The Wolf Of All Streets - How Bitcoin Will Change Your Life with Evan Shapiro

Episode Date: April 6, 2021

While other young people were dreaming of fitting into their social circles, Evan Shapiro was dreaming of an entirely new social reality built by cryptography, Bitcoin, and blockchain. Today, he is living that dream through 01 Labs and Mina Protocol as he innovates technology that allows people to regain control of their digital lives and protect their personal data. This episode will take you on a journey, exploring how his pursuit tackles the infamous cryptocurrency trilemma. In this episode, Melker and Shapiro discuss a range of topics including: Utopian digital systems Regaining control of your digital life Zero-knowledge proofs and zk-SNARKS Monetizing data Ethereum 2.0 and sharding Crossing the store of value chasm The mainstream knowledge 4-year lag The cryptocurrency trilemma On and off-chain data A new social reality --- VOYAGER This episode is brought to you by Voyager, your new favorite crypto broker. Trade crypto fast and commission-free the easy way. Earn up to 9.5% interest on top coins with no lockups and no limits. Go to https://www.investvoyager.com/ and download the Voyager app and use code “SCOTT25” to get $25 in free Bitcoin when you create your account. --- Mina Protocol Mina is the world's lightest blockchain, powered by participants. Rather than apply brute computing force, Mina uses advanced cryptography and recursive zk-SNARKs to ensure a super-light and constant sized chain, that allows participants to quickly sync and verify the network. The team behind Mina is backed by VCs such as Coinbase Ventures, and Mina's adversarial testnet was the largest public testnet outside of ETH 2.0. To get involved ahead of Mina’s mainnet, visit https://minaprotocol.com/wolf --- Matcha 0x Matcha is the easiest way to trade in DeFi. Matcha enables traders to seamlessly swap tokens using 20+ aggregated liquidity sources that deliver better prices than going to a centralized exchange or Uniswap. Connect your wallet and start today at https://matcha.xyz/wolf --- Join the Wolf Den newsletter: ►►https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen/members --- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by Blockworks. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworks.co

What is up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of All Streets podcast. I'm super excited about today's guest because Evan Shapiro is the CEO of O1 Labs and a board member of one of the show's amazing sponsors, Mina Labs. O1 Labs is using cryptography and cryptocurrency to build computing systems that put people back in control of their digital lives and give people the tools to build more empowering and useful crypto systems. Well, that all sounds like techie jargon. I assure you that it's really important and groundbreaking, and I'm looking forward to hearing why. Evan Shapiro, thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah, thanks for having me on the show.

So once again, before we get into it, this is the Wolf of Wall Street's podcast. For twice a week, I talk to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, trading, art, music, sports, politics, literally anyone with a good story to tell. This show is powered by Blockworks. They've got over 20 Bitcoin and crypto podcasts in their network. You can check them out at blockworks.co for access to the highest quality information in the space. And if you like the podcast, you follow me on Twitter, please check out everything else I have to offer my newsletter, et cetera. You can find that all at the wolf of all streets.io. Now to get in today's episode, your goal is for people to

take control of their digital lives. Was the original intention of the internet to take control of people's lives or did that just sort of happen? Well, it's a funny question, because like, as far as I know, like, like reading into the stuff, like the original intention was for people to take control of their lives. It was that this was a, you know, kind of utopian digital system outside of the realms of the normal confines of politics and other kind of physical constraints that people would be free to kind of, you know, feel the actuate their full potential. And clearly that like has been kind of co-opted at this point, but yeah, I think that is like, yeah.

So I'm assuming it's been co-opted by the companies and corporations and such that have used it and not as a result of the actual technology. I would agree, yeah. Yeah. So what does it mean for you then to say that you're giving people control of their digital lives?

Well, I think it's really about giving people the tools to be able to kind of equalize the power with like these entities that are taking control right now of the internet. Right now, as like a user, you go to these websites, you don't know what they're doing. Well, you kind of do know they're taking information and they're selling it and they're using it to make a lot of money. But, you know, you don't, you as a user don't have any kind of check against that power that they have. And this is one thing that cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency can particularly bring is like this kind of tool that users can put back on these companies to say, hey, like,

you have to be doing it this way. Because that's like, you know, either, you know, the standard these companies are, you know, in the future going to go up to because like, they know that users are upset about these things now, or for regulatory reasons or elsewhere. But anyway, cryptography can put these requirements back onto these companies. Can you tell me exactly how that works? Yeah, for sure. Like, I think that there's like a technical answer here and there's like a much more complicated kind of social answer that like, I think that like, I'm just starting to like kind of explore

myself and feel out. And it will take like a large group effort and everyone's behalf to figure it out for real. But the technical part of it is this technique of zero knowledge proofs. This ability for a humble user with their phone or their browser to both receive zero knowledge proofs that say that this huge computation involving all this data and you know it resulted in this result and you know you with your tiny little laptop or phone don't can't clearly can't you can't do that you can't run that data but like the proof that here's a proof that um it did what you expected it to do here's a proof that like we followed this regulation here's a proof that it did what you expected it to do. Here's a proof that like we followed this regulation.

