Verifiable Ethereum Data Marketplace with Rick Dudley of Laconic

Transcript

foreign [Music] folks my guest today is Arthur Frederick Dudley AKA Rick Dudley Rick is one of the most OG people I know in the space and someone who's helped shape my understanding of blockchains and crypto economics over the years he's also one of these guys that you know is fairly discreet publicly but it has contributed a ton to ethereum and Cosmos he's one of the co-authors of eip1559 it was a developer at Eris Industries alongside Jay and Ethan back when they were having some of the early ideas for what would eventually become tendermint in the cosmos SDK and now Rick is building laconic which is a

product that creates a Marketplace for blockchain State data and it serves it to users and applications the way this trust minimized and is verifiable this addresses the issue of blockchain State being expensive to maintain and computationally intensive to verify so we're going to dive deep into that today and understand the broader implications of the protocol how it works and some potential applications for the decentralized critical landscape I'm also dying to find out why Rick thinks most crypto projects have no idea how money in the law works so before we get started make sure to hit the like button hit subscribe and notification Bell to get notified when we go live every week and if you enjoy this content please consider sticking with us as we're live on fmos and Quicksilver and sooner on osmosis just look for the interop in the Active

Audio set my guest Rick Dudley is coming up next right here on the interrupt thank you hey Rick how's it going man good how are you I'm great yeah it's uh it's been a while since uh we chatted I'm trying to think like when's the last time I saw you well covet happened right so yeah yeah yeah were you a cosmo verse did I miss you no I wasn't there and I the only conference I went to last year was eth Denver in February so okay so that's probably why

I haven't seen it yeah it's been a while yeah yeah so how you been uh pretty good really busy working on laconic uh to be honest I mean that's that's where I've been so uh good good good segue um yeah well I mean we're not going to segue straight into laconic okay very very soon like as I was prepping for this I realized that like I'd love to I'd love to do an episode with you and Ethan and you know Jay if those two guys will agree to get on a live stream together and maybe like Brian and and just kind of go down memory lane and

like you know talk about the early days of Cosmos and the types of things you guys were talking about and and um yeah just um yeah I love these kind of retrospective episodes like yeah you didn't episode Chango recently where you were talking about this a little bit and I thought like I just love this kind of stuff it's really cool yeah I think it's really it's really interesting I mean for me what always impressed me about tinderment was that Jay had done the research and actually proposed something that referenced the literature I mean the the Bitcoin paper does reference prior art but uh Jay really uh you know proof of stake prior to Jay was pretty nonsensical and so the whole the whole

notion of like hot stuff or like you know there's these great research teams now that were doing Byzantine fault tolerance in the academic sphere and now they're working on blockchains like Jay was really the first person to do that um and and at in in that in that domain right like I said there were there was there was always an association but at the level that I mean he he sort of did it in a way that no one else had done before and I I to me that's the sort of the fundamental the sort of Genesis of like the cosmos ecosystem right it's like let's actually have this rigorous approach like let's actually go read a book about how to do this and then add contribute to that and and and build a production system as

well like all all of those things right because there's a lot of academics that do great academic research and they don't ever build production systems yeah and tendermint does all of that right it's it's academic it's additive and it's in production and yeah and some of the things I think that also came out of those that early research in those early days uh when you guys were at monax uh previously Eris Industries right and uh was that uh this idea of putting ethereum on proof of stake and uh I I think that that um that library or the software ended up being used in production right in in hyperledger or but yeah but those those ideas of putting ethereum on proof of

stake sort of that initial idea you know sort of got us to where we are today with the merge and everything and like the massive change that ethereum's gone through over the last year yeah I mean there was there were there were um murmurings or however you want to put it uh I wasn't there so I don't want to speak for other people but there was definitely an attempt to to get tendermint to be the proof-of-stake algorithm um for ethereum um and that didn't happen because uh how can I put this uh appropriately um if you look at the guarantees that we have with proof of stake ethereum today tender mint does not that's a different set of guarantees than what tender mint provides

um I think that's the nicest way of putting it um and so so the very nice here Rick you can you can watch it that's the thing right I wanna I I'm I'm critical of the decisions that were made but I also respect the decisions that were made you know what I mean so I don't want to sound like a metallic was 100 wrong but I will say that the set of guarantees that you get with the current proof of stake ethereum are kind of strange and I I don't think it uh I'll put it this way he if vitalik achieved his goal it's unclear to me if all of that effort all seven years later

all of that effort uh improve the product Market fit of ethereum yeah right I think that's the Trap here is about finality right I mean the fundamental trade-off between ethereum and tenement I think has to do with finality but also has to do with the number of validators and and liveness it makes and liveness right and the number of validators uh is what in is what effectively has this impact on finality because you you can't have a consensus algorithm with you know an unlimited number of validators and have instant finality and this is what kind of tenderment achieves exactly and and this liveness property that vitalik wanted that tindermint doesn't have and

these are all related the number of validators the liveness and the finality are all related uh properties and so so to me there's this question like you can't get the liveness that was required or or desired by vitalik and then and then the question is but but what does that mean like what does it mean to say that I have 4 000 um ethereum validators and I have liveness um in a context where you you in the in the sort of it's it's like uh the cap theorem which is not really it's just a place to start it's not really a great uh

description of the actual system but if we have a network partition cap theorem is uh as um consistency availability and partitions so a partition tolerance so if you so basically when the to cut to the chase I'm not going to get into the details of what that is but to cut to the chase you can you can choose either when the network partitions it can stop and then people know that the network is stopped and they can't update the data that was on the network or the network can partition and then it can continue on to take new messages but then at some point it has to figure out as a network well how do we resolve the the messages that occurred while we were split right and so yeah generally

um you know something like Bitcoin is always a great example to start with uh Bitcoin is not really uh it tolerates partitions but it it it it it um it you know you you have to figure out which partition you're on you use the proof of work to figure that out if you're on the minority partition and you write to it you should expect that those rights um will not be merged back into the the main Bitcoin and this is just sort of it doesn't it's not even described in the context of cap um and so the question is and so this relates to finality right if if the network is partitioned then you don't have how can you have finality and yeah and this is an availability and liveness and

finality are all related so so tendermint does not have the availability or or yeah the liveness uh guarantees that vitalik wanted so he uh continued to develop uh proof of stake algorithms until he got one that had the properties that he liked um which is fine there's nothing wrong with that what was this being considered at some point was was tender been seriously being considered us the algorithm for ethereum absolutely yeah really okay well you're gonna have to find those people on the internet and ask them but but I'll say that it that it was discussed before my time prior prior to me being involved um it was discussed okay but very but not that long from

