Episode 214: Emin Gün Sirer on Avalanche and its Formation

Transcript

welcome to xero knowledge i'm your host anna rose in this podcast we will be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online today i chat with amin gunser the ceo at ava labs and the founder of the avalanche network we chat about his early experiences that led him to get interested in distributed systems research we also map his journey from his work as a professor at cornell to his work on avalanche one of the leading smart contract platforms with evm compatibility we dig into avalanche's novel consensus mechanism which uses the

sub sampling technique we look at the architecture of the network we talk about bridges and more but before we start in i wanted to remind you to check out the zk jobs board especially if you're looking for a new opportunity to work with the teams building zk tech and tools we've added the link in the show notes be sure to check it out i now want to pass the mic to my producer tanya to tell you a little bit about this week's sponsor today's episode is sponsored by polygon polygon is one of the top ethereum scaling platforms for developers with over 130 million unique user wallets they're committed to bringing web3 to the masses by improving scalability and fostering the network effects of ethereum they're known for polygon pos chain one of the most popular chains built on top of ethereum clocking even more daily

active users than ethereum itself at times but the team is actually working on a spectrum of solutions solutions like polygon edge which offers developers the capability to build sovereign evm compatible chains as well as a number of fully secured evm compatible zero-knowledge roll-up solutions like polygon hermes polygon maiden and polygon nightfall which is built in association with ernst young as well as the most recently announced acquisition of the mir protocol now known as polygon zero these solutions inherit the security of ethereum and use the power of zero knowledge over here at the podcast we've been tracking polygons journey and have recently had bob and threadbear from maidan and jordy and david from hermes on the podcast to talk about their respective projects we strongly

recommend you check out those episodes so you can learn more about their vision project roadmap and progress so far so thanks again to the polygon team now here is anna's interview with amin from avalanche [Music] so today i'm sitting with emin gunsur the ceo at ava labs and the founder of the avalanche protocol he also used to be a professor at cornell i want to welcome you to the show hi enough very nice to be here thank you for having me cool i'm excited to have you on we actually met i think two three years ago and i sort of i was like hey maybe you should come on the show and then we just didn't but it's really great that we got a chance to reconnect and that we finally bring you on where was that was that in berlin yeah it was the web

summit too i think okay sorry the web 3 summit yeah web 3 summit in berlin i think it was in in the former east berlin area in a fantastic house that used to be the radio for for uh for eastern germany yeah funk house that's what it was totally it was the funk house it's a great venue cool okay so yeah i think we wanted to dig in to avalanche on this episode i since it's the first time that i have you on the show i think it would also be great to get to know you a little bit you have been known as a expert distributed systems researcher that's sort of the space i understand that you're in i'm curious about like where did you get started why did you

choose this field in the first place well that's a really interesting question i mean do you really want the actual personal answer or do you want the the bogus answer i'll give you the actual personal answer sure and i think it started out when i was a kid i grew up in turkey and i grew up in a country where you know everything is done and everything is well done i would say but to a standard that's sort of 97 there i grew up in istanbul with these in these drafty houses the windows closed but they closed you know and then they let some air in the doors closed and then they are not really square in the frame and i remember uh going to this american high school that i got into it you had

to take an exam when you were 11 years old and if you were in the top 110 you get to go to this american school and so so there i was in this giant building it's called gold hole and it's got these ginormous the very first high school american high school built outside of the u.s it's got these ginormous doors uh built to american standards and i remember opening this door and closing with a satisfying click behind me and thinking oh my god this is exactly how everything should work and wow and um and if you if you remember those days you know you would show up to to a bank and things wouldn't work they would be like our systems are down can you come back the next day you would go to the airport and the the overhead displays wouldn't work

so um so that's how i grew up and that i think was the formative thing that forced me to think hey the world can be built out of components that are completely reliable we can and should be able to engineer systems that anybody could rely on and if if we're not doing that everything else is a luxury you know as as every sort of geeky kid uh in in you know in his teens you know i was interested in ai i was interested in you know building robots that did like creative things and so on and i thought that's a luxury mankind can't have we got to get the basics down you know i'm here i live in a country where the doors don't close and uh and here we all live in a world where the information systems are down the whole time

they're not down hold on they're down like quite so often that you can't really use them and a better world is is definitely possible so so that's sort of my creation story it was so clear and pre-ordained that i go into into systems and uh started out in operating systems i was always a low-level system builder i love building things that that give you a strong guarantee for how they should work i love building reliable things i love building things that have a very strong reason for why they should work every time without exception so um that was my background that's interesting what era were you getting into this academically like what was happening around when you decided to kind of go into

exactly the field you were going into what was what was the state of the art at that point so when i was a teenager um the pc revolution was just beginning to take place i was a commodore 64 kid okay so uh so there's a there's a crowd out there that knows exactly what i'm talking about and i love you all um you know we're kindred spirits um it was a fantastic time of experimentation people building their own machines or people taking these commodores and and doing things on them that is so close to the hardware that that's just really creative with this kind of sound you could get out of a commodore 64 you know it wouldn't be possible to get that kind of control over the sound chip for another 25 years right we lost that and then it came back but it took it took a

decade anyhow so that was the era when i was a teenager and i was just being exposed to computers i'm not a dinosaur dinosaur i'm not a mainframe kind of person i start out with personal computers and when i went to grad school so i decided you know hey after uh i went to princeton and i got a scholarship there and it was a lot easier to go to princeton with a scholarship than to to try to take a placement exam in turkey so i left the country came to the u.s and then i thought hey i want to study more and and if you if you go into a phd program they pay for you and if you go to a master's program you have to pay i was like well i kind of want to do i want to learn more so why don't i do a

phd and leave after a year or two it was the initial thinking obviously once you get into that you get sucked in oh you are stuck in the academic vortex huh absolutely it pulls you in and and the process of solving things the process of sort of figuring out things that mankind doesn't know how to solve it's so i mean you know those of you who did graduate studies you know how exciting this is so that sucked me in and around that time i think it was the era when uh i think in the world the biggest thing that was happening then was the internet so mozilla i think got released the second month i was in graduate school and the dot-com boom was happening then um a lot of people around me were

building.coms web crawler the world's first search engine was built in the room right next to mine so there was a lot of excitement in the air so you know that's how i started i was building systems low-level stuff and i always loved things that had a life of their own and distributed systems that sort of came together to have some emergent behavior some emergent property and that's what got me excited about crypto in the first place about peer-to-peer systems in the first place yeah and that's i'm kind of trying to place it so like napster was sort of there and that's i mean that was my introduction to peer-to-peer systems for sure and i think a lot of folks in my generation i'm not that much younger than you i think maybe like five

