ZK Podcast: DAppNode & the ETH2 kick off with Eduardo Antuña Díez

Transcript

[Music] welcome to xero knowledge a podcast where we talk about the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web the show is hosted by me anna and me frederick this week i chat with eduardo antonio diaz the co-founder and project lead of dapnode we talk about the importance of running your own node the rollout of eth2 as well as what dapnode aims to build and be in the future but before we start in i want to remind everyone

that the git coin grand clr matching round eight is on now there's only a few days left in the round and we the xero knowledge podcast have a bitcoin grant i wanted to remind you that if you want to support the podcast now would be a great time there's a lot of competition as mentioned last week so if you are thinking about donating please do and head over as soon as possible i also want to thank this week's sponsor o1 labs the team incubating the mina protocol mina is the world's lightest blockchain powered by participants their novel use of recursive zk snarks enables a constant 22 kilobyte blockchain that will allow anyone with a smartphone to sync and verify the chain in seconds mina has a growing technical community

of more than a thousand members that is spreading across 50 countries and over the past 18 months the community alongside with the core team of o1 labs has been working on a rigorous test net and now they're close to finding a mainnet candidate the last step is the adversarial test net as well as a bug bounty program which in total is offering one percent of the protocol and rewards for finding vulnerabilities testing the network and participating in challenges you can sign up for this adversarial test net test world sign ups are open today but it's very limited and it's limited to the first thousand participants so if you want to participate do sign up asap go to minaprotocol.com adversarial to secure your spot

you can also join their very active technical community discord i've added the link to both of those sites in the show notes so thank you again 01 labs now here is my interview with eduardo so this week i'm catching up with eduardo and tunia diaz who's the co-founder and project lead of dapnode so welcome to the show eduardo thank you thank you for having me hey it's a pleasure finally to be with you so in in today's episode i think the plan is to kind of cover what dapnote is the role it plays but currently like you know in the last few weeks there's been the release of eth2 and there's also been a lot of conversation about the role of

the node operator so it's it's very timely to have you on the show now um i think as a starting point i actually want to hear how you would describe dap node like what is it exactly well that's a very good question we started this project three years ago and the thing that we are realized at that moment is that we are developing these enterprise technologies we want to switch from this web 2 to a new web 3 but the thing that we discovered is that we are using this technology in the same way that before we are using centralized server providers we are accessing to google or send our transaction using infuria and mainly it's because we think that people need to have an

easy way to do that but also we want to create a platform for projects that allow us and i love them to have this decentralized hardware layer and and that was the purpose original terminal to create this decentralized hardware layer allowing to anyone to to run this into application in a truly manner was dapnode ever like was the plan originally to be like a mining rig in a way like did you think of it in the context of proof of work or was it always like a full node but not mining yeah the addition it was never to create a minor thing it was always just to put all the pieces together to connect ipfs swarm to an ethereum node

and be able to access to the the web in a truly centralized way so mainly it was hardware and software that people want to put at home and make easy to access to these new technologies in a truly centralized manner and make easy to share with friends and family and preserve the privacy cool i think in this in the case of dap note i kind of want to talk about it or think about it in maybe two eras like the era of now like what it could be used for today with eth1 and maybe after this we can talk about how it can be used in the context of eth2 and i know there's people who don't like the separation of eth1 eth2 but like for for simplicity's sake let's say like today if i use dap node what am i

actually running what interacts with the eth1 network today yeah okay well we build this system taking into account that everyone is going to run an serial node or something like that the idea is yes we want to create a decentralized package distribution so that is why we use the argon package manager and the smart contract to publish the house of image so that means that when you install a package on your download you can do it in a completely centralized manner and that is why we use ethereum at the beginning because we want to have this decentralization and this trash based on ethereum so now people that are running that node can install

several applications that we are publishing on on this smart contract but we also have a public smart contract in which anyone can develop its own package and pal is dead so for example people can run can't run now full knob servicing for sure also turbo guests archive nodes but also bitcoin monero because at the end we want to create a something quite uh anoxic from the point of view of the user so even if we are using ethereum as a our base technology we expect people to run several applications at the end this is like uh we can understand it like a mobile phone or something like that in which you can have several applications a half of decentralized application oh cool okay

so it is i guess i've always thought of dapnode in the context of ethereum but i didn't realize that you could actually use the software and hardware for other networks as well yeah and even also we are adding more applications that is not just blockchain related for example you can run your own cloud on downloads so you can access to your files or bitcoin to store your keys i mean it's just your own private cloud for decentralization on other things what's your background that led you to build this well it was a long journey i've been doing several things developing android application i also be uh devops i've been working well in uh it company and then

i discovered syrian smart contracts i learned a lot about how to develop and then i meet jordi valina and grief green i discover giveth and everything started to happen then and yeah during the maker dao audit we come up with this idea and yeah it's close to me three years ago and we started to create a proof of concept that started to grow easily and fast so you were one of these projects that kind of like started right as the market was tumbling downwards correctly yeah um yeah that must have been hard i mean i i remember that time

