Episode 286 - Paris 2023 Recap with Uma, Zaki and Tarun

Transcript

foreign [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] this week I host a spontaneous catch-up with Uma and Saki tarun joins us part way through the interview as well this was recorded near the end of the ECC Paris week and in it we talk about the topics that were discussed at the events our favorite talks our favorite parties

and generally what the sentiment is in the space as we round out the week expect some spicy takes off topic Rambles inside Scoops and more a bottle of fine French champagne may or may not have been polished off during this interview so hope you enjoy now before we kick off the application to attend ZK Summit 10 is now open this time around we will be hosting the event in London it's happening on September 20th as always we aim to bring together the top researchers and Engineers working in ZK to share their latest research and new findings check out the show notes for the application form please note spots are limited and only folks who go through the application will be considered to attend so hope to see you there now Tanya will share a little bit

about this week's spawn polygon Labs is thrilled to announce polygon 2.0 the value layer for the internet polygon 2.0 makes Mass adoption possible by offering users and developers unlimited scalability and unified liquidity this mission is fueled by groundbreaking ZK Innovations including a first of its kind ZK powered interoperability protocol and the next generation of the industry-leading and widely adopted plancky II proving system polycon 2.0 will change the way we experience web 3 by bringing the security and decentralization of ethereum to the scale and usability of the internet itself polygon 2.0 and all of their ZK Tech is open source and Community Driven reach out to the

polygon community on Discord at discord.gg forward slash zero X polygon to learn more contribute or to join in on building the future of web3 together with polygon Elio 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 identity products and more Elio's incentivized tesna is now live participate as a developer apply for a grant or go for a bug Bounty check out elio.org forward slash blog for more

info that's elio.org forward slash blog you can also find the link in our show notes so thanks again Elio and now here's our episode [Music] I'm here with Zaki Uma and we might have a special guest coming soon to join us and we're here in Paris near the end of the etcc Paris week welcome hello hello all right so let's kick off with a little recap you know we're we're not quite at the end of the week but we're far enough in that I think you might have some thoughts on what's been happening here so just overall generally what's your week been like this has been a very uh sort of intense and chaotic week There's a

conference there's like infinite side events every place of my calendar like three simultaneous things I was supposed to be at Paris has been lovely Paris accommodates a large you know 10 000 blockchain people really easily yeah I'm very similar experience a lot of very fun side events I think all most people I've talked to have not even been to the conference or maybe don't even have a ticket and the side events have been really the Highlight which seems to be always the case yeah like every I mean each cc is an event itself but I kind of called it the week of it because at this point I think even during those four that four day period each day we'll have I don't know like six seven other full day conferences happening did you get a

chance to check out any of the other ones yeah I went to Mev day which I thought was a really high quality event there was a lot of discussion around like Dex design intents uh the future of like the transaction and Mev supply chain which is interesting and then there was two ZK days slash events and yeah those are the ones that I've been to so far yeah I mean I think a lot of investors also through events um have been is a big thing here so like of funds that have you even either invested in my projects or I've LPN or like done with all had events and so it's just and like one of the things that like the VCS have figured out is

it's actually better if they like throw their events like parallel to a blockchain event that like everyone else is going to and so the old thing which is like everyone fly to San Francisco for three days or like this you know some Resort or whatever uh it's actually like no one really wants to do that anymore so I go you know half day event in uh parallel to a crypto conference you know you can get a lot more in that's interesting you say that because we've actually experienced almost the opposite where like we're so exhausted and you then try to tack on some sort of Workshop or Retreat like where you're actually trying to solve a problem and yeah you're sort of out of it I guess it

works if you put it before yeah I did a topic specific Retreat before before yeah that's fair uh and then did some investor events sort of in parallel yeah I think before must be the trick because we've tried in the middle four worked really really well all right is this your first time coming to the UCC Paris week what's what's your impression I mean Paris has been really wonderful people really warned me about the weather but from my understanding this here is really nice uh so it's been super nice um and I think there is still like a lot of activity going on like even though I think everyone acknowledges oh we're in the bear Market there's still a ton of like activity going on especially at the

infra level uh of the stock so and there's a ton of people here and I think a ton of excitement so it actually feels really good it's really it's always very nice to hang out with like a bunch of very excited crypto people I feel kind of bad for the parisians but it's really fun for us yeah I actually they've it's we've really kind of taken over the city or maybe some neighborhoods I had a very strange experience yesterday where I was in a taxi that was stuck in traffic and there was these like people biking by and scooting by and at one point I saw Alex G from matter Labs he doesn't know this but he will maybe now just like scootering by and then I was like oh that's funny he's there and on the same car ride I see a Merrick from Cello

biking by and then I get out of the cab and I see Jenny at Pollock just walking through and I'm just like are we like do we own this town at this point yeah yeah again Paris has been good because there's been plenty of space and venues and everything for side events you know food reservation has been easy to get so it's just been like a very pleasant yeah and also um what you were just saying about like being warned about the weather I think that was really last year like in the last two years well 2021 I was I was here for that and I didn't find it too wild it was like nice it was warm but I did hear about last year's it was like what 36 degrees the whole time yeah 40 degrees 40. I don't see Fahrenheit so it was like it was like 90

