Episode 233 - Through the Wormhole with Jump Crypto

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 chat with raul magani who's leading the applied zk effort at jump crypto and hendrik hofstadt who's the project lead at wormhole we look at the work of jumpcrypto how wormhole first came to be through hendrick's work with the validator certis one which has since been

purchased by jump we explore the challenges of interoperability the design decisions they made in balancing security speed and functionality the risks facing these types of solutions including the famous wormhole hack what the future holds and how they aim to explore using zk in bridging and more but before we kick off i want to encourage you to check out the upcoming zktec git coin side round this clr matching round runs from june 8th through 23rd it's a great way for small early-stage teams or contributors building zktec to get their first bit of funding or if you're an existing open source public good project focused on zk tech you can also submit a grant at getcoin during the clr matching round funds that

are donated to the zktec side round are matched from our matching pool this initiative is led by xerox park and zk validator as well as our fantastic matching partners from the ecosystem we will have at least 100k in matching for this round so be sure to get your grant in and choose the tag zk tech to be eligible to our matching pool you get the donations anyway the matching is sort of a bonus but this is a really great way to kick start your project just remember the grant round starts on june 8th which i think is today so be sure to get your grant in as soon as possible now here's the podcast producer tanya who will share a little bit about this week's sponsor today's episode is sponsored by enoma anoma is a set of protocols that enable self-sovereign coordination their unique

architecture facilitates efficiently the simplest forms of economic coordination such as two parties transferring an asset to each other as well as more sophisticated ones like an asset agnostic bartering system involving multiple parties without direct coincidence of wants or even more complex ones such as end party collective commitments to solve multi-polar traps where any interaction can be performed with adjustable zero-knowledge privacy anoma's first fractal instance nemata is planned for later in 2022 and it focuses on enabling shielded transfers for any assets with a few second transaction latency and near zero fees visit anoma.net for more information that's inoma.net so thanks again anoma now here is anna's interview

with wormhole [Music] today i'm chatting with hendrick from the wormhole project he's the project lead there as well as raul from jump who's leading the applied zk efforts welcome to the show both of you anna thanks very much yeah thanks for having us so you're working at seemingly two different projects um let's first kind of crack into what the connection is between wormhole and jump is wormhole like a an independent company or is it a project one was a fully fully independent project it was kind of incubated at jump um most of the core project contributors are working at job but the reason for that

is um like lion in the background and the essentially of original like origin story of the wormhole project which we kicked off back um at certain one which was the company i co-founded which later got acquired by jump there we built the original version of wormhole and then after the acquisition kind of built it into its full own thing um spun it out and have kind of been supercharging the efforts there very cool and actually i want to come back to your story with certain one a validator kind of i also have a validator so we can talk a little bit about that but i want to hear about raul and your role at jump and maybe what the zk like applied zk group is sure sure yeah this is something that

we've sort of kicked off very recently um but i think our interest in zk's really stems from kind of really being like hardcore you know builders in the space and and so we really want to tackle some of the hardest problems in the space and obviously zero knowledge cryptography um is something that's that's very interesting from a technical point of view um so we've looked at zk's both from an investment standpoint but now we're really looking into kind of leveraging uh these proof systems for for different sorts of uh you know internal uh projects that we have including wormhole um and a few others that that we're uh really trying to push it sounds like both of you you've become part of jump like in the last two years or so but this is an older is am i correct there i'm fairly recent

actually so uh you know i think it's been about seven months at this point about a year for me okay cool so then maybe like less than that and maybe you're not the total people to speak to it but what what is the backstory of jump like it's an older org so what is jump actually jump actually started started in in the pits in chicago trading it was now i think about six seven years ago that jump really got active in the crypto space okay um first fully focused on trading which is the roots of the company electronic trading high frequency trading uh quantitative trading strategies but then really quickly realized that crypto is one of the like few spaces and a very new space

in which they are like this is not a zero-sum game where they can be like positive some games in uh collaborating and contributing to projects so very quickly at jump um and particularly now jump crypto which is way more public than a jump trading group was before we've kind of built out these three pillars um one of the pillars being the traditional trading uh market making in all kinds of crypto markets from centralized to decentralized exchanges but then the other two pillars being um the actual building so contributing to projects like wormhole to project like pith and portfolio companies in the venture book doing research publishing

research working on really tough problems like zero knowledge um proof systems threshold cryptography and other like cutting edge cryptographic research and applying some of the like deep technological knowledge in the company to that so building hardware building a6 and and working with fpgas and then on the third pillar investment actually um supporting companies through investments but i think pretty much every investment jump crypto makes uses like all of these pillars in like trying to support the projects as best as possible from a technological building and then markets perspective but is it still a tr like a high

frequency trading org is that like where most of the business activity is actually happening you'd be surprised in in that i think more than 50 of jump crypto at this point is in the building and an investing site a research and investing side of things so there's been a tremendous amount of growth uh particularly over the last um one to two years yeah probably in the last year we've seen you know a lot of the the team pretty much expand uh you know probably a hundred hundred percent in the last year and and most of us are very focused on building i think everybody even even from the non-technical side has some background um and like love for crypto uh and truly wants to like push the space forward

from a product point of view um and we have the trading as well because it's sort of our our bread and butter uh but we're always focused on you know building the new tech building new products are there such thing like quants in high frequency trading well known but is there a version of crypto quants that's different or is it sort of the same role there's certainly differences between the the way markets are structured and maturity in the markets in particular but i think there's also quite a bit of overlap that really depends on what kind of product you're trading and what you're looking into the interesting aspect is that quite quite a bunch of the the quantitative researchers and and developers that like we're hiring now also get to learn how to interact with

blockchains um a bunch of our new eyes actually went through um a solana boot camp and um are now going through different on-chain development boot camps and we try to apply this type of knowledge to the building side as well particularly from like an economics and quantitative research perspective this is tremendously valuable knowledge that can also be applied to designing protocols designing tokens and economics so the amount of synergies is incredible cool so raul what's what's your background that led you to be part of this applied zk effort are you coming from zk research yeah what were you doing before yeah so i i sort of had a sort of non-traditional path i guess maybe into

zk's um i in college um i studied sort of electrical engineering in finance you know as a sort of like dual degree program and i was very interested in the quantitative side of modeling for finance and then i uh got into ai research actually um and then i sort of found my way um into crypto as as one of my friends was actually working at pantera at the time doing you know quantitative research there uh and i said you know maybe this is something that i would be interested in i don't know much about crypto but i'd like to like to learn um and i eventually actually interned at pantera for it for a few months and and really got into crypto from there um i ended up actually then going to to arbitrarium where i spent some time just

sort of doing doing a bunch of different things um on the scaling side and that's how i developed my interest in l2s and scaling and all the things that are assisted with that and i eventually actually went back to do to do my masters and that's where i sort of got interested in the intersection of cryptography and machine learning and so i was working on basically applying zero knowledge proofs to do machine learning and figuring out how to create proof systems for neural networks and while i was there i sort of randomly got introduced to jump and and you know left my masters in within within sort of one week you know i had an offer within one week and i saw i just joined jump but i sort of still had this passion for for zero knowledge proofs and i wanted to explore it as

