Episode 249: Impact of Tornado Cash: a Builders Perspective

Transcript

[Music] welcome to zero 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 [Music] in this episode we once again explore the Ripple effects caused by the ofac sanctions against tornado cash where my previous episode covered the events from a legal perspective in this one my guest Martin cobleman and I chat about the impact this has had on builders in the community specifically we look at how

the tornado action helped reveal centralizing forces in ethereum we talk about compliance over compliance censorship and the need for decentralization now before we kick off I just want to share an announcement for one of our partners from the last ZK Summit anoma anoma has recently released a new white paper that better describes their system and architecture it also shows how all the awesome cryptographic libraries they've been developing fit together find this paper at inoma.net papers we are adding the link in the show notes so be sure to check it out now Tanya will share a little bit about this week's sponsor today's episode is sponsored by Elio alio is a new layer 1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of ethereum the privacy of zcash and the scalability of a

roll-up if you're interested in building private applications then check out Elio's programming language called Leo Leo enables non-cryptographers to harness the power of zkps to deploy decentralized exchanges hidden information games regulated stable coins and more visit Leo dashlang.org to start building that's Leo dashlang.org you can also join Elio's incentivized testnet 3 by downloading and running a snark OS node no signup is necessary to participate for questions join their Discord at elio.org Discord so thanks again Elio now here is Anna's interview with Martin from gnosis [Music] today I'm here with Martin koppelman the

co-founder of gnosis I want to say welcome to the show Martin hey nice to be here last time you were on the show we actually talked about cow Swap and the work that you guys were doing around that topic this is over a year ago today the goal of the show is to talk more about like tornado we're going to look at like the impact on the ecosystem this is kind of why I wanted to bring you on but I definitely also want to hear about the update on gnosis like what's happened since you were you know last on the show I know a lot has gone on so it'd be great to hear from you about that yeah maybe to follow up kind of from from the last episode so last time we talked about um yeah back in the day it was probably

still called knowledge protocol then kind of was turned into into car swap so Kyle swap now or call protocol is now its own project and became independent from gnosis and we did this with second very large project the safe just nowadays starts to save down and release the save token and and similar with with car swap so we had this model that we incubated other projects as part of gnosis but eventually decided okay they should be their own things and they kind of should give back to gnosis and to know the token holders by allocating a good chunk usually around 20 of their new tokens to the nurses down so in a

way those from my perspective those projects are now kind of friends of gnosis are kind of still associated with gnosis or kind of tightly coupled to novices but but still their own projects gnosis itself has focused since yeah almost a year now um on gnosis chain so we are running it was previously the X-Type chain and we merged tokens and kind of uh yeah it's now an office chain and our main focus is here um well decentralization and yeah it kind of it connects to the topic so we want to make sure that the application like tornado Cache can securely run on

on Northwest chain so one one big goal is to have a very large and very distributed validator set to really kind of have since this idea of people running a validator at home in all kinds of countries that is yeah the largest priority of nostal chain interesting is gnosis chain like X die I remember that was sort of the first time I'd ever used Bridges we had igoron years ago talking about bridging and it was in context of that project at the time it was actually I don't know what it was it was like a lock unlocked two smart contracts was it a multi-sig yeah exactly okay so that is also kind of a nice connection to zero

knowledge proofs because we are uh yeah in in the process of upgrading those Majestic Bridges to zero knowledge based Bridges and we are yeah working together with the team succinct labs and there are a few more teams that are doing this as well that were able to create light clients as your knowledge proof so you can run a light client of ethereum in gnosis chain and more importantly or you can run light client off noses chain in ethereum yeah verify it with a yeah zero knowledge proof and so that's how we want to upgrade our bridges I always understood um the other way like the sort of trying to do a ZK like client on

the ethereum side has been really challenging why doesn't everybody already do that yeah it is this challenge because it is challenging exactly okay so no so first of all we are in gnosis chain we are using the same consensus as ethereum so we also have a beacon chain so as soon as we were able to implement a light client of that Beacon chain then we kind of solve both ways uh because yeah in a way it's the same challenge it would be different if you want to bridge whatever to I don't know Solana or what something like that then you would need to within ethereum verify Solana consensus which might be possible I might be not I'm not sure but kind of

