$EIGEN Token Announcement With Sreeram Kannan and Robert Drost

Transcript

bankas Nation not every single day is today for a protocol the igen layer token details are here don't call it an air drop this is a stake drop that's because that's the only thing that you can do with your Igan layer tokens right out of the gate Ryan how you doing today my man I'm good I'm pretty excited about this uh stake drop we got going on so what are we in for what's happening uh we're going to cover all the details there's been some feedback on Twitter some people have some questions about how this whole thing works we're bringing on uh three ROM and Robert Robert the new director of the igen layer foundation on the show today to answer all these questions and unpack the announcement details 15% of the total supply of igen don't uh distributed over multiple Seasons season one starts today that's what all the

news is about with 5% of the supply along with one of the most sophisticated sets of smart contracts onchain on mainnet igen is not your typical erc20 token it's got this feature called inter subjective forking which is a and we're gonna unpack exactly what that is and how this actually increases the scope of what igen layer can provide security for uh and so so like I said in addition to the Token details getting released we're also getting an the igen foundation with a new director Robert drost uh who are going to introduce here in just a second so let's go ahead and get right into the details of season one of the Igan layer Stak drop with s RAM and Robert but first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show

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out to the team right now at team to.com that's team o ku.com bang Nation we're here with s ROM Canan the co-founder of Igan lir s Ram welcome back to the show hey David hi Ryan ex to be here and joining s r today is Robert D the new director of the Igan layer Foundation Robert also welcome to bank list hey I'm so happy to be here thanks for having me on so big day today guys uh this is not an air drop this is a Stak drop um first we have to explain what that is uh so what is a straight drop stake drop and why are we getting One S Ram uh what's the thought behind this yeah um the

um the igen token is designed as a staking token in the IG layer ecosystem and a staking token allows uh for new functionality that heat staking alone cannot provide and the the tokens do designed around this functionality and we so that's why we're calling it a stake drop where you know users who participated in the protocol can now actually claim their tokens and then uh stake it to actually participate in providing security to new services that can then be built on top of this so that's the high level idea we'll get into lot more details so oh go for it

Robert I was just going to add I mean because people do talk about staking a lot the token has this um you know I think it's it's a good contribution but this technical underpinning um where it it is you know it is a token um but it also has this ability that it can be viewed inter subjectivity inter sub inter subjective oh my gosh inter subjectively getting ready for the air drop my contribution yeah exactly so um so that allows the um token to have abilities that are um harder to normally do so it allows there to be social consensus outside and people can organize and decide about actions that would be hard uh basically impossible to

tell onchain so it adds a new element of social consensus embedded right into the protocol so there's been uh some just questions about like why is the the token like Frozen on chain right is currently the igen token is non-transferable uh and Igan ler has been in this process of slowly rolling out component after component after component putting it on mayet uh and so like you know air drop days or Stak drop days are very big days in the communities of protocols uh but really from the perspective of the igen layer system this is just one more component that is now live on mainnet to really like complete the engine uh of the igen layer system and the next phase that's of the whole IG layer system that's

going online is the actual staking component of the IG layer system hence why there's a token out there that can do one thing which is be staked is that is that kind of the philosophy of this yeah that's a good way to put it um I think for things like data availability specifically there are certain kinds of conditions that um are really essential that you have this ability to have social consensus um that way it's known that if people are doing certain types of attacks it could be seen there's a good comparison of like if you look at something like ethereum or others um people can determine externally there are to put on things like hard forks and do changes it's not entirely based on like you know

programmatic onchain because the chains fundamentally can be forked it's actually very hard to do that with the regular token because you'd have to organize everybody agreeing there's a new version what to do how to upgrade those capabilities are programmatically in the token and so people are able to kind of cast their decision of oh there's a fork happening I think this one's valid or I think this one's valid so it brings this feature that used to just be on layer one into Layer Two so um it it needs a token it doesn't need it to actually be traded on markets of course at some point that will happen but for right now that allows the network to get started and it's an important step I mean it's uh you know I think the history of crypto has had a lot of these cases where you know uh

True Believers kind of understand it takes a while to roll out things responsibly and you take the time to do it right yeah yeah this um inter subjective forking uh is a mechanism that I remember augur in like invoking way back in the day uh and uh for people who are trying to still wrap their heads on what that is think of it like a hard Fork but for the app layer uh and it's really something that the igen token specifically is bringing into the scope of igen layer to really expand the roles of what um igen layer security can really do uh and so we have like the interests and like needs of the igen layer protocol but then we also have the the token uh receivers on the other end of the system who are also uh looking for some details about like what the

whole Road map of the token is so there are some like parameters of this stake drop uh I believe 15% of the total igen Supply is going to be stake dropped uh and we are at season one this is the details from the announcement that we are at season one of the stake drop in which the first 5% of the total Supply uh of aan is being stake dropped in a non-transferable way um but that means that there are future Seasons right and so uh just can we can we kind of run through some of the highle parameters of like how many seasons are there how many what percentage of igen tokens per season uh and just like the the distribution parameters if we can kind of just run through that yeah I think um you know similar to a lot of situations

if you're talking about things that are in the public markets um you know talking about a lot of future things we are trying to uh say as much as we can without getting to a situation where um uh you know we're giving we're giving specific details on things um you know we do have a good plan for how we're thinking about things going forward um I think people are going to be happy with it um but you know in terms of specifics on is it you know uh three seasons two Seasons Four Seasons um there's you know there's options on what could be done we have an idea on what what would be coming for future but um you know I think there's already some good discussion we'll be giving out more

information for people over time how to be similar to before you know reaking was uh probably the principal thing you could do in netw work now it's uh it's a lot richer um you have not only your E3 stake you also have igin when you claim um next week starting uh May 10th and you'll have the option that you can go ahead and put those into um staking you can allocate them to operators you can run them against abss and so there'll be a lot richer of interactions you can do with the network and there'll be um you know communication about this is considered good or you know like how to basically show that you're doing actions that are good for the network um because

