Anoma: Solving Cross-Chain Interoperability Through Intents - Adrian Brink. Ep. 572

Transcript

a noral has native generalized intents which none no existing system right now has or has any clue how to get intents are clearly the next level abstraction because most users don't actually know which counterparty they want to interact with for privacy preserving system to work you need intense and why is that well privacy preserving systems necessarily push data to Edge devices right like now your state lives on your phone rather than into in the big database in the middle wherever you can see it and with intents you can make statements and sort of updates over your local state and then you can have solvers that Aggregate and sort of compute over this certainly right now like coinbase and Ken and binance are

the single largest mixers in the world hello and welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the Technologies project and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution I'm Brian Crane and today I'm speaking with Aden Brink he is the co-founder of anoma and uh yeah before we talk Ren we just want to share a few words from more sponsors this week if you're looking to stake your crypto with confidence look no further than course one more than 150,000 delegators including institutions like Bido pent capital and Ledger trust corus one with their assets they support over 50 blockchains and are leaders in governance or networks like Cosmos ensuring your stake is responsibly managed thanks to their Advanced me

research you can also enjoy the highest staking rewards you can stake directly from your preferred wallet set up a white label note restake your assets on igon or symbiotic or use the SDK for multi-chain saking in your app learn more at c.1 and start saking today this episode is proudly brought to you by nosis a collective dedicated to advancing and decentralized future nosis leads Innovation with circles nosis pay and metry reshaping open Banking and money with hashy and nosis VPN they're building a more resilient privacy focused internet if you're looking for an L1 to launch your project nosis chain offers the same development environment

as ethereum with lower transaction fees it's supported by over 200,000 validators making nosis chain a reliable and Incredibly neutral foundation for your applications nosis Dow drives nosis governance where every voice matters join the nosis community in the nosis da forum today Deploy on the evm compatible nosis chain or secure the network with just one gno and affordable Hardware start your decentralization journey today at nosis doio cool thanks so much for uh for coming on Adrian I know you were I mean i' we've known each other since

2017 I guess when we're both working at tenament sort of at the beginning of the cosmos ecosystem and and and of those are wild times yes where you have learned the right way to build a crypto project and then you took all these learnings right and then uh some years later you started the project enoma together with Chris ghost right um and AA right Chris ghost who is also one of the key engineers at uh at Cosmos I think implemented a lot of IBC so what what what was the vision for you guys like what what is a Nora yeah uh I

can quickly I mean the CMOS days were interesting um I joined like January 2017 just around the time of the fundraiser um we were like seven people I think with like Bucky and Ethan fry and ragel back in the day and I mean I think cosmos's got a lot of things wrong but also got a lot of things right to some extent like it was actually very innovative um and it actually cared deeply about decentralization right so like and by the way I think we people don't give enough credit to Chris here uh I think the only reason why IBC Works in shipped is because Chris like spent a year and a half of his life on making sure that actually worked in the end um like without Chris I think we would all be

one interoperability standard po right now um no but so the vision behind anal was always how do we get a unified developer experence because so like historically we looked at this and like so me oh and Chris we built a couple of uh so we built the validat cryptum naaps one of their very first proof St validators started around the same time as course one um scaled it up to a ton of Assets in retrospect um and then very gladly sold it to you guys because we very quickly realized that like validation is fun for like six month and I like racking service for six month but afterwards it was like yeah I like protocol engineering research much

more than I like physical infrastructure um and so like around the middle of 2020 our and I sat down it's like okay what what is where's this space going um and everyone seemed to be sort of copy and pasting the three same same three contracts to yet another chain or yet named them another name and somehow this was supposed to be progress on like actually building the future that we kind of envisioned on like a heterogeneous Trust World everyone has everyone uses blockchains all the time blockchains become this coordination substrate not only for financial transactions but for sort of societies as a whole right and honestly no one was really working on this in the middle of

2020 and it it felt very depressing at the time I have to say that like everyone had abandoned sort of the idea of we should be building fundamental infrastructure that actually makes people's life better and instead we like well let's copy these like three cility contracts to yet another chain and somehow this is going to make progress right um and the I mean to some extent we still have this nowadays like everyone is very much focused on this incremental Innovation like some people are trying to make a slightly faster consensus some people are trying to make a slightly different proof system um but to cosmoses and also like Cosmos was credit actually at the time it's like it proposed a new model unlik we weren't going to live in a single chain world we were going to live in this multichain

world and so with anoma this is kind of thinking that through to the end which is a you need privacy guarantees I thought like we figured that this was going to be very fundamental um if you didn't have a Bas layer platform that enabled developers and users to obtain privacy guarantees where you always had to Bol on the Privacy guarantees after the fact that this was never going to work and I think this is still holding true today um this is why I think sort of this is very challenging for existing ecosystems to really get Mass Market traction because fundamentally like my parents will not want to use them right and like for deun casino gambling this is fine but even if you're liquid hedge fund like you need privacy guarantees so that you don't

leak your strategies to everyone else um the other aspect was you needed a I think we always held the view that the world was going to be heterogeneous trust it seemed or it I mean it's very unlikely I think that there's going to be a single chain to rule them all and I sometimes like to do this experiment where like ask people I like do you like a one world government and pretty much no one likes that idea um and yet we're designing for these models right now where like we have a single security model to rule them all and so our fundamental thesis was at the time even that like the world is going to be hetrogeneous trust but you want to have a unified sort of abstraction that developers and users can work against uh so that you don't have to rewrite your