100 plus oh yeah in the middle of a city and like you can see it's not like an I mean yes if you're next to the river it's Airy but most of the streets I'd gone to an event that was like in this restaurant that had no air conditioning and it was like a greenhouse and it must have been 115 degrees Fahrenheit in the second yeah it was like a sauna so this year like everyone was warning everyone like oh why would you go back there but to me this is what Paris in the summer is like in the past when I've been here it's kind of nice all right let's let's crack and then to the themes of Paris what are people talking about here this week so I think everyone has like a different experience like I sort of cross the world of like l1s D5 Cosmos

eth defy eatstaking I've been talking a lot about you know financialization of each staking yield and like the general like eat staking stack that is being built like where interoperability is going value capture and then intents have been which I'm sure we're going to talk a lot about as uh have been you know the intent apocalypse is continuing by the way as you describe the scenes that you're in it reminds when I was younger I was in a lot of different music scenes so I was in like the house scene the German bass scene the indie rock scene the electro scene this is very dating me to a certain era in time and my favorite thing about it was I

would like go from party to party in one night and it would be like just a different vibe do you feel like that's kind of similar like like the you're going to these different conferences different dinners you get to wear a different hat can you give some like texture to what are the different crowds like well so eth staking has revived defy um and uh and so like defy has as as sort of made a comeback I think at this point in the year um and it's basically been revived by Eed staking yield um and like different things you can do with each staking yield in the past in you know other events this year like people hadn't really wanted to talk about D5 it was actually I found that like people wanted to talk more about

applications in general in Europe than in in the US like youth Prague it was the same way it was like people were but it's even more now huh yeah and then like the infrastructure scene is like somewhat distinct from applications defy Etc um like which is more vibrant right now because there's sort of this I mean I've seen criticism that like you know we spent so much time on infrastructure and almost like not enough time on application there's like not enough users there's not enough things for people to do I don't know maybe I'm maybe I'm not in those circles enough I think one of the things that's been exciting is just like in Cosmos a lot of new applications have been launching um so the application space has gotten a lot more exciting I think in general applications are coming back is like

kind of like a theme I would say but you know there's limits to it right like there's there's there's only so many things you can build on top of each staking yield yeah I think one of the themes I've seen is like as Zaki mentioned like staking and then also restaking like a lot of people are pretty excited about eigenlayer and like what restaking will do and the design space it opens and like the new stuff it brings it's also funny being here with Zaki who's from like you know OG Cosmos and seeing kind of like a lot of those themes and Visions around app chains and stream security but it's all coming to life on ethereum as well with like app Roll-Ups now everything is basically an L2 every app has their own L2 and then

yeah you obviously have like shared security with I in there and restaking so yeah how do you feel about that to see like the cosmos Vision like kind of copy paste it well my my vision related to ethereum has always been not to kill ethereum but to cosmosphy ethereum because I've always thought like what ethereum should be is basically Cosmos uh but like part of the goal in like building Cosmos is to like lay the rail tracks that like ethereum would travel and I think over the last two years like we've really seen ethereum start to travel those so like I can I I kind of view though like Roll-Ups the roll-up Stacks especially more open source rope Stacks app Roll-Ups restaking without

any layers like the cosmosification of ethereum yeah very much agreed and then I think also another interesting theme we've talked a lot about uh is interoperability especially in this very multi-roll-up world like the interoperability situation is kind of a mess and then you see for example with Cosmos you guys thought ahead about that and you put it in protocol called IBC and then I think in the roll-up World there has also been a lot of talk about putting interop in protocol because they are starting to realize it will be a huge problem and I think you see this with like polygons zkevml2 roadmap where they have this unified liquidity layer for their new poll token across all their roll ups that's basically going in

protocol to their zkevm roll-up stock there's been like some talk or proposal of like doing something similar with like shared validity for op stock and like maybe other ecosystems but yeah I've heard the words unified liquidity a lot which I interpret as putting interoperability in protocol yeah I think the ethereum people have a lot to learn from the cosmos experience which the unified liquidity is not nearly as unified as you think it's so funny because you highlight sort of the cosmos ethereum connection but I can't help but also bring up the polka dot connection because what I see is like 2017-2018 polka dot and Cosmos were kind of in a similar space but they were distinct

they were really distinct in their vision and what I see is like ethereum is now both of them oh yeah like and Cosmos took on a little bit of uh I think the polka dot with the ICS stuff and I think polka dot took on a little bit of the cosmos with the xcm stuff but then you see ever like all of those ideas being really like brought to life with liquidity in ethereum and so and polka dot now supports IBC so you know Cosmos and polka dot are the same thing no okay yeah those two projects had at their at their start the vision for this in the ethereum's case it's like adoption post launch post you know being very very live yeah but with a lot more

mind share and I feel like it's I mean at least in this snapshot in time it feels like it's very powerful because you have so many people looking at it and working on it but do we think there's also like openings for chaos because because it's kind of piecemeal like there is no larger architecture there is no IBC yeah I mean unless I I guess the ZK roll up might be I mean it I don't know it shocks and horrifies me that like every single roll-up is writing their own Bridge contract why is this not the same Bridge contract and then like the validity or fraud proof piece is just swapped based on like what your roll-up is doing right it's insane conversations

about security have been a big part of this for me too uh there's been a lot of industry-wide conversations about security is like a huge gaining Factor um also at this event and like it seems like only a matter of time before there's a major Bridge hack in the ethereum roll-up ecosystem you know there's been so many near-misses that really that's interesting because I think the roll-up narrative is all about oh this is so much more secure we're inheriting security our bridge is totally safe so I'm curious what makes you say that roll-ups architectures enable in a future in which you can have stronger bridges that do more things that enforce more properties than let's

say the like client model of IBC but that reality is is we are nowhere close to it um and so I think that the reality is is that like there's a lot of fragility in the cryptography layers of these bridges in the software especially on the ZK side there's a lot of agility and like the smart contracts so yeah I'm not sure if you know this you probably know this Uma but I don't know if you know the sucky the fact that there's like kind of a like a huge conversation going on right now in CK about security and that exact thing like each one of these systems potentially using different systems so it's different types of Roll-Ups different types of like using CK you're yes you're auditing them with like a

pretty small group of Auditors who can even handle this tools to audit that are still being developed not quite there and there's going to start having a lot of value attached to them like I'm nervous that like there is something that happens in one of these evm kind of ZK evm thing where it's kind of disastrous and it casts like shade on the whole scene it's definitely something I'm worried about and I don't really know what to do about it well I think vitalik has a really good pragmatic take on this which he I think him and maybe Justin Drake have written about this on eth Research where they really advocate for two-factor kind of authentication for ZK roll up so you have the ZK proof maybe you've even have

