S7 Ep. 10 - From Cells to DAOs: Boris Dyakov’s Journey in Science and Blockchain W/ Boris

Transcript

crypto is a casino but it's also a casino that lets you bet on new technologies my research has been focused on trying to say which proteins are located within specific subcompartments of the cell nucleus oh my God oh my God this is this is how super complex systems in biology and then I saw blockchain I'm like wow that's kind of easy come on man that's too easy Dai initially just sort of the idea of thinking about how to improve science using different Technologies from you know crypto web3 what have you some people will disagree but I I do think that like we kind of

have the tools to understand these systems really well and make informed decisions about how they should be built and organized and designed cuz science is hard work and you really you do you don't do it for the money you do it because you love it but sometimes you start thinking like is it worth the sacrifice when I could be happy doing something else none of us feel okay and they just like started they were small projects got a couple hundred couple thousand dollars and now they are multibillion dollar companies like how crazy is that the the market cap I remember we had this impact reported gitcoin come out when I was there it's really cool because it's not really a dow but it kind of is but we're not calling it a dow but it it is sort of like a community with some governance

it's it's a c yeah welcome to the green pill. network podcast if you're just joining us we're building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers using crypto to bring positive sum digital systems to the world this podcast features the people who are doing it and we publish a season of 5 to 10 episodes every couple months this season is about how to Dow I releasing a book with my co-author H Carr who is also a dow native person and we are really excited about helping people find prosperity and to help them thrive in the frontier for time in Memorial people have gone to the frontier in order to find new prosperity new opportunities and our generation's

Frontier is the internet we want to teach people about the future of dows the future of Internet coordination and this season of how to Da is all about how to we do that how do we Dow how do we find more prosperity in the internet Frontier and this guest season of 5 to 10 episodes is going to be about how to doubt um the next voices that you'll hear will be myself or my guest co-host punar talking about how to Dow hope you enjoy this season see you peace welcome to the how to Dow podcast brought to you by Green pill. Network today uh we are kicking things off with an incredible guest Boris Dio Boris is a phd's candidate scientist and innovator who's

bringing the words of Cutting Edge biology and blockchain Technology we will discuss his fascinating research his vision for decentralized science and how he using blockchain for to reimagine the future of scientific collaboration and incentives so let's get started hey Boris welcome hey punar nice to be here nice to see you thank you so you know I was not reading all your papers because it's just too difficult for me to understand all the research you are doing but I tried the one you put uh together for the lame audience to

understand uh what actually you're researching on and maybe let me give you a shot so what we are basically tracking it's some uh connections uh in our cells which are very fluid so they are actually not interconnected like you know tied together but they are basically very fluid they are like networks and they sometimes work together sometimes don't and then we don't know if they work together or not before or and now you are like basically mapping this whole network of uh different proteins and figuring out who is working with whom for uh what reasons is that kind of the way or honestly you're actually you're actually like a a

good good part of the way there like directionally everything you just said is is basically true it's just all the little details to fill in to to be more precise with things but yeah I think that's actually a great uh a great sort of like take on on what my you know research career has been focused on nice and like so like we don't know it now I assume that's why I doing the research so what the research like is contributing to like when we actually figured that out like what what viil realize yeah so I mean I like to so my PhD that I'm almost done trying to wrap it up just need to finish a bit of thesis writing and some revisions for paper it's in the department of molecular genetics at the University of Toronto and molecular genetics is like a

very broad term it's like saying biology it's really just referring to the scale of biology that we're looking at and I really like to think about this sort of work as reverse engineering biology because we have uh living things made of cells and you know these living things evolved over billions of years they are super super complex machines very complex systems with lots of different parts that are very Dynamic and even like the simplest like single- celled organism that is a machine that's more complex than something humans have built or designed by orders of magnitude super complicated using various uh like chemical biochemical analytical techniques we can Fay or see or explain which parts are there you know which

proteins or what DNA RNA different biomolecules are present inside the cell and proteins are basically the machines that make life happen they're like the little little Parks inside cells that do things so the thing is we don't know what most of them do and there's even very basic information we don't have for most of the you know say 20,000 plus it's it's more than that but you know bottom low lowend estimate 20,000 different proteins in human cells so my research has been focused on trying to say which proteins are located within specific subcompartments of the cell nucleus and I could talk about this for hours but the important things to remember are like cells have compartments at least our cells UK carotic cells have compartments that we

call organel a lot of people are familiar with the mitochondria you know the PowerHouse of the cell or the nucleus which is kind of the control center it's where your DNA is kept your genome is kept where gene expression and Gene regulation happens and the thing is the nucleus actually has subcompartments that are called nuclear bodies and these are difficult to study for various reasons um but my research has been focused on like you said figuring out which proteins spatially associate with each other inside these structures so we can uh better explain how they work because if you know what a protein does and you know that it's part of a nuclear body you can start to explain maybe its function there so yeah basically created a map of over 2,000

proteins in human cells to try to explain this um and that's been the focus of my PhD work and uh I think there's a lot of fun parallels to draw between that and complex systems and blockchains for sure well yeah let's do that I think that would be and when I was thinking uh what you are describing you know the different kind of compartments and structures I'm like well how we can tie this to Da with maybe even AI to attach to it in some sense because like when I think about it you know we understand the structure as like this is the cow this is the sub team this is the you know another team or subow and then we tied to it some like the new AI model which is like the you

know uh neurons uh doing something which we don't understand actually and like giving us some some outcome so basically we are studying that kind of AI attached to it because we don't know what they are doing out there we like created the model but we have like no idea yeah yeah I mean that's uh that's that's one thing that I think I could tell the long story about how I got into crypto to make the long story short initially through dii but Dows as a concept got me very excited and I was sort of uh over the last few years kind of charting my way out of Academia and looking for other opportunities or things that excited me that I could do career-wise and yeah Dai initially just sort of the idea of

