Back when I took architecture and like drafting in like 2006, people had to like pass the
calipers with two hands to each other because they were so expensive that under no circumstances
could they be dropped.
Welcome to Game of Notes, a weekly podcast on the cosmos from independent validator teams.
And we're here this week with Henry from Penumbra, whose experience probably one of the strangest
opens to the cold opens to the podcast yet.
Hey, is dad joining us tonight?
I just suddenly realized I didn't ask earlier.
Yes, I think he said he has a conflicting meeting, but we'll be here any minute.
What is with all these folks with real real business real business activities going on
at the moment?
And so we've got Henry from Penumbra.
We have like, I guess a few other things.
I missed a good episode from you folks last week.
There we go.
Speak of the devil.
He will appear, right?
That's the one.
Right.
You said I don't even remember what we talked about last week.
We talked about what so I would say it was like substantially about regulation because
the whole SEC thing.
And then I was disappointed to note that the one thing that was left in the spreadsheet
by me, which was have you ever seen those Japanese Beatles just fucking each other was
like 5% at most of the show.
Well, stuff about the context.
We're like, I have no idea what it was about.
I was like, I have no pretty bad statement to leave in the fucking spreadsheet.
But all I'm saying is what what happens in Amsterdam stays in Amsterdam.
Anyway, was there a lot of beetle fucking in Amsterdam?
No, no, there wasn't really.
I don't know why I sound so disappointed when I said that.
But so the actual background to this was I can't I can't even remember why it came up.
But you you have this this beetle with no apex predator or no predator that I think is
an invasive Japanese beetle on I'm going to say the West Coast.
And they just they just sit around and they fuck and and they generate and then it kills
the plants.
It is I think maybe they sit on crops and they fuck it's something like that.
And it came up and I was like, that's very bizarre.
But the quote that is introduced to me with was have you ever seen those Japanese Beatles
just fucking and I was like, well, no, no, I have not.
So I thought I passed it on in case you guys could get some mileage out of that for it
for you know, online content.
That was my gift to you for last week.
Wow, you're right.
It is on the West Coast.
There's Oregon has a huge thing about it.
I will I will add that to the spreadsheet for people and look it up.
Yeah, there you go.
So the show does everybody if you're kind of curious, Artifact showed me a video on his
phone and they were indeed really going at it hammer and tongs.
Why is it a video of fucking Beatles on his phone?
I think it was immediately before he then conference called you into it.
To our knees around.
You said, yeah, it was literally like here's Japanese Beatles.
So if I look confused, it was because the thing that had immediately preceded you on
the conference call was Beatles.
That was that was like a decent conversation.
So have you seen these people?
By the way, let me tell you about these Beatles parking, people say that I go off on tangents,
which I do.
So you admitted that.
Yeah.
I also say that I say, yeah, I thought that I thought the thing last week that the conversation
was good.
And there was a particular point as well where it's you were talking about how the regulation
on exchange is going to change.
And I thought it was really, really interesting because you basically spontaneously came up
with a design that's actually the regulatory argument being used by some researchers for
digital cash at the moment, which is that the if you use blind and sorry in advance,
Henry, because I'm going to stumble onto territory, which I'm not qualified to talk
about, which is cryptography.
We only have Henry for 40 minutes.
So keep that in mind before you let's move on to let's move on to to Henry in a second.
But we are so blind proofs not going to go into them because I don't understand them.
But the argument is your first, as I understand it, the first spend using a blind proof to
prove that you have the funds can be privacy preserving.
And then it's only the person who takes the payment that then has to essentially take
that back through an exchange or a money service business or any kind.
So they are potentially subject to the regulatory question of where do these funds come from.
So it's actually part of a design for digital cash is exactly what short C described where
the money services business bank, whoever that is exchange might have to be regulated
because they're going to get money from all sorts of places, even if it is a CBC or a
digital cash solution that uses something like blind proofs.
So I was like, there you go.
Well, I think I deserve a point there.
What's the point worth?
It's internet points, nothing.
It's a one of one NFT.
No cash value.
But so yeah, we have this week, Henry from Penumbra.
And it took me, I think we briefly met, I think with with Jake and 2x4 in Lisbon a couple
of years ago, it took me a while to put two and two together that your GitHub handle was
the GitHub handle being pulled in when I did Rust projects for certain libraries.
And I was like, hold on a second, hold on one second.
This is the same person.
But obviously in this context, Henry, are you the what's your official job title in
Penumbra, your official role?
Is it founder, co-founder?
Yeah, founder is good.
So what happened basically is I had previously been doing a lot of just like cryptography
engineering, building tooling for building crypto projects.
And the way that that had gone is that I sort of be like, oh, this would be a cool crypto
thing to build.
But oops, there aren't any good tools to build it.
So I'll like go off and build those tools.
And now those are built, try and build the next thing and build the next thing and so
on.
This led me to work on some bigger and bigger projects.
I ended up working on Zcash for a while in the early days of the project to build Zebra,
which is like a second Zcash full node.
And they actually just finished and tagged their 1.0 release.
That's really exciting to see.
Hello, I haven't been, that work was carried on by other people, not just me.
And then about two years ago, I started thinking about Penumbra as kind of an answer to a question
of like, how do you build privacy preserving cryptography that people are actually going
to use?
Like it's one thing to just like build a bunch of tools where, oh, you could build all these
different things.
But it's another to have some kind of like theory of change of like, why is this private
system going to win compared to some transparent alternative that people could use instead?
And so one way to think about Penumbra is actually that it's a very elaborate answer
to that question.
So we'll loop back around in a minute to some of the other stuff you said about your background.
But why would you describe it as an elaborate solution?
Well, because it's an entire like blockchain, private decks, like it's a new like privacy
preserving O1 does cross chain privacy stuff.
It's elaborate in the sense that trying to come up with an actual answer of like, how
do you build a privacy preserving system that can outcompete its transparent alternatives
requires like actually doing that and actually like, yeeting an entire new protocol out into
the world turns out to be like quite a lot of work.
Yeah.
So on that point, I would say that just from dipping into the Discord periodically to see
how things are going, there's obviously a lot of vaporware in this system, in this ecosystem.
And I think Penumbra is one of those things that is the absolute like axiomatic opposite
of vaporware that the amount of work that's gone into it over the last couple of years,
it literally, I think gives me a bit of a migraine every time I look into your Discord
at how much seems to be going on as well as the complexity of it, which is very, I think
I guess cryptography maybe always looks like that if you are just a normal software engineer
who generally doesn't have to deal with cryptography and the mass behind it.
But what have been like some of the biggest challenges that you have encountered and like
were they ones you expected from the outset or?
Actually no.
So especially with like ZK stuff, there's a lot of focus on like, oh, here we're doing
these proofs.
The proofs are very complicated.
Here are all these different advances in proving technology.
Here's like the latest proof system and so on and so on and so on.
And for us, we actually found that that wasn't sort of the most difficult or interesting
part.
And the reason is that like, once you start trying to, once you change your kind of frame
or mindset from like, what are interesting things that we could build with all of this
like moon math to what is a useful thing to do, you have to have this kind of like full
system perspective on what it is that you're building.
And the way that you achieve privacy in a blockchain context is by taking all of the
actual execution of everybody's data, taking the user's data itself, moving it all like
off chain onto the end user device and having them send these proofs that like, oh, I did
my actions correctly, but I'm not going to have to reveal what that action was.
And that means that you end up with this totally different state and execution model that is
like kind of at odds with the way that a lot of existing systems are built.
So as an example, if you're trying to, you know, let's say you're trying to build some
app chain, right, and your app chain is like, mostly similar to other chains, except that
it has like some special thing, that's your application, that's what it does.
Then there's a really great solution to that, which is you just use the Cosmos SDK.
