How and Why to Scale ZK Proof Generation w/ Alex Pruden (Aleo Foundation)

Transcript

[Music] hello and welcome back to the strange waterer podcast thank you so much for joining us for this week's episode today we are speaking with Alex Pruden executive director of the Alo Foundation Alo is a privacy focused layer one blockchain using the magic of zero knowledge cryptography users are able to interact with the Alo L1 completely privately while still maintaining all of the benefits of blockchain like permissionless and verifiability but Alo is not just a

general purpose L1 it comes with an embedded prover Network which is something that you'll quickly discover has massive implications for the entire ZK ecosystem during this conversation we dive deep into understanding how Alo works and how ZK completely transformed both crypto and really the broader internet this conversation has something for everyone from the economics of ZK proving to the viability of all l1s to the applications enabled by these new paradigms one more thing before we begin in please do not take Financial advice from this or any podcast ethereum will

change the world one day but you can easily lose all of your money between now and then okay time to start the show Alex thank you so much for joining us on the strange waterer podcast yeah it's awesome to be here thank you for having me of course man so I am a huge believer that the most most important part of every conversation are the people in it so with that as a frame can you tell us a little bit about who you are how you found crypto and like what eventually LED you to Alo yeah sure so um I grew up in a military family and then ended up joining the military um and spent 10 years in the US Army kind

of late uh ODS and to kind of uh late 10s I guess and um kind of in the middle of that process I discovered crypto uh working in the Middle East with people who generally speaking have a lot fewer choices uh than than we do growing up in the First World um so specifically I was working with syrians uh as part of the Syrian you know we were working with some of the Syrian rebels at the time to fight Isis and um you know that's when I discovered Bitcoin and realized that Bitcoin is just a really amazing powerful technology um you know specifically for people uh to preserve and transfer their wealth uh in cases where like in Refugee type scenarios right and that's that's what got me into the space initially

after my my military career yes so so I had this 10- year military career had no computer science background I guess May important to mention and you know discover this technology which I was fascinated by and so I wanted to get into the industry I was just transitioning out of my military career I I wanted to get into the industry had no idea where to start like most people who don't know what to do in the next step of their career I applied for an NBA program and was fortunate to get to attend uh to to get to attend Stanford where I did that where I you know completed my NBA and was also just moonlight and all these different places where I thought I could get relevant experience for crypto um so that included I I helped found the Stanford blockchain club and you know because

there wasn't a pre-existing blockchain Club so that was great because we got to invite people who were experts there to to kind of teach us what was what was the latest in greatest in the industry um I took a number of computer science courses from uh from some professors there to kind of give help me have a you know build a technical understanding of how this stuff worked under the hood and then I ended up working in a couple of the companies you know early days in the industry including coinbase so I was an intern at coinbase I actually worked for um you know prep Emily Choy is now the president of coinbase I was I was her uh her intern and then Max bransburg is the head of product that was his intern so uh yeah anyway so I worked there and then um ended up being fortunate uh to

land a job at a16z uh Andre and Horwitz which is they had a crypto fund uh I was fortunate to land a job at their first crypto fund after graduating um where I worked for ktie H who now has her own fund um Han Ventures but um but yeah that was my start working for her in VC so I got the kind of my start in the industry I guess if you don't count my coinbase internship uh my start in the industry was working as a venture capitalist looking at different projects and you know assessing you know whether or not they were good Investments and then and ultimately investing in and following these companies or these projects and that was fascinating incredibly fascinating um just mainly because of the time the era that crypto was in right so you kind of had you know early Bitcoin era you had early ethereum

era icos I was just kind of getting into crypto right before the Ico Bo end during kind of as a hobby and personally and then I I I entered a16z right before what we now called defi summer um you know so it was kind of like there was a big bare market and then everything was kind of picking back up and a lot of these protocols that are now household names you know we these were these were kind of you know these were projects that we saw like I remember we saw one of the first pitches for salana we saw one of the first pitches for Avalanche uh we saw Unis Unis swap ended up being in the portfolio so anyway it was it was really fun to get to meet a lot of these uh entrepreneurs Founders and communities at these times before they

were big um and I really enjoyed that but I ultimately was looking for a different experience I I found investing was very educating and enlightening but I found it less fulfilling for what I wanted to do I wanted to be on a founding team I wanted to be at some you know in some working on some protocol that was going to make a first order difference and so I was sort of contemplating what I wanted to do for the next step of my career and you know like I said at Stanford I had I had kind of Tak Tak some time to educate myself in cryptography and some of the the trends there and ZK zero knowledge cryptography was one of the areas that I was really interested in and um there was an acquaintance of mine named Howard woo and we had we had worked together uh

in a couple of different spots but most recently at uh at at Libra or we worked with the Libra project which was Facebook's ill- fated cryptocurrency um and he was a he was a um I believe a a contractor and and I was working with Katie just as she was with her board level kind of Engagement anyway so Howard was a cryptographer he's was starting this company called Alo which was based on a paper called zexi um which is basically yeah zexi or zek some people say zexe uh it's basically an implement it was an extension really of zcash or zerocash which by the way shout out maybe was a good shout out for today 20 years or 10 years ago today the zerocash paper was published um which really was the um you know really the Genesis of ZK

and cryptocurrency uh seminal moments there so anyway so but those several of those same authors from the zeroc cach paper collaborated to write the zexi paper and zexi was basically an extension of zash to support smart contracts so anyway Howard was one of the co-authors he was starting a company Alo um to build a protocol around this and I got really excited and jumped in and so that was kind of my start and I ended up I guess just to finish finish quickly I ended up holding multiple executive positions there I joined as the chief strategy officer became the Chief Operating Officer and then ultimately the chief executive officer before leaving and we actually split the company into a foundation nonprofit Foundation uh Alo Network Foundation and then Howard went on to uh has remained it what is now called provable

