Episode 343 - Mastering MPC & Memes with Mikerah

Transcript

[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 this week I chat with makira from hash and stalle Laps we cover how makira got her start in the space the work she did at chains saafe working on an eth2 client how she spun out hash cloak a research consulting firm and her work on privacy preserving Tech like ZK tees and

now MPC we also had to mention her amazing Twitter game throughout the episode as many people know her by her moniker bad crypto [ __ ] we learn what drives the Tweet game but also the wisdom she's picked up over the years as a technical founder driven by curiosity and memes one thing that we' actually meant to include in this episode but didn't because of a recording glitch at the start of the interview is that mikir and I actually worked together back in 2020 we put together the early iterations of the ZK mesh newsletter and she worked with me on this until about 2022 at which point she started to focus more on her hash cloak work but I wanted to make the link for anyone who's familiar with our monthly newsletter it's now produced by the ZK hack team

it's basically a list of links and articles related to current ZK activity I'll add the link to the ZK mesh newsletter in the show notes if you want to subscribe just kind of a cool link between me and M anyway before we kick off I want to point you towards the ZK jobs board there you can find job opportunities to work with top teams in ZK I also want to encourage teams looking for top talent to post your jobs there as well we have been hearing from more and more projects that used it that they have found excellent Talent through the ZK jobs board so be sure to check it out we've added the link in the show notes as well now Tanya will share a little bit about this week's sponsors today's episode is sponsored by Alo a new era of decentralized privacy preserving Computing is here Alo a layer

one blockchain powered by zero knowledge cryptography recently announced their main net launch now developers can build applications that take advantage of ao's unique combination of permissionless programmability and privacy start by learning their domain specific programming language Leo write and deploy your first ZK application at leo.org or head on over to al.org to learn more about their technology and what you can build Alo this is zero knowledge without compromises so thanks again Alo and now here's our [Music] episode today I'm here with mcka from hashak and stofle Labs welcome to the

show mcka Hello thank you for having me so I'm very excited to have this episode with you we've known each other for some time I know we've also been trying to have this episode recorded for quite a while um so it's great to have you on like just before we started we were talking a little bit about when we met and in my head we met in 2019 when you invented the term snark Timber but you just said to me that we actually met before how did we meet yeah so the first time we met in my memory was at Devcon 4 in Prague um Jing from plasma group at the time uh introduced us we chat a little bit about the bull proof episode which was like very Cutting Edge at the time but yeah this like stuck in my in

my memory but somehow like when we met again you remember so I guess this is before I was famous oh no it was a little bit before you were famous I mean I was like famous like for people working on like infrastructure layer stuff like East 2 but I wasn't famous like everywhere ZK you definitely weren't famous in ZK for me like you I mean I I really remember you the phrase snark Timber and this was 2019 summer or fall 2019 this was like the era when we had a ton of research come out all at once plonc Marlin Sonics like all of this stuff was around that time actually

were you into ZK then I was looking into it okay however like at that point I didn't have the mathematical maturity to understand the papers I was reading this is around the time when like the stop playing upgrade came about physique cash Starks had come out um but yeah I hadn't really taken like the cour work to understand all of that math um so a lot of it was like hard to read and decipher yeah yeah makes sense so but let's go back a little earlier so you know we're talking about like when we met but your story in blockchain had already started let's go back to like what got you first interested enough to like jump in right um so to jump in basically this professor at my to organize a talk by

vitalic um and this was during exam season and I should have been studying but you know looking back at it it was the best decision I did and um so I went to this talk by vitalic um it was about crypto economics he's given this talk a few times there a few talks recorded on YouTube and afterwards I walked up to the Prof and asked if I can be a research assistant for the summer um and then that's how I like actually got started before then I just had heard of crypto um I played around with like some of the toing I play around with but um nothing actually involving other people just like as a hobby um what era is this this time frame the first like etherum driven bull market so like 2017 2018 era

okay so you're working for your professor for a period of time yeah how did you then because I know you worked at chains safe like pretty soon after that what was that transition like yeah so during the summer um we worked on this project and somehow like Chang safe guard involved in this project I think they were meant to be like development part partner in some way honestly I I don't know the story myself I just remember like going to one of the meetings and then chain safe fols with there and so that's how I got connected to them and then for like the the next year they invited me to like work there um and based based off like the previous summer of doing research so basically I was doing research at CH safe for about a year and a half um and while there

that's when um I started load star which is now like the typescript ethereum 2 client um but back then it was in JavaScript and it was like poorly written by me in the like oh yeah uh it was there wasn't much right um this was around the time of the EIP 1011 um where etherum was like going to do hybrid proof of stake and proof of work but then vitalic somehow like published this new back said sharding was solved and decided to like push some like python code um and at that point like everybody who was like adjacent to ethereum development research sort of transition to implementing that spec there wasn't a lot to implement frankly

it just like a lot of data structures there's like no networking no storage like no actual engineering so basically I just did like the easy things um I did not really do the hard things but that was like kind of like the start of me being more active in ethereum um I was able to get like a ethereum foundation Grant um they were doing like grants for students at the time um so I got that chains safe obviously like paid my salary I was still doing work for chains safe outside of load Star right like I was like helping them do Consulting for a major client of theirs um so that's what I spent like my summer of 2018 doing okay and then I had to go back to being a student but you know there's like a lot of fomo and less and less

