right you guys have made a lot of progress it sounds like i was reading online uh some of the breakthroughs and uh it's pretty incredible but i think every entrepreneur is like oh man let me tell you not the hill that i've climbed let me tell you the mountain in front of me that i still have to go Yeah, I'll tell you, when we really started getting into ZK, Ethereum today can verify something like five ZK proofs per block. And per block, you've got multiple per minute or whatever, but it's not good enough.

It's not good enough for a world of trillions. So you really do need dedicated infrastructure. And that was the first thing we did. So launching this kind of layer that just sits there for the entire industry to use and also what we call Web2, the rest of the world to use, it's critical. And right now, in terms of technical challenges, we're processing something like 135 million proofs per year through the system at the rate that we have on a daily count. That's going to explode. We're going to be into the billions pretty soon. And we can't handle billions.

So even what we've done, like build a highly specialized layer that does nothing but verify these pieces of cryptography, we still are probably limited at the low level billions of transactions. so like for us technically speaking it's the next order of magnitude and the two and three orders of magnitude scale it really matters no it's totally tractable we're going to do it we're going to get there but the industry has not been set up to be able to do this like i said ethereum you know as one example but then you have other kind of pieces of the theory network you've got l2s and l3s and so forth it's still not good enough but like by orders of magnitude not good enough and when you see that technology how do you get the breakthrough right like hey okay there's obstacle we got to build this technology um if this was a scientific um kind of uh you know

atoms based problem people would imagine like white coats going into a laboratory right like mixing a bunch of stuff together coming out eureka look what we fit what we figured out how do you figure it out from a software perspective so we have really cool scientists as well working for us they don't have white coats they you know wear normal clothes and t-shirts and jeans and stuff like that but we're doing raw like literally like inventing new math to be able to solve these things. So that's one part of it. The other part is the engineering problem. I think where we are right now, so we're sort of like, it's like the 80-20 but flipped upside down, where now it's 20% R&D and 80% engineering. These problems are

tractable. So that's why we built a dedicated layer so we can keep adding to that vertically or horizontally so we can really scale this thing by orders of magnitude. That's the challenge that we have right now. But again, there's nothing that we can't handle there. And we do have partners that are literally today just working on math innovations so that they can integrate into our network all right let's talk costs because it you know um when i do research sometimes before i talk to someone and i feel like i'm going to be out of my uh my depth very quickly i get on and i say okay what are all the issues etc and one of the things that uh it's like if you read zk proofs online somewhere that within an arm's reach somebody's

talking about it's too expensive right like i mean like those two things are married together and then when i was looking through some of your guys materials um you talk about bringing the cost down like pretty substantially i think i saw a couple times the number 90 reduction so you know how do you do that and is that something that's sustainable and then would lead to kind of a boom of use of these uh these technologies 100 and we need it so you need cost reductions of every layer of this value chain also layers that we don't work in like an approved creation side of it and you're going to get that you're going to see orders of magnitude reductions so the way we do it is through specialization, literally offloading this computation from expensive networks like

Ethereum or Bitcoin or others that can technically verify ZK proofs, but just not anywhere near the magnitude that's required. We're seeing a world of billions of proofs today, and we're going to be in trillions of proofs tomorrow. You need dedicated infrastructure, and that infrastructure itself needs to be designed architecturally so that it scales, and we need to compress the map. So we can collapse cost by orders of magnitude. We do advertise a 90% cost reduction relative to Ethereum for certain types of proofs. But the reality is we can make other types of proofs virtually costless, which is really critical. Because again, trillions of proofs could still equate to tens of millions and then billions of dollars in network revenue over time. But still,

we need to make those things on the margin virtually costless, or your phone's not going to be transmitting these things continuously. So it's funny you say phone, because I have started paying a lot of attention to artificial intelligence models that will run on your phone that are more secure. They have all kinds of these advantages to it. Tether is funding one of these. There's a couple of others that I've seen. It does feel like this thing is going to become a data center, almost to a degree. What are you guys doing on that front? Or is that something where you guys will build the infrastructure and somebody else will get it onto the phone? So we have customers that are doing that. And we're providing the tools and