six years because i didn't have the commodore i mean i did use the very very very old apple the single unit for like my first year you know when i was like five or something like that um i just aged my i just dated myself for everybody who's listening here but um yeah but um yeah i mean i'm just wondering like what what did you make of napster were you paying attention to that kind of thing already or was that in a field that wasn't really interesting yeah i'm curious what that meant squarely on top of everything i cared about uh napster came in and showed that that we could build services in an entirely different way so prior to napster everybody was building client server services right so facebook google

these are client servers i i i'm a client you know zuckerberg runs the server i go to zuckerberg for service i am beholden to him he is like a vassal i'm like a serf i'm you know i i begs for service he collects information on me he sells it he does whatever he wants i have no visibility into his operation that's client's client server computing for you and napster showed the world what you could do with a different architecture with a peer-to-peer architecture shortly after napster came limewire and uh and so you know along with napster i think there was a there was a problem that we all noticed and do you remember the leeching problem i don't think i knew that term okay so the issue was when you wanted to

download a file it was it was often difficult to find people who provided that file to you the people wanted things they didn't want to want to provide things right this is a common problem anytime humans are involved so back in 2002 this this was a big problem limewire had arrived and this leaching problem was becoming an issue uh one of the first projects i did as a young assistant professor was to look into the leaching problem and say hey wouldn't it be great if i could solve the leaching problem and uh and isn't it kind of obvious you know in retrospect it will be very obvious isn't kind of obvious that if you had some magic internet money that nobody controlled and people had to pay for

things you know blocks to download they would ultimately run out of money the magic internet money and then they would have to provide blocks to get the money back you know so they could continue participating in the system so i built a system called karma in 2002 it was published in a peer-reviewed journal in 2003 so everything i'm saying is easily verifiable and checkable karma was a system that that used proof of work to mint coins it is the first such system that was implemented that actually has that concept in it so um this predates bitcoin by about six seven years why wasn't that bitcoin though what was different about the work that you had produced like what did bitcoin add

bitcoin did add quite a bit and uh and it got it there were multiple reasons for why it was a huge success bitcoin was a huge success and karma karma was a huge success academically but it's obviously you know doesn't compare even to to bitcoin in any shape or form so technically um satoshi came in and added one technical idea on top of karma in that he combined the minting process with the consensus process i was relying on the on what we call a classical consensus protocol to maintain balances and satoshi said you know forget all that classical stuff that they teach you in school it's fragile it's not open it doesn't scale well and and so he came up with his own system which also doesn't

scale all that well but it's at least open and it's robust so uh so that's that was a brilliant insight that's so we have to give huge kudos to satoshi for that technical part in addition his timing was impeccable so satoshi came right after the 2008 crisis yes and his vision was all encompassing he was like you know what this this thing bitcoin is a system to take down and and compete against fiat currencies with it's a competitor to gold it's a competitive competitor to the dollar and um that's what he went in with and he was anonymous he could take on the regulatory risks and so on in contrast i was a known entity i wasn't anonymous i came after 911

at a time when people were really worried about terrorist financing so um you know people wanted to get rid of all all forms of payment online that could be that could be used by terrorists in any shape or form so um so my timing and my my the division was also not as expensive it wasn't let's take down everybody it was hey let's add a new payment mechanism for only peer-to-peer peer-to-peer file file transfers where were you i don't know if you remember this it sounds like i mean with such a breakthrough that kind of references or has like echoes of the work you had done where were you when you saw it and did you realize it was that what it was right away or did it take a while oh absolutely so i looked at it and i

thought oh this is brilliant absolutely brilliant so there are a couple of things that every every academic does when they first see a new piece of work so first thing you do is you try to fit it into your your well-known pigeon holes and i remember distinctly thinking oh this doesn't fit into any of the pigeon holes amazing work so it's novel for sure it's it's fantastic and novel second thing you do is um how does it compare to other work i've done and does it cite my work you know that's a very common uh academic part and satoshi was not aware of the work i did on karma um he's not you know he doesn't come from a traditional academic

background he's a self-taught person probably and so uh so he's not aware of it and i was like okay well that's fine it's not a big deal and then the next thing is okay and he makes a bunch of claims so are they true and uh and one of the striking things about about satoshi is um he's got some amazing insights and uh he's got a huge technical breakthrough but some of the claims he made were not true but at the very first reading i did not realize that at the first reading i thought oh this is brilliant and if the claims are true it's amazing but he doesn't have proofs for his claims he just sort of makes a gut sort of a gut call saying oh you know this is this is what it does this is how it works

and um and there were properties of his system that he himself did not characterize well and did not understand as well so me and itael ended up looking more carefully and we decided thinking oh we decided that hey this deserves much more scrutiny let's see if any of these claims about the security of bitcoin are true and let's try to prove them you know either prove them you know for real or you disprove them and you have an interesting result and it turned out that that work led to this other work that we did called selfish mining which showed that you know certain things that satoshi said and certain things that people thought about bitcoin were just false and um and there were certain attacks against bitcoin that people could launch were you doing this work

while bitcoin was being developed like was this something that was being shared in those communities as it was coming together or was it something more like after it had already been implemented you you were able to track that so bitcoin was always in in the process of development so to speak yeah you could kind of say it still is but it's slowed down quite a bit now and uh and it stopped to stop you know seeing big changes uh happen um at the time there was a community around bitcoin trying to make it big there was active development going around bitcoin but the work we did was not shared within those that community we were working as an independent academic group and um uh you know we we just did our work independently and separately from

everyone okay got it i know that there's actually a few other stories that we could touch on i know i read the uh i read i've read two out of the three ethereum books i think the third one's still coming and you're in one about like the dao and i know there's a whole story of like aetherium and phil diane worked with you or is like was there a connection between the two of you yeah he was a student at cornell and um he didn't he never worked for me though okay so he was not my student okay okay but i feel like whatever in the story i heard you were talking to each other or something but we were we were so uh it was the the around the dow hack prior to the dow hack i looked into the the code of the dao and um it was a june day

if i'm not mistaken and i had this cold i had you know these summer calls that you get and you know your eyes are tearing and your head is exploding and i looked at the code and around line 666 i saw this bad pattern that's not supposed to be there and i thought you know this looks so wrong um and uh but you know as a as a researcher you you know you get used to making hypotheses and coming up with ideas so i usually use a smart person to bounce them off of you know i have a gazillion ideas for potential leads but you know a lot of them don't pan out so i wrote a message to phil diane saying hey i think there's a problem here on line 666 and uh but i was you know i was just kind of reeling under that summer cold

and phil got back to me and said yeah you know there's some issue there but it can't be exploited and um and he was wrong so it's okay yeah that that was the exploit that's how the dial got exploded that's how i i mean that's what i saw in the in the book yeah i forget which one one of the two that i've read but yeah i wanna i wanna know like at what stage was avalanche at this point like so we're talking you know we're talking 2008 you see the bitcoin paper 2015 is that the dow hack 16 15.

