It's kind of insane to try and do computation and data storage on chain. So you do computation and data storage on off chain. You prove it by posting a proof which gets validated, verified and executed to make BTCA programmable asset and use the Bitcoin Ledger to allow for other assets to be created and used programmatically. This sort of concept is new in Ethereum land, but in many ways is very, very old in Bitcoin lag.
We've got a low level language which is Bitcoin script and we need to be able to compile sort of more abstract languages down there into Bitcoin script. And the way that we do that is through the medium of ZK proofs. And so actually, Boss is very agnostic to the specific higher level language that you're going to be using. If you're looking to stake your crypto with confidence, look no further than Chorus One.
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I'm Sebastian Quiccio and today I'm speaking with Yago, who is a contributor to Bitcoin OS Bitcoin OS is a platform that enables ZK proofs on the Bitcoin blockchains, which is really exciting. And this enables lots of different things, including L twos that are more efficient, more scalable, more secure, and lots of other exciting
applications. So in today's conversation, we're going to be diving deep into Bitcoin OS, how it enables ZK proofs on Bitcoin and what we can expect from this platform and the ecosystem that is being built upon it. Yago, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me. I love Epicenter and it's always fun to to be on the show. Yeah, it's a pleasure to have you on. So yeah, before we get started, talk a little bit about your
background. You've been working in Bitcoin for a while, you know, you've worked on sovereign and other projects. So yeah, what's what brought you to to Bitcoin OS? Well, so I I was attracted to Bitcoin from pretty much the moment I heard about it. To me, it spoke to a new ability to create property rights that were self sovereign, digital and globally available. And that meant that the Internet could have its own economy.
That was a massive idea. And so I think even before I'd finished reading the white paper, I was already writing a a mass e-mail to everyone I knew telling them this was the future. And within a few months I'd been mulling it and, and, and go sort of full time Bitcoin. And so I've been in working since then to try and make it possible to for as many people to use Bitcoin as possible and to do so without having to go through intermediaries.
Initially, it's dug with like relatively limited use cases like remittances. I started one of the first remittance companies in the space and over the years that's evolved. Around 4 1/2 years ago I I joined a team building what became the largest and probably the first significant D5 project in Bitcoin called Sovereign.
And even as we were doing that, we were also exploring how could we go further, because even then we were had to rely on things like merge mining and Federated bridges, which only approximate actually using Bitcoin trustlessly.
And we wanted to go the hallway. And we had this hunch that it would be possible to do that with some of the emerging cryptography we're seeing, in particular ZK we, you know, as opposed to a lot of Bitcoin Maxis, especially at the time, we were very curious about what was going on in the rest of the crypto space and we thought there was a lot to learn there.
And so despite being, you know, from the Bitcoin space, I think I've, I've been working in the, in the, in the modular blockchain world longer than most. Yeah, that's cool. I I'm I'm bullish about bringing it together modular and Bitcoin. It feels like those are two things that are so diametrically opposed, but I think both bring strengths to infrastructure that can really help scale defy. And so I'm I'm really, really looking forward to this conversation and diving deeper into that.
So I mean this today, today is actually pretty interesting day to be recording this. I don't know when this goal come out, but but this is November 6th is the day after the US election. A lot of polling stations are still are still counting the votes. But it is pretty clear now that Donald Trump has won the election. And Bitcoin is at all time high. You know, maybe by the time it's record this comes out, you know, Bitcoin will be at 100K Who knows?
But yeah. What are your thoughts on this new US administration and what it means for crypto generally? Well, I I think of the crypto industry and more specifically of block chains themselves as sovereign jurisdictions, right? They have their own rules set. They're not governed by any court of law outside of themselves, and they have their own ability to both defend themselves from third party attacks and to enforce their own rules. So they're basically jurisdictions.
So I think of the crypto industry as kind of like Singapore in the sky. It's its own jurisdiction, except that instead of being in physical space, it is in what is quickly emerging to be a more important space, which is the digital space and therefore is globally available.
And now if you start thinking about it through that lens, over the last 16 years, we've seen the crypto asset industry, you know, the crypto space, this Singapore and the sky become by far the fastest growing economy in history ever period, right from zero to, you know, $2 trillion in 16 years with exponential growth. And this entire time that industry has been under significant economic sanctions from the world superpower of the United States of America.
So I think the most significant part of this election with respect to our industry, right, our technology is that Singapore up until now has been under sanction. You know, Sky Singapore has been sanctioned by the United States. We can expect now for most of those sanctions to be lifted. And this remarkable growth story that we've had is sort of had the, the, the, the roof lifted off of it. So I think we haven't seen anything yet.
I think we haven't even begun to see the potential growth that we could see in this industry. It's integration into the rest of the global economy and what we would call traditional finance. And yeah, I'm, I'm extremely enthusiastic about it. It's basically our country is no longer sanctioned by the United States. Yeah, that's a great way to look at it. I, I think that I think we're in for a really interesting year, 2025. I think that the uncertainty
that loomed over a lot of U.S. companies building in crypto is going to be lifted. You know, namely by the removal of Gary Gensler and the annihilation of the anti crypto army folks who no longer, as it appears, much of a voice in Congress or the Senate. And you know, we're we're based, you know, we're based in Europe and France here in the UK. You know that that regulatory frameworks here, I think, are
very different. But the wind of change that's coming to to the US crypto front is going to have significant impacts on markets. I think, like markets will be the first thing that we see react to this. And it already has right with Bitcoin now at 7475 thousand and and, and and also, you know, to other jurisdictions who you may want to follow suit. I'm not super bullish on the European jurisdiction and it's more regulatory focused approach to crypto. Does it really matter, though?