thinking about how to improve science using different Technologies from you know crypto web3 what have you um and Concepts like Dows and new ways of of collective ownership and organization that got me really excited and I went down the rabbit hole the ethereum rabbit hole and started learning about how all the technology works and why people care about it but another thing that kind of Drew me to all of this is that even though we're working with complex systems um that have a lot of complicated Parts compared to what I spend a lot of time studying in biology a lot of this Tech is just it's much simpler it's much more tractable the problems are much more more tractable really it's like I mean they're also new and you know we're not studying something that evolved over billions of years we're we're studying and designing

and improving things that people are actively building but it does feel like you know we can actually come up with very satisfying Solutions in a lot of cases I mean maybe some people disagree but I I do think that like we kind of have the tools to understand these systems really well and make informed decisions about how they should be built and organized and designed so basically what they are saying is like well I was studying this like super complex systems in biology and then I saw blockchain I'm like wow that's kind of easy uh it's like very similar but like you know I can actually see what is going on there and you know the systems are way simpler but then like in in my PhD research and what I see under the microscope and uh so what was your first actually project

in crypto when you kind of uh you know said like okay uh I will try to explore that mhm this is crazy to think about actually because now we're looking at three years ago I guess wow yeah it's it's been it's been three years since I've kind of been in the space um and at that time I was I was and I still am finishing my PhD um but I was spending a lot of time thinking about I guess entrepreneurship and realizing that was something I was interested in and that there were a lot of problems in science that I cared a lot about finding potential solutions to because I noticed there's a lot of problems in science um and they kind of boil down to incentive problems so I was thinking like how can

we bring more money to science how can we sort of fix the broken broken business models within biotech VC where it's super Capital intensive and super high- risk and you know not a lot of people can invest in this and and we don't really have incentives for experts like scientists or patient groups people who actually uh benefit from the development of medicines they don't have an opportunity to participate in the upside of of these discoveries and the commercialization of these drugs so I was thinking about those sorts of problems like how can we help scientists capture more value and ultimately how do we make it so more people want to be scientists so people who are passionate don't leave Academia um to look for a less philosophically fulfilling corporate job that pays a lot more

because science is hard work and you really you do you don't do it for the money you do it because you love it but sometimes you start thinking like is it worth the sacrifice when I could be happy doing something else um so anyway th those are my motivations and I actually met some people through Twitter so I was following all these biotech DCS and thinking maybe I would work in biotech DC after I graduate nice combination of like business thinking and scientific technical expertise you get to meet a lot of people anyway they were sharing this cool proposal for a project called labow which is still still around um still existing and I really loved the concept that that they had brought into the world with this proposal like let's have a dow where it's almost like a decentralized research institute and the community can

do work together you know contribute your scientific expertise and figure out ways to share in the the results you know like if this generates IP then the entire Dow and all the members and all the contributors will you know have some ownership of of this and this was sort of incubated by vow and uh and molecule who people who are familiar with Dai are definitely familiar with these names and they decid this should be its own thing and you know sort of put this out into the world I saw the proposal I reached out to the uh sort of like main founder Nicholas and just dm'd him and said hey I really love your idea you're thinking about a lot of the same problems that I'm thinking about I would love to get involved and he invited me to the Discord server and we just started kind

of jamming and you know progress on my PhD really slowed down because I was having so much fun there thinking about how to do all these things and that's that's really what kind of brought me into this whole world like I I think that's when I first started using Discord for example and i' been learning about uh in the sort of couple months leading up to that and starting to read articles and and dig deeper and you know follow that kind of stuff so it all kind of just like came at once and yeah so I was I was quite involved with the lab Dow for that first year during a lot of the community building Community growth the team went on to I I was working on my PhD you know full-time so I didn't drop that to join the core team or anything

but I stayed involved on the community side uh the team raised like over 4 million and they're still building now you know now now they're doing a lot of sort of biom like how do we have generative models um decentralized way that can do drug Discovery but this was like my entry point um and yeah nice no I that's like how you get into Dow you just invited to the Discord and uh then you figure out what you actually can do there uh exact yeah literally for me it was the same you know like a couple DS like I just like hey I love love your mission and I see you're struggling here I have some skills there so let me just help you out and like you might not get paid at the beginning then they see like

wow you are actually bringing tons of value so here is some Bounty or here's some part-time kind of gake that's perfect and then honestly I remember how you were explaining to me uh Le da at Edenberg uh we were at the maker party so it was not really the conference but it was the in church uh I remember that if people are familiar with e Denver like there is a big uh club which is called the church and it's actually a former uh Church there are always good parties there I remember we were talking a lot about the IP how you decentralize it and like should you kind of own it and stuff like that and it was actually the time we were working together in bengas Consulting so proba it was the

similar time you kind of enter Consulting yeah yeah yeah this is this this was the next thing that I got involved in um Dow wise because I was you know on one hand trying to learn more about how like big or organized Dows of lots of contributors work because I was uh involved in this small kind of Scrappy upstart Dow I got involved with with bankless Consulting super early days um and that was that was really fun that was like a real like the backstory was I was trying to get into Consulting as like the thing to do after my PhD and they basically said you don't have any real working experience so go do that and then reapply a lot of learning out of preparing for cases and all that stuff um and I felt like okay I I understand how this work is done I

could I could do some of it and then getting involved in Bank list Consulting within uh bow now it's called something else um Black Flag da Black Flag Dow yes yes I saw that I still subscribe to the newsletter of course but yeah it was really cool because I I got in there and met a lot of great people like yourself and a lot of people who are doing really cool things um still and I still run into them at conferences it was awesome like I saw Omen in uh in Bangkok at an event I was like oh man um and he he lives in Toronto so I run into him occasionally but um anyway basically I saw that it was like Wow anybody can kind of get involved here and if they bring value they can be rewarded and I remember I worked on uh some a couple

engagements with you doing some like design thinking workshops working with some other communities um and I basically like earned my way into like a full Bank listow membership by either you know getting tips or getting paid or or swapping some usdt cash sort of like payments for uh the bank list tokens and then I managed to get like a full it was L1 or l two membership so that was that was a really cool experience for me I got to meet a lot of people and it was just very empowering that it's like okay anyone can come in and if you can bring in dealflow and bring in um like work for this subow I guess at the time it was a subow before it spun out uh you you'll be rewarded for it you don't need to be like a partner to be able to like

