Tim Galebach: Uqbar – Smart Contracts on Urbit

This is epicenter episode 491 with guest Tim lock, myth from Akbar. Welcome to Epson a to show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Brian Crane and I'm here today with my hair Roy and today, we're going to speak. If Tim locked my f f, who is the founder of Akbar. Akbar is ZK, roll up, any, theorem, ZK, roll up. That's built on irbid and, you know, probably a lot of people People are going to be like,

what the hell? So we're going to like uncover all that and, you know, get to the bottom and hopefully you'll come away with an understanding of what opens up to it. Which is pretty exciting. So, thanks so much for joining us teamwork. Yeah, it's great to be great to be here. Thanks for having me, guys. Cool. Well, maybe she'll also make me a brief disclaimer hair. So my hair and I, of course, our co-founders, of course, one and we have invested in Akbar.

And also personally and have been sort of involved in partnership with them as well. So, when I mentioned that, not much though, so a little bit little bit, you just a minor minor disclaimer. All right, so let's get into it. I'm actually one thing I'm curious about is did you first get involved in crypto or in orbit and what was sort of this journey that you had into this into this world, okay?

So the answer is actually like a better question even than it sounds because I think the answer is first into crypto for sure. So I was like one of the people who bought Bitcoin near the top in 2013 at the end and was like sort of into it sort of around and Like I remember actually, in 2016, getting back in and like investing in it then and actually listening to epicenter at the time. I remember taking like random walks around, I think it was in Estonia or something. That's small town.

Listen listening to epicenter trying to sort of boost myself back up on, where crypto was at then. And as that year went and threw like the Ico, boom. I was like, programming in solidity, doing a lot of stuff there. And I think I actually remember encountering orbit, then, sort of looking at over. And doing the thing that I sometimes do, which is something I try to stop myself from doing, which is sort of dismissing it too fast for a simple reason or dismissing things too fast for

simple reasons. So I looked at it and I was like oh this is cool. I see what they're trying to do in terms of having this, you know, Global peer-to-peer Network that can coordinate easily. But I can probably just do that with aetherium like I think this was at a time before like in 2018. If you remember, if your am just had all these scaling issues that were unanticipated, Like with plasma and stuff like that. And people ran into a lot of challenges there.

And but in 2016, 2017 it was like, okay, probably will figure this out. This will be great. I think also at the time, the challenges of kind of stitching together peer-to-peer apps with lots of pieces weren't known. So with all that I was like, I get whatever it's going for but you know, I think if you're am is new it's like seems to be on track to solve those things. If not it, some other similar

like blockchain system. And so I basically just put her back to the side to then and did not look. At it again, until I think it was late, 2019 must have been October or so. Okay, cool. And then you joined us and then you join Clon as well. Like what's the story of how you ended up at long? Yeah, so I got back into urban or checked it out again, not even back then, I wasn't it first in late 2019 because one of my friends who was friends with Rob.

This regular one of the main core developers at Salon was like, oh yeah, I'm hanging out with, you know, Ted Robin has Rec far. He's really into orbit and doing it, but I think it's stupid and it's not going to work. So then I checked it out again, at that point, just to see where it Was, I had more free time and I was just like, an outside Community member. I started, I got really into it in May 20-22 during like the covid stuff.

When I had a lot of free time, I started first figuring out how they're sort of Assembly Language, knock worked wrote a tutorial about that. Then decided like, okay I want to write a tutorial for how to just write programs on the system in general because there wasn't anything like that. So did that on my own as a community? Member at this time there were probably like 45 Community programmers, who weren't working for Tuan?

In our bit was very small kept doing that over the summer, then wallet and late 2020, mid-2020s, something like that. And after I sort of finished up with that, in the beginning of 2021, I joined what became the, ER, B foundation. So, it wasn't exactly tan. I was working for like Josh, who's now the head of the, ER, but Foundation kind of was like, do you want to come with me and sort of be, I guess, more, or

less technical director? Of this New Foundation, where you sort of, you know, figure out things in the ecosystem. Like, help people on board, show them how to program. It figure out what kind of Technical Resources to make.

And so I did that for most of 20 21 and I think the biggest sort of achievement of that time was like up until then all the people who knew how to write orbit practically or most of them were working for to Lon and it was very much like in order to programmer, but you had to become a clone employee or very closely affiliated. And kind of be taught the secrets. And I think what we did successfully is we were able to kind of prove the hypothesis that you could onboard programmers, to Herb.

It fairly straightforwardly. And there wasn't anything overly complex about it, which people definitely worried about before then. So yeah, I never worked for flan, but I guess at that time, the foundation until on, we're so close in the foundation was just splitting off that, you know, I may as well have I was on like, they're, you know, all hands calls and things like that.

But we were very We much trying to make this like outside thing that would be able to successfully on board people, without them needing to go and work for tall. And I think I'm, you know, looking back. It's just a very proud achievement like it worked like, you know, the foundation became its own thing. Soon after I left people keep learning it, there's way more, you know, net. When I started there were a few like five orbit programmers, not until on.

Now, there's probably a couple hundred. So, yeah, that was what I did and I was yeah, pretty happy with how it all went, like more so than most things go in life. You know, as if we've done a few podcasts about irbid, the did the podcast actually long time ago in 2017, I think my hair and I did a podcast with gaalan which is sort of how we learn about herb, it and got kind of involved a little bit and then more recently, we did one, I did one with Josh at that.

You just mentioned, who's the executive director of the Iroquois nation and then also did one with Till atoll, boss. And with you mentioned, Ted, who's the technical director of the foundation. So, with that being said, still most people write in crypto don't really understand or wait.

They're confused. So, how do you explain irbid like, There's kind of two directions that you can come at it from one is sort of taking herb it and saying how this has good features for crypto and how it works. Well I actually prefer the other direction which is you take crypto and you start to say okay why do we not have very rich like daps, what's standing between us and there and what do we wish? We had to make better ones and I think as you do work through that, you almost start to

independently inventor bit. Like you know, leaving it's a Newton like both doing calculus like on the side. You can actually sort of reinvent Urban in this way which is you say, like, okay we don't have great daps. Why is that? Well, let's look at what kind of dabs are successful. Definitely like the biggest successes are things like like swapping and lending by far, like Ave unit swap. Things like that.

There's nothing those all. We could also look at nft like training, protocols, like open sea or blur and in all these cases, almost, all of the interesting action is happening on chain. Well, you know, swamp is like amazing because they were actually able to take some of the people thought, had to be done mostly off chain and get it all on chain. Similarly with like the lending protocols and how they handle, you know, liquidations and things like that. Which is very, very cool.

The thing is in all of this there, trying not to have heavy off, Shane components. Which I think if you talk to people in aetherium and crypto in general, like in like the cosmos ecosystem, like probably seven eight years ago they would have said, you know what, we all know that like blockchains have this limited capacity. So expecting going forward that the will find ways to do lots of action off chain and then settle the main things on chain and in to some degree.

If you even look at like the sick like successful l2s, they've done that where they've been able to do that, like do that somewhat. But in general for applications, it's very, very hard because the problem at the end of the day is if you want your application to be decentralized, not even for like religious reasons or like, you know, privacy reasons. But just for, you know, if you do a centralized service, it's easy to shut down. You can't offer all the features

you want. It's iterate on if you want to do a decentralized app, you now have to distribute this app to all of your users and keep them up-to-date in the right versions handle, all this stuff and if you don't do that or it falls apart at all, it's just kind of gross and so because that's so hard, I think people thought it's hard like okay some whiny engineer's need to work harder for three or four months but it's hard like stuff takes years or just doesn't happen at all

and so if you want to solve that When I say that you would sort of reinvent, turbot you start to think of things like, okay, I need to have some kind of operating system that I can guarantee or some kind of virtual machine that all of these, you know, spread out peers are running. So that at least when I deliver them software, I know they're talking to each other in the right way, they can handle versions changing. Well, they can get it

distributed cleanly. They can know who the other peers are and their networking IDs. Not just there, like crypto IDs, and you start to go sort of further and further. And you end up basically, Reinventing Urban, which is a peer-to-peer operating system that's just trying to make it so that you can. Predictably say what all these different nodes in your network are running and how you can deliver software to them.