Here's a proof that like we didn't steal all your data. Here's a proof how we ran this computation. The other half of it is as a user, I can then compute a proof myself that includes some of my information I need to use these services, but includes them with some privacy so that I can give that proof back to these services and give them what they need to do the service I'm asking them to do without giving them what might be like really sensitive or personal information underlying that proof. So it's these two halves of it where like, you know, you have like us with our little devices and we can sort of start thinking about interacting with entities in a way that's more safe. So as it stands right now, when you provide someone information outside of this ideal system,

obviously they get a lot more information than they need, basically is what we're saying. And then they're able to monetize package and pass that information along for a profit. Yeah, exactly. Wow, it's kind of scary. It's actually really terrifying when you think about it. So can you give some real world examples of, you know, where this is meaningful? I think when I was reading through your guys' stuff, obviously, an example is your credit report for whatever reason, we're applying this right now with a partner to uncollateralized loans on crypto, but you can imagine credit scores come a

lot. Right now to do this, you have to basically provide them enough information that they can verify your identity and get the credit score themselves, which means that your social security number, which means all this information that like, is kind of like much more applicable than just like, there's like this request we want them to do, which is like get credit score or get some fact about the credit score. And really what we're giving them is like, you know, kind of like, you know, admin control of our identity, which is not, not, not ideal. The alternative with zero knowledge proofs is that you can instead provide a proof that this, you know, other identity provider, like it's like credit karma, they've attested to my credit score being, you know, within some provider, like it's a credit karma, uh, they've attested to my credit

score being, you know, within some threshold, maybe, I mean, it's, you know, between seven 40 and seven 50. And I can provide them a proof of that, uh, without providing them all like the other information they would, you know, be able to use to, to, you know, control my life otherwise. So, so interesting. Um, and can this eventually be applied to almost everywhere that we provide personal information on the internet? Yeah. I, yeah. So this is, this would, I think like, this is like the, the hopefully like happy end goal is, is that all these places right now where you're providing all this information, you would instead provide zero knowledge proofs. And therefore you would retain control over like, really like, like you know all like the external facts that that

make up who you are on like the internet so is this theoretical or are we already seeing zero knowledge proofs being used in practice so it's it's real um i look like we're not quite at every company adopting this and everything but the technology is there and working uh zero knowledge proofs themselves have been around a few years now, and they're recently going into production in a major way in both our system and others. And I would say the new cutting edge thing is that now the tech stack is there to build these things,

starting to apply them to products like we are with this credit score example. So I think it's just really starting to take off. It's an exciting time for us. Yeah. With the credit score example, really interesting. So even though you can deliver the zero knowledge proof, you still have to have a trusted third party like Credit Karma that basically vets and approves the data, correct? So there still has to be somebody that has at some point given confirmation that you are who you are and the

information that you're providing is what it is. Yeah. And I think that that's for this example in particular, because this data is kind of dependent on a world where there wasn't already zero knowledge proofs there. Like where it was, it started in a world where like, you know, there are all of these companies kind of trading trust with each other. So you do have these entities that are part of that, like kind of trust network. You have to like kind of lift up into zero knowledge proof land. Sure. But what you can imagine doing is that in the future,

once everything is starting to be zero knowledge proof, then we can kind of, you know, we don't really need that anymore. We can just start like compiling these zero knowledge proofs themselves in a way that's permissionless. And we don't need to like have this trusted step but this is the bootstrap way of uh getting getting this to start happening that makes a lot of sense i mean it'd be impossible obviously to just flick a switch and go from one system entirely to the other so i'm really curious because i mean to me this is like very heady and something that uh

i don't think your average person would have just thought of, but it's so important. How did you get here? Like, what's your background? Where did you start? You know? Yeah. So I, I guess like for me, like kind of the origin of all this is like kind of, kind of in high school. I met my, my co-founder in high school. We were like good friends back then. I think as well as it goes now, but like we spent like a lot of our time just kind of like in the library between classes talking about technology and where it was going. And learning about things like cryptocurrency. And it was like a very formative time. And like, I think that kind of like the the insight or like the, you know, naive kind of assumption then was like, oh, like

cryptocurrency can use to spin up a new social reality reality like we can spin up like whatever we want um in code and we can like you know people like it they can start using it and it's like a new institution that can be built and that that like this this was like i guess where we both of us started getting really interested in this technology and in crypto and not just cryptocurrency but also programming and math and cryptography um which eventually you know after we came back after college turned into this whole open labs and mean a protocol thing uh but at the time i think we just like both like like like you know chatting and philosophizing on like what technology could potentially do for the future that's that's so mind-blowing and it's funny to hear you talk about uh thinking about cryptocurrency

in high school because i went to high school in the early 1990s unfortunately so that wasn't quite on our radar yet when we were in high school yeah i feel like we like just caught the tail end of it too like it was i don't know how we found it was like really like 2011 2012 um i i guess i was like on like a lot of like weird niche internet forums and stuff and somehow i like got across it yeah that that that's pretty early so can you talk to me about then exactly what ola o1 labs is and um its relationship with mina yeah so we're like a cryptography and like cryptocurrencies you're in all the proof studio um we've been like incubating and building you know protocol the last well for like four years now um yeah it's been it's been a while um and and yeah so we really built it both to like build this protocol we felt like could have an impact on how people use

cryptocurrency and just maybe like the internet generally um and that's what we've been mostly doing as like, yeah, for the last while. And Mina just had mainnet, correct? Yes. Yeah. So talk, talk about that, please. I think a lot of people, you know, you hear the term mainnet, you're like, cool. What does it mean? Well, it means that like, we have like, oh, you know know a version of the software that is ready to be in production and that means like a lot of things product-wise but let me just first start like technically like you know it didn't it was like kind of the end of like a very long kind of like you know battle with the software over like two years to to get it into this place two years of test nets um where we improved like the stability of the software.