much as possible so i've been digging into them uh digging into sort of all the math the very interesting cryptography associated with it and really like how to leverage these proof systems to create like production ready systems and really create products that leverage this sort of amazing tech nice henrik i want to go into your back story a little bit and certain one uh validator so years and years ago 2019 new york blockchain week maybe i hosted a panel and i think there was someone from certain one on that panel like bison trails this was like you know right when proof of stake networks were all still very much like test nets yeah and i mean maybe there was a few that were live tesla's i think was live

but like there wasn't very much that was out cosmos i think at that point wasn't out so that was my introduction to sort of the validator crew tell me a little bit about kind of what got you into the validator thing what service one became and sort of what you did with it certain one it was it was in 2018 uh the crypto markets had just crashed i finished high school and one of my high school teachers actually like got me really excited about ethereum smart contracts and like actually building applications beyond just like pure transfer value on blockchain so i was kind of diving into the space looking around when i suddenly saw tendermint and cosmos i was like

build your own chain and the kind of inter internet of blockchains and that kind of really caught my eye and then right on i think on the home page of cosmos it was like we're looking for validators and i was like huh my background at the time i had done like up mostly outside of outside of blockchain um a lot of security research at the time um a bunch of infrastructure things before running blockchain nodes and this kind of looked like a very interesting way this was all journeys that was during high school and this is this is just post high school i was actually like uh i was backpacking in canada and after the backpacking trip i was kind of you could say computer staffed and

i was looking around and saw this saw this post on the cosmos side and so wow this could be an interesting way to apply the infrastructure knowledge and the security knowledge because for the first time like cyber security is always kind of seen as this like extra thing particularly at the time of like it's not the key requirement to have like the most secure system possible suddenly with slashing and the validators like key management was the key and most important property and that looked like an extremely exciting challenge so leopold my co-founder at the time and i set out to try to build the most secure validator possible and that was the start of certain one i think we really approached it from a

deep deep deep technical angle because both of us having very strong technical backgrounds and we build a knowledge base we always try to approach this in a very collaborative approach of like sharing a lot of our knowledge sharing a lot of tooling we like broke cosmos a bunch of times participated in the back boundary programs when we did a chain like the most important thing for us was to really know the software we're running so we read into the code we did security research and we did that for pretty much like all of the chains we then ended up launching a bunch of cosmos zones we were like early in solana doing a lot of security research there working with the team and like expanding the validator business building out more of the

infrastructure which then obviously like got pretty pretty wild over time as it was exploding we would have never expected this to be such an attractive business case as well it was primarily about like the exciting technology and and then through that work we really grew really close with the with the blockchain projects so one day we've been doing a lot of solana research as i mentioned and like and it totally calls us up on a saturday and it's like hey guys you you're probably one of the first people that built like more complex applications or knows the the smart contract runtime on solana well um there's a project coming which then would would later be known as project serum the um central audible exchange on on solana

and it was like we don't have assets can you guys build a bridge and we were like whoa this is this is pretty crazy and the two-week timeline is is pretty wild that's what he gave you hell let's do this let's do this yeah it was like serum is launching in two or three weeks i was like this is this is wild but let's do it let's do it and then we dove right in that was kind of the first point where outside of the pure technical infrastructure building up the validator business and growing that with more chains we were able to really really use that deep knowledge of the system to build out something and that was purely a token bridge at the time but actually then over time with certain uh what happened was that jump had been a

customer of us of ours on the infrastructure side and they had been building pith on on wormhole a bit later and and reached out to us like hey you guys built this bridge on solana can you also bridge out the oracle data to other chains help us expand piv to other chains we're like wow we had we've built this bridge as a token bridge we obviously made a mistake and forgot that there's a lot more use cases and interoperability kind of haven't forgotten our roots in the cosmos ecosystem where ibc was already pretty much fully fleshed out and so we sat down went back to the drawing board um thought about how to do this and it was at that time that we've jumped we

realized there's a lot of potential synergies to work together across infrastructure across um projects like wormhole and a bunch of other initiatives we've been running in security so this is how they ended up making making an offer khanov the the president of jump one day out of out of nowhere messaged me like hendrick i have a radical proposal to make and that's how things came to be and how a lot of things got like crazily accelerated damn you just mentioned something called pith can you explain what that is well pith is a high fidelity data oracle um on salon at the moment and uh as hendrick mentioned these wormholes to take take fifth prices cross chain and

so pith is sort of focused really at the moment on providing really really high quality data so the publishers that we have are some of the you know most respected financial institutions in the world to name a few maybe obviously trump is one of them jane street two sigma like a few other you know trading firms that are very very involved in actually pricing assets and doing price discovery um and and having this data available on chain for for applications to actually consume and so uh we're really really focused on that at the moment but you can sort of think of it as similar i guess to chain like if that's an analogy um you want to use this kind of data is this data blockchain data is it crypto data or is it all data is it like outside of its prices at the moment so it's like you

know yep like trading pairs essentially so some something that might be on on pith would be like you know eat usd price that you that you'd be able to get from it from an exchange or one of the publishers actually in this case it's crypto but it's also equities actually so you have some of the largest firms that and exchanges that trade these equities provide the data straight from the source this is actually one of the crazy examples of what i'd mentioned previously with with jump really seeing seeing positive some games i think it's probably one of the first times in in history that all of these firms that are traditionally like really really harsh competitors actually working together and bringing their data in together and it's kind of cutting out the middle man

instead of like the typical oracle approach where you have a kind of nodes operating that fetch data from different sources data is being pushed straight from the source on chain you don't have to trust any any middleman in between you get like the most most recent up-to-date um pricing information and i see way way more different data points being streamed over time that could be weather that could be options pricing like everything so you're saying that this oracle lives like pith is on solana right like it's a solana-based application i guess that like acts as an oracle but why would you need to move that information anywhere

so right now the data gets aggregated and lands on lands on solana i think the choice there really was with solana's block times as well having access to that type of data source they can obviously stream much faster than like a 10 second block time so the the 500 milliseconds are super attractive they can definitely go even faster so let's see where that leads us but um applications like synthetics on ethereum are more an options protocol another chain a futures protocol that needs strike prices they want to consume that data as well so it's natural that the data needs to flow to other places however you can imagine 30 40

different parties streaming individual prices on a 500 millisecond interval these are quite a bunch of transactions so there's pretty much no other other l1 out there that could handle that throughput without your bills going into the into the millions per day potentially so it's great to use salon as the aggregator and then go cross chain using a protocol like one mole even though pith is also a case where we're actively exploring zero knowledge cases use cases and applications um i think there's a couple of different things leverage to pull here with their knowledge for sure yep but before we go into that i like i have another question on this because what happens when there's exchanges outside

of those sort of providers to the oracle like so say something like osmosis where like it's different assets being traded in a different place like does that go is that fed i mean maybe not as most of things but maybe like uniswap on one of the other evm chains like is it is any of that data also coming back in or is there a disconnect a little bit between like the centralized exchanges and the decentralized right so so so the way that you know that the prices are determined are pretty much what the publishers say the prices are um in the case of pith so it's not really from an exchange necessarily it's what the publishers are providing and their ability to do privacy discovery is going to be the main sort of you know ability for pith to actually have robust prices

