Aroma has native generalized intents which none no existing system right now has or has any clue how to get. Intents are clearly the next level abstraction because most users. Don't actually know which. Counterparty they want to interact with. For privacy preserving system to work, you need intents. And why is that? Well, privacy preserving systems as they push data to edge devices.
Right? Like now your state lives on your phone rather than into in the big database in the middle wherever I can see it. And with intents, you can make statements and some updates over your local state. And then you can have solvers that aggregate and sort of compute over this. Certainly right now, like Coinbase and Croc and and Finance are the single largest
mixers in the world. Hello and welcome to Epicenter, the show, which talks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Brian Crane and today I'm speaking with Adrian Brink. He is the Co founder of Enoma. And yeah, before we talk with Adrian, I just want to share a few words for more sponsors this week. If you're looking to stake your crypto with confidence, look no further than course one.
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Gnosis Dow forum today. Deploy on the EVM compatible Gnosis Chain or secure the network with just one GNO and affordable hardware. Start your decentralization journey today at gnosis dot IO. Cool. Thanks so much for for coming on Adrian, I know you were, I mean, I've we've known each other since 2017. I guess we were both working at Tenement sort of at the beginning of the Cosmos ecosystem and and those.
Sort of wild times. Yes, where you have learned the right way to build a crypto project and then you took all these learnings, right And then some years later you started the project in OMA together with Chris goes right and all right, Chris goes, who is also one of the key engineers at at Cosmos, I think implemented a lot of IBC. So what what what was the vision for you guys? Like what? What is a OMA? Yeah, I can quickly. I mean, the Cosmos days were
interesting. So I joined like January 2017, just around the time of the fundraiser. We're like 7 people, I think, with like Bucky and Ethan Fry and Rigel back in the day. And I mean, I think Cosmos got a lot of things wrong, but also got a lot of things right to some extent. Like it was actually very innovative and it actually cared deeply about decentralization, right? And so like, and by the way, I think we people don't give enough credit to Chris here.
I think the only reason why IBC works and ship just because Chris like spent a year and a half of his life and making sure that actually worked in the end, like without Chris, I think we would all be one interoperability standard poor right now. No, but so the vision behind a normal was always how do we get a unified developer expert? Because so like historically we looked at this and like, so me and Chris, we built a couple of, so we build the validator
Cryptum apps. One of their very first proofs, take validators start around the same time as Course 1, scaled it up to a ton of assets in retrospect, and then very gladly sold it to you guys. Because we very quickly realized that like validation is fun for like 6 months and I like wrecking service for six months. But afterwards it was like, yeah, I like protocol engineering and research much more than I like physical infrastructure.
And so like around the middle of 2020, our Chris and I sat down. I was like, OK, what, what is, where's the space going? And everyone seemed to be sort of copy and pasting the three same, the same 3 contracts to yet another chain or yet named them another name. And somehow this was supposed to be progress on like actually building the future that we kind of envisioned on like a heterogeneous trust world. Everyone has everyone use block chains all the time.
Block chains becomes coordination substrate not only for financial transactions, but for sort of societies as a whole, right? And honestly, no one was really working on this in the middle of 2020. And it, it felt very depressing at the time. I have to say that like everyone had abandoned sort of the idea of we should be building fundamental infrastructure that actually makes people's life better. And instead of like, well, let's copy these like 370 contracts to
yet another chain. And somehow this is going to make progress, right? And this, I mean, to some extent, we still have this nowadays where I'm like, everyone is very much focused on this incremental innovation. Like some people are trying to make a slightly faster consensus. Some people are trying to make a slightly different proof system, but to Cosmos's and also like to Cosmos's credit, actually at the time, it's like it proposed a
new model. Unlike we weren't going to live in a single chain world, we were going to live in this multi chain world. And so with a Noma, this is kind of thinking that through to the end, which is a you need privacy
guarantees. I thought like we figured that this was going to be very fundamental if you didn't have a basically a platform that enabled developers and users to obtain privacy guarantees where you always have to bolt on the privacy guarantees after the fact that this was never going to work. And I think this is still
holding true today. This is why I think sort of this is very challenging for existing ecosystems to really get mass market attraction because fundamentally, like my parents will not want to use them, right? And like for Dejan casino gambling, this is fine, but even if you're liquid hedge fund like you need privacy guarantees so that you don't leak your strategies to everyone else.
The other aspect was you needed AII think we always held the view that the world was going to be heterogeneous. Trust, it seemed or it, I mean, it's very unlikely. I think that there's going to be a single chain to rule them all. And I sometimes like to do this experiment or like ask people. I was like, do you like a one world government? And pretty much no one likes that idea. And yet we're designing for these models right now where like we have a single security model to rule.
And so our fundamental thesis was at the time even that like the world is going to be heterogeneous trust, but you want to have a unified sort of abstraction that developers and users can work against so that you don't have to rewrite your applications all the time. And I mean, we're seeing this right now where if you go from Etherium to Solana as a developer, this is a complete different system.
Like you move trust models, but it's a completely separate and develop environment that you now have to like development environment that you have to deal with. And that's sort of led to the third component, which is this unified operating system extract from.
It's like you want to have a unified like operating system API that developers and users can rely on that can work in many heterogeneous trust models where ideally even heterogeneous trust models can interoperate with each other and sort of like as the trust boundaries, as the contents of systems allow.
And so like the Super simple example is it always struck me a super unlikely that like USDC would be issued globally on Ethereum because and like we're seeing it's just a weird model where it's like no national government is going to give out or like USD, not USC, no national government, like the Swiss government is never going to give up its monetary sovereignty to like some Ethereum valid. I said, like they will always want their own sovereign system.
