Unchained - Uneasy Money: Illia Polosukhin on Why Onchain Commerce Needs Confidentiality

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

Illia Polosukhin, founder of NEAR and co-author of 'Attention Is All You Need,' on why confidentiality will let crypto become daily commerce — plus, some Near lore. ======================================================== Thank you to our sponsors! ⁠⁠Multichain Advisors⁠⁠: Get help navigating TGEs, go‑to‑market, BD and partnerships, capital markets advisory, PR, media placements, KOL activations and more at ⁠⁠multichainadv.com⁠⁠. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Coinbase One⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠: Get 20% off the first year of your Coinbase One annual plan at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠coinbase.com/unchained⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. ======================================================== Before co-founding NEAR Protocol, Illia Polosukhin was on the eight-person Google Brain team that wrote the transformer paper — the architecture behind every large language model running today. He never mentioned it. When Kain Warwick found out two weeks ago, via a crypto AI chatbot, his reaction was: you have to be kidding me. That backstory sets the tone for a conversation that moves from how transformers actually came together, to why confidentiality is what unlocks on-chain commerce for real businesses, and what NEAR is doing to keep criminals off its network without becoming a surveillance layer. The hosts also get into the Ethereum Foundation's identity crisis, why Illia thinks decentralization is a tool and not a goal, and what the economy looks like when AI handles execution and blockchain handles coordination. Host: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kain Warwick⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Founder of Infinex and Synthetix ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Taylor Monahan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Security Expert ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Luca Netz⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, CEO of Pudgy Penguins Guest: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Illia Polosukhin — Co-Founder, NEAR Protocol - https://x.com/ilblackdragon Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My thesis in general, coincidentiality is a key unlock for actually crypto becoming truly day-to-day use. You cannot imagine a business doing commerce on chain where everybody can just go into Block Explorer and see how much revenue they're getting, how much they're paying their suppliers, what does the salaries are. This is why most of the crypto still does, you know, fiat payroll because nobody wants to show how much like payments of salaries, et cetera, going. Hey, everyone. I'm King Warwick. Welcome to uneasy money because what happens on chain never stays on chain. Before we begin, here is a word from the sponsors that make our show possible.

Multi-chain Advisors is an emerging technology growth firm that has helped create 50 plus billion dollars in enterprise value for 80 plus clients over the past four years. They're the partner to help navigate markets. Build real traction today at Multi-Chain ADV com. Hey everyone. I'm here with my co-host, Taylor Monahan, security expert, and Luca Nets, CEO of Pudgy Penguins. And today we have a very special guest, Ilya, the co-founder of Near Protocol. And the co-author, I'm glad this is finally in this line.

The co-author of attention is all you need, the transformer paper that started the model era of LLMs. So, Ilya, you and I have known each other for a long time, right? And I did not know until two weeks ago that you were on this paper. Like I've read the paper. I never read the authors. Like I was just like, yeah, whatever. But like, you know, and I was kind of astounded.

I was talking to a clanker. And I was talking about some near stuff. And I was like doing some research. And the clanker was like, oh, Ilya is like on that paper. And I was like, no, he's not. Like, what are you hallucinating? And the glenker was like, you definitely is. And I was like, and then I look at it.

I looked at the paper and I was like, holy shit. And I was like, how is it that I've known you for five years and you haven't brought this up 250 times? Like, I'm so shocked that this has never come up in conversation. So well played. I think almost anyone else in crypto would be like the first words out of their mouth if they, on this paper. So maybe, maybe even just like I'm so interested like in the process of how did that come about. Give us the quick background of like, you're at Google and you discover AGI? Like what exactly, what happened there? Yeah. So the history was, I always was interested in AI, AGI. I was trying to build my first neural network when I was 14. And so when I saw kind of first unsupervised learning happening at Google, I was like, I want to do that on language,

because language is where the knowledge is, where the reasoning is. And so I joined a team we were working on question answering like the most direct place that's both applicable to AGI like if AI can answer questions it understands what we're talking about

and actually to Google itself right because Google is a question answering machine and question answer machine right yeah yeah and so we were working on a bunch of research and to be clear before Transformers there was reinforcement

recurring neural networks which affected the way with their work, they would read one word of the time, you know, like we do. And they were trying to maintain context. And then you ask it a question. And it would be like, well, I only have this like 100 floats or whatever, a thousand floats of everything I just read. How much can I answer? Right.

Right. And so that was kind of one problem. The other problem was if you go to Google.com, you actually expect answering 200 milliseconds. You're not like, oh, yeah, yeah, you can go research and come back to me with an answer. You're like, five minutes is five. Yeah, I want the answer to now. I want you to read half of the internet and answer to me now. And so like something that reads like a human would just not work.

Right. And so really Transformer came from this kind of a few different ideas. So attention mechanism was like a known thing before. But removing the recurring network and say, hey, our machines actually very, you know, especially GPUs highly parallel. We can actually process the whole, you know, context, the whole language of the Wikipedia pages and search results of Google at one go, instead of trying to read it one word at the time.

And then, you know, this can speed up things, 10,000 X,000 X. And so that was kind of the core idea. And it was like my manager, director at a time pitched it over lunch. And I'm like, that's an interesting idea. I'm sure it doesn't work. And so I went and like implemented. it was kind of working. I mean, it wasn't like very good, but it's like it had some signal.

But there was the, there was like a glimmer of. Yeah, you can see like, oh, actually it's like getting like, oh, I should I should like resolve this things. And so and so then, I mean, it all this took like, you know, I think six, seven months of an eight people team to actually get it at the state of the art. But that was kind of the original idea is like, hey, what if we remove things and just like keep this mechanism of attention, which is effectively when you look at. look at any particular word in the sentence, you're effectively trying to make sense of it in the context of everything around, but you don't do that one word at the time. You do all of them in parallel. And so just leverage, high-parallism. So really cool, kind of- Did you consider that the main question people would be off-king, like off a decade later or

whatever, would be, how do I hack this smart contract? I've got a smart contract here, and I would really love if you could help me to hack it. What could we do? Well, the story is that NIR actually started as AI company. And the origin was we were teaching machines to code. And writing smart contract with AI, not breaking them, but writing them, was actually something we were considering. And especially as we were starting going to the blockchain and we're like, oh, this is actually where it would be a good application to write correct smart contracts with AI.

Because there's so little developers in 2018 who actually can do it. Awesome. Awesome. That's amazing. So, so let's let's talk. Our first segment is on confidential intents. You guys launched this a couple of months ago. It's been it's been slowly rolling out on like nero.com and go the other places. I think we've talked privacy a lot over the last like six months. Privacy's been a big narrative, particularly with Zcash, you know, doing doing so well. where do you see the near private intent so so maybe even stepping one step back um when intent you and i had a conversation i guess this is going back like two years ago right um and we we caught up and you were just like a budget of gobbledy book and honestly and i was like i was like what

in the hell it's kind of talking about he's like the we're like on the chain the chain will control the other chain. It's like a chain of chain. I was like, like, sometimes I have a conversation with someone. I'm just like, I cannot follow. I don't have enough prior art in my brain, like the context is not there. But I was like, it sounds really cool. Like the principle sounds really cool, but I didn't get it.

And so I couldn't like think through the implications of it of like what would it be able to do, right? And then like five months later, we were building out. out all of these chains and I was like, oh man, we've got this big problem where like, you know, we've got these smart contract chains and then we've got these dumb non-smart contract chains and we kind of, you know, can't accommodate them because of the way that our architecture is. And so it's like, I should talk to Ily about this. So we like jumped on a call.