And so I think kind of the proof of that is it took us a while but as we build out with require this kind of crypto layer on top of her bit, where you can start to like actually realize this and be like, okay we're you know, we're having applications, we're delivering them. He's easily to people, we're letting them compose off chain and then do their high-value things on chain and actually is working like better even maybe

then we would have thought. So the what if we kind of Step all the way back and say, how I would explain it to people it's that if you actually want to have cool Rich daps, that kind of Drive the new meta of crypto, like the new narratives that push people in. You need to take a step back and engineer, something a lot like a peer-to-peer operating system. So if someone in the last five or six years, Yours had built something like herb it in another language or in a sort of

another stack. I actually probably would be looking at it and we will probably be hedging our bets, a nuke bar and like, developing on that thing as well or making sure we knew it. The thing is no one's like, no one's done it, it's like a daunting project, that's hard to do. And at the point where someone does starts doing it, I will take it very, very seriously. I just don't think it will happen until Urban and nuke bar, proof-of-concept enough. That that becomes like

economically. Desirable like where investors are think. Okay. We just saw that. Work. Now, we're going to you know throat we're fine to throw money at you. I'm actually curious. If you could take a practical example of what you're saying, like let's imagine like it that that does X. And then you put something on the blockchain and be like, okay, what are the constraints that emerge and why do we need a sort of an off chain operating system? Is that possible? Yeah, absolutely.

So I'll take An example that I don't think is super Advanced or exciting or just like the the start of what we can do. But when we were playing around in November December and wanted to be like okay what can we show people for what this is doing? We're like okay, let's make a poker game and what does that involve practically? If you want to make it peer-to-peer you need to have. Let's leave aside mental poker for now or some Advanced algorithm.

Let's say you want to have a server that kind of decides timeouts in the game who won Etc. Want, you know, at least two players who connect to that server, you want them to be able to put money in escrow before you know each match and you wanted to get paid out appropriately. So suddenly you're looking at all these operations that sound easy. But everything I said their hides a lot of complexity which is first deploy the server, right?

If your if you want it to be running all the time you would have to maybe deploy it to like a cloud service or something like that, configure it, make sure it's running, then have that connect to a blockchain be able to Take events coming in from people who say here's like the money that I want to put up in like lock it until the end have, like, those people read those events and this is all doable in, you know, a basic web

three format. But when you start putting all the pieces together, the friction gets quite bad, both from. Okay, This Server isn't working. I want to make my own, let's go deploy that. Oh, now, I'm following all these instructions for how to deploy it in the cloud. That's actually quite complicated with herb. It it was lit. It's Like, you know, push a button to say, install, the hosting software, push another button, and now it's running.

And so, when we actually had one go down and I wanted to start up another one for our test games, it was actually like remarkably easy and just sort of slots in, then you go to everything about, you know, we want to deliver updates easily, orbit, lets us handle that to all the peers so they can stay, they can stay synced and then we can even start doing and then even the wallet interactions where you're like. Okay, I need to send Send money to the escrow then have it?

Be detected have that come back. That's like something that you want to have done like pretty seamlessly and by putting it inside irbid, we're able to have that happening all, you know, on our back end when the action happens, you can spit it out. And the end result at the end of the day is you have something that just works. Now, we're expanding that a lot to actually use case that I think is much more practical and close to home, which is we wrote We have chat and we're expanding

it now too. I guess something that is it on it basically becomes dou tooling, but in a very full-featured way, where you're like, when you say, what is a group of people, excuse me, in orbit is traditionally been. Okay, I have one server and that server keeps a list of who's in the group and you do that, but there's no reason that can't be a non chain entity that it couldn't be like a dow or some kind of group that records its various permissions or members.

Things like that, you know, on chain the only thing is you have to be able to easily query that you have to be able to update it. Let all that stuff happen, and we're going to release that pretty soon. But in a format where you can basically say, my dad was a non chain thing. But all of this off chain stuff like chat, documents, like blogs people are sharing sending money doing applications that involve assets. Sort of just works based on the permissions of that Dow.

So I think it's those are some of the concrete examples, but I think the coolest thing about it is that all of them extend very, very easily and it's almost like all the stuff that as either a sort of a programmer who hasn't done web 3 and think stuff should be doable. Now, it is stuff that you intuitively think or is a user where users will often think this stuff about. Okay, I have all these things. Why can't I combine them? Like, I have a chain that could

store this dou state. Why can't that also integrate easily with they would think like, you know, my telegram groups And manage permissions their do things like that or and now it can. So I think that that's really the main answer is all the like we can keep giving these concrete examples, but they extend easily and all the stuff you think you should be able to do kind of naively.

You can So, you know, you have a personal story, you don't about a time when you dismissed orbit and then, then you revisit it again, work with orbit foundation. And then how did you end up at the idea for Oak bar? And yeah, how did you end up? Finding the team for it? Yes. So this part is the idea was actually very straightforward because all of 2021 I was dealing with people coming to Urban and saying I want to learn how to build the system and I want to try to do this kind of

project. Like actually I was just describing the poker game that we did a nuke bar that was actually The Apprentice project of the guy who is now our lead developer he came and was like okay I want to see if I can quickly make a poker game on Urban and just taking that as an example, what happened is he was able to do it very quickly, handling, all those pure aspects, I talked about but you know, poker is kind of boring without real money and the kind

of Step that he got You was, how do I have there be real? Like, you know, real money in here and the answer was you have to do all this kind of gross stuff in her awping with you know announce them outside Block Chain and that was not an isolated case. I would I would say like probably 90% of the projects people did when they came to Urban sort of spiritually wanted to be crypto projects.

They wanted to have especially because when you're dealing with these like decentralized applications, you very, very often want them to be able to To coordinate on some piece of state or have some kind of economically, meaningful thing, update, something like that. And so people over and over

again, wanted that. And the answer was always, you could do it. But we've kind of sold you on this, like amazing operating system that integrates everything inside it except for crypto that's not like integrated. You have to kind of go through this sort of gross process all over again. And so it became very, very clear that herb.

It needed a in also like an integrated cryptosystem and the Was I think it was obviously desirable, there were questions over how to achieve it, but we basically started the project by finding everyone in irbid who was interested in that idea and was good at stuff and saying, you know, we probably have a job for you if we can raise money against this idea.

And because I think a lot of the people who were in orbit at the time, got that, it was this very almost like funding of early e thing where a lot of people sort of saw the desirability of this This. We're in like a community and decided to, you know, get in on it. And so we were able to fund it based on them sort of understanding orbit and what it would need and then there were a number of people around we hired like I'm trying to think how

many on our team. Like most of our Dev team is people who I was working with as like sort of new programmers to err. But during that year or who I on-boarded and same with people on our like business team, were people who got interested in it from. Are, you know, from the like something is going on here and I want to be in on the community aspect so and then we had some really great people who had been heavily involved, like working

at tan like like tack, right? So crepe like Logan Allen, who worked with us like part-time to on board, all of our people and kind of get them really up to speed in writing hoon and writing her. But programs he did a great job and has since gone on to sort of take the crypto side and The, that's not even farther by starting a ZK oriented orbit company that's doing really well.

Zorp. And yeah, it was just this like I think we kind of collected everyone who was talented interested in crypto, just getting into orbit and want to just like sort of be in on that. And we at that point we were like okay we have some team, we have some money now, we should have to figure out how all this will work and that was sort of its own, we've gone through a lot of different sort of changes and idea since it started Well let's get a little bit into

details here, right. So because you're basically saying like, Okay in irbid, right? You have a lot of things such as part of the stack, right? So you have, you know, identity messaging, a lot of things are just like in their software distribution and I was saying, okay, the goal goal of work by making crypto part of the stack, as well, like what does it mean? Because it because in the end, right? These other things are actually part of the core orbit like operating system.

Where's Akbar is something that's building on top? So what does it mean to sort of you know make crypto this like yeah this part of the urban stack with his like fundamental primitive that's like easily available for people building irbid applications. I've thought about that a lot because you definitely ask yourself while you're doing a project, like, like is what I'm doing. Necessary is definitely a big thing.

