🟡 LIVE: Privacy Day On The Rollup ft. ZAMA, NEAR, Venice, Multicoin, T-REX, Canton, and more!

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>> We'll see you around the timeline. Feels good to be back. >> [music] >> I think the Rollup is one of the most premier media [singing] brands in crypto, and Andy and Robbie are great experts at everything they [music] talk about, and it's >> favorite podcast. >> Adding it to my library as we speak. >> Potentially multi-chain deployments. [music] >> We are at Devconnect Day One here broadcasting from space. >> [music] [music] [music] [music]

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The entire thing was just institutions. It's just It's next level. This industry is going to the next level. And guys, I I don't know what else to say. >> I'm bullish. >> HE SAID IT. HE FINALLY SAID IT. >> I'm so bullish. >> And he's bullish. I'm bullish. We're bullish. >> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music]

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is headed to the top. If we're not already at the top, we're going to the top. >> The Rollup is my favorite. >> From all walks of life, all over the world, all over this industry, come together for the Rollup. >> [music] [music] [music] [music] >> Super [music] 5 new mouths. Institutions

aren't coming, they're simply here. Take control of major crypto, guys. Get right, let's go. >> [music] >> Welcome to the nest. See you on the show. >> Yes, sir. Happy Wednesday, June 17th. You're watching The Rollup. It's privacy day on The Rollup. Live from the tokenization tower here in the financial capital of the world. We've got an amazing show for you today. Today is Wednesday, June 17th, privacy day. It is the day of the Fed meeting. There's a lot going on. Ladies and gentlemen, if you're watching on the Zalla account, if you're watching on the Near account, welcome to The Rollup. We're live here

in the Empire State Building, powered by our friends at Plume, on chain instruction for asset management and more. We've got a full slate of guests today. Tushar, Joachim, Eric, Rand, Omar, and plenty others. Guys, if it's your first time watching the show, welcome to the show. We do the show live every day. Great to have you guys here. We've got our first guest, Tushar from Multicoin, ready to join us. We're going to get straight into the guests. We'll have some time in between to chat and do some things, guys. But we got a ton of guests. We got a ton of privacy thesis conversations is coming out. Rob, war's over, deals being signed. How we feeling?

>> I'm feeling great. I am excited. I am ready to get into our first guest. Like you said, incredible show today, privacy day, presented by Zama. So we've got Tushar from Multicoin. He's going to join us in just a bit. We've got Joaquin from T-Rex. They're doing billions. We've got Canton. We've got Zama. We've got Zcash, Venice, Near, Nillion. I think it's really the best of the best in the privacy game. So we're going to be talking all the way from the asset layer to the agentic layer to the confidentiality layer. And shout out Zama, uh amazing announcement today about earning yield on confidential deposits.

I think >> On Morpho. >> people just haven't really thought about how deep this privacy, uh structure goes. And so I'm excited to talk to Ran about it today. >> I agree. And I think this this confidential future for on-chain DeFi for institutions, for everyday people is going to be massive. >> Absolutely. >> And who better to start the show than Tushar Jain, the co-founder of Multicoin. First time on the show, let's bring him up. Let's get this show started. Tushar, we're live. Empire State Building, it's 75°. The Knicks just won the NBA Finals. World Cup is on. I mean, come on, man. How we feeling?

>> Life is good. Uh yeah, feeling great. Glad to be here. >> Good, then. Good, man. >> Absolutely. We're we're happy to have you here. I think it's our our first time chatting, first time having you on the show. Um and so, you know, obviously Multicoin is a household name at this point. You guys launched in 2017 with Kyle Samani. Um and, you know, you're you're you personally have been in the game a long, long time. Because it's your first time on the show, Tushar, maybe you could just quickly you know, describe a little bit about how you got into the space, how you found Multicoin, and you know, why why we have you here today chatting about privacy in this space.

>> thesis. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I'm founder and managing partner at Multicoin. And my background is in finance and political science. But I've always been captivated by the intersection of technology and finance. And crypto sits exactly at that intersection. And I'm lucky that it exists because couldn't imagine spending my life working on anything else, really.

I first got interested in crypto when I saw Ethereum in 2016, and it felt like seeing a glimpse of the future. Everything about fully on-chain, censorship-resistant, programmable smart contracts just made sense. It felt to me that this was the future to have internet capital markets rather than the type of capital markets we have now, which are more like printing press-based capital markets. A lot of the fundamental underlying technology that our financial system works on today is from the industrial era as opposed to the internet era.

So, you know, Ethereum felt like the beginning of a new economic paradigm. And that's what convinced me to put everything I had into starting Multicoin. You know, we're one of the first crypto-focused investment firms. We've been thesis-driven since day one. We started with just a few hundred thousand AUM. Today we're 17 people and manage well north of a billion across our various funds. And something that we pride ourselves on is trying to find uh the non-consensus view uh that in a few years is going to feel really obvious.

Uh and that's why I'm excited to come here and talk about privacy. >> Yeah. Love it. Love it. I uh love the hyperliquid purchase is much lower, sir. Welcome to the train. Glad to have you on. Um and you know, you you were I think I saw you on Bankless a couple weeks back talking about Zcash with Mert. Obviously, there was this crazy, you know, Opus 4.8 white hat vulnerability found. Um Zcash now kind of came out of the came out of the ruins a bit with Anthropic's team putting Mithril to the test on Zcash blockchain and effectively verifying that, you know, this is effectively safe, you know, for lack of better term. And I feel that Zcash

itself has kind of revived a lot of the core ethos of privacy uh as a store of value specifically and a lot of the kind of core of the ethos. And in this kind of bearish time, I think what pulls us out of this bearish time is this kind of return to fundamentals. That's, you know, that's at least what I call it. So, I'm just curious, Two Chainz, privacy as a store of value. How do you think about private assets as it pertains to them being store of values? And and kind of like what is the what is the privacy as a store of value framework that you guys have at Multicoin or you personally?

>> Yeah. Uh so, let's talk about Zcash there. Um and let me start out by talking about the privacy store value thesis. And I'll talk about my journey along that thesis because I used to be a bear. Uh you can probably go find up some old tweets uh of mine that were bearish on private store of Uh so, I want to talk about what changed. Uh so, uh I think the core thesis for Zcash is it's a return to crypto's roots. It's a return to the Cypherpunk ideals that crypto was founded on.

Uh you know, Bitcoin is censorship resistant and no one can freeze your Bitcoin or stop you from using it, but that does not stop the state from seizing your known holdings through so-called wealth taxes or unrealized gains taxes or, you know, whatever name they're going to put on it. And that like the whole industry and, you know, Bitcoin initially was founded on this like rebellion against the system that was being controlled and manipulated in order to uh empower a certain set of people.

And now it feels like a lot of crypto has gotten co-opted by the system. Uh and you know, it's it's now melted into the system. So, I think Zcash is a return to those Cypherpunk roots that are all about liberty and individual freedoms uh that seem to have at least culturally moved away from uh assets like Bitcoin. Uh so, uh you know, that's I think the crux of the Zcash thesis. There's a few other pieces such as the quantum resistance, which I think is very important, uh and the ability to actually implement scalability, which I think is important, but the core of my thesis is actually a

cultural Cypherpunk thesis uh more than uh something else. And I think that's what makes something a store of value. People have to believe in it because of their personal uh views, their their opinions. They need to have some basis for it that is not going to be easy to change or to shake people out of. And if it's not a deeply held conviction, then I don't think it can be a store of value.

Uh so now let me talk a little bit about how uh you know, my view on privacy has evolved. Uh I used to think that privacy only mattered for payments, not for store of value. Uh and payments will be in stables, so I thought, you know, private stablecoins will be the solution. And to be clear, I still think privacy matters for payments and for trading. Um you know, that that's pretty obvious. You should You don't want uh your entire financial history to be visible on chain to anyone you ever transact with. Uh you don't want your trades to be visible for other people to go and front-run. Uh you don't want your liquidation prices to be visible for people to go hunt those levels and

liquidate you out of a position. Uh so I think that is important, but now I think privacy also matters for store of value due to uh wealth taxes. Uh right? I think we are going to see increased economic uh inequality due to AI. And that is going to lead to a bigger political movement for wealth seizure. And I believe that people are going to look to protect themselves from that. And Bitcoin will not protect them because those balances are all visible and public.

Uh so I think at a very high level um the private store of value thesis uh it just has a a different backdrop, different fundamentals behind it. Uh so while I was bearish before, now we have a substantial Zcash position in the fund. Um and I'm um bullish on the future. >> Yeah, and just to add something there that happened today is the uh I believe it was the governor of Illinois created this rule um that applies excessive taxation to very minuscule basic transactions of cryptocurrency as well as applying, you know, what is typically known as like a property tax in real estate, applying

that to Illinois residents ownership of crypto assets. And so you've got this already happening in the United States in a single state where a governor is coming out and saying if you own Bitcoin, Ethereum, whatever, we're going to we're just going to tax you on the ownership of of that asset. Um And so, you know, you can put the mental pieces together in in your mind as to how Zcash and private store of values can kind of uh play a role in someone's establishment as a sovereign individual.

>> Yeah, absolutely. That tax is absolutely ridiculous in my opinion. It like you move Bitcoin from one of your wallets to another wallet and they want to take a cut of it. Uh it's outrageous. Um and look, I think people have short memories and they don't realize how quickly political winds can change. Uh everyone has this feeling, you know, with the current Trump administration being friendly uh and uh you know, that gives a sense of safety.

Uh but you don't know what the future is going to hold politically. And at its core, crypto was a political movement. Like that, you know, read the the white paper, you know, it starts out with Chancellor on the brink of second bailout for the banks. Like this is a political movement at its core, uh and we have to recognize that and go back to our roots as an industry. >> Yep, absolutely. And you described how Bitcoin is moving further and further away from our roots and and how it's becoming institutionalized. And this was pretty important for its store value thesis, at least its path dependency of one. And the ossification of it just kind of continued to continue to

solidify it into what it is today. And and the institutions, you know, kind of continued to rally around that rather than rallying around the original ethos of, you know, kind of computer science and Cypherpunk innovation. Uh but that is kind of the the gap now that Zcash is filling. And so we we, you know, understand and and tend to agree with the thesis that there are net new buyers of Zcash and they're probably, you know, disillusioned Cypherpunk individuals that were part of Bitcoin and now are are moving over to the to the, you know, re- rediscovering that thesis.

I'm curious and you do I I I really love the the kind of bifurcation that you you you parse out between, you know, fundamental privacy for a store value purpose and and privacy elements to our monetary system. And I mean, you know, this was kind of a big debate in the Bitcoin days as well. Do you have, you know, big blocks so that you have Bitcoin Cash and you have, you know, these things that you can use Bitcoin to buy a coffee or do you go the store value route? And obviously we, you know, we know what happened with Bitcoin. Privacy can apply in both of these situations as well. Zcash taking the store value route. I'm curious who you see as the net new buyer or the net new user of each of these because they they have different answers for these two classifications of privacy.

You know, kind of with the understanding that Bitcoiners are coming over to the Zcash private store value world, who after the Bitcoiners do you think are the net new buyers of, you know, the private store value, specifically Zcash? And then, you know, maybe switching hats, going to the the private, you know, monetary system, right? Zama launched their confidential earning products on USDC and whatnot. I'm curious who you What do you think the adoption curve looks like on in both of these uh classifications of privacy? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, for context, you know, we're lead investors in Zama as well. We've invested in several other privacy initiatives across the ecosystem. So, that this is a big

theme for us. And you know, one question I like to always ask myself is fast forward 5 years and look back and what's going to be the obvious to you that today is not obvious? And it's so obvious to me that RWAs are coming on chain, right? You see that with Project Crypto from the SEC, you see that from all the big asset issuers, all the banks. Everyone wants to modernize their infrastructure, but I think it's ridiculous to think they're going to do that and broadcast all of their activity in real time to the public.

That doesn't make any sense. Privacy is not optional if you're a large trader. It's not something you can risk leaking out there. People are very sensitive about information leakage. So, what do you need? You need privacy protocols like Zama that then enable you to have the upgrade of the system that blockchains allow, but allow you to do so privately. So, that's a broad category that I'm very excited about. This is the modernization of the financial plumbing that underlies our entire economy. And I think it's going to be absolutely transformational.

We're going to hopefully see the Clarity Act pass here you know, in the next couple of months, which provides even more certainty for bringing these RWAs on chain. And then I think privacy will have its time to shine there. And now getting to the second part of your question on Zcash and private store of value, it's who do you think were the Bitcoin buyers, right? In the 20 15 through 2020 era, right? Uh, I think it's it's that same kind of customer segment, right? It's people not necessarily in the United States, in other countries who want to make sure that they can flee the country with

their wealth, um, that you know, have more oppressive governments. Uh, you know, you you see that the Netherlands passed an unrealized capital gains tax recently, right? Like uh, people are going to try to protect themselves from those kinds of things and they're going to look to private censorship resistant store of value to do that. Uh, you know, you've seen uh, all these wealthy Chinese internet entrepreneurs, uh, get involved in crypto back then. Um, and now they're a lot more quiet, but um, you know, they got a lot of money into the system then.

Uh, so I think it's those types of politically exposed people who are the next set of buyers, just as they were the key buyers of Bitcoin during that 2015 through 2020 era. >> Yeah. To sure, I know you're running low on time. Just real quick, last thing about Zcash versus something like a Zama or a near confidential intense, you know, Zcash had this kind of like we're going to be the place for private value transfer as well as private store of value. I think the thesis that you guys are kind of holding tight is more of the store of value idea.

You know, what is your view on the uh, the separation from confidential USDC, USDT payments with, you know, something like Zama powering across EVM chains versus the utility of Zcash being a medium of medium of exchange. When it comes to like this kind of on a similar track of question, how do you view uh the separation of use case there? And do you believe that Zcash will basically end up being just a store of value and that will have, you know, a lot more demand for something like Zama's confidential USDC USDT payments on chain or how do you kind of see that difference shaping up in terms of store value versus medium of exchange?

>> Uh it depends on your time frame, right? Like just fast forward a few years uh and I think it's still stable coins for transfers. Um it's really hard to get people to rewire medium of exchange in their minds, right? Like they're uh you're already used to paying for things in dollars. And look, like us here and probably a lot of the viewing audience, like we are very tech forward early adopters and we're able to like grasp like oh, yeah, well, I can pay for something with a different currency, too. Right? But uh in order to become a medium of exchange, it needs to be extremely broadly acceptable as payment. Uh and you're

going to need the laggards, you know, the tech laggards to be on board. And I just don't see how that happens within a few years. Like that that seems pretty unlikely. Uh so, I continue to think payments, trading, transactions uh are all going to continue to be stable coins um and using privacy protocols like Zama uh in order to facilitate that. Um and I think store of value is a separate thing. Um store of value like I think the Bitcoiners were right about store of value being the market to go after and I think that's what Zcash should go after.

I don't think Zcash should be competing for I want to pay for coffee. >> Yeah. Yeah, got it. Tushar, thanks for your time, man. Hope the Zcash investment does well. We're in this with you. Uh quite a few of my larger kind of OG friends who run different funds and stuff are also in this. Feels like this return to the roots, return to the fundamentals. And then you guys Zama and their confidential transfers, you've got Near's confidential intents and quite a few of these other products really gaining traction.

There's a lot happening here. You know, we've been saying privacy for a while and I agree, you know, there's I've I've had this kind of bearish view for a bit then gone bullish and gone bearish. But I think from now on it's very clear that this is where we're going. So, thanks for being a part of the show today and we'll love to have you back. >> Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Good to see you. >> All right, buddy. Hey, Tushar. Let's give him some love, man. Yes, sir. All right, guys. Keep it rolling. Rob, takeaways, bullish, bearish. I mean, I think those guys probably have a nine-figure Zcash position or at least an eight-figure, at least a high eight-figure Zcash position.

And they're definitely bullish on Zama. Obviously, they've got a large investment there. I'm sure they're bullish on Near's confidential intents. I mean, Yeah. >> Look, I mean, those guys at Multicoin, they're based in Texas. Sovereignty, freedom, privacy fundamental roots in Texas. I think it just goes to show that these guys, they, you know, they say it, they talk about it, they they walk the walk, they preach it, they practice it. >> Yeah. >> Um and I think it makes a ton of sense. I mean, you know, they're not only buying Zcash, they're also investing in privacy protocols like Zama as well as others like Tushar mentioned.

And this is happening across the board. It's not just happening at the asset layer, it's happening at the infrastructure layer. We're layering on more privacy elements. And I think Tushar's right and I hadn't thought about it as a bifurcation in terms of, you know, we're going to get private store value as stores of value, but then also we're going to get privacy elements on top of the medium of exchanges that we're all used to. And in this way, consumer behavior doesn't have to change and I think that's really important to the adoption of these things.

>> Well, guys, we've got Joachim, the CTO at T-Rex coming up. New type yo-yo, what's up? Freedom guy, what's going on? Did they ask you about the Zcash Orchard Unlimited Mint Threat yet? We'll have Josh from Zcash on in about an hour, hour and a half or so. We'll talk to him about that. Isn't Canton doing this already? We will also have the Canton team on in about 30 minutes. Or was private? Yes. Yes, I believe it was. I believe it was. So guys, Joachim is the CTO of T-Rex. Rob, correct me if I'm wrong. T-Rex is putting a lot of the privacy elements of on-chain world.

>> I think it's Yeah, I mean when you say when you say a lot, I think it's something like 30 billion dollars of tokenized assets. I don't know how much of that is already tokenized versus going to be tokenized. I think we're going to get into that with Joachim when he comes up. But yeah, these guys are definitely on on the frontier when it comes to tokenizing assets both at a technical layer. I think they are experimenting with different token standards. Everyone knows ERC-20. Everyone knows ERC-721 with NFTs, but these guys are working on tokenization standards specific to RWAs. This is something I talked to Joe Lubin about.

He expressed how important it is to embed some of these things into the token standard itself. We're going to hear from Joachim about that. He is the CTO, so I think he's particularly equipped to talk about the technical implementation of this. But then of Of they're also leading the frontier on the deployment of these assets themselves, upwards, you know, billions and billions of of tokenized dollars. So, >> Let's bring him up. >> Let's bring him up. >> Let's get to it. >> Joaquim up. Joaquim, welcome to the show. >> Hello. >> The creator of ERC-3643, the leading standard for compliant permission security tokens known as T-Rex protocol. MJ MJ P in the chat says T-Rex is Tokeny, which is owned by Apex, who are huge. So, it's definitely 30

billion dollars and more. Joaquim, you've got the the audience here for you. Good to have you on the show, man. >> Yeah, nice to meet you. >> Pleasure, man. Pleasure, man. >> Um Joaquim, maybe you could just tell us a little bit about your founder story uh cuz it is your first time on the show. It's a pleasure to have you. I want to get into the depths of this token standard and why it makes the most sense for RWAs, but before we do, we'd love to hear a little bit about your background, how you got into the space. >> Yeah, of course. Uh great to be here. So, uh yeah, I'm Joaquim. I'm CTO at T-Rex. So, T-Rex is a new project that we are working on, but I've been uh in this space for quite some time now.