because I started in in um 2015 so not too far before yeah there's not a whole lot of history before that yeah so um yeah I I honestly like I could talk about this kind of stuff uh you know kind of diving back and and uh and like you know having having conversations about like these these conversations that were occurring and the different trade-offs but but we'll save that for another episode um because today I really want to talk about laconic and you know I I think you guys have not you you're you've just started kind of communicating about laconic I I I've known that you've been working on this project for like a long time and there

hasn't been a whole lot of like you talking about it publicly like you did this one episode with Chango I think this is probably the second podcast you do or something like that um so yeah like I listened to that podcast this morning and I have a ton of questions yes feel free because we're gonna we have to do a little intro first but we will do a little bit intro I'm not just gonna like jump in but I think I think like maybe where we could start is you know I'd like to get your sense of what you think are the biggest challenges in web3 and maybe we can address that thing we talked I talked about the intro which is um why you think that there's a disconnect between you know Builders and investors and and maybe you

know other participants that are that are looking at crypto um you know that's certainly a challenge that I'd love for you to maybe dive into that a little bit but technically speaking I think also um curious to know what you think are the biggest challenges and how that release what you're doing yeah I mean I think there's a lot of let's see let me think let me so get situated here I think there are Social Challenges I think there are sort of related to that like legal and political challenges I think there are Financial challenges and then after you get through all of that there are technical challenges and the technical challenges actually um

aren't really getting resolved at the rate that they ought to be because of these other issues so the main issue that we'll touch on here is that the purpose of these systems the reason you need uh distance remediation the reason you need multiple uh on entities who don't trust each other um to come to agreement we're we're that's a placeholder that's a replacement for the law that that's a replacement for the rule of law we're basically saying we're going to add cryptography in addition to the law and create this system that exists in an a legal space um and that's the goal I mean that's the

goal of Bitcoin ultimately that's the goal of ethereum I mean all of the if you if you aren't trying to facilitate an illegal transaction then you don't need a blockchain you can just use the law I mean that's literally you know what that means so yeah I think I think one of the biggest uh realizations that I had when uh you know around the time we met when when I was building this company called stratum was that none of the people that we were trying to sell this product to and and and I think this applies also to most of the Enterprise blockchain stuff that was going in around that time is that none of these companies had any incentive to use an a legal system when they had the

legal system and all of its infrastructure to rely on like there was no point in building blockchain Consortium when you could just have contracts and agreements right yeah exactly and it turns out that I mean this is something that we talked about at monax a lot it turns out there are actually many um in skew chain is is an example that I'm aware of there are plenty of cases in the real world economic world today where people don't have uh where people are operating legally but don't have legal protection um um so so international trade is is sort of the the you know shipping international shipping we're in open water and you're going from country to country is sort of the canonical example of that

um and but there's many others as well so so beyond that that I mean I think that's like it's a good point and and I I think that I I feel like like power structures get it I feel I feel like The Regulators are starting to get it that um that the that what blockchain is attempting to do is to circumvent in the in the interest of efficient of efficiency and uh and inclusivity and not having to sort of trust Central you know uh bodies were power like where trust is eroding

um I think that that governments and Regulators are starting to understand that and you know in true government or regulatory fashion instead of improving the existence systems they just want to like you know try to control um the you know the the the this new form of like collaboration and and economic um you know activity um but but beyond like that sort of social challenge um what do you feel are the biggest technical challenges that are facing crypto at the moment so that they are related right I I think um there's a lot of interesting work on consensus algorithms I think that's

actually in some sense moving really far ahead I think um what other technical challenges I think getting Roll-Ups uh you know having Roll-Ups as a scaling solution is a a both a basic science as well as engineering issue and then um obviously I'm very much I've been very focused on um this issue of read availability or you know I don't really think of it as data availability I think those are sort of different terms um but yeah actually making the data accessible and making and delivering uh having the end user actually hold the data is a is a really serious

technical challenge for um pretty much all blockchains uh maybe Bitcoin is an exception there maybe it's debatable but actually having users be truly Sovereign and have the data themselves um whether they're even even regardless if they're running a node or not um is uh is a is a serious technical challenge do you think that we like the industry will need to make some compromises you know on on this trilemma maybe like on the on the blockchain try allow my way on the decentralization

security and scale but then also considering that things are becoming more fragmented that were were heading towards a world where rather than big monolithic chains that we can attempt to keep fairly decentralized we're moving towards something that looks more fragmented with different security guarantees in every system and then also security guarantees that people have to reason about when moving between those systems um it feels to me like there's going to be a gradient of like that the end state will be um

a sort of tapestry of you know gradients on decentralization security and scale that people will have to choose what they want to use depending on what their what their needs are and like how they want to interact with other people yeah do you think that but but see the challenge I see here is that I don't think most people will will be able to reason about those things quite effectively I don't think they'll yeah they won't they will fail to I but I absolutely agree that's the future that we're headed towards I think there will be millions of chains I think there'll be blockchains used all over the place and we'll be using a a

combination of Roll-Ups and and sort of mesh like you know not straight linear l1l2 L3 but also meshes of Roll-Ups um and attestations Publishing Bridges Etc and I think that there'll be millions of chains and um in terms of the trilemma we won't have massive scale on most chains of millions of chains most of those chains are going to have seven members three members ten members a large chain will have a hundred members and there will be one or two chains out there with four thousand validators but you only need in the world you only need a few of those and there'll maybe be some weird exotic case like someone builds a popular video game that where everyone can be a validator

or something and you end up with thousands or tens of thousands of validators that way but I think I think I mean I I could talk I could have a whole conversation just about the different types of attestations that we're making and why we believe those attestations and how many people are you trying to convince like what's the what's you know why are we why would we use the same tools to convince 10 000 people that we to convince four people right if I need to convince four people of something cryptographically it's much easier than if I'm trying to convince ten thousand people of something cryptographically and and so I think that that that fracturing that you're

talking about is just going to emerge naturally and I think like pretty much every killer will find its niche right I think they all have well not all of them but like the majority of them have some technical Merit they have some BD team they have some money behind them they're not gonna they're not gonna completely die you know they already have low transaction volumes right they're they're going to find a niche where they're gonna you know those BD teams are gonna say okay well we're just going to focus on gaming in South Korea or or whatever they essentially become app chains like they they sort of they sort of dissolve into app chains yeah and I think

everything becomes an app chain I think I think mainnet ethereum becomes an app chain ultimately in the in the application is settling Roll-Ups yeah very similar to Cosmos Hub frankly right I think polka dot ethereum 2.0 uh Cosmos Hub are all actually very similar in terms of the in-game state in the final thesis and I don't think that there will necessarily be a winner uh per se I think they will have a curious different properties right so you know right now with D5 as at last I checked um ethereum was number one and and Cosmos was number two right and and it's really hard to measure Cosmos because it's a disconnected you know it's who uses the cosmos SDK but I'm still I'm

