How ZK Will Shatter Social Media Monopolies | Alex & Stani

Transcript

like the future is multichain because they just like the internet cannot be built on a single server the internet of value cannot be processed by a single blockchain no matter how powerful no matter how much you're willing to give up decentralization it's just not going to happen for political reasons for social reasons people want to have different systems um adjusted for different needs for technological reasons you cannot do infinite parallelism on a single chain like even if you do like optimistic parallelism like like salana U is doing nor scary stat for you the odds of falling victim to online crimes are one in four AA provides digital security protection to keep your personal information passwords online activity

and Technology safe from online threats for Empire listeners Aura is offering 14 days free plus up to 55% off an Ora subscription when you visit AA au.com blockworks terms and conditions apply C site for details you'll hear more about Ora later in the show this episode is brought to you by Avalanche Avalanche is a leading network of blockchains giving some of the world's largest financial institutions new use cases and business models while leveraging completely customizable infrastructure check them out it's core.

apppp slcover you can explore avalanche's subnet ecosystem at core. apppp slcover I was playing around earlier today really cool are you tired of high gas fees I'm excited to let you know about scale a zero gas fee modular blockchain that's become a perfect fit for gaming and AI apps because of their instant finality and lack of meev explore the scale ecosystem today at scale dospace ecosystem and stay up to date with the gasless blockchain on X scale Network that's scale Network big thanks to scale for sponsoring Empire all right everyone we've got a timely episode we've got stannie uh

founder co-founder get which one stonnie of both a and lens uh protocols uh and St you can correct me if that's wrong Alex uh co-founder of matter Labs uh as well as one of the creators of ZK sync so Alex stonie hopefully I got those intros right welcome to the show thank you excited to be here yeah thank you so much for having us yeah all right so uh last week or week before you guys announced lens Network on ethereum powered by ZK sync that's I wanted to bring you two together um Alex there's a bunch happening in the matter Labs ZK Z not not only the ZK sync world but just ZK in general stonie you guys have a bunch going on with lens stonnie maybe

you can uh tea up this conversation with just the backstory of lens and why you guys decided to launch lens Network um you guys launched three years ago I think it was initially bought built on polygon you made this shift over like tell tell us the story here yeah the what we're trying to achieve with lens is um to create open and fair social spaces um and we kind of all can agree that today we're we're living in a uh world or uh in an internet where uh social networks or let's say social spaces are governed by large uh corporations um and and the users are kind of like the product there so we

create this uh big bunch of data and we give this data for free for the platforms and the platforms are creating better algorithms to feed advertisements or monetize out of the users uh in various shape of form what we want to do is that we we want to take some of these social networking Primitives like identity social graph um and and and Publishing and and basically uh make those Primitives owned by these uh users by using uh onchain and and the way we we do it is that uh the the way for example Bitcoin is uh securing money and ethereum is kind of like securing programmable uh money and other types of

um Primitives um we use onchain to secure your identity and the connections you you make on a shared and open network that anyone then can come in and build their uh applications so the over long run what we're betting on is that um as more people come and build to a open network um where resources are uh shared the users will benefit more because they have more um control and and more choice which applications they want to use without losing their identities and uh and followers if they choose to change an algorithm or or an application um so that's in in short what we're uh doing and yes we launched uh in the beginning on on polygon and this was the time before for example

even uh rollups were um considered as a scaling solution for uh ethereum and now we're living in a in a rollup environment where most of the transactions are now happening on al2 um optimistic rollups and ZK rollups and I'm sure Alex has a lot of opinions on on how to scale uh from the roll of perspective um and and and how ZK plays a role there but what we actually are doing now is that we're using uh validium as a as a way where um we can have this kind of like a modular uh blockchain uh environment and and and scale uh towards mainstream uh usage and mainstream means obviously millions of

transactions and that is something that we can't do uh necessarily in existing um l2s and and drups as an example so if uh I'm trying to think about the like technical decision to move to to make to when you guys launched lens Network why did you um why did you need to like why did you need to make this decision and I guess like if I'm thinking about this from like the founder seat EP like let's say block works like we use um we use HubSpot for our CRM we wouldn't just switch to Salesforce because like Salesforce has the these nice features there' be like a problem that pushes us to then go build on on Salesforce right so like it's a pain in the ass to get off of one thing and to go change

architectures so like what was the problem that you guys were facing that like forced you to to move onto a different architecture in the most simple way the the the challenge for us was was scaling so um traditionally like if you think about how social networks are built they're using client server architecture and and that basically means that you can scale as much as you you you you want to as as long as you add more servers basically more Fleet in in let's say AWS or Google Cloud um but that means that that data is is somewhere on a on a particular server governed by a a company that owns that account um for example a social media platform um in

our case we're using uh on chain uh to actually ensure that there isn't a single party a platform that owns uh the user data and and that data is basically governed by the users itself and they own it so anyone can come and build these applications and and algorithms um and users can then Choice choose without losing um their identity and leaving everything behind um so so we kind of like are building in a an environment that is in the wall Garden um and and to use something like onchain it it also means that there is a cost and this is a typical uh challenge that for example vitalic describe as the blockchain trilemma so for example um the hardest part about blockchain is that uh the the

scaling part so um you have the the scaling the centralization and um the security so if you want to have uh more uh scalability you're sacrificing security uh or decentralization as an example and I think the the the existing challenge for us was that uh we're applying too much of security uh to some of these Primitives that we have for example um Publications or the identity piece or the follow graph um that we don't necessarily need at the moment and and that means that with um what for example we're looking for scaling is that what is the amount of security that we we need to secure identities um in your network that you create on chain without