And it's like this like rails for blockchains, it gives you your template thing, you know,
and then you can add your own custom modules to do your custom thing.
And that works if you're doing something that is mostly similar to other systems.
But if you want to build something that's like, like a fundamentally different architecture,
you actually have to go all the way down the stack and rebuild a lot of those pieces.
And most of the work that we've done has actually been in like building the tools for us to build
the chain that we're building.
We're kind of like evolving towards here's kind of a framework for how to do, you know,
some tenor and chains and rust.
But that's been been something that's kind of emergent from the work that we've done
overall.
And sorry, the cat is yelling, but no worries.
Cats are also friends of the pod.
Yeah.
Well, we there's an automatic door and it's voice activated.
So the cat yells and then the door opens eventually.
So I'll get up in a second.
Yeah, it turns out that it's like 90% of the work is just like sending the data around
and figuring out how to make that happen.
It's actually kind of a kind of a rug.
So obviously, they're obviously big fan of the fact you folks are rust maxis and doing
it in rust.
I guess the voice activated door didn't work.
I think that was a joke.
That was a great joke.
That was a sweet joke.
That was an activation.
Yeah.
I think so.
I've got a very young baby.
I get it.
It took me a minute to get that.
I was like the voice activated door.
Surely that do have those.
I was like, it do exist.
I was like, that would be at odds with somebody who is a well, that would be odds with my
impression of people who work on cryptography would be that somebody would allow a voice
activated door in their place as a resident.
I just slept a raspberry pie and a motor on my door and so I had a spindle that opened.
It's probably fine.
I'm sure there's no software on this that has been owned.
It's like I met some people working on digital cash a little while ago and I was very, very
pleased that all of them looked to me like I was an absolute, like I was a mass murderer
when I used a card to pay for a coffee and all of them had like rolls of five pound notes
that they went around with.
And I was like, this is good.
I now feel bad about using the card, which I should feel maybe bad about.
I don't know, but I've exchanged my privacy for convenience and I deserve to have a boot
around my neck.
Anyway, also those sweet crash back credits.
What else were you going to do?
You can't do that with cash.
That's how they get you.
That's how that's how that's how you're still a penny is a little drop in there.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, yeah, credit card rewards are sort of like the original like M.E.V. economy.
We had somebody flipping quote from this podcast.
That would be every episode there's one somebody comes out with one amazing one.
Thank you, Henry.
You come out with one more than shorts who send you a gift basket.
All right.
We'll see what we can do.
I just volunteer shorts.
Anyway, so, um, so yeah, like obviously it pleases my pleas and glads my heart that you
folks are Russ Maxies, but I guess that also makes sense based on the stuff that you're
doing that you would want to use Rust for this particular use case.
But what made you I guess the answer I think is going to be obvious, but there have been
some other efforts to do changing in tendermen.
So using tendermen that are using Rust.
I'm guessing that you folks, well, from what I've seen anyway, you've basically rolled
it all yourselves.
So are you are am I right in thinking you're maybe using the IBC stuff formal or not?
There's some overlap, but we now have our own IBC implementation just because the chain
side implementation of the IBC state machine is pretty intertwined with how the actual chain
functions and operates, right?
Like in IBC, you have like, oh, chain is running the light client of chain B and like, you
know, deciding whether or not it, you know, accepts the messages, whatever, it's doing
all that and like writing into the state of the chain that it's in.
Um, and so we're interested in like figuring out some way to like abstract that and kind
of commonize it, but, uh, I think it's always better to start with one working version and
like one example and then generalize from that rather than starting with how do we make
this like very abstract thing that can work with anything because a lot of the problem
of software development is like going from the, it's like doing the like draw the rest
of the owl on what the requirements are along the way to actually building the system.
You discover all of these like implicit connections between different parts of the thing.
And I think that if you start with like building one useful thing first, generalizing out of
that is much easier than trying to be like, oh, we're going to like just have the mind
palace like, and it's going to come out fully formed and be this like perfect artifact.
Right.
Um, that's called the chppt, right?
Yeah.
Just rewrite it for penumbra.
Yeah.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah.
So, but that's, that's also been kind of the story of the stack that we've built, right?
So we started, um, kind of working on this in earnest, um, about two years ago.
And at that time, I don't think there were any, uh, tendermen chains in prod that were
running, uh, rust with the possible exception of, I think secret had some kind of thing
where parts of it were the SDK and parts of it were rust stuff.
I don't, I don't know exactly, but nobody was doing like, okay, the entire chain is
just like the app is in rust and whatever.
And so we had to basically figure out how to do that along the way.
And so we built up this kind of like little like salami slice, like layered stack.
And the lowest levels of the slices have been used like very widely among similar projects.
Like the library that we wrote to interface with tendermen is also used by, uh, Anoma
for the MATA.
And then, you know, we built like a storage system that has like Merkleized data stores.
And that's, um, getting used by Astrea and so on.
And so the hope is that eventually, you know, as we finish our chain, um, a bunch of the
pieces that we built along the way can be reused, uh, by other projects.
So we're kind of, you know, most of the way through having to have invented our own stack
kind of out of necessity.
How many are there, uh, working up a number right now?
And did they all have a cryptography background or how did you all like come to work together?
So at the moment, there are three teams that are working on PNUMRA itself.
There's PNUMRA Labs.
And then we're also, uh, working with Strangelove, um, who are helping with, uh, some of the
IDC work that we've been doing.
Um, and we're also working with, uh, Spokane, who are building a, uh, web extension and,
uh, like web frontend for PNUMRA, which is like a whole other fascinating thing of like,
how do you have like a web frontend for a transparent, or for a shielded chain where
like you can't just go and ask some server like, Hey, what's my account balance?
Um, does that mean PNUMRA won't have like viewing keys then?
So there, there are viewing keys that are part of PNUMRA, but like you don't want to
give out, we're basically, we're not building the system on the assumption that you're going
to hand out your like data to an RPC provider because that sucks.
So the challenge then is like, how do you like give every user their own local, like
personal RPC endpoint and how do you design, you know, that thing to do all of the scanning
and synchronization locally?
Fascinating.
Okay.
Yeah.
So we can get into that in a bit.
It's, it's pretty neat.
Um, but yeah, so there's about the three teams working currently on it.
Uh, at PNUMRA Labs, we have about nine people.
Um, and I would say, I don't know, maybe like one third of the team had like previous cryptography
experience.
Um, people have a lot of different paths.
Um, I think the difficulty of like, you know, getting into doing cryptography is, is kind
of overstated.
Um, like not that it's like nothing, but it's, I, I'm a, I'm a believer in like roll your
own crypto, but like carefully.
But then that is potentially with the luxury of hindsight and expertise.
Yeah.
I mean, it's like, you don't, you don't want to sort of like go off and, you know, do stuff
like totally in isolation from, from the world.
But I think one of the things that is the, one of the best things about the like cryptos
and cryptocurrency is that there's very, very little gatekeeping.
And you see the like ill effects of that too, of like, you know, people doing wildly
responsible things and then like losing a shit ton of money.
Um, but I think like, you know, is that really like on the devs?
Or is that on the people who are like aping into shit coins?
I don't know.
But all of that aside, the thing that is really, really good and special and like we should
defend at all costs is that because it is this like growing industry, um, you just can't
survive if you do gatekeeping.
Um, because like, you know, talent is so hard to find.
Like you have to grow it.
Um, and the teams that are like, have this kind of like open sort of spirit.
Um, you know, that's, I think a really great and beautiful thing about the ecosystem that
I think sometimes gets overlooked.
So yes, I think that's a really good point.
I agree that what you just said actually also in general, I think there's been a lot of
negatives, particularly in the cosmos, there's been a lot of negativity recently.