bring deals into into the firm and I thought that was really cool that like really kind of inspired me it's not like I made a ton of money doing this but you know it was like a little bit on the side and and I learned a lot and it was like it opened my eyes to these possibilities yeah like uh I think this is the way how we wanted to to be and you know Bas Consulting is still running in a little smaller scale as everything it's you know in last two years like uh regrouping but we will have some um uh Christmas call actually in like two weeks so I will let you know uh so you can join because at the end of the day it's about people so we want to just like reconnect with the people we used to work with or we will work in the

future and like and I would say the Dows are about still like you know the tech is cool the blockchain is cool but at the end you work with the people and as you said like you know running into each other in the city you live or in the conferences and just like create this good community and basow I would say is one of the strongest Community I actually like been with like there is almost no Financial incentives uh within that da but those people like people still connect like we hosted uh e Denver kind of uh dinner last year it was like 30 people just show up like and like having like a strategy meeting about the

new branding and stuff like that and they all have their own jobs you know but they just love it uh so that's that's actually super cool and so definitely some big lessons in there for uh I think a lot of like projects and and communities or rather projects that have communities and are trying to uh grow communities and I I should reflect on that more given the kind of things I'm thinking about for work now yeah like actually like growing large and strong Community basda was great you know people really like stick together because they had the same like Mission you know the bank class like not the brand but the mission like go Bank class it was super strong and people like yeah we want to be Sovereign you

know we want to own our financial freedom and like so yeah that's definitely like learning for the community building um oh yeah agree with you there uh so when uh and then actually we worked together again at gitcoin oh yeah yeah yeah at gitcoin well I think you actually maybe left right before I joined or like you onboarded me and then I think yes I think it was like just an overlap the like actually did not work together but like we met a little bit in the Discord there yeah remember you got me you got me onboarded um I think to like all the VAR you know notion and whatever else I needed when I when I joined yeah cuz like I was like in the operation so like make sure that every contributor have

everything that they need to uh to work and so basically gitcoin was something on the like let's say it's not the dii only uh but it's not the Consulting as you did by class Consulting but it's something new so can you kind of elaborate what you actually done there yeah so um I was at gito for about six months uh from I guess January 2023 to around June um and the story there is I I got sort of full I knew about gcoin already but I met Scott Moore who's one of the uh one of the co-founders and he was one of the I guess like co-leads of the public goods

funding work stream which basically runs the well I guess things have been restructured since then but you know at the time they would run the uh gitcoin grants rounds and handle like fundraising and Partnerships for that so again I was focused on my PhD at the time but Scott had asked me if I was interested in in um coming on part-time to help figure out the next DSi round because there was a DSi round this is I forget which grants round it was but there was a d round which was pretty successful vitalic put a bunch of money into it a lot of projects kind of got funded and launched through that and there was excitement and interest in doing another one and it was it was also a cool time because the AL protocol and Grant stack were just launching around that time as well so what I sort of you

know instead of just like raising some funds there was some money left over um that had been allocated to a second D round from one of the the sponsors or Partners or donors or whatever and what basically happened was you know I could have just like run it as a normal sort of like round where I get some more money and then I I do all this but I wanted to experiment you know again being interested in decentralization and trying to see how we can make this stuff sustainable I thought it would be really great if we can have uh Community stewards actually run this right so I was like the I sort of like ran it but I I tried to decentralize my authority and and more act as like the liaison between gitcoin itself like the pgf workstream and and these Community stewards so I

you know I had some fun with this um this was I guess a little bit after eth Denver 2023 you know I kind of got a group chat going like a telegram group for like this like dii gitcoin community and I because I'd been involved in dii early on I knew a lot of the people in the space and i' like followed the whole dii thing really closely and I'm still you know still following it and we basically held like a small like election where we elected uh four stewards who had run around and be responsible for uh vetting projects and you know doing all the operations kind of stuff on the back end making sure that we're protected from civil Stuff Etc um and we did like a onchain vote using joke race so there's an unchain record of you know who voted for these

for these stewards who got elected there's a bunch of people who were interested you know and we we were lucky to have a bunch of community leaders from dii kind of take on the stewardship of the round raised a little bit more money um and overall I think we had like 80k in that round and that was really cool and you know uh around the same time I went to zalu because uh gitcoin was very involved there like the original zalu Montenegro and was spending a lot of time thinking about how to you know do more things with gitcoin make Grant rounds more aable uh working in gitcoin was definitely interesting you know like a real working Dow it was really fun so I mean I left well I yeah I stopped working at gitcoin I guess in June so a few months later and I was working on some proposals to

have these kind of like almost like subd Dows like community-led uh subd Dows that were somewhat autonomous but still got support from gcoin and I wanted to like try to shape the Dai Community into one of those um that didn't end up going through because there's a lot of sort of like restructuring happening at getcoin at the time but what was really cool is the stewards from that round and other leaders in the D Community they got together and they I think have done two more DSi rounds since then um you know as like a sort of community run round using uh gr stack and Al protocol um haven't followed that stuff too closely but it it has been really awesome to see that like others have kind of taken up taken up the mantle and kept the dii

rounds running um to make sure that some of these early exploratory projects can you know try to have a shot but succeeding I haven't thought about that stuff in a while but I'm I'm like huh turn not all right yeah that sounds like like you got out of money to you know projects and design and like now they launch and maybe be raised because that's like that's the purpose of gitcoin like it's not like you cannot really survive on gitcoin but you can you can get the good start and then you race you know later on or whatever you need basically to exact se but this is the this is the cake you know and I think uh Unis swop started like that one in so many optimism like tons of major projects started as get grantees yeah

you know and they just like started they were small projects got couple hundred couple thousand dollars and now they are multi-billion dollar companies like how crazy is that the the market cap I remember we had this impact reported gitcoin come out when I was there and it was it's really nice piece of uh you know marketing collateral um but it was like you know the the combined market cap of gitcoin former gitcoin grantees at like an alltime I was like in the in the billions like at least like 1.3 billion or something for some reason I remember that number because that's taking into account Unis swap one inch all these big projects that really did start off as G Gres it's amazing like the impact has been huge and and it should be even more now because I think Unis Swope alone is billion dollars