Incorporated which is like the labs entity H man I this is the first time I've ever regretted asking the background question because I'm not sure if we're going to get to Alo with the amount of questions I want to pull apart of like the most like compelling background I've heard so far but I will control myself hey this is your podcast you know so you go any direction you want no thank you but I want to talk about crypto um so the one thing that I will ask about like and and to um ask you to elaborate on from your background is this moment in Syria where you realize the power of crypto because look like I think um for for most westerners first world worlders especially Americans and especially like

my cards on the table I went to Stanford too like us of this uh like part of society like we get involved with crypto because we see some interesting technology and a ton of upside and like you can kind of like put your own little Spin and spice into it but like that's really like kind of the main channel for people getting in and I think that as you spend more time here as you have more experiences in the world as the world starts to fall apart more and more like you start to understand like the real values and and see why crypto is important but like you actually saw it and experienced it and like saw the promise of crypto long

before like crypto got to a point that can deliver on that promise and so I would just love to like can you tell us a little bit about like what were you seeing in Syria how is Bitcoin being used why was Bitcoin like the only Channel where the traditional Financial rails weren't helping like can you just like help me understand in this moment where you saw that Bitcoin is like an incredible technology that matters to real people's lives like what was happening that gave you that Insight yeah so just I guess maybe just something to to be clear on here there wasn't first off for me personally there wasn't like a moment where I was like oh Bitcoin is the future wasn't wasn't a moment and and secondly Bitcoin wasn't that used frankly in Syria I think this is like this is a misconception a lot of

people have is like in these third world countries it's very common to see this stuff it wasn't commonly used it was used a little bit and the way I got actually introduced to it was very random um you know we were working with we were so we were American Special Forces Unit working in Turkey training syrians who would go fight Isis in within Syrian borders there were no Americans in Syria at the time um and so we basically had to fight Isis by proxy through these Rebel forces um and you know these guys would go they'd come over and they train they'd go back over and then they you know we'd give them weapons and trucks and stuff but they inevitably needed to like support themselves with food and fuel and things and so they required cash and so they're like hey is there anything you guys can

do for us you know American Military you know like your vast resources uh you know we're this ragtag group and we're like yeah sure just come come back to the border and we'll give you cash basically and you know there was some hesitance on their part because you can imagine driving around the Lawless area of Northern Syria driving around a briefcase of cash or a bag of cash is like reasons you know there's reasons why you wouldn't want to do that and uh you know and and one of our Turkish Partners who we were working with who was from the intelligence Community was like he's like why don't you try paying them in Bitcoin and you know this is a bunch of American Special Forces guys who are like you know we're not you know we're not phds so everyone's like what is what is a Bitcoin you know and so

that but that was kind of how we learned about it and then the whole conversation ended up being mooved because you know long story short Russia intervened the you know basically on the American the the flavor of the American inter you know kind of uh cont contribution there changed drastically and a lot of the folks that we were supporting kind of ended up either permanently becoming refugees in turkey or being killed and I actually kind of that was the second piece where it click for me it was like a lot of these folks who ended up becoming refugees some of whom who we' worked with previously you know their stories really struck me in that like they were like you mentioned you know the cohort that we inhabit you know in our in our society right like there were several of these people who were in

Syrian and refugee camps were in the similar cohort within Syria right they were well off they were well educated there they had plans to send their kids abroad for school you know they're doctors dentists professors and then they were in you know one day the Syrian Civil War broke out and there's effectively two sides of the line you know and if you were on one side you were cut off entirely from the from the system right banking system Financial system legal system you just were considered Persona ngr within your own country and then those people it it was you know they were fortunate effectively that they were actually able to flee many weren't right and they were able they were able to flee and then they but then they end up in a refugee camp where they're living hand and mouth literally and they have no access to their bank

account or their life savings which in many cases is tied up real property and this and this is when it started to really click for me CU it's like Bitcoin okay should we pay guys and I I learned a little bit about it through that and then I saw this and I was like wow like this is shocking really to see people who had basically played by the rules their whole lives the rules changed and they lost everything and then in that moment I kind of had like if there was an aha moment it was a little bit of like you know if you had something like Bitcoin if you were a refuge from a conflict you just basically put your whole life saav theoretically put your whole life savings in your head memorize a past you know PR key or a c phrase and

then go anywhere and then you can start over and to me I was like holy this is amazing this is revolutionary and that's what sent me down the path of really getting into the space and then as I kind of was reflecting I guess in closing I'll say as I reflected upon that experience um you know I I was thinking about the rest of my military career too I I deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan as well and you know those places also there's like you know enormous poverty and lack of basic systems to you know enable people to participate in the economy massive corruption all these things I think blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies can directly address um and I think and I think when you do see places where there is high Bitcoin adoption like look at Venezuela for example you see this like relatively and

turkeyy is another one right turkey I think is a relatively developed country but a lot of issues with inflation like people there are rabid for this technology and I think they much more Clos you know much more than many people in the United States at least understand its relevance awesome man that is I that is so incredible and like interesting and eye openening and and um I I'm forcing myself to stop here so that we can talk about like today's crypto and like the things that we're building but I do think it's important for all of us to remember that like this isn't just like a VC marryg go round um like this has like real implications whether it's like these most like devastated War torn places or just like regular moms and dads who like want to like give a good

life to their kids in Argentina but like literally can't because their savings gets eaten up faster than they can earn it and so I just um actually this is a good segue I think that the ZK era is kind of like the herald of this new era where we move away from just like VC speculation and into like true applications and like things that people want to do with this um but it's important to remember that like that if you're not in the space for that um honestly like there's more legal ways to make a lot of money yeah well but I think I think there we're getting to the point where these products that crypto enables are going to become essential and in particular I'm very bullish I

mean obviously you where you stand is where you sit I guess but I'm very bullish on the combination of ZK and crypt n particularly and we can get into this more later but like in the era of AI where content is going to be generated by all kinds of Agents mostly non-human how do you know who you're interacting with right like it's already a huge problem spam calls spam emails spam everything I mean just like that problem is about to a million x and understanding who and uh who you're communicating with under what rules you know the conversation is Guided by that are cryptographically guar and those two things being cryptographically guaranteed that is exactly what crypto and ZK can do and I think that's why like we're just at the beginning of the

beginning of this technology and um well it is very important all the use cases you mentioned that I also was passionate about you know in the third world like just to be clear there's very relevant use cases coming for all of us I think yep no no point taken and what I like you go on crypto Twitter right now like there's clearly some sort of um intersection of AI and crypto just based on the amount of money going through it I think we all have opinions on that and it's like whatever we all have opinions on that but what I do always say is that I don't know what the intersection of crypto and AI is but it's so clear that these are the same side sorry different sides of the same coin and that's because that crypto is about about like is about scarcity and it's about slowing

things down and about identity and AI is about abundance and speed and just like creating um as much as possible and so again I I'm not sure how where these exactly come together I think the guy that does is uh you know the next Hayden Adams right but actually hopefully it's the next uh Alex or this Alex ideally but you know well yeah only the only time we'll tell if if it's me or the next me or Hayden Adams you know yeah yeah no but anyway okay so let's talk about Alo and I I want to go back to this moment of um of like the Inception so can you talk a little bit about like from first principles like what were you trying to build why was Z