here we just need to verify in a way within ethereum we need to verify ethereum consensus or well no such chain consensus but that is the same that is also Beacon chain so it's also ethereum consensus interesting because they have the same data structure on each each side it may it's easier to do um yeah or at least at least you kind of only have to do it for I mean again I think it's potentially possible for most consensus algorithms but the good thing if you do it for ethereum you can also do it certainly for for an office chain interesting were you kind of waiting for the merge to happen like does this only work or does you have POS I think the concept would could be applied to proof of work but of course it does make sense

to to spend I mean this is still this will still take some time to kind of audit and kind of to because it's a cure and so on and of course that effort we uh well obviously we anticipated proof of stay coming so of course we directly put the effort for proof of stake we are doing our merch as well so kind of still the right now nose change is still on the old consensus uh algorithm the kind of X Type consensus algorithm but we are doing kind of in a similar way we're doing our merge and then we will have two chains that both have a beacon chain ethereum and also chain and then we can build this nice uh light client bridge between those two that is so cool this this really does sound like it's going to require a full episode let's do that

when the merge when your merge is over and we can compare merges I feel like that would be cool all right now let's kind of move the topic over to tornado yeah um I think at this point you know we're we're recording this about six weeks seven weeks after it initially happened um this is very on brand for the show I often like to record things once time has passed because then we get to do kind of a historic look back at the impact instead of trying to guess I know in those early days there was a lot of hot takes and you like I mentioned had created this thread that really kind of put them together and and shared a lot of the sentiment

from that like what what was your feeling maybe as it first was happening where did you think this was going to go uh yeah I mean I think it was immediately clear that this is a challenging moment for ethereum and that that yeah in my view it would uh or it would really be a test towards uh how decentralized ethereum is and and or maybe this perspective is or my perspective is ethereum and my view should be this Global neutral yeah settlement layer and how easy is it to uh temper with that neutrality because I mean it's of course the sanctions are one thing but if it is possible to easily kind of block some addresses then

at least technically you could do the very same thing uh let's say you have two competing dexes and and one wants to kind of I don't know kick the other out of the network so if it's possible to to kind of just easily say okay those kind of contracts or those kind of addresses get censored then it's certainly at least thinkable that that is applied kind of outside the kind of context of sanctions just in the case of like businesses competing and in my view if that is possible uh then again it it really it really questions this hope to have this neutral platform do you feel like it just like it showed us examples of how censorship happened maybe for the first time like really in our face and

like what I saw at least was like people started to have thought exercises of what could happen and through that we learned like oh this is how one could censor all of ethereum yeah and and I mean I unfortunately it suddenly stopped that what could happen I mean it pretty quickly happened so yeah we are now uh I mean as we speak we are now in a situation where at least or where we're roughly I would say 50 of all the blocks that are built uh are uh censored or kind of don't include transactions uh to um yeah to those sanctioned addresses and it's not at all here that this number will remain at 50

they are quite strong indications or they're quite strong forces that that this number might very well uh increase I mean originally I know there was some some ideas around potentially the validators being those that censor um especially I mean this was sort of interesting timing too because this happened before the merge right and there was like about six weeks left before the merge was going to happen and then yeah there's this thought like as we go to proof of stake does this make it more dangerous like if it was still proof of work would we be able to like be more anti-censorship or more censorship resistant um do you think that some of the narrative around that was tied to that merge like do you think it was almost

folks who didn't want to do the merge who might have been very loud about this I think it's it is interwined with the question of of proof stake or proof of work but it's certainly not that that would certainly be a mistake to say it's only you um it's only a problem of of uh proof of stake so you absolutely had the same problems or similar problems with proof of work I I think it's too early to to say whether uh proof of stake or proof of work is more censorship resistant or leads to more centralization I have long advocated that uh proof of stake can can actually lead to more decentralized chain

