Lefteris Karapetsas: Rotki – From Ethereum Devcon 0 to Building Rotki. Ep. 533

Transcript

welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution I'm freder ANS and today I'm speaking with left Harris who is a true crypto OG and the founder of Rodi um Rodi is an open source tool for accounting and portfolio tracking and management that focuses very much on privacy before I chat with left Harris let me tell you about our sponsors this week this episode is brought to you by gsis gsis builds decentralized infrastructure for the ethereum ecosystem with a rich history dating back to 2015 and products like safe cow swap or nosis chain nosis combines needs

driven development with deep technical expertise this year marks the launch of nosis pay the world's first decentralized payment network with agnosis card you can spend self- custody crypto at any any Visa accepting Merchant around the world if you're an individual looking to live more onchain or a business looking to White Label the stack visit nosis pay.com there are lots of ways you can join the nosis journey drop in the nosis Dow governance form become a nosis validator with a single gno token and lowcost Hardware or deploy your product on the evm compatible and highly decentralized nosis chain get started

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high yield staking to your own customers using their API your assets always remain in your custody so you can have complete Peace of Mind St sing today at chorus. one hey left Harris it's good to have you on hey hey F nice to nice to be here we had you on uh incidentally for the first time um on the 10-year um epicenter episode because kind of we talked about kind of whom would you we like to kind of have on who's a true OG who's been here forever and your name was very much at the top of the list and kind of we reached out to you and he said you're super happy to come on but it's a little bit weird

because you've never been been on before so here we are to make up for that left you've you've been in this ecosystem literally since since the very beginning um tell tell me about your background and how you first entered the space yeah so indeed I've been here for quite a while um I entered the crypto space first like by mining some Bitcoin back when it started but I lost the oh no hard drive yeah it's well it happened and um like for real though I I I got interested when I was in Berlin looking for a job because um I I had um I had a

job at Oracle game Bea which is the the the big American uh Oracle the the the Giant and it was really boring but I just wanted to do something fun and then I saw an ad by Gavin wood for um the Berlin ethereum office that was just starting to work on on um on this thing called ethereum and I was like okay that sounds interesting let's go and so in 2014 I joined the fdev so the foundation's development arm in Berlin and started working on um what was it mostly mostly on solidity basically because I was really interested in compilers I had even written one it's still in GitHub and of an early version of rust but before R existed yeah I started working on

solidity and uh then later a bit on the C++ client which uh uh unfortunately doesn't exist anymore and um yeah this is how I started the the trip into ethereum and this was literally before before the Genesis block right so you started at the end of 2014 and ethereum went live like July of 2015 right yes that is that is correct what was it like back then because kind of um if you kind of look into the ethereum space now and I mean we we say this all the time it's still early and so on but back then kind of it was like literally very very early um H how did you guys kind of see ethereum

and kind of how did you feel about the Prospect and the chances of eorum making it um yeah that's a good question um H so I thought it's a game back in the beginning I was like literally thinking it's just a fun game let's see how it will work out we were playing in the test net and I remember um like double spend bugs or suddenly money appearing in some account ET it was all just fun in games I I didn't really realize the scope of what we were building until um maybe Devon one because um that's when I actually saw the interest by outside people

because as you know so there was in like so I started the like either third or fourth quarter of uh 2014 and we had Devon zero in November so Q4 2014 and that was in Berlin in the the very first office that that um was in valder m and there there were only 25 30 people all just geks working on ethereum and I was like okay this is like a Meetup and it really was just like a Meetup the only Outsiders that I can remember was probably Golem some people from from from the Golem Foundation well it was not the foundation was project um and was just people talking about how awesome e is and what what what what we

are doing but other than that there was no it was very difficult to actually see how this would be applied in in the real world uh later because there was no other um developed smart contract platform back back back then um as I said so this slowly started changing from the release and until devc one because you started people seeing uh you start see people um use it like deploy smart contracts uh make first DBS and yeah that got really interesting slowly yeah so uh defon one was then in London about um 34s of a year or so later right yeah uh probably November

again uh in 2015 yeah that was shortly after ethereum had gone live in July um and then kind of you you stayed at the ethereum foundation until the end of the year and then you moved to slocked um and you only you only spent like eight months there or something but um I mean now we remember slock it mostly for the da almost exclusively for the da um tell me about why why why you decided to move over to slet and kind of what the promise was well I mean so the reality with with like it is that um back in um there was

a lot of drama in in ethereum Foundation back in Defcon one um because they were running out of money um they had spent already too much of the money that was raised and the so ether wasn't doing that well or at least they were spending more than they had and uh so the fdev um uh leadership basically decided at the moment to just fire everybody and so everybody was fired back then and this is how I ended up in in SLO it I just was looking for another job for the firing it got undone afterwards and there was a change of leadership and people actually ended up staying but I had already accepted an offer to go to Slit and and went there so what was

sloid supposed to be um so kristofh yens one of the three founders of sloid um he was um advertising in Devcon um even in Devon one like this ethereum computer that would be this kind of um Hardware that we would build and this is what I really liked the connection between hardware and the software world where you would have it in your um in your home and you could control various things via blockchain transactions and the the famous or infamous thing right now that also gave it its name the SLO kit it was this Smart Lock right and they have this demo and we we also saw it later in some other events where there is this lock