like why did you decide to go specifically the two things I want you to address are one as like ZK as a core primitive of this L1 blockchain and then two why an L1 chain so um starting off with ZK so I think first thing to me I think ZK was as magical of a technology as I could have imagined and I think it's often conflated with magic which is sometimes unhelpful but it really is amazing what you can do with it I mean it's this mathematical you know it's basically set in mathematical algorithms to let one party prove something is true without revealing why it's true there's really no physical analog it's kind of crazy if you think about it where it's like if you and me are playing poker and I'm like hey I have two pair and you can just trust me like you would never trust

me if we were playing poker right you want to see the two pair before you're going to hand over the money but in this Paradigm using cryptography you can actually be cryptographically assured that I do have two pair without having to see my cards there's no physical analog and so to me just that fact that there was this new capability that didn't exist in the real world got me really fascinated by ZK before Alo and then in particular I think as it's relevant to cryptocurrency and blockchains I think one of the major drawbacks there's two major drawbacks in my mind of of most early certainly crypto networks I think subsequent crypto networks have addressed this or have tried to address this but one of them is um just a lack of data confidentiality right a lack of privacy like if I send you $10 right now in usdc

on ethereum like that transactions there for all time that everyone can see it's searchable by anyone right now you know you may or may not use an ens address or an ens name so like maybe it's harder to figure out who you are but the bottom line is like this full this Ledger is fully public and for any number of real world use cases that's a big problem and this is why I think you see I mean my favorite question to ask at every crypto conference is how many people here take their full salary in crypto and the answer is inevitably no one despite the fact that everyone is talking about how this is the future of finance and like and it's because there's a social Norm around salaries like how much do people make you don't want to publicize that right and so that's just it's kind of a

silly example but it just gets to the heart of like why I think you're not seeing as much adoption for crypto for real world use cases now what has crypto been what is the killer use case for crypto up to this point yeah speculation it's gambling it's a it's a very it's it's a different form of casino and by the way like have nothing wrong with casinos I've been to Vegas I like playing crafts but like the point is like we can't pretend I think that we have somehow created the future of Finance yet right because we haven't solved these fundamental problems and one of which like I said is the fact that we can't have a financial interaction and not publish it right so ZK is a solution to that ZK enables us to have a financial interaction not publish it be assured among each other

that the that the transaction was valid and this and and within the context of the system right by the way you can apply a whole bunch of compliance to that too and we can come back to that later when we get to the inevitable criticisms of this model um the uh but yeah so that's that to me was like was was one aspect so ZK I think really solves the problem of privacy and then the other problem it helps solve the scalability right the other big early blockchains are particular suffered was you know just a limited transaction throughput and ZK as we've seen with ZK rollups provide this nice paradig because in addition to being able to prove a fact without revealing why it's true it's a nice mechanism for compressing a bunch of computation into a single succinct proof which is how most layer tws that commonly refer to

like like uh what is ZK EVMS like this is really what they do it's not really about Pro protecting or preserving the confidentiality of a computation or of an interaction it's more about like compressing a bunch of interactions into one synct proof um but you get both with CK right so that's I think the cool part about it now why layer one I mean to me the three fundamental principles that we wanted um to achieve was you know was Data confidentiality the Privacy um and and then scale like being able to do perform you know um computations of scale and then permissionless and I think permissionless like for me permissionless is a really I mean it's funny to have to say this in a crypto podcast but I think there it needs to be

said like it is a fundamental principle that differentiates cryptocurrency from many other Tech Stacks right and I think if you look at most of the other l2s out there today there's a lot and even many l1s there's kind of a theoretical road map towards a decentralized layer to and I think the reality is these things are pretty much run on AWS servers right and there's not a lot of real interest in in progressing that road map in fact I had a tweet last year where I was like I was joking you know is is the road to L2 decentralization going to take longer than the road to eth2 right and E2 people were famously upset for how long that took but I think frankly in fact

that kind of looks fast compared to a lot of these like you know op a lot of these l2s have launched four years ago and still don't have fraud proofs enabled for example um so anyway so I think for me permissionless like l1s are nice because look the the the assumptions around permissionless are well studied and very explicit right it's like you know there's actors that aren't related to one another they do work According to some you know to according to the protocol and then they're rewarded according to that same protocol and then everyone checks each other other right and so the economics I think are pretty simple and you know I think that from that you do get the best guarantee that we know of of a decentralized system there which therefore gives you permissionless right as a user I can go interact with like

let's take a very permissionless system Bitcoin like I can just you know send a transaction to your node and if you don't if you just reject my transaction I send it to someone else's node or I run my own node like there's no there's no gatekeeper I don't have to I don't have to rely on AWS keeping a server up or relying on a on a company or my bank to decide that I'm bankable right like we have all these systems that by the way work great if we don't care about permission list like you know when the rules are set and nobody you know you know there's no ambiguity there banks are fine for financial transactions but if there's any ambiguity and by the way in cases where there's like two different banks trying to interact with each other that's where we see the big

opportunity for crypto but to have to to solve that you need permissionless so that was really why we went the route of the layer one and and ZK in particular so I want to get back to the layer one thing in a second because um this is just too dense of a conversation but so put the layer one uh thing aside and just to talk about ZK real quick so I am so with you that I if magic is real it's ZK and no one who doesn't already understand this stuff will understand what I'm about to say but like the idea that you can take a number and somehow like hide it behind a like relatively simple equation and then use that to like access that information but it's also lost forever it's like it

is one of those things the more you learn the more you're just like I think magic might be real like I think God might be real like this can't how you know and um so I I feel you with that in that sense of awe and wonder and the other thing I wanted to say about ZK so I think it was about a month ago sorry Anna I can't remember but on Anna Rose's uh zero knowledge podcast she had a guest come on who basically came out and talked about we're in this like weird situation where we have this term zero knowledge and like what that formally means is about um you know a prover being able to like generate a proof without a verifier know having any information about it and yet in blockchain about 90% of the time what we

mean has nothing to do with that and is really just about succinctness and so um I I went I started this conversation being like Oh my God this is so pendan who cares but by the end like you know what like there's actually something profound going on here where like maybe ZK the two letters kind of refer or a category or maybe ZK refers to succinctness while zero knowledge refers to this like privacy thing and I think with what you're talking about with Alo like that distinction kind of collapses back down again because you want those things but um I do think it's like kind of important to put out there because like you kind of really can't understand the the all-encompassing nature of this

technology without realizing that like zero knowledge is super important but like that's not even really half of the juice yeah yeah and I think look so first off I strongly agree that I think there needs you know it does feel pedantic but it is true I think it's important to clarify what we mean by different terms right zero knowledge as you pointed out has a very specific academic meaning right and you you you stated it um and that's not what a lot of people you know who are who have protocols that are some way referencing ZK do right and it's not it's not necessarily a bad thing but I do think for the industry it is important that we have some rigor around how we you