They can issue their own money and right, So like we, we need to end up in this world where we have many of these heterogeneous systems, but while still allowing that assets and developers and applications can flow between them. So that as a user, I can just say, well, I have some state on my system a like call this the Switzerland system.
And now I'd like to use the exactly same application, but I'd like to like do some settlement on, I don't know, on global Etherium. And so I normal was always designed around this. How do we get heterogeneous
trust plus privacy? And then the last part, which I think most people know a normal for which is intense, which is really something that like to a large extent we came up with the idea of intense or Chris came up with the idea of intense in 2016, I think when he built the Wyvern decks protocol, which is the back end to open C pride C port. Still to this day. The single out is gas used on etherium, which is this proto intense system. It was the inside that really most users don't have
transactions. They have intense, they have like a partial state transition. They don't have I would like to like just send you my Bitcoin to you. I mean, this exists in the Bitcoin case, but like anything complex doesn't have this. So it's like I would like to treat a for BI don't know whether with a with one counter party, with 15 counter parties. And so this is really what the where the intent angle comes from.
And so as a whole, taking together, you get this a normal reason, decentralized operating system for privacy preserving like for applications like. Think of it this way. It's a unified operating system abstraction that allows developers to write applications and users to use those applications irrespective in which specific trust model or heterogeneous trust model they run. That's maybe a super quick, not quick, but an intro.
Right. Yeah. I think there's a lot of things here that you know, I think will be take some time to unpack. I'm just wondering maybe on the last thing. So you said that they decentralized an operating system for decentralized applications. I mean, I've been very involved in as I'm very curious about this phrase operating system in this context. I mean, I know Freestyle, I've been very involved in herbage, right, which has the city of
like an operating system. I guess this has maybe been used in some other ways in crypto as well, like this term operating system. I'm curious, like what when you say operating system, what does that mean? Yes. It comes from the specific analogy to traditional computers where really like the way you can currently think of something like the EVM or the SVM is as a specific CPU. Think of this as an Intel CPU
and an ARM CPU, right? And so at the moment we're all living in this world where you program directly against the CPU. And the operating system analogy comes from the fact that enormous operating system can really abstract the way the differences in underlying CPU. So an underlying virtual machine, which means it's like enormous not designed to replace the SDM or the EVMI mean it's
like enormous intent machine. The intent machine is sort of sits on top of existing virtual machines and just allows develop so developers can build applications against the operating system AP is. And I mean, this was sort of the fun of an unlock with Windows to some extent in the past where all of a sudden I could start building applications against Windows and I didn't have to care which specific CPU that that Windows operating system was running on.
And the other thing is the operating system knowledge works also quite well because the operating system like Windows gave you a bunch of system level AP is for example, like distributed systems. So like in Anoma, you can, you can like talk to the operating system of Anoma in terms of like figuring out how to like route in the heterogeneous trust
world. So it's not just you operate on a single CP on a single operating system that gives you the AP is to operate on sort of a network set of operating systems. Does that make sense? OK. I mean, before you were talking about right when you sort of introduce Anoma, you mentioned some things like, OK, you think privacy is important.
You think then there will be like, you know, kind of like different chains or different environments with different trust assumptions that you want to have to unify the API and the intense. Now, I think these are more like you're not really a description of like what is a normal, maybe more some things unlike views you have about how you know how, what is important and what should something look like.
But then it's like it's a normal Is it like a chain and it also a framework for developing block chains and the OR like how would you? Yeah, it it, it's an interesting. Question What is a Noma? What is a Noma? A Noma is probably the single most sort of modular and composable stack you can have. I mean, you can use a Noma to build your own block chain. I mean, I'd be very happy with the Swiss government at some point adopt A Noma to like run their own sovereign Switzerland
chain to issue the digital CHF. You can also a Noma is also, you can deploy a Noma, the operating system directly to Etherium. So a Noma can run on Etherium. And then sort of like now you have all these instances and they may also be a global and Noma chain, right? There's going to be most likely a global and Noma chain which is separate from the protocol. It's like it's not directly tied to each other. Like there's a normal the protocol specification then on
OMA. Cosmos SDK in the Cosmos Hub. Kind of similar actually. I was thinking about this earlier today as well. It's like, and I think honestly Cosmos is actually a good example of like the model really worked like of like this general framework to build many different things. The other thing that also is on OMA is the fact that all these systems have a common PDP stack.
So like if you have a Noma and Etherium and you have global enoma, as a user you interact with the unified P2P stack like you in code you specify and like in your application in your intent you specify whether you would like to be settled on
global Etherium or global enoma. This is not like you have to modify to like point to a different RPC, and that's just one unified P2P stack, so. That's basically like, OK, I'm somebody developing an application and then, you know, I sort of like create transaction and then that's sort of unified regardless of where it goes. I mean, because then in, you know.
Yes, you as a developer, as a user effectively get a unified API here where you describe in code rather than sort of like in physical infrastructure where you where you want your state to live, right. And I think so if the important, because the important thing is you need to figure out as a user, as a developer, where do you want your state to live. I mean, this is actually this is the hard question. State is fundamentally the hard question.
