Guy Zyskind: Secret Network – Bringing Privacy to Blockchain #425

Transcript

welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution i'm sunny agarwal and i'm here with frederica ernst and today we're talking with gaijiskind who is the founder of secret network which is a well not really a new but it's actually a quite a you know it's been around for a long time actually and we actually had guy on uh what maybe four years ago i think 2018 uh and back then the project was called enigma and so since then it's gone through a you know number of evolutions uh and became what it is today called secret network uh but still focus on the same mission of bringing private smart contracting uh to the uh cryptoverse so

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missed out on this airdrop don't worry you can still participate in the upcoming air drops or cosmos chains by simply delegating to chorus one nodes head over now to chorus.one to begin your staying journey so uh guy welcome back onto the show you know as i mentioned you've been you were here a long time ago back in 2018 and so you know hopefully we've gained a few listeners in that time and so maybe for like any of the newer listeners who maybe didn't listen to the previous episode uh you know can you tell maybe start off with telling us a little bit about your background and how you got involved in crypto sure so first of all uh thank you for having me again it has been a long time

so i'm excited to be here um epicenter has always been my favorite podcast about myself i've been in the crypto space for you know since 2013 2014 depends on how you count uh 2014 is really where when i dived in i stopped i started grad school at mit and um there was just before i started grad school there was this like mit bitcoin hackathon uh which we built a cool product for this is like pre-ethereum even um and we won that hackathon and that got me kind of like excited and i like what we can do with this technology and i went to my professor and told him look

i wanna i wanna focus like my research my work on this like emerging technology so um you know fast forward in a bit i very quickly became interested in you know how how blockchain can have inherent privacy not just in the transactional sense not just in like the z cash or monetary way or transferring assets with privacy but if we're thinking about blockchain is like you know these these more um um involved like uh uh replicated state machines more involved decentralized cloud computers then surely there's need to be a way to handle sensitive data uh in those uh

web3 applications so i focus on that i focus my entire research on it i wrote a few papers they got a bunch of citations um pretty uh pretty substantial citations and that kind of led to the enigma project which i spawned out as a company in 2016 um and then in 2017 we did within an ico um and we started building that network 2017 we did an and a token sale um for enigma with the idea of building a network not necessarily a blockchain but a network that allows you to run privacy preserving computations

um and you know somewhere between around 2019 um we kind of realized that it's not working the best way that was about the same time that cosmos was about i think either just released their sdk or was about to release their sdk i was really fascinated i was actually very fascinated by uh tendermint consensus and then i looked into the sdk and said wow this is this is like much better like we should be using that and then we pretty much uh scratched everything and then uh and kind of like the between end of 2019 and 2020 just

like rebuild our architecture around uh cosmos sdk and early 2020 we released um you know secret network um we use a different brand to kind of distinguish it it had a new coin called secret and then in september 2020 we actually launched like the the the the privacy capability so basically in secret network you have the ability to run um encrypted smart contracts where both the input the inputs the the contract state and the outputs remain encrypted

and you can basically build end-to-end uh decentralized applications with privacy and the network has been growing substantially since i think we're one of the bigger cosmos chains today and uh yeah that's that's kind of like the history from 2014 to 2020. thank you that was very comprehensive um i'd like to dig into the switch to cosmos so basically you said that the cosmos sdk um was uh just a lot better than your previous technology stack can you kind of expand on that a little bit yeah i mean look our core offering our core capabilities is like how do we build

privacy into smart contracts and pre-cosmos like like you know there was an option to fork ethereum or do that but that really didn't that didn't really work well and we didn't want to do it so we started building our own p2p stack our own sound some kind of consensus it wasn't really consensus because we were relying on ethereum from for consensus but we spent like i think 80 percent of our development our testing like building that infrastructure that you know it was just a waste of time like like that's not what we want to focus on and then cosmos gave a great sdk

uh truth be told at the time i think it improved today but at the time the sdk was great the documentation was horrible so it took us longer to get like fully onboarded and working with cosmos than we could have have like today but still like all the pilots are there and instead of like focusing on building a p2p layer and a consensus level we have that forgiven and we can just focus on the other aspects of our technical stack so how were the the reactions from the community when you uh rebranded and switched text stacks so um people were confused we were selling ourselves for a long

