This is Epicentre episode 533 with guest left Harris Carpetzers of Rocky. Welcome to Epicentre, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Frederica Anne and today I'm speaking with Left Harris, who is a true crypto OG and the founder of Rodkey. Rodkey is an open source tool for accounting and portfolio tracking and management that focuses very much on privacy.
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We had you on incidentally for the first time on the 10 year Epicenter episode because kind of we talked about kind of whom would you we like to kind of have on who's the true OG, who's been here forever And your name was very much at the top of the list and kind of we reached out to you and he said you're super happy to come on, but it's a little bit weird because you've never been been on before. So here we are to make up for
that left heart. You've you've been in this ecosystem literally since since the very beginning. Tell me about your background and how you first entered the space. Yeah, so indeed I've been here for quite a while. I entered the the crypto space first, like by mining some Bitcoin back when it started, but I lost it. Oh no. Hard drive? Yeah, it's well, it happened.
And like for real though, I I I got interested when I was in Berlin looking for a job because I I had I had a job at Oracle Game Behar, which is the the the big American Oracle the the the giant. And it was really boring and I
just wanted to do something fun. And then I saw an ad by Gavin Wood for the Berlin Etherium office that was just starting to work on on on this thing called Etherium and I was like OK that sounds interesting, let's go. And so in 2014 I joined the F Dev so the foundation's development army in Berlin, and started working on what was it mostly. Mostly on Solidity, basically because I was really interested in compilers. I had even written one.
It's still in GitHub and of an early version of Rust. But before Rust existed. Yeah, I started working on Solidity and then later a bit on the C++ client, which unfortunately doesn't exist anymore. And yeah, this is how I started the the trip into Ethereum. And this was literally before, before the genesis block, right? So you started at the end of 2014 and Ethereum went live like July of 2015, right? Yes, that is, that is correct.
What was it like back then? Because kind of if you kind of look into the Ethereum space now and I mean we we say this all the time, it's still early and so on, but back then kind of it was like literally very, very early. How did you guys kind of see Ethereum and kind of how did you feel about the prospect and the chances of Ethereum making it?
Yeah, that's a good question. So I thought the game back in the beginning, I was like literally thinking, it's just a fun game, Let's see how it will work out. We were playing in the test net and I remember like double spend bugs or suddenly money appearing in some account and said that it
wasn't just fun and games. I I didn't really realize the scope of what we were building until maybe Devcon one because that's when I actually saw the interest by outside people because as you know so there was in in like so I started like either third or fourth quarter of 2014 and we have Con Zero in November so Q 4/20/14 and that was in Berlin in the the very first office that that was in van der Masjase and then there were only 2530 people all just geeks were you on Ethereum And I
was like OK this is like a meet up and it really was just like a meet up The only outsiders that I can remember was probably Gollum some people from from the Golden foundation well then it was not a foundation with us you know project and to this people talking about how awesome a series and what what what what
we are doing. But other than that there was no it was very difficult to actually see how this would be applied in in the real world later because there was no other developed smart contact platform back back then as I said. So this slowly started changing from the release and until Defcon one, because you started people seeing you, you you start see people use it like deploy smart contracts, make first dabs and yeah that got really interesting slowly.
Yeah. So DEFCON one was then in London about 3/4 of a year or so later, right? Yeah, probably November again in 2016, yeah. That was shortly after Ethereum had gone live in July. And then kind of you, you stayed at the Ethereum Foundation until the end of the year and then you move to slock it and you only you only spend like 8 months there or something. But I mean, now we remember Slackett mostly for the Dow, almost exclusively for the Dow. Tell me about what?
Why, why you decided to move over to Slackett and kind of what the promise was. Well, I mean, so the reality with with Slackett is that back in there was a lot of drama in in the Film Foundation back in Defcon one because they were running out of money. They had spent already too much of the money that was raised and the so Ethan wasn't doing that well, or at least they were spending more than they had. And so the F dev leadership basically decided at the moment
to just fire everybody. And so everybody was fired back then. And this is how I ended up in in Slokit. I just was waiting for another job for the firing. It got undone afterwards and there was a change of leadership and people actually ended up staying. But I had already accepted an offer to go to Slokid and and went there. So what was slogid supposed to be?
So Christophe Yent, one of the three founders of Slokid, he was advertising in Devcon, even in Devcon one like this Ethereum computer that will be this kind of hardware that we would build. And this is what I really liked, the connection between hardware and the software world where you would have it in your in your home and you could control various things via blocks and transactions. And the the famous or infamous thing right now that also gave it its name, the slow kit, it
was this smart lock, right. And they have this demo and we we also saw it later in some other events where there is this lock that you do a transaction on mainnet even because it was a bit cheaper back then and the transaction gets mined and then the Ethereum computer sees it and unlocks them. The lock, the idea was you know you would do a Airbnb kind of style of renting an apartment and it will all be on the block scene and verifiable and all that.
And I got really interested in working on this Ethereum computer because I'm still a bit, but back then I was a lot more interested in in very low level back end, back end stuff. So it was supposed to be eaten in C and all that. But what they ended up getting famous for is how to fund this. I think, which they announced also since devconwal, that they will fund it through what they call the DAO.
And it's not like what they do right now, like everybody makes a DAO that just airdrops people tokens and they have a foundation somewhere in the Cayman Islands, and then they have the lion's shade of the token. It was a really pure and maybe naive idea that you would create this Dow that would be an investment vehicle that would invest in many product, yeah, projects, products, including the theme computer that Slogit would make.
