Eli Ben-Sasson: Starknet - zk-STARKs and Cairo 1.0 upgrade #502

Transcript

welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution I'm Frederica ants and today I'm speaking with Ellie Benson who is the co-founder and president of stockware the company building stock net Ellie thank you so much for coming on again um I looked into our archives prior to this and you've been on twice before um once over seven years ago and we talked about zero knowledge proofs kind of introducing them to like a wider audience and once again three and a half years ago and to talk about stockware so it seems like three and a half years is our Cadence here yeah let's keep it up see you in three

and a half as well so in a nutshell because we actually covered this twice already um you are an academic computer scientist and web3 founder you were a professor at the technion in Haifa when you became a co-founder at zcash in like 2015 or so and then you found it stock where um at the end of 2017 with um three other co-founders before we kind of dive into the recent upgrades that stockware and stock net have seen um I find it interesting that you went from a privacy use case um to a scalability use case I mean all

using the same technology but maybe tell us about the shift in your thinking of why you felt it was prudent to kind of move from the Privacy to the scalability aspect you know the first thing that jumps to mind to me is that I think the magic of scalability uh via proofs is much bigger and more mysterious and more mind-boggling to me than the magic of privacy you know not that the zero knowledge aspect is not extremely interesting and surprising but the fact that a very weak computer can assert the Integrity of a much

larger computation in a way that seems to contradict you know mathematical theorems from the 1930s that Alan Turing already proved about like the inability to really understand computation and and yet you have this magical ability to put in check a computer that always fascinated in me more but then from a business point of view um I think that just scalability is a much better business it's also much greater and much more needed challenge in the world of blockchains more so than privacy which will come but like later down the road yeah I mean as you said zero knowledge

proofs are This Magnificent ecosystem that's kind of flourished over the last say 10 15 years it's crazy how much has happened I remember exactly when someone told me about zero knowledge proofs for the first time and I have a fairly mathematical background so I I don't think I'm easily you but basically my immediate intuition was this is not possible it's not possible that this exists um so yeah it is extremely magical six so there are a whole number of DK roll ups now for ethereum right so basically there's you guys

um there's uh the zkevm there's Aztec who were on two weeks ago um there's CK sync Loop ring scroll um linear is coming out later this year do you have in your mind do you have a taxonomy that you use in your head how to kind of classify them how to distinguish them so along which Dimensions do these various ZK Roll-Ups actually differ oh yeah I have a few taxonomies um okay the the biggest distinction is uh which ones are about um scalability so just making computation more efficient and which ones are about privacy and there it looks uh that's the biggest distinction

so Aztec which is an amazing team uh is mostly about privacy or you know privacy with scalability but definitely privacy is a very major component of their offering and I think all of the others you mentioned are more about scalability including Stark net so that's the biggest uh you know uh difference the second um line According to which uh I would differentiate them is um which core technology do they use for their proofs um and they're what it used to be the when we last spoke it probably looked like this everyone was using graph 16

snarks uh based on the elliptic curve cryptography with trusted setup and very short proofs and only start where I was doing this very weird kind of uh you know more future proof but uh less well understood the technology called Starks today the the tables have turned pretty much all of the scalability projects that you mentioned are either already working on top of starks I mean Starks our technology um the one that we are also using Stark net and and which we you know proudly uh invented almost all of the core components so all of the polygon teams which are all very good teams uh you know Hermes Maiden polygon zero uh

they're all using uh Starks with a t ZK sync team I think have already said that they'll move at some point um risk zero is using Starks and there are a few others that are also out there warming their engines and um those using snarks there are I think uh fewer of them there's of course z cash there's uh of course Aztec and and a few others so that's the second dichotomy like are you using elliptic curve-based cryptography with trusted setups or are you using uh things that are transparent and can work over any field and things like that and the third dichotomy is a

long uh which computational model are you using and there a lot of these teams are ZK EVMS which means that they are trying to prove uh solidity or evm by code and we're of the smaller camp but also has a few constituents we invented our own language called Cairo that we're very proud of there are a few authors that are going down this route of uh creating new languages that are more catered towards that I think Maiden is another one risk zero is another one so that's the third big line I want to talk about the languages in just a bit

um but maybe let's talk about um the shift the general shift from snacks to stocks so if I recall correctly um snacks are more easier to to prove and more difficult to verify is that correct or am I misremembering this yeah no no so snarks have two advantages one is that the length of a single proof is shorter it's around let's say 200 bytes or less than a kilobyte um that's one advantage the second Advantage is for very particular settings they have a subsidy on ethereum in the form of a pre-compile which costs

only around 300 000 gas but it's for a very particular setting you know very specific curve but everything aside from that is much more in favor of Stark's Stark proofers are Faster by you know several orders of magnitude for the same payload they have leaner cryptographic assumptions which is better that means this makes them more future proof they're post Quantum secure they require no trusted setup no toxic waste and there are a number of other uh things you can know you can instantiate them over any field and so on and so forth so yeah most of the good things lie or the better things lie with Starks but there are there is one mathematical property that's better with snarks it's the