And I think like it probably would do us well to consider some of those sorts of things,
a bit more in future in terms of like, well, this is the, I mean, sorry, no reflection
in you, Henry, but this is to be fair.
If I wanted a load of hippie positivity, I could just like text Jake and I'm sure he'd
send it to me in spades because that is his, his role in my life is to be the fucking hippie
guy from California.
That's like everything's going to be fine, man.
You just need to put it in a dow.
But, um, yeah.
So like I'm also kind of interested like, you know, uh, just maybe for the viewers,
you don't have to read your whole CV as well, Henry, but like, um, like how did you originally
sort of get involved in the space full stop?
You know, was it, was it that you had, uh, an academic interest and an academic background
in cryptography first and then you're like, Oh, that's an interesting use case for this,
like for applying this or was it, uh, or am I caught before the horse?
And it was, yeah.
So, so originally I did, uh, I did math, um, and around the time of the student, I was
in revelations.
I kind of got into cryptography.
Um, and for me personally, the original motivation was this, like, you can have this very, very
interesting interplay between super high level, um, abstract mathematics, number theory, you
know, the geometry of elliptic curves, all this, like very abstract stuff.
And then when you do implementations of cryptography, you can have very, very low level, like the
most low level kind of computer programming of like, you know, what type of hardware does
this machine have?
Like what type of registers am I going to use?
Um, how do I, you know, have the like dependency chains among the individual instructions that
the whole thing can go very fast?
And it's like this, like, almost these, like two totally different ways of thinking.
And one of the really, one of the most beautiful and interesting things about doing cryptography
engineering is that you get to kind of like play both of these areas against each other.
Um, so that's kind of my origin story into cryptography.
Um, before you go, would you describe yourself as a detail person, more of a detail person
or more of a big, right?
Okay.
That's the thing that's really interesting about it is that you get to do kind of, you
get to like play, like, like sort of change languages as you go.
Um, so, so that was, um, you know, how, how I got into doing cryptography engineering.
Um, but also cryptography as a field is a kind of inherently political, uh, thing.
Um, cryptography, if you think of it as sort of the engineering of trust, accountability,
uh, information.
Um, these are all things that have like very important, um, social implications.
And so it's sort of this, this sort of trifecta of mathematics, computer science, politics,
um, that was very appealing to me.
Um, yeah.
To that end, where, what, um, I guess, where do you, where do you live?
Are you in the U S?
Yeah.
Okay.
Do you have any sort of fear then of, you know, like being shut down, kind of like tornado
cash, given that it's kind of like a, to us, it's not very close.
However, for the general populace, I think it's just kind of like a squint away from
being the same thing, developing a private, private blockchain versus developing a mixer.
Um, I mean, I think so the United States is an interesting place.
Um, and when crypto people talk about the regulatory environment in the United States,
I think they mostly focus on the like financial regulation, right?
And I think part of that is because a lot of the activity in the space is in shitcoins,
which like, you know, maybe those could be regulated and that would be fine.
Um, but the United States also has very, very strong protections around like freedom of
expression, free speech.
There's legal precedent about, you know, code is speech.
People have the right to publish their ideas about, you know, how, um, things could be
organized.
And so, and also, you know, with, with tornado cash as an example, right?
Like Alexi who's arrested and just like held in prison without even any fucking charges
that like, you know, that's not really something that I think, uh, like America has problems.
But, but not that specific problem.
And so I think that from a perspective of like freedom of expression, the right to like,
uh, publish, describe software that expresses some like political idea about, you know,
how people could coordinate with each other.
There's not really a better place in the world, uh, to do that.
Um, you know, although, you know, there's, there's other issues.
And so, so I don't have a particular concern about, about that.
I think there's pretty strong precedence in the United States about, um, you know, people
have a right to develop encryption software.
Um, and that's, that's basically what, uh, we are all doing.
Um, and we'll just see how it goes.
Yeah.
You know, the insane thing about the, the, I'm sorry, I don't know his surname, but
Alexi, the dev that was jailed, it was in Holland, right?
Sorry, not Holland, the Netherlands, isn't the Netherlands.
And the crazy thing about the Netherlands is they are normally a very pragmatic country.
I mean, this is a country where Catholicism was outlawed and their reaction to that was
to when they were sent a police report by like a neighbor, I think Catholics were gathering
on Sunday.
They would send the police around on Monday, so they didn't have to deal with the problem,
you know, and, and thus Catholics secretly met in the country for 300 years until it was
outlawed, you know, there's, there's literally, there's a, there's a, there's a square in Amsterdam,
which was owned by all Catholics.
And the Dutch authorities went, well, they're all Catholics, but they are doing on their
own property and property is sacrosanct.
So whatever they do in their own homes, you know, they can do, I haven't seen any Catholic
stuff happening outside the home, and either they had knocked two houses together and they
had a Catholic church in there for like 200, I forget, maybe not 200 years, but a long
period of time and it's across the road from a Protestant church.
And how quiet could they have been?
I mean, the Protestant church congregation would have noticed on Sunday that there were
some hymns going on across the road, you know what I mean?
Like, so it's surprising to me that the Dutch are pragmatic people, especially when there's
money to be made, which, you know, we, to some extent we are, we are talking about the,
well, I guess the Dutch state isn't going to make any money, are they from taxation,
which is, I guess, maybe where we come back into the pragmatism of the Dutch.
I don't know, but it does strike me as a bit strange of all places that in the Netherlands,
the Netherlands were the people that would hold somebody without trial for that period
of time over something like this, where they are generally quite like individual rights,
you know, maybe, maybe not.
Yeah, I don't know.
I think, well, they love illegal fudge anyway.
It's, it's surprising.
But I think also, I, you know, this is my like, un-nuanced take is I think that in a
lot of ways, like, governments in Western Europe are like mostly pretty functional,
like 80, 90% of the time.
And so I think people have a lot more like baseline trust and like, oh yeah, you know,
well, I guess, you know, they probably wouldn't do that for no reason or, you know, whatever.
Whereas in the United States, because the government is less functional, I think that
there's a lot more distrust of like the system.
And so people are kind of more, more hesitant to kind of like take claims at face value.
But, but I don't, I don't know if I have a really deep sort of take on it.
I appreciate the take regardless.
And especially on the, the encryption side of things, I thought that was a nuanced understanding,
which I guess as a founder of an encryption protocol or encrypted protocol, you would
have a nuanced take.
There's also like, I mean, people will sometimes talk about like, oh, like, you know, you can
just like hop around the world and pick your jurisdiction or whatever.
But it's like, you know, at some point, like, you have to have a life and like live in place
and have a community and, you know, this is where I am now.
So here we are.
Let's go.
But yeah, Henry, interesting.
You're talking before about the, just the amount of changes you've made just on the core stack
and, you know, some of the components within IBC.
It's interesting to hear strange love being involved in that too.
Like we're getting more involved in different chains that are rewriting pretty significant
components of this.
So what does it mean to be a Cosmos chain in your eyes and is the number of Cosmos chain
and how's that definition going to change?
And like, where do you think this is headed like from as a, as a founder of a project like
this?
I guess my take is like, I would be a kind of like more of a not like a sort of stricter
interpretation of like Cosmos, like a Cosmos chain is any chain that uses the Cosmos SDK.
And by that definition, the number actually isn't Cosmos chain.
On the other hand, it is in the Cosmos ecosystem.
And that was primarily motivated by a like belief in the App Chain thesis and be the
existence of tenement and the existence of IDC.
I know there's like a lot of drama discussion, dissension about like, what is the future
of Cosmos?
What is the future of the hub, et cetera.
I don't really have like a super strong opinion about it because of just like all of my time
and attention goes into the project that I'm trying to build.
But I do think that at the level of like the core technology, like I'm way more of like
an IDC Maxi than I am like a Cosmos SDK Maxi.
Like IDC just definitely will win.
