Episode 225: Dark Forest and 0xPARC with Gubsheep

Transcript

[Music] welcome to xero knowledge i'm your host anna rose in this podcast we will be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online this week i catch up with gubsheep from 0x park once again this time we have a look at the dark forest game and how this has evolved in the last two years as well as dive deeper into the xerox park ecosystem zrx park is focused on blockchain gaming and zero knowledge

education so there's a lot to cover we also give an update on the recent git coin zktec side round that we collaborated on it was zk validator and xerox park who managed and coordinated the round lastly we explore future moonshot ideas for zk projects which could be the zk applications of the future there is so much going on in zk at the moment and this interview was a glimpse into the creativity and activity happening there so hope you enjoy it before we kick off i want to highlight the zk jobs board for you if you are looking to jump into zk professionally i want to remind you to head over to the zk jobs board there you can find job posts from some of the top teams working in zk you can find the project or team you may want to work with next i also want to encourage teams who are

hiring to use the zk jobs board to find your next hires we have teams like elio anoma and mina posting there so be sure to add your jobs as well now i'm going to let tanya share a little bit about this week's sponsor today's episode is sponsored by polygon polygon is the go-to ethereum scaling platform for developers it is arguably the most adopted scaling protocol with over 130 million unique user wallets in simple terms polygon is scaling ethereum polygon is committed to bringing web3 to the real world by lowering the barriers to entry and fostering the network effects of ethereum the team is working on a spectrum of solutions like polygon edge which offers developers the capability to build sovereign evm compatible chains to a fully evm-compatible zero-knowledge roll-up

solution like polygon hermes as well as solutions like polygon maiden polygon nightfall which is built in association with ernst young and the recently announced acquisition of mir protocol now known as polygon zero all of which inherit the security of ethereum last but not least polygon pos chain one of the most popular chains built on top of ethereum sometimes clocking even more daily active users than ethereum itself visit polygon.technology to learn more about their solutions so thank you again polygon now here is anna's interview with ox park [Music] today i'm here with gubsheep gubsheep has been involved with research projects at 0x park and also started the dark forest blockchain project

so welcome back gup sheep hi anna it's great to be here thanks for having me so the first time you actually came on this show uh we talked primarily about dark forest and then just recently you were on the episode we did on zk funding but it was a very short interview i felt afterwards like there's so much we need to catch up on i want to hear about what's going on with dark forest since we last spoke about it and since i played it which is like over a year ago and i want to hear what's going on with xerox park which has been created sort of since that initial interview um so yeah let's let's kick off with a little bit on dark forest when i played i think it was the third round it was like still you know there wasn't

ton of animation there was like very it was pretty simple and yet i managed to get like pretty addicted to it for 24 hours and i had no bots so i was like manually clicking this stuff um but yeah can you tell us a little bit about dark forest what it is how far it's come maybe where it's at maybe that's a couple questions maybe just start with what is dark forest for sure um yeah so dark forest is a fully on chain rts game that is uh basically entirely implemented in smart contracts so uh the idea behind the game is it's sort of like if you've played sieve or starcraft or have heard of eve online these sorts of games it's in that kind

of genre so rts slash persistent strategy there's at this point a couple of different game modes now that people can play in and uh there's a couple things that i think are specifically unique and pretty cool about dark forest the first is that um it is entirely on chain as i mentioned which means that it is extremely programmable it's client agnostic so you see people writing scripts writing third-party clients bots all sorts of really interesting things even you know smart contracts for player cooperatives or corporations marketplaces um proxy contracts that do all sorts of crazy stuff um the second thing that's really interesting about dark forest is the way

in which it uses zk snarks so um the original idea for the game uh came out of this realization that you know for a lot of these strategy games strategy games oftentimes rely on some incomplete information or information asymmetry mechanism in many strategy games for example that's a fog of war where you maybe don't know where your opponent's base is or where their resources or units are until you have uh you know uncovered some part of a map and this is really challenging to do naively on blockchain because on you know systems like ethereum and these defensive platforms exactly the data layer is entirely transparent so everyone can see

everything so how can you you know hide the location of your base and one solution to that that allows you to hack in incomplete information into these transparent settings is to use zk snarks in order to hide your movements or hide other aspects of your private state when you're going into the game so combining these two things together is really interesting because now you have this game that's fully on chain it's infinitely hackable it's super programmable and there's this you know very active dev community that's grown around the game and at the same time you do get to have a lot of these more advanced mechanics that oftentimes you would normally have to trade off against if you're building a game with this kind of an architecture this sounds so cool i'm curious what is

your role at dark force today because when we first spoke i mean it seemed like a really small team you were very much like doing the user testing as you go but it sounds like it's grown a lot so yeah what's your role yeah i would say at this point dark forest has evolved into you know something of a proto ecosystem there is a core team that builds out the game um that is led by ichub or i think he maybe changed his twitter handle to chubb ivan on twitter um as well as a number of other core developers there are also a number of different player guilds or teams or individual developers that sort of contribute to various tools or community functions externally as well

so you have this really interesting community of all of these different orgs that are sort of like you can think about as maybe like concentric rings around the core team um i myself stopped being like super operationally involved like day-to-day writing code about six months ago and passed on the baton to ivan um who now leads the core team but uh i still help out by you know jumping into some discussions and sometimes like hanging out in discord and you know bouncing ideas around with the core team and a few other orgs and generally just trying to be a you know community cheerleader at this point i think that like dark force has evolved far beyond any single person or any single vision um so to the extent that i

can be a contributing force i'm happy to do so very cool there's a leaderboard in dark forest right who are those people are they people are they teams do you know them are they the contributors themselves or is there like a different set of participants there's the players and the developers yeah i'm curious to hear yeah for sure what's the connection there's really interesting and it's something that we don't even have full visibility into either i know that you know there's a saying like on the internet no one knows that you're a dog uh you know you can you can say a similar thing about you know in dark force no one knows if you're a bot or if you're a smart contract um or any manner of interesting entities um and you know that's sort of fun like that's kind of

you know it's a callback almost to the dynamics of dark forest both like the thought experiment um and the book that the game is inspired by i would categorize the participants in any given dark force round into a number of buckets um there are solo players okay which was sort of the like this was by far the dominant category for the first couple versions of the game like you know you have a i was playing right now you have an ethereum account where you spin up a new burner wallet and you just play on your computer but since then a couple of other categories of like entities have emerged and i think are super interesting the first is the dows the player collectives teams guilds that collectively work together to operate a

single account or a smart contract account that uh basically tries to achieve you know a maximal score on the leaderboard through cooperative mechanics um so this can take several forms i think like some early forms of this were you would have a single account like a single private key and obviously i don't recommend this for actually interacting with uh real money on more substantial blockchain applications but you would have people sharing these private keys amongst the trusted set of like two or three or four people one reason someone might do this is because dark force is a pretty adversarial game where 24 7 your empire is up for attack so you might pair with someone who's across the world and co-pilot this

