The Next Frontier: Trustless Compute w/ Tim, Wolfgang and Rami (RISC Zero)

Transcript

[Music] thank you hello and welcome back to the strangewater podcast thank you once again for tuning in when I entered this space in 2021 I saw through the lens of Finance after my time running the treasury desk and then controlling a 10-figure budget at one of the world's largest companies I was convinced that ethereum was here to revolutionize the way Finance is done now before I go on let me be clear I still think that ethereum is going to revolutionize Finance I have so many stories about how the actual Plumbing of the Global Financial

system just doesn't work crypto is better ethereum is better but over the last two-ish years My Views have evolved significantly well I still think that ethereum is going to change Finance I don't think that that's the purpose of ethereum in fact I am becoming more and more convinced that defy isn't going to be a particularly important part of the world computer in fact I think that defy has a lot more in common with nfts than it does with global Finance these days I believe that the purpose of ethereum is not trustless Finance it's trustless compute

just like the purpose of computers as in finance computers are used for so much more big data collection and Analysis human connection and social networking content creation scientific modeling and research playing games I could literally go on forever and while we can all think of ways to add tokens and make these actions fit into our current conception of ethereum there's no reason to think that everything needs to be financialized and speculated on now all of this may sound interesting but it's super high level are you having trouble grasping what I'm talking about when I say trustless compute well today I'm pleased to bring you Tim

Carstens Wolfgang Wells and Rami Kalil from risk to zero over the next hour we are not only going to unequivocally spell out what trustless compute is but you're about to learn that it is ready right here right now and ethereum crypto and Computing will never be the same one more thing before we begin 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 bring on the folks from

risk zero hold on to your seats Tim Wolfgang Romney welcome to the Pod thank you so much for joining yeah thanks for having us yeah right on so this is the first time I've ever done a three-person interview and normally I like to start the Pod with like just the background and how you found crypto so maybe we can just kind of like keep it tight but I would love to hear for all three of you um like how did you find crypto and like what was your moment where you realized like oh this isn't just internet money for buying drugs but this is something like worth building a career if not around adjacent to so maybe Tim uh yeah so um

I've had uh crypto has been a close and dear friend for a while I would say um but definitely with its highs and lows um I first uh came into it so I was in math grad school when Satoshi published his paper on bitcoin and I also came from kind of that Cypher Punk kind of scene and so I saw that paper pretty early on and for me right away it was just like the nerd in me was very excited I said this will kick off a whole bunch of new ideas new algorithms new internet experiences um I didn't however think that people would more or less just take that design and run with it in that 15 years later you know these tokens would be worth

tens of thousands of dollars I don't think many people saw that so I kind of hung out in the forums for several years and then around 2012 one of my friends and I we got into mining we did that for a while we got goxxed um and then uh you know more or less actually around the time that people started the early work on the design for ethereum I kind of decided for myself I said okay do I want to stay in this for a while and really and go with it for you know all the way or you know still pretty young do I want to check out some other things so I actually got out of the space for a while and then I I know I'm still holding but you know just you know other kinds of

research formal methods other kind of fun things um and then I came back into the space at the start of last year uh when uh one of our colleagues at ricciro a guy named Jeremy Brussel reached out to me and asked if I'd heard of zero knowledge proofs oh all right so that's going to be the meat and potatoes of our conversation so I'll pause you right there and talk about like we'll get back to what ZK is and um basically what it is outside of the realm of uh crypto Twitter so super excited thank you uh Wolfgang how did you find the space um I guess I was a math PhD student when I stumbled across the Bitcoin white paper and to be honest I was not impressed I was kind of missing the the math the cryptography the the the so it didn't

catch on so I basically left it there for a while and then like it was like 2017-18 during the hype I was looking for a new job and I said man now is a good time to brush up your GitHub portfolio what interesting projects are there so then I really started doing like like Community Development for some projects and I also ended up then working for it's called Iota so they had very strong research Focus which I really liked being a researcher myself and they were building basically their own layer one which was a very very interesting Endeavor to do and then I got into this uh even more really had you had to understand how the

consensus system works that is actually just more or much more than I don't know just the white paper what I thought a few years earlier so much more or also like smart contracts cryptography I got a lot into cryptography and that's also how I then got into like zero knowledge proofs being basically yeah the the I don't know the the the yeah king of of cryptography or the third I thought at least so that's how I ended up at at risk zero then oh God I'm really afraid that Romney's about to tell us that he was a like actual math PhD or studying math two and then I'm gonna be the dumbest person on this call but at the risk of being dumb Romney how did you find crypto oh no well I mean I do have a bit of an academic angle to getting

into crypto but I started maybe a bit earlier because towards the end of my masters um we had this lecture on selfish mining in Bitcoin and that was kind of fascinating and uh that got me interested so I started looking at payment channels I made this scheme for rebalancing payment channels and then eventually started a PhD around blockchain so sorry I did not mean to um belittle at all the academics like I mean just so you guys know real briefly I went to Stanford from 2009 to 2013 studied computer science I took intro to number Theory from Professor Dan Bona I read the Bitcoin white paper in 2011.