know how we refer to things and I think this is unfortunately one of the things that I think holds the industry back is that because a lot of the use cases are spective in nature there is a deep desire to tap into Trends right in order to like so like you were joking about like the you know crypto AI thing earlier right like everybody you know it's like there's there's always a desire to like you know trying to tap into Trends which at some level is fine right you want to make sure this this technology is relevant that's okay right but I think done too liberally I think it kind of dilutes what these things actually are and and I do and I think it confuses rather than you know empowers people right even the term zero knowledge I think is it's honestly even even that is like too pedantic and you

know the AI I'm to be clear I'm not I'm not knowledgeable about AI very much but I kind of see some similarity between like you know I vaguely remember six or seven years ago people talked about Transformers right like people got like got into the level of like how Transformers work right I don't know anything about Transformers but now it's like people are just kind of like hey we have llms right I'm assuming somewhere in an llm there's like Transformers or things but like we've abstracted that right well now there's a layer of abstraction everyone's like oh llms and gpts right and that's where Z ZK is ultimately going to exist at some level of abstraction right where you're like you have a product you're like hey I want to log in without with using my passport without revealing it you're like okay I do it and then it's like oh

I use cryptography and ZK is one of the things you use but like it maybe is like you know you don't we we once we get to that point where there's real products that solve real problems we won't have to worry about having these debates which I agree are pedantic um but but nonetheless important for sure no I I'm a huge believer um that yeah like right now we're we're essentially touching bare metal like this stuff is so low and like I never ever think that Grandma is going to touch crypto anything but I also don't think that like Grandma knows anything about like hardcore like internet networking or routing and switching like but she does know the you have to type in HTTPS col slash and like that's where I think the crypto is inevitably going is

that like you'll see some artifacts that gesture to the technology we're building but like chains defi all this no like it'll you'll feel like a banking app 100% And I just to touch on that quickly because I think this analogy I use all the time for Alo like crypto today from 99% of protocols ethereum Bitcoin many others is HTTP right HTTP so you know and I sadly I'm old enough to remember the internet before TLS and like at the time it was a lot of message boards right people had message boards and that was basically what what was done on the internet people communicated with each other universities Etc and then Netscape famously created you know SSL which ultimately became TLS and that enabled encryption and that enabled

credit card transactions so Merchants could then sell online and people could buy things online without having to worry about third parties snooping their credit card data and that was the moment which unlocked the web in terms of e economically unlocked the web right and of course there's a ton of economic you know already tremendous economic value in crypto but I think that moment we still haven't had and this is what we're trying to build at Alo and this is what I think ZK in particular can enable is the https for web 3 aesome all right so let's go to the layer one conversation and I want to uh just throw something out there um as like and embarrassingly but I'll call it myself like an ethereum maximalist right which is I actually don't think that the point of anything

that we're doing is Building Technology right like I think at the end of the day we're building like tur like Turing complete machines that are about as capable as like the um the computer that got us to the moon in the 7 s right like if you are actually interested in building high performance Computing stop with all of this and like start working on like centralized Computing I think what's interesting about crypto is that first through Bitcoin and then my opinion is that Bitcoin got like so politicized and so like stuck on this like gold money issue that it like we had to try again we created ethereum and like the the

special thing here is not the technology it's not any of that right it's that it is a credibly neutral shared space and like that going back to the stuff we were talking about in Syria or like whatever the point of crypto I believe is to create a shared space that like can serve as like the substrate for property and identity on the internet and so like every time I like look at a crypto project my thought is like if you start at like okay we understand we have shared space we're going to get rid of that one and start over I like automatically struggle because like one it's like again not necessarily congruous with how I think like the

point of crypto is but two it's just like if that's our attitude why in two years when there's newer ZK Tech shouldn't we be like AO that's cool it's a shared space but let's trash it and start over great question and just to be clear I love ethereum ethereum is amazing I was an ethereum community remember long before I was Alo and I still am I still proudly am um but I and it's interesting you pointed out Bitcoin I think these are these are communities right so these are not only Technologies but these are communities and this is one of the most fascinating Parts about cryptocurrency is like it's it's the amalgamation of like kind of the most technical things and the most social things it's like it's like the it's like the you know phds from like computer science and phds from you know social

science got together and created a thing um but anyway yeah so you know different like the the technology in many in many cases kind of represents the values of these communities that birth them and and to be clear you know this is technology right so every choice has trade-offs so Bitcoin for example would criticize ethereum for the trade-offs that it has made around block size right they're like hey you have all these like these blocks say they're very big you know everyone's doing smart contracts but then how how is anyone going to run a full node right when it's 20 terabytes big that's what a bitcoiner would say right and they're right at some level if think that running a full node is really the key thing to permissionless then that's a valid point of view right now the ethereum folks are like well that's

great you know I can't do anything with Bitcoin so what's this like who cares we're going to have to you know buy it and hold it and scold again like what are we even doing here right those that's fair too right um you know and I think for for us with Alo coming into this like why do another layer one first off I would have absolutely we would have done a lay or two if it was possible and by possible here what I mean is if we didn't have to make the the tradeoffs that we would have had to make technically and I think fundamentally that some of those trade-offs that we're living with were made in the early days of ethereum at the level of the evm let me just give one great example um you know kachak so kachak is the basis of the shotu hash

function it is used everywhere in the evm right the E like you know kak is almost 90% of like the evm right because every all of the state is represented in these different state tries you know kachak is used every time there's like you know generating an address or something like that so it's just constant it's everywhere now what is a problem with kachak from the perspective of ZK well ZK operates over Circ you know these things that you know you basically have a program that's encoded as a circuit you could think of like a you know like a circuit board zeros and ones right and when you're encoding a program like that or a statement um you know that kind of the like that the size of that statement kind of directly correlates to how long it takes to prove something and or verify it depending on

the proof system you're using right and the problem with kachak is that when you take that algorithm and you put it inside of this ZK circuit it's massive in size right so which is to say that it's very expensive to do in ZK right that's why if you look at all these teams that have taken they like Hey we're doing ZK evm that's why theal wrote the this great blog post um which you probably remember was like types of ZK EVMS you know people like kind of increasingly contort themselves to say they're equivalent but like this is one of the areas where universally no one is equivalent they all remove the K hat function to use something snar snark friendly like Poseidon right you know so it's up it's up to the listener whether or not you you consider that equivalence