Any systems it is not about sort of like specific execution environments or ZK proves. It's like who controls which part of state. And so with intense, you can specify like I would like the state to live on Etherium. I would like to use Etherium, for example, as my ordering
machine. So in that case, the ordering is done by the theorem validators or you say, you know, I would like my ordering of my intense transactions to be done by like Brian and I would like my state to then be settled to Etherium. So you get all this flexibility along the stack without having to all the time like cherry pick like in like monkey patch your
own components together. Like I normalize a lot of things because it tries to sort of make application development and usage of these systems and order of magnet easier. I mean, I know I was saying this in the beginning here on the university part, right? Like I think everyone else is. Like it sounds much more confusing. I mean, like if if you go to right, if you go to someone who's like AI just want to build some kind of decentralized app,
right? And we like, oh, I can build it on like Solana, easy to understand, right? Even I going to build my own cosmos chain pretty easy, you know, maybe slightly more hard, but still pretty easy to understand. But now this kind of thing of I can, you know, Shard it up, have some part here their execution. I mean, I would just be confused. Let. Me say you can. I'm explaining the complex path. You can just have the simple
path. If you just want to deploy your application to Ethereum using a Noma and get all the privacy guarantees for example and the intent like generalized intense, you can just do this deploy the like you write an application in Dubix, you click deploy to Etherium, it's deployed to Etherium. Now you have to decentralize the application. So, so OK, so but decentralize the application on Etherium? What does that mean? I mean because the transactions don't happen on Etherium I
presume. So these are like normal Etherium transactions then? This looks much more like a plasma construction. Where specifically how this works is you have a settlement contract on Etherium, you have the Enoma resource machine implementation on Etherium, and then you have users that want to send in tents. They send those in tents. For example, you have a simple order book exchange with privacy guarantees, which is something that you can't currently build in any existing system.
Users send these in tents to the Enoma, P to P stack solvers pick them up, solvers compose them together. If there's an overlap, then this transaction gets settled to Ethereum. That's sort of the simple case here where. So yeah, this is actually very important to understand because people keep asking you this all the time. There's no specific or Noma chain that you must send your thing to.
Like everyone else is presenting these like abstractive frameworks that all effect essentially boil down to let like for example, the chain abstraction folks are kind of like this. And it's like, oh, let's just build this out yet another change like solve our all our abstraction problems. And then users only need to interact with one chain that then orders and sequences everything. And then so if we reach out from there, I know what's taking the very different approach.
And like users like there's no, no more chain. Users can directly use the operating system to wherever they want to use it. So in the case of Etherium, this be really just an Etherium contract. Some state that you deployed to the enoma resource machine on Etherium, that state now lives on Etherium.
You send your transactions on PP stack and then those get settled to Etherium. And so you guys like, I presume one of your areas or one of your goals is to get people to build decentralized applications on, you know, the Enoma stack? Yes, broadly speaking, build against the normal resource machine. This is how it describes build against the operating system. Honestly, where a user specifically wants to run the operating system, that is going to be up to them. But I mean, I'm not the
developer, right? I'm not the main, I'm not quite your target audience. But you know, I've sort of been in crypto for a while as a, as a someone who, you know, can try to put myself into the shoes of someone wanting to build some,
some decentralized application. I'm I'm a bit confused because when you say build against a normal resource machine I'm I have just like no idea what that means or why somebody would want to do it. Maybe to make it very simple, imagine you build an application against a normal resource machine and then you. What does that mean? It's, I mean, you build against when you build an application
against the EVM, right? You build against a specific instruction set, against a specific state model, against the. Validity. Or Viper, right? Like there are many things that target the underlying. So like think of it, you build against some system calls. Like you build an application and then at runtime you decide, well, today I like the Ethereum folks better. So you you deploy to Etherium and tomorrow you decide, well, turns out they didn't like the
thing I had. And then you just deploy to Solana and you don't have to rewrite your application. This is sort of like the fundamental point or you deploy this to your local community chain if that ever gets set up and you don't have to rewrite your application. So it's a developer. It's honestly just like a lot easier because it's kind of like I, I guess in the past people argued, well, we should all be building in Intel CB US.
And then Windows came along and people started building against Windows, and all of a sudden developers realized, holy crap, it's way easier to build against Windows because now I can run my application whenever Windows runs. OK, but so I get that that's in it. I get that there's some value in that, but that seems to be something that's actually pretty well covered by the EVM.
No, Because I mean in the end we have now seen, right, you have like EVM Ethereum, you have EVM roll ups, you have Cosmo EVM and Cosmos EVM and Avalanche EV Ms. everywhere, right? So like that kind of thing of like, oh, I build my application in Solidity and you know, I have a lot of benefits because whatever it's like very popular and I can deploy it somewhere
else. Because if you guys building like a completely new stack, then well, you actually, I mean, I get that maybe it is a stack that yeah, in principle it can be used in many different places. So if it gets adoption, then maybe you would have a similar kind of benefit that people have today in Bennett in building on top of Solidity. Which we really shouldn't an estimate. Anoma has native generalized intense which none no existing system right now has or has any
clue how to get, and it has. Why is that valuable? Because fundamentally, like your application, if you build them directly against the EVM or the SVM, for example, I mean, they, those applications fundamentally rely on transactions. So you need to build a bunch of extra moving pieces in order to actually model the domain that your that your users are going to have. Because most users don't have
transactions anymore. They have like, I would like to trade A for B and I actually don't care against who. Like this is not a transaction you can build. I mean, like you have some of the poor man's version of this, which is an AMM, but an AMM only works for assets. It doesn't work for NFTS, for example. So like just you want generalized intense, I think as a long term goal here and even a short term goal because so.
