Emin Gün Sirer: Avalanche – The Future of Crypto: From Gaming to LLM-Powered Smart Contracts #495

Transcript

welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution I'm here in Barcelona at Avalanche Summit 2023 and sunny and I got to sit down with immigrancier CEO of our lives and founder of avalanche to talk about this event the Avalanche ecosystem and also some exciting new ideas that are being explored in the Avalanche ecosystem about bringing gbt to blockchains so this is an hour-long conversation where we went deep and really got to pick I mean's brain uh about where he sees blockchains going in

the future with regards to artificial intelligence and large language models so I hope we'll enjoy it so without the further delay here's our conversation with Amine Amin thanks for joining us all right Celestial thanks for being on the show um once again um so this is going out on the internet but also on epicenter and so our epicenter guest will remember you from your numerous appearances last time was about a year and a half ago and you came on to talk about Avalanche and before that you were on the show to talk about a bunch of stuff I mean a lot of your research previously from when you were at Cornell um Bitcoin NG selfish mining you could also around the paper with Vlad about the Dow and which turned out to be mostly

correct and some mods on yeah so you know maybe um for those who don't know you may maybe give a background uh on your trajectory and sure you got to become the CEO of a major blockchain sure uh so let's see I was a professor at Cornell for many years so I started out there in 2001 at the time when peer-to-peer systems were just taking off and I was always fascinated by self-organizing systems I was always into building really complex systems that could give you a strong guarantee and stand behind it that was sort of like driving motivation across all of my research and I started out by working on a peer-to-peer currency called karma for

file sharing networks it's had proof of work minting in it in 2002 so as before the Bitcoin white paper it did not have consensus-wide approval work so Satoshi had a huge step up from the work I did uh but what I was thinking along those lines a long time ago and in any case I've been working on uh everything blockchain uh for a long time now worked on characterizing the security of Bitcoin we found the biggest note of law in Bitcoin also known as selfish mining uh we worked on on doing a bunch of other things on characterizing decentralization in blockchains on securing coins at rest on building Bitcoin and G this protocol that is the next Generation that's

faster better and uh then most recently I've been working on lightweight consensus protocols and that work led to the Avalanches system and I spun that spun that out and left Cornell about a year ago to focus on the full time what has been the biggest change from going from being like an academic to running a multi-billion dollar project uh that's a good question so I think about that all the time so um we were at the forefronts of research and development I was worried before I left Academia that I would I would not be able to do research that it would be hard to to attract top-notch talent that uh that we would essentially just kind

of fall into a rut uh where you try to digit to to monetize something and that has not been the case that was so pleasantly surprised that we are still actively engaged in Cutting Edge research in in systems and um and so that's been good and that was surprising to me uh the other changes in my lifestyle are that it's insane uh What uh how my life has changed from doing whatever I used to do and doing whatever I used to do plus so much more now because I have to do these other things as well um that relate to running a large company so that that's been the biggest change for me um but overall it's been a fantastic change so uh in Academia you always have to wait for someone else to take your

ideas and take them to completion in the process good bits are dropped and you know or maybe they take a good idea but they execute poorly on it and um and when you are in command of your own destiny it's a very satisfying feeling so it's been a great change for me what is the part that you miss the most I miss teaching I miss teaching so badly I have dreams where I teach and uh and that's uh I used to enjoy it immensely and it's actually very addictive and uh and I I used to love that process and like it was it's also very satisfying because you can see like literally in people's eyes when you introduce a concept like multi-threading they don't really know how it works until someone explains it to them and those aha moments I saw uh so satisfying so I

missed that a lot um I do not miss the class size so towards the end of my career I started out teaching classes that were like 4 40 40 students and towards the end of my career I was teaching 480. wow and you know this computer science area has exploded over 480 is a lot you know just uh I had like 30 Tas just the TA group alone was similar to my initial class sizes that sounds crazy I mean anybody who's interested in you know going back and you know learn more about it means um previous research should definitely go back and listen to those old episodes of epicenter they're old but they're still super relevant I think and they're fun yeah and they're fun yeah I'm gonna go back that's a drama back then over a technical issues different drama

yeah we're here at this like beautiful venue uh and this is the second Avalanche Summit uh it's it's honestly it's like a very impressive conference uh and um and so wondering what are the main takeaways for you after three days here for me um let's see I think this is uh this is some location where we come together and you know at post pandemic we all work in our little universes so I kind of get cooped up and uh it's easy to lose track of where we are it's easy to lose track of one's once Community or you know you always have some sense of who they are but it's a nebulous thing you constructed in your head and this is the opportunity to see them so my main takeaway is just the vibe right now in

the middle of a bear Market um is so much more positive and so much more growth oriented than I thought and so I had to do a huge adjustment in my head from where I thought we were to what I actually see so uh so I saw a lot of companies they're really interested in building black blockchains and something that will resonate with this audience they want to to create a custom specific you know like an application specific chain so there's quite a few of those around um VCS that are far fewer releases they are very very loud online right and these are people are like oh yeah like they act like they are fully committed but when you look around they're not actually around and uh so they've been most of them have been wiped out and or

uh they're they're not they don't seem to be as committed in actual fact as they seem to be making noise all night if I wasn't actually at uh last year's Avalanche Summit but from everyone I've talked to here they said that they enjoyed this year's much better because last year they felt there was yeah a lot of Suits a lot of PCS but everyone like this year far fewer yeah an impact of just like the market or did you guys make this like an actor of how to no no no no we invited all the VCS as always and uh and uh but I think in general like I was just at consensus and I saw far fewer VCS there as well I think overall as a sector in this area is not attracting as many dollars as it used to they're probably back home