multiple proofs and then you also have some sort of tee or sgx space Solution One really interesting thing is I know flashbots is really interested in using sgx for Suave and they're doing a lot of work there and so I think like they're going to do a lot of work there and I think sgx will become I I know it's controversial but like in the short term at least we'll become like a good kind of like two-factor stop gap for a lot of these security issues and then I think one really nice thing about ZK is that at the end of the day the ZK circuits are just functions right they're like f of x equals y there's a really clear spec and so compared to a Smart contract actually for a ZK circuit you can have many different implementations because

the spec is so well specified and it's a your function whereas like for a D5 protocol like Euler or something there's States so like it's hard to imagine how a two-factor would really work there but for ZK you can have many different implementations I kind of view it as like client diversity uh and I think that's something that also the zika industry maybe they're not talking about it a lot I've heard it a little bit but I think we'll become more prevalent and more important so I was actually I had a conversation recently with an auditor on the show and we talked about like under constrained CK systems which is like that's a place where vulnerability can happen but that sometimes teams will do that because they're sort of like there's going to be some sort of validator set that's going to make

choices about governance about upgrades about stuff like that so like there is some backstop that is supposed to be decentralized but that you know means they can be a little bit more loose and fast with some of the constrained stuff I just don't I don't know if like that still doesn't make me feel super confident I do think as someone who has deployed like a ZK protocol to production like our protocol or ZK like client is running in production honestly running it in production feels a lot better to me than having to manage the keys of a multi-sig uh because you have that like math and cryptography so yes while thinking about circuit security is like stressful I think the alternative is that oh you have like I don't know some

like maybe three out of five multi-stick you have to worry about keeping the keys safe you have to worry about who has access to your AWS account or wherever you're running it you have to worry about not losing the keys um and so I think compared to the trade-off actually like if you just even viscerally feel it deploying a system it feels a lot better than just like a pure multi-sig and I do think like it's important to not be purists like I think it's important to have like both kind of like this validator set plus ZK or like ZK plus s like te plus you know all these methods like security is very additive um and I think that's like important to you know be okay okay with and think it's valuable I actually want to talk a little bit about the big announcement by

gnosis because are you I'm just curious like gnosis released this uh gnosis pay and I know that succinct is now it's deployed right it's part of the bridge it's not the full bridge this is what I kind of learned recently it's like there's a number of multi-sig signers but now saying a ZK agent is one of them are you also involved in the in the new product I actually don't know too much about knows this way I think it's super cool I think it is like one of those applications that we really need so I'm really excited they're working on it um and personally like we use gnosis chain a lot as like our test net so I really like using the chain um but yeah we we are involved so I think doesn't involve in securing the gnosis bridge so like die is locked up

on ethereum it's Minted as X died that's like the gas token on gnosis and then we help secure that um through our ZK like client but yeah notices pay for my understanding is like an L2 on top of gnosis to make it even cheaper um but yeah it seems really cool product wise I want to try it out yeah it's lucky you and I got kind of like killed by hypnosis pilled last time I continued Frederica was telling us all the stuff they were doing we're like how is it that you're doing all of these things the infrastructure that they've built is like a seems like a breakthrough like the ability to like actually have something that you can use at a payment terminal like just like boot your credit card Boop your phone

um and have a signature get re-weighed like through like an account abstraction like like you're basically you're integrating your account obstruction directly into the payment infrastructure yeah which is just such an amazing piece of infrastructure building from the best best infrastructure building team in the game which has been gnosis cool any other themes maybe themes even like outside of what you normally pay attention to I think just it's been so reinforced that l2s are the new thing I think in ethereum world like so many people have adopted the op stack they're making their own Roll-Ups like especially in the infrastructure World

it just feels more and more consensus that building your own L2 is like the way to go which is very interesting I mean it's been interesting you know in 2019 the exchanges were all adopting the cosmos SDK to build their exchange chains uh and now you now it's this the story is you know mantle and by bit and bass both doing op stack is op stack is the new Cosmos SDK slash yeah okay it is is there but like as we say this all the other big L2 projects I mean doesn't DK sync have they all new thing coming out SDK substrate slash whatever like this

building environment framework there's a building environment a role kit I guess falls under that category yes which brings the cosmos SDK to Celestia to well to Roll-Ups in general okay I mean so like that's very much the narrative here um but dydx chain is the other side of this right which is an L2 which was an early adopter of an L2 which said I've gone to the limits of what we can do in the L2 world and now we need a cosmos chain well so I think another theme that we haven't talked about is speaking of the limits of the L2 world I think there's a lot of Da layers that are popular right now Celestia Avail I know espresso I think is another one yeah espresso is also going

to make their own da layer and really like the true cost of making a roll-up on ethereum is putting your da on it theorem that is the main cost and yeah there's like seems to be a ton of new solutions for da for these like validiums that are subtle to ethereum have their off-chain DNA which I think is pretty interesting what I would say about that I think another another theme that I've seen on this event and in the future in in other events this year is the block space Surplus theme like we have so much more block space now than we thought we would then demand is for sure like you know you have these Roll-Ups as a service you have these alt d a layers like we can produce petabytes

of block space right like so much block space now no one has a good answer really for like what's going to consume that like the the recurring themes gaming like everyone's like you need something that uses a lot yeah the games are going to come and the games are going to rescue rescue us for the Box Place Surplus so funny I have heard from other people that there's so much happening in games I don't know if I've just been at the wrong event sort of looked in the wrong direction at a certain time I for some reason it has not hit my radar correctly like I've seen cool experiments or I'm I mean maybe this is something I should be exploring on the show like I feel like maybe there's just places I've not been looking on the gaming front I think like one of the biggest things

that like we in the blockchain space don't really appreciate is like how much bigger gaming is gamescon which is going to be in uh cologne in Germany in like a month that's like 400 000 people oh my God right like we we are like oh we're like our like 10 000 blockchain people showed up at bears and we like took over the city and like oh like a GDC or a gamescon or like that these things are like orders of magnitude larger so like I think like one of the things that like is interesting about the gaming stuff and like there seems to be like quite a bit of innovation and there's like there's you know there's projects in my in the cosmos ecosystem that are going like