Uh I was actually there before the RWA term was even uh a thing, actually. Uh so, I've been working on uh tokenization of real world assets uh for the last eight uh years now. Uh that's how I I worked on the ERC-3643, on-chain identities uh in my job at Tokeny, where I was uh Chief Blockchain Officer. Uh now, Tokeny has been acquired by the Apex Group uh as you were mentioning, uh which is a massive uh TradFi player.

Uh they have 3.5 trillion dollars of assets under administration, uh all all the big asset managers, uh and so on. So, yeah, um on the T-Rex network, so the ID is to create uh specific chain for RWAs, but it's it's not just another chain. The idea is to really bridge all the other chains together and to create the compliance layer on top of it. So, to to make sure that we close this gap at the compliance level that exists today on all these different infrastructures, especially when you want to distribute these assets on multiple chains in parallel. Because

today, you just cannot do that. Like, you cannot make an asset that is compliant on multiple chains in parallel and which keeps this compliance where the compliance travels together with the asset on the other chains. >> Okay. Yeah, this has been sort of the thing that feels like the elephant in the room when it comes to RWAs. It feels like, "Look, we want these things to be tokenized. We want them to be composable." Because of the benefit of these things being on a blockchain, it means that we have a decentralized exchange, permissionless transfer, right? We can lend, borrow, use these things as collateral. All of the DeFi mechanisms and primitives that we've we've seen over the years. But when it comes to RWAs, there's a lot of, like you said,

compliance complexities. Like, sometimes there has to be KYC. Maybe you need to be an accredited investor, right? And if I can just swap with you, maybe one of us is accredited, one of us isn't. Where do Where do we check to make sure that these things are compliant? And we've seen different teams do this in different ways. Sometimes the compliance and the regulatory checks are done at the base layer. Like, you know, there are rollups, right? L2s and whatnot that are doing compliance at their rollup level.

Maybe, you know, a chain like Canton, who we're going to have later today, they do privacy and regulatory at the base layer of their blockchain. or you could do it at the token standard like you're talking about or you could do it at the app level. Why is it important and what are the benefits that you get by doing this at the ERC standard level? Why would you implement KYC and and regulatory compliance and meta metadata and metadata into the token standard versus, you know, implementing at the blockchain level or at the app level?

>> Yeah, that's a that's a very good question and actually that's what I've been working on for the last 8 years. So, I think it only makes sense to put compliance at the token level and not at the base layer level even if actually in T-Rex we want to also add some layers at the blockchain level itself. But that's for like the basic checks, you know, like really to to see that there is no uh nefarious transaction happening on the blockchain or something. But when you want to enforce compliance at the asset level depending on the type of asset, the jurisdiction in which you issue, the jurisdiction in which you

want to distribute, like the type of investors that you want to target and so on. The rules are going to be drastically different. So, you cannot just make a one fit for all rule which sits at the blockchain level. You need to have more granularity to that. You need to add that at the asset level itself because every asset has different rules. Uh depending really on on what you are tokenizing and in what circumstances. So, that's that's why we are doing this at the token level. But then you have this issue because as soon as it's at the smart contract level, but it's actually the same issue if it's at the blockchain level.

Uh once you want to distribute on many other chains because right now you can see that everyone is creating their own chain. Every big exchanger is creating their own chain. Actually, even countries are creating their own sovereign chains and so on. So, it's going to be a multi-chain world and be believing that it's going to happen on one chain is delusional at this point. So, we need to be conscious of that. And yeah, the issue is that if you if you put this compliance layer at the smart contract level, it means that the compliance context lives in the storage of that chain, in the smart contract storage of that

chain. So, you cannot just bridge the whole compliance context together with the token when you bridge the token. And that's what we are looking to solve for T-Rex. So, the idea is really to create this golden copy of the asset with all the compliance and eligibility rules that are enforced at this level and then to distribute on whatever chain. Canton is actually a a chain on which we are intending to to be distributing as well and to connect with them. So, all all the chains, EVM and non-EVM, because when you abstract the complexity on that external ledger, you can have very simple version of the token existing on other chains. So, you don't even need

full smart contract complexity to do it. You can distribute on XRP, on Stellar, on whatever, and you don't need to reinvent the wheel, reimplement the whole standard. You just use their their native version of basic tokens like ERC-20s, and you have you add a hook to that that is consuming validation of compliance coming from T-Rex. But yes, compliance is a very important point when you are tokenizing tokenizing RWA as uh because most of these assets are securities. They are not bearer instruments. Bearer instruments have actually been uh

banned everywhere around the world in the last 50 years. So, reintroducing bearer instrument with this permissionless token as if it was like a breakthrough of technology, it's a fallacy in my opinion. Like you you cannot just do that. And you need to apply the same rules as on securities because these assets are securities. And the idea that we want to do with this standard and with the way that we are working is to really say that the token is the security. And the blockchain is the primary registry for these assets. It's the book of records of the issuer. And it's not just a mirroring or a wrapping

or something like that. You can really enforce all these rules chain level and you can use the blockchain instead of using a database with a transfer agent or something. So, that's that's what we are doing with Apex actually. Apex is a a transfer agent. It's a massive asset servicer. And the idea that we are pursuing with Apex is to to use the blockchain as the official book of record for all these assets. And to to do tokenization not not as a product on itself, but as a software upgrade if you will of

what exists today in the database of the asset servicer to to use the blockchain instead of this database. >> This I mean this is one of the most important experiments in digital assets right now. They you know, Apex 3 and 1/2 trillion dollars assets under it administration as you mentioned. And the mission is to tokenize all of this. Have the blockchain as the book of record and serve as the ledger that is able to then transport these assets across all chains. I think this is going to become We're going to look back in 5, 10 years, once all of these assets are on chain, they're all tokenized, we're going to look back at Apex as a pioneer for doing this so early on and doing it in such a way that they maintain the technical

prowess that you have put into place. So, kudos to you for doing some great work out there. I want to ask more about exactly how it works through a concrete example, because conceptually, I think it makes sense. You talk about how anything done at the blockchain level is going to be too rigid. It doesn't give the the generality that you want because all of these different assets or securities, they all have different parameters. Compliance on one asset is not compliance in another asset. You can't have the same type of compliance at the blockchain level for all these assets. At the smart contract layer, that's great. You have more flexibility, but it doesn't go from chain to chain.

So, you have you have, you know, some privacy on one chain, but if it's in that smart contract, you can't take that asset, move it to another chain, you lose all of the compliance and privacy and tokenization and all of this, uh, when you move to the next chain. So, we know that we need to have it at the asset level. That is at the token standard level. So, I'm curious, if I'm, you know, let's say I'm on T-Rex, right? Or I'm on Ethereum mainnet and I want to swap, right? I want to go from these fancy new SpaceX shares and I want to swap into, you know, uh, some some Tesla shares, right? I want to go from one side of Elon's head to the other. So, how does it work if I have some tokenized Tesla, tokenized SpaceX? Let's say I'm going to, uh, buy,

but I'm not an accredited investor, right? Let's say you are an accredited investor and I want to buy it from you, right? How does it if How does it work if I'm on a decentralized exchange and I want to buy this, but I'm not an accredited investor. Does it know that I'm not accredited? How much data do I have to give up to the exchange itself in order for it to recognize, yes, you meet the compliance requirements to purchase this asset or not? What Where are those checks done? How much does that go in? And how how is that enforced at the asset level?

>> Yeah, that's a great question. So So the the whole ecosystem is identity-centric. So you have every single investor, every asset as well. So the assets have their own digital identities, investors have their digital identity, the issuers, the agents, and so on. Everyone has a digital identity. In your digital identity, you can uh enrich it with verifiable credentials coming from any third party which is trusted by the issuer such as KYC provider, AML checks, whatever.

And uh the the way to prove that you are an eligible investor is basically by having the right credentials issued by the trusted third party that the asset issuer trust for that. Uh so once you have that, uh you can bind whatever wallet you want to your on-chain identity. So it's not a whitelisting of of wallet. It's It's like you have your identity which contains the right credentials, and then you use whatever wallets you want and whatever chains you want. Uh you can bind these uh different wallets with your on-chain identity, and the compliance is done at the identity level because it cannot really be done another way. Uh if I give you an example, uh if

you have a reg D in the US, you have a maximum number of investors uh that can have these tokens in the US uh these assets. If you just do with a whitelisting of wallet which has been done by many people uh before 2643. The The issue is that the same investor can have multiple wallets. So, how how can you enforce the maximum number of investor at the smart contract level? You You cannot because you need this concept of identity. And also the identity credentials allow for reusability across different tokens and so on. And so, if you have the same trusted claim issuer, which is trusted for issuing these verifiable credentials

on one asset and another and they trust the same trusted issuer, then you can you don't even need to redo the onboarding. You can just You can just go from one asset to the other. So, in your example with uh Tesla and with uh SpaceX, uh it would likely be the case that uh the the trusted issuer is the same. So, if you are whitelisted uh on one asset, you are whitelisted already on the other. And that you would be able to make this uh swap quite easily. >> Amazing. I I mean, it's so cool to think that we're going to have, right, these things embedded and you might have some Let's call them DeFi purists that don't have this as part of their mental model for how the chain should work.

And so, we have this at the asset level. It depends on the issuer. Do you see the blockchains opting in or is it going to be the applications that opt in to check with the issuer whether or not these things are whitelisted and whether or not, you know, they should proceed with the transaction? >> Yeah, so so the the apps are going to embed. So, we we are going to have an app store, a native app store on the t-rex network, but we are also partnering with a lot of uh players of the ecosystem uh to embed uh simple SDK, which is going to trigger the the checks on the on the smart contract level so that you you can just check. It's very simple uh read-only function where you can check,

yeah, is this transfer going to pass or not? Is Is this investor, uh, eligible or not? And and you you can very simply, uh, display that on the interface and say, yeah, the the transfer is going to fail because this and this and that reason. And if there is a way to solve that issue, like, for example, you are just not, uh, KYC approved. Uh, there is metadata directly on chain at the identity of the asset level. Uh, so the issuer published this, uh, this data in the identity of the asset to, uh, provide the the URL to get qualified, basically. So, uh, the all the apps of the ecosystem can just read

the identity of the asset and say, yeah, for this asset, you need to go there to get qualified because that's what the issuer has published on on the metadata of this asset. >> Yeah. Um, you know, Joachim, I think one of the biggest breakthroughs here is what we want and what, you know, we've been talking about in the more kind of lower level here is what we want is privacy on public networks, right? Like, that's like the big breakthrough. It's like, we don't want the intranet, right? We want to build the internet and have that privacy baked in on the public network level. And so, when you're thinking about institutional users of ERC-3643, actually doing

transactions on the public blockchains that we, you know, have come to know and love, but doing them in a private manner. Has that like clicked to them? Because you've got to explain kind of how the blockchain works, like, verifiability as a baked-in uh, property, right? Of these blockchains. That what makes That's what makes them amazing. But then you've got these incidents, right? With like the the Orchard pool potential infinite mint bug without formal verification. And so, what does that kind of conversation look like when it's like, "Hey, we want you guys to get all the benefits of interoperability, of shared composability across public networks, but we want to enable that in a private fashion." I'm just curious,

how does that like does that resonate with them? What are some of the kind of questions and pushbacks and things that you guys deal with? >> Yeah, so privacy has been one of the major concerns since the very beginning. So, I told I told you I've been working in that industry for the last 8 years. For the last 8 years, the answer has been always, uh yeah, either you do it on a private network and then you have your privacy. Either you do it on a public network and then you have the interoperability with uh with everyone.

Uh that was until about a year ago. So, that that's where uh it comes uh with our relationship uh with Zama because Zama is is giving us the best of both worlds. Uh basically, we we can compute on uh confidential data the same way as we do on public data. And therefore, we can apply this compla- uh this confidentiality at the token level even on complex tokens like these ones because uh you have to understand that these tokens which are embedding compliance rules at the smart contract level, uh it has been much much more complex to

bring confidentiality to these tokens uh compared to uh simple ERC-20 tokens because simple ERC-20 tokens, you had already like ZK uh ZK version of these tokens for quite some time. And it it's working fine, but when you want uh these smart contracts of compliance would be able to check uh rules which are depending on the amount of tokens that are transferred and and retain as well in memory what has happened on the token because the the whole stuff is not just about are you an eligible investor that is able to receive these tokens. It's also about rules such as uh you have a maximum volume of transfer

per day per month per investor or you have a maximum number of investor in a country with positive balance uh or like a lot of different rules like these or a maximum number of tokens per investor as well that that's a very uh very common rule and if the smart contracts are not able to compute on these rules and to to know uh what has been transferred already before and uh make some mathematical operation on that and and remember it then you cannot apply these rules on chain basically. So that's why FHE is so powerful for for this use case is because it gives us the the the choice to do it on a public

network and to connect uh as you as you were saying to to the internet of finance instead of uh >> Yeah. >> uh having these assets being deployed on uh on private networks. >> Yeah. >> And I think that's going to be the big unlock uh to to bring these billions of dollars of assets on chain. >> Yeah, um so a couple things here. Uh T-Rex isn't permission D5, it's stratified high speed rails with access to the masses, confidential compliant interoperable. We've got a question from the audience. So T-Rex is like proof of work proof of stake question mark. Who are the validators?

>> Yeah, so T-Rex uh is T-Rex is Ethereum. T-Rex is uh is going to be a OP stack roll up on top of uh Ethereum. So, yeah it's it's secured by Ethereum and yeah, that's it. >> Yeah, perfect. Make sense. OP stack roll up, we know them well. And you know, like you said, Apex 3 and 1/2 trillion dollars. So, it's quite a bit of tokenized assets that are coming to the Ethereum ecosystem by way of roll ups.

Um, as we as we look we you know, we we think about the scale here. I like to say that dollar on chain tends to stay on chain. I'm curious how you see this flowing and and you know, composing with the rest of the Ethereum ecosystem. We talk a lot about perpetuals. Lyra is doing a great job with perps on on Ethereum. We talk a lot about vaults. We talk a lot about, you know, some of these apps and assets asset layers that are are poised for a lot of growth with the impending tokenization of RWAs in general at the scale of trillions and trillions of dollars. I'm curious bringing all of this on chain now that we have privacy.

The foundation is here to scale the assets by trillions of dollars. Who are the protocols, not specifically, but what types of protocols are you most excited about that you think can capitalize on all of the new tokenized assets coming in? Is it lend borrow? Is it decentralized exchanges? Is it perps? Vaults? Who who are who do you think are the protocols that are poised for the most success as a result of the tokenization super cycle? >> Yeah, so I think in our case because Apex is mostly servicing like funds, private assets, private equity. Like it's it's mostly private assets, it's not stocks.

So, the most important for us is mostly these assets are illiquid and is to provide these facilities of lending borrowing. I think that's the most interesting use case in the in this uh type of assets. After that, of course, secondary market, instant instant primary market subscription redemption and open-ended funds with instant NAV. That's a big a big stuff that we are working on to have the possibility to derive an instant NAV for subscription and redemption based on previous NAV and projections and volume of transactions and so on. So,

that's that's the things that we are working on right now, but I I think that as soon as you unlock transferability for these assets with the tokenization then you unlock what comes next, which is yeah, secondary market and then we can go to more developed ecosystems, I I guess, but yeah transferability it's it sounds like not such a big deal, but transferability is a big deal for this type of assets, because right now if you want to just transfer shares of private fund or a private equity company it's going to take days if not if not

weeks and a lot of paperwork. Now, we can do it in in in one transaction on chain. Everything is automated. All the checks of compliance are automated. That's a big deal already. >> I love it. Joaquim, thank you for coming on. Congratulations on the growth. Look forward to to the chain launch. And honestly, just on the growth of this standard, right? The 3643 ERC standard. There's been such a struggle inside the Ethereum ecosystem to actually get standards to become commonplace. And it's very clear that this is becoming a true standard for the institutional adoption of Ethereum and of, you know,

confidentiality on chain. And so, you know, keep going on that because it's, as I said, it's it's been extremely challenging for standards to become standards. Um so >> extremely important work. Like we we need this in order for the community to rally around, for institutions to look at this as a proof of concept and say there's real money at stake here and it's building resiliency in the standard. So, thank you for for fighting the good fight and, you know, onboarding the institutions. We appreciate the hard work. >> Thank you very much. And uh, completely agree.

Um, yes, standards are very important. Without standards we cannot scale. >> Absolutely. >> Onwards. We'll let you get back to the next time vibe coding on cloud code and co-work and GitHub. Thanks for your time. >> Thank you very much. Bye-bye. >> See you next time. Thank you, Joaquin. Cheers man. Bullish. Bullish. These guys are huge. Um, interoperability while being compliant, Jason says bullish, compliant freedom of freedom guys, bullish. Wow. Good vibes. >> Great vibes. Uh, Joaquin is what I like to call a giga brain.

>> Yes. >> Apex is trillion dollars in assets. This guy is working on the solution that is going to tokenize trillions of dollars of assets. It it I I mean and he walks through exactly, you know, how the metadata works, how it should work, right? Why it belongs at the asset token standard layer, why it doesn't belong at the the blockchain layer or the smart contract layer. There are checks that we can do at the smart contract layer and we will do those checks. That's effectively like, hey, those are checks on the user, not on the asset. And if we have the asset, we can carry through some of these metadata properties like the asset is going to say "Hey

this needs to be owned by an accredited investor." The smart contract is going to look at the user and say, "You are or are not an accredited investor. Yes, you can buy the token or you cannot buy the token." So, I mean, we're going to get into a world where we do have a lot of permissioned uh finance, but things like Joaquin is building are going to help us build protocols that allow us to orchestrate and compose between permissioned and permissionless finance. >> Yeah.

That's I mean, that was my point, right? Coming under these public chains. Speaking of that, we've got Eric Sarnat, co-founder of Digital Asset and Canton. He's going to join us next. Bitcoin advocate since 2009, co-founder of Cumberland DW DRW's crypto trading desk and co-founder of Digital Asset. They just announced a $350 million raise. Um wow. So, that was led by some of the big VCs in the space. So, you can $355 million raise. They're doing $4 trillion of brokerage repo on Canton every single month. We're going to talk privacy.

We're going to talk institutional adoption and more with Eric. And uh it looks like he's in a beautiful downtown New York City. I'll tell you that much. So, let's get Eric up. Let's get this show on the road. >> Hey, go Knicks. >> Yes, sir. >> Go Knicks. >> Go Knicks is right. Eric, what's up, man? >> Nice to see you guys. Thanks for having me back. >> Yeah, thanks for coming back. We uh since I saw you, you guys raised $355 million. So, congratulations. >> Thank you very much. >> I assume that that was uh a little bit extra growth capital to take on the the vision and mission of Canton. Would just love to hear more about it. The the the process, kind of the investor base, and some of the reasoning there.

