Guests: Aaron Day & Mr_Kwibs — Zano vs. the Machine: Fighting CBDCs with Privacy for the People

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Welcome to the Free Thought Project Podcast, a hub for free-thinking conversations about the promotion of liberty and the daunting task of government accountability. Here are your hosts, Jason Bassler and Matt Agarist. Hello again, Freethinkers. Welcome back to the Freethought Project podcast. My name is Jason Bassler and joining me is the Freethought Project editor-in-chief, Matt Agarest.

As usual, guys, there's no shortage of insanities in the headlines, but today we're cutting through the noise with a conversation that really matters with the guest who brings in the insight, perspective, and hopefully introduces you to some new ideas that can transform the way you bank and use your money. Now, we also have a returning guest joining us today who has joined us on the podcast twice before in the last year.

It should all make for a powerful conversation focusing on the future of tech, finance, and the transformative potential of decentralization. But before I jump into a few quick announcements, I first wanted to check in with editor-in-chief, enemy of the state, and all-around thought criminal, Mr. Matt Agarest. So, how are you holding up today, Matty, and are you ready to talk shop?

I certainly am, man. You know how I've been loving Xano for the last several months now, since I learned about it in December, and we just kind of started devoting some free thought resources to it, because it's fucking amazing, and I can't wait to talk about it today. Yeah, I think we're best friends with Zeno now, man. We're certainly fanboys. So, yeah, I'm excited to talk about it as well and kind of get into some of the weeds.

But first, I did want to mention a few things. And as always, guys, wanted to share with you our previous podcast last week. We really had an incredibly eye-opening conversation with the CIA whistleblower, John Kariaku. And, you know, John, he's such an easy guy to talk to. He's incredibly knowledgeable. He's clearly dedicated to truth, even after spending time in federal prison for exposing the CIA torture program. And John shared personal stories from his time in the intelligence community.

He shared his insights on Israel and how he even witnessed the drug war intersect with the war on terror. Of course, guys, we wrapped up everything with some white pill solutions. And it was definitely a conversation that you don't want to miss straight from the horse's mouth. So put it in your queue for listening and download it. Listen to it after this episode.

Also, guys, I wanted to mention that, as you guys all know, we published a children's book last year around this time entitled Little Freethinkers Know Your Rights for kids aged six to 12, which can be found at littlefreethinkers.com. But I am excited to announce that I am currently working on offering an online Know Your Rights seminar to empower people with the knowledge of their rights.

And after a decade, the police accountability sphere, you know, we've really accumulated the knowledge and pieced together what it takes for a one hour class that will teach people how to deal with police, how to deescalate police encounters, your rights at checkpoints and the TSA and really so much more, guys. Now the class isn't quite ready yet. I'm still working on all the moving pieces, but more information will soon be available at JasonBassler.com. So keep an eye out for that, guys.

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All right, so let's go ahead and jump into the introduction of our guests today. So we're excited to be joined today by Quentin Van Welzen, also known as Mr. Quibbs. He is a dedicated blockchain and privacy advocate and the head of marketing and growth at Zeno. He's at the forefront of promoting digital privacy in the crypto space and has been instrumental in forging partnerships between Zeno and CakeWallet.

Now, he spoke at the Anarcho Polko conference last year and has been featured on the Crypto Show podcast. So we're excited to dive into the world of privacy and the future of decentralized finance with them.

So Quentin, thank you for joining us and welcome to the Freethought Project podcast. Yes, thank you for that great introduction, man. And it's a pleasure to be here. Absolutely, brother. Yeah, welcome. Also joining us today is a returning guest, Mr. Aaron Day. Aaron is a fearless advocate for freedom. He's a staunch proponent of sound money and individual sovereignty and has years of experience as an entrepreneur, an author, and a political activist.

He's also one of the biggest Zeno enthusiasts we know, which kind of made it a no-brainer to have him on the show joining us today. And our last podcast with Aaron was in mid-December of 2024 when we discussed how Roger Veer was being targeted and still is being targeted by the IRS and DOJ. And I assume we'll be touching on that today as well. But Aaron, thanks again for joining us and also welcome to the podcast. Well, thank you for having me back. Absolutely, brother. Yeah,

welcome as well. So let's go ahead and get started here.

So Quentin, the reason why we wanted to have you on the show today is because the more we learn about Zeno, the more it seems like one of the only functional, secure and privacy oriented cryptocurrencies that are out there seems highly optimized. It seems like it's only continuing to grow in value. And it seems like it has a lot of momentum behind it. When, you know, people like our friend Aaron here, Sal the agorist and Roger Veer start speaking about how valuable it is.

You know, we don't only just listen to them, but we want to know more, right? So perhaps as a good start to the conversation, maybe you can give an elevator pitch to our listeners to help them understand what Zaino stands for and what it's all about. I know it's probably a bit cliche to start here, but I think it will start the conversation in the right direction. And from there, we could kind of get more into the weeds.

Yeah, sure. Sounds good. Yeah. So Zano started off as a peer-to-peer digital cash project that focuses on privacy and security. And then, I mean, the project goes like way back. And then a couple of years ago, we did the Zarkunem hard fork, which introduced confidential assets. And this is probably the most interesting feature about Zano nowadays, because it allows users to create their own privacy tokens on top of Zano.

So now it's not just Zano as the currency itself anymore, but you can create your own assets. So you can basically tokenize anything with the same privacy and security standards as Zano itself. And you can create privacy stable coins with this, which is very interesting, or private like synthetic assets of Bitcoin and Ethereum and Solana to upgrade them with the privacy and security of Zano and so much more. Well, yeah, I can't wait to kind of get into some of that stuff.