Saga and Argus that are going after these markets and like they don't make a big splash here because like what's the point like oh like we like have it's not like D5 or like a couple hundred accounts can move 100 million dollars like gaming is going to be is like the long tail of users so if it works it's not going to be because we convinced the crypto people to to use this it's like we went to gamescon we went to that like gamer audience we got we got on people's Xboxes we go on people's phones like and that like onboarded it except sadly right at this very moment the word crypto in gaming in gaming land apparently is quite tainted I don't think they like it I don't think I think

they find it quite yucky and yeah I think there needs to I mean I think for that to happen the thing is the marriage makes so much sense because those games are creating their own economies anyways like they're creating these little you know inner game trading all this stuff and it can get kind of sophisticated and it's totally just living in one on one companies servers it's kind of ridiculous the users don't own it the game shuts down at some point people have like put so much time and energy into this it's quite sad it's like having a career that like at some point is just taken away from you I mean gaming is maybe not the healthiest but you know what I mean like it's like people so much time into it

and it's kind of crazy like wouldn't but at the same time I think crypto went too far on the other side it was like let's gamified and pay you immediately and you're just gonna like mine and farm and do these things like in game just to like get immediate tokens and it was such a like an immature model you need an economy you need a community you need like people who give a [ __ ] about what you're doing I mean a lot of a lot of feedback that similia has gotten from like investors is that like we should be gamifying it aggressively and I felt that it's too early yeah trust is more important yeah than like oh like look here's but like I I am thinking also of all the things we could do yeah although gamifying what you're talking about

sounds more like gamifying Robin Hood or something it's like your Game of Thrones Robin is quite gamified but I think of I think of games proper and like they hate crypto but the combination is so inevitable and yet yeah they have this sort of bad taste in their mouth that we need to fix yeah they hate crypto now but I feel like all this stuff they'll like crypto when it you know has another has its time in the sun again so I think there's some in general I've seen this I I live in uh San Francisco and like you know I go to parties and I tell people I work in crypto and I get these like horrified books like honestly people are quite rude about like oh what is crypto but then you just know that all these

people you know it whenever like crypto takes off again they'll be like oh my God like crypto's amazing and in general I feel like the outside sentiment tracks like crypto's adoption quite like closely so I I'm sure they'll they can have their mind changed or like I'm very optimistic about that so what worries me about is like the blockchain Surplus is arriving today like now right like Celestia is launching soon eigenwair is launching soon like this massive Surplus is like coming right like right now I believe gaming can work but it has to be like a little bit more organic like you can't just like knock out a partnership with some Giant Game Dev company or like

some giant publisher or like Activision or whatever and be like oh we've just like produced enough transaction volume to like to like fill the blocks right I mean I've been following what's what's been happening like on uh sui um right and right now like oh they have like this like very simple like mobile phone puzzle game that is like producing an enormous amount of transaction volume and it's great like you know they have an enormous support amount of box space and they have to find something to do it and they've created a little game that does it and they have like you know tokenized incentives and they've gamified things and stuff like that but it's still short term it feels very short term like mobile games yeah yeah whereas like you know what teams like

Argus and topology and I'm sure there are like lots of others art lattice Keystone I think also yeah there's like all of these teams are like really trying to build like authentic experiences the thing about that authentic experience though I feel like what has to happen is it's so hard to work in the short term mentality of like create company get investors get return in X years short term like that kind of thing like if you really had like the blockchain native game growing over time you'd have to have people doing it for nothing for a really long time and like genuinely having people who are just like into it because

that's I like this is sort of the it you know going back to my music scenes or whatever it's like very Indie it was very like you had to have people who were genuinely into it because that was what made it cool and it took a long and the long it's almost like the longer it was underground and before becoming cool the more like backstory you had I mean I could actually give them something closer to the blockchain it's like the crypto the crypto Anarchist yep the Bitcoin early people they worked under the radar for many many years before they were recognized and I think that Legacy adds sort of like strength to a community and in the environment we're in right now you want the big hit real quick

I mean yeah then you sell out immediately like like you're gonna get the pressure to gamify so quickly and then you don't have any of that backstory you don't have the legend you don't have the Messiah who disappears you don't have any of that yeah a lot of this up is descended from the dark forest team which you know does have a little of that organic mythology they're all just descended from the dark forest team right so I mean they never monitor I mean they did some nfts but I don't think they monetize by like starting companies well and do Xerox Park I mean that's yeah and that's so kind of giving it's very altruistic I feel still like it's it's about kind of

like funding other people what I will also just say about the gaming stuff is so like I I do think that we're gonna have like I think there are applications coming that can like like gnosis pay like gaming like that can like actually consume this massive amount of box space that we've created but I think there's a gap I want to bring it back for a minute to Paris what was the best talk that you've seen I am going to more talks it does like latter half of the week because like there's a lot of Cosmo stuff so I'm doing like osmocon modular uh nebula which are all like sort of Cosmos

adjacent and so I'll go to more talks there eat land I didn't go to that many talks I there was a lot of panels which I think I find pretty interesting because it feels like more interactive more live like more fresh more spicy also uh so mevide was actually just all panels and yet those were really fun but it wasn't like talks I was also I did some of the talks for defense security Summit which was like there were some really good talks about you know trying to improve like the way we interact with audits like you know how hard is it to like know what code is actually got audited uh there was a really good talk on that yeah like like defy security Summit I