I think we've all said that on this.
Like that seems like that is the, that's the intellectual property that survives the matter
what, right?
Yeah.
And I think that's a rewriting part of that, but that's not rewriting it, right?
That's not forking it.
It's enhancing it.
It's not that we're even like, it's probably useful to distinguish between like the protocol
and implementation.
Yeah.
Right.
So at the protocol level, we're not changing anything, but at the implementation level,
you know, we're going to have our own stack that sort of integrates that with what we're
doing.
And we want to be able to have a kind of deeper integration with IBC because the eventual
sort of longterm vision of Pnebra is being this kind of private cross chain layer.
We want to help bring IBC to more places, have like more client types.
We have some interesting ideas about how you could enhance the security of IBC.
But all of those things, it's like, you know, I don't want Pnebra to sort of be like building
an ecosystem.
Like I want to be building in an ecosystem.
And I want to do that so that we can have our like differentiated thing of like, this
is what we do.
And for everything else, there's like, you know, other chains and they can have the
things that they focus on in the Internet.
So in the context that Pnebra is sort of well, fire IBC could be a gateway to other places
in the cosmos.
If you're, I guess if you're bridging in from another privacy preserving ledger, DLT, anything
really, in another ecosystem, if you then built the sort of IBC enablers to connect
with Pnebra, it would be quite a logical place to sort of enter the cosmos ecosystem
because then it uses privacy guarantees when they land in Pnebra are going to be at least
as good as wherever they came from, right?
And then if they want to go and just, you know, then go and just mash those mash onto
the hub and then lose that privacy guarantee that's kind of on them, right?
Yeah, I think a really interesting angle here is like privacy and fungibility, right?
So fungibility is a pretty important property of digital assets that, you know, my bitcoins
are worth the same as your bitcoins because they're both bitcoins.
Right, we were talking about this the other week in the context of, you know, the Juno
Prop 16 way allows like my Juno is more fungible than his Juno, right?
Right.
And as soon as you have, there's this kind of fundamental contradiction where if you
have this transparent system where all of the activity is public, then you lose fungibility
because someone can say, you know, at some point in the future and you don't know what
that's going to be, like, oh, these tokens are different, they're not worth as much
as these other ones.
And so especially in the bridging context, I think it's a pretty interesting use case.
Also for liquid staking, right?
If you want to have sort of trades between different liquid staking tokens, you might
end up having like many different denominations of similar or essentially similar assets,
right?
Like here's like atoms that are staked with this liquid staking provider or this one or
that one or whatever.
And one of the really cool things that we built into Penumbra in our DEX is this idea
of on-chain routing.
So when you submit a trade on Penumbra, rather than saying like, oh, I'm just going to trade
X to Y and it'll look at that specific X to Y pair, you submit an intent of I'm putting
in X and I want to get Y out and the chain will figure out what route of different trading
pairs is the best one for it to take.
And the key thing that that unlocks in this sort of like multi-chain world, in this like
liquid staked world, where you potentially have many different distinct assets that are
somehow related or have like known relationships or maybe it's just differing over the bridge
or the staking provider or whatever, our routing engine can basically route across all of those.
So as a user, I don't have to care like exactly which like sub variant of this token has the
deepest liquidity.
We don't have to have concentration into specific liquid staking providers or specific
bridges or whatever because we can just sort of just clarify for listeners what the example
there would be.
So are you saying in the case that you had like one type of bridge to USDC and another
type of bridge to USDC, you would be looking to route to the most sensible one for the
user to execute without them having to specifically say, oh, I want whatever.
Yeah, so like here's an example.
Suppose that I have USDC that's bridged from Gravity Bridge and I want to get ETH that's
bridged from Axelar, right?
Now I have, you know, really what I want to be doing is this like USDC to ETH trade,
but I'm kind of like mixed in this like bridge choice, which I don't really care about that
much.
And so if I was using another system where there's this kind of fragmented liquidity environment,
all of these tokens are all like their own little universes, right?
The pool between, you know, Axelar USDC and Gravity Bridge ETH or vice versa is going to
be tiny because nobody's going to be market making that specific pair.
So on Penumbra, I could submit that trade intent of I want to trade my like Axelar USDC for
Gravity Bridge ETH and the chain just figures out, should I do, you know, a stable swap
between the different USDC representations and then go over, you know, whichever Axelar
or Gravity has like the deepest liquidity on the USDC ETH pair, then, you know, maybe
you have to do another stable swap on the other end.
And you don't have to have, you can sort of let liquidity providers decide where are we
going to be providing liquidity, and you can cleanly kind of factor out the volatile pairs
where there's going to be price discovery happening from the stable pairs where like
if I'm doing market making on Axelar USDC versus Gravity Bridge USDC, like I should,
I'm not really taking on any price risk other than the bridge risk, which like I can just,
you know, unwind, rewind as much as I like so I can manage that.
And so the cost of doing those stable swaps should be very cheap if you can have liquidity
providers compete on price.
So how do you like, perhaps I've not fully understood it, but then if I've understood
the problem correctly, how are you able to know the denom's that have, let's say a different
representation or a bridge in a different way, but are fundamentally equivalent?
How are you folks actually working out what those things should be in that graph where
you're going to try to work out, you know, essentially like.
So we don't actually have to have the chain figure that out.
We just determine that based on some basic heuristics and like the amount of liquidity.
So it's ultimately like a market allocated thing.
If people are going to provide liquidity on, you know, different stable swap pairs, you
know, they can do so or not, and the chain, like when it's executing a trade is just going
to do a graph traversal and figure out, you know, which path is the best.
But that path search doesn't have to know anything specific about any of the assets.
It's just like, you know, where is the liquidity?
Okay.
So the graph traversal does happen on chain then.
Yeah.
When the trade is submitted.
Yeah.
Okay.
So we spent some time making that fast.
Yeah.
I was going to say, I was going to say, whether or not that's on chain or on the user's device
like some of the other things you were describing, that feels like definitely in the category
of hard things.
Yeah.
So like I mentioned at the beginning, you know, we sort of built up our stack incrementally.
One of the things that we actually built along the way is our state and storage system.
And the way that we do it in Penumbra is we model every sort of part of the chain state
as having these sort of independent copy on write forks.
So anytime everything is snapshots, everything is like a right to only my local changes on
top of my snapshot.
And those may eventually get committed back or not.
And what that lets us do is actually have a paradigm where every single execution of
any kind is a simulation.
And some of those simulations, we let it or commit to the chain state, but we always have
the choice whether to commit or discard.
And so when we're doing this like graph traversal, we can actually just like do this like parallel
search of like simulating every possible route that we want to explore in these like different
forked universes and then which one we want and say like, okay, that was the best execution.
Now let's do it.
This reminds me of working with RDF data back in the day where you quite often have like
a large, let's say government data set, and you might want to overlay some new data from
let's say a new financial year or whatever.
And so you end up having to you can't really add just one node to a massive data set of
triples you have to instead add overlay a new subgraph, then examine what the new universe
looks like and then say, do I want to combine these two and then commit my new universe?
And it gets quite quickly mind boggling.
I remember.
So I can't even imagine how it must get for your use case.
But luckily we can kind of encapsulate all of that machinery.
So we just have this sort of, you know, here's a state instance, and you know, you read to
it and write to it.
And you know, this is why we use Rust.
It's that we can build all these nice abstractions.
And it has a lot of cool performance benefits too, right?
Like because we're always writing into a cache, we're just doing like in memory writes.
And as we're, if we're ever like reading data that we've recently written, we don't have
to go all the way down into the like underlying disk storage to go get that data.
You sort of have this like built in locality.
Oh, so it's like the NOMIC, like the way NOMIC did their Merck, like the tree thing where
it's all basically a memory and then it gets flushed to whatever the online data layer was,
like rocks or whatever it was.