>> Yeah, so you DA's pretty unique in the sense that we have almost exclusively been funded by our customers for the better part of the last 12 years. And this was the first time we took on like a like real venture capital as part of this round. And and and a big part of that logic was just to help us think about these broader market implications, not just the capital markets. So, the capital markets was a really important part of our foundation story and it's it's really the bedrock that we're built on top of, but our aspirations have always been much bigger than that. So, the venture capital was a and uh specifically Andreessen is a really good opportunity for us to just think a lot broader and get some really strong expertise and guidance in that

regard. And in terms of the capital, we we're a profit uh we're a profitable company. We didn't need the cash, but it's always good to have cash on the balance sheet. It allows us to be a lot more direct and have greater agency where we want to lean in and put more direct um you know, sort of action into making certain things happen in the network. >> Absolutely. Um you know, Eric, I think our our community has seen how you've been able to foster relationships with, you know, some some of the largest financial institutions in the world. They're they're using Canton uh and they're deploying um you know, their solutions. And there's all sorts of different solutions that you guys are

working on as it pertains to, you know, payments and repo and and all across the docket. What are you guys planning on maybe and maybe there isn't a great great answer as far as like how you plan on using the cash right now, but aside from just having the cash on the balance sheet, but I guess more generally, what is the adoption curve look like ultimately to take these use cases that are currently running, some of them on testnet, some of them on mainnet, not only expand the use cases, but expand the depth that you have in each of the pockets of the financial system right now?

>> Ooh, yeah, I could talk about that for an an So, >> [laughter] >> you know, uh I don't know if I've ever given you guys that, you know, the triangle before, but for for me, our core focus is in this triangle uh in any given market. And it is the cash on ledger of of every form cuz they're all valid. They all have different purposes. So, tokenized demand deposits, stable coins, and, you know, various other interesting sort of ways of doing doing that sort of uh cash on ledger element is coming. The second uh uh point here is short duration govvies.

And the third are the spot and repo markets for it. And the most important thing is to get that triangle really deep and 24/7. And and like it's pretty unsexy. You know, I sometimes call this like the back end of your stable coin. Everyone's familiar with USDC, USDT, or the thing that they have in their wallet. That's the front end of their stable coin. The back end today is 100% off ledger. You're holding treasuries off chain. You're you're completely subject to a Monday to Friday 9:00 to 3:00 market hour structure. And I don't think people appreciate how much pressure that puts on those originators, how much effort goes into maintaining the back end of that product. But it also hurts the quality of the product. If you're a large capital markets participant and

you want to take a stable coin as a margin payment, you don't want to carry a stable coin over the weekend. So, if you don't have any fungibility on a Saturday afternoon for that, and if if you do, but it's light in the secondary market, or you might be borrowing someone's balance sheet to do it, then you're going to use that in a really small envelope. So, if you can get that triangle really going, then it is applicable everywhere. And if you think about the way money is pre-positioned around the world in so many different use cases. If you're talking about international remittance, or card payments, or even things like pharmaceutical co-pays, or prepaid debit cards, it's kind of unbelievable how much pre-positioned capital you have in the world, and how it has to sit cash because you don't really know when those

liabilities are going to come in. And, you know, one of my core goals is to make it that that money becomes more or less a just-in-time concept. And you can think about treasuries as being kind of like a capacitor. So, rather than pre- pre-funding billions of dollars of cash, I can pre-fund this capacitor of a treasury. And if I have the primary and secondary markets available, then I can draw against that in whatever makes the most sense in my context at that time. And And so, in the US, we're we're really well advanced on on this. You know, we have many different deposit tokens, we have stablecoins, we have treasuries in many different locations, we have really great venues, we have all the really largest market makers in the world starting to kick off 24/7

uh liquidity provision in this. So, in the US, we've got a great start. But our focus, we made an announcement with Mizuho a few weeks ago. They have a really large JGB presence. The moment you have two of these triangles, you now have the two deepest markets on Earth, FX and And if you can make that a 24/7 deep market, you can rewire all of finance. If we If we won equities and lost short duration guvvies and repo, I would feel very nervous. In the inverse, I'd feel very confident. And And just kind of I don't know, just a you know, a a point of uh emphasis here is like if if you're trying to settle equities in the Japanese market, the timeline for their settlement cycle is largely dictated by CLS today, which is the pace at which I can get cash in and out of

Japan. And And like so much of what we do hinges on can I get money in the right place at the right time. So, we really consider this to be the core primitive, whether you're talking retail, whether you're taking whole- wholesale, whether you're talking payments, remittances, capital markets. It just kind of sits on top of this financing and delivery market. And that's where the the bulk of our focus goes. And And you know, in every market, it's a different partner, it's a different emphasis, it's a different way of bringing it online, it's a it's a different value prop. Maybe access matters more in one area than another, maybe liquidity matters more in one than than another, maybe FX matters more in one than another. So, there's no one-size-fits-all, but you know, our goal is to win that, you know, for lack

of a better expression, triangle in every ecosystem that we can. >> Yeah. Yeah. And and where are where is Canton at on this journey of the triangle? I think it I mean, it makes complete sense. You're talking about the foundational building blocks of our entire financial system, rather than, you know, going for kind of the the tippy top of that, you're going for the foundation itself and letting that scale naturally from there. So, it makes a ton of sense as far as the go-to-market strategy. Where are you at on this journey and who are the biggest fish to fry to ultimately bring into the network to get you, you know, 10 floors higher?

>> Yeah, I I might have said this on on your show last time I was on it. I I think you have to kind of if they're not parallel motions, but they are separate motions that have to converge, which is you need to support the rapid innovation ecosystem. Let's Let's just call it the, you know, on-chain native audience, because the the quality of the feedback loops you get from that group is very high, very fast. So, you can get, you know, sub-24-hour feedback loops from that from that ecosystem. They can even incorporate any protocol changes or upgrades you might make very quickly as well. So, the the feedback loop and you know, a lot of people give SOL for where they're like, "No, meme coin trading was really great to strengthen us and and harden us for this moment that came up." I actually am a full

subscriber to that. I completely agree with with that strategy. And so, we think a lot of this crypto-native ecosystem as really hardening and improving the quality of the ecosystem, but it also gives us a playground to really push the boundary of access. So, I use I use myself, uh you know, no no offense to Tally, but I I call myself the anti-Tally. I'm trying to move my entirety of my portfolio and everything that I do in my financial life on chain. I get paid on chain. I'm trying to lend my stable coins via a wholesale capital markets repo transaction on chain. You know, I'm in the process of rotating my PA on chain. You know, everything that I, you know, any closed-end fund, stock, etc. that I hold, my RAA, etc. Um, and if I can find a way through the right

account structures, intermediation, uh, protocol and wallet ecosystem for me to be a counterparty in a repo transaction, there isn't a Fortune 1000 company on Earth that that would struggle. And so, I think it's both the feedback loop and the iterations that you get from the retail audience, but also being able to push that boundary out and really understand the totality of access in the right way that then allows like the scale to come in behind it of the really large institutions. I I don't play chess, but I sometimes use it as an analogy of like the opening, middle, and end game. You know, opening game you need the pieces on the board. You're kind of wrote following exactly a specific move and you're in position. The middle game is where you

flex your edge and your your your competitive It's like the most dynamic part of the ecosystem or the game. And then the end game is your hyper ruthless efficient kill shot. And I think of the really large TradFi participants we have as being largely the end game. They're going to be the ones that come in with the massive scale. And you have to just keep be progressing in that direction and make sure that you meet them where they need to be in order to do that. But, you know, all that being said, we have some incredible commitments into the ecosystem. I don't know if you guys caught this, but SocGen made a public commitment to start doing collateral on Canton. And there's a lot more like that in the pipeline where you have the forward-leaning uh, primes and clearing houses that recognize the value of this 24/7

capability. And they see it as an opportunity to win markets parts of the market they may have lost in the past. So, it's not purely sequential, you know, but but I I I do definitely think of those two as having different value props. >> I'm I'm sure Andy has, you know, plenty of questions here, but I just want to ask cuz I love the analogy and and you mentioned how the institutions that are in the partner network of Canton are part of the end game. And I think people can can see that vision. And you also talked about the triangle and how you're starting with the foundation of this financial system, tokenizing it. You're also sort of reflecting on yourself and your own investments and and access and thinking, you know, let's get all of these elements, bring my personal financial life on chain so that you're a

representation of of your peers and and others can follow um and and have access to similar products. My question is, what is Canton's middle game? Cuz I I love this analogy and you talked about how this is the most dynamic part. This is where you affect your edge. What is Canton's middle game and why is this so important? >> I think people are going to be surprised by how much of this TradFi element becomes available in various different formats in the next like low single digit months. Th- There is so much it's so easy to think like it just has this binary switch at the end as opposed to this slow burn of their own adoption, but as they open and turn something on,

I fight my ass off every day to make that accessible to a bigger ecosystem than what they have today. And I like think about the whole virtual bank account ecosystem, how quickly that happened once one or two entities decided to enable that type of infrastructure. And we haven't seen the equivalent on the security side or these capital markets ecosystems. You could argue that what we've seen in DeFi is a glimpse into what that could be, but the products that are available there are not always the highest quality collateral. So, if you could imagine that sort of merging of that experience of a 24/7 ecosystem accessible to a broad audience but over the real asset and in the right venues with the right

counterparties and liquidity, that's that's what I I know we will accomplish over the course of the rest of this year and the end game for me is scaling that. It's not the arrival of those participants at the end game. They are showing up right now and there are things going online right now that you'll probably see the first expression of it in some interesting sort of retail adoption or you know, retail is like all too often thought of like P2P individual but you know, what I mean is like access to a part of the market that others might not have had access to before in an understandable way. That that's that's what I mean. So the middle game is like expressing that audience that we have and that access that we have into a new ecosystem

and demonstrating that capability uh as the numbers ramp up. >> Yeah. You know, Eric, we're on privacy day-to-day as it pertains to this mid game end game and the beginning of the game of the pre-game, you know, what is what is the what is the kind of current state of uh feedback loops as you described with on-chain users but with allocators in the repo market outside the repo market, um you know, in bond market etc. I you know, I think you're taking a flight somewhere today to go talk to somebody who's probably important.

Um what is like when it comes to this privacy aspect of Canton? Um is it is it resonating well? Is it just really understandable and easy to to to grasp? Are you guys thinking about changing any aspects of how kind of your um you know, global synchronizer kind of works or changing any aspects of of how you you guys are implementing more private features into the chain? Just give us kind of a lay of the land and perhaps what's next what what feedback you've been getting? Yeah, that's a great question. So I mean, we're we're evolving constantly. I I get feedback all the time like, "No, no, no, come on. You're It's too fast.

The evolution's a little too fast." And I I There's There's some truth to that. >> This guy. >> Uh you know, a lot of it tends to be kind of in the the the very quickly evolving tokenomic space, not so much the protocol. Uh something that's really important for us this year is figuring out universal ecosystem pricing. So, right now all of the burn is associated with activity over the global synchronizer. But, uh we are very proactively looking at how to make the the price to use the network private sinker, global sync a universal pricing mechanism. Uh trying to figure out how to do that the right way. Uh so, that That's a really big really big to do this year. Um you know, because for us it's one network and too often if it's like, "Oh, the global synchronizer has

this pricing model on the you know, the subnet might have a separate pricing model." Kind of helps reinforce this misunderstanding that it's like a disconnected ecosystem. Instead of just, "No like hey, I have SLA requirements. I need some dedicated infrastructure. I'm an extension of the network." That That getting a universal pricing model for everybody. And And when we say pricing, we always mean burn, right? So, ultimately that's translating down into burn for all users. That's a That's a major priority for us. It's something that takes up a lot of my time. Um and then in terms of, you know, the adoption, you know, a lot of people are like, "Oh, we don't really have an access problem in markets."

But, you know, that that is you know, true from maybe a speculative standpoint, but not really from like a capital markets standpoint. For so For somebody that that wants to take um Here's a common problem I'm seeing emerging right now. There's a big fintech neo bank emergence where they're accepting stables as deposits. And then the bank needs to do something with that. And if you're a regulated bank, you know, permissionless DeFi is not necessarily the right thing for you to do with those deposits.

And they're looking to get low-friction access to Treasury markets. Um and and that's been a persistent problem for the crypto exchanges. You go look at any of the crypto exchanges, they have very similar sorts of problems. And everybody keeps trying to push this back onto the issuer who has the same constraints. So, 24/7 creation redemption, we're working on this in stables, we're working on this in ETF ecosystems, we're working on this money market funds have the same constraints. They forego yield if they manage to issue something off hours. Uh you know, we're working on this in every dimension because it's the same thing.

You have this this combination between the underlying and a broader access vehicle. And being able to make that a seamless 24/7 operationally extremely tight experience allows you to kind of solve both problems. Bring capital markets to a broader audience and not violate uh all the sort of command and control needs that you might have on the capital markets side. >> Yeah. We um obviously it's privacy day and there's, you know, quite a quite a bit that we can dig into on that side, but you mentioned the burn. I'm just curious how, you know, some of these mechanisms may work as you're bringing more of the burn to the subnets. Is there network extensions or subnets or or generally use cases that tend to burn more than others?

>> Yeah, I mean, of course. I mean, anything that's higher velocity than lower velocity is burn- burning more, right? So, the entire tokenomics of the network is predicated on the core thesis that the value of a blockchain is about increasing the velocity of assets. And all of the fees and all of the fee distribution as rewards is predicated upon rewarding the things that are higher velocity. And to give you kind of, you know, two completely opposed points of view, if you solved for TVL and a trillion dollars of treasuries showed up and they just were parked in an account. We haven't really solved any problem.

But if someone brings a bunch of treasuries over and they're like, you mean to make money over here I have to figure out how to make it go constantly? Then we're incentivizing them to figure out how to increase the velocity of these assets. And the velocity comes with utility. It means, okay, I'm going to pledge it here and then I don't know I'm going to use an eligibility schedule. It just got a little bit cheaper to pledge this other thing instead. It's to my advantage to do it or actually want to make sure that these are tradeable or that these are lendable. Like enabling those experiences are what bring the velocity.

So I I've kind of generally rejected access as the reason to be on chain in favor of utility, increased utility surface. And the way you would measure the first would be by TVL and that was the classical stablecoin monetization model and I would classify the second by velocity and we built the tokenomics really around velocity. >> Yeah. Yeah. You know, Eric, um kind of a bit of a pointed one here. We we just had some folks on doing a lot of institutional work from the Apex Group and you know, their their big thing here is building compliance standards, specifically ERC-3643 to allow institutional allocators and

participants to come onto public EVM networks and participate in a compliant private fashion. And you know, the the take here is that what they're trying to build is the internet right, where you have privacy capabilities that are compliant enabled, but you also have this public layer you know, underneath. And when you look at something more in the direction that Can's on it is building towards, it's it's it's kind of comes to the whole like debate that was uh Yuval and Alex G from ZK sync about this kind of permission chain conversation, but I think more nuanced here, the question is how do you anticipate the growth of

private capabilities upon public blockchains versus the ability to just consume and use private blockchains by design like Canton? How do you think about How do you think about like the types of adoption and the differences in use cases from these separate concepts of public blockchain with privacy capabilities enabled versus like a by design private ecosystem? >> Yeah, I mean as usual I'm going to just reject the premise. I mean you know, I know people love to try to put us in this box that we're a private blockchain, but it's just not true. I mean I can't tell you the number of hours of sleep and restless nights I've lost over

helping under hack attacks or civil attacks or weird tokenomics attacks that come from pseudonymous actors in the ecosystem that have come through the the the path that everyone's allowed to come through. So I I assure you no one has borne the brunt of the permissionlessness of our network more than the person on this call right now and I can and I can fully stand behind that fact and it will just increasingly become more and more available. What people like don't have a positive reaction to is that the way you become part of the governance ecosystem is not just a cash quota number. Like okay, I could go become part of the mining set in Bitcoin by ponying up the right number of hundreds of millions of dollars and that's a very simple equation, but the

cheapest thing you can extract from anybody in this world is money. It It's so much easier to get money especially from a large institution than it is to get their sweat equity and their commitment. And so what we've gone is down the path of instead extracting a commitment to deliver something meaningful to be part of that governance set. Now, if you want to mean that you want to label this as okay, that means you're a permission ecosystem, it's ignoring all the nuance of it's an open source platform, anyone can deploy any component anytime, do anything that they want. We're just saying that to participate in the governance of the global synchronizer and the tokenomics, so this one element of the broader network, you need to commit some you know, sweat equity. If that makes us permission, I mean, I guess whatever. Go go go sit and spin, I guess. But, you

know, like I I I find it such an annoying argument. And on the flip side, like every other ecosystem must implement privacy or they will be completely irrelevant. There there's just no other path and it's not, you know, we always say privacy, it's not blanket anonymity. It's that you determine what is the right appropriate amount of data to disclose, to whom and under what conditions. And so, you know, like the snarky way I would have responded to your question is to say, it's cool to see everyone come our direction. And and you know, they would never acknowledge it and they would never admit it, but it it's pretty cool to see everybody come our direction.

And um you know, I think that's a pretty big validation. Um and and then, you know, at the end of the day, I think what's going to win is utility, right? Like it it just like any anything else in the world, imperfect solutions win if it happens to get to the critical mass that people need for it to deliver the utility that they need. So, I you know, I've I've never I've never rested on our laurels of having privacy as okay, we can we can pack it in, boys. We've won. You know, it's okay, cool. We have this entry point and wedge into opportunity, but we have to turn it into real utility. And that's that's really where our whole focus has been. So, yeah, I fully support everybody coming our direction. You know, it it would be great to have more contribution to this

kind of general sort of approach of selective disclosure and um yeah, I don't think that that crowns a winner one way or the other. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, yeah, fair enough. >> Yeah. >> So, everyone certainly is coming in this privacy direction. I think they also are the the the pie in the sky is, you know, privacy with composability. And I think this is where we still have we have a lot of work to do because we do have somewhat of these disparate ecosystems, but the more that we can compose amongst them, the higher velocity that we can expect because more optionality will I'd imagine will typically lead to more utility and and therefore higher velocity of these assets. And so, you know, we're having this conversation

about this new token standard. You know, this is on the Ethereum world. You guys have this CIP 56, I think, is like the primary token standard over on Canton. And I'm just curious, do you guys implement this the same way? It's essentially like you have this metadata you can bake in, okay, this is an asset that requires, you know, accredited investors. And then you do some checks, right, that say, yes, you are an accredited investor, you can own the token. How just to wrap up, like how does, you know, the privacy function work on Canton? >> Yeah, privacy uh and by the way, composability is the hill that we die on. There is not anything that makes it through our protocol design that would in any way interfere with composability globally.

Subnet, mainnet, doesn't matter. It is the whole reason to be on chain. If you are doing anything and introducing anything that interferes with it, I think you're going to end up in the same L2 maras that everyone else has landed in. >> And does that extend to like cross-chain composability? If you wanted to put, you know, a Broadridge repo security in the same vault as a tokenized SpaceX? Like you you That is the level >> Across subnets, you mean? Is that what you mean? >> Yeah, I guess like >> Yeah, yeah, 100%.