and the entire time I just thought like I mean kind of cool I guess but like not relevant I don't care and I left the space until 2021. so um yeah you know I think like we all and and I think too like during those uh 10 years like I worked at um like the largest beer company in the world I became like the cash flow manager and um I was the like Director of Finance for Bud Light so I think like we take all of our experiences and that informs like what we do in this space but um it is pretty wacky how we all ended ourselves up here and I'm glad none of us found it through buying nfts um so I think um before we like really like dig into this conversation

um I think it's like helpful to put into context like what first of all like what is risk zero and like why risk zero so maybe I'll start with like kind of a theory I have on cryptography and then let you guys kind of like build off that and then tell us what zero is but I um I've become like super convinced that like we created cryptography in World War one and World War II to like encrypt messages for war right and then for like I don't know 80 years we got better and better and better and better that but like we thought the purpose of this science was encryption and then in 2008 Satoshi came along and said like hey there's not one use case for this there's at least two and for the last I don't know 15 years we've been like

chasing that thought like oh the cryptography is for one of two things and I like I think all of us on this call and like all of us who understand cryptography realize like if it's more than one it's not two it's end use cases we just need to figure out the other end use cases and like I've got some thoughts on like what the purpose of cryptography or specifically zero knowledge cryptography is but um like that's kind of how I understand where we are in time um and so one I just want to hear like your guys's reactions to that and two um agreeing or not like how do you put into context like what you're building um and like what brought you together for risk zero maybe I start with this

General stuff about cryptography because I I I 100 agree on this um like for example a lot of stuff like it the the theory if you look at the papers or whatever they're quite quite old and then really crypto gave gave all of this huge boost because suddenly there was the motivation suddenly there was the use case suddenly there was funding like outside of of universities so I think that is one of the in my opinion one of the best things that came out of all this crypto Hypes um and for example I don't know there's some theory about like a threshold or multi-signature schemes they're they're quite old but why why would you there's there's no real use case but now suddenly if you have like some some I

don't know tokens and you have a board of directors and you wanted like a three out of five signature suddenly suddenly you need it and it needs to be relevant and it needs to be secure in the real world and not only in certain theoretic aspects so I really think this this gave the theory was there but but the how it can be applied um how it can be made fast how it can be like maybe optimized in Hardware or whatever that really was driven by by the old crypto hype and I'm honestly excited what what happens there next in in the future if this continues yeah yeah I like for me when I like decided to figure out what was going on here and I read like all the Practical Byzantine

fault tolerance papers and I'm like they're all written in the 70s like what's that exactly yeah well zero knowledge is a good example of this um the theoretical framework for it was already known in the 1980s um and it's exactly one of these things where the theorists could Envision somewhere off past the Horizon a bunch of hypothetical scenarios but they were really fairly contrived because at this time we didn't have the internet we certainly didn't have an internet with over a billion users and who knows you know how much Econo economics and all the other great activity that takes place on there today and so you know to kind of echo what Wolfgang has said you know it's been

really exciting for me to see a lot of the stuff that I kind of considered like really far out um very pure math kind of ideas from computer science uh actually coming in and being the hot stuff that like is really unique in its ability to solve some of these core problems yeah makes a lot of sense so with that being said like what is the core problem that risk zero is uh trying to solve and actually I guess like even before that what is resero yeah I'll take this one so risk zero is a zero knowledge technology provider I found it a little over two years ago by Jeremy Russell Frank laub and Brian retford um our key product is an open source

platform uh it's a well it's a library a technology whatever you want to call it called the ZK VM and so this is a gadget within which you can run programs and the important thing is that you know whatever output your program produces you also obtain a proof that that output really did come from that program so this is a very geeky kind of thing but if you happen to be in a space where you have a bunch of computers working together that have no good reason to trust one another it actually winds up being super useful when we think about this cryptography VM is this like a full like turning complete like environment which you could run anything or do we need to think about at least what we have from the beginning as a specialized

Computing environment good question yeah so the key thing about rzkvm is that we see it as a completely general purpose Computing solution and so specifically uh for the for the Builders out there we provide an industry standard risk five instruction set architecture together with a number of accelerate accelerator co-circuits that you can invoke from there to get you higher performance for cryptography which fun fact is exactly how regular computer processors also work and do those same operations uh so we really would like to see it as something that has a broad impact across internet applications and really all sorts of decentralized applications but of course the space that we're most excited about is blockchain because blockchain understands what this stuff

is and is already very excited about it for sure it makes a lot of sense so the base kind of product or concept is this um cryptography VM or what sorry what did you call it ZK VM ZK VM there's too many VMS I need to keep track of these days but okay the ZK VM and um the product that you're creating is an open source like Library package so that any developer can take your code and then run this ZK VM so is this you know in the base configuration does this have anything to do with like ethereum directly or blockchain directly or is this do we start off by just creating a VM that does computer things but happens to generate proofs great question so uh