And so I, when I was giving the stories earlier about people wanting crypto in their apps, but not having it, that was sort of to motivate that but practically how you make it. A part of it is you make sure that everything bar does as a chain. And I'll explain this in sort of high-level technical where it's easy to understand. But just at the even without technical to Everything it does

is like sherbet native. So let's say you have a, I think most people in your audience would be familiar with like, L to sequencers. So you have this machine sitting there, that's taking, you know, transactions and then settles them with whatever chain. It's a rolling up to, right? So we're part has a sequencer. We have it set up actually, so you can have multiple sequencers.

It's actually pretty similar to, you know, how our beat drum has proposed doing multiple, you know, multiple chains that interop. So it has it sequencer and that sequencer has to interact with a theory.

Mm but No one else. Inside the urban network has to interact with ethereal everything that that sequencer does is like you know, an airlock that sealed off tight and you can send it in ER and all the interactions you do with it sort of produce, Urban native data, Urban native events that are easy for urban programs to handle. So that doesn't mean that we're exclusive like someone else could go and make something like bar.

We're not exclusive in the way that something in the colonel if you can actually Imagine a version of orbit where they basically built far as like a core part of the operating system. I don't think that would be the best design because you may as well, there's no technical reason for it. And so you may as well compete on that layer, but we do have to compete with anyone who wants to do the exact same thing as us in their own thing.

Although we do have like, you know, business licensing on the code. So they wouldn't be able to just copy Us. In most cases, they could try to make a really good layer for calling out to like, you know, a theory mm or Cosmo. Sori player 2's or something like That they absolutely could do that. It's hard. It's like a lot of engineering.

So I think what makes us Crypto honor bit, is that we're the only people who are doing it particularly seriously right now and you have anything remotely well-engineered there. And we're also doing all the engineering such that from a developer's perspective. You don't have to think about how it interacts with like, let's say like a theorem or anything like that. Everything is like fully contained Insider bit in this model.

Right. So basically, a developer can write their application right in its own in in irbid as a programming language called Hoon. I choose this sort of the the main development languages is functional language. So and you can build your Urban

application in hoon. And so basically what you guys are then offering is that as I'm writing this application, I can write some sort of smart contract logic in that application in hoon and then it will sort of like, you know, can like Like create a transaction, it can and it will send that transaction to the sequencer which is again just irbid. It should honor bit, right? So just sending a message to basically a particular ship owner between urban in urban

note. Yeah. And then that would be note, kind of sequences it and in the end it said, let's do it here, IAM. So you have sort of the security of etherium and at the same time, yeah, yeah. You can kind of access that smartphone type functionality from within normal. Herb adapt. That's right. And we could get more into the urban tap side because there is this question of why are you doing all this work? So that you can let's say right, smart contracts and hoon and

integrate them with orbit apps? Like what's the win there? I think we've sort of, we've sort of touched on that, but that's, that's another big part of the story. Where, I guess what the way I would say it is right now, when you develop, let's say, if you're in contracts, are evm in general, you use something like hard hat or something like that, and you get this full environment that lets you do, all this testing and stuff for your on chain application.

So we talked like, you know, maybe 20 minutes ago, about how, for just on chain, stuff are the current Paradigm works pretty well. You can make some pretty some pretty cool apps that work that work. Well, and I guess the one way you can think about what we're doing is trying to extend that feeling of being in inside, you know, hard hat, or found Russell Russell, I'm like Foundry, like something like that, and extending that to your entire

application. So that when you want to test your, you know, full application and say it's getting, you know, events coming in from other peers or starting them up. Having the blockchain events coming into is also part of

that. So, really, trying to unify everything into this hole and we wouldn't be able to do that if we weren't writing it. You know, as one orbit application, if you didn't have that, If it was just the Akbar chain and then you were writing with all in JavaScript or something that would be very hard and if it was just Urban apps and you were had to interface with them in like you

know, native evm form. That would also be very hard and the way we the reason we know that's hard is that Urban people have wanted to do this for a while and like they haven't and blockchain people have one of these kind of, you know very much apps for a while and also have had a very hard time doing them. Whereas worse trying to find this like intersection to be like a lot easier and sort of you know more fun to write. Dig into this a little bit.

So our story starts off with kind of just observing that. For example, if we wanted a poker poker app, the hard thing about building a poker a pond is helium is. Well, if Financial logic, there's a natural house for that Financial logic. But poker also requires is this a game of incomplete information? I need to have some secrets from you and secrets are not naturally. Portrait in on the blockchain. So I need something with privacy and lacking and what might be

something with privacy. Well, you might say that, okay, the users browser is something that has privacy so we could have the application run on two users browsers and then they settle on it here. Maybe somebody could imagine something like that and yeah, I think I think even, you know, virtue poker or true poker pretty much He's doing things like this. Like I don't want the people in our audience to scream at us. Like, I know what mental poker

is, you absolutely. There are ways to solve it. I think mayor's point is more about the logistics. Yeah. Yeah. But of course like menu and you start to do that. You come to the United Nation that you are almost trying to use the browser as kind of like a computer, right? You try to do peer-to-peer networking between users with between two browsers. And then what if you had a persistent long-lived computer rather than a browser to represent the user? And like that's kind of that's

kind of herb b or B jump. In fact, if we go back to the beginning of the discussion where we said you almost We reinvent orbit your about like you know 10% of the way to Reinventing irbid already because you start to say, yeah, this would be great. Okay. I'm going to put like, you know, the applications living in my users browser, okay? Now they need ways to talk to each other. Okay, we'll make like, you know,

a stack for that. They also need to be able to know like the identity of the other one and then like encrypted and make sure they're doing that man. My app also might have some like software updates over time. Like I better make sure they're running the same version of the operating system. And and what you do is I'm not Not saying this in a bad way you actually absolutely could make sort of a version of something like Urban tour.

An OS that lived in browsers. This is basically what people want to do with Waze. Mm it's just that no one's done it and so like sherbet is the only thing out there that is in a form that can be used but you're absolutely right that you start to go down this road of needing to maintain the software deploy. It somewhere have places that can talk to to handle identity networking between the things and that's all the stuff that turbot is giving us for free. E. And then what we need to make

sure we can do is in that model. Also, have it be as clean as possible for those. Let's say in-browser programs, to talk to the blockchain and do that cleanly, because right now, orbit is the sort of sealed off thing, where it can do, all of that stuff and solve all those problems. But it doesn't have like without it bar, particularly clean ways to talk to talk to the blockchain.

And so, that's been a barrier for, you know, on the urban side, it's been logistically difficult to develop those kinds of programs. Yeah. And then nothing Next Step, you're you're taking is really that the development environment that works to develop applications in natively in orbit.

Should be the same as the development and environment that you use to build your smart contracts running on a blockchain on Earth. The guy like that's the that's the that's the unification you're trying to do because in the end, what you want is for the developer to to have very little difference between something that is on blockchain and like something that is that is exactly and we can even go

further. Which is in terms of what we're developing internally which is we we want the blockchain to be inside orbit. We want the program to be an urban native program and we even want the testing and orchestration of those. Like let's say if you're testing and you want to your testing a poker game, you need to have three or four different fake peers running fake nodes running to test it and keep doing them. We also want to get that running inside orbit so right now it's run.

If you're actually building an herb, it program the way it looks is maybe you fire up for different terminal windows and each of them is one of your nodes, you know, your sort of fake notes that you're testing with and you have to cut and paste commands into them to get them into the right States as you develop it. And so one in sight we had which is not unique to Austin had started some work on this a while but never took it that far was what if we put all of that

inside our but what if we have in you know, in irbid program that can Create four five, whatever different orbit like nodes. And in orbit blockchain Hoop Bar blockchain inside and run, you know, sort of run all this stuff and let you sort of automate that app development process.

So again, it actually feels very much like, you know, for any of our evm developers here, if you use something like hard hat where you fire up, a local node, and run stuff against it and then reset it, it feels like that.