language of a single proof and the one subsidy that in certain cases helps okay so from the point of view of someone who's kind of been in the blockchain ecosystem for a long time but not in this particular zkap sub bubble it seems like the zkp ecosystem has absolutely exploded onto the scene right so basically I mean it's usually the case that kind of things happen slowly for us and then they happen all at once but is this just kind of what it looks like from the outside or as you um you know being someone who's been inside of this sub bubble um from the get-go um are you surprised how fast everything has advanced

no and yes uh like uh I'm just a ridiculously optimistic kind of person which means that in my view like you know I don't know I or we live in the future it's just the rest of War you know getting here slowly um so it was clear to me that this will happen that um that validity Roll-Ups and the use of cryptographic proofs especially Starks are like really really essential in that you cannot really imagine um blockchains catering to Global demand without

um Starks I think it's this this was the premise for for the founding of starkware we said because we believe blockchains will need to service Global demand and they need to do so without uh heightening the barriers needed for computers who want to serve as validators or just want to follow what's going on the Chain you can't 10x and 100x you know the throughputs of ethereum without them again just making people go out and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on on compute so it doesn't make any sense the only the only way this can scale again without uh harming the the basic assumptions of

what is a blockchain the only way this can scale is is actually through Starks so it was clear to me that this will happen it is of course heartwarming to see how much enthusiasm there is about it you know these days when when we founded the company in 2018 was of course very different but we we never you know no one here at Stark we're like we're very proud that nearly all of the early um you know Founders and employees are still with us and we all had this Faith from the start because we knew this this is going to happen it will just it will become even more dramatic you know over the next five years I have no doubt why the ethereum-based kind of layer 2

CK ecosystem has kind of absolutely flourished um zcash has kind of slandered a bit would you agree to that yes sadly why do you think that is because basically so much of like the ground breaking uh cryptography and kind of like the the paradigms and so on they were all kind of you know put onto the scene by Z cash and they had like this incredible culture and kind of but it seems like it's almost an empty ecosystem now why why do you think this is it's a good question let's see what do I feel comfortable

sharing one thing that is objective is that privacy is very hard to solve not on the technological side uh actually the ZK snarks and the ZK Starks um that's the relatively easy part when it comes to good ux integration with existing you know modes of operation for what users want uh that's a much much much bigger objective Challenge and it's one of the reasons that that we at start where are not doing you know not like going down this sort of you know full privacy route

it's it's it's very very hard to do so I would say that objectively the challenge of privacy uh is there's something about it that is just objectively harder yeah let me let me just give that reason that's fair can you extile on the ux points that you're referring to so what's what makes it difficult to kind of make good user interfaces okay um so let's start with the mere fact that uh okay you know the way that you use ethereum or Bitcoin by itself is is somewhat cumbersome compared to uh the way you would use you know just Mobile

payment apps and in a web 2 world right so there's already like one level of difficulty you probably need to go and buy some Hardware wallet write down a passphrase do that sort of thing okay that's already daunting today the best of my knowledge none of these you know more standard Hardware wallet Solutions supports a shielded transaction okay so like you have to go to yet another level of complexity that even for crypto native persons becomes very hard if you want to generate a zero knowledge proof ons inside one of these Hardware dongles it's it's very challenging and the best of my knowledge

again none of them support it right now if you go to the treasures and you know the ledgers of the world they just don't support that and then if you think about like some of the really cool applications that took off on blockchain Beyond payments right you know uniswap and crypto kitties and the Define composability if you just try thinking about what it means to make them privacy preserving I mean consider uniswap right whenever um someone interacts on you know swap right the size of the pools should change and um so if you even if you put a zero knowledge proof on you know the transaction that did that you're not really getting much privacy so and if you want to compose things then it

becomes even more challenging so so all levels of the ux just become so much more daunting and I haven't even mentioned the regulatory aspects you know tornado cash but even before that the ability of exchanges to comfortably service right on-ramping and on off-ramping of shielded payments is a huge challenge so that's what I mean uh when I say that it's just really really complicated to get the ux good hmm have you looked at the plans for Aztec 3 so basically they've got this entire spiel about um having uh you know private transactions and public transactions and kind of private venues and public venues

and so on it I mean it's all it's not there yet right so basically we kind of have to go by what they're promising us but Have you listened to what they're promising I have a lot of respect for the Aztec team you know for Zach and uh you know the other is I mean Ariel and many of the others there at the technology is surely great but I'll say this already up front the Big Challenge they are going to face the really big challenge is exactly that of ux of making it something that end users can easily work with and uh you know it's an immense challenge I wish them all of the luck surely the

world needs that so I support them and I think it's great but I just want to say this it's a Herculean um amount of effort and it's not about technology it's about user experience something very mundane but extremely extremely important so I don't know how they plan to solve it but that's the challenge I mean everyone thinks user experience is easy right because kind of using an Apple iPhone it just you know it's just so intuitive but actually coming up with the designs obviously is incredibly hard as proven by the fact that not a lot of people can actually do it but even the technology that kind of you know goes behind it and I mean