interest in studies maybe yeah basically but it's probably it's good you did it though right like do you feel like it still gave you a bit of a foundation yeah like an important foundation yeah like I chose like my Majors because I was interested in cryptography so like I don't regret like going um it just like I can like go off and you know pursue something that nobody else can pursue or I can like continue pursuing the current thing um and so it just ended up being like a very unfocused semester for me but um the nice thing that came out of the semester is I went to Devcon that was the first time we met with the other ethereum researchers and developers from everywhere right like anybody who was like attached to um in some way the effort of like building ethereum 2 was

there and then a little bit after that you know I had to go back finish my my finals stuff like that did you feel on the fence at the time were you kind of like torn cuz you were doing a lot of this other work but I guess you like it wasn't like full-time work you couldn't fully commit to it but you had this school yeah yeah I mean yeah it was torn because it was like towards the end anyway um and like that point my grades didn't matter matter that much and I had like an end to grad school so basically I just had to like maintain grades for grad school cuz I was planning on doing research into grad school on blockchain related stuff anyway but I was already like working on Research I was like getting paid to do it I had met all

these people at in Prague so like it felt like I was already kind of there without like you know being paid poorly because gr students aren't paid well and so yeah like I wasn't particularly torn with regards to like staying it was more like most people were just tell you to finish um and I just didn't um looking back at it it was fine like it hasn't really stopped me from getting certain opportunities or like Visa issues but you were also you were there for multiple years right like what year were you in this was fourth year fourth here so you're like close to finishing too you could actually just go back and finish anytime if you wanted to how many courses are you missing like three like a semester worth okay yeah yeah so whatever that is it's true yeah maybe

maybe at this point it really doesn't matter yeah um so yeah after Prague I go back to normal life and uh obviously I'm procrastinating right but I still have to do my finals um and midle procrastinate was on Twitter there's this conversation with I mean s man of spank chain and xerx B and a few other things trying to sort of prod as to like why we can't get to e two faster yeah um and basically the biggest issue was that a lot of the teams doing like a lot of the heavy lifting at the time they were not full-time on E2 um so in my case I was a student I was not focused I was like not even working at chains safe full-time was parttime um and for love the other teams they had people who like

had a day job so that was like the source of like love the frustration and so balic out of his own personal money sort of started donating to teams who needed like more funds to like set aside like a dedicated internal team to work full-time on ethereum basically at first he donated to Prismatic Labs um and people got excited and then he donated to sigar Prime these are like the eth two client teams yeah yeah um they were not full-time and at the time so like it's basically to give enough funding to be able to set aside resources um and then when I saw the sigma Prime team get money I tweeted if valal gives us 100K I'll drop out um and then just a totter thread I don't know if it's still like

easily available but basically V just needed like an address and so I hate slack notoriously I got scolded when I was at at chains safe for not using slack okay that was their tool though I guess so like internally they're using slack but you don't want to okay yeah so like I went on and like you know nagged the team this was like a night too so it's not like they were easily accessible so I have to like go nag the team and be like guys put an address on the website is going to give us money it was like such a rush uh and he sent the money and I was like great I'll finish my last exam and then go drop out um so I went to go do my final exam it was probability which is like a notoriously hard course um and the TA was giving out

the exams and he's like are you ready I'm like no and he's like don't worry but to me it was like didn't matter because like after the exam it was going to go like officially drop out um and so like in Canada you it's not like a ejection button and sort of like you basically just don't like enroll for the next semester and so that's what I did and it was like very like exhilarating obviously I had to like tell my mom and she wasn't happy about it was it were you at all worried No cuz I had a job yeah you're right you're right you you're you were already on a path yeah I had a a job of was doing stuff and also again it was easy to go back um when I went to drop out like they explained that like you can always come back and

that's still the case I guess so yeah like I had to tell her but I had a drop so it was fine it's not like you were close to the end so youd learned enough stuff yeah at that point I was just like out my schedule with like electives yeah I want to ask you a question in all of this so like at this point so you're you've joined chain safe full-time recently you had a tweet about how you like kind of helped invent rollups with John Adler and I'm just curious time frame wise when did this happen and what does that tweet actually what do you mean right so John was a PhD student in the lab that I was working on in the of 201 so at this point the lab was like

doing more like Hardware verification so formal verification of Hardware ciruits um but I had like J on as like the Next Generation who's going to do like more blockchain specific research John was like very keen on doing a lot of blockchain research even though his Masters was in this Hardware verification field um and then the other people at the lab were also like interested in doing blockchain but just not as Keen as drawn like based off my impression at the time and my memory of the time as well and so I eventually he sort of left his PhD to go work at consensus and he was working at scalability at consensus and uh I like obviously being young and like wanted to have Publications and stuff I was like hey can I like help you with your research this was just me I was still at

chains okay um but it's not like they had like any restrictions on what I can do or anything like that so this was just me like exploring the space I mean I had to keep up with what's going on in the space in general anyway so yeah like obviously John didn't just like let me have it easy um right and this like lab settings you interact more with the grad students than with the Prof anyway okay um so we had grown kind of close at the time yeah like he had sent me a few things that he was like working on in the direction and I just had to like guess what it was and kind of how to go about it and uh yeah one night I I was like looking through plasma which was like the leading scalability solution at the time millions of dollars went into plasma um

but also concurrently at the time in Bitcoin there was like these like block size war wars that had like accumulated in the splitting of like Bitcoin cash into its own blockchain um and those wars were like going on for like a few years and I was like following that at the same time as well understanding like what are the scalability issues in in Bitcoin St in scalability in ethereum and uh like a ship post up a text to him about like are you just working on like plasma and merged uh Mining and he was like let's hop on a call and discuss it wait was merged mining this is a Bitcoin term yeah what does that have to do with rollups like is there something in a rollup that's sort of merged mining so I remember at the time when I was like