We improved the robustness. We improved the performance. We built a community. We got everyone using the software, like all this stuff that goes into making it real. What it means practically now is that we can start kind of delivering on some of the, like, you know, I'll use the, you know, some of like the product goals of what we're doing, starting to bring these, these snarks and snaps out into the world, as well as bringing Mina's accessibility back to users. Okay, so talk about snarks and snaps,

because I love how I see Z snark. And I had to look it up. One of those people like, what is a Z snark? So can you talk about what that actually means? Yeah, so there's this class of things called zero-knowledge proofs, which do that thing I said earlier around basically giving users some oversight and control over how they use their data, how they interact with things.

And zksnark is a type of zero-knowledge proof. Starks are also a type of zero-knowledge proof. These are all types of zero-knowledge proofs. So the thing about Snarks, which is very cool, is that they are succinct. So the size of the SNARK is independent of how big the information you're kind of throwing into the SNARK is. You get a proof that the computation is what you want, but you didn't need to, you know, you don't need all that data that went into it. It's kind of a funny property. The formal statement is like there exists data such that property holds on that data.

So you don't have to hold that data on, which gives you privacy and the scalability. The taking that over to snaps. So snaps are the zero knowledge proofs on Mina. And they let developers leverage these snarks to give their users of those snaps, both privacy and like the numbers are kind of absurd right was it 21 or 22 kilobytes yeah I mean it's like the size of a couple emails right yeah it's just like from a complexity perspective just completely different because usually if you want to like get a trusted state from a blockchain you have to download all the transactions you have to like recompute the current state and you have to check that everything kind of you know because like if one thing in the history is like your local history is wrong, you have to have known about it because otherwise no one else is going to be on the same version of the chain as

you. You have to make sure you're looking at the right thing. The cool thing with what we've done with Snarks and zero-knowledge proofs is provided a proof of all that history instead of needing a user to download the data. So like, because these proofs are like constant size with respect to like, you know, you can just keep throwing data into like recursively into them and building a bigger proof.

We're in this place where we can have like a few kilobytes stand in for a proof of like the entire history of the chain as well as the proof down to your particular account. Which is- And so, so why does that matter? I mean, what advantages does it give you to have such a lightweight blockchain? David Sherman, Well, it does a couple of things. So the first is it solves this cryptocurrency trilemma problem that scale and decentralization

are usually kind of intimately coupled together when you have a cryptocurrency. If you have something like Bitcoin, for example, right after we started the project was the whole Bitcoin block wars time, where we thought like, oh yeah, great, it's happening. Where Bitcoin was wondering, should we increase the block size of Bitcoin? Well, if we do that, then the chain's going to grow faster. It's going to be harder to access, how decentralized will it really end up being. And I think very smartly, they kind of figured out like, oh, like maybe we can't do payments and everything. We just digital golds, but or some of the hive mind, like figured that out. But the question in general for cryptocurrency is like, you know, if we keep the throughput low, we're going to have something like digital golds. That's great, but it doesn't

sell everything we want for cryptocurrency, keeps it it decentralized or we can like kind of really crank the throughput up and we have like eos or tron or something and like right like we did it it's really fast but like so effectively you make it faster but you sacrifice the security of the network exactly yeah so with these zero knowledge proofs we kind of break that uh that link because the um proof of the history is now decoupled from the actual size you need to access this thing. So it's much faster. So at the moment, it's actually not much faster.

We've put all of our cycles into building the zero knowledge proof thing. And the next step is to start as we see demand on the network through snaps and people accessing the chain this way, we're going to start, you know, kind of putting cycles into cranking up the throughput. Under the knowledge, though, that cranking throughput up doesn't challenge the existing use cases, it just like makes it more usable. Yeah, that makes total sense. So how do we transition from a world where, you know, obviously, we're giving up all our data and all the things we discussed before to where this is the underlying tech of all of these, you know, all of these systems and every single time that we give someone our data, how do we go from start to finish? Yeah. So I think what's really

interesting to me and like one thing that like I've learned in this company is like, they're like, I can tell you the technical solution, like right away, like the technical solution, but like, you know, the social solution is more complicated. And I'll tell you what I think the sketch of that is. Yeah. For the technical solution, like, you know, everyone just has to accept Mina as like this election that does this, they have to integrate it into all the browsers in the world. They have to add this to like, you know, the spec for, the spec for JavaScript APIs and browsers. And then we need websites to start creating proofs that they send to these entities instead

of what they do now, which is just you type all your information in and that's what happens. So I think that like we're not just going to get there overnight. I think that the following things have to happen. I think that what I see right now is a good path for this is building into an extension for browsers initially. And this you can imagine is a super metamask. This is a metamask where you're not going through a third party like an Infura, you actually are getting full trustless access to like the underlying data. And maybe that can even like be bridged to other chains to give you access to their data as well.