But for everything in your application where you're almost simulating this, you know, Galaxy of different peers who you put into whatever States, you want and one through a program and then the next obvious step after that, that we've just started to look into is sort of further powering that up at the next level will be to like, you know, integrate like AI assistance with it is like a very obvious Next Step, because the thing we haven't, you haven't asked me yet is, but

isn't sort of Hoon weird. And how will you get developers to use it? And so there are some answers to that even without that. But we're seeing some really promising. The Avenues with, you know, training like LMS to know, basically to know who and better and kind of let people do it. The lazy way rather than having to take this sort of religious journey into a new programming language. Okay, great. I did exactly. I wanted to ask about that

question, right? So because food is something that when people see it first, it looks really weird. It doesn't look like any other programming language. So a lot of people, you know, including, let's let's say, of course one, Right. But basically who looks like very strange and four people, it one of the most common objections, you know, we get is that people see that it's like well People are not going to want to learn this thing, right?

So you really have to do something that's more close to programming languages. That develops already know, that's the only way to get like mainstream adoption and get like, you know, hundreds of thousands of developers building on it. And of course, you have like solidity, which is kind of like JavaScript similar. And so that's a very common objection. And then, of course, you have a lot of people in irbid that are like know, who owns the way. And like once you learn it,

there's no going back. And it is the one, you know, they won't Roofing even if in orbit, right. There's a little bit of like division where you had like I guess a project holy mm right. Is now been trying to get more like JavaScript into orbit so what's was your fault on hoon and sort of its suitability for application development mainstream adoption and smart contract development, okay? So this is what we can but we can use the stuff. We've talked about already to kind of frame this.

So, first of all, I'm Of an herb. It atheist. I'm not religious about it. I'm doing this in a very sort of 20th century. Empirical scientific sense where I'm using it because it has specific properties that I want and to the if there's principles I sort of like them because they helped me develop better. I'm not, you know, religiously intellectually married to like having to have weird characters on the screen that doesn't, you know, it's like sort of it's a fun thing but it doesn't matter

to me that much. So if we start out like, why are we using Hoon? The first reason is that like practically right now? That's the only way to get access to the urban operating system. And as we said earlier, the urban operating system is the only thing that has these properties that we need in order

to cleanly build these systems. But then, as Brian said, that leads into the next question of. Ok, you can have all your reasons but will people use it. So I think there's two angles to come here from that are very like, we have a lot of empirical evidence as to how this goes. The first angle we can go from is have people become more likely to learn Hoon over time.

And as I said, I think people don't really appreciate this who are in orbit, but because a lot of them are either have come in the last two years or when they were there earlier, sort of weren't directly involved with education, but I can tell you for a fact that if we were talking about like, June 2020, I would have long conversations with people. And the subject of those conversations was, is it possible to teach, Normal developers to use hoon or is it

just too hard and too weird? And my hypothesis was it's not too hard. It's just being taught badly and some people thought it was sort of, you know, too hard and they had to go through the secret like Cults, like initiation to want to in the first place. And the it's not too hard. People have won hands down convincingly.

So we now have like you know when the foundation runs people through whom school there will be like 100 to 200 people doing that a pop. There's way more you know who in Repose on. There were there's far more, Hoon programmers. Like then there were there's not even enough jobs for them. Like necessarily is probably not as many companies as there are them. And the biggest issue people have now is like I think because it's missing stuff like crypto. It's almost like okay what do

they build once they have this? That's one angle is that I think I'm hoon is not particularly hard to learn but you are correct that it's still a new language and what's the point of learning a new language? You have to convince Developers. To do it. So I think there's again two

aspects there. The first one is, if we think about right now, for sort of non e VM L to stuff or even L ones, there's a couple projects and they're very very successful if we take like obviously, like you have Solana which uses Rost been. Now that's already an existing

language. They get to onboard people who know that, but then you have Stark Nur, which has is probably sort of the most Nerd sniping developer attracting like project like you know in crypto it's like they're like they get a lot of developers and sort of organic attention and people wanting to do it even though the language is way harder than Hoon especially to reason about doesn't look like they've made it some superficial things to make it look different but it's

very hard to think about and people still use it and they still will do it because it lets them do something that they want to do. And I think bar is very much in that vein of if we can. Let you do the types of apps that we think we can, you'll go through the work of using Hoon that said. So that would have been my answer until about, you know, March 15th or 20th or something

like that. And now because we're living in like the singularity like GPT for came out, everyone's on what it can do and can see how this is going to head for other like you know, LMS and people have been making a ton of progress in you know, training, non GPT LMS and doing it legit like

launching. And things like that and it's very, very obvious that if we put the work in we will be able to have computers that make it much much easier for you to write in hoon and let you get in, like, sort of have a superficial understanding of it, but be like, do this for me or show me how this is done and things like that. And I think so, we start basically start with this thing of can you learn Hoon? Yes, it's possible to learn Hoon. It's not particularly hard as

languages. Go do you have desire to we've seen? That if there's enough like economic reason there's like because we're providing enough applications that you can build, that will be there and then can we make that as easy as possible and the main worry now? Is that like, you know, I guess it's interesting. I think, actually, the main competitor of sort of bar type stuff now is actually super powerful LMS that let you take all the stuff that mayor was saying is hard and like, gluing

together. Things are putting their browser and just make it like a Essentially I think the only way to sort of make that stuff go really well as like maybe maybe even a GI or something like close to it and we can see a path to that now. But you know before the computer is kill us, all there will be this beautiful moment of being able to use hoon like very very easily. And I think we're sort of explicitly targeting like I guess 2024 should be the year and then 2025 will all be dead.

So it'll be fun, though will be programming and hoon and Rich but then dead soon after. So this is one thing I didn't think I was going to. This has not actually been on my mind for a while but I have thought about it a little bit in the past. So the topic of like Ai and if you have like AI becoming like super powerful I'm to me, it feels like because in irbid you know you are kind of like owning

your own like Network identity. And because you have this sort of like a governance structure because, you know, but you have to send it right. Basically, you have a bunch of notes like 256 nodes that make up this Galactic Senate. And they are basically like a doll like governance Council, right? And these are people who own baby is cryptographic identity and then can make some

decisions. So, 1/4 I've had with regards to AI. Is that this Feels like something that could be a, pretty resilient structure that like, you know, human beings could keep control of even in the face of like AI becoming like super powerful. So, I'm just curious, like, what are your thoughts with like a? I becoming, you know, a GI, and those kind of things and like, how that will sort of, like, interplay with herb it.

As a, as a network and as an alternative to the internet So there's so many possible Futures there that it's hard to catalog them. I think the only thing that's clear now is that absent maybe massive government or self-imposed like private restriction AI is going to get very powerful. I would end like already especially in the area of programming. Is much more than people thought.

So then you sort of play that out and I think there's like these different Futures where You know, maybe very powerful models are out there but they're only owned by a few corporations in the US and so then maybe irbid plus crypto becomes this platform for people who want to you know, access powerful AI models outside of that or have them like you know interact in that way and run sort of these alternative economy's like

outside of that. If you know, AI is restricted heavily which is very possible in terms of like, you know, size of training runs like gpus being Stricted in some ways, not, not at all inconceivable, you know, then I think herb. It has this and it was, especially if bar has this massive role to play where because in that, if AI is restricted, it's very hard to make all these systems work

together. A, I enabled bar would be one of the best ways to have a large computer system that does work together, you know, for economic purposes, Rich applications easy for developers to make all of that stuff. And, you know, then you do have like, we sort of these weird Futures, like, where I get super powerful models are out there

for everyone. You know, in that, in those cases, I don't even know how, like, if Humanity survives, we'd have to, you know, we have to see but I think there's a broad range of outcomes where a I assisted orbit is very, very powerful for letting people I guess like access the, you know, the products of the products of models to assist their programming and also to Like make throwaway programs that operate like in their orbits and orchestrate, their stuff related

to, you know, crypto applications things like that. And then possibly things like training. But it's when there's this much uncertainty. I think the main thing you have to do is make sure that your you kind of lean into the power and make sure you can do enough in all of those scenarios. And so, I do know, like, a too far. We're taking this very, very seriously, as a kind of bull case for urban in general.

Especially for like bar with crypto being on her butt and just trying to make sure that I guess there's this thing you could do of like making excuses where your where you say, like where people fall back into a sort of urban pure, like Purity thing of like, okay, we're orbit, we don't use Ai.