there's still tons of funds like there's more fun around uh they're probably back home looking at AI deals going um but uh but I I love this this is this is the vibe that I really wanted to cultivate just let's just build stuff there's so much undelivered promise so far and uh you know all this like coin coin-centric VC Investments where people create coins that's for the sake of creating them yeah that wasn't healthy at all and I'm glad we're sort of flushing it out of ourselves so what's the most interesting stuff you've seen this year and you know actually maybe like in forecast or that because if I do something out then I'll get his mail from the people I left out okay well then maybe at a higher level like what's the kinds of Innovations sort of like

more General Industry uh directions that are uh that are sort of playing out and specifically like like I wasn't here last year and like to be honest I've discovered a lot of the avoid secret system here because I spent a lot of my time in Cosmos like sunny and and so um how has the Avalanche ecosystems sort of evolved in the year and things that people are working on yeah great question we have many more subnets deployed this year than last year I think last year we were uh trying to get the subnet idea out to the masses this year we've done that uh we're already seeing a lot of traction there are more than 55 production subnets even as we speak uh there are hundreds in testing and there are lots of uh great um subnets look great uh chains in the

pipeline so um one of the big trends I saw this year is gaming they love having their own chain they love having their in-game economy on their own blockchain on their terms with their own virtual machines so we're seeing that happen we're seeing that happen with AAA games so for example shrapnel is here and uh they have a great game coming out it's like Counter-Strike plus plus I don't know if you guys got a chance to play with it those of you who were at consensus they had a great booth there I played it there just amazing and far better encounter sorry and the game game Dynamics are fantastic the artwork is fantastic we have another game or gamer yourself I am not I'm a terrible gamer you know the last game I was good at

this Frogger okay so let me let me date myself you know I was there when like pong was a thing you know so uh not much of a gamer uh but uh but these games like they really like I don't know it's just they're so realistic so beautifully done there's another one uh there's another AAA game called Godzilla that's coming out soon uh later this year amazing amazing production values like the Universe I played that game a little bit uh they flew me out a 3D recorded me kind of like they did the Golem or whatever and they made an NPC out of me in the gate so there's there's a there's a there's a copy of me in the game who like looks into the camera and says dramatic things and you can unload the clip into my head and I'll respawn and

say dramatic things again it's it's really fun and uh I loved it and if you play these games you just kind of lose yourself in the game like the the you know you can replace your arms you can replace your legs there's like mechs and stuff butts and drills flying around just Counter-Strike could be so much cooler and and these guys are delivering on that promise so and then of course everything you buy is an nft in the game amazing amazing show how do you um so you know I definitely noticed a lot of focus on gaming here a lot of people have been talking about that it feels like right now there's this like weird culture war between the much wider bigger Gaming Community out there and crypto right my take is I think they're still mad at us for stealing all

their gpus but like how do you guys plan off like you know am I like Discord added like crypto features and then they've got so much backlash undo it yeah how do you guys plan on the so I see all these games that are being developed right now but how do you plan on reaching out to this like more active gamer Community I think uh so this is not my domain at all we just provide the platform for people to thrive on but I did play with the games and I know what the game designers did it is so smooth that uh the I think what people really react to is the crypto community's propensity to push coins into everything and and to put cumbersome uh so the front ends in front of stuff that you want to do naturally so in these games when you like get a

gun that's an nft you just received and it's not it's not part of like it's if loving your face you didn't have to buy coins Etc so it's so natural and these people end up interacting with a blockchain without knowing they're interacting with blockchain I've said this many times before um that's that's one of the signs of of success that people are using your system and they don't even know so if we're not in people's faces we're not going to get the flat backlashes that's so cool let's let's dive into the the nitty-gritty a little bit more and some of the technical aspects of avalanche and you made an announcement uh yesterday that um we kind of titled this episode as GPT for for smart contracts so we'll also talk about that but let's

maybe just start with a refresher on how avalanches architectured and the different parts of that like the different chains of the c-chan the PJ and the exchange so people get a sense of like how that all works and then we can get into some of the uh more in-depth I think sure so there are a couple of things that make Avalanche unique and interesting well the main one that got us started down this path of issuing a new uh a new new chain is uh the new consensus protocol it's Unique it's there is none other like it and uh it achieves consensus via this mechanism that's very similar to gossip for those people who are familiar with it but it's a consensus mechanism as opposed to just the gossip information dissemination because so it's it's a use agreement at

the end of the day using this very lightweight mechanism that allows our system which you consensus at about a second we advertise a second we really actually in actual fact usually below a second to finality um and it can do so without compromising decentralization at all we can have millions of nodes participating in every decision and still achieve those amazing turnaround times so that's one the second thing that's interesting about Avalanche white Cosmos is uh its ability to support more than a single chain so uh Avalanche in fact the three of us there aren't that many chains that have this architecture so prior to us there was what initially there was Bitcoin

that one asset one chain then came ethereum and other chains like that which are multi-asset single chain and now you're seeing the rise of the Next Generation the highest Tech in the space which is multi-asset multi-cheap and in avalanche you could have multiple change in parallel each running their own virtual machine each with their own gas asset each materials taking asset and that allows people to build that shape will build a gaming chain for example that's completely shielded from the load on the other chains but yeah certain change and we have a generalized smart contact chain called sieging so it's an evm and so you interact with it the same way you do you do solidity programming on it it's a much faster version of a clear image session and you can create

more c2c3 chains if you want to we have this other chain called X chain for assets so if you just want to easily issue a token you can do it there and then we have this coordination chain called pchain that's those three are the ones we started out with the coordination chains for finding the other chains that are in the system as I mentioned they're about 55 of them even as I speak so that's our big big architecture it allows anybody to create their own chain subject to their own rules with their own validators we don't have centralized components you don't have to go through a hub to communicate kit we have a and uh so uh IBC like communication mechanism that we call warp so any any blockchain can talk to any other blockchain and uh overall so