And probably this like, you know, MetaMask-y clone thing, or really this really new thing with, you know, like, it doesn't have probably a private key. It probably has some other identity solution. Maybe what you do is you prove access to an email address instead of having to memorize a private key. So no one on-chain knows what your email address is, but you can use your email address to get access still via these snaps. And so now you have this little extension. You have a kind of a normal like login thing where it's not like this confusing like did you memorize your 14 words like so annoying yeah memorize them um and at that point we can start imagining what i think will happen first is um cryptocurrency products like the recent partner we've brought on and started working with teller um start

integrating this service into their websites this is like really a thing for new companies first that want to all start offering this service. And I think once that has started happening, there's kind of like a parallel track, which I'm imagining, which is that people are going to get increasingly sensitive about their data as like AI gets more powerful, as these sites are demanding even more data

to like make their shareholders happy. And I think that that'll be a point where we start seeing real opportunity for alternative business models for bigger companies where they're like, Hey, you know what? We're not going to play this game anymore. We know it's like a losing battle. We're going to start trying to, you know, and this is out of self-preservation, of course, they're not like, this isn't like, you know,

the good and welfare of humanity, right? Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. I think at some point though, like I, I do think that it'll be a big enough deal that companies are adopting it. Like Apple has started doing this in some ways. And then I think it can start happening that we can have this start taking effect in the world. What's up guys. If you've been following me literally for more than five minutes and you don't live under a rock, then you've probably heard me talk about Voyager, which is where I invest and trade Bitcoin and other assets. I love this platform so much. I literally can't stop talking about it. Now, it's so easy to just go download the app, start an account, attach your bank account, and start trading 55 assets completely commission free. I've saved so much money on fees.

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That means you can fit 45,000 Mina blockchain proofs in the same storage place. 22 kilobytes is the equivalent of the email you sent your ex asking for your high school sweatshirt back. 22 kilobytes is the equivalent of eight tweets you sent about shrimp tails in your cereal. 22 kilobytes is so small, if it were a ship, it'd fit through the Suez Canal while the evergreen was still stuck there. This means any website program or startup can use their blockchain to protect and verify data without the need to run a massive node. The ecosystem is growing so fast. Amina's mainnet has just gone live, offering users a platform to build a private gateway between the real world and crypto. And a reminder that Mina's public token sale, only available to non-US persons, will take

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like limit orders, liquidity depth visualization, gas efficiency, and more. Sign up for Matcha now at matcha.xyz slash wolf. That's M-A-T-C-H-A dot X-Y-Z slash W-O-L-F and join the tens of thousands of traders who are already a part of the movement. At least at this point, I think there's two obvious problems in society. One is that they want as much data as they can to sell. And two is that people really don't seem to care about

giving it all up for convenience. Right? I mean, I, yes, I agree on the first one. On the second one, I guess like I'm torn on the second one. I feel like if you look at people's behavior on the first one. On the second one, I guess I'm torn on the second one. I feel like if you look at people's behavior on the internet, I'm like, yeah, people clearly don't care. They're just using these services continually. But I guess what... I mean, it feels to me like the sentiment is starting to shift. I don't know how much it will shift towards people starting to care about this more. I think that today it's kind of borderline, but I can imagine some very creepy use cases involving AI and all this data that start making me feel like, oh, there's going to be the Cambridge Analytica moment of five years from now where everyone's like, okay, maybe this was really bad

idea. Yeah. I would love to hear you posit on the potential risks of ai and data i i mean like i think we have like these this is a little abstracted first like we have like these these kind of like digital agents that like are you know they're not they're not humans they're just kind of like machine learning algorithms and they're optimized to make money and they're optimized to like, um, do what they can to manipulate our behavior, um, to, to make that happen. And it's like, you know, we're like a little human, like we like, you know, our like system one system two with our, like, you know, kind of built in way of looking at the world. And they're really just like this like all powerful AI thingy. So I think that, you know, it's, I can imagine.

And like, I think this is like a little like maybe forward thinking potentially or just crazy is like, we're in this world right now where like, you know, companies want to harvest our survey data to like, you know, get better ad profiles of us. That's like well and good. I think though that there is an overwhelming amount of data that people post on Instagram, people post on Facebook, on all these websites. And I think it could really end up giving an AI an extremely detailed profile of who we are, who we want to be what we want what we're dissatisfied with what would make us happy um and i think you know if you imagine this they're kind of like wielding this like a blunt object it's going to just be very turn off and like people are just going to like run away

from it but uh that's not how they're going to be optimized to operate they're going to be optimized to operate within the confines of like we have to like kind of trick people into doing what we want based on this information to make us more money. And maybe it's not like quite as specific as like, I'd like to have an answer, but. I don't think it's far fetched at all. I mean, I had you, my humane shake of a fetch on the show, not long ago. And we had a very detailed sort of conversation about the agents and all the things that, you know, AI and stuff can do.