reading plasma a lot of the issues were like regarding like inhering security from like the parent chain and Bitcoin like way back had like the community had come up with a thing called merge mining where it allows like a miner to like mine on both chains on like two chains um so obviously like the main chain and then like another chain where you can like add extra functionality and to me it was sort of like when I just combined merge minding with plasma and I just like send that as like a text me message um to to John it seems like that that's exactly what he was working on oh so I kind of just like guessed it and then yeah that's how like I was able to like contribute to some of the ideas and stuff in the paper but John did most of the heavy lifting for

sure yeah so that's why I don't make it my my personality yeah and it's why it's not in your bio but rather it's just one tweet so it used to be in my bio actually oh okay yeah so I've gone through like different waves of like Twitter phandom or stardom right so my current wave is NPC you did have you had invented snark Timber is that still there no that's no longer there that used to be there oh yeah I remember that one I thought that was great I thought that was a great bio mention okay so this one had been there so but yeah and now I'm like kind of curious how because that must have evolved a lot like the Bitcoin merged mining I mean that doesn't exactly sound like a sequencer writing to an you know like a smart

contract platform well like rollups now are very different from like the paper like this been it's been like five plus years so obviously like a lot of things have changed since then like we formal like as a community we formalized a lot of the things um we've come up with like better designs for rollups even in terms of like designing like blockchain apps right onchain apps like cod processors kind of came out of like seeing rollups as like an application MH right your application is a blockchain why not have your application be something that like your application on chain cares more about right so uh ZK Co processor is like an example of this axum like allowing onchain applications to query old um chain States that's like a specific application and you don't lose

security if you like delegate this functionality off to axm for example um so like the space has come like a long way in how we view rollups and how we like design rollups and stuff like that so back then there was nothing about sequencers and like the terminology has changed a lot as well oh for sure that's cool though um you know we just mentioned your Twitter uh your Twitter account bad crypto [ __ ] amazing why don't you introduce it real quick because like you know where did it come from but also when did you create that because where like did you have that throughout like from UFT on or was it later right so the Twitter account came about right before I went to um 4 so before then I was controlling my

club's Twitter account so I started like a blockchain club at UFT um as a student um and we had a Twitter account and I was doing a lot of my interactions to that account um and then obviously just at a some point like I couldn't do things through that account um there were certain things you were not allowed to say well no no that was not allowed to say but it was like the kinds of trolling that I do now I was doing it through like a club account and that look wasn't it's not good like even at 20 years old I knew like there's a line to draw between like what the CL say account and like my personal account yeah that's good so I had to start my own account um but I was like the president of the club so obviously I can

like to take that but at some point like you know just because I was 20 doesn't mean I was like stupid like just you can't be tweeting certain things from your club account yeah so I seted my own separate account and this was around the time of like cardi B's like invasion of privacy album came out right and it was charting I had some really good bangers on there and I was listening to that and so like bad crypto [ __ ] came out of like just me listening to this album all right is that an actual quote from there no it has nothing it's just like it's just sort of vibe wise similar yeah it's just like c music at the time is like very like if you're like in a bad mood it it makes you confident yeah and so bad Crypt BR was

the the Twitter handle I can't change it now the space has changed a lot um so like if I were to create it now I'd have to be like more professional or something but yeah no it's stuck people like it stuck people recognize it yeah that's the story of the the birth of the B crypto [ __ ] account what about hash cloak so like so far we've learned a lot about kind of you're at chains safe you're full-time at chains saafe you're working with them on different projects you're at the same time doing this eth2 client so the eth2 client was at chains saafe it was at chains saafe so it's connected to it but how does hashak happen and maybe also where does like ZK happen right so at that point I had dropped out um so I had like more time

to like think about just what I wanted to do in general and cryptography and privacy was always like an interest of mine and I wanted to like pursue that more and a lot of the tasks I just assigned myself at chains safe were like less focused on load Store and More focus on like PTP and privacy um and that's just got in way and you know it got me trouble and uh you know I took full responsibility for that I should have just like you know talked to them and like asked hey can I work on this other stuff or whatever um but instead I just like this is like interfering and I wanted to focus more on privacy I felt like I was like very neglected this was around the time T cash had launched oh um so this was like pretty important is

this late 2019 so like T cash was launched I think in 2019 but the people working on it like had a lot of Community Support like Mok da was like funding a lot of the Audits and stuff like that um so i' been like following at the time e was fun and I learned a lot but like my the way like my attention SP works is like if something is like pulling me to do that more I typically just like do that instead um yeah so I I left chain safe to start hash and hash was just this like legal vehicle to like allow me to do any s of Consulting take grants um and like a more tax like tax efficient manner than just doing it for myself um but I had savings I just like lived off of those

for a bit and uh I allowed me to work on whatever I wanted I explored different layers of the stock like I worked on mixnuts for four years um I didn't chill it much on Twitter but a lot of the stuff that we did was public so I can always like you know somebody cares I can always talk about that later um but did you have people working with you at the start like because I know you do have a team now but like was it a was it just you yeah it was just me um I just wanted to explore um different aspects of cryptography and at this point I had the mathematical maturity to understand a lot of the papers that was was coming out when I tried earlier on I just did not know what a field was I had not taken like