It's like six months later. Like, hey, we've got this big problem like, you know, these dumb chains. Like how do we store assets on them and like how could. And I always like, bro, I told you about this. six months ago. Like, I told you the whole thing and how it works. And I was like, oh, that's what you were talking about. Okay, that makes, you should do that.

He's like, we've done it. Here it is. It's there. And so the goal of intent was basically bring all of these dumb chains that don't have smart contracts up the thing level as smart contract. Is that fair to say, like give you the ability to control assets on these chains and do all this? cool stuff that we like with more contracts on Bitcoin,

etc. I mean, I would say goal is way broader, but that was like the first PMM. That was my goal for you. Yeah, yeah, that was your goal. Yeah, I mean, the first PMF definitely was like, hey, look, you have, you know, Bitcoin and Dodge that people want to hold, but there's no good bullets. It's really hard to find things and really hard to trade.

If you want to go like Dodge to Solana, for example, And so that was kind of the first PMF. And then obviously Zcash was like very natural. Yeah, like even harder to get to it. The exchanges were delisting it, et cetera. And we're like, yes, like Zcash works perfectly here. You can move anywhere. You can exchange it to anything.

It's decentralized. But I mean, the broad idea behind it is effectively combination of indeed through near. You can control any other chain, any other account on any other chain. And we're actually having now first examples of people doing this on Solana because Solana's smart contracts are very tiny. And it's hard to make like a contract that runs for a long time. On NIR, you can actually run the whole other blockchain as a smart contract. So we have a lot of capacity for writing complex logic. And so you can write the complex logic on NIR and then push just the exact execution on Solano.

So not calling it not a smart chain, but just like the level of complexity of logic, recovery systems and other things you can do. Right. But the trade-offs based there on Solana is like, you know, they're optimizing for kind of a different set of things, right? Correct. Yeah, they're estimator for immediate latency, but this allows to have like a lot higher, yeah, kind of capacity of execution and intelligence.

But only like sort of just in time, right? Like you only use it when you need it and then you can get the fast meme coin freighting that we all meet, you know, kind of on the primary chain. So you can all load that. And so, so, you know, the intense thing, I think, worked a lot better than maybe people were expecting. you know there was there was like the initial launch and it was fairly quiet and and then it started to kind of blow up as it was obviously there's a lot of kind of breads kind of weaving together here right like everyone wanted Zcash all of a sudden they realized it was really hard and you guys had a great solution for that and so but that that started to get some traction at what point did you internally go uh we should like

vampire attack Zcash and just like replace their technology. What was the I mean that wasn't the thinking and it is not. Zcash has a different thing. It's a different thing. As a sovereign asset is very much

has its place and is important. I mean honestly like as usual you know I was talking I was thinking and we were trying to build private effectively shard back in 2022.

Now, back then, as you can imagine, was regulatory environment and all of the fun stuff going on that effectively was a no-go for actually launching it. But, yeah, kind of my thesis in general, coincidentiality is a key unlock

for actually crypto becoming truly day-to-day use. Like, you cannot imagine a business doing commerce on chain where everybody can just go into Block Explorer and see how much revenue they're getting, how much they're paying their suppliers, what are the salaries are. This is why most of the crypto still does,

fiat payroll, because nobody wants to show how much, like, payments of salaries, et cetera, are going. And so, like, privacy always was like, hey, this is a key enabler, but, you know, we needed a regulatory positioning that actually worked. We needed to have enough liquidity and kind of flow through this to actually, like, because like, we build privacy, but nobody's using it, like, you know.

It's not private, right? It's not private, right? So we needed enough, like, liquidity going through it. And, I mean, it obviously helps when there is like a broader market acceptance as well that this is actually needed. And so that was kind of, yeah, the motivation is like, okay, actually now it's time. Like, that's off the thing we built in 2022. to update it to some of the intent-based structure, and let's launch it, and then let's make the experience really rock.

And that was a lesson from Zikash and Deed. The Zashi Zodl wallet is just like really good experience, and you actually want to hold your assets there privately, like you feel good about it. So like that's what near dot com is kind of for. But obviously we're opening up this API for everyone to use as well. So obviously, Infinex and everybody else can actually do that as well. Yeah, I think one thing for like, you know, there's like the theory of how something

will work and then there's like practically when you actually encounter it, right? And, you know, it had been a long time since I've held Zcash. The last time I'd held it was like probably on finance or like ages in like 2019 or something, 2018 and 2019. And I went down the Zcash rabbit hole and I was like, oh, I'm going to, you know, try and like figure out how to like implement my own wallet and like did all this stuff. And the challenge, obviously, and like this is well known in the Zcash community, but it's not really talked about outside, right? It took me like doing a bit of research to figure this out, is the cash is somewhat volatile.

Like, you just not just not is that. What did you in the way? Maybe losing millions of dollars trading on hyperlux. Liquid was the thing that was the giveaway for me. But the core asset is the only one that is private on Zcash, right? And so in order to have privacy, like it might feel really good. The cold year the cash privately shielded on bottle wallet, right? But it might not feel great. It might feel great one day when it's up 30%, then the next day it feels bad when it's down 30%.

it seems to me like really obvious that like we need private state influence like you know and Zcash has thought about this uh the community's got like multiple proposals of like ways to do this but um you know that that to me seems like the obvious thing that no one's really land like i mean here tornado cash had a ustc pool for a long time um you know uh but um but um um you know uh but um But to your point, like, it's not enough to just have one pool. You need enough to admit. Like, there's all of these different things for it to actually work and be scalable. So, yeah, how are you guys thinking about that in terms of, like, what are the assets that you think should be, you know, private by default?

Yeah, so everything is private. So over, we have 150. I mean, it's changing every day. I think they're launching something right now. 150 plus assets, all of them can be private. I was just checking there's like a few million USDC, 8 million mere, actually a couple million Zcash as well, stored in confidential intents.

You can actually check it out on Dune now in the intense analytics. They have a kind of dashboard for all the assets that are in confidential shard. And yeah, I mean, I think, as you said, right, if I want to pay for coffee, I probably, I mean, yes, if I'm Zcash bull, which, you know, I am, like, it's great experience. Like, the cross pay is actually pretty cool because you can go and like pay, you know, I don't know if you tried, but Square has a Bitcoin payment.

And so you can pay it from your Zcash into a Bitcoin QR code. And it's facilitated to near intense, right? And so, you know, the merchant doesn't see where it came from and you pay in Zcash. but like that's still a little bit jank experience you know the Zcash time like latencies yeah the block times are still the block times high i mean they're probably fixed 200 milliseconds yeah wait times right like if you're standing in line at a store trying to waiting more than like 50 milliseconds you're like uh fuck yeah and so so with intense with we are with concessional intense the the thought is indeed this is like uh execution confidentiality right like we're

running a full NIR, effectively shard that's confidential, and we're running intense there. We're planning to have more applications running there as well, like lending, et cetera. And with that, you know, you get all the benefits of NIR, which is 600 milliseconds blocks. You can have your assets there to pay directly with stable coins, with Salana assets, etc. You can pay out into other chains directly as well. and Fiat is coming. And so you can actually be like transacting normally as if you were on

your neobank app instead of kind of feeling. Now, importantly, the tradeoff is we're explicitly fighting against crime. And so it's not... I'm going to say, you got to jump in here because we were talking about this before

and Ilya was like walking me through like all of the stuff that they're doing. And I was like, this feels like the inverse Thor chain. Tay's going to love this. So, yeah,

and there's been, there's been a couple incidents. One of my favorite money launderers was trying to use near and didn't have the best time, let's say. Yes. And then took to Twitter and I was like,

come on. But I think I told this story, Kate, like a couple weeks ago. The, yeah, the money launders, they revert to like the most core OG Bitcoin Maxi

why isn't this blah blah blah blah blah like every single How dare you? Yeah they're doing like social pressure Yeah like hey you know isn't this supposed to be unstoppable money We're like yeah when your money is clean it's unstoppable Yeah A bunch of stolen butt and he was like

And now I am poor I am poor And I was like And I was like, I took two seconds. I was like, bitch, you still have a thousand soul in Bitcoin. Like you couldn't find 10 of the thousand. I was like, you need to go yourself. But yeah, I think it's, okay, I think it's critically important.