so the robustness comes from the publishers uh being able to do this very well and like obviously we we wanted to pick some some of the best financial institutions in the world to provide this um so that we have robust you know price aggregation and and feeds coming in yeah it's very interesting in the sense that these data providers what they often stream is their own trades and the prices they are quoting and a lot of them operate across different venues including decentralized venues um so quite a bunch of the firms there they trade on uni swap as well they trade on curve they trade on all the exotic different exchanges they might even be doing meb so they have a quite good overview of the markets but at some point and like exchanges also source data and there's a couple cases where

um pif is already consuming decentralized exchange data right from the source with serum being on the same chain but there's also cases that we're exploring there of using wormhole to essentially get the data from uni swap from trader joe and and all of the other venues throughout the the multi-team world and aggregating that back and bridging that back to to form a better aggregate value so i want to hear the end of the cirtus one story and then i want to dig into wormhole deeper and pith and the zk stuff but i think we should sort of finish that so certain one running validators had this conversation

about joining what's actually happened then to service one because you had a team that was running validators like are you still running validators is this like yeah how did you distribute out how this all works jumpcrypto is now has taken over sergius one um we've actually increased the the number of engineers that are working at the team has grown um running more chains more infrastructure across the board the validator some of them we've we've renamed to jumpcrypt though some of them are still called service one but we keep on running this infrastructure and then um our internal security research functions uh development functions all moved in and particularly like our focus on things like wormhole has has been been supercharged been spun

out into known foundation uh with a much larger team now counting more than 30 people being dedicated to the project and this has pretty much happened to to all of our efforts um that we had before wormhole itself now i want to dig into that like i mean what do you call it is it a bridge is it a bridge technology is it a i've heard i mean i'm interoperability solution i i feel weary saying bridge because every time i try to call something a bridge someone's like no no no yeah what do you call yourselves this that happens to me still i still sometimes say bridge but interoperability protocol is what we call it and i think that might even change over time um i think the way we

look at it has changed as we interacted with more people work together with more people we started as a bridge now we've become an interoperability protocol and actually what what we're seeing now is we're getting even closer to to the users kind of what we identified our our identity had to be our mission had to be is is what we now call is like turning blockchain users into web3 users which is allowing people to use decentralized applications without having to think about the l1 this is kind of the the final mission of no matter where i have my main wallet i want to be able to interact with uni swap i want to be able to interact with trader joe and avalanche c chain and with any other application in the ecosystem and i don't

want to have to bridge around move move funds think about the different wallets switch my metamask network this is just annoying and coming from an interoperability protocol if we look at it the kind of final goal has to be fixing the user experience and this is kind of what we're looking at we haven't found a better name than like interoperability protocol yet but um i i think we've we've really really identified what what the core mission statement should be yeah and it's not just the the users sort of interacting with the applications themselves it's also applications on different chains being able to interact with each other seamlessly so it's you know the the fundamental sort of interoperability protocol that the generalized sort of

message passing layer as we call it is fundamental to sort of like the the generality of wormhole as opposed to you know just being a specific application like a token bridge let's let's actually dig in on that because you said it sort of started more as a token bridge what do you have to add to allow for this generalized data passing like what do you do yeah you take one step back actually it was okay token bridge is is already like one level up it's already one of the the higher level layers uh down below that what we looked at was like at the very base level what is happening is that there's a way for chains to essentially access or verify the state of the other chain that's the underlying fundamental

problem is that these chains can't like access each other's state or trust each other's state without running light lines so this is where we can later jump into the zk angle so we had to take it a step back and essentially build build a basic layer that would essentially um give access to this functionality of verifying state and exchanging information this is the messaging layer and then on top of this messaging layer this is what happened with the wormhole v2 or now just wormhole with wormhole v2 we split it up into the core messaging protocol wormhole and portal the token bridge on top which is just an application using this primitive just like there's now quite a bunch of applications out there that are using

the raw message passing uh to build out the use cases like pith but also like a bunch of other applications that we call x-steps cross-chain applications that use the messaging to like expand to other ecosystems and allow users to interact with their protocol despite being on another chain so you just sort of said this it's like you had to go back to that idea of verifying the state i'm assuming you don't use light clients at this point because as i learned in a recent episode with nomad it's very very expensive to run full light clients of other chains especially in something like ethereum and often you are trying to link yourself to ethereum so what was it originally if not a light client the way it currently works is

with 19 oracles we call them guardians okay these are some of the largest proof of stake validators actually that usually also happen to operate um a significant share of the of the stake of of any of the connected chains and they operate nodes in all of these chains and what they do is they attest to and sign observed messages and state of these chains and that is being used to then um allow the other chain to verify that so essentially an off chain oracle and we've kind of a tiered approach to how we want to get from here to a set that is more than 19 signers and then finally in in the last step to

a stage where we don't increase the number but we go to zero because we don't require oracle's anymore because it's fully zero knowledge proof and like client based fully trusted okay okay this is really ambitious this is why i wanted to invite you on the show because i i do want to say this like the criticism i've heard in the past about wormhole is that it's a multi-sig it's a multi-signer and when you talk about those 19 guardians are those the multi-sig holders as i don't know what you call the multi-sig participants yeah exactly these are the 19 19 19 oracles um i i find it a bit ironic um sometimes when when people i i totally get the criticism and it's a valid point and it's something we want to change we

want to increase the size and eventually get rid of any trusted third party or middleman but these 19 actually usually make up what you could say is like one-third to sometimes even 50 percent of the stake of the connected networks so saying you don't trust them then i can also ask you why are you using this changes obviously it doesn't apply to an ethereum but it applies to most of what we see as proof of stake out there simply because and you you probably know that very well there's only a limited set of companies that have the expertise to operate like highly secure validator nodes and that set i think is no no larger than 100 to 200 um firms so this is kind of where we see

the sweet spot of of node operators and where we want to go interesting but you want to expand it so let's talk about that first step that you just suggested this idea of like making it larger what would that actually entail yeah i think one thing that might be interesting to go into is the original sort of like wormhole v1 and why there's 19 in the first place i don't if you could talk about that yeah yeah um the original reason this there's 19 is because with the multisig what needs to happen is in order to prove that two-thirds plus have signed um and observed a message we need to attach two-thirds plus of of signatures which is i think 13 13 right now so you have to bridge that number of of signatures

to the other chain which is quite a bit of call data and then quite a bunch of signature verifications which is expensive we could go beyond that um there's some practical limitations with chains with compute limits kind of upper caps particularly solana as well but 19 was kind of the sweet spot between like sufficiently decentralized and we can get like enough of the typical pos voting power in to feel confident about the safety and liveness of the protocol but at the same time it wasn't a spot where it was still like viable computationally and cost wise to verify the messages then there's obviously interesting ways to reduce the number of number of signatures required

but at the same time increasing the sinus set right right and and i think like practically like you know the approach that that we've been looking into for increasing the guardian set is really to say let's not verify you know 19 or 13 signatures on chain let's do let's just do one signature and so there's a variety of approaches you can use and there's a bunch of different cryptographic primitives but threshold cryptography is one of them that's sort of very interesting um at the moment and i think you know hendrick has talked about this before but originally when uh you know he had looked at you know doing threshold cryptography originally you know for wormhole because he sort of you know always on the cutting edge of the stuff but uh i think the the frost paper was released i think december of 2020 and at that point uh wormhole had just