Europe's kind of like a museum, you know? We could kind of keep Europe around to remember what humanity was like. Right. I mean what I mean by that is I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not bullish on what that means for European starch and crypto. I think like European starch and crypto will, you know, we'll have a very hard time to to innovate and that has been the
case that's never. Been really my concern so much I mean many years ago I moved to the UK from the US because at the time you know the US sanctions are making difficult to build businesses in the space. But over time, especially as we've seen sort of the creation of, you know, Dows and other ways of, you know, generating
revenue and tokenizing projects. The systemic importance of companies in the traditional sense governed by courts of law and jurisdictions of sort of the terrestrial terrestrial jurisdictions has significantly reduced and sort of crypto native businesses, crypto native projects are not don't have a company at all or are not, you know, associated with one specific company. And so, yeah, I think there's actually a huge amount of entrepreneurship not just in
Europe, but all over the world. It is the first truly global industry in that there is no physical centre. It's not like San Francisco or London or Shanghai is the centre of crypto. It's all over the world. And and that's because we are denizens of, of Singapore in the sky. So I, I think that that's, that concern is important for those businesses that are dealing a lot with Fiat and that's an important part.
But but they're, they're sort of the merchants who are, who are allowed in trade between the two jurisdictions. It's not, it's not our native economy beyond that. I I think that actually, if you look at the crypto industry, it is the best way to understand what work will look like in the future. The crypto industry was totally ready for COVID, right? Because it was already fully remote, it was already fully globalized. It was already completely unreliant on the supply chains
of the physical world. People will frequently be working for more than one project. Sometimes they're able to work Anon they get paid in crypto. There's very few agreements that get signed because everything is done through smart contracts. The future isn't evenly distributed, but it's here and more and more of our industry is going to start looking at crypto, which means that that the the crypto industry itself is, is going to become sort of
our economy. Yeah. I, I, I think that that makes sense from a like a long term perspective. I think in the short to medium term jurisdictions still matter. I mean, look like the Usus dominance, like U.S. dollar dominance over stable coins is 1 indicator that Europe is like really lagging behind. And I think that like the use of US dominated stable coins is one of the, one of the reasons why like one of the indicators that, that, that, that Europe is going to lag behind in it, its
dominance over crypto. And and then the other, the other is purely just the, the, you know, like Mika for instance, you know, if we look at Mika, it's it, it makes it very difficult for, for European startups to set up here and become compliant just because of the high cost.
And so it's going to favor and already is favoring large organizations, large institutions like the likes of finance, etcetera to set up shop here because they have the ability and the compliance teams and the capital to comply with compliance. But you know, if you're if you're a start up and you want to comply with Mika and like offer your services here in Europe in a compliant way, that's going to be increasingly difficult.
Now we'll see like what the regulatory firmware looks like in the US. But for the moment, as far as I know, there is no sandbox right in Europe for start-ups to ease into compliance. It's like 0 nothing. Sure. I, I, I, I don't think we're disagreeing. I, I, I agree that this is not good for the jurisdiction that is Europe or the EU, but I don't think that you can identify the jurisdiction with the people,
right. There's, there's nothing stopping Europeans from being involved in this industry and many, many of them are, they hold the assets they are involved in, you know, developing the projects. So I just think you're right that we're not going to see like overnight the disappearance of the jurisdictions. We don't need to. There is more and more a viable alternative economy and viable alternative methods of commerce which people around the world are able to use. It's sad. I.
Agree with 100%. It's sad that, you know, Europeans have to deal with all these capital controls, but it it hurts Europe more than it hurts Europeans. Yeah, well, it's going to be an interesting next couple of years for sure. And I'm, I'm really, I mean, the thing that I'm more excited about is just like vault building in the markets in the in the next, you know, weeks, months and years. And, you know, volatility is typically when, you know, there is the most money to be made.
So, you know, everybody should be, should be exposed right now. Not investment advice, but being exposed is probably but good life advice. Good, good life advice, Yes. So not investment advice, but life. Cool. So let's let's let's take a step back and, and talk about Bitcoin in US or or boss, actually, you know something I think now, now, now that I'm thinking about it, I think we actually met in person in in Denver last last year, very briefly at the Bitcoin Renaissance event.
I came up to your booth and and then said hi. But but yeah, So what what is what, what is Bitcoin in US and and what does that enable fundamentally? So fundamentally what we're looking to do is to make it possible to use Bitcoin as a general purpose Ledger with
unlimited programmability. So make BTCA programmable asset and use the Bitcoin Ledger to allow for other assets to be created and used programmatically or you know, in sort of more colloquial speak, turn Bitcoin into a smart contract layer, smart contract chain. And the way we do this is we're is basically taking the, the, the insight that modularity proposes, which is that it's kind of insane to try and do computation and data storage on
chain. So you do computation and data storage on off chain, you prove it to the, the, the, the chain or what I prefer to call the Ledger by posting a proof which gets validated, verified and executed. And that execution allows you to issue new assets, introduce, you know, qualifiers, encumbrances or covenants. You know, basically say how those assets can be used and to move assets from from, you know, from the ownership of one entity
to another. This sort of concept is new in Ethereum land, but in many ways is very, very old in Bitcoin land. Bitcoin has been designed as a extremely limited system in comparison to most of the sort of out chains that we've seen in that really it specializes in being a Ledger only. Whereas mostly due to the influence of Ethereum, other chains have sought to sort of add into the chain smart contract, you know, execution, AVM, data availability, basically everything plus the
kitchen sink. Right, Bitcoin is the original lazy Ledger. That's right for the modular world. And, and it's sort of like the perfect base layer to act as a Ledger. It's extremely reliable. You know, it's perma Ware. It's not like software that keeps upgrading.