the ZK VM by itself is completely General it doesn't have any built-in features that are specific for blockchain however it's particularly easy to use it in a blockchain context because we do have some other stuff that we've built around it specifically to to be rails and make that nice and easy so for example today it's absolutely possible to get proofs out of the system and then verify them on sepolia we have a smart contract that does that right now on testnet it's also possible to run programs inside the VM that read data from the chain and which validate that data from the chain and which therefore do so in a secure way and so we have a number of exciting things about that that also might be fun to dig into a little bit as well for

sure man so I'm a little bit trying to like figure out basic questions to ask you without like just diving straight into like the juicy stuff here because look like I think already how you've described it is essentially like part of how I see the end game of ethereum right which ethereum as it exists today like the whole point is we have this pristine credibly neutral computing Zone the problem with it in order to maintain decentralization which is the key product is like it's slow and terrible and expensive right but in order like I'm just such a big believer that like now that we've created ethereum we need to figure out ways to jam more like compute more tools just more usability

and like functionality into ethereum and so like a huge part of what I see here is like being able to um project computation into the the the evm Via these proofs and so um one does that like the way I just talked about that resonate like with what what you guys see the purpose of risk zero is and two like can you just talk a little bit about um why that is so important to both like the the company that you're building but also like the technology that we all care about yeah so I think that one of the most exciting things that we're all going to get a chance to see over the next several years is exactly the scalability and performance improvements that ethereum is sure to adopt right uh everyone involved in the project has got

Clear Eyes about you know what needs to get done and it's really just a matter now of making the right decisions and executing them at a pace that you know works for people yeah I think the two years ago someone might have asked the question of is that going to happen but then one year ago we saw the success of the merge which I actually contend is one of the most impressive internet upgrades for any protocol that we've ever seen and gives me a lot of really positive hope I think for the future of ethereum and its role in the ecosystem um as far as resciro and you know the other ZK providers as well um I think that there's a number of kind of well-known problems that we're all trying to solve in the best possible way uh and almost certainly you know the the

top of mind one for everyone is uh the scarcity of compute capacity on chain today right so if you take a look at um the ethereum staking contract you'll see that there's currently over 700 000 uh staked validators for ethereum seven hundred thousand if we go ahead and just kind of oversimplify and say that each of those is a computer that is a phenomenally large cluster of computers right this this is that's big money that's that's that's not small beer right um and what we get it for that is the incredible security that ethereum provides there's a reason why it's The Ledger of record right um but what we don't currently get for that is any of the scaling benefits of

having such a large cluster of machines um you know the security scales but the compute performance currently does not right and so I think that the trillion dollar like you know next huge wave of of applications kind of question here is you know what's the right way to solve that problem what's interesting is a few years ago the question was is that problem solvable so we've come a long way now now I think it's well agreed that like technology like zero knowledge and more generally any kind of verifiable compute technology um can solve this will solve this and and it's now a matter of the researchers and Engineers building ever better systems until finally we're at a point

where we have something that makes sense for mainnet ethereum so so we're we're in that game you know it's it's a race on performance features compatibility uh security for sure figuring out the right design abstractions and you know participating I think in a very large conversation that's happening right now about what that future looks like yeah I think there has been there will be like an evolution like how layer ones work I guess especially with the Advent of of like zero knowledge proofs they'll be more like an anchor and then it's perfectly fine if they're a bit more expensive slower whatever because you can then build layer 2 layer three well whatever on top of you just need the the

security uh of the layer one and also the flexibility to maybe get your your proof system going there and make modifications so your proof system but that's going to be it all the other stuff is going to be moved to to other layers and yeah I think risk zero uh fits very well into this Vision we I think we even tackle this one level lower because we're not looking exclusively uh into ethereum but we built this very general purpose machine which then you can also use for other stuff outside of crypto and there are a lot of applications I think people are only starting to see what what applications for zero knowledge proof there are outside of of crypto in

finance and insurance whatever there's so many many applications for it and and yeah they all then can be connected very nicely with crypto with their knowledge proofs for sure and I think like something that a lot of people who are not like living and breathing ZK like haven't really wrapped their head around is like we at least crypto Twitter right thinks about ZK as like this privacy technology and like I don't think any of us think of it as a privacy technology I think we think of it as this magic that can be used for privacy but can be used for so much more and so I think like that's an important frame to break out of but I I'm just gonna like go straight here and ask it like how do you guys see what

you're building as like different or better than or less than a let's say a ZK roll up so for us you know we're we're what I think we're trying to do at least as an engineering organization is you know we're not trying to race to a specific answer or specific outcome I think that one of the things that really sets us apart is that we have a certain degree of patience if it you know allows us to make better engineering and kind of like scientifically informed decisions about where this technology really wants to be so it's a very abstract answer but you know I think that you know there's some ways in which our product has already kind of changed the conversation in ZK though and it's it's come about in this way

so last January or February whenever it was that we open sourced the ZK VM um we were the only people doing a general purpose instruction set architecture and really focusing on support for mainstream languages and very traditional Notions of programmability at the time the status quo was you know you have kind of two options you can build your own ZK circuits directly which is challenging it's fun and interesting but it's challenging it's not as productive as you know regular software engineering it's a little bit more advanced and a little slower going or you could work in some of these other VMS that were designed specifically around the mathematics of zero knowledge

