Episode 253: A look into Namada and Anoma with Awa Sun Yin

Transcript

foreign [Music] welcome to zero 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 [Music] I chat with AWA co-founder of anoma and namata we talk about her background in crypto analytics her shift to working on infrastructure and privacy Tech and how the enoma project came to be she also introduces us to namata a separate but related Network we go through all the

various cryptographic pieces that their team has been developing many of which have been presented at the ZK Summit the gay hack and in our ZK study clubs we then discuss how these fit into namata and in the future into the enoma protocol but before we kick off I just want to share an announcement from one of our partners on the latest CK Summit the web3 foundation they are hosting an in-person event called Subzero in Lisbon at the end of this month it's a polka dot developer conference this year's Edition will bring together the global polka dot community and provide an open introduction to those looking to learn more about substrate polka dots framework for building custom blockchains I've added the link in the show notes where you can learn more and apply I also want to let you know that

there is a new ZK hack multi-week event coming up starting on November 22nd if you haven't been to any of the previous ones it's a series of workshops spread out over four weeks with puzzle hacking competitions be sure to sign up for a kickoff event and jump into ZK puzzle hacking and workshops with us now Tanya will share a little bit about this week's sponsor today's episode is sponsored by Elio Elio is a new layer 1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of ethereum the privacy of zcash and the scalability of a roll-up if you're interested in building private applications then check out Elio's programming language called Leo Leo enables non-cryptographers to harness the power of zkps to deploy decentralized exchanges hidden

information games regulated stable coins and more visit Leo dashlang.org to start building that's Leo Dash lang.org you can also join Elio's incentivize testnet 3 by downloading and running a snark OS node no signup is necessary to participate for questions join their Discord at elio.org Discord so thanks again Elio and now here's our episode foreign co-founder of anoma and namata welcome to the show hour thanks for having me I'm very excited to be having you on the show I've had two of your co-founders on there's three of you who who are co-founders of vanoma Nevada I've had

Christopher goes years ago talking about IBC Moore and Adrian bring last year telling us about like a Noma sort of the first time we talked about it so yeah it's great to sort of have you join as well I do want to say right off the bat that I'm an investor in anoma long-standing through ZK validator and I also like to consider anoma this like a team I constantly partner on so many things like we've done CK Summit ZK hack you sponsored the show and anyway it's just really great to have you on and I'm very excited to actually catch up even for my own understanding there's been so much that's happened since that last episode with Adrian in terms of cryptographic builds and new libraries and announcements and I think what I want to

do with this episode is generally like bring it all together before this episode we talked about how you'd never been on the show but actually Ally you have been on the show before so you were on this is such a funny episode so I did this episode the z-con zero like combo episode where I interviewed 12. oh people yeah so I did the same thing with strad just recently like it's there's so many great people on that episode that was just because we did such small interviews I think a lot of people people don't really remember I clearly I don't remember I forgot but yes I was interviewed at six years yeah yes but uh what I want to do with the beginning of this interview is definitely understand a little bit about your journey like what were you working

on before and what led you to actually work on Noma and namata and the problems that you're trying to solve and generally like working in the Privacy space yeah so the way I got started with this entire decentralized space was I guess less common compared to everyone else you have on this show um actually my first job in the space was Edge analysis maybe some listeners here do not know about your analysis but actually channels knows a lot about all your listeners um so it was a very interesting introduction to it what I was doing there was that um towards the end of my graduate thesis I was looking for data sets to analyze I was back then in ml and they came into the company called analysis they were doing developing

tools to the anonymized block teams this is basically the business model and um I wrote a couple of papers on how you could use ml to anonymize bitcoin so it was a really cool intro to the space because it made it very clear how much privacy was working in the base layers and how much you could do by deploying some basic statistic analysis or not even very fancy tools or algorithms so like extract a lot of data about individuals and entities that we're using blockchains I kind of wish I could like sponsor people to internet analysis before they touch any blockchain because I think then we'll want privacy much quicker or a lot less people will be

using this for serious things wow it was almost like that was the your first foray in and a major eye-opener like it sounds like this also colored a lot of the work that you did after tell me after you left to analysis though what what did you do next um so towards the end um I kind of realized that I started to follow more ethereum I that's how I came across with Cosmos and Thunderman back then and I kind of wanted to be more involved in the actual development of the protocols this is because the thing that motivated me the most about technology that really led me to choose to be more and more related once is that I'm into this entire space because I kind of want to bring in systems and

applications that do not further explorative paradigms that we currently have with especially in web 2 like we have all the systems that basically give a few parties a disproportional amount of access and this proportional amount of power and leverage of like users individual data or a bunch of other things and I kind of wanted to pursue a path where I could actually stop building things and contrary to Buildings systems that can bring alternatives to this exploitative paradigms so then I realized that doing data analysis and Page analysis was probably not the most way to have a big impact and um and then I saw that still the state

of protocols was in very early stage like back then proof of stake was still like theoretical concept right what are you what year are you talking here 2017. you're talking about it was the end of 2017 beginning of 2018 right I think that's when we met right like I think it was right around that time at full node that we would have first crossed right had you left the company then or were you sort of like in the process of leaving I was still part of genosis didn't leave yet um until I started to be more involved with Cosmos and then for Cosmos I was just involved like pretty limited capacity uh part-time and that's where I met created and Chris and then the history follows cool but before you did Noma you did have another

project together the three of you tell me a little bit about being a validator yeah yeah the entire thing you said um so I met the Adrian and Christopher at the cosmos or tenement and in summer 2018 questions were supposed to launch and it was not very clear whether um there would be enough competent validators to operate the network adminate and this was still I mean in summer 2018 perfect steak was still a very early concept totally it was theoretically going to work like now nowadays it's completely given only you change the launch are following the standard of mistake but back then it was not so obvious and there was definitely not a very developed landscape and ecosystem of different validators so