account where you take shifts you know someone in east asia is online at this time someone in north america is online on the account at this time someone in europe is piloting the account at this time so that's one kind of entity that's emerged um and it's been really interesting to watch uh i think a couple of the most well-known names of course are to folks in the in the dark force community these will be very familiar but like orton gg is a group of largely eastern european players who have dominated a lot of v0.6 df dao is a collection of players from across the world with a bunch of different backgrounds who have been running all sorts of crazy experiments and they're very competitive as well and maro dao which is a collection of players i think a lot of whom are based

in east asia they run a lot of interesting community functions build out a lot of infrastructure and also uh have a lot of very competitive players so that's another category a third category that i think is very interesting um and that i hope we'll see more of is the idea of a smart contract player so this is an account that is not an eoa but the dark force core contracts will basically allow you to whitelist into the game regardless of whether you're an eoa or a smart contract so you could build these contract players that do a variety of different things one early example was onsgaard built a simple proxy contract early on to you know exploit a bug and

also enable a couple of interesting functionalities back in v 0.5 you can also have smart contracts that act as these like interesting cooperatives so i think like the earliest visions are the purest quote visions of decentralized autonomous organizations where people are just coordinating and emergent behavior comes out of this smart contract maybe the smart contract allows players to deposit resources into it or make moves via the smart contract interface um all sorts of mechanisms here i think are ripe for exploration and df dao launched one called the astral colossus which aggregated a bunch of player resources and points um and you know there was some super interesting questions about identity

from that as well but what you just described is that almost like you're crowd sourcing a lot of the decision making would multiple parties be doing that or is there still sort of one person at the other side of this smart contract i think that's the magical thing is that you know you don't have to choose one or the other smart contracts give you this expressive language for defining how you want people to interact so you can imagine and i'm speculating here because um you know this is a direction that i think we're just at the beginning of the exploration path you could imagine smart contracts that are very democratic almost like an arctic where anyone can submit a move and that smart contract will simply execute the move on behalf of the player you can imagine smart contracts that have a governing council

where any action that's like greater than a certain level of importance must be you know released by what might be the equivalent today in a dow like a multi-sig holder so there's all these sorts of governance experiments that you could imagine doing it's not like naturally smart contracts must be one way or another and i think chaos god from df dao has a really great blog post out about how this kind of experimentation that you'll see with like governance and games could even hopefully provide a template for governance in the wider crypto world as well cool you sort of mentioned like a marketplace what are people actually doing in the marketplace what is that maybe the first thing that i'll say is

to give a little bit of context around why this kind of thing is really powerful like the ability to build marketplaces or other constructs as a player you know i'll sort of make an analogy back to web 2 games so if you're in a traditional web 2 game and you are the developer and your players are clamoring for a new feature such as like a player-to-player trade feature then there's really only one way for that feature to get introduced into the game you have to lobby the company right right right so you the developer have to write code on your back end to introduce a new type of data transformation then you have to write an api route that your canonical client then has a new button or ui or modal or something that triggers that api route that triggers

that data transformation so it's very much the case that the only way a new feature can get into the game or a new you know coordination mechanism social mechanic whatever else is via the core developers the really interesting thing about this uh you know ethereum based architecture with smart contracts is that now you can have new features new global features to the game added permissionlessly so if someone wants this peer-to-peer trade feature then all they have to do is they can permissionlessly spin up a smart contract that talks to the core smart contract and maybe acts as like an escrow saying you know if you deposit one each into this smart contract

it will programmatically trigger my planet to release some x resource or ships or whatever from my planet to your planet so after you do this you could imagine that the developer of this new functionality writes a front-end javascript plug-in and you know darkforce has a plug-in system where basically you can take uh additional javascript client functionality and just plug it into your own end-user experience so you could write a plug-in that basically hooks into this escrow smart contract distribute the plug-in via various community channels and people can inspect the plug-in code make sure that it's doing what they think it's doing and install it and then suddenly everyone now has access to this new trade feature that you've just

permissionlessly deployed uh to the blockchain there are open source games too though right like there are games that allow contributions from external parties where's the difference there yeah i would say that like the big distinguishing factor here is there's the notion of open source and then there's the notion of interoperability and open source means you know in the context of some games for example you can create a modded version of a game that runs on your computer so you can customize your own gameplay experience but one of the cool things about interoperability is that it means that anyone can contribute to the global shared state the canonical universe that everyone is a part of so you're not just modding your own gaming experience

locally in a way that doesn't you know interact with the rest of this whole creative space but rather you're adding new things that anyone can plug and play into and the universe is sort of co-evolving alongside all of the players in this whole shared world are you worried though about like you know malicious insertions in that regard like could there be someone who's like i'm gonna break dark forest and then they just like put in a bunch of stuff how do you like guard against that there are limits so you can't do anything that you know breaks the core rules of the core smart contract okay on top of that core smart contract you can do anything that you'd like to do so this course smart contract almost defines like the laws of physics

of this universe subject to those laws of physics for example how fast can a ship move from planet a to planet b there's almost like a you know universal speed limit or like a speed of light that's just like encoded as a constant in the game um subject to those rules you can build any for example coordination mechanisms on top or you could imagine building new resources or even nested games but just like you know in reality we can build buildings but we can't mess with the laws of physics that define how buildings can be constructed so there is a distinction there between the levels of abstraction and that kind of means that game design is almost more like laying out a set of physics that we think might lead to some interesting expressive and emergent behavior rather

than specifically defining like either like total chaos like anybody can do whatever they want or total order or just top down saying exactly what you can and can't do i am curious about the spaceships i saw that in one of the recent newsletters so when i played what it was was like you'd basically capture a planet and then the planet would sort of shoot out at another planet right like what's been added since then yeah yeah spaceships are a really exciting primitive that were uh you know designed and uh deployed by ivan and the rest of the core team so the core idea behind spaceships is that they're almost like these you know hero

units uh in some sense that are not bound to the same kind of constraints that other resources in the game like energy or silver which is like these are like economic resources are bound to so your spaceship is a little token that you can move around the universe even to planets that you don't own you can park your spaceship on a planet you don't own uh and still have control over it this is not true of other resources like artifacts in the game um and they're basically a way for you to project power or different functionalities across space in ways that don't sort of just reflect the state of your own local empire so spaceships might have

different effects for example there's one spaceship that nullifies the effects of a planet you can park a spaceship on a planet and it will halt the energy regeneration of that planet and that is a common harassment technique essentially if you're you know fighting an opponent and they have some big energy factory that's like shooting a ton of forces that you you park your spaceship on that planet and sort of disable its effects there's other spaceships that amplify the effects of a planet there's other spaceships that convert planets uh to have different functionalities and all of these things are basically almost like i think you know ivan and the other core team members who designed the mechanic can speak more to the motivation but one thing that i find fun about spaceships is it's like moving

little chess pieces across the universe to kind of do your bidding when you start to add those kinds of levers basically you start to open up new strategies to winning and what it sounds a lot like and i'm going to nerd out a little here because you'd mention civ that's my favorite all-time game i think i think i can say that and i've played it forever like i've played almost every version at some point in my life and the early versions were very much just about dominance right like you had to like capture all the cities and there wasn't really any other winning conditions and then later they introduced stuff like religious winds diplomatic winds space race like this kind of thing i think you need that nuance to start to have those other winning conditions at