and they needed to do that for performance or other reasons so we came in and we had this very unusual idea at the time we said we actually want to make this look and feel just like a regular computer in every way except that it produces proofs about what it's done um you know and there was a question at first I think for that a lot of people had which is you know how can you get away with that surely there has to be a lot of performance overhead and other kind of downsides and penalties ZK feels very slow so don't you need that performance and one of this other kind of like longer Horizons sort of attitudes that we took is that we're currently in a time when ZK technology itself the mathematics and the performance is evolving super

rapidly and so we thought that if we waited long enough the mathematics would fall into place to make those overheads inconsequential and if we designed things right we would be able to adopt that those those new developments without disrupting everything that we've already built and so you know this is one of the things that this risk 5 Core gives us is that it's a firm separation everything up above that users build it's a risk 5 processor everything down below that we build is whatever it needs to be to achieve the best performance so we're really trying to take that longer Horizon sort of attitude and this is sort of the opposite of you know building you know a specific ZK roll-up where you have to pick a very specific

model of how you think that that's going to work and be programmable and you have to decide are you an L1 are you an L2 are you going to be evm based are you going to be something different um it's in some sense a it's a very different kind of goal I guess I would say yeah let me very quickly iterate on this because that was actually finally left the point how I stumbled across risk zero because I wanted to to play around with that and maybe wanted to do a bit more than just I don't know doing some very artificial mathematical things that you can then bake into a circuit and then surf somehow and then and then there risk zero you can do that basically the the approver is is open

source you can write more or less any any program you want as as long as it's in Rust which is currently the most supported language you can use any any libraries you want to it and then you run it on you can create a proof of it maybe it it is the two takes too long for your use case or for your machine you're currently using but you can play around with it and you don't have to leave the the ecosystem or the tools you're familiar with as a developer you can just start this use all the libraries you used before and and and get get into it and that's that's I think very very interesting thing to do yeah so let me try to synthesize what you guys just said with a little bit of my own flavor but I think like it's so

if you are at like that cusp of like really understanding what we're doing here like you you start to understand ethereum as like a turing complete Computing platform that's just slow and then like okay then we we're moving into this roll-up Paradigm where like we have the same Turing complete platform so you can do whatever computation you want but like because we settle down to ethereum we can like make all these changes here and so like essentially we have a faster and and basically like our current Paradigm is we start with slow ethereum and as we move further out we can increase performance and I think what you guys are saying is like that is true or not I don't know we can talk about it but

the problem is is that you're always starting from this first principle of like starting in the blockchain VM and starting with blockchain thoughts and and like with blockchain whereas what risk zero allows is like hey like the way developers actually code is on computers not on blockchain VMS and so like let's provide that as a um environment but that also is giving us like the um the benefits of cryptography and so maybe like the the kind of distinction between a roll-up and what you guys are building is like the the roll up Paradigm starts with like ethereum or blockchain as first principles and builds from there and what you guys are

doing is starting with computation at first first principles and then building um like zero knowledge tools to like connect it back to blockchain does that sound fair it is an explanation but it's not maybe not a hundred percent Fair ethereum has a very strong pull on a lot of Concepts so like Wolfgang was saying a lot of the cryptography was there before but not never really got improved until people were really interested financially in it and something like what a roll-up is itself a rollup is basically just a mapreduce workflow but that term started surfacing around the time I think plasma it started to come out and the whole idea was yeah let's

call this a roller because we're rolling accounts up and things like that um but essentially um for risk zero um we are doing a lot of uh generic things where the very fertile ground to apply those things is basically blockchain and more specifically ethereum and for us the problem of verifying our proof on ethereum actually came way after we'd established a lot of our infrastructure a lot of our tools so and that was because ethereum has a really strong pull basically who's most interested in all of this it's the ethereum crowd why because they have a long history of

trying to apply zero knowledge in the context of uh roll-ups so yeah it's simple it's easy to get caught up in a world where uh roll-up is you know the basic foundational term whereas you know a lot of these things get uh mixed in with the ethereum ecosystem yeah fair enough uh point taken and like the what you guys are building is so much more applicable to crypto but like this is the first customer and that makes sense um and I guess this conversation is just what you get when you are on a ethereum podcast yeah yeah of course so um like let's let's get like a little

bit more concrete like one of the things that I was super super excited about coming from your team as I saw on Twitter um that I don't know if this is like at a production ready yet or what but I saw someone running a version of Linux using like the risk zero architecture and so um can you like talk a little bit about like what that is the journey to get there and then um either either just say it directly or we can talk about it after but like why is that one sentence like Linux that is ZK provable like such a big unlock yeah so I think that there's a few folks who've actually managed to pull that off I think that cartesia is probably the big weeder uh in uh doing ZK Linux um so uh you know there's there's a

question right now that again you know we're the whole Community is participating in which is ultimately what are these Stacks going to wind up looking like right and so you know maybe maybe at one end we have um the ZK evm Roll-Ups you know we take ethereum as our foundation and we z-kify it and you know this is a new platform upon which you know we can move some of our stuff build some new things um risk zero is you know as you mentioned this thing that's foundationally very general right but the way that normally we program riskero is we uh write software that just runs in there directly there's no Linux involved we keep it really small core um and that's kind of the analogy of doing like bare metal programming right

