DeFi 2.0 - The Dawn of Private Defi

Transcript

come in how's my how's my audio can everyone here good all right awesome so my name is alex shipp i am the head of business development at off shift uh before i get into any of the presentation here i want to thank everyone because i know the we're almost at the end here of the event and i'm sure everyone's tired they've been all sorts of satellite events everyone's been at late night

parties and everything so i'm going to do my best to make it as entertaining and worth your time as possible to start i want to ask has anyone seen this word before no one in the whole audience okay well you're in the right place then good i need to get started so pry phi as i'm sure many people here can probably imagine stands for private decentralized finance private defy right so i'm going to talk about privacy there have been a number of talks already about privacy on the privacy track that have spoken about privacy through the lens of humanitarianism i'm going to talk about privacy as it relates to systems of exchange and the way in which it promotes healthy economic prosperity and function so i'm going to start with a little bit of

background into money and credit money emerges naturally in any sort of civilization any sort of society to facilitate trade and commerce it's superior to bartering and it allows society to expand it allows society to grow it allows people to store value across time and space and it allows us all to conduct exchange with less friction now credit also emerges organically and it emerges on top of money and credit could be considered any form any sort of receipt that can be at some point in some way exchanged directly for money it's most commonly we consider gold being money and we consider a paper

bank notes in some ways fiat currency even being a form of credit and so for the longest time in the crypto space we talk about this sort of crisis of sound money we talk about this big problem we have where we no longer have sound money in our world and that crypto offers some form of sound money that can replace our faulty systems and produce something that's more equitable more fair and that can ensure property ownership through the lens of money right and it's interesting because credit always emerges organically in fact in much the same way that money does and that's not something that we talk about a lot because in the crypto space we think about credit in particular we think about fiat currency as some sort of perversion of

money where fiat is sort of something that ruined the gold standard it ruined a sort of scarce money but in fact credit always emerges because it allows us to facilitate transaction it allows to facilitate exchange more efficiently and it allows us to do so more in a more versatile fashion so while money creates this sort of sound foundation for our civilization which we can store value across time and space credit is this thin laminate this thin flexible laminate across the top where we can exchange that value more efficiently because the qualities the intrinsic qualities of money in particular gold which allow it to be scarce divisible portable etc necessarily take away from and detract from its ability

to serve as a superlative medium of exchange in the case of gold its physical substance makes it or requires some sort of energy output in order to exchange it and that becomes costly it prevents micro transactions and as society becomes more sophisticated there are also challenges involving derivative instruments which are needed to help businesses function more stably in volatile environments there are also different forms of loans there are also different forms of financial instrumentation that gold could not support alone and even today gold derivatives markets is cash settled because it's simply infeasible for us to continue growing these perpetual evolutionary algorithms that are constantly advancing our civilizations our systems and ourselves require more efficient and more

versatile forms of exchange and so i pause it and i'm here to talk a little bit about how credit not necessarily fiat currency through the lens that we normally look at it but that credit is an inevitable organic and emergent phenomenon which cannot simply be fixed by sound money because sound money is only a part of the solution okay so here we have this uh little little graphic um to say the car is 10 ounces of gold but we pay in useless pieces of paper and we can also pay with useless plastic cards if we wish right and it allows for far more economic prosperity on the whole it allows for a broader diversity of labor uh it allows for technological innovation in so many ways the challenge is that credit issuance is

opaque and our systems of credit issuance are very much centralized whether that begins in the form of some very advanced and and very a wealthy network of financial institutions or whether it ends up what we have today with central banks and a network of super national financial institutions like the world bank the imf et cetera the bis that are connected to central banks and that are all connected to governments they all have the power to issue credit or in essence create wealth and extract wealth from the population we all know this narrative we're all very familiar with it but we tend to blame a lack of sound money when really what we have is a conundrum of sound credit in other words this natural and emergent system of credit

