‘Protocol Councils’ Can the Blockchain Ecosystem Trust These People?

Transcript

the answer is like complex systems fail in complex ways so you might worry that like well you know one AVS gets slashed but there's a big overlap between the operators in this AVS and another one and then suddenly that second AVS kind of also ends up with some slashing conditions and now maybe a third AVS and right so you can get this kind of contagion from one AVS to another if you set things up wrong uh and in that kind of high-risk scenario now suddenly you've got a bunch of operators who are also ethereum operators who are suddenly being you know penalized for their beh that has nothing to do with ethereum and so if that ripples back into ethereum now we have to worry that somehow you know ethereum is trying to set up its own set of incentives but those incentives have nothing to do with the

incentives in the avss that live on top and so at least in principle you could have [Music] problems hello and welcome to the protocol podcast I'm Brad C here with my co-hosts Margot nykerk and Sam Kessler so excited to dive in today's show the latest news and developments and technology behind crypto and blockchains first please do not forget to subscribe to our Weekly Newsletter the protocol on coindesk.com and let's get right into it we did have a lot of good stories today

uh that we were thinking about covering we had to pick a couple but one of them was falic beran's 30th birthday birthday uh and he's already created an entire uh blockchain ecosystem how many people do that before age 30 anyway all right let's get into it our first story here Lio da rebukes layer Zero by endorsing Rivals Wormhole Axel for Crypt Bridge it's it's quite a mouthful uh Sam this is your story a lot of words that I didn't know five years ago but but um yeah tell us a lot of words but it's a fascinating story tell

us you know just give us a the uh you know the eighth graders version of this story yeah a lot of words a lot of companies here um the story itself I think it's kind of just entertaining um but it gets to some like core ideas and Concepts around Dows decentralized autonomous organizations which are these you know organizing groups on blockchains that kind of govern protocol like Lio the liquid staking protocol on ethereum um and they do this governance by tokens um they have tokens that they distribute to um members of the you know blockchain community that they live on and those tokens can usually double as votes in some sort of a governance

system so Lio da you know Lio which is again liquid protocol on ethereum one of the biggest protocols in crypto generally I think the biggest def5 protocol it um needed to find a new bridge to you know shuttle tokens from the ethereum blockchain where the LI of protocol lives and it's staked eth Ste token which is one of the biggest tokens on ethereum lives to other blockchains and this thing happened recently where layer zero which is the biggest bridge provider in this sort of like competitive Turf battle between infrastructure providers that do this bridging they released a product that allows users to do this thing that I was talking about moving Ste to a bunch of

other blockchains but they did this apparently without talking first to the Lio da without submitting a proposal going through this whole due diligence process that the LI OD da says it's supposed to do and as a result L DA got really really pissed off and they later had a new election where they kind of like surreptitiously you know dis disgraced admonished um this layer zero bridge and said hey from now on we're going to give our formal endorsement to this other bridge for bridging tokens from the ethereum blockchain um to um specifically in this case the binance BNB chain so they endorsed in this vote um they being Lio da in this vote two of

layer Zero's biggest Rivals um those Rivals being Wormhole and axel um I know that's like a big jumble of things again I hope that cleared it up somewhat but I'm sure you guys have questions around what we're talking about here and why it's important um but I I'll leave it at that for now I think this is this is really interesting because it kind of gets into what you know a lot of people coin desare cover is this decentralized theater right like you have the mechanisms to set up a dow and yet for one I guess who are the people who are making decisions to override the Dow and two what's the point of having a dow then if these kind of decisions can't be made in a decentralized way right like where where where does this go yeah I

mean that that's like the interesting the core thing about this which is like layer zero they you know ethereum is a permissionless protocol anybody can build on top of it and layer zero created a bridge one of the beautiful things about this system is that they're able to kind of create this thing where they lock up stake deth in a smart contract on ethereum and then reissue it on other blockchains in a wrapped form that's how a bridge Works they're able to do that without permission from anybody but they didn't ask for permission and now they're getting in trouble for it so layer zero will will probably say um hey that that's screwed up like you know the whole point of blockchains is that I'm you know open source permissionless I'm able to do something like this and I don't have to go to anybody for permission and they do