algebra um I took linear algebra but that's not the same so yeah at this point I had like a lot of mathematical maturity um I can like go back and revisit papers I had the time to do that um I can explore like more U obscure aspects of like PDP networking and just like Bey on my own time that's basically why I started hash at hash we mored into like a regular cryptography consulting firm we do like a lot of long-term um engagements related to like R&D and cryptography for clients did hash cloak become an auditing for like what kind of work have you done since then so what happened was one of our clients Fu apps uh in the early days they needed some work done and uh a lot of this earli

work was in cryptography so there was like a trend at the time to use BLS signatures to make certain aspects of rollups um a bit more efficient now everybody just uses ekk but back then people were very focused on BLS signatures but then a little thing called defi summer in 2020 came up yeah um and for like a year and a bit I was actually people are always looking for Auditors but I was saying no to a lot of that because that's not what I wanted to spend my time on but DFI summer happened and uh Fel Labs couldn't get an audit and so they asked me to do it and then once you do one audit you're kind of like people just get to know that you're doing Audits and so you get

a lot of just business that way so I never needed to do much marketing um so like the audit stuff is like one thing that we do a lot of it is mostly just like this R&D stuff that um we do on behalf of clients and that's the stuff that I guess gets you really excited yeah and then also I have like my own internal like whatever is interesting me at the time yeah so yeah like I said mixnuts I worked on that for four years I just did a bad job of Shing it but um we got like grant funding disc code um cool which ecosystems did you do that for like a networking solution so could be for anything it could be for anything but who who funded it though if you did do yeah so we got two grants uh one from

binance X Fellowship okay um so bance was running this like grant program way back um and a bunch of people that I know had gotten it so I asked them like oh how do you apply and then that's how I got it uh etherum Foundation okay yeah that's why I was kind of curious which yeah sounds like yeah I sort of said this earlier but I feel like your narrative right now is very MPC Focus so like MPC is a center of your that's like in your heart and then there's other Pro other things like fhe or te's that seem to get sort of like some disdain and there's a lot of like comparisons and like I don't know if you want to summarize your your thesis right now on on MPC versus the world but i' I'd like

to hear it I mean I think I think a lot people are like too married to like their specific thing like it's just easy for like Twitter and the algorithm to like [ __ ] on different things cuz that's what it prioritizes like my personal opinion is that we're going to need all of this yes stuff in some way or another um in different configurations and I guess I can be nuanced like that but that doesn't give me the engagement that I need to show so instead you place it in a battle scenario I love this though I love that you're sharing like the nuanced view is that you totally see them all as like collaborative Technologies and we should like work you know have them all working

together I think that is actually what most people think but I think it's also funny to see them being pitted against each other and I've had over the years people try to tell me that like one of these Technologies would just like actually beat out ZK that ZK will become obsolete because t because FHA because MPC yeah I don't I don't know like so far I haven't seen it happen so it also doesn't make sense um right like I think we kind of just like have this umbrella of like privacy privacy enhancing Tech uh for all of this and we just think like oh you can apply it in every single instance you'd apply zkp or something like that but really it comes down to

like your application design right and I think a lot of people don't think about how to design their applications and like what their needs are um they just try to like use whatever trendy thing for whatever reason um maybe it's like very BC driven maybe it's not or narrative driven whatever but um really just comes down to like what does your application need and how can you get there and you know sometimes you need ZK sometimes you need NPC sometimes you need some combination of all of them yeah I think that's like how I think about this another thing is everybody sees like each of these things as like a thing that's going to take over everything which is weird um and it's coming from people who should know

better yeah yeah something I at the same time I yeah I feel like you've you've also highlighted some of the like hypocrisy in some of the marketing like so if I could summarize roughly what you often tweet it's like MPC is your fave fhe over promises and te is being pushed down our throat you have one quite graphic tweet about that one so but I feel like that is a little bit of a summary of like the story that you're telling and I I sort of want to explore a little bit of that like because I I don't think you're saying NBC wins all but clearly you're working on an NPC project so like that is kind

of what you're focused on but yeah do you want to talk like can we talk a little bit about like the FH world I mean FHA and te kind of get full comparison right because it's like these private spaces where like computation can happen I don't know that MPC and FH get directly compared as much but yeah what are you thinking on that I mean I think it's just a matter of like narrative like whoever pays like these influencers like shove stuff down our throat um and like attends all these conferences what gets the most sort of Mind share and so it's like hilarious like looking through through crypto that somehow like f like made the J but this other stuff is like not as

prominent um when you get out of like magical internet money crypto and into regular crypto those same people like more focus on like npcu or some other thing um so it's like super interesting seeing like the count ofies there because there's actually like a lot of people doing PC stuff um in general it's just you know they're not working in magical internet money crypto they're working in like Enterprise stuff but the tech is like repurposable to magical internet M crypto and so yeah yeah that that's like pretty interesting because yeah I remember seeing like a lot of people doing F work when I was trying to get into cryptography stuff and a lot of that stuff is just like unusable like whenever I would see somebody tweet

about it f him like have you tried using any of the available tooling it's kind of unusable and so like even from people that I've heard who are connected to teams at Major tech companies um when they talk about FH even they're not like super optimistic about it wow um so it's like super interesting to see that in crypto um yeah there's like a lot of over promises about fichi but there are teams in crypto doing like things that are not over promising they don't get a lot of attention though unfortunately I feel like I should probably write a Twitter Thread about them now that I have a bit of uh Shilling power yeah yeah because there's people like doing like really cool stuff with a and like those people are are like doing stuff