come out uh so using something like a technology for which the paper had just come out you know the month prior probably wasn't a a very good you know practical solution so i think like we we know a bit you know a lot more about frost and about you know some of these protocols we know about the robustness of them uh there have been audits of these implementations of these protocols on different elliptic curves and so we know kind of much much better now like that these protocols are actually very robust and provably robust and so we're actively exploring this area um you know how to do thresholds nor signatures how to sort of expand the guardian set maybe to 100 generate one signature that we just need to verify um on chain and sort of reduce the cost as much as possible where are you using the

threshold cryptography in that like is it the selection of the signer or is it in the data that they're signing on it's it's both so i guess there's two components to this one is the threshold component and one is the signature component and one thing that's nice about uh you know some of these protocols is that you can choose any subset of let's say t out of n you know signers and and that will result in a valid signature that you can use so effectively all of these guardians would have a key share they would generate a signature share send it to a central dealer that would then aggregate these signatures and then that dealer would sign the message and then you'd all you would have to do is essentially verify that that signature is opposed yeah this is the threshold

signing thing okay yeah i remember this from conversations with the new cipher guys and keep and there's actually a project called thresholds which i guess and there's a new project called entropy that's also playing with this stuff okay got it that's where you're using it because i've also heard this in the context of mev and like creating more privacy for like what is written to the chain this is the osmosis just the word threshold it gets thrown around and i'm not exactly sure where it lives in this okay but i i see what you're saying there yeah same technology different applications very flexible so it's it truly is like a primitive um you know so can be used anywhere cool yeah but really the core for for making the decision to go for the 19 in the beginning was robustness

of technology you're building something like a messaging bridge or and a token bridge on top of it this is a core trusted primitive and it must not fail because there is a lot of value that is either explicitly as tbl or implicitly through just trust assumptions of if you trust the cross chain messaging for your governance then the value of your protocol essentially becomes kind of implicit tbl that is hard to measure but it's there it must not fail it must be as robust as possible so making conservative technology choices was always super important we saw what happened with some of the like some of the threshold signature papers there were

people that were implementations that um forgot a very tiny detail which was tragic in the end um and would have like allowed the protocol to be exploited and this is something we want to avoid by making like conservative choices on technology but always being on the cutting edge with rahul and team exploring the technologies um building out mvps so the moment we consider them safe and um also viable enough in the sense of some cryptographic primitives are just not supported on chain i think you've previously discussed that on the zk side a bunch as well um where we just need to wait out for l1 and l2 is supporting them for you at what point is it safe

there's a lot of i think there's a lot of a lot of different aspects when is it safe is i think when there's been multiple like audited implementations when there's been aggressive peer review um of the papers and they've just had a bit of time to settle there's no like fixed amount of time i would say um after which you would call a paper or a mechanism mature there's also different levels of complexity like some mechanisms um like frost are considerably straightforward in how they function other protocols um are significantly more complex so with them you would rather want to wait out a little bit more or see a bunch more of audited implementations and kind of let other people like try this out before

taking a multi-billion dollar use case that has that much tbl um already um and making the migration but i think we feel pretty confident about frost and rose just recently came out um for making it more robust as a distributed protocol um so i think there we've we've been able to develop confidence so we're making a strong move in there right now because there's another extremely exciting aspect about this which is that it allows us to now with tabro also support bitcoin on the wormhole portal and i think there there's been a lot of discussions about you know what makes you know a protocol sort of secure you know from a theoretical standpoint versus like it's secure um an implementation i think there was also you know related to zk's like i think

maybe a few weeks ago an issue with like uh fiat shamir and and the use of the hash the correct implementation of the hash function and so there was an issue that i think i believe it was trail of bits that that these were plonk implementations wasn't it an implementation of plonk actually like an older i think uh there was an issue with that i believe it was also like some some issue with like bullet proofs as well and and so like the issue was actually found in the paper as well so you know some some of these things have been around for a while and people have used them and but you know they're so complex that it's very difficult to know if they're actually going to hold up over time and uh you know that's just uh something that happens with you know

building new technologies so i i recently did have a conversation uh i think in a podcast where we talked about this idea of like engineers like in the implementation of some of these things these bugs actually get found but they're not always like projected into the world like the fix is just made and it's not out of malicious intent but it's because like someone might be re-implementing it and or there's like assumptions in a paper that aren't completely over to everyone who's implementing them um and i know that's a really interesting example because that kind of disclosure of trailer bits that was actually it didn't affect every system and that was so fascinating to see like what what did get hit and what didn't but yeah i actually want to i want to

move on to the hack or the vulnerability expl because i want to go into that because everything we're talking about right now is like cryptography being well you know well battle hardened and and even like you described this initial design as being conservative like careful yeah and and as i get it like i mean you call it a hack yes some people would say like vulnerability other people anyway but okay so it's a it's a hack there was a hack because there was a vulnerability with both descriptions all right um so yeah in that hack though like can you explain to us where the problem was because was it i mean was it in

the 19 guardian choice or was it somewhere else um it was not in the design and it was not in the 19 guardian choice anyway we've seen an example of maybe too small of a sinus set with the ronin bridge exploit recently um in this case it was um probably one of the most most common common things in in blockchain and smart contract exploits which which is a smart contract exploit so there was a bug in the implementation um of the solana smart contract of the wormhole call messaging bridge which essentially allowed an attacker to bypass the signature checks so the attacker could essentially forge signatures and pretend that there were enough signatures of guardians

and then produce valid messages and what the attacker did was they produced messages that looked like token bridge messages bridging ethereum into solana so they were able to mint arbitrary amounts of wrapped eath in the solana ecosystem which they then using the legitimate breach bridge path bridge back to ethereum so that was despite like multiple passes of review um and audit at the time that was um a bug that was overseen and i think this is really what what we need to realize with what we're building here in blockchain like code is unfortunately never perfect so striving to get as close to perfection as possible getting

as many eyes on it as possible yeah is really really core there have been really strict practices before actually internal review processes um we made even stricter we've um since then despite there already having been audits and multiple ads actually in process or about to be kicked off um we've done even more audits we have i think four or five different security firms on retainer that are constantly looking at the code base at every single change that's being made no changes rolling out without going through that and we've got one of the industry's largest bug bounty programs out there to actually incentivize white hats to collaborate and report bugs if should they find them and i think the

combination of these different pillars this is really what what is what is core in in something that is yeah a rocket ship and a car you can't just drive to the mechanic and have it fixed the moment it's launched it's out there and it better works and um since then i think well like we're spiking up to i think value being secured four to five billion we've had tons of people look at it also as a result of the attack and i think this is one of the pieces of infrastructure that really over time also because messaging you rarely modify anything there just settles and becomes a like fundamental very secure and mature piece of infrastructure that people can rely on and i think this is