But it will be completely up to anybody who participates in the Dow. So everybody who who puts money in, in order to decide if they would ever end up funding slogit. So this fundraise was actually incredibly successful, right? Basically back then, there wasn't actually all that much you could do on Ethereum. And so like 15% or so of all ETH actually ended up in the Dow
sometime. I think kind of they started their tokens there in April or so and then but by June the contracts had been hacked and you were very much at the forefront kind of when that happened, you and Griff and and a couple of others, there's actually really good coverage of this and also kind of like the Theorem Foundation situation that you alluded to earlier in Laura Shin's book. I think kind of you were one of the main sources for that book.
Do you think it's it's accurate? Yeah, yeah, it's very accurate. At least for the stuff that I was that I was involved in, it was very accurate for them. A theme foundation stuff in Switzerland. I can't attest anything about this because I I never went, actually never went to the Swiss office. Oh, OK. But all the drama that affected Berlin and all that, yeah. OK, so tell us about the hack. What happened and kind of how how did it go down? Kind of like from from a first
person perspective. So there is a lot of background to the hack like the problems that were found with them idea of of the DAO that it could split to other sub Daos and you could exit the DAO essentially by saying OK I want to you know like they have now in Molok DAO the rates quit you can just quit and take your portion of the fans that you put in into a sub like a tile DAO I think they called it and there were lots of game theoretic problems that some people suggested and they
even had called the moratorium to the Dow so to stop it but you can't you could not pause the the the dao it there was no admin key there was no pause button it was impossible to stop it. And so this fateful day I don't remember exactly but somewhere in June in the morning I just wake up to Griff's call telling me that the Dow is being drained and like what what what good morning And yeah.
So what ended up happening was that there was an exploit that was found that was a recursive call inside this exit of the down. Like like you take your fans and go, but you could essentially drain the the entire, the entire amount. And yeah, so it happened that it was being drained. We tried to understand what's happening in the first hours. I think I managed to recreate it in the test net, but at the same time they stopped. So whoever did this stopped for whatever reason, we don't know.
And they drained something like 30% around I think of the down and 70% was left. And then we were like wondering what to do now because I had recreated on the test net and had the contract to white hat hat kit. But yeah, there were questions because was member of of slokid back then. So should we do this as slokid, do it as someone Anon? Should we not do it at all? Is it legal? Is it OK?
And so we were really just not doing anything for the first days and we're really scared about what with implications was, What would that mean? Were you worried that someone else would recreate this? So basically even if the kind of the initial hacker, I mean they got, they got 30% of the DAO
ETH. But in I mean basically it, it was clear that there was an exploit and kind of there were probably not all that many but probably on the order of like 10 or 20 people who could have just recreated this. Yeah, yeah. So this is exactly what worried us that copycats would eventually pop up, right? It's, I mean once you see what happened, even if so I get it fast because I, I, I I had also written part of the contract,
right. But if I took a few hours, someone can do it in like double the time or a day and it didn't happen like a few days later there was the start of copycat attacks and there was like two or three sub downs being created it. They were kind of sloppy because they probably didn't do something right and they were they were starting draining very small amounts because it really it was such a funny exploit because it really depended on
how you write the contract. You have to be very careful to put some parameters correctly and also how much. So you needed a capital to run it because you essentially are running capital through the Dow to drain. So the more you put in the more you could take out. So in the end that some like a don't remember how many days later but not too much later we decided to to act and we weren't. So nobody said who we were
except for. So AVSA agreed to be the the face of of this of this white hat attack because he didn't want and he was writing that to so AVSA Alex Vander Vandersund that he didn't want people to think, OK, that's another Black Hat. So I don't remember he wrote the Reddit post that the Dow is being safely drained or something like this and people were saying what why should we believe you? Who are you guys and and all that. But we drained basically the
rest back then. And Alex back then was with the Ethereum Foundation, right? I think so, yeah. And he, I mean he later Co founded DNS, but yeah, so I think he was at the ethereal foundation at the time and then kind of the other people who were involved were Griff obviously Christophe and his brother and Stefan Twil and Jordy. So it it depends.
Like, like Stefan Twil, Christophe and Simon Yentz were the three founders of of Slovid. Jordy helped with the He didn't help so much with the first white heart attack, but later then she was a lot of work and he he basically helped a lot in this. In the aftermath of there was quite a few more stuff that I said afterwards. Super cool. I recently found some some DAO ease and I kind of I I hung on to it kind of just as kind of like a reminder for for for old time's sake.
Yeah, without talking there. Kind of a collector's collector's edition. Absolutely fantastic. So in the kind of the entire drama actually led to the split of Ethereum and Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. What did you think about this at the time? Yeah, that's a hard question because I, I, I, I was much more in the camp of let's do the DAO wars and the soft fork and let's try to get it somehow through through counter hiking the hacker, we had so many nice plans.
I even gave a talk about this in what was it like Lenuid to hack in Disneyland Paris in July. Like I, I, I, I, I had like this nice slice and all of them explaining what we can do etcetera. But it turned out that the soft fork was infeasible as an idea because you could we had the idea of kind of making it so that all the miners agreed to throw to the transactions that would be sent by the attacker.