So we only did one commit per block.
It's beautiful.
That is pretty cool, actually.
Yeah, fair enough.
I appreciate you said you had to go.
Do you have to talk about the stuff on client devices because that sounds really cool.
Yeah, sure.
I do have to run about a point in eight minutes, but I can just use up the time by running
to it.
So the cool thing about the client devices, right, is this problem of when you introduce
privacy into blockchains, you quickly realize that the sort of existence of this big database
in the sky with everybody's state in it is actually this load.
That's the problem that you're trying to solve, but it's also this load bearing component
of pretty much every single workflow.
And when you bring in privacy, who gets access to what information that adds this entirely
new design access, right?
And in terms of the data access, that means that now my wallet has to know about what
is my account state.
It can't just go and ask some server because the point is that I want to keep my data to
myself and have control over it.
So we actually, that was the first thing that we started with.
It wasn't like, oh, how are we going to implement all of our proofs right from the get go?
It's how do we solve the personal data problem?
And what we ended up building is this thing called a view server, personal view server
that is basically like a personal RPC employee.
So you can think of this as being kind of like a micro node that synchronizes with the
chain state, but instead of synchronizing every single block and every single transaction
and doing all of the chain state, it scans and filters for only the parts of the data
that are relevant to your specific user and your account.
And saves and indexes all of that data locally.
It's built to be this lightweight embeddable component.
When you run our command line tool, it actually starts this node internally and does in memory
requests to it.
And with the spoken team has built, the people can actually go and try out now, although
it's still alpha quality, is an extension for Chrome that runs the Penumbra view server
in the extension, does all the scanning and synchronization locally, and then you can
have this kind of connect to wallet like flow where you can go to front end, like app.tessnet.penumbra.zone,
and that front end can be querying the browser extension as like here's a personal RPC for
something that is going to know about just my account state.
That's pretty cool.
That's really cool.
That's pretty cool.
So yeah, I do got to run, but the kind of interesting takeaway there that I think people
should sit with is there's a really interesting interplay between privacy on the one hand
and scalability on the other.
A lot of the time people are like, oh, is it DK for privacy or is it DK for scalability?
And although those are sort of two different initial directions, I think that they have
a kind of convergent evolution because if you think of sort of this perfectly scalable
system, then it shouldn't be broadcasting information unnecessarily.
And if you think of a private system, the fact that you're not disclosing additional
information means that other people who aren't you don't have to be, like they can't see
that information anyway, so they don't have to process it.
Yeah, I've heard a similar argument about digital cash where if you issue tokens but
then recycle them very frequently, chain state never gets out of control because the ledger
is only ever so big, right?
It's only ever as long as the in-flight transactions, which on the Visa networks, what, 1700 a second,
to absolute peak, and then it's only that many things written to desk, which is like
a megabyte, probably or less.
So that's really interesting.
Thank you so much for coming.
We kind of did try it on.
I know we've been trying to arrange it for years.
Yeah.
We really appreciate it.
Thanks, Henry.
Yeah, thank you so much.
Thanks, man.
Bye.
So I did track down that wallet and I have it in the show notes, so people will be able
to try it out if they want to.
Henry is such a positive influence in the ecosystem.
Every time I chat with him, he's just, one, he's obviously is like a mega mind.
He's a crazy smart.
He is.
So like you just got to sit back and let his flow.
I was just soaking it in.
Yeah, exactly.
He's got a great vibe as well.
He's just, yeah.
Just first listening.
We'll add it to the show notes.
You should follow Henry on Twitter as well.
Lots of hot takes, lots of memes, good value for money in terms of being free as well.
I think my crypto Twitter, I only follow about five or 10 people and Henry is one of them.
So strong recommend.
Yeah.
He'll go hot though.
He does, but he also has a really good way of explaining complicated topics on Twitter.
There have been a couple of times where like someone will say something about secret and
Henry will pop in and be like, well, actually hold on and they'll come away and be like,
I feel like I might have learned something, but more importantly, I might have lost all
respect to myself.
That's okay.
Which is the more important thing really, isn't it?
Yeah, exactly.
Please, please, please self-respect.
I was towards the end of that.
I was like, I literally cannot take up any of Henry's time because we've got a limited
slot and we need to get some value for money.
But a friend of mine who's very like cryptography and chaos computer clubby and whatnot in Germany
back in the day sent me this sticker, which you see it's one of the when there was the
asylum campaign for Snowden in Germany.
That's one of the stickers from that.
It's just sat around here on my guitar in the office.
You know, I remember whenever the snow thing happened, I expected, I didn't expect to happen
what happened.
I didn't expect him to be vilified.
I thought he would be considered, you know, not a hero necessarily.
I think it's a bit strong, but I thought things were going to go differently.
The fact that he's still in exile effectively, it's just wild to me.
It is genuinely baffling, isn't it?
I mean, I would say hero.
And I'm not even in the States.
Like we're just in a five-eyed country that are affected by your domestic anti-terrorism
policies.
And yeah, I mean, I think that there's like a, I think if you see like any generational
shift in like resistance to mass surveillance or greater awareness of mass events or anything
like that, I think it does genuinely start with Snowden.
Like it's really hard to overstate just, and yet still, and like it has kind of been
expunged from the historical record a little bit.
Like,
Well, big brother used to be a joke, right?
You'd be like, you'd be talking about something and be like, oh, big brother's probably listening.
And now you can be like, well, big brother is quite literally listening.
We know for a fact that he's listening right now.
We are so the government, not just Jeff Bezos fire Alexa, but also the government via emails.
I mean, but that's the flip side, isn't it?
You can't expect Snowden to be a universal hero in a world where people bring Alexa and
throw her in.
This podcast is probably the most secure communication channel we can come up with,
actually.
I mean, I was fucking listening to this.
I mean, well, I think it's, you said, but like the correct size for dissemination of
information, but also resistance to infiltration for a terrorist cell is about three.
So you know, by having any listeners, we are already exposing ourselves to severe operational
risk.
I would say as a government would, they would kill themselves not being able to listen in
on our, our private signal chat, but they would never watch this fucking podcast.
That's basically the same thing.
This is a hell of a tangent, but please.
This is kind of nice.
There's like, well, even this seems a little bit off kilter.
So Reddit recently like changed their API policy, right?
Where the charging Apollo, the Apollo blow up.
Yeah, exactly.
And what I think is really, really interesting about this is so many of these subreddits have
gone dark.
They've gone private.
So now it used to be that you'd Google something and some of the most helpful links would be
from, from Reddit.
You're like, Oh, I need to solve this programming problem.
And then inevitably Reddit, like on programmer humor or something, or something will like
have a pithy answer for what it is.
And that answer is actually true.
Well, if all these subreddits are now blacked out, you can no longer find the answers on
Google because you can't actually access the subreddits that have the answer.
And the problem there, I think is really interesting because so many communities are like going
to discord now, like almost all of the, the networks that we're on, like their primary
means of communication is discord or telegram.
But those you can't index, right?
Those are private.
And so all this information that is being shared in discord can't be indexed.
You can't Google it.
You can't look up, Oh, what's the answer to this?
We never say discord.
And I think that's creating such a big hole of knowledge that I don't know.
I don't know what the answer is, but it makes me push back discord.
Do you think it's just that we're at a point now where, you know, everything is all, well,
I should know, I guess I would say this because my intellectual basis is the European socialist
left, but everything's a dialectic, obviously.
So, you know, it swings one way, then it swings the other way, you know, are we just at a
point where we had a very open internet in the early days, governments decided that was
great for taking all our data, companies decided it was great for taking all our data.
And so people have gone like, you know, whether that's the reason or some other thing, just
you know, convenience or just commercial pressure or whatever, people have gone into these more
closed communities where to be fair, a company is still taking and selling your data.