think was like one of the sleeper events that like some subset of the population not do but like didn't get hyped up there were no like big fancy announcements but like a lot of conversations about Security in Paris uh one of my favorite talks actually happened today at CK so we're recording this on the Thursday CK Paris was happening today this is an event that the ZK validator and geometry put together so I'm biased but Kobe did this little intro at the beginning sort of showing what a user in 2020 I think it was 24 25 could do using some of the tools in the ZK stack and like the different things that you could be doing um if you wanted to win at Dark Forest I

think that was his model and it was just it was this really really useful image to just see what a user would need to do and then also like you still see like okay there's a lot of clicks you're kind of going through it are there ways to even like make that more efficient and I feel like it was a beautiful picture like if if that happens like a lot of the companies he referenced or like companies that are building right now so like those products don't exist yet those products might they might pivot we don't know if they're going to be used in the way they're expected but even to have that I like I hadn't actually seen anything like that at all in the ZK space ever so anyway I in that video I mean we're gonna have a video for it soon but yeah

I love that I think another thing has been account abstraction seems to be really breaking through like the tall it gave a talk about it but like I think we have to come up with something new to call it which may be just intense which might be better branding but these sort of like you know augmented wallets right is like a big is a big part of it and like the too many clicks problem the too much waiting like so you need so like ux I think has also been like a big there's probably more of a focus on ux now than I think in than in previous eras of blockchains yeah I strongly agree that yeah I have heard a lot of stuff about account abstraction and then also like the ux of interop and I think everyone

is kind of now on the same page that it really sucks like it needs fixing whether that's like putting it in protocol or using account abstraction or whatever to fix that I think has been definitely another theme which I think is really positive for like actually getting real adoption all right we did best talk what about best party could be best party best crowd but it could also be like best venue I mean the food has been amazing in Paris just generally across the board I didn't go to any of the Catacombs parties but those were pretty cool I just like watched I saw that I saw the photos but there were a bunch of catacombs events um you know Paris is generally I think a pretty good city with a lot of good

venues in it and I think like we've had a lot of like classy less generic blockchain events I love how in Paris you can be walking around doing a walking meeting you turn the corner and there's this like very historic very beautiful like amazing building and you're like oh my God I need to know about it and it's it's literally every corner so there was there was a party I'd wanted to go to but didn't make which was in the Eiffel Tower the ZK on conference tomorrow is in the Eiffel Tower well I like that's where I mean I've been around it in the past I've not gone up to it in a really long time but I was like oh my God there's something you can do in it but I didn't make it I did go to the eigen layered Drinks dinner which had a

view it was amaz like the the venue was fine but like the view from the venue was like the river and the Eiffel Tower and it was all green it was Blue Sky it was just incredible I mean because I got here early I got to do Bastille Day in Paris yeah this is their big celebration their big celebration they do like huge fireworks show in front of the Eiffel Tower like the French take fireworks very seriously they like budget for fireworks at like the federal level yeah like it and it's like it is a matter matter of Honor that like the Paris Bastille Day fireworks show be ridiculous someone just walked in in a puff of smoke we didn't say his

name three times but we could have we're not we're not we're not in New York where which is a city that is literally covered in Smoke nowadays I know I mean so we nobody not anymore not just Kanda who I think we need some reparations from personally like I I distinctly think the US deserves reparations from Canada for all the smoke but uh secondly uh no New York is in this very weird state with weed legalization where they like this the state [ __ ] up and they didn't come up with the licensing agreements which was the tax law for how to split the revenue then basically they said it wouldn't be illegal for six months to be unlicensed and sell weed

and there's been this mad frenzy to buy any retail space and turn it into a smoke shop oh my God but also the smoke shops are all selling drugs like in general oh dear so it's like it's like everything went from like everything was illegal to nothing is illegal in like a very large city overnight so it's been kind of crazy so welcome to the show Tyrone yeah very nice intro there I'm sure it had a lot to do with the rest of the episode we we had not been talking about New York we had actually been talking about Paris uh but yeah welcome thank you great to be here just to kind of bring you up to date on what we've been talking about we have done a little bit of a Paris recap talked about some of the themes but now I'm really curious

what's your Paris recap now that you're here um I read somewhere that someone wrote this on Twitter but I thought it was a great summary which is like the future of crypto's off chain is like a lot of the announcements have been like pseudo off-chain stuff like there are things that are on-chain components but they're like unsettled on chain but there's a lot of off-chain logic around them um it's probably so true or the short term I I've been thinking about it I like I think a theme of like the talks I'm doing later in the week is that like kind of we figured out a lot of the like the limits of the on-chain pieces and like pre-consensus peer-to-peer wear order flip like order flow intent dissemination like all of these things

are like the future um and so yes I I agree with that take the that like trying to do the off-chain things but get them to be decentralized to get them to be constrained to get them to be secure I think is a is a big because like the past of crypto is off chain too which is like everybody uses centralized exchanges so I'm gonna posit a spicy question for you from my perspective at least it's spicy which is the idea of doing a lot more off-chain logic that settles or has some proof of correctness on chain is actually really bad for the Cosmos app chain thesis because in some ways the chain itself needs to be like as secure as possible for the settlement you can't have like 500 chains with varying levels of

security and doing like all the soft chain logic and treating it at one to one on many different chains right like doing the same thing on different that's a bold case for polka dot bookcase for Roll-Ups in some sense right because like they're still going back but but like yeah how do you feel about that do you think the off chain version of the world impacts the pure app change I call them the pure and adulterated app chain Theses the adulterated one is the roll up one because it's not the true one of the things though that we've seen right now is that the people who are like flexing decentralized off chain the hardest are why people like dyx who needed the cosmo stack in order to decentralize the off-chain components that no one else could give them how to