And you know okay right off the bat i already feel like an idiot so is it zano or is it zano because i feel like i've heard two different we just read it all the time it depends on where you're from actually like we as the zano team we don't really care some people like americans usually say zano i am dutch so i always say zano some russians say zana so whatever you like works All right. All right. Fair enough. So I guess I won't beat myself up too bad about that.

But I guess a good follow up question. And again, we'll kind of get more into the technical side of things.

But like, what was the inspiration of the creation of Xano? And from your perspective, like, how does it stand out in a sea of altcoins in this crowded crypto space?

Yeah well i think most cryptocurrencies nowadays they don't really i think don't think even you can name them cryptocurrencies anymore they focus on very let's let's say interesting things such as meme coining or i mean number go up you know that's what most people care about these days in crypto but crypto was originally designed as a peer-to-peer digital cash system and xano sticks to those ethos and will always do so.

So, yeah, that's the main difference between the currencies that most people probably know in the crypto space and Zano. And some people might be familiar with Monero because that's a very known cryptocurrency, of course, which is also private. And Zano basically has the same privacy features as Monero, but it became an ecosystem where you can now build on top of Zano. So it's not just Zano anymore, but you can actually build your own stuff on top of it as well.

So that's like you had mentioned that earlier when you were describing it is how it's just it's this ecosystem right and one of the things that kind of sets xano apart from other privacy coins and you can correct me if i'm wrong but i don't think in monero the users don't have an ability to let other users create their own coins right like i think this is specific to xano.

And which is a fucking powerful concept when you think about it right like we're not just talking about sending and receiving a single token but by giving everyday users like me the tools to build their own fucking private economies, if you will, like whether that's for community barter systems, localized currencies or whatever, like you could probably even do rewards or something with this through some business application, right?

That it opens up a whole new frontier, basically, and decentralized cryptocurrencies. And what I wanted to know is like for the layman, right? Can you break down how this works? Like, how easy is it for a user to create their own token? Like, what kind of cases have you guys seen? And how does a user make value backing this currency? So I know a lot of new currencies, when they come online, they're doing an ICO. But how would the user who creates their own on a Xano blockchain add value to this?

Yeah, so it's very easy to create your own asset on top of Xano. We have this interface in the mobile wallet, for example, also the desktop wallet.

Basically, it's a small interface and you can just put in the name of your token, the ticker, the supply metadata such as your website and boom you just paid a small network fee of 0.01 zano, and it creates your asset for you instantly and then you can do whatever you want with it and an asset that you create yourself doesn't necessarily have value from itself like right from the get-go depends on what you what use case you tie to it of course and so for example there's

this really it's very new but very cool project which is called freedom dollar which launched i think just two weeks ago on on top of the zano blockchain which is a privacy stable coin and the way they so there the value of that asset is supposed to be pegged to one u.s dollar and the way they back it is with native zano so you basically are able to swap your zano coins for freedom dollar and this way there's always enough zano to back the freedom dollars that are issued.

So that's just one way to do it. But there's also many more ways to give your asset a value, of course. Yeah, that's pretty amazing, man. I love that. And, and I guess if you got enough users yourself, you could, you could, you could just build and add value to it as it would go. I know the, so like the, the reason we're talking about Xano right now for all our listeners, I guess the first person who put it on our radar,

or at least my radar was Aaron. And when we had him on the podcast back in December, he talked about it. And then I saw Sally Agarest, who Jason mentioned earlier as well. He tweeted about it. So I was like, man, I got to get into this. And then once I started looking at it, this seems, and also on that podcast with Aaron, we also talked about central bank digital currencies, right? And there's a lot of talk about CBDCs right now allegedly being banned while

stable coins are quietly stepping in to take their place. is like the bait and switch, right? So this question is for Aaron since we talked about it last time on our podcast. So Aaron, I know you're super familiar with Zano and you might even say it Zano, right? So how does Zano defend against this bait and switch? And why is this true privacy coin so important in the age of programmable money, if you will?

Yeah, I pronounce it both ways within the same talk or the same- depends on who you're next to. So I'm not even sure myself, and it almost seems like it's context sensitive. So as you guys know, I dropped everything that I was doing two and a half years ago when I started to see fellow free staters get targeted by the federal government in the crypto space. So Ian Freeman and the Crypto Six and Jeremy Kaufman and others.

And I was very curious as to why specifically this intersection of people in crypto and liberty were being targeted. And that's when I did a real deep dive into CBDCs and found that, and this wasn't the case when I started doing the research, but the case now that, 134 countries representing 98% of global GDP are working on CBDCs. So I wrote a book about it called The Final Countdown.

I ran for president to try to raise awareness, not to win politically, because to me, CBDCs represent the gateway to complete digital tyranny. To me, it literally is the end of free will because essentially... The way that this works and how they're rolling it out is a CBDC is basically just a tokenized form of fiat. So it's basically taking our current fiat system, which is, by the way, already largely electronic and can be tracked and can be programmed,

but it adds more programmability. It adds more trackability. It makes it very granular for the government and others to be able to completely block your access to money. And it's the stepping stone to hooking into social credit systems and everything else. But the other thing that I found is, and I've been really fascinated about tokenization since about 2019. As Quentin said, in crypto, most people think about tokenization as meme coins or NFTs.

But the way that BlackRock and these globalist authoritarians look at it is. Money represents 5% of global assets.

Stocks bonds your home everything else represents the other 95 their plan is to tokenize all global assets in addition to money and add the same dystopian tracking and programmability to it so the reason that i was i'm so interested and passionate about zeno is you know as i started talking about the cbdc thread roger reached out to me and so he because he saw me on a podcast saying, hey, we need to make this stuff easy to use.