i mean it was it was interesting because there was fantastic energy in people who were building really cool things but there was also a little bit of this sense of like where is this going because you know prices were actually going down and they went down for from like if you're if you're saying beginning of 2018 or so yeah like it was sliding down until the end of the year so what was that like starting a project at that moment yeah it was quite crazy but the thing it it always has been a very small team at the end and we get some grants to build this we don't create an ico or something like that yeah and yeah it was really crazy i told my friends about time that just because of we

survived to bear max maybe we need to get an ft or something i don't know but it was very very crazy stuff but at the end we always want to spend this money development so that is why now i have the feeling that we have a quite solid product and yeah i'm quite proud of all the wrestlers during these years and yeah also very proud of the team yeah yeah it's really amazing so going back to kind of the purp this this sort of dap node as a like what would you what do you call it then like what is the you have a hardware piece and you have a software piece what is the hardware piece called we call both dab not at the end uh the thing is we started this as a software project but

then we realized that some people are maybe lazy or they want to have a more convenient solution a local play solution but it's not part of our business it's just to make easy for for anyone to run now to just buy it plug in and start to operate this is not all will happen router and all the stuff is crazy but we try to help people to make that happen but at the end the hardware is just a commodity on top of the shop where it has to make easy and more convenient i see so what your main kind of core business is still the software but you like is this unit that you're selling as sort of the dapp node hardware is this something relatively standard that anyone can find or is this something you've created no it's something standard it's a nook

in intel and uh even we encourage people to buy themselves and install the software for us it's even it's even better because we don't need to give them support on that but uh yes yes and also there are some people that wants to buy ours our hardware because they want to contribute to the project so i mean we don't get too much uh profit on them but it's something and it's something you can yeah something like physical you can send in the mail might be kind of exciting for people to receive it yeah exactly it's a connection between users and the project at the end also and like what just kind of going back to what you had said about it being this place where you can run multiple networks is is there sort of like a

drive to be more pos focused or is it actually proof of work or proof of stake agnostic like do you want it to primarily be supporting the emerging pos systems or is it just like all systems for me so all the systems at the end the idea behind developed is since you can run different applications and this application can have some incentivation for running there you can get some revenue for for running a node and for creating that it's like we want to switch the value from big corporates and and central and centralized parties to the users and and this integration model is the thing that makes all the things happen for example

like uh swarm that are going to start to have this individual model or or a single proof of stake that the cool thing about professor stake network is that it's quite easy to provide this depending on on the consensus protocol but if we think about this new proof of staking which with a small amount and a lot of validators can can run it makes you to run several i think at the same time for example i am running in my home right now 3-2 avalanche and also a short note the store notes so at the end the the all the all the division that they're getting from several priorities that they think that is making that not profitable okay yeah that was actually a question that i that i was

curious about because like when when i think of running a node i always think of like the full node of a like extended network but are you also going to be supporting like these other roles that are emerging things like the i don't know what they're they're called different things on all the l2s but something like the committee role or the the checker the i forget what they're all called but you know what i mean like for each for each one of these if they have any sort of committee or decentralized group of people who are supposed to verify what they're doing as they write on chain are you also supporting those type of things yeah that that is the whole purpose of this project at the end is he has to make easy to run these roles just with one click be able to be a

slasher of season two or i don't know uh well polkadot has another role but at the end if it makes sense to run in uh home in a note it makes sense to be in damn not at the end we want to create a platform even for projects so that means that if you have these school projects and it's a committee for doing something it makes sense that you put in that note because right now we are i don't know we don't have numbers because we always want to be decentralized so we don't have metrics about how many users do we have but we estimate that we have around 300 200 nodes people running downloads so that's it's very good this is starting to happen a platform on top of this

cool so what do you what do you think i mean i think you're the right person to ask this but like what is the benefit of running your own node you sort of mention like it's more decentralized if more people are running their own nodes but like why is that good what's the what's the real like benefit here it's very hard to to convince people to run notes first of all because of the complexity that is why we develop this software to make easy and in general i think privacy is a good reason to to do that tools like infura or other node providers i don't know if they are doing but they can collect your metrics they can know what are your accounts because you are always querying the same accounts and even they can track you and and know where are you

doing that so if you want to preserve your privacy you need to run your own notes for sure it's the only way to be completely decentralized and preserve that more than that i think also that it's important for the network um people running out is important for example we have seen that not too much full note of ethereum is a problem if people want to run like clients for example and in general they thing is very hard it's very hard to convince people to run nodes because sometimes privacy is not enough that is why this integration model makes a difference it's when people start to run these nodes can you say something more about privacy though like maybe what isn't private about the way it's