point to specific instances on the Lio da where some of their competitors specifically axar did something like this where they launched a bridge without like submitting a formal proposal that got voted on by the community like the community apparently wanted in the layer zero case axar went and did this in the past for the cosmos ecosystem so they're currently issuing tokens from ethereum to Cosmos and they it sounds like behind the scenes got some sign off in some offline process from some Lio da committee to do the same sort of thing that ler Zer was doing and nobody was pissed in that case so it's very confusing like what the rules are so it's immature it's you know there there there yeah there's a lot to talk about I'll stop for for a second

but Brad you you look like you're meant to say something well I was just gonna say you know what is this say about the the state of competition among all these bridge bridge projects right I mean it's pretty intense yeah I mean one way to look at this is even though you see Lido da throwing its weight um it its you know name and credibility reputation behind two of these other Bridge providers which is kind of like a tacit um endorsement of their you know technical um you know their security because bridges are the main things that Tech like typically get hacked and so they're saying hey two of players Zero's competitors are better in this case they're more decentralized also you know better for you know better for for um

you know creating a plug andplay solution that doesn't lock people into certain kinds of bridges anyway they say that these competitors are better um but it also underscores the fact that layer zero has I I don't have specific numbers but they have enough of the bridge market share they are the market leader they have enough of that market now that two of its biggest Rivals that are between themselves rivals are willing to team up with one another to create a proposal to bridge tokens that don't lock people into specific ecosystems so yeah this is almost a you know sign that layer zero might be on its way to winning this really competitive race at least as it stands right now and as as it's been defined right now yeah I mean

especially with Lio you know becoming such a huge Force too but uh you know and we've talked about I mean since last year about just just how many blockchains there are all of a sudden and more all the time you know and and these bridges are going to play such a key role in connecting it all right and what does an endorsement mean in this world too because you've got a bunch of protocols that live on top of all these ecosystems that are now throwing endorsements behind different infrastructure that anybody can use whether it's endorsed or not so I think that these also proves as a test case like hey open source again permissionless you can use anything you can build anything what does it mean for certain things that do the same thing as

other things to have an endorsement from a credible project like does that actually like are we you know specifically in this case going to see more traffic flowing through the infrastructure that Lio DA has endorsed um yeah does that matter they've all got their BFFs yeah yeah and is that good I mean what's decentralization if it's all buddy buddy behind the scenes let's that is a that's a cool story and thanks for you know explaining it to us Sam um all right Margo uh the next Story coming your way is your story um as blockchains pushed toward decentralization these people serve as

ultimate Guardians uh this story started off as the polygon protocol Council story that you were doing Margo and uh it's such a cool one why don't you tell us about it well this all started because you know as many know polygon is on its road map to redefine the blockchain and its ecosystem as and as part of that they have decided to create a polygon protocol Council so I was like what is a protocol Council so I I just started to ask questions like is there a need for this like what is the purpose behind this like some skepticism and I think like as the reporting went on my ultimate conclusion was like okay I understand why there there's a a council like this that's created so what is this

coun Council right basically it's made up of this specific council is made up of 13 members that are there to maintain the security of the protocol they are there's like there two instances where they sort of come into play the first one is is through the like normal governance process where there's some kind of protocol change that needs to be made to the network um and they're involved in that governance framework um and they sign off on implementing those changes after it's approved by the community um and goes through various stages but also in the event that there is a major you know a hack or something that needs IMM mediate attention this Council can be called on to implement

those changes and override this governance framework they framed it as sort of a way of a step in the right direction towards full decentralization because the ultimate goal is for the blockchain to run itself for the protocol just to control its own code while the other end of the spectrum is having some like some other protocols that um some of the members on on on the protocol Council have told me some there's some other protocols that have foundations that like purely run the security and maintain the security of the blockchain and this is sort of this intermediary where there are people involved in this who are not who are involved sort of with polygon but not necessarily working for polygon who have an interest in the road map of polygon um to implement these security changes