applications all the time and I mean we're seeing this right now where if you go from ethereum to salana as a developer this is a complete different system um like you move trust models but it's a completely separate developer environment that you now have to like develop environment that you have to deal with um and that sort of led to the third component which is this unified operating system struct where it's like you want to have a unified like operating system API that developers and users can rely on that can work in many hetrogeneous trust models where ideally even heterogeneous trust models can interoperate with each other sort of like as the trust boundaries as the contens of systems allow and so like the super simple example is it always struck me a super unlikely

that like usdc would be issued globally on ethereum um because and like we see it's just a weird model where it's like no national government is going to give out or like USD not USC no national government like the Swiss government is never going to give up its monetary sovereignty to like some ethereum valid I said like they will always want their own Sovereign system they can issue their own monies and right so like we end we need to end up in this world where we have many of these heterogeneous systems but while still allowing that assets and developers and applications can flow between them so that as a user I can just say well I have some State on like system a I call this the S Switzerland system and now I'd like to use the

exactly same application but I'd like to like do some settlement on um I don't know on global etherum and Soo was always designed around this how do you get hetrogeneous trust plus privacy um and then the last part which I think most people know an noral for which is intense which is really something that like like to a large extent we came up with the idea of intense or Chris came up with the idea of intense in 2016 I think when he built the wanex protocol which is the back into open SE prior to cport still to this day the singal largest gas user on ethereum uh which is this proton intense system it was the Insight that really most users don't have transactions they have intents they have like a partial State transition uh

they don't have uh I would like to like just send you my Bitcoin to you I mean this exists in the Bitcoin case but like anything complex doesn't have this so it's like I would like to trade a for B I don't know whe with with one counterparty with 15 counterparties um and so this is really what the where the intent angle comes from and so as a whole taken together you get this um an nor really is a decentralized operating system um for privacy preserving like for applications like think of it this way it's a unified operating system abstraction that allows developers to write appli and users to use those applications irrespective in which specific trust model or heterogeneous trust model they run um that's okay maybe a super quick not quick but an

intro right yeah I think there's a lot of things here that you know I think will be uh take some time to unpack I'm just want to maybe on the last thing so you said that decentralized oper or an operating system for decentralized applications I mean I've been very involved in uh as I'm very curious about this phrase operating system in this context uh I mean I know for example I've been very involved in herbate right which has this idea of like an operating system uh I guess this has maybe been used in some other ways in crypto as well like this term operating system I'm curious like what when you say operating system what does that mean yeah so it comes from a specific analogy to traditional computers where really like

the way you can currently think of something like the evm or the svm is as a specific CPU think of this as an Intel CPU and an arm CPU right and so at the moment we're all living in this world where we program directly against the CPUs um and the operating system anality comes from the fact that aiz operating system can really abstract away the differences in underlying CPU so an underlying virtual machine which means it's like anoma is not designed to replace the svm or the evm I mean it's like an noras in intent machine the intend machine sort of sits on top of existing virtual machines and just allows develop so developers can build applications against the operating

system apis and I mean this was sort of the fundamental unlock with Windows to some extent in the past where all of a sudden I could start building applications against windows and I didn't have to care which specific um CPU that that Windows operating system was running on and the other thing is the operating systemology works also quite well because theer system like Windows gave you a bunch of system level apis um for example like distributed systems so like in anoma you can you can like talk to the operating system of anoma um in terms of like figuring out how to like route in the heterogeneous trust World um so it's not just you operate on a single CP on a single operating system you it gives you the apis to operate on sort of a networked

set of operating systems does that make sense okay I mean before you were talking about right when you sort of introduce a no you mentioned some things like okay PRI you think privacy is important you think that there will be like you know kind of like different chains or different environments with different trust assumptions that you want to have this unified API and the intents now I I think these are more like you're not really a description of like what is a noral maybe more some things on like views you have about how you know how what is important and what should something look like but then is like is a Noma is it like a chain uh and that also a framework for developing

blockchains and or like how would you yeah it it's an interesting question what is a Nora what is anoma anoma is probably the single most sort of modular and composable stack you can have I mean you can use anoma to build your own blockchain I mean I'd be very happy for the Swiss government at some point adops AA to like run their own Sovereign Switzerland chain to issue uh the digital CHF um you can also anoma is also you can deploy aoma the operating system directly to ethereum so Ana can run on ethereum um and then sort of like now you have all these instances and there may also be a global anoma chain right there's going to be most

likely a global anoma chain um which is separate from the protocols like it's not directly tied to each other like there's aoma the protocol specification and then AA Cosmos SDK and the cosmos Hub kind of similar actually I was thinking about this earlier today as well it's like and I think honestly Cosmos is actually a good example of like the model really worked like of like this General framework to build many different things the other thing that also is aoma is the fact that all these systems have a common P2P stack um so like if you have anoma on ethereum and you have Global anoma as a user you interact with the Unified P2P step like you in code you specify like in your application in your

intent you specify whether you would like to be settled on global ethereum or Global anoma this is not like you have to modify to like point to a different RPC endpoint um there's just one unified P2P stack um there's not many separate P basically like okay I'm somebody developing an application and then you know I sort of like create transaction and and then that's sort of unified regardless of where it goes I mean because then in yeah yes you as a developer as a user effectively get a unified API here where you describe in code rather than sort of like in physical infrastructure where you where