And he effectively convinced me that we were in the matrix. So yeah. In terms of just like the AIs are just kind of like watching everything at this point. And like, And that's what they're developing is that AIs will effectively will do everything for us. The agents, as you said, like, you know, reading traffic for cars and things like that but all these basic things and as they add up and compound but then on a total side note he literally

like almost convinced we were living in a simulation which i guess yeah next level to like i guess like put a metaphor on top of this like i kind of imagine zero knowledge reaches like the things that bind these agents that like kind of bind them to our will in some like uh you know fantasy setting or something that um you know they're kind of like unconstrained right now and they're even controlled by actors that don't have our best interest in mind but maybe with like zero knowledge proofs we can start kind of like you know putting our confines on them to have them do what we want so what was your tipping point moment where you decided that this was specifically what you wanted to focus on? Obviously, you are a programmer, you could probably be doing anything in

cryptocurrency. Was there something that happened? Like, I don't know, was there just some aha moment with corporations or something that you went through with your data that made you realize, wow, there's a huge problem. I don't want this all out there. I, I think what happened was I, I think, I think like, well, a couple, also a couple of things. So, and you know, this is like, you know, I don't have like a super clean, this is like the messy version that actually like down is like, I was, I was pursuing robotics and machine learning as a, like, you know, career path. I was going to go do a PhD in uh in robotics and at some point I kind of realized like this didn't really feel like the I I just like didn't love the idea of

being an academic first of all for for like you know a long time for like doing that for a long time and also I just didn't feel like that was like I guess like connected to like the things that I cared about and like the things that like I as a technical problem like thousand percent like I love the work but like at some point I think I just started like getting drawn back into cryptocurrency because it felt more like socially relevant it felt like that was like the place where the world was like kind of happening with it, connected to real people. And I think that this was also kind of colored by like my kind of dystopic visions of AI. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I don't. I mean, the dystopic visions, I think, are becoming a lot more mainstream, to be quite frank, as the technology has developed.

It's funny. You know, people used to say we were insane for thinking Bitcoin was important. People used to say you were insane if you thought that there was a dystopian future with AI, and both have sort of hand in hand evolved as to more normal. I'm curious for you, has this pursuit become easier as a businessman as a programmer as we've actually seen this sort of mainstream awareness of bitcoin and i i guess a very superficial level about cryptocurrency it it's it's funny because like the the like the the like the super mainstream awareness like what like my parents read in like you know forbes or whatever like lags the space by like you know four years or something crazy yeah um so i i think that like

kind of my like awareness of like that has like developed as like i've also been just like we've been you know spending time like working on zero knowledge proofs and stuff so i don't think i really wrap my mind around it yet and like i'm still like maybe living a little bit in the future, but I think that it does, it's really exciting because I think that I do, it does make me see a path to the stuff going mainstream in a way where the stuff that we're working on can also play a part in that. And like, if you asked me that like four years ago, when we started this, I would have no idea if like Bitcoin would be in that place. And it is, which is incredible. Right. So you can somewhat piggyback on it, which is nice. It's so funny you talk about things being four years behind. NFTs are the perfect example, right? Yeah. Anyone who was

deeply involved in development or crypto saw the potential of NFTs and not just for NBA Top Shot and Beeple pieces, but the actual use cases of non-fungible tokens. And now it's this huge, it's on Saturday Night Live. Yeah. I didn't know it's on Saturday Night Live though. That's crazy. This weekend they did a, last week they did a huge sketch

where when someone was Janet Yellen and someone was Eminem and they did an entire rap song on what NFTs are. Oh my God. Okay, I'll have to go look that up afterwards. Right, but that's like, we went from completely no awareness of what an NFT was in the mainstream, probably one to two months ago to Saturday Night Live.

Yeah. It's speeding up too, I guess, which is just also crazy and good. Right. But so can't we see that sort of velocity with what you're doing as well, in theory, if we hit a tipping point? I hope so i mean our theory is that there'll be enough utility to like existing crypto companies and that like this will be cool enough in general that like this will start picking up in terms of you know i think if you're like a developer right now like being able to apply privacy to what you're building is is like a big advantage um and something that like we want to help people do. So I could see that happening. Fingers

crossed as we take advantage. Privacy is such a hot button item, both in the world, as we discussed, but also within the crypto world. But we've seen some pushback on privacy coins, the Moneros and such of the world, them being delisted is there any like regulatory risk to what you're doing do you fear that they'll say hey man we want this data like yeah so so we're actually like not not not that would be funny we're actually approaching this like whole privacy thing from a very different angle um yeah totally which which is like like um you have something like like let's say like a Zcash where you can move things into like the secure enclave and move things around in there privately.

So actually with Mina, we're doing like sort of like the opposite almost, like the data we're injecting onto the chain is private and then everything on chain is kind of just like normal, like Bitcoin. So there's definitely like not the same same kind of regulatory issues because this is actually just better from a regulatory perspective because you're just not exposing sensitive information that the regulations say you can't expose anyway on-chain.