Left Harris maybe let's let's kind of clear up the term soft fork here so we we all know what a hard fork is where kind of the network splits and in a software a software for kind of like some transactions are censored right. Exactly, exactly. So then the idea was that there would be some kind of agreement with with the majority of the miners to send some transactions that would be sent by the attacker and to favor ours. But the problem with that is that it actually allows the
network to be D dosed. And there was one more problem that I don't remember. And so it was infeasible as an idea at the end and otherwise the Dow wars would just end up in an infinite. Hiking and anti hiking thing, allowing probably the the fans to never be recovered by the guy, by by the attacker but also by anybody else and it didn't make sense. So it was either at the end to accept the loss or to do the the hard work that led to a film
classic. I assume if something similar were to happen today, maybe the decision would would have been made differently. But at the time, do you think kind of with them the 2 remaining choices left? So kind of either kind of just giving up the funds or kind of doing the hard fork, do you think the right choice was made? Looking at the aftermath, I hate what happened for the next year or years with the Ethereum Classic and how the community split this was. It was pretty bad at the time.
I felt that probably we shouldn't do the hard fork because from a completely personal point of view, I only had, I don't know, 100 or $200.00 on inside the Dow and I I could just lose it. But also from the point of view where you know, you felt responsible, like I I felt responsible. And probably also the others in in in Slokit and in in in the team felt responsible for for the loss of funds. It was a relief because then you wouldn't have to feel OK all these people lost money for us.
So I was really, I was really torn between those those two and I still am ideologically I didn't like it that is that is that is that's quite true. I didn't like it but it kind of also proved that it's not all about the code but it's also about the social consensus of Ethereum. If something like that happened right now, I have no idea what would happen with. We are getting the question right now, right if. Lido get if if Lido gets hacked
or something. Yeah, no, this thing that is right now in Twitter about the minority bug. Hey, sorry, majority. The Super majority client bug. I mean that could burn more, not 15 but 25. Right now Percent. No wait, 25 is staked and if 84% of the 25 is in gift, let's say that all of it would burn. The worst case, it will be 20% of all ether. What would happen in that case? Well, to be honest, I don't know like as you said there weren't too many applications back then.
Right now there is so much and there is so much capital inside the ecosystem to just burn 20% of the EFF. That is also backing a lot of the LSDS and the DFI and what that will do to the to the price of it, I really don't know if that it would be acceptable let's say. Let's let's hope we don't find out.
Yes, yes. So basically one of my, my, my, my main things when I see the current situation is like like we should not even have to question this, we we shouldn't be in a place where a bank can actually get us to that. Yeah, absolutely. So you spend probably the longest eight months of of your life at Slackett. I'm sure you kind of aged like by ten years or something. And then kind of just after the hack, you actually moved to
Brain Bot, which was a company. So basically at the time you were working on Raiden which was kind of posited as a payments channel for for Etherium. So basically back then we kind of distinguished between between state channels and yeah, so basically, yeah, so basically it was meant to address kind of the scaling slash interoperability space and Rainbow was very much at the forefront of that, but then somehow completely missed
the boat later. So kind of when it actually took took off, tell us about your time at at Brainbot who were hugely involved in the space. Right. So basically you guys developed one of the clients there were kind of you guys were kind of involved deeply with the Theorem Foundation. There were quite a number of different projects you kind of did in house. Yeah. So basically, tell us about your time there and where you think kind of it it went wrong and ultimately failed. Yeah sure.
So one question. I didn't go to brainbot after the hack. I the longest period that I spent and the worst was basically from the hack until September because that was the the really complicated stuff where there were attacks in the DAO after the the the the hot fork because someone put money in the DAO after the hot fork by
mistake. And then the whole thing with theorem Classic and the DAO was there because we were called to help there because the the the hard work never happened and that was basically the entire summer. That's a very big story which you can read in Laura's Laura's book. But after that indeed like in September October I I joined brain board and I joined to help with building building Dryden basically. So Ryden was as you said, the payments under solution, right?
So what, what is payment channels, if anybody knows lightning, the lightning network to Bitcoin is what riding is to Ethereum. That is extremely simple that you take stuff off chain and it's just for payment.
And you say like let's say I have a payment channel with with you Frederica and I just sent you, we deposit in this payment channel which is a contractor, I deposit 10 Neath, you deposit 10 Neath and then we can send those tennis to each other as much as we want of chain and if ever there is a problem we just settle it on chain. Yeah. So basically you would actually have to sign each transaction. We just wouldn't put it on chain.
And then basically if you kind of if you were to dupe me or whatever, I could kind of prove this because I kind of had you assigned transaction, right? Exactly. And it's a network because it's not just between us two. So this is what, a single payment salary and it's a network because then you may have one with Martin and then Martin has one with Christoph, let's say, and then I can send directly to Christoph through all of your channel. So we spent quite a bit of time developing.
Now why did it ultimately fail? I don't know. I like that. I still like the idea of payment standards, but not as an entire network to to be used as an A2 solution. Like it's it's a different, it's a different thing. As we see now from the roll ups, you want the the fully VM experience to be scalable so you have the contracts, you have the D5. This would be only for token transfers from to summer.
One of the reasons was that Brainbot was probably a a very development oriented company and not at all user facing, so it was mostly like some geeks just writing code. So I I think that this had a lot because there was no contact with with the actual community. Another is that it's actually a lot more complicated than it sounds to develop this. There is so many edge cases and so many problems that it it becomes very difficult to actually make this production
ready. I I remember our issues probably they're still open like half of them about every single edge case that we hid or could think of. And you know, like it's it's a very difficult technology to actually to actually scale because of all these edge cases.