which comes and is sort of layered on top of money is centralized and therefore it's very easily exploited and exposed so that is the number one thing that i want to emphasize here now finally step into cryptocurrency a little bit bitcoin and arguably ethereum you could say monero you could say a lot of these sort of blockchain 1.0 applications have allowed us to form different sorts of very very sound money because they are decentralized and inherently scarce now the challenge of course is that the very qualities that make them scarce that make them sound inherently unnecessarily prevent them from being exchanged as efficiently as maybe some other means and in particular that would be in the

case of bitcoin the difficulty level and the hashing algorithm we all know this and so credit naturally emerges again no matter how we no matter how you slice it or how you cut it if there's a sound money there's going to be a system of credit on top of it there's going to be this laminate and so the question is how can we build this sort of system and the answer most of the people in the room know is that we have now d5 which is super super exciting and we already see that bitcoin wrapped bitcoin has migrated over to a number of different dfi applications because on ethereum using defy transactions are far more efficient and there's this really versatile array of things we can do from nfts and all sorts of different lending and borrowing and they're staking and there are a lot of great

interest rates and yields and all sorts of different things and so defy is such a profound innovation it sort of offers us the opportunity for the first time to resolve this quintessential challenge that has plagued humanity for the longest time we have issues with sound money certainly for example the most prominent being maybe in a village a very long time ago millennia ago where seashells might have been used in the mountains as a form of money and you could have some other tribe a group of people that takes those seashells and brings them into the village and extracts all the wealth by exposing the money as being unsound or at least only sound in a regional sense but gold on the other hand and bitcoin have not gold certainly has not been

exposed or exploited as being unscarce or unsound what we have again is this really challenging issue where credit is inherently unsound because it's inherently centralized and no human seem to be able to act responsibly with the power to control its issuance now here's the challenge because if it were that simple and i wish it was uh that would be the end of my presentation and i would just say thanks for your time i'm alex and i have no job uh but in fact the reality is that we are building this system of decentralized credit these defy applications in the virtual domain and the virtual domain is very different from the physical domain where say gold would exist and so we have one additional layer one additional

challenge which plagues us because in the internet all of our data is can be harvested extracted it can be compiled and concentrated and then it can be used in order through predictive analytics to profile population demographics to understand us the way we we behave and then of course to manipulate and shift the way we behave as any authoritarian entity or any marketing agency or any powerful corporation see fit and so the challenge there is one that is certainly humanitarian and there have been a number of great talks already that have talked about again the humanitarian implications of surveillance capitalism and authoritarian measures that are being implemented by a number of different governments and supernational agencies regulatory agencies etc but i'm not here to talk so much about that

certainly i and everyone who i work with at off shift and probably many people at this conference would agree that privacy the right to be alone with yourself when you transact when you live when you socialize when you use the internet and in real life is something that we're all born with it's an inalienable fundamental right however i'm going to again address privacy through the lens of what it provides for the public good via systems of exchange because that really is the argument of the authoritarian agencies and the governments and everyone that wants to surveil which is that ultimately it provides for the public good by protecting us so privacy is the key piece that protects rehypothecation it prevents the rehypothecation of our data which is most certainly a form of wealth and i have to imagine that most people

here have seen the 2018 article from the economist where they talk about data being the most valuable commodity now in the world more so than even oil and so when we have any new form of wealth any new asset class that sort of emerges or arises and becomes prominent the rehypothecation is what breaks down that fundamental ability we have to own private property and will ultimately result in the dissolution of the destruction of our economic and social fabric whether that takes place in the form of unsound money unsound credit or the extraction and unwarranted theft of our data this can be systemic through inflation through rehabilitation it could also be through the form of confiscation that's happened with gold but the result is the same okay so now to look through the sort of