but nonetheless the point is that like there is very much that's just indicative of the trade-off that's made which is that ethereum was built without the ZK in mind right it kind of evolved in a direction where this was desirable but it was not built with that in mind and of course you can't just switch everything because you've got Unis swap that's deployed right you all these deployed programs and by the way it's even worse than like traditional software where you just like push an update here these things live on a blockchain there's a smart contract that's there and it's long lived and by Design so it's very non-trivial to do any kind of migration I mean I actually think speaking being complimentary of ethereum I think the eth2 merge was incredible I mean the the that people do not appreciate that accomplishment enough given the number of parties

involved in the number of interests anyway for Alo we decided to take the approach of like okay look we we started with this technology which we you know you and I consider magical ZK we think that it can enable a lot of really interesting user interactions I agree the identity is one um and it enables these properties of privacy you know data confidentiality per permission list and programmability so how do we start from first principles and build a VM just for this and then how do we build a blockchain around that and build from the ground up and then I think there's still I me was it was and still is a desire to interoperate with every other crypto Network that's out out there to the extent that it's relevant including ethereum right I mean day one we're planning on having multiple bridges over to ethereum Etc just like just like many

of these other networks do salana is another example of the network that took a tradeoff of like hey you know this could be way faster if we all didn't run small small computers what if we had like a handful of people running really fast computers and data centers that was salana Bas that's I'm sure anat would kick me for saying that but like that's how I think of of salana right and so these are trade-offs so anyway we decided to make the tradeoff like hey build this thing from the ground up to support ZK that means we're not going to be support ethereum smart contracts out of the box we'll have to figure out other ways to interoperate but I think that's how if you look at a lot of traditional web Technologies that's how it started too right you had a bunch of these competing standards and you kind

of over time like overlay different ways for them to interact and and then ultimately what you end up with is is the web and it works pretty good despite the fact that honestly at a pretty low level it's pretty you know balkanized no I think that's fair and and when I'm trying to make the ethereum maxus argument like I I often go straight to JavaScript which is like this like really weird language that like especially 20 years ago like it didn't really work like it was super idiosyncratic and strange and like if I had a dollar for every single team that were like we're going to do a JavaScript killer it would like I would not be having this conversation from you from this like kitschy home like I'd be on my yacht right and I think the the lesson

from that is like it is not about the best technology ever it's about like this is what we have and this is what the community uses and let's like collectively push it forward but I think the point that you're making is that like yes while there was this maybe like core that is the community pushing JavaScript forward the reality is there's like a ton of different languages that you can write uh web programs in and like maybe compile down to JavaScript or maybe have reached a big enough size that browsers support it or whatever and like the point is that all of this is abstracted away from users and um and they just experience it as like websites and so I still believe what I believe but like I the your

analogy or your the way you talk about like this balkanization underneath the hood but like because of the interwovenness of these Technologies and how they are ultimately supporting applications and like user interactions and not like just technology for technology sake like gives me a clearer picture to what a um more diverse world looks like exactly because you think about a web app I mean like just this one we're using right now I mean under the hood I'm sure there's JavaScript but there's other web Technologies too there's probably some database somewhere in the back end like not you you or me don't have to care about that right we're just like Hey we're having a conversation this is a podcast getting recorded it's magical and that's great and that's that's ultimately where where crypto will get and that is where we have to all continually focus and my

view is that ethereum I I remember when I started at a16z I remember there were critics of ethereum they were like no one is going to want to learn a new smart contract language solidity it's like no way and people swore up and down it was it was Dead on Arrival and now of course now that's the argument that people make today about other languages they're like no way anyone's going to learn anything other than solidity and of course those are both overstated right but the reality is these things are going to grow towards the direction where there are real world applications right and and these Technologies need need to start evolving and will inevitably start evolving in that direction to serve an end use case because right now there's like a lot of investor money there's a lot of speculative Frenzy ultimately at some

point this will have to find a place that this will have to find a problem and be the solution for it right and that that will ultimately be what drives what this looks like whether it's Alo whether it's ethereum whether it's JavaScript whether it's python you know like that's you know ultimately these things have to be tools to solve problem yeah I love that ma'am I love that I love that like it's not just about speculation like we actually have to go find problems and solve them so let's uh let's move out of like debate Lord world and go like straight into Alo and like help me understand like what so let's start with a generic blockchain and then help me understand because ZK is built into Alo like what just on first principles like does Alo provide both um

like end users of the blockchain apps and like developers who are trying to build those apps on them like what is special about Alo yeah so let's talk about it and let's let's let's just one way I like to describe this is kind of looking at like the history of blockchains how they evolved and kind of where Alo fits there so talk bit let's start with Bitcoin right bitcoin's big innovation and people forget there were like 50 protocols that preceded Bitcoin that all failed at trying to be digital money right and and bitcoin's Innovation was this concept of Economic Security right so you have this Economic Security guarantee where it's like hey we're all minors and like you know we're going to do this you know grind shot you know 256 and then earn rewards and if anyone screws up we'll take their money or we

they'll forfeit it right so basically everyone was kept Honest by the rules of protol it's like able to have this Byzantine network of actors work together right downside well you couldn't really do anything but transfer money around right so then ethereum came along and ethereum's Innovation was that hey wouldn't this be cool if instead of we just had value transfer logic we effectively kind of built you know a virtual machine on top of this therefore we could do smart contracts and have real like functioning programs right which requires some kind of a reimagining of how Bitcoin worked under the hood I mean it's very analogous in fact to what I was just saying about ethereum it's like you know bitcoiners would be like well you can write smart contracts just write Bitcoin script I don't know if you ever tried right Bitcoin script but it's it's uh not as

user friend not as developer friendly as JavaScript let's put it that way um but anyway so ethereum took ethereum took that direction they said hey we're going to build a a basically build a blockchain around this VM and that's what they did and that you know enabled the world smart contracts now zcash actually went a different direction with Bitcoin they were like said kind of similar things to what I said earlier in in this in this podcast around hey you know real people real businesses need some level of confidentiality for their interactions because otherwise dead on Rival so they basically said okay we have this Bitcoin model let's use ZK and basically have this so you know everybody doesn't have to share every interaction and that was the direction the zcash took and so Alo is trying to merge those two directions back together the programmability and the and the