We need to focus on privacy. Say, hey, you should really look at this project. And so I did. I read the white paper and joined the discussion groups, downloaded a wallet and everything else. I'm like, wow, this is actually the solution to CBDC and digital tyranny because it not only addresses an alternative to CBDCs, but allows you to privately tokenize other assets.

So in other words, instead of having this centralized stock market where all of your stocks can be centrally wiped out and controlled, you can create private stock markets. You can literally tokenize. I think there's something like $1.2 quadrillion worth of assets in the world. With Xano, you can actually tokenize any asset of any size and trade it privately without third parties.

And so to me, as someone who's been trying to fight this CBDC tyranny, this is the most powerful technology that I've ever seen in being able to do that. Right. And when Quinton was mentioning there, you know, why it stands out compared to some of these altcoins, I really am happy to hear him say that it's kind of the principles of decentralization, the values of privacy that's kind of adhering to Satoshi Nakamoto's original vision for Bitcoin.

It feels like that's been you know so it's long been departed from as far as the the bigger community of crypto and bitcoin it seems like people are no longer interested in that obviously i'm speaking about the maxis here but it is promising to me that this is something that's kind of continuing that vision and to me it really does separate zeno from so many other projects and god i mean this is why we got into crypto in the first place right it's not to it's

not the get rich quick scheme or the digital gold or any of that stuff. So maybe here, this could be a question for both of you guys. And I know right now, Aaron, I believe you're still currently living off of crypto, right? Like you don't use any fiat, if I'm not mistaken. One of the things that we discussed when talking about crypto in the past is the scalability issues and the user adoption.

I think half the issue with adoption is that crypto just feels a little too technical and complicated maybe for the average person, maybe even intimidating. I don't know, for your guys' perspective, how do you see Xano fitting into the everyday life? What is it uniquely positioned to solve these issues? How can it make a difference for regular people who are maybe, I don't know, a little intimidated about learning about and adopting crypto?

Is there anything that you guys feel like it's moving in that direction to kind of make the adoption a little more streamlined? Yeah.

Well, I mean, Zano's quote is confidential, secure, and easy to use. And that easy to use part is essential for the adoption of any currency, of course. And I mean, I'm not going to claim that Zano is where it wants to be in terms of usability, because that's the hard part about cryptocurrencies, because the technology is very sophisticated. But you can already see, for example, in Africa, Zano's community is quite large, because essentially it's banking the unbanked, right?

There's a lot of people there that, you know, it's very hard for them to open a bank account or they can't even open a bank account at all because their government doesn't allow them to. So you can imagine everyone there does have a cell phone and with something like Zano, Freedom Dollar or Zano or all these assets on Zano, it suddenly becomes very easy to trade with each other. And also in a secure way, you don't have to have these big stashes of cash with

you all the time. So, yeah, it's actually being used a lot there. And that is a great thing to see. And I hope that one day it will also be used in the West a lot. It's not the case right now, but it can be a great solution and save a lot of people from the CBDC threat. Here in Europe, in the European Union, they are going to introduce the digital euro in October already this year.

And at the start it will be you know it will be they already tell you like right now for example that the digital euro will actually make your privacy better they promise that they won't they won't censor your transactions and they won't like check what you're doing with your money they promise right and at the start but we all know what it can lead to eventually and I think it will be used for bad things. And then something like Zano, which is censorship resistant, I mean, they could ban it.

But then again, good luck with what's the right word in English. Like, you know, how are they going to knock down your door and arrest you for using cryptocurrency? It's very hard to do that. So, yeah, this is where Zano could become really important. So I have been living off of crypto since 2019. And over the past year, I've actually moved exclusively into privacy coins and predominantly into Zano.

And in just the period of time since I started playing around with it, you know, a year ago, they just basically launched a mobile wallet and the ability to create assets. And, you know, in the last just 90 days, you know, I'll list off some of the things that you can now do with Zeno, which all of these things make it easier to use for a broader audience. So Zeno is now integrated in a number of different wallets that have huge install bases. So Bitcoin.com has added Zeno to their wallet.

Cake Wallet added it. In fact, Cake Wallet, I think, was the first to add it. And then Edge Wallet has just added it. So this gives access. This gives tens of millions of people. I mean, I think 50 million people have downloaded the Bitcoin.com wallet. So these are solid, easy-to-use wallets that are integrating not only Zeno, but the assets that you can create on top of Zeno.

So this is a huge development. it. And so that's been, you know, work that's been going on behind the scenes for a long time. Part of living on crypto is right now there are these intermediate steps, right? Because it's not as though there are millions of businesses that take cryptocurrency P2P right now.

So when living on crypto, I have to do a lot of things like buying gift cards and, you know, using maybe in some cases, particularly if I'm traveling internationally, a crypto debit card or whatever. But there's been something launched called ZanoX.io. I believe it's .io, where you can actually buy gift cards directly using Zano. And so this is a project that is just only a few weeks old. You have ZanoBed, which is a P2P marketplace.

I mean, I don't want to relate it to Silk Road. It's actually, you know, it's kind of like eBay, except built on top of Zano, where you can actually trade goods and services peer-to-peer with no third parties. And it also has PGP encryption so that you can actually, the buyers and sellers can communicate back and forth with one another. You have freedom dollar, you have coming up something that is a, this huge piece of news called confidential layer where.

And before I go into that, I want to say that a lot of people still aren't aware of the fact that Bitcoin and Ethereum are not private at all. There are still people that have this illusion that their transactions are anonymous. And I will tell you, I've learned in the past, just this year, I've had three different people that have reached out to me that were looking for help because there is now an entire industry of people who are certified in blockchain analysis.

