Modularity Maximalism w/ Uma Roy (Succinct Labs)

Transcript

[Music] hello welcome and thank you for tuning in for another episode of The Strange water podcast we've got a great one for you today at some point in every Builder's career they have a very specific moment in the process of trying to solve some big hairy problem they find themselves so bogged down in implementation details that they end up spending more time creating custom tooling and Frameworks than actually solving the problem or maybe they skipped over thinking through the framework and the tools that they might need and they just charged ahead

only to realize halfway through that they don't have any tools and are irrevocably tied to the thoughtless architecture that they just hacked into place again this is a very common experience what is not common is the realization that if you're experiencing all of these problems every other developer is probably going through the exact same Growing Pains these special people realize that if they spend enough time and Care making their own lives easier and their own development faster they can also offer these tools to other developers and transform incredibly Advanced and nuanced computer science into

plug-and-play apis and if all the stars align just perfectly these people are able to bring together all the ingredients needed to transform practical developer tools into a venture-backed company a company capable of that 1 + 1 equals 3 magic and one desperately needed to make advanced mathematics ICS and Technology easily accessible to application developers well as you're all aware zero knowledge cryptography is one of those fields incredibly ripe for these kinds of Builders while capable of what seems like actual magic ZK cryptography is

incredibly hard to understand and it's even harder to actually get working and so I'm sure you can see where this is going it was inevitable that a builder like today's guest would seize this opportunity umaar Roy is the co-founder of succinct Labs a company that aims to make ZK development as simple as possible I've heard some very prominent members of the cryptoz community describe succinct as Foundry for ZK but I like to point it how twilio abstracts away all the challenges and and complications of telephone companies and provides web API access to text

messages and phone calls and use that to describe what succinct is trying to do for ZK either way the point is that succinct aims to abstract away all the advanced cryptography of ZK so that developers can focus on building applications and not post talk level math in today's conversation you'll hear everything from from the story of succinct to what kind of applications and use cases the platform is beginning to open up in particular I want to underscore the theme of today's episode and maybe of cinc ethos modularity and I guess I want to leave you with this idea that there's only one

way to build at the bleeding edge modularity maximalism one more thing before we begin please do not take Financial advice from this or any podcast ethereum will change the world one day but you can easily easily lose all of your money between now and then okay let's get to the show Uma thank you so much for joining us on the strange water podcast thanks for having me of course so I'm super excited I like I think that what succinct is is like both the um the right business to build right now but

the perfect story of like Builders finding problems and realizing that you can build a company around the problems you just solved but before we get to any of that um I'm a huge believer that like the most important uh thing in any conversation are the people in it so with that as a starter can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you found um crypto and ZK yeah for sure so uh throughout kind of my life I've always been really into math um I did a lot of math and research in high school and then also I was a double major in math and CS in college uh so I've always really liked math um and then I also realized you know I really like building things and so coming out of school you

know I was working at a few different places doing machine learning stuff but when I found crypto I thought it was very interesting um I do logically and also kind of like the space I think is very interesting and it's always very exciting it's different from everything else and when I found about found out about ZK in particular I thought it was kind of this like Perfect Fit of my math and computer science interests um like there's so much interesting math going on which really was what drew me in but then also it felt like it was this really exciting new primitive that could be used to build a lot of really exciting stuff in crypto uh and that's why I became just like really enamored

with ZK and went fully down the rabbit hole for sure so when you say um it really resonated with you ideologically like what does that mean yeah I think like a lot of crypto's principles around like self sovereignty and um those ideals resonate with me and then I find like a lot of the mechanics like composability also very interesting and you know the world computer vision I think is very interesting um and also like the deeply open- sourc ethos of the space uh Al resonates with me I guess you don't hear many machine learning people that make the jump in the same way you don't hear of ZK people that make the jump because there's so much to like learn and fall down the rabbit hole like I guess I wonder what what was not that interesting or not interesting

enough about uh machine learning for you that you did get attracted over here I mean I I think machine learning is very interesting and I still really like it um I think at the time I just thought ZK was like so new and so underexplored that that's what like made me extra interested in it if that makes sense for sure I mean I've had the a repeating theme with a lot of the conversations I've had on this podcast are like what's special about ZK is it's like almost like the soldering point between research and uh entrepreneurship and I I said to you before the podcast I was at Stanford SBC and I saw um John from cinct present and like that that's a conference where it's literally every

other presenter is either a professor or a grad student reading out their research and then there's a bunch of kids the audience like figuring out in real time how to turn that research into a real product and that happens everywhere but there's like clearly something special and and fast happening here yeah for sure the space moves really fast so um can you talk to us a little bit about your journey from I guess like finding ZK and and falling in love with it to uh founding succinct like yeah just how how did you get to um the point where you realize like oh we need to start a company yeah so I and my um my co-founder and I we met at this zerox park co-working space they had um

last year uh xerx Park is this organization that's kind of like a sister org to the ethereum foundation in some ways um and they were hosting this like ZK oriented co-working space and kind of summer program I guess and I met my co-founder there and we started working together on a ZK Bridge Project um it was technically really interesting a novel at the time um and I also really enjoyed working with my co-founder and yeah from there I kind of felt like oh ZK bridging really resonated with a lot of people and made a lot of sense in terms of solving a really important problem in the industry um and we realized a lot of that work could be like more generalizable and important to