this point though how many planets are captured is the winning metric right it's some combination every round usually some new objectives get added to the game so in early versions it was pretty straightforwardly like how much silver have you mined or like in combination with what are the biggest planets that you own according to some scoring function one of the cool things about dark force though is that even this is something that can be customized and tuned so a couple of rounds ago the team implemented a scoring contract which is basically a contract external to the core contract which tracks different scores and actions of players that were relevant for the specific round there

so you can imagine worlds where you know via scoring contract or a different indexer defined function the game is one in accordance with like the number of how many such and such planets you have you can imagine another version where the game is one depending on who has uh harvested the best artifacts okay some combination of these things something totally different we did around where it was a race to the center of the universe so there was a wow big level nine planet at zero comma zero um so this is very customizable and in the most recent round of dark force the scoring function was a combination of a bunch of different objectives amazing now it's starting to look a lot more like some of these more mainstream turn-based role you know strategy games that are very very famous and have kind

of a legacy of their own multiple editions now you have multiple rounds right right yeah it's almost like each round is like another chapter in a story of ongoing development both like game development and community development um and i think one thing that's uh really exciting also about like the way that these mechanics have shaped out and it's something that we've kind of hopefully been trying to be intentional designing towards uh since the beginning is that like ideally each subsequent mechanic should have a multiplicative effect on the game where because you have these previous mechanics you don't want to just add a mechanic that allows you to do one new thing you want to add a mechanic that allows you to expand the space of strategies

exponentially because you can use it in all these interesting combinations with other mechanics so for example spaceships and artifacts have a certain relationship spaceships and planets have a certain relationship artifacts and planets have a certain relationship all of these things have different relationships with potential marketplace constructs or the mining and information hiding construct and you get all these neat little combos and uh people pull off like heists where they'll use like five different artifacts in a spaceship to do something crazy and it's a lot of fun to watch that's so cool would you say that in that community there's also like any additional contribution to zk like is this is it purely on libraries is it yeah i'm just curious like what's that interaction today for sure so there's a

couple of different touch points um one of the first things is that like i think that dark forest is one of the first applications where really you're putting zero knowledge proofs in the hand of an end user who is interacting with the system via a browser client um so over the course of developing dark forest we've found that we have certain developer needs in terms of you know writing and deploying these circuits we've also found that like players who are making large volumes of zero knowledge proofs oftentimes might find the need for certain tools once they scale beyond like wanting to do a certain throughput of moves

so a number of our community members who have discovered either crypto or specifically zk through dark force have ended up contributing substantially to the zika ecosystem so one example is blaine um who was one of the top two players along with jacob back in round v 0.4 more than a year ago since then the two of them have built a lot of useful infrastructure for zk apps and zk developers um blaine nowadays is one of the co-maintainers of circom actually uh and he also helps out a lot with just that whole surcom snark js stack as well as various plugins and tools um that allow developers to

have an easier time doing all of this uh we've had players built out like remote snarking web servers so that way you can like offload computation and uh there's a project in progress now to build another marketplace for you know encrypted data in dark force secret data so you can transact map data privately and that uses zk snarks as well and that's actually a part of our latest xerox park zk learning group so a lot of things have either been inspired by or motivated by the game and i think this is one of the really powerful things about building out these kinds of experimental applications that can take a technology all the way into the hands of the end user you figure out what you're missing you figure out

what's actually hard and you start to get a sense of the road map necessary to take this technology to production very cool like in that marketplace maybe the one that's coming or the one that already exists are those objects being sold as nfts like with the planet being an ft or something else yeah so there's a couple of different constructions here so um one of the very first third-party contracts that was built on dark forest was an information marketplace where you could put bounties on planets to have their locations revealed so this is not like trading nfts or anything like that this is trading information similarly with the data marketplace well the concept of a data marketplace is actually very very

flexible but in this case you could imagine that you're simply buying and selling information you're buying hash pre-images um there's other constructions where you can associate this with an nft and actually we have a couple of projects in the xerox park community that are exploring that as well um but i mean these are all primitives they're very flexible these totally new landscapes that are opened up by zk um and kind of like how smart contracts enable a lot of programmability these zk primitives should enable a lot of new permutations as well nice is it still on xdi aka gnosis chain because i know that that's where it was when i was playing yeah so has the evolution to gnosis chain changed anything

yeah it's actually been really helpful to be able to you know build out dark force and continue development on gnosis chain um and there's been an interesting kind of back and forth between the game and the infrastructure slash the chain i know that like early on when we were bombarding the public rpc endpoints with all of these requests uh for data from thousands of different players uh one thing that i know that that helped certain teams with was i you know it helped nethermine actually discover a couple of various performance optimizations or bottlenecks in their client implementation um and it also provided sort of a stress test for exercise public node fleet as well so uh yeah being on no system has been

really helpful it's something of a like it's more real certainly than initially we had versions deployed on stuff like robsten but at the same time obviously mainnet today is infeasible um it was even when you started i think right yeah it was already crazy to do it there right each move would have been like 25 cents each or something now it would be like 10 bucks yeah wild so this is a theme that's true of all xerox park projects including dark force and i think in a lot of ways dark forest set a template for a lot of these other projects um we're not building for what's necessarily feasible or even like commercializable today in april 2022 but we are trying to explore

what will the decentralized apps of the future or like the applied crypto applications of the future look like when the cost of consensus is cheaper or when zk snark proving systems and libraries are much more well optimized and performant and trying to understand like you know one question we kind of ask for example is what can you build in a world where you have 1 trillion gas per second throughput right now if you look at ethereum mainnet there's a 1 million gas per second throughput and this means that it really constrains the sorts of applications that you can build i don't know that gas is necessarily the correct measure of the future in terms of measuring how much computer storage you can do in these decentralized

systems but to the extent that we can think about like what happens when you have the world computer or the world data availability engine um that is much more scalable than it is today i think that these experiments are super valuable for trying to envision that future and make it concrete nice now this is kind of the end of the dark forest part of this interview i did want to say one last thing which is i'm so happy that you introduced me to the book series because i finally finished it just recently um i got a little stuck on the third one i read quickly and then started and then waited and didn't quite get back into it but finally finished it and it's a great series i totally recommend it and i know it inspired the game but would you say that thematically do you

still see a link between the book series and the game i would say that like in practice a lot of the mechanisms initially envisioned in both like dark force theory and the dark force book didn't end up playing out exactly as how things play out in the dark force game there's a lot of reasons why for one thing it's a game it's not like the future of your civilization is at stake and i think that when you have uh those kinds of different preconditions you end up seeing very different player behavior there's all sorts of different externalities um and i would say that like the game itself has taken a lot of directions that you know we have this community now it's no longer just like there's a

single vision of what to do or what to put developer resources towards um so it's i think even if we wanted to say that there's this like single unified coherent thread that dark forest is going down um at this point i don't know that that's like whether it's possible or desirable um i think that we have this backbone that is very much inspired by this core mechanic but from there everything from the different resource types to spaceships to even the round structure itself to dark force lobbies um to all the governance and team experiments you know this kind of like explosion of creativity i think has taken us probably out of the realm of necessarily like a single specific