time as an l2 to ethereum as an altitude to other other chains like at that time people did not believe in the in the cross-chain world like everything was like at least in smart car that related to smart contracts was like no no no everything has to be on ethereum like what are you guys doing so we got mixed reviews um but we didn't care not that much i mean we it's always better to get good feedback but like we just knew this was the this was the right approach and i think you know uh in the test of time it's it's it's pretty proven that this was the the right course of action with looking back is there anything you

would have changed in how you uh how that process went there's one element which i think the jury is still out on so at that time cousin wasn't was just starting on it was still a prototype as well we've actually helped cousin wasn't quite a bit like one of our team members became a co-contributor to cause and wasn't and i i think there was a big question like whether we are doubling down on causing wasm and web assembly or focusing on evm which is kind of what uh eve moss is now trying to do my gut feeling is that you know we made the right call i do think that

going the cousin was a web assembly route is is a better approach i feel that that's what cosmos is consolidating around um so i think it was the right decision but i'm still not sure i think we'll know that in a year or two would it be possible you know uh to like for secret network to support multiple vms in the future or is you know is the goal really to like focus on like you know you lose composability benefits and stuff like if you start to do that yeah it gets complicated you most likely lose composability i'm we're not 100 sure like it may be it's a matter of effort so supporting multiple vms is a lot of effort once

you've stuck with one now we can do it but you know we are still a fairly small team in terms of the developers not the ecosystem is big but in terms of call developers we're still small so nacho that's like where we want to put our effort in maybe and in that case yes you start to run run across problems like composability other types of like integrations um yeah it becomes there will be trade-offs for sure so guy um let's talk about the secret network so there is um if i understand correctly um there's currently 50 nodes um so basically how is it determined how many nodes can participate 70 sorry okay

and why is there an exact number right so we initially we set it to 50 nodes the reason was that you know in our network one thing i didn't mention that you know there's one requirement for running a validator on a secret network that other networks don't need and that is uh you have to use sgx we use secure enclaves to achieve privacy that combined with like security and encryption protocols um and there is some some costs associated to it so like you know if you run it without sgx it's not like orders it's not like you know multiple times faster but you do

get some some speed reduction and so we we thought that starting with like you know 50 nodes basically smaller than i think the 100 or 150 that cosmos chose and other changes shows we felt that was the right number um it wasn't an issue until like the last six months in around six months ago when the network was starting to grow really fast like we got a lot of people want to become validators and um that's why there was a network vote to increase that to 70 reasons so you're right it was 50 but recently it was increased to 70 due to a vote and i do think we will will um i think we'll extend it over time but

also a lot of our work for the next seal is around improving like the vm and like you know making that work faster and i think as we do it i will be easier to grow the the number of nodes okay i i think um probably about more than 50 of the listenership are familiar with what sgs x is but maybe for for the rest can can you in a nutshell um explain what a trusted execution environment is and what kind of trusted execution environment sgx is sure so a trusted execution environment basically is is kind of like a a segregated piece in like your process or your memory

which basically is com like completely walled out from anything else happening in that system and no one can probe into it not even the person uh owning that physical machine it's essentially a generalized hardware wallet you know a hardware wallet is essentially a piece of hardware where it allows you to run one computation which is to sign transactions but the but you can't probe into that wallet and actually extract the sensitive data which is the private key so sgx works very similarly but it allows you to run any kind of computation and then any data that you push into that

enclave uh into that uh trusted execution environment can't actually be seen by anyone not even the validator running the running the machine just one quick note there are different kinds of you know trusted execution environments pretty much any big vendor today like like that that's building processors has has a version of it so arm has a version intel has a version it's called sgx that's what we're using right now and amd has its own version how does the network know whether the nodes um trust execution environment is legitimate right so that's one of the first things

that we did we we built um a registration protocol so that that's where we kind of diverge from like normal cosmos so when you and you when you join as a new validator in our network essentially you need to go through a registration process before you can start to validate blocks so what you would do is you would run some code that we wrote inside of your trusted execution environment and that code basically says it generates a a like a key a key pill right a private and a public key pail and then

the enclave signs it it's it's a process called remote remote attestation and then like the the the remote at the station the signature over the generated public key that blob of information is then posted on chain as a proof that you're running a genuine enclave so essentially sgx and other systems they basically allow you to verify externally that um a computation has happened inside of the enclave it you know would correspond to a specific piece of code