But I mean you, you guys as a collective had thought so much about kind of the constraints and what had to go into it and kind of you were there for kind of like all of the talk about plasma and scaling and so on. So in principle, kind of like when the L2 revolution came, you were in almost the ideal place to kind of launch your own L2 and kind of make it big. Why do you think that didn't happen?
I can't answer this. I really don't know because so I wasn't in. So the problem with Brain Boot is also that it wasn't, it was basically a top down organization. So we had no say into what is done. There was like the the management decided and we I was just a developer there and we just did what the management said.
I think that we missed the boat for as a project because it was too slow to finish riding and then there was no pivot at all even when stuff changed when it was obvious that there should be a St. one for example at the same time like we had the plasma as you said that popped up from the generic states analyst that states analyst people which we also cooperated with had started went from states analyst to plasma and then later to basically I think it's this very big part of the same thing
that's evolved with optimism right now. So they pivoted every time while well, Brainbow just stayed on on right? And so for for this, I guess the lack of of of of pivoting is what killed it. You then kind of moved on to kind of start Rot Key, which was your own baby. So as we said in the very beginning kind of Rot Key is an accounting and portfolio tracking and management software. But why did you put? Why did you choose that niche for for your own startup? Good question.
I don't like accounting. I hate it's. I hate taxes. I hate accounting. But I just needed to do them. So I didn't even want to make a startup. I just wanted to do my taxes. Well, that escalated. I, I, I never intended to start a startup like it's just that I actually started this, as you can see from the commits in 2017. So two years before I left riding, it just was a side project helping me submit my taxes to the bonanza. In the beginning it was just a command line interface.
And the question came in 2017 when I first realized that we have to actually, you know, submit taxes on all this stuff back from 20/14/2015 etcetera. And I was thinking, so how can I do this? I had no idea. And I think back then the only thing that was available was Bitcoin dot tax and I go there, you know, Bitcoin dot tax, what is it? OK, website, you know upload CSV or give me all of your addresses and I'm like, wait, why should
they give you their addresses? Can't they just download something and calculate it all locally and then send it to an accountant or to the finance on directly? And the lack of such a tool existing is what pushed me to create broad case of command line interface basically in the beginning to just, you know, locally calculate everything and not say it with I don't know someone else because then they
know you know it's. It's not like it's not like with with banks, with crypticity a lot more sensitive because you are setting your transactions and with them your addresses. So everything you have and because everything is so public, everything you will ever have in crypto. Unless you use Tornado or you go through Kraken or Coinbase.
Because someone who actually really wants to follow you, they can just take all this and then just monitor what you are doing like years later while you wanted to do your tax reporting. I don't know 2017 so that I consider it like extremely sensitive data and I never wanted to say this so this is how I started working on on on ROT key. And there's now quite a suite of kind of competitors, right.
So basically there's most, most of those you actually use by still inputting your addresses in a centralized framework and they kind of calculate things for you, but and you are definitely sharing your data with them. Do you think kind of the space has professionalized in terms of kind of like data security and data privacy or do you think it's still as dire? It's it's it's a lot worse.
Like instead of having one way to suit yourself on the foot, now there's a hundred ways to suit yourself on the foot. It's it's it's really bad. I'm actually very sad that I so I don't consider any of them actual competitors because they nobody does what we do. I would also have a competitor like a lot actually there is one called Ghost Folio. I think it was shown by one of our users to us. I think it's more more UK focused or something something
like that. But there was one that had exactly the same ideas but written in a different language or something. And but they had basically exactly the same problem and same idea. And I if I could say at anybody's competitor, it will be someone who offers the same thing that we offer which is basically privacy and keeping it, keeping it local. Yeah. So I started like that, but I never actually wanted to make a start up. As I said, I don't know what happened.
It's just that after having to leave a brain boat, I just thought, you know what? I so there were many problems. I don't want to go into that. But after that I was like, I would like to work for myself. So what do I have? And I'm like, OK, I have roti and by then it had you know quite a few like actual users and even paying users and I was like wait, I have never made a startup so maybe I should try that and just started it along with.
So even though he's not a Co founder, he was basically the first dev cancel. So a friend of mine and quite a good developer who is doing the front end in in. I mean, he's not the only one doing the front end, but he's the front end lead and lots of other stuff in in in rot key. What are the main challenges behind running a tool like you guys are? Wow, where can I start? OK, there seem to be a lot of challenges. Choose any choose anywhere you want.
Probably the biggest one would be the choice of being local and privacy. Preserving actually limits you a lot in the development processes. So like while every other tool that offers similar solutions to to a user, they can just have a website right? And then in the website they just roll out an update and then another update. You don't need to download
anything. You don't need to do anything, you just auto update it. It is a problem both for our users and for us. It's really really annoying that when you make a local application you have to create binaries, people have to download them. And it's not just that you have to create binaries, you have to create binaries for Windows. You have to create binaries for Linux for many different distros then for Apple macro SX stuff.
Then later when the silicon stuff came this different binary because completely different architecture. So you need to have you know 2 binaries for for Apple. So developing local software though it's I believe as a user it has a lot of benefits as a developer it's a pain in the behind right Because I like like it it it takes basically it costs more money in the end because it more dev resources, more time while you just make a website and you just update it.