together we kind of decided to start a validator called cryptium labs this is how I also moved to Switzerland and why we picked Switzerland as well and the anecdote that maybe agent skipped is that actually we are the only validator that is kind of considered a national security critical for Switzerland cool so like it is part of the critical infrastructure of a bunch of um Swiss banks wow so the story is that like one day Adrian was going to Data Center and then he ran into a few tanks they were just doing some kind of um they were just doing some training and testing how they would defend this data center um in case something happened whoa but wait it wasn't data security just

because of what you guys that you guys were in the data center was it like there might have been other things there as well you wish because there are a bunch of national wide critical Financial infrastructure I see there's also uses that data center oh cool and then that was just like entire group is uh was being defended and secured by the military wow but anyways crypto Labs previously validator it was a actually the first organization or company that we started the three of us and it was a professing validator that focused a lot on security overliveness there's a bunch of only things those things mattered nowadays everything is on the AWS and where were the few the actually ran as much physical efficient structure as

possible yeah so bare metal as users matches the same physical hsms as possible and we focus on operating networks that we consider technically interested in novel so a lot of layer ones that was a very different time for the validator community though I mean I've spoken to Brian Crain about that too which is like back when it first started there wasn't really a clear business model like it was just so unsure if this would be something that could be a business that would be sustainable so a lot of the people doing it were kind of just experimenting like trying it out like seeing how it went like how was that I mean in your case were you all still working somewhere else like I know Chris

was still doing IBC research and stuff like that at the time that's right yeah and Adrian was still part of Cosmos later on he's doing with free before being more involved but I was working on it basically full-time okay so the entire the end of your crypto Labs was just that over time it was really cool to be part of like operating infrastructure and the networks of Leo ones but sometime in the middle we cannot realize that we want to be more involved with more practical research and also getting more into like some areas like cryptographies and large proofs like back then I think 2019 was the Cambrian explosion of the cavities right so by then for example specifically to that field is when we

started metastate and I remember that like it was like this is a validator and yet there's this really crypto heavy blog I actually I remember I'd always posted on ZK mesh which I'm gonna plug right now by the way CK mesh is a monthly newsletter that's still out where we put like the latest research I'll put a link to that like I remember Zuki mesh did feature um some of the articles that we posted on metastasis walk this is the company name yeah um there's a way for example Punk by hand that's one a very popular one totally but yeah I remember that and I remember thinking like this is an interesting pivot sort of for a validator I mean around the same time I started ZK validator actually and we just we fully like leaned into like

we're just promoting talking about and like yeah championing this like new technology but tell me kind of from metastate to heliacs maybe like what was that trans like was it was cryptium becoming heliacs or was metastate becoming heliacs in a way so actually cryptium was just a validator and you just stayed that way okay we started metastate as independent company and the thesis behind metastate was just that we're not very clear on um ahead of time what would be the business model behind merostick but we kind of bet on the people who are able to write novel protocol they want protocols build them and and upgrade them and maintain them plus they were knowledgeable among three

particular fields which were distributed systems and consensus plcs programming languages and cryptography especially in the key piece will be able to make money in the future assuming that those four pillars were going to be crucial for any team that in the future will be um if all of this is gonna replace Financial system then a team that has this kind of knowledge and accepted his will not have issues making any money that was like the story behind metastate our Purpose with it and did it become heliacs or did you kind of start something new with the the like learnings from metastate actually the team that was the medicine towards the end of 2020 officially on the 1st of February was the one that was

brought to Helix okay so I think you could consider that metastate people that works Helix we started with a team of 15. cool and that like that group it was a research group like you were creating content You're Building sort of like this knowledge-based Talent base in a way like were you building something then too were you already experimenting or was it more like a research group no it actually builds all major protocol upgrades on pesos oh yeah this is maybe something to mention because that you like tezos was a strong Connecting Point you were really involved in that Community after being involved in Cosmos eh after um so I think it was more because actually Teslas was the first for the state Network to launched oh yeah true it had a very unique like their own

proper State model but it did go live in summer 2018 so that's when we started crypto man we kind of decided to just operate that to see how it goes got it that's how we got um connected to the Texas ecosystem and uh we did get some grants from cases foundations built on super some of the research that they were also interested in so all the areas on PLT the GPS and consensus that we're doing they were interested in as well but at the same time we also worked together with the core development team and uh build some of the major changes that upgraded lives a few billion worth of value good experience process damn yeah yeah yeah

that's wild but this is just to show that like I think our background is more like it's actually very full stack in the sense of you see a lot of teams nowadays that are Stellar in cryptography you see a lot of teams that are Stellar in layer ones and some that really Stellar in application but I think what's very unique about Helix as a team is that we have like everything from operating networks from the validator side so like writing extending um layer ones so like application building like so adapts and everything and this has also translated a lot into today's Helix because we're building Helix as an organization that is vertically integrated so we're not building only layer one launch it and say you know now go have fun build

applications and interfaces we actually faciliter with Nevada for example it's not just the protocol and then the tooling and everything are in ecosystem it's also been released with uh at least one end user interface so people don't have to rely on the command line got it and actually I think it's a really good moment for us to Define these different groups that we keep kind of mentioning so when I introduced you you were the co-founder of a Noma namata so we've mentioned this a little bit but heliac so the Helix is a is a company full of great Engineers with all of this experience what is anoma today just just a note like when I had Adrian on a year and a half ago that's we talked about a Noma so how do you define what a Noma actually is

um so anoma is the name of the protocol okay it is one of the protocols that we're building the other one is no matter it is also protocol so there is no company or organization okay do they interact like are they connected is anoma going to be I don't know some protocol underpinning what no matter does um so first I'd like to just give an updated definition of where the Noma is just on a higher level sure sure um just to position the entire thing um so actually anoma is just new like novel General architecture it's how you build blockchains okay uh we refer to it as a generation three so it's a general architecture um it has a lot of association with privacy but it's actually not a privacy