Generalized intense, like the, the, the so I get, I mean, right, So if if we talk about intense, right? So I guess the simple example of intent to be something like like a limit order, you know, where I'm like, hey, I am willing to, you know, sell whatever E for one E for USCC and, you know, give me the best price and I'm paid winning up to pay up to this, something like that. And then I saw in the AMM case,
it's pretty clear. But like, so the argument is here that it makes it easier for an application developer to allow people to sort of, you know, more more express desire about the end state they want to get to as opposed to, you know, a specific transaction. And that that's valuable for or important for a lot of use cases and and so. You for example get like nice benefits such as you get
composed composed liquidity. Currently you have to make specific choices on do you interact with this AMM or that AMMI mean there's like some aggregation that can happen as well. But genuine with Gen. license, you can have the thing like, well, I'd like to sell like 1 NFT again, like 2 green cryptic kitties against some ETH. And maybe there's no direct match because the person that sort of wants to buy the two green cryptic kitties only wants
to take US to C, right? And so you can do these multi party compose like multi intent composing. I think that's one very huge benefit. The other benefit is as a user, you can also say things like I would like to trade A for B, and I actually don't care whether it's settle on optimism, arbitrary, more Etherium, just give me whatever is quickest or fastest. This is something that you just can't express right now.
This is sort of where the heterogeneous trust component or heterogeneous trust model component comes in. You can really think of this as defragmenting a lot of the state, but even just in a single sort of like state model, like a single chain world, we can compose like intense can just compose across every like however many cases you want to have. Which means, for example, even for like simple things like limit orders, you aren't limited
to settle them against an AMM. You can say, well, I'd like to do A for B and maybe it's an AMM or maybe it's Brian, or maybe it's only these five people on the white list, or maybe it's not anyone on this blacklist or it's just 50 people that I've never met and that I never coordinate with, right?
Like you have this full flexibility, which is just going to give you deeper liquidity, if I'm honest, because intense can match against all of it. And I think this is sort of the fundamental thing where it's like intense are clearly the next level of abstraction because most users don't actually know which counterparty they want to interact with.
Like like when we came up with the so transaction centered model in the Bitcoin world was always, well, I'll go to store and I'll buy some milk and then I'll send some Bitcoin to the store. But it turns out that the reality of the applications are in the building is mostly around like like Internet based coordination was like, I have a 4B who who wants to do the other side of the thing. And I don't really want to have to figure out how to do manual
counterpart discovery, right. And I think this is This is why you also see that everyone is starting to think and move towards intense. And like this was actually very validating because like when we start on Oma in the end of the beginning of century one, people thought we're nuts. Like we kept talking about these intense and like why intense were going to matter. And now everyone is like, oh, we should like start thinking about intense.
And like most of the defy application is starting to like think on how to move towards intense. And I mean, everyone is starting to like move to like application specific intense, but I know it's the only generalized intense framework out there where you just get generalized intense. And like you don't have to build the stack yourself anymore. You don't have to handle a bunch of infer. You can just go, yeah, intense,
let me build my application. And I get like all this like very annoying networking code to like do counterpart discovery for free. Right, right. So basic. I mean I kind of get that argument where you say like, OK, they are like applications, right. So basically defy applications or similar types of application. I mean probably all defy and training related realistically where you know this is relevant and and I guess often is is also often around trying to minimize
MEV maybe. This is the other huge component of intense. It's and by the way, this is not just D5. I can give you an example in a SEC on like where this where you have intense as a non D5 example. But so we, I think 3 years ago or four years ago, made a mistake where we went like instead of trying to actually come up with a technical solution to this arising problem of MEV, we'd sort of like engineered and called it a feature.
Another buck intense of the base layer, mostly soft because all of a sudden you can say, well, I have the specific state transition and like you have to sign over. Like I'm willing to trade one youth against, I don't know, 2000 USDC. And this can be ordered in whatever, sort of like it can be included in a block in whatever order you want because you signed over a specific thing.
Like one of the big problems with transactions is that transactions don't specify state outcomes, they just specify like compute steps. So you end up like you have some starting state, then you apply some, some like compute, and then you get into some resulting state outcomes. Well, now depending on how you interleave these computational traces, you get to different state outcomes.
And intense, mostly soft because in intense you just specify specific state outcomes and it doesn't matter how you interleave them. And the other interesting example of an intense centric system is actually 2 one is NOSA safe. Most people don't realize this, but like if you have a partial multi sick, like we're in a one out of two, like 2 out of 2 multi sick and we're using NOSA safe, what actually happens is I create my partial signature, it
gets sent to the central server. You then create your partial signature, pull my partial signature from the central server, then submit both together. I mean, this is a prototypical example of an intent centric system where right now we're relying on very simplest infrastructure in a normal with generalized intense, you don't have to rely on the Centrust service anymore. The other really good example is roll ups.
I mean, when you think of what a roll up does, it's you have a user that has an individual state transition and then many users and then the roll up that some computer collapse all these things together. Well, honestly, that's just the number of intents that you collapse into one to settle in as a state transition function on some underlying base layer. So like for example, with a Noma, you just get roll ups of
free to some extent. You don't have to build all your own components for your own roll ups. It just happens to fall out of this generalized infrastructure that intends to adjust a better abstraction to also represent things like roll ups. And maybe then the last thing, because people really forget about this when they think about privacy is one of the big things. Well, everyone's privacy preserving systems.
And sort of my fundamental thesis is like, and this is just true that like for privacy preserving system to work you intense. And why is that? Well, privacy preserving systems as they push data to edge
devices, right? Like now your state lives on your phone rather than into in the big database in the middle, wherever I can see it. And with intense, you can make statements and some updates over your local state, send them to someone else and then have sort of the other person or like have many of those intents flow into the centre of the network. And then you can have solvers that aggregate and sort of
compute over this. Whereas right now we just all computer of this like global known state in a privacy preserving world, you're going to need intents because the state just lives on edge devices at that point. And you need to be able to make statements over like local state that doesn't live in the middle. Right. You're not trying to replace, you know, EVM or SVM or
something like that. So basically it means I as a. So let's say I'm building some application on Solana and I'm using the SVM, then I would use sort of like a Noma as almost as like layer in between. This really depends on where you are in your stack. I mean, if you already have an existing application running on the EVM, for example on Etherium, you may just want to move tiny parts of your state of
your application to a normal. That just means you rebuild this against your normal resource machine. But the important thing is you don't have to move all your stated ones. Like I think one of the reasons that I was always very skeptical and sort of just yet another L1 or yet another L2 was always like, you have to force all this valuable state to move to this new L2 or this new L1, right? Like you have this like massive bootstrapping problem.