so like but isn't their order matching still done off chain yes that's what I'm saying and they're using the cosmo stack to facilitate decentralizing that off chain system um I think there's some version of the app chain future that like is being is becoming less relevant because of like moving to this like intense-centric world and stuff like that but you have a lot of people building like they need a tool kit for building decentralized off-chain pieces and the cosmos toolkit becomes very relevant there can I can I ask you one of the questions we just were talking about uh best party and that can be because of crowd or location honestly maybe it's because I've been in

this industry long no parties are good for you I kind of am like all crypto people kind of have shitty parties oh no they're just like I feel like the nft rage was a Scourge on this industry because it allowed people to go for like the least common denominator where they like they went for the shittiest anything as long as it was golden looking and so stuck I don't think the tide went out with that I don't think the the party planning event planners have adjusted I think they're still living as and during these parties as if it's like and if it just doesn't feel it feels like pre nft boom was a different different Universe than

trashiness and like miami-ness was like kind of somehow became acceptable everywhere always I was like were you at the blockchain conference in like New York in 20 oh is it 18 yeah yeah when Arthur Hayes showed up for Lambo so I don't know what you're talking about exactly was it classy because I do not remember this is this is theoretically a developer conference since the beginning of History that's almost their definition okay okay but but developer conferences being trashy only except it really was accelerated by nft okay this is a bit of a question I I

really don't mean this in a bad way but it's like is ECC still a developer conference itself because I I mean I I think there's there's deeper technical conferences happening around it I just don't know if it's there I can't say because I haven't been to ECC but I feel like all the events inside events we've been to have been very developer focused so yes there there's literally not one app specific side event that I felt like was super popular correct me if I'm wrong I'm not sure I totally agree with that I think that there's Paris still has a lot of like nebulous stuff like web3 fashion [ __ ] and like there was like tons of parties in that form

to the web 3 fashion parties uh and there's a lot there's a lot of like that type of stuff that like I think those of us who are focused on adding numbers instead of adding Apes uh our our kind of a void on purpose I feel like is there anyone here who added it who's into Apes actually like we're like you lived in New York man you were like the closest to this thing I know this is what this is why I'm saying I I take I can see across the chasm of like this exists and like we're all very oblivious because these things are happening but we're just like not it's not are you do you think we're sliding towards it though no I just think that like the trash like remember like the event planners for

these things are shared and a lot of them are picking the same venues they're picking the same whatever [ __ ] [ __ ] DJ and it's just [ __ ] on the event planners man I'm an event planner that's hard all right sorry sorry it's hard I'm trying to do events in different cities like all over the world I agree yeah yeah that's fair sorry sorry I I didn't mean to to give them a hard time as much as the fact that there's a lot of repeated effort okay now I have a more superficial question what was the best Swag On that theme I just find I find swag cringe there's actually like one amazing answer one amazing party I went to where they said

you're not allowed to wear any company logos t-shirts or whatever and they're still people doing that wow I thought that was funny to me I was like I was like wow you you it became like the burned Banned Book okay so you just swag but wait I I was planning on going to that party but then I got back to my hotel room to change and then I went to sleep still ask the question to the non-swag hater I mean I think if teams are trying that's cool I have I think we've I mean I've seen a socks are always handy and useful for sure water bottles always handy and useful yeah I take it back

there's actually one swag piece that I thought was very on point and very good which was at Mev day I'm just hosted by Frontier there was a a sunscreen from Mev protect and I thought that was just like both useful so brand so like accretive and not trashy and that you like look like you're in San Francisco I didn't actually see this for real but I saw like on Twitter with like some random Twitter person they tweeted like what was it what are they like here in France the little colorful a macron with scroll on it yeah that was cool I like that yeah yeah and the ECC did its soap oh soap okay and I think wait we saw a really good one um there was these eigen

layer Nike Air Force ones that were had the eigenlayer logo on it I yeah tarun's cringing but I thought it was really cool I thought it was cool too you know why it was cool because it just looked like cool design and you did not notice the logo until you look closely it was actually cool yeah I I saw I saw I saw someone from angler with it and I think as long as the one I saw had no text but then I saw a picture online that looked like it had text and I would I would you don't want that the text want the text is like a little too the thing is if you have no text why is that comp like how does the company just it's an amazing logo but just the colors you have to have I mean the eigen layer words logo

it doesn't have to have the tagline maybe but yeah you know I may be the wrong person to talk about this it's like it's like my company gives that swag I have absolutely nothing to do with you actually Gauntlet had a cool orange cap I saw that I just like don't I just like I never want to wear this sorry I know Zaki is here sitting here wearing a piece of Swag that he can describe I'm just you know the sommelier swag distributor I just have a bag of similarious Swag did I I will also say I mean like I do feel like eigenwair has really like broken out from like a momentum in branding point of view I remember I've been a sriram fanboy since 2018.

um but it's it's sort of interesting it's like I was I my take on eigenwair has been all of the challenges around like the business value accrual product none of these things have been solved but we've really like momentum Vibes branding have been really strong but tarun the other day you were telling me about some kinds of Swag you really like which are kind of like bags that like middle-aged women in New York would be carrying around yeah yeah so I I love the uh irony of of wearing carrying bags although I hide the logo as much as possible in fact sometimes I put duct tape or the logo and uh I like hearing bags that yeah just look like you're going out to the beach and or to yoga or to yoga or something

and just because it feels very ironic to do that but I think some of the best swag is candles although you have to get good one I've seen those but like cheap candles no not cheaper you're like you don't want that either you want like a burrito or something like that you don't want some yeah I'm actually sitting next to an enoma bag it says intent Centric architecture and actually this is a topic we have not not fully dived into on this show yet and I feel like since we're all here we might as well do it we're talking about themes of the week things that have been talked about would you say I know that like at the research day that was the well before before we even talk about research day umagata shout out from Brian Armstrong