that you do a transaction on mainnet even because it was a bit cheaper back then uh and the transaction gets mind and then the ethereum computer sees it and unlocks the the lock the idea was you know you would do a Airbnb kind of style of um renting an apartment and uh it would all be on the blockchain and uh verifiable and all that um and I got really interested in working on this ethereum computer um because uh I'm still a bit but back then I was a lot more interested in in um very lowlevel um back end uh um back end stuff so this was supposed to be

written in C and all that um but what they ended up getting famous for is how to fund this thing which they announced also since Devon one that they would fund it through what they call the da uh and um it's not like what they do right now like everybody makes a dow that just air drops people tokens and they have a foundation somewhere in the came on islands and then they have the lion set of of that token it was a really pure and maybe naive idea that you would create this uh Dow that would be an investment vehicle that

would invest in many produ uh yeah projects products including the ethereum computer that slockit would make but it would be completely up to anybody who participates in the Dow everybody who who puts money in in order to um decide if they would ever um end up funding slit so this fundraise was actually incredibly successful right basically back then there wasn't actually all that much you could do on ethereum um and so like 15% or so of all e actually ended up in the da um sometime I think kind of they started their token sale in April or so and then but by June um the

contracts had been hacked and you were very much at the Forefront kind of when that happened uh you and Griff and uh and a couple of others there's actually really good coverage of this and also kind of like the theum Foundation situation that you alluded to earlier in Laura Shin's book I think kind of you were one of the main sources for that book do you think it's it's accurate yeah yeah it's very accurate at least for the stuff that I was that I was involved in it was very accurate for the etherum foundation stuff in Switzerland I can't attest anything about this because I I never went uh actually never went to the Swiss office ah okay but all the drama that affected

Berlin and all that uh yeah okay so tell us about the hack what happened and kind of how how did it go down kind of like from from a first person perspective so there is a lot of uh background to the hack like the problems that were found with them uh idea of of The Da that it could split to other uh sub Dows and you could um uh exit the Dow essentially by saying okay I want to you know like they have now in molok Dow the r quit you can just quit and take your portion of the funds that you put in into a sub like a Ti Da I think uh they called

it um and there were lots of game theoretic problems that some people uh suggested and they even had called a moratorium to the Dow so to stop it but you can't you could not pause uh the the the Dow it there was no m key there was no pause button it it was impossible to stop it um and so this faithful day I don't remember exactly but someone in June um in the morning I just wake up to Griff's call telling me that the Dow is being drained and like what what what good morning What's happen and uh yeah so what ended up happening was that um there was an exploit um that was found that was a

recursive call inside uh this um um exit of the Dow like like you take your funds and go um that you could essentially drain the the the entire the entire amount and um yeah so it happened that it was being drained we try to understand what's happening in the first uh hours I think I managed to recreate it in the test net but at the same time they stopped so whoever did is stopped for whatever reason we don't know and drained something like 30% around I think of the Dow and 70% was left and then we were like wondering what to do now because I

had recreated on the test net and had the contract to White H H kit but um yeah there were questions because was member of of slit back then uh so should we do this as slit should do it as someone Anon should we not do it at all is it legal is it okay uh and so we were really just not doing anything for the first days and we were really scared about what the implications what what would that mean were you worried that someone else would recreate this so basically even if the kind of the initial hacker I mean they got they got 30% of um the da da e but um in I mean basically it it was

clear that there was an exploit and kind of there were probably not all that many but probably on the order of like 10 or 20 people who could have just recreated this yeah yeah so this exactly what worried us that copycats would eventually pop up right it's I mean once you see what happened even if so I Rec it fast because I I I I had also written part of the contract right but if I took a few hours someone can do it in like double that time or a day and it did happen like a few days later uh there was the start of copy cut attacks and there was like two or three subd Dows being created they were kind of sloppy because they probably didn't do something right and they were they were starting draining very small amounts

because it really it was such a funny exploit because it really depended on how you write the contract you have to be very careful to put some parameters correctly and also how much so you needed a capital to run it because you essentially are running Capital through the Dow to drain so the more you put in the more you could um take out so in the end at some like if don't remember how many days lat but not too much later we decided to to act and we weren't so nobody said who we were except for so Absa agreed to be the uh the face of of this uh of this white had attack because he didn't want and he was writing that

to um so Alex Vander vanderson um that he didn't want people to think okay that's another black hat so I don't remember he wrote a RIT post that da is being safe L drained or something like this and people were saying what why should we believe you who are you guys and and all that but we drained basically the rest uh back then and Alex back then was with um the ethereum foundation right uh I think so yeah and he I mean he later co-founded ens but uh yeah so I think he was at the ethereum foundation at the time and then kind of the other people who were involved were um uh Griff obviously Kristoff and his brother and Stefan TW and ji so it it

depends like um like Stefan TW uh Kristoff uh and Simon yens were the three founders of of uh Jordi helped with the uh he didn't help so much with the first white hat attack but later there was a lot more and he he basically helped a lot in this in the aftermath of there was quite a few more stuff not AF afterwards super cool I recently found some um some Dow e um and I kind of I I hung on to it kind of just as kind of like a reminder for for for Old Time sake yeah the D talking they um kind of a collector collector's