So it this is probably one of the biggest challenges the other would be, but this is something that everybody says. So I have two talks with founders of of or developers of other tools that are, you know, completely online when you want
to track crypto. I mean there is a new protocol or a new primitive, completely new idea popping up every week or so. And the users are extremely demanding and they are also very entitling like they're like, wait, why doesn't it track this protocol that only I know very well. Why doesn't it do this? So trying to keep up with with crypto and it's development in this in this field is so fast that it's it's extremely
difficult. Yeah, I can. I can see that you guys have a free tier and a pay tier. So how does it work? Kind of what? As a user, what can I do with the free tier and from which point onwards do I actually have to pay? Yeah, so the three tier, so this tiering will change because it's unsustainable. The three tier is way too cheap. It's 12, no, absolutely €10 per month plus VAT wherever you are. Because for example, for Germany we have to start 19% VAT.
If you're in Portugal, a different one, if you're not in the European zone, it's €10. We've got a feedback that you can get a lot done with the free version and that we should actually change that in order to get more money from users. But the IT has limits. So it is limiting the amount of
events that you can process. So if you have more than I don't know 1000 or something then or 500 I don't remember you will see a notice saying OK we can't process more than this, please upgrade to the to the premium version. And there is some features that we have also in the premium
version like a staking I think. And another one is that we allow and this one of the features that people really like for premium we allow to up upload your database to our server and then download it from another machine. And this is completely private because the database to all of the data in ROT keys encrypted using a password that you give. So we we just see a BLOB of data. We can't treat it. We just act as a cloud where you upload the thing and then you download it somewhere else.
You also said that you don't just do accounting and portfolio tracking, you will also start much doing much more portfolio management. How does that look like? So Rocky right now is is mostly a tracker, right, an accounting tool. There is many ways that you can take it, but we're a really small team. So we are, we are resource constrained. We can either try to do a lot more accounting, you know there's so many jurisdictions. This is another from from the
another one of the problems. Because people say, OK, I want to do accounting right, but I am in the Netherlands so I have these rules. Please help me or I'm in the uki have the bed and breakfast rule. What is that? Oh here, read it. It's you know the ASRM website. You know APDF of 100 pages. Please implement it. I have a premium user. I'm paying €10 per month. Please I want this implemented from you.
So it starts getting extremely difficult because there really is every country has its own rules. So we try to have generic accounting customizable bid as an accounting solution approach. And we want to make it configurable for users and users can make PRS even and add their stuff. But for management side it's including myself as a user and other users have told us. So I open the road key. I see what I have in Kraken in Coinbase or in in DFI. Why can't I actually manage it
from Rodkey? Rodkey has the Kraken API keys. It has the Coinbase API keys. If I want to make a trade in Kraken to sell F4 Euro, why can't I do it from Rodkey? Why do I have to open Kraken, sign in, put my 2FA and not do it from from from Rodkey? So the idea is to manage your funds by making both on chain transactions and trading on the
exchanges from rot. Here this is not possible yet, but this is the direction that we would like to take it towards because it would make it more much more useful tool for for everybody. Yeah, I I I can see that and I think it's also something that a lot of portfolio trackers kind of a path that they have taken also to kind of increase monetization, right. That's that's true. Like for other portfolio trackers, this is mostly for DFI only because they are like DFI oriented.
But yes, indeed they they turn into wallets. Yeah, absolutely. So since you started this, there have been enormous developments in the privacy sphere, right? So basically, back in 2017 when you kind of started this as a CLI project, there was no CKPS and now kind of we're talking about fully homomorphic encryption, right? Do you think these cryptographic tools could help build something that is easier to maintain but still fully private for the user? Yeah, I'm I I'm not sure.
I don't know. I don't know the technical details of the ZKEPS enough to to answer. OK, what What are the plans for the future of Orotky? Yeah. So the plans for the future is to basically capitalize on on having a local tool by going towards the management side. Because another thing is like you you wouldn't sell your your API keys, active API keys with with with an exchange with a centralized website.
People have done it once at these three commas think and if you've read like the they had the stating API where you had a what was it like some kind of website where it it aggregates trades from different exchanges it's called 3 commas and they got hacked because and they lost a lot of money from the customers because they the database got hacked so active API keys were leaked and boom while with rot it would all be locally OK you someone can put a kilo there on your machine but
then it's it's it's your fault it's not someone leaking your data and we did access to your funds.
So we really want to capitalize on on on this a lot keep offering more accounting solutions because this is probably one of the things that our current users want the most and figure out a way to well allow for easier to capitalize on the open source part, allow for easier contributions and maybe also incentivize them somehow because if we as a as a project do good, so maybe also our contributors could could
somehow profit. So we're thinking of ways that we could we could achieve this and change the architecture of of the tool again capitalizing on the local part so make it multi processing we want to, we are working on different demons underneath doing other things because it's I mean it's a it's a back end and a front end and it's doing so many things, so many calculations underneath that. It's already the limits of the current process and it's slow in
many things. So we want to I basically go to a multi service architecture and some services written in different languages and we're looking at at trust right now in order to well, I mean my computer has how many cores and I ran Rocky on on the one Python back end. I mean you know how Python is, is, is single process. Though this is changing with newer versions of Python, still we want to go to a multi service architecture to get rid of these these limitations. Super.