set up right now if you are using an infer and fura node or like a kind of hosted node you sort of mention that the metrics they can track you but what does that mean exactly like what's an example of somebody interacting with that where they would be tracked i mean at the end is we have the feeling that we are running the dabs in the same way that we previously run the web 2 applications so i mean that you go to a dot io domain so you are accessing to a dns to a public dns for example google and then you are downloading a web page that is stored in aws so at the end it's the same that before and then you are interacted with a blockchain okay that's fine but you are using

a centralizer we provided usually infuriate so at the end you are using a new technology but using like before yeah so we are not finishing anything that's so it's so funny too you're very well described here like the website that's hosted on aws like all of those regular touch points that are web 2 and centralized are still centralized and then even the blockchain part if you're relying on the on the note like a hosted node for you you're still relying on some central body and that's that's kind of where my question is is like say i wanted to send a transaction like if i'm relying on this centralized node what does that mean exactly um well the thing is when you are

sending a transaction you are exposing all your privacy to these providers you are telling what is your account when you can do it when you want to do it who are the sender the receiver the amount the the token and all the stuff and even for regulators could be interesting to know this data also so at the end if you are exposing the data you are giving for free you have always this fear that someone can control that but isn't like aren't like aren't all blockchains kind of open like you can always see the transaction data after the fact but i feel like the centralizing point like does it have more to do with like when your message lands in the mempool like where like is that the part that becomes a bit

trickier i i think more than that is the ib sometimes okay so for example with ip they can track where are you and they even send the police to your home if they want if you are not using tor or other privacy tools yeah so at the end is if they collect this information from several points they can track you completely so at the end i mean we know that maybe blockchain are depend on the blockchain is not focused on privacy but giving all this power to centralized providers means that they can collect and make an amazing track of you do you know we had a few weeks ago i think dan robinson on we talked about this mempool the dark force

of the mempool but i do wonder like with these centralized node operators did they also like i don't know exactly how they work but could they in a way control when a message reaches the mempool like say there was this like front running attack happening could it be the centralizing node who actually you know is is a part of this or is that sort of at a different point in the in the transaction life they can do for for sure i mean at the end you are sending the transaction using their infrastructure so they can block you they can do whatever they want i mean don't understand me i love you sure and they are making an important role but at the end is

the power that they can get in the future and and obviously if you are using them to transact they can control even that even the when the transaction is is maintained on or if they come from run from running if they want i i never thought about like the node operator as that as part of that potential kind of like vulnerability of the system but now i can kind of see it yeah relative to this some quick circle when something some for happens and infuriate goes down for a while a lot of that stop it stop working so for me it was a good test that okay the network is decentralized because it worked nothing happened but not elapsed it was

a good test for that yeah because a lot of them stopped working because of that wow do you recommend then that all dap providers like actually i mean i'm sure i assume you do but they should actually have their own nodes like wasn't that originally the idea that the dapps would somehow have their own nodes running i think so and i mean for me is enough if they provide you a way to change the provider that for me is is enough because you can use if you want to your their uh infrastructure or you want to use your own infrastructure to interact with the taps that could be at least a good starting point and then obviously if they can have their own infrastructure much further cool

so one of the things that was recently came out recently was this um and this is actually kind of a big deal on twitter right now this proposal of the stable act basically um this is a law or a proposal for a law and it requires like the requirement is that stable coin issuers would need to get a banking license potentially and in the dialogue on twitter one of the people behind this bill kind of said well you know if if somebody acts against the law then it's up to the node operators or the validators or the you know miners to exclude any transactions from this entity and obviously that got a lot of feedback of like you can't do that it's

decentralized but i wondered what your take was on this is there a way currently maybe that people could enforce such a thing uh well at the end if you think about individuals running notes it's going to be very hard to go to every house and okay you're not as validated as track traction maybe yeah the ip is again another one problem but if you think about big providers centralized providers then the government can call the door and tell them you need to switch this off because you are making something legal at the end it's the same problem if we want to be truly decentralized we need to uh and we want to avoid this kind of

weird laws we need to figure out a way which is impossible to do that and that is decentralization for me that is something that solved its privacy and this um government things yeah i also well sometimes ago i read about the european commission talking about to forbid the encrypted p2p communication that is also crazy stuff for me and i think i hope that in the future political parties and people around this start to realize that at the end the technology is not the problem the problem is the people so we need to focus on people not nothing technologies

also i mean to me it's more that like uh lawmakers need to spend a bit more time understanding how these things work and what would actually be possible to even legislate exactly um yeah so i wanted to move on like so far i think we've been talking mostly about dapnode today and yesterday but you know in the last two weeks there's been been a big update a big change kind of in the eth community that is the eth2 phase zero i think is it phase zero has recent has launched and so it's kind of exciting because there's a lot of talk of like whether or not this would happen in 2020 and it seems like it has i want to hear kind of what what's your connection to eth2