edition absolutely fantastic so um and the kind of the entire drama um actually led to the split um of ethereum into ethereum and ethereum classic what did you think about this at the time yeah uh that's a hard question because I I I I I was much more in the camp of let's do the Dow Wars and the soft fork and let's try to get it somehow through through counter hicking the hacker we had so many nice plans I even gave a a talk about this in what was it like lenu du HCK in Disneyland Pary in July like I I had like this nice slides and all of

them explaining what we can do Etc but it turned out that the soft Fork was invasible as an idea because you could we had the idea of kind of making it so that all the miners agreed to um throttle the transactions that would be sent by the attacker um left teris maybe let's let's kind of clear up the term soft folk here so we all know what a hard folk is where kind of the network splits and in a software soft for kind of like some transactions are censored right exactly exactly so the the idea was that there would be some kind of um agreement with with the majority of the miners to censor transactions um that would be sent by

the attacker uh and to favor ours um but the problem with that is that it actually allows the network to be dsed and there was one more problem that I don't remember and so it was invisible as an at the end um and otherwise the Dow Wars would just end up in an infinite hacking and anti-hacking thing allowing probably the the funds to um never be recovered by the guy by by the attacker but also by anybody else and it didn't make sense so it was either at the end to accept the loss uh or to do the uh the hard for that led to ethereum classing I assume if something similar were to happen today um maybe the

decision would would have been made differently um but at the time do you think kind of with them the two remaining choices left so kind of either kind of just giving up the funds um or kind of uh doing the hard Fork um do you think the right choice was made looking at the aftermath I hate what happened for the next year or years with the eum classic and how the community split this was it was pretty bad um at the time I felt that probably we shouldn't do the hard for because from a completely personal point of view I only had I don't know1 or $200 on inside the Dow and I I could just

lose it but also from the point of view where H you know you felt responsible like I I felt responsible and probably also the others in in in slit and in in um uh in the team felt responsible for for the loss of of funds um it was a relief because then you wouldn't have to feel okay all these people lost money for us so I was really I was really Tor between those those two and I still am ideologically I didn't like it that that is that is that's quite true I didn't like it but um it kind of also proved that it's not all about the code uh but it's also about the social consensus of ethereum uh if something like that happened right now I have no idea what

would happen which we are getting the question right now right what if there is a g if Lio get if if Lio gets hacked or something yeah no this thing that is right now in Twitter about the minority bug sorry majority the super majority client bug I mean that could B more not 15 but 25 right now percent no wait 25 is staked and if 84% of the 25 is in GE let's say that all of it would burn the worst um case that would be 20% of all ether what would happen in that case well to go I don't know like as you said there weren too many uh uh applications back

then right now there is so much and there is so much Capital inside uh the ecosystem to just burn um 20% of the eth that is also backing a lot of the lsts and the Defi and what that will do to the price of e um I really don't know if that would be acceptable let's say let's let's hope we don't find out yes yes so basically one of my my my my main things when I see the current situation is like um like we should not even have to question this we we shouldn't be in a place where a bug can actually get us to that yeah absolutely so you spend probably the longest eight

months of of your life at slocked I I'm sure you kind of AE like by 10 years or something um and then kind of just after the hack you actually moved to brainbot um which um was a company so basically at the time you were working on Raiden um which was kind of posited as a payments Channel um for for ethereum so basically back then we kind of distinguished between um between uh uh State channels and uh yeah so basically yes so basically it was meant to address kind of the scaling SL interoperability space um and brain was very much at the

Forefront of that um but then somehow completely missed the boat later so kind of when it actually took took off tell us about your time at at brainbot who were hugely involved in the space right so basically you guys developed one of the clients there were kind of the you guys were kind of involved deeply with the etherum foundation they were quite number of um different projects you kind of did inhouse Yeah so basically tell us about your time there and where you think kind of it it went wrong and ultimately failed yeah sure so um one correction I didn't go to brainbot after the hack I um the longest period that I spent and the worst was basically from the hack

until September because that was the the really complicated stuff where there were attacks in the Dow after the the hard Fork because someone put money in the Dow after the hard Fork by mistake and then the whole thing with eum classic and the Dow was there because we were called to help there because they're the the heart work never happened and that was basically entire summer that's a very big story U which you can read in Laura's Laura's book but after that indeed like uh September October I I joint uh brain board and um it's Jo to help with building building

Ryden basically uh so Ryden uh was as you said the payment tunnel solution right so what what is payment tunnels um if anybody knows lightning uh the lightning Network to bitcoin is what um Ryden is to ethereum the idea is extremely simple that you take stuff off chain and it's just for payments and you say uh like let's say I have a payment Channel with with you and I just sent you um uh so we deposit in this payment Channel which is a contract I deposit 10 e you deposit 10 e and then we can send those 10 e to each other as much as we want off chain and if ever there is a problem we just settle it on

chain Yeah so basically you would actually have to sign each transaction we just wouldn't put it on chain and then basically if you kind of if you were to dup me or whatever I could kind of prove this because I kind of had your sign transaction right exactly and it's a network because it's not just between us two so this is a single payment Channel and it's a network because then you may have one with with with Martin and then Martin has one with uh Kristoff let's say and then I can send directly to Kristoff through all of your channels so um we spent quite a bit of time developing this now why did It ultimately fail I don't know I like I still like the idea of payment s but not as an entire network to to be used as an L2