Like, let's ignore the ideological side of things just for a second, right? Because we can like debate that all day. I think it's critically important, though, that people understand, like, you cannot not have a really good, useful protocol and find real product market fit for the market, not criminals, right, but like, you know, the actual market that has huge tamp, right? You can't do that if right off the bat, the criminals take over, right? Because it impacts you in every single way. Most importantly, though, as you're iterating your product, as you're iterating your protocol,

as you're finding the product market fit and understanding what users want, if you're only serving criminals, like thieves and money launderers, their needs are actually dramatically different than average use. Than an average user. Dramatically different. Like, they do not care. They're very price insensitive. They're,

they love like 1% fees. Amazing. Amazing. They think that's great. No questions off. Like, sign me up for that. If it takes a while. Well, people don't appreciate paying 1% of their wealth.

to group their money around. It's just a completely different use case. Their needs are different. Their desires are different, et cetera. And so, and I've seen this play out, time and time again with protocols, especially when they get flooded, when DPRK especially, like,

just comes in and floods them right off the bat, they get excited about, oh, my God. Like, we have users. And if they don't. It's, baby, let's go. Yeah. But it's really hard for them to then, it's like you're serving this one customer,

and they're like quite a loud customer by the way like people think that money owners are like hiding they're not like they are in they're in your freaking discord preaching to you like loudly um and it's just a it's I think people I think it's it's definitely like underrated and so um you have to get good core users that that sort of like are a different demographic in my opinion

because then as you're iterating your protocol as you're designing the next features to launch as you're prioritizing things you're going to be doing so for a much larger market because at the end of the day money laundering it's caps like and it's it's a pretty good in crypto terms like it can look like pretty good product like a bit in the short term but when you're thinking like big picture long term you can't it's nothing right like it's nothing if you don't have trade off is so bad as well right because you end up getting put thing. The margins, your, your structures are undermined and you end up, you know, being like a pseudo.

Your brand. Your brand chairs. Yeah. You can't. You have, every time you get on a plane. You know, and then, and then I think also, again, it just goes back to this, like, what you're prioritizing. And if, if you're not prioritizing, like, real users are, have a whole diverse set of things that they screw up. things that they have to get right.

And if you don't hone the user experience, if you don't hone right, like all these little details, you're never going to sort of like, like, you're going to actually get escape a lot of the, you're stuck in this. Yeah.

Yeah, it's the healthcape of money laundering. But, you know, I mean, the problem is, I think, like, as a startup in crypto, especially, you know, in a bare market or something. Like, you're trying to survive. And there is a pressure of like, you know, we've got a team,

We've got to pay bills, et cetera. And like, you know, this feels like product market fit, you know, especially when you can kind of squint at and go, they don't get that bad. Like, we're not 100% sure that they're laundering money. Like, they're not telling us that they've deep. Like, so, yeah, I, I, I, like, we just. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, so we took a pretty strong stance here for a couple of reasons. I mean, obviously, personally, I don't want to, um, I don't want to, I don't want facilitate that in many way. And then the other reason indeed is we think, and you mentioned like intents is, you know, for dumb chains to become smarter, the reality is intents is for facilitate all the economic activity in the world. That's really the goal. Like not just crypto, we, you know, we're adding Fiat, we're adding all kinds of other assets,

but we also adding work. You will be able to hire, you know, agents and people, you know, buy goods, et cetera. So that's really kind of the broader vision. And if you want to achieve that vision, as they said, we cannot be stuck or, like, we cannot touch and in any way facilitate money laundering or any other legal activity. And so for us, it was a pretty strong stance. It's like, hey, we want to figure out how to balance between, like, this is a non-custodial protocol that is accessible to everyone that unites liquidity across those chains.

And at the same time, we don't want to. crime here. Right. And these are two very hard problems. Yeah, that's the top vowels to strike. Right. Like, yeah. And so one of the things we've been working in journaling and we kind of starting to roll it out, we call it shield. This is our AI system that effectively is scanning other chains and transactions in real time. And it's trying to detect when there is illicit activity happening on those. Like if, you know, an account that historically didn't have a balance just got $100 million, that's probably suspicious and we should not.

No, it's great. What are you talking about? That's amazing. Yeah. Like, what of our customers is rich now? It's going to be great for us. Yeah. And so a lot of it is affecting anomaly detection on all kinds of criteria.

Same for change, right? We were the ones detected the light coin has been attacked and actually informed like other exchanges that they should pause light coin because we, I mean, we had like few transactions went through, but then we're like, hey, something is wrong, right? The finality didn't just suddenly get rich. Yeah. Like something's going on. Well, I mean, so the the actually attacker exploited their mimble, wimble. There was a vulnerability in mimble vimble and they effectively withdrew money from their privacy pool. without any, like, was effectively fake, proof.

And then DDoS the rest of the network to drop the hash power. So only the, like, invalid, like, the blockchain was invalid, the code, build blocks. Yeah, it was a, that was, hold on, that was the, that was the good attack. I was going to think. I was good a take. Okay, so it basically used a vulnerability in the core, like, one. of the core features of Lightcoin, right? They use this vulnerability to essentially be able to do a double spend, which typically,

let's just say. It's not actually double spent. They literally withdrew fake money. So they drew money that they didn't have. It's not even double spend. You use the same money. They literally withdrew somebody else's money from the privacy pool. Oh, okay.

Yeah. And then because they were able to, and there was like three bones, like, or three sort of pieces that stacked on top of each other because you essentially, you had the first thing, which was the mimble-wimble, being able to pull this money out. And then they found this other one that DDoS half the network. But the whole thing was, correct me if I'm wrong, the whole thing was racing.

And that's why they went through. They tried Thornton, they tried NIR, to get these funds out while this side of the network was like offline, was basically DDoS. Yeah. So what happened is Lightcoin core developers knew about this vulnerability two months ahead. They patched it.

and they then sent it to their miners. And so a lot of the network has upgraded. They did not let anyone else know. Like, you know, intense, exchanges, Thorchain, anyone else that this exists. Just the miners. Just the miners. And so it's weird to me because the miners, I would have thought they don't know them. So I'm out strange.