actually giving that control to one single uh platform Alex maybe I can pick on you and stany actually I'll Circle back to you because I want to learn more about like the I'm sure I want to hear about looking at other things and how you guys make this decision internally and there's the technical decision but there's like probably the ecosystem and like Community alignment decisions I'll get back to on that stuff but Alex I've actually I've heard you talk a couple times about like ZK is the endgame for scalability and I think the idea here is that like if you if you break down the core functionality of ethereum It ultimately comes down to verifiability and that ZK is the endgame to solve verifiability so maybe you can expand on on this thesis that you have Happo and I want to go back to what Stan said uh

that lens is giving the power back to individuals taking it from the corporations from Big centralized actors this is what crypto is supposed to do and this is what crypto is doing at all levels uh and this is what made ethereum and Bitcoin so powerful like the force of uh of the social uh um you the the societal force today like in in the political sense in in in every every sense the um it's really the ability of every single individual to enforce their rights to enforce their ownership of their assets to enforce the um you know playing the fair rules of the game with everyone else this is only possible if

every single individual can verify what's happening on chain and can only stay on the chain that is following the rules like you know your your ownership of the keys is strictly enforced every rule of smart contract is enforced no players that are more powerful than the others can arbitrarily change the rules of the game and for this to happen we really really need to preserve this verifiability property that Bitcoin and ethereum have and that rollups were constructed were designed for specifically to enforce to derive 100% verifiability from E and uh the uh the basically the the it's only possible with something at

scale that enables a single individual to to verify the entire chain because otherwise you're going to be making concessions you will be able to verify your part but you know someone else you need to rely on them and then you have to extend trust multiple hopes and that becomes a huge mess then eventually the power ends up again in the hands of big centralized corporations uh zero knowledge proofs Su zero Pro snarks is the only technology we have today that can do this job at the scale of billions of people where and like I'm I'm not talking theoretical like this is a very practical reality that is happening now with Z rollups and with ZK networks you

can run thousands of chains together in parallel each operated and owned and and you know enforced by their own entities and validated by their own entities and groups of people you can produce your knowledge proofs for all of them then you can recursively combine them and synchronize using a single settlement layer such as ethereum and I believe that ethereum is by far the most decentralized the most resilient and also the most compatible with the with this culture today from all the smart contact platforms that can verify their knowledge proofs and I believe that this will remain this way and and what you can do is you can have a single chain that verifies all of this millions of

transactions of billions of people on thousands of chains having everyone in the world be able to come to a consensus of what the state is who owns what and what computation happened and what rules were enforced and then arbitrarily access any part of this data that is possible with Z knowledge proofs and and and this is what zky is building we're building for unlimited perfectly elastic horizontal scalability Alex can you just expand I think I followed all of that except for I don't think I understand the full why of like I think your argument is anything without zero without zero knowledge

proofs introduce a couple things like uh you introduce trust assumptions uh lower security and I think you would make the argument probably even lower throughput um in the future can you can you just expand on like why that is the case sure so like what what makes Bitcoin and ethereum verifiable is that every single parti ipant can make sure that the entire chain is operating correctly how do they do this very simple everyone verifies everyone else we have this don't trust verify Maxima from Bitcoin so what everyone does is they have the full node they can run it on their laptop luckily Bitcoin and ethereum both support very low Hardware requirements specifically so that you can run it on

your laptop you don't need some like super powerful cluster in the cloud that you you have to own Etc no you run it on the laptop but then you download all the blocks that contain all of the transactions from all other participants and you rerun them so if we have 100 participants each of them verifies 100 Trans like and everyone does one transaction let's say per per hour you everyone has to verify uh 100 times a single transaction so overall work we're doing is like 10,000x of a single transaction if we have 1,000 participants then everyone has to verify 1,000 transactions and so the overall work

becomes like 1 million next a single transaction if we go into the million users million transactions territory then the square of that is going to be like 10 to the power of U uh of 18 like the huge numbers right so like th this approach fundamentally inherently does not scale you cannot have everyone in the world rerun computation of everyone else doing their own stuff apart from the fact that you you should not maintain the state of all the value you know contracts and and and and assets of everyone else in the world you should only care about your piece of the state your balance your nfts your social

identity credentials Etc so like this approach just does not scale and everything else like we the rest is a big open space space of research and development of scaling protocols and all of them have been falling in like have been like hitting against the blockchain through Lama they were trying to increase the throughput but then they were forced to compromise either on security or on decentralization or like actually on both you have a limited space like you have a limited available Hardware capacity of a single laptop or a single smartphone you just can't fit more there so either you have to trust someone else or you need some magical

trick it's your knowledge proofs give us this magical trick and that's that's the only technology that we have today maybe tomorrow we'll we we'll invent something else but nothing is even even close in the Horizon your knowledge proofs enable you to do is to take a huge computation compress it into a very very small piece of data and then let everyone in the world verify it with a smartphone in in less than one second it's a very like just a small number of very simple um algebraic operations that you have to perform in this piece of like one kilobyte of data and you can verify arbitrarily large computation can be 1 million transactions can be 1 billion