You have private investigators that are now getting licensing in blockchain analysis. And so now it's easier to track financial transactions on Bitcoin than it is even going to a bank because at least the bank records only go back seven years. And so people don't realize Bitcoin and Ethereum really are not safe.

Even though, in theory, you can't stop the transaction, the reason the United States government has 200,000 Bitcoin in its possession is they were able to track whose Bitcoin they were. And basically, the ultimatum they gave was either turn over your private keys or spend the rest of your life in prison. And it turns out most people are not going to die on the sword of not giving up their private keys. And so what Confidential Layer allows you to do is actually bridge your Bitcoin

or Ethereum into Zeno and make it private. So you can basically have a privacy version of your Bitcoin and Ethereum that you can then spend. And then you can bridge back out of Confidential Layer to a completely different Bitcoin or Ethereum address. So this is a game changer because it's going to bring access to a couple of trillion dollars worth of potential buying power to Bitcoin.

And then I'm working on a couple of things myself. Actually, I released a. I created a plugin for WooCommerce and WordPress where, you know, anybody that has WooCommerce, I think they're like 8 million businesses, you can now actually accept Zeno. And I'm working on updating it so that you can also add Freedom Dollar as well. So these are things that are already kind of in the works. I'm also working on a point of sale system, but the things that I just announced are already there.

So we are at a point right now where this isn't theoretical. We can now begin promoting private peer-to-peer digital commerce and the tokenization of all assets, not just money. That's why I'm so excited about it. Well, we're certainly grateful that you're at the tip of the spear there, Aaron, and you've been so innovative.

Both of you guys have done excellent work in this, and that's exactly why we wanted to have you on, is to dig a little deeper with this and really allow our audience to understand how deep the rabbit hole really goes. And it's funny that you mentioned the lack of transparency within Bitcoin. I remember that, you know, in the early 2010s, we really thought the blockchain was going to be this revolutionary function and feature, which, you know, in some ways it is, in many ways it is.

But I guess we were overlooking some of the privacy issues. We were thinking transparency in a good way. And I guess we didn't really realize that it could be used against us. So that's certainly a conundrum in itself. But one of the things that I did want to talk to you guys about was what you mentioned there, Aaron, which was the Zanobay. And Matt and myself and our team over at the Free Thought Project recently took note that the Zanobay had launched.

I think it was recently anyway, and it certainly looks very promising. I think it's a brilliant idea. Like crypto, it's, I guess, historically done since its inception. It kind of eliminates the middleman, the big corporations, the banks, and of course, the taxation through the government fiat. Certainly a welcomed addition to the Xano universe. And I did notice that you could buy Amazon gift cards and DoorDash gift cards over there with Xano.

So that's definitely huge. But if either of you guys could kind of speak on that, and not only that, but what kind of community has grown around Xano? And I guess that being kind of an integral feature here is like the community aspect of this. How important is community, in your guys' opinion, to the success of Xano?

Very important for example iron himself has done a great job in promoting zano i mean zano itself the team we we can only do so much right we're quite a small team and although the developers have done a terrific job with creating very cool and usable technology it takes a crowd and a lot of people to actually use it and promote it and all these all these projects that build on top of it, you know, like that these give life to the Zano ecosystem.

So yeah, that's, it's, it's super important for us. So the community is absolutely a huge part of it. And actually, the people are a huge part of it. So much of crypto has gone into this mode of, well, it's all about the code and anonymous coders and everything else. And, you know, by the way, usually when that happens, they end up being rug bulls. We've seen a lot of that in DeFi where it's like, oh, hey, this new protocol is developed by an anonymous developer.

And then, you know, lo and behold, it ends up turning into a lawsuit. You find out who the guy is and it's his third Ponzi and everything else. I want to say, so one thing about this, the people are really important and I've had the opportunity to meet not only Quentin and spend some time with him, but the two technical founders. And this is really important. So Andre, who is the primary technical founder behind this, along with Pavel, he is like the OG in privacy.

He was one of the developers of CryptoNote, which was actually the precursor of Monero. So that's how much of an OG this guy is. you know, he worked directly with Nicholas von Saberhagen, who was the, you know, anonymous creator of, of, of Monero. I, you know, Andre's worked with him and I, I can say that cause I heard him say it on another podcast, but, but this guy is absolutely brilliant on this. And one of the things that I noticed, so I went to Monerotopia and I was just

kind of watching and observing what was going on. And so Andre is. He's a really humble guy, but he's always interested in pursuing the truth and staying kind of on the cutting edge. So a lot of the things, as you've probably noticed in crypto projects, they almost turn into religions in a way. So it's like, so this is the white paper. So now we're going to freeze this and we're not going to change it at all. And now we're going to have our different factions. Well, here's the reality.

We are competing with CBDCs. We are competing with stable coins that are backdoor CBDCs. This requires constant innovation. And so what I've, so I've seen Andre reach out to people that are working on other projects and these guys do really in-depth research. And this project has been around, while Zane has been around since 2019, there were actually projects that preceded it. So, I mean, this project's actually kind of been going on for like 10 years.

So this is really hardcore technology, but with a team that has committed to innovation and that it does the research and is humble about it. And that to me is critical. I mean, as somebody who's been a serial entrepreneur, but also seen a lot in the crypto space, that is one of the reasons that I'm excited about the future prospects, because there are some innovations that Andre's working on.

And when you really start to study the technology, there are so many innovations here that it's almost hard to communicate them in a short period of time. I mean, it's just, it's, it's phenomenal, the, the, under the hood, what's going on with this. And so I encourage people to look into the project themselves, but also look into the backgrounds and like join the Telegram group and just see what's, what's gone on.