vision for an anniversary game cool well i want to now switch kind of gears and start talking more about xerox park which is the project that i know you're very focused on today maybe just to link to that what is the relationship between dark forest and xerox park like is there still a connection between these two orcs yeah for sure so uh when we were building out dark forest over the first two-ish years i found that about 70 percent of the time just in terms of like raw linear you know months for example we're focused on developing the game and about 30 we were like you know myself and the various other team members involved uh we're spinning out all sorts of other

like zk hacks educational programs just like spin-off initiatives these sorts of things so for example eath uni is one thing that came out of that also collaborations with reboot which is a collective of young writers and technologists as well we explored a couple of different zk constructions at various times you know we had a couple of other ideas for zk games yeah we did one right right yeah at the zk summit six you showcased boat fight in gather which was so cool like gather the virtual space all the players could kind of crowd into the special room and then play the zk game that you guys had developed it was so cool it was super fun and you know we were able to like integrate into like the virtual event

um on gather uh and we had this whole kind of like card game uh construction using snarks as well so there was a lot of exploration during this time and also during the time we met a lot of other you know friends so for example uh ludens on twitter who is now building lattice which is another like sort of core component of the xerox park ecosystem uh reached out to us because he found out about dark forest uh we ended up getting in touch and really hitting it off he actually ended up like building out a couple of experimental features for dark force we chatted more about zk games and crypto native games and now ludens is now working on a number of very interesting crypto gaming experiments around lattice and ember which i won't

say too much about because i don't want to spoil things but a lot of these experiments will be announced at our upcoming devconnect event in amsterdam on the 19th so one way that i like to think about xerox park is it's almost like this alliance of projects you've got dark force you've got lattice you've got these educational programs you've got all these uh now we're getting a lot more involved in a lot of like zkr d directions and the cool thing about having all of these programs in one ecosystem is that there's very tight feedback loops between for example end users developers uh circuits builders devx builders researchers these sorts of feedback loops i think are really powerful in

terms of accelerating the work that gets done very cool i'm actually so excited to have you on to explore this because i mean our interaction recently has been primarily for the git coin zktec side round so i know more of the funding aspect of xerox park but i don't know that much about the projects and the use cases so this is really cool to get a chance to dive into it i do want to sort of take one step back before we do that though which is like what is 0x park cause you just referred to xerox park community like what is the work yeah yeah so the xerox park org is fully funded by donations and grants and our mandate is basically to allocate these resources over a period of about

two years to accelerate application level research and development on decentralized systems like ethereum as well as you know pushing forward applied photography so for example a lot of our applied zk efforts so this funding goes into ensuring that projects like dark forest and lattice which are you know the two like largest kind of like closest to production projects that are out there right now are able to iterate creatively and iterate in an environment with very few constraints um on just like interesting research projects we also run a bunch of these educational programs for university students as well

as technical specialists who are looking to get more into applied cryptography so for example like our applied dk learning group um we're very involved with uh this program called hack lodge we have eth uni as well as sort of an undergraduate education arm we have a student research program and then we have a bunch of different applied zk r d projects as well around for example building out core circuit primitives for identity applications um so we support work into implementations of elliptic curve cryptography in circom we support proof of concept applications such as um you know private message boards with dk snarks private airdrops all sorts of like different experimental

applications of zk for end user facing apps and then finally we also do support work on devx devtooling and infrastructure for the zk ecosystem so this is things like various contributions to the circle and start js tool stack uh right now we're trying to build up internally like a stronger opinion about where the next generation of proving systems and tool stacks is going to move so we can start contributing there and allocating resources there um and then maybe a final thread of our ecosystem activities is uh we are getting more involved in the public goods conversation well you know pretty much all the things that we do

internally are i would hope to say public goods um in the sense that like these are all reusable things that hopefully can be permuted by other people in the future to build other awesome stuff um but in terms of things like git coin and other you know ecosystem funding that goes beyond our specific areas of focus recently we've been helping to allocate the proceeds from sequoyah's nft sale uh last year towards things like zk tech and other ecosystem initiatives that's so cool is there other kinds of support that you would see xerox park giving other than just funds grants and stuff like that yeah definitely so i think one of the most like legible

support vectors that we have is grant giving so we accomplish most of our work through grants and contracts um where there's a team that is trying to build something uh maybe it's a team that's coming out of the xerox park learning group or the xerox park working group or by some other mechanism and you know we award grant to help them get there but i would say that actually a lot of the support that we're able to provide is in less tangible directions so by having a community of projects that are working at different levels of the stack for example one team is working on circuits primitives for various cryptographic primitives another team is working on developer tools another team is working on proof of concept applications even when you just

look at like those three layers of the stack if you're getting them together and having them in conversation on a weekly or bi-weekly kind of basis then you end up with these fast feedback loops where if you someone at the application level is running into a problem they can talk to someone at the circuit development level someone at the circuit development level is running into a problem they can talk to the library maintainer they can talk to someone who is an expert in tooling who might be able to give them what they need and what we found is that because dk is such an immature space and everything and every level of the stack is moving so fast creating that space for people to come together and just have easy access to all of the learnings and all the knowledge that's coming out of the rest

of the ecosystem is extremely valuable for folks in our community so to that end you know that's why we do all these educational programs or various events retreats stuff like that and uh i would say like the final like vector of support here is also in providing some sort of a unifying framework for projects to think in terms of not not necessarily one that's like top down directed but something that like when you put a bunch of people who have a bunch of different perspectives on what ck is and where it might be going then you sort of naturally have this uh almost like collective vision emerge

where you're like oh here's the place that like this zk identity primitive might fit into a larger context oh here's the place that this tool might fit into a larger context oh here's where these you know like the timelines on these proving systems we might be able to make some prediction on because this person has been thinking about like that system very deeply this person has been thinking about the needs of the application level developers um and what happens is everybody is able to i think like get a much better sense of like what are the most important problems to actually be answered it's a very immature and very fast moving tech space it's a place where it's like really easy to lose your footing there's there's just so much going on making sense of all of it and understanding what are the bottlenecks and what are the real like points of

leverage is something that i think happens when you bring a lot of people together so people just have i would say like higher quality project ideas as a result and better ways of getting involved in the ecosystem so building those entry points creating those ideas yeah and sort of linking it back to this funding thing though i mean when you do grant giving i mean there's lots of entities doing grant programs a lot of zk projects we'll have foundations that are giving out grants but i mean our recent experiment with git coin was basically crowd sourcing the decision making on which grants get how much so like anyone can write a grant put it in get coin i mean they do have to go through a few steps like not any one like you have to sort of semi kyc or something to be in

there but um after that you know they could put themselves into a round people can actually see their grants decide to vote with their cryptos basically donating dye or eth or usdc and then having that be matched by what we had collected which was a matching pool for zk tech i mean we just completed this one i think at the end we have around 20 projects that were funded we had 275k we already did an episode on this so i won't spend too much time on it but um now that it's over like what are your thoughts on that like do you see this as a very scalable way to get funding into the hands of these projects or yeah i'm curious what you're thinking i mean first of all i would say that like you