are you like planning on just being a place for validation to happen or like what's the connection point yeah um since one year more or less we focus too much in make happen to be a validator of cn2 professed taken down not and we did it and several people are right now running validators from dublin i don't know the exact number today but yesterday more than 100 blogs were half our graffiti with dabnet and that's incredible and yeah we believe that the purpose of proof of staking one of the purposes that he has to try to decentralize this new mining power to individuals

that is why we believe that it was very important to make that happen in dublin and yeah we figured out how to do it in an easy manner that was the purpose because we start to see people that doesn't know how to run a node i mean uh this is not for debuffs this is for people that maybe don't know how to run a common common line and yeah it was incredible it was too much stress at the beginning for here but finally it seemed that people are are doing that and as i told you before the importance of this is people when they have this integration to run nodes is when they are really do it so one of the consequences

of this happening of ethereum too is that right now we have more if one nodes in the network because so like oh i might as well also run an eth1 node and the compensation is going to be coming from me too when you just said um just one thing when you just said you run a validator as far as i understood what you mean is you've created like a way for anyone to run a validator right like it's it's more like you've created a portal for for anyone to kind of join the network exactly we are creating tools for anyone at the end this is think that for individuals we want individuals to write down we don't want peak parties or bit companies running on sticky uh service we expect people at

home running and maintaining a node in an easy manner not not to make again the same mistake that before or for example right now there are several exchanges that are offering this is taking service we want to have an alternative to that i mean i think at the end a network should be mixed between several entities and several options but we we want to provide something easy for individuals also cool does dap note when you say though you're creating kind of the tools and stuff to be able to do the validation are you also building a client or is this something else maybe help me understand the distinction yeah this is something different at the end

you can understand i'm not as a robber of clients so at the end we mainly dockerize this client of prism right now and we put it in our dart store so people can install it but at the end it's freezing uh we are also expecting to to import uh lighthouse also at the end maybe in download you are going to have all the clients so you can choose what client you want you want to use on even you can switch between clients in the future even well you need to be careful about that but you are going to be able to do that what is what what does it mean then like so you just said you tokenize it somehow like so if i had 32 eth and wanted to validate on through dapnode what is actually happening to that eth well this is not happening today at the end

the thing that is happening nowadays in doubt is is like a regular uh process you go to the launch pad you deposit the 32 east and you have your keys you put in your target and then you start to validate i see and and right now it's with prism primarily so that's like the client that you're using to do it exactly okay and you're going to introduce more in the future that's correct and we also add in some uh tools like the refinance dashboard and other things to make easy and so you can track it and we are also going to add notifications and tools to make easy to do it at home okay i want to kind of you did mention this sort of token part though but let's revisit that in a bit because i want to kind of

finish talking about this eth2 launch and how that went so what was it like for you like you you were really in it i guess yeah yeah but yeah it was very very hard to be honest because at the end we don't know if everything is going to work at the moment and you know that you have a lot of people running notes around the world and they are put a lot of money on that so if something goes wrong they are going to start to route you directly and the things can they go crazy for sure and yeah funny story happened but but at the end everything was worked quite well

um just in a small pack in the present client related to people that put my turkey on the ui but we fixed the same day in a few hours and since then no one is having problems with that but at that moment that you don't know what is going to happen it was like oh my god i can totally picture that that's such like the but i mean it's so funny because like launches it's almost like you need this you need these hiccups to make these launches as exciting as possible and i have rarely if ever heard of a launch where there isn't something yeah yeah it's it's incredible and these are aligned and it's something that you don't

control so it's it's i mean and the feeling that you have when everything goes well it's amazing it's like oh my god this is incredible how long was you sort of said you started in on this about a year ago you must have been i guess you've been like practicing on test nets like trying this out constantly on test nets but like how long has that has the software lived on a test net as it is well i'm not as a software it's always has been in immediate from the very beginning we also deployed the arabic smart contribution for 10 minutes we it was crazy because yeah jordy was one of their auditors and we needed at that moment and we deployed it again

wow but i don't i don't mean the overall dap note software but i mean the specific like the eth2 validation yeah there's two at the end we follow the testnet that uh client teams deploy like medallia or well we have plenty of testnet and and that is another challenge the thing that is happening is since it's free to set up a note in this statement a lot of people start to set up 1000 nodes and then forget about the nodes so that we need to restart the network grain and it was a little crazy and that is why i understand that intent device test network like kusama in the case of pokedot makes a lot of

sense because this new proof of stake network has another way to to work so if you want to have a valid network i guess that this network needs to have some value and it makes sense at least for me yeah this is i mean we've talked about this a couple times this idea of the incentivized test net and like why why i guess more and more networks are at least considering doing something like this as they launch but would you say like is eth2 phase zero is it an incentivized test net because it's not really right like you can't know anything with it exactly no no i'm talking that we need another taste another network we need a parallel network with some value