Right. That makes sense. I don't have an answer to the... I think eventually we'll probably see privacy tokens built on top of Mina, but it's like a bigger question that like, I have not like, yeah. I mean, that's, that's really interesting though, because basically you're taking all the advantages of the public ledger. I mean, like everyone can see, we sent this data here and here. They just can't see exactly all of the data that's in it, which is the biggest risk is leaking your data as we've seen with ledger

or Equifax or, I mean, yeah, these huge data leaks are nothing new. Right. Yeah. And it's just, it's so, so disgusting that, you know, that, that can happen to people and it puts them at such risk. Totally. Yeah. It really is. Yeah. So, so I'm curious, how does this, you know, is it interoperable with other chains? I know that there are permissionless bridges that exist, but how does this sort of fit into the greater ecosystem as a whole? So the vision in general for this is that we have these very small zero knowledge proofs that we can verify very cheaply. If you wanted to verify Bitcoin on

Ethereum or something in a full node way, well, good luck. You have to put everything onto Ethereum. It's just literally not happening. But if you want to do the same with Mina, all you have to do is put the zero knowledge proof on top of Ethereum, which is a much... It's actually not only doable, it's very doable uh the the vision is that you can put these neural networks on all these different protocols and connect to them because like we do believe that like we don't want to be an island over here we want to like help up people like take advantage of this stuff and use it themselves and we have like a a grant out right now uh for an rfp with the ethereum foundation for doing this very thing with ethereum so we

can start bringing some of those advantages to that chain. Okay, but Ethereum is super slow and clunky at this point, right? I know that those improvements are coming, but you have this light, fast chain, and then you move over to Ethereum. And I mean, I was just actually trading on Ethereum before the show, and gas fees were like $120 for any transaction. Yeah. The thing that's like, is that like, that's, I think clearly not where we want to end up. We

want it to be like, you know, gas fees are like a penny or less that everyone can use this stuff. And that's where we want to eventually go with Mina, but people are using Ethereum at $120 or whatever. Like it's, it's utilities there. Yeah. We're all on it. Utilities there and the liquidity is there if you're actually trying to, you know, use swaps and things. Yeah. So, so I mean, well, all that value is there on the chain. We like, we definitely want to like, you know, be part of that ecosystem and like, see if we can, you know, plug in and helping some of the privacy features over. think in the long term it's like a different question like you know by then like eth2 is out like does eth2 do what we want it to maybe and then like i don't know but

i would i would argue maybe not from a decentralization perspective but a different topic um that's a worthy it's a worthy topic though i mean what do you obviously do beyond the staking is still sort of like just endlessly delayed. But do you think that ETH2 will solve a lot of the problems that we see with Ethereum? And do you think that that will happen anytime soon? Sort of. I think it's really complicated because ETH2 is trying to do a whole bunch of things between the proof of stake and sharding and scaling and all this stuff my biggest concern with the ETH2 architecture and like you know please forgive me if you're like very deep in it like if anyone is extremely deep into like the space is like the whole sharding approach in general seems

like a little bit concerning to me that you now have parties which are only fully verifying particular shards and you have like this complex you know distribution problem of sending everyone else with individual shards and you have to like kind of switch shards all the time if you want to know that another shard is like actually doing what you want versus like being evil and then also like like, if you're really making an app, you have to like switch between the different shards at different times. Like if I'm an app developer, do I then have like full nodes in the different shards?

Am I delegating this fully to like the proof of state consensus set? How big is that set going to be? I'm sure there's like, you know, reasonable like things put out about this so far, but like, I just feel like it's so complicated. Like, I just want to see what happens before, like, I really kind of believe. Right. So like, if that doesn't work, I mean, do you think that there, that, you know, we hear about Ethereum killers all the time, but it obviously never happens. And still, even with faster, lighter blockchains, whatever, we don't see people really

developing on them in the same way that we do ethereum i i mean i think it's it's not just like an ethereum thing it's the core blockchain thing is that like if you want to crank the scale up you know you need to have some way of verifying the scale you've just cranked up which means that people someone has to be verifying that which means the decentralization has declined in some way. And I think with things like what we're doing with Amina, we can start kind of changing that, as well as potentially people kind of ditching Layer 1 Ethereum for Layer 2 zero-knowledge proof stuff, like secure roll-ups. But I think that if ETH2 doesn't work the space will have to like kind of grapple with like well what's our path forward yeah it's not going to be thousand dollar gas fees certainly

which is you know if it continues at this rate yeah it seems possible so what you got I mean is your plan effectively to be interoperable with everyone you know do you have to sort of choose your battles or is there a path where like, you know, you can work with Cosmos and Elrond and, you know, and you've got everyone's. I mean, there's definitely kind of a bandwidth question of like, you know, what once like the first one is like done with like a theory and like but there's definitely like doing it with all these different protocols, I think would be like, with like, I think kind of like somehow the right thing to do for like putting ecosystem together in some way, but also just like, that's the easy cause of the small proof. So we should do it. How is all this data that you need accessible and how far back and how hard is it to find old data, you know, to, to obviously make these foolproof? Yeah, I, I guess like, here's like a couple metaphors I would give to kind of explain what we're doing.