Privacy piece right so what does it look like fundamentally well we started with a VM right and this VM is and this is by the way I referenced a paper earlier in this in this podcast zexi that is what this is zexi is describing a virtual machine meant to be run on a distributed Network like blockchain um that uses ZK to affect State updates now the mechanism by which it does those by which the virtual machine does State updates is very similar to how zcash does it although you can think of zcash effectively as a special case or a program within a broader Alo context right so zcash only handles value transfer in the same way that Bitcoin only has value transfer and Alo enables all of the many of the rich interactions

that you could expect on ethereum um and so that was what we started with with this with snark and I can talk at length if you want about the zexi model and why it's different why it's not actually that straightforward to Port over ethereum to ZK but leave that aside for a minute then we built out this blockchain and we said hey what do we want what properties do we want this blockchain to have to well fundamentally it needs to be provisionist so we adopted a version of narwhal bullshark proof of State consensus which is um an iteration of Hot Stuff a version of which is what powers ethereum so it's kind of like basically taking the modern proof of stake architecture uh and then the only kind of twist we added in is you know to achieve another goal was we want ZK to increasingly become practical

right and one of the powerful things about a network like Bitcoin is it drove enormous investment into uh the generation of shot 256 hashes which I think it's pretty useless but you can imagine that like that economic incentive is powerful right there's a lot billions of dollars been poured into that and so what we wanted to try and do is really to create a form of useful work and an incentive for which people to invest in this low-level kind of ZK Hardware basically to make it better to go from like Hey cuz you know theoretically you know for a ZK proof you do on AO you probably do it in your browser might take a few seconds depending on what you're doing you know if you had it on GPU it could take a fraction of a second maybe if you have an as6 someday you could do thousands of

proofs in a fraction of a second right so just like semiconductors have kind of advanced over time miniaturized more specialized faster faster faster you know I think there's still an arc there's an arc for that in ZK we wanted to bootstrap that process by building in this incentive me so there's effectively what I'm say so we have a proof of stake network with kind of this like rewards mechanism that operates alongside which is basically a proof of work Network where provs generate proofs for the protocol to receive rewards right so that and that is really there not really for the security of the network or anything but as a matter as a means to bootstrap or create a business for provs who ultimately can also serve consumer use cases too so if you imagine like a a common go to market strategy for a lot

of rollups and you know zkv providers is this like hey are software is going to power approving as a service stack right so it's like you Rex come to me and you're like hey I want to prove a statement about myself I want to prove I'm over 18 or whatever and you know Alex you generate the proof and I do that for you and then I give that back to you and you send it on to whatever blockchain or whatever authentication Service right now the reality is like that would be great if that that service existed you know because you you could basically take advantage of the you know same reasons why the web went to a client server model servers are powerful clients are weak you could Outsource the power the heavy computation of the servers the issue is though like there's not really there's no Market yeah like a

market kind of needs two sides right there needs to be suppliers and people who want the thing right and right now there's just not that much demand for proofs therefore there's no incentive to invest in this market which is what we're trying to solve with this coinbase puzzle this is exactly the thing we're trying to address so that's the so that's the VM then there's the blockchain um by the way the VM we call snark VM snark stands for succinct non interactive argument of knowledge that's kind of a z ZK wonky term but if you hear snark that's what it is uh and so snark VM is our evm equivalent snark OS is our blockchain it's like our node implementation uh for you know this node running NW bullshark consensus um and the EV or the snar VM on top and then we have Leo which is our equivalent of

solidity right so Leo is a language by which you can write it's kind of JavaScript rust combination of like syntax and you know you can write human logic you know a highle logic that will be compiled down into what are called Alo codes which then themselves are synthesized into these circuits which are fed into snark VM right and that's and then those circuits and that that logic is what defines how value transfer happens right according to to whatever logic you encode so that's Leo and that's kind of really the last step or the last bit Alex why did you let me go on and on about like Syria and l1s when there's so much interesting stuff here I can't even believe we have like only 15

minutes left so well we can do a sequel yeah we no we're doing a sequel but let me try to keep this succinct so okay first let me try to pull out like the most interesting thing that you said to me um in in in describing what Alo is which is and correct me if I let me know if I got this right so what you said is for Bitcoin what like the core difficult thing there was like doing this Shaw 256 hash and because like that was both like so critical um because it was so critical to bitcoin we for the last 15ish years have seen VCS publicly traded companies like Pension funds

whatever just dump like investment into making that sha 256 hash like faster and faster and faster as possible and what the realization was is like that work that shot 256 hash is like only useful in the context of Bitcoin and the aha moment is like okay what if we design our protocol to do a similar thing in that like we have this core primitive that's going to be need to run like millions and millions of times so it's going to like require and incentivize a ton of investment but let's design our protocol so that that core primitive is useful Beyond just this protocol and the idea is that now this investment will

not only go towards Alo and and like bootstrapping the system but will also create investment and infrastructure into general purpose ZK proving that's exactly that's exactly the idea now for anyone of your listeners who may be hardcore bit Bitcoin Maxis you know let me just acknowledge the trail of trying to take a useless proof of work Al algorithm to a useful one there's a trail is littered with bodies right like there's so many attempts that have failed at this and this is actually like maybe just an important point to note I mean Alo has been around 5 years an earlier version of Alo was actually entirely proof of work there was no proof of stake at all and um what we found is that it's very difficult to

design a puzzle that is fair in terms of like the amount of work you put in is proportional to the amount of rewards you get out that is non amortizable which is for a variety of reasons we won't get into a very important property of these of these schemes um and actually gets you to like the end goal that you just subcribed so this is kind of why like we went away just get a bit of Alo history here we were proof of work and the entire coinbase puzzle was our equivalent of shot 256 and then we had a test net where this was broken very publicly um where like one team would just dominated it and it was clear that we was going to be insecure going forward in this model and that's when we switched to a proof of State consensus but kept but kept and

iterated on this coinbase puzzle such that to achieve exactly what you described but in the event that someone with a billions of dollars understands how to like you know ultimately exploit this the consequences while sever will not be the same as like destroying the protocol right so it's basically a risk mitigation mechanism anyway just a side note no awesome and so this like so is it I'm just going to say that like maybe Alo consensus It's like got this proof of stake path that is actually about securing the blockchain and it has an independent proof of work path which help me understand so does this independent proof of work path is completely independent of

cryptoeconomics security for Alo but does provide services that are relevant within the snark VM so let me let me try and elaborate so there's the so the what are the crypto economics so there's a starting supply of Alo credits Alo credits are inflated or there's inflation through one of two sources one is these proofs right so if you submit a proof that's above a certain difficulty threshold uh then you get basically paid out for that work right in the same way that that Bitcoin kind of works the only Nuance difference between this and Bitcoin is that actually like kind of natively in the in the proving logic we we um we pay out proportionally so Bitcoin is win or take all and then for us it's proportional by block kind of just a little Nuance doesn't really matter that much but I thought I'd mention it that's one source of