blockchain in that sense it is just um on the Privacy side it allows you to expose really good privacy designing Primitives for application developers but the way right way to think about anoma is that it is just the next Evolution and how you're going to build layer ones to later on support applications with different properties so novel applications cannot build an existing blockchains or the same applications but fully decentralized and then at the same time though like would you then categorize this as something like substrate is it the Builder or is it like the cosmos SDK uh no if we're back in 2015 and we only had Bitcoin protocols and cryptocurrency protocols like we call them we call this

group as scriptable settlement um and then Vitali came and said you know I can try to do a few cool applications with Bitcoin but honestly it doesn't work it is all plenty as and this is just not usable so here I proposed ethereum which is just a new way of building blockchains so I know my age is the same okay but today I know my shoes feeling uh is just proposing a new way of thinking about how you build the base layer okay on top of which you can build applications but it is so is it sort of like the way Bitcoin goes from like utxo to account model are you going from account model to like new account account models or like privacy occasions no so actually the right progression I'm just gonna

tell you the entire evolution of protocols is like in a nutshell okay I think is that we look at the first generation marked by Bitcoin as scriptable settlement so script or someone is actually really good for building cryptocurrencies with different flavors and privacy guarantees like with that you see Motorola Z cash a bunch of cool stuff but a lot of people don't know in history is that with Bitcoin script uh you can actually build other tabs and applications like color coins um name coins Beacon stock change however the issue is that you saw you can build it and it works but the issue is that applications will always have trade-offs and they will always look clunky and hard to use so actually

vitalik speaks about this problem in the ethereum white paper and that gave the room for him to introduce an entire new paradigm which is what we call programmable settlement so it is more ads more specificity and you're able to program more logic at the cinema layer and this is what gives birth to better versions of color coins which is the modern uc20 or its name coin which is a modern ens way more usable way more widespread right yeah and they had also gave birth to a new era of new applications that it was way hard too hard to build on the script also or maybe impossible and those are things like nfts taxes amms um and theme marketplaces Styles

um a lot of very interesting applications that you see today and then ever since ethereum if you look into all the layer ones that were launched ever since we call them basically programmable settlement plus plus and this is because if you look at them in essence the model that they introduce for application developers is still the same so this imperative model smart contracts common differently but it's the same but they come with different improvements in some particular areas like it's faster it's more scalable in some areas um it is more private comes with different consensus different civil resistance mechanisms switch from before work to perform stake um but if you look at them and also the applications are built today they're

basically the same so this is why you consider everything ever since ethereal launched as programmable settlement plus plus okay and what is a Noma doing different and maybe you wanted to clarify that because it's it doesn't use as sort of utxo type model but does it better that is actually not so important um the background to why and normal is is narration is that how we got Sonoma right how do we got to today's architecture of anoma and it is because we looked at some of the most advanced applications in ethereum world but it generalizes to any other program of settlement or system applications is that they all follow every similar pattern and you will see that it has a bunch of uh downsides like a lot of

centralization points so every application in ethereum think of for example all the layer twos think of a cow swap think of open C the nft marketplace they all follow the pattern where the user has an intent so an intent issues a sign message that they send somehow to the application right the same transaction and authorization that intent is scattered by at the moment a lot of supplications make this feasible by up by a single operative database that usually becomes synchronization point that there's some kind of compute to Output a state transition on ethereum and that gets finally settled on ethereum so this is like the common pattern of most interesting applications

um on ethereum that at the moment the best you can do is to follow this thing where okay you have the single operator database to get us the intense um it doesn't compute that becomes actually the centralization point entry point and it comes with all the issues and kind of becomes the regression point with this entire technology but there are currently two parts where you either go for the dydx approach where you choose launch layer one to decentralize just that part right just comes with a lot of complexity but um it is a easy way to fix today the problem um I would go for the odd approach where you are ready to operate a very large organization like conveys and everything and uh and I guess you can see it might

go for that approach as well but the main point is that how does a number fit into all of this um and actually this is the background of how we came to the conclusion of what do applications need before they need a blockchain and the main point is that if you want to do kind of part of Discovery so where you any application that needs kind of part of Discovery where you do not yet know who your other parties are and what it is you're settling with this is needed for basically any application including dexters and marketplaces does it affect your ability to do an intention the way you describe that because you don't know who your counterparty is um so today there is no way of doing the centralized kind of party okay outside of

um you have always interested party where you're studied intense and they're gonna like try to do sort of thing and here you're thinking like an order book a little bit like you say I want to buy this at this Mount and you're waiting for someone to sell it to you at that amount exactly so I'm going to get that to those design principles in a bit pouring off phenomen how why we think of it as the third generation is primarily that it is one architecture to think of it as like ethereum but it's just a different protocol and many levels in the in-house constructed and this protocol has the bandage that allows you to do um the centralized kind of party Discovery it supports intense the centralized kind of part of Discovery distribute solving and multi-change

settlement so you also has the settlement part so it is it's just like a different way of thinking about it decentralized counterparty Discovery like it's sort of introducing almost like a different Paradigm on how you would then build applications on top of it correct have these different tools okay now I have to ask like is namata not using that too like is it not using these principles or is it just tackling a different problem so actually enormous architecture for applications okay but we kind of realized that early this year so the story of why we why we decided to actually release the Mata sooner is because there are some parts of a Noma component wise think of for instance just think of uh tiger and there's some other components that were still in

development and there were also a lot of features that were already ready that we could just deployed into an application or into a layer one that could provide a lot of utility today and um there are a lot of parts like for example the base Ledger the value predicate system especially the masp the entire thing that allows multi-asset diagnostic part A lot of these things actually were ready and we really wanted to launch nomada sooner just because we need this we need a protocol that allows you to gain privacy without caring about what access you use as a monetary policy okay now more than ever especially with the recent events let me let me sort of rephrase what I think you're saying here