Cause I, I, it's different than the existing kind of paradigms for cryptocurrency. So the first I'll give is like extremely simple. It's like, you want to spend some money using your credit card like you don't have to look back at like your credit cards for like six years ago if you want to do that like doing that it seems like an unnecessary thing that's on top of this the other example i'll give for like programming is the way cryptocurrency is right now it's sort of like the cryptocurrency has a history of like your hard drive, like forever back in time. It's like, you can never delete a file. You can only add new files. And like, it's as if the programs on your computer could access all the history of your

hard drive since forever. And, you know, if that is like a property that you can do, that's like, great. I mean, like, I'd love to have access to like a mutable history of forever. The problem is that it's not like a physically like kind of realistic property to have. Instead, the paradigm of MENA is that you programs can only touch and modify the current state of what's on MENA, similar to like how programs today can only touch what's on the current state of your hard drive. Which means that like, you know, if you want to keep things around, you got to put extra effort into it, you don't just like kind of get that for free. So this lets us kind of think about the world into two halves. We have like the history of everything and we have like the current state of everything. And what Mina does is it says,

we're going to develop this system such that not everyone's going to hold the history of every single account, they'll hold a proof of it. You as a user can hold the history of your particular account if you want to like have your particular credit score history or credit card history. But not everyone's going to have to look at literally everything to send a transaction or write a program. That is not what we're trying to do. I'll stop there. That's kind of the metaphor for the different paradigm that is being set up with Mina. Well, that makes a ton of sense and really explains it. Like who cares what all the data was. We just want to tell you that

it's correct and it's authentic, right? Yeah. So you guys, I've noticed Mina has a really, really strong and passionate community. How did you build that? And I guess how, you know, why is that so important to have a passionate community in this space yeah so well it took a while it took uh two years to get where we are today um it started with like 20 people on our discord that like we like chatted about test nets with like it's it started really small but like it kind of just like had that exponential curve over time where now we're at a place today where we do have, like, we're fortunate to have a large community that is working with us on the protocol. Now, I think if we ask like why that happened, I think like, both like we gave people opportunities to participate in like a real way on our network. We like developed it such that

like you could have as many validators as you want. You're not limited to just 20 or 100 or something. So I think we created a lot of opportunity to get involved. You're not just like, you can actually do something real in the protocol, which is, I think, that's kind of the point. It's important. And the other thing I think is that we set out from the very beginning to be very intentional about building a very different kind of community. We noticed a lot of toxicity, a lot of arguing, a lot of kind of, you know, I don't know what like, you know, just kind of like incentivized actors coming in

and just like kind of, you know, just like trying to mess with the place, like, and that just kind of being the standard by which communities existed in. And we wanted to do something that like was friendly that like we felt like reflected our values that like people could engage in and like this is something we've seen a lot of response to is people saying like oh like you know i love the munich community it's so friendly like i love being here like it's great so i think that's like some background on what we've done and why it's worked and stuff. And I think that like, you know, this isn't to mention also just like the tech itself, I think is very, is important in this as well as

that, like the tech also kind of reflects these values we're putting forward to the community and that we do want to build something inclusive. We want to build something that like supports users and empowers them. So I think it's a good fit with the technology as well. I don't see Mina, I don't see Mina Maxis fighting with Bitcoin Maxis on Twitter very often, right? Yeah. And there's no need to. We don't have to do that. But yeah, exactly. Everybody's at war with everybody in this space. I find it so sad. I just wish that everybody would get along and realize that there's a place for everybody. And really, there's so much that we need to do together to

really uh move this space forward yeah i think that's like kind of goes well into like the second part of why we're doing this and like i think that crypto is not just like a technology it's also like a social movement like if you could you could build like the most beautiful blockchain in the world and no one shows up to it it's's like, well, good job. Like I don't think that would actually happen, but, you know, the people show up to it and that's what makes it what it is. And I think that if we do want to build something that, you know, can empower users, it's important that they're involved in both like helping create and develop this empowerment. So, I mean, I view the community is not just like an add on to Mina, like community kind of is Mina. Uh, it's like the, like it's kind of our goal as a project to use the protocol to like Marshall everyone into building better systems for themselves and for others.

And yeah. I'm curious in the curious in the privacy conversation, like one of the hot button topics and the whole space obviously is central bank digital currencies. And I'm curious what you think about their impact on privacy. I think would be massive personally you start there yeah um well i bet that by default they're not going to be private like i think that's fair i've heard versions of them where they are private but like nobody's accepting them yeah so i think that we do end up in a world where by default, a lot of these systems are not in the best interest of like the people behind those governments. And I think that there's nothing wrong with a central bank digital currency, but it's really important that they reflect like the will of the people and not the will of like a handful of companies that have, you know, been kind of brought into like the circle to build this thing. And I worry that that's

where it is heading by default in today's climate. And it's the central banks, obviously, because they would have, you know, perfect control of the money supply and would be able to kind of access your entire transactional history, take your taxes right out of your wallet when they want it. And I think it's interesting is like, theoretically, that should be okay, because like, we are the government and like, we should decide what it is. And that's fine. I think that the problem is that the government's increasingly like misaligned with the people from a democratic perspective versus companies. So I think in practice, I completely agree with you. But I like to imagine it could have been another way. Anyway, yeah. I mean, so one of the arguments, obviously,

a bullish argument for Bitcoin, I guess, is that they'll release central bank digital currencies, everybody will get a digital wallet, they'll become familiar with digital wallets, they'll realize that their central bank currency is not private and they'll move to Bitcoin as the superior option. But do you think that Bitcoin is private at this point? Well, it's funny because I do see that being a very reasonable path to happen at the same time. Literally, people wouldn't be getting any privacy at all. There's no privacy at all in that because if you can track the on and off ramps, even like just kind of once, you know, you just get like one insight into like, oh, like this person bought, you know, I don't know, like a Tesla, like a dumb example, but maybe like in

the future, like on Amazon or something, something at that point it's there, like everyone can track all of your transactions on bitcoin forward and backward in time so like you're you're kind of screwed at that point there's just like the the pseudo anonymity doesn't work when you're starting to interact with like the real world um and so i can totally see that happening but it'll be hilarious when it does because like it's like well no you did not get any privacy by this move. It's a lot easier track than cash, right? So the privacy of it in that regard is a bit of a myth. I sort of agree with you.