at the current point I would probably have to admit that it's more nuanced so I I still see clear advantages in proof of stake and and to name the names the most obvious one I can run I do run a validator and then that's actually not too hard I mean it's effort but it's absolutely doable uh kind of the bar for me to previously kind of run a mining rig would be much much higher so that is kind of one of the main arguments for a proof of stake kind of to lower the entry bar for kind of self-validators in a way compared to setting up a mining rig um but yes there are certainly also

elements that yeah are problematic problematic in in improved stake and just the name one is kind of this coincidence that that now kind of the main validators can very easily and be a custodial exchanges so previously kind of the miners of course had a had had quite some centralizing role or well I mean there were only a handful of large mining pools and kind of even maybe even fewer basic manufacturers but then at least they were distinct entities from the central from exchanges so it was it was a factor of of decentralization but

at least you had kind of many players and now kind of in a way the mining pools have become the exchanges which is certainly a problem for for decentralization yeah that kind of all that complexity is yeah over or okay kind of um in parallel we had this shift from or can kind of the shift towards proposal Builder separation and that is not and people mistakes is sometimes it's not necessarily a proof of work proof of stake issue it's just the thing thing that doesn't matter whether you're the The Miner uh the mining pool or the validator but whoever is supposed to build the block we have now this concept and that was previously possible but it

just became now more popular that you Outsource kind of this actual activity of of collecting transactions into a block to a builder and let the Builder do it for you and that is interesting because the Builder might be able to produce a block that kind of it extracts more fees or more value and that is that is something again this could be done in both work proof's sake but but it just recently became very very um yeah prominent and now kind of the second force of centralization that you have potentially just a small number of those builders that actually decide uh how and when transactions get included into blocks

interesting I actually there's a whole episode we did with the team from flashbots uh just a few months ago and this like in that case we talked about this PBS or right but is it proposer Builder separation and actually how that works I think the Builder in this case is sort of those Mev yeah Bots right those are the folks that you yeah or the is that the finders The Searchers or the builders I'm sort of thinking on that actually previously it was called Searchers um yeah and previously it was possible to kind of just um yeah kind of find so-called bundles so kind of small sets of transactions that would extract some

value but the rest of the block was still um built by um the validators now kind of the dominant model has switched to builders where kind of this Searcher is now a builder and actually builds a whole block and that is in my view a big centralization Force because previously it was enough to kind of um be a specialist in in one small area and as long as you were now you can combine roles right or you have but you have to combine roles you have to combine roads because you only win it's not enough to kind of say I I know about this particular dexes and I can extract some Arbitrage here you need to propose a full block so you need to know about

everything to kind of in the end have blocks that that is is winning um and yeah the consequence is that currently very few Builders win almost all blocks and for some reasons those Builders have decided to not include uh tornado transactions for example yeah and maybe to explain how that happened like this is because of them using specialized Mev software right where like the Mev the like the censorship is actually happening at the level of the team that's building some of the software that they're running right it's not them individually choosing to be censoring yes and no so so there are

again two layers so there are builders that actually build those full blocks and they they send their blocks to so-called relays and currently there are a handful of relays um five five to seven and some of those relays including the most prominent one by flashbots themselves uh those relays sometimes require to to censor so kind of flashbots would not accept the block that that includes a sanctioned transaction so kind of on that level you can have censorship but even if there is another relayer that is not censoring as long as the Builder still decides or the most successful Builder decides to

censor then even if you ask all all the relays then you will still pick the one that that pays the most so as flashbots coincidentally also builds a successful builder then even if you ask non-censoring kind of relays you will still if you just go by who pays most you will still in most cases pick the the flashbots built this is really interesting where I know that initially so going kind of back to those initial conversations like it really was this idea I felt like the focus tended to be on the validate or custodial relationship I actually wanted to find that a little bit broader for anyone who's not aware like when you talk about it and being more separated