you said your um incredibly optimistic as to kind of what you can build in timelines and so on um I am the same I think all founders have to be because otherwise you wouldn't start and um and that said Team um they even said that they will have this they that they will deliver this by the end of next year um so uh you know in in blockchain timelines uh yeah this is uh it's crazy I'm also looking forward to it so I think I'm super curious to see how it pans out yeah okay so let's look at Stark net you've got a couple of major upgrades coming soon one is

um the upgrade from Cairo zero to Cairo one so you talked about the fact that kind of you guys have your own um programming language unlike so for instance um DK EDM they just kind of take all the op codes and they kind of transpire them into a ZK version um and you guys you came up with um you know this domain-specific language I wrote um what did you optimize it for the the initial version by the way now all of the code is is the newer version called Cairo 1.0 the initial thing that the what we call well Cairo zero or Chasm Cairo assembly was optimized for was that

um that of creation of the most efficient start proofs for a given computation so really um I mean machines in the end they they understand bits right so like there's this meme real programmers program in binary um but of course the whole point of programming languages is to be sort of uh a way for talented developers to express uh to machines where non-human in a way that's efficient and ergonomic and safe uh computation and so that the machines can can do them now in the context of validity proofs such as Starks uh the important thing is not so much the

machine that will carry out but rather the proving process so you want to run the computation but then also be able to create a stark proof for their computation very efficiently and Cairo is an extremely uh succinct and efficient programming language or virtual machine that at the same time is also cheering complete so as all the it has the ability to uh run General computation but it leads to very efficient proofs and you know side by side the length of a stark proof of a computation created in in Cairo is going to be probably uh you know between 10 to

1000 x more efficient than if you just take the solidity version of that thing and transpile it into any other proof system and prove it so it's this efficiency that was the main thing we wanted to solve now the second phase was to create a better programming language one that is modern ergonomic Pleasant to write in safe um has strong you know safety um properties that allow for good development process uh and that's exactly what tiro one has achieved and the developers who are now flocking to it are actually raving about it

including statements that say that it is a more pleasant language to write your smart contracts and then many of the existing Alternatives and along the way you also get very very high efficiency when it comes to validity proofs when you look at the efficiency do you have any uh you know rules of some as to kind of how how kind of Cairo actually constructs these Brews so kind of if I were to do it manually what are the rules I'd have to follow to kind of also construct efficient proofs yeah so um the main complexity measure to to consider when you're thinking about

truths is how many finite field elements will you need in order to write down your witness that the computation went a certain way and I'll give you um it's really really good to think about things like hashes because a hash is a very uh a very basic crypto primitive that I think almost all of your listeners are familiar with so if you think about one of the existing standard hashes Chateau sha3 Blake that kind you can ask yourself how many field elements will I need to express the fact that I computed one hash correctly and the number is on the order of tens of

thousands to a few hundred of thousands of field elements to when all is said and done and by the way this happens both in the world of starks and those snarks and plonks and uh it's it's really an artifact of of this thing that when these hash functions were created no one thought about they're proving complexity so you have this hash function that will take you many many field elements to prove now in comparison some Stark friendly hashes like Poseidon instead of being like 20 000 or 200 000 field elements per hash they're around 200.

to answer your question the main complexity measure is how many field elements do you need to have in order to argue about a step or a block of your computation and in this respect what is unique about Cairo is that one step of the machine that is Cairo is less than 50 field elements so with every step of the machine you're only paying 50 field elements whereas if you would go to an evm model probably with every step well depending what kind of steps what you'd probably be looking at hundreds to thousands of field elements through some of these operations so that's really the big advantage of Cairo so does it mean that kind of if you compare Cairo to say

ZK evm that basically zkevm can never be as efficient as as a program written in Cairo um well can never is a very uh strong statement but I think for the vast majority of cases if you want a certain functionality um if you take it and write it natively in Cairo the amount of tray cells of these field elements that you will have to pay which then goes on into the proof to get the the proof correct to get the proof generated will be roughly a hundred or a thousand times less than if you take solidity and I just want to say it's not surprising I'll give you

another example where this would work you someone could write a compiler that takes a c code or Java or Python and transpiles it into solidity right no one has done this because it doesn't make much sense but if someone were to do it you'd find out that you know if you write something in solidity or you write it in Python and transpile it you're probably like you know Factor 10 to a thousand X less efficient in the transpiling world yeah that makes a lot of sense um so maybe moving up from the stack so um what does the macro architecture for stocknet look at look like so we all

know it's scenario but give us the details so it's a layer two there are you know Bridges and messaging between layer one of ethereum and Layer Two um there's because uh it's a very modern um framework and because uh well at star core we're very very confident of our understanding of the technology of both blockchains and of starks um we baked into it a number of things that are you know discussed in research circles in ethereum but uh are very very interesting so like one of them is um we have uh basically account