15. and like at what point did ava gel for you like when did you start working on it it goes back a long long time i mean it goes back a long time in india so i've been thinking about lightweight consensus protocols for a very long time like decades and it is the holy grail right to have something that scales something that's fast something that's cheap you know it's it was it's we know what we want we always knew what we wanted and um we knew classical protocols were absolutely horrible and so there are also these jokes in in distributed system circles about oh you know oh you think this is inefficient wait until you see byzantine fault

tolerant protocols or wait till you've seen a consensus protocol those are really inefficient wow so um so classical protocols were well known to be crap and you know they're making a comeback everybody and his brother is trying to take an old protocol and bring it back in the form of a proof of stake chain right now interesting but uh but we knew that they they were bad and and satoshi's invention nakamoto consensus or proof of work systems uh you know they they're fine but they consume a lot of energy they're terrible for the environment and they're very expensive to run there's constant leakage going on from your store of value so we always knew we wanted something better but it was you know you know if it's just

sometimes you just run into a brick wall i know that i didn't have any ideas on that front i know that all my colleagues had no ideas people were just making incremental small additions to classical protocols and um and kind of looked hopeless but around 2015 um again right before the dow hack i started thinking about ethereum two um we spent a day and a half with vitalik vlad and others on how we could improve ethereum and and i learned about the difficulty bomb i remember you know being told that this the change the shift to uh to proof of stake was imminent for

ethereum and um and they were trying to come up with the protocol the new protocol and they they listed all the there's the rata everything they wanted and i was like well look guys you know the things you want are not possible with the technology that we've got so so we got to think more carefully about this um anyway long story short i started thinking about it and um sometime around 2017 i had this insight that one could perhaps use a different mechanism for consensus that no one had ever thought of using before so classical protocols all involve all to all communication so imagine you're in a parliament you're trying to pass a law

every single senator ends up checking the bill to see if there are enough signatures on it this is how classical protocols work so the process of creating a block is essentially a process of collecting signatures on it so this is what ethereum two is trying to do this is what tezos does this is what all the proof of stake protocols are trying to do and so that doesn't work well it works well at the size of a senate but you know if you got 200 people and all of them have to hear from 200 other people that's 40 000 messages that's a lot of data and if you have a thousand people there's a million messages if you have ten thousand it's a hundred million it just goes out up with n squared so it's a terrible way to build your system so it doesn't scale so i was like okay

that's classical that can't work i don't want to do nakamoto consensus and proof of work that i don't want to destroy the environment or be part of that so um so i thought hey there is another process maybe and um and i remember talking to kevin secniki who was a graduate student at the time and saying hey how about this process of repeated sub-sampled voting which is a fancy term that simply says you know i'm not going to be in a senate i'm going to be in a very very big stadium and i want to i want to check signatures from almost everybody but i don't even know everybody in the stadium and i certainly don't even agree with you on who's in the stadium it's just so big and complex and it's in flux and it changes dynamic but maybe just maybe if

i were to check signatures from my friends and they were to check signatures from their friends and we repeated this process a bunch of times would we be able to get assurance that's essentially as good as checking all the signatures from everyone sounds similar to like gossip protocols a little bit is it in that category okay it's exactly so but gossip is solving a much simpler problem gossip protocols are very well known they're a cornell invention they're invented by people about 20 years my senior and um and their the gossip protocols are great for disseminating information so i've got something i want the world to know i send it out but they don't they don't guarantee

consensus consensus is a far more complicated problem consensus is all of the correct nodes have to come to agree on the same decision even though some people are are doing all sorts of malfeasance and trying to trick you and so on so uh so it's very similar to gossip protocols and how it works but it's solving a far more difficult problem and i mentioned it to kevin and we ended up writing a simulator and i remember him rushing to my office saying hey you know this is amazing like this thing it just you know it's it's it's logarithmic or maybe even faster and it's just just amazingly fast and how it converges uh and we weren't expecting that and so so that got us started down the avalanche

path and the rest is history let's talk about the consensus part of this actually so you're mentioning you've you know you've sort of placed the proof of work proof of stake we actually did an episode in 2020 with a tai abraham and we talked all about consensus protocols and it was byzantine fault tolerance and the p before the what is it pbft s pbft we kind of went through a lot of these i'm going to link to this in the show notes for some background um we talked about hot stuff can you help me understand where avalanche fits i know we talked a little bit of a we talked about a spectrum

between like very concrete like for sure correct and sort of a little bit more um optimistically correct i think there was a spectrum there yeah so we're like maybe help and by the way i'm sorry i'm paraphrasing this people should actually listen to him explain this correctly but yeah where where does ava fall and what or avalanche and actually is it wait is avalanche avalanche is not the name of the the consensus protocol is it it does oh it is avalanche it works kind of like a like a snowflake rolling down a hill turning into a snowball turning into a giant avalanche oh that's right it is it's supposed to be evocative um so uh so just to summarize the space the

the distributed systems area is not a it's not a very old area it's been around for 45 years so in those 45 years there have only been three different approaches to the consensus problem one is classical consensus protocols and people may have heard of pbfd they may have heard of tendermint and tezos and ethereum two et cetera these are all in the classical domain they all involve all to all voting okay and a second approach that came uh you know in 2009 from satoshi nakamoto is proof of work also known as nakamoto consensus so any coin that you see that has mining in it

is uh using proof-of-work and then those were the only two methods by which people knew how to achieve consensus in a in a setting like the internet and then the third and final chapter in the saga is the avalanche protocol it happened in 2018 and it uses a mechanism that's entirely different and i would say ground breaking and unexpectedly so so it uses a different mechanism and as a result it's super fast and super cheap where do you put something like tendermint in this story though because like is that that was i i also don't know the dates offhand but i feel like that's around 2015 where that was kind of developed what would you call that

classic or is that was that an evolution as well though no no it does have uh it does have some improvement so history is uh is a funny thing right it's it's not you're not always going from a to b and then to c yeah um what ended up happening is we had classical protocols then uh and and the and one of the good ones is called pbft it was invented in 1999 and it's used in a lot of services if you go to google's if you go to gmail in the background uh there is a protocol that's essentially a simplified version of pbfd that's directing you to a server that i think the p there was like partial byzantine fault tolerance practical