It's it's like it's code base is small enough that human beings can understand it, which is very different from, you know, Etherium sort of being the classic example of something which not now there's not a single person in the world who understands it's full code base. And it's relatively lightweight also as a result. And so it's the most trusted,
most secure system. And for years there was this debate between Bitcoiners and Ethereum, which effectively was like the early innings of the modular debate where Bitcoiners were saying, look, guys, you're going to be giving up. You're going to be, you know, you're, you're, you're putting, you're shoving too much into a chain. You're going to be giving up on decentralized. And you're going to find that the system doesn't scale this
way. And you know, a few years ago, it became very, very obvious that Ethereum wasn't scaling, transaction fees were becoming too high. And now depending on the date, you know, you'll see more than 95% of the transactional activity on Etherium occurring off chain, primarily on what we today call roll ups. So I think in that respect, Bitcoin was designed in a manner which foresaw where we would ultimately have to go and has
been. Sort of like the turtle in the race, slow and steady, moving towards a very, very clear North Star which everyone is galvanizing around. You really think this that like Bitcoin was designed in in this way, like to to figure out where it had to go. And it's not just like a happy coincidence that, you know, there are now technologies that enable I mean, you do. I really think that in 2014, like Bitcoiners were thinking, yeah, we're going to have like L twos and modular block chains on
top of Bitcoin right now. Yeah. And I, I mean definitely. So actually it's interesting that you say 2014, 2014 is when the side chain white paper came out for Bitcoin. So that was very, very explicitly how Bitcoiners were thinking about expanding it. And then later in 20/16/2017, when there was the block size wars, right, it was the group of people who didn't believe in that vision who forked themselves off. They said, look, we need to have much bigger blocks.
We need to introduce, you know, more things and have more frequent forks so that we can upgrade Bitcoin. And the majority of the Bitcoin community, and in particular the Bitcoin developer community, rejected that idea very, very explicitly with the idea that no, that's not how any system ever has scaled. Yeah, that's great, great, great point. I mean, those those, those Bitcoin scaling debates were yeah, I mean, it was, it was, it
was a a really interesting time. And I at the time felt that Bitcoin needed to increase its block size in order to enable more transactions. I I didn't see Bitcoin as a way to do smart contracts though. I felt like Bitcoin needed to stay as a very simple sort of payment system that other systems would would fill the role of smart contracts. And like up until now, that has been, that has proven to be
true, right? Like other systems have filled that role, Ethereum, Solana and all the other kind of like, you know, modular chains, app chains that have come. So I guess I, I guess there's still time to be proven wrong on that, you know? Yeah. Well, I think if you've come into Bitcoin in like, let's say the last five years, you would be. Forgiven. I came in in 2013. Yeah. Oh, so there you go.
So I think you'd be forgiven for believing that Bitcoiners didn't believe in smart contracts because the Bitcoiners who have sort of come in over the last five years dubbed, and the reason they don't I think can be attributed to Stockholm Syndrome, right? So Bitcoin didn't have smart contracts. They were held hostage in their own minds by the fact that Bitcoin didn't have smart contracts. And so they convinced themselves therefore that if it doesn't exist in Bitcoin, it must be
shit, it must be unimportant. And so instead of saying, well, OK, we, we're working from first principles on how best to introduce smart contracts to biker. And they, they just rejected the idea out of hand as sort of throwing the baby out with the bath water. If Etherium has it, it must be bad. And that's how you ended up with the ultra retarded maxi. True. I like to call it bag bag bias as yeah, maybe not ultra retarded.
Yeah, no. But I mean, there were some like really early applications on Bitcoin that I thought were really cool. I mean, like we at Epicenter, you know, we were using, we were part of the Let's Talk Bitcoin network and we were using Counterparty to do like tokens that our listeners would get access to.
And like this was all built on on this kind of, you know, early version of a Bitcoin L2. It didn't have smart contracts, but you know, these were kind of early ideas of what then became, you know, very common in in terms of tokenizing using using a blockchain to create other tokens than than the underlying store value. So yeah, these are these ideas have definitely like gotten taken whole.
Well, I mean 11 interesting thing which people don't know most people don't know is that this sort of idea that you will have the Ledger and also applications was there at the very, very genesis of Bitcoin. In Satoshi's Bitcoin version 0.1.0, there were the beginnings of the first DAP.
It was a poker DAP designed to allow anyone to play poker over Bitcoin. It was called Poker Lobby and was later removed because he felt like, yeah, you can't just shove these things into the chain if you want them to work. And then in 2011, Bitcoin invented the first ICO with Master Coin, which was a system designed to allow for smart contracts on Bitcoin through a meta protocol.
So in a way, you know, all, it's sort of like, you know, people will say that all of Western philosophy is a footnote to, to Plato in a way, all of the development that we've seen in crypto is sort of like a footnote to those first, you know, four or five years of, of a Cambrian innovation and explosion that occurred in Bitcoin. And we've just been playing with the same themes ever since. So let's talk about the the the ZK proof.