though yeah yeah yeah yeah there's been like I don't know 80 million in funds distributed through gitcoin um we could probably talk about gitcoin for hours and I'm sure a lot of people listening to this have opinions or yeah I will share the link in the show notes for the impact report because I think it's still live so I will find it and show I'll share it but like you said like you also been in zalu uh so not everyone knows what zalu is so I think uh you know the simple start with that is like vitalic again so whatever vitalic does and adors it happens so now he basically created this kind of uh movement uh where he thought it would be nice to connect for a little longer

period of time than uh Dem conference because it's usually very much Rush it's a weekend or week but less than University so you don't need to like spend four years or some some people spend even more time at the universities uh but like you're still connecting uh people and like creating those relationships basically and I think they came up with like two months being like the or six weeks being the ideal kind of time Horizon so how was the experiment actually so the Montenegro Zu You were in was the first one how was it yeah oh man um it was honestly it was like a pivotal I'd say like I saved for six weeks it was a pivotal six weeks in my life just because of um well was very unique

experience and just the people who who came through and who were involved were all like amazing and you know made like 200 friends kind of thing yeah so I mean the backstory for people who haven't heard of zalu but it's this popup City Network State co- living experiment that vitalic launched I guess like a year and a half ago basically the idea was yeah to sort of like get like 200 people to live together for two months and just like live together work together have these sort of mini conferences with different theme weeks eat lunch together there's very big longevity focus a lot of like Healthy Living um we would be doing group runs it was like and it was really kind of amazing a lot of really um wellknown ethereum researchers were

there because they were sort of co-working and like working on these ideas but they brought their families you know like Justin Drake was there with his family and stuff it was it was it was a really cute time very wholesome so how I like to describe it is it was it almost felt like well it was like a rolling conference like each week was a different sub event so there was one week which was a public goods funding focused you know public goods focused uh sort of like sub event there was an AI in crypto one network State stuff there was longevity stuff there was a synthetic bi sort of like mini conference which I was involved in as well and oh of course ZK was another one of like the big tracks but so people came in for these different tracks and it was like this like rolling conference

but it was also just like living life like there was a whole co-working Space set up and you know people were just like hanging out and working all day together or hosting little events and teaching each other things you know having breakfast together like I said and honestly what it kind of felt like was summer camp for nerds cuz we're all like living together in this kind of like unique environment and that's really I think the best way to explain the feeling it was like summer camp with a bunch of like nerds and I mean that in the best way possible of course um being a huge nerd myself but yeah um I went because well so I I got invited through dii related um sort of circles because of the people who were organizing this were were a lot of Beed out folks but

also because I was part of gcoin at the time it just seemed like a no-brainer too because gitcoin was quite involved with with organizing this or rather people from gcoin and also gcoin as an organization so I went and I'm super happy that I did it because when I first heard of it I was like this sounds crazy like vitalic is putting on this like Network State pop-up City thing in Montenegro and I thought I this sounds like too much like I need to focus on PhD um instead of like extending my winter in Europe for this crazy thing but then it was like how could I not go to this this sounds absolutely absurd it's like it'll be worth it just for the stories um but it ended up being worth so much more than that and like you know now there have been tons of these sort

of zalu um spin-off events like they didn't do another zalu but vitalic is still sort of helping a bunch of these other spin-offs that are happening Edge City a lot of people are familiar with that one there's also Zoo Thailand which is happening right now and I think it's really cool because people have kind of Taken on this this same model and have continued to iterate and experiment with it and there's been governance within the zalu community to try to like I haven't followed all of that too closely but you know as with anything governance related you know not everyone's always happy and there's maybe some drama here and there but I think overall everyone has good intentions and and people are still getting really cool experiences out of this I did go to Zu Berlin actually that was that was really cool as a twoe event in June but aside from

that I don't think I've been to any because I've just been kind of busy yeah there is always drama with uh you know Dow governance uh and even to try to decentralize and don't take favors and like you know how we should be like you know credibly neutral and stuff like that and you know we are still people so we will will still fight uh kind of for our cause or you know don't like something I think others zo city which are happening right now it's January zma uh in India so it it should be very good one of my friends are organizing that and like I'm also helping actually Switzerland so it will be uh basically Zolo in Switzerland uh somewhere in the

April uh and uh yeah it will be happening in the team Park uh so alien team Park in the Switzerland will be taken over by Crypton nerds uh amazing for six Fe or longer so it might be also happening to be a permanent space uh oh wow very cool yeah I know I and this is great like you know as we as we said at the beginning with the bow like Dows are able people and now if you can create even stronger connections like people live together for some time you know and oh yeah and have those like normal experience is like yeah we have breakfast together uh it's it's so important no and I think that's like well the first thing I wanted to say is

actually like the the whole zalu network the zoo popup cities I don't know exactly what we're calling them now but it's really cool because it's not really a dow but it kind of is but we're not calling it a dow but it it is sort of like a community with some governance it's it's a c yeah but but I think that that's kind of interesting right and like you can see a lot of like there's a lot of lessons to be learned for like formal Dows that come from from seeing how these things are are going just like there's a lot of lessons for Dows from just normal companies and and the more traditional ways people have worked together for a very long time yeah it's uh you know like uh those people actually stick together or like fight with each other but that's still the connections there

totally no I and I've made like so many like honestly I will say lifelong friends through those experiences and like now when I go to conferences there's so many people I know from that right or even people who I didn't get to know very well zalu but we follow each other on Twitter now and now like you know recently I had a reason to connect with somebody professionally cuz I'm working on ZK stuff now and you know uh this is somebody who I met at susal but we didn't really talk we just like were introduced but you know we're connected we follow each other on Twitter and we were able to like get into it and talk shop because it was was like I mean sure people are friendly in crypto and it's easy to reach out to people and and get a response but this was like a a