>> If there was if there was a tokenized share that originated on another asset, but then it got bridged to Canton, you could combine them and vice versa. You could bring in the Broadridge repo security out of the Canton network, put it somewhere else. Like >> Yeah, yeah, you can, of course. I mean, we we've got great partnerships with Chainlink and Layer Zero. They're working very very hard to bring uh your standard bridging, but that's not composability. Right? That That is the exact same risk that we face today in our financial system. If one side halts for any reason, or something goes wrong on one side for the other reason, you can have incomplete settlements. You You can. And And And if until you have transactional atomic composability guaranteed at the protocol

level, universally across smart contracts of any type, the same thing you enjoy on ETH L1 SOL L1, until you have that across every bit of your ecosystem, you don't have composability. Now, a lot of people, you push them behind closed doors, and they'll say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, but we're close enough, you know, so why not just call it that?" I've I've I've heard that argument many, many times. >> heard that, too. That usually doesn't happen on the show. That happens at conferences when, like you said, behind It's such And And like the thing is, that that is the hill to die on. And in Canton, that the whole global network, the whole global ecosystem, that is the number one priority is maintaining global composability at all time. So, you know, and preserving privacy through it. This

is where I like I think people really underappreciate how much bigger a problem privacy is to solve for than scaling was. Cuz like everyone followed a very similar path on scaling. It's like everything was slow, and yeah, we know we need it. And then, you know, people started showing up with with speed, and it just it eventually became relatively ubiquitous, right? And And like you're solving bottlenecks, but not architectural things. When you're talking about composability and privacy, like a very simple thought experiment I like to ask people is, cool, we just brought your doctor on chain, and we just brought your bank on chain, and you want to pay your doctor bill, which is a common source of reconciliation.

Do you want your doctor to find out how much money you have in your bank? Do you want your bank to know why you went to the doctor? Because a lot of times, that is actually the trade-off you have to make in the privacy solutions in these other ecosystems or to do some highly coordinated, you know, two-way free of payment transfer and then call that composable because some other system coordinated it in a relatively low latency way. And and like to me both of those things are unacceptable solutions because maybe you've reduced the timeline of that risk, but you have not eliminated it.

And it's a it's a fundamentally different problem if I'm trying to create a stablecoin with a treasury. And I've accidentally somehow delivered or encumbered my treasuries and not receive the stablecoin, CEOs are getting woken up. If I try to do that and it just didn't complete, an ops person's getting woken up and they're resetting the system. It is a fundamentally different risk system and you have to hedge it differently, you have to have different processes for it. Your entire business is fundamentally different, right? And so if you want to if we want to enable if we're genuinely interested in enabling these sort of really low latency agentic experiences where my robo-advisor is literally an AI agent on top of my wallet, well, we would need to make sure that I have not

introduced weird intermediary risk where actually maybe the agent has that money suddenly or like this one entity like I want to know that the decisions it makes complete or don't complete and that I'm ending up only in, you know, I I kind of call this like the hostage handoff, right? There's no scenario under which I can give up the girl and not get the money, right? It's just it's crazy, right? So if we really and and that's where the latency is in our system today is coordinating that handoff and making sure that we don't run into those problems and then injecting a ton of risk capital to prevent anyone from being out of bounds if something bad happens. So you have to eliminate, not reduce, eliminate. So privacy plus composability is a very, very hard problem set to put together.

There's a lot of great stuff going on to kind of introduce privacy, but in many instances, it throws out composability. And then again, it's just like what really is the point? >> Yeah. Well, I I I mean, this is the the very difficult problem has resulted in in a lot of idle capital in off-chain traditional markets, but this is the capital efficiency that we are aiming for is unlocking all of that idle capital because we have unlocked atomic composability or composability plus privacy. That would allow us to have all this the you know, the hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars that's just sitting there in case something wrong happens.

>> Yeah. >> Don't need that sitting there anymore. It can go be productive, right? Cuz we can pull in liquidity just in time that we need it in case we need it. >> Yeah. I mean, flash loans are the coolest thing I think I've seen in the DeFi space. Like, hey, I've identified an arb. I can execute all legs of the arb and borrow the capital I need to execute the arb and return it in one transaction. Is so sci-fi from a finance perspective. But really, I think the destination on a lot of this stuff.

>> It It It feels like teleportation. >> Yes. >> [laughter] >> Yeah, it does. Absolutely. I mean, it's it's like the old uh I don't know, you guys probably didn't do econ, but it's like the old economist joke is like, "Hey, you know, is that $20 bill on the ground?" It's like, "No, it couldn't be cuz if it was, someone would have picked it up already." You know, it [laughter] feels like it's that sort of phenomenon. >> Yeah. [snorts] >> Well, Eric, go Knicks, man. >> Yeah, go Knicks. >> Go Knicks. >> You're going to miss the uh you're going to miss the parade on Thursday, I I I assume, but uh not sure if that's your vibe anyways. It looks like you're somewhere nice downtown, so >> Yeah, thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure.

>> Absolutely. >> Safe travels, buddy. All right. >> See See you again soon. Thanks, Eric. >> Bye. >> Yes, sir. Good to see you soon, stablecoin. >> [laughter] >> All righty, guys. Up next, we've got Rand, the CEO of Zama. Man, the privacy day is kicking right now. >> I think we're I think we're trending on X. >> Smart guy, awesome segment. Thanks you Rug Rat. Thank you MJP. Why is Worldcoin flying this past week? I don't know. I do not know. We've got the Fed decision on rates in 25 minutes.

We've got Rand Hindi, the CEO of Zama joining us. They have just launched what is the very first confidential, I guess, yield farming. I mean, for lack of better term. We're going to pull it up. We're going to talk to Rand about what that even means. Why Morpho? Why confidential yield? And what this means. There is the the very first DeFi integration for with Morpho, letting you deposit confidential USDC into Steakhouse's USDC Prime Vault.

We're going to talk about that and more. Let's get Rand up on the show. Let's give him some love. Rand. Confidential DeFi, privacy day on the rollup here with Zama. Great to have you, man. How How we doing? >> Very good. Very good. Good day today. You know, I always love days when we launch new products. It's always very exciting, you know. >> Yeah, man. Great timing here. Uh to be honest, I wish we could take credit for that being planned. Sometimes [laughter] it's better to be lucky than good. >> not. Everybody should know it was not. >> Yeah, cuz I'm better to be lucky than good, isn't it? So, guys, um Zama's launched this new confidential USDC product, this first DeFi integration with Morpho. And it's not a new vault strategy, it's not a new

lending market. It is the same strategy, but it is fully confidential. Rand, >> Mhm. >> talk to us about this launch, what this means for Zama, what this means for DeFi. Welcome to privacy day. Great to have you. >> You know, when you think about finance, what do people really do with money? They pay things, so you need payments. They trade things, so you need swaps. But, they also want to borrow money, right? So, you need lending protocols.

And importantly, you know, when you have money sitting around, you don't want it to just sit around. You want to make some yield on it. And if you want to build finance on chain, you're going to have to address each of those things. And whether these things are done confidentially or non-confidentially, you know, we can debate, but they have to exist. So, our goal with Zama is to offer this entire suite of financial products, but with full confidentiality. We want every payment you make to be confidential, every trade you make to be confidential, every position you hold in a vault to be confidential.

And so, what we launched today with Morpho is the first step towards that. Is the ability to hold dollars, USDC, and earn yield on it without having to use a new, unproven, untested DeFi protocol. You take your USDC, you shield it into confidential USDC. Nobody knows how much money you have or how much you're going to be depositing. But, now you can actually deposit it in Morpho SteakHouse Prime Vault. It's the same strategy on Morpho protocol on Ethereum. This is not a new thing.

And this is really, really important because as we build natively confidential DeFi protocols, there needs to be a way for people to start making money with existing DeFi protocols. And this is exactly what we enabled today. >> This is incredible. I think uh I I'm curious, honestly, actually to hear about the scale at which you foresee this pool. Um because, you know, we're going to start to see deposits into this. Uh I'm just curious, what are your internal projections? You know, are you looking billions for fun?

>> yeah. >> yeah. L- l- let me ask you a different question. >> Okay. >> Why would you not shield your assets if you can get exactly the same yield opportunity from exactly the same protocol and strategy and curator? >> This is the question. There's it's an it becomes a no >> There is no reason. >> Yeah. >> I- it's like it's like, you know, if you can send someone an encrypted message, why would you not? >> Yeah. >> If you can access a website encrypting your data when you're sending to it, why would you not? Like at some point I think privacy becomes so seamlessly integrated that it becomes commoditized, and if someone doesn't use it, they need a really, really, really good reason.

And I think what we prove today is that earning yield on your dollar is not a good reason to not shield it anymore. Like you can actually shield it and earn it exactly the same way as before. >> And so >> So, Ran, if I was just to push back slightly, not to not to be the thorn in your side here, I feel like privacy is something that people it is it's got this kind of paradox where there's a it's got [clears throat] this stated belief problem where it is often a stated desire of somebody to be private, to have private messaging, to have private uh, you know, finances, to be private in the in in their life, but then the action does not typically

reflect the stated belief. We still post on Instagram. We still text on WhatsApp and on iMessage. People still do do NSFW FaceTimes. People still do pri- uh, public blockchain transactions with large amounts of capital. W- What do you What do you think bridges the stated belief to actual human action dilemma? How How do you think about solving that, uh, as part of this product launch as well, cuz it's deeper than just hey, I got some cash. I'll put it in this this private pool, earn yield. It's like a deep human psyche kind of psychological issue. How do you think about this?

>> I mean, I think you're right and the way I see things evolving in the future is that nobody's going to care about privacy. Not because they gave up, but because it's going to be by default in everything they do and so it's just not going to be a question anymore. It's like you you won't you will not have to actively pursue privacy because it'll just be there. Again, you know, taking HTTPS as an example, when you connect to a website and you want to pay something on an e-commerce on Amazon, right? You put your credit card number. You're not thinking about whether your credit card number is encrypted or if it's going to be stolen by someone who's just like eavesdropping on the internet because, you know, it's by default it's encrypted and that's how the internet works today.

We want to get to that point with blockchain transactions. We want to get to the point where you just don't discuss privacy anymore. Privacy should not be a narrative. It should be by default in every transaction we do. And so how do you do that? Well, it's a question of distribution and adoption. And earning yield, earning extra yield, having access to new products is a way that you can start moving people toward, you know, uh privacy by default products like the Morpheus Vault which just launched. And once they're in the system, you want to build enough that they never have to leave it again. And so that's why I'm saying earning yield is just the first step.

You want confidential swaps, you want confidential payments, and you want all of that to be integrated with your wallets, with exchanges, with custodians, with your credit card. With your whole ecosystem has to adopt this new privacy standard, Zama, in order for this to become invisible. But that's the point. The The point is that people should not care about it. >> Yeah, so the thesis is just by default this is not going to be a question anymore or a a choice. It's just going to be the standard and you know, yeah.

Yeah. And you know, part of this as well from today is this growing uses use of D5 from institutional allocators. I've got a panel next week here in New York. It's this conference called Tokenize This and it's with some of the largest allocators in the world and we're talking about vaults. Right? And we're talking about what vault adoption looks like, what that means, how that's going to happen, why they're so bullish on it. And I refuse to believe that you know, vaults will take off in the public transparent form that they exist in today. And so maybe you could speak about the institutional thesis here for this Morpho vault and what you see as kind of the ever-growing

use case and customer base for the evolution of Zama's product with Morpho and with other, you know, kind of like D5 protocols. You know, what is that customer base and how do you think about that like institutional era of vaults? >> There There are different reasons why people want privacy. Uh some people want privacy because they don't want their neighbors to know how much money they make or how much what they're spending it on. So if you're a neo bank and you're using stable coins, it's very obvious to me that you want privacy for payments and for the accounts of your customers. Like no bank today go to someone in the street and tell them show me your bank account. They'll look at you like you're a weirdo, right?

And so there's no reason to believe this won't be the case for on-chain banks using stable coins. So privacy there is going to be honestly like just a very obvious thing people are going to do. The second thing people want privacy for is um keeping their assets and revenue hidden from their competitors. If you're an international company and you're doing business in different countries, you're getting paid in different currencies, and you have to move money between your different subsidiaries, you know, do cross-border payments. These are huge use cases for stablecoins, massive trillion-dollar use cases for stablecoins.

You cannot do that if you're not hiding those movements. You cannot have a company entire books completely open to the public for any competitor, anybody to actually see. It just doesn't make sense. So, here you want confidentiality. Uh and then you also have investors. If you're a large investor, you need confidentiality if you want to be able to make returns on your investments. VCs on average, when they invest in crypto, the moment they move their allocation to an exchange to sell it, which by the way they're entitled to do, they're investors, that's what they do, you know, make money, right?

>> Yeah. >> The moment they move it, they get front-run, there's signaling risk, the token dumps. They lose 20 to 30% of upside because of a lack of confidentiality on their ability to liquidate their investments positions. You have to understand, when a VC doesn't make money, they cannot raise a fund to invest in new projects. The whole ecosystem suffers from the lack of the ability of investors to exit their position without front-running. It's a massive massive problem.

And finally, vaults. Vaults I think are super interesting. Today we think about lending as, you know, a way to make yield. But I actually see vaults as something that's going to evolve to be a strategy for whatever can bring yield in the future. You know, a fund manager is probably going to offer a vault for people to invest in his funds in a kind of DeFi capacity. But that fund manager probably wants to keep their strategy private. So here, it's not just the deposits that you want to keep private from the LPs, it's potentially the whole on-chain strategy of the creator that you also want to keep private. I mean, if it's not,

why would you pay the premium for someone else to manage your money if you could just copy trade everything they're doing? So I think in general, as as different strategies move on chain for lending, for hedge funds, for trading for whatever else, confidentiality will be completely normal, completely by default in what people do. >> Yeah. And I think and I I I I just want to kind of circle back to the the stated belief problem that Andy had mentioned because I think there are alternative you know, so so I looked up because actually someone close to me said that, you know, they they use incognito mode every time they do search history now and it [clears throat] kind of surprised me cuz I don't always do that, but I do it sometimes depending on what I'm

searching. Um and so some data here is that back in 2016, so 10 years ago, almost half of the people, 45%, said that they used a private browsing window at least once a month. If you fast forward to today in 20 actually from 2024, but 50% use incognito mode regularly and over 75% of the Gen Z population use it regularly meaning that it is increasing as more more young people are protecting their data. So I think the trend is that people are taking this more seriously and they're choosing to go incognito, choosing to default towards privacy more, especially

as the solutions, the privacy alternatives, are getting easier and easier and and there's no more lack of convenience. I think that's typically why uh has gone of kind of gone to the to the background of it because it hasn't been convenient for tokens. >> Right? So, I I think one of the reason why we're excited about Morpho specifically. So, first of all, you know, they're French. I'm French. >> [laughter] >> Uh but, you know, joke aside, I think Morpho is an incredibly talented team. I mean, these guys are good. Like, they're machines at execution, honestly. Like, probably one of the best startups that we've had in Europe in a very long time.

So, I'm very excited about working with people that provide a real utility and a real product. But, beyond that, I think, you know, Morpho is actually turning into I would say like the central place where people are going to go to offer strategy and to make money from those strategies, right? And we don't want to recreate another Morpho. There's only one Morpho, and there should be only one Morpho, and that's their job is to do that. What we want is to have a way for people to plug into that, have all of the advantages of Morpho without having to take the risk of using a new protocol.

And if there's one thing to learn about DeFi, is that it's very risky to actually use a new improving protocol. >> Yeah. >> And so, I think what we're going to see over the coming years with AI and everything is going to be a consolidation of liquidity around a few battle-tested protocols, and Morpho is definitely going to be very high on that list. So, you know, making a bet on working with them is not just a bet on any random DeFi protocol. It's a bet on a protocol that we consider to be extremely robust against potential risks that we cannot manage at our level.

>> Yeah. Yeah, it it makes complete sense, and I think um you guys are now working with Morpho. Morpho's going to be around for the long haul. We're starting to think about what this [clears throat] looks like for securities and real estate. And as, you know, every asset becomes tokenized, comes on chain, it probably ends up as a form of collateral deposit in these vaults. And as Zama makes these vaults confidential, it becomes default. Not just, you know, >> [clears throat] >> uh you know, easy or commoditized, but actually default, right? Which I think is going to make it as ubiquitous as possible. And so my question here is, you know, you've got this first confidential USDC uh DeFi yield venue vault on Morpho launching on the 23rd of this month.

I mean, how how quickly until we see pretty much every vault on Morpho turn on the privacy switch? >> Well, I mean in theory, anybody could deploy, uh you know, a shielded adapter for any vault, for any asset. However, the approach we're taking on on the Zama protocol is that we have what we call the the registry. The registry is a list of curated tokens, vaults, and protocols that we believe pass the bar in terms of quality security integrity

compliance, and so on and so forth. You know, there can be a thousand different confidential USDC tokens, but we really only need one that everybody is using. We want that one to be, you know, very secure and everything. So, I don't think we're going to be listing every vault overnight. I think we're going to want to start with, you know, the the very high-quality, very I would say battle-tested vaults first. You know, we want that to be a no-brainer for people. We don't want people who have to think about it, you know, like is that like a good vault, a good No. Look, Steakhouse USDC Prime, period right?

It works. People use it. Like we don't have to re- Like that's not our job to decide, you know, that like it it the market has voted Stakehouse is awesome. That's it. And that's how we're going to think about it. So, rather than having 100 USD vaults, I think what we're going to focus on is supporting more currencies. You know, we want people to be able to hold euros confidentially and make money on it. We want people to be able to hold pounds and make money confidentially on it, yen, and so on and so forth. It It's really more of the multi-currency uh uh thing that is important rather than having like 100 USD vaults.

>> Got it. But, what about other assets, Rand? I mean, a lot of our a lot of our viewers here, I mean, you got some people in the chat supporting you and talking about Zama the the token, the a lot of Ethereum bulls, Hyperliquid bulls, lighter bulls, Bitcoin bulls. People want these assets in you know, as close to their native form as possible in a private way. How about the evolution of more speculative assets in a private manner on chain? What does that process look like? >> Yeah, I mean, anybody is free to actually make a governance proposal uh on the DAO and basically said, "I'd like you to list, you know, that token as a confidential token, you know?"

Um so, that is actually technically that's what we do, you know, when we want to list a token, we actually make a proposal on the DAO. So, you know, we're going through the same process. Um we have actually a few assets already in there. So, you know, we have confidential USDC, we have confidential USDT, we have confidential Zama, obviously. Uh we have confidential TGBP, which is a GBP stablecoin, a British pound stablecoin, very nice one. Um and we also actually have confidential gold, uh XAU, XAUT, so Tether Gold. Uh so, you can technically already take your Tether Gold, shield it, and just hold it. It It's sort of like the is is the modern equivalent of stashing gold under your mattress in a way, right? Um

and there might or there might not be yield opportunities in gold in the future. I can't really comment on that. Um I'd love to do Bitcoin, but which Bitcoin? >> Yeah, wrapped Bitcoin. >> Exactly. Like what is Bitcoin on Ethereum? I don't know. >> Yeah. Okay, so there is going to be this process and there's this open kind of you know, framework to evolve into you've got the stablecoins, Tether Gold Tether Gold, Zama, a pound stablecoin and we can get to ETH, we can get to you know, Morpho token, etc. etc. etc. And so is the right way then to think about Zama's current initiative just to be the

the like kind of confidentiality layer for all of EVM blockchains and all of EVM networks? Like at some point there should be a Zama confidential version of most of the notable tokens on chain in the in in the future. >> Oh yeah, 100%. I think you know, like like Zama is not a chain. Zama is not trying to be everything. We're trying to be one thing and that thing is HTTPS for blockchain transactions. Every financial transaction on a public blockchain, whether it's Ethereum or Solana has to be encrypted with Zama in the future because this is how finance works, right? That's what we try to do.