So if that was the reason, then don't don't even waste your time, folks.
But we're now just at the other end of the pendulum swing and like we can expect more
open protocols, more open services in the future or I don't know, it's hard to say,
isn't it?
I think there was a Twitter for the block.
It's only.
Yeah, it's nice.
Well, I think the, yeah, okay.
Well, I heard some wanker developed that.
Yeah, yeah, I think we can take it as red that be a wine.
Yeah, I mean, from a business perspective, I think it makes a lot of sense to have the
groups like isolate like Discord and Telegram and WhatsApp do, right?
Like these are quite large communities.
I think the sweet Discord is the largest one I'm in and it has like 400,000 people in it.
Right.
Like that's pretty big.
That's pretty big.
And from Discord, that it's becomes a walled garden.
They have complete control and so it makes perfect sense from a business perspective,
but it doesn't make nearly as much sense from like a user perspective.
Yeah, but it's, I mean, it's all information suck, right?
Like the search tools are terrible.
It's in the app.
Like you're, you can't really do it across channels or you can do it across channels.
You can't do it across domains, whatever servers, I guess, whatever you want to call.
Also, do you feel like the noise is like nonlinear?
I feel like that's fucking garbage.
It's like exponential noise, like absolutely getting out of control.
I just noticed a friend of the podcast recently elevated to part-time presenter of the podcast,
Ben Davis has missed the guest.
Missed our guest timing.
Great timing.
Spectacular timing.
But I mean, from the open web perspective, yes, anything like that should be number one,
I don't know if Reddit's the right place for that type of structure, but whatever.
But I mean, I agree that it's a huge issue when you can't search that or when those results
get pulled out because the pages are down or whatever else.
It's a hassle.
And I guess, I guess the, that's the whole point of the, of the, of the whole lockout.
Whatever you want to call it.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah, but I've been following that guy and, and like Reddit did not do a great job in
terms of how to communicate this in the timelines associate.
That guy who runs Apollo also not the best business negotiator in the world.
Like, like that was like, I'm folding my hands and I'm walking away and blah, blah, blah.
I'm going to make a big deal out of it.
And, and like, it's like, you got to put 10 years into this stuff.
You got to think a little bit longer term than that.
But, but yeah, it just seemed like that's just a shit show around.
And I don't, I don't believe I don't believe in Reddit for charging for API defeats.
I think totally reasonable, right?
Like they should know, no different than Twitter should have, but what 10 years ago, like if
you want to do a third party and you want to be able to do that, then offer something
that has a value and be able to come up with a reasonable price for that.
The hell.
Yeah.
I mean, I think that, I mean, the correct, the issue isn't that they are charging for
API.
It's how much they're charging, right?
Like the conservative estimate for how much they are charging is 20 times more than how
much Reddit actually makes per user.
Yeah.
Like the core issue that came in to kind of wrap up my thoughts on the subject.
A lot of people have been talking about federated instances of replacing Reddit, which is Lemmy,
I guess I haven't actually used it or not blue sky, mastodon for Twitter.
And I, I don't know, I tend to disagree.
I have always had a lot of difficulties searching those.
So I don't think it really solves the issue of searchability and user friendliness.
I think those like while federated is a really cool concept.
I appreciate it.
Um, it, one, the user experience sucks to can't search as well.
I don't know if they can be index or some issue with it.
It's like that, that actually the message on stuff is pretty cool.
Like it's kind of like the IBC of Twitter, right?
Like the way that you can, you can be able to move your profile across different servers
and like how that search tool works and like, I don't know how well it scales.
I think it's going to, it's going to find out here pretty soon.
Well, it can, it can search, but can Google index or something.
Cause I've never been able to actually like find federated mass servers that I can actually
like trend information.
Yeah.
That's a good question.
We do indexing it might be a bug, not a feature.
I think you can, well, true.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, I don't know if I found really good, I mean, being able to search for somebody's
Twitter handles one thing, but finding value on Twitter is a little bit difficult, but,
but, um, yeah, yeah, but that was good conversation.
So I think, I think that's also like a, maybe a function of the, so I spent a bunch of time
in my life working on the federated web in the context of RDF and the thing that that
RDF is linked data.
So machine readable data.
It's what Tim Berners-Lee did after the worldwide web, basically is, is okay.
What if every database exposes an API endpoint that every other database can speak over a
protocol?
Um, and then you can make federated queries across all graph databases in the meta network
of graph databases.
Um, it's a grand vision didn't end up happening.
Um, and I always tended to think that the reason for that might be because the focus
was on the data store rather than the protocol itself.
And, you know, obviously also it was all XML and so that changed and then Jason LD and
then technology moved on.
Right.
And also the thing is like key bono, man, like academics fucking bono.
If you can just query all data everywhere with machines, um, government bono, um, people
who want to do helpful public goods, things bono, nobody's making a whole load of cash.
Like the people who care about that kind of shit are like NASA for weather data and combining
large graph data sets, you know?
Um, so yeah.
I kind of think that like maybe some of the federated like social stuff suffers from the
same problem where at least from my understanding of a lot of it, it's not maybe thinking about
it from protocol up, which is like maybe a little bit of the benefit of if you start
working in smart contracts and ledges is that you almost have to start with the protocol
sort of and then sort of define up from there because probably your blockchain is a bit
of an abstraction to you.
Unless you're the big brains at Penumbra in which case you're re you're building your
blockchain abstraction as well as you go.
Um, so I don't know.
It's hard to say because like obviously like, you know, like Henry was saying, you can't
also build a protocol as a put on like ideal either.
Um, so maybe it's just one of those hard engineering problems where you can have, you know, like
distributed systems, you can have fast, reliable, whatever.
You can't have all three.
I can't even remember what the, the three are, you know, the ones that it's fast, reliable
and cast, right?
Uh, no, the three.
No, no.
Well, time, time and cost is definitely one quality time quality cost.
I guess reliability is quality.
No, I'm thinking of, I'm thinking of like with, with specifically with distributed systems,
it's like about replicating and stuff, you know, you can have like, you can have like
essentially finality.
You can have, um, it's like, was it finality, liveness and integrity of the three?
Something like that.
Oh, okay.
So we're talking about like database and stuff with like, which I'm a darning and stuff.
And yeah, I was, um, uh, sex, drugs and rock and roll.
I'm just podcast by guy.
On this one.
No, it's been muted for an hour and six minutes.
Rest of the year.
Yeah.
I just, uh, like Henry was a bit big brain and kind of fraud my shit a little bit.
And I was just, didn't really have much constructive stuff to add to it.
So I thought I would just shut the fuck up and listen.
I mean, his dry humor around the automatic door.
Whenever he threw that one down, it took me a second to like process it.
And I was like, I do have those doors.
Like I know they do exist.
Like you could do it where it like I should respond to something like that.
But, but yeah.
Not like that one.
I got, I got, got, you got to respect the player of the game.
Oh man.
I would say about that one.
Which surprises me.
Cause that, that to me seemed like a pretty like British tier joke.
Like if I would have seen that on a money Python, then I would like it wouldn't surprise
me at all.
Right.
But the, but the shibboleth here is that British people know when we, we meet another British
person.
We're like, ah, we both hate each other.
And we hate the world.
And we're going to just try and outdo each other in verbal shitposting.
This is understood.
It's understood.
You know, there is, there are rules to the game.
You don't expect it from a Canadian.
Canadian question mark.
I had a bit of a moment there.
I realized I don't know Henry's nationality, but I maybe think Canadian.
Well they said they lived in the US and that's, I don't know, good enough for me, I guess.
And Canadian North American, American.
Yeah.
This is interesting how the quality of the podcast has gotten done for sure.
High level.
Yes.
High level cryptography concepts to like, what are you?