that really delates like the differences between when You' use FH when you use like some other variants when you use FPC and stuff like that but they don't get that much attention so I should probably highlight them soon yeah yeah also like with FH like I also kind of have the impression that like some of the FHA potential like it is a potential but like we're far from that potential and yet sometimes we're being sold FH as though we've reached that potential but if you choose like a very narrow use case maybe something simpler then FHA maybe is at the level where it could be used right like it's it's sort of the Le like how generalizable is it how huge

like a computation can you do within an F environment like isn't that sort of if you if you go narrower and simpler that actually maybe it is possible would you would you say that's the case yeah yeah I would say that's the case yeah yeah so like a lot of sort of web two use cases where FH is like usable and that's why like a lot of big tech companies have research teams focused on FH because like they have direct applications where they can use it so yeah like I I agree with that um I think for for crypto it's still like you know debatable whether it's useful or not simple we just haven't like seen much um we've seen demos but at least give me a production level demo or something then I can like

change my tweets um prove it yeah and then bad crypto [ __ ] won't mean tweet you anymore yeah what about te's we just did an episode like a few weeks ago with Andrew Miller who also mentioned you so do you like te's cuz like I don't hate te's I don't have any reason to to hate them it's it's weird that like I don't know I think I've come off of like very aggressive on Twitter so people think I hate things like no no so like te's are very useful my concern always just goes back to like application design cuz there are people who hate te's and like they will make it their personality like in the ZK podcast

group on Twitter like there's a lot of people who genuinely hate te's and I think that's like throwing the baby out with the bath water really it sort of like it depends what your application needs and to just like give up and say oh we can't use te's is like kind of anti science or like anti-truth um and really we should be trying to like make them more palatable because there are use cases where um they are useful um and so like Andrew is like you know doing a lot of that heavy lifting and trying to make them more palatable and I think that's why it kind of got like a Resurgence in the space because like uh you know the stuff with secret Network happen and people kind of just like dismiss teas um even before sequ Network there's like always an attack on a tea

every year and so in general like cryptographers were just like even recently right yeah so like in general like cryptographers kind of just like yeah were like not interested but it turns out there's like quite a few interesting use cases for te's and really you should like work on trying to like make those like vulnerabilities or issues more palatable right like I mean we all use you know Twitter and whatever and you put all your thoughts on there or maybe you don't depends on how you use it I don't yeah I'm pretty I'm pretty chill on Twitter right and there's a risk to doing that right and you still you still like use Twitter in the way that you do so I would argue that like doing stuff on Twitter is like worse than doing it in a te the I guess

maybe that's like a broad that's like a very broad it's like a bad statement to me like te is more private than Twitter is what you're saying I'm saying like I guess the point I'm trying to make is that there are things that we use in in technology that have like sets of trade-offs that might be palatable but are still not great to have right like people still use Facebook and Google and all of these things even though like they actively harm you but the difference there is you know you're acting in public or you should Facebook maybe it's a bit more like I think people think they're working in a more private environment often on Facebook than they actually are but on Twitter you know you're public but you can protect your Twitter account yeah I guess if you have a private Twitter but

still like I don't I guess the point is that like there's a lot of tech in which like in order to use it we make some form of trade-offs right so you know as you mentioned earlier in the call we hate slack but we have to deal with clients so we still use it somewhat but then we don't use it for like our day-to-day um as an example and like you kind of have to see not just te's but like all of this stuff is in the same vein right you're going to have to make some trade-off somewhere you're not going to get the most perfect system out of using like ZK or whatever or te's or whatever so like people who like hate te's I'm just like yeah there's use cases where this is useful you may not like the trade-offs but then what is

like what is the alternative and so like te's help with stuff like that so I've been like sort of trying to understand how to use te's for NPC I think Andre like brought up some like good examples of that um in the in the previous episode um and so yeah that that's like been my thing is just trying to be an open I have an open mind when think about te's but obviously I'm just like trying to be trendy with my Twitter trying to take the piss because it gets a little bit of a yeah little bit of leg um what about ZK though we talked a little bit at the beginning about what you you know how I met you and the stuff we were doing around ZK but like what has your relationship to ZK been cuz in a way like you seem much more focused on

NPC it's funny like I in the tweets that you have it's often like a three-way battle or it's like there these three players are sort of like put in some constellation and ZK is often not there so I'm wondering yeah I mean my earlier memes from this year have a lot of ZK in them um I guess like personally so um a lot of our business at hash is ZK focused because that's where like it took like four or five years before people cared about ZK and so now we're like for me like just being active in the relevant communities we've like gone business that way um so like a lot of the team is like focused on ZK personally I've like moved from ZK to NPC because I just think it's like more

interesting for me but obviously for NPC I have been thinking a lot about ZK you know about collaborative snarks well I've just been thinking about like computation in general okay right so we we use ZK is this like short term for like snarks when like ZK is meant to be like a extra property you add to snarks and really like I guess the point of using ZK for blockchains a lot of it comes down to like verifiability um and how you get that for for just arbitrary programs um so I've been thinking a lot about yeah like collaborative snarks and and stuff like that so like for what we're doing we're building NPC VM you want the NPC computation to be verifiable you need a