So Bitcoin OS verified the first ZK proof on Bitcoin in in block number 853626 that's proudly on your website. Block of historic importance. A block of historic importance. How does this work? So you know, for like, let's let's break this down for people who understand Bitcoin at a fundamental level. You know, how do we use Bitcoin to verify ZK proof and what are the different pieces of
technology that enable that? So yeah, it's it's very different from how you would do it on a different chain, right? So in a different chain, like with theorem, you have sort of a easy Turing complete system. You basically write a verifier into that code. With Bitcoin, it's much more complicated. Obviously you've got limited data avail, you know, limited data available to you. You've got 4 megabytes per block. You've got 1000 stack limit. You've got an extremely limited
scripting language. And So what we had to do is we had to write from scratch AZK verifier using Bitcoin script. And when you do that, you're, among other things, writing AZK verifier without even the ability to use multiplication. So the script size becomes huge. And then the next challenge becomes how do you get that into a Bitcoin transaction? And so obviously you can't. And so you need to beyond standard optimization, you also need to, to, to chunk it up.
And so their introduction of Taproot into brickwork, which allows you to create these very complex trees of, of transactional outcomes, allowed us to effectively split up the script and its potential outcomes as binary outcomes in a large taproot tree. So we split it up into the leaves. And then the Bitcoin miners aren't able to directly verify ZK proofs. And so you need to construct some kind of mechanism where external verification can be proven Unchained to the miners.
And so right now the way we're doing that is with like a challenge response game. We we bifurcate the, we set up a a series of pre commits and then we bifurcate the. The the, the, the, the. The script outcomes until we force someone who's cheating to basically reveal their hand to, to show that they're contradicting themselves. So this has, yeah, there were a lot of mini innovations, optimizations and and sort of breakthroughs along the way to
achieve this. There was a paper that came out called Merkelize All the Things, which described splitting scripts up into these Merkel trees and writing them in TAP script. There was a paper called Bit VM which described utilizing this to write a code of arbitrary complexity. There was the work that we published. In bits, Stark and Grail. Which described how we can write as a key verifier in this.
And then there was the very significant optimization work that is ongoing to, to make this not just fit, but it'd be so cheap on bickering that it's competitive with verification on Ethereum or even cheaper. And we haven't we're not done yet, right. So there, there, there keeps them there, there. Now that sort of the, the ball
has gotten rolling. The momentum keeps building and, and, and new methodologies which improve the speed and some of the security assumptions with which you can do these things keep on getting published. There's work that the Boss development team and its community is doing which which is remarkable. I mean, every every month or so sort of a new startling idea or sometimes even a significant
breakthrough is made. And so sort of the, the, the limits of what you can do with Bitcoin have effectively dissolved away almost entirely. So with Bitcoin OS, with Boss, our goal is to. Create an. Operating system for Bitcoin that allows you to take any arbitrary code of any size, prove it to Bitcoin as a ZK proof and then verify and execute it on chain. And once you do that, you've effectively got a highly efficient Turing complete system which can handle any code.
And and then, you know, sort of the question that has been one of the most fundamental questions in the entire crypto space, which is what can Bitcoin not do, goes away because Bitcoin can do. Everything OK, I, I want to, I want to just like dive into this a little bit. So, so the, the issue is that Bitcoin doesn't have the right, it doesn't have the necessary OP codes to produce AZK proof because it doesn't have multiplications. And so that makes it impossible to do Unchained.
It wouldn't produce AZK proof. That's true. Somebody else needs to produce AZK proof. I think that's true of all systems. Sorry to verify AZK proof. Yeah, it it also doesn't directly verify AZK proof. And So what you need to be able to do is to create a, a scenario where you have other parties who can verify the ZK proof. And if the proof is incorrect, they can, they can force a transaction on chain which
invalidates the proof. And so that, that, that's what I was describing with the, the bifurcation game. And and and I think with in a few months we'll be beyond the bifurcation game and we'll have basically one shot verification and so. Let let's maybe also just kind of take a take a tangent here and talk about Taproot. And So what what Taproot enables for Bitcoin, you know, that wasn't possible sort of pre Taproot.
And and how how does Taproot work exactly to enable, you know, this this entire new ecosystem of Bitcoin health twos? So Taproot had a lot of implications and it was a a pretty chunky upgrade to Bitcoin in terms of it, it was, you know, relatively it relatively narrow in what it allowed sort of in it from from a, you know,
just like surface perspective. But what that did is it opened up avenues which have given us among other things, Ordinals and runes and BRC 20s and ZK verification and Bitcoin and etcetera. So why did, how did Tepper do
this? First of all, what Tepper did is it introduced the ability to introduce new cryptography into Bitcoin, especially around or specifically around the ability to sign, to generate and sign transactions so that you could generate a tree of conditional transactions, right?
And this had all sorts of sort of obvious implementations like you could create a multi sig where the signers were not known or you could create a conditional transaction schemes which were hidden until they were actually performed. And a big part of the motivation there actually was to try and improve Lightning Network by allowing sort of all kinds of conditional payments which would impact liquidity transitions
within Lightning that. But once you get this tree of, you know, of arbitrary complexity where you have, you know, different conditional paths that you can, you can walk down, well, that has massively opened up the type of computational complexity that you can introduce into bits. And so what's what happened was that when Taproot launched in 2020-2021, there was a lot of excitement and then literally nothing happened. Like it wasn't used for anything
significant, right? There were a bunch of experiments. So it was pretty quiet until the beginning of 2023 when Casey introduced ordinals. And that was sort of like first, it was like the simplest use case, but it was the first use case that really, really took off. And what we've been the dividends that we've been seeing since then in Bitcoin have to a great extent been from the fact that the level of sophistication and understanding of how to manipulate and utilize Taproot
transactions has just. Exploded, right? What have we learned from from Orden Will specifically that you know helps create a path forward for Bitcoin policies? I don't know that I could dress necessarily draw a strict line between ordinals and sort of what we're doing, although we do utilize inscriptions. So we're use it utilizing to to
to inscribe data. I think one of the things that it did is it sort of introduced this idea of being able to inscribe very large pieces of data into Bitcoin. If before the upper turn, which is where you would put usually put arbitrary data was quite limited and suddenly the space that you had available to you was massively increased.