to make some tests not going directly to main it i guess uh the thing is i have the feeling that this test network that you that are using girly it's that since it's free we are going to start and put several networks every time that's we need a network and it's crazy for example also if you want to um participate in the world at some point maybe you need to wait 10 days or something like that that is also too much why because in a second too you need you have a queue of validators so you need to we you have a a hard limit of validators per day so you need to wait so if a lot of people vote into the test network then you need to wait into the queue like in maintenance at the end

and when that happened to medalia a lot of people tried to go into the test network and yeah the queue was full and yeah it was crazy so that is why we have now perimod that is working quite well but i don't know if it's going to be forever let's see but things freeze sometimes the people sit up on 100 notes and forget about them they don't sign the exit and yeah i don't know is there any plans for any sort of incentivized test net or is that just sort of like a wish of yours right now into the into the world yeah to be honest is one of my wishes i don't know if it's going to happen

maybe we are going to try to do something similar i don't know sure yet we are trying to figure out it makes sense but uh let's see i guess it's needed yeah i know it is responsibility of that note or other bread but i think it makes sense it almost sounds like it could be i mean this is obviously very speculative but maybe the ef should look at something like this because this seems like it seems like it could be valuable even if it i mean say it even becomes like a shard i don't know if that's possible but like you know these first phases where you're kind of it's kind of a like right now when it's very limited functionality maybe this would be something that they could think of as like rolling it into the eventual larger eth2 anyways yeah i don't know but i guess it also in

the future maybe roll ups that are going to interact with this 3 and 2 and we expect to do that happen they need to have this other test network to to make things because imagine that you have a lab that are testing whatever and you need to move to another test network because the other one is not working so it's going to be crazy so i guess to have a stable test network makes a lot of sense and i don't know if the only way to do it is with integration but at the end people i think it makes sense that using the device since people are going to run notes and i mean you are allowed to have the same duties that's in the maintenance so why not i like that so like to wrap up on the on the launch and the roll out and all

of this like what's your feeling right now about eth2 like looking forward are you are you optimistic do you feel like the community was very pleased because i mean at least on twitter everyone seemed pretty happy yeah i mean i think it's amazing that after years of work everything's happened but and everything goes good and goes in the right way i mean nothing happened yeah i mean we we have the there's lots people but not more than that and yeah that's not my long and and it's crazy that that everything is starting to happen right now and i'm very excited about the future and also this new roll up centric direction that for me makes a lot of sense

it's incredible i think that is just the first piece of the puzzle and we have a lot of things to build on top of this yet but it's a good starting point um migrating from one network to another one it's not easy at all no never what do you what does dapnode do like that if you think of the software hardware like does it have what do you need to build to make it resistant to slashing in a way like what's unique about these pos staking systems like what do you have to develop to prevent that and how much of it do you actually are you feeling like you're responsible for yeah that is a good question okay now at the end uh educate people is very important i mean even if we try to

protect them not if people are start to put in that keys another piece of software they are going to be a slicer for sure so we cannot prevent that for example prism has a slicer protection inside the other client so they know if you're started or but if you move to another prism client in other nodes you need to move that protection to not be a sludge in the future we expect to add the remote signer that is something that is starting to be developed that yes this remote signal can design in different hardware so that means for example if you have your uh download with the remote signal you can sign in a server that is in maybe another country on all your friends hardware so at the end

you are the custody of the keys but the the competition happening in another another node and that's this is very interesting because if other implementation other clients support that for example can allow us to run in download all the client at the same time and you can easily switch from one client to the other one without slashing because at the end this remote signing is who controls this uh slash rotation so you are safe interesting is there anything is there any equivalent to that like in existing pos systems that you know of remote signers i feel like i've heard of that somehow yeah i mean i think mainly the thing that is happening here is the difference between other proof of stake network

and accident the thing is for example if you go to polkadots you can uh rotate your keys easily but that is because you have a blockchain that has all the functionality so you can publish and you and you can make this kind of but since yes that you are not able to do that that is why we need to use this technique to to i see to make that do you think eventually eth2 will have it though i don't know maybe i hope i mean at the end for me from the design point of view you don't have any reason to slash people that just are making silly things because i mean they don't take care of these things

they are not attacking the network so exactly and we need to protect them from from making that happen so any kind of protection that we can add on chain to that i think it makes sense is there anything else that you do though to help protect the those that have actually validated with you is there any sort of indicators for them if like the you know internet is down or they've been offline for a period of time like i'm just trying to picture what this feels like for a maybe a non-technical user trying to use dapnode for the first time staking like what can they expect to see yeah i mean there are several tools to to make that happen at the beginning when you set up your node you have the presumed ui that gives you some

information about the status of your node that is quite interesting we also have integrated graphene and promotions so you can if you want to have more metrics you can take a look to all the things that are happening or not that is really amazing but maybe it's too much techy for some people i don't know but you have it and in this rafah you can configure if you want alerts for example if you miss one another station you can get a notification diagram or another channel and also there are tools like bitcoin a change in which you can register your validator and you can you can get notifications one important things related to that is human utilization is in the same system