that's ultimately the the goal for early people is to kind of learn uh learn that and get the network up from its wobbly feet right into a a full program programmable Network so the snapshot for season 1 was uh March 15th so of course what that means is the parameters of season one are closed uh but it sounds like the parameters of future seasons is still up in the air uh and so we are on like a slow roll out of like this eventual full full scope of the um release of the token Yeah by necessity you know you can't speak about things um until the time's coming up we have some ideas about what's happening we have communicated that um you know we're looking for ecosystem participation we are looking for things after that date we are going to look at things before

that date it's you know one of these I think the best is to just look at what we're publicly saying in the documents and then that'll give you some ideas and uh there'll be more Communications in in the coming days and weeks inside of season one again which is this season there's phase one and phase two um so I'm hoping we can kind of provide some clarity on these two different phases um phase one has the bulk of the igen Stak drop inside of it and then phase two is accounting for like kind of these edge cases can you can you walk us through the different phases of season absolutely absolutely I think the first part to talk about the principle um you know we originally opened up the app and people could um stake either you know e or lsts restake them and um the goal is

very much you know we like to look at the end users um and you know people who are actually coming into the system and uh make sure that we're looking directly at what what they've done and um you know feeling like we're understanding um um you know what's what's the right thing to do there so we're trying very hard to do that I think the situation that we just want to make sure that everybody um gets into a a good place with is there were a couple of um protocols and people that built up more complex um structures on top of you know around what we were doing um you know it's an open Innovation platform so uh just like the rest of crypto people like to um uh build up uh kind of interesting

systems novel systems and we don't want we don't want to get into a position where we are looking at what somebody else intended and then figuring out something that they didn't so the point was you know we made sure that that everybody is treated the same from our perspective um what we would have actually dropped on to users had they not B been in these uh protocols that's all being um uh reserved and the protocols are the ones who are going to make the decisions because the users ultimately went into different protocols those protocols have policy they have people involved in them uh I think users need to wait a little bit because those protocols were finding out some of this information necessarily close to the stake drop time and so they need to go

through I mean obviously if a protocol created a system somebody um put some tokens into it they have an idea about what you know what they were going to expect that that protocol would do and so I think people can you know look to the protocols to figure out um what's the kind of fair allocation from their from their goals and that'll be phase two but it's you know it's it's uniform with as if we could have if we could have figured out everybody's position in the first one we would have done it all directly this is just to make sure that everybody is treated fairly so so the base case I think the numbers just one thing the numbers 90% And 10% maybe through off some people seem like they're round numbers they

were not like hand allocator they just yeah the outcome of a natural calculation yeah and it's not exactly 90% And 10% there is some round off and all this stuff but the actual numbers are you know somewhere in the 9. x% and yeah we that's right they they came out to roughly those numbers um and you know it's just sort of easy numbers to put out there the the exact ones were calculated down to uh specific numbers and um yeah I guess if if people are interested at some point we can just put it out you'll see you know um by May 10th you'll or sorry after May 10th in phase two you would actually see the exact numbers but we can talk about it sooner but like sharam is saying it just happened that the numbers turned out to

that I think um you know people do also need to keep in mind that the way in general um when people are looking at uh restake points or other things they were measured as um kind of a integration of um that's great balloons why not so um you know there's there's value over time and um so the the exact proportions and things you see right now are very different than looking back over a span of time so um you know every everything is calculated based on you know uh Impressions that we have from a sustained kind of commitment and um yeah I think everyone should be happy with

the end as they get more analysis okay so let me try and uh summarize the whole phase one and phase two of season one just just as I understand it um the 90% which is phase one which is what's happening today is like the the bulk of base case of reaking inside of igen layer which is like totally objective e inside of IG layer per unit time and this is like a calculus that anyone can run uh and that is the bulk of of cases and that's the bulk of tokens is 90% And then there's been like um a side of Ian layer that has um had these derivative platforms built on top of it inside of the ethereum app layer like and as you guys said like a completely open

platform right and so people started building derivatives on top of igen layer like speculation on the token right so some people could go along yield some people could go along the tokens this was happening in Pendle but there was a bunch of other app layers around this uh and this is um and and coincidentally this is a 10 uh a 10 to 90 ratio right then these are just like that just happened to end up this way with is how much people were vanilla reaking like me and Ian lar vanilla reaking wasn't doing any sort of DJ gambling stuff but then some people chose to do the derivative stuff that happened to the land at 9010 and then also the reason why that that second phase isn't included in uh the first

phase is because there's a bunch of complicated math that is opinionated that you guys would prefer the app layer the app itself to actually make that calcul calculation themselves uh because that's their math not your guys's math uh and so it's up to and we've seen this actually happen before in other token drops where um like if you were a solo Staker with rocket pool or Lio in order to receive your stake your airdrop from Stark net you would have to actually go to Lio or rocket pool to go to get those tokens and so this is something that you guys of the people that chose to speculate on the igen token in the defi world it's now up to the defi layer to actually allocate the actual uh appropriate calculations because they're

the ones with the calculations is that is that a fair summary yeah that's a fair summary and you captured a really key point there which is you know open ination means that the protocols that did all these things um not attached no guidance from us um they had interpretation and just you know people are free to do what they what they want um that's the big value of the crypto world is like self-determination self- ownership in any agency and so you know we ended up in this situation I think um you know I think it's all good um you know people are like you're saying used to it who have been around maybe for some people who haven't seen it before um you know it it is something a little bit new but like like you said for people who just came in and followed the regular reaking