like Beyond just what we done that summer so that was when we decided to start things and so I guess to like open up that uh moment a little more I was watching uh one of your presentations um earlier this morning about how the bridge you're talking about is the nosis uh Omni bridge I think they called it something like that right right so um first like from a kind of like entrepreneurship Journey can you talk a little bit about like how you found the opportunity to like be working on you know like at least for ethereum such an important part of the infrastructure and then can you talk a little bit through the Journey of like actually building the ZK bridge and then realizing oh my God these Primitives are so difficult

but once they're done they're super usable and um you know I don't want to put words in your mouth but I believe that's probably the start of your company yeah for sure so yeah when we started the company um I think the nois people had been in touch with some of our friends and some of the xerx park people and they kind of had this idea for a ZK bridge to secure the ethereum tosis bridge um and basically that involved instead of having a multisig um which you know is like kind of problematic and they can get hacked and they have these bad security assumptions generating a ZK proof of consensus and then kind of having this trust minimized cryptographic proof of the state of Two Chains uh and using

that to secure the bridge instead of like kind of what at the time was the industry standard of the multi- so the idea actually I believe originated from one of theosis co-founders I I think it's Martin um and maybe I think some of the people also working on nosis train like some of the original team of nosis train like perhaps eigor as well um and yeah I think at the time we were just working on ZK stuff and kind of looking for something to do and then they had this idea and it you know that was like kind of the match uh there so that's how we started on working on the bridge um at the time I think it wasn't super clear if it was even technically possible like verifying the consensus of a chain in a ZK proof involved a lot of

like non-native arithmetic and like a lot of kind of slow Primitives traditionally in a circuit and so I think a lot of people didn't think the proof time would be performant or it'd really be possible um but yeah we just kind of went for it and did it and then it ended up being performant like the proof generation was like you know two minutes so like totally reasonable and yeah then we got it working kind of end to end and today it helps the no ethereum tosis Bridge um yeah along the way as you kind of mentioned um we are building this bridge um and I remember for John and I we'd worked on it over the summer I think

we'd gotten the circuits working maybe sometime in September or October and then from that point to take it to production was like a really long journey and it finally launched on mainnet in March and there was a lot of things about like ZK development and deployment and production that we realized throughout our journey were really terrible developer experiences um like you know we we are developers so we've developed like front end and backend and we have all these nice tooling like for sale for like automatic deployment or like GitHub for collaboration and CK development in contrast feels so primitive um and that's like at every part of the ZK

development stock so like building with circuits I origin when we were using circom and like for listeners of this whove used circom we were using an old version of circom that didn't have like print so when you were debugging your circuit you couldn't even print what was going on so it's basically impossible to debug um like does it work or does it not yeah exact it's they have like no insight into what's going on and since then they've added logging but yeah we were on like an earlier version where they didn't have that um so you know developing the circuits is really hard and kind of nightmarish and then you know keeping track of like all the kind of build artifacts associated with the circuit process is also really difficult

we had to we were working with some of the biggest circuits I think that have been used in production even now so we'd always have to SS AG on to remote machines and like to do our builds and to generate proofs and so it was just a really horrible process um and then deploying it in production had like a lot of other hurdles too like we had to write our own relay infrastructure we had to write our scalable proof generation infrastructure and stuff like that so yeah and end to end it probably took like more than six months to go from start to finish um and along the way we kind of realized like a lot of this tooling is kind of a general problem um for any ZK developer out there so after we worked on that we started working on like other ZK like

clients um because you know it was a very Natural Evolution we' done an ethereum ZK Li client and then we thought okay let's do a ZK tenderman like client which is used by the cosmos ecosystem and help connect it to ethereum and we also are working on like a ZK um grandpaw like client which is used by a lot of substrate chains um and so those things are actually like we've we've spent the past months since March building those out um and developing them as well um they're not in circum anymore they're in like a different proving stock called plunky too um but along the way we realized like a lot of the same problems were still there and so when we'd been building these ZK Bridges we'd built a lot of

infrastructure in house to kind of make it easier for us internally to build with ZK so we kind of came up with this system of like you know really easy remote builds and like version circuit artifacts and like better sdks and better Frameworks and things like that and at some point we realized like okay what you know it's not sustainable for us to always be building all these circuits and this infrastructure is going to be useful for a lot of other ZK developers too what if we can turn this into a platform where it's not just us building these ZK like clients but we can let any developer build with ZK and the they way the way they want to build so yeah that was kind of the evolution from like our start and focus on ZK

bridging to kind of building this like broader ZK platform and so just to um I don't know like help like put context into this so when you say six months to get like this Bridge up and running like what percentage of that would you say is like solely about ZK and what percentage of it would be about like you know just the the things needed to make a bridge work that uh are just application Level yeah it's a good question they're pretty intertwined I think we probably spent like I would say maybe two to three of the months on the ZK stuff so like getting the circuits building them redoing the builds when we change stuff copy pasting the the verifiers into our projects and things like that um and

then maybe two to three months are spent on like more generic infrastructure around like scaleb prooof generation relaying and stuff like that and then of course some of that infrastructure is like more specific to our app um but yeah that was I would say it's like pretty even split yeah so I apologize for jumping to like the hard portion of this uh episode this quickly but because my question for you is when you're building um you know a framework based around uh ZK based like Primitives that are you know kind of like modularly plugged into apps I I wonder in a uh in systems that are so complex in Nuance like how reusable and how like plug

andplay are these systems and I think that has implications for U like using third parties like succinct or like more importantly uh for as systems upgrade like how tied to uh indiv like specific implementations or versions or whatever are applications uh going to be when they make the decision to like develop with any specific CK system do you have any sense of that yet yeah that's a good question so I think to describe what succinct is at like a high level the succinct platform is basically kind of this set of developer tooling that modular and proof system ostic and it helps any ZK developer build with ZK