know this past round i think was a huge win um we got a lot of funding in the hands of a lot of really valuable projects um and even beyond that there's kind of the second order effects of even just bringing together a group of these matching partners for the first time to publicly make this commitment to funding public goods projects um and also holding a beacon for various zk projects that you know otherwise might not have known about these kinds of avenues for funding like it's not entirely clear i think a lot of times if you're looking to get into zk how do you fund your work what is a path forwards if you see that there's this need for like a very important like open source library or

something like that well how do you get started on that and how do you get like compensated for that um or totally have to do things in the context of like a company or a university or a startup or something like that so any experiment that allows us to iterate on how work in the space gets done and how work in the space gets made legible i think is a step in the right direction um and by and large like that's also a high-level mandate of xerox park as well it's an experimentation with organizational structures it's an attempt to make space for different ways of producing knowledge and useful tools so the git coin round was a huge win and i'm looking forward to more

collaboration with the matching partners and between the grantees uh and i think that like there is definitely a lot of iteration that can be done here i think of iteration in a couple of different dimensions so one dimension is just like can we get more valuable projects and can we get more funding into the space in these values aligned and very kind of neutral and ecosystem aligned ways i think that that has to be done at pace however it's not clear i think that money is always the bottleneck in technology like you need a language for how to even discuss the technology you need vision for the technology you need strong technologists uh you can't just like throw money into the air and see

progress come out the other end it has to be a very deliberate process and um i was really grateful to be able to work with the zk validator folks on pulling together matching partners and high quality grantees that we're doing at least what we assess to be impactful work um that being said i think that there's also plenty of directions for iteration as well in these more qualitative senses so one thing i think about is you know zk tech is still something that's pretty early on could credibly be considered deep tech and it's not always the case i think that it's not always easy to help people make informed decisions about what projects are actually like doing what so i'll give an example of like one of my

favorite projects that i would love to have actually seen a lot more support for but i think like had some you know difficulty being legible to a more general audience so a very important direction that we care about is verification auditing security tools for zk circuits so these are tools that make sure that your circuits are bug free you're not missing any zk snark constraints this is especially important in zk because if a bug is exploited in a circuit it's not even clear that you can tell you can detect that and that is precisely because it's in zk so um this kind of tooling is of the utmost importance and we have a project ongoing right now called acne that's actually

come out of the xerox park student research program and is affiliated with our identity working group and acne has shown some really tremendous results basically they have verified the uh witness uniqueness for huge parts of circomlib as well as some of the circuits that we're developing uh with xerox park community teams now this is something however that is really hard to really sum up and explain the importance of i think in a half-pager blog post right like i think you know franklin wrote a description that was something like acne is the first r1cs constraint soundness verifier which is true but hard to market exactly

and it's like how do you make that easier to market like i don't know if it's exactly the right solution to be making this a game of kind of like mass market appeal either because you do want to be honestly representing like what's going on in a way that other specialists can understand and determine the value of um that's definitely one of the limitations and it could be interesting to explore like i think you need a portfolio of funding mechanisms you need the democratic public goods funding mechanisms you probably also need more curated grants programs you also need you know grant givers who come from all sorts of different perspectives and and areas of expertise as well totally and what we've been talking about is also this idea of like what do you do after that initial push like when the library's been created and you need to

maintain it it's even less kind of attractive to fund in a way because for like the average person because it's just something that's there it's not new like it's not shiny exactly yeah maintenance is not sexy but you need people you need people to be doing it and that's the challenge how do you keep those maintainers going and paid and excited and all of that um one thought that i know in our takeaway we did a little debrief this week on just the bitcoin round but it was this idea that this is a phenomenal place for new projects and individual contributors who are like just arriving into zk just starting out because the sums cannot i mean some of them can be quite substantial but if you're new you maybe

don't raise that much but you can start to almost like build up your project through creating a grant like you know you do one round with us and then you get a little bit of seed funding something to start you out and as you develop that grant you can actually be in subsequent rounds potentially see it grow so it's like it's great seed that's sort of the idea it's a great sort of seed funding yeah and i think another great second order effect here is that your project gets in front of so many more eyes so even by putting a grant up that's another uh awareness vector for people to know like oh this is the sort of work that's going on this is a team that's actively involved in the space we found all sorts of projects that uh applied to join the grant round that just weren't

on my map at all so yeah yeah i totally agree i mean this is a really good way to also get in front of gubsheep and me for sure because we're staring at it all the time just like every day i'm just refreshing over and over checking to see who's submitted right but um yeah thank you that was really fun doing that with you and i think it's good that we talk about it now on the podcast also to give people a sense for like this is ongoing right there will be another round yeah i think one of our challenges was actually like there are lots of small zk teams that maybe weren't aware of the opportunity and you know i was at the same time running zk hack so i like sort of trying to double my marketing efforts um but yeah for the next round i don't

think we have a date yet but they happen almost every quarter and so if there's someone out there who has a small zk project or idea or they want to sort of get that seed funding please look out for the zk tech side round it comes every quarter it's on git coin we'll be announcing it probably on the xerox park twitter and on the zk validator twitter and on my twitter so definitely like keep tabs on that and we would love to see more projects so that's my that's my call to action for the mid oh yeah but i have more to ask you before we wrap up this show because i've sort of been holding off on this but this is to me some of the most exciting stuff coming out of 0x park and that's these use cases the six zk moonshots blog posts that you

wrote you had already mentioned ck identity but like maybe we can dig a little bit into what that means for sure yeah i think that identity is definitely starting to become a hot topic it's something that i know a lot of the you know earliest people in the applied zk space have been thinking about for a long time and it's something that's really exciting to see like more and more buy-in uh for as the tools have become a little bit more mature and we can start seeing what these applications might look like in concrete practice so at a high level one thing that we've been thinking a lot about is what does a world where you have these

more neutral or permissionless identity protocols actually enable and so i think that zk identity is becoming increasingly a hot topic within zk at least it's starting to see more and more attraction it's something that a lot of the earliest people in applied decay have been thinking about for a while i know that like item 3 for example has had this vision of permissionless identity for a long time now totally but as the tooling has become more mature and concrete practical applications and what they might look like the pathway there is starting to look a lot clearer we're starting to see more and more activity in the space pick up i think that you know in terms of decentralized identity protocols where you have these like

permissionless and neutral self-sovereign identity protocols the reason that zk snarks are such a big unlock here is because they allow for a much more general and expressive kind of identity language than was possible in the past so one framing that i have for the history of like a lot of uh useful cryptographic primitives is that like over time we've been gradually expanding the set of possible claims um that you can make using cryptography so initially when you have public key cryptography and public key signature schemes you can make these claims uh that are basically like you know i know the secret private key corresponding to alice's publicly declared public key um and therefore you can probably assume in your interactions

with me that i am alice and this is a huge step up from just not even being able to prove anything at all but obviously it's a pretty specific kind of claim and over time we've seen you know new primitives and new kinds of claims uh that you've been able to make with cryptography for example group and ring signatures allow you to say i know the private key corresponding to one of alice bob or charlie's public keys and i'm going to attest to this message so you don't know specifically who i am but you know that i'm a member of this group um and you can imagine someone signing like on behalf of an organization or a whistleblower proving that they're you know someone in a company or or agency um you can imagine