practical sorry practical byzantine fault tolerance because everything that came before pbft was uh was was was trying to be byzantine fault tolerant but it was so inefficient okay and pbft is like the one that's acceptably not terrible but it's still pretty darn bad is this kind of the optimistic version where it's like you're you kind of do you know that kind of expression of just like you you're doing you need to reach a threshold for you to feel confident that it's working but it's not it's not full confidence no the pbft doesn't have that i know what you're talking about and itai abraham probably talked about that other work um but uh but pbft does not have that component pbft is a fully deterministic probability one kind of a

system um so i don't want to get into too many technicals but the history history arc goes as follows so we have classical protocols then we have satoshi come in and satoshi gives us this vision that hey you can build really high value systems and you can in fact approach this problem probabilistically right bitcoin doesn't give you an entire entire guarantee there is a chance that somebody will will will mine a lot of blocks and revert history it's just incredibly unlikely it's exponentially unlikely the deeper the block is very so so we have classical then satoshi and then you have people going back and revisiting classical things okay and they're like hey we want the benefits of what satoshi did

but we also don't want mining and we want a much faster much more scalable protocol and now we're stuck and we don't know what to do so why don't we go back into history and take one of these old ugly protocols and put some lipstick on it and see what we get okay and there was a lot of lipstick on the pigs back then you know whatever around now um so people are trying to resurrect these protocols they put some blockchain makeup on them you know um so uh tendermint ends up building on pbft it adds a small twist that makes it a little bit more efficient in one particular scenario but at the core of it lies pbft and it's it's a pbft is a sound protocol and so

it's great to be building on a sound protocol there are also many protocols that are not even sound they just crash they're wrong and people are putting their life savings and and if you're somebody who's technically sam you're like hey i don't know what the heck is going on here it's not going to end well and it typically does not end well and avalanche is a big difference there so avalanches is you know suddenly changes here so we have a b a prime which improves on a and then suddenly we have c coming in and c c is the avalanche it's the biggest third biggest jump tell me a little bit about that change then what is it doing differently what like how would you where i don't know where to start exactly but maybe like given those that that story the proof of work

we know it's proof of stake but yeah what's the big shift so in the consensus protocol behind the avalanche there is one big difference which is its scales it scales in a way that nobody else can scale and it performs in a way that nobody else can perform finality in avalanche is less than a second even when the network is enormously big we have a network currently of about 1100 nodes scattered across the globe on every continent uh and and yet the system is able to make decisions in less than a second and i keep advertising less than a second it's actually 750 milliseconds so in like two slow blinks of the eye

a transaction an avalanche is completely immutable it's done it's finalized so for comparison that takes an hour on bitcoin and and again for comparison with my bank it takes like five days so we went from we went from traditional finance to to satoshi's vision with an hour um to uh to less than a second and in a in a fully decentralized setting so it's uh that's one of the biggest changes but that's that's the outcome i'm i'm more curious like under the hood you sort of mentioned it as a big shift away from the classical consensus so yeah what's that change what does that look like in in terms of its operation the thing that that uh that distinguishes

avalanche is the the way it messages the way it achieves consensus is uh by repeated sub-sampled voting so instead of trying to essentially pass a law by collecting signatures on it potentially from a huge number of participants okay got it so it's a sub sample voting that's what you're okay that's the subsampled voting i think so instead of instead of collecting signatures on every on every block what avalanche does is uh every node checks with a small number of nodes repeatedly does the same thing and so we get the power of parallel processing across the across the network to quickly uh decide or to quickly come to a decision on whether a

block is valid and should be admitted to the blockchain how how is the sampling chosen is it sort of a random choice of other nodes to sample like yeah i'm just kind of curious like how are even the hierarchies of these sub sampling working uh so the math is is so robust and this operation is so robust that um that all you have to do is just have an approximate understanding of who's in the system so you and i don't have to have an exact match of who exactly is in the parliament so this is a very robust protocol classical protocols if there is any kind of discrepancy between you and me the two senators in the system then they will actually break down but avalanche can tolerate a lot of fuzziness and inaccuracy actually so as

long as you and i have a rough idea of who's in the system and we randomly pick some people from that list okay and we repeat that process in a very small number of steps we are guaranteed to be in consensus and then you is it is it sort of like a probabilistic consensus then like you're you're assuming because you're randomly choosing random groups enough times but like how in this case though like when i think of like longest chain phenomenon or like if they're all validating if these validators or nodes are actually writing anything do you not end up with conflicts or cl like clashes of what chain some of these groups think they're on so um good question and and so one of the things that avalanche

does is indeed it's a probabilistic protocol so what does that mean there's a difference in theoretical computer science between protocols that give you a guarantee of probability 1.0 versus protocols that give you a probabilistic guarantee so one minus epsilon and so this was one of the things that satoshi identified and he said look everybody's been approaching this consensus problem as a as a problem that needs to be solved with probability one and instead if i make it probabilistic i can use a different technique i'm gonna use this mining idea and uh and you know so one minus epsilon is identical to one if epsilon is slow so small enough yeah

and so that was his insight and um and as you know you know it's possible it's entirely possible for a miner to come up you know i could run a miner right now yeah and i could you know i could get so lucky that i find you know seven blocks in a row it's possible there's a probability of this happening the probability of that happening is far lower than the probability of me winning the lotto 10 times in a row right yeah it's an incredibly unlikely event but it's possible and uh and satoshi said look you know forget these silly academics they are always trying to achieve some theoretical perfection and and you know you're computing all this on a machine that's also probabilistic and you are taking probabilistic risks all the time so one

of the things i like to remind people is that you know even as i speak to you right now it's possible for all the air molecules to collide with each other and all the nitrogen to end up on my side of the room and all the oxygen to end up on the other side of the room and perhaps that side would then ignite and then i would suffocate on this side this is possible okay it is absolutely possible it can it's a horrible horrible scenario though but it doesn't it's not a scenario we worry about because the probability of it happening is so small so avalanche is a similar similarly probabilistic system and um uh you know you can adjust the probabilities any which way you like by changing the the number of people you

sample and the rounds in which you do the sampling so find an epsilon that you are comfortable with and the system can implement that for you uh and so as a result it provides guarantees very similar to bitcoin probabilistic but incredibly strong can you share a little bit about how a chain is built with this system because i mean in some of the documentation there's also talk of a dag so like i'm i'm wondering if you are building it you know you're sampling and then there's like a a moment a beat where like everybody submits and then you make the chain or like how like how are the blocks in the chain actually being created that's a great great question and uh it shows that you've read the avalanche avalanche paper but let me actually answer from