is like you've been building and we're going to talk about this like a bunch of different cryptography pieces we we haven't always understood how they fit together when they've been released that's right great research paper is very interesting but we're like okay why why exactly are they doing that so now what you're saying is you have a few of those pieces in a state where you could release something but you don't necessarily have all the pieces you would need to build Out full anoma is this true as of today okay so is then is Nevada sort of like your Canary Network then is it like your first and then there's gonna be another one or the the thing about namara is that I think the closest case in layer ones well is kusama okay but it is actually different because the mara is it's only a one with

its own scoped future set which is um Leon proof of stick protocol that provides interchange agnostic privacy so that's the purpose of Nevada um it did start from a earlier version of anonymous that's come with some features that developers they look closely it's basically introduction or like stepping Zone towards a normal in the future okay however namara is gonna just live as its own chain it would not it would not have an upgrade path no solid to anoma however it will be a really more intuitive and more immediate um introduction to a lot of Concepts that later on um will be useful to the same anoma practically speaking looking at how the landscape is today with users

especially if it's some aspects around interpretability like cross chain transfers and all these things IVC and bridges a lot of bridge exploits I kind of feel like we've seen early stages even with Concepts that we've been talking about for years right now so I kind of feel like we need to launch a network as well where you prove that um there are better designs for ethereum Bridges trustless Supreme Bridges and there are good ways of leveraging great protocols like ABC to for applications can get on other blockchains that you cannot get on the base chain so I think like I think of no matter as a more intuitive immediate entry point to a lot of these concepts of interpretability

but also protocols that are as a diagnostic so it doesn't matter what the native facets are it's more about the protocol provider utility and then you decide which assets want to benefit from privacy or when I leave work and I guess like and I think we're going to get into this a little bit later but because it's a privacy focused project and because it's like dealing in interoperability and privacy you are trying to build up in a way like that shielded pool the candidates the participants the assets that live in the sort of shielded environment because the more that's in there the less easy it is to like you know figure out who's who um is that also part of it did you feel like this part of Nevada yeah is that why but that's that's what I'm wondering like Did you sort of feel like if we

don't start building this up if we wait until everything's perfect and release it like you're gonna have to start then to build up those type of pools actually no it's quite independent it's like um so if you if you need to take uh take away two major features that Nevada brings to the table today that no really no other uh protocols brought so far um the first one is just idea that all assets share one anonymity set this is enabled by the MSP plus two upgrades that include the convert circuits and this allows you to have one shielded set for anything including it doesn't matter with the denomination and the origin of the asset so think of like initial set the native asset tokens from the friend Cosmos seconds from osmosis from

ethereum nfts they all will be part of the Sim set so you that just what means is that the anonymity will not be weakened or fragmented and then the Privacy grantees are going to be the same for all assets because the issue that you have with when you do not have something like unified sugar set is that if you if your asset has pretty low transactional volume it is actually quite trivial to the anonymize it but just monitoring the entries and exits I'm sending me this is very small but if all assets share the same then NFC that has low volume looks the same as a transaction that pays gases yeah although it's always at the movement

outside of the shielded environment that becomes the problem that's correct yeah so um this is the a dancer will be just that they point to to the show set to namara that will still be transparent and then if the origin chain is transparent which is the case for most layer ones then that also becomes where a place where observers can observe can get a lot of information but if you interact within the shoulder set so as soon as that people will not be able to connect the ones and exit unless you do some kind of a usability error where you send it to the same account on ethereum or something like that so that linkability is broken and as long as you are within the digital set which you can also just use to do any kind of

transactions with all your assets industrial asset there won't be no transaction graph would just be removed do you imagine actually any computation happening within that space though in namata I think just like arbitrary computation yeah or is it is it more for the transfer more for the people it is possible actually um some interesting application that we have been experimenting with recently and this was inspired by a conversation that the Christopher girls had with Dev audio from us was this is that actually namata is a protocol and this is we we're not releasing this with version one but this is really cool and we could do this is that you can actually use namara to us run them to to create shielded actions on other networks oh

because it's IBC enabled maybe because it's IBC enabled um you have no glass teleport Ash is already there um there's no linkability for there's going to be so for example um and this is how you work with osmosis the way you were useless is that imagine that you uh when I like do a trade on on osmosis and osmosis is transpiring change so everything that happens there uh is kept transparent but what you can do is no matter the shielded pool you can authorize an action of traders to assets own osmosis and then this package gets transmitted over IVC to osmosis um that treat happens and it gets back to the um to the sugar pool just the info that

it happened just like a message that it has happened or some sort of token in this case you'll be uh if you for example the tokens uh the initial token say a shin would die on namara wants to be swapped for osmo then the children die is sent from namada to osmosis via in this case there's so much to support let's think of ethereum then um but anyways you want to try die for us to see so you have already in a pre-step um whole die on the Mata and this is The Shield of set so it's fully private with that account you authorize a trade on ethereum so let's get the X application in ethereum that allows you

to trade die for us to see but you trigger that action by sending the message on namara that means that has been transmitted by the trustless ethereum bridge that we built and that triggers the action on ethereum then the results in the usdc that you send back so you can initial level and it gets shielded again on that return but nobody knows kind of the there's no link ability even if you get like you can see like how much you see uh it's been swapped for die on ethereum that's transparent and you can also see that there's some UCB move over the bridge to Nevada going to the shield step but that's it this is like a really cool application to compile using Nomad it's

just more to answer a question of yeah at the moment we don't think we're gonna make um the probability predicates no matter but I think the main purpose is to focus on in the chain NASA diagnostic privacy so like start really getting people used to the idea that assets can be decoupled from the protocols you can get privacy without having to buy in into the monetary policy you can usually can pay for your milk privately even if you don't know pricing milk using SEC or Bitcoin no matter how much we love Zack yeah Fair one thing we sort of hinted at but we didn't go through yet is the different pieces of cryptography that have been developed and I kind of want to ask you as we go through this which parts are in namata and which maybe all of them are but um