pretty sure even with the downturn it's still number one ethereum number two Cosmos and I think that that will persist and and you know maybe Avalanche ends up dominating in games or or something else but um I I think that the projects will naturally find their own their own places yeah I I for me that makes sense the idea that all of the eve killer sort of layer ones that emerged over the last cycle um end up finding a niche I mean maybe some of them will die but certainly I think at some point they will end up sort of you know all of them will kind of slot into their niches and figure out um uh what is the use case that they can

best serve and then and then at that point yeah everything is sort of a nap chain everything is sort of a platform that serves a particular need we just spent you know billions of dollars trying to get there uh but um but yeah I mean that's that's the pace of innovation I guess so yeah let's let's uh switch curious electronic here um why do we need laconic Rick are you there I think we may have lost Rick

oh we lost them um well while he's coming back um just let you know that yeah I guess I mentioned earlier uh we're live uh we're validating on um at most and Quicksilver so if you hold any of those tokens please consider staking with us and we are looking into getting a um an Atmos uh sorry an osmosis validator up and running and that will probably happening soon so get ready to start delegating your tokens uh to interop um and yeah we've got all sorts of other validators plans um so yeah this is a this is a bit annoying to

have it on a live stream let me see if I can get them back there he is that's a little awkward yeah it was awkward for me but all right you're back though uh so um I was saying exactly so why do we need laconic oh yeah so so yeah what problems does laconic solve so laconic the the ultimate goal of laconic is to get all of the data that a user is concerned about in the hands of that user so not in the not on a cloud-hosted environment not in Microsoft not at AWS but in their actual custody and and to

have all of the verification that they need to do be possible uh by themselves and so it turns out in order to do this in the sort of General case on ethereum uh with a Dap so let's say you're using um the the sort of our our one of our our some of our model examples are uniswap.info which is not not to be confused with app.uniswap.org which is the actual swapping code the uniswap.info has all this historic info that it that it calculates about about previous activity so it turns out that this is actually a very complicated and difficult thing to do how do I take the data from the ethereum mainnet that is relevant to

this front end so I have a front end I've specified the front end I have uh I've uh have you know an uh an ipfs uh Sid for the front end so I I have this um you know fixed static front end and then it's going to make certain calls how do I um you know what do I do to um how do I um how do you provide the data to users yeah how do I how do I take all of that data and provide it to users is actually uh pretty complicated um and so that's what we've uh that's what we've been working on um so in the case of unit swap like

um in the case of unit Swap and and all the odd apps essentially like what's really happening most of the time is that the teams that are running these apps um have some server infrastructure on AWS run centralized server they have nodes that are querying blockchain data they're taking that data they're maybe transforming it they're maybe um making some some transformations to it they're putting it in like some graphql or postgres database and then they're serving that up to users but the problem here is that there's this sort of central point between the blockchain and the user when it comes to making transactions and interacting with a protocol for what it was intended to do

you're you know you can effective really you get your own ethereum node and like run your transactions through it and be fully decentralized but when it comes to the services that teams are often proposing in terms of analytics or data or like this sort of info uh page uh with with unit swap there's usually a centralized service there yeah like graphql tried to address this issue but you the graph yeah sorry graph the graph yeah so try to address this but um what was missing there I think from what I understand is that the verifiability is missing your business are trusting that the graph is offering up the correct data yeah it can't it can't provide you it can't leverage

existing ethereum infrastructure to prove that the statements coming from the graph actually came from ethereum or whatever I use that though like why can't we have the graph or like why couldn't Alchemy for instance do uh provable data where okay maybe you're making some compromise about um you know the availability or maybe they can shut off the service but at least you know that the data is is valid they could so the short the short answer is it's absolutely possible that's what laconic does so it's absolutely possible and so there's this sort of historic question of why didn't that happen and I think there's there's a couple of different historic answers there but the

tldr is the original plan for ethereum was missed if you'll remember where missed was you run a browser and the node together holy man and so you would be able to prove it yourself the the problem was the math didn't work out there and even in the test Nets scaling uh meant that you couldn't synchronize um the Geth node in a reasonable amount of time so if you're just using your laptop like a normal laptop and you try to start missed you just spend all your time syncing so it would never work so laconic addresses that problem and there's and in the time you know there's been fasting protocols import and I think it's um

called portal uh from the ethereum foundation there's a couple of other protocols uh there's multiple light Les multiple light client protocols that have come around um to sort of alleviate to help alleviate this problem but they still don't go the laconic Network goes the whole way so it goes from source code to what is in the user's eyeballs with everything being verifiable so if you see a message on laconic that came to you through the laconic Network you could say I want to know which blockchain or blockchains this came from I want to know where the sort what code generated this result I want to know who wrote that code we have all of that

stuff in the laconic Network um and so um yeah I just sort of went because it turns out once you solve the hard part of getting the the ethereum data in the network in a reasonable way then getting all this other stuff is Trivial you know getting getting there getting uh JavaScript files in there all that stuff's like literally like a a side note a little asterisk once you've gotten the ethereum data in there so once we got the ethereum data in there while these really two contemporaneous projects I was working on uh separately and I was like okay well if we can do the ethereum data with this project then we can do we're doing all this other data with this other project we can put them together in the same database and because we're using ipld uh and we're

building the hash links auxiliary hash links ourselves which I'm sort of jumping ahead but once we're building those auxiliary hash lines then it's trivial to do all this stuff and we and we're going to take um we're going to do TLS as well so we're going to do certificates and certificate transparency so we'll be able to make like some pretty intense I mean you'll literally be able to say I know who wrote this code I know where this message came from I know who signed this certificate I know all of these things about this data and I I the entire supply chain like basically yeah data and so what one was like when we were mentioning earlier the example of say like uniswap and what they're doing to the data like they're transfer they're

transforming the data in order to serve their use case which is to like show you this info uh daily total volume for example for example that's data that's not available in like you don't see that data in the blockchain you can't query ethereum with an RPC call and say like I want to know how many like what's the TBL on right on uniswap someone's had to take and build that model where does that come come in and who's building those models for electronic for specifically the applications that they need that data for right so that's a good question so we have a we have a tool called or part part of our our suite of software is something called a watcher which um will do that