very low level um you know in principle uh and then you know maybe maybe the right answer though is to say no no let's bring in like the entire ecosystem of Open Source software and that's where you'll find you know the value and being able to boot up Linux right that gives you everything that you can run on Linux which is not an insignificant amount of code um so it's really exciting to see it I think because it again speaks to you know the scale that ZK has been able to achieve over the last couple years in particular um it's again really far out that you can just like boot Linux and prove that that's what you did it's not a small computation it's not a balance transfer from one account to another right like a

lot goes on to make that happen and I think it's a real Testament to um this idea that we're on a path where ZK is going to be solo overhead that you won't be counting Cycles you won't be counting you know gas you know these only if you're doing something preposterously large uh will it will the size matter right like deploying your own risk zero instance for example yeah no and so like the way that I would describe um like for when I'm trying to like tell people what ethereum is that are not computer scientists like what I love to say is that like okay the whole point of this is that the evm is turning complete and what does Turing complete means it

means that mathematically kind of everything that a theory that your MacBook is capable of doing your the evm is capable of doing now it might not be easy to do it in there it might be super expensive to do it in there but like what turn complete means is that mathematically we can do the same things and like the thing that to me is just like so mind-blowing about running a instance of Linux with ZK provability it's like my little like stupid analogy like is actual literal now like it is actually you can run anything on Linux because like when you run it on Linux it'll pop out of proof and then ethereum can verify look like I didn't do the computation myself like I don't know

what kind of silicon this is running I don't know the person who pushed the button whatever but I do know that based on this proof and based on um like the the input parameters that like this result came from this computation and I think um like that's huge that's so he like that invites like there's like probably 800 solidity developers total right but like what this does is invite like the other like I don't know 200 million programmers on this planet to like come participate and build solutions that Leverage blockchain that's exactly right uh that's why we're so excited to have embraced rust a language that has a growing uh industrial use case around the world and

which is also noted for its performance and security itself kind of a Holy Grail technology of programming languages um that's why we're also excited to unlock additional languages uh you know in the years to come um but you know start by being good at one thing right for sure and look like solidity or like the way that ethereum works is like we we had solidity and then now we have like other teams creating things like Viper or like building adjacent to it but like yeah like the actual Builders like please focus on one thing like let other people do interpreters and um that kind of stuff yeah but I think the computational power of ethereum is important because I think we've seen this in the space a lot

people first start maybe with some very basic Ledger that maybe this utxo only and they say okay you can move tokens and if you dig deep you can maybe do colored coins or some other Shenanigans with utxo but then you I think you'll notice that you're missing stuff you need the computational power that ethereum has maybe there are some other you don't need full theoretical Turing complete this maybe you could do other things but in general that's what you need because then you have the flexibility to do those things you don't have to worry about When developing your ZK mechanism oh will that run on on on on my my smart contract because

essentially everything runs just after the freedom to do the the most powerful thing there and then rely on the on the computational power of ethereum of the smart contracts and yeah so I think that that's definitely the the way it goes yeah for sure so I I um I've been thinking about this I want to save like kind of the end of the conversation to be about like okay what does the world look like when you can build whatever you want on risk zero and like what does that world what are you enabling but before we get there like let's let's dig a little bit deeper into like what it takes to project something that was computed on risk zero into ethereum so like there's all like the the super simple uh or something not

simple there's all the super just generic piping of getting data back and forth and that is what it is but like can we talk about what happens um on ethereum so let's say like you do something on a risk zero instance you're given like a result which is Rex transferred 20 tokens to Tim or whatever we don't even need to talk about tokens but for the sake of this let's just say that uh that happened on a risk zero outside of evm and then we're gonna get the result plus approved and that gets sent in a transaction to ethereum what happens then so actually I'm going to turn the tables around a bit and instead of the token example I'm going to invite

Romney to talk about a different example that he explored that I think really shows the scaling and generic power of resero uh maybe we could talk about the club for a sec yeah right so the club has actually been like a dream of mine for a while because it was not actually practical to implement until I stumbled upon risk zero um and in the club it's sort of a hybrid model or well yeah we've seen this model before where you have a basically a central sequencer and that sequencer is sequencing trade orders um but publishing its results on chain um and using a risk zero proof to

ascertain that have matched these trade orders and have moved around the balances exactly according to how a limit order book uh would have done those and um that is actually uh pretty useful because then um which you you don't run into the problems you do on a DEX for example a performance wise um Mev wise um of course you know that Central uh order book sequencer could still you know shuffle things around and there are of course uh actually part of the club is a somewhat of an approach to tackle

that um let's put that like a little bit more into context right so like the what happens if you don't have like a central limit order book that is like verifiable FTX right that that is essentially like they had sorry club for those in the uninitiated central limit order book and the idea is that in order to do trading like the sellers are on one side the buyers on the other everyone's sending in their orders and then somebody in the center has to coordinate that and what our good old buddy SBF did was instead of like coordinating that honestly he just had this like infinite uh balancing account where like if you needed to go