100 billion one trillion it doesn't matter there are no fundamental limits on what you can verify and there are also no limits on on how much data how much proofs you can produce because all of these proofs for all of these transactions can happen in parallel they they they don't have to happen on a single server by one single entity on a single blockchain no you can have like any arbitrary many participants producing their proofs and then like slowly gradually combining them together until you have one single proof you put it on ethereum then you verify the proof of ethereum itself we are coming very close to a state where zero knowledge proofs will be will be able to produce a proof of validity of an ethereum block and we can recursively connect it to the

previous block and this enables us to verify proofs of the current state of ethereum the the most recent block and we guarantee the validity of this block from Genesis the entire chain and the validity of all the chains that settled on ethereum and basically every single smartphone in the world will we will turn it into a full note of ethereum deriving 100% verifiability from the from the base chain like to me to me this is fascinating and this CU right now you can do light nodes I think on mobile some you can read the header or something like that on mobile right now exactly you but but like running a light node is essentially trusting the validators right and this is a

reasonable trust assumption if you're doing some small transactions you know but like you have to be conscious that you're giving up control you're giving up power you're empowering validator and maybe now it doesn't feel scary but over time if everyone keeps doing that we will end up in the same situation as as we are with with web two and web two socials this is exactly what happened remember the time when when Google was empowering people or you know Facebook was empowering people all of a sudden you could connect with your friends and and do like all don't be evil don't be evil don't be evil don't be evil and and but over time like the more concessions you give to them the more powerful they going to become and this is this is why we're so excited about lens because lens takes the the user ownership and the

user like empowerment of the users extremely seriously we don't see this happening in the like as much in in the web to world like for example in Lance every single like the entire social graph is on chain you really own your profile you really own everything that's happening there yeah so um we're we're absolutely values aligned in this regard with with the lens team and and could not be more fun nice to yeah I kind of you know explain it in a way that like whereas like these bigger companies that were built on the success of the internet like Google um and the whole phrase of like don't be evil what uh what ZK is doing and also fundamentally blockchain uh is just creating that

can't be evil um um uh setup actually and I think that's like a powerful especially because we we talk today got all about like you know web 2.5 and and and think about like okay what's you know what what actually what are the use cases of of the blockchain you know besides finance and these are the choices that we also at at Lens we we have to think about and and especially when it comes to scalability because there are limitations of how much you can scale with ethereum security setup or let's say um a rollup security setup whether it's like optimistic a ZK and then more more like of these modular approaches where you can use for example validium so like

how can you actually add a the progressive amount of security for your your own use case and if you have that uh like a Progressive approach to to security and scalability um then we have these different use cases and we can actually create this um security setups where the users can own the data and we don't have to trust the platforms and there there's we can mitigate the actual risk of uh some one big um kind of like a server becoming becoming the main place of of of data and there's a risk of that server becoming actually then than something where uh that something that becomes a wall garden and I think this is kind of like a fundamental uh

difference of of like what is in terms of like the values for for the lens team uh and also the matter laabs team like how we can actually avoid down the line all this kind of like a power shifting back to these um uh companies that are building on on online and I think that's happening already on on AI uh significantly like if you look at the AI space these biggest uh large language models are built by these biggest tech companies and and they have the resources and the power to actually do that but most significantly the data as well so kind of like how we can create these save cards by by using onchain and and ZK is is is really what's uh what is driving our uh thinking here nice uh sty

can you take us behind the scenes of like M actually making this decision because ZK matter laabs has built something great but other people have built cool things too like there's the op stack and there's arbitrum orbit and then uh maybe there like there's you know those are kind of like the L3 Stacks I'd say then there's um like Cosmos app chains um then there's some of the ZK ZK players like uh maybe scroll or I think Stark net or something like that like walk us through the the the actual like thought process and Discovery and like demoing these other things yeah I mean the landscape is really um I would say quite wide at at at this point and these different technologies that exist it it it really

gives a headache to to think about like what you have to choose and most of developers that maybe are um in in the position of of choosing their technological stack maybe the main driver for them for example is that they they just need where a al2 or solution where they have let's say the the most of the users um you know that that might be an al2 that has most of the users that are that is basically most developed at this point for some it might be something else where you know you you want to have um faster exits uh from from a al2 where you know maybe waiting seven days is is too long for your use case and and maybe

something like a ZK setup is is is better but fundamentally what's what surprised me uh over this uh few month process is that uh I mean I've I've known Alex uh for a few years now and and what they've been building has been uh quite quite exciting um but more like I would say like a year um over a year ago year and a half maybe I've I've personally been surprised of the the progress of of a um evm compatible uh ZK rollups or like EVMS which has been kind of like pressing quite quickly um for me that was a a very big surprise so so the the speed of how the ZK technology

progressing at the moment is um really rapid and that means that the more ZK improves the the more data can be compressed the better compression techniques can be used and also the the underlying infrastructure as well so what Alex mentioned about thousands of chains and and being able to to cross verify it's actually something that uh is is called horizontal scaling and and that really enables um a lot of that scaling of infrastructure and and use cases so for for us it's it's it was like a very big of a much of a question is that what is the infrastructure where we can apply um a progressive security towards our use case um and when you look at fundamentally what lens protocol

is and and lens ecosystem it combines of two pieces so so one big piece is social transactions um that users are are are are creating for example they're creating their identity following other uh users so so linking with other identities uh then for example tokenizing content in form of nfts um but also there's the monetization aspect so so for example once you have that audience you can start monetizing so you can monetize your follows uh your content as as collections um or tipping as an example or to um open actions you can actually have directly on the feed

different kinds of actions that are onchain or offchain for example a an action to vote on governance can be on chain on on on your feet or voting on poly Market or doing a Unis swap swap directly on the feed so and I do believe that a lot of these uh dab specific uh use cases will go directly onto the feed because we're we're kind of building everything on the same network um wider Network the the the onchain network and that hasn't been the case for example on these more traditional social networks where the the social uh behaviorist is is is the main thing and then you have maybe like groups where you might have like great list types of uh Commerce and and whatnot so