work and does it in a provable way so it it actually generates its own little blockchain if you will um uh explaining how it did its Transformations um yeah so actually let's let's go into that so I would say laconic is is the project represent is like three different pieces of innovation there is the laconic LLC itself which is in the Cayman Islands there is the laconic stack which is the Standalone software uh that anyone can run today to generate this data and these proofs this evidence that they need and then there's the laconic Network which facilitates the buying and selling you know it facilitates running these Services

discovering the services running the services paying for service and then and then making sure all of that's verifiable um and so you know those three pieces are an evolution right we were just we built the stack part a long time ago we've built it many times you know we've iterated on the stack many times over at this point we started working you know uh uh uh maker dial is still using an early version of of that stack uh to this day um uh last I checked which was recently um um and we've iterated on that stack many times and and that Standalone stack right now I think is is very robust I'm very happy with where it is it's pretty

solid um and if you were uh Intrepid developer you could go into uh the the stack orchestrator code and and run that yourself and put that into production yourself right now today but the the problem with that is it's very expensive to generate this evidence it's very expensive to take the extract the data in real time out of the ethereum network and and and and preserve its provability and place it in another uh data store that's a computationally um very expensive and and specifically disk IO uh disk i o operations very expensive activity to do and so as an as

a Dap developer when you have you know very few users you can run this reasonably on a laptop or whatever it will it's possible but as your app grows or if you're doing something like you want to see all of the uniswap V3 pool data right well then a laptop's not going to be able to uh process that in a timely manner necessarily I mean laptops are pretty powerful so some of them can but like maybe not all of them and so at that point you need hardware and and when you need Hardware well now you have this problem of okay well am I going to buy hardware and rack it in the data center that's probably not a viable answer am I going to go to AWS well AWS is centralizing there's all sorts of problems there's censorship you know AWS

may choose to comply with a law that I'm not um legally obligated to comply with and we've seen this issue with Alchemy and inferior and these people where they're complying with the laws in their jurisdiction but the daf developer is in a different jurisdiction so so then you end up with a situation it's like okay well if I want to have multiple service providers actually serving this data to users they need to be in multiple jurisdictions and that's what laconic LLC solves it's a Cayman Island LLC so we can have the members of that company in different jurisdictions and those members will contract with the end users and comply with those laws in that way and also the the Cayman Island law of course they comply with um

anti-terrorist activity and what have you money laundering activity they're actually quite strict about that stuff but some of these other laws that are more variable from jurisdiction to jurisdiction uh they're very friendly with so so uh or you know amical reasonable I would frankly is what is what I would call it they're just reasonable um and so they're a good jurisdiction to be in for those reasons um and also again as a sort of international meeting place where entities from different countries meet in the Cayman Islands it's a reasonable place to to do this activity so yeah the end user won't be won't be buying data from laconic LLC they'll be buying data from a service provider who is registered with the LLC

and that registration happens on chain so the LLC itself is a is a legal um is a legal rapper or a legal container but all of the activity actually happens on chain okay yeah I want to talk about the the LLC and the governance a little bit later because I think it's one of the most kind of Novel and interesting things about the way you guys have set this up uh so but coming back to laconic and how it relates to ethereum um so so first of all I mean laconic is is sort of built for ethereum like using laconic on something like a cosmos chain or a roll-up doesn't really make sense right because it depends it depends so

it so well so what's interesting is we um uh the same team that works on laconic was also core contributors to uh Cosmos SDK so we we did a bunch of work on Cosmos SDK um the fundamental hard problem of how do you get data out of uh so the the data structures in ethereum and the data structures and Cosmos and many other blockchains were designed to facilitate consensus not to facilitate reading the data back out and so in those architectures there's there's utility in taking the techniques that we've applied to ethereum and applying them to those other chains so there is a value and utility to taking those techniques and

applying in the cosmos SDK chains and and well you know for better or work so so uh osmosis is an example where it would be useful um Cosmos Hub less so but also just the way that we've designed the system so for example you can't have a block explorer that works across uh Cosmos Hub upgrades right no one's ever bothered to build one that works that way if you built the block Explorer on top of laconic instead of directly on top of the chain you would actually be able to provide that continuity um okay so block Explorer what you're saying is block explorers can't uh remain continuous through Cosmos Hub

upgrades because every time there's an upgrade something changes and then the block Explorer they have to they lose they read Genesis right they restart the chain right so when you start that new genesis people just as a matter of convenience don't um don't preserve that data and and and you don't have a way of representing the irregularism right okay yeah I see so like this is historical data from before the upgrade uh gets wiped out yeah and and you don't have a way of representing the irregular State change that happens during the upgrade whereas in the laconic system we have a means of doing all those things we can link any two arbitrary chains together and we have a means of representing these arbitrary State changes

um so you can we can provide that continuity as a service so but in the case of ethereum so it's coming back to like this this idea you say uniswap or you know in any sort of major defy application or application on ethereum um the The Watcher is sort of purpose built for um a data use case I think right so in the case of uniswap you might want to collect and display or serve up some some data but someone else might build another service that I don't know Aggregates like compound and use swap data and Ave data and like serves that up in a way that's

like useful to a specific type of user and then they would build their own Watcher to do that so if I understand correctly it kind of doesn't it doesn't like do a blanket like here's all the ethereum data it's it's use case specific and the idea is that instead of having to reconstruct the state yourself verify that State uh maybe run your own service that that that that does this data transformation you can pay someone pay a service provider to write that Watcher for you and and post it up so you have access to that data and anybody that you feel needs access that data yeah so the depth the DAP developer would probably write The Watcher

themselves and Watchers are composable so um so you could so one dap developer might choose to write a watcher that's only concerned with uniswap.info another adapt developer might choose to write a watcher that's concerned with uniswap.info and compound um or you could even have a case where someone wrote One Watcher for compound someone else wrote One Watcher for uniswap.info and a third person came and composed those two Watchers together and a third Watcher and and then is serving that data up so they're composable as well okay yeah does I mean do you think that do you think that the end State here is that essentially no one will be sure I mean like there

will be very few people that will be serving up like full archival notes and that probably what will end up happening is that lots of sort of non-critical data like no one cares that I sent an eath to myself in 2015 right like at some point in time that data will not exist it like it will cease to exist in any place right that's a great question so I actually think that you need something like laconic to incentivize people to preserve the archive the archive and another another thing that we do um because we're ipld based um we actually can easily well it's all

relative but relatively easily take our our archive and push it into filecoin where where then there can be this clear monetization strategy for storing the data so because we monetize the transmission of the data which is a much easier problem to solve than the verifiable storage of filecoin um we're providing an incentive for why that so you have to think about it like there's different incentives throughout the process there's an incentive for why did I include the transaction right that incentive is very clear but there's not really any incentive in any blockchain I'm aware of for why I should then send that data why should I satisfy a read