and then just holding and staying on the platform that's all you know that's all treated and that was all included in phase one can I so uh just to let me try to attempt to summarize where we've gotten this conversation because I want folks to be crystal clear on what's just happened all right so there there is a token now it's called igen right EIG en that's a token that is now locked uh igen layer has done a stake drop not not quite an airdrop stake drop we've talked about the Contours of that and we are in season one of that stake drop where 5% %% uh of the total supply of igen is being released and it's being released in kind of like two phases so there's the phase one that we talked about and then kind of the phase two and that's 5%

of a total of 15% of the supply that is eventually going to be distributed right and now the tokens are locked so you can't sort of go on Unis Swap and do anything like that with it at this point in time but there is some functionality uh for the igen token which is in the igen ecosystem that's where we've come so far yes yes that's right okay perfect so uh Robert could you tell us a bit more about what people can do with the igen token right now so it's so it's locked but what sort of things can uh folks do with it so I should clarify one thing because we did the announcement today um people can go to the claims page and they can check on you know making sure that they are there

um there's you know an escalation process there's Discord and others where people go if they think there's errors and other stuff so we have you know a team ready to kind of resolve things like that um the actual claim date uh when it you will be doing the actual claiming will be a week from Friday on May 10th got it so people can't claim today but they can check to see an address is eligible yes that's right you can check that your address is eligible uh if it's eligible that means it's in phase one if you did activity and was in one of those protocols if we look through the FAQ there's a list of contract addresses uh and those Protocols are going to be included in phase two um so there's information

there and we'll update things as we go um but yeah it's also I mean the other part which is um just to keep in mind for a lock drop it's you know it's not a rush it's open for 120 days um if you came back in and you looked at it later you would claim there would be no difference um the only thing that is good about coming in early and claiming after 10th is you can go ahead and you can um uh stake and delegate your IG to operators and abss which is a positive action to take in the system so to answer your question you know you'll get the tokens if you do you know nothing with them which we hope people won't you can just leave them inside of your wallet they're

non-transferable during the claiming process there's the option in the ux uh which were it's on the normal pathway which will take you into the allocation uh sorry into the delegating to an operator and The Operators list abss and others so you can actually participate in doing security Now for the idland system and you'll have the option to do that as well with your eth um so those are the main things that are happening it's sort of the first step into the protocol getting you know flushed out it's it is it is functional so like at this point this is securing Igan da and this is allowing the first abss that are using Igan da to to you know have the cryptoeconomic security with them and uh

then over time there'll be more features we mention in there on like things that we're doing and looking for um which you know we want to see as we increase decentralization of course is going to be the crypto economic payment slashing system and um you know occupying a lot of sh Ram's time I know okay so so Robert at this point uh people can see whether they're what they're eligible for that address they can't do a claim yet after May 10th they will be able to do a claim and then once they claim they will be able to actually delegate then through the kind of the governance process and the AVS and the stake to different avss at that point in time yes and like when they stake what does that do what like Ju Just give us a refresher on what value that provides to

the igen network and like why why stake what's the compelling reason to do this I mean it's actually the whole reason for Igan ler to exist so it's good for people to kind of and I appreciate you guys have a platform where we can talk about it a little bit the goal of igen layer is to like more general purpose allow what used to be you're going to create a new ethereum or filecoin or you know some Network and you have Tob together um the idea of the software get together people to run the network and then figure out how they're how you can create the cryptoeconomic security to back it so igen layer is trying to make Innovation incredibly easier than it had to be before where you focus on the parts that really are the Innovation and

you're not forced to have to create uh a new blockchain um you are able to actually Implement what you wanted for your software um it's a very general thing that you know uh blockchains themselves are just peer-to-peer networks of nodes that follow some kind of uh computer protocol which is an API plus like a Time Communication factor and in igen ler igen layer you're able to take the security out of ethereum and now also the Igan layer token itself and you apply them towards somebody else's protocol and it it's very much like a reusable um template that we've done this before for things like Bitcoin we've done this when we participated in

ethereum and now through the IG layer it's a launch board to be able to do this for every single ABS that comes onto igen layer they have a uniform interface for having what used to be spinning up an entire new chain in ecosystem okay so why are the token like when do the tokens become unlocked so they're locked right now but is there is there a date by which at some point in the future they unlock we have three things that we're looking for and we're going to want to try to get through them quickly like one of them on the community side it's really important we dropped an inter subjective work token and we're actually taking people back to basics inter inter sub inter subjectivity oh God I said it that time and social consensus um these ideas have always been part of the core of the

layer one blockchains I think sometimes you have competitors to like for instance ethereum that they look kind of like a blockchain but at its core it's a bunch of like completely permissioned people who own the network and they might as well be like Amazon web services or something um it's very centralized it's that's that's not social consensus right that's actually a centralized entity that's controlling things things like ethereum and Bitcoin have always had this property that the social consensus was this is the valid chain we've had you know a tax on chains like Bitcoin ethereum where you have eth classic or eth W or you know um bch and they Branch off but people say well that's not actually the biggest one this is the big one and so this social

consensus has um um been there before and you know allowing this to now be inside of what in the past would have been an erc20 token that was just fungible adding this capability to it um there's I think a lot of value for people to have some time to absorb it uh you can read there's going to be a lot of people who talk about what this means it's going to get enhanced you know everybody has people that they trust a lot you guys have a lot of viewers and readers who you know will kind of look to you to explain to them what does this really mean to bring Fork ability into a token rather than be part of a blockchain and so it's good for people to understand that because ultimately when the token goes fully unlocked um you know at that point there's there's a

lot on on stake for people and they should really understand what this means it shouldn't be something that like hey this thing is out there it's unlocked hope hopefully you'll figure it out we want there to be a period of like learning and just acclamation and everybody to kind of understand um you know if this is right for them so Robert are you saying uh right now there's not an unlock date per se some of ideas have to propagate or like back to the people who are wondering like at what date is there a concrete date by which this unlocks or is there some kind of an estimate yeah I mean they're they're non-boundary like that first one um there's going to be a wave you're never like it it you know we want there to be some time but it's uh it's not going to