As it turns out, we actually to, you know, I, I have optimized things so that even sort of the, the, the, the limitations that we had from a data perspective could have been respected even
without taproot. But it, it, it's primary benefit was getting eyes on the problem and sort of opening up sort of like, you know, once the first person ran the, I don't know, 8 minute mile or whatever it was, suddenly everyone could there's, there's something about just demonstrating that something is possible that makes it possible for others. There's another part of so we have we have the bits snark, which allows for ACK proof verification.
And then there there's two other components to Bitcoin OS, which is grail and Merkelmesh. I I'd love for you to also explain what what these two pieces of tech do and and how they enable better L twos for Bitcoin. Sure. So a boss is an operating system. And like any operating system, it's designed to allow you to have different types of computation which you can coordinate.
So you could have different external computational environments, let's say two different roll ups, which boss will coordinate between them and and then it will also coordinate that with the CPU, which in this case is Bitcoin made, right? And so to make that operating system as useful as possible, you need to bundle in some core use cases. So 1 core use case is the ability to lock up BTC and other Bitcoin assets and then allow them to be manipulated in
external environments. So other chains, roll ups, Daps, what have you. So that is what Grail is designed to do and it does it first of all for assets and then secondarily for messaging, arbitrary data and perhaps most
importantly for security. So if you're building A roll up on Bitcoin, it is through Grail that you can sort of write your state to Bitcoin and then use that as the transaction ordering tool for your roll up so that your roll up has the same or very nearly the same, depending on your design decisions, security assumptions as Bitcoin maintenance and and and is secured by Bitcoin proof of work, right.
So that's that's how you expand Bitcoin both from a scaling perspective and a features or sort of, you know, expressiveness perspective with making few or no sacrifices. And then the next big challenge is you, if you're doing that, you want to avoid what has happened to Etherium, which is each of these different execution environments, these different roll UPS is its own whole new chain with a whole new
world. And you lose the interoperability, the fungibility, the composability, you lose access to the users, the developers, and the whole thing kind of becomes a mess. And So what you want to be able to do is you want to maintain that composability. And so that's what Merkelmesh is designed to do. And, you know, these are things that we're still, you know, they're all in different stages of development. But the idea is with Bitcoin OS, you have a single chain
experience, right? So a user is on, on, on, on in one execution environment. Let's say it's a an environment which is designed to, you know Shields their transactions and provide data and information security for them and privacy of
their transactions. Can interact with an EVM which is focused on D Phi and a a UTXO based system which is focused on Dow's. And within a single transaction, interact with both of these things as a shielded transaction which will get aggregated and ultimately settled on Bitcoin main. OK, got it. So we have, we have the ZK proving aspect, we have the bridging and then we also have the interoperability and composability as one cohesive system which is Bitcoin OS.
Are there any other features that we're missing here? Like is there an SDK that people can use to build their applications using Bitcoin OS? Not yet. We expect that there will be and there's going to be other components. Not everything will be developed sort of by the the boss developer ecosystem. Some of the things like data availability, which is going to
be really important. You will be able to bring in other tools like Celestia or Nubit, which is like, kind of like ADA layer specifically designed for Bitcoin or Babylon or introducing the idea of staking. And so, you know, as an OS, probably there'll be a set of core components that get bundled together. And then you'll probably also just be able to sort of pick and choose from a large number of other tools, dev tools that you'd want to to to use to make buses usable and and and then as
valuable to you as possible. OK, so, so effectively what what boss enables or what it allows it it allows L twos to use Bitcoin for security. They still will, you know, can utilize should utilize some data available there, like Celestia or new bid or avail. Now there. There is one missing component here, which is sequencing. What's the preferred or kind of recommended way that Boss yeah recommends for for sequencing so. On the basic level, BOSS is agnostic to the specific
sequencing methodology used. Where sequencing does become sort of where BOSS becomes more opinionated with regards to sequencing is when you want to have the highest degree of composability. And there there's sort of this concept of shared sequencers, which we're skeptical of because getting everyone to use the same set of shared sequencers is that sounds like the kind of thing that you can do in a centralized environment, but not in a decentralized environment.
And so the way we're looking at this problem is to be able to provide sort of an inter sequencer data feed so that sequences who want to be composable with each other will have access to a feed of transactions that are relevant to them. So let's say you've got and by the way, I, I tend to not use the term L2 because it has almost lost all meeting. So I, I, I use the more general terms sort of external computing environment or external
environment. So you have these external execution environments and I want to perform an A transaction which is going to call on another external environment, right? So I want to have a system which is available where I can basically ping that other system. So rather than trying to force all of the sequencers to basically view everything, we're trying to pare down the problem so that you, the sequence, can
message amongst themselves. Here I have a transaction which is going to involve you and and and you need to ultimately sequence it. OK, got it. So another question I want to ask is, you guys are partnered with a team called Merlin Chain, which is an EVM external sequence external execution environment as as you put it. They they, they would describe themselves and what they are looking to become is a Bitcoin roll up right. And so they've generated quite a lot of enthusiasm.
They've got quite a lot of TBL just in the basis of the fact that they're going to be able to be an EVM roll up to Bitcoin. And there is actually remarkably quite a lot of competitors with significant size already who, who are doing this. So so I mean. Merlin Chain is, is an EVM based roll up and certainly there are a lot of other EVM based roll ups that are launching on Ethereum.