so by proof system agnostic I mean you can choose like any framework like circom or Pony 2 or ganar or anything else to build your ZK circuit with and then we have this kind of like modular set of components that'll like help you so as an example we have like circuit builds which help you manage like your circuit artifacts and things like that we have like oneclick verifier deploys we have a proof explorer that shows you proofs from like any proof system so the reason we built it this way is internally even we've been using a bunch of different proof systems for our different like clients and so we kind of realized also in the long term ZK proof systems might end up being very

fragmented because different proof systems are good for different use cases and so that's why we kind of built this platform to enable developers with like kind of best-in-class tooling no matter which proof system or app or use case they're doing um and we call like our mindset is kind of summarized by like we're minimally opinionated so basically if you have like this succinct do Json which is kind of like a package Json if you've worked with like front end or like JavaScript before which is kind of like tells us okay here's like the commands that we want to run and like they have to have like a certain format and maybe sometimes some of your files have to have like be named a

certain thing and then if you like follow this set of like minimally opinionated conventions then you kind of get all this nice tooling for free um so so to answer your question around like yeah these these ZK applications are like pretty complex like they can there's often a lot of nuance and like how ZK is being used or where it's being used um but I think because we're DK developers ourselves and we we have used like a bunch of different proof systems in a bunch of different contexts for a bunch of different use cases we've tried to make it as general and flexible as possible while still like retaining a lot of the benefits um and I think from our own internal usage of our platform it's like been pretty successful at striking like the right balance and that

makes so much sense from the standpoint of like the company you're building and like the services that you want to provide to developers I guess I'm wondering as a application developer yourself who has developed with um like these ZK Primitives do you have a sense of like let's take for example The nosis Chain Bridge that you've made once you've deployed something with a specific let's say proof system in it like are are you committing that uh entire application kind of irrevocably to that proof system or are we able to develop these uh like Primitives and I guess like Frameworks in a way that like allow uh maybe some like modularity and

upgradeability I think um for us our we have this as part of succinct we kind of have this proof standard where a lot of the use cases we're targeting um kind of follow this um new term I don't know if you've heard it of like a ZK co-processor where basically you're taking a lot of compute that's too expensive to be done onchain and we move it offchain and then verify a proof instead and so we have this proof standard where like for any offchain compute it just there's this simple API where you pass in like input bytes it generates a proof and then you verify a proof and you get like verified output bytes corresponding to your input byes so you're you can think of it as you're making a function call with some

inputs and then you get verified outputs but instead of the function being computed on chain it's computed offchain I think given this kind of proof standard abstraction it's actually now much easier to switch out your proof system because basically you can have the same function and same logic and you just implement it in the new proof system and as long as it conforms to that same like spec then it's really easy to swap out um which is awesome so I think before the way we developed our so when we originally developed our system for example like the ethereum osis Bridge a lot of our infrastructure was built in this really monolithic way where you know the proof system we' Chosen and then all of our

infrastructure was like really tightly coupled and really tightly integrated so actually it would have been really hard to switch out the proof system but I think with our new product and kind of like our new standards and our new mindset it's actually a lot more modular so it's a lot easier to switch so I guess uh like that is the the story of succinct realizing that I mean I guess to take off like uh lessons from our ancestors that like standards allow us to um really like multiply um or or have outsize force on Innovation because like once things are standardized um like the next layer of people like have a lot more flexibility to worry about what they're building and not worry about um

in our case like complex math and um like essentially Wizardry right so so um I guess yeah that that is like what you're building with succinct uh whether it's the the actual like compute that you're offering or just like the standards themselves um which I'm sure you're hoping like are adopted by like people outside of you um that makes a lot of sense and now makes sense why people are investing in you yeah we definitely hope that we've been using like our own platform for a lot of our internal development of ZK like clients and with our new like clients like we've been able to get them to production I would say like easily 10 to 20x faster than our original ethereum

like client like our the like client like I mentioned took like six months to get to production fully and then our tenderman like client I would say you know end to end just thinking about like getting into to production took like maybe around a couple weeks two a month um using the platform and that was just something that was really enabled by our developer tooling buy our standards like buy all that stuff um so I think hopefully we can offer like the same sort of Leverage to like all other ZK develop yeah very cool so let's like uh move this conversation a little bit to um the applications the almost application layer because first I'd like you to just like kind of expand um we've been using light clients and bridges kind of

synonymously so can you just like real briefly for people that uh don't really understand that explain what you mean but then uh what I really want to talk about is like now that you've figured out these light clients uh to reach across chains like what are some other interesting applications outside of bridging that you guys are um if not saying actively developed yet at least thinking about uh that now that you have this uh ZK package yeah to talk about bridges and like clients basically bridging is just the problem of like I have one chain a and I have another chain B and I want chain a to be able to talk to chain B and I want to kind of do it in the most secure trust minimiz way POS possible uh the best way to do that

is on chain B you should verify the consensus in chain a because like that kind of is the ground truth of what's going on on chain a um historically verifying consensus has been really difficult on a chain because it's like a very heavy computation like you have to verify signatures you have to verify a lot of hash functions and so that's like a perfect use of ZK where you can take that really expensive computation you can generate a cryptographic proof for it and then you can just verify that proof um and it's you know verifying that proof is a lot less expensive than redoing the original computation and that's kind of where you get this like ZK bridging um a likee client so yeah that's verifying consensus um is useful