be waiting around for years um and anywhere close to that um that the second factor is probably an important one which is um payments and slashing so having the token cryptoeconomics uh Pro you know happening programmatically on chain that's very important um people would like to actually see how the system works right now you can imagine what does it look like for an ABS to be paying for security how does an operator process those how do the rakers get the value from it and so in principle you see how it works but the actual system is important to have live and working um we've seen this before like for instance the flash Bots ecosystem you know it takes a little while to figure out what

are the roles of uh people who are Builders and relays and proposers and you know these these roles have a different uh place in our case because we're actually not like we're not doing block building but we're actually doing security building for a protocol um so there's you know there's a component of making sure that uh people know what they're getting so if you're actually in our ecosystem and you know the token is uh unlocked you would like to have people have that information accessible they're not waiting and saying oh I hope it I hope it comes out the way I'd like it to be you should be able to just read and see that it's done okay and I think I heard in this uh maybe months not years would be sort of an estimate of when unlock yeah I mean there's been a lot of work on it already

um we can't say for sure exact when um some people that we're working with of course there's a lot of really good robust incentive type uh researchers around ethereum um igen layers is like barring a lot of uh you know uh a lot of the best ideas that we can get from it um but you know we'll have we'll have more updates as we're you know getting closer um we have a forum up and uh you know the inter subjective work token is already there there's like more um more work that we can do now the foundation is been around for a while behind the scenes but now we're actually going to be public and out there as well so um yeah so if you're following us you'll start getting a better feeling for how

the progress is coming along okay so it sounds like the the answer here is just like there's some actual technical infrastructure that needs to get built in order for the actual token to get unlocked and then also there needs to be some sort of just like uh Community understanding there needs to be more conversations about what an inter subjective work token actually is then who are the players in the game and so one part in the hands of the community one part in the hands of like actual infrastructure devs on the aan side right yep yeah and then the third part that's important is um you know we we uh so shrom and the team um you know made the decision this is going the path of progressive decentralization so the foundation was formed a while back we

were doing work in order to get ourselves ready for this point um and so we're able to launch the token token is launched out of Foundation uh the stake drop is also out of the foundation um and so over time we're going to get more and more um progressively decentralized so you know we know what that means the community is going to get more involved they're going to have more input um already over I'd say the next month there's going to be opportunities for people who are you know more technical or more in the business side or others things to get involved it's been it's been you know uh very I'd say very thankful and appreciative that there's been a lot of interests in people who um believe and understand that reaking is the way for

um the capability of uh blockchains and especially ethereum to scale out in very novel ways and um yeah going forward we'll have a lot more opportunities for people to participate in uh the discussion um beyond that you know important but simpler thing in the beginning which was uh us getting the initial tvl into the system sure I want to bring you in here as the um information Theory expert here about about inter subjective forking can you talk about just like the increased scope of what a the the contract system around the igen token what this whole system of inter subjective forking what this unlocks for igen layer like what does

igen layer do it provides security to avss um but what new frontier has the igen token uh unlocked for the IG layer system yeah um really you know the the rest of the things are really supporting this particular thing which is that how do we enable more people to build new uh actively validated services on top of i l so you start from there and as you you know some of you know here we are building ourselves I Labs is building ourselves the first ABS on top of I layer I da it's a very useful example to think about and understand uh how and why we had to come up with the inter objective forking

token uh in for you know what is the data availability system you need a bunch of nodes to download and serve data to any participant who is actually interested in downloading the data so this is what a data availability system is intending to provide and as we were designing the IG da system one thing that became very clear is there are certain kinds of faults which are provable on ethereum on the blockchain and certain kinds of Falls which are not provable on the ethereum blockchain like for example we had this idea which is building on the ethereum researchers danr and Justin Drake uh on uh proof of custody which is a mechanism which you

can prove on chain that you're storing the data you know because you have knowledge of your private secret but also knowledge of that particular block so it's a kind of like a zero knowledge proof that you are actually holding the person who has knowledge of the private key also has knowledge of the block so this can be proven but what cannot be proven is that the person is serving this data to the users who really want it right imagine an optimistic rollup an optimistic rollup only works if any Challenger potential Challenger can get access to the data that the rollup is publishing and it is possible that all the IG da nodes collude and never serve data to anybody this is not a fault that

can be observed on the ethereum blockchain but from the so you take the ethereum's point of view and and you sit there inside ethereum and you look at hey can I do I know what the uh is has data been withheld and you can't know because ethereum does not know whether the I da nodes are serving the data to Ryan and David and Robert but from the outside no user if all the I notes colluded and said that this block has been published but never released the data to anybody no RPC node will be able to serve it if you run a full node you will not be able to download the block if you run a light node you will not be able to get the few chunks that you are asking for all of these give raise to inter subjective

agreement from the outside any two individuals can agree that the data has been withheld even though ethereum as a blockchain cannot know that data has been withheld data withholding is a great example of an inter subjective fault where ethereum is a blockchain cannot know whether data has been served and propagated to everybody in the world whereas from the outside out observers know very well that hey I'm I'm trying to access the pp Network I can't get it I go to RPC noes I can't get it I'm running a full node I can't get it I'm running a light note I can't get it therefore I know that the data is not available so ston really quick I I'm with you so far right and I can understand why this is a bad thing I I layer notes withholding data is not