what it is developing towards and has developed towards um having been life since then with tremendous amounts of value being secured and i think jump plugging the the 320 million dollar hole was a sign of the conviction we have into the security of the code base and the processes involved but it's um obviously something that i think we're gonna see see in the space with applications and this is why i think the audits white hat incentivization through black bounties and just a collaborative security approach and better tooling is so important yeah this it's what's interesting here is it happened on the solana side so and this kind of speaks to

the idea that like the solana smart contract ecosystem and tooling set is probably less developed than the ethereum one at this point and so you don't i mean i'm just guessing you don't have the same kinds of checks and tools and we had georgios on recently to talk about foundry and i mean that's pure evm it's not looking at anything else and so like yeah is there an equivalent of foundry or something like that over on or truffle on solana there's tool chains um a lot of that has also just developed uh recently and security scanners are being built in the salon ecosystem like in the evm ecosystem you have three four different security scanners that can help

automatically detect some of the common vulnerabilities um you have scanners that can actual actual solvers where you can do formal verification of smart contracts that isn't like these are pieces of deaf infrastructure where the evm world is just still miles ahead and um i think that was part of like part of the reason how things like this like this was dealing with a more like deeper solana more complex solana primitive that maybe out of 20 people building smart contracts uh one or two only have to interact with like these type of things they're just not as fleshed out yet but that doesn't change the fact that things can be overseen even in the evm world and these processes remain

just as important though to me it highlights something like there's all these new chains coming online and i mean yes there's a lot of evm compatible ones but there's also a lot of new smart contract chains people are bridging to those chains there's all these different kinds of bridging technologies that are happening but yeah the smart contracts on those new chains need to sort of catch up in terms of the security understanding it's not to say they won't i'm sure they will but it's just maybe something to for people out there listening to to start working on because it's a bit scary that idea of like becoming very multi-chain and having these kind of dangerous pockets that like are so unknown

yeah yeah i think we're trying to tackle some of that in in particular as well with like building depth tooling for building cross-chain applications and building across these highly heterogeneous environments like the core pillars of wormhole we kind of define as like x assets truly cross-chain assets assets that don't live just on one chain but can freely move without slippage or any exchange having to happen on multiple chains and ust was an example of that ust was fully fungible between all chains as a as a wormhole ax asset unfortunately it failed for other reasons but that part was particularly successful about it in it being able to move around we have a bunch of other assets where we see that there's like extremely strong synergies

the moment your acid becomes a truly cross chain acid and then the second aspect of what we call x steps truly cross-chain applications they kind of rely on these assets being fully cross-chain fungible you don't want to swap every time you move between an ecosystem you want the coin to be everywhere and have a canonical representation and then what you can do is build applications that span across multiple chains build applications where you have your hub you build your application once in one language like that can be solidity and on evm you have one core deployment and all the other deployments essentially are just light clients to that are essentially just remote controls and then you have liquidity in one place no

fragmentation but you can still use them from everywhere and this is where we're trying to build a lot of tooling and yeah this is actually like this is very exciting from a security standpoint too because right like if you have multiple different chains with different tooling you're writing in different languages and different virtual machines like the the probability of bugs is like you sort of have this like combinatorial explosion of bugs um that you really you know you have no idea you know how to find these bugs you have some maybe a bespoke sort of you know primitive on solana that you don't understand but there's another one aetherium you don't understand there's one on some other chains that you don't understand and what's nice is like you know i'm sort of particularly excited by things like formal verification because you can sort of prove at the protocol

level here's what i want my application to do and here's what i believe is going to happen please tell me if it's going to happen as opposed to you know let me go find every you know nook and cranny of this code base and search for you know what potentially might be the be the error and so if applying those principles to maybe one application one x step is is a lot more sort of secure from a from a defense and depth standpoint um than doing sort of the traditional approach yeah kind of the build ones ship to all the chains model this is the type of tooling we want to build because like liquidity fragmentation is just no option for protocol and building the same code base in five different languages um i think that's we don't need to

debate debate that um that's just unnecessary um amount of work going back to the formal verification idea i mean first of all that's a lot of work to do formal verification across a lot of these things and even with formal verification i feel like i've spoken with people about this where like there are still limitations because there's bugs you can't you can't imagine testing for or something like you still have to have a very good imagination to be able to be sure that everything you've tested for has been tested correctly it sounds almost like a wild west and a bit of like i'm gonna borrow this from the mev language but like this accelerationism where it's like you're just like as long as there's these this chance for a lot

of these exploits people will probably try and it could actually build a much more battle heart in general i just think it's going to be very it like it does sound like there's we're like in for some things in the next little while but hopefully hopefully they are mitigated enough by as much testing as possible and then also that at the end of this there is something much much stronger and more understood and that like a lot of these other languages get you know better tooling and all of that yeah i think that i think this sort of like main difference between sort of blockchain development and sort of the web 2 paradigm i mean there are bugs for sure you know in the web 2 paradigm and most of them go unnoticed largely

because you're not really securing assets directly and the difference here is like you write some code and that is directly securing let's say you know in the case of wormhole at some point like four billion dollars um and so you have you know the potential you know the the risk uh is is much much higher and so focus on security has to be much greater and i think that's why a lot of protocols focus on on audits they focus on you know doing defense in depth but you know i think formal verification as you mentioned is definitely difficult it's more complex but it's sort of just another tool in the bag that you can use to you know sort of prove the correctness of your program and i think it'll become more and more important especially for finding smart contract bugs um but not just for smart contract

bugs it's really like proving protocol level security right so interactions between different programs um different modules different libraries um and knowing that this is actually what is supposed to be happening um you know data like moving through you know every library every module every api um correctly yeah that's why we're actually taking the leap of getting a bunch of the wormhole modules formally verified with with a partner i we think like going forward there's just no way around it for something as fundamental and critical as this it just has to happen no matter how complex one quick question i have going back i want to go back to the 19 guardians and the next generation of guardian numbers and the zk because we haven't talked

about that yet but i just want to ask unlike the guardians that are there now do they have any sort of like protective function can they halt stuff can they freeze anything like do they also in a way currently act as like a backstop so these guardians um just like in a normal blockchain network if they shut down they can halt the system or if it's sufficiently large number of them so one-third shuts down they can halt the system um this is not explicitly programmed into the protocol but in actually in the case of that exploit that is what happened oh you were able to stop it basically to say ah within just a couple minutes um the team had detected what

happened and um the guardians had been informed and the guardians verified and then individually shut decided to shut down their notes preventing further damages to the system and i think this was an amazing like showcase of how well the community functions and i mean within 24 hours the system was operational again i think we're quite proud about the the incident response process there and how well the processes worked you know that as a validator like we always talk about these these there's always talks about how what what to do in these crisis cases how to collaborate how people have exchanged numbers and how how you can page um all of them in an instant and sometimes and like in in cases like these this is what needs to

happen and there needs to be community consensus in this case it worked out like perfectly you could say and they all coordinated to like do governance and do an upgrade fixing the bug within just a few hours and shutting down within just a couple minutes individually verified no central kill switch or anything so this was like the 19 guardian said okay we're gonna halt the chain to prevent further damage what was happening on your side like what was what were you what was it like in that room um or is it were you in the same office one whole team particularly quite distributed um all across the world so like the drainage of funds was quickly detected we have an internal process so this is part of like doing security