abstraction an EAP 4337 as the standard meaning there is no eoa versus uh you know smart contracts all accounts are uh well you know account abstraction there is you should come and craft your own standard which now leads to uh uh immense opportunities you know we were pleasantly surprised to see that the brilliant Visa Visa research team use the Stark net in order to explore uh what account abstraction can do for end users on Visa on the Visa you know credit card and payment Network um this was not so much because of the Starks it was because it's a very

pleasant uh framework in which you have account abstraction baked into it there's uh we're soon adding a volition which is this data availability Spectrum users and applications can decide whether they want all of their chain recorded on layer 1 which is safer but more expensive where they want it to be recorded on layer 2 via a validium model and they can you know switch between the two and again this will be something very basic that is baked into the system so the architecture is uh you would say a standard Layer Two but with a lot of bells and whistles and modern things uh

you know much more ergonomic very safe programming language which is Cairo 1.0 there's a count abstraction baked into it we have things like storage proofs and um volition and of course more will come yeah there's a lot to unpack here maybe let's go through them one by one so account abstraction just to kind of back up a little bit um I mean it's basically it's the idea that you kind of as a standard you have a smart contract wallet rather than an externally owned address right so basically what it allows you to do is kind of both kind of on-board users more easily into the ecosystem because kind of you can for instance custody their keys for them and onboard them say with

an email address and you see the keys can be swapped under the hood later you can have things like um social recovery um Guardians you can also do things on the ux layer so things like kind of wrapping transactions together so that you don't always have this super annoying thing where you kind of you need to approve something and then you need to send it in a second transaction and so on um do you guys have a guideline to stocknet DAP developers to kind of Encompass these and kind of make use of them because kind of more moving from other kind of blockchain based ecosystems this is not the standard and

kind of It kind of it requires kind of turning some of the things that you know and trust on their head right so basically you need to be you need to be aware of these possibilities to kind of make use of them you're right so you touch on a very important point which is that um well the sort of best practices and the exact standard by which users will transact on starknet because of uh the uh novelty of account abstraction at this level and the opportunities it presents um it hasn't been finalized yet but I you know The Optimist in me and the scientist and me thinks that this is

beautiful because you have multiple teams working on beautiful you know ux experiences for users you know I've seen demos by Argent by braavos to Leading Wallets on on starknet that allow very seamless social recovery and cartridge as well another project in which basically you can use your you know iPhone security technology which is a you know you know apple and iPhone probably have the best uh combination of ux and security right so you can essentially Port that over it like basically use the very same technology to secure your contract now you know uh friedrichi you're also one

of the ignosis team members and of course one thing we'd love to do uh you know after the podcast is to get your assistance with creating the analog of uh diagnosis safe as a standard on Stark knit so that you'll have uh um these capabilities so it's it's still an open uh design space I'm sure that there will be some beautiful standards that are going to just emerge from the community um as to how to do it but but you'll have just to explain of course when you have account abstraction nothing prevents you from using the good old eoa model as a special case and you could still use your you know favorite

Hardware wallet but in addition to that you'll also see new standards that I'm sure they'll look much more like your the way you use your phone for uh doing transactions but with much higher safety yeah I think uh if you look at the user experience that we as an ecosystem currently offer to actual users it's a personal I mean I'm totally with you and I think uh that's really one of the areas where as an ecosystem we have a ways to go the other thing that you mentioned was volition where kind of I can um I can determine what kind of information gets put on L1 so if I if I

forgo putting this information on L1 where where is it put so it is uh recorded among all the full nodes of starknet yeah so it doesn't give you the same security of ethereum but it's not like uh you know zero security or but but it is it's like is it like another layer one well one thing that we we don't need to do with ethereum especially not at this phase is we don't need to have a consensus layer uh meaning so right full nodes there are now you know thousands of full nodes being executed

run all over the world but we're not using them and also the the beauty of uh validity proofs is you don't need uh validation and signatures in order to know that the right thing was done for that you have the Stark proofs however in terms of uh just redundancy the data on volition will be replicated and available on all full modes as they you know process the chain and see what's going on so I wouldn't say that it's another I'm not I don't want to mislead listeners into thinking that you get the same security level of layer 1 ethereum no it's a trade-off you can pay more and have your have the security of

ethereum or you can pay less and have a level of security that is not as high but is still meaningful and the way to think about it is like you know suppose right now transactions on most l2s they cost around if they're not subsidized they cost around you know half a dollar or so and all of it is is because of the L1 cost a lot of it's about data so sure if you're you know if you have nfts for instance so if you have like a very uh rare and and valuable nft sure you do want to keep that on there when ethereum and pay the half dollar but if you're playing with a pack of cards your favorite game where you just paid one dollar for all of it you probably really

want to keep it on on the volition and you know pay whatever I sent or a few cents so let me understand the trust assumptions yeah so do you is this like an honest majority trust assumption or basically is it like on another one where if you run your own full node you can't be duped I think it's neither so it's it's like this again and this is just about if you save your your date on volition so what happens is that and and here also there's there there are going to be two stages there's the current state right now and there's the uh you know the state upon decentralization so the state um that we have right now is that there's a single uh sequencer improver