fulfilling their their their duty of an igen layer node just a a quick side quest though is like why would they do that like we would call that like corruption like what sort of things like I can't I'm having a hard time off the top of my head imagining a scenario why like why would they do that don't they like igen network is like is there some sort of reason that that comes to mind of why corrupt go evil in this way that's a great question uh you know when we're building these blockchain systems we want to protect against all kinds of you know nuclear events and a nuclear event here that one would be worried about is all the igen layer validators coming together and saying hey you know let's just attack the system why would they attack the system by withholding

data because there may be an optimistic rollup let's say they're involved in and if in this optimistic rollup I actually make a invalid claim on ethereum by publishing data to a DA and then like getting my fraudulent State past because nobody can challenge because nobody knows what the heck is going on and and I can now steal money so we are obviously always worried about the absolute worst case so this requires a heavy amount of collusion right all the operators have to be in coods because a small fraction of operators can still serve the data but they are all colluding they're colluding with the rollup sequencer and they're all like you know in it together to actually steal money from a rollup and that would

be an example of why they do it okay so if that happens basically uh you're validat set you're kind of like node set turns evil they get corrupt for a lot of chains a lot of consensus systems that's kind of like game over it's like reset time like oh the system's dead like it's corrupted right it no longer works but I think where you're getting to is inner subjective forking means that there's still a path even in that failure mode situation yes that is correct exactly so this is uh again comes from you know deep in the ethereum research culture that you know we want to build for you know World War II as as we call it in ethereum but the idea being that what

kind of systems can withstand all these complex attacks and you know people you know some people might say oh why are you worried about such adversarial scenarios because when we think about blockchains we we don't think about blockchains as like you know toys that we're playing with for today it is the kind of rails on which you know human coordination can be built and you know if you want to build a system to that grade you need to make sure that it is it can withstand these kinds of faults and in this case what what will happen is because a majority of the igen stakers have colluded and done this malicious thing of withholding data the

token can be fored and you know somebody can raise a challenge and say that hey this is not the right token because these ion stakers did something bad and create another version of the token where those particular stakers their stake is removed and the the new token now just removes that those guys stake and then everybody else still has their stake and what this does is this creates a concrete penalty for these Mafia from actually like you know going and taking their gains and running away instead you have this alternative um token that from from the outside we can all agree that the

alternative token is the right token because you know everybody knows that an attack has happen and because of that we all now everybody now coheres onto the second you know forked token because now we all like agree on this folked token that token is what imbus is imbued with value so when we think about what is an inter subjective agreement I think the simplest thing to think about is all value is inter subjective like why is Bitcoin valuable why is this token valuable a particular mem coin valuable but a fork of the mcoin is not valuable right this is all of this comes from inter subjective agreement we all look at it and say oh yeah this is the right one let's you know invest and it is a

sum total of all individual you know free choice that creates value in one one tokens versus the other token and similarly here what's happening is the to the igen Token system can create this fork and by creating a challenger can create this fork and by creating this Fork they're actually uh saying you know throwing the gauntlet to everybody saying hey you know this is the right token now you know all of you shift your reference to this this token and so the normal problem with just doing it on a regular erc20 token is the original token is now being traded it is now in locked in exchanges dexes all these places and you suddenly go and like rug the guys and say that other token is

valuable what what happened to the guys who are trading this token what happened to the exchanges like you know it's chaos and Mele if you just do it on a random erc20 token the igen system not only pre- anticipates this as a behavior it sets it up that this is the correct expected behavior when people collude and create malicious you know actions they need to be held to task they need to be actually punished and the system itself is designed so that's why we have this two token model where one token can be used in a way that is Fork unaware like you don't need to know anything about oh my God this I tokens too complicated there are forks and all this stuff you don't need to do any any of

that you're just like hey this is an i token just use it like any other token what it does is there's another token which can Fork it's a different frame of reference and we call it B backing igon so the the one that's actually backing it with real value and that can fork and if you hold this like other token you should be able to claim one each in each of these Forks so you are protected against forking if you are not you know staking and being malicious you're kind of protected so that's a kind of high level idea is I get it that's very cool so so the the net gain is it makes igen layer and kind of like the the validator node set of igen layer nodes more corruption resistant right because there there can always be this like like Fork

that happens and that's all embedded in the pho in in the protocol so it's like one example of um something that was wasn't uh inter subjective Fork was like ethereum classic like branching from ethereum and for for people who are like remember back then how messy was that the ENT like consensus had to be reformed there was like like Wars and tribes and all of this this messiness Ian layer just kind of handles a revolt against the validator set in protocol and relatively uh seamlessly right so if any kind of dictator or cabal comes to power like there's a a revolution sort of like baked into the protocols you could just kind kind of fork out and even having that mechanism there will make it probably less I mean you're the game theory guy that would make it less

likely for such a cabal uh in corruption to form in the first place that is correct so you know no so this core idea I think uh David mentioned earlier that this was from augur and actually from some of vitalik's blog posts and even earlier from an idea called Truth coin which was a forking version of futari so there's a kind of like a history to this uh you know in the blockchain space but the um a few things had to be resolved to actually make uh our you know version of this Universal inter subjective work token i' say there are four major things we have to solve to actually get it get

it to the point where it's usable in this way number one is universality universality is that it is usable across not just one particular you know app application like augur was designed for one particular application and because it's designed for one particular application it uses application specific semantics for example augur measures how many how many bets are outstanding and then you know that that's the cryptoeconomic surface area that is open and it uses that to create an economic mechanism that makes sure that the system works and when you're doing it universally you don't know what is happening like somebody's using an igon Oracle in in a bing Market they're using it here and there and like God knows

where else so when we want to make it Universal we need to have a solicitation mechanism which is universal which is that it somehow needs to understand what is the total cryptoeconomic risk without being application specific so that's a big big thing we had to do to actually make I work there is another aspect to universality which is you know we think of these inter subjective systems as happening in two phases we call it a setup phase and an ex excution phase and you know the reason I I think it's important to mention this is when whenever people think social consensus they think of hey we all get into a Discord or like you know hash it out in like you know the in a room but that's really not what we