in the past I mean I sort of understand this because we have the ZK validators independent non not not attached to a custodial exchange validator but maybe it's good for us to understand like what that separation used to be and how it's more tied yeah so in proof of work kind of the the most successful mining pools just happen to be I mean usually they were miners initially themselves so the dominant mining pools were separate from yeah kind of centralized exchanges now of course what happened is that uh that centralized exchanges well happen to have a lot of well either kind of deposited from users so they started offering this very convenient service to

users to say your user allow us to to use your user and we will we will use it to validate for you and kind of give you some of our most of the uh of of the rewards and of course that leads to a situation where quite a significant percentage of the current validator set of ethereum comes from centralized exchanges exactly so those are of course now in a quite powerful position because I mean exchanges always have been in a powerful position um but now they got an additional power that they also built a good percentage should be currently around 30 40 percent of of the validators on ethereum are

coming from centralized exchanges and this may be for listeners who have tokens on exchanges it's sort of for them to understand like when you just say like staking rewards if that's like an option usually that's just going to the validators that are run by these exchanges so this is where we talk about about that sort of centralizing factor it's it's the ease of use it's easier ux you don't have to run your own infra you're not I mean in other networks where you would delegate through some other interface you don't have to do that it's all done for you I mean one interesting thing about ethereum though is because it's like there's no delegation right each like there's only 32 each per validator um do you feel like the average user

still has some alternative if they don't want to participate in this kind of centralization but they don't want to run their own infrastructure because it's kind of hard to do like a full I know you're running one and it's like easy for you but I don't think it's like easy for everyone to do 32 eth on their own and no of course of course and and in all fairness it is even if the 32 East would not be the problem and uh just a small advertisement on noses chain you can do it with one genome that's currently 150 you can become a validator but but even then I have to admit uh kind of running a validator is still it's not a ton of work but yeah In fairness it is work so you need to kind of check at least the from time to time

and from time to time you will need to do something what are the Alternatives the Alternatives there are still kind of there's there's a spectrum so kind of if you don't want to do do a centralized exchange the slightly better thing you can do is use something like a liquid staking provider yeah Lido is the most prominent one I'm also there somewhat critical because actually Lido yeah also has now roughly a third of of all ether so I also consider that the force of of centralization but they certainly I would say they are certainly in a way better than centralized exchanges because they try to do it or they largely have set it up non-custodial so

they don't really control but they don't control the user and they actually try to then work with with many validators they are not even available there to themselves they kind of just delegate to yeah I think 38 and entities who are in other jurisdictions too probably like a little bit more around the world right right then kind of the third thing uh that then kind of if you want to go more decentralized than there there are solutions like rocketpool where the requirement is stricter or it it's kind of the number of validators is is much higher so rockpool has a permissionless model so in in Lido kind

of you need to be selected as a validator so at the end it's yeah professional entities or that do it in rocket pool you can anyone can become a validator but to do that you have to um yeah bring half of the at least to bring 16 Easter yourself uh so it yeah it's certainly more decentralized but it also scales slower because kind of people cannot just dump a lot of eser in there you always need kind of the same amount of ether coming from people who actually stake themselves so again if those are kind of maybe the three the three steps in the force uh the most decentralized thing would of course then be to run

your validator so I want to like the reason I wanted to clarify that too though is like you just sort of mentioned there's sort of these two places where censorship can happen if the validators censor like could something like Lido do the censorship or not really would it still need to be the validators that they've delegated to actively doing it right so so in that sense there are three layers so kind of there's one maybe the the Lido or kind of the lighter is maybe the exception and I would say Lido has of course soft Powers about over their uh validators because they can simply say as soon as the validator doesn't do specific things and the most obvious thing is is I mean if the validator would for example

funnel the the uh the rewards to themselves instead of to to kind of Lido theoretically validators could do that but of course there is a soft power relationship where Lido can I mean stop using this validator essentially um and there are some details around kind of when this is exactly possible but but anyhow so then the second the second layer are the validators themselves and they generally they are in control however unfortunately many have kind of chosen to give up this control about whether or not to censor by using a builder so if you are a validator and you basically