for understanding the state of another chain and then that is useful for running a like client which is just a client of a blockchain that just keeps track of like the block headers or like some sort of minimal State about another chain and you want to run like a like client of chain a in a smart contract on chain B so that you can understand like what's going on in chain a and then you can do stuff like oh there were tokens burned on chain a Let Me Mint tokens on chain B so like a onchain gas efficient like client powered by ZK is kind of like the Holy Grail of bridging and that when we originally started that was like the main focus was replacing you know these centralized multisig that are kind

of this like shortcut and like not very secure with these onchain ZK light clients got it so that is um like how why we're using like clients in bridging uh in the same way because essentially the hard part about bridging is the like client so with that his background um like what are the other types of uses for light clients that are like really starting to get you excited um like I know like the most basic things are things like okay your uh browser wallet doesn't need to use like INF fura um it can like directly verify the chain but is there anything else that like now that it's trivial to deploy a light client like you you are hearing or thinking about um like what applications

can be built with it yeah I think for the like like for a gas efficient onchain like client I think the main use case is bridging and I think bridging can be pretty broad like it can be used for you know just moving money and tokens it can also be used for like sending messages which can be useful for things like cross-chain governance or like cross-chain lending or like more complex cross-chain interactions uh we've been recently working with some da layers like celestian ail that where they use the bridge to like verify that data was posted to their chain so it's not like a money movement use case it's more of like a verify that the data is available on another chain use case um so yeah I think those are kind of like the use

cases of like clients um but yeah there's also a lot of other applications of ZK other than just like like clients that we're pretty excited too yeah for sure so um like I'd love to get to that I wonder if it's worth talking about the work you're doing with Celestia uh while we're still in kind of this realm um so I'll leave this to you yeah so uh we've been working with two da teams um Celestia and Avil uh they're both basically providing a L1 blockchain that's only focused on data availability so it has a very minimal execution layer and it you know has data availability sampling um to provide like more very high throughput da because that's a

bottleneck for a lot of rollups on ethereum in general um in order for ethereum rollups to be able to use these da layers they need to be able to verify that the data is actually in like the other chain um and so for that uh both celest we've been working with both celestian Avil to make like a ZK enabled like clim for their chains so that we can have like an ethereum like client of Celestia or an ethereum like client of aail that can basically a test and say like hey this data is available on celesa or hey this data is available on Avil and then ethereum rollups that are using those chains for da can like use that like client uh in the case of like

a fraud proof or something to say like oh yeah this was like the daa of the data that was posted on those chains or in a ZK roll up as like a part of verifying their validity proof um so yeah that's like the work we've been doing with them it's been really interesting because to do that work we've had to develop like a lot of really optimized Primitives um for like signature verification and hashing and the work has been exciting because it's like a lot of The state-ofthe-art Primitives that we've been able to put together and we've gotten it to the point where they're like clients are pretty like the ZK proof generation is like really performance um and then yeah we've been building these like clients and developing them internally with our platform so kind of our the first customer of the platform is really

ourselves and you know the platforms really sped up a lot of our work feel like clients like I would say 10 to 20x so that's also been really exciting um to have like a real world use case for a platform too and then sorry last thing on light clients but um have you guys started like thinking about tackling the like super high throughput chains like um like Avalanche or salana that um you know like regardless of how complicated it is to do like ZK proving on those chains the reality is is that they move at like orders of magnitude speed faster than etherium that um I don't know I just imagine that like whether you're talking about like latency issues or just um like size issues I don't know

but there's there must be some sort of complication there yeah I think for salana um I think they're actually still working on their like client protocol I think it's maybe called Tiny Dancer or something like that um or maybe diet client yeah diet clients I think is they're what they're working on so I think they're still working on kind of like their like client protocol um although I think it would be quite possible like salana uses ed25519 which we have like really optimized circuits for I think they use Shaw hashing which we have really optimized circuits for so I think it's like a matter of someone who understands the Sal of consensus and understands their like client protocol putting the pieces together whether that's like our team or

like someone else um yeah yeah yeah makes sense cool all right so let's um continue this conversation forward and talk about like now that you um have some of these general purpose tools and are in this space of ZK I guess application Innovation what are some of the other things that um you're starting to get really excited about um for for ZK yeah so I think just this General class of ZK co-processor applications with augmenting smart contracts with offchain compute um is exciting um I think the like clients are specific use case of that but I think some other specific ones include oracles so for example we recently have been working

with Lio to make a validator statistics Oracle um to replace their current trusted Oracle so for some contexts like right now in Lio it's really important to their protocol to understand how much eth is staked by their validators on the beacon chain and right now they have like a trusted Oracle for that where it's like a I think five out of nine multi of people who compute that quantity and then they post it on chain but as part of like making their protocol more decentralized and resilient um they want like a ZK proof of that um and you can't do like if you tried to do the computation on chain it's like way way way too expensive like yeah it'd be way too difficult and sorry can you just like unpack that a little

bit is that because it would be about identifying all the individual validator keys that are corresponding to each entity and then bundling up the aggregate signature for just so like why why would that be too difficult um without ZK yeah basically you'd have to iterate through I guess at this point the million validator public keys on the beacon chain then you'd have to like sum them up if they're in like the Lio um validator set and then you'd have to like add up all their balances so y' andan like doing a million of those like local proof verifications and additions is just going to be way way too expensive um yeah but with ZK it becomes like a lot more feasible you just move that compute off chain and then you