the perspective of somebody who's now built the system and uh and it differs a little bit from what's in the the avalanche paper because the avalanche paper provides you with a a smaller view and the thing that got built is even greater even cooler so implementation often you know forces innovation i heard it really did in this case it really didn't and we started out wanting to do just this dag based thing but then we ended up doing something far cooler so let me tell you what it is so at the highest level avalanche is not a single chain system okay so it's actually maintaining multiple blockchains in parallel that are connected to each other so um we have multiple things we could be doing and um and one of the sort of one

of the big innovations in avalanche other than the consensus protocol is this notion that the system can maintain multiple chains at the same time and so for example we're maintaining a linear blockchain that is a copy of the ethereum virtual machine and we also have another chain on the on the side in parallel that is a directed acyclic graph that is maintaining the the uh the avox transactions and and in fact if you wanted to create a new virtual machine based on a dag based on a chain we could accommodate that and spin it up and in fact this is one of the big use cases for avalanche there are many enterprises that would like to have their own chains and to them we just go and say hey look

you can start your own chain subject your own rules with your own validators and and subject to whatever you want them to be number the fee regimes and so forth or with compliance requirements that you might have that are within the same avalanche family but independent from the rest of the system so that's sort of the big picture and it changed a bunch from from what we focused on in the early days but let me also get back to the specifics of of how this works so for any given transaction uh one of the core ideas in avalanche is that there is there is this really large network that generates blocks those blocks could could belong to a linear chain or they could belong to a directed acyclic graph either way

whichever one makes sense for the use case with that option is one the avex and one would be a subnet or like one of the or the evm one like yeah where does that like where would the second choice or the choice to follow a single line lead you where do you end up great question so um these are all subnet decisions okay uh so you could pick a dag subnet or you could pick a linear chain subnet okay evm evm requires a linear chain because smart contracts require linearity uh but transactions you know can happen in parallel and they're happy with the dag so uh the x chain in avalanche is a dag and the c chain is a regular linear block chain and

this this decision is based on you know do you need linearity you're going to give up some performance or are you happy with not having linearity and having things happen in parallel uh and building a graph instead you'll have slightly higher performance but but two things can happen concurrently and if that's going to mess you up you know you're a bank and you require strict ordering then you should use a chain uh if you don't care for that then i can get you even an even faster solution in this system the sort of x chain and the c chain how does like do they communicate with each other is there movement between those two things yes they can and you can take funds from the x chain to the c chain or the c chain to the x chain all of that communication is coordinated by this uh

p chain the platform chain the final the third and final chain okay that uh that tells you exactly how many chains are in the system and who the members of the chains are interesting and so the ones we just described x chain c chain the p chain is sort of overarching but would there be like if one wanted to launch their own blockchain that was also public would it take on a new form or would it be considered also a c chain no no there could you could create an nft chain dedicated to nfts you could create a you know a siemens chain for siemens applications you could create a bank of america chain for bank of america uh you could create a u.s u.s securities chain and put u.s securities

subject to u.s securities laws on that chain you could create a data chain that holds you know eu data subject to gdpr rules so these chains they can run their own virtual machines they have their own validators and their own rule sets subject to whatever technical and legal requirements you might have got it and the sub sampling the the sort of consensus where is that happening is it happening in all of them is that more in the p chain no it's happening on all of them at the same time in parallel but is is it the same nodes like would a client be running all three of these things or is it one thing that generates all three of these things it need not be the same nodes so uh okay

so you could create uh you know an anna chain subject to you could create a closing remember private permission blockchains back in 2017. yeah back in 2017 everybody was doing them because they wanted to have supply chain control yeah they wanted to have control over their assets and that's a normal thing to want yeah and um and so if you wanted to build one of those you could say hey this is anna chain and to to be a validator you need a token that only anna gives out and so so that gives you a solution that completely subsumes everything in the private blockchain space so whoever was doing all that work that went nowhere and they realized hey these things go

nowhere they're one-off solutions they're isolated they can't connect but now if you were to do it as a sub-network on underneath avalanche you can connect them you can start out as a private permission network you can open it up you could connect it to other private permission networks you could connect it to the public network it's kind of like it's exactly like how we wired the internet up remember it started out with universities connecting their dorms and then universities connecting to each other and it kind of went up from there it's a similar idea you can create your own subnet subject your own rules connect them where necessary where it makes sense and then you build something richer and bigger as you as these things connect to each other do you see the p

chain as sort of the connective glue in this yeah like is it a bridge is would it be like do you when you send from one of these to another are you using it um no you are not you're not using the p chain yeah but uh but it is the connective glue um you are going through the information on the p chain to go from x to c and c to x for example but not sen not transferring not like token transfer exactly if you did go through the p chain then the p chain would have to understand the asset description of everything that happens underneath uh and it chose not to have that it's it's instead peer-to-peer so so if there's an another chain and there's a hendrick

chain then those two can talk to each other without the p chain knowing anything about what's happening on the ana chain or the hendrick chain there are lots of these interoperability plays in the blockchain space where they made decisions that just don't make sense where you have to a priori know a lot or or expose a lot we always make decisions that favor privacy uh within each blockchain the only thing that that the p chain knows is the is the membership is the validators and the chains got it also cool shout out to uh our editor henrik henrik you got a chain [Laughter] i wonder okay so i want to talk a little bit more about bridges as a topic as a

theme like sure i mean you have an evm compatible chain the c chain so and i know that the ava what is the name of the bridge what is the main bridge between like ethereum and avalanche we call it it's got a very prosaic name we call it the avalanche bridge okay the avalanche bridge sometimes there's other names like rainbow bridge um okay so the avalanche bridge that's i mean an obvious i think a lot of people are bridging to ethereum do you like are you working on a bridging like almost an ava native bridging technology or would you see kind of these other chains independently bridging to other networks

and maybe not ethereum like the other kind of upcoming ones great question so i've been saying this for some time now and let me let me mention it for your audience as well i see this next year turning into a big war of bridges wow so um i think people are people were early on very confused especially in the ethereum community about layer ones versus layer twos and so on and so forth um the way i see this world is very very simple and let me just mention it and i think once people hear it they will understand that this is the proper way to view view these wars layer ones and layer twos and so forth it just doesn't matter the technology underneath them the terminology used