ZK proof um or guess you need a snark at at minimum you need a snark and then if you want to keep certain things private then you need a ZK snark yeah so I do think about ZK just it's kind of trendy I can't like there's no like low hanging fruit like meme ideas that it can like come up with I think I posted those earlier in the year already okay maybe I'll have something in the future also we're using the term coar recently so I I I need to like make fun of that somehow because I made fun of ZK TLS recently okay yeah is there any I mean it sounds like because your work is so K Focus that in a way your interests need to be like in a slightly different direction yeah but MPC is also becoming

your work maybe you can talk a little bit about like what is the work you're doing on MPC because like this started as sort of an interest space but you have no stle which I think we should talk about so basically for a long time in the space people have been wanting to do like private smart contracts um and so one of the ways to do that that was proposed a few years ago was like NPC and a few companies came out like trying to do exactly that and kind of failed and it's not clear to me why um at least like when I started getting into NPC like that was the questions like why do those companies fail or not launch or whatever yeah it was it was like kind of shocked to me for why why that was and so um in 2019 I went to this ic3 boot

camp that's held every year at Cornell Andrew goes to it like every year and he's always talking about private smart contracts that's been like a lot of his research over the past decade has been around like doing private smart contracts of private compute and that year he had given a talk on using NPC as a confidentiality layer and that got me interested and then I guess like the next fall so fall 2020 we started working together on I guess I just wanted to learn more about NPC so I was able to get like a visiting researcher sort of uh thing going on um it was like all remote so very informal yeah um and so that's how we got to like working together and this is when like Andrew like introduced me and a few of his

other students to like all this NPC infrastructure that academics had written but has like no adoption in the real world um that's cool that's like a treasure Trove it's like that's that's like amazing yeah so like a love of is like usable I mean it's hard to use but a lot of those academics are like actively updating that that code um or if they're no longer updating the code if you send them an email they'll respond it was like approachable I guess yeah so I wanted to just learn more about that stuff um and it somehow got roped into this like shed exchange project that they were working on internally I guess yeah one of his students was like looking for something to work on and so I guess I just was in those calls and uh different things were

happening um for me I was just trying to like get a mental model of how do you use NPC outside of just threshold signatures um at that point in 2020 threshold signatures were like the major use case for NPC and I guess in the current year there's like a lot of debate about calling threshold signatures NPC and so I started working on like a amm um so just like the basic Unis swap equation but using MPC somehow using NPC framework like written by some academics like how does that wait where is the amm is it in it is it the trade itself is like done through a multi-party computation or something so basically what I did is like these Frameworks allow you to write NPC circuits um either through an API or through like a a DSL and so basically

this allows you to just like write x * yal K exactly as as you would in like solidity okay so yeah that's basically what I I did one of the Frameworks I was using didn't have div Vision so I couldn't Implement like everything and then it be transferred to a different thing and then this was a bit of a blur but like somehow like a bunch of people got roped into this project and one of Andrew's students like took the lead and like she actually made it like into her uh PhD thesis and wrote a ton of the code I just wrote some like cute lines and some old framework and then did some a little bit of cute stuff and then somehow like I don't know this turned into like a whole PhD thesis um like I don't know how but wait I want to go can

I go back to the NPC as amm like I just I want to understand where is the multi party in the decks kind of in the trade like is it two parties on each side and they're doing some sort of multi-party computation to make the trade happen like I just don't know who the multi-party is here okay so I guess we can go back a little bit um so basically what these Frameworks allow you to do so basically you define your what your circuit or what your program actually does yeah in like one language or API and then later on you can Define who are the parties okay um and at this time I didn't really understand like what that meant right because I was trying to learn NPC so like looking back at it I don't think I have a good answer for

like who was doing what okay I guess if I were like reimplement it today I probably like have a better answer um but at the time I was like I don't know what this is I can just write this python code and have it run it does something it does something nice now let's talk about the present in stofle Labs what is that working on is this like a research project is it a a so St OBS is a separate company where um at hash while I was doing this research with Andrew and understanding like what was going on we had to like look into the code for some of these academic Frameworks um particular MP speeds and it turns out like it's actually quite approachable like sure like you know the

code isn't like the best like engineering quality whatever but it's still like you can read it and you can kind of get the gist of what's going on it made me realize that like why can't we just do this for blockchains or like have this as an extension for blockchains in the way that people are doing ZK co-processors now I think yeah I think at the time we weren't calling things co-processors we were calling like rollups or side chains or something else but basically yeah I realized like why can't we just do this for blockchains um I started writing an implementation at hash clook and then we open sourced it um but it was very like still very early days and unfortunately when you're doing consulting and internal projects the Consulting has to come over because you to come first yes come first P the bills um yes so we're

spinning out that work into its own company so it can have resources basically and yeah that's what stabs is is like working on making a lot of the academic NPC Frameworks bit more production ready and making NPC more accessible to everybody obviously we'll be focused on web 3 but there's like a lot of low hanging fruit like web 2 applications that um we'll also want to explore for this company as well is this going to be an NPC framework do you imagine it being a collection of libraries do you imagine it being a DSL or do you imagine building like the actual co-processor or like some sort of environment uh so basically the way we're doing it is I guess the the way to explain it would be probably contrasting

it to like ZK infrastructure M so if you're familiar with like Risk zero what allows you to do um you write your programming R compiles down to risk five bite code and then the risk five bite code runs in Risk zeros like VM um we're doing something similar to that except our VM is a custom NPC VM we have our own Isa we're not using it an existing Isa like Risk 5 or MEPS or or whatever okay and yeah it's like very similar to sort of th that kind of framework so we are going to go with a DSL but like you can always like emit the DSL and like build out like an llvm infra and have like people write R and compile down to the N pcvm all that is on the table but it may still be rust the language that