inflation proving wors but one one important note though is that anytime a prover finds a solution actually part of those proving rewards go to the validator that created the block and that's important because if you don't have some kicker to the validators that are ultimately creating blocks the validators have no incentive to include those blocks right because they're just being inflated so there's kind of this kicker this it's like 2/3 of the approver third of the validator then the second source of inflation is for actually validator rewards themselves so validators just like other proof of State networks need to be compensated for the risk they're taking for locking up their capital and for also you know for doing the work of like creating blocks and you know running consensus for the protocol so that's the second Source there's this like staking kind of validator reward there's this proving

reward the proving reward you could provs could stop doing anything and the blockchain would progress as normal right so the proving reward you can kind of think of it as like one way to think of it is basically like a lottery for which there's an onchain smart contract and to get tickets you got to submit proofs of higher and higher difficulty right so it's almost like that's sort of the the economic way to think of it and ultimately The Proven rewards start to be start out to be very lucrative they're the majority of the inflation but over 10 years they decrease to zero right so again and now back to your question of how is this relevant if I'm aover earning these rewards what else can I do well the nature of this puzzle is such that it's it's a large majority of the steps that are required to

generate a a zero knowledge proof for like an Alo transaction right so theoretically if you get really good at generating these proofs you're going to be really fast at generating Alo transactions or maybe they'll be really cheap for you right um and so then that that has effectively bootstrapped your like your your natural pivot after the coinbase rewards go to zero is going to be like hey users of Alo blockchain of which hopefully there are many use my service I have a fast cheap proving service service where you could basically you know work with me and then I'll you know submit proofs for you and then that makes the barrier to entry for users lower fees are lower things are faster and then it enables a bunch of other applications on top of that right in the same way like again this is kind

of pie in the sky future but like you think about all the things the iPhone enabled you pack a computer into a small package it's not really like none of the pieces themselves are novel but it's just the fact that all these things are together and then because those things are together now there's a bunch of new applications that are possible that then people can build towards if that makes sense yeah it does make sense and I guess my question for you is like so totally hear you like on the role of this proof of work Network directly to alio and like how this um you've created this like natural pivot that like is very useful for like these inflationary dynamics that you're creating my question to you though is like this work um this again that that is being done in the proof of work side of

Alo like could I conce let's say as a user right now like I want to go generate some transaction on Stark net but I really don't want to use like the Stark net RPC or whatever because I know that my transaction if I have to give them all the information will leak so much information that like someone's going to move on it maybe instead I could take all of the components send that to Alo have them generate the proof and then even though that proof is like completely irrelevant to the Alo Network it's still um like using the alos service for proving and then I can take like that final proof and send it to Stark net is that like at all part of the system You're Building or is it

really like the proof of work for Alo is really relevant to Alo and not so much else it's just that the investment in the R&D will be relevant to other stuff oh there's so much in there let me try and let me try and pick apart and take like the yeah answer succinctly because it's a really important question you asked so first off I want to distinguish one thing between Stark net and Alo right this is important distinction soret you can't generate approv for yourself right like they you have to use their API and that's that's a requirement right because their approver is closed Source A and B it's actually pretty intensive so even if they open sourced it like a stark Pro is not something you're going to run on a client side device most likely um in Alo and this is one of the reasons why we

built Alo the way we did is that we very much wanted to ensure that you could generate the proof for your transaction alone with your device whatever like there is no barriers to you doing that the reality is you know it's just like I use Gmail from I could run an SMTP server but I use Gmail right like it's like the reality is most people are going to choose convenience but I think that that choice of what of being able to interact directly with the protocol is is to me gets back to the core of permissionless like we're if we're not going to keep that then what are we even doing so anyway um but that so back to the question about could an Alo Pro generate a stark proof for Stark net that is an interesting question but I think it's there actually it's a little

bit of two concepts right like Alo the network has its own like encoding of transactions and like what validators are going to check and then there's like a theoretically offchain service that could have been bootstrapped by the Alo approving rewards right that then could offer services to multiple networks and I think that's very very true I do think it's likely um at least in my mind that you're going to see specialization around specific use cases for different proof systems right so Alo has kind of you know we've chosen a specific proof system Stark net has a specif proof system other you know plon uh polygon that uses plon E3 has their own so you got all these different things that are kind of incompatible and

whenever you're optimizing something you want as few choices as possible right so you want to like you're like I want just like shot 256 you're like this thing and this thing only right and and that's really how you get the real kind of juice from the squeeze for optimization and so my gut is that like I think certainly that Alo will drive a lot of investment in ZK Hardware in fact we're already seeing that and I think a lot of that will translate over Beyond certain point though I think if you want to talk about as6 you're not going to see as6 get developed unless it's specific for a use case specific for a proof system and those will not translate across ecosystems yeah well let me like throw this big one out there maybe we can walk out on this but like the way you've kind

of framed Alo like the holistic system is that like it's really an L1 blockchain and that's what you're building and like you're creating this this parallel like proof of work structure that like not only um like has some like interesting properties but it's really about bootstrapping like the the Alo blockchain yeah the pro networks exactly yeah my question to you is I now that we're an hour into this conversation I'm almost seeing the reverse like we have so many blockchains and like honestly we're getting to the point where we have so many ZK blockchains like to even the point where it's just like who care we need apps man

like we need apps and reasons to use this and so why I am like so bullish on what you're building now at the end of this conversation has really nothing to do with buil like a snark VM or any of that stuff the the problem that this industry is about to face is that even once we optimize all of these ZK proofs that it's not casual to do them and we're going to need to come up with like infrastructure and services and systems in order to like make a ZK powered World whether it's related to blockchain or like completely independent from blockchain um we're going to need something to make that work and so I guess my question to you is is Alo

really a general purpose L1 blockchain that is bootstrapped by aover Network or is it aover Network that's bootstrapped by an L1 general purpose blockchain oo wow great you know I think it's both I I ideally it's both I mean right we're at the beginning to be and just just I guess to maybe as as a quick note before we end the show like Alo is currently in testet beta which we just launched this week main Net's launching later this year and then we'll I think ultimately know the answer to your question of like what's the pro Network what's the network like how do those two interact but I think in the perfect world it's both and I totally agree that ZK has application Beyond just Alo I think I mean in general I this is why I got into the industry I think 20 years from now