someone proving that they're a politician and signaling consensus on some measure so you have group and ring signatures and all of these protocols have sort of different properties then you have aggregate signatures threshold signatures all sorts of things again that are just allowing you to widen the space of claims that you can make one of the problems here though with i think putting these things into practice is that each of these kinds of claims requires you to like do new math so suppose you want a new kind of claim a new kind of identity claim that you want people to be able to make well what you kind of have to do is you have to go to a cryptographer they have to like invent new math and then like this math in particular might not be interoperable with the previous math that has been driving like

previous um public private key registries and you know because of this it's it's just difficult to get a lot of these claim languages off the ground in practice but now that you have zk snarks and we have a couple blog posts on this as well so if you're interested uh you should check out the zk group signatures blog posts and our zk identity series um with zk snarks dk snarks turn a lot of these math problems into coding tasks so you can basically write code that says stuff like i know a private key such that when you run it through the function pubkey gen i get this public key value x and x is equal to 1 of a b or c but all of this is happening inside of a zero

knowledge proof so i won't tell you which one it's equal to and then you know you have all these properties like for example if you want to enable people to disavow messages after the fact then you can like write another line of code that like uh adds or removes like a salt to the message attestation and as a result you now have this language for expressing identity claims which is interoperable with all the other languages because you're building up from the same zk snark primitives uh and furthermore it's not like you have to be a mathematician in order to generate a new like type of claim i mean you do have to know enough math to like code zk snarks but uh it does reduce down to something more of a programming problem it's much more configurable and i think that's one of the big things

that's enabling all of this new thinking around decentralized identity like i know you know decades ago the cypherpunks had kind of this vision for the world where you'd have these like self-sovereign identities people proving all these things to each other on like neutral protocols it's only decades later when we're starting to get these much more powerful cryptographic tools that a lot more of that is you know becoming in reach it's getting closer to the actual user yeah absolutely yeah um still not quite there right we have to admit it'll be a while still but we can start seeing like the shape that this might take down yeah i've been thinking a lot about the zk identity or identity generally like so i just recently heard about some ai

program which can take audio voices and basically just start i mean it's deep fakes basically but they it's already there it's like a commercial product where you can just take audio and just get them to say stuff and that's kind of terrifying as someone who speaks on air a lot right and then i was thinking like oh man so i you know now potentially my you know some sort of signing with a ethereum address or some sort of address will potentially actually be the only way that people can know that it's me but then there's a lot of data spilled and like which address would i use and would i feel comfortable sharing that that's my address if it has you know funds on it or something like that um and that's where this zk identity all

of a sudden starts to become very very real for me at least and i think the problem of identity has been voiced for many years but i think now it's getting to a point where it's going to be a need not like a problem of the future but a problem of now and i hope that does push it to become much much more usable and i think there's zk identity but are there other like applied cryptography solutions to that is there like identity or i don't know if it would really make sense yeah yeah i mean one thing that's really exciting um that recently came out is uh dan bonan some of his collaborators i know um recently released a paper about basically like mpc friendly snarks so

you can collectively generate a snark proof uh with a number of other people all of whom have their own secret data who they're also not revealing to anyone else in the collaborator set and there's certain kinds of claims that you actually just can't make if you are only allowing a single person to generate a zk proof on just their specific private data so that kind of thing just continues to expand like the level of generality with which we can use these tools i think that zk snarks are actually the first in what will be a much longer line of what i think of as like next generation of like really powerful and more general cryptographic tools fhe mpc maybe someday even like you know people

talk about like i o indistinguishability obfuscation um and i think that these tools are going to be really important for combating like we've already seen in the last decade a lot of the pitfalls of the gradual like centralization of online identity and personal data it's been like one of the biggest topics regarding like the evolution of the internet in the 2010s and i think that like you mentioned this is only going to become more and more of a problem like perhaps as we move to biometric identity systems uh in the longer term do you really want your biometric data to be stored in places where you don't have control over that like that's something that's so close to you there's so many different kind of like attack

vectors um i think that like a lot of technologies have the tendency to make the powerful more powerful especially like communications and information technology uh when you think about things like um you know surveillance technology or data analysis tools getting more and more powerful like maybe one of the issues with biometric markers is as cameras get better and we're able to like store and process larger volumes of data one could imagine that it gets scary and scarier if someone's able to like reconstruct some uh part of your face or something like that and use that in a deep fake or use that to try to like authenticate on your behalf so i see the other side of this as these cryptographic tools which inherently

give the defender an advantage over the aggressor or the person like on offense here so these kinds of tools for preserving individual liberty ensuring that like individual people and entities can maintain their own boundaries um are only going to become more and more important as tools on the other side continue to get more advanced as well let's dig into some of the other moonshot ideas that you had covered and i just have the list in front of me now but one was fog of war which i think we've covered quite well which is this idea of on-chain gaming i guess you could do other games which use fog of war maybe very easy to use fog of war libraries maybe that already exists from dark forest does it not really yet dark force like hashing

construction is like pretty specific it would be very cool to see it used in elsewhere though cool the second one was private data marketplaces is that what you were talking about before within the dark force context or is this something i guess that was an experiment of that but it could be anything yeah so the idea behind the private data marketplace is that um blockchains are really useful for enabling trustless escrow of you know assets that can only be owned by one person so for example if i have an nft then it's really easy for us to spin up an escrow contract that says uh all right like you know as soon as you've deposited one ether into the escrow

smart contract and i've deposited the nft then both of those items can be swapped and the nfp sent to you and the one each sent to me um the problem with data however is that data is something which once it's made public everyone can see it yeah so if we're trying to exchange like some sort of content or some secret or something like that where i'm selling you data in exchange for some compensation um this construction doesn't really work like let's say that we have this escrow smart contract you deposit one eth uh i publish the data to the contract as soon as the the contract checks that it's the correct data then it releases the east to me well there's this kind of problem of like if everyone can see the data why are you paying for it right so

uh the idea behind the private data marketplace construction is that uh what i should be able to do instead of just sending the data up in plain text to the smart contract is i should be able to encrypt it with your public key and then provide a zk snark proof that the plain text message corresponding to this ciphertext has certain properties for example like the plain text message is indeed the coordinates of a dark forced you know planet hash or this plaintext data is a high-res image that when down-sampled down-samples to this like public thumbnail that you're buying so one of these projects um 0xe basically is building out like uh nfts that you can't

right click save which i think is a really fun tagline um so uh i think that there's like you know this is an important primitive um you could imagine it being used for a bunch of different things another thing uh in the very very long run is one of our students at uh one of our uni programs built out a decentralized taggle proof of concept that i just thought was really awesome so you can prove that you have an ml model that achieves a certain performance on a data set and then you can send the encrypted parameters of that model to the smart contract as well as a snark proof that you've run this on the data set and then this way you can like sell basically a model with x performance to someone cool yeah i think that's a really cool application as well