and also a little go a little bit into that not all of them are oh not all of them okay yeah yeah so I wanna I wanna start with one uh vampire uh Joshua Fitzgerald is that I think that's how you say his name right yes Joshua Fitzgerald had presented this at ZK Summit seven in Amsterdam and I remember like because there's a lot of awesome names that come out of the anoma Nevada so vampire is definitely one that's going to keep its name okay so vampire let's talk about what that is so it's is it it's a language right and I I kind of wondered like is it a DSL for writing um not exactly so anyway we can look at

this and then some people from compellers we're gonna just might kill me because it depends of like which obstruction you take from what part okay um but you on one hand have bsls and higher level languages through which you can write seconds yeah that's it so think of for example look at these think of um like a lot of high-level languages dsls I think Leo will still be from Alia will also be part of this category okay and then you have in the end proof systems like Punk um risk five Etc and in the middle sits vampire so vampire is the intermediate representation okay that um allows you to basically transform the higher level languages and dsls it is something that

any prep system can understand so it's not native just to the kind of circuit you're using then no okay so vampire and this is why we want it to have its own name and its own memes and brand he is completely agnostic okay so we build it in a way as like we thought that it would be really high leverage to bring in this part of the entire tooling for writing circuits in ckp world because there is just no standard and by having this it will allow us to basically um make all higher level languages be able to compile down to different proof systems independent of what purchases available today and in the future so it is completely intended to be a um kind of standard but a neutral tool that

other ecosystems languages and Builders can fully benefit from got it do you have a DSL as well or would you imagine people writing I don't know if they have to but if they're like if they're trying to write the circuits in your system would they then use a different DSL could they use Leo and vampire um so we are for the full like vertical integration for just because applications look the same as applications on on programmable settlement architectures okay we actually are building a high level language called jubix I think you guys have spoken about this on a different podcasts it didn't make a lot of sense but the the way jubix integrates these jubix is a high level language for

writing applications on a normal I see so it's for all kinds of applications ones that handle private state or not private state or a good transparent space so you would write in juviks and then vampire would convert it or would you not need that fire oh you do need no you would it's integrated with vampires so if you want to write certain applications that require for example custom circuits um you will be able to do that directly on jubix as a higher level language then we then goes for vampire and then it gets like compelled onto the corresponding proof system okay as the application needs the next thing I want to ask about is Tiger I actually have the name and I have no notes because I don't know anything about it what is Tyga yeah yeah yeah so um Piper is

actually a normal think of it as like the state machine of anoma does namata have that or not no matter does not come with tiger so Taiga is a enoma only actually going back juviks would be used for and vampire would that be for both the Noma and Nevada so for namara we actually don't need it okay because the circuit has been written his name ISP second okay and the we just have been upgrading it um we didn't use the the tool supportives parts of it I often compared to sexy and very sexy okay so just a little bit back on the story of white tiger and how it relates to know my wife's specific to Nomas architecture so I know my architecture has this unique design principle which is it is intense Centric so users do not

sign transactions use a sign which ends State they will be happy with okay and that end State can be like a fixed value it can be rain juice can be whatever but they do not pre-authorize an excretion Trace which is what you do with ethereum programmable settlement architectures so the only sign for I'm happy with is it where I'm half minus a thousand eights and plus one Bitcoin this is what an intent is it's it's not derivative so is it um well because that like that idea of the range and the wish it's like it's often like I just think of derivatives it's like a a bet on the future it hitting a certain moment and then something happens you can't totally build applications like that using the intense

system is actually going to be much better to use intense system that how currently some of this the marketplace with notifications have built yeah um but the main point is that so that is like a big part of how we designed the anoma and there is no other protocol that is intent based at the moment oh interesting um and how that relates to Tiger is that so we want intents to be able to be fully private um also fully transparent depending on the application and we look at it as like when you define an intent if it's fully transparent then you this is just wasn't good it gets executed it gets awesome you don't need time to cryptography for that but there will be

applications which will require different privacy levels for the same application so at the moment with tiger will be able to support transparent shielded and in the future private intents the transparent in terms I just like you can read what's what the contents are yeah but the shielded intensity who is kept uh private okay but the what is kept transparent okay and this is the best we can do with the CK piece at the moment but you just said that this private one is there one where both are kept private or no that's right but that relies on some fancy fully homophoric encryption and we're looking into how how long it will take and say oh that is actually visible in the system okay but there's actually a lot of things you can already

build with the combining transparent and shoulder side and that lists tiger so tiger is able to basically take intense no matter what like what part is transparently or privates and then execute those so uh the background of Tyga is not ethereum is fully transparent let's make it fully private or full shielded the background of tiger is what do application Builders need and for some applications like a Dao you will need parts of it to be transparent think of for example the results of the calling of a latest vote but parts of it to be fully private like for example the individuals votes they don't need to be transparent interesting okay I want to keep moving on to another project fervio

a dkg protocol yes where does that fit in and is it in a Noma and namata or only anoma this can be in both okay yeah so on Anonymous and this relates as well to this entire thing about architecture favorite issues a mechanism that the protocol exposures application builders that makes it really easy to do programmable batching um and a bunch of other properties like for example the threshold decryption scheme just removes the ability for validators observers at the mempo the transaction mempool to basically do a maybe or from running because they gain access to that information ahead of time so um Fairview onanoma is two things I

think that the most the ability for validators to do mov or people who observe the transaction mempool here mbv we refer to the movie that you can get by gaining access and information ahead of others so like this informational asymmetry and the other part is that it allows you to do a bunch of cool things like um say for an application I want a batch to be this many blocks this is cool for um building applications that allow you to for example cash up on another map uh benefits a lot from batches up any application that where you want to gather for example votes or you want to gather um bits from an auction benefits from this kind of batching where you're going