12-year history i believe 12 years of blockchain that we have we have these blockchain 1.0 use cases where we have a decentralized form of money we have sound money and then we have blockchain 2.0 which is these these brilliant d5 applications that are popping up on ethereum other avm chains and all over the place and then we have 3.0 which is this really brilliant and important piece where we infuse privacy into the mix so that not only do we have decentralized systems for the formation and exchange of credit instruments but we also have rehypothecation proof credit and rehypothecation-proof data because we own it so privacy is so important because privacy is scarcity in the virtual domain and

it certainly seems like that's the direction we're all moving in at this point into the virtual domain okay so i'm now going to finally get to the main topic here which is prify and what prify is private decentralized finance should now be very apparent and very important to anyone in the room a true bona fide a truly sound application of profi should have all three of these qualities it's super super important as sort of a project that we like to say that we're pioneering prify or that we're sort of one of the first figures in the space it's really important to set a standard at the outset so that things don't become centralized don't become compromised and we sort of see that on ethereum when we don't really define what a good sound touring complete chain

is that to decentralize we see i'm not going to name names but we see all sorts of eth clones popping up that aren't actually decentralized that can compete with ethereum because the costs are lower but they've already given up on the decentralization piece which was the most important in the first place so what a pry fi a bona fide prify application should be is it should be obviously filled with decentralized applications of finance uncompromising obviously they should be fully decentralized no exceptions they should confer unequivocal privacy there should be no loopholes or exceptions there either and the last piece which is especially important is that they should operate fully on chain that means on ethereum and that means layer one okay and why unchain because that last piece is really

challenging and it really knocks a lot of projects out of the mix so i want to just touch on that here because it is very important so why on chain because on chain is where it's most decentralized it's most accessible to establish in particular on ethereum to the established and most robust communities in the space and of course it's going to be censorship resistant as a result the challenge is that so many projects are very tempted to simply build on another chain to build elsewhere to build their own and it is i'll get into that a little bit later but there are a lot of technical challenges involved with building privacy-centric applications on ethereum but regardless the challenges that privacy faces

are that it isn't that accessible for people and the space looked by people i mean users and in fact i mean typical users and probably not the people at this conference but the mass crypto market that actually wants to use this stuff but isn't an expert isn't flying to paris to learn about it the challenge is that in 2016 2017 the blockchain space looked very different where there were predominantly blockchain 1.0 applications you could send you could exchange and store value with bitcoin or you could transact and store value with monero and maintain your privacy that was pretty cool and that was pretty nice deal you're on a separate blockchain but you're not really missing out the challenge is that now in 2021 the crypto landscape looks entirely different because users don't just want to store a

token or a coin and then send it to their friend and then take it back they want to stake it they want to earn huge returns they want to buy meme tokens steak that earn pineapple tokens mint aware nft sell at auction style at open seat get that back and keep steak and keep staking and get synthetics and so on and so on and so now participating in the privacy landscape in particular privacy coins is kind of like going to an amusement park and being told that you're not tall enough to go on any of the rides and you kind of just sit off on a bench off to the side and you get to tell yourself that you're maintaining your privacy it's not really a great deal especially because of how lucrative defy can be at times not investment advice but the point is that in order to bring

privacy back on stage because at this stage it's certainly been relegated to the back burner of cryptographic innovation and even cryptographic consideration because as the capital and interest of the mass crypto market have shifted to d5 elite developer teams and venture capital resources have followed in suit and privacy is very much on the back burner uh and unfortunately in order to bring it back on stage we really need to bring it back on chain we have to make it more accessible we have to make it almost as cheap as any alternative that's public and it has to be simple user friendly a couple clicks away it has to be an accessory of sorts something a feature that can be augmented that can be adapted

very easily onto whether it's a protocol or a token or whatever it is it's something that user can say i feel like being private today without having to use tor or figure out what onion is or learn about all sorts of different separate block chains it's too much work so here are all of the live hi-fi platforms today the list is a little bit shorter than you like given how impactful and promising these technologies are you'd like to see a little bit more going on now i'm not going to just have everyone stare at a blank screen the whole time so i want to zoom out and i want to take a look at a lot of the projects that are on the fringe a lot of different platforms a lot of different ideas that are satisfying some of these conditions that contain

some of the characteristics of a bona fide private platform but aren't fully there and it's not to insult any project it's not to say that anything isn't good there are so many different sorts of privacy-centric applications and technologies out there but nothing's really hitting the mark and i'll elaborate on that but i first want to go in depth here into sort of taking a look at everything so this is probably the sickest infographic i've ever seen in crypto our designer is awesome uh here you can see we have these sort of four components you can take a picture if you want and you could also just by the way if you have any other project you could fit almost anything onto this chart you know and again there's nowhere bad that you don't want to be except for meme coins coins and rugs you're pretty good anywhere on the