to follow the kind of governance for this but also be there in the event that something happens because ultimately you know layer twos and and these rollups they're fairly new networks so they don't have the ability to control themselves right now it's too nent there's too there's too much of a risk to have some kind of bug and that's why there's this as one person I interviewed said there's this lesser evil step that they need to take which is creating these councils so that there can be that kind of backup in the event something big to the protocol happens in terms of its security yeah I think you you mentioned something interesting in your piece um around like just broadly the inconsistency that you have between these different implementations of a

protocol Council of a security Council so obviously like you just said like this is a weird sort of a system where you have these you know decentralized code-based systems that are governed by human beings that key parts of the chain so it's like doesn't matter if the rest of it is decentralized ultimately if these 12 or however many people in some cases control a multi Sig address that you know um has control over the funds that bridge things from one project to another like you know maybe to to get a little bit more specific one specific thing that I thought was crazy about your piece you know I want to write more about soon with one of our colleagues Danny Nelson is like optimism their protocol Council they have this setup where it's Anonymous and a lot of

protocols do this with regards to who actually has the um key controlling the multisig for the optimism Bridge um so this is one of the biggest protocols in crypto there's random people that we I mean they're not random but we don't know who they are who control things they say that's for security but you know not only are we trusting humans but we're trusting humans who we don't know who they are there's definitely an inconsistency with that I think and and I briefly mentioned that in the piece and this is something definitely that you should get more digged a whole into because I'm I was when I was writing this I was trying to figure out who uh from the optimism side and they call it a security Council arbitrum also has one they like these names are sort of all over the place but they all basically do

the same thing protocol and Security Council so the optimism one yes they say we we don't share how many people are on this Security Council and we also don't share their identities because in the you know to protect the security of the network poing on on the other hand is saying something differently they're saying look we are all public figures you know who we are and there's there's 13 of them someone I spoke to is the creator of EC in Paris right so that's that's a pretty public figure the other one is someone that does a lot of the security audits for polygon and also some of these layer twos to have and they and they said specifically that they chose to release their identities because they want to give credibility and that in the event that something happens they can hold them accountable or that the that the ecosystem can sort

of trust these people so it is interesting to see sort of like who these people are another thing that like needs to be explored a little bit is that sometimes on some of these councils there are multiple of the same people like Justin Drake is on from the ethereum foundation is on the polygon one and believe I believe he's on another one and I believe it's arbitrum but I could be wrong the arbitrum one if I remember yeah right and so you know you would hope that Justin Drake is I I haven't spoken to Justin Drake about this but like in theory you would hope that he's smart enough to have different keys for or put them in different places but you know maybe someone makes a human error and mistake and they get hacked or their keys lost there's always bugs there's always always Danny had that

story one of our colleagues last week where there was a dow I mean this is a little bit of a a side you know I'm Sidetrack from what we're talking about currently but like there was a dow that held a bunch of Treasury funds in a multisig that was configured in such a manner or didn't have a flip switched in in such a manner that allowed for only one of 12 of The multi6 Centers usually you need a majority that's the point of a multi only one of 12 people could sign off and move all the funds so one of those 12 was like oh oh I I can just take this money and and they did oh my god mulick um it it's pretty pretty hilarious what's the point of a multii then yeah none um there's lit but it is funny everybody trust

everybody well Margot that was such a cool story I mean I it's like I feel like some of these you know the layer twos they kind of move in herd sometimes you know they're all you know they did the blockchain in the Box all at the same time and now they're doing these security councils but there's to your point there's always some differences in how they do it right yeah it really I mean it really also depends on the I think they all have like a sub like a subculture um you know these these layer twos and so they sort of stick to that as well I don't see any of optimism Maxis going after optimism for their Anonymous Security Council and and polygon Maxis are probably happy with what's going on with the polygon

Security Council so or protocol Council I'm getting them mixed up too but you get the gist so I mean these things defined right they weren't a few years ago a couple years ago that you started seeing these things you actually for the first time I mean it gave people a reason a thing to scrutinize because they actually Define their security practices but often times what happened was the security until again a couple years ago would be held like in the case of arbitrum in the arbitrum foundation it would just be them or offchain Labs rather the developing firm that created this this infrastructure giving an example I don't actually know if that's how it worked in that specific case but anyway at least you see that they're doing things in such a manner as to try to decentralize things further yeah totally

all right well that is a fascinating discussion um let's wrap it up there when we come back we've got Riad wabby co-founder and CEO of Cubist uh he's also uh on the faculty at Carnegie melon um and I spoke with him a couple months ago and it was a great discussion so we've got him coming up and uh talking about some of these same issues actually in terms of various uh security aspects we'll be right back calling all developers score a consensus 2024 developer pass for just $19 but Act Fast only a limited number of these passes are available you may