It's really interesting, though, to think about a world where people are pushed that far in that direction. So what's I got here? So I'm curious then, where do you think that with the level of sort of adoption and interest that we've seen in the last year? I mean, do you think we're early in this? And I'm not talking about price cycles. I'm just talking about awareness and adoption. Do you think that we're early in this cycle or do you think that we're going to hit a wall and then it's going to kind of decline again?

And, you know. I think that it depends what you're asking about. So I think that for a store of value, I think that the, you know, people get it. It's like mainstream. It's maybe beginning of mainstream, but I think that like, there's like this cross the Chasm metaphor.

I think that that's happened now for store of value. Like Bitcoin made it and it's real now. I think that for like maybe literally anything else that hasn't happened yet. Right. So I think that from like last cycle, what I saw was like, you know, people like were really hyped about like, you know, Dentacoin or whatever, like we're going to have all of our, you know, and like not only what people realized was like, really hyped about like you know dentacoin or whatever like we're gonna have all of our our you know and and like not only what people realized was like not only was like the the business model not there but also the tech wasn't even there it didn't even work

um and what we saw since then was development of technologies that could potentially let things like that exist you know once they have a you know maybe invent a coin as your business model in the future someone proved me wrong right but um i think that's what's kind of next is like taking this base layer technology and making it real for for real products real businesses and expanding beyond store value which i think crypto is like destined to do um uh and i think that's like the next like kind of thing to for it to do We have like 6,000 coins on CoinMarketCap. Man, that doesn't seem. You know, so I think it's fair to say that there'll be a culling, right?

And then we're going to trim a whole lot of fat, probably like 99% of it. And that the few that actually have real utility and value will be left standing. Don't you think? I think eventually there's still like, you know, some, some tokens around that from last cycle that like, I was like kind of like thinking these really make sense. These technologies, the technology is not even real. Like, like, but you know, there's some of them are still around today.

Most of them are gone. I think that it's a kind of gradual random process. But I do agree in the limit for sure. No, I guess I just agree then. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I just it's it's the easiest analogy is like the 90s, obviously, Internet boom. Right. Because you saw like, you know, the pets.com die and then the Amazons and the Googles survived.

So I wonder if we'll see like 10 people come out of it and they're just like 10 of the biggest companies in the world and everybody else disappears maybe i mean i i hope that there's i guess like i think that that will happen at the protocol layer um is is that is how i'm thinking about it i think that will happen at the protocol layer because like the returns to network effects for those protocols are just so big. I think that for application type things, even for things where there's file storage, for example, there can be multiple of those. But I do think there'll be some sort of consolidation when the stuff picks up real traction. Sure. Do you think we get to a place where, I mean, for example, like when you

use your phone, you don't think about what's powering your phone. When you use the internet as a normal person, you in no way do you consider how the internet works. You just know that you can like pull something up on your browser. Do you think that blockchain becomes that, you know, proliferates to the level where it's just the underlying technology and so many things, and we have no idea that it's there? I think so i think so yeah i mean this is like sort of the vision of me and i laid out earlier is like you log in with like your email address like you don't know it's private key or whatever and then you just start using the various websites like as an integration and it's just kind of like the same way you sign like with google like single sign on today it's just like another service on the

internet you use that brings all these cool primitives you didn't think was possible before um i i like with or without me and i think that'll happen eventually like our goal is to like speed it up um uh so no i i completely agree like that that's what i yeah it's gonna happen i think awesome i know we're getting there with the with the time um is there any parting thoughts anything you're really excited about uh for you guys and in the space, you know, in the, in the coming months and years, you know, in the more immediate future.

I'll say something like very like, so if we'll soon be like giving opportunities for people to like start building snaps on, you know, and like I mentioned, this like gives new primitives in terms of privacy, in terms of putting large computations on chain that I think will be very exciting. So like, if you want to like get involved with that like please like you know start following us check out our community because like um we don't expect like there's going to be like a billion people like using that immediately but if you're one of

the people that do want to be like kind of on the ground floor building this thing with us like please like join in we want to like you know help build it with you that's awesome so where can everybody follow you and keep up with what you guys are doing yourself and the companies? Yeah. So, uh, our, so, uh, first is our, our Twitter, just mean a protocol. I mean, a protocol is like the one for the protocol for me at Evan, a Shapiro is my Twitter. Uh, you can find me there. Also, uh, our discord is like where like us in the community are usually like just kind of chatting more casually. So if you want to just pop in, that's the place to go for that. Awesome, man. Well, thank you so much for your time. Gave me a lot to think about. And

I think that these are the kind of things that people don't realize are happening and are going to be probably the most impactful use cases of blockchain. So it's really, really impressive. Yeah, thank you so much. It was really fun chatting on them. Awesome.