and it ran correctly and he trained on a genuine enclave and now that's been put on chain everyone can validate that um you know that new validator is running a secure enclave they generated this uh keeper inside of the enclave so the private key and the and well the public is as interesting but the private key that was generated never left the enclave okay and now any other validator can basically take that information uh take the the publicly know that this was done in a genuine enclave um and

encrypted encrypt some kind of shared seed uh shared seed that all validators uh share um and uh put the encrypted seed on the on the blockchain now the validator that's registering can complete the registration by taking that encrypted seed because we know that the private key for that only lives in the enclave we know that the validator can actually decrypt that sit and see they pull they pull it inside of their enclave and they uh decrypt it there and now it's you know it's an ongoing process any new validator that comes in go through that process and you get into

a system that the base seed is shared by all enclaves they've been vetted and now and now uh using that seed you can derive new keys um that again only the enclave can actually uh use to decrypt stuff and now information coming from the outside you can use you can use using those keys again all of them return to the the base entropy from that scene you can use it from the outside to encrypt stuff and then send it to the validators um um enclaves i hope that's not too dense i don't know if anything is confusing in a minute feel free to ask for clarifications

i i think i've i'll just follow up on this so um does does this process i mean it sounds like magic a little bit um so does this pro does this process actually work without relying on the attestation of intel or whichever chip manufacturer you're using um so basically can the secure enclave prove that it's not being watched or how exactly um do do you come by that attestation so the initial registration part does rely on intelligent it's called intel um isv i can't remember the

intel service verification i can't remember the the acronym but it does rely on intel to basically say look we have like that signature that remote attestation which is essentially a signature is from a genuine enclave that you know we manufactured now i do believe that in the next version of hdx which we are working on including this flexibility in that like there's ways to do it without without actually going remotely to intel servers we have not implemented that yet but it does it does exist that said the process that we're generating

that we're generating you know a private key and a public key pair inside of the enclave does mean that we only have to do it once for every validator and then that point the network can really kind of like self-manage yourself sovereign can can i follow up again on the sgx so basically if i have a consumer notebook would that typically have an sghx or would i have to buy a special computer um to actually have that included it used to be the case that is actually that is actually something that you know our network has an infrastructure committee which basically checks like at all times like what are the supported hardwares

and what you need i think to be fair like we can talk philosophically if that's the right direction but to be fair it seems that a lot of validators are becoming more professionals so they're running they're not running notebooks anyway they're running um you know serious server infrastructure again a philosophical question but it used to be the case that like any notebook uh would actually have sgx support but intel i think in their latest chips have decided to only do that only enable that in servers so the answer is

no no longer or at least new notebooks do not support sgx as far as i know but again i think it's less of a problem because everyone in our system in our network are like mostly professional validators that are running servers anyway do you know what caused intel to like sort of reverse direction on that so we we have pretty good ties with intel um i've asked that i didn't get like a fully clear answer like i think that's that's something that's very internally important for them but my thinking is that you know they want to focus on high like using sgx and enclave and

confidential computing in very very high loads and that works better with servers like they want companies to provide their services you protected by things like sgx and enclaves less so originally originally the the idea of putting sgx as far as i know in every computer was so that you know let's say there's there you that like a company gives you an agent software that you run locally not on the server and that agent you know would run inside of an enclave locally so you as the end user and the customer are comfortable that your software hasn't been tampered with

i think that that didn't become like that didn't pan out as a good business direction and it was just costing them more money than it was you know uh giving them also has a little bit of a drm solution i remember that was sort of like one of the things that they were pitching early on so only the validators need a uh you know so i guess there's like different classes of users so to use secret network you know i don't need to have a sgx in my own computer to just be a client um but so i guess two questions one is would if i just want to run a full node uh not as a non-validator do i still need an sgx

and to um what what kind of how does the security model change from when you're not running if you if you you know if you don't have an sgx and you're you're you know rely relying on uh validated like so i guess you know one on one side i feel like you know maybe you can even improve the like client security model from normal because you can you know rely on certain aspects of the sgx to improve that but on the other hand how do i get more interesting is how does the privacy model change then i mean first of all this was mostly for simplicity like we thought about doing like a hybrid model where full nodes don't are like