from a user a user asks for a read why do I care and that's what laconic is trying to solve is we're incentivizing the reading of that data and by incentivizing the reading of that data we now that's step number two now we can talk about the incentives of Step number three which is a long-term persistent storage of that data because if you think about just having in the incentives of just file coin and just um ethereum you have this Gap in the middle whereas well why do I take the ethereum data and transform that and publish it to filecoin there's not really an incentive for me to do that whereas with laconic there there starts to become more of an incentive to do that because I may I need to um support my own infrastructure that is that is read

infrastructure so people will come to know to come to a single place to get their their historic reads as well as their uh more recent reads and so I'll be incentivized to me to to charge them there'll already be an ecosystem in place where people are accustomed to paying for data and so when they want to pay for old data or new data they'll come to the same place buy that data and that will incentivize the archival storage because you're absolutely right right now we don't have a very good model for why um archival storage uh persists and it is a real mechanism design issue actually so you've been talking about ipld uh you

you mentioned that a few times and I realize I don't really know what that is so maybe it's a maybe we should like explain what that is yeah so that's interplanetary linked data is what it stands for and that is the sort of underlying um storage format for ipfs so uh ipfs is interplanetary file system it's like how do you move this data around ipld is how do you represent this data in a self-describing sort of package so when you have an ipld object or I don't need uh you have ipld codecs I don't know all the the verbiage but basically when you take um a file format and you create an ipld codec that supports it now I can create

a hash linked references to that data okay so what is that what does that look like concretely so let's say I don't know if I've got like a JPEG uh yeah I have I have a i i serve up that JPEG but also some metadata that describes yeah I have a PC ID so I have I have the the the data the raw bytes themselves and then I have the the CID associated with those bytes so when you go in a in a file uh into ipfs and you retrieve that image by its hash yeah that is ipld right and then if that data had a hash

in it ipld is smart enough to figure out how to Traverse the whole purpose of ipld is how do you provide the metadata so that you can then Traverse that graph of hashes okay okay I see so it's sort of like creating um is this the is this like the versioning system that's in ipfs like where you're essentially sort of following versions of files well it relies on this property but it's not the same thing so okay like um so like a clear example would be uh there there somewhere you can find the um protocol Labs how to block Explorer for ethereum data where you could go and you

could go from the Block header all the way down into the different you could follow the hash links that are there in that header and get to the other data types and get to the other data um and so and and it knew because of the codec how to display that in the browser so it's almost like magic right it's you describe the the protocol you describe the file whatever the the set of bytes is you describe it in an IPL decodec and now you can Traverse that um you can write some code that will Traverse anything written in that format so the same code will Traverse the Bitcoin blockchain that will Traverse the ethereum blockchain that will

Traverse you know some other blockchain in your nft and it will drill into the nft and it'll be able to display the JPEG and it'll be able to display the metadata and all this stuff because it is represented as an ipld object okay and how do so how does laconic utilize this um to to serve like data for uh applications so it's the core of our system in that the first thing we do is we take the uh ethereum data which could be any blockchain it could be any hashlinked data structure and we convert that into an ipld object which is very easy to do we then index it in that context and we store it in that in that

so we we're storing the rlp encoded bytes but we're also storing the the Sid the the the the multi-format address of the of that object so that's how we're able to generate evidence so that's why so um let me think about how I can explain this in an easy way so on ethereum you have um you have uh transaction receipts and you have the event messages when you have an event message on ethereum the event message does not prove all the way back up to the the root so when you have a set of events which is what um which is

what the graph consumes the way that you prove that that event is correct is you find the block that that event was in and then you rerun that whole block and at the end of it you see did you have the same event that you started with yeah whereas if I have an account balance on ethereum I have a block number and then I can get a proof so I don't have to recompute the whole block to figure out the account balance in that block I just get the proof from the ethereum client about that account balance at that block and I can present that proof and the balance to the user using ethgit get proof but but the the actual logs in ethereum are not provable in this way

so this is why the graph isn't provable and there's a whole there's a lot of consequences of this but because we use ipld we can create those hash links so where the link was missing in the original ethereum protocol we can augment that protocol and now we can generate a proof using the ethereum data and our additional links which are understandable relatively easy easily and it's it's it's it's not some weird crazy different format it's this format very similar to the existing ethereum formats to prove that this log actually came from this block is this something that could be integrated into ethereum that were you

basically could like look at any uh event or uh slot like and improve um that that this thing did in fact happen because it would have this IPL the information attached to it so yes and no so yes it could be integrated at the client level but no that's not practical because the client is 100 focused on following consensus and so this is again why the laconic stack exists so what we do is we take all of this data while the blocks are being validated in the client we take all that data out and we store it in a postgres database and we can we take that data out we convert it into ipld

objects we take those IPL the objects we store those in postgres and now we can do this additional proof system on top of that and we can do this as a generic system we can do this with any hashlink data structure we can do it with Git repositories we can do it with TLS certificates we can do it with Bitcoin ethereum any anything it's funny it's I don't mean this in any disparaging way it's hard to do that with Solana because the way the hash linking Works in Solana you don't it's harder to do but for most it's still possible and for and for most blockchains it's it's it's it's like relatively I mean it's a it's a lift but it's not impossible okay so the the the

the laconic has its own ethereum client that is processing blocks it is taking the data uh the out of those blocks um transforming them into ipld data which preserves uh Providence of like transactions yeah uh and events it takes that data and puts it in the postgres database my question here is okay so now like how do we know um well I I guess I guess the verifiability comes from the IP LD data uh I guess does does this postgres database sort of

live in a decentralized distributed way oh that's a that's a good question censored like where does the blockchain come into it basically right right so this is the Standalone stack that we're describing right so an individual person or an individual developer would run this stack which is doing this very complicated uh compute intensive ingesting process now if you want as a user the data that that Standalone node gives you you could verify by yourself potentially but it's expensive it's it's still expensive to verify so instead we say okay well let's make a federation let's take a bunch of these people at six seven of these people Federate them together and now the user can always verify and then and then that is the laconic L2 so

the laconic L2 is seven members right now is what we have today these seven members are validating they're they're ingesting the blocks and then they're coming up with you know uh uh they're making commitments to the state of those blocks and then and then they're sharing that information with a with a paying customer and now the paying customer has all of the tools all the ability to verify that data but the reason they believe that data is because those seven members are are bonded on a proof-of-stake network so that's that's where the network comes in because the cost of so you because the user doesn't want to have to verify every single transaction they're making you know thousands of queries a second or whatever it is the