doesn't matter these are all different kinds of chains you have chains and then you have technologies for connecting them that we call bridges so we started out with a lot of value created on a few chains and now it's going to be a a big fight to get that value onto chains where it can be processed much more efficiently you know much more beautifully much more elegantly whatever it is that people want from these chains the value will try to flow there moving that value securely is not easy and that's where the bridges come in i see so layer ones and layer twos i don't know what the distinction is between them i think every layer technically i can go on to this i don't know yeah it

depends a little on the l2 it's like somehow so i just on the last episode was talking to uh one sub from z kapru and he he was like every l2 is a dap and i was like whoa mind blown because it's smart contracts but like there is potentially sometimes a more evolved chain under the hood and so yeah which is a blockchain which is an l2 which is an l1 but i like kind of your framing that basically if you're running if you have transactions that are secure and then you're bridging to an another chain then you are you're effectively just using a bridge exactly exactly the this the technological distinctions are just so so immaterial they all blur into each other and all you've got are chains and

bridges we are lucky in the sense that we pioneered the cheapest most secure bridge built to date and this avalanche bridge uses a different technology that prior to us nobody was using it's a secure execution technology from intel and it allowed us to build a trustless bridge and that bridge is uh essentially a chain of a bridge that um cannot misbehave even if the person operating the bridge decided to do to to do malfeasance is it using intel sgx is it in an enclave okay it's an enclave exactly so it's constrained in what it can do and and it facilitates the transfer of value

um using only a single transaction on each side so that's why it's so cheap and so fast to use it's the simplest bridge technology i've seen that bridge that you're describing that the avalanche bridge like i always understand that as being ethereum to this to the sea chain like to the evm compatible but could you use that bridge for other types of bridging absolutely there is no reason why it should just be confined to ethereum and we are actively working on bridging to other other chains cool can you say which ones i'm curious no i i don't want to leak alpha and then i want to know where your bets are going though exactly where where is the where are the bets going so who how would we benefit

the most how would our community benefit the most that's the big question um no i can't say where we are headed but it's going to be such a fun year and we are so far ahead given the fact that we built this awesome bridge uh using sgx technology which i think is the right way to do this and the only way that that's universal so i'm really excited about what's to come actually one more question on this i don't know if you're gonna let me know this but like are are the bridges that you're looking at also evm compatible or would you even be considering bridging to like non-evm compatible through this bridge i don't want to leak alpha but i will say this if you are unable to go everywhere where value is then you do i don't think you should be in this game okay so where

there's value let me also mention this and here i'll leak some alpha for you okay thank you if if your universe for bridging is confined only to other crypto then you're in the zero zero sum mindset and you are not really thinking big enough i think from the get-go um in avalanche we've been saying the same thing which is we are here to digitize all of the world's assets and most of the world's assets are not in crypto form now we didn't come to this world to try to take value away from ethereum that's the last thing i want to do um we came to this world to try to go after the 700 trillion that's not in blockchain form and so we want to get those on board

ourselves so that's what i'm really excited about is there any sort of expansion plan for the sea chain like is there right now it's evm compatible will it be evolving differently from the kind of ethereum version of it absolutely and um so what's there to say on this one there's so much to say on this by the way just a side note that question comes from tyrone who was supposed to be who we wanted to have on the show but we couldn't because of scheduling so uh shout out to tyrone thank you for that one yeah now turn turns the bright guy he's asking all the right questions to leak all the right alphas so absolutely um so look ethereum is constrained in so many different ways right so they they came

up with an evm if you look critically at the evm if you're a distributed systems person and you were to make build a new smart contract platform you would probably not make 90 of the decisions that they made you know they were they were first so they made a bunch of decisions in the dark and knowing what we know now i can build an evm that's much better much faster so there is so much to do that that that one could do also they are constrained both politically i didn't appreciate initially just how politically constrained they are yeah they are committed to eth too they are committed to uh the old byte code there there are a bunch of things and they're

committed to certain data structures there are a bunch of things that that they cannot undo uh it would be they would lose too much face and and i didn't appreciate this i thought they were they were nimble i thought they could undo mistakes they have done but time has shown us i think by now that that they're not able to do that so for someone in my position the right move is crystal clear which is innovate technically and uh bring the science hammer and hit it hit every problem with it so of course we're going to be modifying the evm of course we're going to be introducing new opcodes i'm on the zk show there's so much zero knowledge uh stuff that we can add there that that is far more efficient than what's

already in there um i can add more you know i can add all sorts of new data structures that simplify the things that the nodes do and there is like sky's the limit and anything and everything is is on the table for us we have a very strong team of technologists i'm thrilled about the the innovation that we have planned i want to so this this story is sort of the slowness we kind of mentioned it earlier about like bitcoin not moving as quickly and i think ethereum governance i've i've covered it a number of times on the show over the years and it's like it's beautiful because it's very collaborative and there's a lot of people whose you know interest is considered and there's a lot of conversation and people who care but it ends up you know it's this sort of classic of like

direct democracy for all choices with different levels of understanding makes for like a complicated potentially like slowed down process and not that it's direct democracy actually in this case it's like sort of sentiment of the crowd trying to figure out what what to do next how is avalanche governed and by the way sorry i keep switching between like avalanche and ava and maybe i shouldn't maybe i should be more specific like how is the network oh the the network is called avalanche and ava labs is the company that provides the technology for the code so and the client is the avalanche client avalanche client and ava labs decide like that's basically what i'm curious about it's like the decisions about

client upgrades at this stage what what does it look like a great question we are at a different different uh place in our evolution uh compared to systems that are that have been out for six plus years like ethereum and others so um we are also at ava labs we are committed to ensuring that we only do those things that our community would overwhelmingly and with great enthusiasm accept so um our vision for governance is that there are key parameters in the system that uh that need to change dynamically for example the minting rate is something that should be subject to change as the macro conditions change and we can't have anybody in charge of

changing that and other labs would never even dare to to modify something key like that so um the uh the plan the vision for uh for the changes and key parameters is that uh they are subject to modification by coin voting oh wow so on chain governance kind of chain using the avalanche actually it uses the avalanche protocol for uh repeated sub-sampled voting to to see what people will go along with so you anybody could propose a change and then that repeated process will come we'll see if there's consensus around that proposal i have a question on that actually so like the valid is it the validators primarily who are doing the voting in this system or is it sort of mentioned

token holder so it's like say you delegate to a validator and then the validator the validator would do the voting can you also as an individual do voting um so that this this component is a great that's a good question this component there are actually multiple implementations of this component so um the very initial uh vision that we had for this is that to have a voice you have to have a validator so it's the validators that that uh participate in this repeated process but you have a lot of validators we have a lot of validation it's easy to be a validator i guess it's easier than some other systems the system can absorb any number okay and they meaningfully participate in every decision it's not like oh this