somewhere between a light client and a full node and don't actually have to run a gx it was too complicated i mean it's not we can't do it again it's it's it's a cost benefit analysis and so so so for now even four nodes need to run hdx obviously end users and clients like they don't need to they don't need to involve you can talk about a little how the leg client would work because i know this has been a big issue in many privacy coins like in z cash especially where you can't you know there is no light client that exists for zcash so is there a like client that exists for secret not not really um but like you know when it comes to like specific things so like

like there's a concept of viewing keys and pretty much anything that's encrypted like you can give a viewing key for example to kepler and then like you know they can they can get like read-only access to like important information so that's usually the way that we that we solve it but no there's no proper light client yet yeah okay so then back to the previous question so like what does so how do i like um what kind of privacy guarantees do i get when i request when i when i try to use secret network uh like does the validator that i'm sending my transaction or like the validator that i'm querying information from can they learn about like you know my data

no the the the validators for sure can't um you know there's side challenge information and secret itself the coin is is not private so there's such a information from that like in many systems but no when you when you send your information to a validator and then when it's you know uh run an edit to a blog like the inputs the state and the outputs they're encrypted they're only being decrypted inside of the enclave so like you you'd like there's there's there's nothing that you miss and and we basically for correctness like we we still take all of the benefits of tender meat because because of the the the key sharing process that is

because of what i said in the beginning when you register you get a randomly generated seed but then that seed is used to suit randomly and deterministically uh uh generate like the same set of keys for for all nodes for all computations for everything that's that's that's going on so consensus doesn't break like all all validators even if they don't see what they compute at the end of the day like the blocks that they're producing the the transactions the outputs like all of them aren't the same i i guess my question is um but if i'm querying data from the blockchain so if i'm so you know you mentioned this viewing keys

like so if i'm asking a you know i'm querying a note saying hey i want to know uh what my balance in my account is who can can anyone see that i guess two things one can they see that i'm asking for a balance and from what token and then two can they actually see the balance itself no yeah so let's take the example of asking for querying for like a token balance so they would see that a certain secret wallet and they can see the the address of the secret wallet is uh uh uh querying uh for a balance they will not see they will know which token they're

current because each token is its own like like a contract but a they would not be they would not know that you're craving for a token they would just know that you're interacting with with the token contract from this secret address and then um um the query would basically you know it would pull the your balance from the state the validator won't see it because like like that part happens inside of the enclave then before releasing it outside of the enclave i mean there's there's kind of like for each for each query or each transaction there's kind of like a derived key between the user and the enclave that only the enclave itself can can see and

the user can see so what happens is the enclave uses that to encrypt the query result inside of the enclave for the user and then release that so only the user can client-side uh decrypted information the the the other part is that there's there's a viewing key so you can you can share a viewing key such that for example another service could you know could could uh could get some kind of read-only access and and can also decrypt the information from the query but those are the only parties that that can actually see the results either the user or whomever they gave um if you in ke2 does that make sense

thank you that's super interesting yeah it makes total sense i imagine i imagine um there are particular challenges um to building the user experience building you know as as a fully private chain um what are those so there are there are actually several challenges both from a developer and a in any user from user perspective right like whenever you're doing something you first have to give a a a viewing key permission for the wallet like let's say there's a new token so now there's another click where you need to create a viewing key for

that new token and then you know let your wallet or the application use it in some in some way usually your wallet and that's just like another click people are not often used to it because it's like only on secret network pretty much that's something that we're working on and recently we've enabled the ability to use permits i'm actually not even the best person to explain those like that is even still new to me but they make the the process much easier it's much more automated basically it's like you don't have to create it purely it's much more automated uh in that sense um so that's one challenge the other challenges that this creates is

um in many cases you know let's say there's a big nft drug right and everyone are coming at the same time and they want to meet their nfts well they first have to like create viewing keys uh to to see those again this is mostly solved with permits uh but if you're not using permits then that that creates like a lot of transactions uh immediately on the network and we have seen that create some let's say difficult stress on the network that in other networks you don't see because you don't have that functionality so that's like another challenge and the third challenge is um you know a lot of like if you look at terra and other and other networks

