The Wolf Of All Streets - OG Cypherpunk Explains Why He Is Building Platform For Smart Contracts | Dean Tribble, Agoric

Episode Date: September 27, 2022

Dean Tribble is an OG cypherpunk and former Principal Architect at Microsoft. A 34-year industry veteran, he co-designed the first smart contract system, AMiX, architected the brokerage information system for Charles Schwab, built a start-up that was later acquired by Microsoft.  We talked about smart contracts, original cypherpunk ideas, and Agoric, the platform for smart contract developers that Dean is working on right now. Dean Tribble https://twitter.com/DeanTribble Agoric: https://agoric.com/ Thanks to House of Muse for providing the space to record this podcast: https://www.houseofmuse.io/ ►► Get 20% off on your ticket to W3BX. Use my code: WOLF20. Register here: http://web3expo.live/  ►► Sponsored by Bullish. Sign up here https://thewolfofallstreets.info/bullish/youtube  Have you ever had your exchange go completely offline during days of high volatility? Of course you have. We've all been through it. Those days are no longer with Bullish. Bullish is a new breed of digital asset exchange that empowers users to trade with deep and predictable liquidity across highly variable market conditions. They also have incredible automated market-making and industry-leading security. I can't get enough of this platform and it's fully regulated. JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER ►► https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen  GET UP TO A $8,000 BONUS IN USDT AND TRADE ALL SPOT PAIRS ON BITGET FOR ZERO FEES! ►► https://thewolfofallstreets.info/bitget    TRADE ON THE WORLD’S BEST DEX, BULLISH: ►► https://thewolfofallstreets.info/bullish/youtube  Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wolfofallstreets   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io  Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe  Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c  The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

In the crypto space, we talk about cypherpunks and OGs and think about the generation from 2008, 2009, 2010, Satoshi Nakamoto, Hal Finney. But there was a generation before them of cypherpunks in the 1980s and 1990s who were also equally focused on privacy, even in our money. Dean Tribble has founded Agoric and he is one of those original OG cypherpunks. Wait until you hear what he's building now. That means that everything you've already said has been recorded and we're going to use it against you at a court of law. I'm sorry. Good, good, good, good. Now it's official. Everything, Bitcoin to 5 million by next week. That's right.

You heard it here first. That's right, that's right. But you heard it from him. That's right. No financial advice here. The record is true. But you've been around Bitcoin and crypto space for quite a while, right? I have, yes.

Can you tell your story? Yeah, I was one of the cypherpunks back in the day, back in the late 80s, early 90s, or mid-80s, early 90s. That's funny because in crypto, in Bitcoin, we like to think the cypherpunks were like 2008, 2009, 2010. There were waves of them. It is a continuing challenge that we must all step up to to make sure that that kind of crypto is free, available, integrated into everything. You know, let's encrypt the thing where it's easy for websites to get SSL certificates.

It was a huge revolution. That was pretty recent. Unfortunately, the creator of that passed away recently. It reminded everyone just how important it was to go from, you know, 5% of the websites on the web encrypted to, you know, 95% of the websites encrypted. And so anyone can take credit cards and anyone can transfer secrets and that sort of thing. What's better than listening to the Wolf of All Streets podcast? Listening and watching the Wolf of All Streets podcast live. Well, they say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but this time that's not the case because I'm hosting a stage at a conference from October 10th

to 13th. That's the WebEx conference. I'm going to be bringing you live podcasts, live panels, masterclasses from the leading minds in the industry. This is going to be absolutely epic. It's going to be live streamed, recorded, and presented to you live. You can come have a happy hour with me, eat dinner, potentially play golf, and watch all of your favorite content being recorded in real time. Guys, the link for this is web3expo.live. That's web3expo.live. Use code WOLF20 to get 20% off your ticket. WOLF20 for 20% off your ticket. Guys, let's hang out in Vegas, October 10th through 13th. What attracted you to cryptography and to the ethos of being a cypherpunk so early in the 80s and 90s? A big part of it was privacy. I'm an individual, right? I'm