And to me, that's why we just, you know, do handcrafted artisanal programming, like, you know, ourselves there's something great to me. That's a lot less interesting than saying we have this really powerful. Integrated system. The biggest barrier to its adoption was that the programming language is a little bit weird. Now we have machines that can just knock that out for us and so that's a little bit scary because you're definitely going in the direction of making some

very powerful systems. But, you know, I don't think there's sort of any other way to go. From your description. It feels a lot like the Oak bar system can be thought of in the best case as similar to Apple,

right? All of us have this experience that when you bite into the Apple ecosystem, you get one device and then the next device becomes apple and then you're kind of Trapped into like 10 devices inside the Apple ecosystem and if God forbid you ever need an Android device and interoperability is going to be really bad.

So, the sick you think that scanner in future for bar when it's successful that, if I am an obit user, and I'm an upper user, I'll have a very good experience when I am interacting with just two bar having on my finances, their Exciter, but if you consider the other cases, which is like a developer that's kind of I don't know, building on the cosmos SDK. And trying to ship to a, trying to ship the cosmos, SDK application to a user that is on irbid that interoperability may

be very weak. Okay, so there's a few different cases embedded in your question. And so we should like one is don't like sort of done if you are successful. Does it sort of takeover lots of computing and then the other one is If there's stuff outside of bars exact settlement system, how does it work in that? And so those are, those are

pretty different. Let's start with the second one, which is the cosmos SDK developer, who has, I don't know, maybe like an evm compatible app, or something like that, done on it using like their own consensus system,

right? I think in that scenario, what happens is because they're only building the consensus portion, and the blockchain portion on Cosmos a world in which Bar was very successful would be one in which developers were very used to developing these Urban applications in which users were very used to like installing and using them and we could try to

imagine. Let's imagine that like for whatever reason that developers Cosmos SDK application has become very popular like running outside of that. I think it's very likely that someone will, which might even be us will make a very strong. Let's say evm compatibility layer where if One has substantial assets and or like, interactions, they need to do with an outside and outside chain that they can do it, actually.

In a similar way to how far does which is, you know, you have some kind of like, you know, node reading that chain. You can do read and write or some kind of like graph style indexing through there, and I think there would be a lot of economic incentive for that to get built. But I do think that it is the case.

That in that world, unless the developer was like, deploying something that really needed its own consensus, or that was like a legacy application that needed to get deployed there in that world where we part was that successful. They would probably deploy it on, you know, in a bar town that said, I do think that, like, sort of already written an audited, evm type code will be with us for a while.

And so I would expect at some point there will be some like compatibility layers that make that ingestible an But where maybe you're not writing new contracts and deploying them but you are getting other ones. Now, the other one though you correctly, you know got our goals which is if you are a successful it will accrue. Lots of network effects like

sort of apple style. We try to mostly have in terms of our economics have the way that we monetize that most be them like, people transaction on the Google, like, you know, using the uke bar chain and we try to make everything else like Reopen like the application. So, you know, while I lead a while, becoming Apple would be a great outcome financially. I think we do have a bit of a different ethos, because we have

a different way to monetize. And so everything we've done so far in terms of like, you know, chat stuff.

The things we're doing with Dows, social groupings, things, like, social applications coming out, we've made all that open because the entire goal is just for people to use bar in a way that like, and also, you know, I guess it's just To some degree that would also too if we were settling on and then like flow through to aetherium somewhat as well, we'd see which assets were used on the thing but we are trying to build very, very

strong Network effects in far. And have that be the place where you go and have that also maker but apps like sort of the go to apps. And this is why I sort of mentioned the AI angle because I think without that to assist developers and also to make it easy for like, really easy for users to make these Art of throw away programs that can just operate on all these, you know, bar Urban apis and the life.

I think it's a little bit. It's harder to imagine that future happening, obviously, until recently, we were trying to make that future happen, but I think AI really increases the odds that we can, you know, that we can do such a thing. So I've always imagined right at the way Urban would work is that irbid as a whole would be this sort of like apple like system,

right? Because you have this fundamental thing like a networking identity stuff that's like unified and everything will kind of work together like that. But then I I think what we have seen interestingly, is that actually in? I don't well, so you have like some companies that now have built. More and I think pursuing a more of a philosophy of this kind of like, you know, vertically integrated stack that like all works? Well yeah.

Other and and you know for example there's a whole bunch of different chat apps on honor bit now and they're like, you know, separate apps, right? So if I'm like messaging, you know, with you do Mark, right? And then on one app, then it's going to end. And I'm messaging. Same username, right? Like you on another app and it's like separate. Relations. So where do I think that's going or how do I want it to?

How do I wanted to go? I mean, my actually I would say, sort of say that like my impression of work bar is much more. That is much more trying. You'd be this like thin transaction layer or like you know, basically covering like the smart contract portion and then sort of, you know, because I think that's the other.

That's so a little bit. The other approach where we can say like, okay, I'm going to try to build like Some some component and then you know lots of other people can build and stuff versus like being this building this kind of vertically integrated full-stack thing that it did enter being is sort of like Walled Garden a little. Yeah. So we're very uninterested in the Walled Garden.

We very much like that vision of urban as this like open system that a lot of, you know, that a lot of different applications can build on and compose and one reason we're sort of We try to make our own programs. That maybe look a little bit vertically integrated when we sort of, don't see something out there that does what we want. So like we did do our own chat that we use just because there wasn't anything else like that.

Good out there and I think when we drop the next version of like we're includes groups like on chain, Dow type structures, I think people will see that but our goal is not to be like you know, a vertically integrated chat company. We're mostly just trying to, I think we see this moment in our beds life where a lot of these Primitives and protocols haven't been made and instead of like trying to round people up and make a standard and tell them, they all have to follow our

standard. We've just been like, okay, let's try to get the best thing out there that we can. If people start using it and we can build on an easily, that's great. We do try to leave them so that

they're very very open. So actually a great example of this is we have like multiple other projects now building With our chat, Primitives with some of our social graph and like grouping Primitives. And we actually do work to sort of support them and make those happen, because it's not, again, it's not really interesting to us to have that, Be in there.

It's just that we think that that base layer of Primitives extends Beyond just the chain and we have to do a little bit of work to get other stuff out there which actually it makes

sense. If you think about what we've been saying this whole time, which is what we just want Richard apps to, if they're not, there we have to show people then, and we're seeing a lot of people get interested, specifically, because of things that we've made and then want to build Richard apps and that's mostly what we want. But in the, that's the short term and maybe medium.

Term in the medium to long-term. I want, you know, herb it to be its own, kind of Walled Garden. But for that, inside, that Walled Garden to be very very open. And for that to be this like, you know, Universal Computing system, which isn't, it's not that crazy to think about, because everything else is so centralized and hard to build on, and compose, which is sort of another topic we could hit if

necessary. Yeah I mean did the the fascinating thing in a way is that you can have both right? You can have people built like involved Garden type system honor bit which is is going to happen and then you can have others build kind of open system and everything runs on the same OS. I think the walled Gardens, they'll be under pressure. Including the ones that like, know things were making that are internal.

I think, at some point some of them will get popular, they'll become Open Standards. People will fit like build their own like let's say front. Ends for accessing, you know, the chat apps that are dominant. The those and we're just so early that people in urban have tried to do it, like, for a while was like the social thing where someone would start building, maybe a new app like in chat and people are like, oh but don't, you know, Tom is making that or this other group

is or something like that. And after a while we're like this is stupid. We're so early. It's just people like, you know, a couple hundred people fighting over this, let's just like build it and still like let that process happen. So let's let's talk about another topic. So it's kind of like another big topic, so you guys decided to build a rollup, I guess another path would have been to build basically like a sort of layer 1

irbid chain. What was the reason why you guys decided to go the roll-up path and not to build L1? To pump my if bugs. Now, the the reason was It lets us when we understood our core value proposition better, which is about this, like, being able to enable these like very rich applications better experiences for developers and users, you start wanting to focus everything on that as long as

possible. And if we did our own chain with our own consensus, initially we would have a couple issues right off the bat which are fine and other chains kind of validly want to do those. Right off the bat before us. They weren't is interesting which is one you have to build your validator set and like get that you know get that all going and another is that you do have to bridge if you want to get in assets from other ecosystems and so which again it's fine.