And so with the nomas of the architecture, the operating system comes to where the valuable state already lives. And so then over time, as you might want to migrate more and more of your application to an OA, you can do this over time, but users don't have to actually move the assets from Solana from Etherium to yet another L1. They can just move within the system into sort of the normal operating system operating the normal protocol adapter on Solana on a theory.
Now you mentioned you guys are creating another L1. What does the Anoma chain do? Very fundamentally, I mean Anoma, the L1 is really designed as a it's a global consensus mechanism, but they can also be deployed into local instances. So you want to have someone Noma native consensus effectively that can really leverage the operating system to its fullest. Like maybe one good analogy you can think of is it's a hyper optimized CPU implementation for anomaly operating system.
Generally speaking, most functionality of the operating system should be available on most other virtual machines on the enoma on the enoma chain is just going to be more optimized. The other thing is there is a sort of. It's the obvious place. Sorry I I totally did not
understand this at all. Like so basically a Norma L1 would be like a chain that I like me I as an application developer, if I want to build like an app, I can now say, hey, I go to Solana or I create a Cosmos chain or I build on this and Norma L1 is that what? Yes, in in the end it's going to come down to whether users like which chain users want to like have their state live on. I I think currently we live in this like various. Do not care like I mean users
like they. They ask any user the question of like where do you want to stay to live on? They will just be confused. Yes, but eventually users will need to care for simple latency reasons. I mean like one of the very fundamental things it's like and normal will always be faster, like local and normal will always be faster. And Solana because it's like, it's just like Solana is limited by speed of light and like it has to run like 2 consensus rounds on over the global fiber
network. If the two of us want to trade and we're in the same room, we should do this on a local system. There's just like no way around this. Like in the local system will always just be faster, right? I agree that right now users may not fundamentally care as much, but I think it's also mostly because our like our industry has kind of designed a bunch of infrastructure that's very target towards casino use cases.
Whether this is like going to survive long term is very questionable to me. And for example, I mean, like the other interesting thing to consider here is I think if you'd ask people, I don't know, four years ago whether multi chain was going to be a thing, everyone would have said no. Like people were at least very skeptical about this. It it's very clear that the multi chain world played out between like all the L2 chains as well as all the L1 chains.
I mean, the world is clearly going to be multi chain. So users clearly have preferences on which chain they are. And like where the state lives, users care. I, I don't know about that conclusion. I mean, you could, I think it's like primarily the application developers know who make that those decisions. I mean, obviously users care about things like I want like faster transactions, right?
Or I want cheaper fees. And then of course that may mean, OK, they're now like arbitrary more than than either one because it's cheaper. But like, I mean, no one's going to be, oh, I'd rather use. I mean, very, very few people are going to be like, oh I'd rather use arbitrary then. I. Think optimism. Like who? Who does that? I don't know. I mean, I certainly do because I like because fundamentally effective security model and
your latency model. I mean this is just like something that you shouldn't underestimate. And I am, I, I think if users really like long time don't care, honestly the best answer to like how to build a hyper optimized system is like, we should do definity and just live in a bunch of like centralized data centers because users don't care where the state lives, right.
And so like, I mean, this is, I mean, if users don't care where the state lives, I think it's a very strong argument that users don't care about decentralization. And I think with a no more, we've always take the approach that decentralization actually matters because otherwise we're just building very slow, expensive databases here. And yeah, if, if decentralization doesn't matter in the end, I have questions on like what our industry has been doing in the last couple of years.
And but my point to this is like, I think decentralization really fundamentally matters because users care about this privacy, their security model. Why does decentralization matter? As a whole, why does
decentralization matter? Yeah. I I I think this comes really down to if decentralization doesn't matter, we spend a cup like 10 years building probably the single slowest database implementations that for some reason keep like multiplying all the state across hundreds and thousands of nodes across the globe for no particular reason. Like if decentralization doesn't matter, we should just all be running on a single server run by. I know. Like, I guess, but like, let's
say, like what? What are some things that to me feel like important, right? So 1 is that people anywhere in the world can just use these blockchain networks, right? That's like Open Access. I think that's like, and then some kind of censorship resistance, you know, people can like transact in whatever way they want and the transactions to get censored and then you. Don't have decent transition? You don't have any of those properties. Maybe, maybe not right, but still it's not.
They're not an ending of itself, but it's like a means to an end. Yes, I agree with that. Sorry. I mean, I, I think we want sense of resistance. We want, I mean, we want World War three resilience to some extent. Like we want the ability to have many separate systems that can fail independently of each other. We want to have privacy
guarantees at these base layers. And I think self decentralization is an easy way to describe all of these things because if we don't have decentralization, we're not going to have any of these. And for example, actually this is an interesting point on like. What do we want from these systems? Like what I personally think is actually very important feature of them is like on the eve of World War three kind of thing, global fiber will go down.
And so like you can't rely on these global consensus systems to remain up. And so like I know it's also designed around this failure case. And like, if you don't have global connectivity anymore, you're not going to run Bitcoin or theory Ma Salana. That's going to hold almost immediately. And so you want to have infrastructure that people can use locally to coordinate locally. And this is really like what I think of as World War three resilience of actual decentralization.