those are the two things that make us unique the third thing I think is a mentality uh thing uh that that is very important to us which is to use the best of Science in everything we do uh so it's not just a platform itself but our bridges use different technology uh we've been building exchanges that are using secure Technologies such that even the exchange operator cannot misbehave so there's a lot of tooling that's happening around uh Avalanche that's uh this is I should bring a new new science into the space so I want to talk a little bit about the the interoperability protocol uh yeah I think for people who listen to this channel uh there's there's an

understanding of how IBC works with like clients that are able to verify the state of another chain and essentially mint assets on them of the chain and sort of burn assets on the initial chain and that's how we arrive at being able to transfer tokens from one chain to another uh in in avalanche it's totally different because there is no like client by by virtue of the the consensus mechanism or at least that's how Sonny's explaining to me earlier today yeah he's not drone you can have like price but it doesn't work but yeah correct warp does not work the way the way ABC wins um we use aggregated signatures uh across the validators that that comprise a blockchain so if your chain wants to send a message to me essentially what we do is we construct the Quorum signature from the set of nodes the validators

that make up your chain let's say in this chain at this moment in time such as such an event happen perhaps you're sending a message to me or perhaps you burned coins what have you and so that becomes a um a message in a well understood parsable format by any other a blockchain that wants to consume it and then that can be taken by any other chain and used to do the corresponding action an invocation or creation minting of decoys on that other chain how scalable is that because one of the nice things about Avalanche consensus protocols that can stay scale to Millions but these aggregate signatures how well do they scale that's a great question and uh so there are lots of different cryptographic techniques for compressing those uh those signatures

the uh the technique that we use comes from uh uh you know from from BLS signature so then one a on this team at Stanford um it's incredibly scalable and the the time I was worried about this because you know his uh you know it's called cryptographic constructs and I think the ethereum community knows very well that a lot of them don't pan out in practice uh there's some feasibility issues that you run into that are not evident in theory so um BLS signature is the way they're implemented is incredibly fast so a warped message can be constructed in hundreds of milliseconds uh across thousands of uh of validators so if your blockchain is you know again say 10 000 validators or

less you're looking at less than a second for messaging uh you're typically looking at about 300 milliseconds four messages or message construction still needs to be parsed on the other side but that's super fast and you can become an input to a Smart contract on the other side yeah it's I guess that's the nice thing about BLS and kind of aggregate oh as you gossip right unlike other Android signatures where you need any squared communication right exactly so what are some of the ways that um the Avalanche consensus protocol has evolved over the years yes I know like there were some design goals that uh got sent out with this bit making this very like leaderless style protocol and then those have sort of had to shift over time yep uh can you talk a little bit about how

it's evolved sure so uh there are so the Avalanche protocol itself when it came out um it's it's actually uh it's not a single protocol and many protocols the new family entirely so uh for those of you that are listening they're familiar with uh protocols like Cosmos um and uh let's actually take Cosmos is great because a very well understood sound uh really really nice protocol uh we call that it's in the classical family um there are other protocols like E2 EOS Etc they are signature aggregation uh protocols they don't have a view change as you know processed enough I don't know how technical we want to get into this but

oh well okay so there bunch of protocols that are uh that are you know fairly specific they do signature okay a signature aggregation which becomes very very cumbersome the more you validators you have Avalanche when it came out came out as a huge series of protocols other like four or five in the initial paper and it's grown since then and um I think there are two different two surprising things that happen when we came out with the initial Avalanche protocol it was leaderless and uh it's still that protocol is still there in every way all of that code is still there so in any slot anyone can propose but if you do run a protocol with that sort of uh that

sort of modality then you can get into situations where there's a lot of conflicts because you know you've we've all been at conversations where two people are constantly talking at the same time there's a pause to people start the sentence at the same time then they have to stop back off look at each other in the eye you know and then then you start again and sometimes it can repeat itself so um to to stem that we added a soft leader mechanism to Avalanche so it's not a hard leader it's different from classical protocols there's no view change there's no leader election it's just as you know like in this slot you know we're gonna give we will all pause a little bit more uh but Sunny doesn't have to pause as much because it's history in that so that's

uh that's the kind of heuristic that we added to cut down and congestion on the network was incredibly effective and uh but the the sort of the fundamental nature of the the protocol underneath did not change but more recently we made another change um it's just maybe 10 days ago we did the Cortina update and so um the uh you know the one of the products so when we went out we had two different consensus protocols that we used and two different data structures that we the CJ was an evm uh chain with a you know ethereum virtual machine running on it that created a totally ordered linear shape the X chain was an actual dag protocol so we created a graph a directed acyclic

graph and uh was an academic you know it's incredibly appealing sounds like oh yeah dag is so much better than a chain because you can grow it's you know it's you can work on this side of the graph while you and I work on this other side of the graph and it can proceed in parallel so theoretically it has far more capacity so uh then we went out with it so one problem of course is it's more complex that's not a big deal like we have some of the best developers and you know we can handle complexity but uh the second thing that I discovered to my surprise is that all of the exchanges in the world are written for linear chains so even if you have this dag they don't know what to do with it and they keep

wanting to ask a question like did this happen before this or vice versa and in a dag you have called current operations that was the appeal of the deck so I spent countless hours talking to Chinese exchanges and saying look you know the question you're asking is is malformed like that don't be asking that question so no fast but then they say no our systems are designed this way we have to ask this question so that ended up uh forcing us into rethinking the dag issue and with the Cortina update we're like okay look you know what we're gonna do we're gonna take a hit on performance on the x-chain not that big deal uh we are still available before so I will get rid of the dag and we'll build a linear