solution like it's it's a different it's a different thing um as we see now from the rollups you want the The Full evm Experience to be uh scalable so you have the contracts you have the defi this would be only for token transfers from to somewh one of the reasons was that uh brainbot uh was probably a a very development oriented company and not at all um the user facing so it was mostly like some gigs just writing code um so I I think that this hurt a lot because there was no contact with with the actual uh Community um another is that it's actually a lot more complicated than it

sounds to develop this there is so many edge cases and uh so many problems that it it becomes very difficult to actually make this production ready I remember our issues probably they are still open like half of them about every single edge case that we hit or could think of and you know like it's it's a very difficult technology to actually to actually scale because of all these head cases but I mean you you guys as a collective had thought so much about kind of um the constraints and um what had to go into it and kind of you were there for kind of like all of the um talk about plasma and scaling and so on

so in principle kind of like when the L2 Revolution came you were in almost the ideal place to kind of launch your own L2 and kind of make it big why do you think that didn't happen I can't answer this I really don't know because um so I wasn't in so the problem with brainbot is also that it wasn't um it was basically a top down organization so we had no say into what is done there was like the the management decided and we I was just a developer there and we just did what the management said I think that we missed the boat for uh as a project because it was too slow to finish riding and then

there was no pivot at all even when stuff changed when it was obvious that there should be a change while for example at the same time like we had the plasma as you said that popped up from the generic State channels that state channels people which we also cooperated with had started it went from state analy to plasma and then later to uh basically I think it's this a very big part of the samey that's evolved with optimism right now so um they pivoted every time while well Brabo just stayed on on right and so for for this I guess um the lack of of of of pivoting is what killed it you then kind of moved on to kind of

start rodkey which was was your own baby so as we said in the very beginning kind of um Rodi is um an accounting and portfolio tracking and management software why why did you put why why did you choose that Niche um for for your own startup good question uh I don't like accounting I hate this I hate taxes I hate accounting but I just needed to do them so I didn't even want to make a startup I just wanted to my taxes well that [Laughter] escalated I I I I never intended to start a startup like it's just that um I

actually started this as you can see from the commits in 2017 so two years before I left uh Ryden it just was a side project helping me submit my tax to the finan in the beginning it was just a a command line interface and the question came in 20177 when I first realized that we have to actually you know submit taxes on all this stuff back from 2014 2015 Etc and I was thinking so how can I do this I had no idea um and I think back then the only thing that was um available was bitcoin. tax and I go there you know bitcoin. tax what is it okay website you know upload CSV or give me all of your addresses and I'm like

wait why should I give you the addresses can't I just download something and calculate it all locally and then send it to an accountant or to the finance directly and the lack of such a tool existing is what pushed me to create r a command line interface basically in the beginning to just you know locally calculate everything and not sayare it with I don't know someone else because then they know you know it's it's not like it's not like with um with banks uh with crypto a lot more sensitive because you are selling your transactions and with them your addresses so everything you have and because everything is so public

everything you will ever have in crypto unless you use tornado or you go through Kraken or coinbase because someone who actually really wants to follow you they can just take all this and then just monitor what you are doing like years later while you wanted to do your tax report in I don't know 2017 uh so that I I consider it like extremely sensitive data and I never wanted to Ser this so this is how I started working on on on Ry and there's now quite a suite of kind of um competitors right so basically there's um Mo most of those you actually use by still inputting your addresses in a um centralized framework and they kind

of calculate things for you um but and you are definitely sharing your data W with them um do you think kind of the space has professionalized in terms of kind of like data security and data privacy or do you think it's still as dire it's it's it's a lot worse like instead of having one way to suit yourself on the foot now there's aund ways to suit yourself on the foot it's uh it's it's really bad uh I'm actually very sad that I so I don't consider of them actual competitors because nobody does what we do I would love to have a competitor like a actually there is one called ghost folio I

think it was shown by one of our users to us I think it's more more UK uh focused or something something like that but there was one that had exactly the same ideas but written in a different language or something and U but um they had basically exactly the same problem and same idea and I I if I could say that anybody's competitor it would be someone who offers the same thing that we offer which is basically privacy and keeping it uh keeping it local yeah so I started like that but I never actually wanted to make um a startup as I said I don't know what happened it's just that after having um to leave uh a brainbot I just thought you know what I so there were many

problems I don't want to go into that but after that I was like I would like to work for myself so what do I have and I'm like okay I have r and by then it had you know quite a few like actual users and even pain users um and I was like wait I have never made a startup so maybe I should try that and just started it uh along with um so even though he's not a co-founder he was basically the first Dev Kelo so uh friend of mine and a quite good developer uh who is doing the front end in in uh um I mean he's not the only one doing the front end but he's the front end lead and lots of other stuff in in in Rod

key what are the main challenges um behind um running a tool like you guys are wow work can I start okay there seem to be a lot of challenges pick CH choose any choose anywhere you want probably the biggest one would be um the choice of uh being local and privacy preserving actually limits you a lot in the development uh processes So like um while every other um tool that offers similar uh solutions to to a user they can just have a website right and then in the website they just roll out an update and then another update you don't need to download

anything you don't need to do anything it's just Auto updated it is a problem both for our users and for us it's really really annoying that when you make a local application you have to create binaries people you have to download them and it's not just that you have to create binaries you have to create binaries for Windows you have to create binaries for uh Linux for many different dros then for Apple Mac OSX stuff then later when the Silicon stuff came this is a different binary because it's completely different architecture so you need to have you know two binaries for for Apple um so developing uh local software though it's um I believe as a user it has a lot of benefits um as a developer it a pain in the behind right because