It's not about like having a single global decentralized system. It's about having many systems independently of each other that sort of like when the habitat exists, can coordinate and like interoperate with each other. But when the sort of unhappy path comes to be, the local
infrastructure still works. And I, I always use the example of Switzerland's like the Swiss financial system will collapse immediately as soon as like N Atlantic fiber goes goes down like that, that none of these systems are set up in a way in which like it can handle like global network outages. And I know I was always designed as like as it almost like a drop in replacement for local coordination infrastructure so that there's a coordination substrate that people can run
locally. Then as sort of connectivity recovers again, you can coordinate with people further away. But then like for example, the enormant L1 is going to be proof you say, you know, with like something like tenement, like consensus or something similar. It's. Heterogeneous Paxos plus heterogeneous now all I mean. So realistically speaking, we are all children of tenement at this point. Like a cerium consensus, Pocket consensus. Even Solana looks a lot like PBFT after Suite.
Definitely PBFT. So I roll out the sentence of tenement at this point. Because there's some kind of, because that again will be a system right where you're going to have validated across the world. There's going to be token stick. If the validators and they are communicating with each other right to sending blocks around, they're saying, OK, this block is valid. This block is fine. So that system if you now have OK, no more fiber because World War 3.
Any global consensus system is going to have tremendous problems in sort of a globally global world scenario, including Bitcoin. This is just going to be, I think, like I think people really over. But Bitcoin with like Starlink and stuff should probably be pretty pretty OK. The satellites are the first things to go. Like there's no. Because they shut down or how? How are they? Or because bandwidth is going to be heavily restricted to
military use cases. I mean, like I, I just don't see a world image like we enter global a bunch of centralized global conflict and we go like, but the mean coins must keep going on global consensus. Like I, I hold the pessimistic view. Hopefully I'm wrong, I have to say, but I mean actually. So Bitcoin if slow block times may actually be helpful here because you're very. Little for sure. Slow block times, definitely.
Very little bandwidth requirements for global consensus, but like something Bitcoin may be fine. If I had my vote for Bitcoin, you should slow down blocks like an hour then we definitely fine I think. I mean, it probably could may well have some kind of issues, right, Like let's say Bitcoin would be because some of the hash rates cut off and now all of a sudden basically the hash rate like temporarily goes from like, you know 100% to 20%.
Now block time goes up to like an hour or two hours every block and and then slowly gets long run again and. Then we may have a problem that like so if global stabilization time is ever more than 10 minutes, Bitcoin does never convert this. This is sort of just a like the fundamental life and sort of safety trade off that most of these systems have made like tenement made the other tricks right. Tenement will stop will halt
block production. But for example, if it takes on average 11 minutes to gossip a Bitcoin block around the net the globe, there will always just be multiple chains that converge from each other because no one sees sort of like their next tip prior to them having mined their own team. No, I don't think that's true. This is it's a fundamental
property of the street systems. I mean, this is like This is why tenement was so controversial at the time, because tenement took the opposite approach, which is tenement decided to halt rather than sort of like fork. I can find I ever talk about this from like 2017 I think. But anyway, it seems to be it's a little. Different, this is very much out there and we've kind of like lost the track here, but. Although important to think about.
Yeah, so. So I mean, like my entire thing is like outside of like specific infrastructure, like we should be thinking on how to design, like we should be designing protocols that can actually be resilient. As in like in like you want to think about the worst case
scenario. And so you want to have systems that A, are hard to capture sort of politically and B, that can interoperate with each other quite easily so that we don't have sort of like these because even a single decentralized network is still very centralized.
It's a single figure. I'd much rather have like 1000 decentralized systems, but it's super easy for users to switch between any 500 of them because that means that no individual system gets a tremendous amount of power and like an almost fundamentally designed around this goal.
I mean, what one of the things that you really like about in OMA and, and, you know, I think I remember having some, maybe some podcasts, some discussions in the last year's, you know, I was like asked about like, OK, how do we feel about crypto? What, what are some things that, you know, concern me? And probably the biggest thing is the privacy thing, right? We're like in the beginning, we were always like, oh, you know, there was even an assumption right in Bitcoin of it's
private, right? Because you know, you have a different now, of course, very quickly. It was again, not that private actually. But then with time, I think what we've had is, of course, you know, services like analysis, you know, where they really good at the anonymizing transaction linking them together. And then I think the other thing we've had is that exchanges that are obviously regulators, they don't seem to like privacy because they want to control and they want to have transparent
data. And so the privacy coin set that that do exist and the privacy portion set do exist seem to have a hard time getting listed on exchanges. And of course, if you don't get listed on exchanges, no trading, no money, it's very hard to go anywhere. So I do really appreciate that you guys have always been kind of strong proponents of privacy and of the importance of it.
But what does that look like You Are you also like you worried about like for example exchange listings for like a Noma and? The Super nice thing about South Noma's on a privacy coin or privacy chain, it just happens to have the facilities for developers to build privacy preserving applications.
And interesting enough, it's not even developers necessarily deciding whether something is privacy preserving right like on Etherium or on Solana. You have to make this choice on like do I write it like is my entire application privacy preserving or not? In a Noma, it's much more of a user choice. It's like, does user A want to interact with the system with this application privately or not? It is not a system level choice. A Noma can be fully used as a fully transparent system.
If no one ever cares about this, they don't have to worry about it. But if individual users care, they can make a choice And like, well, instead of attaching a plaintext signature, I attach a zero knowledge proof. And I I think sort of like the industry has largely failed at making this like relatively nuanced thing understandable to the outside world. But like, to me, ETH is a privacy coin. I mean, like there is pools like I mean, there is like ETH. ETH is clearly privacy.