a lot of them um um the they cash the information so you know let's say you interact with the contract and there's a lot of the same queries there's mostly reads just a few rights so they would cache it honestly on a centralized server to kind of reduce the load the query load from the network but here because every user have access to only like one row like their row of information no one can see the full like the full state it and and usually each user just queries their own row you get a lot of again a lot of queries which you cannot cash and that creates making optimization really really really hard

um i don't think there's a perfect solution there we are doing we're doing quite a lot of work there to improve but that's i think that's part of the cost of you know running with privacy enabled how about from the developer stand point of view like can i you know so you know as we mentioned cosmosome is like you know becoming sort of the standard across many cosmos chains like especially like tara can i just go take a tara contract and just one click redeploy it onto secret network or is there um sort of additional hurdles that we developers have to like go through in order to make their contracts uh design working with the privacy models

very few hurdles most of them are just like because of like ecosystem tools so you know terra is still a gs we have secret.js um but it's pretty much the same thing we we've done it other people have done it it's really simple it's simpler than most people think i think that's the the biggest benefit that you know we're all we're all converging to the same like you know model with cosmos and where it's like very very easy to cross deploy and actually one of our things that we want to do in q1 is we want to give a very a very easy guide on um if you deployed your app on terra here's how to convert it to secret in like you

know five minutes do i what about like for like how do i define this like viewing restrictions right because you know on i'm sure on most cosmos contracts anyone can just query any part of a contract here obviously i have to add additional restrictions to say you know if you're trying to query this balance you actually have to be the owner of this balance um so are there like additional sort of i guess in the view func the read functions of the contract i just have to add more a little bit more restrictions there or is there anything more complicated than that i mean that's again if you want privacy if you want to do like more selective access control stuff like that it is

that you need to add that is up to you i mean technically you don't have to do them it would work without it but if you if you want to use these functionalities then you have to make slight changes yes but again they're they're not big they're usually not big can i um when using secret can i uh do i do all contracts have to execute inside the sgx so let's say there's some things that are just like you know you know because obviously exactly maybe one thing before like regarding that is like how does computation you know expensiveness work in relative compared to something you know that you know if all the car you know i know one of the big issues with not issues but

you know one of the restrictions with sgx is you have like you know it's definitely slower than running on a normal on a normal cpu you can't do like can you do like hyper like you know uh multi-threading and like you have less ram and stuff so can you tell us a little bit about some of the restrictions that uh a developer might have there sure so uh it's a single threaded but i think most executions in cosmos cause them was a worsened threat until recently we are working right now on adding multi-threaded support like that's actually almost done so we are going to support multi-threading in hdx it wasn't trivial but that's one of the optimizations we're doing

um the the memory issue there's enough memory but in many cases because of the way sgx works then you know you have you have a lot of like cache misses and you know if you if you if you don't like you know efficiently load uh information inside of the enclave and outside then that could take a really long time i think in our profile and we saw that like you know every time we opened an enclave we loaded we reloaded the contract that is taken in some cases i think like the majority of time spent in running the execution so yes the the considerations there it's

not trivial we are slowly improving these um and resolving this and if and i think we're in a much better position the slowdown is not that bad today but it's gonna really improve in the next year that's that's one thing the other thing which is slightly an issue is you know because of because of edge like um sgx doesn't uh for security reasons it doesn't allow you to use like standard libraries and stuff like that um and so like using something like wasmel which is the go to i guess interpreter or just in time compiler for uh running wasm code and that's what i think cause that's what

cosmos amuses natively like we couldn't use that not easily so we um uh replaced that um that took a lot of effort but we replaced that with wasmi which is more like a pure interpreter and that works but that is much slower than wasmere as well so again one of our one of our things on the to-do list is to go back read the great wasmere in a way that is supported by sgx so can i then like so that in that case like if there is um can i opt to have uh certain contracts not run in the sgx where like let's say there is just you

know heavy computation functions that you know i have no reason to keep private um can i you know reduce my gas costs by running those not in the sgx not right now but that's a fantastic idea from like a scalability perspective then here right where would you place like um the limit of where like sgx computation can go like you know you know we have a spectrum you know like you know like okay do you think it will is sgx computation today like is it can you do more than you can in the evm or you know could it ever get to native cosmos scale or like even solana style