just say I blindly kind of I mean so how does it look like if you use a builder then at some point it's your turn to build a block but now you're just querying this API and this API gives you a hash in return so you don't even know kind of what block you are building you you don't even know really whether you're censoring or not you kind of just get this this hash and you sign it blindly and yeah as it happens right now kind of this hash will most likely come from builders that is censoring so effectively you are in a way participating in in censorship this is interesting and so like actually just to Define this little deeper so the custodial exchanges are they running Builders are they actually doing sort of

vanilla validation usually from what I have seen it's to mix so they don't run I mean they don't run Builders but they and this is all kind of still unfolding so as far as I've seen it cracking is using the as far as I can tell basically building their own blocks after running a vanilla validator uh while coinbase has at least started to use Builders so flash pods I see so custodial exchanges might also be using this software but not always and I guess it will depend the liquid staking validators are those often running their own Builders as well they are never running their own Builders but they they amazing Builders or their validators to use Builders okay

and yeah so so at least at least for Lido uh for Lido they kind of made uh yeah kind of rules for validators what they are supposed to do and yes they are supposed to use Builders which essentially means profit maximization because that's really what what you care about yeah I mean this is what's so interesting in teasing this out is you are seeing like the Ripple effects of one action on like maybe unlike other other kind of Concepts or like when people have talked about the censorship resistance like it was to me at least like somewhat theoretical but here you can actually follow like here's the sanction here's sanctioned addresses these groups followed suit and actually

set like censored them and how does that actually impact overall the ecosystems ability to censor or like censorship resistance based basically like and so where would you say we're at now like what percentage like you sort of mentioned this 50 is would you say majority of this is because of the use of builders and it is are you saying that like 50 of the validators that are out there are now using Builders and that's why that's happened or are there like various forms of censorship happening uh it's not yet 100 clear I mean it's just empirically clear that that a lot of validators have to have started using Builders and it's empirically clear that uh most of the

time that's uh blocked by flashpoints okay um now it's it's unclear whether flashbots is just the most success most successful uh Builder um and kind of just the most profitable and people just care about the profits and therefore they always choose flashpots because they are the most profitable or they specifically choose flashbots because they censor that's not necessarily clear by just observing the current state didn't flashbots also release sort of an open source version where you could change that so like wouldn't people be able to be running the same thing without that censorship again again there are there are other relays

um that do not censor and they are they are somewhat being used So currently 20 of the blocks that use Builders uh come from other relays that don't I mean that some of them also censor but not all um but I mean that's not enough because again you need also the the successful Builders and if the most successful Builders are the kind of the most one of the most successful is by flashbots themselves so uh so as long as that runs only on flashpods and you again ask all relays even those that don't censor you will still pick pick the one that's that sensors because it's the most profitable I see so this this impact I mean so far what we've talked about primarily has

been this act of censorship in what you're even saying a lot of it sounds like since a lot of these actors are it's Game Theory they're looking for the biggest profit like they're not you know necessarily acting out of trying to be compliant or not how do you think things could actually be changed to be more decentralized like to be more censorship resistance in in the way it's built right now like do you would you almost call for like a competitor of flashbots to not be flashbots and not be doing that but be as successful like is that kind of what you'd need I I would Instead try to to focus on solutions that makes this this building process uh less relevant so in my view

um decentralization would come from a lot of validators that actually produce their blocks themselves I feel like having a large number of validators that is supposed to help against censorship resistance because you you say can if you can't censor them all but if this large set of validators all just uses three Builders then yeah all you need to do is censor those three Builders so in my view what we need to come to is to make it possible to build your own block without and of course the the downside currently I mean of course it is possible to build your own block but yes currently it is very likely more profitable to outsources so in my View kind of One Core goal should be in a way

to reduce the Mev um so to reduce the amount of money you can get extra by building the Block in a specific way and yeah there are a handful of or there are plenty of proposals uh out there how to do it and they would all kind of tighten the freedom of how you can block So currently you have a ton of Freedom so in your blog you usually have two 300 transactions and there are absolutely no rules so you for example you don't have to sort them by gas fees you don't I mean you can really order them in any way every rule every additional rule of how to how to build the block would at least reduce the freedom and therefore