So is used to see, by the way, like anything, because any like permission is asset I can put into a contract on Ethereum that like provides me strong privacy guarantees. Like this, like notion of privacy coins is really like a Bitcoin era thing where like assets were tied to fundamental state machines. And like this distinction is like, I mean, we can pretend it exists. It just doesn't exist in reality because these assets can flow across many different state machines.
They can like flow across bridges to other systems that have different properties that they provide over these assets. And so in Anoma, it's really like it's not a system level choice. So an almost not a privacy chain. I know it just happens to have the right primitives to allow developers to build useful privacy preserving applications that end users can then use. And the nice thing is you can even have like an intent that's privacy preserving and an intent that's transparent.
And both of them can be mashed together like you you aren't splitting your liquidity or you aren't splitting your state across private versus non private, which I think is actually. But well, let's say, let's say there's like something like a unit swap or something like that. And now I want to trade with this system and I have, you know, let's say I have E and I want USCC, then I can Noma allows me to do that in a private way. If you built an app, I mean that
many caveat. So Noma is a so a very fundamental. Basically I like if someone builds an application that allows you to do this. Yes, with A1 caveat. So it is a concern of the application developer that person has to worry about that. So it is a concern of like privacy comes with many nuances very quickly, which is like if you want to trade A for B, you must tell someone about your desire to trade A for B. This is just always going to be true.
You must reveal at least your state changes to someone. Now with a normal, you can sign an intent that says I'd like like that just like authorizes A for B privately and you only reveal the fact that you're willing to do A for B to one specific solar. This is generally true for like everything and like you can structure and you can't do better than this. So I mean, this is a fundamental limitation. Even with FHE, you aren't going to go. You aren't going to do better
than this. You could imagine that I I have one if and I can basically say, hey, I can prove one if is willing to trade for, you know, USCC at this price and someone can get that, you know that intent without knowing whose if it is. Yes, this is exactly sort of a simple case of an OMA of like how you would like as a user authorized private intent. But even there, I mean, you leak
some data. So if you want to go like you don't even want to leak that like there's an intent to trade A for B, you'd have to like figure out only to which specific counterparties you want to reveal to your desire to trade A for B. And the other thing is, I think we always think of as like regulators don't like privacy. But the other thing like, and I think it's because like Bitcoin status is like counter government movement.
Like I am much more concerned on the flip side, which is like I own privacy for National Defense. Like I like Switzerland, but I also have no illusions of the Swiss financial system is going to like be resilient against the like dedicated nation state attack. And like so as a result, we currently creating these like
massive honeypots. And like, I'm worried on like, how do I do local, like how do we build infrastructure that allows us to do like National Defense, community defense, where individual communities can actually run this infrastructure to be resilient, hostile actors. And like, this is much for the frame from which I'm thinking about privacy guarantees. It's not like I'm trying to hide something.
It's more like I'm really worried about North Korea, like getting access to all my financial data or like this all the Swiss financial data. And so like, I want to build good infrastructure so the Swiss government can kind of run with it. Yeah, I don't, I think the crypto spaces like doing itself a huge disservice here on like and how the we phrase a little bit like our desires privacy because it's like I trust my local community.
I like my local community. I'm actually really fine with it. But and like I'm worried about how do we build systems that can help defend my local community? Because like, I think the fastest way to get Ethereum killed tomorrow is we move over the US financial system into Ethereum and then like tomorrow the NSA will wake up and go, that's a terrible idea. North Korea's data minding the fuck out of our financial information. And then we're done here. Right?
Like this is sort of like a very practical concern, which is, yeah, I know this is like my it's privacy for National Defense. I think we're not going to get away, especially in this multi polar world order, which we're going to go into right now. You need to have resilient systems as individual entities in order for you to prosper and survive long term, I think. So you guys, so you know we've
talked about Noma so far. Now there is actually a chain that you guys are launching or that is being launched which is called Nomada which so can you can you share like what is a Nomada and what's the relationship between a Noma and Nomada? Yeah. So you can really think of Namada to be the crazy people in the Onoma community in the normal ecosystem that wanna try privacy preserving guarantees really quickly in a simple fashion. That's some other.
And so Namada is a sovereign L1 or I guess we could frame it as an L2. I mean like the distinction between what is an L1 and what is an L2 is kind of, it's very relevant and mostly mimetic at this point. There's no technical, reasonable technical distinction at like a distributed systems level for this. But so Namada is just a subset of the normal community of people that really deeply care privacy guarantees and that like
want to try this out? And So what Namada does is it provides a multi acid shielded pool or multi acid shielded set. So you can move any asset into it, including NFTS, and you get uniform privacy guarantees for all of these assets.
And this is generally true. This is generally also true that it's not just assets, it's generally data like the fact that we ascribe meaning to these bits like that we ascribe financial meaning to like these bits floating around in like some global state on Ethereum is really arbitrary. I mean, in the end is just data messages. So with with Armani, you just get very good data protection guarantees for whatever data you want to have. I mean, your data could represent financial assets,
could represent messages. You pick your choice kind of thing. So, so I mean, for example, 11 place where for example, like let's say me personally or I mean, I think a lot of users will probably try to get some privacy on chain is let's say you have like, you know, some Ethereum wallets or some Ethereum accounts.