Yeah. This is one thing about Pryptil. like whenever you say somebody doesn't know anyone there's probably it's probably a telegram group they're able to get in touch with them they must have their emails I'm yeah it was definitely I mean I was one of my first times where I genuinely

said like in the age of mythos this is unacceptable because the like sort of rollout just closed your timeline was months yeah it was too much yeah for vulnerability that they themselves found with AI oh they found it with AI yeah

And so then they patched it, but like they were as, and you know, this is like, I'm not, let's be clear, like, when you're rolling out of it, to keep it in a privileged thing and try to get the network like, and then ramp it up. But you, you have to understand, like, it's still like a, like, let's say like a zero day, meaning that you, you're, you're racing against someone else finding the same vulnerability. And when it's something that AI found originally, you have to know. signed it. Someone else is AI. Someone else is like I was going to find this. Two months was a wild. Like when we started going through the time, it was a wild one.

Crazy. There's a lot of things like this that I think it's like everyone's scared of me. I right now. Like, rightfully so, but in weird ways that we don't necessarily talk about. Right. And to be clear, like this is where you find this thing. And then the next next thing is like you need to let everyone know who can be potential off-ramp because they need to be able to detect this and be aware of it.

And then you need to have incident response effectively while it's selling out at least to like, you know, whatever percentage of the network. And so they just sent a patch out and... They just sent a patch out and waited and effectively, yeah, weighted network was upgrading. But then the new version had the bug with DDoS. And so like, effectively, the old version had the Mimble Wimble bug. The new version had the DDoS bug. And so the attacker withdrew money from imbalimble-wimble,

effectively dedos the rest of the network. So only old nodes were staying and producing blocks and then used and then started trying to withdraw this money on different exchanges. So this is something we've talked about a lot, right? Like this, this AI-assisted apping situation, right? Like, you know, what's your, obviously you've been watching this? we've been talking about all these hacks, the number of hacks have come come through. This is an example where like the good guys found it with AI.

Maybe it was just a leak, right? Like, you know, the danger. That was the question is like, hey, is this inside job because like it's been two months? Like by this time, you know, internally in any of this organization, there's a bunch of people. It's going to leave. People are going to know. The miners know you've sent it out to people like. Did they tell the miners that this was like, did they tell them what they were patching or

they just sent out the patching instead? I haven't seen the exact communication. We are not the minor. Right. So, yeah. You're not that guy. The guy that they were voted. Yeah.

It was super enlightening for me to realize, you know, obviously, like, I spend most of my time in EVM land. Like, I started on Bitcoin, but I don't live there. It was, it was surprising to me because in EVM land, we naturally prioritize the integrators, the, the, the, the, the, sort of the UI layers, the user layers, the exchanges, right? Even before like, yeah, from day one, really. It was never just about the miners on Ethereum. It was quite surprising for me to learn that some of these chains, like like coin, for example, the mine, like everyone else, like the near guys are just like

not seen like a thing that matter. Which is wild, because Guys, the only reason people are using you is if they can get to and from your chain. Why are you spoiling the miners? Right? Yeah, so that's kind of what we're doing with a shield is like we're trying to build almost like information network

as well as AI detection so that you can actually subscribe as if you are an exchange or kind of partner and you can get advisories. Like, you will not get the actual, like, what's happening, but you at least get advisory that, I mean, in different severity. Alert, right? Yeah, you're getting an alert. Like, yeah.

I mean, including like, hey, we think you should shut down this network right now, like up to that level, right? Or like, hey, this, this hash of addresses are, like, suspicious, right? You know, you can, you don't, we don't know, like, you will not know which ones, but you will be able to check your deposits against that list, right? And so, like, we can push Bloom filter. Like, you can do a lot of interesting. things where like we preserve privacy, we don't reveal their underlying, but we actually give

everyone an ability to check and, you know, and then decide on themselves, right? And so that's kind of the general approach we're taking is how can we use AI, how can we use kind of cryptography to really route this information? And then also build the network, right? We work with Zero Shadow. We work with like the other kind of professionals in the space. How can we make sure that we have the reaction speed as well. Because that is the other thing. Right now, like, every time, it's almost like everybody's learned from scratch how to do incident response with those things, right?

Because, I mean, and we've been on the other side of this where, like, you know, drip tape like crap. I mean, like, drives got hacked, right? Like, you know, my like signal lights up. A fact you're like, hey, war room, let's go. You know, I go to my team. Like, war room, let's go. It's like, you know, okay, let's actually like,

we should have like a, you know, information. highway where like they can push really quickly, that gets propagated everywhere. And then we can like figure out, okay, then you can have time to analyze what happened. But like at least we like, you know, like at least like slow down the propagation and can like take time to investigate. I mean, I think, I think, you know, the challenge with this, right? And like it's easy to say, you know, people should have done this before that are like, you know, there's a bunch of approximate causes of why we're still bad at this stuff, right? Like, you know, the centralized exchanges don't have necessarily, like, the expertise

to be able to monitor, like, deeply a chain, whatever. Like, they've got services they can subscribe to. But, you know, they're much more concerned historically, at least on, like, their internal infrastructure of making sure that that's secure, right? Like, what's happening on the chain is like, eh, like, not really a problem, right? Like, we don't care about the chains. We're a bucket shop here that's, like, you know. moving tokens around um and then the people who have been at the center of like these bridge

issues you know like the the thor chains or whatever um have like a perverse incentive to like not be monitoring this or like you know be like oh we could never know who's using the thing you know whatever um it's it's kind of unusual that um a team that has like the domain expertise as well as well as like a stated goal of not accepting crime is kind of you know in the epicenter of this like moving funds and you know bridging etc so i do think that like this this feels like a bit of a shift in terms of the setup here is slightly different to um you know someone who needs to work cross chain but also is trying to you know uh be aware of this but also has their own chain that they're like they've got that domain expertise.

So yeah, it feels like the right group of people to be thinking about this problem. Yeah, I mean, for context, obviously, we, sorry, yeah, we've, we've interviewed most of the, you know, modern blockchains and like know actually exactly how they work. We broke some of them. You know, we had Salana actually paid bounty to us for breaking it back in a day. So we're, yeah, we indeed very well aware on all. the kind of risk vectors and general design of all the systems. Yeah.

I think a lot of people approach and it's a very, it probably stems from like just the like the compliance people and stuff. But it's like their approach is sort of this like we need to be compliant or we need to like stop bad guys. And it's like not really from first principles, right? Is this admon where you're like, I want to do this thing. I have this goal that I'm trying to build for.

But in order to do that, in order to not go to jail, I need to like slap a thing on so that I don't go to jail. And I think that that's always been very problematic because like with anything that you build, if you just slap something on it, it's not going to do anything well. And it's all going to work against your goals of the protocol. But if you think about it, right,

If you think about like, what are the goals of the protocol long term? What are the, you're trying to give your users, you know, it actually is more about like security risk. Where is the danger? And when you approach it from that way, which I say, like, that's like first principles, right? How do we de-risk this for ourselves, for our partners, for our LPs, for our users, whatever it is?

How do you de-risk this? Very quickly, especially in crypto. you have to confront the fact that, like, things break and things get hacked. And if you're sitting at the center of that, you're also going to be impacted by that. And it's not because, like, law enforcement is going to come and arrest you. Like, maybe, right? In some cases, maybe. But the bigger issue is everything around that, you know?

And so, like, especially with the bridges and stuff, the first principles is don't like don't get hacked yourself but a lot of times that's relying on a huge number of other things and if you don't have any detection in place you have no way to monitor and react to this stuff you know circuit breakers that's how we have

you know name a bridge hack right and there's been a lot of bridge hacks like a lot of really really really big obvious bridge acts and a lot of them like Ronan is the is the infamous example but a lot of them didn't even notice that their money was gone. It's crazy. For like two weeks,

it's nuts, right? You know? And so that's the thing is like, I get the pushback where people are just like, I don't want to know what the, don't tell me that Lazarus is using my thing. Like, it doesn't matter like what is bad,

what is good. I got it at the same time. Like, what it's bad, but it's good. When it, what it, like,

devolved into like, the philosophy of, like, evil, you know you're in a good place. Right? Like, is it really North Korea? Like, are they really bad?