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is a developer of Hardware backed non-custodial key storage and signing infrastructure that enables companies to protect staking keys and secure withdrawals it sounds it's quite a mouthful as a lot of these things are RI but you know Riad is also by the way great at explaining things because he is a a a professor uh in this case he is on the electrical and computer engineering faculty at Carnegie melon University um and he's been around at Academia a lot but is also an entrepreneur here um Riad thank you for joining us thanks for having me really uh looking forward to

the chat yeah yeah well we're looking forward too all right I was thinking about how we could get into this Riad and I thought it might be good if you know two minutes three minutes like make it quick but try to orient people in terms of kind of like top of the you know crypto taxonomy blockchain and then homing in on exactly the the problem that y'all are focusing on yeah so um you know in some sense uh maybe this is one way to think about it let's say is um actually like keys are kind of everything right like every time you interact with a blockchain what are you doing well you find you interact with a node Etc but if you want to

actually have an effect on the world you have to generate a signature and post it right like that's kind of the fundamentals right um and so you know in some sense like that that's that's your interface to the whole world um and so there's a lot of Leverage there um but there's also of course a lot of danger and we've seen I I think in the prior segment there was a big discussion about like well how do you manage the keys and um uh yeah so I I think our perspective on this is that you know there are a lot of things that individuals and companies can do to improve their security posture just by thinking about like what is it that my keys should do what should they be able to do what shouldn't they be able to do and so being able to you know

in some sense say look this key has certain things that it can do and then everything else will just be ruled out by say the hardware or by you know some system that lives around the key that that kind of just protects it and makes sure that it can only be used for the right things so you can think about doing a lot of different things with that you know if it's your wallet you could say look I know that today I'm only going to be trading you know with a couple uh let's say a couple I'm gonna hit a couple dexes no other transactions should be allowed okay if zooming out you know if I'm doing some kind of trading strategy well I can sort of build a model for like what are the trades going to look like what are those transactions going to look like and then

my my key can actually enforce like you're actually making a transaction that is consistent with what you said your trading strategy was and then you mentioned validators this is a big area where we've been putting a lot of thought and there I I think for a lot of folks in the ethereum ecosystem for example basically if you're running a validator the thing that you're most worried about is am I gon to get slashed right because that's that's kind of the disaster scenario um in some sense getting slashed is just a matter of like signing the wrong message I mean forget in some sense that is it like if you sign the wrong message you get slashed if you don't sign the wrong message you don't get slashed so if you can somehow say well look this key knows this message is bad and this message is good

and it'll only sign the good one I mean maybe that sounds silly maybe it sounds like too reductive but in fact you can do that like the the slashing condition for ethereum is actually pretty simple and it's something that your key in some vague sense can enforce on its own and so that's the system that we've built we've built a system where you can actually just build the policies into the key and so for folks who are doing things like validation what that means is they can just have confidence that even if everything else goes off the rails even if they mess up their infrastructure even if their client has a bug in it which is something that we've seen in the ethereum ecosystem and I think we're going to continue to see especially with reaking coming on um even if all of those kind of disaster

scenarios happen as long as your key is sort of making the right decisions about whether it should or shouldn't sign something you're safe um and so this is fundamentally the the kind of approach that we're taking and and just again to help to ground us you know tell us exactly like who is your customer generally speaking you know is there one or is there a particular ecosystem you're focused on and and what do you do for those customers when we're talking about validation our Focus has up till now been primarily in the ethereum ecosystem and sort of by extension in the kind of reaking ecosystem growing up around it so you know we announced last year a partnership with igen layer we've been really kind of thinking hard about