There's also a bit VM, which I think has its own programming language, although I'm not entirely sure maybe we can clear that up here. But you know, if we take a step back here, do you think that? So my, my view is that the, the EVM long term is going to lose market share to other more modern VMS that are abstracted, where sort of security and complexity is abstracted away from the developer that is more performant, doesn't have some of the legacy bugs that EDM has
like like re entrancy, etcetera. And and that is more modern and tuned for modular block chains. And the analogy I I like to draw here is how you know, the early development languages of web like PHP and ESP has have mostly given way to more modern languages and frameworks like Node JS with the advent of mobile and and the modularization of the web 2 stack with Bitcoin. You know, now now that Bitcoin has sort of leapfrogged the entire sort of, you know, defy
period of the last couple years. Isn't there an opportunity here for Bitcoin to adopt very modern VMS as the kind of flagship L twos on Bitcoin VMS that are was and based like the slot of VM like move and attract new new waves of developers that are coming from say like emerging markets that are looking to learn the next generation of of blockchain languages that will be you know, used in the next 1020 years. Yeah, what? What, where do you sit here on
this, on this issue? Yeah. So if so, I think the way to think about boss and the boss stack is we have a low level language that we need to sort of compile that. This is an analogy, but it's a pretty close analogy. We've got a low level language, which is Bitcoin script and we need to be able to compile a bunch of different languages, sort of more abstract languages down that into into bit conscript. And the way that we do that is through the medium of ZK proofs,
right? So basically any language, any language can which can be proven as a ZK proof. And and now current iteration and probably, you know, for the foreseeable future, we're talking about Groth 16 snarks. If you can turn your code into a Groth 16 snark then BOSS can read it and so actually BOSS is very agnostic to the specific higher level language that you're going to be using. Now with regards to EVMI, mostly agree with you and in fact I would go even further than you. Right.
So I think the reason EVM has been so popular is an artefact of the way that Etherium was constructed. So Etherium hard coded it's VM into the system and then Solidity became the most popular sort of language group. But basically everyone is forced to use EVM. And then the way that other chains have developed is well, they've just forked that. And so they've they've taken all of that with them. And that's true for other L ones and it's also true for roll ups to Etheria.
Now we are, I think, rapidly moving into a world where almost everything that we know and sort of assume around our industry is wrong. And so the best example of us is we call ourselves the blockchain industry, right? But that is just a symptom of us not understanding what we're actually doing. Nobody wants a blockchain. A blockchain's a sort of a stumbling block towards getting what we want. It's this really annoying, slow,
non performant database. What we actually are is we're a property rights industry, We're a digital crypto asset industry. And it turns out that you don't need most of what you would have in a blockchain to generate that in at all. So 2 examples of companies that are really, I think at the leading edge of this is RISC 0 and succinct. And both of them have developed more general purpose ZKVMS,
right? And so these are VMS which allow you to take Rust and then, you know, later TypeScript, WASM, whatever, compile that down to directly to ZK proofs. And So what that means is that we're actually not going to have sort of chain specific or blockchain specific languages we're going to see this year. And it's certainly in the years following the developers being able to choose whatever their favorite language is and then compile that down.
And it also means that this idea of you need to have your own L1 or you need to be a chain at all is going to look very anachronistic to us quite soon because you've got this really great Ledger, right? It's Bitcoin. You use that as your Ledger, you've got data availability, multiple different projects are competing to, to do better, more efficient, faster, more scalable data availability.
You've got the VM, you, you can create an execution environment which is highly optimized to your particular use case. And then you have a whole assortment of builders and, and, and sequencers who are sequencing and providing interoperability and composability between these different execution environments. And so at that point, you've completely unbundled the blockchain. Why would you even want a
blockchain? It's, it's, it's, it's sort of getting in the way of everything that you want to do. It's constraining you. It's, it's heavy, it's expensive. And so I, I think we're actually at the early innings of an entirely new phase. The blockchain industry is dead, the crypto asset industry is
about to take off. And this whole idea of layer ones is, is is going to disappear the and so our this prism through which we've been looking at our industry, right, that it's a blockchain industry is wrong. And projects are going to have to either choose to adapt to this new environment, which is I sometimes call the post chain environment, or I think they're going to wither.
Yeah, I think I was watching a talk from yeah, I, I think it was Murad, you know, this, this, this meme coin guy, I was watching his talk from 20 from token 2049 and, and he says basically like, you know what, what, what, what this industry does is produce its tokens and, and that the technology really
doesn't matter. And in the same way that like if you look back at in the last 20 years, intranet and web development are the industry developing Like what what we produce is like we produce services and software that that improves people's lives. We didn't produce like, you know, database technologies or, you know, we don't look at it as like, you know, the, the database, like the connected database industry or, you know, the kind of like cloud industry.
We look at it as the software industry or the services industry or all the different like food tech, Med tech, fintech industries that were produced there. And, and, and I think that that's like an aptology for crypto. And thinking about it from like the end product, which is, you know, tokens and, and applications that allow people to utilize those tokens makes a lot more sense than looking at it from from the underlying
technology perspective. That's I think a symptom of the industry being very early, which is something I believe in real adamantly. Like I think we are much, much earlier than people think we are or people think generally. I think we are, you know, we're somewhere still in the 90s, early 2000s era of the Internet where nothing works. Building applications is a mess. There are like tons of different
ways you can do things. I mean, I was a web developer in late 2010 and I mean was a web developer just by teens. And you know, remember it was like building a website 15 years ago, just 15 years ago, building website was just so incredibly complicated. You had to write CSS for different, for different versions of of your the same browser. You had to build different applications for depending on the on the type of device you were on. Nothing was secure.