you want your state to live right and I think so the important because the important thing is you need to figure out as a user as a developer where do you want your state to live I mean this is actually this the hard question state is fundamentally the hard question systems it is not about sort of like specific execution environments or ZK proves it's like who controls which part of State um and so with intents you can specify like I would like the state to live on ethereum I would like to use ethereum for example as my ordering machine so in that case the ordering is done um by the ethereum validators or you say you know I would like my ordering of my intense transactions to be done by like Brian and I would like my state to then be settled to ethereum

so you get all this flexibility along the stack without having to all the time like cherry pick like in like monkey patch your own components together um like an Nora is a lot of things because it tries to sort of make application development and usage of these systems and Order of magnet easier I mean I know I was saying this in the beginning here on the Innovation part right like I think everyone else is like it sounds much more confusing I mean like if if you go to a right if you go to someone who's like hey I just want to build some kind of decentralized app right and be like oh I can build it on like salana easy to understand right even I going to build my own Cosmos chain

pretty easy you know maybe slightly more hard but still pretty easy to understand but now this kind of thing of I can you know short it up have some part here there execution I mean I I just be confused let me say you can I'm explaining the complex path you can just have the simple path if you just want to deploy your application to ethereum using anoma and get all the Privacy guarantees for example and the intent like generalized intents you can just do this deploy the like you write an application in Dux you click deploy to ethereum it's deployed to ethereum now you have decentralized application on ethereum so so okay so but decentralized application on ethereum what does that

mean I mean because the transaction don't happen on ethereum I presume so these are like normal ethereum transactions then this looks much more like a plasma construction where specifically how this works is you have a settlement contract on ethereum you have the anoma resource machine implementation on ethereum and then you have users that want to send intents they send those intents for example you have a simple aut Book Exchange uh with privacy guarantees which is something that you can't currently build in the existing system users send these intents to the normal P2P stack solvers pick them up solvers compose them together if there's an overlap then this transaction gets settled to ethereum that's sort of the

simple case here um where sort of yeah this is actually very important to understand because people keep asking you this all the time there's no specific anoma chain that you must send your thing to like everyone else is presenting these like abstractive Frameworks that all effect essentially boil down to let like for example the chain abstraction folks are kind of like this it's like oh let's just build this yet another chain to like solve our all our abstraction problems and then users only need to interact with one chain that then orders and sequences everything and then s of we reach out from there I know was taking the very different approach on like users like there's no noal change users can directly use the operating

system to wherever they want to use it um so in the case of ethereum this be really just an ethereum contract um some state that you deployed to the noral resource machine on ethereum that state now lives on ethereum you send your transactions on P2P stock um and then those get settled to ethereum and so you guys like I presume one of your areas or one of your goals is to get people to build decentralized applications on you know dioma stack yes broadly speaking um build against theal resource machine this is how it described built against the operating system um honestly where a

user specifically wants to run the operating system um that is going to be up to them but I mean I'm not a developer right I'm not the M I'm not quite your target audience but you know I've sort of been in crypto for a while as a as a someone who you know can try to put myself into the shoes of someone wanting to build some some decentralized application I'm I'm confused because when you say build against the anoma resource machine I'm I have like no idea what that means or why somebody would want to do it maybe to make it very simple imagine you build an application against theal resource machine and then you what does that mean uh it's I mean you build against when you build an

application against the evm right you build against a specific instruction set against a specific State model um again solidity or Viper right like there are many things that Target right so like think of it you build against some system calls like you built an application um and then at runtime you decide well today I like the ethereum folks better so you you deploy to ethereum and tomorrow you decide Well turns out they didn't like the thing I had and then you just deploy it to salana and you don't have to rewrite your application this is sort of like the fundamental point or you deploy this to your local community chain if that ever get set up and you

don't have to rewrite your application so as a developer it's honestly just like a lot easier because it's kind of like I guess in the past people argued well we should all be building against Intel CPUs and then Windows came along and people started building against windows and all of a sudden developers realize holy crap it's way easier to build against Windows because now I can run my application wherever Windows runs okay but I so I I get that that's in it I I get that there's some value in that uh but that seems to be something that's actually pretty well covered by the evm no because I mean in the end we have now seen right you have like evm ethereum you have evm rollups you have Cosmo evm on Cosmos evm on Avalanche EVMS

everywhere right so like that kind of thing of like oh I build my application in solidity and you know I have a lot of benefits because whatever it's like very popular and I can deploy it somewhere else uh cuz if you guys building like a completely new stack then well you actually I mean I get that maybe it is a stack that yeah in principle it can be used in many different places so if it gets adoption then maybe you would have a similar kind of benefit that people have today in B in building on top of solidity which we really shouldn't underestimate anoma has native generalized intense which none no existing system right now has or has any

clue how to get um and it has uh why is that valuable because fundamentally like your application if you build them directly against the evm or the svm for example I mean those applications fundamentally rely on transactions so you need to build a bunch of extra moving pieces in order to actually model the domain that you that your users are going to have because most users don't have transactions anymore they have like I would like to trade a for B and I actually don't care against who like this is not a transaction you can build uh I mean like you have sort of the Poor Man's version of this which is an amm but amm only works for assets it doesn't work for um nfts for example so like just you want generalized intents I think as a long-term goal here and even