verify that proof um and so we posted this proof of concept we did for them where we generated a proof of a ZK proof of their validator balances across the whole Beacon chain um and then yeah that could hopefully one day augment their current Oracle and then in the future like totally replace it with like a fully trustless cryptographic soltion um so I think this class of like validator statistics applications is really interesting for like all the liquid staking protocols or like anyone that's doing like validator related stuff like including igen laay um so yeah that's like one broad use case of oracles I'm excited about another use case is like I think teams like axium are focusing on this um where

you have like historical State queries so basically you can have like this really large scale big data computation of you know a t-w or like some historical information in the chain and normally to do that onchain is like way too expensive because like you have to do all the you have to verify kind of like previous block headers and like Merkel proofs of the state so you move that competition off chain you can use it you can do something complex like a tuwop or like some average or like a sum and then you can use that statistic on chain um so that's like another interesting use case um other interesting use cases are like similar to that are like for example instead of doing like a for an airdrop instead of

doing a Merkel route like a trusted Merkel rout where someone just posts like hey here's all the addresses by some Criterion now you can have like uh ZK proof that like those addresses were computed with respect to like some cryptog like some cryptographically provable Criterion and so you can have like autonomous airdrops and maybe you can start having like continuously rewarding autonomous air drops um so yeah like I think a lot of these Oracle use cases are really interesting um I think ZK machine learning is also like pretty interesting I think that's like a little newer um but yeah there's been like some exciting use cases around like having like nft valuation protocol for Lending or

something with KML I'm not like super familiar um but yeah I think zkl is exciting and then of course I think a huge category is also like privacy like um there's a lot of you know new interesting privacy Primitives and applications like nocturn and um some other ones out there like for like kyc and things like that um and so I think that's also like an exciting application of ZK as well yeah I um no for sure there's like a lot of interesting stuff and I think so much um like once you understand the primi or the I guess the concept that um what ZK is like particular ularly useful for is taking something that's complex and then

projecting the results of that into ethereum or a blockchain but who cares if it's not ethereum right and then and then um like just understand that like when you find these like huge differentials in uh like computation needs that's like and I guess like I'm just really struck by um the Lio example because it seems like you're kind of dancing between the consensus layer and the execution layer in that one in this like interesting way that um just for one like kudos to you for figuring it out but two just shows like we have a long way to go in terms of um like core ethereum protocol development um so last question before

we move on from like just uh what's exciting in the application um area for ZK have you gotten any um like cool like visions of how ZK is going to transform things that aren't necessarily directly related to blockchain I mean I know the the famous one that we like keep batting around in our circles is uh like the cameras that can like prove that this cam this image was taken with this sensor at this date and time and um like that kind of stuff and so I might have taken away like the one good answer but um is there anything else that is on your mind where like ZK is really going to change um the way that like the world actually works yeah I think some

like one interesting one I've heard of recently is basically um there's a team at Zur Park and then I think a few other teams working on this idea of like like attestations with ZK for Selective revealing so I think at a high level the idea is like something like you have all these like attestations of like you know someone you know was at this event or maybe someone has this GitHub repo or something and festations could be like like kind of like provided by decentralized authorities or like some cryptographic proof like anation could be like oh I have this balance on ethereum which is obviously like secured by ethereum but they could also be like provided by a centralized Authority like

the government for example oh you have this driver's license with this birth date and then you know this expir date and things like that and then with those credentials you can start with ZK you can start revealing like complex subsets of information so you could say something like oh I have this driver's license credential with a birthday that's greater than 21 but I'm not going to tell you like exactly when I was born or anything else um and so you with ZK you can kind of have these like very general statements um across like many different attestations or subsets of attestations and combine that into kind of like a rich identity layer or platform or protocol um and I think you know that

could be you know I think probably that will end up being like on or involved with blockchain in some form but it doesn't have to be at all um and I think yeah that's like quite an interesting um use case yeah I mean like the obvious like way to sell that to every American is like imagine not having to give your social security number out but still like complying with kyc so that when you get you know just like your get my renters insurance from Lemonade like a company that sounds like a joke you know but I still have to give them my social security number like Z this kind of system or this kind of world would like solve that yeah for sure like another common example is you know often when

you're doing a rental application they'll want to see like your bank account or like a W2 or something which obviously I think a lot of people view that as kind of like a gross violation of privacy and so with ZK you know you could have like an attestation from your bank attesting to like your previous you know bank account information in history and then you could selectively reveal like oh my income is above this amount but I'm not going to tell you exactly what it is and like that's all the rental people need to know yeah and then the other so I we've talked to a lot of people on this podcast about ZK ml I still don't really understand that I think it's like to me so obvious that um cryptography and machine learning come together because like machine learning

is about like abundance and like just craziness and like chaos and cryptography is about like um just scarcity and control and and slow you know so those will come together at some point I don't really understand uh it yet but um the other application which I actually feel like no one's really talking about yet but the the deeper I get into technology the more I'm convinced that like the Jetson is an accurate representation of what the future is going to be like just everything like robots like Chrome crazy shiny and I think that whether we're talking about driverless cars or you know Amazon sending drones to do deliveries or all this stuff like part

of the true implementation of the internet of things is going to have to be like machines with some sort of autonomy that have some sort of identity and like I don't understand how that happens without ZK and so that's like the other um PL some like the the intersection of Internet of things and ZK is like really where I've got my um chips on if I could put chips on it m interesting yeah I haven't thought too much about that but it is an interesting idea cool well um so let's uh like kind of move back to the succinct uh level and like something I'm very curious about when you're like building a company that is predicated on