Can anything be bad? I mean, is like, code is law until code is wrong, right? That's, yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, what do we do with LinkedIn's wrong? All right, let's take quick ad break here. And then we'll come back and talk about the EF and lay eye drops. So let's let's go to break here. That has helped create over $50 billion in enterprise value for more than 80 clients, like Pith, Moon Pay Commerce, and Wormhole.

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coinbase.com slash unchained before member month ends. No purchase necessary. See rules and other ways to enter. Terms apply to other offers. Futures swaps via Coinbase financial markets. Risk of 100% loss. Payouts event-based, not investment advice, not available in Nevada. Coinbase 1 card is offered through Coinbase Inc. and cardless ink. Cards issued by First Electronic Bank. Bitcoinback rates are based on card holders assets on Coinbase. All right, everyone. We are back. So let's talk Vitalik's

smaller ship EF. I guess we still need analogies for what the EF is because we can't actually talk about it directly. So the first of all, so Vitalik dropped

the 1500 word ex post which should be illegal in my view. Like, we have articles, we have threads, There's many options. Don't drop of 1500. I read the whole thing. I saw a bunch of people like, no one's going to read it.

I was like, I'm reading this whole. I'm a masochist. But like, why are you doing this? Like, just put it in a thread, bro. It's not hard. You can get AI to do it for you. It can slice it out. Anyway, so I think the reality of the situation is there's been a bunch of people who've been leaving.

and you know the funny thing is usually when people leave right you get the like vesting clip reached meme you know and it's like the person jumping off the the cliff no one posted that in the F because

I think they know they're not given any tokens so that's not the problem they were paid too much money that's actually such a good point game that like part of the confusion with everything else when people leave there's like three

reason let you know immediately. So they need a job. So, so obviously, you know, it's a bear market. Everything's, everything's been, been ripped pretty hard. It's up for near and Z-Cash. So, so, you know, it is still struggling. You've got like the people like David Hoffman capitulating. And, and I think there's like a very like direct question of like, what? is the EF war? Like what is what is their purpose? What are they trying to do? You know, there was a period where they they like the 2025 EF I guess right where they tried to do a bunch of things. I know like Luca like you know you talked to the Talic for the first time I remember I introed you guys. They were like boarding builders and all of this stuff and it seems like you know that that era

is over. But at the same time, the bullish thing for me, right, is there was at least some clarity about like what is the theory of war, even if it's unclear what the EF is for and what the purpose of the EF is. And I was very, I was excited to sort of see Vitalik saying, like, we're going to lean into being the most impressive chain from like a technological perspective. Don't get too triggered. So yeah.

Okay. But, but, you know, the, the, the fact that, you know, they have all of these properties that are like, you know, very unique to Ethereum that they've worked hard for, the Talic push for. And those are the things that people will ultimately care about. I think is bright. And I think, like, you know, the thing that probably people have been frustrated by is that there hasn't been like a clarity of purpose. Like, you know, what is the theorem for, right? Like, you know, there's, We've had so many different narratives, the world's computer. And, you know, in absence in a vacuum, people will invent their own things, right? Like ultrasound money and like nonsensical things that have been, you know, markets come up with to try and explain like what is he, right? You know, and so Pitalch stepping up and saying like, no, no, this is going to be like a technological thing. I mean, the best technology we're working towards it, et cetera, at least feels like a good response. from my perspective to the market. What, what did you think, Luca?

Do you read this thing? Yeah, I read parts of it. I didn't read the whole thing like you did. I expect, yeah. I can't speak on it just to the T, but I mean, I mean, you're seeing it across all blockchain guys except for Ilya. It's brutal out there, right? And Ilya had the foresight to at least like see where the puck is going,

kind of or at least like build something that was like novelly different but i mean you're also seeing some of the things with toli and salana some of the tweets that he's been dropping lately i don't know if you've been seeing that pain i think it's just hard there across the board right it's just and i think they're feeling it and it's interesting because when price is up you kind of just become in this like well and a lot of people try to pretend that like they don't care about price until everyone starts caring about price and starts punishing you for it it's like a fascinating dichotomy. But look, I, you know, my stance on it is I personally just think it's a mistake. I think when you look at communities, like what is a perfect example of a community and an ecosystem? Like,

look at your local town, right? Your local community in your, you know, in your neighborhood. Like, there's police stations, there's fire stations. There's the municipal. Like, there's the courthouse. Like these things all need to function and they all need to support each other. And, you know, in this case, you know, Ethereum acts as, you know, the town mayor and the EFs at least acts as the town mayor and whether they like it or not. Like, that's just the nature of owning an ecosystem and asset as an ecosystem asset. And I've always taken the stance that you have to just treat it like you would a town or a city or a country. And I think taking a different approach is maybe more in line with, I guess, the cypherfunk thesis, but I just don't think that

that's how these things win and succeed. But frankly, seeing it across the board. I think a lot of guys are starting to feel the pressure, specifically in blockchain land, maybe the exception of Ilya, who seems to have figured out where the puck is going and is capturing a lot of that mindshed. Yeah, what was your take, Ilya?

How did you... So, I mean, we have a long history with Ethereum because we actually pitched in 2018 to build these two, to Ethereum Foundation. Because I actually, like, if we could just build these two, make it work, we would go back to AI in like 2020. And because that was like the whole thing.

We're like, we needed a blockchain for our near AI stuff. And we're like, looked around. We didn't find anything that would actually match our needs, right? Scalable, easy to use, kind of abstracted. And so we were like, well, Ethereum is, you know, was talking about sharding back then, was talking about web assembly, was talking about, you know, faster slot time, was talking about better user experience. We're like,

you don't hear that very much in the No. Deerland, B-6. And so we're like, cool, we can just build all that. We have a team, you know,

we're VC funded, we just need an upside. That was the things. Like, hey, we need a way. Whoa, whoa, sorry, I'm going to stop you right there.

I don't know if you're familiar with the concept of communism, but we're not paying you shit. You can build a thing. too, but we will not pay you a red cent, my friend. And so that that was kind of where that conversation went. Yeah. And so, and to be clear, like, I've pitched this idea multiple times.

So, like, before launching Mainnet, I've pitched it again because, like, hey, look, we've built it now. Right? We had Baynet, we had charting. We had the BASM. Do you risked all of that. Yeah, we had a kind of obstruction. Let's figure out, like, what this could look like. We do have VCs.

We need to pay the money. I have a team that, you know, one's upside. they worked, you know, 24-7 effectively for... Why would you have PCs? What were you thinking? I know. And so I think like, there's like fundamentally to me there's few things. One is I don't think decentralization needs to mean this organization. And so this is something I've told my team over and over again.

We can be decentralized and organized at the same time, right? We can have a system that is support a decentralized set of like near is actually, Whenever people join Near, they were like, holy shit, I didn't realize there's so many things. Like, we have, you know, dozens of companies working together at all types. Like, you go to our Slack, there's like 20 Slack connects, you know, that you definitely join by default, right? Because we actually have lots of different companies working together in close coordination. When we did have, we had a hack as well on Near, it was RIA. We had five different companies effectively working together.