chart and so it's just to take a look at these these qualities does it have a basis in decentralized money is it private does it contain financial defy apps and is it fully on chain on layer one so i don't have time to go through all of these pieces but i would like to talk about a few of them at least and i've highlighted a few of them that we can sort of go into here when you look at pry 5 through this lens and you look at some of the projects that are sort of on the fringe that are in different spaces you'll start to notice that yeah you really need to be dead center there and you need to satisfy all these conditions so the first one here is um number five which is right there in the in the upper upper right which is

privacy coins um and that's that's quite an appropriate term at this point because again they just allow for the storage and the transaction of wealth and you can do it privately and of course over here you see monero zcash private chain these are the most prominent privacy coins and they're excellent at what they do but again the trade-offs to using them being outside the ecosystem even though many of them have very robust and powerful consensus mechanisms and some of them even especially monero has sort of championed this idea that privacy confers fungibility to units of exchange to money in the digital space and therefore it may even be more sound money than bitcoin maybe more sound money than ethereum that's fine but it's not going to help us with credit and so privacy coins kind of serve in an odd way

as havens in the event of some kind of very predictable economic or financial crisis they're a good place to hide to store wealth but they aren't going to help us to systemically prevent those kinds of collapses from happening because there's no credit solution there and so from there the next logical move is to number four up at the top there which is your off chain private defy these guys are getting pretty close because they're saying let's build their own stand-alone blockchain that confers privacy as for the most part a solitary value proposition it's an exciting idea and we can build our blockchain in a way that's conducive to privacy-centric applications we don't have to deal with any of the challenges of building on an established public

blockchain that was built to be turing complete and obviously public by definition so some of these projects and again secret network is at the forefront and certainly as someone in the privacy space i'm not here to disparage any projects a lot of these guys are very interested in what they're doing and they're picking up a lot of steam that being said building your own separate blockchain is a very tall order as is competing with the established network effects of ethereum and arguably polka dot and especially just in general competing with the established network effects of evm chains and so it's almost a nice parallel is you kind of throw a crazy house party and you wake up the next morning and it's a total mess and the rug is disgusting and you decide let's just

build a new house this is going to be terrible it might work and you could even build that house in a way that would be with marble floors and it'll be easier to clean the next time you have a party but in any event regardless you're always going to deal with the problem that when you start to actually build the house you have to feed in the electric wiring and the internet and the plumbing and so many other things you're going to realize that it's quite an intricate and difficult task and similar thing takes place when we talk about building a separate blockchain that may be very well designed for privacy but how are you going to build the robust and battle tested consensus are you going to be able to put together a global fully decentralized body of nodes and very well populated body of

nodes and then of course can you bring in the developer teams can you get a bunch of developers and you're probably going to have to poach them from the ethereum community at this point there aren't that many blockchain developers in the world it's going to become very challenging and so it's not to insult any of these projects it's very tempting for someone that's a little bit ahead of themselves to label that uh you know ghost chain fire something along those lines but really ethereum was just an idea at one point as well and so to these projects that are building their own privacy-centric financial universes from the ground up we simply say power to them perhaps one day and we can certainly expect that there will be many competitors both in the privacy and in the protocol air space for many years to come as the space becomes

more mainstream but they certainly don't meet the needs for pri fi in the immediate present because again without an established consensus mechanism and a really decentralized body of nodes and a lot of trade-offs going between chains it's not going to be as user-friendly or as accessible as we want it to be next i want to talk about eight which is mixers mixers and tumblers tornado cash could also be in here they're a little bit more sophisticated because the way they use contracts um as opposed to mixed miss and mobius but mixers for anyone who's not familiar sort of cycle your funds through a series of addresses and so they can sort of help you to become more anonymous by dissociating those funds from your original addresses and some of the transactions you conducted earlier it's a nice band-aid solution and