to keep the intents from the users um encrypted on the blockchain but encrypted and they're only going to get decrypted at the same time depending on how long the batch is the only implementation that I know of that's closest to be released on a layer 1 is Fairview which is our implementation and the paper was released this year it was a collaboration between Joe and Deb okay but like we were the team actually for everyone started meditate and not at Helix and we just continue building it so to my not just the only implementation of this kind of scheme that allows you to prevent mov uh from validators and observers of the transaction mempool so how built is that like you're saying it's already going to be used in the Mata is it red like

finished so I'm just going to come through that but in the Mata we are probably gonna leave it out for a protocol upgrade okay no matter after minute this is mostly not because Fairview is not ready as a mechanism it's actually because the mechanism is implemented on a very closely with consensus and there is a part on namata that relies on ABCI so this is tending core stack uh that is not ready and so we were thinking of which is the point of view in the future protocol upgrade of Nevada so you talked about batching and like helping prevent Mev or change Mev basically but first of all what is it and how is it working in this context oh um right the intuition is the following

so um when you have transactions they all go to the main pool right so far all transactions are just transparent like anyone who just takes a look into the current mempools of any blockchain they can see a lot of stuff in there and that information can be front run so like for example before you craft abroad then you look into the library transactions are available reorder them the way that you benefit to you the most and everything right so um the way Fairview removes um that ability is that transactions before they make it into the mempo they are encrypted against uh validators public Keys what you're talking I mean because I talked about this with Dave

and sunny in our interview on osmosis we talked about this decryption and I sort of understood all that but why are we using the term dkg for this because like to me that distributed key generation like it's breaking up a key into multiple things right so like this is where I get kind of confused like this is just a component in the protocol and this is suit that gives you protocols but I wouldn't know why we're using this otherwise like so so like Fairview has uh like two parts like one part into the kg protocol and the other part is the professional decryption part oh I see okay there's something in the technique maybe that's using yeah yeah but I'm sure like because she is a family of

protocols within cryptography that's not only used it's not specific to uh to Fairview and from running protection and stuff like that okay um because your protocol is also used in other schemes for other applications I see you soon you just mentioned a trustless bridge to ethereum right are you doing work on Bridges is this like I mean Chris having worked on IBC I feel like had we've I think when I had him on last we talked about like what would private Bridges look like very theoretical but yeah are you are you working on that is that part of the sort of strategy of a Noma namata to have that um so the very first versions of anoma will benefit from like users can like

transfer the assets from auto chains to anoma and then they'll just benefit from the kind of Futures and Primitives that exposes with anoma Vietnam this is actually more more straightforward we actually need this because we're not presenting the Mata as a team that creates new assets it's more about when you have assets or created an auto transparent change how do you retrofit privacy how do you benefit from the Privacy um of Nevada uh independent what else you want to hold they want to use so in order to make that possible in today's world for any chain that supports modern fastenality and BFD trains like think of for example any chain that is built using the customers SDK

um supports IBC so that's compatible with the IBC protocol and that is actually the most preferred design for how you do bridging because it just like has almost you do not have any trust assumptions even on the relayers this is the crypto cryptographic Bridge straight up both sides have like clients you don't even need like expensive decade bridge for any of this you basically just have a like client on both sides that's it um so that would be the best but sadly not all change that are used today with a lot of assets um support personality so an example for that is ethereum and uh the goal was that we really wanted to make privacy accessible for all the people who are

using the theme and have holding at Holy different tokens including nfts in ethereum so we looked at the different propositions of like Bridge designs and there's a lot of things that Nomad XLR there's a lot of bridge constructions out there but um we actually decided to build our own this is a custom bridge design because once prioritize the security for the industry Assurance for the people who use this bridge above everything else and it actually doesn't come at a huge like the transactions are still really fast like it doesn't really come on with the leaders to trade off so this bridge designed on a high level the way it works is that valid leaders

ornament will also have to operate a full node on ethereum I see is the reason that you decided to build your own a result of some of the like the hacks that happened in the last like year was it sort of like instead of working with a partner that maybe you have a little bit less control over you would want to build it yourself or was it more just that efficiency or that customization that you wanted um we would have made this decision regardless of the exploits exploits were predictable to be honest but the issues on a higher level with the issue that you have when you use something like Nomad or XLR is that you do not have um control of what happens in event of an exploit you do not have any control

of like what happens um in there and these are usually operated by another entity so that's a not at another layer of like security through through which the users have to reason for and if anything happens well it how does the buckets get fixed how does it gets upgraded um they can at any point at arbitrary controls or freeze assets over the bridge this just adds a lot more complexity to the end user and allows us to like it removes a lot of our ability to um add extra security guarantees what do you have to build to actually build this like what are you building oh the the Ethan Bridge yeah do you have to build

an ethereum like something on the ethereum side do we have to deploy a bunch of smartphone tricks in a few okay yeah and then the bridge protocol um is a bunch of uh it's a bunch of dress code integrated with Nevada and we can also use it later for anoma okay so once it's built it's kind of cool and you kind of this design is actually generalizable to bridge into Auto protocols so I think the design is actually very similar to we propose ah you may not know this we actually proposed a a bridge to zcash oh yeah on us published from the cash government and the cash foreign actually oh yeah we'll also give a talk I'll also link that in the in the show notes and stuff but cool okay so they'd have to build it though in that case

right like they'd have to build the bridge part we could build it ourselves or you could build it yourself but in their case there's no smart contract platforms it's not like you can just trust this yeah deploy it actually that's a good point I think for because you'll be a little bit different but for example for any other chain that there is probable settlement but the national support IBC then uh we could build something very similar to reveal for ethereum interesting just enable the bridge in the case of the ethereum one are you acting then as a bit of a roll-up are you like a privacy roll-up I love those words keep blending together one shielded action's enabled it's basically like a show that roll off okay but it's not it's it actually provides it privacy it's not like a secure life