It's a valid choice, I have there have been a number of issues with security of that in there, so there's challenges and doing it. But it's you know, people do it. And it was just we didn't want to, if we don't do it as a rollup, initially then we have to spend more A money and like, take longer because we have to do all that stuff. We have to set up like things facilities for bridging, we have to set up and be confident sort of the game theory and security

there. We have to like build validator sets and figure out like you know the economics of that plus like you know finding them and the valid like the validator approach. Lets us start the the role of approach. Lets us just focus on. Okay let's have this sequencer or set of sequencers that are running and that And sort of just keep out of our mind while we're doing it, which has been great the last few months to be able to sort of, hold that steady as we iterate on other

things. And I guess also, I did have this kind of feeling back in early 2022. That Roll-Ups, we're going to get hotter and all tell ones. We're going to lose some of their premium just for purely.

Sort of technical economic reasons, which I think is like most to look at the, you know, No, the fully diluted valuations of the top, like, l2s or things that try to pretend they're LTS, like polygon, you know, they've generally been better than Solana effects like, you know, Luna Rest In Peace.

So yeah. And I think in terms of the base layer and getting that, right, I do think, like if you rem is doing really, really good work there and I don't want to, you know, mess with that for the moment. Now, of course, Is the moment that will come along and every successful l2s life, like down the road which is okay.

Now you do have a lot of money on here, you are very successful you very easily could build, you know, a validator set out of, you know, what your token is. Does it make sense for you to

keep rolling up to aetherium? And I think anyone who says they can answer that like, you know, one way or another right now is lying and I think we absolutely could see, for example, like, you know, our btrim or our optimism has their own stuff for their Folly. Wouldn't But, like, you could use on Stark not have that decision down the road and make that in that direction, we're, it would be an, it will be a nice problem to have to think about where I think we would be

doing really, really well. And the first goal is just to get maximal like bar and urban adoption without distractions. So I'm actually really happy that the sort of Base roll-up architecture has been I guess like worked out enough now that it's kind of boring and there isn't my I know I've gone over the various, you know, the literature seeing what people are doing and there's nothing very new or interesting in most

cases which is great. It's like somewhat commoditized and we can sort of just go to it slowly while knowing that'll be there as an option. And then if we're super successful, we can have those discussions down the road as

will. Everyone else who is, you know, very successful with an L2. So, in, in going down the role of path, of course, the massive Branch point is between optimistic Roll-Ups, which ensure our security through Game Theory and ZK Roll-Ups, which ensure their security through zero, knowledge, cryptographic proofs, and you've chosen these EK roll up part so sort of sort of okay. So so yes it does. It's like what path you have chosen and kind of what are the major technical decisions of

business decisions. You have if taken on that path, ZK. Roll-Ups in my opinion, are obviously desirable in the long run because as you said, you don't have to secure anything with Game Theory, which gives you a lot more options for things like data availability. It's a lot safer to do. Various let's say like the lidium type schemes, where you're not writing the data to layer one of helium or whatever layer one you're doing.

If you're using ZK, because now you have, like, sort of two pieces of Game Theory to get right there. If you're trying to an optimistic roll up that uses the lydians, it's very Bard and generally it hasn't been, you know, hasn't been taught that said, ZK stuff is advancing very fast and if you put too much work into getting it, all right, right now, you can put in a lot of work and then find out that like one year later you wouldn't have had to put in nearly as

much work for the same result. And so you've basically wasted a lot of time and money for something which isn't really our core value proposition, which is, you know, creating this like developer user ecosystem. Natively on Urban. So the best balance we found for that. So far is to have a progression. That's kind of as rapid as we can make it. So first part of the progression is you know what? Our value proposition is making this like sherbet developer user.

Ecosystem will start our roll up on test. Net in proof of authority mode. Like we just say, this is the state and this was the state transition then but while we're architecting that it's not like a dumb proof of authority where you just Like right, the new state and that's it. You also make sure to implement data availability at the same time and also, you know, the various sort of mechanics, making sure that, you know, deposits and withdrawals work,

right? And can be proven and so that you can switch that to in optimistic mode. Now if you go to an optimistic mode then you have the question of like do you turn your fraud proofs on like optimism still hasn't done that are Beach from has but with permissioning but optimism is still proof of authority.

Like just trust me bro. But just the billions of dollars which is, which is fine, actually, get their reasoning, which is that their main value proposition is being this thing that can become an optimistic roll up and that like people trust it enough to be like, it's basically, you know, if you re m-- side chain that people like the tooling on and that's good. That's it's working for them. The thing we can do next though.

A lot of progress being made on sort of urban native, ZK proofs, we did that internally in a bar and then some of the guys doing that, spun out to form zorp, which is a separate. Russian doing ZK, proofs of like, knocking Hoon code and their stuff is going really, really well. And we talk to them a lot. We work with them closely and will probably be able to jump from instead of going from proof

of authority to optimistic. It's very likely will be able to jump straight to, I guess, I would say optimistic, ZK, where it's optimistic, but instead of having a long challenge procedure for resolving a fraud proof, you just submit a ZK proof for the fraud proof. The reason, You can do that when

ZK might not be ready yet. Is that for if you're doing a typical ZK, roll up, you have to prove every transaction and so you need some, they need to be fast if you need to be doing those in like, whatever it is like a second per transaction of tenth of a second per transaction, proving them fast enough. If you do this optimistic, ZK thing you only need to prove the batch when there's a problem.

And so in that case like if someone Flags it and there's a problem, you actually could take like three hours to prove the batch of like let's say a Your transactions are thousand transactions and it's totally fine.

In fact it's a lot better from the game theory perspective because you then only need one on chain transaction to prove it. So it's very, very likely that when we launch week bar on Main net, it will probably be proof of authority but ready to turn immediately to a ZK optimistic

system? And then from there, it's literally just a matter of marching through the optimizations to get regular ZK fast enough which were pretty pretty optimistic on. On but we're extremely optimistic on optimistic, CK. So this is all very pragmatic and it's just focused on how fast can we get people interacting with our core value proposition, which is the sort of, er, 'but ecosystem where you're doing stuff on it for real money and we're probably more limited even by audits then

by ZK or optimistic. And so what we'll probably do is that system I was talking about throwing out on maenette, probably Leave this summer will probably have a deposit limited. We're can only take a certain amount of ether ERC 20s, just so that, you know, people don't put in hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of tvl and then something happens.

And then GG, U Bar. I think we'll, you know, try to have it be like, okay, you should be responsibly putting on like, you know, a couple thousand dollars or something or whatever, you can afford to lose. But yeah, that's that's sort of the way that we think about that and the either way to sum it all up is You have the technology and The Game Theory, plus technical Primitives. And you want to make that sort of maximally accelerate your

core value proposition. And so when I see other l2s that are making decisions like we said, with optimism of not enabling for all proofs yet, I actually don't hate on it at all and I get exactly what they're doing, which is they can kind of see where things are going. They've also thought of, you know, going from optimistic optimistic ZK, which makes sense, and they're just trying to, like, you know, have that make sure they do have a plan at least in the long run to have it in. Sect.

So, you know, our situation is very similar, it's just we'll probably get to something secure. Maybe faster - its I have a question here in terms of like the finality. So if this optimistic, CK, if let's say in you examples, okay? Maybe you can take three.

I mean, I guess there's like some time needed for somebody, say, hey, that was an issue of this transaction and then some time needed for like someone to create the approve and submit it. And then, that is kind of like, whatever window you have to sort of be able to live Viv that until you have finality or like how do you think of this sort of like you know, the the finality time that guarantees of obviously the pure ZK is the best because you can just be

final. Once you're on within whatever the batch time is that you're doing it for optimistic. People usually have done a week. The reason is that you often have to do multiple challenges like the way our be trimmed. Does it is like a bisection thing. Where tldr Are you could maybe have to do 15 30 different transactions to sort of complete the fraud proof.