They tracked down exactly who did it. They had all the forensic evidence and effectively returned all the money, right? And it was done because all those teams can come together whenever there's a need and figure out how to work together. And so, and that is like I see the function of leadership. And I mean, not perfect obviously. It is a lot to improve. But that is a function of leadership of both, you know, the kind of spokesperson and a vision setter of the ecosystem, right? Which is Vitalik in Ethereum and like this is not going to change.

and the foundation as a supporting function. It doesn't need to go and do the actual day-to-day even sales function, but they need to organize and set the framework for that. So, for example, near-intense, all of the BD, like for example, Kane's team working day-to-day, they're not, like, I mean, some of them were near foundation, but they're all now in the diffuse company,

which is, like, overseeing near-intense growth. And that team is, like, day-to-day looking at, you know, growth of intense and growth of all of, And they have incentives. They have incentives. But you talk to them and you're like, oh, these guys being pretty incentivized to make this work, right? Yeah.

And it's both like near incentive and they have bonuses based on success of that specific unit. Right. And so same like if we talk about near AI, right. They're not going and selling near and dense. They have their own product. They have their own market. They still incentivized by near and they incentivized by success of the unit.

And so we kind of trying to build that architecture. Like the way I think of it is like, what if. if you took things like Google, which I actually think internally is very, like, there's a lot of issues, but like has a lot of interesting kind of organizational structure and opened it up, made it open ecosystem that anybody can join, anybody can kind of collaborate, work on each other, but you had like common, you know, alpha bet stock that incentivizes everyone. You have common like HR finance that you can tap into. And so like that is the kind of leadership.

The economic scale plus incentives, right? Plus incentives. Funanceance of man and open, like, ecosystem. Yeah. The interesting thing is, like, Vitalik's like, well, you know, Google. And, like, I get this, right? Like, when I was a teenager, like, I was like,

don't be evil. It's like, oh, companies are bad, you know, like, because I was poor. And, like, things were expensive. And I was like, oh, man, companies charged me so much money. Like, there's such jerks. Why can't they make, you know, building a computer cheaper?

I want to do all this stuff and whatever. And so you had this like intimately towards these large corporations that, you know, especially like Microsoft charging you for the operating system. Like, come on, man. Like make it free like Linux. You don't need to make money. Like and so, you know, there was like Google was like, oh, we're going to be a corporation, but we're not going to be evil like those Microsoft guys.

And Vitalik now seems like has such an ax to grind of. like Google became evil and stopped the don't be evil thing and like did all these evil things and and like yeah what okay so it's not this is the thing you can have the goal and don't be evil like personally in my life I try not to be evil great it's fantastic right I would recommend everyone operate like that not probably evil yeah just try not to be evil okay guys like that in terms of running a freaking organization at scale that is trying to achieve things if your let's say bottom line mantra that your employees your teams your partners are all living by is don't be evil what the hell are you doing right and google i think when like they they

explicitly removed it maybe eliot maybe you know better i feel like the explicit removal of this was because it kept probably clashing with the actual goals and actual KPIs and actual, you know, mechanisms that they were using for their organization, right? And so when they stopped, say, having that as a mantra, it was mostly just bringing it in line because they actually have goals. The issue that I have with, like, Vitalik and the EF and their approach,

again, try to do all these things, try not to be evil, like, that's great. But what the hell are you trying to do? because that's like I can go sit on my fucking couch alone never talk to anyone never contribute value to anything never buy anything never sell anything I can go sit on my couch

and not be evil right okay what end though right like exactly like obviously that's not a win if the EF is sitting on their couch not being evil or Google is sitting on their couch not being evil not doing anything that is not actually a bowl right it's just not that is actually you have to define

you have to define like what you guys are going for, and I think that this is core to any organization. If you do not understand what the hell everyone is striving towards and have that, like, you know, people go out the North Door, whatever you want to call it, right? To get people moving in the same direction and working together and understanding, like, where, again, where their peers are sitting, what their managers are trying to execute, what the partners, right? Like, everyone has to be heading towards that same goal.

And I just worried that. Don't be evil is not a goal. It's not a goal. It's a non-goal, right? Like, you can't, like, it's like telling you, like, what not to do. Being smaller is also not a goal. Yeah. Right?

Like, whatever comes from that, I understand that Vidalic wants the F to be smaller, but that's actually not what he wants. What he wants is he wants a flourishing, decentralized community of people who are all executing different things and all have, like, slightly different incentives, and are all using their talents differently. That's the goal. The goal is not to make the EF smaller.

The goal is like the EF is not needed because all this other stuff is flourishing. But when we define it as like the EF being smaller, I think just confuses things, in my opinion. And I think same for don't be evil. Remember a couple weeks ago we were talking about like how this skew of morality has just been like totally left the window. And like I would love for him to define like evil

because like me eating a hamburger with like a vegan sitting across from me like could be evil. Right? So like let's just define evil, at least for the sake of like if that is the goal, like what is evil? Evil subjective, right? Like, evil. I mean, you could argue. And different than me. You could argue that you could argue that me sitting on my couch doing absolutely nothing productive for society for my family, for my community, right? Literally just sitting on my couch wasting away is like quite evil. And right? Crypto DGens that have been trading Ethereum, the price has been the same for. the last five years to them, that's evil. Right? Yeah. That's true. I know we all don't agree with that. I'm sure like there's a lot of deeps at their computer. You're like evil.

So, I mean, coming from, coming from Google, right? Like, you saw this transition. You know, there's like a view that it's great to say don't be evil. The only reason why you could fucking get away with that, right? Is the same reason why the EF and get away with nonsense and not having and having non-goals and not having to like actually execute and do things because they have so much fucking money because they found this money printer and they now are like outside of the realms of like finance and consulate right like google just had this advertising money printer is just a money pipe that was just spewing money in that allowed them to do whatever the fuck they wanted run any experiments or whatever like like what you were in

Google. What's your perspective on that? Yeah. So the way I think of it, there's mission and there's values, right? And so when they were saying, like, don't be evil, it's not your mission. Mission is actually what you're trying to achieve in the world. And for Google, the

original mission was, you know, organized the world, right? And don't be evil was the approach they were taking. Now, you're right that also, effectively while they had a dominant position, and was kind of, I mean, complete monopoly on not even search, but specifically the advertisement

like the eyeballs, like they were effectively owned the programmatic advertisement market. They could do whatever they wanted. What happened actually while I was there, there was this transition where like the easiest way in Google to get promoted was to go to ads team and grow some revenue metric. And so I was talking to one of my colleagues who went there from research and he's like, yeah, you know, just got promoted, got the, got the like revenue, you know, growth. And like, what did you do? He's like, well, you know, we are actually correlating your maps data to the ads that we scanned from the streets and we rechargeting it on internet. So you saw on the highway a ad, like a billboard. And they're like, we will retarget you while you're visiting some web page now this exact ad, this exact product. And I'm like, this sounds kind of evil. And I'm like, why is that?

Why are we doing this now? And it's like, well, Facebook is doing this. And so what happened is Facebook effectively pushed Google to become a lot more aggressive in how they were using user data and approaching, in general, in general this. And so, I mean, we see the same right now. AI is pushing Google, you know, to be better at AI and everything, right? Even though, you know, Transformers were at Google, like, we had chat GPT, right? We had chat GPT product in like, even before Transformers, to be clear.