how to secure avss how to make operators confident uh in that you know as they enter that ecosystem uh we're also working with the folks at Babylon so that's sort of an interesting uh Twist on on reaking you know staking Bitcoin through a really cool piece of technology um so we're working closely with them we've announced a partnership there too um so on the on the validation side that's our our primary focus so you've mentioned this reaking thing um a few times maybe to ground our listeners um you you said Ian layer specifically this is one of these protocols that's popped up the main one um you know that that comes to mind over the past couple of years that lets people take the the ethereum in in the case of aen ler that they've staked on or The Ether rather that they've sted on

the ethereum network and use it to not only help now secure ethereum but to secure other networks other protocols um and um there's a lot of risks with that which is kind of what you're nodding to with this whole idea of you know key security when it comes to reaking can you speak a little bit about you know first off what those risks are why are people kind of concerned about this ballic buan being one the idea that ethereum itself should just be kind of like one network doing one you know sort of um thing security wise anyway you know I I'll let you talk a little bit about what those RIS risks are yeah there are a bunch of different risks and it depends on which perspective you're taking which risks you're thinking about so uh vitalik's uh take on this I mean he he's got a very nuanced take on this

and obviously knows a ton about the what's going on um but his take is essentially like how do we protect the ethereum ecosystem from you know other ugly stuff that could happen right and what kind of ugly stuff could happen well you know if there's some kind of event where a bunch of people have restak um then you know you could imagine some kind of and I mean very hypothetically some kind of you know contagion type event where you know one bad event in the reaking ecosystem sort of ramifies in the in the ethereum staking layer right a bunch of people get slashed for stuff that doesn't really have to do with ethereum it has to do with the reaking so that's yeah I mean that's obviously something to leverage almost right it's like you're Levering up your exposure or the

exposure of the ethereum protocol exactly right so if I'm an operator that's basically what I'm doing when i'm operating as a restating operator I I I stake my ethereum and then I say well look since I've staked the ethereum I also want to you know participate in this other network that basically gets its security from the fact that I've stake ethereum and so now if I mess up in the sort of secondary Network that can have ramifications for my stake in ethereum right so there's an interesting thing here and this is like now on the on the technical risk side um so the these igen layer defines these these entities called avss These are um autonomously valid Services um and the idea there is each of these avss

is um or actively validated sorry I made a mistake there um each of these Services is essentially developing um their own uh consensus protocol where the stake that they're um using to sort of have people participate in the proof of stake is at least partially derived from ethereum stake so there there's sort of this derivative uh of ethereum stake and that is what gives you uh you know the ability to to validate these in these services so those avss can Define their own slashing conditions right so in ethereum if you double sign or if you do a surround sign you know there are these kind of technical conditions for what constitutes slashing and ethereum has you know designed their system so that you get slashed if you do things

that are really bad for the ethereum consensus avss can do the same thing they can say you know here's the the the the set of conditions under which you would get slashed and some of those are completely or you know uh isomorphic to the ones in ethereum you know if you're running a consensus protocol you might say double signing you get slashed but you could you can dream up basically anything you want right so you could come up with some crazy uh condition like well you know if 50% of the validators go offline all the validators get slashed which seems nuts but like somebody might opt into that if it paid them enough they might say well we're going to take the risk right but so the worry and I'm not saying that I this is always going to happen or that this is likely to happen but the worry is that

somehow you get a bunch of these abss that you know all have these kind of weird slashing conditions it becomes really hard to reason about what happens in some bad event and then suddenly the bad event occurs and now in like I think the concern again I'm not saying that this is likely is that somehow that that affects the underlying security the security of of ethereum what is the somehow um I I think that's like the missing piece for a lot of us um yeah so I I mean the answer is like complex systems fail in complex ways so you might worry that like well you know one AVS gets slashed but there's a big overlap between the operators in this AVS and another one and then suddenly that second AVS kind of also ends up with some slashing conditions and now maybe a third AVS and right so you can

get this kind of contagion from one AVS to another if you set things up wrong uh and in that kind of high-risk scenario now suddenly you've got a bunch of operators who are also ethereum operators who are suddenly being you know penalized for their behavior that has nothing to do with ethereum and so if that ripples back into ethereum now we have to worry that somehow you know ethereum is is trying to set up its own set of incentives but those incentives have nothing to do with the incentives in the avss that live on top and so at least in principle you could have problems it's almost like analogous to like the whole Terror thing that we saw a couple years ago um where in a completely different way you had this like system somewhere that had all these weird conditions that were you know