that is centrally operated and basically it receives the transactions sequences then processes them and then trim transmit the block data to all of the other L2 nodes okay so among its along the way is it's transmitting stuff it's also transmitting updates to the volition data set okay but all the other nodes all the other full nodes that are tracking this are basically just tracking the network and seeing that this is what happens now this sequencer uh even if it is malicious it cannot steal funds it cannot you know move the system to a state that is invalid because it won't be able to

generate the start proof that would be verified so that's why we don't need the signatures and validation of the full nodes they are just tracking the system okay but it could censor you right so if you're just on volition the sequencer could censor you well irrespective of okay okay as long as you have a single sequencer it could censor you even if right now we don't have volition and still the single sequencer could maliciously decide to censor someone what a malicious sequencer could also do when volition is turned down in about you know two months or so is it could move the system to a valid new state but decide to not report this to anyone

right in order to sort of you know freeze the system or uh blackmail all of the users or something like that right so that's something that is impossible today and it's also impossible with the on-chain data but for the off-chain data the fully off chain data a malicious attacker could do this sort of thing you know if you want to talk about threat models this is the threat model that when users will be using volition in the single sequencer and operator State this is the risk that they are assuming this is why they're paying lower costs okay so basically what they forego is kind of the right to escalate something that the sequencer

does to L1 no it's just about hiding data this by the way appears in any off-chain data model so if all of the so for instance the starkic systems that we're running for for many years now some of them work with uh data availability committee so if all of the data availability committee members collude together they can decide to move the system or sign on a state that they know it must be valid because otherwise ethereum won't allow you know the L2 state to be chained so you can move the system to a valid state but the data about it becomes unknown to the users that is the type of attack

that could be mounted before decentralization and once you have decentralization in a year or so this this will go away because you'll have something a little bit more like an L1 situation where you need well you need a majority of stake to collude to uh on the L2 to collude to do bad things taught me through the sequence a decentralization because this is something that currently all l2s kind of face they all have a single entity that kind of is allowed to build blocks so yeah so basically how how are you gonna uh kind of decentralize your sequencer so um the first thing we did was research there's so much the good thing

about decentralization as opposed to Starks is that we don't have to you know uh blaze a trail through so much good research and so many good protocols that have been battle tested in practice you know proof of works and proof of stake and tender mint and hot stuff and so on so it's it's really great so the first thing we did was researched extensively which of these decentralized protocols works best of course it's not completely you know copy paste because we have uh you need to adapt it to a layer two and it's a layer two that also generates proofs so there are like several moving Parts here that are novel and that's the stuff we focused on so we're very close

to finalizing the research phase and saying this is what we're doing it looks like it's going to be something tender mint like but something that looks very familiar and is very well respected and battle tested we're not trying to create new things in this case because there's just so much good stuff out there and once we finalize that uh we'll of course publish it within the Stark Community get feedback get everyone's approval see that people you know kick the tires and are happy and then we'll just start implementing it which you know hopefully I don't want to make predictions but like uh yeah hopefully a year from now uh will be deployed or

very close to deployment but yeah we're we're almost at the end of the research phase and then we're just gonna start moving to implementing it with them the current regulatory climate are you worried that kind of having a centralized uh sequencer is kind of like a choke point in terms of like yeah regulation and kind of putting it in danger of kind of like regulatory interference knowing yes so the number one thing that we're thinking about is doing the right thing and just um a blockchain cannot have any single point of failure not the development team not the operator set or any part of

it so and it doesn't it's not even about regulatory constraints even if all of the regulatory bodies in the world said guys do whatever you want blockchains are all about a different way for creating an infrastructure for General Social functions social functions are protocols and data sets that carry immense value and that value necessitates Broad Social consensus so money is an example of a social function academic titles or the titling system you know the doctors the professors the uh all of the professional titles they are part of the social function right they you need Broad Social consensus

about who is a doctor in order for it to have value um of course property rights and you know contract all of this is all of these are social functions and blockchain's approach to social functions is very novel and different and it says instead of entrusting the social function with a central party we will use a protocol that somehow first of all it's very open to all and Broad and invites everyone to participate in it and the second thing is that it distributes value at the protocol level to The Operators and does so in a way that is tied to the integrity of of the

social functions but it's really crucial that you have an open and Broad set and that it distributes value to this operator set now if you think about it this way and that's really the way we think about it I think it's the only way to think about what blockchains are without that they're just very cumbersome uh technology you can you must decentralize it I mean if you don't you might as well just build it on AWS or something and you know it'll be cheaper and easier and I totally agree I'm just wondering in this current climate are you Ali as the president of stock are you worried that you'll get saved a call from a three letter agency saying look you can no longer process