Like, there was a, you know, chat product is not hard to build. I guess it wasn't maybe that as amazing. It just didn't make sense for Google to release it because, like, I mean, multiple but the fact that it wouldn't be good enough compared to Google Search, you would create like dichotomy and you know, you get you open yourself up for a bunch of lawsuits and there's there's actual like legit reasons. Yeah. Or startups to actually out innovate the companies, but now they're like stepping up and really,

really ramping up machines. So competitions always leads to this. But I do think there's there is a natural kind of tendency in like I also like taking, you know, the Daleks and kind of more cypherpunk side, I do think corporations in general have this tendency of becoming like extractive, right? As soon as you effectively achieve your target audience and there's no more to grow, you effectively need to grow how much you're making from a single user. And so you effectively trying to either upsell them or in some way increase how much they're spending on your platform. And so that I think is actually the problem, is that there's

no steady state. Like corporation is either growing or shrinking. There's no way for something to be at steady state. And I think in blockchain, we actually have something where because we can have fixed supply, we can have like a different dynamics when we say this is money, when this is and kind of if our vision is forward enough and, you know, for us, again, we think the economy going to transition to blockchain, right? Right now it's extremely effective. you know, all of the negotiations, like actual supply chains, actual work is done extremely effectively. Blockchain will make it, you know, 10 times more effective. And AI will make it 100 times effective. And so together, AI and blockchain will make it, you know, thousand times effective.

And that's a tam, right? That's, you know, 10, 100 trillion tam of effectively post-AGI money is what we're targeting. And I think that is, like, when that is the vision, that is the goal, then you still have values, right? We want to do it in, you know, no crime, for example. We want to do it in a kind of methodical way. We do want it to be not, like I actually think of decentralization as a tool, not as a goal. For me, decentralization is effectively making sure things are redundant,

not depending on a single person, not depending on single organization, not depending on single validator, on single wallet provider, and single RPC provider. Like all in all of those things, we want redundancy. We want ability to kind of work around. Like user benefits and, you know, beneficial to the process, right? Exactly.

Yeah. No, I ever talk, everyone was talking in 2018 where I'm like, this obsession with decentralization for decentralization's sake is the silliest shit and we need to stop. Discentralization is good, but it's not, it's not, it's not the decentralization as good. It's what comes from that. So redundancy, like, also,

I mean, competition and innovation comes from this as well, right? Exactly. So you have, you have cooperation, which achieves certain things and can grow certain things in certain ways. You also have competition, which is the same, like stability, like security, right? All of these things can come from decentralization. They don't necessarily do, right? And that's like the, again, it's like going back to like, what are you actually aiming for? to just be decentralized.

Like, okay, so what? You kick everyone out of the Discord and make them and don't support them on your Twitter? You cannot be on the same Discord. And then when you have zero day, you have no idea how to actually let everybody know, right? You know?

And so it's like, what are you trying to achieve? And I think, again, I think that this is like a very, a very big part of like what contributes to the Ethereum culture and especially at the app is like, What is, what are you trying to do with decentralization? Again, you want other people to build up in ways that you would never build up. You want people to be working together, to be competing with each other. We want everyone to be leveling up and filling the gaps in the ecosystem.

And the EF's job is not to do those things. The EF's job should be to build those people up. But by framing it as like, we want to be decentralized and stuff, what it ends up, like the execution ends up being is like, We don't tweet about product builders. We don't talk to product builders. We are another one in neutrality, right? One of my favorite ones.

Okay? So you don't fucking support anyone? You don't care about anyone. You don't incentivize anyone. We don't have a favorite file. I would be people. That'd be horrific. We can't pick.

Can't pick pictures? I don't know what I'm saying. Why don't know. They're poor. No, therefore, therefore. It's so important that we don't have a favorite child that we actually don't talk to our children. Yeah, we don't talk to any of the children.

We don't talk to them at all. They live in a different house in another area just to make sure that it's so important that. Fair. Totally, they're all neglected equally. Look, just like, let me in your house, dad. I just want to give you a hug. He's like, please, man.

Come on. So I really wanted to talk about, like, Iron Claw and some of the, like, agentic stuff that you guys are doing. But I think we're out of time. So we might need to bring you back. Because I'm very curious how you are thinking about this from, like, a practical standpoint of, like, an organization, right? We've talked a lot about, like, you know, mission and, you know, morals and goals and everything.

We live in a world that in the last three months has changed dramatically, to your point, 100x AI, right? We're in maybe the 5x or 10x period of this, right? But it's only going to get crazier. In that backdrop, like, how do you build an organization? How do you structure an organization? How do you get people to coordinate? I'm really curious to get your perspective on this.

but I think we're out of time for... Give us like two sentences, though. Yeah, well, it's like this game. Yeah, I mean, the high level where I want to get to is markets. That's the highest level, right? Like, we're transitioning from corporation or foundation or whatever, needing to be the holder of people because you needed kind of to bundle because you had trouble doing credit assignment, right?

Like if, you know, Infinex done something, it was really hard to like, this individual person contributed this much to this product. I think that actually is a lot easier to solve now with AI, right? It can actually estimate this. And then on the other side, each individual has become more productive. So, like, I mean, it's, you know, I know multiple people who are working on a bunch of projects at the same time now because you kind of have a lot more bandwidth. And so I actually think we're going to start transitioning to more organizations almost. that are just operating on the market principles, where you're effectively hiring, you know, an individual

and their army of agents to do something and you kind of can estimate, like, how much that contribution would have done to the bottom line of the bigger thing you're doing, right? So I don't know if you saw, so Jack Dorsey actually, like, he posted something, like, which is spiritual line, kind of going from hierarchical organization

to more kind of peer-to-peer. And again, this is where blockchain and kind of all of the intent-based stuff that we've been doing is exactly, that's exactly the world we've been building for where you affect it and say, hey, this is intent. Like, I want this new feature in Infinex. And now, you know, there can be. This is what's worth to me. Yeah, this is what it's worse. Or you can have a bidding and an auction and finding, you know, a solver that will say, cool, I'll build it in, you know, 24 hours. Like, this is my expectation of, like, of quality it's going to be.

And then if you don't agree, right, there's another agent that comes in and reviews it and effectively judges if that was done. And so this is actually what we're building as our near AI marketplace and kind of testing this out right now. This is still early. So I'm not. But we have like first actual businesses starting to use it like for insurance claim filing for background checks, for event. Like actual Ureal use cases where they effectively hiring agents to do some jobs. And it can be like because somebody who is an expert, we codified the workflow, package it up, and now offering that for a dollar.

As a surface, right? As a surface, aggregating what would have had to have been inside of a corporation, you know, like you have your, that function of three, four, five, ten humans that are, you know, manually doing that all the time and sometimes they don't have enough work and sometimes, you know, you pulling them to do something else. Now you can, yeah, disaggregate all this and then have the marketplace. And so that's actually, I think, where are we going. It's, I mean, it's not going to be, it's going to be a bumpy, right?

but I think systematically that's what makes sense. And again, this is where AI and blockchain really fits well because they're kind of powering this trustless transaction. We have escrow. We have verifiable AI to evaluate if the agent done their job well. You can still have human in a loop right to kind of cross-correct if something wrong. So it doesn't need to be like, and now everything automated,

it can be like, you know, I hire, you know, Kane's agent. And, you know, Kane will like make sure that his agent done the work right. or like correct it before passes his over, right? My other agent will make sure that the other agent did a good job. I will be involved. It's going to be five guys. It's going to be great. So, like within the near ecosystem, and we've experienced this, right?