Yeah. No, that's super, super. Interesting to hear kind of what the plans for Rocky going forward are, maybe that's that's kind of change gears a little bit and talk about Ethereum culture and the general ecosystem. So you have been in the ecosystem for 10 years, you you kind of joined in 2014, now it's 2024. How has how has the culture changed in your eyes? So we grew a lot, right? So I don't know what to call Ethereum culture anymore. It's so many people compared to how it was before.
It's so many new people and we have different subcultures right now. Inside the theme, we have the regions, the digens, the the, the, the traders, the gamblers. I don't know like the builders and they, we have the builders who are OK, you know we don't need open source.
So let's go closer So the way the Builders who are like like me like open source, we others who are like OK maybe let's go somewhere in between So there's there's it's so big as an ecosystem right now and I'm very happy and proud of that. But I can't really define what is what is a theorem culture anymore. It's just a lot of subcultures. Yeah, I I I think, I think that's, yeah, that's that's a very sad point. So if you kind of think about kind of like the Ethereum O GS from back then.
So I recently saw again the picture from Devcon 0 and as you said as you said there were literally like 25 people there. Of those there are very few leftover. Do you think that's kind of like Natural Chan and people are just doing something else now? Or do you think it's something that's particular to to this ecosystem? And is there anyone you miss in particular? Anyone you you really wish would come back? Yeah, yeah. Well from Demko 0, yeah.
I don't know. I like, I loved Jeffrey Jeffrey Weekly the basically main, the first developer of of Keith. He's a really good guy. If I were to say anybody from from from that picture that I just just remembered As for the term, it's. Completely out. Out of the ecosystem, right? He doesn't. Yeah. Completely unlike the only time that I saw his name was when someone accused him of selling
if in order to find his. I think he's doing a game right now like a software game and some because they tracked his theorem address from but in genesis and they you know try to name same him in Twitter for for selling if. Busted kind of selling the East that legally belongs to him. What maybe we were talking about maybe a year or two ago. So yeah, there is definitely a natural turn.
I mean, people being 10 years older, if if you're now it's 40s or 50s, I mean at some point you're like OK, you know middle age crisis, some get married, some with kids. The turn is is natural. On the other hand, there is also something that most of the people there, if they actually had even kept it, probably don't need to care about anything
anymore. So maybe this also shows who was interested in it for just, you know, like, OK, let's just make something cool but make money and then retire. And who is still here and is just building because this is something really interesting. And I mean this, this thing that we're building is really interesting and the people who still are here in one way or another, I I, I find it really, really nice. Yeah, no, it's it's it's always good to kind of run into old faces.
Yeah. You're a very active Twitter on Twitter and the things kind of you cover a lot are kind of like things like privacy and free speech kind of tornado style kind of project, but also security. You're also pretty big in the Ethereum public goods and protocol governance scene. So you're one of the largest delegates for a number of projects. How? How do you choose which issues to get involved in, and what makes you passionate about them?
Yeah, That's a good question. I I never plan to actually become a, as they call it, our politician or governance politician or. I have no idea how that's happened. Really. I I I really have no idea. For example, it turns out that I'm the biggest delegate in Diva. And they do a distributed staking validation protocol, right? Exactly. I have no idea how. Like someone told me, hey, do you know what you're delegating? Diva. I said, yeah, remember that. I said, OK, if anybody wants to
delegate to me, do that. And then someone tells me, hey, can you come to this telegram? We need you to vote because you're the biggest delegate and I'm like, wait, what?
But everyone knows you, right, because you're so active on Twitter and kind of you seem, I know I've delegated to you in the past because kind of you you you seem to kind of think think things out well and you know I I don't have bandwidth to kind of look into all of these things and I know they're kind of if if you kind of looked into it I would probably end up agreeing with you. So kind of, I think this is these are the reasons for which people delegate, right? Probably. Probably, yeah.
It started probably with ENS and Gitcoin. I guess because Gitcoin is something that I really love. I I stopped actually being a delegate there because of issues with the governance. I just said OK, I don't want anymore, I'm just too tired. But things that try to change the world like like Gitcoin, because I I find it amazing that it can basically it has so many flaws.
I have criticized it as many times as I have said that I love it. But it's amazing that you have this idea where OK, you gather people from all around the world and you fund projects and then there is a matching port and these projects get more funding from from the port.
And we have funded with this even things outside of crypto like I treated the other day about your Lib 3 which is a very basic library in Python. So it's it's really amazing to see how these primitives that we have created in in, in, in crypto can help people build amazing stuff and fund them. So I guess that's how I got into it, Just wanted to influence its its direction. How much time does it take up
for you? Because kind of like following like other forums, I'm involved in way fewer projects and even I struggle to kind of keep up. I don't follow forums as as much as people probably think. If if if government relies on needing to follow forums I probably don't like or or like step step step away from that particular project So actively, actively I think I'm mostly in optimism in ENS.
This is probably the most active ones that I, I, I I am activating right now And one really cool thing that I have asked of every doubt that I'm involved in I'm also involved in hope a bit etcetera is is to get delegates having a mailing list. So like what happened like weekly sum up this is beautiful because I can just go through it and say OK that's it good good info. It's it's, it's it's it's a game changer are. These published somewhere. Yeah, I think, I think everybody can.
Just like with a mailing list, right? You can subscribe and then you you get it. I think so. It's. Definitely no, no, no. No, no. It's like the governance weekly or something like that. It's it's pretty it's pretty helpful if you're a delegate because then you actually can know what's happening without having to be on the forums every time.