if for example you lost the internet connection you lost the metrics that is why it's important to have these external things change your nodes not just the monetization inside them i see i see so let's step into the future of the project and even of like you know these node operations like what's what's what are you looking at kind of going forward yeah the thing is we recently announced announce our future plans and the thing that we are seeing is freedom is probably the most decentralized network at the beginning because our individual participates on the network but we have the feeling that centralized staking providers are going to appear

and they are already appearing because essential has some risks from the individual point of view uh you are going to lock your eighth for two years three years maybe you need to maintain a note and also that you are tied to these keys for two years you cannot shut down your ball you can sign an exit but you are losing this this revenue that are you getting so we believe that big parties like on base and it's happening are going to give you an easy way to stake the just click activate you are sticking congratulations and they are creating virtual pulls so at the end they control daily they can have this liquidate that is not real and it still entails and we truly believe that is going to happen

and we want to propose an alternative to that we think that if we want to have a healthy decentralized network we need to figure out how to propose an alternative to that that is why we want to create a dab the debit handed out is just to put all credits to pools of people the people that want to stake and the people that want to validate um right now there are several projects that are trying to solve this problem also but they are always or that is my feeling they are trying to focus from the point of view of the staker in our case we want to focus from the point of view of the individuals of the hardware and the validators since we have been working on that direction

since three years ago and the idea is to try to create a decentralized transport of validators at the beginning we are trying to figure out how we can do that there are one project that is happening on the syrian research that is the secretary validators that maybe can can make sense but we are also trying to figure out other alternatives using bls strictly to be able to create this translucence pool of validator so that means that for me the key point of all of this is if you have the hardware you can start to validate and you can go outside the validation pool if you want and also you can if you are running a validator yourself and you want to have more x and get more reward you can do it that and that is the first

step to create this trashless pool of validators and as a consequence of that then it's when we can tokenize these deposits and then we have the liquidates as a consequence of this but the vision is the reverse white we start from the point of view of the invalidators yeah so that's a question that i wanted to dig into is this idea of like the liquid assets of these staked tokens but i wondered before before we do that i want to sort of understand the pool idea a little bit more because you know eth2 validators it's this the way i've always understood it's like 32 eth only right per validator and so you can have lots of small validators validating with their 32 eth but when you think there it doesn't have

at least so far the e2 spec that i've that i've understood it doesn't yet have this concept of like delegation exactly and that's what i understand the pools are supposed to sort of signify or do but how does it work how do you actually pool if you're only allowed to do 32 eth doesn't it mean you have to inevitably hold custody of these tokens and then submit them or is there other ways to do it yeah that's the thing that we are trying to figure out we are writing the white paper right into that we have serious idea the one that we are just trying to write down is uh to use a distributed key generation for the validator key and have a kind of conceal that has who creates this key and then split that for every individual that's each part of

the pool so that means that this console can select one of the validators and can switch to another one but they never have the cost of the key at any moment neither the validators needed the council and that was non-custodial are decentralized so say like as an example here like say somebody only had four eth but they want to participate and like so are you collecting up to 32 eth from smaller eath holders and each one of them would have would be part of the committee that holds the key not exactly the idea is we tokenize this deposit and then we pack it in the city east and then this council get i mean not disconcert the doubt deposit on the

deposit smart contract and then the key is generated by this concept of of validators so at the end is i mean the council is the validators not the token owners exactly the council is like a protocol layer that allow us to not be custodial of the key but also be in control of who is the validator that could it's two things right so i see there's like a pool of like small token holders or big maybe but like whatever like various token holders and then there's also a pool of validators and and then there's a mechanism in between them to be able to like match

up the token holders package it into 32 ether i guess give them something back that like proves that they have access to it and still but still not like just have it sit with one of the validators but rather like live like actually no to explain this part so there's a committee of validators but then is it that the committee decides which validator at any given time will validate or like take in that 32 eth package is that kind of what their decision making is about it's more or less at the end at the moment that you deposit the ether you that you don't have the control of it is i mean you the only thing that you need to to be a validator is the validator key and so many idea of this console and this validator is to

split this key in a way that is not custodial and allow us to switch between one validator and the other one that is from the point of view of the validator and from the point of view test taker that can put the east and get their stickers and and finally the dao is who makes this connection between both bullets who create the balance between both substance and are you not worried i mean is like the centralizing figure here then could be like the dow the dao is decentralized but you're trying to avoid i guess having dap node be the centralizing body that's like doing any of the decision making here exactly we don't want to have that and for me make sense that it is controlled by an adult and to split the control between the

actor of the system so part of the token of the control of detail is going to be to the stakers other part is going to be for the validators and also maybe we are going to leave some tokens for the client implementation so we want to incentivize client implementation and diversity so at the end it's about to align situation and align motivation between actors when when i think of validating and in any way though i always think of like running software so who's running it like where is the active validation happening like on whose computer basically is what i'm going to understand mainly the thing that we want to achieve is imagine a validator at home and it gets another station and the idea is