implementing Cutting Edge research that is like so Cutting Edge that they're still like printing out the paper for the first time like how do you as a business business leader think about like when it's the right time to dedicate resources to um something that's brand new like when does something become proven out enough that you feel like comfortable allocating company resources like can you just talk to me what it's like being a company at the bleeding edge of research yeah that's actually a great question and something we've had to kind of like grapple with a lot I think my answer might be like a little maybe different than what you'd expect which is we had kind of seen this landscape of like Cutting Edge research and algorithms and

even engineering improvements like constantly like every month it's like hard to keep up and I think another thing we observed with a lot of companies in this space is like a lot of them had kind of like made a bet uh on like a particular research direction or like stack and then you know if it had gone well well okay that's great but if they kind of made the wrong bet then they were maybe kind of like stuck with those choices even if if like it's suboptimal and so I think one thing we realized is we' been struggling with this for a long time which was like okay there are new there is new stuff coming out like folding you know there's all this stuff with Starks you know there's like a lot of different directions like which one should we

choose and we struggled with that question for a long time you know of course we we had made some concrete decisions for our like clients um but you know for further for future efforts we we were always still like grappling with that question and then I think one day it kind of came to us that like in our struggle was the answer which was not to like come up with some Galaxy brain like We Know Better Than You Know Dan Bonet and like all these other people of like what the future is but kind of like the answer we arrived to was like given that it's so uncertain given that there's so much movement let's build something that's like actually modular that no matter what direction the research goes we can still like help take it like we can take

advantage of that research and provide value to that research and more easily use that research so that that like perspective around like not wanting to commit to anyone Direction and and not wanting to build monolithically kind of led us to that answer and our vision of like building this more modular toolkit and more modular stock so yeah my answer to your question is kind of like this no answer which is we we decided to invest in a modular approach that would let us be like evenly kind of hedged no matter what direction works and so you can see that in our platform and then in our standards and um like a lot of the other pieces of what we've been building it's be it's really built in this proof system

agnostic way so that like when the latest proof system comes out and like it finally gets to production it can just like plug into our system really easily and we can take advantage of the new stuff as it comes out yeah so I guess like what you're really saying is that first and foremost you separate as much as possible in in a modular way the like literal actual math and like the things that are related to cryptography and like the harnesses in which the cryptography needs in order to run and you try to make that interface as seamless and as replaceable as possible and so that gives you the flexibility to um like continue like making the harness better and better

over time while like swapping out and implementing more and more of the math engines correct yeah yeah no I think that's like a great summary yeah and so are you guys the kind of people that are at these conferences when a new paper comes out and are like that day like let's try to get this into production or are you more taking a step back looking at like okay what are the like types of applications that this could be useful for who are the types of people that are using this like is their developer enthusiasm for this and then waiting to uh like start to put that into production just how do you think of um new proof systems in that Dimension yeah I think for like we have we are still

very aware of the latest research because I think even as like application developers it's we still have to be responsible for like if for example this new lookup argument came out and we implemented it in our proofs in our proof system we were using for our like clients and then It sped up things by a lot so we do have to be aware of the research I would say like on the engineering to research Spectrum we are like aware of the research and we like keep up to date with the state of the art papers but like we're not writing papers so we're not like that far um along that the research Spectrum but we're still like very aware of what's going on and I think that's important for a company like us to like always keep on innovating and be at the bleeding edge um I do think compared to

like a lot of other ZK teams like we are a lot closer to the app player and like actually getting like we're really focus on like oh what's the use case like what does this enable um how is this going to be important for like us our applications or like other developers building applications um so I think in that sense like we are we try to be close to the app layer and the user layer because also like we care a lot about that and we think that's what's important um so yeah that's that's kind of how I'd say we fall on that spectrum of like engineering too to and maybe like you'll who knows you'll get to a point where you open up that back end like the engine portion so that anyone can plug in their proof system and somebody else might like do the work for

you of implementing the paper they came out five minutes ago or or or the researchers themselves can put it in your system and see if it works before they even release the paper like that's the cool part about building a modular company yeah for sure I mean that is definitely the goal like we think the platform's really useful for like app devs because you know it just helps them with their development and deployment workflow but then we also think that like if you're your new proof system and you want people to use you like you can plug into our standards and then it becomes you just gain a lot of distribution because now it becomes any easy for any application developer to try out your stuff so we kind of view it as this like two-sided almost like Marketplace like thing where like

there's benefits to both sides and then they can come on our platform and like coordinate and then it's like a really positive some game to be playing so that's definitely Our intention is like we want new proof systems that are like five minutes old to be integrated into the platform and like available for everyone to use for sure for sure so um while we're still in like the um I don't know this part of the conversation um how do you guys think about uh the role of um ZK hardware and like we're there's just so many interesting companies right now um from like cisic to inama to um like a lot of the like research is coming straight out of the EF for the

ver ified sorry the verified delay function stuff like clearly whatever the role is going to be however important it's going to be there are going to be ZK based like as6 and Hardware how much are you guys thinking about um that whole field as important to like what you're building um both in like the the immediate term and in the long term yeah I think ZK Hardware is like really interesting and hopefully is what you know takes proof generation time to the next order or orders of magnitude of being you know performant and fast um for us I think again like we have this more modular approach where like hopefully one day also as the