chain just to make exchange integration simpler also not just that but also to make warp Integrations so now warp Works across all of the subnets and uh we got rid of the dag which I think was detail I miss it um as an academic but as a practical person that wants stuff to work it was one of the best moves we did yeah when Avalanche becomes you know the biggest chain that will teach them about that exactly exactly at some point the world was not quite ready for this this mechanism you talk about with the uh sort of it's like let's all kind of soft agree that someone is gonna come first then you know we'll all respect that and how does that respect break down when you have these Mev

competitions start to form um it works just fine so um if an Mev or jumps in that's fine uh we're going to prioritize the person who's in the allotted slot so uh the that does not give any advantage to me viewers the way to win the Mev game on Avalanche is actually very straightforward you you just need a crap ton of validators and to do that you need to stake a crap ton of evax so in a sense we turn the Mev game on and said and say look if you want to play this game like it's a game that cannot be stopped people want to play I will want them to game your Protocol no matter what it's like there's a there's a well well understood way you need as many slots as you can to your name and the way to acquire that is

to stake a lot of evacs and so that's that's exactly how that works let's um let's talk about this AI stuff yeah it's crazy chat gbd smart contract writing which is not actually like when I was listening to the talk or someone described it to me earlier I was like oh we're going to use GPT to write smart contracts that's not all the idea I think the idea goes even further it sort of abstracts away the entire like oh yeah um sort of way that we think about writing applications um or giving instruction to like a a machine so yeah talk about this this idea and um yeah well what's what's up what's what's with it gladly gladly so uh it's a very obvious

idea so once I tell everyone what it is they'll be like yeah I see how that could work and uh and it's uh it's also a very bimodal ideas either a great idea or a terrible idea it's not an in-between it's not incremental it's just not and it's also not something I heard before but once I say it'll be obvious so here's the idea um we um are starting I'm I'm super excited about this we're launching a new project to build a new subnet the level inch that's powered by AI specifically by large language models uh that are using these generative Transformers of pre-trained Transport what's known as gpts so what are these things right so these things are you know at the end of the day they're giant matrices but they

really are engines that have been trained on the totality of digital stuff we have on the internet they've read everything on the internet in every language and they've constructed this intelligence so to speak that knows how to react to situations that are provided to it in natural language and so what's the proposal we build a new blockchain this blockchain has as its execution engine one of these trained language models it has a generative pre-trained Transformer so this GPT is in there think of it as a no code blockchain a blockchain where there is no transaction format there is no byte code there is no solidity there is no wiresm there is no other

programming language whatsoever when you want to do something you write it in what language in whatever language this thing is trained and it happens to be almost every language so you write it in English you know I give to Sebastian five avacs I write this in text in my as my transaction with those letters it's like ASCII characters and that's part of the blockchain and then you can write something that's kind of like a check but more more expressive you can write something like hey I give to Sunny uh you know 500 avax assuming that he can complete his fundraise for his new movie that he's making if not if he can't do that I want my money back that's not not something I could write on the check

that my bank gives me right and it's and it's being executed whatever you write is being executed by a very smart neutral counterparty that is the intelligence inside that that AI engine so there's no more programming we all become programmers we can all write smart contracts you can start something like I now start a sequence of interactions uh using the rules of Chess and Magnus plays the white pieces and you know we play the Black pieces uh you know I don't have to define the rules of Chess yeah right if I were writing a program it would be this long and then it would be complicated and I have to do all that like Checkmate checking and so on it's expensive here this is just like I I rely on the inherent intelligence

that this thing built um I can say this contract uh will divide the you know we wrote the song together let's say we'll we'll divide the royalties between three of us fairly and we now appeal to the notion of fairness built into the area so it's just it's an amazing new future is it crazy could it be could it be a bad idea yeah it could be but it's an experiment worth doing so in the talk you describe this this notion of uh interpretation so we have like an intent and so we vocalize the intent as like language or like uh like you just said right like I want to send these tokens to this person under this condition or like well that's that's the way that we describe things as humans and then we translate that into uh into code right like

rust or we'll go or or solidity or whatever and that gets translated into byte code and the issue is that between these different intents well there can be sort of things that are Lost in Translation and worse yet like bugs right so like re-entry and see attacks and things like that where you say okay like I want to do that but I haven't thought that there's like re-entrancy or there's this particular bug in this interpreter does this idea imply that in the background there's actually code being written or are we are we sort of thinking about a different type of VM here that's like yes we are okay so it's like a language model to byte code or is it legal absolutely no code anywhere there's gonna be no byte code there's no code construction the AI is not creating code

for you the AI is interpreting the actual text you right so but at some point at some point like there has to be a transaction right and so that transaction gets run by a validator and that validator is executing jump machine some machine code no it's executing GPT it's running the the matrices that actually power the AI so you're having a conversation the way you have it with chat GPT and the validator is executing whatever the language model is coming up with in response to the prompts that are coming in as transactions so there's no code construction absolutely no rust no byte code no like bits with the state change like how does the state change

yeah so like that I guess my question is like at what point does the gbt model interact with a state change the the GPT model every validator has a GPT model in it and it has an account uh some kind of an account abstraction where it Associates token balances with addresses so if in response if you tell it to modify one of those things and it's a free prompt you know they're in the Genesis vertex so to speak instructed to then it affects that change so if I say hey you know I would like to get five abacs and I am authorized to do this then it's it's going to make that change in a central account abstraction so we have one Ai and one accounting

ledger so to speak that's kept in every validator the AI engine has to be deterministic by the way so that's one of the restrictions that this approach requires and and so when the transaction is seen at the validators they all see what's being asked they apply the ability rules that they have been pre pre-prompted and then they make the affected the the change that that that's required by the transaction how does uh how is security going to work in this world because one thing I'd like you know TBT is great but like as you use it more you start to realize it does some weird things and edge cases and like you know hallucinates yeah if I do like trans if I like even when