negative you would just put it in this account and like the result of that was it all blew up it all like fell apart because the money wasn't actually there and Romney it sounds like what you're saying is that like with risk zero you can recreate FTX like all of their crazy performance and their cross collateralization and none of it was probably real so whatever but you can recreate like the most advanced Central limit order book run it on like you know a super computer or right out of your your basement or like you can have complete control of it but because of risk zero the users of it can like can be assured that that this the club is running honestly is that correct yeah

but to simplify a bit the thing that we trust is uh basically a blockchain itself we trust the data we see there is valid and essentially we can see it so what something like the club solution using risk zero provides you with is basically a transaction that you can look at on chain and that transaction would tell you that the club is actually solvent that the money in your account in the club is exclusively allotted to you that the club cannot take your money or use it elsewhere at all because then it wouldn't be able to provide the proof on chain and then you'd know that something is wrong

um so it's not that the club um has complete control it basically only has one path to follow more or less and that path includes no scenario where basically you lose cust or you lose your funds so it's sort of a non-custodial solution where the club's just managing the orders and doing its work but it can't do work that harms the users yeah I uh like so many people have like God that that's just so powerful in so many ways right because like the the thing that is trendy to talk about is like proof of reserves and proof of liability and like I'm sure all of us like talking

to some VC or some point have like off the top of our head come up with like some kzg scheme or whatever that like allows us to to Jerry rig it but like the power of race zero is like forget that like literally forget like building tools to like look in and make proofs and stuff the idea is instead like we are going to have home base live in ethereum and then yes we're going to use centralized compute to make changes to this home base but like zero knowledge is this like tie that that um allows us like to to to take the trustlessness from ethereum like you're just trusting ethereum and um I don't know we might be just be

hitting the same point over and over again but that the central limit order book it's huge right it's it's has been the holy grail for um at least D5 for 11 at least two years now but um it's like really cool to talk about what what resvero um enables so I guess we'll we'll jump into it now are there any other um like use cases that you guys are super excited about that are like kind of outside of just the the simple things that we think about um if you're already like an ethereon or stuck in defy mode so there's like a lot of exciting applications for ZK that we're really looking forward to seeing uh you know come to a broader audience um one of the first examples actually

that we published was of a peer-to-peer video game um we implemented uh so there's this classic board game um called Battleship and um for for folks who are familiar right you know the idea is you have two players and each player kind of has their own game board and the other player can't see it it's basically a guessing game you take turns uh taking shots at pieces on the other player's board even though you can't see and they have to tell you whether it was a hit or not and you know the game proceeds accordingly right so you know if you wanted to build that kind of thing as an internet experience sort of the obvious way to do it is to set up a server and all your players talk to that server and that server is keeping track of what everyone's boards look like and is answering the questions

and all this kind of stuff right um but with zero knowledge you can take the server out of the picture entirely and you can have two clients you know players talking to each other directly across the internet and neither is able to cheat because you know if you ask me hey like do you have anything on B4 you know I have to produce a zero knowledge proof that my answer is faithful and relevant to the board in front of me right and so um this is a you know an area that we think could be potentially very interesting for online gaming communities especially for open source games and other kind of experiences where you have a lot of player driven content instead of you know centralized publisher kind of situations um

but you know there's you know coming at bringing it back though to uh you know sort of the decentralized um you know blockchain kind of space I think that one of the other application areas that we've gotten excited about recently um is actually in the foundations of blockchains themselves so there's another project that actually be fun to talk about um it's not out yet but it will be out by the time uh all this gets posted here um which is a project that uh Romney Wolfgang and myself have been working on for a few weeks called zeth z-e-t-h cool uh I should probably um

Romy do you want to give like a kind of a quick summary of uh what the idea is there yeah so that that is basically a binary built in the ZK VM that allows you to verify the execution of a of an ethereum block so you feed it in an initial ethereum block all of the transactions and a bunch of other uh authentication data and it does what a node in the ethereum network would exactly do to execute all of those transactions and produce a new block and then it just gives you the block hash to tell you that after running these transactions and

after processing all that input this is the block hash that you would get and this is very exciting for all twos and very exciting for a lot of other reasons because uh I don't know if we could say this but we have secretly verified it here we are mainnet blocks on the ethereum test net so yeah ethereum mainnet is now uh an L2 onto sepolia uh it's one way to look at it yeah whole wait so hold on like let me just like allow my mind to explode at what you guys are talking about here right so essentially like we have Geth right which is like for the sake of argument let's just say Geth is um the

evm and like the way that it works today is that like you can put in a bunch of stuff and it'll build up like the database of the evm and then you can add new transactions and like your guest client will spit something out and then like that's cool because like I trust my own guest client but the way ethereum works is then we take my block and send it to the other 700 000 computers and every single one of those computers needs to make the exact same computations and calculations to get the same hash then we compare it and then we're like okay good to go what what you guys are building with zeath is like my computer will get all the transactions create the new block and then instead of socializing that