There was no HTTPS, everything was nothing was private. Deployments were slow. You had these like very unsecured kind of languages like PHP and my SQL and and that all changed in the last 15 years long. So, you know, think of think of that in in terms of blockchain. Years. We haven't even scratched the surface. We haven't scratched the surface and this was 20 years after the first website, right? Like so we have not scratched the surface.
And I really believe that we're much earlier than we collectively think we are, you know, looking back at Ethereum, bringing it back to Ethereum. And you know, if Ethereum I think has somewhat suffered from it's a roll up centric road map with cannibalization of the L1's business model. And you know, we we've seen these charts, right, of base generating millions of dollars in revenue, but yet only paying several thousands of dollars of fees to Etherium.
How does Bitcoin avoid this? And like is, is Bitcoin fundamentally different from the fact that it's proof of work and that it's just a different animal than than Ethereum? Or or are there really like lessons to be learned here where Bitcoin needs to do things differently and it's L2 strategy? Well, first of all, Bitcoin is fundamentally different in many very significant ways.
First of all, Bitcoin, the chain doesn't have an asset in the same way that Etherium the chain has an acid, right. So the entire Etherium chain has been built around ETH. It's the method of consensus. You need to stake it. It's highly dependent on revenues and and sort of it's extremely over engineered. BTC is a simple commodity and and so I think I think Etherium is phenomenal. It's been, you know, an absolute treasure trove of
experimentation and innovation. But at the same time, it's been sort of running around like a headless chicken for exactly the same reason. It doesn't know that Ethereum is
not built from first principles. It, it, it it's sort of is in a constant race to run after the last narrative right So smart contracts when you couldn't do smart contracts on on Bitcoin proof of stake because Bitcoin was proof of work modularity, because we needed to solve the technical debt that we created with those first two decisions ultrasound money because we need to compete with BTC and, and, and so Ethereum is is fantastic, but it's not both from first principles.
BTC is a product in and of itself that's why it's called digital gold. It's extremely simple to understand and, and that's what makes it so popular and so Bitcoin is not reliant on BTC in the same way that ETH is reliant what BTC is it's a first class citizen in the Ledger, right. It is like the first example and the best example of an asset secured by the world's best Ledger.
Another way in which Bitcoin is very different from Etherium is it has what you could call second mover advantage, right? So despite what people think, it's not really important who's first, it's important who's lost. And so one of the advantages that we have when building bosses, we get to look at Ethereum, we get to look at other systems and recognize some of the pitfalls. So we're building in composability and interoperability as a first class citizen.
And then the, the, the third sort of conceptual problem is that Ethereum itself is very dense, right? It's, it's, it's got so much in it. And the roll ups that have been built for Ethereum partly as a shortcut, have just basically replicated that chain. And so they're not built as execution environments.
They're built as sort of alternate L ones, which just happened to have, you know, an optimistic or a ZK bridge to Etherium. And so in many ways, actually, their relationship with Etherium is, is possibly less than what you ideally would want for Etherium, although it's great for the for the roll ups themselves.
And I, I think that's going to change both for Etherium and for Bitcoin, But for Bitcoin it, it, it might actually happen sooner, partly because of the simplicity of Bitcoin where we will start seeing sort of highly optimized non EVM, right? We, we, we don't have the baggage of the EVM that everything needs to be built for EVM.
And so you're, you're likely to see sort of rust and, and, and WASM and TypeScript experimentation on Bitcoin, perhaps even more aggressively than you would see it on Ethereum. That that I'm not sure about, Yeah. Yeah, that that I'm very hopeful for. I'm, I'm very much a proponent of, you know, building new environments with which developers can, you know, interact and build applications in a much more efficient, scalable and secure way.
And, and I think we get there by sort of investing and believing in like Rust based VMS, Watson based VMS, move based VMS more so than the VM, which, you know, it's 10 years old in, in a few months. And and just wasn't, wasn't built for, I think the future of of blockchains, even though I think it will continue to be relevant, you know, in the same way that PHP continues to be relevant.
You know, it still powers something like 70% of the websites, but it's not the thing that college kids are going to be learning and getting excited about, you know, in the next 10 years. Yeah. Before we wrap up here, I also want to talk about Cardano, which is interesting because you guys are working with Cardano to bring Cardano liquidity to, to Bitcoin or maybe I think it's the other way around, Bitcoin liquidity to Cortana. Sorry. So yeah, what's what's happening
there? So I think the big story is that from Bitcoin's perspective, everything is an external execution environment, right? And if you can hook into these systems and extend Bitcoin into these systems, they become
scaling. Tools, they become basically layer twos to Bitcoin and Cardano is quite unique in that Cardano yeah, has a lot of sort of philosophical agreements with Bitcoin, but from a technical perspective as one which is particularly important, which it is, which is that it's UTXO based. And so to do address and transaction mapping as well as transaction finality between Bitcoin and Cardano actually turns out to be relatively easier, right? It can be done with an EVM.
It can be done with any chain, but Cardano have at least in the early innings, a important advantage.
And so the Cardano community and Cardano developer community in particular saw that we'd verified ZK on Bitcoin and they reached out to us. And as they dived deeper, there was this growing sense of excitement which culminated in one of the the weirdest things that have ever happened to me, which is I went and I gave a talk at, at a Cardano conference, which that in and of itself was an extremely unexpected outcome for me. But but then also the reaction,
right? I, I, I, I was just, you know, it was just another one of many panels that I've given at a conference. But suddenly sort of the, the crystallization it it's sort of Cardano realized a lot of what we just discussed over the course of this call, right? That the the whole crypto space is sort of inverting that you can utilize Bitcoin as the sort of global canonical Ledger.