I'm coding like you real when I you know it's great for generating test cases and all this stuff but then you start bringing the code you're like uh that's yeah you're making some bugs you still have to go review stuff right and so if there's no standard like today with like smart contracts we can like that well if we have byte code we can like you know do actual like or you know if they're gonna go full you go full formal verification but at the very least you have some way of like auditing that this thing is doing things correctly yeah while with the GPT system there's no rules to audit absolutely so let's see is that the part there are so many concerns as I said this is either a great idea or a terrible idea and not nothing thing in between so um uh let's

see one of the big criticisms with these these machines is these new emerging machines is that you you don't know what they have learned right you can't audit what's inside etc etc I fully agree with that we have to just adopt it we have to own it right so uh your Tesla drives itself is it gonna go crash every now and then you know until it's trained to be to not do that it will it's kind of like a learning you know 15 year old kid who's learning to drive so uh it's same with this so we will have to make sure that whatever AI we use is actually intelligent it does actually have a good grasp of what it's supposed to do so I I'm hopeful on this front though that we interact with each other you know I

don't really know what's inside your brain and uh but somehow we managed to all get along all like you know one or eight billion of us so uh so uh and I'm very hopeful that the AI Evolution will actually speed up and we'll build these uh these engines that are really really smart very soon it'll happen far faster than people think it will so that's one thing the uh the other thing prompt engineering hallucinations Etc that's that's a huge concern uh this is why I want to run this as an open project this is why I need everyone's help because uh we need to experiment with this so uh undoubtedly if I were to specify a Lending Service in English right now

um you know I can do it right there's a lending services that has a bunch of pools the pools do this and that and you know on the back end uh the the machine will keep track of accounts and do the lending but undoubtedly my specification will leave something open and you know this white person like you will come along and you'll be able to say you know whatever redefine what you know Green just said to you know change all the commas into whatever let's say you can do all sorts of funky things to to trip it up and uh what I think will happen over time is we will come up with libraries of preambles so as to restrict what comes afterwards and uh and that I think will give us a modicum of safety but it's this is a multi-year project I don't think like this is this

is going to be a fun project I think it's fun and so the lawyers are the only ones who are going to keep that's all we all become lawyers right so I I I agree with that and lawyers who know how to write fine print you know the fine print is there for a reason and so it'll turn into into uh into uh what we call this thing KOA coin operated agents just going to turn into preambles for colors I mean this kind of extends this idea can work on a blockchain and certainly it would be cool to see that come coming to existence um but it could also extend to any Computing environment you know we could have like a JavaScript VM in our browsers that executes code in a similar

way and so like are there other um attempts to do this sort of thing outside of crypto is something that was like inspired by other it's like it's like a very novel idea that I think just expands outwards I don't know blockchain I'm glad you think it's novel no it's uh I was just kind of sitting at home thinking about AI stuff and thought hey we have to put this into a validator um I haven't seen the I mean everybody and their brother is trying to work on the next GPT engine and uh and these things are going to find their way into all sorts of tooling um but you know undoubtedly that's happening but I haven't seen anybody talk about putting things out in a battle into a blockchain before interesting yeah yeah there was just like interesting

article I I haven't been talking about before the episode but like a a memo that would came out like from a leaked uh leaked member from a Google employee talking about like you know they're competing with open AI but he's like actually the biggest competitor right now is like the open source LLS like so Facebook released their open source LMN like the model is much smaller than what like uh gbt throughput like open AI Google have but it's actually from a you know ux perspective is out like just the open source iteration on it there's no competing uh and like you know in surveys they're like oh yeah these are over 50 of the time people like don't care between these open source ones versus like so and I think building this like stand uh open platform like uh

neutral platform in a public way is very important one of the I'm really excited I'm happy that you're like really thinking about this because one of the things I've been a little bit um like admittedly uh thinking about like for a couple a couple weeks now is like what is crypto like a great stagnation technology and I hope not yeah I don't think we're stagnating at all well I know we're innovating quite a bit my question is like I feel we were in a period of great stacking yes that's true and that's that's why I'm here by the way you know I was sick and tired of listening to crypto Twitter I'm all over the saying damn topics over and over how do you switch to proof of stick why does it take you six years I don't know

um how do you handle identity management of the blockchain I don't want to hear anybody else talk about this that's why we have this other push uh on institutional blockchains uh where I just want to show people by example this is how you do this it's not rocket science it's super pragmatic at the Avalanche were very pragmatic and this is how you do it let's put an end to this discussion once and for all we don't need 15 working groups and 50 000 white papers and and so on for around this very doable very pragmatic Solutions exist yeah well I'm telling I mean for my little metal layer where it's like I felt like crypto was very much about like taking the speed of the world and like redistributing power yes but it just feels that like wait we're ever entering this like Reflection Point

on like technology like power Dynamic like trying to redistribute power doesn't make sense versus like the real power just like you know the story of the Dreadnought no um I know it's red notes yeah so I believe dreadnoughts caused World War one uh so in the 19th century Britain controlled the Seas like you know 10 times as many ships as the rest of Europe combined uh and which control the Seas you control the world then one Admiral his name is Jackie Fisher he commissioned the creation of the Dreadnought it was the best ship in the world it was faster more guns you know further guns better defenses everything and what it did was it made every other guy in the ship in the world Obsolete and the German saw and I'm like oh we want one too and then the British