reduce this kind of additional yeah leverage you have in extracting mov although I'm going to throw back to that episode we did because what we talked about there was like using threshold decryption or like some sort of you know cryptographic way to reduce Mev and what they were saying was like you can do that but it's like whack-a-mole like yo bump that down and Mev will pop up somewhere else yeah I don't buy that so I mean I mean I mean you won't get it to zero but you can absolutely reduce it and do you feel like there's not is there not enough action on that do you feel like people have sort of like accepted Mev as like a fun New ecosystem and they're not really trying to fix it I mean it's also quite profitable yeah

interesting so I I would like to kind of hear from you sort of other Ripple effects that you've seen since that ofac action and since since the community has started to react yeah I mean it was certainly interesting to see how different different players reacted one one thing I found uh quite problematic was that also kind of some RPC providers have started to censor even kind of requesting or kind of requesting state of a contract which yeah which in my view is is crazy that's almost like saying kind of you go to Issa scan and and it would say you can't you we we don't give you the answer of

what's the state of this contract is because it's a it's a censored one I saw one RPC provider yeah if you would include kind of just the address of a yeah kind of one of those sensor addresses in any transaction so so you wouldn't even necessarily do a transaction to this address you would kind of just do a transaction to another contract that would contain as a payload um this address even then they would would censor that that message because it kind of contained The Forbidden word kind of so it's completely insane because like then it would mean even if you like let's say you wanted to create a blacklist

you wanted to comply and you wanted to create a blacklist so you couldn't do that because because kind of you would need to tell your contract this contract is on The Blacklist and this transaction would not make it Blacklist because it contains this forbidden thing so the sad reality is that um yeah that those news simply caused a panic I would say and I think in many cases uh projects completely overreacted and yeah I mean it's understandable it's kind of yeah the guidance uh was was minimal um there was kind of just this announcement uh and and yeah many of those practical questions were were not answered at all

um I feel like with the little bit guidance coming out from uh from the relevant authorities I would say in many cases project have completely overreacted and have done things that weren't at all required but yeah again it's kind of understandable that if there's uncertainty many decide to better be safe in most cases if you have an ethereum wallet you don't run your own ethereum full node and of course you could and I ideally you would yeah many cases you don't do that but instead you point to to a external node and that is yeah called an RPC provider and the most

prominent one is inferior but but there are plenty others anchor and um and more and some of those um I'm not exactly sure what the state of Ventura is but uh I think inferior also censored Trends I'm not I I don't know but I I've seen others censoring even requests uh that would just ask state of this contract certainly would sensor transactions um to those um addresses but yeah interesting so this what you're saying here is like this was not an Ask of ofac at all and yet they sort of started to say like just to you know make sure that we're not in any way infringing in any way we're going to

kind of overstep what we actually need to do any sort of mention even if it's like a query not even like necessarily a like a transaction with one of those accounts we're also going to censor that so as as far as I understood kind of now the situation is if you're an American citizen and you want to withdraw or you you had kind of deposited previously to tornado uh as far as I understood you can request that uh and and kind of well quite likely you are actually allowed to do it uh so if that is allowed then I mean then you might have practical problems actually doing it because again uh some of the underlying infrastructure

might make that impossible for you will they roll it back now that they know because like what you're talking about here is ofac actually issued some clarity surprisingly on the like the day after I released the last episode so we didn't have any of that info when we did it but yeah ofak released an update of an FAQ where they actually did outline if you had money in tornado and you're innocent and you can prove that how do you actually get it out so there are ways but what you're saying is like even to try to access that because other members of the community other sort of tools have blocked any address touching it you might not be able to succeed at making that request it's definitely not the case that ethereum is is totally censoring and