mean by inter subjective foring what we mean by it is there is a setup phase where the conditions of what needs to happen are pre-specified for example this token forks for you know fals in igda let's say let's let's say say that's the setup phase or in the augur case this token will fork for errors in the prediction Market that is the setup phase now in the execution phase anybody can self evaluate whether they need the four one is the right thing or the other one is the right thing it's kind of like having a fork Choice rule built in to a protocol like in Bitcoin you say the longest chain is the right chain somebody can create a fork block but if it's not part of the longest chain

you're going to reject it you don't need to call anybody else to know that need to reject that other block the longest chain rule already tells you that you go with the longest chain and anybody else who is going with the longest chain is already in sync in consensus and so this segregation into the setup phase and the execution phase so Ian token itself has a setup phase which is basically creating the shelling point that it is a universal inter subjective work token so it will fork for inter subjective Falls that stakers make on the in venue take I in I layer and this is very important you know because like we said all value is inter subjective it is it comes from our agreement and if already the

pre-agreement is that you know if you stake and do this wrong thing then you will get slashed and you know and the token will Fork we call this slashing by forking and so if you already know this then you know like uh Ryan said there's maybe no incentive for you to actually go and do this but that's the first one universality we want to make this Universal it's usable across all these systems you need to have a mechanism to know how much value is at risk you also need to be able to fork for all these you know in false the second one we call isolation which is that a def user should not have to know all these details about forking and all the D5 should be able to work nominally because otherwise you know D5 has to keep track of is this the original token or the

fork token or how do we handle this split so that that becomes very messy so the protocol has isolation which is that's why it maintains two tokens one token which will never which doesn't need to Fork on the other token which can fork in the background the third property we call metering which is that what is the cost to create a fork because you know you're inducing a social cost whenever you create a fork like imagine we were callous about how we build the system it's say oh you know everybody now like for a meme reason you create a fork and you somebody else creates a fork and you know it just goes unbounded complexity and we want to keep forking rare and serious how do we do that we have a metering which is that to create a fork you need to burn a bunch

of the igen token otherwise you can't create a fork because you're serious and why would you risk your igen token to create a fork you Bunch you burn the igen token in the original Fork but you don't burn your own token in the created form because you believe that that's correct and that's where everybody will converge you're not really losing anything you will lose it only if you were wrong so we call this commitment so you have a binding commitment to actually go to another fork and you need to have enough binding commitment to move to another fork and this basically compensates for the cost of social consensus you can think of the igen token as providing social consensus as a service and so you need to have like a cost otherwise you know people will abuse you know by spam and various ways

you know there's just lots of like meme tokens and then like who knows what what is happening so folking is considered to be a serious event and it will happen only if somebody is Will enough to create the fork that they're willing to bet their life or certain fraction of the token that the other Fork is the one that's going to survive that's the third property we call metering then the fourth property which is actually a really I think a striking property in cryptoeconomics we call compensation compensation is imagine I use an oracle as a D5 protocol a landing protocol that relies on an oracle if that Oracle goes wrong due to the behavior of the stakers then you know normally you know you're like tough luck you know move on you

know that that bad things happen let's just move on and figure out what to do do with it but with the igon token one of the things you do is you can have a mechanism to compensate an AVS for misbehavior because we are taking the bad guys tokens and and burning it instead of burning all of it a portion of it can be redistributed to the AVS and there is a mechanism to redistribute tokens so these are all the New Dimensions that are opened up with the igen token and and that's why you know we are like okay now we are ready to actually talk about this Universal inter subjective yeah I'm I'm laughing because PE people came for the uh the airdrop and and we're finishing this episode with a master class on cryptoeconomics

and uh that that was both uh geeky and incredibly cool and Incredibly ambitious I would say and um I think shows a lot of foresight into the seriousness of of how you guys are designing igen lay to sort of plan for complete corruption of the node set and still have a like a failover uh strategy for that too so uh very cool is there a whole white paper on that uh s Ram if people are like interested in exploring how you set up uh the inter subjective forking functionality absolutely um you know the the white paper is uh published on the uh igon layer web page it's it's link is you know we'll we'll give you a link at the end of the talk in end of the chat

um there is also a Blog post you know the paper is pretty dense and long you know it's a 40 plus page paper but there is a five-page blog post which is you know a somewhat simplified version of what is going on in the white paper um yeah so we are looking forward to and and you know Robert mentioned you know the few Dimensions we were waiting for before transfer restrictions could be removed and one of the first ones is community discussion and one of the aspects of community discussion is some of the parameters what fraction of igen should be burned in order to consider a fork right so there are some core parameters like this how do you define a new AVS now inherits the fork ability

like you know it's like a constitution and and like you know edits to the Constitution how what is the mechanism is it enough that you just take in igon layer do this does it have to be return return somewhere what is the mechanisms to modulate inter subjective forking are these are the few Dimensions which we want to nail before we open the token to both Fork ability and transferability yeah and it's really important um it would be um I mean it would be possible to make some guesses at what are the right thing to do but as we've seen with ethereum and others I mean look at how look at how much effort is put into the design parameters on 1559 or in thinking about going from 32 eth validators to uh you know thousand

plus uh eth validators before that right I mean there was like a thousand shards and 64 shards then one Shard with rollups these are you know you need a lot of great minds and even you know vitalic and ethereum has had many times they go down a path and they work for a while and then they have to figure out something else so you know this is important enough to get a lot of people's um uh input towards yeah and well that was kind of a lot it it's actually kind of simple at the same time once once you've put all the pieces together really a lot of this complexity from the fact that um we want igen to be interoperable with defi yet also have to this forking ability and so like the base case of Ian actually kind