pre-made warm introduction which was really cool what I wanted to say is yeah I think like Suz Alo in some ways reminds me of like the experience of uh going to University and like living in in Residence living in dorms going to college what do they say in the US you know and that's I think that's one of the only times where people or like that's kind of the last time most people get to experience co-living where you spend you know more than just like transient amounts of time with people and actually get to live with other people and learn from them people who you maybe wouldn't surround yourself with in like your spare time you know you're not doing a typical Social Circle and I think that's really special and that just leads all sorts of serendipitous kind of experiences and connections and it's like I think that's

one of the real superpowers of this like conferences are great but everyone's attention is everywhere but when you actually stay somewhere for a few weeks you settle in and you have these kind of like random conversations with people who you wouldn't meet and then you can continue them over practice the next day you know yeah I think that's like super super special yeah because like I feel like people at the conferences have an agenda you know everyone has their intentions there and it's fair like you are going there because you want to achieve something but when you are at the University like I probably never talk business with you know in the dorms like we just have fun and talk yeah random things and uh and you know when you spend more time with people it feels

like the same way you are a picture project so everyone knows what you're working on now we can relax and just like have a normal conversation as people you know totally no it's funny I mean like yeah we we'll maybe change topics from Jal but one fun kind of thing I remember is um like I wasn't very deep into uh ethereum protocol stuff or in for stuff I was you know focused on public goods and dii and and my own science um but I was surrounded by a bunch of people who were like deep in this though you know like for example somebody was like oh wow Justin Drake is here and I didn't know who Justin Drake was I definitely know who he is now and we we've met a bunch of times and stuff but I remember I ended up just randomly sitting next to him on a bus when we

were I think coming back from a hike that vitalic organized and like you know 80 people went on this like epic hike um and I was sitting next to him and they were just chatting and I you know I just sort of started asking him like so how should I like what what do you recommend if I want to learn how ethereum really works like how the clients work how the protocol works you know what are the different pieces where where's the development happening like what are the exciting research topics and you know he s made some recomendations like reading the eth two book which I still haven't read but it was just really funny because I'm like what else will I will I have a chance to ask Justin Drake like what he's personally excited about research-wise within ethereum and at the time he told me um murn which I guess

has kind of been now they're calling it different things you know pre-confirmation and execution tickets and inclusion lists and all this all these cool things but at the time they were just calling it me burn how do we sort of like burn me to give that value back to the say validators or stakers or users of the of the protocol and yeah it was kind of funny to think about that like this guy a lot of people he's like he's kind of slevy with ethereum and I was like I don't even know who he is but I'm gonna ask him about this stuff yeah he's just like dude sitting next to me in the bus so I I just asked some random things yeah yeah yeah and he's a super nice guy so of course he gave me a great answer if I still remember you know a

year and a half later yeah like at the end like everyone is just person like we are all normal people you know some some people are more famous so they well yeah normal nerds they are normal nerds in crypto space some people are more famous you know so they like protecting themselves more and stuff like that but like when you are in like these intimate groups like those barriers like are not there uh but just to move on on um like when you basically then like you know move from gitcoin out um mhm was it that time you start working working more like in the ZK uh type of uh world or not yet no not yet so so I kind of left zalu um

and came back to Toronto kept working on my PhD and you know I saw working at gitcoin and I started just like I was getting more interested in the infrastructure layer one I mean there there's a lot of opportunity and I met a lot of smart people working for various like l2s for example and there were something cool that getcoin tried at the time which was PGM public goods Network which was a a public goods focused rollup um which has been shut down now but it was yes it doesn't exist anymore yeah do not access it but I I really I thought that was a very cool idea and a cool experiment and I thought wow yeah like what if we had sequencer Revenue going towards funding public goods right obviously getting enough transaction volume that there's

meaningful sequence to revenue plus all the overhead cost running a rollup is expensive especially ZK rollup and I can touch on that later but that kind of inspired me to start learning about modular blockchains and rollups and how the business models work because I thought maybe there could be like a dii rollup I was sort of thinking about different dii related or Noni product ideas because I was still thinking oh you know like I'd like to found something or work on this or at the very least I'll learn by sort of exploring these different product ideas so that's what kind of brought me down like this is like not this past summer but summer 2023 just like trying to wrap my head around the whole you know modular stack and if a d side rollup made sense or if there were other kind of products that

could use different aspects of this that that might make sense and like in the end I didn't think of anything like I spoke to a lot of people decided the D rollup idea didn't make sense at the time maybe it still will in the future I mean story protocols like a whole IP blockchain for example um and they they've raised a lot of money I just like agree like they rais tons of money yeah um I don't understand you know totally why uh it's so valued but yeah you can have this like you know let's say crazy idea and then if you get like enough support or like you prove that it can work in the future like you can run with it no totally I mean that's the thing you know crypto is like a casino and this is something that um my my boss

uh or one of them Federico Kon who's the founder of Lambda class and one of the co-founders of Ali which I'm working for now you know he he told me this and I I really like this it's like crypto is a casino but it's also a casino that lets you bet on on new technologies because of like how how Capital formation can work in like a decentralized way regular people more or less can uh have the opportunity to kind of like bet on some technology being really successful which is like a really cool idea right so people think that an IP blockchain can be really successful and sustainable and can have killer apps and has like really good use cases then it's like yeah sure they're allowed to invest in that and you know maybe they're right maybe they're wrong but but at least somebody

has a chance to try I sort of went down the infar rabbit hole but around this time last year I was again like sort of trying to not get distracted by uh by all that stuff and focus on finishing my paper and my thesis this time last year I'll be done I'll be done in a few months there's obviously delays science is slow getting the paper took a lot longer than expected had to do a lot of reanalysis yada y yada but I had you know I'd been learning about infra and ZK and all this stuff kind of as a hobby for a while already and I had figured okay once the PHD is done this is what I'd like to work on you know and I'd like to start something of my own at some point but I think I have a lot to