Like, you guys are already somewhat in this direction, like these smaller corporate entities, like smaller business entities. Yeah, I mean, that has been my principle from long time ago. So, I mean, again, to me, AI, again is an accelerator blockchain is coordinator the principle starts the same but so so very but from a very practical standpoint right like the this is something that I'm like super focused on at the moment you know we went from 2025 or like you could grind your way through and get some like production code was really hard then December 2025 through to like maybe March or something

like that you could you could not just grind your way through like you could just kind of to prompt and get like production code if you had you know experience well and so a lot of engineers were like I don't need to write the code anymore I can get agents to write the code and have you but it was still very much like a synchronous process of like a single person sitting in front of a computer producing code right that doesn't to me feel like the final form of this right like it feels like we we need uh something else and so that interesting thing about Centaur, what paradigm dropped last week is like it's trying to move the agents in Slack so that you have like an agentic partner or teammate or whatever that is responsible for the coordination that an individual human would be, you know, buy part to coordinate and can, you know, deploy agents. And then like it's really the humans in the loop for haste and judgment and goal seeking and all of that. and then like the execution side is all handled by by agents.

Like, you know, given how much you guys are doing in this space and how long you've been involved, like from a near or perspective, are you still in the mode of one person sitting in front of one terminal doing things? Or are you experimenting in this like multiplayer space? Yeah, we're experimenting definitely. And so the Iron Claw itself is actually multi-tenant. So open, open claw and Hermes, they're effectively like, they're effectively like, like your system. And so Ironclough actually supports a multi-tenant mode where you can log in with Google,

you know, or near account. And you're actually joining a single instance. You have your memory. You have your kind of missions, et cetera. They also have shared projects. You have shared memory. You have shared workflows. And so, yeah, we're experimenting, kind of designing how we call it a commitment system.

So whenever, you know, we're having a meeting with Ukraine and like Ilya said, you know, yes, we're going to ship this feature for you. you, this should actually go somewhere automatically and then, you know, pop up for the team. Yeah, well, it also should pop up for the team. And then I also like, you know, follow up if it's done, put it on the roadmap, update the right documents. Similarly, like, I actually have workflows that, you know, scan everybody's meeting notes and like give me like decisions that were made.

What are my guys commit me to? Not for me, but like in general for the organization. But also like, actually the most useful. in finding where decisions were not made. Because that's actually where organizations taxes is people discuss something and did not make a decision because as a decision maker

is not clear or it wasn't in a room. And so just extracting that and making sure that's visible, like it's already helping because then I can... And is that like an org level panopticon agent, multi-agent thing? Like how... Right now we prototyped it more like from my perspective just because I have access.

But then we are now building this as like a system that everybody, again, the main question is permissions, right? Like, for example, there's some HR things, right? They shouldn't be visible to anyone except maybe some HR people. And so, like, you need to kind of configure that. But otherwise, yeah, like, you know, I may have like full purview and then we kind of can like cross, cut it into like specific departments. But yeah, we're kind of building it as like a single near foundation, at least right now, Iron Claw that has everyone kind of as a user, and then there's like a common area with permissions as well. Yeah, nice. Yeah, I think this is like the most fertile ground for efficiency of improvement.

Oh, yeah, 100%. But it's super hard. Like, it's hard to reason about you start building something like, this isn't exactly the shape of it. Like it's a really complex design space that we don't have good intuition about. It doesn't because it's just like we've only got had human. You just like throw a human as a problem and like they're just different. We're very bad at the human side of this. Like organizations, right?

Especially like running like an organization at scale is bad. It is like it is bad. It's always broken. Organizations are always broken. Always. 100% always. And so it's like then you're like,

okay, let me stop an agent on this bitch. And it's like, that'll solve everything. What are you talking about? I mean, so you have to like either. I think like the approach, right, like, okay, let's, let's just solve the problem, which is such a common organization problem. Like, why wasn't the decision made or like, and also just tracking the decisions that are made, you can actually solve that and bring efficiency. And then you can then sort of circle back around and be like, okay, clearly this area of the org, this team, whatever.

Yeah. And like, those non-decisions. Yeah. I worked at many companies where. Yeah, I mean, my entire life was. not making this. It was sitting on calls

that didn't make decisions and me getting like just fucking banging my head off. Why are we here? Yeah. I mean, so I pitched this actually

near Con 2020 I pitched this idea of AI CEO, right? This was before any of this AI staff started to work, right? And so my, my vision always there was like, yeah,

like working from two directions. One is how to make individuals more, have more context. Because like a lot of the middle management and kind of It's just like propagating context from like relevant places. And at the same time, cutting down stuff that's not relevant.

Because like people cannot just like, you know, have a feed of everything happening in the organization as well. And so that is AI, like AI can do that very well, right? Like whatever is relevant to your work, whatever is relevant. And you can still query out whatever you want to know. And then the other way is like bubbling up in deep information is like what is going on, what decisions have made, what suggestions, what's improvement. What is like where the trade-offs are? Like that's the other thing. A lot of it is like we're operating on a tradeoffs.

Like what are the tradeoffs? Like sometimes like people making decisions have no idea what the tradeoffs were that actually led to this. And this is actually by the way why I think Daos never worked is because all of this infrastructure is missing. And so like for Daos to truly work, you kind of need to have this system truly working where you don't need middle management. You don't need if you have credit assignment embedded into your organizational design. Because right now, again, credit assignment is a very, like credit assignment, I think actually is the fundamental world problem. Interesting. Like on an organizational level in AI machine learning, what gradient descent, like the training of models is credit assignment problem.

And so like in every place you go, it's like credit assignment is the main challenge. But like if you can't assign like, oh, you know, this person contributed this much to this bigger thing we've done, if you can do that, then like, again, right now like promotions, compensation, All of these things are like somewhat arbitrary. Very fuzzy and adversarial. Yeah. And so and Dallas couldn't deal with them. Yeah, exactly. Because then you put rules, like these very hardline rules on things that are

fundamentally fuzzy underneath. And then you're like, it's fair. But you have to. You're like, uh, we'll just like. Yeah. Yeah. You have to like it's fair. And then people.

And go. I mean, yeah. It's fair. But, you know, but this other company gives me like double the compensation. Right. So like, probably it's not fair. It's probably not fair. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Yeah. And, you know, it's funny. Like, there's the unintended consequences of, like, how you incentivize people are, like, so funny to me. Like, you know, I kind of vacillate between these, like, communist bonuses, right, that we call them in, in, uh, input experts. Like, hey, everyone was here. We can't really attribute, you know, perfectly.

So we're just going to give everyone the same thing, right, for this particular thing, right? And like, the people contributing to the most fucking hate it. rage so hard. They're like, this is a travesty. Like, anyway. But I mean, I know we're over time, but markets actually solve all of this. Like, if you forget about or inside organization, between companies, there is market. And so if you don't like the partner, you switch to another provider, right? If you like, markets actually solve all this problem. We just haven't figured out how to do it on a lower level. And this is again, where AI and blockchain and kind of the intent architecture is actually like built for.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I'm there. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you, sir. Amazing having you on the show. Thanks everyone for joining us for this episode of Uneasy Money. Remember what happens on chain never stays on chain. We will be back next week until then do your own research before aiding in. Nothing you hear on UnEasy Money is financial advice. We're just three builders talking about what's happening on chain and we want you to always do your own research before aping in. You can find all out ofclosures at unchaincryphala.com slash uneasy money.