right um these things can still happen but you have a process in place um even for the worst case as unlikely as you think it is um so there was a process around someone taking the lead and owning this um essentially this incident a war room being opened up all people being paged woken up like no matter what the time was i remember i was just playing a game with like a murder mystery game with my friends that night turned into true crime but um we got all pulled in within minutes after this happened and made decisions to like inform like ping the guardians have them verify that there was indeed an incident so they can individually make the decision to then shut down if they think it's the right decision and

then it was just a very constructive process of like how can we like what was the actual bug how can we fix the bug how can we prevent further damages um and i think it overly like i'm quite proud about like the performance of the team and how quickly we've been able to resolve and deal with the situation despite the financial damages cost did you find out who it is um no this is this is still unclear investigations are ongoing oh wow did they use any sort of ck related mixers so far um the original funding came through tornado cache um despite that i can't really comment got it hmm well i guess we'll keep an eye on that

the thing that i you know felt like when having you on the show one of the thoughts i had and i actually didn't know this as a fact but i assumed given the development of all of these you know interoperability solutions i've had like axillary on i've had nomad on like i've had you know i've been talking to these other non-bridge x bridge interoperability whatever they're called you know interoperability solutions and basically i got the sense like wormhole is most definitely going to be thinking about this even though i didn't know that as a fact i figured like you must be looking into new models new ways to think about bridging these assets without the guardian model so tell me a little bit about what work you're

working on you'd sort of mention some of the threshold cryptography stuff but like let's go further into that yep maybe maybe starting from the like just high level business perspective of the the wormhole approach the normal approach is always one of like an organic um kind of development as the space matures and as technologies mature and become viable and while technologies are not ready yet we try to like always provide the best possible interface um to developers and to users so the way the wormhole messaging api is built is that it totally abstracts away the back end so when you use walmart as a developer to build a cross-chain application um just use the portal to make your asset a cross-chain asset when you do that you never inter like you

never see the 19. you never see a multi-sig you never see any of that and you're never going to see threshold signatures and at the same time you're never going to see ck proofs this is happening essentially on the back end is fully abstracted away from the interface that developers and and users use so that was the core making it modular and plugable would you also you wouldn't see any delay you wouldn't like have to wait for signing to happen or something like that yeah it would it would only get faster i think with with like potentially like actually speeding up ck that's another topic we can we can dive into that we're like heavily working on um but yeah this is essentially like the focus there and and as we're making that um we obviously like there's no way

around trustless we we see that when two chains these like the the middlemen the signers the multi-stick participants guardians they are only there because there's currently no way for the two chains to verify each other but fundamentally they're trying to step in as a midterm solution to that but ultimately um we kind of go where cosmos started um three four five quite a bunch of years now ago um and uh with what ibc is which is like clients verifying um where the chains actually verify each other and establish direct trust relationships um and the only way we can get there no trust in middlemen only trust in the chains you use we need to go and use zero knowledge

proof light clients and and zero knowledge proofs for the reason like you could run light lines without your knowledge proofs but there's the aspect you already mentioned of like it's extremely expensive imagine relaying every single solana slot to to ethereum um you would probably occupy most of block space and that would be quite expensive so zk less for the like zero knowledge part in zero knowledge being privacy but zero knowledge in hey i can compress i can prove something without giving you all the data and this is where this comes in where we can either do like if we prove amina we can actually use the full full state proven execution proof or if we have an ethereum we do a like line proof

of the header chain are you influenced or inspired by plumo and the work that they did over at cello because there it's like the light client kobe who is the co-host of the previous episode uh and who i work with at the validator plumo being this this compressed like line are you are you using this model or is it is it somewhat different um it's it's the plumo is amazing because they saved our team a lot of time and implementation because for a chain like like cello we can just like essentially reuse a lot of the ck um work having it on the dk like line compression that has been done there cool um but and it's it's a similar architecture right at the end of the day like like it provides us like a basis to see like you know here's how we

should think about the architecture um but obviously there's gonna be some things that change um one of the sort of difficult things about using zero knowledge producing in this case we're more concerned with with the you know compression as centric mentioned like as opposed to the zero knowledgeness i mean yeah that's something that we want to add potentially have as an add-on that can be sort of enable privacy infrastructure for wormhole but we're really interested in doing like sort of these light client proofs where we're verifying like we're essentially creating these state proofs and then bi-directionally the bi-directional state proofs to allow different chains to verify each other directly and so that's that's the ultimate goal and and i think like obviously there's going to be a lot of challenges with this and i think one of the main ones is that the consensus of

different chains is quite different and these mechanisms um are quite different so integrating also which curves are allowed that's another thing that we should definitely you know sort of talk about and that's actually one thing that i've been more and more interested in in terms of like standardizing curves you know across different chains i mean a lot of uh you know chains even right now like for example the evm doesn't support you know pairing friendly curves really um and you have you know bn254 which is sort of the standard but it's not very efficient for for uh verifying you know zero knowledge proofs uh and once we get to a standard where we have these pairing friendly curves where we have like you know some of the other cycles of lift occurs that are necessary for recursive proofs uh that that will be extremely important to like the

adoption of zk proofs as as like a cryptographic primitive as opposed to something that's this kind of bespoke area of research that we're sort of interested in because it's a cool technology uh supported by a lot of interesting math but then are you waiting for that are you sort of waiting for like a standard across chains of which curves are allowed and then you create a version of plumo that you would kind of like implement there like would you implement it would you build it out generally i think jump takes the approach of like really kind of pushing the forefront of technology as opposed to waiting for things to happen so like we've been actively you know speaking to uh a few folks in the ecosystem i you know i recently like had a conversation with with the solana folks in like anatoly about like potentially

supporting uh some of these pre-compiles you know that are necessary for this stuff and we want to leverage dk proofs because we think that they're they're very important and that they can allow us to do things that are more interesting uh than sort of the traditional sort of cryptographic primitives but we still need some tooling around it we need the ability to even write circuits efficiently right like there's a bunch of different proof systems out there now like you know plonk nova like nova is a recent one but interacting with them like you know like arc works for example like is is a pretty standard library at this point but doesn't support more novel proof systems you know even plant support it really isn't there in art works right although there are initiatives to build

that out i know like plonk is has a crew like like manta for example has recently launched like open zk lib and like the folks there and they want to make a higher level abstraction that allows you to interact with different systems from the same uh language and so that like a lot of these initiatives are very very important i think like as we spend more time on this tech like we should be thinking about tooling and and like part of the the work that i at least want to see you know that comes out of the applied zk work that we're doing is like really digging into how do we build this tooling and make it more effective so that we can leverage the technology in a in a really sophisticated um and really robust way as opposed to just going after some of them and not worrying and

you know outsourcing some of the tooling work to other people um we're really like focused on on on building this out like like we we don't like to wait around for other people we like to do it ourselves yeah it's a very it's a very jump approach of you've you've seen that i think both wormhole and pip are an example of jump culture in the sense of they're like throughout venture and and trading market making we get exposure to pretty much everything out there and then when we see a problem where we think why is no one solving this then we first try to find the people and and work with them but if there's really pressing issues where we see ways we can contribute as wormhole being able to like solve the interoperability problem or pith of like why why am i only getting data that some