a short-term goal um because so generalized intense like the the the so I get I mean right so if if we talk about intense right so I I guess the simple example of intent would be something like like a limit order you know uh where I'm like hey I am willing to you know sell whatever e for one e for usdc and you know give me the best price and I'm pay willing up to pay up to this something like that and then I so in the amm case it's pretty clear but like so the argument is here that it makes it easier for an

application developer to allow people to sort of you know more more Express uh a desire about the end State they want to get to as opposed to you know a specific transaction yes and that that's valuable for or important for a lot of use cases and and so you for example get like nice benefits such as you get compos composable liquidity uh currently you have to make specific choices on do you interact with this amm or that amm I mean there's like some aggregation that can happen as well but gen with generalized intents you can have the thing like well I'd like to sell like one nft again like two green crypto kitties against some eth and maybe there's no direct match because

the person that sort of wants to buy the two green green crypto kitties only wants to take usdc right and so you can do these multi-party compos like multi inent composing uh I think that's one very huge benefit the other benefit is as a user you can also say things like I would like to trade a for B and actually don't care whether it's settle on optimism arbitrum or ethereum just give me whatever is quickest or fastest uh this is something that you just can't express right now um this is sort of uh where the heterogeneous trust component or heterogeneous trust model component com it um you can really think of this as defragmenting a lot of the state but even just in a single sort of like State model in like a single chain

world we can compose like intense can just compose across every like however many cases you want to have um which means for example even for like simple things like limit orders you aren't limited to settle them against an amm you can say well I'd like to do a for B and maybe it's an amm or maybe it's Brian or maybe it's only these five people on the white list or maybe it's not anyone on this black list or it's just 50 people um that I've never met and I never coordinate with right like you have this full flexibility which is just going to give you deeper liquidity if I'm honest um because intense can match against all of it and I think this is sort of the fundamental thing where it's like intents are clearly the next

level abstraction because most users don't actually know which counterparty they want to interact with like like when we came up with the sort of transaction Centric model in the Bitcoin world was always well I'll go to a store and I'll buy some milk and then I'll send some Bitcoin to the store um but it turns out that the reality of the applications we end up building is mostly around like um like internet based coordination it's it's like I have a for B who want who wants to do the other side of the thing and I don't really want to have to figure out how to do manual counterpart Discovery right and I think this is this is why you also see that everyone is starting to think and move towards intense and like this

was actually very validating because like when we started Nora in the end of uh beginning of 2021 people thought we're nuts like we kept talking about these intents and like why intents were going to matter and now everyone is like oh we should like start thinking about intents and like most of the defi applications are starting to like think on how to move towards intents and I mean everyone is starting to like move to like application specific intents um but anoma is the only generalized intense framework out there where just get generalized intense and like you don't have to build the stack yourself anymore you don't have to hand roll a bunch of infra you can just go here intense let me build my application and I get like all this like very annoying networking code to like do counterpart Discovery for free

right right so basic I mean I kind of get that argument where you say like okay there are like applications right so basically def applications or similar types of application I mean probably all Defi and trading related realistically where you know this is relevant and and I guess often is this also often around trying to minimize Me Maybe This is the other huge component of intense it's and by the way this is not just defi I can give you an example in a sec on like where this where you have intense is a non defi example but

so we I think three years ago or four years ago made a mistake where we when like instead of trying to actually come up with a technical solution to this Rising problem of me we sort of like engineered it and called it a feature not a bug um int at the Bas layer mostly solve this because all of a sudden you can say well I have the specific State transition and like you have to sign over like I'm willing to trade one e against I don't know uh 2,000 usdc um and this can be ordered in whatever sort of like it can be included in a block in whatever order you want because you signed over a specific thing like one of the big problems with transactions is

that transactions um don't specify State outcomes they just specify like compute steps so you end up like you have some starting State then you apply some Rand some like compute and then you get into some resulting State outcomes well now depending on how you inter leave these comput computational traces you get to different state outcomes and intense mostly solve this because in intense you just specify specific State outcomes and it doesn't matter how you interl them um and the other interesting example of an intent Centric system is actually two one is NOS is safe um most people don't realize this but like if you have a partial multis like we one out of two M like two out of two multis sake and we

using no save what actually happens is I create my paral signature it gets sent to the central server um you then create your partial signature pull my partial signature from the central server then submit both together I mean this is a prototypical example of an intent Centric system um where right now we're relying on very simplied infrastructure in a noral with generalized intense you don't have to rely on the centralized servers anymore the other really good example is rollups um I mean when you think of what a rollup does it's you have a user that has an individual State transition and then many users and then the rollup does some Compu to collapse all these things together well honestly that's just the number of intents that you collapse into

one to settle then as a state transition function on some underlying base layer um so like for example with AA you just get rollups of fre to extent you don't have to build all your own components for your own rollups it just happens to fall out of this generalized infrastructure that intends arejust a better abstraction to also represent things like rollups and maybe then the last thing because people really forget about this when they think about privacy is one of the big things well everyone wants privacy preserving systems and sort of my fundamental thesis is or like and this is just true that like for privacy preserving system to work you intense and why he said well privacy preserving systems necess push data to Edge devices right like now your state