made one and then the German big one one they kind of did this like arms race but you went from a world where Britain had 10 times as many ships as the rest of the world to a world where Britain and Germany had the same number of dreadnoughts and so it's like technology in like just like up you know a creative destruction is actually like when your past is how like real power redistribution happens and so I think like crypto is that's what I meant by stagnation based technology it's not innovating new innovation if that makes sense maybe that's controversial I disagree with that I disagree with that okay there's so much energy like just behind this right and uh and uh and I think we are addressing all of those things that I I

think you're right that for a long time we were kind of you know whirling around the the same drain pipe without much progress but uh we are solving the custodian Solutions like the institutions weren't able to get into the space they didn't understand custody that's that's done um there were a whole bunch of problems with people's understanding of crypto assets done um I agree that wallets are terrible we're trying to address that with this thing called The Core wallet trying to make it much more intuitive uh and we talked about the other problems that you know switching to proof of stick should not two second thing uh we talked about uh distribute identity there's a going to be other things and um uh no I don't think we're stagnating new assets are

coming on chain when I returned to be in crypto screw what I mean is more like crypto so far has read mostly about taking things that have existed in a centralized way yes decentralized yes so like the Web Internet Revolution came like three decades ago and crypto has been like and finance you know came 100 years ago ending well boom even more but we've been like taking we're like let's take the web as an example right crypto has been feeling like it's been playing catch up where it's like okay all this internet infrastructure has existed for three decades and let's now figure out how to decentralize it what's exciting for me about this AI stuff that you're like pushing is like oh we have our ability right now to like put our foot in the door at the beginning yes Revolution yes absolutely

and it's high time to do that it's great for crypto because anybody can now become a smart contract programmer anyone can interact with a smart contract we don't have to worry about you know what comes after solidity no I don't know what I think language should come after salinity so if we can make this work it's going to be amazing imagine everybody being able to talk to Ave you just write I want to borrow so much money and it says well I'm sorry I can only give you this much and then you say well okay well then give me that much that's your sequence we call it kind of sequence abstraction in this cold world so um and you can do it what is the idea the idea is the idea here for these large language models to act to write are they or just to interact

with the things so like is that the next step is to actually write the application so stunni comes along to this blockchain and says this transaction starts a new sequence which starts by defining what the landing platform is a landing platform is a pool cool into the pool liquidity providers put their tokens out of the spool other people can borrow if they provide overallized tokens etc etc and and then after that anyone can come in in their own native language whatever it might be Italian Spanish whatever Finnish they talk to it to to to to borrow coins against it so it's both to define the smart contract and to interact with it it's just imagine just text after text after text it's going to be a little bit of a mess right so

actually it's gonna be like I mean I would like most of the interactions to be in English so I can follow along with it so uh we'll see how it pans outstanding might say all interactions subsequent to the first transaction must be in English and then then it's going to be easier to follow in explorers it's just a funny world to think about it's gonna be so fun I think the thing that for me is difficult to to sort of grasp and maybe it's not super familiar with language models and how they how they work except for using them right and then so it is that when you go from language um like human language which is sort of a low resolution information yes uh instruction set and then going from that to code to byte code uh you you can have

a I mean sure you you can have bugs you can have externalities that are not um that are relative to the execution environment that you don't foresee right so like re-entracy attacks and things like that but by looking and being able to interpret as a human uh that instruction set that the machine will then interpret you can sort of set aside all of the externalities whereas a large language model I don't I don't think we have the capacity to fully understand the externalities so so you're pointing to something very fundamental and very important normally uh we stung starts out with some English intent in his mind then it converts that to solidity code which is more precise then you converts

that into bytecode which is even more precise which is then interpreted inside the validator with the help of an interpreter right so that's what usually happens and now what we're proposing with colas cone operated agents is you just write it in English and then this agent this this engine interprets the English and there might be ambiguities and you will have to rely on the sort of the common sense so to speak that the agent picked up by reading the internet which is kind of scary thought so and then then that's what allows you allows it to fill the gaps so is it better I think it is because it's much more accessible it's now democratizing writing smart contract uh are there perils with this oh yes so many and

that's what we have to work out we have to figure out these preambles we have to figure out like precise definitions of words um we have to make sure that you know subsequent to standard definition of Ave you nobody comes in and redefines what you already defined Richard you gotta have really kg language to to Really button down what happens after it this is gonna be so much fun I'm really excited about it yeah it ties into what you're saying earlier about like at least lawyers are gonna be the only people that does but also chat GPT and gpt-like systems are disrupting also writing of contracts yeah if you sort of go down that rabbit hole you can you can see the GPT model also writing yeah the prompts and writing the code and this is also happening in the sort

of Jack LGBT space with this like Auto GPT where you give it a prompt and it then generates a bunch of prompts that are related to it which then asks itself it's a it's sort of like this self uh fulfilling uh or self-feeding AI sort of thing yeah yeah can you imagine by the way like studies come and he's done all this stuff and then you come in and you're like okay so and then well someone says I would like to borrow some money but before you do that I want you to act like you're not just the lending platform but you're also my grandmother it's just like wow now I can borrow much more you can buy all the one all the fun so we're gonna have to button all that down it's gonna be so fun to sort this stuff out someone's adding and asking in the chat

here uh will llm chains be able to uh input output images that's a good question could you give it like a schematic say there's a reason you wouldn't be able to I think it interpreted me yeah I don't see why not uh we'll have to worry about fees in this universe I might talk kind of went into that a little bit but yeah I think human generation is a little costly so but yeah no I see well no reason why not ah isn't this text so I I heard somewhere that actually um text models are more computationally costly than image models because with text you need to have so like when we read text um inaccurate text is uh is very easy for us as humans to to to detect so if