transactions from so and so addresses I'm not the worrying type in the sense that so I'm no I mean well sorry whatever what I want to say is that I'm aware of the harsh uh seemingly um unjustified uh climate that today is certainly evident in the United States it's very unfortunate I myself first of all I'm not a lawyer I'm not a legal expert I am not a U.S citizen you know we you know we we are not a U.S company but of course you know I read the news like like other folks and um I am very saddened by a lot of the news

that I read because um well how should I put it it's so clear to me and I guess to all of us in crypto that uh again I'm not a legal expert but whatever it is that is going on there it's like there's this huge discrepancy between just the common sense thought of what a regulatory body should be doing like protecting citizens yeah protecting citizens from bad things and of course you know I think uh the FTX Shenanigans and and Luna and these things are bad actors in the space I'm I mean I think no one would would kind of disagree on that yeah Bad actors that by the way uh again I'm just reading the news were not prevented in any way by

any of these agencies in fact they apparently were in very good terms with him I don't know again just reading the news so what I'm saying there's this jarring and uh very troubling and very unfortunate um discrepancy between by layperson you know non-us view of what makes sense and what uh and what crypto is I mean crypto is about really what is it about it's about a different way for implementing arbitrary social functions in a way that does not include a central Arbiter but is open transparent invites everyone to participate and distributes value at the protocol level in a way that is tied to

the Integrity into the operation of the system I think it's an amazing Innovation an amazing technology and I just I'm very saddened to see that you know regulatory bodies are just somehow trying to shut this thing down and not really making an honest attempt to understand or to somehow give it some leeway to to flourish on the other hand we saw like that like the UK seems to be leading the charge on on actually taking this sane approach to this so but I can't you know you can't uh if I would worry I would the I had a very safe job in Academia that I liked a lot

so um but but I think this is well we're doing all of us in crypto is very positive and very much needed so and I think in the end truth shines and the truth is that the vast majority of the people operating in crypto are not out there to scam and are not out there to you know over run around and like disobey rules and laws I think they're out there to create something that is very much needed it's very much better than the existing system and um I hope that uh you know leaders and politicians will will see it for what it is I think I I I'm with you 100

um we went off on a slight tangent here so the last thing that you talked about that is new in stock uh um storage proofs what do they do so from uh to a technology-oriented listener they are a little bit like the process of mounting a file system but right if you live on ethereum so you have access to the ethereum state or the ethereum file system but what if you want access to some other uh cool State well it's going to be very hard and you're going to need to have some trusted Bridge with people signing that in this other Universe here's what happened but what storage proofs do is they use the Integrity of of math of

validity proofs in our case of of Stark proofs to basically refer to the state in this other system let's say Bitcoin and say okay here's the true State of Affairs there and now you can sort of Mount let's say the state of Bitcoin onto ethereum without any trusted party just through a smart contract and the first thing we'll be doing is is mounting the state of ethereum onto starknet which will allow cool things like snapshot X voting uh you know the Herodotus team like a whole lot of uh usage of data that appears on ethereum but is too expensive to consume on ethereum so people are going to process it on starting it with all the security of

ethereum so how does it work technically do you kind of just put like the entire history of the state in a proven kind of just put it how does it work okay so it's actually quite simple like once you have so once you send over let's say to starknet one single message which is let's say the hash of the current state of of ethereum the latest block where you just send this information now from this anyone who wants to refer to the current state can just do so by providing authentication paths to you know all the state of ethereum and if you have efficient validity proofs to assert that so right you will just say oh you know inside

this cell inside this ERC contract whatever the state on ethereum is such and such or to give an example with voting so you can just once you have the uh you know the latest commitment to the ethereum state you can also get from that the sub commitment to the state of accounts on a particular erc20 token and you can use that for voting so you can do all of the voting on starknet it all gets processed inside one big happy Stark proof and and the advertised cost per vote becomes very very low I attended your talk at edcon in Montenegro and you talked about how much this upgrade is going to change the transactions per second that stocknet

will be able to process so where from where do these gains actually stand because it seems like there's several updates kind of that happen in conjunction so here's the really funny thing so one would think that like the proving technology we like changed it and improved it but the well the happy thing is that the core technology of of starks I mean we talked earlier about various proof systems it's extremely scalable and extremely efficient so it was never the bottleneck for us but um current TPS of starknet if you think about like you know standard transfers is somewhere around like ethereum levels it can process roughly 10 DPS sometimes 20. so let's say

ethereum levels of TPS and the bottleneck is the sequencer it's the state that comes way before the proofs are generated it's this machine that runs uh Cairo programs and sequences them and the reason it's slow is because it was written for other purposes for the starkic systems and it was written in Python so what happened was uh there's this amazing team in this darknet ecosystem called Lambda class led by Federico quieron and an amazing team from I think Argentina and the other places in Latin America and all over the place they're just a brilliant set of Engineers and very very smart mathematicians and they

came and said we're gonna rewrite the Cairo virtual machine in Rust and at first we were like okay yeah you know that impress us it's not going to do much but it like I think the initial measurements was it like was like 100x more efficient and we immediately like said okay welcome to the Stark net ecosystem they're now like you know uh Prime VIP members of it and like yeah and um the next version which is gonna be unrolled in a couple of weeks incorporates their amazing performance Improvement which will bring us to Triple digit TPS that's like this very next version how performant we're we're