lives on your phone rather than into in the big database in the Middle where everyone can see it and with intents you can make statements and sort of updates over your local state send them to someone else and then have sort of the other person um or like have many of those intents flow into the center of the network and then you can have solvers that Aggregate and sort of compute over this um whereas right now we just all compute over this like global state in a privacy preserving world you're going to need intense because a state just lives on edge devices at that point and you need to be able to make statements over like local state that doesn't live in the middle right you're not trying to replace you know evbm or svm or

something like that so basically it means I as a so let's say I'm building some application on salana and I'm using the svm then I would use sort of like aoma as almost this like layer in between um this really depends on where you are in your stack um I mean if you already have an existing application running on the evm for example on ethereum um you may just want to move Tiny parts of your state of your application to a normal that just means you rebuild this against your normal resource machine um but the important thing is you don't have to move all your stated ones like it I think one of of

the reasons that I was always very skeptical on sort of just yet another L1 or yet another L2 was always like you had to force all this valuable state to move to this new L2 or this new L1 right like you had this like massive bootstrapping problem and so with a no more of the architecture the operating system comes to where the valuable State already lives and so then over time as you might want to migrate more and more of your application to an NOA you can do this over time but users don't have to actually move their assets from salana from ethereum to yet another L1 they can just move within the system into sort of the normal operating system operating theal protocol adapter on salana on ethereum now you mentioned you guys are

creating another L1 what does the anoma chain do very fundamentally I mean anoma the L1 is really designed as a it's a global consensus mechanism but they can also be deployed into local instances so you want to have someone n native consensus effectively that can really leverage the operating system to its fullest um like maybe one good analogy you can think of is it's a hyper optimized CPU implementation for a normal operating system um generally speaking most functionality of the operating system should be available on most other virtual machines um on the anoma on the anoma chain is just going to be more optimized uh the other thing

is there is a so it's the obvious place sorry I I totally did not understand this at all like so basically a noral L1 would be like a chain that I like me I as an application developer if I want to build like an app I can now say hey I go to salana or I create a cosmos chain or I build on this a normal one is that what uh yes uh in in the end it's going to come down to whether users like which chain users want to like have their state Li I I think currently we live in this like very users do not care like I mean users like you ask any user the question of like where do you want

your state to live on they will just be confused yes but eventually users will need to care for simple latency reasons I mean like one of the very fundamental things it's like anoral will always be faster like local anoral will always be FAS than Solana um because it's like it's just like Solana is limited by speed of light and like it has to run like two consensus rounds on over the global fiber Network um if the two of us want to trade and we're in the same room we should do this on a local system um there's just like no way around this um like and the local system will always just be faster right um I agree that right now users may not fundamentally um care as much but I

think it's also mostly because our in like our industry has kind of designed a bunch of infrastructure that's very Target towards Casino use cases uh whether this is like going to survive long term is very questionable to me um and for example I mean like the other interesting thing to consider here is um I I think if you'd ask people I don't know four years ago whether multi-chain was going to be a thing everyone would have said no or like people were at least very skeptical about this um it's very clear that the multi- chain World played out um between like all the L2 chains as well as all the L1 chains I mean the world is clearly going to be

multichain um so users clearly have preferences on which chain they're on and like where their state lives users care I I don't know about that conclusion I mean you could I think it's like primarily the application developers know who make that those decisions I mean obviously users care about things like I want like faster transactions right or I want cheaper fees and then of course that may mean okay they now like uh arbitr more than Sal than the e one because it's cheaper but like I mean no one's going to be oh i' rather use I mean very very few people are going to

be like oh i' rather use arbitrum than I think optimism like who who does does that I don't know I mean I certainly do um because I because fundamentally affect the security model and your latency model I mean this is just like something that you shouldn't underestimate and I am I I think if users really like long-term don't care honestly the best answer to like how to build a hyper optimized system is like we should do definity and just live in a bunch of like centralized data centers because users don't care where the state lives right and so like I mean this is I if users don't care where the state lives I think it's a

very strong argument that users don't care about decentralization and I think with Ana we've always taken the um approach that decentralization actually matters because otherwise we're just building very slow expensive databases here and yeah if if decentralization doesn't matter in the end I have questions on like what our industry has been doing in the last couple of years but my point to this is like I think decentralization really matters because users care about this privacy their security model why does centralization matter as a whole why does decentralization matter yeah I I I think this comes really down to if

decentralization doesn't matter we spent a cple like 10 years building probably the single slowest database implementations that for some reason keep like multiplying all the State across hundreds and thousands of nodes across the globe for no particular reason like if decentralization doesn't matter we should just all be running on a single server run by I know I guess like let's say like what what are some things that to me feel like important right so one is that people anywhere in the world can just use these blockchain networks right that's like Open Access I think that's like and then some kind of censorship

resistance you know people can like transact in whatever way they want and the transaction doesn't get censored and thenation you don't have any of those properties maybe maybe not right but still it's not not an end in of itself it's like it means to an end yes I agree with that uh sorry I mean I I think we want sensor resistance we want GL I mean we want World War I resilience to some extent like we want the ability to have many separate systems that can fail independently of each other uh we want to have privacy guarantees at these base layers and I think s of decentralization is an easy way to describe all of these things because if we don't have decentralization we're not going to have any of these and for example actually

this is an interesting point on like what do we want from these systems like what I personally think is actually very important feature of them is like on the eve of World War III kind of thing um Global fiber will go down and so like you can't rely on these Global consensus systems to up and so like an's also designed around this failure case and like if you don't have Global connectivity anymore you're not going to run Bitcoin or ethereum or salana that's going to hold almost immediately um and so you want to have infrastructure that people can use locally to coordinate locally and this is really like what I think of as World War I resilience of actual decentralization it's not about like having a single global decentralized system it's about having