you're actually using but you're not going to use like the risk five instruction set yeah I see I guess yeah there's like compiling there's the possibility to compile instead well like the reason for that is because like NPC is just a different kind of computing Paradigm like things are not done locally and so basically made more sense to just um use like an existing like academic framework that took into account those like design constraints and those exting academic Frameworks already have like a custom Isa for NPC so it makes sense to just like take that and you know make it a little bit more like developer friendly or some improvements to it because yeah like using risk 5 is like a bad idea but it

does have its own set of constraints right it's kind of like the difference between like Risk zero and Vita where Vita also has its own custom Isa for ckvm okay one thing that like those systems promise though is like verifiable compute that's like the feature does MPC offer something like that too it doesn't offer like an NPC VM doesn't necessarily offer out of the box a verifile compute but it can what we offer is like you know private distributed K okay so it's more I mean it's focused more on the private part and actually I guess with an MPC too you don't have this pro issue where like the prover can sometimes be the especially if you have like a centralized prover it

it sort of removes this the Privacy part or it makes like someone some prover is going to see what's trying to be made private with MPC as far as I understand that isn't the case so like the Privacy part it's like in this joint environment that no one can see right so the nodes are operating over secret shares so you don't so the nodes individually don't see the private inputs which would be secret shared however there's like collusion issues okay with NPC and like in papers they kind of just like brush it off um right so you have like these different uh different like threat models for NPC um like this honest majority um honest majority active security passive adversary stuff like this and depending on like your threat

model you get different property of like what your committee can do and that's like actually like a an issue in like practical deployments of NPC right so in practice like a lot of deployments sort of just assume most notes are like honest or if they're not honest some you know you're like be holding to some contract some sort of practical deployment job is made there right so like that's actually like a a major issue um and I I think Andrew might have brought it up in the episode um where you can use te to help with like collusion preventing collusion of NPC nodes interesting so like that's like a a way to solve that um but yeah outside of collusion uh the MPC node shouldn't see your secret chairs and outside of

like bugs in your code as well right yeah I should also maybe add the kind of thing I was saying about ZK and the pro scen stuff there are actually Solutions out there where they are truly ZK where they'll do ZK on the client side and then maybe have a pro prove those proofs but it's still kind of private but yeah with MPC it's it's interesting because like as a design space I I definitely have not explored it much I feel like in the last year I think we've talked about NPC we've had like proper NPC episodes like two or three times so it's like not much yeah I definitely would like to see more of what's possible like the kind of paradigms that are just different things that are created that wouldn't be created with any other Tech do you see though so like you kind of gave an

example here of like te's helping MPC to help with this collusion issue but do you see some overlap with other Technologies would you sometimes think like oh I wish I wasn't using this I wish I was using something else like I know you maybe not because MPC is like the passion but yeah well I guess not that it's a passion it's more like I think going back to something I said earlier in the episode like people try to use like ZK if she whatever for like everything as opposed to just like looking at the problem at hand and like seeing what what you actually need for your problem um so I think this is probably like one of the issues with NPC in the pass is that people like want to do everything with NPC as opposed to like looking up where it's actually useful um or like making effort to like

find where those areas are so I guess like back to the question of uh is there intersection of NPC with other things I mean I think we brought it up with ZK right there like private input um situation right there's like a few companies working on Distributing proving and that uses NPC so that's like a area of intersection um for FHA I think think some of my memes kind of bring this up a lot so you know like for practical FH deployment um you have to like split decryption Keys otherwise like even like an honest but curious server can like potentially decrypt your your Cipher text um and so you would use NPC for spaying decryption keys so that would be

like intersection to like those things actually it brings me back to kind of what you said like the what is good for what in you just describing MPC in this system that you set up like you sort of mentioned the Privacy component but like is the problem that you're trying to solve creating an environment for private compute better like I'm trying to figure out if it's like yeah what's the add-on what's the additional benefit of using MPC because there are obviously lots of projects that are using ZK for private compute is there an efficiency gain when you do it with NPC what is it about that system that sort of makes it a better fit to use NPC uh right so I would say in order to do like more

interesting private computes you need a way for everybody to access your private information right so the issue with DK is that basically if you like take at face value like the laot of the definitions for like ZK snarks it kind of just says like you're a approver and you want to proove something to somebody else and assume that you have the data and you don't want to share that data um but what if you want somebody else to like do some interesting thing over your data in that case like with ZK you're still kind of limited right so you mentioned earlier on where there's like designs where people still do like a proof client side but then they have to send the proof to some other thing and that kind of like limits what you can do because yeah now you're like you know

constrained more by like engineering SL application design um as opposed to like the issues with ZK like at that point you're kind of just like trying to like square a peg in a round hole or whatever square peg in a round hole or is the opposite like at that point it's sort of like would you not explore something else um I think for a long time people just use tease for that and you know teas has its set of issues um that a lot of people seem to hate and so there wasn't like a lot of good options and so NPC and F kind of occupy this space of it let you do stuff over encrypted data interesting um or private data yeah and I think from what I heard about NPC too is it's like you can do something over private data and then that data can also

have more things done to it because it sort of all stays in this fully private environment right like it never it doesn't have to there's no like you yourself in the ZK sense if you're the prover you you see the information so some person is going to see the information at some point and you can maybe do some sort of computation in a ZK environment that's private but it's not that it can then remain in this private Zone and like more can happen to it as far as I can tell yeah so there's different models like security models for NPC um and like a popular one is like delegated security where you don't want to do the computation yourself but there's like some servers in which like you can send them your information and