I like like it takes it basically it costs more money in the end because more Dev resources more time uh while you just make a website and you just update it so it this is probably one of the biggest challenges the other would be but this is something that everybody shares so I have talked also with founders of of um or or developers of other tools that are you know completely online when you want to track crypto ah I mean there is a new protocol or a new primitive completely new idea popping up every week or so and users are extremely uh demanding and they are also very entitled like they are like wait why

doesn't it track this protocol that only I know uh very well why doesn't it do this so trying to keep up with with crypto and its development um in this in this field is so fast that it's it's extremely difficult yeah I can I can see that you guys have a free tier and a pay tier so how does it work kind of what um as a user um what can I do with um the free tier and from which point onwards do you actually have to pay yeah so uh the fre tier uh so this tiering will change because it's um unsustainable the fre tier is way too cheap it's 12 no EX 10 per month plus V8 wherever you are because for example for

you have to start 19% V if you're in Portugal a different one if you're not in the European Zone it's 10 we've got feedback that you can get a lot done with the free version and that we should actually change that in order to get more money from users but the it has limits so it has limits on the amount of events that you can uh um process so if you have more than I don't know a thousand or something then uh or 500 I don't remember you will see a not is saying okay we can't process more than this uh please upgrade to the um to the uh premium version and there is some features uh that we have also in the premium version

like uh F staking I think and another one is that we allow and this one of the features that people really like for premium we allow to up uh upload your database to our server and then download it from another machine and this is is completely private because the database so all of the data in in R is encrypted using a password that you give so we we just say blow of data we can't treade it we just act as a cloud where you upload the thing and then you download it somewhere else you also said that um you don't just do accounting and um portfolio tracking you'll also start much doing much more portfolio

management how does that look like so rki right now is is mostly a Tracker right uh in accounting um there is many ways that you can take it but we are a really small team so we are we are resource constrained you can either try to do a lot more accounting um you know there's so many jurisdictions this is another from from the another one of the problems because people say Okay I want to do accounting right but I am in the Netherlands so I have these rules please help me or I'm in the UK I have the bed and breakfast rule what is that oh here read it it's uh you know the asrm website you know a PDF of 100 Pages please implement it I'm a premium user I'm paying 10 per month please I

want this implemented from you uh so it starts getting extremely difficult because the really is every country has its own rules so we try to have generic accounting customizable a bit is an accounting solution um um approach and we want to make it configurable for users and users can make PRS even and add their stuff but for management side it's including myself as a user and other users have told us so I open Rod key I see what I have in Kraken in coinbase or in um uh in defi why can't I actually manage it from Rodi uh Rodi has the Kraken API Keys it has the coinbase

API Keys If I want to make a trade in Kraken to sell F4 Euro why can't I do it from Roy why do I have to open Kraken sign in put my tofa and not do it from from from rki so the idea is to actively manage your funds um by making um both onchain transactions and um uh trading on the exchanges from Roi this is not possible yet but this is a direction that we would like to take it towards because um it would make it a well much more useful tool for for everybody yeah I I I can see that and I think it's also something that a lot of

um portfolio trackers kind of um a path that they have taken also to kind of increase monetization right that's that's true like um for other portfolio trackers um uh this mostly for defi only because they are like defi oriented but yes indeed they they turn into wallets yeah absolutely um so since you started this there have been enormous developments in the Privacy sphere right so basically um back in 2017 when you kind of started this as a CLI project um there was no zkps and now kind of we're talking about fully homomorphic encryption right do you think um these

um cryptographic tools could help build something that is um easier to maintain um but still fully private for the user yeah I I I'm not sure I don't know I don't know the technical details of zkp enough to to answer okay what what are the plans for the future of ory yeah um so the plans for the future is to basically um capitalize on on having a local Tool uh by um going towards the management side because another thing is like you you wouldn't

share your your API Keys active API keys with with with an exchange um with a centralized website people have done it once at this three commas thing and if you've read like The they had this trading API where you had a um um what was it like some kind of um website where it it Aggregates trades from different exchanges it's called three commas and they got hacked because and they lost a lot of money from the customers because they their database got hacked so active API keys were leaked and boom while with r it would all be locally okay you someone can put a ky looger on your machine but then it's it's it's your fault it's not someone leaking your data and with it

access to your funds so we really want to capitalize on on on this a lot keep offering um more Accounting Solutions because this is probably one of the things that our current users want the most and figure out a way to um well allow for easier um so to capitalize on the open source part allow for easier contributions and maybe also incentivize them somehow uh because if we as a as a project do good so maybe also our contributors could could somehow profit so we're thinking of of ways that we could uh we could achieve this and um change the architecture of of the tool again capitalizing on the local um part