worried of of mentioning but definitely triple digit TPS which is you know roughly at least 10x ethereum by the way the amazing Lambda class team were not done yet they they said the next project is converting the virtual machine or parts of it into um like x86 native code through the mlir compiler framework now I'm speaking about terms that I'm really not an expert on but you should definitely get the Federico to come on your show and like uh tell all all the cool stuff he's doing again he's mentioning four digit it TPS and you know five digitps down the line so like we're not even close to getting done to being done with this uh

yeah so that's in a couple of weeks coming out triple digit TPS on ethereum super nice I'm looking forward to that oh yeah we will have to absolutely go on we talked about um the centralized sequencer just a bit ago um but then you kind of brought up voting and I remember reading that um vehicle trees if they happen for ethereum um we'll break snapshot X right so because there's kind of this another you know centralized choke point with well you and all their tools right basically um there are currently still upgradable usually if I'm a single marquisite I think all of them I don't wanna I don't want to lean out of the window too too much but I think it's all of them that

are updatable from a single multisig because ethereum hasn't ossified right so basically you can't it's not Bitcoin you you have to expect that that it will change um in in the future in ways that might actually require reacting um in terms of kind of what how the L2 works right how do you think about this in in the in the mid to long term because obviously decentralizing the sequencer this is 100 The Right Move we all agree um but when when would you kind of consider uh kind of like uh setting the owner to the uh star connect mightysig20 oh of like the of upgrading the uh the

contracts I would like it to be you know moved to a security Council or some something that is as soon as possible from a technical point of view I just think it's much better moving to a multi-seat now whether this multi-sig now or later includes also a Dao or a governance vote I don't know but like at the very least just having you know some Security Council that involves multiple members of The Amazing Stark net Community I'd feel much more comfortable with that uh we are already in the process you know all upgrades to the Stark net um core contracts anyways go through governance votes right now so I think we should head in that direction maybe even use you know agnosis safe in order to do

these sort of uh um upgrades it's certainly much better but it shouldn't be too much in the long distance I mean you absolutely should use a mighty Sig for this but basically still if you have say like a five out of seven mighty six or something you still need to hack like five devices right to kind of like put all of the funds on stocknet in danger right uh yeah you're right yeah I mean by upgrading the contract and so on exactly yeah yeah there are other mitigations uh which uh you know we for instance we did these on the Stark X systems and at some point should also be considered for instance there should be things like uh delay periods right that no upgrade can

happen immediately but then the trade-off is well what if there is like this horrendous bug that is discovered then you really need to stop things quickly so you probably need some sort of security slash red button Council that gets to press the red button and do things I I would feel generally speaking I would feel more comfortable with uh with having a red button Council than just having something that says you know no I'll upgrade before like a two weeks expiration time just because I think the probability you'll need to press the red button is higher than uh that's of like uh always being able to wait two weeks for an upgrade I mean ethereum doesn't have

a red button per se but it's kind of like a social consensus among the validators right basically even now validators kind of upgrade yeah but like I mean fortunately it didn't happen too many times but at least one famous example when there was this Dao right uh the Dao bug um you had the analog of that and I think uh you know it would have been better so so the process there was that some sort of social discussion went around and then uh stuff happened um now I I would prefer there to be a process there that says so there I guess the analog of the red button Security Council was I don't know who was there probably vitalik and some others said

guys this is what needs to be done and let's do it quickly and here's the patch and was patched and uh then others you know other Heroes of that time but I would prefer to sort of have even for ethereum I would advise them you should have a red button Security Council that if you know um hits the fan they have the authority to act quickly and do some stuff I think it's a better model I hear you I feel kind of in the current regulatory climate that would be actually worse because basically if like five people that's five people like someone you know a three data agency can call

right so you need to press this button now because we think there's illicit activity going on and you're putting user funds at risk and so on and they I mean where the network and principle is decentralized these people very much are not right so I mean that's kind of the Crux well my answer didn't take into account any regulatory input maybe you're right maybe it's unfortunately impossible maybe there's a regulatory way around it I was just saying as a you know as a matter again as I said before if suppose all the regulatory bodies of the world say it do whatever you want to do right I would I would advise it to be uh that there's a process there is a council the people on

the council are known they are respected and a little bit like in this case like maybe a supreme court but with very very very limited uh capabilities for instance they can only freeze the system they cannot change it you know there's a vote afterwards that I'm taking a new version I don't know exactly the details but like I mean we all want to live in a world where there never is any bug that is serious and demands immediate uh um action but we have to plan for the event that such a thing happens and then what do you do on ethereum or on starknit I think when what I'm suggesting is the best option for you need a mechanism right that says here's what we do I mean