for us um what we really wanted to achieve is that um for all these different Primitives uh in use cases we can apply the the the amount of security that that is sufficient um and then with that we have the the scale so what we found out that with the uh matter lab stack you can actually we have a a ZK roll up um that is settling transactions in the state to ethereum so that's perfect for for example uh Financial transactions where you want to secure a lot of value then uh you have also a a validium uh setup where you are uh registering the state transitions into ethereum um but you actually are storing

the state somewhere else either the validium uh node and and and later expanding to a Network or using a separate data Avail availability provider and once you do that once you actually select a a different security model and type for the data availability the transaction costs actually go significantly down so for example running something like lens uh let's say creating profiles could work on on on on a ZK rollup on a optimistic rollup but once you get to a bigger scale um you're going to hit some U scaling issues there but it's steerable but then when you want to use on chain to actually secure the linking between profiles uh you have

way more transactions and then that's where you hit the second much more bigger bottleneck uh for scaling so that part has to be for example on on something like validium and then obviously um you have all these micro payments where you know you might have a use case where you scroll a feed um and upon each craw there's a event that triggers a micro payment uh from the users to the appli ations and the algorithm um or various different payment mechanisms that really uh will not be efficient if there will be if you're paying like uh 40 50 cents uh per transaction um or even like 5 cents uh per per per transaction um as well so for us it's it's mainly about finding

the right setup where um technological setup where you can have that those financial transactions whether they're bigger and small depending on different setup and then the the the social transaction and social transaction is interesting because um most of the actual content is of chain on on lens so there's um they are already on a data availability layer so for us it's it's not a completely uh like a foreign setup for us and then the one big decision obviously is that um well you have optimistic rollups that are that are having a head start already for um couple of years um how do you create those Network effects when you go to and

utilize completely new technology but the way we see it is that um eventually everything will go towards uh the ZK technology so uh maybe Alex has more on this topic but what what what our research was was telling is that eventually um ZK as a scaling mechanism verification mechanism uh is something that is that is going to be far more powerful than the optimistic setups and these optimistic setups will eventually convert to ZK based setups because the better technology will prevail um end of the day so we want we wanted to go where uh the whole industry will go in terms of like technical advancements in the

future um and be there early and and actually build some of these pioneering uh setups and Primitives and and lead by example so I think that's kind of like the thing but but I do think it's a very difficult Choice uh for any developer that is choosing a stock where to go and what SC what scaling solution but also which an ecosystem to build upon this episode is brought to you by Aura online crime is growing at an alarming rate and cyber criminals continue to find crypto investors like the Empire Community lucrative targets we've all heard of someone who's Fallen victim to some sort of online attack Aura helps prevent against that for example if you're online accounts or your passwords were leaked online or if

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everything that Avalanche has been building the last few years has culminated in this moment where today you have institutions and developers able to essentially have Limitless possibilities with the chain they've enabled developers to build cross-chain swaps or create gaming environments where one subnet can unlock features in another or can use usdc as a native gas token Onyx for example by JP Morgan or city or dtcc digital assets or uh the Australia New Zealand banking group they are all building on Avalanche Evergreen subnets really cool stuff big thanks to Avalanche for sponsoring this episode of Empire go explore Avalanche subnet ecosystem at core. appd Discover that's core C.A slcover thanks again Avalanche hey

everyone Jason here I know you've been hearing a lot about the intersection of crypto and Ai and that's why I'm really excited to share our new newest partner and sponsored Empire scale a high performance modular blockchain that's revolutionizing gaming and AI with zero fees and instant finality scales unique architecture allows for massive scalability and has already saved users over 6 billion in gas fees the five main takeaways that you need to know for scale one zero gas fees two scale has instant finality and lack of muv three the zero gasby model of scale is really important for blockchain gaming adoption as Gamers don't have to pay transaction costs or have the skl token four scale is multi-chain this design allows for

nodes to be combined to create chains and for individual sub nodes to actually be removed and relocated which creates greater security and collusion resistance and five scale has become a really good fit for AI dabs because they're fast automated zero fee transactions big thank you to scale for sponsoring Empire we're excited to partner with you guys bridge over to scale if you're listening to this at scale dospace ecosystem follow the Journey along with scale on X at scale Network that's at scale Network big thanks again to scale for sponsoring Empire Alex can you just um maybe zooming out of the the lens conversation for a sec I'd love to just learn about like matter labs' strategy and Let Me Maybe share the 15 seconds on what it

feels like from an Outsiders point of view so it feels like you guys have are uh extremely technical people who have not been as focused on like the marketing and BD side as a lot of the other uh networks have been so there are things like maybe arbitrum uh optimism polygon Stark they all have tokens so like one is you guys don't have a token yet a lot of them already have a token uh and then the second thing is um I think they a lot of them have done a lot of work trying to pull people onto their onto their chains whether it's the kind of like last cycle strategy of getting the big Enterprises which for the most part flopped or maybe uh you know foraster on op stack and base or

fantasy on blast or whatever it may be a lot of them have these kind of like booming defi ecosystems I don't really see that as much on ZK sync it feels like now is kind of the turning point for ZK sync um so that's the that's the outsiders point of view I'd be curious how much of that you agree with um so look the way we see we we we kind of treat the uh the strategy is we are think thinking very long term ZK Sync has a powerful mission to advance and and protect freedom in the world by making blockchains mainstream by making ethereum mainstream so we take this ultimate vision and then we reverse engineer from there what has to happen