in the sense of things are going well absolutely provide you a lot of uh scalability but it's not so much privacy this is now leading me to also like digging more into Nevada and that's what I want to do next because I want to talk about the multi-asset shielded pool and Yamada and the rollout and all that stuff but like now I'm curious like you would sort of mention that it won't have or like anoma is a whole thing consensus execution all of that does Nevada have its own consensus just modern bft kind of being consensus okay it's uh it does use a really novel um purpose sake mechanism so it comes with a bunch of Innovations around for example how the fees are distributed it follows an advanced version of the f1p

distribution model it allows you to when you receive in prophetic rewards you do not have to like before them and then restate them that creates a large transaction to spam which is like the protocol just like other compounds it unless you want to unbond them and then do something with it okay but there is like there will be a full validator set for Nevada oh yeah it's a it's a perfect easily one okay so then that way it's maybe a little different than some of the Roll-Ups which are relying on ethereum as their like shared Security in this case it isn't no matter is day one but with a specific purpose but anoma is more a general architecture 4 billion depths however it is one architecture where it is agnostics how you deploy it

so what we're building easily in one party we're gonna aim to deploy the little one but you can actually leverage a normal layer 1.5 or 11 genoma as a layer 2 on ethereum for example if you just do have to just strip out you don't need the consensus there no no you don't have to strip out anything you just can like it really depends on like what it is the application wants so layer one would be just in the an intent would just start and then die in the end like I mean finish be finalized and settle on and on my right fully on chain um from beginning from the intended sale it makes it circumstances and it's fully written and legendary so that would be enormous layer one anonymously 1.5 is think of it as if you're an application

like openc git coin counsela you want to decentralize a very specific component like um in the case of layer 2 uses the sequencer that's usually what's uh centralized in the case of Cal swap is you want to make the solvers permission less so you don't want to be that the party the white list servers in the case of openc you want to decentralized entire part of kind of part of Discovery how like trades which trades are made and matched um in the case of Bitcoin you want to centralize a lot of things because at the moment the sad thing about programmable settlement is that really cool applications like credit funding uh just what Bitcoin offers a big part of it is happens off band and only the final payments from the more the sake

get the settled in the theory right that's a shame for like such a beautiful application so the case Bitcoin you will be able to build few qf but fully decentralized so if you're applications that you just want to decentralize a certain part or benefit from a Noma for specific component of your application then the way we use this is that you use anoma until it creates transaction for ethereum okay and the transaction yeah makes it so if you get settled there via the theorem Bridge so that would be a normal layer 1.5 okay going to anoma as Layer Two but then do you still like because I always think of l2's it's not I mean I know they have like committees and sequencers and stuff like that but like

they don't need the full validator sets right right so l2s only makes sense if you want to rent ethereum security in the case of anomalously 1.5 the transaction it still gets settled on ethereum but if you wanted to rent the theme security what that means is that you trust ethereum's validators or miners um more than you trust other chains and anoma as a leader to ethereum the way it will look like is that it will allows it it comes with the verifier of the entire State transition that happened on Aloma but that only makes sense for if you want to rent ethereum security like I

think there's a lot of uh um confusion around what l2s are for what they really give you and I think that the most compelling case for applications um I know mine why a normal will make sense in Layer Two is really if you wanted to get the extra security guarantees um of ethereum to verify the state is actually valid okay but you can do that all right I want to do a little bit more on the Mata I mean we've definitely talked a lot about the pieces that are making out up Yamada but the part we didn't go that deep into yet is the multi-asset shielded pool and asp ECT I mean I guess we did we did talk about it maybe early on but like I think

that's like that's the thing that I think people are going to be able to play with already and we can talk maybe a bit about like the values and like the ideas that it's trying to actually promote by existing and I think that was like if I think back to earlier the earlier episode I did with Adrian I think that was the primary thing that we talked about it was this multi-asset the bartering system I've listened to that episode and I thought wow Adrian basically preached namara just like back then um but the but yes the barting applications entire things that he mentioned today would just be example applications you can build using anoma um but this entire asset agnostic world multi-chainable with privacy that is

completely brought up to you with the Namaz all right so let's talk a little bit about this multi-asset shielded pool what is that I know and like we're going to Define it now but it's kind of already been defined in the in the episode but like what does that look like for you user so the mortgage sugar pool is cryptography-wise it is a custom circuit and it has been upgraded a couple of times to enable a bunch of other features on it and this is based on sapling right this is a custom initial version like the initial code base was uh sampling okay and then we just customize it two more times at least um to on one hand what means what it means for the user is that when you make sugar transfers on namada all these

assets will be sharing the same shielded set it's this analogous synonyms so when you make a short transfer with the non-native token or with a cryptic Kitty or with a dye your CC with atoms or osmo it will all look indistinguishable from like any other transaction and this is an important property so that you do not lose privacy guarantees in case you are transacting with an asset that is very unique or has low volume so for example some nfts um there's just so many of them oh they're pretty unique actually so in those cases one transfer in the modern shillable

um in the Charlotte set actually benefits from the synchronous guarantees as any other transfer having watched the and I again I'm going to add this in the show notes but I watched Chris's talk at CK Summit eight and there he kind of talked about like the way that you define these different objects in the multi-asset shielded pool it's just by create like you have basically a new category of like type of token oh yeah that's the technicality of how the second works but what I don't understand is with an nft is each one a unique token or what if it's an nft in a set because if you think about it you need a price like a floor price for the set in a way I got confused on that one so the way things this may be the