inflating the value or whatever of this of this asset that was then being used to secure and run and and power a bunch of other things somewhere else it ended up crashing everything all the way to institutions to FDX um and and everything that relied on it so you know it's just one more of those things that we see so much in finance and in particular in crypto yeah I mean we're we're sitting here and we're talking a lot about the risks that are associated with reaking and and and every and all the prot or Innovations and protocols that are coming out of reaking on on igen layer or or you know setting up an ABS I'm wondering like in your view this whole reaking ecosystem that's emerging is this something that is viable or is this something that is is um like not a

trend but just like a hot thing that's happening I I want yeah yeah like it's just like like why why do we need why does reaking need to like be a thing or or why is reaking needed for for for blockchains if if it is at all yeah I so I think first of all it absolutely is viable like we've been talking about risks because I mean you know it's important to assess them but I think there's absolutely huge upsides so one huge upside of the reaking ecosystem is that it provides you kind of a base layer on which to build new technology where you're not Reinventing the wheel so you know the the reaking ecosystem gives you kind of the fundamentals of if

I want to have a proof of stake chain I need to find people who are going to opt in I need to have them run a validator I need to make sure that all that kind of stuff works and so all of that infrastructure is basically there for you and now you can focus on the thing that you're doing that's bringing the you know the bringing the the sort of the new piece the new the new interesting stuff to the ecosystem so I think what we're going to see is that this unlocks a lot of innovation it's gonna you know we're going to see people who are coming up with kind of all all like very interesting kind of crazy things where they've been able to focus just on the new piece just on the thing that they that they're bringing to the table and not on kind of Reinventing the

wheel so I think that's the reason to be super optimistic about this the question you know terms of the design principle of Designing things you know a for failure be assuming that there's malicious actors out there right and if there is a way that people can do bad things they will you know but I mean here we're talking about using as a validator using these anti-s slashing you know uh mechanisms to avoid void getting slashed but you know some people might not take those precautions or use those

systems right and so how do you build a system that can withstand those people who don't do it yeah great question so I think this so first of all I think the standard answer to you know how do we like how do we withstand people who are just gonna whatever it might be maybe it's not that they're malicious necessarily but that they you know they're trying to run at the absolute lowest cost they're trying to cut every corner just trying to you know make yield without putting you know much thought into it um I think first of all that's the biggest risk right like the incentives are make the money you know kind of YOLO um and I mean really right so I mean I think honestly the answer is that on top of all of this like on top of this

formal system of you know machines interacting and a way that's specified by a protocol we're going to have informal systems of information uh and maybe more formal ones eventually too but basically what you're going to see is something similar to today when somebody saysi want to invest in a liquid staking protocol I mean the very first thing that people say is well here are the three that you should think about because they're the ones that have the best reputation they're the obvious on we're going to have a similar reputation system uh for the broader reaking ecosystem so you know if I'm going to put money into an operator I'm G to presumably choose an operator that gives me the right balance of risk and reward right obviously they're going to be some people who are super conservative only going into the very lowest risk things um and presumably you

know those operators will you know will see a lot of traffic but there are other operators who will be very clear we're going to go into risk your avss we're going to give you more yield as a result that's great that's the kind of risk you want to take the kind of risk you don't want to take is the operator doesn't care messes up does things badly and that's why I lose money right like you're not getting paid for to I mean the operator's getting paid more to cut corners but probably you're not getting more yield because you went with an operator who cut corners or at least not much more so making sure that people have can make this informed decision like this operator is doing the right thing they're they're they're taking the right approach to their infrastructure they're you know actually trying to

prevent slashing and mistakes and all this kind of thing that's going to be important for people who are actually putting their money in and so I think what we're going to see is this information ecosystem we're already seeing folks talking about reaking risk how we can categorize these things how we can you know build Insurance products and other kind of derivative products on you know based on the risk from The Operators and so I think a lot of that kind of thing as we as that grows up in the ecosystem will kind Drive money towards quality now if I can ask a completely different kind of question you're you know on the faculty at a very esteemed um university particularly when it comes to the you know the discipline of computer science and computer engineering which is you know where you work um I wonder um just you know from