decision got made by a subset no no in every decision you and i and everybody we know was was a participant we have a second implementation of this which has a different flavor to it where you could delegate your tokens to a to a validator for the purposes of making decisions on the network but the governance is implemented via these these um why a separate key so it's a more you know it allows people to have validators that participate in the protocol while retaining voting rights if that makes sense yes so so we have two different implementations for this uh neither are active at the moment our system is brand new we are barely 14 months old and we're in a in a phase where all of our economic

parameters are frozen at the moment they haven't been subject to governance and we are making changes to the underlying technicals essentially the sort of the client implementations that make the system more efficient and more smooth we are not at the stage yet where we can open it up for governance and that's coming up soon that's going to be at this year event i'm really excited about it and uh and so so far it's been heads down built the best technical foundation for absorbing all of the world's assets that's where we are and we've been delivering like no other team in this crypto universe i mean this is such a challenge this like this move towards decentralization and decentralizing the decision making

and i think what we've kind of covered a few times also on the on the show is this idea that like in d5 protocols when it's like a a numeric change that's very very clear and determined deterministic like you can see what this would like you can go to five or you can go to eight something like that like something very very specific then governance seems to be quite effective where it becomes more muddled is when it's like should we fund this initiative how much budget he so i i do wonder like if you have i know this is like maybe not the problem that you're focused on but i'm curious what the thinking is around that further step of decentralization oh right so that uh that pertains to different entities in the system so the

avalanche foundation for example has substantial funds and it gives some of these funds as incentives to certain deserving projects so you know what should the avalanche foundation be doing um in making those decisions so uh up until now we've been in startup mode up until now we've been in essentially uh benevolent dictator mode if you would um making decisions that obviously would bring the best the best of outcomes to the community as a whole i think we have weathered many storms and we have made some amazing decisions that brought us from relative obscurity to at the moment i think we're a top 11 coin but

but i think in in every technological respect uh we are very very very high up there you know we're like number two or three in terms of tvl and uh in terms of mind share and for developers we're right up there as clearly the the best platform to be building on for smart contract developers so um so i think we managed that process well and and we did okay so far going forward the principle that's guiding this is that everything should be community serving and the foundation itself should be something that is open and serving and accountable to the community and um you can rest assured that we we will be doing everything we can as we have been until now uh to make sure that the decisions are maximally serving the

community um i think our track record speaks for itself in this regard so you can expect more of that um and with more transparency as time goes on as you know as we get as we sort out our processes for exposing more i mean to me it's like this is a question that all new l1s kind of face i mean you can look at how ethereum managed their funding and their foundation uh as some sort of guide but i i'm personally very curious to see what the next few years bring for the newer networks um with the lessons learned from previous ones seeing if there's ways to yeah kind of decentralize or automate like uh what do i want to say automate sorry or like automate some of these governance

decisions that go past sort of the more like d5 or validator emission like reward rate metrics but i don't know that anyone has the silver bullet yet like i think it's going to be interesting no no one has a silver bullet you are so right and i want to unapologetically and unabashedly put a stake in the ground about what we plan to do so i have seen time and time again and i've even been part of in in some cases some mistakes that people repeat in this space people get caught up in their own rhetoric people get caught up in in nice sounding dreams that are not backed by science and in appealing sound in verbiage they get

tangled up in it and they find themselves um sacrificing the ability to execute in order to to pursue some abstract dream so in particular decentralization you know often means different things to people and projects that uh you know you hear about it's like oh you know we ended up decentralizing this that and the other i don't know what that means uh in many cases they don't know what that means they end up losing the ability to execute projects that are that are giving up the ability to move fast and also the projects that are giving up the ability to fund development end up end up making huge mistakes i

mean it sounds great oh this is community owned uh sounds wonderful at first but then you look at these community owned projects and they're not going anywhere i mean so or bitcoin it's like so this and that great well who are the bitcoin devs and how are they getting funded and it turns out it's very hard to get funding for them so um so we have an advantage and uh in that we have a well-funded team that's driving the development process and the foundation itself has substantial funds and as long as we're in startup mode we're going to be using those funds effectively quickly and we're going to be deploying them for development wherever the ecosystem might need them without incurring the overhead of having to conduct everything uh every decision

in public committees and so forth so we're i'm not going to be making that mistake i've seen it kill projects and you can look at you can look at the predecessors that came before us they're not doing well they're not executing well so another terrine question was actually a question of how defy acceleration worked like kind of on this lane like in terms of funding and and getting projects over how has that been done and and because at this stage as i understand it there's a lot of d5 projects on ava and in a short period they started deploying there so tell me how you did that yeah no i'm really proud of what's happened we have more than you know there are many chains that are saying

things like oh we have you know 250 projects coming on board and what you really have is a ghost chain with five or 50 projects and 200 in the planning stage as i said they they gave millions of dollars to 200 many of those projects they they finish up and they they decide hey i'm not going to deploy on the people who funded me i'm going to go deploy on avalanche because so much better so we have more than 500 deployed projects with countless in the in the background ready to come out so we ended up going from essentially not necessarily literally zero 14 months ago we had no main net uh to being the second or third uh coin with the largest tvl so how did we manage to do it we attracted so much

value and uh so many devs there's more than a million point three develop unique addresses on our c chain in in the last three months alone so it's it's just the numbers are insane they speak for themselves we have so many users i'm really proud of it and um the question is is right on uh part of the success had to do with incentives so um uh you you know we did a combination of uh giving grants to new projects to deploy natively on avalanche as well as incentivizing existing projects successful projects that had grown up in ethereum but had hit limits so you know ave for example fantastic project but there is only so far it can

go if it's limited to ethereum because the world's supply of people who can pay 50 per transaction it's pretty small or more it's just pretty small it turns out so they want to expand they want to reach a different audience they don't want to be relegated to a chain that's mostly whales and bots they want more people and so um so you need to you know the d5 incentive programs played a huge role in getting them on board us and the funny thing is of course now a lot of people have been copying us uh this has been true since day one uh since our public sale you know people have been emulating you know we had a glitch in our public sale people have emulated even the glitch we had during our public sale there are lots of copycats out there but um you know it's not there's a huge moat

here and and the people who've been trying to emulate us are figuring out this exact same thing you can you can give people money you can do all sorts of things to try to bring them on board but if the product you're offering them is not pleasant to use if it's not delightful if if the users touch it and they're like what the heck was that or that was rough or it was that then they turn away and they turn away permanently and for good so um one of the nice things about avalanche is we got our ducks in a row before we we invoked the incentive programs and so people who come to avalanche they find that it's very hard to go back so once you get used to that super fast interaction you know i find myself unable to touch my funds on ethereum i just okay i can't