many systems independently of each other that sort of like when the happy path exists can coordinate and like interoperate with each other but when the sort of unhappy path comes to be um the local infrastructure still works um and I I always use the example of Switzerland like the Swiss Financial system will collapse immediately as soon as like North Atlantic fiber go goes down like that that none of these systems are set up in a way in which like it can handle like Global Network outages and a noral was always designed as like as almost like a drop in replacement for local coordination INF structure so that there's a coordination substrate that people can run locally then as um sort of connectivity recovers again you can

coordinate with people further away but then like for example the ENA L1 is going to be proof for stake chain no with like something like tendent like consensus or something similar it's hetrogeneous paxos plus hetrogeneous now um I mean so realistically speaking we are all children of tenament at this point um like etherium consensus po consensus um even salana looks a lot like pbft Apu definitely pbft so we're all descendants of tenament at this point but there some kind of because that again will be a system right where

you're going to have validator across the world there going to be token Stak with the validators uh and they are communicating with each other right they're sending blocks around they're saying okay this block is valid this block is fine so that system if you now have okay no more fiber because World War II any Global consensus system is going to have tremendous problems um in sort of a globally Global World of three scenario including Bitcoin this is just going to be I think like I think people really always Bitcoin with like starlink and stuff should probably be pretty pretty okay you know the sadell lights are the first things to go um like there's no you mean because they're shut down or

how how are they or because bandwidth is going to be heavily uh restricted to military use cases uh I mean like I I just don't see a world in which like we enter Global a bunch of centralized global conflict and we go like ah but the mean coins must keep going uh Glo on global consensus um like I mean I hold a pessimistic view hopefully I'm wrong I have to say but I mean actually so Bitcoin if slow block times may actually be helpful here because you have very SL for sure slow blown definitely very little bandwith requirements for Global consensus uh but like something iin be fine Bitcoin may

be fine um if I had my vote for Bitcoin we should slow down blocks like an hour um then we definitely be fine I think I mean it probably it could May well have some kind of issues right like let's say Bitcoin would be because some of the hash ratees cut off and now all of a sudden basically the hash rate like temporarily goes from like you know 100% to 20% and now block time goes up to like an hour two hours every block and and then slowly gets Longline again and then we may have the problem that like so if Global stabilization time is ever more than 10 minutes Bitcoin just never convert this this is sort of just a like the fundamental liess versus safety trade-off that most of these systems

have made like ten made the other TRS right tenement will stop will Hal block production but for example if it takes on average 11 minutes to gossip a Bitcoin block around the the globe um there will always just be multiple chains that convert from each other uh because no one sees sort of like their next tip prior to them having mind their own chain no I don't think that's true this it's a fundamental property of distributed systems I mean this is like this is why teneran was so controversial at the time because teneran took the opposite approach which is tenament decided to Halt rather than um sort of like fck I can find I have talk about this from like 2017 I think but anyway it seems a bit it's a little different to this is very much out there we've kind

of like lost the track here but although important to think about yeah so so I mean like my entire thing is like outside of like specific infrastructure like we should be thinking on how to design like we should be designing protocols that can actually be resilient as in like and like you want to think about the worst case scenario and so you want to have systems that um a are hard to capture sort of politically and B that can interoperate with each other quite easily so that we don't have sort of like these because even a single decentralized network is still very centralized it's a single failure Point i' much rather have like a thousand decentralized systems but it's super easy for users to switch between any 500 of them um because that means that no

individual system gets a tremendous amount of power and like I nor almost fundamentally designed around this go I mean what one of the things I do really like about an Nora and and you know I think I remember having some maybe some podcast some discussions in last years you know I was like asked about like okay how do we feel about crypto what what are some things that you know concern me and probably the biggest thing is the Privacy thing right where like in the beginning we were always like oh you know there was even an assumption right in Bitcoin of hey it's private right because you know you have a different now of course Very quickly it was like yeah not that private actually but then with time I think what we've had is of course you

know services like genalysis you know where they really good at De anonymizing transaction linking them together and then I think the other thing we've had is that it changes that all obviously Regulators they don't seem to like privacy because they want to control and they want to have transparent data and so the Privacy coins that they that do exist and the Privacy PS that do exist seem to have a hard time getting listed on exchanges and of course if you don't get listed on exchanges no trading no money it's very hard to go anywhere so I do really appreciate that you guys have

always been uh kind of strong proponents of privacy and of the importance of it but what does that look like you are you also like you worried about like for example Chang this things for like anoma and the super nice thing about so anoma is not a privacy coin or privacy chain it just happens to have the facilities for developers to build um privacy preserving applications and interesting enough it's not even developers necessarily deciding whether something is privacy preserving right like on ethereum or on salana you have to make this choice on like do I write it like is my entire application privacy preserving or not in Ana it's much more of a user Choice it's like does user a want to interact with the system with

this application privately or not it is not a system level Choice um a Nora can be fully used as a fully transparent system if no one ever cares about this they don't have to worry about it um but if individual users care they can make a choice on like well instead of attaching a PL Tech signature I attach a Zer knowledge proof um and I I think sort of like the industry has largely failed at making this like relatively nuanced thing understandable to the outside world but like to me eth is a privacy coin I mean like there is pools like I mean there is like eth ether is clearly privacy so is usdc by the way like