cost of verifying one transaction is is longer than the you know it takes a long time and there's just nothing we can do about that um and so instead of them having the reason they trust uh the members is not because they're verifying every transaction themselves it's because for any fraudulent transaction that they receive they can generate approve a fraud proof submit that to the blockchain and be refunded uh for that erroneous transaction okay so so this what you described as the as the stack is like the individual client this client uh basically you have like a network of validators that are running

this client there are seven of these validators is I'm curious like why seven uh yeah a personal preference of mine um seven is a good number but you know yeah 60 on this one it's it's the lowest number that is both um uh odd and Byzantine fault tolerant hmm why why is it Byzantine false already um well it's it satisfies the three and plus one requirement right okay um yeah I think so I think people might hear that and say hey that's not a whole lot of validators sure that's what we're starting their plans but that's what

we're talking about so there's plans to add more at some point yeah absolutely and again um uh from uh from a customer perspective if our customer is adapt developer and and they're saying um right now I have to use inferior Alchemy block native to assert that my data is correct because one of them goes down or whatever for whatever reason right that's three right there that sounds like a pain in the ass you integrate one protocol with laconic and you get seven instead of three and you get an assertion from us that you can verify yourself that we're actually physically located in different places Alchemy and inferior both run in AWS so presume I presume

um so if AWS decides we're not doing this anymore you just lost two out of your three if not all three out of your three in that case right so seven is a low number but seven is incredibly High compared to what people have won right now right or they or they think they have four and they have one whereas we're positively asserting that you have uh seven so you mentioned that uh this was that this network right this blockchain network is is a is a roll-up um and I read somewhere I think on your website that's the best way to think about of of laconic is an overlay child network of a collection of existing l1s which I I sort of get that NL twos but

um it may also be thinking helpful to think of it as simply an L2 that helps make ethereum data more available to end users so it sort of sits on top of existing l1s and l2s as uh because it it has clients for each of those l1s and l2s right now ethereum um but when you say that it's L2 does it uh does it make proofs back to ethereum like is it sort of like similar to an optimistic roll up it does an optimistic roll up that's exactly what it does it does an optimistic roll-up um but also all of the value there's no value there's no economic value created on the laconic L2 so the token is an ethereum L1 token that we then Bridge

into our Network so why did you choose to build it as an L2 like why not like a an independent chain because you have validators what was the benefit of building as a yeah um so that we can actually use that stake to refund users as opposed so I mean that's it's basically that's basically that's the short version there's more reasons but that's the main reason when you transacted with the laconic Network you're not trusting those validators to be honest because if they're dishonest you can go to the ethereum L1 and get your money back okay so you're losing you're using ethereum here as a settlement mechanism in case they're dishonest if you were if you were just uh your own L1 you wouldn't have this underlying settlement

mechanism that people trust correct wow okay this is uh it's really interesting um and I read somewhere also that laconic predicts reorgs how does it do that will we protect again well well so what's interesting right we've been working on this so long there aren't ethereum reorgs anymore but when there were ethereum reorgs um at the execution layer I should say um uh we were able to expose because of how we return the data in a query you would be able to see the reorg uh oh predict reorgs I know I'm sorry we've been doing this a long time

we do we do have a tool that um that could be used to predict reorgs um and it turned out nobody cared about that so uh we we still have that tool we still use it in our stack it's it's uh an alternative client that we have um that looks directly at Dev P to P um so we we have a fork of Geth and then we have this other thing that we call eth probe it's a very clever name uh that um is written using the JavaScript libraries which looks at uh because we are geographically distributed because we're connecting to different parts of the internet we can actually see all of the blocks so we can see contentious

blocks in the old regime we could see like oh there's a block with this you know because uh ethereum would sort of fork naturally pretty often um and so we would see these we could see these Forks we could actually detect them um back when it was proof of work uh now with the theory and proof of stake um these sorts of reorgs don't happen anymore um and there's all sorts of issues with uh it's a it's ethereum solves a set of very interesting engineering challenges so I don't want to sound I don't want to give the impression that I'm critical but the execution layer uh no longer reorgs as far as we can tell and uh we haven't gotten we haven't gotten 100

confirmation on that of someone would like to explain to me with 100 certainty uh if reorgs can happen at the current execution layer that would be great we've been looking at the code and sort of going back and forth on it amongst ourselves um but that doesn't happen anymore so you can have these reorgs um at the seat at the at the consensus layer um and we do have a consensus layer uh uh we don't just have a fork of death we also have a fork of Lighthouse that um injects state from Lighthouse into our system as well which is which is almost is is adding another chain so like adding quarterly is adding another chain like corally and ethereum are different

enough that we might we could just as easily be adding Avalanche as we could be adding quarterly um the same thing with the beacon chain that was the same lift as adding uh an avalanche or an optimism or optimism would have been a lighter lift actually if you add other chains um does that mean that you're creating another effectively got another roll up uh for that chain or does that all happen in the same client and can you run all that on the same because it starts getting kind of computationally expensive yeah it depends so it would be so the trust so the way to think about it is trust anchors so we're we're going to launch with a trust well we're already engaging customers without a trust anchor right

because we have legal agreements with them the trust anchor that you've that we've been discussing in this call is on ethereum we could support any number of chains and only have a trust anchor on ethereum but it would make sense if you are you know doing Avalanche data to have an avalanche trust anchor in which case we would we would go through the burning and minting of tokens to to generate that trust anchor so but by trust anchor you're referring back you're referring to this idea that um people can always settle on ethereum if you're providing data to say like applications on Avalanche um it would make sense for that trust anchor to be on Avalanche I mean I guess

you could have it on ethereum and people could Bridge their tokens over but that would be like complicated and convoluted you'd want to have it over there specifically for Avalanche and like maybe then there's an opportunity for you to bridge these two things together such that like there can be some sort of interesting use cases that come out of like the melding of these two types of data and they would be bridged in rl2 right those yeah those trust anchors would sort of emergently be bridged in our L2 but they wouldn't necessarily be connected to each other in any way besides that okay and there's there's not really I mean what we've discovered in this process so we we started this project I

mean this project parts of this project started in 26 20 I mean I started thinking about this stuff in like 2015 and then when we were working at monax there was actually some I was trying to explain why we wanted to do some SQL stuff at monax and with regards to ethereum data um and then like I said we we had vulcanized DB uh which we worked with uh maker dial on that for two years um so we've been working on this stuff for a very long time um and um and in that time we've sort of the product direction is sort of shifted over time as we've interacted with people and they've asked for different things um and so I'm saying that to say no one