And so you have to make sure there's enough time not just to find the fraud but to get through all the transactions, in an adversarial environment where someone might be doing the calculation of, I'm fine to das. The etherium network, would diss many transactions and pay this much money, because I'll be able to withdraw more than that from the roll-up.

If it gets through, in that window, if you have this like optimistic, ZK, you only Need one proof and so that should reduce the finality window by a decent amount because you don't have to calculate it. So like that you don't have to worry about them dosing it for like 15 to you know

transactions. You only need one transaction to get through but you know, off the top of my head it would probably be more in like, you know, one to three-day range for find out for finality on it. But even that would be a little bit of a stopgap while we go to full. ZK because I just, I don't really like the, you know, sort of multiple time finality that said within each bar.

If you're talking about transferring from one hookah bar, like let's call him Shard, we call them towns to another. You can get faster like as long as you sort of trust that the main thing on chain won't get rolled back. You can let those shards talk to each other pretty rapidly because you don't have to worry about if one gets rolled back.

They all like they all get rolled back but Again, another good reason to get to ZK as soon as possible but also worth keeping in mind that even if we got there tomorrow and had a full ZK system, we would still have to audit the rest of the system. So it's not sort of worth it. We're trying to like make everything go together a little bit later in the year or early next year. So we can stitch a few things that you have mentioned

together. earlier in the episode, you talked about how the developer experience of Hookah bar, and irbid will be the same or similar which means people will be able to write smart contracts in Horn and deploy them to bookmark. And then later you mentioned that eventually you would like Akbar to be a z Carolla and in the short run and optimistic seek a role of where If something goes wrong or Oak Bar, it can be proven on is helium. That something went wrong.

So if you put the two things together, it feels like the essential primitive that you need is for a developer to be able to write a program in hoon and then have that program be executed somewhere and then generate a zero, knowledge proof for the results of of that program's execution. Because absent, that primitive. Cooper, cooper could neither be an optimistic. ZK, roll-up. Now be a full zekiel. Not in the jealous. So how and this is like an oven challenge, right?

Like you have you have the whole language. So you want to program in home for execute it somewhere. You need to generate a zero knowledge proof that the program's execution resulted in this particular result. So, how are you solving that problem? That primitive? So specifically like just executing the zero knowledge proof. So you have a transaction in each bar and you need to do it.

Meaning any, how do you generate the proof and how do you verify the proof and how are you attacking the problem of, you know, depth building or developing a proof generator? Yeah. This is the answer is sort of boring unfortunately, which is for verifying the proof. There's pretty standard stuff that you can roll on with whatever system you're using to put it on to deploy it on a theorem and have it verified that for generating the proof.

This is where we did a lot of sort of initial feasible. Bility research and then have some of that internally but zorp. This other orbit company has made such fast progress on specifically proving orbit programs of actually, any kind, not just our transactions, but since we part transactions, are Urban programs. They get those and they've made such fast progress on that, that we actually can just, we've been negotiating, a deal with them contingent on them getting it working.

Which seems We're going to be demoing the first version on this Wednesday, I guess, on Friday, but literally you throw in an urban program. It spits out a proof. You throw in, you know, a thousand bar transactions. It spits out a proof of those that you can use for this validation. And so, while that answer is boring, the implications of it are really interesting which is that not only Will Herb it. Be this like place where you can write these rich applications that interact.

With the blockchain. There's one other thing that's sort of catnip Barnard snipey to blockchain programmers. And people around that which is the ability to zero like easy, zero-knowledge proofs and we will likely have the ability to eat, not just for your on chain bar transactions. But even stuff that happens off chain that you want to prove, you know, make these proofs that something was done, right?

So an example of that off chain would be and also you can vary Loop bar so we can deploy not just Program on a theory on that can verify proofs. We can deploy a program on hookah bar that can verify these zero-knowledge proofs. And so, what that would look like is imagine, I don't know, you have like a game world that someone enters and puts in Assets, in order to like, do fights, or something like that.

And at the end of it, they just they need to, like, run a proof run approver on all of the actions, they took and the code that happened and proved they followed the rules of that game world. And then they can, you know, withdraw more assets, potentially or lose some, you know. Depending on how it went, and I think there's this whole world of verifying Computing completely off chain stuff that happens.

And then using that, to trigger on chain of events, but having that be at consumer scale that we're really, really excited about. So we went this actually these like to the blockchain aspect is actually maybe the most basic and simple which is literally we license, you know, I think from them we probably do some kind of license where it's open for

people to use. Long as they just use it for require so they don't have the you know, Stark where problem of not being able to access the provers. But then they have this whole other world of, you know they can go and you know license proving or do proving that lets them do. All of these arbitrary off chain interactions, they can prove on chain that they followed some set of rules in order to unlike in order to unlock things and so

we're very excited about that. It's definitely something we want to mark it really heavily as this additional T government programs, but it was sort of just, we didn't know until very recently that it would happen. Basically, the timeline was, it must have been March, maybe 13th 14th. We have the conversations with zorp, where we saw, how far stuff was getting and how this would be a thing that we could also offer to loop our developers. You know, then we're thinking about that.

Then all of the GPT for Stuff hit and we had to also think about AI at the same time and figure out like that strategy, but I don't want to downplay the ZK side. It's Like one of the most interesting things happening on orbit and like in bar and we think that, you know, kind of, if you liked Stark what like Stark net like you'll love. You'll love this. Because you can everything you learn in terms of writing Hoon programs for having a computer.

Right for you, you will soon be able to just proven ZK and it's really wild and people aren't don't really know about it yet, and we'll probably just have to show them in order for them to believe it because it's kind of a wild claim. So, indeed, in the rest of this ecosystem, there's broadly broadly, like, I'm not talking about Akbar or sore, this broadly to two, approaches to the building. No smart contract capable, ZK system.

So one approach is That you develop your own virtual machine, which is different from. The ethereum virtual machine has a different set of instructions. But you architect, those instructions in a way that Creating zero knowledge proof is easier and then you have some kind of domain-specific language built to utilize that virtual

machine. So most famous example of this approach is Startin it which virtual machine is different, and then the domain-specific language on top of it is Cairo, which is different from from solidity, and then, so that's kind of one approach. And then the second second kind of approach is All of these projects that are trying to build a zeeky zeeky evm of sorts o. So this would this would be polygons.

But then there are there are other projects as well maybe three or four of them that are trying to build is ETA e VM in which the virtual machine, the instructions of the virtual machine are the same as as etherium and you're trying to develop a kind of approval that can kind of reuse those instructions and And and, and build the proofs. So Given that there are these two approaches. And you're just by, you may just end up buying the technology of Zorb. What camp, do you belong in?

And what kind of constraints does that imply for the future? We're very were very, obviously in the old VM, like start NAT type approach, where we're not like making our smart contracts evm because we have a good reason not to, which is that, we want them to be maximally integrated in orbit. So that's that decision sort of already.

Made for us. And then the fact that, you know, parties legs or per making a lot of progress on improving, those native Urban transactions makes everything pretty smooth in terms of ZK e VM. I think it's important to just say how I think about the evm in general because it's been very successful. It's very widespread, there's a lot of audited code that runs on it for like large amounts of money, and I think it's going to sound - if I say this, but I

mean, it in a very positive way. It's a lot like COBOL where you have like, Lots of unfortunate and we have like a lot of code that runs billions trillions of dollars that runs on kobol. Still like four Banks. They know it works, they use it, it's hard to find, you know, people who want to like program on it or do it but you know, it's there and that's going to be with us for some amount of time.

And I think that the evm is very similar and so I think that steps towards having given that that we're going to have evm code with us for some time managing billions of dollars. Whether it's on, you know, Cerium, cause most obviously Avalanche did that like heavily. But everyone who uses the evm wants access to those programs given that we need. ZK, V, Ms, because this is better than the optimistic setup and those projects are all making great progress there and

I think it will eventually work. I think we couldn't. We could see things even, like, successful or wealthy optimistic projects, like optimism or abuse from switch to ZK because I think it's getting very commoditized. I would actually Spect to see that polygon sort of leading the way there in terms of just trying to go directly to that.