certainly for the time being it's useful to many people but it's certainly not a priorify solution it's certainly not a sustainable solution and it doesn't involve any inherently private assets so it's going to ultimately disincentivize spending it's going to ultimately disincentivize users from engaging defy applications unless they absolutely need to because there's a cost especially with gas fees where they are there's a cost involved with using the tornado cache application or mixed miss or mobius or whatever it is and anytime you go back to transact you're kind of making yourself public again so that leads us to the last one which is layer 2 private defy so this is really the most fascinating the most interesting there have actually been a couple projects um i believe one anenoma i believe hopper also presented there

are a couple that that are sort of doing different privacy-centric things on ethereum and they're doing them on layer twos which means that they sort of have their own platform above the layer one where they conduct transactions or obfuscation the the number one that i really want to talk about is aztec protocol would they sort of conceive the concept of an unchained confidential token standard i believe it was eip 1715 where they talked about building some sort of very foundational very basic pri-fi sort of idea on ethereum they elected to use zk snarks with an n as opposed to using one of the other zk zero knowledge proof implementations and so their solution involves some semblance of a trusted setup they did do it very well they did

actually not too long ago i believe um but in any event all of their obfuscation and the privacy application takes place in a zk roll up so again it's not fully on layer one is it a really sound idea yeah there are a lot of these um again the prify the standard is all layer one can we do it fully on layer one without resorting to any solution that could be inherently require a trusted setup that could require any element of centralization or anything of that nature so here there are quite a number of projects that are doing quite a lot of things and there's no one that's really launched a fully complete profile application we're doing that i want to talk a little bit about why none of these exist because you would think why not just do it why not

just put one on layer one and there are some significant technical challenges involved in particular it's simply that ethereum was built and designed to be turing complete not private and so anyone who's trying to put privacy-centric applications on top of the theorem is dealing with a very tedious and challenging it's quite a tall order and of course developer resources are at this point quite difficult to come out so here's what it boils down to transaction models ethereum as most people should probably be familiar uses what's called an account based transaction model whereas the alternative generally or the second most prominent in the space is something called the utxo model an unspent transaction output model bitcoin is most famous for using the

utxo model and ethereum is most famous for using the account based model simply put global states exist on ethereum in the protocol layer they exist fundamentally and so a concept like an account balance an actual user or someone that has an actual account where they hold tokens exist in the protocol whereas in a utxo model like bitcoin no such thing exists utxos in other words in layman's terms coins or tokens coins in the case of bitcoin are simply sent from one cryptographic address to another on the ledger and concepts such as account balances are handled by higher levels of abstraction like wallet applications block explorers and other things which is to say that they don't really exist on bitcoin you don't really have a

wallet you don't really have an account you're just accessing some sort of unspent transaction output and every time you try to send a transaction you're just having a node or a series of nodes query the entire history of the blockchain for all of the previous transactions that have been made to and from your particular wallet address the benefits here of i'll go to the next slide the benefits here of a utxo model is that they're very conducive to privacy-centric applications you'll probably end up using something like ring signatures or zk proof zero knowledge proofs uh but either way if you can just obstruct if you can obscure that information the transaction itself everything that's abstracted at higher layers afterwards by wallets all sorts of account balances

are going to be totally hidden are going to disappear whereas in an account based system it's a very different story because the account exists in the protocol layer so you can't merely obstruct transactions and so if you do that you're going to run into a lot more problems if you want to build a privacy-centric application on ethereum so here's the thing here's where it gets a bit interesting is that oh it says right there never mind uh monero and mimblewimble both who built their own privacy-centric stand-alone blockchains decided to use utxo implementations utso transaction models it should come really as no surprise whereas ethereums which is obviously going to be more beneficial to smart

contracts and d5 applications applications which require state saving use an account based model so the question is what kind of technical solution can we develop what can we do in order to create some kind of fully private application that enables the exchange of credit instruments that is fully decentralized layer one on ethereum uh none yet really exists so here's what we're doing [Music] we're building directly on ethereum's account based transaction model which means it's fully layer one totally unchained course going to be some comments about gas fees about the expense and how that's managed and that's definitely for the scalability track although there's plenty i could say on that the second piece is we exchange our