technologically in the world to achieve this Mission and then we we build the all all all like kind of like our approach or planning down from there and it's very clear to us that the future is multi-chain and the future is old ZK like the future is multi-chain because they just like the internet cannot be built on a single server the internet of value cannot be processed by a single blockchain no matter how powerful no matter how much you're willing to give up decentralization it's just not going to happen for political reasons for social reasons people want to have different systems um adjusted for different needs for technological reasons you cannot do infinite parallelism on a single chain like even

if you do like optimistic rism like like salana is doing or mon is doing so like there will be many chains and we already see this there are many chains governed by different approaches so what you what what you really need to to have is a multi-chain system multi-chain world that can scale like the internet anyone can add a chain permission isly and anyone can join and participate in this huge network of chains and and then the interactions feel seamless for the end users as an end user you should not be thinking about like oh I am on this chain and like you you you give me this address to to send you funds in but what

chain are you on uh do I need to bridge funds over there do I is my wallet compatible like all of that has to be abstracted away there must be a single unified address standard and you should not care you you have your assets on on your home chain you should be able to to interact with application specific chains or other generic chains just like on the internet you know you just interact directly from point to point to that to that single address so this is the end Vision technologically architecturally that that we have to get to and uh realistically it's it's like most of the chains are going to be at least initially evm based so it has to be something like ZK uh evm that that supports the uh um contract thre

solidity on Viper that you deploy there so okay so that's the vision now can we arrive at this Vision incrementally can we take the existing landscape of optimistic cups and maybe side chains or other scaling approaches and then gradually convert it into the ZK based world and like my answer as an engineer is no this is not going to work like I predict that it it's um you know most likely optimist cup steams that will want to embrace ZK in the future will build new systems from scratch and will have usus migrate to those systems because the complexity of adjusting an

existing system designed for specific set of constraint often exceeds the complexity of building this new system from scratch think of um Zeppelins that were replaced by planes think of propeller planes that then later were replaced by jet planes those what Paradigm shifts you cannot just take a Zeppelin and put Wings on it you cannot take a propeller plane and and put a jet engine on it this is not how the word Works PlayStation one PlayStation two yeah like you you have you have a transition you have to abandon all old some like you know sometimes there is an incremental Improvement like we can start with zkm and we can add different execution

environments and we can support risk and and then like let rust programs be running it and we can compile from from rust into into risk and execute on the ZKA environment but if you're not building for ZKA like the transition from like cryptoeconomic scaling approaches to ZK to cry to purely cryptographic scaling and verifiability is a step function it's it's a paradigm shift and like it won't be possible to to just replace so what what what's possible is to design a new system from scratch like taking this ultimate ZK Singularity the verifiability that is fully plastic that can incorporate any chains and build right away for this infrastructure and this has been our approach we're

ignoring the short-term hype we're ignoring all of this noise that's that doesn't matter we're very very early how many people are actually transacting on chains you know like we have millions of crypto users crypto owners but frankly most of them are on the centralized exchanges just trading Bitcoin ethereum and and and a bunch of tokens much less people are on chain because the U ux sucks and because we don't have the these protocols the like basically ux is the biggest botl and so we ignored all of that we said okay we like when we launched ziki syn era the first ziki chain in this network of chains that we're building we delayed it

until we had native account obstruction because we realized that it's very important for the end users to on board with uh you know not only build something that that the existing powerful crypto like crypto power users will be able to use with metamask Etc but to build something where your you can onboard your parents and your grandparents and just give them a wallet and say like look here one click One Tap uh face ID Touch ID you have your account it's still yours it's still fully self- custodial you own it but it's very very easy to use you cannot forget your seed phrase because you have social recovery you cannot accidentally lose all of your assets because you signed one wrong transaction and

authorized you know infinite amount of uh um like infinite approval for an rc20 token because it's just so inconvenient because you otherwise you would have to do multiple transactions like we need to solve all of the ux complexity before we on board mainstream users and so we're building the the right architecture from the start that will absorb all of this new demand just because it's going to be so much easier so much more fun to use and so much more safe to use yeah and I want to say that part of the uis is really the transaction cost so if if if the transaction costs are going to go down as as we learn how to apply um Progressive security and and also we

introduce more and more uh ZK proving techniques that basically opens up the door for uh bigger audiences and something interesting about U the whole landscape is that none of the kind of like uh ecosystem really ecosystems that that we've seen um you in our space They Don't Really own the users like there's there's no like loyalty towards you know uh being on specific like chain or uh ecosystem and they have different kinds of reasons and actually can say that even um the uh acquisition of existing users is relatively easy like crypto early crypto audience and the audience we have today they're quite eager to try

different things so they're they're eager to TR um new rollups or new technology but like obviously the retention is is is what what is kind of like a chronical uh challenge in in our space and that's why like we have to go towards more of the mainstream audiences and and it's not just because um that's where we get the users but these technologies that for example we're working uh on lens and also what Alex and and their team is working in in matter laabs these Technologies are are meant for the people in a in a global scale so if you actually can have a technology uh and you can verify and and scale globally um these use cases and create open Fair social spaces uh for

the mainstream like then we're in in a correct uh path before that like I I think the uses which just follow where you know the next technological um advancement is or you know the next kind of like arbitr opportunity um and and I think down the line we have to just work on that ux aspect stonie can you tell me about uh a so like Switching gears to your to the other one um I saw that you you tweeted out a network is planned to come after V4 actually was a pretty interesting Mark Zeller tweet fun fact if a were a layer on its own it would be the largest ethereum layer with a market size of 20 billion it would also be the third largest chain after ethereum and Tron well I'm I don't know if I I don't know