i want to sign with my part of the key and i'm going to send to the this committee i'm going to make a broadcast and when i get the first n of m responses i'm going to aggregate them and that is the signature of the blocks so it's like i made some part of the work and this concealer helped me to verify all the all the processes i mean it's like i collect all the signatures of them and and with my one and then i make that happen that is one of the challenges of this now uh we have other two challenges to to solve to make that happen one is uh the s1 withdrawal situation uh there is a channel right now in ethereum research the thing is withdrawal is eth one withdrawal

exactly the thing is right now you can only um use an abelias as a withdrawal key andelia is just to figure out if it's possible to ask a new feeding account as a withdrawal key so that is the thing that uh unlock this down because if all the eighth can go straight out then you can split this ether between the holders of the tokens that you originally give to them and i imagine well we are yes in conversations and we we are trying to create a lobby around that and we have sellers ideas and we spend it even it's hard to know because the future of how withdrawal is going to

happen is not too much clear yet we imagine like a kind of massive migration after a lot but well at the end we are going to try to make a proposal and try to be the champions of that or at least help to make that happen is our role on that and the other piece that is missing is the the how to connect this ethereum 2 to 001 and it's the how to get the balance of all the validators of the of the dow into three months to so we can give the value of the performance and also penalties and all this stuff i see that's actually that's so interesting yeah this connection point right now i mean eth1 has a lot of tools and things but eth2 doesn't so

is it is it on that side were you just like there's nowhere to lock in on the eth2 side yet yeah it is when we spit or we are trying to figure out we can use teleknowledge technology so the thing that we need to know is the balance of all the of all of this dial and even if the balance of this validator individually so we need to have a way to prove unchained the current balance of these validators so mainly the idea that we have in mind maybe or right now or we need to refresh about that is to use a kind of optimistic for publishing the finalizing hash of the cn2 and then create a technology proof with all the balance of these validators and submit the the

generalist proof on change so this way is more more efficient that using traditional records and allow us to prove all the things that we want cool that's exciting delving into the zero knowledge world yeah or and maybe maybe yeah we need to figure out i mean it should be doable we need to figure out about how many times the proof takes but at least it seems that the technology that we have right now is allowing us to build this but yeah our current state is we are going to write a kind of white paper and we are going to expose to to the world and let's see if people believe that we need to build this i mean we as i told you at the beginning we don't have a big team

we are right now i think five people and it's the moment that we have more people involved this but we are trying to get people that want to build this and help us to build this vision for example recently africa just joined us to the team so it's nice yeah it's amazing we'll be excited about all the things that are going to happen yeah we i mean africa was on the show after it was on like our fifth episode or something like that we talked about like the history of yeah like how he had gotten into it um that's so cool we had mentioned we had just mentioned this idea of this liquid token but i want to kind of revisit it now that i understand a little bit more

how basically pooling works how the the dao interacts with this validator committee but how like where does the this liquid token potentially live is this like liquid version of eth2 staked is that something that you picture being part of this construction or is that like a secondary project um in the season that we are envisioned right now you're gonna need to understand that we are going to have uh two tokens one is this liquid s so that means that when you deposit you get this rapid is it's like futures yeah yeah yeah although i guess it's not wrapped eat because that exists yeah like wrapped eat too or something maybe it dries deep or no if we need to find a good thing or liquid

i don't know but mainly the idea is we if you have that you can easily put in in your shop so you you have this liquid you can buy people and you can trade easily and one of the risks that you have if you try to make this leaky test in a centralized manner is that the law can understand it as a security but if you do it as a dao then it's not a security it's just uh utility and that is a key point and you can try it in unison easily and the other token that we are envisioned is the the token of the tao and the idea is that using for sure aragon b2 for making this down happen and we want to split this token between the actors

so for example imagine that you make the deposit if you just take this uh liquid in a small contract you get this doubt because you are telling us that you want to be part of this doubt you want to have make a decision on this that are going to happen and also we are trying to figure out and we are i mean when i i try to explain intuitive base test network policy and 2 i trying to figure out if this token of the dow could be also a token for a bigger chain so we have this beacon chain with a native tokens of the dao because at the end it's like put all together

hmm how would that work the beacon chain would accept or like work with the token from the dow yeah that's fun i always understood the beacon chain though as being a singular token sort of like in between chain somehow of the shards but maybe yeah but imagine that um for example like it's working right now with gurley you have this quarterly yet and you deposit on the smart contract and then you get this on on the beacon chain and the idea is the same you stake or you deposit this dow okay got it got it got it so it's still you're doing sort of this other