of like the first class citizen the main version of the token is actually the def5 version of the token the token that people are generally familiar with and then there's this like derivative I if you WR called it backed igen which is like this forking contract which spawns two separate universes uh for people to choose which Universe they want to go to one which is the malicious attack and one is the non-malicious attack and really like why is this happening it's actually because G L is increasing the scope of the things that it can provide security for inside of the uh inside of their AVS ecosystem so it's just like kind of a natural byproduct of the nature of what igen layer is and how we can build smart contracts a day and the

fact that also people are also going to want to put their tokens into Defi and do defi things with it um that's kind of kind of my summary with this there are some other like loose ends I think we still actually kind of need to um tie off on this conversation um uh one is the aen layer Foundation uh so brand new organization uh that's why Robert you're here on on the show with us today because you're the new director of the foundation so what what's the Mandate of the foundation who is going to the foundation is this are people from igen Labs going to go work for the foundation and leaving igen Labs what's the road map for the igen foundation what's kind of the deal kind of give us the the DNA of the igen foundation yeah I mean the foundation it's it's brand new in terms

of uh being public um it's been behind the scenes for a little while now there's a lot of prep involved um in the process of getting up to doing one of these types of transitions from having you know a Labs running entire protocol to the labs making the trusted decision to start moving things over into the community so that started happening um from a while back now um the foundation is uh basically a new organization so everything in igen layer uh labs igen labs is staying in place there's always a trade-off sometimes people make it option they kind of roll a lot over it's not it's it's actually important that for two things one is the execution we

all want igen layer itself to move very quickly and not disrupting the organization is is a very critical step to that and then the second is you know this is uh this is a separate new organization it has a different mandate uh Igan layer Foundation is a shareholder less nonprofit whose objective and it would be violating its you know its Constitution basically its articles of Association if it was doing anything other than spending all of its efforts to make the igen layer protocol more successful and so there's a set of kind of ideals in it and it's a difference between you know igen L Labs which had to necessarily be an investor based company it had to have something

that looks like a regular corporate structure and then I layer Foundation which is much more or really compatible with a community focused environment and a lot of communities form themselves around Dows there's many different structures I mean ethereum Foundation doesn't even have a dow it doesn't have token voting yet still the foundation has those ideals so you see different versions of it optimism Foundation is a great example um fors is like very much for public good and other things and you know our foundation is also public good with the public good being how can we use social consensus to make block chain and crypto security applicable to many more you use cases other than people creating new layer one layer Two Chains you know these types of first things we

want to project crypto security into a lot more of the technology world and business world so yeah so the summary is uh you know we're building uh we are hiring quite a bit um you know on the announcements there's some links to go to um our web pages as well um you know for the most part people have been coming in there's a lot of people who are very interested been in the space uh people are you know engaged and want to do that it's a fast growing organization we've got a lot to cover so happy to you know happy to have that um and uh we do have a couple of people will'll be putting out some announcements really excited about who joined our team as the chief governance officer and some others so we'll we'll kind of Flesh it out some more and

there'll be more Community participation even on our side um but yeah really good question thank you um that you know it is a whole new organization and it's not you know lab shifting over it's a you know it's a separate organization okay so just some uh straggling questions as we finish this conversation uh off so people are probably wondering points what does anything happen to igen layer points is that is there a points program continuing moving forward do you have any comments on this yeah um so as far as like after March 15th was the cutof off date and um you know everything from that point on is still in the system it's not part of this season but it's all tracked and you know it is uh

nothing is nothing is going away nothing is like going to stop being considered going forward we just had to pick a point in time and commit to it because there was quite a bit for us to do in preparation for getting to the uh to the stake drop so um that part is all um is all uh you know uh set up for the future the issue around restake points going forward fundamentally today we made you know a big difference here because now we know that users who are participating in igen layer the only thing to do has broadened out a lot more previously you could put stake in and it was registered as being in the igen lay system but it wasn't actually contributing to the social consensus now people understand you know what the system is we started

seeing it with the launch a couple weeks ago that the operators abss were coming up now we see it with the igen token as well and so after May 10th there's going to be um more attributable things that users can be doing that will signal that they are good ecosystem participants and they are helping the protocol so um we're not ready right now to say what that is but you know we're working on getting that out communicated it'll be available to people before they you know need to actually take action so just follow along on Igan Foundation uh on Twitter uh igen Foundation uh igen labor will I'm sure refer over to them as well so people who are following that account as well can see it um but yeah no there's definitely changes that are

going to be coming but nobody is going to get you know wiped out for what they've done everything is going to be um counted as well since March so so some of the messaging for for this conversation is uh today folks can go to the website and go check to to see um like how much their their address might be eligible for except and this is a subset of of Bank list listeners people who live in the US are hit with a a block and other uh certain jurisdictions are hit with a block and also not like uh I I've heard Tale on Twitter of VPN blocks as well is there anything you can say about that I mean we all know Bank list listeners know we are living in a difficult let's say enir regulatory regime these days so I'm not sure to

what extent you can comment on this but um like it is a concern it is something top of mind for those folks looking to like participate in these networks do you have any uh comments on this yeah I mean it's a difficult situation like you're saying it's not possible to operate in the space without um you know following um uh you know regulatory guidelines and being responsible to that and um you know the the challenging part is there's not a lot of clarity and um you know there is pretty strict guidance around what is possible to be done and not done in places like the US so um I don't think we're doing anything different I think uh that's been the majority of um of tokens that have come

out the foundation itself is a non- US entity and so it's a non us um uh uh non- us um uh involved uh action you know non- us involved procedure and um that you know unfortunately for you know many other protocols that have come before that uh you have to end up having these types of uh Geographic restrictions as well as technology restrictions one one thing I'll say to bankless listeners this is for for me personally if you're angry uh go contact your your Congress representative go contact your lawmakers get involved politically because that's what it's going to take to sort of change some of these things yeah I I'll get on my pedestal for a second as well which is I mean we you know we have a government we