hardware gets like more mature and like more production ready it can also be another actor that like ends up coordinating on our platform so like it's kind of this like three-sided coordination game of like application developers proof systems and then hardware and like hopefully the standards of the platform the component and like you know that that platform becomes like this coordination layer for all these actors and like the ZK supply chain of the future I my impression of Hardware now is that the hardware teams are still like working a lot to get their stuff actually usable and production ready um I think some challenges they face is kind of around like they also kind of have to bet on like what PR systemer approach is going to work more than most

yeah and so they're like really exposed to that kind of risk I guess um and so I think that's like a challenge for for their teams to kind of like deal with and figure out I think one interesting thing we've seen with teams like ulana is like they are designing Next Generation proof systems in I think coordination with their Hardware so I think that's like a really interesting approach where like they have expertise on both and then they can really tailor the two well together um with their like more recent work on Bas I think it's called so um yeah I think that's like really interesting um and yeah I think for us like the hardware companies I think most are still like fairly on the earlier side of things um I some some are

actually like working um but yeah I think as they become like a bigger and bigger actor in The ZK supply chain like hopefully we can also start involving them more in like the conversation between app developers systems and like that Hardware piece yeah I mean I think um I think what we're learning as computer scientists like we learned on day one and just it's gone in the background and now it's coming back in like making sure we know enforce is just the power and the importance of modularity and like whether that's the modular blockchain thesis and how we're like all designing our life's work to like look or it's how you as an entity are deciding to build a company and I

think that this is just what it means to be um developing responsibly I guess guess in such a high Innovation environment is like you build out what you can today and you just prepare for everything to get better um and maybe not at the same rate but you just got to know that everything will get better like probably faster than you individually can do yourself yeah I I'm like a big believer that you know we'll have thousand X the ZK compute in like a year or two and so like we should all be building and thinking of applications with that frame like that kind of frame of reference in mind and man can't believe this now but it I think it's been two years I think it was 2021 uh and it was Thanksgiving um the starkware

guys came on a bank list podcast and I remember somebody said something to the effect of yeah already today we're doing protein folding calculations on Stark net or whatever the on starkware and um you know it's like why would you do that like there's no reason to do that but the point is it's just like really hard computational stuff that I don't now that I know more I don't even really know what it means to say they were doing it on Stark but uh just I'm a huge believer that order of magnitude improvements just open up entire new applications and entire New Visions and like that's how we got from like the text based arpanet to um geoc cities to having like live conversations

amongst thousands of people at once and so what that means for ZK I don't know but maybe that's the pathway to my robot B ZK future yeah that's that is like a I had not heard of that use case of ZK and yeah it is I don't I also don't really know what it means but um yeah it is interesting to think about like oh yeah in one to two years or like even 10 years like what stuff will be in ZK like maybe one day the entire n will be ZK aied right or like you know let's like let's think really big like maybe all of these like Finance venues will have to generate a ZK proof that you know the orders were executed in this particular way or whatever

so yeah it is kind of like nice to to let your mind go crazy yeah no and I just think it's especially important in this field to like take a step back and be like wait why are we creating these Moon Moon maath Primitives um and like I just I hope some people are thinking like past the blockchain layer but anyway um with the last 10 minutes that we have here um I would love to talk about your your guys's latest announcement which is uh the succinct developer platform so can you talk a little bit about like what um what you guys announced and like what people can come do and I guess like some of the things that people are doing yeah so yeah I mean I've already been like kind

of mentioning it throughout this podcast but the succinct developer platform is kind of this place where we want to bring kind of state-ofthe-art like best-in-class tooling for any ZK developer in this modular proof system agnostic way um and today we've already been using it internally for a while to develop our ZK like clients and that was kind of the original inspiration for building this tooling um so all of our ZK light clients whether that's our ethereum one or the celestial like client or the Avail light client are all projects that are hosted on the platform today um another important piece of the platform

is it has this like discover layer so if you're not a ZK developer you're just like an application developer maybe you don't even know that much about ZK one really nice thing about the platform is you can go to Alpha doing. XYZ discover and you can just see like what projects are out there like what proof systems are people using what PE what is possible with ZK like what can you do today like you know what interesting class of applications even exist um and I think like that Discovery layer is really important for ZK to even just like educate people on what's possible if that makes sense um and that's like something we thought was like really underemphasized in the space um so yeah the platform is like General ZK

developer tooling helps you manage like circuit build circuit artifacts like remote building one-click verifier deploys um scalable apis for proof generation hosted relays like manage production grade infrastructure onchain requests offchain API calls for proofs like all that stuff that if you're a zika developer today like is a huge paino and I think a PLP solves a lot of that um and yeah in general it tries to make like ZK applications just like more legible to the public um yeah so that's kind of like the goal of the platform and we've been using it internally to build these like clients we've also been building like for example the Lio Oracle

that I mentioned earlier with the platform like a lot of our ZK projects are built with our platform and and it's really helped us go faster and like now we're like opening it up to the world and we announced it publicly because now we want other people to start like building with it because it's finally in like a spot where it's I think good enough for external use and I this is um I don't know a little bit of a like soft question but um like let's say you had this developer platform that as it stands today when back when you guys were developing the nosis chain uh you said before that took you six months like what would you roughly say like having these ZK tools but not having any of the bridging infrastructure and like

just coming to the table knowing you want to build a bridge like how long do you how quickly do you think that you could um get the job done yeah I think with the platform it would honestly have taken us maybe one to two months to get it done um yeah like I think a lot of the stuff we had struggled with or is like directly solved by the platform cuz like we created the platform so we were solving our own problems um but yeah like even with our new like clients they took one to two months to like develop um I mean developing the circuit Primitives are you know took longer but now that's kind of done and like reusable by anyone but then the actual