privacy-centric derivatives we have a token our native tokens xft you can burn that and shift into this sort of uh proprietary line of private synthetics and all of these are exchanged between addresses on ethereum in the form of cryptographic commitments so we're not sacrificing any of that programmability that ethereum can offers and we're also not shifting to a layer two in order to avoid the challenges involved with the account based model we're implementing and exchanging these cryptographic commitments in a utxo model so we call our model our transaction model a utxo account based hybrid where the cryptographic commitments are exchanged between accounts in the form of utxos so to simply obscure those transactions

to simply obscure the information what kind of synthetic it is what it's pegged to in the number of tokens that are being sent we call them zk assets because they use bulletproof ck proofs all of that information is hidden and there's no worry there's no issue with the account balances whatsoever so in that sense it is a fully bona fide prify application again we employ bulletproof ck proofs because unlike snarks they do not require any sort of trusted setup and we can deploy this again fully on chain on layer one like a broken record okay so to tie everything together we do not have in any way whatsoever a crisis of sound money

at least not since the emergence of gold as a monetary medium and a global standard what we have now is a challenge where we continue to cycle through really toxic centralized systems of credit issuance that serve a select few individuals and organizations at the expense of the rest of the population and compromise our ability to own private property we have a conundrum of sound credit because our credit instruments aren't being exchanged in decentralized fashion and therefore are not sound now that we have some sort of ecosystem of d5 applications on ethereum we have a very profound and exciting opportunity for the first time to build a system of sound credit on top of sound money

but again in the virtual domain we have issues with the rehypothecation not of money or credit but of data which of course is one of will be and is rapidly becoming one of the foremost sources of wealth the number one commodity in the world and so privacy is the key element that keeps virtual economies in check that keeps data scarce that allows for private property ownership in the virtual domain and really is the solution that allows our d5 applications to play the role that we want them to so as it says here privacy without defy is extremely boring all we can do is hold a coin that's really it at the end of the day which serves some functions but defy without privacy

is predatory it doesn't fully resolve doesn't fully resolve the problem of rehydration so prify is sort of we presented as the way forward we're pioneering it and so anyone can come check us out um here's a nice little graphic to tie things together as well the car is one of do you take cryptographic commitments as well especially if they employ bulletproof ck proofs haha obviously just want to mention not not price not price commentary not speculation about the value of one ethereum not saying you're going to be able to buy a car with one not investment advice whatsoever need to make sure i'm clear on that disclaimer okay so to conclude um here's where you can find us here's our website osha.io

for anyone who thought wow i really wish that had been more technical that did not satisfy my technical appetite i wanted to get way more deep we published a 30-something page yellow paper recently it has all the cryptography and mathematics you could ask for uh you can get into the peterson commitments and the range proofs and everything involved in our bulletproof zk proof implementation if you want to you can also check out we have our decentralized git on git lab because github is centralized so we're very very committed to ethos of decentralization you can check all of our code on git lab if you want to dive in and sort of what what i want to emphasize here again and if you're not super technical you know find us on twitter find us on [Music] telegram we have a dedicated discord we do monthly amas you can see my face

again if you want every month um we have bi-weekly development updates we although we're committed to privacy at the individual level everyone on the team is anonymous except me i don't even know who they are but we're very committed to transparency in the development process and so there's a ton of information out there in particular before i close i want to mention that anyone that's interested here should definitely reach out and contact everyone's anonymous but friendly and the reason i mention that is because we're sort of starting what we see is a pri-fi ecosystem it's an interoperable suite of decentralized inherently private layer one applications that allow for all the things you do publicly with dfi applications we're just building that on-ramp from xft our native token