anything because any like permissionless asset I can put into a contract on ethereum that like provides me strong privacy guarantees like this like notion of privacy coins is really like a Bitcoin error thing where like asset were tied to fundamental State machines and like this distinction is like I mean we can pretend it exists it just doesn't exist in reality um because these assets can flow across many different state machines they can like flow across Bridges to other systems that have different properties that they provide over these assets um and so in anoma it's really like it's not a system level choice so anoma is not a privacy chain anoma just happens to have the right Primitives to allow developers to build useful privacy preserving applications

that end users can then use and the nice thing is you can even have like an intent that's privacy preserving and an intent that's transparent and both of them can be matched together like you you aren't splitting your liquidity or you you aren't splitting your state across private versus non-private which I think is actually but but let's say let's say there's like something like a Unis swap or something like that and now I want to trade with this uh system and I have you know let's say I have e and I want uscc then I can NOA allows me to do that in a private way um if you buil an app I mean that many caveat SOA is a sort of very fundamental Bas layer like if someone

Builds an application that allows you to do this yes uh with a one caveat Al so it is a concern of the application developer that the person has to worry about that so it is a concern of like privacy comes with many nuances very quickly which is like if you want to trade a for B you must tell someone about your desire to trade a for B uh this is just always going to be true uh you must reveal at least your state changes to someone uh now with a noral you can sign an intent that says I'd like like that just like authorizes a for B privately and you only reveal the fact that you're willing to do a forb to one specific solver um this is generally true for

like everything and like you can structure and you can't do better than this I mean this is sort of a fundamental limitation even with fhe you aren't going to go you aren't going to do better than this you could imagine that I I have one e and I can basically say hey I can prove one e is willing to trade for you know uscc at this price and someone can get that you know that intent without knowing whose e it is yes this is exactly sort of the simple case of AA of like how you like as a user author is a private intent um but even there I mean you leak some data so if you want to go like you don't even want to leak that

like there's an intent to trade a for B you'd have to like figure out only to which specific counterparties you want to reveal your desire to trade a for B and the other thing is I think we always think of as like Regulators don't like privacy but the other like and I think it's because like Bitcoin startus is like counter government movement um like I much more concerned on the flip side which is like I want privacy for National Defense um like I like Switzerland but I also have no illusions that the Swiss Financial system is going to like be resilient against the like dedicated nation state attack and like so as a result we currently creating

these like massive honey Poots um and like I am worried on like how do I do local like how do we build infrastructure that allows us to do like National Defense Community defense where individual communities can actually run this infrastructure structure to be resilient against hostile actors and like this is much more the frame from which I'm thinking about privacy guarantees it's not like I'm trying to hide something it's more like I'm really worried about North Korea like getting access to all my financial data um or like this all the swis financial data and so like I want to build good infrastructure so the Swiss government can kind of run with it um yeah I don't I think the cryptospace is like doing itself a huge disservice here on like and how they rephrase a little bit like

our priv desires of privacy um because it's like I trust my local community I like my local community uh I'm actually really fine with it um but and like I'm worried about how do we build systems that can help defend my local community um because like I think the fastest way to get ethereum killed tomorrow is we move over the US Financial system into ethereum and then like tomorrow the NSA will wake up and go that's a terrible idea North Korea is data mining the out of off financial information and then we're done here um right like this is sort of like a very practic concern which is yeah I don't know this is like my it's privacy for National Defense I think we're not going to get away

especially in this multipolar world order which we going to go into right now um you need to have resilient systems as individual entities in order for you to prosper Sur life long term I think so you guys um so you know we've talked about Norma so far now there is actually a chain that you guys are launching or that is being launched uh which is called namada which uh so can you can you share like what is a namada and what's the relationship between AA and namada yeah so you can really think of namada to be the crazy people in the anoma community

and the anoma ecosystem that want to try privacy preserving guarantees really quickly in a simple fashion that's NADA and so NADA is a sovereign L1 um or I guess we could frame it as an L2 I mean like the distinction between what is an L1 and what is an L2 is kind of it's very irrelevant and mostly mtic at this point there's no technical reasonable technical distinction at like a distributed systems level for this um but so NADA is just a subset of the anoma community of people that really deeply care about private guarantees and that like want try this out and so what does is um it provides a multi acid Sher pool or multi-asset shielded set um so you can move any asset into it um

including nfts um and you get uniform privacy guarantees uh for all of these assets um and this is generally true this is generally also true this not just assets it's generally data um like the fact that we ascribe meaning to these bits like that we ascribed Financial meaning to like these bits floating around in like some Global State on ethereum is really arbitrary I mean in the end it's just data messages so withar you just get very good data protection guarantees for whatever data you want to have I mean your data could represent Financial assets represent messages you pick your choice kind of thing so so one I mean for example one one place where for example like

let's say me personally or you I mean I think a lot of users will probably try to get some privacy on chain is let's say you have like you know some ethereum wallets or some e ethereum accounts now you want to buy I don't know an nft somewhere and then you want to you don't want to have that in like I don't know your main wallet that's like linked with all your I don't know stable coins and other you know me whatever you have in there and then like I mean I guess the main way people do this today uh is that basically are going to use a centralized exchange right they're going to say hey I'm going to create a new e address and then I send there uh