unintuitive part is like actually within the shield that's set there is a utxo model that keeps track of uh of the assets but um it doesn't care about the denominations of the assets to the asset type part is like a big change in MSP and I think another thing that kind of came to my mind and this is sort of it speaks to the same question though it's like the like the Oracle like how do you define prices of these different assets that are coming into this space like if there's a full marketplace within it and things are being swapped and intentions like oh so you cannot actually do anything further than transferring okay so it is not um not a decks there's no okay okay no no just

for transpose just a shield and set um one unified one that is shared among any kind of person I see so this is really like because okay so you would move an asset maybe from ethereum over the trustless bridge into namata you could move lots of things into it you could transfer them in that space to other people I guess yes or to other wallets of yours yeah and then you could bring it back out it there's no price exchange and this is maybe where this is yeah okay then you don't need an oracle that's fine yeah then actually the asset type like maybe this is a detail here but like our asset types each kind of like erc20 it doesn't matter which asset

types your Sunday but it's the more the question like does die have an asset type associated with it that all die would use or is it like it always has like a new value every time something new is sent in it has a new value I'm not sure but I'm also not sure if it matters okay yeah sure well I guess it's something that I can I can ask Chris at some point um so everything we've talked about though so far this is still like I think the distinction of Nevada is there's multiple assets that can be used but what else like is there any other Innovation that's coming along with such a development because right now it's sort of sounds a little bit like Solutions we've already seen where you

just like move things into a private space and then move them around um yeah is there anything else that you like that's kind of coming with namata that we can look out for so something that is pretty excited about namara is that users can get rewarded for using serial transactions over transparent ones and this is in alignment with our vision of the auto tagline of namara is privacy as a public good the way we look at philosophically at the Schiller set is that privacy is actually not a feature it is more of a public good that it is non-excludable so nobody should be able to be prevented from accessing privacy features and on the other hand it is also anti-rivers so like the more

people actually use the contribution to the Schiller set the more privacy Grant these individuals get so how does no matter fund purposes the public good it leverages some mechanisms in the MSP that allows the neighborhood pulling some dips so a portion of the protocol inflation is actually directed's fund actually transfers and it is calculated based on how effectively a contributing solution would set so um it is not made to encourage spamming and the requirements are calculated based on which assets are sent to Schiller set and also how long it has stayed there are some assets going to be better rewarded than others

that's to be determined but definitely the MSP is a program in a way where we can determine like what is for the based on what parameters is there also sort of like a strategy to expand the shielded set or like use bridges into other privacy networks the way I look at this is that independent what assets you like uh and then which layer ones they come from they can all be part of some set so on one hand biodiversity it allows you to create more larger sets even if you do not necessarily like the same kind of assets so that's somewhere with no small way of looking at how you expand the set um but then a feature next step is that actually privacy sets or Sheila sets are

competitive so if there is one that has there's a really large synonym with the set then a new one the whole spawn is going to have a hard time competing totally and it has this network effect of you're going to get private security on the larger set so there's no really an incentive to go to the small one over this one and this is where our Research into private bridging in private ABC comes into play because we would actually enable we would like to enable actually let's set to be able to live in different layer ones depending on um like which security model they want they prefer what they just want to do but without actually having this competitive effect on the schlutz set so if we enable private Bridges and the

private iuc then all shielded sets will actually be shared independent of like which layer one yeah but that's that that's that sort of challenge of these privacy the sort of shielded pools or like anonymity sets is like if you were to create a lot of these privacy networks that don't connect then each one is going to have to bootstrap that on top of whatever like a validator set and an user base and all these things so yeah it and like the lower the smaller number in the anonymity set the less Anonymous people are yes because if there's four people and they're doing things you're kind of you can kind of figure out who those four might be and actually this all comes into play of like uh it's an initial questionna you

asked me about like how does a normal one no matter relate and we're trying to like get to that but we haven't really answered it right so actually enormous long-term vision is that we strive for a multi-chain world where um even I know my instances breakdown instances scale fractally and we want to push for a decision that we call homogeneous architecture and heterogeneous security this means that protocols and applications become just standard and they can be ported across different security domains that are not standard this is why heterogeneous security because um in a world where applications and the base Protocols are the same everywhere the only thing that is going to matter

is going to be who do you trust so what is the token what is the governance around this and who is the value set or the miners that is what composes the security domain and it depends on the application and on the user but I can totally see a world where for financial transactions some people might trust more ethereum security model than they did Trust on the local security model whereas in other cases think of for example in in Berlin some businesses might trust more the Berlin security model over the one from current one that is a little bit fuzzy where I think it's kind of it's a suitable front end so like Visa Mastercard and a bunch of financial institutions

actually namara is a first fractal instance of a normal ah so we can think of it as another layer one it should show you that over time there's going to be different fractal instances some of them might specialize and then pursue different paths Sonoma but it is just um a stepping stone to this multi-chain world of homogeneous architecture and heterogeneous security cool nice so thanks so much for sharing this sort of like breakdown of the differences and sort of the general landscape there's always a lot of work coming from the enoma crowd and crew so I hope this helped people also to understand where those different pieces

live and how they work together and what we're going to already see with the Mata and what we are still waiting for with anoma do you have anything else you want to maybe share with the audience I know that there's like possibly a trusted setup coming or something thing oh right they are there are a few things I can share it with uh with regards to namara which is the most immediate thing is that um we're gonna do it just set up it's just because the nmsp needs its own parameters and there will be announcements coming up soon and then we also be doing uh public test sets as well so watch out for those and with anoma I'm pretty excited to start seeing next year so first first test Nets that kind of show you like really the overall architecture

transparent way with like a few applications and then it will really demonstrate it will allow you to kind of imagine what are the differences in application learn online how do they benefit from this overall architecture that's so different cool all right well thank you so much AWA for coming on the show and sharing with us all of this thanks so much for telling me I want to say thank you to the ZK podcast team Tanya Rachel and Henrik and tour listeners thanks for listening foreign