just turning into an adult and this is my money and my control and my secrets and none of your business. A big part of it was about enabling people to cooperate. That's been a long element, is how do you make humans more effective, and how do you make groups of humans more effective, and how do you enable humans to cooperate in lots of different contexts? This also drove the ideas behind smart contracts. It's just this software that's enabling strangers to cooperate with each other. It enforces the terms of an agreement, so you can trust what's going to happen, so you can cooperate with someone that you don't know or you haven't done a background check on or

that sort of thing. And so all of that vision of software is making the world a better place, that was one of the main ways. It could make my life better. It could let me do things and yet keep privacy. It could let me cooperate with a bunch of people that I otherwise might never have met. Okay, so you were already concerned with privacy in the 80s and 90s. And that was before we had big tech companies violating our privacy, selling our data and collecting everything who are probably listening to this conversation. Absolutely. As we speak through these microphones. Exactly. Exactly. So what does it feel like to have been passionate about it that early and see the direction that it's taken?

So all of these things, I mean, it's always a mixed bag, right? You know, the best way to predict the future is to create it. But other people are creating their own futures, and you get some blend of that. So we have had repeated important successes with respect to protecting our freedom to use information technology for privacy. You know, zero knowledge. Zuko's been a creator. You know, Zuko Wilcox of Zcash has been a creator for years, along with lots of others, of applying this technology to give us the privacy that we as humans should expect as normal. And so we've had a lot of successes. The debate of does technology, I mean, you mean, technology is just a thing. It's not good or evil.

It's how do we choose to use it. In the 80s, in the 90s, at the Foresight Institute, whether it was nanotechnology or smart contracting or crypto technology, it was always what can we do, what can we build, what can we emphasize so that we get more of the good parts and less of the bad parts, right? So we get more ability to protect our houses and watch our streets without ending up in a surveillance state. So we get more ability to protect our secrets as opposed to have the government protect theirs, right? This is an ongoing thing, and we're getting another round of it,

not just this year, but this week, right? On an ongoing basis. Did you expect to see it apply to our money? To the creation of Bitcoin? Absolutely. And where were you, what were you working on when that actually happened? Which one? When Bitcoin and... Oh, okay. So Bitcoin was a funny, I have a funny relationship with Bitcoin because, you know, we'd worked on what would it be like to have a safe cryptographic currency. There was CyberCash. There was eGold. There were lots of these initiatives that were really well done and really important. And eGold, for example, was a very sad story because it got broken by regulatory people coming in and using excuses

to throw people in prison unjustly. So, you know, some of these, not all of these are victories. So I am, you know, the idea of currency being a big part of this, a driver for these security technologies, that sort of was obviously a part of it from the beginning. I mean, that was pretty clear that that was going to be an important thing because sort of where you want crypto is where you're protecting secrets or you're protecting transactions. You know where you want the authenticity to know that I'm actually getting a payment that is legitimate even though I don't know much about you. Right you know someone buying something that swap meet you know that

the cash works I'm good right you know I want to be able to do that online. And it's not about any nefarious things. It's about making my life easy. I'm just trying to sell, you know, this thing on Etsy. You know, why am I doing a background check of someone who wants a, you know, a kitty made out of stone? And you talk about protecting secrets, and it certainly feels like at times, I don't want to make sweeping generalizations, but if you believe in privacy and you value your own privacy and you want to protect secrets, that means you're painted as some sort of criminal or nefarious actor, as you sort of alluded to. Yeah, which is sort of total crap. I mean, privacy is something that we all used to have. One of the things about OGs, maybe we remember more of that, right? Pre-internet, pre-surveillance. Privacy is something that we as humans should expect. Any of the representations