block to 700 000 computers and forcing them to recreate the same work they can just accept it they can run the proof which is like computationally speaking like let's say 100th of actually doing the work and we can move on from there is that is that correct for for like clients like clients especially benefit from this because they don't need to mine on top of blocks but if you need to mine on top of a block you sort of have to also update your state so that you're able to update it further when you get new transactions but for like clients this is very useful because a lot of the work on like clients especially in Bitcoin has been very complicated in order to provide some kind of root of

trust and have some short proof that tells you that some long suffix of the chain actually is related to the prefix somehow here it can all just be one ZK proof short relatively short and gives you all the benefits like so so that's huge and like let's for a moment talk about what like clients mean right and like I think there's there's like clients in Bitcoin world and honestly I'm not really in Bitcoin world so I don't care but like what like clients in ethereum world mean are like today for oh God I hope if you're listening to this podcast you understand this already but

um the way like when you use metamask your metamask isn't actually touching ethereum right because getting into ethereum is like a very computationally hard problem and essentially what it is is you have to like verify two billion blocks to get to where we are today before you can even start and the the idea of a light client is like instead of having to do each one of those verifications to get to where we are today and then say I have access to the evm we can directly access into the evm through like computation sorry through uh cryptography and like the the long in short of what this means is like we don't need to use infrar or Alchemy or like centralized RPC Services anymore

and so like literally go look at vitalik's writings right like this is like endgame stuff this is like 10 years out we'll have ethereum like clients but I believe what these three guys just told me right now is that as of today at least on sepolia like we have that for ethereum all right I I will take this silence nodding as just like yeah you got it yeah yeah so it's uh it's it's been a pretty interesting project I'll I'll mention a little bit more about it um and kind of how we got into it and and what's so fun about it so um a few weeks ago um

you know we we're thinking about you know what would be a really good test for the performance of the ZK VM right we've been making a lot of improvements over the last year we've added a number of features that uh are particularly exciting and differentiating we have this thing called continuations which is a geeky name but what it means is that you can run arbitrarily complex programs in there and prove them efficiently in parallel um which is like very different than how a lot of the other zkp Frameworks uh function today right and so we sort of envisioned this world where you have a bunch of computers participating in the peer-to-peer nets for these blockchains and where those computers are going to be kind of ordinary machines with an

ordinary amount of memory and an ordinary amount of internet connection and Graphics capabilities and stuff consumer grade stuff that's what we think that you know is is best to have either at home or in the data center right so we picture these huge peer-to-peer networks full of a bunch of ordinary computers and there's an abundance of resources there so let's go ahead and take these complicated proofs and split them across all of there so that we can shorten the time needed to get that proof completed and distributed and shared right so we can achieve that finality and and move the chain along so we added these things like continuations and it opened up you know this ability to just kind of write whatever program you want no matter how

complicated it kind of traditionally would seem and so we're talking about you know okay well what will be some fun things to to try out and very quickly someone said hey can we build ethereum blocks inside here um this was a really exciting kind of question because you know is anyone following the space over the last few years knows there's an abundance of companies out there who want to do something that's ethereum compatible but powered by zero knowledge and you know there's there's a lot of reasons why that's hard and why ethereum itself hasn't gone there yet right um a little over a year ago vitalik wrote a blog post kind of categorizing all the approaches everyone was taking

you know he talked about you know type 1 type 2 type 3 Type 4 and that it's sort of a spectrum of design changes you can make from ethereum to you know make stuff more ZK friendly is basically kind of the synopsis there so you know a lot of folks have placed the bet that ethereum is not ZK friendly you got to make changes to it if you want an evm type experience with ZK we wanted to see if that was really true so we sat down and you know we're rust people so uh we took a look at um popular rust node software like wrath for example wreath however you want to say it um and we started looking at you know can we take this core logic that you know takes a set of transactions and

kind of a snapshot of the current state of chain and builds a new block can we take that kind of core algorithm and run it inside the ZK VM is that something that's like possible today and pleasantly we kind of made two observations one it wound up being a really easy project because there's already a bunch of rust crates that do all the heavy lifting there's a fantastic crate r-e-v-m that just does everything you need in order to apply transactions it tells you what state changes to make it's fantastic it's super modular um and so I think that uh it was it was under three but let's call it four weeks of effort for us to get to a point where uh we were passing tests and validating

real world blocks from mainnet and in doing so kind of without breaking a sweat like for for relatively like low effort both in terms of writing the code and actually generating the proofs um so that's that was a pretty exciting result for us especially given you know this time last year the conversation around evm compatible ZK was you know how many hundreds of millions of dollars have you raised that's such a hard engineering task my God right now I I think it's a kind of a light lift yeah I can't even believe what you just said that you built like a zero knowledge um Geth implementation in four weeks I mean that that's literally the white whale of like where we were this time last year is like one day we'll be able

to I mean like I I'm I'm trying to figure out are we at stateless clients based on what you guys have done like that's crazy that is insane I think it's a good step forward for it and um as far as you know the execute you know the the time taken to build it I mean I think also it's a testament to uh Romney and Wolfgang being very good at what they do uh and really uh making it happen at just an amazing Pace um but I think also it's a testament as well to the maturity of the rust ecosystem and the benefit of again that general purpose compute notion that we mentioned you know back at the beginning um if we weren't on risk five if we had done what other folks were doing and