We we try to be the confidentiality layer. And of course, you know, there are I would say categories of tokens that we are we think are going to be driving a lot of the adoption. So stablecoins is obviously, you know, one of those things. RWAs, huge huge opportunity. You know, we announced the partnership with T-Rex a few months ago. You had, you know, Joachim on the call on the show earlier today. >> Yep. >> Like T-Rex is is tokenizing a hundred billion dollars of verb of ways in the next 12 months. I mean I'll give you one number. If 5% of T-Rex's initial commitment of a hundred billion dollars, so 5% gets shielded with Zama, it would make Zama a bigger privacy protocol in terms of value shielded than

Zcash. So, 5% market share of a single partnership is enough to make Zama the biggest privacy protocol ever. Like guys, RWAs, I don't think people understand the size of that market. It's just it's trillions. It's literally trillions. >> And we're so early and I love the way that you and opened up this article, this blog post around this product announcement with Morfo because you said, uh and I'll read it I guess word for word here because you said the Zama protocol made confidential tokens possible on Ethereum. The natural next step is giving them utility. I think everyone is having a very, very similar

conclusion and revelation here where they realize, okay, we are now tokenizing all the assets. We're starting with stable coins. We're starting with the high velocity assets. We're doing equities. Then we're going to do real estate. We're going to do the bond market. We're going to do forex. We're going to do all of these things. All of these things are going to become tokenized. Doesn't just stop there. They end up flowing into these protocols where you can actually do something with it. And some of those assets might be better collateral. Some of them might be better to fractionalize. Some Some of them might be better as deposits to borrow against or what not.

And and so many of them are are applicable for privacy. >> Can Can you imagine, right? I'll just just I mean honestly, I have goosebumps thinking about how big this market is going to be. It's insane. Like RWAs, okay, combined with blockchain composability means that you can actually start to build synthetic derivative assets for anything you can think of literally by pushing a few lines of code. Do you know how difficult it is in TradFi to actually build like a new financial product by combining a bunch of assets?

It's really hard. We're turning that into code that anybody can be like, "You know what? I have an idea. I'm going to take that asset here, I'm going to take this asset here, I'm going to put it together, I'm going to sell that as a new thing." And guess what? That's exactly what Curv is actually do. And so that's why I'm so bullish on this thing is like I think what we're discovering we're rediscovering finance on a whole different scale in a completely programmable way and confidentiality isn't is an obvious requirement for that to even happen.

>> You're absolutely right, Ran, and and you know, we're increasing the velocity of all the assets that already exist, but we're also increasing the velocity of the innovation of creating new things and new assets and new derivatives, which is going to add and grow the entire financial pie. And and you know, you and Zama are already a leader in the privacy industry as it relates to this. And so you guys are fighting the good fight. We really really appreciate you coming on today and sharing some time with us. We realize it's a it's a busy day. >> on the announcement and thank you for being >> Big day for the French.

>> being a great a great partner here on privacy day. The power law is your friend as a leader in the privacy world and as every asset comes on chain, you guys are in a great position. So thank you so much and congratulations again. >> Thanks for having me. See you guys. >> Thanks, Ran. Thanks, Ran. >> had [laughter] no chance. They never had a chance. All right, guys. We're going to keep things rolling here on the privacy day. We just got the announcement of unchained unchanged rates in the Fed.

nine of 18 FOMC participants pencil in a 2026 rate hike. Remember the bet we placed yesterday around the dissents? We said unchanged rates and no dissents. So ladies and gentlemen, we've got the unchanged rate. We will see if we get a dissent. Guys, we've got Ilya from Near and Josh from Zcash coming up next. We'll be right back after a quick break. We're going to keep privacy day rolling. Thanks for rocking with us. >> [music] [music] [music]

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You know we get deep. You [music] know we get deep on >> Yo, yo, yo. Welcome back to privacy day, ladies and gentlemen. If you were rocking with us yesterday, you remember we put the unchanged rate and no dissents play on Cal She. I do believe that that hit according to my quant Rob. >> Uh next up on the roll up is Kevin Warsh here to tell us about the state of No, I'm just kidding. Uh we've got a couple of bangers here coming up. Um we've got Josh Swihart of Zodl and Zcash. We've got Ilya from Near. These guys are going to tell you everything that you need to know when it comes to

Zcash Near intense. Um >> Yes. >> pretty epic uh from Rand. Obviously uh great confluence seeing that announcement go live the same day as privacy day. Unplanned. A lot of volatility out there in the markets right now, but guys we're >> Yeah. >> we're we're holding it down. >> Rob. We've got um a tie game right now between Portugal and Congo. And um you know I think there's a case to be made for over over three and a half goals here.

>> All right, we're sports betting live on the show. Uh >> [laughter] >> All right, let's get Ilya >> get Ilya and Josh in the back. Let's get this show started. Privacy Day continues on. Guys, good to have you there in the chat. We got some volatility there on the FOMC as expected. We've got Kevin Warsh speaking in a little bit. We've got Ilya and Josh on in the back ready to come up. Let's bring them up. Let's talk Zcash. Let's talk Near. Let's talk confidential intense. Ilya, Josh, guys, welcome back to the show. Good to have you back. Happy Privacy Day. We need to make this a recurring thing.

>> Every day is Privacy Day. >> Yeah. [laughter] Apparently. >> Certainly is. >> Apparently. >> Certainly is. Go Andy, please start us off here. >> Gentlemen, good It's great to have you back. I mean, I think at this point in this kind of state of the space, we're very, very clearly moving into a privacy-first mentality. I mean, Ilya, you tweeted out that in the near future, you want NEAR intense just to not even have a a on or off switch, it's just always going to be on. Josh, obviously, you know, committing your life's work into Zcash into making Zcash kind of accessible.

And, you know, as we kind of think about these things and the evolution, I would just love to hear each of you guys' perspective as to where we are in this evolution, right? Because public blockchains have been since the inception of smart contracts in 2015, 2016 with Ethereum, we're about 10 years past then, about 15 years past Bitcoin's era. Just kind of starting really broad here, where do you guys believe we are in the transition from public kind of networks into more privacy-first networks and how how you guys or why you guys believe we are where we are. Josh, we'd love to hear from you first.

>> Sure, I think I think we're at a a tipping point. Um, you [clears throat] know, we we've been I mean, many many people many of us have been talking about privacy for a long time and the you know, the the public has seemed to be apathetic and saying, you know, who care we've already lost our privacy anyway, like does it really matter? And now we're seeing the implications um, of it mattering. And so, people really starting to grok or understand uh, what that is.

As governments become more authoritarian, they're locking down more things, they want to watch more things. Um, we've had this battle around communications and the the ability to protect our communications and now we're having this battle um, around around money because digital money's become a thing. So, I think it's part of a natural evolution. It needed to mature, the technology needed to mature. I think we're here. Um, it still to some degree needs to scale. Uh, but that's coming very fast and I think we'll see much more mass adoption in in the coming years. I think people now have their eyes open.

>> Yeah. Ilya. >> Yeah, I mean very much agree. I think the the only way to do kind of verifiable money payments prior were to make them fully public so everyone could verify. We now have technology to do that not publicly and so uh now we can actually start rolling that out and and we have and I know this has been eCash been pioneering this from uh from a while ago.

But if we want this to be used by mass market, by day-to-day, by companies, and by agents, like it needs to be private, right? That's just like as we move from pure speculation uh to real value that this technology brings to the world, privacy is effectively like a zero-to-one feature here. >> Yep. And you know, we we've seen how we're we're getting more and more censorship, uh you know, across the broad swath, right? Like we're we're seeing tax uh rules being implemented in Illinois today how you take money from your one pocket, you put it in your other pocket,

you get 0.2% tax. Just pretty much asset seizure at that point. >> Get me out of Chicago, please. >> [laughter] >> Um, and obviously we all saw what happened to uh Anthropic and Mythos, right? The US US government was fearful that it was going to fall into the wrong hands and and decided to, you know, put the uh put the put the stops on that as well. And so, I think people are realizing that um this these things are out there. Um, they're not guaranteed access and there needs to be alternatives. And so, and given that we're looking at this, you know, Elia more on the confidential intense side, kind of at the smart contract layer, and Zotl and Zcash more at the asset level or the chain level,

I'm curious, we've kind of been having this recurring conversation today, where should there be privacy implementations? Should it happen at the asset layer? Should it happen at the chain layer? Should it happen at the smart contract layer or combination of all? Is there design choices that make more sense as far as how we implement this privacy? Because I think we're at the stage, we know that it's a it's a must at this point. It's gaining more adoption, but how exactly should we be implementing privacy mechanisms? Um, Elia, maybe we can start with you and we'll we'll switch to Josh. >> Yeah, I mean, I think it needs to be at every layer, right? That's the kind of TLDR. Um, the asset layer is extremely valuable because, you know, what Zcash

provides is something that you cannot get anywhere else, right? It's it's really kind of the strongest properties that you can have uh, of both privacy and uh, kind of decentralization of control and governance of of the asset itself. And so, that is kind of the absolute hedge against, you know, any kind of uh, government or uh, uh, you know, even m- kind of cross-national level uh operations.

The as you go up the stack, right? You still need to use these assets, you still need to pay, you still need to transact, you still need to uh, interact, you know, may want to lend, you want to borrow, you want to do all of these operations. That's where you have kind of execution layer. And if you need to then go and kind of unshield and then, you know, if I'm lending and borrowing and everybody sees, you know, what my position is, we've we've seen this on hyperliquid, right? People getting like hunted to get liquidated for their positions on hyperliquid. Like that is all kind of extremely detrimental for any, you know, normal financial operations.

And again, this is where like if you look at institutions, they've been trading off of DEXes. They are on centralized exchanges, like, you know, which don't provide visibility into what's happening. And so, if we want, and I think like they want to move fully on chain because it's cheaper, it's faster, it's, you know, more access, we need to offer them privacy as well. And same for individual users, right? As a when I pay for my coffee, I don't want everybody to kind of see that this transaction's happening. I don't want to every every time. And as as we go up the stack to, you know, kind of the way I think of stack is, you know, AI's on the front,

blockchain on the back end, and obviously like assets execution. There, you you need privacy for AI, right? We've seen all this censorship now with models. We see the model providers censoring on the other side as well. We see, you know, they can change the rules at any time saying, "Hey, cool. We're going to keep your data for whatever purposes we think it's useful." So, you know, if you want to have kind of similar properties with your AI, which I think is going to become the like the way we interact with computing, the way we interact with blockchain, the way we interact with money is going to be modulated by AI, you need the same properties there. So, kind of across the whole stack, right? And that's why, you

know, excited to work with Zcash, excited to bring these technologies to mass market. >> Yep. And Josh, on your side, you know, given that you've integrated with Near and tense on the Zotl in the Zotl wallet, you know, I'm I'm curious about that implementation, right? You've got the ability to shield Zcash for private transfers, but then you've also got confidential intents from Near. Are these things compatible? Do you get some extra privacy by doing this at both the asset level and the smart contract level? How how should we wrap our heads around, you know, what we're giving up in some solutions versus what we're gaining in others?

>> Yeah, I'll I'll start. Before I get there, I'll like start back where Eli started, which is to say like I fully agree. You have to have to have to have privacy at the base layer, at the database, at the token level. Um, otherwise, it just it did like it it doesn't make sense. It gets hacked. Um, it can be seized or it can be censored. You have It's like traditional systems like we've had this kind of front end, middle middle tier database, and you're saying, "Okay, we're going to keep the database completely transparent, but we're going to implement um, privacy or encryption at the kind of these upper layers." It just doesn't It does not work, right? All of the data is there. It's there that can be seen. It can be hacked. People have access to it.

If you're using WhatsApp on Facebook or with Facebook, there's somebody that has keys. Um, so you can say, "Okay, it's encrypted between parties." But like somebody has keys. So if somebody wanted to go be able to see uh, transaction data behind the scenes, or they, you know, a government comes in, whatever happens, um, it just doesn't work. So you do have to have it on on on all layers of the stack, or you have no privacy guarantees. And the strongest privacy guarantee that you have at that lowest level is zero knowledge, where no information is posted to the chain. It's just a proof that something happened, a mathematical proof that you can trust.

Um, so it's not even just encryption or like you would encrypt the uh, a database. The the information does doesn't exist. So if you don't have that, you can't like bolt that in up the stack. Um it's just an non-starter. Um and it's not just for security or privacy in the way that we traditionally think it. It's It's about censorship resistance. We have these decentralized systems and if somebody can see the information, if somebody in power, whether that's a company, a third party that's a running in software on top of the data, or that's a government that wants to see it, the only way that it can be censorship resistant is not is not decentralization.

It's privacy. And you have to have You really have to have both of those properties in order for that to work. And then you have the stuff that that Elia's doing. Like there's there's like there's people in this world and there's people in this ecosystem that are zero-sum people and they're like, "Well, if Near is doing something and they're adding confidentiality or they're adding some privacy at some layer in the stack, then does that take away from Zcash?" Like it's the it's it's just bad bad thinking, right? So, we need more and more. We need these applications that are built on top. We need things like confidential intents. We want to be able to be able to transact. Um I I want to be able to do a swap from Zec to USDC or to something else and I want to be able to do that confidentially without having

um a third party at or without leaking too much data, then I can do that with something like Near intents. Um where like Zcash as an asset doesn't have like that kind of capability built in. Um so, as people are adding these layers and and capabilities that others be able to want, whether it's swapping or lending or borrowing or like those kinds of things, um to the extent that they're adding privacy on on top and kind of hardening the whole privacy stack, I think it's super important. >> Oh. >> Yeah. >> Um >> Yeah, and you know, I think that that we actually had uh Tushar on the show to start off today and he was talking about privacy as a store of value. And so, you know, I I want to ask you guys both this. Like we think about privacy as like a feature or a capability of a

system, right? Rather than as a means of storing value. And I think what what Near's confidential intents have done has allowed Zcash and other assets to be far more like composable and usable across the on-chain ecosystem while maintaining that private nature. But when you think about the idea of privacy as a store of value, it's not necessarily as much on that medium of exchange point. Uh it's more around this idea of the value that privacy can bring and in storing that value in in a kind of like meta way. And so, you know, I'm curious from both of your perspectives here on this kind of privacy as a store of value conversation. Like when you think about

that, what does that entirely mean as privacy storing value? And and maybe you can compare that as to medium of exchange or using these things for private payments, like Z- like Zec for payments versus stablecoins. And just kind of generally like this privacy as a store of value thesis, you know, what what that really means for crypto assets and for investors, users, etc. How how to kind of wrap our head around that. >> I'll jump in. The like there there are a lot of people in the Zcash ecosystem that want to be able to spend Zec and use it day-to-day, and there are a lot of people that view it as a store of

value. And if you think about how amazing that is where we are today. So traditionally, if you have a store of value, like we go back to old stones or seashells or um gold or things like that that are hard to divide, hard to move around the globe very quickly. Um we went to like Swiss bank accounts. You still have a physical location in a jurisdiction where rules may change, and you're not sure if the rules may change. And you still got a process and intermediary to kind of go through. And now we have this store of value that is completely unseen. It's just a black hole.

Only you know what is in that hole and and how much is there that you can tap into any at any time without any intermediary telling you you can or you can't. That's completely portable and can be around the world in seconds, right? Like never before in the history of humankind have we had this kind of capability with store value and protecting our security, our liberties, um and what we want to do with it. Now, at some point you want to be able to exchange it or spend it, right? What is a store value? It's your your It's the battery, right? I'm storing this up over time and then I'm going to be able to want to use it at some point. Otherwise, it just doesn't work. Like if I have a gold brick and I want to be able to expend um

you know, I want to go be able to go buy a bike. I can't go buy a bike with a gold brick. Like I've got to convert it or whatever and it's very very complicated. But now we have this store value where I can easily move it into the the my counterparties' currency of choice, whatever they want to receive it in. We use Near and hence in order to be able to make that happen or you can do it directly. Somebody else has their own black hole of store value and you you can send it straight across. Um so infinite capability to to to store and use your wealth, whether that becomes, you know, at some point the store value becomes a medium exchange or it can become a medium of exchange.

Um so that that dichotomy I don't I struggle with a little bit, but >> Yeah. >> but like I get it, but that this store value narrative is very strong. >> Yeah. Um Josh, I think uh he's going to stick with us for a little while. So and and you know, we've we only got a few more minutes with you. So I wanted to get into maybe some of the recent developments with Zcash. You guys have, you know, kind of had a little bit of some ups and downs as of recently. Um and I I'm just curious, you know, it it is a very difficult challenging thing to sort of find something adequately, you know, probably, you know, stay up a little late on some of these nights and and ultimately implement a solution um which has seemed to be very effective and and you know, fast forward now, you

know, getting help from some some of these frontier model companies on on really tightening things up. I'm just curious, you know, how things have been for you the last few days, you know, kind of what was going through your mind and and maybe take us through, you know, from here now where we are and where we're going so that, you know, we can sort of maybe fill in any mis- correct any misconceptions, fill in any gaps in the minds of Zodlers. >> Yeah, it was a kind of it was a crazy week. Um the from the notification of the vulnerability to the roll out of a soft fork to the roll out of a hard fork over a matter of days where the team is effectively working

around the clock. Um 24 hours a day, somebody's up working on something. You know, I think we had days where someone was at 2 hours of sleep. So, we were able to kind of get a nap and and get back at it. Um and I think it was handled very well. We have some some really good security protocols and we were very well prepared. Um and uh and I think executed well. I think the the you know, the market does what the market does and there were some, you know, questions and and that kind of thing. So, some people had moved out. I think we saw people moved out of the shielded pool of the orchard pool specifically into transparent addresses.

Um some people, you know, may have sold their their holdings didn't see a lot of movement like multi-hop out of the shielded pool as we were kind of watching that into the transparent into an exchange. Um so, some of that was speculative and then it kind of bounced uh pretty nicely. The great thing about it is, right, is that um is that like it mobilized both our team and teams across crypto to like further harden their protocols. It's like saying like holy crap, like these AI models are getting really good and these protocols that have historically had a lot of complexity where it's hand-checked, human-checked, um there might be issues.