What's already been built over an extended period of time. Cause that's, what's given me a lot of confidence in the project. Well, if you guys don't mind, like maybe, maybe we could get into kind of a little bit more deeper into the back end of things.

Because, and this might be a little more inside baseball for the crypto nerds out there, but last time we spoke to a friend of the Free Thought Project, Joel Valenzuela, he was talking about how fast the DeFi world was moving and how NFTs, I guess, they were once popular, they're slowing down a little bit. I think both of you guys have your finger on the pulse of this one, giving that DeFi and Web3 are currently reshaping how we think about ownership and finance and online interaction.

But like, how does Xano fit into a broader ecosystem? Like what, what role or maybe possible advantages do you guys see that Xano can bring to the table while it continues to grow and mature? Yeah, it's the privacy. So many of these projects like Solana and many others, they make these claims, right? Like my blockchain can handle 10,000 transactions per second. Mine can handle 100,000. Mine, half a million per second. But they don't even have like a tiny fraction of that in usage.

So why would it matter, right? And they all skip the privacy and security aspect of it. and that's where ZANO excels. ZANO actually puts the privacies and security first and then it thinks about all these other things. So yeah, and I believe there are only very few projects that actually work on privacy tokenization. So, and then the interoperability is another part of it that is really important.

This is, then we get back to confidential layer once again because now if you want to enter the Zano ecosystem, you would have to buy Zano or one of these confidential assets. But many people, they just want to hold whatever they already have or they have like an obsession with their favorite assets. I don't know. For example, Bitcoin, Ethereum, which is fine.

But then with confidential layer, you can actually keep that asset but upgrade it with the privacy and security of Zano by bridging it onto the Zano blockchain. So and that could that opens so many doors for the Zano ecosystem as well right because.

Yeah i mean it will become very easy to just like take your ethereum bridge it through zano and upgrade it with our privacy and security yeah man and that's that's one of the huge functions of zano that i that appealed to me the most was the you know no more public ledgers but what i do like about it is that it's so versatile that if you do want to have like some transparency in the ledger xano allows you to do that right like say you wanted some public transaction to be public it

you could you can set it to show that right is am i am i mistaken that like you can actually, well not quite literally but i think you're referring to the auditable wallets features so we have right where yeah where you can create a special type of wallet that starts with an a instead of a z and you can share the key the tracking key of this wallet and then actually other people in the ecosystem can add this to their own wallet

and they can actually track your balance and your in and outgoing transactions. So we use this, for example, ourselves for the Zano dev fund. So the funds that we use to develop the project. And, you know, we can say that there is X amount in this wallet and we used X amount for that and X amount for that. But, you know, you rather verify than trust in certain situations. And this is one of those situations.

So you can just put that tracking key in your wallet and you can actually see the balance how much funds we have left what we spend it on and that's that sort of thing yeah exactly and that's something that where transparency is very important right if people are willing to invest a lot of money into this that the transparency of the devs and and everybody who's creating this is a is a very good thing and i love that but perhaps one of the like the the most

appealing things to me is is the deflationary aspect, right? So one thing that's been front and center for most Americans right now, I mean, is since COVID basically, is we've watched the value of the dollar plummet, right? While everyday costs soar and groceries go up in price. And sure, I guess it kind of slowed a little bit since Trump's been in office, but we all know what happens next, especially when he, you know, he's spinning yet another record-breaking military budget, right?

It's clear the money printers are warming up again and we're going to watch inflation go through the roof one more time right so but that that's what really stood out to me about xano is that it flips that script entirely right so every transaction actually burns a small bit of the supply which means it's deflationary by design right it's not just a hedge against financial tyranny with all of its private privacy aspects right but it's like a smart long-term store value too that's

like it's That's especially rare in crypto, especially even in the privacy space. Right.

So, Quentin, can you walk us through how Zano's deflationary model actually works and like maybe how we can help newcomers grasp just how different this is, you know, as compared to inflation based currencies? Right. Yeah, yeah. So most currencies, they, most blockchains, they have a model with halvings. So how that works is at this very start of a blockchain, their block rewards are very high. So early adopters have the opportunity to mine a huge amount of coins at the very start.

And then with many of these currencies after like, let's say three years, already more than half of the supply that can ever be mined has been mined in those very first three years. So yeah, that gives, in our opinion, a very unfair advantage to early adopters. Zano never had such a system. We have a block time of one minute and a block reward of one Zano per block, and this goes on forever.

So it doesn't matter if you join early or late when you're a miner or a staker, you always get one Zano as a block reward. And Zano isn't deflationary at this moment. It only becomes deflationary when the network fees, the burns from the network fees exceed the block reward. So Zano has a flat network fee of 0.01 Zano per transaction right now. And that's for any network action. So it doesn't matter if you create an alias, which is a username on the Zano blockchain.

If you send some Zano or a confidential asset or create an escrow trade or create a confidential asset. that for all of these network actions, you pay the same fee, which is 0.01 ZANO, and these all get burned. So the more the ZANO ecosystem gets used, the more ZANO gets burned. Currently, there is 1,440 ZANO being minted every day because today has 1,440 minutes and the block time is one minute.

So ZANO needs to have 144,000 daily transactions to match, to burn exactly 1,440 ZANO, which matches the 1,440 ZANO that is emitted via the block rewards. So we're not quite there yet because I believe, but the daily transactions have been soaring. I believe last year it was 2,000 to 3,000 transactions a day. And a couple of days ago, we had 15,000, 16,000 transactions on a single day. So it's going up fast.