that, oh, well, you don't need privacy unless you're nefarious, to me those are reprehensible. Privacy should be the default state. Right. That's the McCarthy area language language and the Nazi-era language. I mean, it's exactly the kind of thing that you're subject to abuse by your government, and that's just not okay. Right, so you've been building for 30, 40 years with that in mind. What are you building now? Everybody knows that there are advantages to trading on both centralized and decentralized exchanges. But why not choose an exchange like Bullish that offers the best of both worlds? Bullish's total trading volume recently exceeded $25 billion in just seven months since they

launched, and they have the best liquidity in the game when it comes to Bitcoin USD. Now, Bullish has released the first major upgrade to its liquidity pool technology with the introduction of a concentrated range-bound liquidity pool for the Bitcoin USD trading pair. This upgrade triples the order book depth within a range of 2%, making it one of the world's deepest Bitcoin USD trading pairs. This industry-leading order depth means you can trade confidently at scale with clearly understood price impact. You should check them out immediately at bullish.com slash melker. So, you know, my real driving vision. So to me, privacy should sort of be table stakes. So I support a lot of those activities.

I have to admit a lot of my energies. I mean, early Cyberpunk stuff, I worked on mixed networks and stuff like that. But and I've supported a lot of those people. But I'm more focused on how do we get computers to amplify what humans can do and what groups can do. And privacy is sort of an ingredient of that, but smart contracts are a much bigger core. And a lot of people are confused about what is a smart contract. They think, oh, it's software running on a blockchain.

So smart contract, when we first envisioned the ideas behind it that Nick Szabo later came and characterized, and he had similar ideas that all overlapped, and he characterized and coined the term smart contract, it is software that's enforcing the terms of a contract-like arrangement between third parties. And that predates blockchain by a lot. Someone joked that my mustache is older than Vitalik. So that idea is PayPal, eBay, Venmo, Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, high frequency trading, those are all software in the middle that's enforcing a contract like arrangement of exchange of money and rights and so forth between mostly total strangers to the tune of

you know trillion dollar market cap before watching right and then what blockchain brings in is this replicated execution in multiple jurisdictions in multiple administrative domains all checking each other and coming to consensus about what happened so now you can run smart contracts and Bitcoin is a software that's enforcing the terms of a contract. So Bitcoin is a smart contract. This replicated execution so that you get an integrity of execution of the smart contract that no human organization or intermediary in the middle the the ebail the eBay or the the Enron or the the the you know ticket shuffle or whatever it is right you know that might be slipping in their own transactions taking their

own fee or simply setting a policy that you didn't need or deciding okay we'll do ticket trading for NFL games but your little local football game yeah you're not big enough for us you know know, pound sand, right? And so having the ability for people to deploy systems permissionlessly to enable cooperation for their, you know, church choirs or football games, you know, that's a technology that lets humans self-organize and cooperate in more ways. And so it's all about this, let's get more cooperation, so we end up with a more cooperative world,

and my way to solve these problems is build technology that helps that. And talk about what that technology is or the platform that you're building. Yeah, so continuing that, right, if smart contracts are really a big value add for enabling cooperation, that only works if you can get lots and lots of developers able to build them. So there are approximately more lawyers in Denver alone than there are solidity developers. But we need all of them.

But we need all of them. All of those lawyers are serving. But what that means, if you need a contract, you might be better off finding a lawyer because there's more of them and they're cheaper than good solidity developers. But there are millions of developers in the world, most of whom know JavaScript. If we're going to get so that all the kinds of human endeavors, all the kinds of things that humans want to do with each other, all kinds of cooperation they would like to enable,

that people can have an idea and go out and build it, deploy it, maybe earn it. Our mantra is build faster, earn faster. That means we need to enable the existing developers. That means meeting them where we're at. So the Agora chain is for doing smart contracts in a hardened version of JavaScript. 14 million developers on the planet know JavaScript, program it all the time. JavaScript controls literally trillions of dollars every day through brokerage terminals and Bloomberg terminals and services in the financial industry. We have been in the JavaScript Standards Committee

for 15 years, driving into it the elements required to be able to make a hardened version that can take arbitrary code and run malicious code and be safe from it. And so all of those pieces have come together, so we get to take that technology, deploy a new blockchain, uses Cosmos Tendermint, so the battle-tested, best-in-class proof-of-stake system, and build on that so that millions of developers now will be in a position to write smart contracts and solve their problems their way.