if this is public or not or if I've missed any blog post or anything but with a network will you also build that on sync well eventually I mean ZK sync is the technology we've previewed most until this point um and we reviewed other uh Network as well so I I do think that like in overall if you think about defy and you know securing what you mentioned like 20 you know billion B of value or that ballpark like at that point you have to ask yourself is that what is the underlying security that these ones are are secured and um it boils down to end eventually on the

methods um and obviously the data availability where it's secured and obviously the benefit of of of of rollups is that you can inherit the security from ethereum so what I can say about uh the the ZK stock and and ZK syn is that uh if if you use actually proven mathematics to secure the network uh secure the data and and and verify and and then use those verifications and store in ethereum you have a very strong setup for uh decentralized Finance um and the drawbacks of let's say optimistic drups is that and by the way I think both of these are really uh needed at at this point and I'm I'm

pretty sure like lot of these uh U teams that are building optimistic drill Ops you know they all have some sort of aik um future uh plan but I think what's the challenge with optimistic rollups in defi is that obviously you need to have some additional trust assumptions with the pro proving uh as an example and and then you have the the withdrawal uh Windows of of seven days um so so you need to add that kind of like uh either trust assumptions on or some sort of like uh staking type of a security um overhead into that uh environment so I do think that for defy um I would say that the best environment will be some sort of a

um a ZK based uh rollup where you have like a minimal trust assumptions um and also overhead of of uh um let's say security uh staking but that's something that eventually is up to the decision of the a DA and and the a network is is basically part of this U uh figure of a 2030 uh proposal of where uh where proposing to build the V4 which is further optimizing the the a um as a a liquidity protocol infrastructure and making it just like more advanced in terms of like getting the best yield with the most leanest collateral that you bring to the protocol or if you're other side of the uh risk spectrum and

I4 itself has so many uh different new features that I'm not going to go into it but but but but that's a great example of like thinking like where defy should go from here you know and if we if defy is going to have it's now roughly um 100 uh billion dollars worth but let's say if it's going to be uh multiple trillions at some point uh what are those what kind of security assumptions we can take um or overhead to secure and have a secure infrastructure for a financial ecosystem I do think rollups do reduce the cost of transaction transaction which is really important for defi because that creates access you know and access creates adoption um and that that creates more

fair and and and better uh Financial uh infrastructure Alex when you think about building out the ecosystem so so you've got lens now um if you could go get like two or three more big I guess like brands or platforms to go build on ZK sync like who who would be your kind of dream brands or like what types of folks would be the dream the dream customer here um we have already a dozen of ZK chains SL up some of them were announced some of them like Kronos and gravity for example Kronos is uh has built the the largest defi ecosystem in in in Cosmos and they they are supported by uh

crypto.com uh wallet with uh close to 100 million users I believe uh we have others coming that are still not announced and that they come in announcement very soon and so like we already are forming a system a network of the ZK chains that that is going to be the large just in um in today's uh ethereum skating landscape I don't know who to ask this question to but I would actually love to talk about something stonnie mentioned in the very beginning of the show which is uh decentralized ml or like the broader topic of you know crypto meets AI um so who any anyone can answer this but like hype not hype really exciting several years away or one to two years

away like would love to hear I guess maybe both your guys' like broad perspective perspective on uh just like what's hype what's real what are you guys excited about in this area uh yeah I I mean I do think that's um especially like these large language models they have a lot of utility and and it's really fascinating like I'm more observing from like the AI like maybe a little bit from the a perspective of like automatization and and kind of like a better human decisions perspective and and and there's going to be Tools around that um in the future that we're researching but from the lens perspective is is is really fascinating because um the way I think about let's say um Financial uh

Finance on chain like Defy is that you you really contribute Financial value um let's say like liquidity and you put that Capital into use and the outcome is yield as an example or some sort of a increased value um and in in lens perspective that you know there is this financialization and um you know you pay for attention and whatnot but actually um what is more exciting is that um the data acquisition so so for example like how do you share data and affo data um and then put it out put it into use and and produce something as an outcome so what these uh language models they they really do well is that you know they are

very data hungry and they grab enormous amount of data and and then train these models um and that better model is kind of like the when you put data into work um as a result and I find it it really like a fascinating that um like from lens perspective the the data is actually going to be in the future more valuable than uh let's say like thinking of just like purely like Financial um capital and then when you have that data the question is how do you monetize and also incentivize in the first place uh for paying those uh data sources so I'm I'm looking more of the perspective of like how we can end this um nonsense we have now where we have people giving up

their data for free to these bigger platforms on an ongoing basis and they grow these large uh train models and then you know use them against the users in a way to extract value out of them or you know make them more addicted to these different algorithms and I think that's where kind of like um the the blockchain comes into play and Lens comes into place to to basically ensure that if you have some of the ownership components and Primitives and you own your network you have Choice um you can actually like move that power away from from these bigger institutions to to yourself in in the community and at the same time um you can like if if you can turn the monetization switch on on on

personal data if you even want to share it in the first place um we can end this whole kind of like a existing status quo where we're just giving all our data you know for free uh we are not getting paid anything for that and we don't have any any say of of of it Alex what do you think uh and to add to this my view is simple look blockchains are going to permeate every sphere in the world that touches value everything that that has to do with value ownership identity will be on chain eventually this is an inevitable next step of the evolution of the internet now everything that that is concerned with um computation uh