it's impossible but it just became quite a bit harder because because many tools you would usually rely on uh might not be working and yeah and into your previous question I think I hope or well I saw it in some places but I hope it will also happen further that some have kind of reacted immediately maybe overreaked immediately and now are are now pedaling back and they kind of are now doing are becoming more permissive again but of course it it showed where the choke points are where the forces of centralization are do you think it's kind of a good thing I know it's a bit funny to say but it's like it really for me at least it also shine a light on exactly where those weaknesses were and

yeah it brought up a lot of things I feel it also I mean personally it also made me kind of go okay where where do I stand on a lot of this stuff like that was something maybe in the past I've been I don't know just going along learning about tech not really thinking about so it's kind of useful no for sure for sure I mean I think it's probably too early to answer that but yeah it certainly uh yeah it certainly has has kind of increased the awareness of those whole issues it certainly has uh to some extent um brought more attention to I don't know projects like that note kind of that try to make it very very easy for individual or well as easy as possible for individuals to become validators but I think it's it's by no means clear at

this point whether the willingness to make ethereum a neutral platform will be yeah kind of strong enough to overcome yeah certainly yeah simply centralization forces that clearly do exist it does almost seem like it creates a bit of a Schism where some groups used it to identify places where they could work to decentralize further others were kind of moved more in the direction of like how does one comply more right do you actually feel that do you feel within the community that sort of split I I feel more more the uh the split to question kind of what is an acceptable level of um centralization or

or censorship so a lot of the not the guys the flashbot guys and kind of others who are currently also in positions of um they say okay if things would get worse then then we would do this and that or then we would uh kind of uh stop offering the service or and so on and again I think to me the main question is or they they seem to say yeah as long as I don't know 20 of the blocks are still not censored then that's fine uh to me that's not fine um to me kind of the current situation was like roughly 50 of the blocks being censored is absolutely not fine but yeah I mean that is that's not a black and white answer I guess yeah I think the

other thing maybe to note is like you're not based in the US and we learned in the last episode what it means to be a U.S citizen in the case of these sanctions although I did hear like anyone around the world could still get in trouble for interacting with them but like especially for U.S citizens it's it's more intense and a lot of these teams like do you actually see it a little bit as like a us and non-us are most of those teams that are complying happen to be like U.S entities or they have a lot of employees there maybe although kind of the guy who's actually in prison is in prison in Europe in the Netherlands and not in the US and the tornado developers that are in the US are okay fine so it's not that clear although kind of of course on the

sanction on the sanction issue uh of course that certainly uh more problematic for U.S entities so I think it's time for us to sign off but I I want to ask you sort of a last thing on like how what kind of advice would you give to people as I mean there is sort of a a worry that we're going to see more actions like this what do you think when these things happen how do you think people should be reacting maybe differently than they did this time around in the actual situation there's some so so much you can do but certainly like you can ask your the question right now in whatever position you are of kind of how would would you act and in kind of what okay kind of what what is your power uh in a way and

do you want to hold this power or other ways that you can give up this power so you're basically saying to the to anyone who has who could potentially be impacting something like this in the future those who can centralize those who can make these decisions to ask themselves if they want to be in that position and if not how can they like no longer need to be in control of these things yeah basically it sounds like you're like decentralized everything yeah I mean that that that is that is the one thing at least on such important um kind of infrastructure components I would say yes uh on on many other things the that's that's not required but kind of this very core concept of does the transaction uh gets included into a

chain um I would say absolutely we need to decentralize everything and actually something we didn't get to talk about and that was something that came up through this was did decentralization actually save it in this case not really in turn it turns out like decentralization can help certain parts maybe of the stack keep their neutrality but in the case of tornado I mean they were also a somewhat decentralized entity they were smart contracts there was a Dao to be fair it is still possible to use a tornado and in that sense decentralization help but it certainly became much much harder if not impractical for for absolutely most users cool Martin

thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing with us your perspective on this and like I mentioned it would be great to have you on again at some point when the merge when your merge is over so we can talk about gnosis chain a bit more cool thank you so much and I want to say a big thank you to the ZK podcast production team Tanya Henrik and Rachel and to our listeners thanks for listening thank you