no one's asking us about um you know people we've had to actually sort of go backwards we were we were uh in in 2022 we were trying to get people we were building Watchers for people we were showing Watchers to people we were trying to get people excited about Watchers and then what we discovered was that you know on the path to us building Watchers we had to build extremely performant RPC endpoints and we had to build out a a deployment system and all these sorts of things we basically had to build out a tiny a tiny inferior or a tiny Alchemy and we realized that that was actually what people wanted to buy from us and they didn't The Watcher concept is a little it's not too advanced but you have to be really

committed to understanding that you know the maker dial team went away and built all the whole they did a whole bunch of experiments on their own and like okay we agree with this you know they were super thorough the DAP Hub folks were like super thorough in their research um and so they had done they I sort of made this pot I made this hypothesis they're like oh I'll go test it myself right so they went away and they tested like okay we get it and like then they bought into the Watcher thing turns out they're like the only people in the world who want to bother with that right no other person that we've tried to sell the product to has been interested in uh doing that what they want to see is this immediate savings on the RPC endpoint side and then from there you know now

that our foot's in the door we can say well we can give you even more savings we can simplify you're you're using that RPC endpoint to build your own indexer we have a whole library of tools to build indexers that will auto-generate indexers for you and we have a marketplace where you can go to get other people to run that indexer for you when you don't want to scale it so it's sort of like that that product pipeline foot in the door thing that we're that we're figuring out now so um right now we're trying to get people to understand we're in the process of testing and evaluating you know my my hypothesis is our is our is our RPC endpoint runs you know uh you know ridiculously more performantly because

we did run in AWS so we've been we've been bare metal first the whole time but we did run some some infra in AWS and and and the cost of that was just astronomical I mean it it it it paid for you know the hardware paid for itself in two months so um so we're leveraging that to you know potentially provide a discounted RPC endpoint service which is a very complicated business I I don't know if you want to get into that but it's not um it turns out that that's not even what we started with because the RPC endpoints are subsidized by VCS dap developers are never experiencing

the true cost of running an indexing service or running an RPC endpoint they're not exposed to that in an economically in a free market way right there's this there's this actor there's this venture capitalist who's going in and giving away free samples at like a massive scale yeah and so there's a challenge for us in how do we compete with that but there's also a challenge in that our customers are being you know are suckling on this centralization service and don't realize it right is that the case also in like I guess in ethereum that's the case because you have Alchemy and and just to a large extent fira has been uh this uh this T that's the developers have been

suckling on if you will uh but but it but in Cosmos um you know all they're all typically validators run RPC endpoints and I think also they sell those rpt endpoints and it might be that like an fmos contracts you know such and such a validator or maybe a set of validators to set up RP standpoints and so like at in the end like VCS are paying for it because like yeah it's up it's they're still right in that ecosystem that's still subsidized as well that true cost of a read isn't exposed directly to the person doing the read yeah yeah and that's that is again the problem we're trying to solve because I realized you know back when Mist was

being when I was trying to run Mist that this was going to be a problem and it's taken an enormous you know number of years to get to the point where uh being self-funded for so long that we were able to actually have a product uh or really engage in the marketplace so um we're running a little long here and I could go on forever but uh I do want to talk about the governance aspect because I think this is one of the most interesting things and I know that I know it's the thing that you're uh really kind of passionate about um so what's the governance structure here and like why did you build it the way you did yeah so um I worked with uh koala on the um Dow model law so I hung out with all

these lawyers talking about dolls and learning about legal personhood and I learned all these legal Concepts from them yeah and we were in some of those meetings together yes at some point yeah and um and um and then and then I'm American uh if you can't tell and um in America we have this wonderful State called Delaware and and it turns out that if you're a foreigner if you're uh European and you form a company in Delaware you have more offshore protection doing that than you would in almost anything that we think of as an offshore jurisdiction you know you're the transparency that a a person has as a citizen of the Cayman Island to

figure out what's going on in your company is greater than anyone in the U.S has to figure out what's going on in a Delaware c-corp it's just private information it's just not published anywhere and so the tldr there is there's all these people in the in the blockchain space who are trying to create dials and these legal structures and they're trying to figure out is a doll a legal person blah blah blah and I said well wait a second llc's in America provide a huge amount of that protection already in in Gabe Shapiro is someone who sort of mentioned this to me in passing and and at that point I entirely understood what you mean I was like yeah you're absolutely right I hadn't thought of it that way and so that's essentially what we're doing with uh the the Cayman Island LLC

uh law is based on the Delaware LLC law so we're taking that and we're putting it in a in a in a more crypto friendly jurisdiction and um and we're using that to provide the the positive uh legal protection what I mean by positive is like it exists right as opposed to like it doesn't exist right not not happy and sad like like the the we're providing the positive legal protection um for the organization um using this legal structure and so um we're we're positively asserting that we're not you know engaging in Securities transactions in the United States a all our transactions are in the

Cayman Islands if they were somehow security transactions which we do not believe you know there's again you're it's you have to they say belt and suspenders but I I don't know enough there's not enough garment Fasteners we we're using a lot more than just belt and suspenders to make sure that um everyone's protected us as The Operators are protected operators of the business service providers end users dap developers we're trying to make sure that all of us have um sufficient legal protection where possible and where we have um recourse if that uh protection fails or is not available to us so we we've created this protection legally and then in those bylaws in those in those well

not bylaws it's it's a it's an agreement but within that agreement we say the governance for this company happens or Corporation whatever happens on chain yeah so you now have this sort of hybrid model where if the chain fails you can go to the court and Cayman Islands and do something but the chain has all this cryptographic stuff that was not you know it falls over to ethereum but if somehow that still didn't work you could still maybe go to caymanans and try to call people back but in the same vein if the Cayman Islands um governance gets captured you could just say well we're just going to keep doing this on chain stuff and

um you know came out and come after whoever they can come after good luck with that um we're going to continue to operate on chain and and so it's it's really trying to hedge it from all those different perspectives all at once by having bylaws that reference the on-chain activity and then ultimately we will be taking our res our corporate resolutions um and Publishing them on chain um because they are currently uh published at the registrar in the Cayman Islands as I understand it uh you can go pay uh intermediary to go to the Cayman Islands get the paper reports of all of our resolutions and you can get them mailed to your house we're going to um in addition to continuing to facilitate that as we're required to by law we will also allow

um anyone using the network to just read that data from the network as well so it's interesting that you you build it this way and that so essentially the Cayman Island company is a legal vehicle but all the governance um is happening on chain and like I know that there are like the the Lao you know is doing something similar in Wyoming and um do you think that this is a model that will end up being used more and more because like the Swiss Foundation is like you know the thing that everything that everybody uses we could I could spend a whole hour talking about Swiss foundation so I I'm I'm very let's not but uh I'm very opposed to Swiss