What do you mean by hardened JavaScript? Okay, so JavaScript starts out malleable, right? And in the browser, you can add things to array. You can have print string. And the problem is if you used a library from somewhere else that an attacker made print string, first find my public key file, send it to another country, and then print your string for you, that would be bad. So the programmer has these expectations of how things will work,

and they don't. Hardened JavaScript is take existing JavaScript, any standard JavaScript, run the lockdown code that will freeze all those primordials. So array is what the JavaScript spec says array is. Print string does the Java print string, and some library can't change it. Now, instead of programming on Quicksign,

I'm programming with concrete. It's solid. It can't change. It's exactly what the spec says it does, and now I can write the JavaScript programs that I expected to write. And most JavaScript out there doesn't muck with these things that are at the bottom. They just rely on them to work the way they expect.

So hardened JavaScript is actually how most people should be programming almost all JavaScript on the planet. So Salesforce AppExchange, brokerage terminals, the next generation of MetaMask Wallet, their Snap system, LavaMote that they can use to harden existing JavaScript applications, embedded systems, so there's JavaScript running in light bulbs, and of course there's our smart contract environment. system, LavaMote that they can use to harden existing JavaScript applications, embedded systems, so there's JavaScript running in light bulbs, and of course there's our smart contract environment, they're all running hardened JavaScript.

They take existing JavaScript, run this thing that locks it down, and then build on that the thing that they need to ship. Have you had any pushback by either Solidity developers or crypto you know, crypto maximalists who believe that we should be replacing any old system so JavaScript is dead, or do you think that most people get it? So, ironically, the pushback is people saying Solidity is just like JavaScript. So they're trying to claim the mind, and it's just not. It's just not.

I mean, even I know that. It has totally basis, right? It's just like JavaScript the way it's just like C. And so we haven't really had that pushback. We've had exactly that kind of pushback of, oh, JavaScript, right? Isn't it like squishy and insecure? It's like, well, it controls trillions of dollars every day. So clearly something's working there.

You're entering your credit card into a website. Exactly, right, right, right. And you're using embedded, you're using web plugins, web browser plugins for your wallet, written in JavaScript. There's sort of this cultural memory of the very first versions of JavaScript that hadn't thought about security, because this was all the very early days of the Internet, same as the first versions of Java or the first versions of CSR.

Or the first versions of Solidity. That's right. But in fact, there's a quote somewhere of Brendan Eich, who was the creator of JavaScript. the same versions of the first versions of C or the first but that's right but in fact there's a quote somewhere of Brendan Eich was the creator of JavaScript I had on the podcast oh good yeah so ask him about Mark Miller the next time he's our chief scientist he mark came in when JavaScript was just transitioning from es3 very early JavaScript into what we have today, basically defined ES5, which was the JavaScript with strict mode and proxies and various other things. And that is the beginning of being able to lock down JavaScript so that we could use

it in all of these safe contexts. I don't want to misquote him, but even Brendan himself, when I had him on, sort of described the creation of JavaScript, but then how it was utilized as sort of Frankenstein's monster. That's right. That's right. But as that transition from ES3 to ES5 really was a sea change in how secure it was, how securable it was, and how the standards process would help evolve that towards being ever more secure. So come 2018 is when we had gotten into the JavaScript standard. And we've been in the standards committee for JavaScript.

Mark has been there for 15 years, Chip for 13. And we've been there a long time to get all these pieces in. And so 2018, they kind of came together and we go, oh, standard JavaScript can now be locked down. Let's do that. And so we did. And as I said, it's now showing up in not just a Gorg, but our technology is open source and being used in Web2 properties as well. So the reason that you're focusing on

that simply because there's so many people who understand it and that will be faster for mainstream adoption, faster for programming, or they're actually security reasons that it would be superior. Or is it strictly let's get as many people onboarded and this is the best way to do it because who wants to teach them Solidity, which by the way is already being replaced by other languages. Right, right. Yeah, no, the problem with, so, okay.