ZK is just going to be part of the fabric of the web um and I think I I think you know something like Alo will be too be mainly because I think blockchains are great when it comes to Value you mentioned identity and property I think that's a that the your framing of blockchains as Spaces by public Spaces by which identity and property are managed in the digital world I couldn't agree with more and to me I think identity is one of the use cases I really like to focus on a lot because I think to me you need the combination of programmability permissionless and privacy to do a good identity protocol right like imagine like even just take let's take a problem on the web that's still unsolved to this day age verification on the internet you want to go buy you know go to a Beer

website it's like are you over 21 you literally just click a button there is no check and is that there's literally no check at all right and you can imagine all kinds of other content on the internet that like you know I have kids that I would prefer my kids to not be able to just wander into right but that's not it's it's very difficult to solve without giving away all of your identity information right and people don't want to do that but I think you can imagine a ZK protocol like this where it's like hey I upload my my identity document at somehow validate via Smart contract logic verify the signature whatever now this is there now I can make proofs about it to whatever third party service and that third party Service is like well I got this proof here's the proof the proof says this is

a valid identity document and that these these you know these uh you know kind of uh aspects of this person are what they say they are and that is mindblowing that's revolutionary I think we talk about applications like that going back to blockchains like we're at the beginning of the beginning of the beginning and I hope that that's where we ultimately get to and I'm super excited about the work we're doing at Alo that you know of course I'm very bullish on what we're building but also I am very confident that ZK is part of the future and I'm confident that the work that we're doing you know will help hopefully Inspire others um to leverage this technology to achieve those things to enable real world applications for sure man like I my most like provocative like so you know people ask like okay well fine like we if we believe in

blockchain like what what's the killer up like what's going to change and like honestly like you go to someone like a16z and they talk about like all of this just like crazy stuff and like particularly crazy stuff that they can capitalize on or someone can capitalize on but like really like between True Believers right here like the the actual killer app that I think that crypto but like maybe specifically ethereum is going to be is like passwords man like passwords don't work and like look at the way that I need to prove to like a bank or to an employer or to like literally anyone that touches money that I'm a US citizen is to give them my social security number and that is the

reason why mine and yours and everyone's social security number is available for purchase for like five bucks for like 30 billion of them and so like yeah man I'm with you that like we're we're in the short term that's how humans live like we need to be thinking about VCS and incentives and like generating bags and like all this stuff for sure but um and to be clear like I mean it's it's amazing that you know ZK has gone in the span of 10 years it's Advanced 50 years and the reason is that for that is naked greed right people want to make money on crypto protocols like Alo right like investors who give us money and and like I mean of course like we we have many investors obviously care about the long-term Vision too but like look the

reality is like the money that's coming into the space is absolutely going to ultimately enable all these cool things and so it is I I just like your call out that you know even though it's like short-term long-term both can be be important it's possible for two things to be true at once right and so I very much agree with you there no and you're right I was I was painting with two BR brush or shooting with shotgun shells when I shouldn't have been because like yeah man like I believe in V some VCS and I believe in like some projects like Alo that are trying to transform things I just like this industry is tough right cuz like for every Alo there's like 45 pump do fun coins there's two teras there's a you know like there's s bankman freed running around and so like

it's hard not to be like really skeptical and nihilistic about the capitalism side of this but um I appreciate the push back because you're totally right like we are not moving forward without that energy it's the best and worst part of the space it's the marriage of the internet and money and like that enables powerful things that most people haven't even been able to imagine up to this point and it also attracts this all of the scammers that Humanity has ever produced and they're in the same place right that both are true and um you know it's unfortunate sometimes to have to with that but I do think I and going back to maybe the beginning of this conversation like I remember when I first found out about Bitcoin when ethereum first launched I mean even though all like you know we in the interim we've had SPF we've had Tera

and all these bad things I mean just honestly it's amazing the number of people that use usdc every day even if it's not for like salaries like people do use it I mean Banks now like like Black Rock has a Bitcoin fund like it's crazy and even like in like ease of use for all these things like the what what products like Unis swap have enabled nfts which I think kind of went high and then died but like actually it's like still a lot of use cases for marketing I mean like compared to 10 years ago the space is Light Years Bond what it is and 10 years from now I think we're going to Marvel at what we collectively have been able to do and I can't wait I think it's going to be really cool man I uh I we need to close this off right now so I

can immediately go to our calendars to schedule the followup uh podcast episode so man before I let you go I just first let me say thank you this I'll say it like definitely top five maybe top one episode I think it was just like so enlightening and interesting and awesome so thank you so much for your time and like your energy and like your contributions to this space thank you very much for saying that thank you very much for having me on and letting me gush about you know all of all of this that I'm I'm very passionate about and thank you for hosting the show and for informing The Wider world of why this technolog is important oh well I appreciate it and uh Before I Let You Go um if anyone listening is interested in finding you finding Alo or if they've been inspired to like really think about

what does it mean to be building in blockchain ZK and how to get started uh where would you point them towards yeah sure so um I think you know at the highest level I'll uh I'll give a shout out to my our mutual friend who you mentioned uh Anna Rose she has a great great show called The ZK podcast and from from there also there's a bunch of stuff that she um publishes through ZK Study Club Etc there's are great resources for people just kind of looking in to learn more about CK um I think with regard to Alo so natural starting point is our website al.org uh if you're developer also you can go to our uh GitHub organization Alon net that's the Alo Network foundation's um uh organization on GitHub we have two repositories there snark VM and snark OS you can actually get your hands dirty

run a node uh you can check out Leo which is our language we talked about leo.org that's where you can kind of understand you know and learn a little bit about what it's like to write a program in ZK um using our domain specific language so that's that one and then lastly I would say uh for anybody who's really hardcore interested in the proving as a service kind of you know uh future of Hardware uh we didn't get time to talk about this but I run this order called Z prize which is all about basically accelerating zero knowledge cryptography and we just we publish all the results uh in or all the results are open sourced and we've had some incredible breakthroughs over the past couple years so that has its own uh we have z prize. um and then uh also if you go to

our GitHub organization z uh I think it's Z prize uh I think it's just Z prize Well I'll give you I'll give you the note you can put in the link but anyway Z prize is uh is its own work and all the open source results there are published and we just published the 2023 submissions that are um represent some real breakthroughs in uh ZK proving times and efficiency so um for those who are really wonky you'll have to accelerate GPU uh you know implementations of of algorithms and gpus have at it um that's it yeah so and oh and I guess lastly for me I'm on Twitter Auden 08 um at some point I'll probably get on farcaster and other places but for now AUD no8 on Twitter is uh is the place to find me awesome man well you already had me before before

but fine we'll do it again so we've got the Alo follow-up conversation and now we have a z prize conversation that we need to have cool all right well sounds like we'll be we'll be chatting again soon Rex I'm looking forward to it for sure man thank you so much and uh have a good rest of your day thanks