And then you see OK so this particular proposal is something that I should look at but it it it does take time and unfortunately some things take a lot more time than they should like so ENS for example it's it's pretty smooth like it's they have this sub groups or working groups they're the most they're mostly running the Dow and then they're asking the delegates to to vote on staff. And when there's a big vote that's when a lot of thinking needs to happen like there was
now with the service providers. But mostly it's hands off optimism is so much work I I don't know what the heck I'm doing there. It's like so much work. Are delegates compensated for their for their time? No. And this is another problem that so ENSI mean it's too little, it's it's not too much work but like there is the best of work. Optimism is, is really a lot of work. They say that they don't want to so for optimism they don't want to compensate but maybe there
will be retro PDF. So there's this kind of bait of sorts to get people more interested in governance. But for me it would be much better if it was like, OK, so this is the outside put and this is how much I get compensated. Not like a little PCF because it's it's a different, I think they're they're completely different things This this shouldn't work like this because it really takes a lot of time.
Optimism is I find really cool and annoying at the same time because so optimism has the foundation behind it and it's not hands off. It's very hands on. So this is what I don't like it. Some. A lot of the times it feels like the centralization theatre as opposed to like actual governance. They are taking feedback well and they're changing it. They're really trying. They have voting cycles.
They have seasons and every time it gets better and better still hands on. The question will be if Optimism Foundation wasn't actually guiding this, wouldn't would it be chaos? Maybe it's better this way. I, I, I, I, I don't know. Optimism does it in an interesting way. The most cool thing about optimism, and I find that I find really interesting, is that they have a by camera or by chamber governance. So they call it the token house and the citizen house.
The token house is the use on delegates. It will delegate up to someone, and these are the token house delegates. Then there's the citizen house, which is supposed to fight them plutocracy by having recognized citizens as one person, one vote. Right now there's 125 people I think, and they in the beginning only voted in the retro PCF, so all retro PDF rounds were actually voted only by the bot holders.
So the citizens. But right now from this season, they start to have a voice in the actual governance too and they can basically veto almost everything. So they tried to have to experiment with this idea of of two different chambers of governance so that there is no power of plutocracy completely on the on on the on the token holders and that cannot be captured or if it gets captured so that it can be saved by by the citizen house.
It's really interesting approach I I I find it unique and I really want to see how, how, how it goes. Yeah, I think governance is it's going to, they're going to be so many. If this is to work. There's going to be so many upgrades. So kind of like this, this one person one vote and then kind of the delegates and kind of it's kind of it's it's too easy to break and to spam and it's yeah. So I'm super curious to see how
that will go in the future. What makes you hopeful for the road ahead for Ethereum and what worries you? So hopefully, hopefully I guess all the cool stuff like we're really building really cool stuff as like I saw a tweet by Peter and I I kind of agreed with it. Peter from from Gev C Laggy. Yeah I'm not going to try to sorry, sorry if you what's this, Peter.
But like I also was a bit guessed the EIP 1559 because I didn't think it would work or the, you know like it didn't make sense to me. But you know, like, it's a resounding success as an idea. And it's really. So, yeah, P 1559 was the fee market, right? Yes, yes, that's correct. Sorry. I I yeah, I hate this when people do that and I shouldn't have done this like these numbers, you know, like, you know, 1547 and 4633 and I'm like, OK. What? Yeah, I know. Exactly. What is this?
Yeah, so the fee market one has worked amazingly. So I think that it's probably this also goes back to the people. So like the there's so many smart people in this field. There's also many people smarter than me, younger, talented and you know, hungry for for for building beautiful stuff. I think this is the hope like all this new new new generation that is inside this ecosystem that we built back then. It's this is making me extremely
hopeful for the future. It's it's really beautiful to see all those young people trying to build cool stuff and also them. How generous people are about helping good causes. Like now with a tornado, right? You see how both back when it was just Alexei Persev's case. But now with that, it's both cases with Persev and Roman in the US, how everyone just, you know, opens up and says, OK, yeah, let's donate, let's help defend open source and defend
privacy. So this kind of reactions and this kind of people in the field really make me extremely hopeful and proud to to be to be part of this ecosystem. I love the way that you frame the kind of what makes you hopeful, because I think kind of like young and smart people in the ecosystem. I I think you're spot on. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's it's amazing. It's it's really cool to. See. And people who are still in it for the right reasons, right.
So basically, I mean intermittently, we always kind of have these faces where there's a lot of money Bros. But yeah, by and large, they're still they're still the people who are in it because they just believe in the vision. Yeah, yeah, that's true. For for for what worries me, I guess a lot of things again, like super majority of of, of, of gift, in in in stating this, this. I had totally forgotten about it. And now that it became a Twitter thing again, I'm like, oh wow,
that's really serious. That really worries me. Like I the moment I realized that it's so bad, I I'm really worried about this. So things like that. Like they call it a Black Swan event, but it's not really a Black Swan if you actually talk about it and expect that it may happen if. You can see it coming. Yeah, yeah, I I find it weird that you would call it a Black Swan event. But also, you know, the other thing would be the image that we have towards the outside.