So we got into doing this in the first place because in 2017, there were all these breaches, the DAO bug and all this sort of stuff. We've still got them. Well, that's the thing. Our lead engineer, Brian Warner, was on the security review committee, at least authority, reviewing Ethereum.

And he noted the reentrancy bug in the architecture of Ethereum and pointed at Mark and I's earlier work about why this would be bad and would be exploitable. And then six months later, you have the DAO hack. This was in the security review, and they decided not to fix it. There might be good reasons to have not done that. It did make for a simpler system. And so you might not have gotten the traction if they had actually solved that problem early on. But this is the same kind of bug that killed Flash.

Humans cannot defend against it well, and you can't paper over it. You can't add a different language because the reentrancy is native to the EVM, and so it's intrinsic to the interaction you're going paper over it. You can't add a different language because the re-entrancy is native to the EVM and so it's intrinsic to the interaction you're going to have there. And so in Ethereum, you will have re-entrancy bugs forever and that impedes real composition. So the reasons for JavaScript are,

A, as you say, I've got 14 million good reasons for JavaScript. And so if you can solve the problem in that context, that's the way to meet the developers where they're at. But it actually turns out that JavaScript is more securable than all these other languages. So the security approach we use comes from secure operating system techniques. It comes from the objectability architecture that is used in SEL4, which is the number one secure operating system on the planet. I used it at Midori when I was at Microsoft. It's proven. It's proven, and it is extremely high security. But more importantly,

it is well-suited for smart contracts. It's well-suited for dynamically changing who has what rights. My analogy is, if I want to lend you my car, I give you my key, you get in the car, you drive to the hotel, you give the key to the valet. They park the car. You're good. You come out. All very straightforward. In the model of security, now this is not the re-entrancy bug.

This is the other issue in EVM. In the model of security, instead, I add you to my car. You drive to the hotel. You say, hey, could you park the car? It's like, OK, add me to the system. What's your name? And you discover that you're not an administrator on the car, so you can't add them. So now either I make you an administrator, so now you can not only park my car, you can also sell it.

Because now you have good administrative control, right? And that's exactly what happens in all these systems, is that either you have too little authority or you have too much authority. Because it's just the wrong model for, here, drive my car. I'm done. Bearer instruments. Bearer instruments, cash, they work really well for large classes of things. And in particular, they work really well for smart contracts that are just orchestrating, that are all about the code of how is it that we're going to change who has what rights. And so our model in JavaScript takes that model. It's a very different security. The other important thing is, OK, and this is now very JavaScript specific, right? JavaScript was out there.

It was in browsers. It was growing. Experts could do some pretty cool stuff, right, with the browser terminals, the bank sites, and so forth. But then frameworks like React and Vue came out. These are JavaScript frameworks for easily building applications, and in particular, for building applications out of components that other people wrote. So I, as an artist, because of course I am an artist...

Huge head shake for those who are on audio and are not watching this on video. But I, as an artist, could take a slideshow widget that some expert in animation and whatever does. I could take a credit card widget, plug them together, deploy a new site to sell my art, and it scales up and down with the website and works on a mobile app, and it's easy to internationalize and all those kinds of things. And I can do that even though I could not have built a slideshow or have no idea how to do reliable PCI credit card integration. And that kind of component model is actually one of the promises of object-oriented programming, and it's actually realized in JavaScript in these frameworks for UIs. You have these frameworks for being able to build up, and there are now literally millions