just designed our own architecture we're nerds it sounded fun you know like who wouldn't want to do that um then we wouldn't be able to just pull in a bunch of libraries to do all this we'd be busy doing what everyone else is doing basically like implementing everything from scratch all the way up through you know just all the Myriad things you have to do to make it happen yeah but also we have to give a huge shout out to the ethereum ecosystem because the stuff like ravm like a high performance rust evm was there we we could use it and and that is clearly not there in other platforms or whatever because the ecosystem is not as broad then it's maybe just in in typescript or whatever and and we specifically could rely on this and this is what made it so

so easy to rely on our work on the on the ZK VM but also on the libraries and crates out there and the whole ethereum ecosystem for sure I mean like one of my one of the reasons like I've I've just bet so much um financially and not on ethereum is because like I really believe that ethereum is the final manifestation of Open Source like I think that that we were building towards this the whole time and like what makes ethereum that final manifestation and not like I don't know Linux or whatever is that like for the first time we benefit every time like there are open source code is used right and like that has to do with like the burn and

like so much of of the organic development of ethereum to where we are today but um yeah I mean I think like to hear this story you have to recognize that like the work you guys did was in the two years of building risk zero to have this generic platform and then it's about like going to the store picking all the parts off the shelf and then combining it together into a real application and like that's the magic of computer science absolutely it's certainly a great example of you know all the good stuff they taught us in undergrad about you know use libraries split your work into functions and and here we are we get to benefit from that ecosystem uh doing most of the heavy lifting you know there were a few things that we had to do that

were you know maybe a little specific to doing it in zero knowledge it's not as simple as taking an existing uh you know full node and just running it inside the VM yeah some algorithmic things important it's it's almost that easy you know but but there are some some things that we did to uh make it work securely in zero knowledge to validate that the data being supplied into the VM is is trustworthy uh consistent with previous state route from from the parent block Etc um but it's it's really very close to that and so you know this is why we we've taken the project and you know we're it's just it's it's now out there it's an open source thing um you know we want other folks to be

able to take this base and run with it for their own projects um and you know we're going to continue to to build on it as well um uh you know recently uh I think it came out that uh risk zero uh together with o1 Labs uh was awarded um an RFP award from optimism uh to help them explore design options for their stack in ZK and this tool that we've built here is a perfect foundation for that kind of project because optimism is of course highly evm compatible um as are a lot of other other scaling Solutions out there and so we think that this is going to be a real accelerator for the adoption of ZK and like I said it's just out there it's open source

anyone can Fork it edit it add their own op codes uh go to town yeah I mean what an amazing place to end end this conversation that like we we have gotten to the point where ZK cryptography and like the tools being built on ZK photography are so Advanced and actually useful they're like optimism the company name for like the technology that like we thought we were gonna have to use because ZK was so far out is already like uh crap like we need to like change what we're doing um because it's here and it's ready and so I think um like I know at least one of you has a hard stop uh now so I will hold I I want

to ask you like okay like what does this mean for the what is the purpose of ethereum and like what what are the big things that we need to achieve to get there and on and on and on and on but um for the sake of I don't know all of our personal lives I will um wrap it up here so again you guys thank you so much for um your time of course but like really what you guys are building because I think without like teams like Risk zero and like looking how do we make ethereum a useful thing for for modern computation like really what we're stuck with is nfts and Ponzi games right and I think that like I have I have nothing against somebody

who wants to deploy like the next D5 thing and like maybe Goldman Sachs will like want to be using curve for trading or whatever right but like what I really believe is like ethereum is not here to just like replace all the things that we hate like ethereum is here to like change and like to to allow new things that have never um been done before and I think for me that's been very clear for a long time but like what you guys are actually showing to to the general world like exactly how it's going to happen and so um couldn't be more excited couldn't be more proud and uh couldn't have any more desire to be involved so thank you guys and uh before I let you go uh anything

you want to shout out socials um I know you just dropped this new project so anything any place where we can find information on that uh yeah so um I'll start with my socials of course you can find me on Twitter at uh int overflow is an integer overflow um and uh you can find uh zeth our open source uh type zero EK ZK evm uh at uh the risk zero GitHub github.com risk zero with the number zero Wolfgang where can we find you um also um on on GitHub is probably the best place uh like a few projects there so that the GitHub handle is is well

like there um yeah and please do check out the the risk zero and especially the zest repository and hope to see some great PRS coming in and I am on GitHub and Twitter as hash cashier so just write hashcash and then ier and uh yeah all right again thank you guys so much and um yeah I mean I I hope that I have you guys regularly on this podcast to like help us understand just what we're even doing here and like what um the purpose of cryptography and not only the purpose but like the applications that are possible because of it and um I don't know I mean I think that nobody is really like at the the spear tip of

cryptography and this industry as much as you guys so thank you so much for your time and uh yeah man good luck thanks thank you it's been a real pleasure hope to talk again soon