scale where do you see like the limits are good or you know assuming you can get all these optimizations you want where do you think it'll end up landing yeah i think that won't be an issue i think these are engineering challenges and i think at the end of the day the slow down there will be slow down it won't be meaningful i think the one place where i'm not sure is wherever in cases where you need to access um you know let's say areas of information like you know you want to access like like you you want to run through all of the users at the same time that that might be the only place where i think it's going to be problematic at the end but everything else i think is you know we can resolve it and we will

resolve it so secret network is ibc enabled right so basically how does um how does um the secret part work across different um cosmos-based blockchain so can you kind of can any ibc enabled blockchain query um smart contracts or what how does it work so right now we kind of did what tara did and i think most chains um sunny i don't know if you remember but you and your co-founder with us moses you gave us the tip to do this um we we we only enabled like you know sending native

native assets on ibc right now between chain to chain we do not support calling one contract uh on our chain and on another ibc chain that is something that's going to happen in let's say ibc 2.0 upgrade upgrade which is going to happen sometime in 2022. um but so far what you can do is you can transfer assets and you can also do something which we are doing like for example you can take osmo or atom or luna or usd and you can transfer them to our chain and then vibc and then you can wrap them um as a as a token and that token gives you

privacy so for example if you want to trade your osmo privately um then you can move it to secret network wrap it we actually have a ui to do it very simply and then you can transact with it you can you know split it different wallets you can add it to secret swap which is our amm and trade there and convert to something else and then you can you know exit back in line you can d unwrap it and exit back through ibc to whatever whatever chain in ibc that you want so those are the capabilities that are enabled right now and i was wondering um so can you use the sdx um to do multi-party computation uh i mean multi-part i mean technically

what we're doing is multi-party computation but we are using sgx if the question is whether we can do multi-party computation like in its pure cryptographic form then i would say that's that's a very different implementation we can do it it can use sgx to simplify something so some element of sgx can you know make the mpc protocols that you use simpler because you know you can try if you if you take an assumption for example that sgx um you know can protect correctness and and you know whoever is running the code inside of an enclave will not break protocol so you can use more like what we know is semi but

honest but curious protocols which basically assume um participants will try to leak data but they will not change the protocol so again sgx can help us in developing like these kind of solutions in a much simpler and more scalable way um but you know they're they're they're another tool they're not like it's not that you get mpc for free it's still a very complicated thing to do and you know we talked about scalability so much um i think mpc for general purpose computations unfortunately the the the the cost reduction the the sorry the the cost increase and the speed reduction would be so heavy

that i doubt any developer would use that unfortunately today so yeah you know i think one of the interesting things that i you know how what i see uh secret network is doing in a lot of ways is you know i think the sgx as a compute system like you know it provides you basically like high levels of you know safety and privacy but on its own it never it it doesn't provide liveness and so one of the things i see it as you know i pitch secret network as when i explain it to people is like i call it like it's like a distributed sgx right where it adds liveness to to the you to the sgx platform um

and like so you know one thing is like could we start can we also use it for things like a being a custodian for example so you know i think like for example i know the avalanche bridge ethereum is basically running on a single sgx right now which is kind of crazy to me um but like the you know partial and it's kind of crazy mostly because you know if if it's a single sgx you know it could have a lot of you know liveness issues where like sure you can trust the sgx's safety properties but if that machine breaks down like we're in for a lot of trouble right and so like could we use the secret network as a distributed custodian in that sort of way

i think we can and we actually have some grants that are you know taking the direction um we have a developer a co-developer called assaf he just made an interesting tweet about how like dows can now control like you know private keys um inside of their of their contracts and then with ibc and other things like essentially like do stuff on other chains through the dow uh because because it controls you know the the uh the keys and the instantlyness liveness is pretty much guaranteed so by the way i like your pitch i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna steal that if that's okay so okay so here's the other part that

about you know the big question i have for sjx and so you know um you know i i you know we've worked a lot on like front running resistance uh related things um and like mempool privacy and i know that's like something that the sgx also you know secret network provides in a lot of ways but for me one of the biggest concerns i've had with like the sgx is you know we see that like there seems to be r on a semi-regular basis like flaws found in the sgx and the sgx and like you know people are able to find vulnerabilities and you know in my opinion well how i see it is like right now the the value in finding vulnerability like