for her talk about intense on Twitter intents are going mainstream a public company CEO knows about intense and Suave we're we're really gonna make it crazy but yeah let's let's kick this off shall we I mean there's no better person to start than the Numa I think yeah I think uh so Zaki was the original one who intent pills me and just from a group chat Zaki is a super spreader so that's the thing we've been thinking a lot about interop better ways to deal with interop mostly from a security perspective but that also from a ux perspective and when docky had mentioned this intense concept uh I just went down the rabbit hole and it seemed it's one of those ideas that seems like

more and more obvious in hindsight in a way I think you saw throughout this conference a lot of teams converging towards it like uniswap X for example is this like intent based RFQ or request for quote for you know trades and then I think Skip recently released this like Cosmos Dex aggregator which kind of also looks like an intent based system so you see it across ecosystems you see it across domains you see it like single domain you see it across roll up uh and so it seems like a lot of those ideas that we were even discussing like two to three months ago at that research day where there was a talk I gave on intense and a kind of abstraction and Suave and cross stream bridging and how those things are related and how all those

things are important for ux a lot of those like Visions are coming to life which is like actually really cool to see I have such a question here because when you talk about the rabbit hole because like I think for a lot of people the intent conversation research the rabbit hole is your talk so what was and like other talks that happened on Research day so like what what were you looking at in building this like who are you reading I think I was reading like zaki's messages and group chats and I think also a lot of it was just I think I was in this really interesting spot thinking a lot about interoperability but then I think also just personally I care a lot about ux and we'd been thinking a lot about like how existing wallets suck and existing Bridges suck and so I was just at these intersection

of like personally I was like oh my God I have to bridge to operate my protocol and I dread it and then oh also I like work it then for Lair so I just was thinking a lot about those ideas and then honestly it was a lot of like me and my co-founder just getting in a room and like jamming and being like this hot this cannot be the way like this has to be better but yeah there wasn't a lot of like Source material like to this day I think a lot of people ask me oh what should I read about intense and yeah I think the talk is a good start but there isn't a lot of written materials so I hope that changes um there is uh George's post on the Paradigm blog which is uh oh yeah which is a very very good intro to intense

this is since those talks though right since those like in the last few months yes there's georgios's Paradigm intense OG that came out after the talks yeah I mean I think like if people I swear like this intense conversation came from a Noma started two years ago like Chris goes who you know built the system that like openc used for their Marketplace which was essentially like a proto-intense system he built IBC like he uh he was like two years ago Zaki intense and I was like I don't really know what you're talking about um but like really for me what it was was the experience building similar because I'd never built an end user dap before like Tom is so different is like my first end user dap and then we like

realized this enormous problem that people had which is like I want to use your app but I don't like how do I Bridge how do I like where do I go and with all the answers that we've given people are like people can like struggle their way through it but like and like so people use the app they're like you can't just like accept and or expect a noise and you feel like the intense Centric architecture something like an intent would be better in a system like that but you can't do that yet yeah and I think like one of the other things that I think is intriguing about about uniswap X which is their new RFQ system is it very much as like in my mind of like what you could build without solving any of the researchy problems right then so like we have like a the

research problems of intents are like programmable privacy there's like a programmable privacy problem that we don't really have a solution to there are like how do you do price Discovery how do you do like multi-chain settlement like all those things are like the research problems of intents and like I think uniswap I think what things that's like intriguing about uniswap X is just like build the thing that like you don't have to solve any of those research problems to build and like put that out there just want to do a quick call out because what you're talking with Chris's work like we actually tarun and I just did an episode came out today I think yeah or like this week and um yeah so I'm gonna we're gonna put the link to that if people want to hear a little more of that backstory one thing um I guess that's

worth calling out about this is intense do you feel like the first piece of infrastructure that people care about from purely ux reasons versus some like theoretical efficiency gain reason like most things that people have always proposed infrastructure-wise or like efficiency gain or it's cheaper gas wise or it's easier to do X Y or Z action um but I think the interesting thing about the intent architecture in some ways is it has a lot of empirical proof that it works even though like the empirical proof it works is not the one that people would cite people usually would cite the fact that 0x which did our has still runs

rfqs as sort of you know not controversially has done significantly less volume than non-intent based systems and dexes uh and so people always point out that as something not working but the fact that openc worked for many years is a much better signal that like this is an architecture that people like now one interesting thing about Chris is I feel like he did not come up with this architecture for ux reasons he came up with it for completely up opposing reasons in fact his research day talk gives his like philosophical reasons for why he thinks this architecture is the best and it's exactly almost anti-ux he has like an example in that talk of a problem that finding a fixed point of a

particular system and the finding a fixed point of that system is actually like a very hard computational complexity problem like it's like the opposite of ux so it's like funny how something that started for Pure reasons is actually now being co-opted for ux reasons but perhaps that's a much better way of getting it built ux is the go to market for intents no I think I do think it does help with scalability though like I feel like a lot of the reasons you know swap X or the you know swap people cited they did unit swap acts was for moving a lot of the computation off chain uh and like you know saving users gas costs and things like that and the RFQ system impulsively does do this right because you have these like sophisticated actors who are the fillers

or the quoters who you know are monitoring the price on binance or wherever else and they're very sophisticated they're quoting you a price and they're doing a lot of off-chain logic so I do actually think it does help quite significantly with you know scalability and basically leveraging off-chain compute to do like on-chain settlement a lot of the problems that we'll get are like gonna I think going to be like the key features of like sort of blockchain development in the next three years I have not previously really been hyped up like I think a lot of the problems are going to be things like oh like how do you do exception handling like how do you do like oh this bridge oh like the chain halted or the bridge halted or