uh i think we'll only see more applications as the amount of data that's like um stored on chain increases because you have more data now that you can make claims about you can have like more secret data that can be checked by contracts on chain but yeah a number of interesting experiments there i think once the first proofs of concept applications of this get released hopefully we can start to generate even more ideas and there's some really smart people who are thinking about this cool should we go through some of the other ones that you had here i know you just mentioned the machine learning one yeah yeah so i mean that's a nice segue into some of the like machine learning experiments so um you know it's it's hard to define like a single application here but this feels like the sort of primitive that's very

valuable because for example like if you're able to implement a machine learning model inside of a snark then maybe that like changes the or widens the scope of claims that you can make about uh information that is being sold in these encrypted data marketplaces so to this effect um some folks in our community have implemented uh you know a demonstration of like linear regression inside of a snark there's a group right now from the last zk learning group that is working on implementing an mnist classifier inside of a snark what would that do what is that i'd actually don't know yeah so so mnist is basically this data set of hand-drawn digits and the problem here is to for any given image

classify correctly with high probability whether or not it's a hand-drawn zero or one two three four five six seven eight or nine is that the like captchas you sometimes have to fill out when you have to put in the numbers kind of yeah it's somewhat like similar um in the sense that like you know you're trying to recognize like a handwritten um symbol but here the question is like you want to build a machine learning model to be able to do that um so this is one of the relatively like simpler benchmark tasks that people often look at um and trying to build out a zk snark to do that uh would be an interesting primitive what would that be used for though like what use is the zk in that one right right so there's a couple of dimensions here um

it depends on what you're keeping private and what you're keeping public so first off if everything is public then this is still potentially useful as like a decentralized computation oracle you can imagine that like inside of a smart contract so let's say like inside of a smart contract i want to execute some ml model on some data that might be very expensive to do inside of solidity but if you can do it outside like off chain and then roll up that computation with the zk snark and then post that zk snark proof on chain then suddenly you sort of have the ability to execute ml models that you've pre-committed to inside of a smart contract so this is a sort of like roll up like application now

if you keep the model private but the data public then what you can do is things kind of like this decentralized taggle thing where you're proving that you're executing this private model on a publicly known data set and this is the result maybe you don't want to release the model so that way people can't like game it or something but you do want to pre-commit to it so that way like people are like yeah like this same algorithm is being executed fairly on all of these different inputs um then that could be another application and then finally you can sort of think about the reverse which is public uh model but private data so you are maybe in this case and this has ties to identity as well um you're proving for example that you have some like biometric data that like does

indeed authenticate to you but that private data is never actually going over the wire you're just proving that you have it um and this is kind of like almost like a you know imagine a password system where you don't need to ever send your password and plain text over the wire and have that be manipulated in server memory for sensitive kinds of data uh where verification of the data does involve like passing through an ml model uh this could be something that's valuable very far down the line so these experiments are super early i guess there's a reason you called it a moon shot yeah right you were like things were building now although yeah so you just said there's a working group actually building on this right now or what yeah so like we have this um

basically zk identity working group with about like a half a dozen teams working on various different applications primitive tools etc um just various groups from the community that are uh testing these kinds of things out and the working group is just a loose structure for these teams to come together and share their progress share their learnings and knowledge um and yeah i think a number of these groups are going to have write-ups in the next couple of weeks which we'll also you know post and share on twitter and on the xerox park blog so be on the lookout for some exciting new proofs of concept yeah i'll just mention a couple of the other moonshots from that article which was procedurally generated virtual

worlds although i think we covered that in our first interview actually where we talked a lot about purlin noise yeah exactly all of that so i'll link to that in the show notes um if people want to hear more about that one another one that you had mentioned was this private asset and inventory commitments but i feel like that's somehow related a little bit to the data marketplaces the one i want to focus on is actually the zk message board so what is the zk message board yeah so this is one of the first applications of a lot of the zk identity primitives that i think is maybe most obvious but with this idea of a zk group signature where you're proving that you are a member of a set so for example i am the

holder of a dark forest planet or i am someone in this organization so these zk group signatures allow you to make claims like this without revealing your exact identity and one of the first applications you could imagine for that is these message boards where you can post as a member of a group without revealing your exact like ethereum address or username or whatever else maybe you're just you're to make a proof saying i'm posting as someone with at least 1 000 karma so you know that i'm like someone who's invested in this community and a trustworthy member or you might post saying like i am someone who is even permissioned to post in the first place to this whitelisted message board but i'm going to be posting anonymously so there's a bunch of different potential constructions here

that you can imagine um and another dimension that these kinds of applications can vary along is which identity registry they are using um in order to bootstrap these groups so we have a demo up at zkmessage.xyz that shows a message board where you generate a message board specific public and private key and you can then generate these like signed messages signing as a member of say like a 20-person group where you select all 20 people but one of the exciting things about the circom ecdsa project is that enables zk proofs about ethereum addresses so now you can claim like i possess the private key of an ethereum address that holds a crypto

punk or a dark forest planet and i'm going to like sign my message basically with that information and uh because of that that allows me to post this like particular message board or whatever else um and you can imagine like a world where you have like reddit like boards or something uh where people are posting like yeah i'm posting as part of the moderator team or like discord service where it's like i'm posting as someone with a particular role um this is just like another interesting social mechanic there's obviously a lot of different ways that it can be used um it's hard to say exactly like what the exact like emergent behavior will look like um but once you have this i think you're kind of on the pathway to

other applications around things like whistle blowing or other credibility preserving uh mechanisms where anonymity and privacy is important it's like you're taking an idea that i know we had heard about a couple years ago semaphore i remember barry talking about this sort of like fully private board where anyone could post anonymously i remember finding that like actually terrifying because there used to be this app called secret that was like the same thing but in mobile and it wasn't really private but it was private enough that people felt comfortable sharing stuff and all it became was a like horrible gossip turbine of like falsehoods about people that knew each other and it just sounded like kind of a cesspool and that really

kind of scared me when i heard about like just pure semaphore which is just like you can always be private you can say whatever you want sort of unsensible but also like unmoderated i love the idea of the roles and the idea of reputation somehow being built into it but still being kept private i think that is in a way the solve to that concern that i had had which is it's not just like an anon coming for like one second and just making up stuff so that is kind of cool i like that ideally like you know we also want to be really careful around that kind of stuff as well because one of the scary things about anonymity is that uh there's questions about accountability that that raises um i think we will have to evolve new standards and design patterns um for

example like there's a bunch of different axes that you can tune here and like dials that you can play with one is that you can have like moderated and still censorable message boards where yeah maybe like there is a centralized service provider that is like hosting the data and stuff and they're just like not going to allow uh any just like content of certain types um or you could imagine that like the primary mechanisms here are like you do have to prove that you have posted before you have a lot of reputation you're a valued member of the community and you know that ensures that like you have a disincentive to post stuff that isn't going to be helping the community you know that isn't in for the betterment of the community um and only once you reach a certain threshold of