So for us like it's just a different Universe, I think the most likely Universe if you bar wins and if evm code is still running is that we'll have we'll probably sponsor or work with some projects to make a clean interface for ingesting evm data from the most popular l2s or l1's into orbit, like bar

programs. And you know, then people you know, if they have some multi, With like, you know, tens of millions of dollars that they just for what they want to have on gnosis, you know, they can they can do that. But as far as we go, there's no reason for us to it would be it would be a lot more work to make our thing. Evm compatible and ZK provable in the evm.

And at the end of it, our payoff would be that people had to write, you know, solidity or similar programs Insider but which we don't really want it also, you know, we want to have our own thing. Get maximum adoption for our old VM settling to a theorem. And then later on do the work to be, you know, be able to ingest and right to evm contracts on other chains for sure which I guess also sort of addresses your question from earlier about the poor, you know Cosmos SDK

developer with a popular chain. Who has this thing? That that sort of the answer for him is that if it's evm compatible, we would likely do the work to make it, you know, ingestible from his as long as you use, like standard tooling. And so this aren't alt VM that your stack is based on. Is it, is it the same or to be MSS star player or a? No, we are no, no, no. So that's a turbot no, it's Urban. Yeah. It's just like a normal rvm is inner bit program.

It's like maybe a thousand lines of code. It's not very big. It's like it's there. It takes in transactions that are orbit data in the normal form, it processes them within In written in orbit and it spits out, orbit data on the other end that we can, then serialize for posting data, availability on of Olivia Moore to aetherium.

And because of that, we're, that's why we're able to take, let's say, a ZK, proving solution that wasn't developed for bar, in particular legs orbs, which is just for proving Urban code in general and say we have our B code prove this and it shows, you know, should just work the only for people who want to get Get really Technical and put, don't wanna bore your listeners, but orbit has these things called Jets.

Which basically, if you have some piece of code, it processes them faster using may be essentially in a foreign function interface and in those cases, you have to make you have to decide on what your set of jets is for the ZK approver of like beforehand and sort of say I'm proving a transaction, assuming the existence of these Jets. But I don't want to go too far in there. The basic message is you, Of, you know, we are engine rvm.

Is just a turbot code and we proved our bit code when we were using Stark where's products back in the summer, what we were doing was using them to essentially, write Urban

interpreters. So we would write a program in Cairo in Stark where's language that would take in orbit code and prove and generate proofs that it was done, right, according to Urban schools but you know, cutting out the middleman to some degree and having a more native system for it is probably going to be beneficial well, if we had to go back to that, you know we could But it's unlikely at this point.

Cool. So one question set of as as you get to a c and so one question I'm curious about when it comes to use cases that you want to see people build and that like you know you most excited about and that you think would be, you know, the things that will really leverage or and Herb, its capabilities, you know, the best and that that are kind of going to be the things that can really like take off in the next year.

Two years. Are there particular things you have in mind, you have a sort of list of like things I want to see built. Yes, I want to say that we need to see them. Develop still I kind of make our imagination, go further. But I think everything in the world of social but social meaning, everything like related to, you know, networks where you're posting information and having stuff come in and communicating with people. Dowels are an example discords, everything in there.

We want to ingest everything like then that can in the social

plus like game type world. I think is really is really interesting like and um and we're actually talking with some like game projects to onboard them because one of the best things that we can provide is this like, you know, just sort of full crypto plus social plus, you know, chatting Etc integration into their, I guess one way I would say it is that right now a lot of herb it people just for coordinating their development, use stuff like Other dot town, where they

can go on and like chat with each other and have like, you know, some environments to like go play with. I'd like to see stuff like that. But much much richer.

I'd like to see things like what people use, Twitter Discord, other social for, but much much like much, much richer, and DOW like in it. The thing that we're not going for As Much from the start is the typical thing that people do when they launched a chain which is try to you know, copy like you No, make some amm clones and don't want to look good today.

Yeah, he's loved it. And like does it and we have one guy who's like has closed like made an AFM just like you know, for the hell of it because like we can and it's on there. But we're exactly interested in getting people doing these much, more social type game type applications, seeing how those actually integrate integrate with crypto in like a mature

environment. And then once there's demand for it, doing the liquidity type stuff, Because I think it's yeah it's on our it's a thing we want to be doing eventually but it's not the new interesting thing in crypto. The other way of saying that is that everyone in crypto sort of knows that just doing unique swap. Clones is kind of a dead end and not very interesting.

And we're trying to create, you know, this new, this new meta like this like just much much richer set of things that you can do. We don't even know fully what that looks like, but we have. It's also not just a blank slate. So we're like okay, I wish we had chat so that we can do these things and see where it goes.

Then once we had chat, we're like, oh, now we actually can do basically groups Dows discords, like things like, much more like that with crypto and then I think we'll see what the, you know, what the next thing is after, but there's a some other projects that were working with that will, you know?

You add those, I think on one that we were interested in was like what portal was doing, which is trying to make like a discoverability thing for everything in all the content in orbit and that has a lot of obvious crypto Integrations. And so I think like, in terms of incentivizing people to do stuff for it, you know, limit, you know, limiting things in various ways. Let me people collect assets and so I'm interested to see how that goes.

But just in general, like I guess the idea of Making those applications, but then letting people extend them easily is something we haven't seen a lot since the, I don't know. Probably since the late 2000 like Facebook like Twitter, open API apis phase. When people could just sort of build whatever applications they want integrated into those. And we want to bring that back to some like, to some degree. Cool, fantastic. Maybe like final question.

What's the, what did what did the timeline is look like where you at right now. What are the main Milestones coming up right now? We are in the process of finishing, our main engine, integrating it with ZK, at least for optimistic, ZK and doing the basic version of the roll-up. We have a very basic version on test net, but even need to add

stuff like withdrawals. We also we Talked about little bit about which we call ziggurat, which was basically the thing that's going to let you pull together. All of, you know, developing for lots of, er, bit nodes at once checking that against the ubar chain, doing all of that, that will be out in users hands probably later this month or in May and then we'll start iterating it fast based on that. We would like to then go to main net.

Probably in June or July where you're sort of doing stuff for real money but deposit limited and start doing, you know, audits of our code. And then having people get familiar Auditors, get familiar with our Hoon engine. Also the on shame, the on chain portion. And as the summer, you know, as the summer goes, will be doing more experiments with AI to like in a balloon programming.

But and in terms of having like the actual chain launched would like sort of full tools and everything working that'll be like probably the alpha beta version over the summer. And then as the year goes on and we do audits. It will get closer to doing stuff like potentially lifting, any caps on the amount of deposits. Really, going after developers very hard, things like that. So I would look for some action If you're sort of really into.

If you're into urban development already, or want to get into it, this spring like around May and then the real, you know, hardcore lots of apps are coming out and we're moving closer and closer to you know, no training wheels over the summer and fall. All. Cool. That's exciting. Yeah, I mean I think a lot of things going. Yeah, a lot of things going on in irbid, lot of things going on in Oak, Park things, moving fast. So I think it's going to be

pretty mind-blowing. I think this sort of experience, the user experience is people are going to be able to like enjoy in this world. You know, in sort of, I think, you know, next year, maybe towards the end of this year, some things but I think definitely next year it's going to be something. We're having a lot of 50 people will go and be like that's That's what I expected. It should work like and that's, that's what I've been kind of

waiting. For one thing we say internally that's it's very much like a bar can make ico's great again in the sense of like when people were saying all these things over, you know, 2016-2017 it was based on this idea that we have this Global consensus engine. We can do all these crazy things with it and for a variety of reasons, obviously, there were like, you know, the issues with, you know, scams and things like

that. But also, So there were like people who are trying to do ambitious things and they were just too hard then and I think they're now finally in reach and so you know ideally we could make another Ico, boom happen and everyone will be happy with us, don't like that. This kind of this kind of the vibe Perfect. Cool. Well, thanks so much for joining

us Tim lock. It was really great to have you on. It was great to talk about bar, super excited about the project and where it's going to go. Yeah, thanks for having me guys. Really fun, great questions and thanks for listening for tuning in. If you're going to be back next week and have a great week. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week.

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