That doesn't mean that you're dead in the water instead of fighting that you can actually utilize that you can gain access to, you know, a multi trillion dollar asset base, hundreds of millions of users. You can provide data and compute that Bitcoin itself is never going to do for itself. You can do it trustlessly. And so I think Cardano is
turning out to be just one. You know, we, we discussed Merlin and b ^2 and and there's a whole bunch of other projects that haven't made public announcements sort of sort of
also integrating boss. But Cardano so far are the biggest sort of project and community that have gone public with the fact that they are sort of pivoting or starting to see themselves as an ideal platform to provide asset management and smart contracts to Bitcoin. I, I, I think that this is going to be thematically one of the most important things over the course of 2025 and beyond, right?
The, this idea that we've had in our heads for the last 13 years, which is that you've got Bitcoin and then you've got all of the competitors to Bitcoin. Like, I don't, you know, I, I don't agree with a lot of the, the what I call, you know, ultra retarded maxi stuff. But Michael Saylor has this thing where he says there is no second best. And in one very deep respect, he is correct.
There is no other platform, there is no other Ledger out there that is going to prove to be the credibly neutral globally spanning Ledger that all of these other chains and projects can plug into, right? Everyone else is sort of a threat to themselves. Bitcoin competes with nothing. And so this idea that you're competing with Bitcoin, I think has been dead in the water for seven years. The the the high watermark of it was 2017 where sort of there was
the Ethereum flippinning. Since then, if in BTC terms has fallen more than 80%, pretty consistent monotonic decline. The flippinning is never happening. Bitcoin is a fact. It remains as much as ever the center of gravity of this entire industry. And so the game has changed. It's now the technology for the first time through boss is also available where you can integrate with Bitcoin and and and and and provide services to
that asset base. And not only that, but utilize Bitcoin as a Ledger for many assets beyond BTC. Is Cardono the place where it's going to happen though? I mean, like Cardono is is in in the top market cap assets by virtue of having been early and it it's very liquid on on sexes, but the cardinal defy ecosystem and like the cardinal ecosystem generally is not that exciting. I think to a lot of people, you know, TVI was like 200, two, 130 million.
I just checked, you know, like the excitement around things like Solana, you know, even Cosmos, I think you know as as a place for a defy innovation powered by Bitcoin liquidity feels more credible to me than than Cardano, I mean. Well, you know, the Internet is sort of like this one globally spanning network that we all use and on top of the Internet over the last, it's called a 20 to 15 years, a number of companies have launched which have grown to multi trillion dollar market
caps, right? So many have, you know, hundreds of billions in dollars in market cap, but there's a several that have trillions in market cap. If you roll the tape forward with Bitcoin, Bitcoin if even if it continues at a sort of 50% of its current trajectory, is going to be somewhere between 20 and $40 trillion in asset value 12 years from now. There's going to be several companies or more likely protocols that are going to have trillion dollar valuations
building for that ecosystem. Now the question is who is it going to be? I think some of the winners are
already out there. Cardano might be one of them, and Cardano could have a very, very significant trajectory change if they end up, you know, becoming a leader in providing a really great UX experience and really secure smart contract experience for Bitcoin. Other projects are taking a different approach and they're sort of more tightly coupling themselves to Bitcoin. They're basically becoming roll ups and not, you know, they don't have their own consensus
mechanism at all. I don't know if it's going to be, you know, if Cardano is going to be a project that wins here. And I definitely don't think there's only going to be 1 winner, right. So you could have Cardano being one of 10 very, very significant projects 10 years from now. That's really a question of
execution. But what we are definitely seeing is more and more projects are starting to recognize that this is not just a viable path, but the most viable path towards positioning yourself for 2025 and also 2035. And so if it was just one or two projects, it was just Cardano and just Merlin, you know, I would say, OK, that's just a straight line. But it's enough significant projects and many, many, many smaller sort of innovative projects that at this point it's, it's a, it's a trend.
Cool. So what's what's on the road map for Bitcoin OS and how can people stay up to date with a project? And what is your what is your call to action to our audience? OK. Well, you know the the the first versions of the ZK primitive are already unbecoming and we're now in the process of integrating different pieces of the OS to launch sort of V1 of the production level OS, which is going to make it easy for developers to start using these different primitives.
And we expect to roll that out over the next that's quarter four or five months. So where things will get particularly interesting is the beginning of next year. In terms of following us, that's pretty easy. You can follow me on Twitter, I'm at Idan Yago. You can follow Bitcoin OS which is at BTC under SCORE OS and there's a whole bunch of other projects I'm working in Cardano and Merlin that you can follow as well to to track their progress in terms of call to action.
Like your audience I think is particularly tech savvy. You guys have a lot of developers who listen to you. I think there's just a huge blue ocean opportunity. Bitcoin has been sort of this dormant platform in many respects with a completely underutilized asset base and all of that is changing in now extremely rapid.
So there's huge opportunity. There's huge opportunity to do new things, but there's also a huge opportunity to just see what's worked in other environments, in Etherium, in Solana and bring that over to Bitcoin.
And then just more broadly, I think thinking about what we're building not through the lens of chains, but through the lens of ledgers of assets and computation or asset management, I think is an extremely helpful frame of mind to understand what's going to happen next because we're not a blockchain industry. And if we ever were that, that that time is coming to an end. Couldn't agree more.
That's great note to end on Yago, thank you so much for joining us today on Epicenter. We've been great learning about Bitcoin OS and diving, diving into Bitcoin for the first time in a long time. To be honest, it's been really exciting and interesting. Thanks again. Thank you.