validity data scraped up of google finance um and not the data directly from the sauce then like people like just start building and applying some of the research i think on on this research side like jumps always been super research heavy um has like crazy amounts of hardware expertise not not just jump crypto it's always been like you know a very research oriented firm yeah um you know from the hft side as well it's like go ahead like okay we're just gonna build it or we're just gonna work with others to try to make it happen if it's not there yet and i think this is the approach where like largely taking on the ck front of just hiring the best talent um and trying to build solution bringing the best people out of the traditional side of the

company in to help solve these hot problems going back to that earlier point we had made about when is something ready like how are you gauging like so you're you've talked a little bit about how like individual chains potentially need to allow for certain circuits in order to deploy some sort of standardized light client compressed light client using zk is there something else in the actual proving systems or like the ecosystem is there some point that you're waiting for to do it because it sounds like right now it's too early like it's in your research kind of trajectory and you're hiring a bet and you're probably going to do like test implementations but it doesn't sound like you're going to like

enable this next month it sounds like it's a ways this is much more much more long-term yeah what's the point where you feel like it's gelled enough to actually implement so yeah so i think like one thing that i'm sort of specifically waiting for is like having like sort of pairing friendly curves um like support for pairing friendly curves on on every chain that um is really the the moat here for for actually deploying uh zero knowledge proofs because you can't really efficiently verify without these uh pairing friendly curves and so once once that happens like i think we'll be in a good position to actually deploy zero noise proofs on on many different chains as opposed to just uh you know one chain that you know that supports it right now

um and one thing that i would really like to see is like support for like recursive uh you know zero person in that case you would need sort of these these cyclic uh elliptic curves where um and that's you know that that's a bit more complicated i mean mina for example does support these curves like you know the the pasta curves is there known yeah i almost feel like and this maybe this show can help this a little bit but like getting folks who understand this to start sort of speaking up in different ecosystems as to the need for it because it's they shouldn't really be controversial they're just like things that would really make you know connecting to other chains potentially zk friendly you could actually use zk to do it yeah i think i think this is actually maybe a maybe a

good segue because we've sort of been working on the hardware side as well and i think um there there is a sort of community initiative around you know accelerating zero knowledge proof systems which is it's known as the z prize and there's quite a few number of people working on it and i think this is probably one of the first moments i think in sort of this zero knowledge history where like a bunch of different participants in the space are coming together and like trying to standardize uh things and so there's been a lot of discussion for example on like uh when actually designing the prizes like which curves should be used like what is the standard here there have been you know a number of different discussions and and people have finally sort of settled on a few curves and i think like once we have

this collaboration this like communication between different parties like we're going to be able to actually uh people will know like this is what this is the courage that we need to support and so if there have been like some standard some synonymization across this like like with the merge like e2 is going to support like bls 12 381 like there's going to be a support for like three seventies that's true i actually i i thought they were um i might be wrong but i but i i heard that um i know at least for the z prize for example like a lot of the prizes are sort of settled on bls 12 377 and 381 and so at least there's been some discussion about that which which i am very excited about um supposed to you know just using random curves that's awesome

and actually yeah zebra that's so cool to think of that initiative c prize is like pushing the standardization because actually there there is a group called zk proofs who's been doing standardization and research work but i i did always get the sense i think they did too that it was like if they were doing this at such an early stage there'd be like new protocols coming out new systems being developed and it was like kind of hard to say what the baseline is at that point and it's it's kind of funny to think that it's through this uh like competition basically like funding the hardware acceleration just sort of forces the issue being like no no now we really have to make a decision competition is a great way to motivate it's a great motivator that's cool

and thought about it that way um you had also mentioned using zk in pith is that used in a different way yeah so so it's actually i think pretty similar in the sense that like right now the way the way pith works is that these you know you have these set of publishers who sign um prices that they want to attest to and you know on solana it's it's verified using a multi-sig approach um and again we want to you know reduce the cost of this uh so we can we can actually leverage threshold cryptography again as a potential uh way to aggregate the signatures um so that we're only verifying one signature and then we want to actually potentially use uh this is also obviously just a an active area of research we haven't this is not something that's going to come out you

know next month but it's something that that we're actively exploring and leveraging like zero knowledge produces a way to maintain state off chain as opposed to uh you know maintaining state on on solana imagine if you want to take you you have fifth data it it essentially it gets aggregated in solana so you are somewhat implicitly trusting solana validators besides the data source you want to go cross chain then you trust the proof um in addition um off of the aggregate there and here you can essentially eliminate every single like middleman between the like source of the price component so individual price price contributions of the participants and like you're kind of cross chain

native because the moment you have a proof of an aggregate price that is portable a zk proof is very portable and you can even like compress multiple of them into proof of proofs so imagine the like that both on the wormhole side a proof of the world of like here's a state a proof of proof of the state proofs of all of blockchain and there's a proof of proof of like 200 or 2 000 different like instruments that are getting priced and you submit that single proof to the chain um cost of one transaction one proof verification and then you merely do a very cheap inclusion proof to get an individual price this is where we want to go and then like as these proofs get faster like we can have data

arbitrarily and yeah that's that's the cool part it's that really like you can scale to as many number of publishers as you want you can scale to the number of prices as you want um there's really no like limit other than the verification cost on the chain itself and so that's really the approach like there's this divergence that's really nice in these proof systems in the computational complexity of generating the bruce and the complexity of verifying so that's where we really get like the cost savings yeah so it's pretty amazing you can get like really crazy frequencies of updates and you have no cost of scaling to two more products which is like the big goal and here in the same way research means we're starting to write circuits we're experimenting

with different proof systems but like a lot of the things we do now like contrary to like a research these are more like mvps that can develop into a full product there's not like a small research team somewhere in the basement of the company this is very much directly next to the product team or sometimes the product teams already working on this and i think a lot of the circuits will be developing like on the wormhole side the light lines there the designs that get written now they are going to be ready for when the technology is there to actually cheaply verify them on chain or verify them on chin at all so once it's viable like we can make the move and ship next month we're going to push to make it viable too right like we want to build those those primitives as well yeah we we have

a team working on like fpga hardware acceleration competing in the z price ourselves besides sponsoring um like trying to push the boundaries wherever possible cool i want to know actually the state of what you just described for the zk pith stuff piff am i saying it right yeah like what state are we talking you sort of say you're next to product but like how far off yeah so i mean i mean we're very new at this at this point where we have sort of like built out a very small like sort of proof of concept like very you know very small smart get to do like signature verification uh we've obviously spent a lot of time like i've been writing quite a few like design docs on this uh trying to actually come up with a an architecture that makes sense we've

explored you know a bunch of different things from zero knowledge proofs to you know creating a pedophile network that's asynchronous using threshold cryptography using threshold cryptography with ck proofs to make it curve compatible so that you could sort of wrap up the entire state in a proof and then uh you know basically sign it with the threshold with threshold cryptography so you can actually verify it on chain so there's a bunch of different uh you know architectures that we were actually just talking before this about this um and like how can we make you know it compatible right now i think there's a lot of different options that we're exploring right now we just haven't uh we still need to go through the process of like rigorous design and rigorous sort of the process of actually engineering something so it's it's gonna be it's gonna be definitely be uh some