they somehow like don't see it and then they give you the result and in that case you kind of like giving up some form of like sovereignty over your data but like secret sharing it whereas like in the case of if where you encrypt it yourself and then you send it over so like that's like a very common like PR for for NPC and yes it allows you to like once that's done and um depending on like I guess the policies you've set for your program that data can be stored on a set of NPC servers uh set of nodes but unviewable to everyone right like no one can access that well as long as they don't collude right as long as like a a Thal of them don't collude like no nobody sees your your data um and that allows you to do more interesting things

the trade-off you make there is that now you have you have like more complicated did you know security model and threat model there um dealing with this like collusion issue but it allows you to do more interesting things so that's like the the bigger trade-off there yeah I like this though this is really helpful like this is kind of this is giving me a picture of like why one would want something like this so that's how you go from like why would you use NPC over over ZK is like maybe your application just needs to do like more interesting stuff over private data and you don't want the liability of managing that or you don't want to store yourself um in that case you can do like this delegated like NPC model where you send your data off to a set of nodes and they

do the compute um and then they send you back the the results or if you want you can like have it be stored amongst the nodes um and as long as they don't cude they nobody should see your private data or your the result of your private data the result of the computation on your private data yeah I feel like this collusion issue is something that I now want to explore a bit more though because this sounds like this is the Crux this is the the drawback you've highlighted yeah I mean even in blockchains like this is a major issue right yeah right you know we've seen 51% attacks in practice so um you know it's it's not it's not like it's never going to happen that some Quorum of like nodes in in a PDP network will never attack it right and so this this is like an issue

for NPC systems and in practice like I mentioned earli the way this is solved is like choosing like an appropriate NPC protocol and specific security model yeah um and then you just have like the nodes be like Bound by you know some legal jurisdiction system um you know you sign contracts with them if they you know deviate in like a Byzantine way then sue them um if there's just a bug then um hopefully you can recover and you don't sue them but yeah like in practice is still very kind of it's not enforced via cryptography or via physics it's like enforced via like legal by the legal system yeah which I guess to some extent can be true for certain blockchains as well right I guess that's

like a another episode for another time depending who you talk to like or are like if you have to like stake into a system and you kind of like validated are you like Bound by like some legal jurisdiction or something I I don't know um I'm not the person to ask about that but yeah for for NPC you have like a similar situation where in practice we need deploy these nodes who runs them um how do you make sure they're not like malicious um how do how do you make sure that like even if they're not malicious but they go down you can recover your data um like a lot of these questions or questions that play Just distributed systems in general right true like what happens to like when you can't access Google or Twitter right and I know

there's like you know 30 plus years of um just like practical engineering advice around there um that you can apply potentially but then there's some stuff that's specific to NPC where I I still think they're more engineering problems than there are like research problems frankly but yeah I think they're they're solvable and um some of the solutions people may not like but I think they should be palatable so like one of the bigger Solutions that's used is te's yeah and uh as I mentioned earlier like a lot of people hate te's but right now if you want to deploy NPC in practice it'd be irresponsible to like not use a te to prevent uh collusion okay I mean one day could it be FHA I guess it would depend on like what you're building yeah exactly kind

of going back to that use case thing yeah haven't seen I mean is there a lot of MPC FHA crossover like Nigel smart says they're the same thing that FH is like a version of MPC so FH is a version of NPC that's what he said yeah on an episode we did a long time ago oh I think I think I had a meme that was like so like in the space a lot of people use the term TF which stands for like threshold F yeah and that's just like NPC with extra steps um so like he's not wrong but I guess the way I typically think about it is the opposite um is that PC is a version of fpg because like in a lot of NPC protocols the way they're implemented is they have like somewhat hom War

encryption implemented or um partially yeah or partially not the fully yeah yeah um so like to me like I usually think of it as the opposite obviously like I don't make memes out of that if I make meum out of that like it's just people it goes against the stories yeah makes sense I mean maybe I can like make a meme out of it and like be more nuanced in some way but as soon as I just put the meme out there it sounds like you're not supposed to be nuanced on Twitter from what you said so maybe I think you're doing great keep going um but yeah like that's how I think about it nice so makira thank you so much for coming on the show uh I know

we tried to do this over a month ago we were actually going to do an in-person kind of roast uh tun and I and you were in the same city at the same time but sadly it was during a hackathon and we didn't actually have any time to record it this wasn't quite a roast it was more of a story but it was really great to get to hear your story and also I really like the stuff on NPC like to me this is a way of using NPC that I haven't heard before so yeah for me it's been pretty cool to to learn about yeah thanks for having me on you know good thing there's no roast because I would have roasted um but instead I guess we got this uh Nuance conversation different from your Twitter I hopefully it doesn't give my

enemies like any ammo against me I doubt it I doubt it I I love your Twitter I think it's really fun that's why we mentioned it over like throughout this episode but I also think it's really nice to hear because like I think you're quite reasonable when when you meet you in person you're like quite reasonable about all this stuff and you have really like good Insight you've been in the space for a long time you've also consistently explored a little outside of what the crowd is thinking about you know what I mean like everyone's focused on one thing and you're sort of checking out something over there and down the line that becomes really interesting to people so yeah I think it's cool yeah I don't know why I think my attention span is just like if something's mainstream

I'll learn it because people will like shove it down your throat yeah so I should probably spend my time on something that's like less mainstream something that's like more under the radar um and if it turns out it's popular then at a good time yeah um if it's not popular then that's great I always love learning new things nice go follow me on Twitter yeah go follow all the accounts on my Twitter bio go see B kind of yeah well thanks again I want to say thank you to the podcast team Rachel Henrik and Tanya and to our listeners thanks for listening