of components you can pick from to incorporate into your user interface. So you don't have to start from scratch. You don't start from scratch. And six months after React came out, amateurs could do a better job than experts could the year before at making it internationalizable, mobile-friendly, resizing when you turn your phone around, all that sort of stuff. It reminds me of WordPress websites, right? I mean, you used to have to know how to program, and then all of a sudden, you just bought one, and it was 20 bucks, and you had a website. Change the text. And it was probably prettier than people were doing. So React did that for user interfaces, where the affordances are mouse clicks and rendering. We're doing the same kind of framework,

you know, the same style of framework. So it's a familiar programming model, a familiar programming experience, but where the components are escrow and exchange and payments and purses and price comparisons and the kinds of things you need to build a business, to build DeFi. We have DeFi Legos, right? Those things. We have governance Legos. So I want a super majority voting quorum with a veto where I hand out the keys in the following way and the committee can be revoked this way. Those are Legos that once someone has built them and debugged them and gotten them security reviewed,

now literally millions of developers could pick them up and use them for governance for their contract instead of starting from scratch again. Or instead of copying the code from compounds governance just like Uniswap did. That was great. Copying the code is great. But there were other people that tried to do that,

and they lost millions of dollars because they didn't know about one bug that Uniswap was told about. It's the assumption that everything that was built was perfect, and it never is, especially in this space. So what kind of things are you seeing people build on it now that you've enabled 14 million people? Well, so we're very early still. I know there are not 14 million people currently doing it. that you've enabled 14 million people. Wow. So we're very early still.

I know there are not 14 million people currently doing it, but what are they building or what do you expect to see built? So first there's the thing we're building to start with. So we are in the process of rolling out, and I'll be talking about that, the specific dates real soon now, but the JavaScript stack. And then above that, the first use case, which is the interstable token or the interprotocol, which is a set of smart contracts for doing a stable token dollar parity for the interchange, for the Cosmos-connected 50 or 60 zones connected with IBC that make up the Cosmos ecosystem, and 200 or more are coming, where it enables a token that can be easily used, a stable token that can easily be used for cross-chain DeFi and decentralized

finance across all these different zones. So that's the first use case that we helped build. So we just had a blog post about five or six other ones. So there is a group that is building, Rockway Labs is building a liquid staking architecture. This is something that people

in the proof of stake world care about, where this one has some very innovative features to really help with decentralization, where they look not just at geo-decentralization,

are there enough nodes spread around the world, but are they in different administrative zones? Let's say 80 people, 88 people control 100% of that. Exactly. Or as it turns out, a surprising number of them for many of these chains are all in one cloud provider. Well, you want to be decentralized across cloud providers and countries and not all of them in the EU and stuff like that. So they can smoothly and dynamically reallocate. So that's on one dimension. On another dimension, there is a group, Prya, that has built a NFT creator where it's specifically

for games, but it's much more general using reusable NFT components on our system, NFT Legos, where it's not just here randomly generate, you know, a graphic from all these features. It's I've got a game character. I'm going to acquire the mask and the hairdo and from you all buy this, you know, this item or this shirt or this background,

whatever it is. And I can add those as sub-NFTs onto my NFT and then sell the whole aggregate as a tasteful composition that includes three rare items or whatever it is. We call that a remix. Yes, yes, yes, very much.

But it turns out that's much more fundamental for gaming than just having an NFT is. And since our nice JavaScript framework that's much more fundamental for gaming than just having an NFT is, right? And it's, and, and, you know, since our nice JavaScript framework with all these things is all about interesting property, right? It's very easy to make, not just fungible tokens or non-fungible tokens, but semi-fungible tokens. So there are 500 plus one magic swords, but only two legendary ones, right? You know,

whatever it is. So that's the third one. There's someone that is building a lending protocol. And that's one where, again, they use some of the DeFi Legos that we built for IST. They can reuse them in the lending protocol, right? The governance mechanism, if they have an economic committee, they can use the same software, elect their own economic committee, and that would control parameters on their system. If they've got liquidation, which they do, we've got liquidation for the vault mechanism in IST. It's already been. And it's already been done. It's already been tested. It's getting reviewed. If we did another one, they could pick that up and plug it right in because it's the same API. All of the upgrade