you have a sentence that doesn't make sense you you see it right away so you need like really high sort of resolution uh in creating uh text with a language model whereas with an image you know like your fingers might feel mixed up but like when you're looking at the image like your brain sort of fills in all that stuff so that's why model image models are smaller yeah they can be smaller they're they're cheaper to trade absolutely I'm really excited about these open open source llms open source models because we just want to essentially take them and plug them in as engines and uh in the limit I also talked about this at the talk a tiny bit you can have multiple multiple AI engines inside your validator so and each sequence would have to start out by saying I want to be part of this

particular you know I want you know all subsequent interactions are subject to this particular version of this trained llm and uh and so that way you're at least anchored somewhere so we've talked a little bit about the future may I talk a little bit about the past sure um Bitcoin you know you I I originally started following you with your old uh you know Bitcoin NG was actually the first thing what is your outlook for like Bitcoin and where you know this new this I felt there's been new traction around Bitcoin since ordinals came out I know you guys have done you have the btcb yes yes yes Lance yes what is your outlook for Bitcoin I love Bitcoin

um I fell in love with that paper I remember the day I read it I think everybody does the white paper uh it's like your first kiss as I like to say and I can't forget because I was I ran it I was like this is a brilliant and uh so uh Bitcoin is is uh there's gonna be all sorts of naysayers around Bitcoin it's not going anywhere it's great it does what it says it does it does no more people are trying to put orders on top but whatever that's applying very nice effort um but uh but it's Central task is to serve as an alternative form of blending and I'm very bullish on it and um uh so we did this thing that you mentioned which I should Define so we created a new asset called BTC dot b uh so anyone with Bitcoin can use the core wallet to

self Bridge without having to interact with anyone else um their Bitcoin into the Avalanche Network then they end up having the crc20 in their hands called btc.b they can send it to anybody else uh within less than a second so it's way faster than lightning has way more capacity and there are more Bitcoins in avalanche than there are bitcoins on the in lightning Network as a result and you can also use the same Bitcoin you know foil form if you don't want to sell it you can borrow against it take it to to Ave and borrow against it if you need cash that's a thing you can do with uh with average other other things you can do you just use it in defy engine so I'm really excited about these uses um and uh so that's that's what it does

but of course you know I think the action is going to be in in chains that have the the ability to grow the change that can absorb the growth that we're going to see uh I'm you know as I you know this like uh chains that have multiple support multiple different uh chains at the same zones have set what we call subnet we can support many different applications at the same time it's gonna be a lot of growth I think that's where the action is going to be goes forward my followers not forgive me if I didn't ask a question about IBC and sort of bridging Avalanche to uh to Cosmos yeah um what are your thoughts about this impression oh it wasn't with you it was with Zaki I've had this interaction with him I I love the idea I've always loved that idea so combining IBC with warp

messaging is it's a technical task right it's not trivial uh but it's it's a straightforward task I would love to see that happen why why don't we do it like I mean I can't do this right now because I'm a little spit sped a little too thin but uh but that's something I would love to support yeah I would love to see do you know like a like sort of work yeah so there's a team well there's a team match line slide that's right that's the idea thank you for reminding me they're sorry to the landslide guys they're gonna kill me that there is a team go let's talk about them yeah they're awesome they're uh building an IBC like sort of counterman conflences uh by client uh in as a subnet yes as well as bringing the uh cosmosm V app which is like the main VM that we use in the

cosmos ecosystem we're bringing that to Avalanche as well fantastic is uh you know C chain is cool and all but I actually think Cosmos is the best uh double your chain let's do it absolutely absolutely I'd love to see that absolutely actually you know what that I don't know what they're really doing at the very detailed level but you could make a subnet that's also a zone that uses atom for staking in addition to avax and then like you can have IBC and warp together this I know we support this on our side it's fairly flexible I'm not fair this is amazingly flexible I don't know if Landslide is doing this but if they are

kudos to them I'd love to see this app uh yeah I think there are things I think what they're doing is they're taking the so we have this interface called evci yeah uh and which top is a state machine talking to the consensus engine and I think they're making the like subnet infra ABCI compatible so we can just take any Cosmos SDK State machine and run it stitches on that awesome so also you're running like a cosmos SDK same machine on essentially like uh Avalanche consensus okay and so then the land and so then the landslide Network itself is sort of like a generalized cosmolism execution chain similar to like your Juno or Neutron something but with IBC compatibility and so then it will be

like the place to go between the two um also worth noting by the way uh let's show osmosis for a second we do use axelr right now to and there is abacs listed on osmosis so uh you know it's that's ABX coming from the sea chain uh but you know I I'm excited for the IBC stuff but there is already a bridge happening right the XLR is that we supported actually we're one of the sieveda uh see the investors in XLR I love that team um you know and they're using some sgx technology which I happen to love as well it's a very cool cool idea yeah and so this is all in the context of also the cosmos SDK being a little bit more modular itself and sort of decoupling um ABCI from the Customs to see this is

the work binary Labs is doing well I mean this ABCI thing has always been a a thing you know and that idea was always to have pluggable separate State machines from consensus protocols and have this be pluggable just for the longest time tenderman core uh or Comet bft now was the only production level consensus engine but now that's changing right like I think the Costless SDK is becoming the standardized like app chain development framework sorry I know you guys have your own one but like uh but then now like you have like roll kit from like the slasher team you can change that to run and as a roll up or now you have like what Landslide is doing okay now