learn still and if I can find a good team to join um that's working on something cool you know smart nice interesting people working on something interesting and exciting that can have an impact I'm like yeah I'll I'll take that so I wasn't really looking I was you know keeping in touch with things with people and staying on top of the um you know what's happening in crypto spending way too much time on Twitter still now it's partly my job to be on Twitter so haha but yeah I wasn't looking to find a uh a job but I I met the team from aligned in Lambda class kind of by chance through a friend got introduced and I didn't go to them looking for a job I just went for dinner

and we were chatting about science about you know blockchain infra about ZK and all these things and uh B told me that there was something cool that they were going to be putting a white paper out about over over the weekend and he liked me and he thought I'd be a good person to send to conferences to kind of draw system and tell everyone about aligned so yeah that's that's basically the short story you know I couldn't turn down the opportunity to join the team and they raised uh successfully in the first part of this year so yeah I I joined aligned in June and it's been a really wild six months and I think it's only getting get crazier too um but that's that's really like I'm kind of M to ZK it's really only been the past six

months that I've been focused on on ZK related things um and there's just so much cool stuff happening that like I think I'll be here for a while nice and like ZK you know uh you might be new to ZK but like ZK been here for for a while I remember when I still was working at ey uh we were open sourcing the first kind of ZK protocol the Nightfall like 2018 the Defcon PR uh so that was kind of my first proper kind of interaction with like you know blockchain and doing uh event actually Devcon and stuff like that but like that ZK is very different compared to this ZK like the transaction cost of one like

one transaction cost back then like 500 bucks you know it was like super expensive like even 2018 phes huh yeah exactly like it was just like so inefficient but like we proved the concept you know and like yeah and then it go to like sense eventually years you know but like yeah cff because I remember at zalu Paul Brody was there from ey he was actually presenting um like nightfalls like this private L2 and I I sat it on the presentation and I didn't know much about ZK at the time I was probably trying to do some science work on some data analysis but like it was in the co-working space so I was listening I think I have some notes in a notebook somewhere um but it seems like that's

still like a thing they're working on and I'm super interested in seeing what this uh early Nightfall ZK thing like what the AR architecture was like again I'm not I'm not an engineer um but I think I have a pretty good understanding of like how the big pieces fit together I'm not going to look at the code myself but you know the sort of system architecture I think I I have an idea of like how it all fits together but that's also another thing I wanted to say that uh I heard that Prague Devcon in Prague was like a really really good Devcon so people were saying that was the best one until Bangkok in Bangkok was my first Devcon but it's cool that you were there yeah I think like I did not experienced the full of Defcon in prog you know I'm I was local I was like crypto is new to

me you know I don't know anyone um so it's very different when we are like new to the community and you're going for events you kind of get to know but it's hard to get to know any events uh and and it was first time I actually met Paul and then he became my my boss now he's not my boss anymore but we are still friends so still keeping that relationship but you know uh to that point uh I will put also in the show notes like the uh Nightfall repo so you and other people can check it out to exist it's still it's still going you know there was some partnership with polygon and stuff in the uh later in the later stage which which helps you know it's like something to me like first

Defcon I need nobody no partnership like it's hard for me to navigate around now I go to bank conference I know plenty of people people you know like you get invited to to stuff it's way more kind of easier to get places you actually want to be at and yeah stuff like that so and you know Tech it's similar way yeah yeah no totally I think like that's that's the beautiful thing about crypto and Dows are definitely a part of that but it's like I I think it's just like a very welcoming Community if you want to learn if you're excited it's like I want all my friends to work in this industry because it's super fun and I've met so many great people um and it's yeah and if you're a yourself like you really like want to

learn you want to contribute like people definitely connect with you very well you know like if you come in Lambo which has like uh Dogecoin on it like probably nobody will connect with you we're only the wrong people exactly that's not the crypto people we are talking about no exactly that's the thing and I think like I'm very thankful that I I think I met like the the right people uh when I first got involved in crypto like you know three two and a half three years ago I went to e Denver in 2022 and that's what really opened my eyes to things I went to shelling point and that's basically the first time I heard about gitcoin but I I applied for it and I really loved the questions they were asking like um in the in the application

form and like yeah it was I I got lucky because everyone I met was mostly through the D siize circles and they were all like oh wow cool using science for or using crypto to make science better and yeah it was it was awesome and that's just like I basically went to to eth Denver almost 3 years ago now and decided okay this is the industry I need to work in yeah like and E Denver it's actually great like uh and I like it probably back then even more because the venues were a little smaller the crowd were like little you know like more the core ethereum people now it's getting a little bit uh too bag uh but it's still great like because you can still find the people on the places you know and

all yours yeah are you planning to come this year as well or next year most likely yeah yeah we we're still figuring out our 2025 um calendar in terms of events hackathons conferences Etc but I think we'll probably uh I think Alli will be doing a lot of stuff at eth Denver so I nice that's the case then I'll be there well we are doing how to D in shelling PA like gitcoin it's kind of working on shelling PA now so uh that can be your next chilling Point as well prob the first one now but it will be like third or something third one yeah yeah I didn't go to Ean very soon but yeah third sh yeah that'd be awesome um yeah yeah I will I will I will shoot you an

invite so so now we basically got into like the ZK space uh which you know progress a lot uh you can see a lot of the ZK rollups now popping up it was you know predominantly like optimistic goaps like you know polygon and optimism and arbit room now even polygon is basically having their own ZK roll up and you are working with Aline which it's not ZK rollup if I understand it correctly it is we are not a rollup no so can you elaborate a little bit more on that yeah totally totally yeah I feel like this isn't even like a hot take anymore I think this is kind of like the consensus um opinion which is that basically all rollups are moving towards being ZK uh

for people who don't know what ZK is who are listening ZK is short for zero knowledge and this is in reference to zero knowledge proofs which are a type of cryptographic primitive you know programmable cryptography that has some very cool properties basically in uh zero knowledge proof there's like two parties involved there is the prover and there's the verifier and the prover can generate a mathematical proof of some data or that some computation happened and then the verifier can verify that this proof is true that it's correct without actually needing to to do that computation or see the data and this has some like very cool properties right you can sort of like compress computation and still have it verifiable this has really like this technology has found