you know there isn't even that high of a benefit right now it's been mostly like you know just academic research teams that have been finding these vulnerabilities but you know as there's more and more economic value that's happening and you know if you can extract mev by breaking the security model of an sgx and extract billions of dollars of mev that that's essentially a billion dollar bounty on breaking the sgx and is that like do you think that the scx can sustain that level of security budget i mean i i guess it's you know i'm speaking from a position i do believe that's the case i do believe for many many use cases

that's definitely the case i like the idea that secret network is the biggest honeypot for testing secure enclaves at scale um so far we didn't have problems and you know anytime there's there's a flaw we immediately patch it and and through a network upgrade you know you make sure that everyone is patched we are very very strict about it even stricter than most other players i've seen using hdx um but i i i guess it's to be seen from my perspective look as you know my background is in cryptography mpc like i am very very much excited in the future to include other kinds of

technologies that are you know more cryptographic in nature um into secret network at this point like i'm more concerned that you know developers would not be willing to take the slow down and the cost increase of using purely cryptographic technologies and many of them have other other issues and constraints that people often overlook when they when they present them so it to us it's a it's a balancing act like we do feel this is the best solution for the problem right now we like the idea that it allows us to check you know things that scale with high

value and then you know um over time hopefully that would help us to make our system enclave as sgx specifically enclaves in general uh more and more robust but at the end of the day like if the technology allows if the users and developers demand it like i would be super excited to look again at mpc and even homophobic encryption solutions at least to you know to some aspects and some use cases that are being built on our network and i really want to talk about the ecosystem but now i have to follow up again damn you sunny um so basically um

if i'm a node in the in the network and i um how would i how would i know or how would i find out about the fact that some sgx was compromised or is being viewed um by something that's not the sgx i mean so basically how um how would i catch on or i mean how how is there like um is there a cannery in the coal mine somewhere because basically with a lot of the shielded protocols there's no way to actually do checksums right the the ones there's once there's a so first of all i do want to say that most vulnerabilities you know their academic researches and and they are way way overblown there's been

very few of them especially the ones in the early days um which which were i think devastating and easy to exploit not in a or not easy but like you know possible to to exploit not in a laboratory setting but putting that aside um you know once there's once there's um um you know an an sgx issue then we can trigger a hard fork we can uh uh ask everyone to re-register you know the registration protocol that we mentioned we can trigger a hard fork and up and or post like an enclave update

and then everyone has to re-register every out folk that happens everyone has to go through the registration protocol again and at that point if they are not running the the fully patched you know version of their sgx internal firmware and software then they won't be able to register so that's and that's how people know like you know there's there's a hard fork in the network and yeah so but that's only if it if it's brought to your attention right that there is a vulnerability in the sdx so basically how would i how how would you find out that there's a vulnerability if it's not um you know someone uh you know white or gray hat

who kind of uh makes this publicly available information yeah i see your question if someone were to fight affordability it's a blackhead they they don't disclose this if they'll isn't aware of it we're not aware of it and then what happened could that could not exist the answer is yes i mean i there's no there's no way to protect against that you know very much like with the z cash like you know um publication there was a math equation evo and you could have done like pre like you could leak the keys if i remember correctly and if someone had found it and not disclose it and someone did then they could exploit it so there's there's no way we would know in that in that situation

okay there's no way to know okay cool um so let's move on to um through the ecosystem so tell us about the kind of applications that are currently running on secret network um yeah that i'm pretty excited about we have a few dexes that are front-running they're doing fairly okay not not as great as osmosis but they are used i'm i'm an avid user of them the front running resistance is really cool the privacy aspect is really cool um we have over 100 million i think of assets maybe maybe even i mean maybe more depends on your account um in our network that have either

originated by projects in our network or have been brought from ethereum because we have an ethereum bridge from body smart chain because we have to buy the small chain and from other ibc enabled networks um so a lot of use cases around around that then there's we've released um the secret nft standard which basically allows you to um you know launch nft nft collections and it's the the point of being a secret nft is that you know you can define private metadata such that only the owner can actually see the data and that owner can give