What Canadian or American?
How many guns you own?
How do you feel about them guns?
Oh, Canadians have guns too.
Right.
Well, right.
You are like more than Mary.
So, we have some casual stuff right?
I was saying just notice this week.
I've also just noticed your screen behind you.
So that's very much the mood.
So I was going to ask, you know, in the context of, you know, I caught up on last week's episode.
It's great.
The SEC stuff has me asking, is this the end for zombie Shakespeare?
Your screen behind me, behind me, behind you.
Yeah.
Kind of seems to suggest the answer, huh?
Yeah.
I thought I'd mix it up a little bit.
Can you just program anything on that screen?
If I spend the time actually doing it.
Yeah.
I'll just put the title.
I was like, how much calls today?
I was bored.
Yep.
That's exactly what happened.
So you did, you did a, before we run out of time this week, you did a bit of a, you
did a poll.
You want to go through your poll findings?
Your Twitter, your Twitter poll?
It wasn't so much of a poll, was it?
As me shitposting and then seeing what came back.
Yeah.
So there was, so there was a thing here and it got a little bit silly because obviously
I forgot that people were going to just go, you should know this, you're on core one.
But I asked a question, which we have asked in this podcast a bunch of times, genuine
non-facetious question.
What are the user needs in Cosmos and what common tasks the user is trying to achieve?
And the TLDR of this is a lot of people replied.
Some people were like, you're on core one.
About, hey, valid point.
Fair point.
I wasn't talking about, I wasn't talking about, you know,
Not about me.
It's not about me.
Yeah.
There were, there were quite a few, yeah, that kind of ilk and some of them from other
project people, people from other projects.
And I was like, that's not so, that's not three stones folks in a band.
They don't know either.
Right.
Let's be nice.
Anyway, the conclusion was there are a bunch of replies.
Some of the better ones.
Jorge from Stargaze said all roads lead to NFTs.
Wait, what was the question?
So genuine non-facetious question.
What are the user needs in Cosmos?
What tasks are, what common tasks are people trying to achieve?
Users, users.
Like I don't want to know about fucking stakes and tokens sit on them for five years, just
making money, not a user need to me.
Like it is a user need.
Some people it's not that interesting.
It's a byproduct of user need.
Yeah.
Exactly.
They need to be able to run and track their stats is what they need.
Yes.
He knows it.
Especially to me, like what was it?
$44 a day at peak?
Something like that.
$142 a day.
What is that?
I have no words.
Wait, which one are you talking about?
You talking about the nearest thing?
I think in like the economist, this is how mental it was.
It was like the economist had like an infographic like peak crypto market, what people were
making potentially per day on those step-ups just by sending the data and then getting $45
just walking around.
It was like, you could, you could, if you, if you like, like we all now do, we all obviously
work at McDonald's again now.
So you know, you can make more than your McDonald's job by just harvesting those shitcoins.
Man, I would have played Pokemon Go and took it steps every day if I had known that.
God, I'm so far behind the frigging.
Anyway, go ahead.
So yeah, so there's some good, like I said, there was a good response to that.
Obviously, Hawa is one of my favorites all roads, lead to NFTs, which genuinely I think
actually their users are certainly asking to fucking mint NFTs and then do lots of tasks
with NFTs.
And the definition of NFT will change like that's that answer has layers.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a lot of their, Hawa is pretty smart.
We're big fans of Hawa.
So Simon Water from Confio, Cosmwazem, another one of the show, asked, asked, also Big Brain
asked, do you have users?
You have users, which I think actually also neatly sums up the problem for a lot of the
Cosmos.
Instant Jesus on Twitter said, easy, find out what blockchains are actually for.
First step one, find out what?
Step one, I don't know what they're for.
Step two, question mark.
Love, love that answer.
So yeah, Brain Tricks said, we unironically aren't there yet.
So very behind in apps, let alone things to do that aren't financially driven.
I think we would all agree with that.
These are the highlights of the comments.
The other ones just yelling at you basically.
Dragatory comments.
Yeah.
And then a car.
And then Zeke, another friend of the podcast and Dada Superdev basically said, make friends,
ship post by Bad Kids, which I think are actually three completely valid use cases for the Cosmos.
So there was a bunch of also discussion around on chain entities and stuff, which a lot of
it was quite like aspirational for the future would be my way of putting it.
But I will allow for a start on chain entity because it is a fully novel use case.
And obviously we're big fans of Dada on the show.
So the conclusion of me posting that question and then harvesting the responses for engagement
for three days and getting 10,000 or so impressions as well in the process was buy and trade Bad
Kids, make money because it is one, even if I don't, I'm not so bothered.
And then number three, start an on chain entity.
Those were the three actual use cases.
And maybe the real dows were the friends we made along the way to paraphrase what Zeke
definitely was not saying.
So, yeah.
So on chain entity, which I, that's a good use case.
That's a real use case, which is going to take some time.
It's real use case.
It's not a 2023 type of thing.
I don't think.
Okay.
For sure.
I'd be surprised if it was.
The rest of these are all a bit either facises or whatever.
So did you get any real answers?
Anything else?
Well, so, okay.
So, the right.
So I apologize in advance to anybody that's listening right now because I'm going to have
to show something on the stream.
We'll put it in the show notes.
What's going on here.
But what the purpose of this entire thing was at the moment, I'm working with a bunch
of product people in my day job and I'm reminded of product maturity mapping, right?
Where you do something like this, where you have a value chain and you show where, how
mature a product is, right?
If you can create a product that's over on the left there in the Genesis area where you
have to do actual R&D to work out whether this thing even has a market and then take
it to maturity, like commodity, you make a, that's how you make a billion dollars, right?
This is literally the product development matrix for how you make a billion dollars.
Like it was originally the person who did Wardley mapping, Simon Wardley was, my understanding
is the commercial guy who was tasked with taking Ubuntu from a tiny percentage of the
server market to being the definition of a commodity where you say, I want web server,
don't care about what web server is, give me server and they give you an Ubuntu server
by default.
Right.
Which is what you want.
When you ask for a server that isn't Ubuntu server or you are basically Ubuntu turns
into that definition.
Yeah.
So he has a little bit, his presentation style is a bit annoying, but I feel like he might
a little bit have credibility within that.
The other definition of utility of course is literally buying your electricity.
If you make a builder buy a decision as a business, you're not going to be like, we're
going to build our own energy grid lads.
You're going to buy energy.
You're going to buy your internet, your natural gas depending on which country you're in.
So, and this then was me throwing two use cases that came out of this actual discussion
on a wardly map, right?
And it's a bit shit map because I did it in about 10 minutes before the show tonight.
And you can't really read it.
So sorry about that.
But the left one is created now.
The right one is send user tokens with some financial value.
And so you can see like the things here that are super mature, right?
RPCs are pretty mature.
They're very fungible validators in theory are quite fungible.
There's a stable coin down there, the Cosmos SDK.
So these are all the things that the further you go down, the more hidden they are from
a user, right?
But what's super interesting is that if you want to send somebody anything with value,
eventually I figure you get to taxes at the bottom there.
But a lot of the stuff around the DAO stuff, it stays over here in this really custom interesting
product area where it's valuable, it's new, its value isn't defined yet, and it's just
waiting to be commoditized.
So it makes me think a lot of that financial type stuff, again, we kind of go on about
users needs about real products.
A lot of the financial stuff is still like, it's very hard to define without it touching
the real world, whereas that DAO stuff is just there.
It's in a new product area, it's waiting to be commodified.
So anyway, that was me during my conference course today doing work that I shouldn't have
been doing, was doing a wardley map about DAOs.
So I hope people on the stream enjoyed that slightly insane diversion.
I'm so happy that after 66 episodes we finally got into PowerPoints on stream.
We've got a problem around here.