And so like the the hardening that's going on, the formal verification that's going on right now, there'll be a new Orchard pool uh called Ironwood um with the uh the bug ver- uh uh addressed and uh formally verified plus Mythos has already had a crack at it. There was a friend of the project Mythos and and did not find anything. Um so there's a hardening and like people want assuredness, right? They want security, they don't like uncertainty. And so to the extent that this has been hardened the way that it is hardened as quickly as as it has been and as quickly as it will be, um it is is pretty amazing. And so you can look at like a short-term like price dip over a couple days, it's a blip in time,

right? Like we're building for generations to come. Um and uh we're accepting pretty pretty good. So um I'm pretty happy with where we are. >> Yeah. You know, Illia, on that point, you know, I'm sure you saw the uh uh Mythos verification announcement as well. You know, it I'm just curious your you know, your thoughts when you saw that. You know, what that even means from your kind of AI perspective of like the strongest possible model kind of like verifying a blockchain security perimeters and just kind of like what that process looks like, how you reacted to it. Um is that something that you're interested in

doing for NEAR and confidential intense and and and intense? Just kind of give us your viewpoint from that part of the equation as well. >> Yeah, so I mean right now if actually everyone who is building this kind of systems is throwing everything that's available, right? And so uh Uh, obviously Mythos, right? I mean, especially now is restricted. Um, but uh, at the time was restricted. So, it's really amazing that the team was able to to kind of work with the myth is team there. I I I mean, the reaction was very much like a pin Zuka to get more context on that. But, I think the reality is and and this is

I think was important part of what myth was saying uh, kind of when we were discussing this like it over a week ago. The actual vulnerability finding usually comes not from just like, "Hey, you know, myth is or hey, whatever opus finds uh, find vulnerabilities, make no mistakes, right?" It's really a kind of crafting a a effectively attack harnesses for the code. And so, I think it's important to recognize that, you know, potentially you can use, you know, new open source model in a more targeted way to find vulnerabilities, right? And and I think generally

I would be surprised if a lot of hacks that came out in April were used we people used actually the kind of closed source models. It I mean, it would be very dumb to do that because obviously those logs are stored one way or another. And so, I think a lot of it is now using open source models like a lot more effectively. Now, I mean, and this week again, we talked about it. I think there is no like there's the the model verifying is always going to be chicken like kind of uh, kind of mouse like catch up game.

And so, like you need for verification and you need you need a a bit new paradigm on that. This is something we've been working on where you can really write code for me verified right away because I think for any system that stores value that transacts value that is kind of mission critical, I think we will need to formally verify it. And so, like end-to-end, right? Like networking stack needs to be verified, not just like not just code that runs, but also like everything under it needs to be verified. And so, we need to scale this ASAP. And again, AI is actually a great argument to do that uh effectively and the cheaply. And so, uh that is something that, I mean, we will see a

lot more progress across the space in the next like 3 months. >> Yeah, Josh, just on that note, right? Ironwood is going to have that that formal verification property kind of embedded into it. You know, it seemingly can't come fast enough. What does that look like for all the Zcash community here today who are listening? Um you know, what is that What is the roadmap to Ironwood and and to Tachyon reasonably look like? And I know you guys are fully locked in here, but you know, when can we expect a formally verified uh Zcash ledger?

>> Yeah, the the testnet's already up. Formal verification is progressing well. It Everything everything is progressing is um faster maybe than than we anticipated. I think the uh there's a lot of coordination as it relates to new software. So, for Zcashers, they know there's Zcashd, which is the legacy consensus node that was, you know, the the code for it of Bitcoin. Uh that will be retired as part of this process. Um and so, people that are using that node are going to have to move to a new Rust-based uh consensus node called ZebraD.

And so, I actually think that that coordination problem is probably the bigger problem. Um not problem per se, but um yeah, it's I mean, that's it's it's just a lot of work. Um so, I think our target is mid to late July for Ironwood activation. That's when the current end of service or end of life is for Zcashd. >> Yeah, and and that's when we'll be able to have a clearer view on the the amount of Zcash potentially that could have been minted in the orchard pool. Is that correct?

>> Yeah, what it does is it's going to force people effectively out of the orchard pool into the new pool. So, people will be able to maintain their same addresses. So, it will feel very clean. They'll walk into a wallet. They'll have an option of either kind of background moving things over or moving things over manually. Anytime you move things, it leaks data. And so, provide some guidance on how to minimize that data leakage. And there's things that are being built into that turnstile, what's called a turnstile, that to effectively move that money over this next period of time. We're already working with wallet providers and providing guidance on on how to do the implementation within their wallets.

And then if you choose to, you know, spend um notes that are in the orchard pool today, it's going to spend them into Ironwood notes. Um So, I think, you know, the the um that whole transition should be pretty smooth and and we'll have some dashboard kind of stuff up as well out in the community where people can be able to see and track the movements across these pools. >> Got it. >> Awesome. And you know, Ilya, just last question from my side is as, you know, there's soft fork, hard fork, ultimately new pool implemented on the Zcash side, is there anything that you have to do on the near side to make sure that it's compatible and things run smoothly on,

you know, some of the ecosystem enablement protocols that that are, you know, in and around Zcash? >> Yeah, I mean, there there's some work because compared to most if most other kind of Zcash exchanges, we actually support shielded pool directly. And so you can go directly from in and out of shielded pool. And so I mean we obviously will want to support new pool kind of directly and and maintain all that. So we'll need we'll need to update for that.

Um but otherwise I think I mean as as with kind of other chains, just making sure that you know as the forks are progressing, we we are on the right fork and everything is working correctly. So you know, monitoring situation. Uh and and supporting as much as we can. Right. Um I mean like the week it was happening, right? We were kind of providing I mean uh information about like the flow of value in intents. Like there was actually in um inflow into Zcash through intents when when the price dropped because there was supporters actually were buying. The people who were on chain were buying. So

uh as price drop dropped. So uh so yeah, just making sure that that all is working and and kind of enabled properly. >> Awesome. Uh Josh, last thing for you. Um what do you have to say to all those who panic sold their Zcash? >> Sorry, people. >> [laughter] >> Thanks for coming >> Thank you so much for joining us. Um Josh, I think we're going to let you go. Obviously still hard at work, lots to do. Uh appreciate you joining and and fighting the good fight. Uh feels like a great cohort of speakers here for privacy day. Appreciate you coming on.

>> All right, take care. Thanks, everybody. >> Thanks, Josh. >> Next time. Thanks, Josh. >> All right, Ilya, man. >> Then there was one. >> Ilya, man. What were they thinking banning Fable 5? Like what what like what were they thinking of the of this outcome, right? I mean, how how to shoot yourself in the foot 101. >> Yeah, I mean, I think the it's an interesting like there's already obviously been a conflict between kind of US government and Anthropic, right? So, this is just kind of continuation of this. I think from a US government, this is extremely bad precedent because effectively what they've shown,

they can ban any internet technology from by US company. >> Yeah. >> Like and this means for every single other country, right? Where right now they're relying on, I don't know, Google or browser or maps or something. Like, all of that now is effectively under threat, right? They Like, tomorrow they can say, "Oh, the maps is a strategic information and only available to US citizens." And it's not It's going to disappear for everyone, right?

>> And what You know, one of the things I realized the other day is I was looking at a map and I was I was kind of planning some traveling and I realized that it said Gulf of America near Florida, but it doesn't do that everywhere. Like >> No. Only for US, yeah. >> Right. So, Google and Apple are showing different people different things. There's not really an objective source of truth that we're using. And it feels like another scary like just something to consider here is that it it may not be so black and white when it comes to these models. Like, some people might get degraded service. Like, you know, we got Fable but not Mythos. Like, the the US government is going to make sure that they get the frontier of the frontier, but there might be AI that is showing some people a certain version of the

truth and other people a certain version of the truth and some of those people are going to get more truth. Like this is It feels fundamentally it's very confusing. It's very complex. I mean, does it have to be this way Ilya or is there a way that we can get around this? >> No, I mean we need to we need to get around this in and what web3 been building. But I do want to know that this actually been like this even before AI, right? Google is showing you different results depending on where you are for the same results, right? There is countries going forcing things that are not should not be visible in search results. And I'm not talking about China. I'm talking about, you know, Western Western Europe or Europe and European countries.

And so [snorts] the reality is like for any centralized provider like they will be by definition one way or another complying with whatever the kind of regulation and policy and I wouldn't say that countries have been moving toward a more open information flow generally, right? Uh, across the board. And so I think web3 has been building for this exact uh, goal. And so for AI specifically, you need, you know, kind of decentralized compute. You need private inference so you are not kind of subject to this. Again, similar to how

with money, you need privacy as a method to have uh, to be kind of uncensored. Same for AI, right? Privacy is enabling to be uncensored because now like I I call it store like you know, you already mentioned store of value. I wanted to say it's store of freedom, right? >> Yeah, that's that's what I was trying to get at. Yeah. >> Like >> Yeah. >> When when so when you use AI that's like truly private and uh, you don't have this like overhang. Like right now if I'm asking something to chat GPT, I need to think about if I'm going to ask something that'll trigger their understanding that I'm doing something wrong.

Yes. Like I'm like, "Hey, a friend of mine is doing like mRNA company. I want to know more about mRNA. Am I going to get a ban for like asking questions about how molecules are affecting DNA because like this is also the same thing that you do for bio weapons? Like is this going to be a problem, right? And I know like a couple people who actually been banned from OpenAI for example for asking like questions about you know, nuclear power. So like >> It's crazy. >> The reality is yeah, like the the freedom of like using technology that is private and decentralized is you don't need to have this mental overhead of am I going to do something wrong and you can just ask it.

You can get the results. The model may still be like, you know, whatever fine-tuned to not answer some questions, but at least like you don't have this overhang. And then obviously for models themselves, we do need models that are actually trained kind of more by actually community versus, you know, by a single company. Because right now so my my like there's like two two sides of things. I actually think trying to align to kind of a general goodness of humanity is an impossible task because, you know, the humanity is not aligned, right? Every country, every city, you know, we have two parties. If you're within a party, like at every level we have misalignment, right? And that's kind of what makes us human, right? Everybody kind of has their own

perspective. And so I only think I I think the only alignment that's possible is with the individual, right? So you can have That's why we call it user-owned AI. It's like it's aligned with you. It's private for you. It has like your interests in mind. >> Yeah. >> Right now, the you know, if you're consuming AI from a company, it has company's interests in mind by definition. >> Right. >> Right? And so So that's kind of the really the conceptual transition. And then we We to build better products that actually surface that, right? Because you can, you know, do financial transactions, health care, and all these things and not worry about where is this going to go and what's going to hacked and what's going to be disabled tomorrow.

>> Yeah. Ilya, we're going to bring Jordan up from Venice and continue the conversation. We're just going to keep flowing right into it. Uh we're going to bring him up now and just keep it going here. So, give us a one sec here. Let's bring Jordan up here now. And Jordan, so we're welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. I know we you know kind of last minute, but good to have you. You look like you have an amazing setup. We're literally just talking about this ban and Ilya kind of just talked to us a a bit there about kind of what happened, why it sets a terrible precedent, and really just about like structuring the future of AI with this kind of like altruistic perspective.

It's it's quite difficult to kind of satisfy all parties, but there is an answer. There is a a worry of the types of queries that users put in that lead them to a ban from some of these frontier models. Obviously, Venice is kind of has this uncensorable, unbannable kind of feature set. Man, just kind of giving you a chance here to come in here hot from Venice's perspective. Man, what the hell happened with the Anthropic Fable 5 ban? And how do you react to this? >> Well, I think the Anthropic Fable 5 ban, or rather the government's attempting to ban it, is uh indicative of just the nature of these centralized locations, I guess we'd say, where we

get our intelligence from and who these companies are beholding to and the rules they must follow. So, in this case, I believe it was foreign nationals uh were supposed to be banned from using Fable 5, and because they couldn't actually enforce who is using it, they just put the global kill switch on. And this, I think, sets a precedent um because what happens next? And who's banned next, right? This isn't even about what you did or what you prompted. It's just, well, if you're not from a certain country or it's it's who you are that is actually um being blocked from using this technology, from

accessing the intelligence. So, at Venice, it's really important to have unrestricted access to intelligence, whether that is censored, uncensored, uh whichever model you choose. So, the frontier level intelligence, frontier open source intelligence, which is catching up swiftly, and it's really important to for Venice to offer permissionless access to this intelligence to all humans and agents. And that's what it was designed for, this moment where censorship comes in. Uh it's probably not full force yet, but I do believe we will be seeing it in the not-so-distant future. And Venice is ready, Venice is ready to embrace people searching for more freedom when it comes

to AI and being able to access this intelligence. >> Yeah, and Jordan, you know, I just wanted to piggyback off that on the kind of nuts and bolts here. Um I think people are, you know, kind of trying to understand how Venice works, and a lot of the privacy features from the inference level Ilya and team here have been working on for quite a while. Uh on the inference level specifically, I I know there's a kind of a private set and an anonymous set. You know, we're active users of Venice here. Maybe you could just explain a bit about the private inference side of things, why that's so valuable to the core value prop of Venice, and just, you know, some of the uh work that you're doing with NEAR, and just generally how you're thinking about that private inference

capability. >> Sure. Well, as you may or may not know, Venice access offers access to all levels of models. So, you can access frontier models and VPN Venice almost acts like a VPN. It shields your identity to these frontier models. But sometimes you don't want any of your prompts stored because in the background obviously Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, they're they're storing all your conversation data even if they don't know it's you. So then what Venice does is it provides access to all kinds of open source models. So GLM 5.2 just came out. We have Kimmy K2.7 code, Gemma 4, all the top of the line open source models and Venice hosts them and does not store any of your data and has zero data retention agreements with any any

background infrastructure going on there. So there's contractual obligations here that nothing is stored anywhere. And then a step further is that there are certain models you can access completely end-to-end encrypted where your conversations are run in a trusted execution environment. In which case you have can have the most confidence. You can get the attestation reports of the encryption, all the details there for those that like to verify and not simply trust. And so Venice with a single API key or on one single interface you can have full workflows to go through the different brands of intelligence you might need for certain use cases which I think I think makes it a very compelling product. I know for me personally [snorts]

I have things I build for professional purposes. I'm not terribly concerned about privacy. I want performance. I want the the best possible intelligence like Fable 5. But then another case is for more personal use cases in my in my home life for example, I want I want privacy. I I don't want anyone storing these conversations but I want to still be able to harness artificial intelligence to enhance my life. In which case Venice is the perfect solution for me because I can actually alternate between different models to see which one serves my purposes the best, see which has the the cost the cost performance ratio, what works the best for me. And we offer that to every customer human and agent.

>> Incredible. God, I think there's like this trajectory that we're heading on where, you know, we are somewhat at risk of the government institutions handicapping these frontier models. We've seen that happen already. We can anticipate that it might happen in the future. And there's a couple of different ways in which we can get around this. We know that, you know, we have open-source models, some of which may be distilling these frontier models, and those are probably going to offer the similar similar levels of intelligence, maybe 1%, couple of percentiles, you know, less intelligent, but at a order of magnitude more affordable cost.

Those models are think seemingly be going going to become more prevalent. The other aspect here is this orchestration, and I'm curious how you guys are thinking about this, right? If we have almost an aggregator of models, and I think Venice and Near both in a position where, you you know, it's almost like a portal into accessing some of these models. We have the ability to coordinate models together, and that could be for reducing token consumption. Something is good, we can go send that for a particular task rather than sending it to the most expensive model, or for really combining the strengths of these models together for like really really great intelligence. And we've seen some of the some of the markups, the benchmarks from Open Router and

these kinds of things that, you know, show how powerful the the combination of these models are. Is there a particular aspect of this that each of you are are focused on? Ilya, maybe we can start with you. How is Near thinking about, you know, itself as, you know, not a a hyperscaler like trader of the you know, creator of these models, but as you're thinking about access to these models and orchestrating coordinating these models together either for token consumption or powerful intelligence, how are you thinking about providing the most robust solution while also keeping in mind that, you know, you could we these things could get censored. We have open source at our

disposal. What is your broad thesis around orchestration of these models? >> Yeah, so I mean, my thesis in general is the AI is going to be the new operating system. And at the same time, indeed, you know, you don't want to use the most expensive model for, you know, ordering ordering you know, lunch. And so, you do need an intelligent routing and you do need all of these components. And so, the way I think of this as we need the agentic operating system that is actually doing all of this work and maintaining context and is able to execute actions in background and is able to, you know,

leverage whatever the kind of uh optimal solution is for a specific request. And so, that's really what we're doing with Iron Claw, right? We kind of think of this as as this hard like on a harness level, you can do the aggregation, you can use maybe batch API. So, for example, if you're running something on the background to do like news aggregation, you don't really need real-time APIs. Uh which is what kind of the all of the current API uh offerings are. You're actually okay with maybe waiting 10 seconds, 20 seconds to get scheduled. And then you can be way cheaper because you're filling in so-called bubbles. You're filling in gaps in the computer utilization of the of the hardware in

the back end. And so, you can do a lot more kind of broader optimization when you have this kind of a solution operating system on top. So, that's kind of how we think about it. Then you can think from use cases, then you can think from costs, and you can benchmark the whole system as well how well it does on, you know, everything from day-to-day life to coding to, you know, using computer to like all of this tasks including security itself, right? And so that's really what we've been focusing on with attack bench and other benchmarking as well.

>> And then Ilya, just real quick before we get to Jordan, on the cost side, the economic side, how do you think about the trade-off between the um the cost of the closed-source closed-source version of these really, really high-performance models versus the, you know, let's say, for lack of a better term, Chinese open-source version that is just as close, almost as good, but at, you know, a 20th of the cost. How do you think about kind of like maximizing your token uh spent? >> Yeah, so generally for, you know, by default we we route everyone to the kind of cheaper model. I mean, DeepSeek Flash right now is extremely good for general use cases. Uh the V4, uh it's super, you

know, super cheap. Um It was cached tokens as well, and uh yeah, it allows you to get a lot of the general stuff, and then your agent can bump it up. Uh we also have like LLM console, for example, just to scale in our claw, right? So if you do need like, "Hey, I have my medical analysis, and I really want to make sure that this is, you know, I want second, third, and fourth opinion," right? Then you just slash LLM console, and boom, you know, you're spinning up, you know, Opus and uh and uh GPT-5 5 and Gemini like all together on the same request and then consolidating it, right? So you have all of these things actually like at your fingertips. And yeah, you have, you

know, privacy for general use, all your context is private as well, all the background processing, memory, everything done on kind of private inference. And then when you do need, you kind of bump it it up to maybe more kind of kind of um like that, you know, a few more percentages uh, when you really need that, uh, you know, for coding planning, for medical, like high high analysis, etc. And then you use uh, those models. And indeed they're effectively VPN'd for you. But, you know, some of that context stays. We also have an anonymizer running, so when you route to these centralized providers, all your like name, phone number, emails, and like

other critical PII information gets removed and then re-added back when it's, uh, when it's feeding back. >> Awesome. And, uh, Jordan, same question to you. How are you thinking about model orchestration? How important is it to optimize token uh, consumption? And given, you know, Venice's, uh, position in in the market, do you think it is in a unique position where it can it can serve as this model orchestration layer to combine the best of all these models? >> Yes. Well, first off, Venice has been cooking something that I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to indulge, but it is directly related to model orchestration and creating workflows that might mix

and match through different models depending on what the the end goal is and the actual use case. And these will be workflows that users can submit. And, um, the I won't say any more about that, but even now we just recently released the agentic chat. And if you use the agentic chat, you'll see how you can choose the base model for the agent and then depending on what you tell it to do, it will then route to different, for example, if you want to generate an image, edit an image, generate a video, it'll route to the appropriate model. So, imagine that, but you use a frontier beast model like Opus 4.8, for example, for planning something, creating the documentation for what this is going to be and how it's going to how it's going to be built. And then you can mix and

match like say, okay, there's a little bit of coding here, there's a little bit of writing like copywriting perhaps, there's some design, and imagine you can just choose which model gets popped in for each of those, whether that's for cost efficiency purposes, whether that's for performance reasons, etc. etc. So, yes, Venice is in a great position for that type of model orchestration because it offers all these models and it is in the process of making this much more widely available to the average >> person. I think as Ilya mentioned, model routing itself is really powerful, but it can also be really tricky. And it's kind of a code that I mean me personally I've been trying to crack for many months is getting my my agent, my

local home agent to route this way when I when it's a private topic, route this way when it's a building topic, etc. And it's just tricky. In general, it's just tricky even when you really know what you're doing. So, our our goal is to make this >> accessible and easy for everyone on the Venice interface. So, I think people can really express their creativity. I think there's a real creativity that comes from being able to to orchestrate AI agents to do things for us in ways that we've never really experienced before as humans. And so, that definitely is is a big part of of what Venice wants to offer people. It's not just access to the intelligence, but the opportunity to really express themselves without needing [snorts] to

self-censor. >> Yeah. I think this is one of the things that people are thinking about most, right? They're thinking about token consumption and therefore they're thinking about model optimization and orchestration is a great great way to do that. Near and Venice are both at a unique vantage point in the market where we're serving the most amount of intel the models from all across the board to end users. Circling back to privacy, this is the other thing that people are are thinking about most. How much are the frontier like if I go to open AI or if you know, if I go to chat GPT or Grok or Claude, what is their current policy? Just from a for the sake of user education because I'm honestly not too familiar myself.