so make it multiprocessing we want to we are working on different demons underneath doing other things because it's I mean it's a it's a back end and a front end and it's doing so many things so many calculations underneath uh that it's already at the limits of the current process and it's slow in many things so we want to basically go to a multi-service architecture and some servic is written in um different languages and we're looking at at trust right now in order to well I mean my computer has how many cores and I run Rod key on on one python back end I mean you know how python is is is single um process though this is changing with newer versions of python

um still we want to go to a multiservice architecture to get rid of this these limitations cool yeah know that's super super interesting to hear kind of what the plans for rodkey going forward are um maybe let's let's um kind of change gears a little bit and talk about about ethereum culture and the general ecosystem so you have been in the ecosystem for 10 years you you you kind of joined in 2014 now it's 2024 how has how has the culture changed in your eyes so we grew a lot right so I don't know what to call ethereum culture uh anymore it's so many people um compared to how it was before it's so many new

people and we have different subcultures right now inside the them we have the region the Deens uh the the the Traders the gamblers I don't know like the builders and then we have the builders who are okay you know we don't need open source let's go close Source have the builders who are like like me like open source we others who are like okay maybe let's go somewhere in between so there is there's it's so big as a as an ecosystem right now and I'm very happy and proud of that that I can't really Define what is um what is etherum culture anymore it's just a lot of subcultures yeah I I I think I think that's uh yeah that's that's a very fair

point if you kind of think about kind of like the ethereum ogs from back then so I recently saw again the picture from Dev kzero and as you said as you said there were literally like 25 people there um of those there have very few um leftover do you think that's kind of like natural ch um and people are just doing something else now or do you think it's something that's particular to to this ecosystem and is there anyone you miss in particular anyone you you really wish would come back yeah yeah uh wow from Demco zero yeah I don't know I like I loved Jeffrey Jeffrey Wile the basically main the

first developer of of of gith he's a really good guy um if I were to say any from from from that picture that I just just just remembered um as for the turn it's Lo he's completely out out of the ecosystem right he does completely completely L like the only time that I saw his name was when someone accused him of selling e in order to fund his uh I think he's doing a game right now like a software game and uh because they tracked his ethereum address from back in Genesis and they you know try to name shame him in Twitter for for selling e bastard kind of selling the E that legally

belongs to him how dare he what we were talking about maybe a year or two ago so yeah there is definitely a natural turn I mean people being 10 years older if if you're now it's 40s or 50s it I mean at some point you're like okay you know midle AG crisis some get married some have kids uh the turn is is natural on the other hand there is also something that most of the people there if they actually had e and kept it probably don't need to care about anything anymore so maybe this also shows um who was interested in it for just you know like okay let's just make something cool but make money and then

retire um and who is still here and is just building because this is something really interesting and I mean this thing that we're building is really interesting and the people who still are here in one way or another um I I I find it really really nice yeah no it's it's it's always good to kind of run into Old faces yeah you're a very active Tweeter um on Twitter um and the things kind of You cover a lot are kind of like things like privacy and Free Speech kind of tornado style kind of projects um but also security you're also pretty big in the

ethian public goods and protocol governance scene um so you're one of the largest delegates for um a number of projects um how how do you choose which issues to get involved in and What Makes You passionate about them yeah that's a good question I I never plann to actually become a as they call it Dow politician or governance politician or I have no idea how that happened really I I I really have no idea for example it turns out that I'm the biggest delegate in Diva and they do a distri distributed um staking validation protocol right exactly I have no idea how like someone

told me hey do you know that you're a delegate in Diva I said uh yeah remember that I said okay if anybody wants to delegate to me do that and then someone tells me hey can you come to this telegram we need you to vote because you're the biggest delegate and I'm like wait what but everyone knows you right because you're so active on Twitter and kind of you seem uh I know I've delegated to you in the past because kind of you you you seem to kind of think think uh things out well and you know I I don't have bandwidth to kind of look into all of these things and I know that kind of if if you kind of looked into it um I would probably end up agreeing with you so kind of I think this is these are the reasons for which

people delegate right probably probably yeah it started probably with ens and gitcoin I guess because gitcoin is something that I really love I I stopped actually being a delegate there because of issues with the governance I just said okay I don't want anymore I'm just too tired um but things um that try to change the world uh like like gitcoin because I I find it amazing that it can basically it has so many flaws I have criticized it as many times as I have said that I love it but it's amazing that you have this idea where okay you gather people from all around the world and you fund projects and then there is a matching poort and these projects get more funding from from the poort

the and we have funded with this U even things outside of crypto like I tweeted the other day about your lib 3 which is a very basic um library in Python uh so it's it's really amazing to see how these Primitives that we have created in uh in in in crypto can help well people build amazing stuff and fund them so I guess that's how I got into it just wanted to well influence it's its direction how much time does it take up for you because kind of like following like all

the forums I'm involved in way fewer um projects and even I struggle to kind of keep up I don't follow forums as as much as people probably think um uh if if if a government relies on needing to follow fors I probably don't like or or like step step step away from that particular uh project so actively actively I think I'm mostly in optimism uh in ens this is probably the most uh active ones that I I I I am active in right now um and one really cool thing that I have asked of every doubt that I'm involved in I'm also involved in