strong product Market fit within blockchains and specifically for scaling blockchains through thec rollups like scaling ethereum and probably all blockchains because it allows you to basically do verifiable compute offchain so you have a separate blockchain that's a lot cheaper that just generates a proof h of its of its state of all the account balances and that all the computation within virtual machine happened correctly and that can be verified in ethereum so this basically lets ethereum offload computation offload transactions to other blockchains without um needing to trust that it's correct because they can just verify it using cryptography the thing is to run a zero knowledge ZK rollup uh it's actually quite expensive because

verifying these proofs on ethereum is expensive it's computationally expensive right like the evm the in virtual machine was not designed for verifying proofs so it pretty much just like computationally expensive and thus gas is expensive to do this so writing a ZK rollup can cost like a few million a year in verification costs on ethereum which is like kind of crazy to think about and um aligned the project I'm working for we are not a rollup but we are a decentralized network uh that verify zero knowledge proofs and post the results to ethereum with security borrowed from ethereum through staking so we're our first product our ZK verification layer is an igen layer Ava actively validated service basically

we're kind like I think how you can think of this is Imagine like a traditional web 2 microservice um that somebody could use in like a cloud computing setting that is backed by stake so it is like backed by cryptoeconomic security derived from ethereum or borrowed from ethereum right so what this microservice if you want to call it that is doing is verifying Zer knowledge proofs so you send proofs to aign aine verifies them and then posts results to ethereum saying that the proofs are verified correctly and by doing this we can actually make zero knowledge proof verification on ethereum much much much cheaper like 99% cheaper and you know we can verify thousands of proofs per second basically the more proofs that get verified the cheaper it

becomes because the cost of verification gets split up uh between all the proofs in a batch so this is what I'm working on right now I am part of the ecosystem team and we actually launched our main net beta on Friday um so this is congratulations thank you thank you yeah the engineering team has been working tiously for nine months but they did ship this in nine months um and I know I'm rambling on about this but it is something I'm excited about because I think like there will be governance questions to think about in the future um tying this back to Dows but yeah so I mean like there there's still some upgrades that ain't to be made um we're slow in beta um I don't think this might be the first podcast that's being recorded related to this actually because this just happened Friday um but

yeah yeah basically some some things are being improved but it's already live so people can already send proofs to line and have them verified with the results onum so if I understand correctly but you are still competitor to like ZK sync like uh no no no we're not we're not a rollup and we're not like creating like an execution environment for uh for people to have Smart contracts or anything but a ZK rollup would be one of our potential users for example um like they could use us for verif they will get more efficient okay yes and we basically make it so ZK becomes affordable enough to use in all sorts of applications so like Bridges rollups are very direct applications but really

we're excited about things that people haven't even tried yet because ZK on ethereum was just too expensive so I think like identity applications yeah exactly us 500 per transaction exactly and now it's like now with the line like this super super super cheap right so I think for like l3s or app chains uh that without us it doesn't really make sense economically to do that as a ZK roll up and then you're stuck with like an optimistic stack but with us I think that becomes a lot more feasible this is just the first product we're launching there's a lot more we have in the pipeline to get excited about other like we want to build on top of this verification lay ourselves because there's a lot of ZK products we want to build but yeah we're not competing with rollup if anything they are our customers or Partners or

whatever you want to call them right um we're just our whole mission is to make the like basically accelerate ethereum's road map because ZK is like the future of ethereum you probably was it something what was it something what Justin drag told you to do no um but I I'm sure he's had a lot of conversations with uh with folks on our team I mean yeah like Lambda class where we were incubated is is quite involved in the whole beam chain initiative um they are working on a execution client called e Rex an L1 client for ethereum as well as an L2 client and a consensus client written in Elixir so so uh the sort of not parent company but the company that the founders and the engineers that I

work with came from um and where the whole project was incubated they they were very involved in ethereum development because again we're accelerating ethereum's road map and the adoption of ZK and initially this is by making verification very cheap very fast and very scalable um because now more people can build with ZK and that's super cool and like if you want to learn like uh more about the scaling future of ethereum there is actually great post from BET like like describing all the phases uh and all the parts yeah and uh you know as I see like one of the parts is helped uh by by the uh by the team uh from Boris from Alli uh no this is this is cool and I think that's what

can like help this ecosystem to grow that we actually work together and you know help kind of coordinate and like I would TI it back to your research like you know it's very fluid you know there are this companies working uh they are not connected to each other at all times uh but if you flag them uh with some color I think you are flagging them with Calum I believe those proteins so if you flag those companies and DS with something you can see that they sometimes like stick together help each other and you know continue in their Journey yeah no that's the thing and you have to kind of make these these things legible right like when I'm studying cells we can't just look with our naked

eye and see proteins inside a cell these are these are on the Nano scale they tiny they're submicroscopic right so it's all about labeling things using different tools um that let you see what's happening right and some of the questions you had before uh we we got on this call were kind of around like am I you know what are my sentiments on Dows right now do they work am I bullish on them am I bearish on them I'd say I'm I'm still on them as a concept I think in their current form there's a lot of issues but it doesn't mean that we shouldn't keep trying to do this cuz there's a lot of things that you can only do as a DA I think right like for example I'm tying this back to work right like we we care a lot about decentralization which is why we want to

build why we are building decentralized infrastructure for ethereum that makes ethereum better so people don't need to rely on centralized solutions to different problems govern over such infrastructure in a decentralized way like you kind of need some sort of Dow like structure right otherwise you're always trusting some company or individual to the right thing and keep running this and stewarding this right and like this is one of the superpowers of crypto right so I think like it's been cool to see which Dow tooling kind of uh projects or startups have like survived over the last like two three years um and some of them have right and I think like there's iteration happening on all of this all the time and people are may be realizing some stuff too complicated and I think like I I'm not super I'm not really involved in

governance related stuff right now but it is something something that I follow on Twitter at least you know newsletters and it's cool to see that there's a lot of people still trying this a lot of ecosystems a lot of rollups for example obviously there's problems but you know it still seems like how it has to be done um which is why I'm kind of bullish on the concept right like I don't think Dows are good for a lot of things like in a lot of cases a company is what you want because you need to move quickly and you need to have like centralized decisionmaking and authority and that's how you can achieve your goals within the time frame that you have but for some things like something that's meant to be around for a very very very long time longer than anybody who's currently