process of productionize months and that just like would have not been possible before so yeah I think it's like a 10x over like our previous experience and it's also a lot more fun because I think the platform takes care of all the boring stuff that no developer likes to do like all the infrastructure like you know like setting up a ec2 and like you know pushing your artifacts to S3 and like setting up manage build pipelines and stuff like that all sucks like that's not that's not the fun part about building with ZK and like we take care of that so you like I think it's also a lot more fun because like you can focus on like the interesting math Parts the interesting circuit Parts like the stuff that's actually specific to your application and then all the Like Glue

and like behind the scenes stuff is like taken care of for you you know so um I I'll tell you a quick story uh this summer I had the opportunity to have a few minutes with Professor Dan Bon and um he I mentioned to you before and I've mentioned on this podcast many times I went to Stanford and so um he was like oh do you know the story of alchemy like where they came from and I was like no I mean I guess I don't really and he's like it's a pretty cool story essentially and I forget like exactly what it was but they were either developing a game or a DEX or or something and it didn't really go that well but what they realized is they spent so much time dealing with RPC stuff that they realized like oh like everything that we did in order to Sol

solve our own problems is a product and we should just like double down on this thing that's actually pretty great and so um you know I I back in the day in like 2013 I was messing around with stuff um not blockchain stuff but I was messing around with building apps that could send text messages and like twilio was just perfect you know you didn't have to worry about like networks or how to communicate across um like any of this stuff you just it was literally an API and like maybe you had to fund your account but um it was just taken care of for you and so I think like there's so much opportunity in what you're doing and there's so many like clear examples like Alchemy or a billion things outside

of our industry that um this is a to a unicorn that um I'm just like so excited for you and so impressed and um yeah just excited so congratulations oh thank you no that that means a lot um and yeah know it's like great to hear I mean I think it's just like the start of like a lot more work to come but um yeah no I think like the early support is like always very meaningful um and yeah it's like great to hear that like I think people like you who are like really familiar with the DK space are like excited about the ideas because we've been like hard at work you know building this stuff for a while well what I just I like really really believe that like I love all you guys but like we're really big nerds and I think that like not

everyone wants to be as like nerdy as us and like let's let the application developers focus on building applications and like the game right now um whether it's what you're doing or what a lot of the hardware companies are doing or a lot of people are doing in their own way is like let's create let's turn this from uh Moon ma gibberish into things that developers are familiar with like apis and um just modern like computer science paradigms yeah cool so um last few minutes like can you tell us uh like what are like how is the developer platform going to evolve like what are the things that you're excited to um to to add on is it more about like

performance is it more about new features around the harnessing is it more about new proof system systems like what are you excited about as now that the developer platform is externally facing yeah I think the thing I'm most excited about is like the applications like what are people going to build that's new with kind of like the tooling um so that's really exciting I think integration of new proof systems is also really exciting so today we support like a lot of the popular ones like circom gark and Pony 2 but I'm also really excited to integrate things like Noir um or even like I think ZK VMS and ZK EVMS are becoming like really accessible and so I think for some use cases like that may not need as much

performance I think they're also a great fit um and so for example we can imagine like integrating for example an existing ZK evm or a ZK VM into the platform and making that accessible for people um or things like ZK wasm or like what R Zer is doing or or Scrolls Z KVM I think are like really exciting to integrate into the platform um so yeah I think like basically applications and then also Integrations of like to make it easier for those application developers to like use that tooling um it's like very exciting um and yeah I think those are like kind of the things that we're looking forward to doing um and always improving the developer experience with

like the customer feedback that we get well if I can make one request is can you like start doing the Stark stuff because like I am so impressed by them but I don't understand why it's like such a kind of segregated community and I like I understand it's like such a different amount of math but like I want I don't understand how there's so much TV on starkware and somehow I don't know any of the starkware people yeah yeah like we could integrate Cairo onto the platform too like you write Cairo and then it's deployed that's actually pretty interesting and I I had not thought of that yeah no Cairo could be a supported proof system for sure cool well we can talk afterwards about my like really just off the cuff bad business ideas but but uh Uma thank you so much for joining us on the podcast um

before I let you go can you just tell everyone where they can find you where they can find C sync and if they just like want to learn how to um get involved in ZK or like learn the things that they need to learn in order to build on cinct like what is your recommendation yeah so you can follow our Twitter account atsinc laabs on Twitter we generally post all of what's going on there um and then you can go to our website cinc doxyz and like kind of describes our platform and like what it does and kind of like our philosophy too um I think our blog is also a good resource um for like a lot of our announcements and kind of like the vision of what's going on and then yeah the platform is available at alpha. syct

doxyz so you can go check it out like anyone can like deploy our demo application there um it's still an ala so if you want to deploy your own ZK thing uh you just have to like reach out to us but and then we can whitelist you and then you can like go topl playy your own repo um yeah those are kind of like all the resources we'll probably have like some docs coming soon um I think right now the best way is just to like reach out to us on Twitter or DM and then um yeah we can like help you guide you through that process we're always like super happy to help um yeah I think those are kind of like the main ways of interacting with with us and the platforming US cool awesome well thank you so much Uma again I um I hope I just

like made clear how like awesome I think what you're doing is and how excited I am for you and uh just wish you the best so uh thank you again for the time and I don't know have a good rest of your day yeah thanks so much for having me