intelligence decision- making is is going to be prated by AI That's also inevitable that this is happening so like you have these two spheres that are ever expanding and uh embracing more and more of of the uh Realms of the physical and digital world obviously they're going to intersect a lot and whether this intersection is going to be direct where you have some AI applications doing things on chain and very fine on chain that certain computation has been done in certain data sets and connecting this to chain activity or whether they're going to be interacting indirectly just by by the uh virtue of AI agents having some value in transacting on chain or humans owning

you know the having decentralized communities that onlyi and that that that have some saying how they govern the AI systems how they fight tune them I don't know but it's very clear that they're going to be interplaying in one way or another so we're focused on our part and uh yeah we have already couple couple of teams building zik chains on zync uh with regard to AI deploying AI enabled AI powered applications on zync era and uh I'm sure there's going to be lots of applications powered by AI building on the lens Network because that that has directly to do something with the user data and user identity so lots of possibilities how this things

will inter Alex Alex three years from now are there is there more activity on ZK sync from coming from uh you said you said all the world's value will eventually live on chain which I which I agree with um I'd bucket that into two buckets there's places where there's existing societally uh assigned value that's like Finance like there's a dollar assigned to different things that have value and then there's things that don't have a dollar assigned to the value but probably will in the future maybe it's attention maybe it's your own personal data um and I think that's more like you could almost Define it as like a vers lens right there um so like three years from now will there be more activity on ZK sync from the predefined society values like I guess you could bucket

that as defi or the like web three decentralizing Google and Facebook and things like that I think it's uh it's going to be more of the letter for the very simple reason in in the web two world this is what we observe there are a lot more transactions in social networks than the financial transactions just because the the letter encompasses more spheres and more more domains so like there there are yeah just a lot more interactions will happen naturally between people than purely Financial transactions but they will be intertwined how do you think about appealing to a like who is your customer you're trying

to appeal to um and and the the context for this question is obviously the tech matters but then there's been this um the word Community is like overhyped and fluffy and stuff like that but there's a I think people who have done who have talk directly to a very crypto native audience have actually done the best and people who kind of talk at the institutional crowd or the like Normy crowd have actually with the goal of like onboarding the masses with quotes around that have tended not to do very well how think about like who you're talking to in like in the in the ZK sync marketing yeah for us we've been extremely consistent on this we from day one of the creation of ziki sync we have declared the values we stand for It's The Cypher Punk ethereum values if you

read our ZK CR if you see everything we've done like from supporting the legal defenses of the tornado cach team to like every single blog post every every uh uh public statement we did is reinforcing those values it's only valuable for us to to scale blockchains to the degree of the real world to to like bring in Mass adoption if we can preserve those key core properties that make blockchains valuable if we cannot preserve them if if we don't uh ensure that these networks remain permissionless open for anyone to access sensorship resistant uh resilient against powerful ad series then we might

have just as well build it on on top of you know Google and Facebook and and all the web to platforms like what then what part of blockchain yeah and I I really like want to double down on that like that's the reason like what what why we're like building it in the right way and the decentralized way and and where you can actually like establish ownership in censorship resistant networks and and that creates like more value for the users and I think like a great way to think about um The Zing ecosystem is is quite similar like back in 2016 when I um got into ethereum and and started to uh build actually like one of the

pressors of of a back in those those days it felt very uh developer oriented but then you started to see a lot of things um uh coming out and a lot of experimentations and I tend to see also that there's uh a lot of tendency now towards um ZK in terms of also like what you can build and for lens what why this is like overly like fascinating why our team is like um very excited about uh building L Network on on on zik sync is that it opens up to the doors to brigher uh category and and ideas in the uh ZK um use cases and and that means in

the future for example if you comment on someone else's post you know you uh you can prove that you have common friends you can prove you reach a threshold of certain amount of followers and you have common groups without actually revealing which the data itself to any server third body that data doesn't really go is not exported from from your um position and that's like a really exciting uh area of various different use cases and and when we think about uh lens V3 uh data control U and data privacy will will have a a a very big significant uh importance and focus so I do think that like uh we build so much

on on ethereum at this point and we're still building in CHS of like scalability as a wider ecosystem but there is now actually more utility found from the from this new ZK I mean new but ZK U technology stack so I do think that over time we just see uh solidity developers to to actually uh build more on ZK and I think one the core Innovation that that really U made for us the decision a little bit easier is that when you have a uh evm compatible uh zik rollup or or validium it basically means that you you you take the code that you already have um and you can redeploy it um you might have

some smaller changes but in in most of it you you basically redeployed and that's distribution so if you build something on uh ethereum or like the bl1 or other networks you can easily Port it and add also ZK based features uh if you have use cases for for example privacy or other types of adapations so I think it's really uh just a new world of building and for me like I need always like intellectual uh Challenge and I think we built so far with a and and lens uh today that that being able to to actually build around DK is is really really fascinating as a builder yeah um all right Swit Switching gears a little

bit putting on your like a founder of a protocol hat there's uh interesting regulations going on in the US and like interesting uh like ca change it feels like so you've got like Trump came out and said he supports Bitcoin now and self- custody and things like that the Biden Administration seems like they're changing their tune they you had fit21 I think it was Sab 121 things like that uh in an election so if I look back at permission list last year um I think we had 37% of our speakers dropped out because they were worried about being on us soil now most of the big protocol Founders are speaking Alex I think you're speaking there uh uh arbitrum founder optimism