involved may continue to be involved in it then it's like I think Dows are still powerful and like we need to keep experimenting with them and um trying them out and and using parts of dows in a lot of different things you know yeah I I totally agree with that like uh we experimented a lot in the last three years we figure out there is no one doubt that fits all there is like so many different type of dows you know and you mentioned the decentralization and or efficiency and you know sometimes there is a trade-off and sometimes we just need more of the efficiency and then we you know adjust to it and like on that note like gitcoin used to be like super like huge Community many many people and now the you know they are

more like uh core teams very efficient working on like shipping product yeah it's actually what they had to do to be become again like successful and start growing you know so and this is like what company or any organization should think of like what's the like benefit for like how we actually can get all the benefits you know can we grow uh and later on we can again expand maybe but now we need to really focus on shipping products defitely definitely right and I think that's like that's that's a definitely it's important like I've I've uh I haven't followed it too recently but you know around the time that auke was uh returning to the Helm

of gitcoin you know a year and a bit ago I was still kind of involved in governance a bit I had some GTC that I was like using to vote on government's proposals and I was staying involved and reading all this stuff and I I think like the way that jco has been doing this at least from last that I saw you know it makes sense and it's necessary because it's competitive market and you know it is it is sort of like a it needs to generate Revenue somehow for example for to be able to continue its mission of like funding public goods giv people the tools to fund public goods but at the same time it's kind of like I I have this alternative thing and I'm I'm happy this isn't what happen but same people said okay gitcoin got too bloated and like it's running out of money or

whatever and it like it shuts down it gets Sunset if you want to put it into kind terms you know that I I also thought I'm thinking right now anyway like doesn't mean that it was a failure I I don't think so right because like you look at the impact that gitcoin had in terms of funding projects right and we're talking like whatever 70 million plus maybe it's 80 million now in funding to public goods open-source software um sort of like giving developers a chance to try to like take their idea and and build something great with it that's on the one hand but also just like the community of like contributors and members and supporters and grantees that that's like a product if you want to call it that will outlive the Dow probably right that's going to

live on for decades because of the the connections in the community that were made and then also the people who worked at gitcoin as contributors I mean like the professional networks that came from this professional opportunities like I think this kind of has the potential to be looked back on as having like a medich effect sort of where like there's all these people who came together to work on something really cool under some like shared philosophy and like Mission and purpose and you know now everyone who I know from gitcoin is still like doing great things working at Great projects I I have tons of friends who are like all sorts of things um in crypto and I know them from getcoin and it's like that that's one of those things where it's like how can you say that gitcoin failed like I'm not saying

it did but say somebody did say gitcoin failed I'd be like no it didn't it did like so much positive stuff for the world you know yeah and like you know like when you look at it and I've been at giton probably almost two years uh and I basically went through like three reorganizations uh and when I look at the people from like the first wave who left uh you know they are like successful contributors in other other projects or they are run their own f FS uh you know and then uh others like they they run the next zalu uh note you know or like you know there are so like diverse type of projects which are actually run or founded by former gitcoin uh contributors uh and they got

these ideas there or like you know the like how they got into crypto through there and uh yeah I I definitely agree like gitcoin was like great like nurturing ground for projects and people and they're still going well and if you're still interested in Consulting they launched uh Professional Services uh arm uh for Grants programs I'm not sure if they are hiring or you know uh but you know like if you still like want to do little Consulting on the side uh maybe you can reach out to some folks at gitcoin um true well I think we are kind of I went through all the questions I had but is there something I did not mention didn't ask

you would like to say what do you think I mean I think well one thank you for uh giving me the opportunity to Yap for an hour or more you know I'm always down for that um and no I think we covered all the things I mean like I could talk about Dows or crypto or anything for hours I think my kind of closing thoughts are I mean on dii um I'm so very excited for D even though I'm not very involved in it but there's exciting stuff happening in that space um I still think like this superpower of crypto and capital formation in a global decentralized permissionless way is very very powerful there's just some things we got to figure out about how to like bring this to like you bridge that to the traditional scientific world and

also to govern over this in like an effective sustainable way it has a lot of potential I'm super excited for it in terms of dows same thing I think Dows are important as a concept maybe Dow is the wrong term for these kind of like decentralized organizations or onchain organizations maybe we're going to do away with the Dow terminology one day um but the idea I think is around to stay and it's important and I'm excited to be involved with more Dows you know um when I have a little bit more time yeah and I don't know getcoin public goods all all really great stuff don't need to get quid grants if you're watching this and and check out the how to D book I'm really excited to read it because I remember yeah I I did a call with uh one

of the authors or contributors man that would have been like springing 2023 I think so get on two years ago so yeah I'm I'm super excited for the launch um and to come to the event in Denver and to read the book and to see all the other podcasts because I'm sure there's some really great interviews here so punar thank you thanks Boris no this was a great discussion and really appreciate you coming coming in and two years ago contributing uh with your interview uh to our to our book it was like threee Journey uh to publish this book but we are here so if you haven't ordered this book yet now is your chance no discount just like order it on Amazon you know and it

helped like you know also get the dii uh angle to it and as you said like Dows are here to stay the concept will be AOL uh but we are here uh to support the movement and if you want to be part of the how to down movement uh and easiest way is just to grab the book uh read it and then let's go from there uh so thanks everyone for listening uh thank you Boris for coming and uh this is the how to Da podcast thank you for tuning into how to Dow if you are excited about the future of dows as we are don't forget to check our book how to Da available on Amazon and for those looking for something special visit how toow doxyz to grab a limited partner

Edition version with an NFD that unlocks some very exclusive perks and if you want to dive even deeper we just launched our six week course on Dows back with actionable insight and expert guidance so get a book follow us on social media join our community and we will guide you through the fascinating world of decentralized autonomous organizations until next time keep building keep Dowing [Music]