And the more of these confidential assets that launch on our blockchain, the more transactions go through our blockchain, right? So that's why I'm very excited about something like Freedom Dollar because a lot of e-commerce actually loves this thing, right? because Zano itself is maybe not so usable for e-commerce because the value fluctuates so much. But with something like Freedom Dollar, it's actually a stablecoin.

So that suddenly becomes very interesting for e-commerce owners to accept as a currency. And those all contribute to the daily amount of transactions. And the same can be said for Confidential Layer. This bridge, whenever someone bridges through the Zano blockchain, this all contributes to the daily amount of transactions. And who knows what other projects might launch on Zano in the near future. I mean, Aaron has been working on Karma, which is a gold-backed stablecoin.

So he has plans to build that. There's Obscura, which is a private NFT platform. There's Bandit, who's building trading tools for our DEX.

Who knows what people might be building on Zano. And the more that's being built the more transactions will go through zano and then at some point it will likely reach a state where it becomes deflationary yeah man it's it's definitely exciting you piqued my interest with freedom dollar this is i've i've just been hearing a little bit about this could you could you go into a little bit of detail about what that is i know it's kind of like a stable coin right yeah yeah it is a stable coin

so it's a stable coin built on zano and but not as like a stablecoin that you that you know that you're probably used to as like tether for example like the cool thing about freedom dollar is that it's as private as zano itself so you don't see amount that was transacted you don't see wallet addresses involved you don't even see the asset type that was transacted on zano's blockchain so all you see is that a transaction happened so it's extremely private and something that is very dangerous

with something like tether for example is that they can blacklist certain wallet addresses right so you've been you've been a bad boy so we we put you on the blacklist and there there your funds are frozen nothing you can do about it but on zano this isn't even possible like you can't block certain addresses nobody can so it's it's censorship resistant private stable coin on built on zano. Censorship resistant. Well, we've had our fair share of censorship over here. So we love to hear that.

And I think it makes sense why you guys are you have so much momentum. And I'm glad to hear that as well. Because I believe Xano is it's truly worth it. And one of the most important cryptos that we could be using and the innovation that you guys apply to this and the fact that you're just thinking about all these different moving parts is very impressive to me.

But we are getting low on time here and i did have one last question about xeno and then we wanted to talk about roger veer a little bit here and as always guys we wanted to talk at the very end about the white pill right talk about solutions a little bit so i'm just going to squeeze this one in and then we can we could go ahead and move forward but boy like zooming out here we've been talking a lot about xeno

and i've known him for a short period of time it's obviously as we were just talking about, it's growing quickly. It's carving out its place in the crypto world.

But this tech space moves fast and the crypto space moves even faster. So I guess looking ahead, what's next for Zeno? Is there any upcoming developments, any partnerships? Obviously, the Zeno Bay is huge. Is there any innovations that you guys are excited about or anything to kind of, yeah, like we were saying, make it a little bit more accessible to mainstream users? I feel like we've already touched on this a little bit. It's more of kind of

wrapping up this conversation. If there's anything that you guys are excited about regarding it, we'd love to hear it. Yeah, I mean, there's so many exciting things on the roadmap that I'm excited about. On the ecosystem level too, right? So there's many, many integrations coming up with wallets and payment gateways and new exchanges as well. And these all contribute to the adoption of the Zano ecosystem. But also on the core level, this is maybe a bit more for the crypto nerds.

But Zano now currently is a hybrid proof-of-work, proof-of-stake blockchain where half of the blocks are verified via proof-of-work. in the other half via proof of stake. And you still need, this has to do with blockchain security, before you can re-spend your coins, you have to wait for 10 block confirmations before you can re-spend any asset.

So that is roughly 10 minutes right now. But Andrei, our lead developer, he found a way to probably move to full proof of stake model while completely keeping the privacy of our current consensus. And this makes our blockchain like way more secure than it already is. And it allows us to lower the amount of block confirmations and also to make the blocks a bit faster.

So hopefully in a year from here, we'll be able to like complete transfers within like a single minute instead of the 10 minutes that it takes now. So for the usability of the blockchain, that is very exciting development. So for the people that are more tech savvy here, that's probably very exciting. And then before we switch to a different topic, I would also like to recommend everyone to go to intro.zano.org because it's a great place to start if you're new to Zano.

It has like an explainer video that just takes three minutes, a few small texts with explanation about Zano and then a bunch of links. So you can join our Telegram, Discord and other communities and basically go from there. Wonderful. What was that website called one more time?

It's intro.zano.org. Yeah, that's simple enough. All right. Well, yeah, definitely check that out, guys. And yeah, big things are happening. Very much encourage people to go to the Apple store or the Google store and download the wallet as well and just start poking around, explore it a little bit. And from what I could tell, yeah, Zano is accessible on most exchanges. So yeah, we're definitely moving in the right direction here.

And I'm so excited to share this with our audience because we talk about solutions and We talk about how we could move past the state and this is both of those things. So very much appreciate your explanation with that, Quentin. And, you know, as we were saying here, Roger Veer kind of wanted to take a minute to touch on his case. I know last time we had you on, Aaron, we talked pretty much the entire time about Roger's case.

And in fact, I believe it was just last week, the DOJ had a recent memo making it clear that prosecuting Roger Ver over the unclear and backdated crypto regulations is now officially against federal policy. And also, Aaron, I heard that you recently completed a 40-day fast to protest the persecution of Roger Ver. And honestly, man, I have no idea how you pulled that off. It's definitely bold and ambitious, but pretty base too.

But yeah, a couple of things here, and I guess is more directed towards you, Aaron, like, can you share what that experience was like for you? And also, like, do you feel like this new DOJ memo might possibly alleviate Rogers, you know, a political persecution? Does it seem like that might be the direction that we're heading? Or are you kind of skeptical of that? Well, so I'll say this on the fast, I've done a lot of fasting, I really got into fasting hardcore in 2019.