This saddens me maybe more than worries me, but also worries me because this image. So we we, we, we tend to have a very negative image right outside of the crypto space. They just somehow associate us only with crime or scams or gambling, you know, very negative words. While in reality it's it's not. It's not like that. Although there is a lot of scams, a lot of bad stuff in in crypto for sure. It's like the developers that are just working in other non crypto fields seem to actually
hate developers work in crypto. Like there is a lot of actual hate. I have been attacked in in let's say issues in GitHub when they realized, so we are reporting a a library issue somewhere and then they realize that they work in crypto and they're extremely like unkind telling me to, you know get off that they don't want to help me. I have heard this will happen multiple times.
And I mean this. I find it extremely worrying because this translates later into what we see in the political scene in the US, because if many people associate something with with crime, then they can push it to be banned or to have, well, a lot of political consequences. And this this actually really worries me because the misinformation there can do a lot of damage to to to our sector. And it's often strongest in groups that should in principle be values aligned with us.
So kind of like the the people who kind of came out from the original cypherpunk. So kind of like the CCC in in Germany or the Electronic Frontier Foundation almost everyone is extremely web three critical. So yeah, I I I feel you. I also, I also find that very worrying. Yes, yes, yes, exactly. I and I don't know. You know, I normally don't worry if I have a solution and I know, OK, let's go work towards that. I don't know what to do here because I don't understand why
this is happening. OK. No, I mean, I can understand why. Yeah, I also understand why. So basically I think kind of like being on the inside, there's a lot of scams that we're not even Privy to. So basically that kind of like regular people are the target audience for and we don't even we'd never actually end up hearing about. So there was like this Runaway hit podcast I think made by the BBC last week last year the the Crypto Queen or something.
And I had. It was literally a project that had. A parent lady, right? Yeah, exactly. Had apparently raised billions of dollars and I had literally never heard of her like zero time. So I think kind of we're kind of like we're very much in this bubble where there are largely well-intentioned people and kind of like all of this scammy underbelly of crypto, we're not Privy to it.
So I think probably for every legitimate project that we know and love, there's 20 scam projects that we've never heard of. And I think this is very much kind of how this image of crypto actually rises. And I think kind of the way to kind of dig ours, dig ourselves out of this hole, I hope is by building genuinely useful application for regular people. And I think kind of this is kind of where we where as an ecosystem kind of we need to get to, right? Yeah, yeah, that's that's that's
true. But I don't know how to get there because even if we do like we have, we have, we have a lot of stuff like, I mean, OK now I like advertising is something that you guys work on in Gnosis, like the Gnosis pay, right. Like this is amazing. This is going to be super cool, based on Monarium, which I have actually also used, right? And these are really like the payments, unlocking payments. It's, it's. Yeah, but it's still, it's still a promise, right. So basically it still hasn't
found. I mean it's so kind of, we're very hard at work to kind of make it usable for anyone who's kind of on a regular new bank account. So maybe not for your grandmother, but kind of for for kind of regular people our age who have no crypto background, should be usable without them having to know kind of what is heat phrases and so on. But we're not there yet.
So kind of if you kind of look at actually users in crypto, kind of people who are there to kind of use the products because they are legitimately better than the web. Two equivalent. I would there's I think there's literally zero. And I think kind of moving from a place, I think I'm super hopeful we can we can get there and we can get there maybe this year or next year.
Basically having real applications with real users who are not in it because it's crypto and it's cool, but because it's better than what they used to have, I think we can get there. And I think this is, this will have to be the way to kind of get out of this, you know, public relations nightmare that we're in at the moment. Yeah yeah, the we we need to find like well, not exactly find PMF, but it would be nice to have a good good applications.
But I still think of the stuff that crypto does a lot better than anything else right now, which is, I mean payments, it's it's nothing can do this as well as crypto. I like paying people in outside of the EU, paying people in Africa. So we have some independent contractors in the Rocky that work some hours for us, right? And we pay them through through crypto. If you try to pay Africa, sometimes Asia also, right?
Yeah, so we tried, even with I don't know what other solutions are there like PayPal or or Wise transfer. We tried wise. Oh my God, it's first of all so slow, then expensive. The percentage on the amount and the second payment that we tried to send, it took about a month because it got somehow flagged. And then we had to talk with support and. Look, you're you're preaching to the choir here. I totally agree.
But I think kind of then kind of if you look at the other side, the question is kind of like how do you off rampant, how do you, how do you make the stables accessible so that you can actually spend them for groceries and your rent And I think this is still way too hard. So I think kind of, yeah, I mean I think kind of it's potential improvement is definitely there and I think we can get there. But I think kind of making it more usable.
I think this kind of needs to be kind of like priority one for now. Yeah, yeah for for countries like for Asian countries from what I I I heard they just use you know like exchanges like like I I do normally for for off ramping in Africa. It's extremely interesting.
They use this like PP2P stuff. They they just do Crypto P2P just like we used to do. Not so much anymore like Local Bitcoins and Local. Yeah Local bitcoins there was there was a fun time yeah cool left Harris it's been a it's been an absolute pleasure to speak with you and have you on this podcast for the first time for real after 10 years of kind of working together where if people are interested in trying out rough key or contributing where should where should we
send them. For for contributing it would be a GitHub and Discord. So GitHub to see the code and Discord to basically chat with us ask us any questions we are. We're extremely welcome to contributors and to download it. You can also download this from GitHub but we have it on our website likeerotki.com. You can just go there and press download. Depending on the IT will probably detect your operating system and then download the proper binary and just try it and then come to discord and
tell us what you think. Perfect. Thank you so much for coming on Lev Harris and see you soon. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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