work but it's very interesting yeah something that's gonna come fairly fast is uh right now providers stream straight to solana and provide that prices there in order to even do the zk prices we need a peer-to-peer network where everyone kind of gossips and publishes the individual price components and starting from that point some of these pocs might even be able to roll out to some chains and actually use that so they might actually be viable like alpha but usable in the real world and this is kind of amazing because like no matter like what chain in the world or no matter what network as long as enough people are publishing data you can push it on chain and you you totally avoid these like certain points

of failures and we want to get there as fast as possible so we're going to like take an incremental approach here and with piv i think that's more possible than with a wormhole where kind of in order to really put it into practice all the chains need to support it um but with pith we can take an incremental approach yeah it's definitely it's definitely nice in that in that right i think like one of the things that that i really want to highlight here is that like we want utilities like like we're fundamentally building utilities for the ecosystem with like with wormhole and python and we want these utilities to be sort of like decoupled from each other right like we don't want utilities to be sort of coupled right you don't want your electricity to be coupled with your gas right like you know if you lose your

gas you might lose your water like that that's not great for your house so like for this ecosystem we want you know oracles are our fundamental primitive of the ecosystem and so our cross-strain bridges and generalized message passing uh we have like you know layer ones like solana right like we want to make sure that there's no sort of like single point of failure there's no there's no domino effect so like when for example when something happens to pith like it shouldn't affect solana when something happens to solana it shouldn't affect pith um there should be a fundamental independence between them and that's really what we're trying to achieve with this and sort of zero knowledge became a way that we were sort of exploring to sort of like start decoupling cool i want to wrap up on sort of a last question bringing back the sort of

future vision you have for like let's let's assume that in a short amount of time period friendly curves are like supported everywhere you're able to do the zk model would you remove the guardians in that case or would you kind of keep something like that and this is more of a question of like bridge stuff and this also by the way comes back to the point about ust like the ability to stop something when it's going out into the ecosystem when maybe it's toxic yeah there's definitely a case to case to be made for for keeping some set of guardians i think like one one thing that i think we were talking about as well at some point was like if you want to make a protocol truly

decentralized you want to make the participants of the protocol who are most invested in it uh to have the ability to sort of provide their their resources in a moment when there's like catastrophic failure right so like yeah figuring out what these failure modes are and then saying like who is going to be involved in ensuring that uh if this doesn't happen or we can stop what's happening and i think like in that case we'd wanna instead of like you know wormhole arbitrarily picking who these guardians are it would be more of the network picking who they you know who would be who would be responsible for this failure mode is is more of a is more of the question you kind of picture it being governance right like an almost a vote some something that would decide which assets maybe get stopped or

included and this is very much on the portal side on the on the token bridge side they were actually also moving away from the bridge and i like calling it like just uh essentially a portal to create cross-chain assets um okay because fundamentally with one click you have a representation of your asset across all of these chains that can freely move between them fully permissionless and without any whitelist or anything so that's pretty cool but one thing we're thinking about there is um particularly for hideout order applications on top of one more like the portal you'd want to have a council that is governance selector that has stake that can like two of them can halt it for five minutes three of them can halt it for 15 minutes and then if they halt it and governance

decides that was not legitimate halt they can get slashed for that amount and ideally that bond they put up would be larger than what you would recently reasonably expect mev to be by halting uh token transfers on a particular link i think a token bridge protocol or tokenization protocol will require this the messaging itself i think there should rarely or never be a case where there needs to be a halt because fundamentally it's just a testing state um and mentioning ust i think usd would have been an example where like there wouldn't have been any reason to stop actually i think this has been one of the strongest days for for wormhole because wormhole met facilitated pretty much all of the ust

transfers across chains and walmart facilitated a lot of the um before st if transfers in and out of anchor because they'd been using that as a canonical bridge without any hiccups like record days and volume um but i think the whole team is really proud about like how that like the bridge was able to stand up to what i haven't checked the exact numbers but very likely was record bridge volume are you talking about like when it fell apart and everyone tried to get their assets out um yeah that was probably the most stressful situation a bridge can imagine that your bridge happens to be the bridge that a protocol has chosen as its canonical bridge that is currently falling apart that was racket load in

terms of messages being transferred and value being transferred in a short time this is also why you like the circuit breakers in volume we've been discussing them for a long time but aren't really valuable the last thing you want to happen in the situation is the transfer of ust being cut off um so this is why like we're like extremely happy that the protocol like held up so well and i think it's only only a sign of like how this technology becomes more and more robust over time and can actually handle this type of load because like what we want is that really like big assets in the space to become cross chain assets and i think they can only reasonably do so if they know the bridge protocol will even be

able to handle like the craziest situation of stress you could imagine which i think this was pretty much as close as to the extreme as you can get um but full portal market meltdown yeah portal i didn't realize i didn't know you were the canonical bridge to anchor that's wild it was a it was a tough week for a lot of people but i guess it is very good that they didn't feel stuck by that um i know that at some point ibc transfers have i mean they're stopped now from terra to other places in the ecosystem this was super fascinating because here here comes the difference between light clients and this oracle approach because the all of the guardians they run a full terror node um

so like when someone takes over terra consensus and they try to fork off they try to arbitrarily mint coins or something this would be an invalid state transition a light client would still think oh look it's the valid validators that signed this token transfer out so you could print money with the in the wormhole case if they had forked off the chain and taken over the network as there was this crazy inflation you wouldn't have been able to essentially take out like arbitrary amounts um this was obviously a situation where there there was a little war room and people have been discussing like can the bridge fail if like terra gets like taken over by a single validator and in this case it wasn't so there's some interesting

actually considerations when you do just like line proofs and not execution proofs of the actual virtual machine wow i feel like there's so much story time in this i feel like it would be so like these war rooms and like the imagination that people have for like what would happen if and then you have to like map out activity of like millions of people at the same time and try to figure out i mean this is just like simulation but simulation on things that nobody knows yet it's so unmapped it's crazy the best thing is you can have is like good tooling for observability and most importantly it being open source tooling like if there's only people sitting at jump monitoring the protocol something has gone fundamentally wrong there needs

to be tooling for community to individually be able to like see transfers going on detect malicious behavior like i don't want a situation where the jump contributors go to the guardians say shut down your bridge there's something wrong and they would do it i would never want that to be the case and it isn't the case there's always a way to individually verify same as with validators validators in the beginning they did whatever the network told them to like upgrade to this version there's an emergency patch now we've got like security councils coming together verifying the source code changes and actually being these checks and balances and it's the same for the bridges and like this just needs to be supported further because otherwise like this is

the only way this decentralized infrastructure can can really grow further and it seems like the future plans it's we're always looking in that direction like how do we ensure that it's it's distributed and decentralized like it's always in our in the back of our minds yeah cool well i think on that note we can wrap up the episode i want to say thank you so much for coming on and sharing with us the story of jump of wormhole of the applied zk group and the work that you're doing looking forward yeah really appreciate it thanks a lot and uh this has been a great conversation i enjoyed it thanks really enjoyed it cool and i want to say thank you to the podcast editor henrik the podcast producer tanya chris who worked on research for this episode

and to our listeners thanks for listening