I think between 2022 and 2023, I did fasted for like 200 days, not certainly in a row. But I'd done like a 37-day fast. And I will say for those of us that are obviously in your audience that's interested in, you know, taking control of your own life and your own agency, I think fasting is probably one of the biggest shortcuts to basically saying F you to the centralized medicine death cult that's out there. Without going into a lot of details, by day three, your immune system resets itself.

By day seven, you're actually producing these stem cells. What actually happens is you're recycling all of the bad material. If you don't already have cancer, but you're kind of pre-cancerous, your body's going to eat all of the garbage. So it's amazing what the health effects are, and you almost can't find any of the information about it. It is a profoundly spiritual experience because you can't help but be present the whole time because your body is kind of in a survival state.

So you're not sitting there worrying about the future or the past. You are completely present, which... There are usually some kind of profound revelations, and I won't get into all of that. I will say it was very difficult the last five days. And I would not necessarily recommend that anybody do a 40-day fast. I think 21 is actually probably optimal. But not only that, I traveled to Amsterdam and had to give four talks.

So on day 38, I'm flying to Amsterdam. On day 39, so I was almost half dead. Actually, Sal Diagoras met me at the airport in Boston. He's like, dude, I don't think you're going to make it. And it was a little bit rough. So I wouldn't recommend that. But it was good to raise awareness. And I'll be honest, what ended up happening, the Wall Street Journal reached out to me. The New York Times has reached out to me. Bloomberg's reached out to me. And I did talk briefly to the Wall Street Journal.

And I just didn't talk to the other two because I want to help Roger. And I don't see any scenario where the mainstream media is going to try to do anything other than turn it into a hitter. piece. So I've actually rejected more interviews around it. So it's been more about raising awareness or maintaining awareness, I think, within the existing supporter base.

And so I want to say a couple of things about this. So I'm going to be at Freedom Fest, and I hope any of you guys can join June the 11th through the 14th in Palm Springs.

And I'm going to be working on a couple of different tables. One's a Free Roger table. The other is actually a Xano table. I wasn't expecting to do this, but I guess, so Roger's going to be doing a virtual, talk and it's either right before or right after Ross Ulbricht on the Friday of that event. And then I'm going to be on a panel on, on Saturday. So now I was saying that I hope Roger's actually out before then.

And I hope to the other part of your argument, I mean, your other question, I do think that there's a reasonable chance that, that Roger's going to resolve this.

And you're right. You know what they did. And the whole reason I became passionate about this is that I was warning people about, and in particular, when I dropped everything two and a half years ago, what I was warning people about was Biden's executive order, which both promoted a CBDC and is responsible for the entire crackdown on crypto. Roger was enemy number one, because if you're going to roll out a CBDC. You have to shut off the alternatives.

And nobody is better in the world at promoting peer-to-peer digital cash as an alternative to central bank tyranny than Roger. So that is why he was targeted. That is why he has the most egregious, he's facing 109 years, which is worse than anybody else in the entire crypto sector. So he was targeted by the Biden administration and certainly the case should be dropped. And I think something will happen. I think it will be resolved.

I think on the other side, the DOJ is not, we've seen all these other cases dropped by the SEC and dropped in other areas. and the DOJ, you know, whatever, I'll be charitable. They have a lot on their plate. And so the question is, how do we make sure this gets to the top of the pile? And so that people understand that, you know, the United States is not going to lead in crypto if it's crucifying Bitcoin Jesus. I mean, it's just an absurd proposition. And so the Freedom Fest event is coming up.

There is a hearing, assuming the case hasn't resolved before then, in LA on June the 23rd at 1.30 PM, there is a court hearing on a motion to dismiss this case. And so I'm going to be there. My wife's going to be there. I encourage everybody to show up to that so that we can show support. And hopefully Roger will not be there because if he is there in person, it means he's been extradited and is probably in prison in LA.

So hopefully he will not be there if the hearing moves forward, but we still want to be there to show support. That's great, man. The work that you do, Aaron, not just raising awareness for Zano, but for what you've done to raise awareness for Roger's case, it's unprecedented. He's probably very happy to have you in his corner, dude. It's amazing. Most definitely. But before we wrap here, I just wanted to thank both of you guys.

Quentin, man, you do a great job, man, of bringing Zano to their message about the utility to this big audience. Dude, I love it. You did a great job here today explaining it to us, man, it's clear how passionate you are about building something meaningful, not just marketable, right? And just go up. Like you said in the beginning, I love that, man. Aaron, man, you're like what I just said, dude.

You work about fighting for Roger and also just spreading awareness of the financial tyranny that we're all facing. It's great, dude. We love it. It's a pleasure to have you on here for a third time. You guys both represent two sides of the same fight. Hey, Freethinkers, this is Matt Agorist, and I'm going to take a quick pause to remind you of something really important.

First off, apologies for the interruption. But if you're still here, that means you're resonating with what we're doing, and we need your help to keep it alive. Independent platforms like ours don't survive on corporate sponsorships or mainstream media funding. We survive because of you. If you're finding value in these unfiltered conversations and real solutions, the best way to support us is by liking, subscribing, and sharing this podcast with your friends and fellow freethinkers.

It's a small act, but it's a powerful one. It helps us break through the censorship and algorithms designed to silence voices like ours. This isn't just about supporting a podcast. It's about standing for freedom, exposing corruption, and building a movement that inspires real change. And if you want to go beyond liking and sharing, we'd love for you to become a member of the Freethought Project.