wait 15 seconds it's not even final after 15 seconds but i can't wait 15 seconds once i'm used to 750 milliseconds for me it's always the gas estimates that it's that's killing me oh yeah transaction 56 [Laughter] yeah yeah really killer i have a question that sort of goes back to the technical level which was about uh mev uh in november there was something with ava and mev some sort of bot thing mev's come up a few times on the show it's been like you know a topic that you know lots of teams are working on and like i guess my first question is like

which chain does mev even live on for for your system and what was that what what happened in november maybe actually let's start with what happened in november and then i can explore i think there was uh there was a lot of discussion between the researchers who work on mev and and various other l1 teams about emmy about what mev is and uh how much of it there is so i think the thing to remember here is that these are all new concepts that uh for many years we built systems paying attention only to safety and liveness as the two properties that we care about and mev extraction extractability you know who benefits from the operation of the

system how do they get to benefit are there special nodes in the system that are in a privileged position to collect money as intermediaries these were all questions that sort of got swept under the rug or were ignored and uh in a wonderful paper a few years ago researchers from cornell university tell part of it involving phil diane started looking into this and and they gave it a name called mev minor extractable value so since then um i think people have been paying much more attention to essentially just think of it as the collection of activities you can do to extract money from the system it's a bit of a pandora's box right it's like by shining

a light on it all of a sudden everyone's like oh you can do that cool right but it's it's like yeah meet the new bosses and they're kind of like the old bosses they're kind of like the people like the citadels of the world who come in between your order flow and then start sniping on transactions the the mev value that's extracted typically comes from retail users so but i should also mention this we're in the early stages of developing the the science around mev and so in november there was a bunch of discussion and it emerged for example that my definition of mev was different from all the other people's definition of mev and i mine is internally consistent and coherent but it's not the same as other peoples and theirs is okay too but and

it's also internally consistent but it's not the same so essentially we were trying to figure out our definitions and what the definitions ought to be um there it's it's a little hard to um you know there needs to be somebody who does a great scholarship you know a great work of scholarship here and bring some nomenclature at the moment we even lack the ability to to uh to categorize different forms of mev so there's always going to be arbitrage opportunities arbitrage opportunities are not necessarily bad so you should be able to go to a market and make money that's good well are you making that money by sniping on somebody else and are you taking it from somebody who would be in some fashion more rightfully uh you know

more rightfully licensed to that cash well then that's bad so so we need we need the terminology that we currently don't have because the scholarship has not been done yet so um so that that terminology needs to come in and and then the techniques will follow i have found that um that people who don't bring this technology this terminology um are usually also unable to think clearly about solution strategies as well so as a space that hasn't had we haven't been able to do that yet so i think we're going to sit and uh and and figure out how to sort of categorize this and come up with techniques for for minimizing mev extraction uh of the wrong kind from

the system the event that i'm referring to it's something i mean this was on twitter i don't know real backstory on this but it was this idea that like non-validating nodes could have an edge and so there was these mev or like some sort of maybe it's not mev maybe some sort of validators who are trying to kind of game it somehow right so we we made a couple of changes to reduce mev extraction and avalanche okay um let me also put my foot down here and talk about our strategy and how it's different from uh from other people's so so protocols like ethereum they do what they do right they have their miners and the miners could actually extract a huge amount of mev they can jump in front of every order

they can sandwich every order they can do whatever the heck they want because they are ultimately the ones that order transactions so um uh in avalanche we have validators and we have a very different protocol and so in that protocol it is possible to do a bunch of things again as it is possible the extractable value will never be zero so there are things that could have happened in avalanche and we looked around at what people were doing and we made some changes to reduce the ability of of people who don't run a validator to jump in and uh and do front-running attacks got it so this is entirely in the service of our users and

it reduced the ability of of people to snipe at transactions inside the system and so this gets people upset because oh hey i was making money why are you upset you took my money source away and uh and uh again unabashedly and unapologetically i i and other developers for avalanche will enact every single uh change that gets rid of the bad bad sources of amy of do you feel like at least from what i understood from this it was this idea that like if you launched lots of these non-validating nodes that it would somehow pull the network you put the network in some sort of like odd space and i realized i'm citing

a tweet so like don't get me wrong i i have not dug into that that's that's not the main issue that was the secondary so there were multiple things that there were multiple optimizations we deployed uh that was a secondary issue uh which was that if you deployed a lot of non-validating nodes then you could slow down other validators and get an edge that way and there is no reason for the validating nodes to to spend so many resources on non-validators and and so we added some limits which again clipped people's wings and limited what they could do and these are all to protect the consensus protocol underneath we will unabashedly employ everything we can to avoid ddos

attacks mev attacks and to protect our users and uh and this is one of our huge advantages compared to uh to other systems it sounds like sort of riding a ship like you're kind of like you're gonna move a little bit in this direction and see if there's some sort of change of behavior you can kind of move in another like you said it's sort of a field of study that's still not you know fully fleshed out and i i do wonder like thinking about mev for ava is it a very different science than thinking of it sounds like it's very different from thinking about mev4 just a standalone chain like you said there's sort of other behaviors that could have impact and it's different like it's not a one-to-one from the work that's been done on like geth and no absolutely

that's exactly right exactly right avalanche is so different as a protocol that the sources of extractable value are different the types of things that people can do against the protocol are different and the science in this in this area as i mentioned is just so nascent the terminology hasn't hasn't really flushed itself out yet let alone the solution strategies we don't have metrics for measuring mvv how do you measure mev it's just unspecified so there are no good quantitative measurable metrics in our hands uh there's so much work to be done by good academics in this space cool well i've run out of questions i want to say thanks so much for walking through all

of this no problem we ended up going quite deep on a number of topics i was i was delighted to do that i'm always delighted to talk to a technically savvy audience and a technically savvy interviewer so fantastic to be here thank you for having me yeah thanks again for coming on the show and sharing with all of us the story of ava i hope we get to you know explore more you know as new insight comes maybe projects that are built on top of it as well i'd love to get to know the community a bit more um yeah just as an aside this is actually the first deep dive i've ever done into ava so this is this has also been really informative for me fantastic well let's hope it's not the last so there's so much happening on top of us i

hope you'll interview other people from the community there's there's so much exciting stuff going on cool all right i want to say thank you to the podcast editor henrik the podcast producer tanya and to our listeners thanks for listening