What is chat GPT, [snorts] Claude's, Grok's, what is their policy right now on how they're using data? Because like if our imagination runs wild, like I can foresee a very dystopian thing where chat GPT is sending my data, you know, they're storing it. If someone wants to advertise to people that drink coffee, like they're going to hit me with some propaganda and I'm not going to know anything. And they actually I I remember Sam Altman said something like, "These are just going to be diffused naturally into the responses. You may not even know that an ad is in there. Isn't that nice? You're not going to have to watch." It's like, "No, like you're literally brainwashing me." So, are they doing that right now or is this sort of

this dystopian thing that we're just kind of imagining? >> I I'll I'll take that first, I guess. I think it was announced not too long ago that open AI was going to start injecting ads into conversations. I am not a chat GPT user, so I'm not sure what happened there, but I'm Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's safe to assume, just like with any big tech product, that your data is being stored, it's being processed, it's being harvested, sold to the highest bidder, and probably many others uh in many ways, shapes, and forms. I think it's not just about hey, you're a coffee drinker, here's an ad, but it's also the psychological profile

of you it's making by how you respond to things, how you answer, your own personality in response to the to the agent, uh excuse me, to the to the model, really, to the intelligence. And then what these companies are doing in the background, which we can only imagine. We really have no idea what they're doing in the back underneath everything. And so I think even like with this anthropic ban, I think it was an eye-opener for people like wow, I can just get rugged. Like Fable was a I don't know if anyone used it here, but I used it for just a like two days and I was blown away with what I was able to build with it. It was so impressive and then it disappeared. And so to think wow, I just lost all those capabilities because I was essentially renting this product that's not mine.

There's nothing I can control over it. It makes us realize oh we really want to have as much ownership and sovereignty as we can over this technology and in the ways that's available to us. So for some people they're able to run local models cuz they have powerful hardware at home. Others makes more sense to call an API make an API request via Venice cuz you know it can be private end-to-end encrypted etc. So I think um you never know what they're doing in the background there. There's advertisements. I don't know if I've ever seen an advertisement in like Claude code. I think I'm more of a Claude code user than anything and I know that it wants me to keep consuming tokens. I noticed that. But as far as an actual advertisement things like that in

the in my the personal realm, I've never really chosen to give any information like that to these to these chatbots because who knows where it's headed. I think advertisements is just the tip of the iceberg. >> Ilia, you laugh at that but it it is that something that you've experienced that just this consistent desire to keep consuming tokens? >> Yeah, I mean I think it's like there there is now optimization product optimization that people started to do right because you know, if you're [snorts] like this is example I use like from days at Google like you as a individual as a team get rewarded based on you know, launching something that

generates more money for the company. And so you're naturally like you're literally AB testing when you're launching something. Hey, did it did it get a lift in revenue? And so, like adding things that are like, oh, for example, follow-up questions in a chat, right? Get people to use more. Spend more time, you know, use more tokens, consume more, right? So, like all these things are just like people just keep tagging them along because they drive your metrics, which like in turn drives the company revenue. So, I think like it's it's important indeed that, you know, incentives drive everything around us and, you know, those incentives are very much making those companies uh kind of more money.

The I think like I mean, the general terms of service, right? I was actually just checking the ChatGPT, right? It's obviously they can use all your data for training right now. That's what it says. And uh uh you can opt out, but they still store all of your data, right? And so, it's still uh may or may not be used. Um And obviously, there's no like it's not open source, so you cannot like verify that this claim is true that it's not it's not used anyway. Uh but but I agree that like the ads is a very natural extension. And because it's embedded into the very personal UI, I think I think the real I think a lot of people trust this

kind of chat conversational interface a lot more than they would trust uh like even Google to some extent because Google is more like, hey, here is a list of things. And by the way, here is some ads, right? So, like it's it's kind of more like an inventory of things. And chat is feels like you're talking to a friend who is like recommending you things, right? And so, it's a lot more conducive. Uh I mean, I've you know, repeatedly said that if somebody wants to sway an election now, the easiest thing to do is to put it into the system prompt of one of these products that used by, you know, uh like almost a billion people, and it will be like a very subtle, you know, as

you're talking about something else, it will start like kind of adjusting your worldview on this. Like these models are really good at like psychophony and kind of like this slight manipulation. Like we've seen people going, you know, crazy because of this. So, I do think it's pretty I mean, for for the future of kind of people, especially people who want to be sovereign, who want to, you know, have critical thinking, it will be critical to use something that you know, there is no like injected middleman between you and the and the weights, and even the weights, right, are a problem themselves, so

we'll need to figure out how to train models that, you know, we know what goes in, right? We need organic, you know, community grown models uh where we know what went in, and then you can leverage that in your confidential inference, where you can like inspect the system prompt, you can inspect like one of the things in Iron Claw, we have a debug mode. You turn it on, you actually see literally the whole system prompt, context, memory, everything that it done, all this, all the actions. Like it's a bit overwhelming for people who are not using it, but you can literally inspect like what actually hits the metal, what comes back, right? Uh versus like a lot of stuff is hidden in these products

usually uh to um because like there is a lot of like and and people like show how to query it out, like how to get this, but like they hide it because it's kind of part of their product offering. Um but I think, yeah, like really making sure it's it's easy visible, inspectable, and to end verifiable what you're using is critical for effectively uh future of honestly society. >> Yeah. Gentlemen, to each of you, keep fighting the good fight. Open source, open source, private anonymous inference uh training data, the entire stack. Thanks for joining us on privacy day here

today. It's been an absolute pleasure and uh wish you wish you the best of luck >> Jordan in your uh you know, model, you know, orchestration for your home agent. And Ilya, uh keep fighting the good fight, guys. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> It's marvelous. >> Till next time, guys. Thanks so much. >> All righty, Rob. I just Every time I leave these conversations, I'm like, man, I need to work on my models. I need to have better better agents. Like, I just have one open claw and like, get my iron claw set up. I need to just do more. So.

>> I think that's where we're at, man. I think um we can do so much these days with these models. I'm also very excited. I mean, you heard Venice uh you heard Jordan talk about some new things coming out of Venice, model orchestration. Um I think that is huge. So huge. Um it's effectively the cross-chain composability in DeFi, but applied to AI. >> For AI. Yep. >> It's beautiful, actually. >> It's also like, you know, we we we like to talk about how blockchains are are really great mechanisms for coordination. Just coordination in general, like coordinate financial activity, coordinate consensus.

It makes sense that you could coordinate agent agent agents' intelligence on blockchains as well. Just because you could have different agents as validators. Right? So, like, and I think this is what I'd like to see hyperliquid do with their their hip four sort of prediction market vibes. Like to have a market resolution mechanism where you have a different model as independent validators and you try to reach consensus. To me that would make a lot of sense for a potential oracle or market resolution mechanism.

>> Yeah. >> Or also just generally for like >> agents as validators. >> Yeah, agents as validators for for a chain. >> it. >> And I think it would work for a pretty >> John Woods. Sorry. >> John Woods joining us. >> He's coming up. Privacy is a human right on the hat. We had press conference with Fed chair Warsh. I believe he's still answering questions as we speak. Another 20 or so minutes. We did get a bounce, and a dump, another bounce. We just need him to get the hell off of the stage and let the boys have some fun. Let's get John Woods up here, the CEO of Nillion, talk about what he's doing with AI. John Woods, privacy is a human

right. >> What's going on, man? >> Hey, what's going? Thanks for having me. How are you guys? >> Doing great. Doing great, man. Um that is quite the hat. It's privacy day here on the Rollup. >> Privacy is a human right, baby. >> There you go. Yeah, man. I mean, come on. All like all what's happened the last several years, privacy kind of coming to the forefront as a human need, as a right. John, just give us a sense of your ideology a bit as we kick off here. Um why do you feel so strongly about this?

>> Yeah, you know, um when I started off in my career caring about privacy was more like, "Hey, isn't it cool we can use mathematics to send secret messages to people? Isn't it cool that we can we can have conversations not everyone is party to?" Because that's an important thing. That's why we have homes with doors and windows we can close, right? Um and I think um um it's moved away from that. So, you know, that was that was where I you know, I started off with the the love of the idea. Um but you know, I've been involved in a number of different privacy projects, currently Nillion, but I've worked uh in the Monero community before.

And I've worked on privacy-enhancing technologies across a number of cryptocurrencies, including Algorand uh and Cardano. And um what I would say is I think that financial privacy is critical, data privacy is critical, and I think you know, without getting too political, uh I think we can all see across, you know, the landscape of of the macro right now, just how much civil liberties being eroded. And uh and uh you know, people's uh essentially uh private lives are being interfered with. Um and there's an attack or an assault on, and I think not just in the UK, but in the EU, less so in the US at the moment, but uh there's a a general attack on privacy. And I think we need I think the only way we can um stand up to it is by normalizing privacy uh and not

having it be something for uh sexual deviance and criminals, because it's not right? >> Yeah, I mean, that's a crazy uh analog, but I I agree. But I've asked a couple of people this today, and I feel like privacy has a stated belief problem, where humans state their desire to to have privacy, but their actions don't always align with privacy. Like they they they often choose to upload their information to public social networks, they you know, do transactions on public blockchains, they you know, they they they do all these things. How do you think about converging the stated belief versus the actual human action on chain?

Just in general, how do you kind of balance that and bring that together and reconcile the stated belief versus the actions of of human beings? >> Uh sure, absolutely. And by the way, it's a salient point, and you're quite right. Um most people do, through I say spray their bits, their ones and zeros of their life around the internet without without care, whether that's pictures of themselves and their family, their children on Google Photos, or whether it's something a little bit worse, like, you know, the the fact that your your Gmail account basically knows everything about you, right? Um, and it's not encrypted. Um, I think that people do this. It's a trade-off, right? It's a trade-off of an easy life, uh, the um, the the comfort and the I guess the

the the the less hassle that comes with the fact that all of the information you need is available immediately, and it can be processed and presented to you uh, at the right time. Uh, and so privacy, of course, can add friction when you when you layer on hard privacy around these services. They don't all talk to each other so easy. And, you know, you got to dig for the email rather than having it just surface in your calendar or whatever. But, I think what we have to do is try to normalize that. I think that that human behavior that you mentioned, and I think it's absolutely true, typically changes after people have been compromised or or violated, okay? Uh, so, I can tell you, I mean, think of all these kind of There's been many many leaks. Many celebrities have had their private data exposed, etc. I I bet you, for those

people who've been sadly affected by those things, the first thing that they did after they they got regained control of their accounts was to enable 2FA, turn on passkeys, uh, you know, put down the the harder security. And so, unfortunately, it's probably a thing in human nature, which is like, you know, once bitten, twice shy, and you kind of got to wait um, until until you've been hurt by these things before you actually take action. But, I would like to think, uh, so that not everyone has to learn that lesson so explicitly, um, it it's probably a uh, you know, the the endeavor should be for technical people, uh, to and and people who are building products to layer this stuff in by default, so that people can can can benefit from it as much as possible, just like uh, we we do with many other aspects of our design

these days. >> Yeah. Do Do you think that we've been sort of bitten like more as of recently? And because it really does feel as if there's been this resurgence around privacy and sovereignty and we're seeing the likes of, you know, a lot of these things become instantiated into our technology and our software. People like the privacy assets at this point in time. And it feels like it's got this cyclical nature to it where it it does have an ebb and flow and it comes and goes. Have we been kind of bitten by the privacy bug more as of recently or do you think that we we are now empowered and we're empowered by AI, we're powered by technology, the permissionlessness of this industry and, you know, we never really had the chance

to take this into our own hands and do something about it. We've always been bitten by it, but we never really had the opportunity to do something about it. Do Do you think it's one or the other or maybe both? How How do you How do you think this squares up? And, you know, I'm just curious. Yeah, and maybe we'll start there. We can we can go from there. Uh so, I think it's interesting. The The industry at large, certainly I've been working in, you know, {quote} {unquote} crypto, right, for for for the last decade or so across a number of kind of projects in the top 50.

And I think there when when I was working at those projects, there wasn't really a heavy push into privacy. I mean, it was it was a niche thing that sat at the side and people were working on it. Even on Ethereum, Vitalik would might have talked about it or there was a small project that might roll some ZK circuit on on on on smart contracts to try to, you know, do confidential transfers. You might see Solana do confidential transfers. But, typically, it was always an afterthought. And I have noticed absolutely, as someone who's, you know, been part of the Monero community since maybe 2015, I guess, so super super early that started around 2014. I've always cared about it ideologically, but I have seen as of late um as I'm with Zcash as well, a huge push around this idea of understanding how

important transactional financial transaction privacy is. At Nillion, we're we're a layer up from that. We're working on essentially encrypted markets, not at not not down at the at the transactional level. But, I do see beyond the kind of I know there's a lot of shilling at the moment in the in in the crypto ecosystem around privacy being the last 10x. I've seen lots and lots of people say say say that sentence. Um I believe it, right? That's why I hold privacy coins and have held them for 10 years. I'm due my I'm due my payout. >> [laughter] >> But, like um I do think that there's something there. But, I think it's not just like people on Twitter uh or X uh pumping this thing or shilling the the notion of privacy. I I have this feeling that the the genesis of the movement uh

is twofold. Uh number one, it's a little bit a pushback into the Cypherpunk movement of what Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies were started for. I think we lost our way a little bit. Uh not to sound too too like nerdy about it, but you know, the Bitcoin, you know, it ended up being like, you know, Michael Saylor and and and ETFs and and funds and BlackRock. And as cool as that is for number go up, and we all want number go up, um it's not cool for the kind of like carving the banks into into into the genesis block, right? And so, there's a little bit of a push around returning to the Cypherpunk roots that in the in the crypto industry uh I think. That's number one. And number two, I think that um it goes back to what I mentioned earlier about the macro. Like, we're living in a

time where it feels a bit icky. Like, you know, we're having our civil liberties e- e- eroded. And like, crypto cryptography and privacy are not is not the answer to every single one of these things that we face around the world, but it does put a shield around certain things. It does stop people interfering with you to a large degree, and I think it's a I think that that's part of it. >> Yeah, man. I mean, just we just saw the UK government put out some insane things about social media, yeah, about finance. We saw um the EU's banning buying it or removing Binance's licenses in a push to create a euro dollar thing, euro stablecoin.

Today, we saw the governor of Illinois try to put taxes on sending transactions from your individual wallets. It's just like and this is what you know, this is not happening in like, you know, developing countries. This this is like >> America and UK and Europe. >> Right. Right. And like if you look at the countries that are doing this kind of thing, it's like, you know, North Korea, Turkmenistan, you know, Southern Belarus. Like it's typically not the places you go on holidays with your girlfriend, right? Um and and we're seeing this from what we would have thought of as democratic rather Western countries. And look, here's the thing. It may be is

better for 15-year-old kids not to have access to TikTok. I don't know. But what I do think is that it's a parent's choice and not it shouldn't be Daddy Starmer who who tells us what what to do. >> Yeah. That's absolutely the the the case. Um I'm curious a little bit more about how the privacy solution works. Maybe just on a more technical note. We've heard, you know, from from several of the the you know, developers, not quite developers, but you know, teams here today developing privacy. Some of them are doing so at the asset layer, you know, actually building new token standards with uh T-Rex. They're tokenizing tons of assets, building in privacy, but building it in with an ERC token standard. Uh we had Near, we had Canton,

you know, at the smart contract level, then at the base level, right? And building in, you know, privacy into certain elements of the stack. How does Nillion implement privacy and where does it implement privacy in the you know, broad scheme of the way in which we have this set up? >> Cool. Yeah, thanks. So super quick answer is Nillion, the token, is just an ERC-20 token. It lives on Ethereum. We have our own L2, but it's vanilla in that sense. It doesn't There's no transactional privacy around the token. The token is used to pay for the privacy services. And so, what are the privacy services? They are, right now, private compute and private data storage. And so, you use the Nillion token to pay for those things.

And we can do in our We call it the blind computer, but basically a big privacy hardware stack. We leverage a smorgasbord of crypto. So, there's some trusted execution environments or TEEs in there. There's some multi-party computation in there. There's some homomorphic encryption in there. There's There's Shamir in there. There's, you know, the usual signatures, symmetric, asymmetric cryptography. So, we've got all that rolled into a kind of a ball. Um and then we have, sitting on top of that, a decentralized network of people who essentially verify the integrity of the privacy continuously, and that's where our coin is staked to to do that. And so, together, you have this um you know, platform with which you can essentially do private inference of LLMs. You can take Gemma 4, you can take GPT-OSS 120

billion, you can take, you know, fairly chunky models, 70, 80, 90 GB models with billions of parameters, 8-bit quantization, something like that, maybe 6-bit [clears throat] sometimes, depending on the size of the model. Stick them in you know, one of our TEEs, Venice style, and do private inference. But we also do, you know, "Hey, I have this file. I want to shard it, encrypt it, and split across MPC. Hey, I want to, you know, run this Docker image, but I need to be computationally assured or cryptographically assured it's running privately." And I think it's cool. I would say, you know, we've done some really cool things. And actually, one last thing, we're working on this financial product at the moment um around the encrypted market space, where we're going to be bringing, I hope, you know, legal legal legal legal approval pending,

essentially, I think the first purely trustless atomic Monero swap. So, the ability to swap from Bitcoin and Ethereum into Monero in a in a genuinely trustless way. Not in a Havana Redo, oh I've been defrauded again, uh but in a genuinely trustless way. Um Okay, so that's what I'm excited about. I would say we we're not perfect though, and so there's lots of work to do. And so, where where is Nillion 3 years? Um it's using less TEEs. They're a bit icky. I don't love them. I mean, they work, but it's hardware. And hardware doesn't scale. And you can't decentralize a network that requires non-commodity hardware. If everyone's got to have a special card, how can I roll that out to the world? I can't really, okay? There's parts that we've decentralized, but that bit we haven't.