founder like a lot of the big you know Aptos founder like a lot of the big suie founder like a lot of the now now everyone's coming to permission list and speaking and so it's like I think that's shown me like wow how how much has changed in just a year um stonnie you're from Finland I think and Alex I I don't actually know but I'm picking up on the accent either like Soviet Union or Ukraine maybe um I was born in Soviet Ukraine yes oh so okay so combine the bo uh combine two um so like tell me how you guys think about the us right now and just like you're both you know I don't know what's more exciting like Europe uh Asia where there's a lot of activity um Middle East where you know token had their thing in Dubai or is the

us back like how are you guys think about this as Founders it's long-winded question uh I I think one great thing that we see in the US with crypto is that crypto Community has manifested itself as a powerful election Force it's clearly having an impact on the uh on the US politics now on the election process um I I guess we will really see this connection after elections uh but like this is FAS inting and and it's only going to become stronger every year as Millennials and and Jet Z become more and more active um in the Electoral space um and uh yeah they like for now we don't have a lot of concrete steps

the fit 21 has not yet been fully passed and it it it's not also like ideal for crypto but it it it's definitely going in the right direction um we will will see and I I I think it's also important for politicians to feel the consequences of the uh of the you know like not just switch the rhetoric one day before the elections and then roll it back but like be held accountable for what they have been doing for years and uh you know like feel that it you know the community remembers yeah yeah and I I do think that there's a lot

of positivity um and and progression and I I I think it hasn't happen uh by itself so so there's a lot of smart people in in the crypto community that have been involved um in CHMS of like from their own position just basically being vocal about how um big of a deficit it is for uh developers uh in US or Founders that really want to build this technology that is really bringing a lot of uh value for U basically the people the the nor the normal users and and and done in a right way using different kinds of uh proven best practices uh this technology can be really really empowering um I think defi

is is just better Financial infrastructure from all like it it takes all the boxes for actually just like empowering U users giving more protection it has the transparency um you can create rules that can't be changed by uh single entities like you have that immutability governance um and also from like uh lens context and and social like you can create actually um open you know Fair social spaces and users have more Choice they're not look into the platform so like these Technologies are fundamentally really really uh valuable uh for the users and that choice really doesn't mean that it

takes power from from the governments it's actually um ensures that corporations actually you know they participate in this uh an environment in a more fair uh manner so for example if if if these companies in in big Tech they don't have you know most of the control of the data they have to listen more carefully for the users and and and their um thinking as well and I think it is fundamentally important and and obviously like the past year has been past years has been really hard hard for a lot of people who are developing and I think we lost a lot of uh Innovation and I do think that us is kind of like a significantly um you know in in a position of being a leader in the tech and globally those hubs are um also uh

growing in other places of the world so like being able to actually recognize that this technology is is really uh benefiting the people and and and thinking of like how we can Implement that and be the leader is groundbreaking I can speak so far from from London where um uh we're we're also based um in the sense that there's there's a lot of positivity um here as well um obviously institutions are looking into the space quite a lot Hong Kong is another uh place as well where I I've seen a lot of progress so the the the technology in in blockchain space is global which makes it really exciting from like a democracy uh perspective so

I would say that the progression is great but devil is in the details so as with any Bill and law we have to ensure that it's written uh and proposed in a way that it's it's really actually doesn't kill the Innovation uh silently so I think that's the people who are working uh towards this direction and and um seeking for our values is is really they're doing the the God's work here yeah Alex Don great chat um anything that you guys want to cover that we haven't touched on yet I think we didn't talk about them coins but I think that's that's actually good that we didn't I'm uh I'm I will admit after uh Caitlyn Jenner came out with a the

Jenner coin I'm I'm meme coined out I got to admit I have a feeling uh Alex I don't know you too well I don't know you as well as I know stonnie but I have a feeling you're not a huge fan of the meme coins too so uh I prefer utility yeah they are cultural phenomenon like generally like nfts the this is something Community does and uh you know like we have to embrace um whatever is is is is fun for people um whether or not they're going to be a longlasting trans is a different question I do think that uh you know it's so easy to ruin the mcoin space um you know with with just floating the market with a lot of nonsense but I but I do think that coins

that really find some sort of like a community around and a purpose and and a utility um you know that that might make sense from like a cultural value and also like some sort of utility utility perspective but I do think that there's also like the the challenging part that you know if people think these are some kind of like you know investment uh tools then you know it's it's not it's not going to be beneficial for for the space I think yeah I mean but also if you if you if you think about it from the philosophical point of view isn't Bitcoin a mcoin in a sense it is but mean also but yeah but at the same time Bitcoin transfers energy into uh a kind of unit um so like

that's the thing I I think there's there's kind of like there's some sort of a balance of of the both even like Dodge Coin has utility to some extent where um it just is cheaper to transact the same way as you're transacting on on on bitcoin so I do think that like some of these more um kind of if if there is like a real Community behind of the face value you know that that makes sense as well and and I think there are good examples um and I've seen examples where for example uh something starts as a meme point and it becomes like a a currency that people actually use to collect you know or tip each other like we've seen with Bonsai on on lens and other SIM token so I

think that's the interesting part what a mean Point starts and how it evolves down the line yeah yeah I think things like Bon on salana Bonsai on lens Doge like I some of these have been actually pretty valuable um cool guys this is great [Music] um appreciate the time I think that's it we uh I have a feeling this won't be the Stan's been on here uh too many times stonnie on Empire but Alex we'll we'll have to have you uh back on this is great I enjoyed it I'm gonna take a break it was a pleasure really the questions thank you great right [Music]