Hope a bit Etc is is to get delegates having a mailing list so like what happened like we weekly sum up this is beautiful because I can just go through it and see okay that's it good good info it's it's it's it's it's a game changer are are these published somewhere um yeah I think I think everybody can um just like with a mailinglist right you can subscribe and then you you get it I think so just fores no no no no no it's like um governance weekly or something like that okay and it's it's pretty it's pretty helpful if you're a delegate because then you actually can know what's

happening without having to be on the forums every time and then you see okay so this particular um proposal is something that I should look at but it it it does take time and unfortunately some things take a lot more time than they should like um so ens for example it's it's pretty smooth like it's they have this um sub groups or working groups they are the most they're mostly running the Dow and then they're asking the delegates to to vote on stuff and when there is a big vote that's when a lot of thinking needs to happen like there was now with the service providers but mostly it hands off optimism is so much work I I don't know

what the heck I'm doing there it's like so much work are delegates compensated for their for their time no and this is another problem that uh so ens I mean it's too little it's it's not too much work but like there is B of work optimism is is really a lot of work um they say that they don't want to so for optimism they don't want to uh compensates but maybe there will be retr pgf so they have this kind of bait of sorts to get people more interested in governance but for me it would be much better if it was like okay so this is the outside put and this how much I get compensated not like retrop pgf because

it's it's a different I think they're complet different things this this shouldn't work like this because it really takes a lot of time um optimism is I I find really cool and at the same time because uh so optimism has the foundation behind it and it's not hands off it's very handson so this something I don't like it some a lot of the times it feels like decentralization theater as opposed to like actual governance they are taking feedback well and they're changing it they're really trying they have voting Cycles they have seasons and every time it gets better and better still hands on the question would be if optimism

Foundation wasn't actually guiding this wouldn't would it be chaos maybe it's better this way I I I I I don't know optimism does it in an interesting way the most cool thing about optimism and something that I find really interesting is that they have a by Camal or by chamber governance so they call it the token house and the citizen house the token house is the usual delegates people delegate up to someone and these are the token house delegates then there is the citizen house which is supposed to um fight um the um

plutocracy by uh having recognized citizens uh as one person one vote right now there's 125 people I think and they in the beginning only voted in retr pgf so all retr pgf rounds were actually voted only by the bat holders so the citizens um but right now from this season they start to have um voice in the actual governance too and they can basically vet almost everything uh so they tried to have to experiment with this idea of of two different chambers of governance so that there is no power of plutocracy completely on the on on

the on the token holders and that cannot be captured or if it gets captured so that it can be saved by by the citizen house it's really interesting approach I I I find it unique and I really want to see how how how it goes yeah I think governance is it's going to they're going to be so many B if this is to work there's going to be so many upgrades so kind of like this this one person one vote and then kind of the delegates and kind of it's kind of it's it's too easy to break and to spam and it's uh yeah so I'm super curious to see H how how that will go in the future what makes you hopeful for the for the

road ahead for ethereum and what worries you so hopeful hopefully guess H all the cool stuff like we're really building really cool stuff um as as like I saw a tweet by Peter and I I kind of agreed with it uh Peter from from GUI yeah I'm not going to try to prounce sorry sorry if you would say Peter um but uh like I also was a bit against the e559 because I didn't think it would work or that you know like it didn't make sense to me but uh you know like it's a resounding success as an idea and

it so so yeah p1559 was the fee market right yes yes that's correct sorry I I yeah I hatte this when people do that then they shouldn't have done it like all these numbers you know like you know 15 47 and 46 33 and I'm like okay what yeah I know exactly what is this yeah so the fee Market um one it has worked amazingly so I think that it's probably this also goes back to the people so like the there is so many smart people in this field uh there's so many people smarter than me younger um talented and you know hungry for for for building beautiful stuff uh I think this is the Hope like all this new new new generation that is inside this um

ecosystem that we built back then uh it's this is making me extremely hopeful for the future it's it's really beautiful to see all those um young people trying to build cool stuff ah and also the how generous people are about helping good causes like now with the tornado right you see how um both back when it was just Alexi pv's case but now with that it's both cases with perv and Roman in the US um how everybody just you know opens up and says okay yeah let's donate Let's Help um defend open source defend privacy so these kind of reactions in these kind

of people in the field really make me extremely hopeful and proud to to be to be part of this ecosystem I love the way that you frame the kind of what makes you hopeful because I think kind of like young and smart people in the ecosystem I I I think you're spot on yeah yeah it's it's it's it's amazing it's it's really cool to see and people who are still in it for the right reasons right so basically I mean intermittently we always kind of have these faces where there's a lot of money Bros um but uh yeah by in large there're still there're still the people who are in it because they just believe in the vision yeah yeah that's true for for for what worries me I guess a lot of things again

like super majority of of of G of GE in in in stating this this I had totally forgotten about it and now that it became a Twitter thing again uh I'm like oh wow that's really serious that really worries me like I the moment I realized that it's so bad I I'm really worried about this so things like that like they call it a Black Swan event but it's not really Black Swan if you actually talk about it in expace that may happen if you can see it coming yeah yeah I find it weird that you would call it a black SW event but also you know the other thing would be um the image that we have um towards um the outside um this saddens me maybe more than worries