mechanisms would work, but it'd be under their control, all those kinds of things. And so those are some of the three top ones. There's several other that are interesting. Lending against NFTs. So I heard the new regulators four-letter word in there was stable coin. Okay, not four-letter. Stable coin. I say stable token. Stable token. And I'm assuming there's a reason you did that because we're even seeing them say, hey, two-year moratorium on algorithmic stable coins until we... Which is just dumb. Well, the particular mistake that's easy to make, I mean, they look at UST and go, oh my God, it's algorithmic. It's just like, no, no, it was a bad design. We know this was a

bad design. People told them it had problems. It had these failure modes. And oh, look, the failure modes happened. There are issues with algorithmic stable coins, but there aren't two categories. There's just dollar-backed in a bank account or euro-backed or whatever. Then there are ones that are collateral-backed, asset-backed by things that are worth more. So DAI, seller, IST. Overcollateralized stablecoins, but not with dollars. Exactly. Right.

And that's a category that has been more sound than a lot of things in CeFi, a lot of things in TradFi or whatever you call it, and certainly algorithmic things, right? The recent downturn, those just sailed through. They were fine, right? The market went down, they liquidated, everyone was fine. They didn't lose as much of others because it worked so well and so smoothly. I mean, that's a high quality set of things to do. And that's what we're emulating. That's the space that we're in. But there will be algorithmic coins that are good, that are solvent, that are coherent. Delta neutral, if people have heard that, I'm not going to try and describe it. But that's a version where if you have a rich option market, that's an economically sound

algorithmic architecture that will remain solvent as the market go up or the market go down. And so plausibly, one eventually adds that to the pool of stable coins in the world. But our focus is on the stable token environment of over collateralized. Now, you asked about coin versus token. The Agoric platform is about giving large numbers of developers a place where they can rapidly build and safely deploy their application or DAP or whatever in a stable economy, right? All of these chains where you use a speculative token to pay for gas. Gas is kind of like rent. So that's like using Apple shares to pay for my rent.

Correct. It's not utility, so it should be stable. You can pay Apple shares for rent if your land rule will take it, but it's not great. We invented currency 5,000 years ago, and it's been a pretty good idea, as it turns out. It works pretty well. It's the grease for the wheels of commerce. So we require, in order to provide that service on our platform, that there be a token that they can pay for gas, a fee token, that has a stable value over time. Doesn't matter if it's a dollar. It doesn't matter if it goes up a little bit or down a little bit, as long as it's well predictable. The problem with all these speculative

things is long-term contracts require that you have the ability to talk about the value now that something will have in a year and have it be something that is predictable. And so one of the primary ingredients that stabilizes fiat currencies is simply they're tied up and priced in long-term contracts. And people have not been able to do that on blockchains. That's one of the things that when you get into mainstream applications, lots of people are going to want to do. That's our target.

We're the big bridge out to mainstream applications because we can bridge to mainstream developers. So that's a critical element of the platform we're delivering. But as I say, that's what the platform requires. Whether it's dollar backed, whether people use it for money, whether they lend on it, whether they go along, that's a community decision. That's up to them. There's good accounting reasons to have it be parity with a dollar. Pegged to a dollar, there's no reason to work that hard at it, but we do think to have it be as close to a dollar as reasonably possible because that makes accounting easier.

If you've got to pay taxes on it, it makes taxes easier. All these kinds of things are easier, but if that's a problem, it'll move to somewhere else. That's not under our control. There's an external community. There's an economic committee of people from all over the world that are experts in that area that can think about that. And they've done that before. They understand how the mechanics of that works, how macroeconomic works, how it should tie in. You know, they can help us all figure that out. Well, I think we should put you on a panel in front of Congress and Senate and let you explain this all to them because they clearly do not understand the nuance.

But I'm glad that we have very intelligent people like you speaking for us. Really excited to see what you build. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.