you know maybe e or stable coin or something and then I buy uh I buy asset from there now of course in that case you still have maybe binance or Kraken or someone who will be able to connect these different addresses but it's it's like for example one of the use cases now for namada that like I could do something like that and like let's say move Eve in there and then move Eve out of there to like a new wallet and now somebody's not going to be able to link those two uh wallets I think that's a very possible use case um so certainly right now like coinbase and Ken and binance are the single largest mixers in the world um I mean this is just like practically true at the moment

and we can talk I mean and the problem the big problem is like I think we really underestimate how useful like for example like some of the um sort of like KC policy that binance does are because especially in the age of generative AI all of these things are just going to be toast um like I think we really have to come up with a different model here anyway but like generally speaking they're the single largest mixes in the world um and yes most people use it like this I did this earlier today um I think this is one option um like something that the N Community could pursue is sort of I mean this is like what I would like to use it for honest

I'm like I would like to like buy this nft I don't want to have to link all my um sort of like activity across all these chains uh I think the other thing is also around I would like to participate in government votes but on other systems but without leaking all my data and so like with M you can also do something called chilled actions which just gives you the ability to to sort of remain shielded while also executing something for example osmosis or participating governance vote um so like it just gives you this ability to not only for your trading but also for like just your general other data to actually remain shielded at all times um yeah I think honestly this is sort of

like the nicest thing for Namar um at the moment I I think we really want to see like where the community ends like I'm very curious on like where the Community ends up taking it because like I to this extent like the community is launching the thing um I have no idea that things happening on the Forum it may come up come online at some point in next couple of weeks from a forum post it seems um so I'd really like to see where s of uh they're going to take it the thing is I think we really haven't tried this in practice a lot yet um on how these systems can actually be utilized and yeah I am very excited for it what else do you think we should

cover I mean we could talk about the collapse of the banking system uh I find this quite curious let's do it let's do it that sounds fun so basic thesis here um which is so every year we add more regulatory pressure to Banks right and so every year the marginal cost of an extra customer of existing customers becomes higher and at some point and like these regulatory pressures generally never go away right like the it just keeps being added and so like my bold case for crypto is that sort of like banks will start off banking normal people very soon like if you ever if you do like three transfers about 15K a year your bank is going to ask questions at least in Germany um and so like at this

point well if you do three transfers above 15K so I mean I have this very specific use case someone tried to send me money from Germany to Switzerland apparently the high-risk jurisdiction this caused an entire thing where uh there was an entire day involved three day three people looking compliance because like it's an unusual amount it's an unusual country and so like my entire sort of my basic thesis is like these pressure points on banks keep going up and Banks don't like them because it increases their cost of compliance but it means that large parts of their customer be are just going to become unprofitable um and so these people have nowhere else to go where do they go well to this alternative Financial system and

so I think honestly banking regulation to some extent is like the bull case for crypto because every new banking regulation just drives more customers to use DC no I mean I think it's it's obviously the case already right like within crypto let's say if you take the example of making investments in other projects right like you make an angel investment somewhere or you know course one we invest in something I mean all of these payments are stable coins right and just like nobody would use want to use a bank wire for it cuz it's just like so inferior and if you try to do it then you have some person calling you up and they want to like you know get the documentation and it's a bunch of Hassle

and takes longer and it's more expensive and it's just so I I think that is like very very clear that there's a lot of a lot of Advantage here for crypto yeah and I I think this will push a surprising amount of people into crypto very quickly actually I mean like in the West I think we have less the pressure points but especially if we live like in like middling developed countries these pressure points are just going to keep increasing for you um the other thing is I think also like Neo banks are toast um due to generative AI like I think like the first lot like I think cust self custody scourage become inevitable because at some point someone is going to generate

100,000 uh like realistic looking gen AI videos to like recover revolute account access and a bunch of accounts will be drained and like I I I don't see anyone proposing realistic Solutions outside of self- custody where you must own your own keys that you aren't than train to give to scammers because like my passport data is clearly going to be in some leak somewhere like and it's not going to be difficult to generate like realistic looking videos um to like r kyc me with banks or exchanges and definitely not in 5 years from now and the same is going to be true for like 90% of the listeners of ENT I think like

it's an actual risk we should be thinking about um it is I I think very underappreciated and I think these two things are the probably the single largest driver in terms of like why what is crypto's use case um right now cool so uh timeline I think you mentioned namada is you know probably sometime soon and then imminent I think imminent um last check the Forum it seems that the Genesis transaction like preg genesis transactions I think they were supposed to they're going to close end of next week or something like this um so so by the time this comes out May

already be live no no no and then like a couple of weeks I think the Val want to do a lot of testing so probably shortly around the time this goes out yeah and then we have anoma which is like sometime next year probably no this is um first private devet um coming this year uh so we'll start the builders program this year so keep a lookout for that and then targeting public chest starting early next year and then mean it towards sometime middle of next year yeah it it's super exciting on the anoral front it it's going to be I mean like it's the first time where like we're trying to propose something

radically new um and it's going to be cool and it's going to allow to do new things that we couldn't do before and like I remember like whenit when ethereum started becoming a thing and I could do new things that I couldn't do on bitcoin and they became easier and I think we're going to see a similar moment um so I'm pretty bullish I'm I'm very excited for that I would love to you know try some new things and uh see see some new some new types of use cases and keep it abilities enabled so super excited to see that thanks so much Adrian thank you very much