Here is my business development thesis from Cosmos.
Hold on, kids.
This is the thing, Mike.
I have been accused on many occasions of not having a strategy or a plan in terms of the
projects that I had to face with.
I literally just presented a PowerPoint on the show.
So when I unironically say that, yes, I don't do Twitter spaces, but you can join Game of
NERC 2100 every Wednesday, you could have a PowerPoint about my thesis on GNI.
That's right.
Thanks for the TED talk.
Thank you, Rama.
You are an inspiration, as always, to my aspirations to become more corporate.
Not only do taxes get mentioned, taxes got mentioned on a PowerPoint.
Fucking amazing.
This podcast is awesome.
It's a value that they blow as well.
It's like all the good.
Not only do we piss people off with the PowerPoint, but we...
Taxes was in a box with an arrow going to it.
It's fucking awesome.
And it was the end of the boxes.
Like everything leads to taxes.
Eventually, all this shit you do ends up in taxes in a box.
It's amazing.
And in some way, it wouldn't have any value without those taxes because it turns out the
entire thing is a massive circle tax.
Everything is.
No, you said something really perfect there, but I think you're on mute.
It wasn't important.
God damn it.
The one thing, the one time.
One thing I want to throw in there is with the question of what are users trying to achieve,
like what are common tasks and whatever.
I want to talk about the opposite.
I think the go-to conversation piece for what crypto can do is for NFT-ing mortgages or
house deeds.
And I think that's a horrible use case.
That's a rubbish use case in my opinion.
Everyone brings it up.
But they talk about how much simpler it could be to get a mortgage.
And there's a lot of protections there.
There needs to be a lot of protections there.
When there isn't, 2008 happens again, right?
And God, I don't know.
So if you have, if you can transfer deeds simply, fine, great, whatever.
But there would need to be better handling of your keys.
You lose your keys.
Therefore, you lose the deed to your house permanently.
Come on now.
That's insanity, isn't it?
But there's a reason that these things are literally held by the state that you pay taxes
to so they provide public goods for people that live in the country.
And it's so that if you do lose that stuff, you go to whatever the equivalent of, actually,
to be fair, I don't think it is some house anymore.
But whatever the equivalent of that is in both the UK and the US, and you say, hi, my
name's Frey.
I have a mortgage.
I need to find out about the property deed.
It's this address.
Here's my driving license.
So you know, I'm not some fucking random.
That does exist though.
Because I used it last year, actually.
I was actually doing a quick Google on who we used because I was doing something with
a family member's home figure, figures who I use.
So they're not actually...
An NFT.
No, no, no, no, no.
It wasn't that piece.
They were just using the blockchain throughout the REFI process.
So they were using it to...
I mean, you can go look and see.
I think it's figure.com if I remember correctly.
REFI?
Is that Regenerative Finance?
No, REFI isn't.
I have a mortgage.
I want to refinance that mortgage.
That's what I mean there.
But also, I think this was...
I was doing a REFI or a bridge for somebody, or a HELOC as they call it, like a home equity
line of credit.
And I think figure uses it as...
Who knows?
It might be mostly marketing.
Who gives it?
Oh, the fuck.
But they use it, I think, as items come in and as documents get produced, I think they're
using the chain somehow in terms of ensuring that throughout this process that there's
some sort of integrity there.
But you can look and...
I think it's figure.com.
I'll put a link in the show notes as well.
But we use them...
I think I use them.
It was 2021, actually, a couple of years ago.
So I think that that's a valid use case.
Making sure the validity of each state of the process makes sense.
Similarly, the discussion of supply chain on blockchain makes sense.
I'd actually do that if that makes sense.
If you are making a claim that you are having organic goods or whatever, or that everything
is built...
No, no.
Okay.
I don't know.
That got killed, right?
Because SAP had that huge thing with MERSC, right?
And that got shit can't do.
Or no, IBM and MERSC had that huge blockchain project that they were doing, trying to do
global shipping container structures on the chain, and that all fucking died.
But that might have been because it was too large.
They might have been trying to do it globally.
I think it's too slow and too large.
Is it tenorment?
Or is it corporate social responsibility thing?
Six-second block times the...
That's an ever what?
It's a container.
How fast does it need to be?
No, it would be in just slightly amount of data, I think, is the problem.
But when it comes to corporate social responsibility, which is the other thing you hear about,
I think, like, Shorthy was kind of getting at that use case, like, organics, fair trade,
anti-slavery, that kind of stuff.
The point is that ultimately it has to be certified by somebody on the ground who can
just falsify the record.
And the primary problem you have with certification is the certification itself.
So the blockchain doesn't solve that.
And there is actually at least one that I know of, but multiple projects that have tried
to do this with a relatively credible team, a relatively credible set of advisors, and
absolutely smashed into a brick wall because everybody in the industry just went, look,
the certification you're looking for already exists over here, and it's expensive.
There's a reason it's expensive because they have to send people out or they have to have
people in country to do XYZ.
And the technology doesn't matter.
It can be an MS access database.
It can be a spreadsheet.
It can be a big piece of paper because at the end, they can be a folder with all the
certifications sent back from the people who are qualified to make that certification.
But the database is not the problem.
And if data integrity is a problem, put JSON schema in front of your database and you're
done, you can still have your MS access data.
Hot take.
Hey, I used to work on a lot of data integration stuff and there are a lot of different ways
of solving the schema registry thing in terms of data integrity.
Blockchain is just one of many.
It's a very slow way of achieving that.
So no new use cases for your Twitter poll then?
That's what you're saying?
Is that okay?
Could Bad Kids get us out of the barrel?
So I voted no on this stride thing.
So somebody want to talk about this governance proposal on stride buying Bad Kids as an asset?
Go ahead.
I voted no because I thought it was like Degenerate shit.
But do you guys want to at least talk about what that is?
I mean, what's more to say, I guess.
Bad Kids wants to buy Bad Kids with I think community funds, right?
But I haven't looked too much into the prop to be honest.
I read it and it was just like, Jesus.
So ultimately they want to take user dollars that are real dollars flowing in and buy NFTs,
right?
And be able to hold those NFTs as an asset that could grow over a period of time.
Is this a separate pool or this gets folded into an existing pool of some sort?
I'm not sure.
I think we need to look more into it.
If their goal here is to take stride from the community pool, buy Bad Kids and put Bad
Kids in the community pool so the community can then do something with it if it went up
in value or whatever, fine.
I don't really care too much about diversification.
I care deeply about diversification.
I don't want to make a big point out of it.
You can make an argument in a different way.
And Bad Kids are the de facto blue chip NFT of the cosmos.
And by extension, you would be giving credence to the cosmos.
Which is fine.
Fine.
I'm fine with that.
It is what they're doing, right?
I mean, I'm not talking about Bad and Bad Kids.
We hold a shitload, right?
But you're basically saying that it's an asset that has the ability to grow over time.
And so if that asset's going to grow, I'm treating it as a security.
Hello.
And I'm treating this NFT as something that has value that I'm expecting them to buy.
It's going to increase in value based on the work of others, in essence.
So I thought it was a bit too, D-Gen.
I thought it was a bit too early in this life cycle to me.
But I don't know.
I voted no.
Everybody's shit on me for it.
They could vote their own shares.
The fucking validator thing.
You shouldn't be voting anyway.
Yeah, I agree.
I still like the idea of Aptos's method of doing it, where a voter and validator are
separate in theory.
They can't have them the same.
Whether they can.
Yeah.
I wish.
Yeah.
I don't feel qualified to vote on all these things.
Seriously.
Right.
Like this situation, like it's a whole thing is like people look to validators for incredible
guidance around these types of issues.
And I agree that you're more involved, so therefore you have more opinion around it.
But that doesn't make them an authoritative source on what the right thing is to do.