Just head over to thefreethoughtproject.com and click on the TFTP membership link at the top of the page. As a member, you'll be directly supporting our mission and helping us to stay independent. Your support is what keeps this platform alive and fighting. So thank you for being part of this journey, for sharing these ideas and for standing with us. You know, we always like to end in a white pill and I don't usually, we don't usually have two guests.

So I don't usually ask two guests the same question, but this is the first time I'm doing it. Right. So here it is. You know, we've talked about some pretty good stuff here, surveillance, CBDCs, inflation, just about everything else we can get into in regards to financial tyranny and freedom. Right. But I want to ask you both, I guess, Quentin, you can go first.

What gives you hope right now? Right. Whether it's the rise of privacy tech, the resilience of decentralized communities, or even just the growing number of people waking up and the number of Xano transactions to keep it continuing to increase. What makes you guys believe we can still turn this around? It's a very good question. I would say, I think, I mean, I can obviously say it's great to see so many people.

I mean, I see the privacy community grow every day and the Zano community in particular. And also the way Zano has grown is amazing. As in a couple of years ago when I got involved, nobody was talking about it and it was super small. And now, only a few years later, we have amazing people like you guys giving us a stage and like Aaron and onboarding all these great people.

So that definitely gives me hope. But also the younger generation, as in myself, I'm 24 years old and people around me, I do see a lot of young people that actually start to care and start to wake up. And actually also start to think about what privacy means and where the world is going, and they start to get, at least they show more interest. So that gives me hope. Right on. I love it, dude. I didn't realize you were that young. You were 13 when we started the Free Thought Project.

Holy shit. Yeah. All right, your turn, Aaron. You know, a little over a year ago, So before Roger introduced me to this, it was actually looking pretty, pretty dismal because I was doing these CBDC workshops. But, you know, we had Bitcoin stuck at seven transactions per second. BSV turned into a, you know, WEF project hosted on Amazon. And I'm like, so on the one hand, I'm warning people about CBDCs.

And then I was trying to promote solutions, but then all of the solutions were kind of disintegrating and turning into these religious turf wars. And so I actually, to me, Zano is the bright spot in all of this. And I actually think that we're starting to see the aggregation of all of the people who originally got into crypto because they want to stop central bank tyranny and wars, and they want to promote freedom and human interaction and voluntary exchange around the world.

I think people, I think that group is coming back. We're bringing 2012-2013 energy back to crypto. And the most exciting thing about this is this technology might exist in the future. As I said earlier, just in the last 90 days, there's now a marketplace. There is now a privacy staple coin. There are now tools for you to be able to integrate Zeno into WordPress and WooCommerce. There's all of these other things also being developed that will be launching within the next month or two.

But those things already exist. So we can build what we thought Bitcoin was supposed to be, but with added privacy and that's available now. So now it's about adoption. And then the last thing is where I see spending my time, I'm less concerned about the people that are already in crypto because only 0.5% of Americans actually bought something using crypto during the last quarter. It's actually down. It's dropped off where I see the big opportunity.

And when I do these talks around the country, I talk to people that aren't in crypto, but You have people in the health freedom space, in the food freedom space, in a whole variety of categories where they've been debanked, but they're not already wedded to a crypto project. And they're now, for the first time, starting to question things like the Federal Reserve. Those people are very passionate and very interested in alternatives.

And you don't have to try to pull them away from a pre-existing cult. So that's where I'm going to be focusing my time. And I will tell you, the reaction is very strong. And now that we have these tools that are easy to deploy, I think you're going to see real adoption from new people that haven't been in crypto over the next 12 to 18 months. That's amazing, man. I got to say, this is like one of the most uplifting podcasts we've had in a long time.

Normally, we need the white pill just to maintain our sanity at the end of this. But this whole podcast was essentially a white pill. Like Zano is the white pill. And I'm firmly behind it. And I think it's amazing. I think it's a solution, man.

So before we get out of here, how about you guys tell people where they can follow your work and see what they're... We know what you're working on, but where they can find you guys. Twitter, I would say, at Mr. Underscore Quibs. But I'd rather have you follow Zano Project, Zano underscore project on Twitter instead of me. Right on. Yeah, follow Zano Project. You can follow me. I'm at daylightfreedom.org.

And I also highly recommend if you can make it to Porkfest this year, please come because we are co-sponsoring. We have the biggest tent at Porkfest. So for an entire week, you know, we're going to be having talks and kind of hands-on demonstrations on how to use this. And if you've never been to Porkfest before, there'll probably be 2,000 people there. And it's a week-long event, but people actually use alternative currencies.

There's a place called Agora Alley where you can buy food, you can buy a whole variety of things, and people are using alternative currencies. And so we're going to bring back... Roger was actually giving away Bitcoin in 2012 at Porkfest. And a lot of people were introduced to this because of Roger, but the energy has dissipated that it's moved to BlackRock and people trying to get, you know, coin strategic reserves. We're bringing privacy back. We're going to bring back that 2012 energy.

So please come to Porkfest. And if you go to porkfest.com and you buy tickets, you can use the discount code FREEROGER and get 10% off your ticket. So I hope to see as many of you there as possible. It's going to be a phenomenal event this year. Dude, I would love to make it, man. And speaking of Roger, we talked about his case and be doing a disservice.

I know Aaron mentioned we need to raise awareness for that like if you go read the article on the free thought project about how the doj released this memo basically torpedoing their own case there's a call to action there you go to freerogernow.org and it'll show you how you can help you know raise awareness and stop a freaking crypto hero from being or like aaron said a crypto jesus from being crucified by the state man we could do that let's do it roger freerogernow.org

thank you guys for coming on this was an amazing show. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks, guys. Thank you for listening to the Free. Music.