reputation um which again you can prove in zk do you have access to this kind of functionality um i think it is the case that like you know new technologies do unlock like cool new things but also scary new things yeah technology itself is not like inherently like oh just because we build this like it's better for the world or something so that's why it's extra important here i think with communications technology to be very deliberate um and thoughtful about the ways in which we're putting these out into the world and kind of the design patterns that we're espousing a lot of these ideas and concepts and experiments you know do have these two sides going back to something like identity which is obviously you know something that i've definitely been thinking about

more how do you actually see something like this truly developing so far obviously it's been proposed and there's been groups that have sort of championed it is there like a way that you'd like to see this evolve are there some things you're worried about how this could also evolve yeah definitely i think that like the next couple years are going to be really crucial uh for the evolution of identity systems as well as other zk enabled tools one thing that i've been thinking a lot about lately is what are the structures the structures the organizations and the communities which these standards and patterns should evolve from i think that with something that is as impactful and has such a breadth as digital identity does it's really

important for the stuff to get built in in values aligned ways that take into account a bunch of different perspectives uh and our truly developed bottom up so you know i think that zk identity is something that ought to be bigger than any one particular company or organization or vc or anything like that it has to be a joint community effort there has to be a lot of collaboration and back and forth if we do want to make truly neutral self-sovereign identity protocols um so to that end the ways in which we are wanting to support this kind of effort is through um you know open source r d um through more collaborative modes rather than for example like you know i think it would

be a huge shame if like the identity protocols of the future were built and governed by like startups like i don't think that's the right model in the same way that like there were a bunch of attempts at building the internet-like protocols in proprietary ways um those eventually lost out to these like much more permissionless and neutral and unopinionated protocols like iptcp i think that that was really good for the internet i have a bit of a counter uh example there which is like do you remember i mean facebook became the automatic login now it's google maybe four other places and that is sort of your id and it's kind of it's exactly what you're describing right like it that is kind of the nightmare scenario

it's already kind of happened where you're using those centralized services that totally sell your data to as your identification which is right right super scary yeah yeah so we definitely want to avoid things like that i think cryptography gets us a long way there like there's certain things that even like a startup that's attempting to do identity stuff like just can't do um by virtue of you know your private keys are private like they're mathematically unbreakable um nonetheless it seems very important that if you want this stuff to be built in a thoughtful and deliberate way it has to emerge organically from a community of values-aligned technologists um again rather than like a company with a token or like like what

would the implications be of some actor holding like a 20 financial interest in the identity protocol or the attestation protocol of the future like i think that makes no sense i think that that's crazy probably leads to a bunch of like weird externalities where someone is trying to push for something in this way because you know they're misaligned with the good of the community um and i think like you said like a lot of these tools are quite scary and one of the ways that we can defend against uh tail risk and the worst possible outcomes is getting a lot of voices in the room to help patch things up as they come up you know someone from this kind of a background or this corner of the ecosystem says oh you know but have you considered this or maybe they

they realize that like there's this important tool that needs to be built that allows for some sort of like audit of such and such thing or uh you know whatever else so the plug i guess i would make for how i hope zk identity to develop is in this more collaborative way and you know i think that like i would basically extend the invitation to anyone who is interested in developing in this way to join us we have a lot of different programs here a lot of different like teams in the community that are working along these like lines of inquiry uh and xerox park itself hopes to be a vehicle to facilitate like again new ways for projects to be built like you don't just have to build these things as like delaware c corp vc back startups or whatever

the structures we use to build things should align with our goals and to the extent that we can keep options open by like giving grants bringing values aligned people together uh i think that's the contribution that we can make to the space here so it's super interesting how the funding plays into that too because the minute you say that it's like it can't be vc backed you can't just stick a token on it you have pressures to do those things this also goes back to like when people have early ideas in zk right now zk is very fundable there's a lot of vc's that are going to be interested and get you excited and be like oh we're going to give you money but it changes how you think in certain ways it changes how you're going to act inevitably like you you're going to and you the pressures

that you're going to have to manage and the expectations from peers or guides like a lot of those investors and vcs can be incredible guides and helpful in the right context but in the wrong context they could also be adding pressure pushing you to market too fast getting you to put a token together because they need returns too like we always have to remember what are the motivations there um like that's what their business is so for what it's worth i don't think that like it's this is like a bad thing like i'm not like anti like companies or anti people making profit rewarded for good work i think that like in fact it is a net very positive thing for certain parts of the ecosystem so for example like there's a lot of infrastructure uh

and like service businesses that i think should be vc funded that's going to accelerate that kind of stuff so much and like that is going to benefit like that that's a rising high that's going to lift the entire ecosystem i think you just have to be careful about like along which dimensions like for what you're trying to do what is the right funding mechanism or what is the right like ecosystem for this to come out of um i think like for example for open-ended research a lot of times you're going to be able to take advantage of the most open-ended and creative explorations when you do have flexibility and like you know you have like essentially no strings attached like mandates um yeah to just pursue these like lines of inquiry and then you know once maybe you know the thing that needs

to exist in the world and you want to step on the gas pedal maybe that's the time and you know that like this kind of alignment is correct that can accelerate things but then maybe for standards or where you're trying to build like neutral or canonical substrates something like ethereum or the internet or potentially identity protocols of the future you need to think about that probably a little bit differently yeah um and i think yeah it's it's just important to be thoughtful there cool i want to say thanks so much gupt for coming back on the show and having this conversation you know it went from dark forest and games all the way to identity and zero knowledge libraries and funding and yeah i really enjoyed this journey with you yeah this was a ton of fun

thanks again for having me anna i hope we get to collaborate on more things in the future too i know that we've done the git coin together but maybe we can get you involved in zk hack somehow absolutely yeah i mean well i know kobe is going to be presenting some of the zk hack puzzles at our zk learning group so there's always ways like the community right now is pretty small and whatever we can do to work together to expand it is that's up our alley very cool i want to ask you about how people can get involved and people who want to learn they want to learn about zk you have this learning group do you expect to be opening that up more are you going to keep it to a small cohort like what's the future of this yeah so um right now like we have

published a lot of the resources pretty much all of them actually at learn.0xpark.org so you can see various recordings exercises learning group notes from the past learning group as well as demos of projects from that learning group as well we hope to do the same with this current learning group um a lot of what we're trying to do right now is first we're trying to get from zero to one on our like educational programs uh grant giving programs just get the engine started up um but then the next question is like yeah how do you scale beyond that our goal is like you know we really do want to allocate like substantial amounts of funding to move the ecosystem forwards here um again like money is not always

the bottleneck but to the extent that it can unlock like freedom for values-aligned technologists to just pursue an interesting line of work um then that's our goal uh we're already seeing this with like dark forest and lattice which xerox park is the primary funding source for currently um so we're looking to be able to run more learning groups in the future larger learning groups perhaps more open grant programs uh that's just something that we're figuring out over the next couple of months but if you know you're excited about what you've heard today and you want to get involved you know keep on the lookout uh we have a blog we have a twitter where we like post updates um and yeah we want to be supporting people who really want to work substantially on

this stuff so cool thank you gov sheep for coming on yeah this was a ton of fun again i want to say a big thank you to the podcast producer tanya the podcast editor david who's filling in for henrik this week and to our listeners thanks for listening