And so, what we're working on now in the simplest in a sentence is basically the idea of running the Linux kernel, okay? Basically, the base for all computers around the world, or all servers around the world, inside a fully homomorphic context. So, you basically have this private decentralized global computer that you can fire problems at into, and they get computed on privately and then sent back. But that's not there yet. I don't like talk about things that we haven't built, but that's where we're trying to get to. So, yeah. Pretty cool. >> Wow. And do you do you think that there's going to be material adoption for entrepreneurs to come in and build private AI solutions?

Like, is that going to be a very well-funded category in your view? >> It's a really interesting question. There's there's two aspects to this. The first aspect is do we get to the place where we move Hm. Maybe I'll just say first, there was frontier models and there's local there's the kind of open weights models that you can run on your own computer if it's big enough, right? The frontier models, we don't have the weights, we don't have the secret sauce. That's the ChatGPTs, etc. And And then, uh you look at something like GLM 52 released today. Apparently, it's the third best performing model in the world. And anyone can download it. Now, you have to have a a Mac mini with 512 GB of RAM to run the thing. It's going to cost you like 16,000 for the computer, but you can run the thing on a on a Mac

Studio, not on a Mac Mini. So, the question is, do open weight models become the standard? I personally think that they will. I think that like these open weight models, they're kind of open source, if you like, quote-unquote, uh released models, and there's lots of these, Gemma, Kwan, you know, GPT-OSS, GLM, uh there's many others. Uh Kimmy K2, uh Deep Seek. Will they will they end up being as good or better than the ones by by Claude and and and and Open AI, etc., or Anthropic? I think over time, yes, they will approach they will approach parity.

Then the next question becomes, if that is the case, the democratization and liberation of those models becomes really important, because right now, if I ask Open AI a question, and it doesn't fit with Sam Altman's uh outlook and bias and and and and political stance, it'll give me an answer that basically scolds me like a parent. Whereas, if you look at some of these open weight models, they're they're typically more truth-seeking. Now, sure, if you ask Deep Seek about Tiananmen Square, it's not going to give you an honest answer, right? Cuz it's built by the Chinese. But, there's there's typically more truth-seeking in it, and I feel like you want to get away from corporations tilting the bias on the information you receive, and trying to be uh you know, using a model that's maximally maximally truth-seeking or or

truth-finding, and they're going to be the open weight models. Then the next big thing is, do we get to a place where we can basically use Byzantine fault tolerant networks? That's like the Bitcoin consensus, you know, some type of consensus mechanism to train and to execute inference, or to use these models. To both ask them questions and to make them smart. And so, does that become a group a crowd-sourced thing that we can all contribute and then use, you know, the models as much as we've contributed? And we basically democratize and and make egalitarian access to these unbiased models. That's the view of the world that I'd like to get to. Like, don't Don't wrong, I've got Claude open right here. I'm prepped for this interview with it. Like it's not bad, but like a cleaner world though

is as I've described. >> And John, I I mean, I just can't help but think that And John, before you joined, we were talking about like the open-source nature of these things and how blockchains are great at coordinating actors, coordinating market participants, you know, generating consensus. I can't help but think that that, you know, there is this funding mechanism or this monetization mechanism where all like you're talking about the crowdsourcing or the the decentralization sized contribution of intelligence to a network, using that as the model and all of us reaping the rewards of our contributions.

>> Right. A a blockchain would make the most sense to to do exactly that. >> Pre- pre- precisely. And by the way, there's one or two companies out there a pal of mine is leading one called Pluras. Um and and and what they're doing basically is they they're writing white papers that that describe that this is possible. That it's possible to train a model, okay, in such a way that even if one bad actor or or n number of bad actors, some say 20% of the network is bad and they're injecting bad false truths into the model, whatever it is, that you can weed weed that out and not have the overall model affected by it.

So, just like with Bitcoin, you know, you can have a load of bad actors trying to hack the thing and it's still it's robust. If we can get model training through the same place that everyone can help out and if there's a few and if if the sub-majority, so like the sorry, minority, not sub-majority, what the hell is that? If the minority are are you know, evil and the majority are good or honest, then we end up with an honest model. And that's a very powerful idea, you know. >> Yep. >> John, I wish you the best as you continue to push this idea of privacy globally. We need it. We need it. And someone's got to invest. Someone's got to raise capital. Someone's got to build this.

You're doing it with Nillion. And it's a human right, man. It really is. >> Thank you so much. And look, if anyone wants to chat more, I'm at John Allen Woods on X. And Nillion is at Nillion. Thanks so much for having me, boys. >> Absolutely, John. We'll see you next time. Thanks. All righty, Rob. What happened to the this Fed share just kind of threw a wrench in my afternoon euphoria. It's pretty It's pretty upsetting. >> [laughter] >> We've got Omar from ZK Sync joining us, guys, to wrap up Privacy Day. It's been a marathon, 3 and 1/2 hours. Guys are grinding.

I think Aton just put in a food order, and he called it the nuts. So >> W's in the shot. >> [laughter] >> We got Omar still here. Freedom guy, what's going on? Alan Branch, outstanding podcast. >> Thank you. Hot protocol. We're going to bring Omar up in a sec to round out Privacy Day. I was watching yesterday's stream, think it was the current stream, LOL. >> Yikes. >> Yeah. The chat is fired up. >> Let's get Omar up here. Let's not talk about Kevin Warsh. All my homies hate Kevin Warsh. Omar, what's going on, man?

[laughter] Good to have you on. >> How's it going, guys? >> Good, man. It's Privacy Day. >> It's Privacy Day. Did we all just like turn off our cameras then? >> Exactly, right? >> Full anonymous mode? >> I mean, you look like you're you've been talking to some institutions, man. >> No, this is just generally dressed when it's nice and sunny out in New York, you know. >> Yeah, it's a beautiful day. >> Yeah, no more teachers, just scholars only. >> Yes, sir. >> Oh, yeah. >> Yes, sir, man. Well, we we've seen quite the adoption lately from privacy in terms of an idea, in terms of of a narrative. Obviously, zero-knowledge technology, ZK Sync, you know, has been has been kind of like a not like a tangential kind of side effect, but it's a it's a nice property

of zero-knowledge technology. I know you guys have been doing a a lot of work with the kind of banking side, the institutional side, kind of looking to onboard them into their own Providiums. So, I think it's a pretty timely conversation for understanding like what these guys are looking for when they're building with ZK sync, when they're launching their own chain, when they're doing business on chain. Obviously, it's privacy day, so I think it all kind of comes together. Omar, maybe just catch us up, man. What's the latest? How has the adoption been? How has the institutional relationships been? Catch us up. >> Yeah, no, adoption's been great. A lot of interesting conversations.

I would say in the last 6 months alone, the industry, at least on this side of the house, has been, you know, it's gone from 0 to 100 miles per hour very, very quickly. Everyone's trying to figure out, okay, these are the core use case we need to build out, whether it's collateral management, tokenized deposits, money movement. You're seeing like, you know, tokenized equity starting to move on chain, settlements moving on chain. Even the large exchanges are also starting to talk about, "Okay, how do I support 24/7 trading?" And all of that, no, it's market demand. There's the use cases have been figured, "Okay, these use cases make a lot of sense to move on to blockchain with, you know, 24/7 movement." And then the question has

become, "Okay, how do you do it?" Right? And so, privacy is the first gating criteria, but it's not the only one. And so, everyone talks about it quite a lot because it's relatively new for, let's say, the blockchain industry and the crypto industry in general. And so, there's the privacy aspect, but then there's also, "Okay, how do I work with the privacy? Where does the privacy actually reside? Is it some sort of privacy pool? Do I control the data and I'm just hiding the data and I'm controlling the data and, you know, you're getting some sort of proof, which is kind of how, you know, Providums work and our private interoperability works.

Um, but then there's all the other questions around the rest of the infrastructure stack, too. Okay, you've got these private private infrastructure. Can my same wallet infrastructure work and the same, you know, Oracle data pricing infrastructure also work? How do I connect it to off-chain systems? So, it's a much more mature conversation beyond just, "Hey, I just want to deploy a wallet. I want to deploy and get access to these types of assets." It's now much more sophisticated from, "All right, the life cycle of a trade end to end, how does that work within the infrastructure stack? And how do I also make it work within my compliance paradigm, my risk accounting paradigm, and audit?"

All right, as well. So, uh, but the conversation is very very fruitful, very interesting. I think you'll see quite a lot coming out in the next couple [snorts] months. Uh, particularly on the Providums side, especially with our private interoperability, as well. Um, it it's going to be a very interesting time, I would say. It literally, you know, institutions that I did not think were going to be moving fast on this type of thing. Every everything from government and institutions down to local regional banks. Uh, not just in the US and Europe, but around the world. >> Do they Do they feel the heat? Do they feel like, you know, okay, we this is a regulatory regime that's actually pushing this and this the adoption of this thing. SEC's got project crypto.

You know, we've got to be known as the, you know, crypto capital of the world. They see their competitors or their peers running a digital asset strategy. They They feel like if they don't have a strategy or they don't implement something here, they're going to fall behind. Is that the general sentiment amongst these institutions? >> Yeah, I would say Yeah, so the formal aspect is definitely very real. Um, and it's coming at a time where the use cases have more or less been proven out. So, you've got on some side, you've got the market dynamics of okay, stablecoins are coming. They're great product market fit. Uh tokenized deposits have been starting to move up as well. People are starting to figure that out. Now, they're moving to more complex types of trades like settlement,

um equities, treasuries, etc. So, it's it's a amalgamation of both the regulatory regime changing quite a bit and giving a lot more clarity on what can and can't be done. But then also, there's a market dynamics as well, right? And you don't want to be left behind. So, everyone does need to have an on-chain strategy. They need to figure out, okay, where do I position myself, my current business? How do I transform myself as well? And uh you know, it's interesting because you've also got AI on the other side, too. So, there's a lot of different things people have to very quickly figure out.

Um because, you know, the future of business is not going to look very similar to what it has been over the last like 5 from 5 years from now is going to look very different from what it was 5 years ago. >> Yeah. You know, I'm curious on on the Providian side, Omar, what is the what has been the kind of response from these firms that you're speaking to about kind of launching their own Providian? Do they understand that kind of like the nuts and bolts? Do they need to? Are they Is it Is it compelling to what they want to do? Are you seeing any special like customizations or requirements? So, like generally on the Providian side, what's been the kind of feedback loop that that you've experienced?

>> Yeah, I would say it's it's it's resonates very well. Um the main thing is it's not you know, so much of an individual institution launching their own Providian. It's more about what can I do with my counterparties? What can I do within my network? Which means that it goes beyond just a single Providian chain itself which uh an institution would be able to run, have fully private control at full full privacy, full control over everything to do within it. But, beyond that, it's okay, how do I properly interact with my banks that are within my network? How do I interact with stable coins? How do I do money movement? How do I interact with, you know, all the different types of tokenizations that's happening? So,

the conversations have moved quite significantly from individual prividiums to now being more of um I would say network discussions. It's like, okay, I am a bank. I want to interact with this other bank to try and figure out, okay, can we do cross-border 24/7 much faster, much cheaper? Okay, now I also need some way to actually move my token as a positive with their token as a balance. Now, okay, now I potentially need also clearing solution in the middle. So, it's now turning more into just pure infrastructure and now a lot more into coordination, I would say, as well, which is very interesting.

Um and I think it's a very good sign overall for the industry, as well. But, because it's instead of just, you know, in- the banks or institutions or any enterprise is doing point solutions that are just relevant to them, the bigger piece of the puzzle is, okay, how do I build this network and how do I interact with everyone? How do I actually move assets and money around? Because, you know, uh finance in general doesn't work if it's just one company. >> Yeah. Yeah, naturally. Like, these things are constantly lending to one another, borrowing from one another. Um and this has been one of the hardest, you know, circles to square. It's been the the balance or the harmony between privacy, and we are here on privacy day, privacy and composability. Because,

fundamentally, you know, privacy means that I'm not sharing all of my data with you, and maybe there aren't there are there are aspects of um you know, a a transaction or an asset or a chain or or a smart contract that are withheld from who, you know, we're transacting with, but we still need to maintain the composability with that person because like you said, this entire financial thing doesn't work in a vacuum. So, how has ZK Sync been able to harmonize between privacy and composability? Like we've heard, you know, responses all across the docket from, you know, uh you know, technical things like we have a token standard that maintains a

privacy, but you know, we have a smart contract check that makes sure that, you know, someone can own this particular asset if they meet all the requirements. How have you seen some of these institutions kind of pull the levers or tweak these providiums such that it it makes sense, it's compliant and everything, but it maintains the composability broadly across the ecosystem? >> Yes, that's a good question. So, I would split that into two layers really, right? One is a composability on the infrastructure side. And what does that mean? That means, okay, I have my own privacy layer, which could be a providium. So, what my counterparty has their own privacy layer, which is their own providium. Uh they fully control everything that goes on side. Now, how do I, from a technology or

infrastructure standpoint, how do I do interoperability with that other chain? But how do I do interoperability while maintaining atomicity, right? So, either transaction happens or it doesn't happen, right? So, I can't essentially send you something and then wait for you and then trust that you will send it. I need to make sure that if I send it, you also send it, otherwise transaction completely uh otherwise transaction doesn't happen, right? So, that that's a pretty big counterparty risk side of things. So, we are solving that with our own private uh atomic interoperability between providiums. So, that kind of solves it from a technology standpoint, right? Um the next layer, which is also just as critical, maybe even if not just as critical, is the composability of the

actual assets themselves cuz now we're talking about things that are on different banks' balance sheets or different custodians' assets. Uh for example, a good example might be two banks that each have their own tokenized deposits. Uh they want to transact with each other. Okay, from a technology standpoint, we can make that happen. Uh you have your own Prividium, your counterpart bank has their own Prividium. You have the token, they have a token. We can make that be in a fully atomic transaction, so you only send it if they also send it. And that could be a protocol level guarantee as well. The next question is, okay, well, I can't necessarily receive their tokenized deposit because that's a their liab- I'm assuming their liability, and they can't receive mine. So, now we need

to talk about composability between these assets themselves. And this is kind of where I think a lot of the question marks are coming on. Do you still maintain and have things like, you know, we have clearing houses for these types of things, where banks essentially are sending money to each other for wholesale payments? Um or another interesting thought is, what if you had a like a settlement token that everyone kind of agreed to? And this is potentially an interesting area where stable coins can also come in to play, where effectively the money in, money out is a stable coin or some sort of settlement token that everyone agrees on and is a neutral uh party.

Um and that could be the money at move at movement, and then the tokenized deposit or other things could be money at rest within each Prividium. So, when you talk about composability, we have to think about how do you actually convert these assets to the other while not taking on someone's uh counterparty risk. Right? So, it's it's very It's It's It's I mean, it's pretty much kind of the same thing uh as in DeFi as well, right? But we just don't because in DeFi everything is a bearer asset, so it's a little bit different. You know, just kind of closing out where it's It's been a long privacy day. We're just thinking about tokenized funds in this kind of rise tokenization and how this wave continues to happen. You know,

we just talked about interoperability, privacy being kind of two sides to a different kind of sword here. When we're thinking about this wave of tokenized assets coming on chain, how do you think about capturing um an outsized share of that value when it comes on chain? There's going to be everything from non-speculative assets like stable coins all the way to, you know, the furthest thing down the risk curve. You could call it equities, private credit, whatever it is. What is the ZK sync vision for capturing a ton of that tokenized asset market share and what does it actually look like practically?

>> I would say it's building the protocol and the infrastructure that effectively removes a lot of the counterparty risk, removes a lot of the operational and reconciliation costs and risks. And that's kind of a big area. If you can remove that, that enables a lot more seamless movement of assets between different partners. The other area as well as, you know, there's a lot to be done in terms of connecting this to on chains off chain systems and doing the reconciliation that way and the workflows and the templates of okay, what should be the open standard for how you move these assets across. I think someone, whoever can help create

those open standards and build a network effect around those open standards is where a lot of network effects can be built out. And that's going to so so so there's the you know, the Palladium itself and then but then there's a network effects of okay, here's open standards, everyone agrees to them and everyone's willing to trade through these open standards because the benefits are huge, right? You're eliminating counterparty risk on these trades, you're taking out a lot of the reconciliation cost, a lot of the operational cost and burden.

Uh and you know, that will create, I think, a significant multiplier on how money moves, how assets move. >> Yeah. Ab- absolutely. >> Omar, Omar, thanks for joining us, man. It must be busy in New York with all this. It's been an institutional bull run and token bear market, but man, things are happening. >> Yeah, things are happening. >> Absolutely. >> Interesting time. >> Yeah, privacy day is uh is coming to a wrap and uh we appreciate you joining and and uh wrapping us here. Um man, we've uh we've had all kinds of speakers from all all across the docket, so appreciate you taking some time spending uh some time talking about privacy and privacy is the good work. So, keep up

keep up the good work out there. Appreciate >> Go close some deals, Omar. >> Appreciate you fighting the good fight, man. >> Going to go going to put on my suit next after this call. >> There we go. >> 75 and sunny out there. Get out there, huh? >> All right. >> Have a good day. >> All right. All right, Omar. Cheers, man. >> Thanks for having me. >> Bye. >> Wow. Dude, Portugal Congo tied one to one. I knew it was going to be a tie. I was 8% on Couch. It would have been an insane hit. Guys, what a >> Um did this This is what Wurst did to our portfolios. We are resorted to sports betting.

>> What a day. >> Man, hell of a hell of a day. Feel like these guys are really >> What a privacy day. >> You know, these guys they're they're really Look, privacy's hard work, but it's important work, man. It's important. Um >> I agree. >> Not everyone's going to do it. It would be easier to just take the money from the people that are going to buy the data. >> Take the money and run. >> Take the money and run. >> Guys, you know where we will be tomorrow? Here at the Empire State Building live building the future of finance one day at a time, 12:30 p.m.

Eastern tomorrow, same place, same time. If you guys are on YouTube, drop a W in the chat. We are having a fun time today, privacy day. Shout out to Zama. Let's give Zama some love. These guys powering our privacy day today. Ladies and gentlemen, we'll see you guys tomorrow. That ends our show from the Tokenization Tower. All my homies hate Kevin O'Leary. And >> shout out to Zama. >> See you guys tomorrow. >> Happy privacy day. >> [music] [music]