your perch there have you noticed um engineering students um computer scientists programmers still moving to blockchain Tech and still working at blockchain crypto companies have you seen them move instead towards AI what's the trend looked like over the past few years yeah I mean first of all absolutely the answer is tons of students are still extremely interested in this but that's true of AI too right and and to be clear like CMU has a fantastic AI department and like literally an entire department um and and so like the the answer is I think we see kind of a huge push towards both um I think okay so my my uh PhD adviser uh was Dan Bonet at Stanford uh and he

taught one of the I think one of the first like classes on sort of blockchain in the crypto world yeah I mean Dan's fantastic I love Dan um and so he I used to ask him about this like hey how does how does the enrollment for this class go he says well you know it kind of tracks a little bit the price of Bitcoin as Bitcoin goes up more people enroll in the class like year to year and I mean that's hilarious but I think it's I mean obviously it's a it's true right like there's more opper like that's a measure of opportunity unfortunately it's a trailing measure right so like the people who went in in 2021 and then graduated in 2022 like maybe saw a little uh shock but um so but but like on a on a serious note I'd say like

there's a ton of interest in um computer security cryptography all of the kind of elements that go into uh building in blockchains and then on top of that um you know there are a lot of students who are super uh like undergrads who are like super Advanced at writing smart contracts you know build defi protocols I mean it's kind of amazing um so yeah I'd say super strong interest and what we're starting to see now is a convergence people talking about you know how can I use ML and blockchain together you know whether it's uh you know zkl or whether it's right this kind of thing so I think that's an exciting future where we have people who are kind of crossing the streams and and really kind of putting together some interesting stuff we haven't imagined yet and just you know I think we're pro

we gotta probably wrap it up here Rian and this has been fascinating but you know how do you we've talked about this and we've already we've talked about doing the story we haven't done it but how do you as this you know entrepreneur in this crazy world you know that we're covering and that you're working in and it's you know so fast moving and so much information and there's so much to do how do you juggle that running this company with being a professor like is there is there a secret there like not really teaching that much or like how does how do you make it work or how does that work generally speaking um okay so

I I am actually teaching an undergraduate course this semester in in Prior semesters i' I've I've 's the course I'm just curious computer security yeah which is a fantastic course it's it's super fun um I think the students really love it um but okay honestly the answer is a little less sleep uh a little bit of uh a little bit of um you know uh working smarter not harder I mean trying trying to um you know be as productive as possible and I think you know this is something that you there there's a lot of synergy here so like a lot of the time when I'm thinking about a research question you know I can also kind of in the back of my head there's something that's very closely related maybe on the technical side in the company and so you know there's a there's a lot of times when I

can kind of get a little more bang for the buck just by kind of thinking a little smarter so but that said like at the at the bottom you know more work you just I think the only thing you can do is sleep a little less drink a little more coffee I feel like there's one key thing that you maybe forgot to mention which is grad students like that they must play a role in some way I would guess right teaching assistance um yeah yeah so shouts out to the ta's of our head TA in particular this semester is she's fantastic um my grad students are amazing they're extremely productive and they're just like totally like they're doing such a great job um I'm sure that they wish that they like had a little more of my time and I'm sorry to them um but but they are like really honestly

doing fantastic work and I mean that's one of the honestly that is kind of the major benefit of being at a place like CMU the grad students are and the undergrads are kind of unparalleled so I mean I I count myself lucky that that we have such great students amazing Rian thank you so much I mean fascinating discussion um we'd love to have you back at some point thanks for having me this has been uh super fun yeah all right well that is a wrap for this week's uh the protocol podcast thank you Riad for joining us thank you for listening to the protocol podcast if you have any questions about any stories or comments please do not hesitate to reach out to us at podcasts

coindesk.com subject lineth protocol you can listen to US Weekly on coindesk podcast Network or wherever you get your podcasts also please subscribe to our Weekly Newsletter the protocol on coindesk.com where we did actually have I think Riad your story about the story I wrote about cubis was featured in the protocol newsletter a couple months ago but anyway all right see you next week thanks a [Music] lot