foundations they have a lot of known problems people can go read about all the issues that have existed with Swiss foundations I I think that they serve a very limited purpose and they've sort of been overused um the Wyoming stuff and the and some of the other uh stuff in in America I believe there's one in Vermont um those some of those are sufficient and solve certain problems that you have as a US citizen but they don't do anything for you if you and it you know in some of these cases they don't they're not sufficient so if you're a European or or what have you and you want to you don't want to land in the United States well then that's a non-starter um and so yeah but do I think these these um strategies will gain traction um I hope they do I sincerely hope that

they do um I hope that we can uh lead by example but I'm also very you know I'm I'm kind of been doing this a while now I I don't think that if the users I'm doing it for myself for my own personal reasons in terms of my own sense of safety and protection but if the users don't get a value out of it it's not gonna it's not gonna gain adoption yeah and I and I think we are in a situation where we are providing a benefit to users because you you can we can now say with confidence we can serve you as an Iranian we can serve a Russian we can serve a Chinese person um you know we can say that with a

confidence that you can't say that inferior just legally can't can't say that um and so I think that that does provide value to the DAP developers who will use our service yeah there's one last thing I want to talk about here just before we wrap up and maybe just talking about road map quickly is you know in in your in your documentation it says that it sort of describes the governance um that there's a diversity of jurisdictions there's a diversity of sources of uh funding sources and there's no early allocations for VCS or Founders so how is this being funded are you raising have you raised funds or are you raising funds or is it funded by the

service providers that are are there partners that are part of this early Network like yeah how does that work yeah it's the latter it's been funded so um there's been contributions of eight million dollars in cash um uh by the various members so there's seven members um the split is not you know it's not immediately guessable split but um members contributed two million dollars in cash not all of them did um to to uh to the development of the project and so what what is the reasoning behind this uh this um like I mean I feel like we've talked about this before but like

why not build this as a sort of Co-op or like a sort of like non-profit Association um yeah that yeah that just doesn't really provide so it is very much like a co-op in the way that it's governed but the legal structures there didn't help us didn't didn't solve the pro you know it made things worse we're better off being a transparent for-profit company than we are being these other things and that's a matter of opinion I mean that's that's if somebody said well for me you know these is my argument for why you're wrong I'd be like okay I mean for you that makes sense but I I'm still pretty confident for us that the for-profit this transparent for-profit structure um was better and to be frank

it's very difficult to operate and we are considering you know I would love to keep using this model but I'm not going to let you know the perfect be the enemy of the good so um we may have to change the model in the future and and we are also raising an ecosystem fund I mean that's the current plan so we're trying to raise tens of millions of dollars uh in the ecosystem fund um um outside of funding the LLC directly um and the LLC does have tokens there is a token but it's not a it's it's for payment it's a prepayment of service it's not a it's not equity in any in any sense it's it the goal is for it to clearly fit for a number of legal reasons for it to clearly fit within the

regime of either either or a um loyalty point or prepayment for service so um hope maybe we'll be able able to do both or I mean the law is complicated maybe we'll do one-on-one jurisdiction another another jurisdiction or whatever but the the goal is to it not be money and for it to not be Equity um and if it's a commodity whatever we're kind of neutral on that but positively for it to be a loyalty Point um or the prepayment of service uh and and we and we are going to build a refund platform to facilitate that prepayment of service uh guarantee um which is you know nothing like uh you know uh a speculative token right yeah

yeah wow I feel like I could go on for I've got so many more questions but uh we're gonna have to wrap it up I think uh we've been yeah it's been an hour and 20 minutes uh just before we do though like what's the road map um what can people expect from the from this project and uh how can people get involved like you know can people build using laconic already yeah so they can definitely build we have a we have a Twitter um at laconic Network um uh we have a telegram and um a Discord as well which you can find um you know going through there um we have a lot of source code all uh a lot of it works very well

um as always it's a little underdocumented but actually Zach who he worked with I worked with at RS is doing a great job of improving the documentation so the documentation is getting like Leaps and Bounds better every day it's a it's making a lot of progress there so people can yeah people can um download the code and run it themselves um and yeah there's laconic.com where you can find all of this information you know how to engage in all this in terms of the road map um there are again seven different companies working on the project at the moment um seven or eight depending on how you count or more is that public by the way did you disclose who those companies are um it's not secret but it's not public either

um so no there's no blog post um but it operates in this a legality space yeah exactly exactly exactly um and so um so yeah so you can um in terms of in terms of road map um the company that I run Circ is primarily focused on acquiring customers so we we do we manage all of the software development and then we do in-house a significant portion of the software development and then that I would it's not really outsourced but there's the different members contribute different things and it's all very complicated I'm trying to be tourists here because we're running over so so um so we're focused on going to

individual projects Who We Believe have a need or a Synergy and getting them to use our stack and and so we have announced Moby mask which is from metamask which is from consensus um there are other things that we've done with with other people uh at consensus that may or may not be made public in the next month or two I don't know what their publication what their publicity roadmap is there are other people that we're talking to who are well-known well-funded projects um there are people in the nft space so that's the roadmap that we're focused on now we are building a blockchain um it is Cosmos SDK based um it has a name registry in it it has a

name service in it it has some other interesting features that people talk about often in the cosmos ecosystem um and and so we're absolutely developing that um when we will launch that network is a more open question it's it's based on our ability to actually get traction with customers it you know if we get as we get traction with customers because I think we already have some demonstrated traction with customers as that traction grows um that will inform us on how we want to I have I have a whole Model A whole plan in place for how to launch the network but it's it's sort of sans feedback right so we need to get that feedback

from people actually using the system to help direct how we should launch it do we need to add more than seven members does is that actually matter you know the the the the verifiability the fault tolerance the the the trust minimization we can get these properties without having a hundred validators yeah right and so it there's a question about why do we need more validators do we need more validators how do we add those validators and all that stuff is again I can sit down and write you know a 40 page thing giving my view on it and articulating a whole plan which I have done but um but that's that has to you know meet

meet reality you know we have to go through the process of of interfacing that with reality so there's not so hopefully by the end of 2023 we will have an incentivized testnet um but I gave that long preamble to say you know that's not set in stone yeah Rick uh thanks so much for your time here um I've really enjoyed uh diving deep here with you and um yeah looking forward to doing it doing it again at some point uh in the future maybe about this topic or maybe about other topics yeah a pleasure happy to talk about whatever you think I should talk about yeah we still need to do that that podcast we would be talking about doing

for a long time but uh all right man thanks so much and uh yeah we'll talk again soon it's always a pleasure bye bye cheers