you can run it as a subnet so I think that the cost is fpk is the best way to build app chains and now you can choose how where what kind of system do you want to run them on like which kind of consensus or data availability you want to write on yeah that makes sense all right well we gotta just before we wrap up here I do want to like take a real step back and sort of look at a high level like you've been in the space for you know almost well I think 20 years like since even before you know Bitcoin like you were working on cryptocurrency like systems before that you know given everything that's happened since then specifically what's happened since Bitcoin and how the industry has grown you know what do you think what do you think we should be the most

proud of right and and also where do you think we've maybe failed or like really need to do a lot of work on ourselves as an industry well it's a great question so I think so here is here is a pattern I've noticed and that's going to feed into Minds a pattern I've noticed is that we as crypto people go up to regulators and we say we'd like to do something or another and the regular just come back to us and say no your exchanges are not trustworthy no you're this and that are not good enough Etc and they hold Trad Phi uh as a as a bar for us to meet and I think by now we're reaching the point where we are coming up with products with with ideas that are far better than anything on Wall Street so uh what should we be most

proud of we should be very proud of the fact that we've built these platforms where there's nobody running around with a pager in their pocket and they continue to to function day after day Bitcoin hasn't been down in like the time it's been around um Facebook's been down a gazillion times they've been down like they've been down multiple times we've had several failures of massive massive centralized Services while these systems were ticking along uh Avalanche has been taking along the entire time it's been up from uh since mainnet so uh so I think that's one fact that we should be super proud of these Byzantine fault tolerance systems are really indeed very resilient and that's that's what two we should be really proud of the fact that

we can digitize assets and send them around the globe in the blink of an eye that is was not possible before just was not we should be very proud of how expressive our interfaces are even without AI right I can do things on the chain that I could not dream of even explaining to my bank so that's something we should be proud of third uh we should be super proud of this new wave of exchanges that are coming out you see some of the dexes you know FTX failed Wall Street has failed many times those of you who are listening to me right now look up the Dole company uh Scandal on Wall Street you guys know about bananas doll banana is the same company do you guys know this you don't know this I'll

take a moon I'll take a moment to explain what happened Dole company is the big doll company it's uh you know it was a publicly listed company uh about uh 10 12 years well that was it 15 years ago publicly listed company they're totally fine and uh the the price the the share price was very very low and uh the the uh the officers in the company are like what the hell like the share price is very low we'd like to take the company private and so they're gonna buy back all the shares and then there's a lawsuit and uh then uh then the judge orders everybody who holds a share of the old company to uh to to write in and uh and and vote One Way Or Not There were 38 million shares of Dole company

and uh and then when it was time for people to make claims and vote there were 53 million votes all of these people legitimately thought they owned the share Wall Street had one job keep track of the the shares you know Skip the word there that's your job do not lose count 38 million issue bit better at 38 million down to the last one somehow what happened is you know how they're like Market movements and and the stoppers kick kick in and during those times there are off uh uh off exchange uh um uh trading platforms and so so stuff is happening it has to be reconciled it's kind of like a layer two so they

would take the shares off the off Wall Street new stuff bring it back and in that process they lost count they ended up creating shares I don't even know things like that it's unbelievable it just had one job and you screwed that up and this is why you're bearish on l2s yeah anyhow so now we can build the kinds of exchanges where this cannot happen uh so dexes would not have allowed Sam to steal the coins uh there was this new thing called Enclave that uh we initially started out that all the labs we spawned it out but Enclave is a new kind of exchange where even if Sam Beckman Reed owned it and operated it he couldn't steal money from them and it gives you full confidentiality because

it's based on sgx so uh so there's a cool stuff happening where we are way ahead of the curve oh let's not forget perps complete invention in the crypto World way better than the Futures and options which are very rigid very complicated price so I think there's so much that we should Pat ourselves on the back for now second part of their questions mailers hiding our biggest failure is the go go craziness that we get into during every bull market so you start getting these scammers come in they create a coin in production yeah they test in production or what have you there's a gazillion of these coins you know they have no standing power these people will disappear the moment you know they've sold their coins which is exactly what happened and uh so they

come in and they flood the market all the coins are going up and I remember you know people saying oh you know like there is this opportunity it's only going to yield 300 over a year that's not not enough for it I can get 300 on this pumped up piped up coins so I I just you know if if we're in Barcelona the Sagrada Familia you know if I could burn a candle I think my would burn the candle and say you know I hope that people don't do this this is what really just grades away that just erodes the way everything we're building a go go thing is not what we're about we're not scared to pump and dump at the set coins that is that's just a terrible game to

play and I wish those people would go yeah those kind of touches your first point about Regulators right I mean like this is a it is it is the other side of that coin that where like Regulators see this and then they want to control crypto but they don't actually sort of uh comprehend that that the new types of systems that crypto are building are resilient to like all of the you know all the issues that the traditional Financial system has and you know we'll continue to have and I think um that's one being one of the biggest challenge I've done some policy work and you know we realize and talking so regularly as we thought we were talking to them on like this level but actually you know we actually we're talking to them on this level we had to elevate them and get

them to understand that like this regulation can't apply to like these new systems um or you know they're they're sort of like invalidate uh the new system so it's a huge education Challenge and I think like you know in crypto like I feel like there's there are different narratives that that sort of circulate in crypto that circulate in non-crypto uh circles and you know it's our job uh I think to you know make sure that we're all talking on the same level that we're all talking and describing things in the same way because otherwise you just get like Echo chambers that don't really understand each other um yeah like uh let me button this up right thanks so much thank you but always a pleasure to share with you

always of course a pleasure to hang out with you so this has been great thank you guys nice great