actually you know it is our government in the United States especially I assume you're kind of talking more about um countries such as the US and so yeah the voting system is you know where we really get our voices in ultimately I think a lot of us in the crypto space feel this way that um you know for countries to not pay attention to those of us who are in this space and to not um adjust you know make the laws work for that is just pushing Innovation to other places and it's actually putting countries at a deficit yeah sometimes Robert I wish we had an inter subjective fork in the US that we could just kind of R to but I don't know if that's baked in the Constitution so we gotta work these things out socially a conference where one of the big

there's a number of Senators and others who are trying to push this forward there are states that are a lot more aggressive about trying to represent the real interest um you know I think a lot of the laws we have they were created at a time that it's very hard for them to anticipate the rapid P technology so we just need to we need to just keep our voices you know uh loud speak up and you know we know we can move we can move things in the right direction yeah we're just tying off some locense here I'm collecting some questions from people in the the BOS Nation Discord there's like a different a whole different like rabbit hole we could go down on like a sizing Philosophy for Distributing a token to the community there's like linear versus unline there's like you do you give 8% 10% 15% uh Igan Lay's given

15% which in my opinion like check me if I'm wrong listeners but like 10% is kind of like the what the industry standard has been like Loosely give or take uh Ian L has chosen to do 15 but do you guys have any just like directional like philosophy thoughts about like how you guys chose the parameters that you that you've chosen like I've been trying to solicit uh like feedback from people but like everyone's got different opinions and everyone's is all kind of conflicting with each other so maybe just like at a high level question just like philosophy on the the parameters and how they were chosen and why yeah I mean I think the general parameter that we have is we want to make sure that there's a meaningful participation early on from the whole community and you know

we know in this case we have a lock token and there's still a lot of um you know a lot more um that you know we we are um looking at um making sure that we're able to kind of get people in and uh and kind of reward people who are you know paying attention and you know would be good for you know future participants in in the community so um so it's good for us to have a higher number I mean obviously there are people who might look and say oh we want to go to lower percentages or you know pick this arbitrary one I don't think it's zero sum it's a very positive sum situation when it comes to airdrops the main goal and you know what we are you know hoping

over time is it's a very compelling protocol as people see this token as people start to understand this idea about creating social consensus as an API that can get attached more readily it means we're going to increase the velocity we'll be able to like see much faster pace of new exciting protocols being built in the crypto space and uh you know having aird drops like this it's an important tool for us to be able to um decentralize I mean you have to actually get some people into the space through an airdrop who have not invested anything right they're just participating in your ecosystem and um you know you know they're the kind of people who would be good to be part of

the you know the community and helping to do governance and other things so um yeah we definitely were trying to be um at a number that would allow a lot of people a lot of people to get in so we'd have freedom um and so you know we started off with this uh first season um but we know there's a lot of things like this season we were taking a look at um particular rakers who were in the earlier phases there's a lot of other people in the space who are developers who are doing other things in the community so we need to make sure that we're able to you know look for activities in other places well in future Seasons well uh congrats to the igen ecosystem on the Stak drop uh this definitely another exciting milestone in

what we've observed with Ian layer shipping so much and kind of this whole uh narrative and idea around reaking has been really excited to go down uh the rabbit the the rabbit hole um so I have a question for for each of you guys as as we end so want the foundation's perspective and then want Igan lab's perspective is what's next what's the most exciting next thing that you guys are looking forward to let's get Ian Labs first uh Shri Ram yeah um I think uh looking forward to the some of the unblocking some of the technical infrastructure like payments and slashing getting them ready and going on Main net that would be the biggest thing we are looking at from

Labs how about you Robert yeah I think the compliment for that um the foundation its goal is to serve the larger Community to be able to meaningfully get involved and so um what I'm really excited about is you know as our foundation is um you know getting our our our um our planted uh and we are able to um communicate more with the community allow more people to be involved in you know some of the uh important research that needs to happen in community building and getting people to be aware about this new opportunity to interact with crypto in a very different way um where you really think about it much more as like a software

developer who understands what you want to get done but uh you know blockchain is something that's a much easier service for you to consume rather than having to you know actually transition your whole application mindset over so there's a lot of like Web Two moving into web 3 um I dare say you know everyone will be like I'm saying AI everybody says AI I think uh I'll say it because I know for somebody like me I know Shams in that case also we've been big AI fans for you know well over a decade um because you know we saw this coming but you know so web two and things that are like the future direction of um Computing getting things set around igen layer so that we can support that and I do say that very humbly like you know for foundation we're going to be

assisting the whole Community make this happen and then igen layer itself for everybody who's you know looking at it it's a it's a layer of infrastructure it's a security layer of infrastructure but there's a massive amount of value that anybody who's bringing applications or services in you know will be able to get um by utilizing it and um you know it's a Marketplace it's not looking to be extractive not going to be rent seeking it's just providing service that is valuable and allows a lot more a lot more value to flow into crypto by real world use cases so exciting times uh Robert sh R thank you so much for joining us today on bankas congrats guys thank you bankas Nation uh one thing to leave you with of course is uh be

careful of scam links you know there could be all sorts of go to the official channels we will include links in the show notes to those uh official channels we can see the announcements and you can see the links and all of those details got to remind you of course crypto is risky you lose what you put in but we are Frontier it's not for everyone but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot mantle formally known as bit Dow is the first Dow Le web 3 ecosystem all built on top of Mantle's first core product the mantle Network a brand new high performance ethereum layer 2 built using the op stack but uses IG layer's data availability solution instead of the expensive ethereum layer 1 not only does this reduce mantle Network's gas fees by 80% but it also reduces gas fee

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