you can also do that after the fact right so basically you say ethereum when catastrophically wrong because there's I don't know some sort of bug um what you could do kind of as a social consensus kind of a majority of validators decide to kind of start from State at Point T and kind of just you know implement the uh the uh the necessary um updates to the protocol and then kind of start again from that state um I think this is what I I assume would happen yeah you could do the exact same thing on a layer two in the sense that let's see how it would work I mean not not in like it's easy to say we're just

starting a new Layer Two where it gets tricky is think about you know suppose there's usdc locked on ethereum inside a bridge and now something really happened something really bad happened that you would like to be the case that the state is now you know no one accesses that side of the bridge and everyone just accesses you know you want to move the liquidity of this usdc to the new contract the new bridge to this new world well it gets very tricky right because you either need the collaboration let's say of ethereum on this or else you would need some some very hacky patch like everyone knows that even though the real usdc let's say it's 100 usdc so even though everyone knows that the real 100 usdc is on you

know uh contract a no one's going to touch contract a and you make up this hundred funny usdc that aren't really and people start accepting them I mean it's a slippery slope right I mean so basically I would argue that kind of it it would depend on the consequences so basically obviously you wouldn't do it for 100 uscc you probably wouldn't do it for 100 million uscc but say basically you say someone found a bug that could mend unlimited ethereum probably might do it right because otherwise the entire system's broken yeah I'm I'm just contemplating the suppose there's a bug that allows you on starknot let's say to Mint uh unlimited ethereum or that something is just completely broken right we're in that

world and now um so option number one is that before that there's something called the security Council let's say they can press a button and there's a way to upgrade something you know with another vote to some music world the other thing is no we we say nothing in advance okay now we just huddle together and think well we do what do we do now now you could go down this other route where it says now okay we'll sort of copy paste everyone will agree there's this new universe now you add whatever a billion dollars locked in value on the old Stark knit everyone's just gonna sort of accept that uh for instance circle is going to accept that whatever usdc comes from this new set of contracts is the real one and respect that never do anything you know sort of

color all of the bad usdc's that was locked there yeah I think if you're we're talking purely technological like uh failure modes I think I could be convinced to be with you but I think kind of in in in this day and age of kind of impending a regulatory capture I I would probably the dean the other way let's agree that the best thing would be to now I'm putting the mathematician hat so by induction you know we've been in production for three years and we never had to face the situation so you know by induction let's just hope that we never face this situation on this is a nice proof by induction so we are kind of um running

um late but I would like to ask you since we will have the next appearance of Ellie on episode 103 in three and a half years what will be what will we be talking then so basically I mean that's end of 2026 um where will we be talking kind of recursive ckps where we'll be talking multi-party computation will be we'll be talking fully homomorphic encryption where do you think we'll be at okay we won't be talking about recursive proofs because they're already in production now with Starker for over a year so like you know been there done

that I don't think we'll be talking about NPCs because they're just very complicated and FH even more so so unfortunately like there are a lot of technical problems with MPC even more so with fhe so I don't think in three and a half years you'll see uh MPC and fhe uh unfortunately um what will we be talking about definitely I think we'll see more standard privacy so you'll have both scalability and some form of privacy but the biggest thing will be just um I think that every household will be uh you know consuming social functions over starting it whether they know it or not and I think this infrastructure will also be adopted by modern countries

um who will say well the way the sort of blockchain way we actually internally call it there's this beautiful phrase that one of our team Ilia Volo came up with a web of Integrity so just like you have a worldwide web what blockchains are they give you an Integrity web they give you this network that operates with Integrity it does the right thing even if you're not watching without you know requiring a trusted party they and it's just so much better right it's through protocols that are very positive leaning they distribute value to operators in a very transparent way and they are open and inviting to everyone so I think in three and a half years we'll see a lot

of uh you know um National and Municipal and um just community-wide uh Integrity webs of various sorts that I'm very sure that all of them are going to be based on the Stark net stack so we'll be using Cairo 5.0 that's going to feature is so much better as a CPU and they'll be using Stark proofs I have no doubt of that and they'll be like all over the place that's what we'll be talking about in three and a half years nice so if people want to get an Early Head Start and kind of join the ecosystem now and where can they go and where can they find resources what kind of apps are on

on stock that at the moment and if someone wants to build a new app on stocknet do you have a grant system or an investment um where should where should we send them yeah the starting Foundation is up and running and it's already announced several several you know dozens of of Grants to early adopters or now uh already deployed on starknet um the Discord server of starknet is like this very welcoming environment that I'll send the link to you and hopefully you can share it the there's a lot of tooling and documentation for uh Cairo so it's like very easy to just

start learning the language and programming in it I'm not a hacker myself but I managed to do the uh it's called the starklings it's based on the rustlings uh sort of self learning process for learning rust there's something called starklings that was built by the community it's an amazing tool for learning Cairo and uh through many resources just it's in a very it's a funky fun intelligent magnanimous community stagnetis so please join perfect thank you so much for coming on Neddy thank you Frederica for having me and uh talk to you again well I I'm sure we're

going to talk again before that but on epicenter in three and a half years and I hope you'll bring some of the cool projects uh to to your podcast thanks