the infer to make it happen. But actually, on that fancy little supercomputer that you just showed us, there's a secure enclave on there. There's a piece of hardware in there that is highly private, rightfully so, but massively valuable for computation. And we actually have the ability to generate ZK proofs in that secure hardware enclave and get those proofs verified in our public Web3 infrastructure so that then you can connect them to other things. So imagine connecting your phone in a cryptographically secure and private way to your world coin id and then to be able to connect that to an application that maybe allows you to enter an avi borrow land market right so like there's different things here and we're working

on all those but i think this can be a massive explosion or like literally like connect that's your favorite dating app whatever it is like we're gonna see these things explode because human beings are like not just addicted but like absolutely required to be on their phones for a a variety of things from work to personal stuff and like the ability to connect that securely to the world of web three and to other applications out there digitally is just absolutely huge you mentioned uh bitcoin ethereum others can all do you know some version of zk proof verification um is there a world where i'm using something on the bitcoin network i need to do zk uh proof verification i kicked the request over to dedicated infrastructure and then i bring it back

and that's kind of where like you know there are a lot of people who watch this who are who are bitcoiners they're like all right cool man you got great technology how do you help bitcoin is that like one of the use cases for how you can do it yeah i'm a bitcoiner as well i definitely want that to happen um so yeah that's exactly the idea so with zk verify like we're not here to replace bitcoin like that's ridiculous like what we are here to do is offload computation that's a very different thing i'll float the computation and then we we literally send it back to where the application needs it so we don't yet send it back to bitcoin but we will we send it back to ethereum evm based networks just because it's easier for us technically today but we're going to do it for

bitcoin we're going to do it for every other type of web3 infrastructure that people demand it for we're just taking like we're a business and we're running this thing as kind of a distribution first like model of where our customers what our customers want to need and that's where we're kind of triaging our market bitcoin's absolutely on that list now bitcoin like it is kind of like near and dear to my heart because there's some companies like Starkware that are pioneering, um, you know, like ZK proof verification on Bitcoin. It's still computationally very expensive. There's optimistic ways to do it and so forth, like technically speaking, but nonetheless, it just doesn't scale to what we need. Like if you're going to be in billions and then trillions

of transactions like that, that should not be on Bitcoin. You don't want to completely destroy the Bitcoin network by bloating it with this unnecessary computation that could be done offloaded. And then the result of it go on chain where it's needed. Now, my last question for you is there's a piece of technology that's coming that I get a little uneasy about. They're going to put the computers and machines in our brains. It's coming. They're doing it already for a couple of people. One of the questions I ask all my friends always is like, how many times do I have to do it successfully for non-medical purposes before you're willing to do it? Right? Like, you know, some people are like, Hey man, I'll be the first. That's not me. Some people are like a hundred's good enough. That's

probably not me uh but like i don't know if they did it 500 000 times you know could you get like the arbitrary could you get the advantage of doing it this seems like a piece of technology that i don't want you know some scanner to immediately just be able to read everything in my brain computer um how do you think about you know something like the integrated uh technologies like the uh brain computer interfaces yeah like cryptography didn't just win this world war ii cryptography is also really important for when chips and things go into our heads uh so that's what i would say i would say guys like like pay attention to privacy i know we we don't do this enough and like i came into this industry as a privacy advocate um and i will i will remain

there and follow my sword because we absolutely need cryptography and privacy and security for anything that is going to interact with us at a biological level it's funny the uh the intel guys advocating for privacy that it might be all we need to know then all right where can we send people to find out more about what you guys are building yeah i mean they can follow us on socials or to go to zkverify.io it's kind of a one-stop shop for everything all right zkverify.io and that's where they can figure out the technology where they can use it everything you guys got going on 100 amazing well rob thank you so much for taking the time to do this i really enjoyed it um you know i i think that uh uh this is an area of this entire technological boom that we're

living through that's not getting enough um uh attention but it seems like you guys will pop your heads up as kind of a cohort and everyone will say oh wow look at this like you know 15 year uh overnight success story right because you've got to kind of build the technology and then all of a sudden we're all going to need it and hopefully it's done that's exactly what i think is going to happen i appreciate you covering it yeah all right we'll do it again soon thank you