this once again you're kind of wrapping it yeah somehow or converting it somehow so when when we think about a lot of these like liquid asset liquid staked assets like i've heard this actually described in different ways but we'll call it that for now one of the questions is should this be created by some group outside of the development group or should it be already built into the protocol itself because if it's let out into the wild then it can kind of go wild and could potentially like hurt the security of the underlying system i think we've mentioned this a couple times on the podcast where it's like if the liquid token is able to generate more interest than the reward that the pos system offers then is it potentially would

encourage people to like take it out eventually i guess because the eth in this case is locked it's not a huge issue but do you know if like ethereum themselves like the the construction is taking into account these liquid things or does it actually fall to other projects like yourself to come up with that like do you know what the thinking is um in the ecosystem around this to be honest i think the thing that is happening naturally is that a lot of players are trying to create this leaky test and for me that makes a lot of sense to not fall in the same problems i mean we don't want to centralize all the stickiness on on them for sure and that is one of the things that we spread the the control for example how many each we are going to attempt for example

i think it makes more sense to have this actor around the world to to i mean for me diversity is key on all these and that is why i believe it it makes more sense that is outside of the protocol and it that happened like happening right now but i think that is important uh that the developers this year the core developers help to build these scenes so i mean at the end this proposal of the dao a lot of pieces are not doable today um but our intention is to try to make that happen and kind of with the support of the core team that are developing it too so they might have to build certain things so that you can actually do this at the end this is our ambition of a decentralized decision and

it's how we expect that it's going to be built but let's see that's awesome this is super fascinating i mean it's making me really i i realize how much i need to do also just a recap of like where east 2 is at because i haven't we haven't done an episode on it in a long time we keep mentioning it it keeps coming up some for some reason but we haven't actually dug into it so this is maybe a to-do for me uh but this is super interesting just to think of like all these different projects creating this underlying infrastructure and then you can kind of picture how some of the like bright minds that you already see in the eth1 ecosystem who are building these like very novel sophisticated tools or constructions or swapping things and

amms and that whole world i'm just it would be so curious to see what they do with this as it as it develops yes i i guess the future is going to be amazing i don't have the about that and also the relapse i'm very excited about that in the next year i mean you if you try to figure out what excited you years before it was completely different today so it's so this technology is going so fast that i mean it's very hard to know but it's very cool it's very exciting also i have a last question that i want to ask you and that's about sort of zk computation you know you mentioned the sort of l2s or like the the roll up idea and some of them are using zero knowledge

proofs and some of them will need places to actually do the computation for those zero knowledge proofs some of them are doing it on chain somehow and it's not always the best idea but what like have you thought of in the context of dapnode have you thought of including somehow zkp computation or providing any infrastructure for that i don't know if it's if it's in your wheelhouse but like yeah what are your think what's your thinking on that yeah we having always thinking about that because we truly believe that centralized technology technology is going to be the future or that is my feeling my personal feeling and um the thing is i expect in the future that some fpgas or some kind of scenes can happen and then if

this thing makes sense to put in a hardware box then we are going to do for example one of the projects that i also involved is island free and and one of the idea that it has is to computate these claims in your own hardware on your your audience so that is why we expect in the future when projects need to make this computation in a private way because right now the feeling that i have is the general technology in relapses it was used for compressed data not for privacy right now yeah it originally it was very privacy focused but there does seem to have been an evolution towards more like scaling or compression is also how i think about it yeah maybe next version of relax but right now is

it more about compression that privacy yeah and at the moment that you want to add privacy maybe maybe you need to do it in your in your house in your home and then it's when we expect to add that to them or also imagine trying to imagine a blockchain that want to use general technology and then have these nodes around with this specif specific piece of server but yeah as the future i expect using download as you're generally challenged so it can compute anything that you need and not just your mobile phone i hope that maybe in the future mobile phones are capable but i guess that when we start to have more complex proofs then it's going to be possible to do in a mobile phone so to

have this audience makes maybe make sense interesting that's super cool i'm curious to see how that goes going forward and it's good to hear that you're working with the folks at idan3 i guess jordy as well yeah who by the way was on the show and we'll i'll add the link to his episode as well so you can hear a little bit about what they're doing this is very exciting yeah you might need to grow your team at some point i don't know yeah i mean uh us what we talked previously survived with grant is very hard so yeah we need to get another way because we have a lot of ideas and it's hard to make that happen in a small team but yeah we we ambition to make a big team and

at the end we are trying to create an ecosystem we are trying to put together all the pieces to put ipfs swarm blockchain syrian terrorist proof i mean at the end it's too much and but i think the future is going to be really amazing or i hope so very excited about that well eduardo thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing a little bit more about dapnode with me um i've learned a lot through this and i and i can also tell i still have to learn a lot there's a lot of documentation that i should be reading do you have anywhere that you maybe want to send people who want to find out more yeah well we have our website that is and we have also a discord channel the cool thing that is happening with the

season 2 is that our community has grown a lot and right now we have plenty of people willing to help other ones to run a note so that is really amazing and we are appreciating to do that so please join us and let's start to make this change cool all right so thank you again and to our listeners thanks for listening