Now you want to buy, I don't know, NFT somewhere and then you want to, you don't want to have that in like, I don't know, you main wallet that's like linked with all your, you know, stable coins and other, you know me, whatever you have in there. And then like, I mean, I guess the main way people do this today is the basically are going to use a centralized exchange,
right? They're going to say, Hey, I'm going to create a new EFI address and then I send their, you know, maybe the EFA or staple corn or something. And then I buy, I buy that from there. Now, of course, in that case you still have maybe finance or Kraken or someone who will be able to connect these different
addresses. But it's, it's like, for example, one of the use cases now for Namada that like I could do something like that and like, let's say move Eve in there and then move Eve out of there to like a new wallet. And now is somebody's not going to be able to link those two wallets? I think that's a very possible use case. So certainly right now like Coinbase and Kraken and finance are the single largest mixers in
the world. I mean, this is just like practically true at the moment and we can talk in. And the problem, the big problem is like, I think we really underestimate how useful like for example, like some of the so like KYC policy that Binance does are because especially in the age of generative AI, all of these things are just going to be toast. Like I think we really have to come up with a different model here anyway.
But like generally speaking, the single largest mixes in the world and yes, most people use it like this. I did this earlier today. I think this is one option and I'm like something that the Nomada community could pursue is sort of, I mean, this is like what I would like to use it for, for honest. I'm like, I would like to like buy this NFT. I don't want to have to link all my stuff like activity across all these chains.
I think the other thing is also around, I would like to participate in governments votes, but on other systems, but without leaking all my data. And so like with Armada, you can also do something called chilled actions, which just gives you the ability to sort of remain shield while also executing something, for example, osmosis or participating governance
vote. So I could just gives you this ability to not only for your trading, but also for like just you general other data to actually remain shielded at all times. Yeah, I, I think honestly, this is sort of like the nicest thing for Armada at the moment. I, I think we really want to see like where the community ends. Like I'm very curious on like where the community ends up taking it because I got to this extent. Like the community is launching the thing.
I have no idea that things happening on the forum. It may come up, come online at some point in the next couple of weeks from a forum post, it seems. So I'd really like to see where. So they're going to take it. The thing is, I think we really haven't tried this in practice a lot yet on how these systems can actually utilized. And yeah, I am very excited for it. What else do you think we should cover? I mean, we could talk about the collapse of the banking system.
I find this quite curious. Let's do it. Let's do it. That sounds fun. So basic thesis here, which is, so every year we had more regulatory pressure on two banks, right. And so every year, the marginal cost of an extra customer of existing customers becomes higher. And at some point, and like these regulatory pressures generally never go away, right? Like the IT just keeps being added. And so like my bowl case for crypto is a sort of like banks will start off banking normal
people very soon. Like if you if you do like 3 transfers, about 15 KA year, your bank is go to ask questions, at least in Germany. And so like at this point. What if you do 3 transfers above 15K? So I mean, I have this very specific use case. Someone tried to send me money from Germany to Switzerland. Apparently Switzerland has a high risk jurisdiction. This cost an entire thing where there was an entire day involved, three day three people looking compliance because like
it's an unusual amount. It's an unusual country. And so like my entire sort of my basic thesis is like these pressure points on banks keep going up and banks don't like them because it increases their cost of compliance, but it means that large parts of their customer base are just going to become unprofitable. And so these people have nowhere else to go. Where do they go while to the sort of turn the financial system?
And so I think honestly, banking regulation to some extent is like the bold case for crypto because every new banking regulation just drives more customers to use DC. No, I mean I think it's it's obviously the case already, right? Like within crypto, let's say, if you take the example of making investments in other projects, right, like you make an Angel investment somewhere or, you know, the course one, we invest in something, I mean, all of these payments are with stable points, right?
And it's just like nobody would use, want to use a bank wire for it because it's just like so inferior. And if you try to do it, then you have some person calling you up and they want to like, you know, get the documentation and it's a bunch of hassle and takes longer and it's more expensive. And it's just so I, I think that is like very, very clear that there's a lot of, a lot of advantage here for crypto. And I, I think this will push a surprising amount of people into
crypto very quickly actually. I mean, like in the West, I think we have less the pressure points, but especially if you live like in like middling developed countries, these pressure points are just going to keep increasing for you. The other thing is I think also like neo banks toast due to generative AII you got things like the first lot.
Like I think self custody is going to become inevitable because at some point someone is going to generate 100,000 like realistic looking generative AI videos to like recover Revolute account access and a bunch of accounts will be drained. And like I, I, I don't see anyone proposing realistic solutions outside of self custody where you must own your own keys that you aren't then trained to give to scammers.
Because like my passport data is clearly going to be in some leak somewhere, like, and it's not going to be difficult to generate like realistic looking videos to like re KYC me with banks or exchanges and definitely not in five years from now. And the same is going to be true for like 90% of the listeners of episode. I think, like it's an actual risk we should be thinking about. It is, I, I think very
unappreciated. And I think these two things are the probably the single largest driver in terms of like, why? What is Kryptos use case right now? Cool. So time 9, I think you mentioned Namada is, you know, probably sometime soon and then imminent. I think imminent last check the forum. It seems that the genesis transaction like pre genesis transactions. I think they were supposed to. They're going to close enough next week or something like this so. By the time this comes out, may
already be live. No, no, no. And then like a couple of weeks, I think the values want to be a lot of testing. So probably shortly around the time this goes out. Yeah. And then we have a normal which is like sometime next year probably. No, this is first private definite coming this year. So we'll start the builders program this year. So keep a lookout for that and then targeting public chest and starting early next year and then mean it towards something middle of next year.
Yeah, it's super exciting on the enoma front. It it's going to be, I mean, like it's the first time where like we're trying to propose something radically new and it's going to be cool and it's going to allow us to do new things that we couldn't do before. And like I remember like when when Etherium started becoming a thing and I could do new things that I could do on Bitcoin and they became easier. And I think we're going to see a similar moment.
So I'm pretty bullish. I'm, I'm really excited for that. I would love to, you know, try some new things and see, see some new, some new types of use cases and capabilities enabled. So I'm super excited to see that. Thanks so much, Adrian. Thank you very much.