like the key is disappeared you know how do you deal with exception handling how do you deal with routing like hey like my portfolio like I hold this set of assets but I want to use this app and I need to use I need to like get into the entry asset so like I like each similier seller has like an entry and exit asset which is like maybe a stable coin or ether or wet or something like that but you have a user and they hold like all of these liquid state tokens like lsds and all this stuff how do they transform that how do they do that in an efficient manner these are going to be the big problems rather than just like how do we make more block space because I think like we basically have made more block space than anyone really needs right now

yeah and I think an interesting point sorry it's it's a tiny tangent but it's towards this view of exception handling which is the multi-chain bridge hack uh put maybe bridge in quotes hacking quotes also yeah yeah but but I think it's kind of this type of case where like imagine if the contracts had some exception handling on bridge Keys compromised uh we actually have never really thought about this in this industry at all especially because multi-chain's whole thing was like we use NPC don't ask who the signers are and I think like one important thing to think about is people building this technology is there's also people who can like misuse it why how like who they're using it for

multi-chain misused acronym NPC to be like oh look we're really safe we're doing some NPC thing across multiple signers and of course you have no way of even knowing how how if all the signers are the same computer let alone like same subnet right like yeah they this is why ZK is actually really nice because I mean I think we should strongly Advocate or it should be totally unacceptable to have a ZK circuit that's closed Source obviously it's like a smart contract it's like basically the same as like any solidity code um but yeah with DK you can't really misuse it like anyone can look at your circuit and find bugs you because with MPC a lot of the uh correctness of it relies on like the infrastructure which

is generally has to be closed Source right like oh what AWS box are you running your MPC signer on whereas with ZK if your circuit's open source then you can't abuse it this easily so I think for example combining ZK plus a multi-sigger ZK plus MPC or ZK plus MPC Plus sgx or something that's when it gets like really powerful it's just like an additional layer that can be abused as easily yeah I mean I guess from your Vantage Point um do you think this I'm gonna keep calling it a hack even though like obviously it's like this weird security incident that's probably a better word the security incident which you know had a ton of side effects where there are a ton of protocols that were just like yo we're shutting down because like we just

never can get out of the bad debt we have so yeah and sometimes a one version of the world is is sort of what docuous intimating too where there's like exception handling to particular types of events across Bridges the other is which is like the clue G kind of duct tape and baling wire thing but it'll you can do it faster and the other is like hey we get everyone to use DK so what's your view on like you know in the one to five year time frame how that changes for both of her both you I mean I'm obviously really biased but I think hey let's just all use ZK uh is obviously the correct thing I think with exception handling I don't know how you handle an exception where it's like oh now billions of dollars are gone like sure you can handle the exception but the

conclusion might still be the same that oh our protocol is like completely done like it doesn't really matter and so I I just am always like advocating for let's add more hours of security and like make this stuff more secure so that because usually in the case of hacks they are very catastrophic and so it doesn't really matter if you handle the exception or not for sure but there are things like halting particular markets in response to when the key signing stops happening like the the threat response stuff is like actually still quite poor in some of these contracts because everyone is gas optimizing so they're like oh no no we can't add this like extra hatch and I I my point is like I think there is a lot of value in it it's just not but if the hack can be Atomic then you're

really for sure for sure like the Beanstalk hack there's no way around that yeah exactly and I think there is actually a lot of value too so I think there's arguments where I think there's a lot of value to Atomic composability so I do think it's kind of annoying to have a lot of this exception handling because if you've ever like programmed an even like JavaScript where you have to like do this async await and then handle the exception with a try catch it just all gets very ugly very quickly uh so it is nice to assume oh things are fine one thing I have thought about is like what if you had a roll up where they're you know you could fraud proof certain exit conditions like for example oh none of the protocols are hacked and you kind of have Atomic composability between all the apps in that domain but

then the domain itself has kind of like this optimistic challenge period or things like that like maybe that's interesting to think about as like a research exercise but I think it's very tricky because often in D5 like the hacks happen and it's like in one transaction all the money is gone it's not this continuous trip and there it doesn't really help if you like if you can pause the protocol it could Because by the time you can it's it's done I think one thing that the multi-chain hack has been a great example of is the way in which the security of your system ends up being reduced to like your like largest or most dominant Bridge right it doesn't matter that like Phantom is like consensus secure the fact that like it's

still like making blocks securely doesn't matter because like everybody lost all of their money because the bridge was what represented everyone like all of the meaningful assets on chain is like curity incident that's true and reminded me say you have a token that you know you're bridging across a bunch of chains through like one bridge I think that's really silly and I think there really needs to be a standard for having like a cross chain erc20 or a cross chain asset that you can be compatible with many different Bridges so that you're not kind of like paying you know you're not kind of like a slave to any one Bridge

or any one like security model um and so I think that's like really important to make that a standard going forward because my one worry is like okay multi-chain got hacked and now people are going to move to like having their assets secured by one other bridge that is equally susceptible by the way to the same security uh properties and that's really dangerous for the ecosystem in general like uh if that happens like I think it's dangerous to crypto in general so I think Builders should just be really aware of like the security properties they're assuming and then also I think as an industry or in the interop space we should make this like more of a standard so that you're compatible to many different Bridges there's not vendor lock-in because it is really hard to have good security properties of any

one Bridge uh and and before Anna concludes I want to say we normally don't have so much doomerism like a ZK Security doomerism on the or you know well NPC or is he but this was an incident where it deserved to be talked about we have been talking about it actually before you arrived it oh you talked about multi-chan no we talked about CK security it's definitely yeah yeah that's definitely yeah awesome I wish I could keep talking forever but I think we all are really long time we all have true but we also all have dinners things we're supposed to go to so I think it's a really good time to wrap thank you you all for coming and doing this sort of like the Paris ECC week round out Roundup sharing all the ideas

and themes hopefully giving folks a bit of a sense for like what's been happening here what the conversations were like so yeah thanks so much thank you thanks for having us thanks my pleasure cool and I want to say a big thank you to the podcast team Rachel Henrik and Tanya and to our listeners thanks for listening foreign [Music]