into these private synthetics but we want to build dexes where they can be exchanged seamlessly while being fully private that integrate our zk assets into decentralized borrowing and lending pools the formation and exchange of insurance products private nfts and all sorts of different staking models and different applications derivatives instruments etc and so if you find this interesting we plan to be launching our mainnet in six maybe seven months very very early q1 2022. if this is something that interests you get familiar with our code base reach out read our yellow paper we did another feasibility study which was highly technical check out our white paper or pitch deck and if you want a contributor you want to build some sort of companion application in our prify ecosystem we're certainly open to lending a hand and giving any support or resources that you may need

um that being said i just want to thank everyone especially france for organizing the whole thing during a time and it was not easy to organize an event and again everyone who who sort of stayed around here despite it being super late so merci beaucoup [Applause] um i i think oh yeah yeah yeah we have like seven minutes for questions so anyone that wants to can can certainly go hey it's a great talk really interesting uh something that i wonder about with private d5 it's how do people trust you how do your

users get to trust you um because if you're an anon team there is the risk of a rug with all the food coins that came out in d5 summer uh sort of half of them were rugs we're seeing it more on some of the new uh side chains like polygon binance a lot of those projects are anonymous and then rug there are a few that are anonymous and have stayed the course so how do you uh promote trustworthiness with an anon team that's a really good question especially in the privacy space um yeah we we could have called ourselves uh baguette coin i guess but it's a good thing we chose offshift instead um we we i mean first of all again as i sort of emphasized that

we uh everyone's anonymous except me so at least we have me at least i'm here i'm showing face i'm real i'm not gonna rug you guys um but the the thing is that you know again it's this careful balance between there's that that famous um glenn greenwald quote something along the lines of um transparency is for people in public office and positions of public power and privacy is for everyone else and so as individuals behind the project it certainly makes sense and it's totally valid for people to choose to be anonymous but again there has to be in the in the sense that we are figures and that they are figures producing a platform for public use a private platform for public use is that we have to offer as much transparency as possible so that's why the bi-weekly development updates that are that's why the super

technical yellow paper i think tech is something that you really don't see from a lot of the food coins even maybe they're copy pasting a lot of existing code um so i think coming out with a lot of you know proprietary technical documentation is is one of really important way obviously conference appearances being here in person is another important way to address quantitatively what you're talking about about rug pulling all of our wallets are fully transparent and visible on our site and all of our our vesting rates are not only gradual but they're also hard coded in using lock boxes which are smart contracts so that the vesting schedule the tokens are released periodically and so even our team can't access we it's it's uh we cannot rug

pull we coded that out of the equation um so you can go anyone again you need to be a little technically oriented to check out those lock boxes and make sure we're not full of but again we're doing as much as we can on that end to be as transparent and honest as possible anyone else i'm interest how did and i'm interested how did you and the whole team get connected with each other um yeah so so they started um quite a while ago in a private discord channel that's how they met

sort of just talking about again this aztec protocol their eip ethereum improvement protocol 1715 they were very engaged interested in this concept of an on-chain confidential token standard and so they sort of got together and and started to put together a project or some concept some some sort of broad idea and interesting enough um i sort of connected with them uh like about five months in so that project launched you know bootstrapped liquidity on unit swap in august last year at august 2020 and i sort of connected with them in sort of like november december to say hey i really like what you guys are doing um i kind of want to contribute i have some ideas the way you're presenting your tech and so that's how i sort of got involved

and again why i still don't know who they are which is part of the way the project functions um the idea though for the project i mean if you're talking about like the concept from a bird's-eye view um was just because a lot of authoritarian stuff for the last two to three four years has been rising immensely and cryptography was really supposed to be i mean it's the the heart of encryption it's the core of encryption it's privacy is supposed to be the primary fundamental value proposition of what cryptocurrency was built on in large part um and so we're sort of seeing that kind of they're they're they've been in the space for quite a while i've been here since 2017 but i think a lot of people like og so to speak are

a little bit disenchanted not to say they don't really like d5 but to say that it feels like a lot of the principles and the stuff that really rooted that seeded this space is kind of getting again gravitating to the back burner not many people are interested um so that being said is there anything else there was something else i wanted to say to that but it's just completely left my mind so if there is any other question sweet okay right on the dot thank you very much again [Applause] thank you

you