viewing access to other parties if so they choose and where you know there's a there's a big um uh well published that we announced yesterday uh with credit tarantino that there's an auction for his original a screenplay of pulp fiction which is something that no one has ever seen it's like in his hand right there's a lot of things and details about the the original script notes to himself like markups markdowns like you know comments stuff that hasn't been in the in the final movie and others that that has been something that he kept private for 25 years and now he's selling those a secret nfts and essentially

uh that's going to be in an auction in two weeks and only the people who buy it would be able to see it and then you know they they can decide if they want to if they want to give access to other people or not um uh so that's that's another use case there's just a slew like so many nft use cases right now there's a marketplace called stash that launched a month ago and there's been i think like two dozens of nft drops and there's like new one every day and each one of them use like the the privacy aspects in very very interesting ways um there are a few games building on our network and i think what we can provide a lot of networks can provide is that we

can allow you to build your games with like hidden uh hidden game state on chain so for example if you do poker you can do it fully on chain because you can keep the cards themselves you know private for each participant until the right moment so we've seen a lot of that and we're actually seeing um uh there are the default use cases so there's private landing coming out this month by a company called sienna and uh other there's shade which is gonna be the first privacy preservation stable coin algorithmic stable coin uh it's kind of a mix between olympus dow

reserve currency and a fully picked privacy preservative stable coin um and then there are a bit more lofty ideas that i think are just gonna be uh they're gonna take time to be adopted but i'm really excited about them there's data vault which is a data a a secure data marketplace for all kinds of like use cases there's [Music] a doctor trying to work on putting some form of medical data on the blockchain and allowing like physicians to look into that there's a company building credit score resolution so that you know

privacy-preserving credit scores so you know you can do maybe like stuff like under collateralized loans on the blockchain so a lot of things are like being built right now yeah i think that's really cool you know i think well um you know a lot of these use cases it makes a lot of sense well one thing i don't want to ask though is like you know for the nfts it seems like you know and you know at least from my social networks and stuff you know i've see a lot of people are pretty excited about like the nfps happening on secret network why why are nfts really want that much privacy you know it seems that usually nfts are mostly about status signaling and i want people to know that i own the like hey check out look at my collection of nfts um

what what is sort of what's driving the user demand behind like private nfts well first of all you can do really interesting things that you can do it like we're just scratching the surface so like you know there's like the they're like now redacted drops well you know you see you you can brag that you have the nft you see it with a watermark or low resolution or a part of it is redacted it's like a redacted club where the eyes are redacted stuff like that but then the full picture you see for yourself there were secret pumps where like you know the background was was only at the auto could see there's uh secret skulls which created a really interesting economic dynamics the

idea was that you meet or excavate a skull and that has its base properties that's visible but now you have several times where you can reveal traits like one by one and that created an interesting economic dynamic where people were like okay maybe the things that are worth the most is just selling a fully hidden scallop with all the trade still hidden or maybe i reveal like one trade you know kind of like in blackjack i got like a really really rare trade but maybe the other ones are like you know they're crap and it's not really worth that much so now there's an interesting game theory do i sell it now

or do i keep opening it and hopefully even increase the value further so there's a lot of interesting things you can do that you can't do with normal nfts and if you want status then again you can you can reveal a portion of a low resolution version or you can reveal the whole thing that's fine there's adam's collection which does reveal the whole thing but then the private metadata is you added your head there and that adds you to a secret chat that no one else can know about or be added to so you know it's it's it's an interesting experiment i feel and with credit tarantino i can tell you 100 he's been approached by a lot of nft companies and providers and he said no

to all of them because he said what is the point of me uploading something that is already public and then everyone can see it and download it um and then why would anyone buy that if they can already get like you know get a copy of it and the the idea of like keeping it a secret until the first person buys it that really clicked with him and we got that feedback from a lot of artists since then that we talked to so apparently there's there's a need so guy thank you so much for coming on where can people learn about um secret network and find the docs and find the grant program and so on right so uh if you go to secret.network

and that's scrt.network uh you should be able to find pretty much everything that you know you need um and then you can find uh there's the uh add secret network and twitter and we have a discord and you can follow me at edges zys on twitter um and if you want to apply for a grant you know just hit me up on twitter personally or come to our discord come to the dev channel on the general channel say hey we have a great idea we want to talk about it and either myself or one of the team members will talk to you

perfect thank you guy thank you very much