me but also worries me because this image um so we we tend to have a very negative image right outside of the crypto space they just somehow associate us only with crime or um scams or um gambling uh you know very negative words uh while in reality it's it's not it's not like that although there is a lot of scams a lot of um bad stuff in in crypto for sure it's uh like the developers uh that are just working in other non- crypto Fields seem

to actually hate developers work in crypto like there is a lot of actual hate I have been attacked in in let's say issues in GitHub when they realized so you know reporting a library issue somewhere and then they realized that they work in crypto and they're extremely uh like unkind tell me to you know get off uh that they don't want to help me I have had this happen multiple times and I mean this I find it extremely woring because this translates later into what we see in the political seen in the US because if many people associate something with with crime um then they can push it to be banned or to have um well a lot of political consequences and this this actually really worries me

because the misinformation there can do a lot of damage to to to our sector and it's often strongest in groups that should in principle be values aligned with us so kind of like the the people who kind of came out from the original Cipher Punk so kind of like the CCC in in Germany or the Electronic Frontier Foundation almost everyone is extremely web three critical um so yeah I I I feel you I also I also find that very worrying yes yes yes exactly I and I don't know you know I normally don't worry if I have a solution and I know

okay let's go work towards that I I don't know what to do here because I don't understand why this is happening okay no I mean I can understand why yeah I also understand why so basically I think kind of like being on the inside um there's a lot of scams that we're not even privy to so basically that kind of like regular people um are the target audience for and we don't even um we never actually end up hearing about so there was like this runaway hit podcast um I think made by the BBC last week last year the the crypto queen or something and I had it was literally a project that Hadar lady right yeah exactly had apparently raised

billions of dollars and I had literally never heard of her like zero times so I think kind of we're kind of like we're very much in this bubble um where there are um largely well-intentioned people and kind of like all of this scam underbelly of crypto we're not privy to it so I think probably for every legitimate project that we know and love there's uh 20 scam projects that we've never heard of and I think this is very much kind of how this image of crypto actually Rises and I think kind of the way to kind of dig ours dig ourselves out of this hole I hope is by building genuinely useful application for regular

people and I kind of this is kind of where we where as an ecosystem kind of we need to get to right yeah yeah that's uh that's that's true but I don't know how to get there because even if we do like we have we have we have a lot of stuff like I mean the okay now like advertising is something that you guys work on innos like theosis pay right like this is amazing this is going to be super cool based on on monium which I have actually also used right and this these are really like the the payments uh unlocking payments it's it's uh yeah but it's still it's it's still a promise right so we see it still hasn't found I mean it's so kind of we're very

hard at work to kind of make it usable for anyone who's kind of on a regular new bank account um so maybe not for your grandmother but kind of for for kind of regular people our age um who have no crypto background should be usable without them having to know kind of what is heat phrases and so on um but we're not there yet so kind of if you kind of look at actual users in crypto kind of people who are there to kind of use the products because they are legitimately better than the web 2 equivalent I would there I think there's literally zero and I think kind of moving from a place I think I'm super hopeful we can we can get there and we

can get there maybe this year or next year uh basically having real applications with um real users who are not in it because it's crypto and it's cool but because it's better than what they used to have um I think we can get there um and I think this is this will have to be the way to kind of get out of this you know public relations nightmare that we're in at the moment yeah yeah the we we need to find like well not exactly find pmf but it would be nice to have a good um good app but I I still think that there is stuff that crypto does a lot better than anything else right now which is I mean

payments it's it's nothing can do this as well as crypto like paying people in um outside of the EU paying people in Africa so we have some uh independent contractors in rki that work some hours for us right and we pay them through through crypto uh if you try to pay and Africa sometimes Asia also right yeah so we Tred even uh with um I don't know what other Solutions are there like PayPal or or wise transfer wise yeah we tried wise oh my God it's first of all so slow then expensive the percentage on the amount and the second payment that we tried to send it took about a month because it got somehow flagged and then

we had to talk with support and look you're you're preaching to the choir here I totally agree but I think kind of then kind of if you look at the other side the question is kind of like how do you off-ramp it how do you how do you make the Stables accessible so that you can actually spend them for groceries and your rent and I think this is still way too hard so I think kind of yeah I mean I think kind of it's potential Improvement is definitely there and I think we can get there but I think kind of making it more usable I think this kind of needs to be kind of like Priority One for now yeah yeah for for countries like for Asian countries from what I I I heard they just use you know like exchanges like like I I do

normally for for off ramping in Africa it's extremely interesting they use this like P P2P stuff they they just do crypto P2P just like we used to do not So Much Anymore like local Bitcoins and local local Bitcoins that was uh that was a fun time yeah cool um left haris it's been a it's been an absolute pleasure to speak with you and have you on this podcast for the first time for real after 10 years of kind of working together if people are interested in trying out Rod key or contributing where should you where should we send them for for contributing it would be um GitHub and Discord so GitHub to see the code

and Discord to uh basically chat with us ask us any questions we we're extremely welcome to uh contributors and to download it uh you can also download this from GitHub but we have it on our website like ry.com you can just go there and press download depending on the it will probably detect your operating system and then download the proper binary and just try it and then come to Discord and tell us what you think perfect thank you so much for coming on left haris and see you soon yeah thank you so much