The Rollup TV: Boundless Mainnet Special

Transcript

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[Music] Bang. Happy Monday. It is the Boundless Maynet special today. Coming to you live from Florida. I've gotten back home. Uh I'm gonna have Jacob as my co-host. Jacob Everly, product manager of Boundless. Boundless has launched their mainet today. That is what we this stream is going to be mostly about. Um I'm stoked on this. They have been in a long long push to mainet. So we are happy to have them here as the co-host.

They've been a supporter for some time on on our show and as a partner. And yeah, guys, we I'm going to have Jacob as the co-host. It's been a wild weekend. Uh today the markets are just down a bit. Uh which is okay. Um, and the one thing that is up is Pump, which is absolutely hilarious. That is still up today even though the rest of the market's down. Um, and yeah, guys, today we have Justin Drake. We have Shiv, the CEO of Boundless, we have some uh folks from uh the Ethereum >> uh uh ecosystem forest from Conduit, David Phelps. We've got uh some more people from Risk Zero developers,

>> which is hilarious. I hope you know. >> And of course, Reika on the more marketing side of things. So, huge stream today. Should be a doozy. Um and yeah, I'm just going to put this tweet out and then we're going to get Jacob up and let's get started. Let's get Jacob up ASAP. Rocky um so we can get him in guys in the back. would like to get Jacob up immediately and we will start hanging out on the stream. Jacob is in Jacob is in the stream. He doesn't realize it yet. He's he's fresh to this technology. Jacob is the co-host. He probably kind of knows what he's doing.

He's looking around like he's like never co-hosted a stream before. Jacob Everly, product manager, risk zero, OG in in in the space. long time coming. One of the biggest enthusiasts I know of ZK and just generally pushing this technology forward, man. It's got it's good to have you on stream today. Robbie's at base camp actually, which they just announced they would maybe do a base token, which is kind of cool. Um so, man, it's good to have you. Otherwise, I'd be alone today. Um yeah. >> Yeah, man. Thanks for having me. It's uh it's an exciting day for ZK. >> It is. It is. Um, it's been a journey to get here for Boundless. And I know we're kind of running a bit a bit behind, but I think it's it's totally cool. I think like what's super important is for us to

set the stage for people watching uh who will tune in. You know, Jacob, what happened today? You know, what impact on the industry is the result of what happened today? Um, and maybe you could help introduce our next guests as well. Who are your colleagues? >> Yeah, so quick introduction of myself. My name is Jacob Beverly. I'm the product lead for the protocol here at boundless networks which is the main developer of the boundless um protocol. Boundless protocol is the universal zk protocol that's helping blockchains reach this internet scale. What happened today is you know after 14 15 months of development we're are finally on mainet and the way we've sort of you know defined that as you can now finally zk mine tokens. So with our novel incentive

mechanism you can now generate proofs and get paid for it. Um this is meant to you know overall bootstrap CK adoption in general. Second is we're now suggesting that partners you know once this initial migration to the new network occurs which will happen over the next few days um can start using it in mainet you get the best guarantees full decentralization um or just a really robust you know infra proving stack that's easy to use um much easier than what you've had to use in the past. And then lastly, we've started to kick off uh already our govern first round of governance proposals that you know at the end of this process um we'll pass over um ownership of the protocol to the DAO itself. Um next on we have um our CEO

Shiv who has had you know quite a tenure of doing things with markets that I'm sure he'll touch on. And then our VP of product, who hates that title, but um is our product guru who who leads the product organization as Boundless and and sort of incubated the idea of Boundless from the get-go. >> Yeah, man. So, how are you feeling today? Are you tired? >> I'm a little bit tired. >> I got a Celsius. I don't know if you uh are a caffeine guy. >> Yeah, I've already had three shots of espresso this morning, so I think I think I think I'm good on the caffeine.

But >> honestly, now that it's out, man, I couldn't be more excited. Yeah, >> you know, we really view this as as the first step of this really long journey and we're glad that this is out. >> Um, and we have some really exciting plans for the next six 12 months, >> man. So, ZKC is trading, I think. Let let me pull up. I don't have my my monitor today. I need to go pick one up. So, I'm kind of running on uh on uh on digital nomad mode. I'm back in Florida home dealing with some stuff, unfortunately. But uh let me look at ZKC. See what Coin Gecko is saying. Balma ZKC.

Coin Gecko has the numbers definitely wrong. You guys should check that out by the way. Um I don't know why they have they have the FDV as 25 mil currently on Coin Gecko, which is weird. >> Yeah, I think there's a bug over there. >> Um >> Yeah. No, I know it's been a journey. We're gonna get this show on on on the road. We're gonna get Brett and Shiv up. I believe they're ready. We'll get them in the back end and we'll we'll get them up. So, uh I am looking forward to hearing from Shiv. I know he's been in the trenches and I know that you guys have all been in the trenches and so uh yeah, glad to glad to have him and the rest of the team on. And then we have

Justin Drake. Then we have Forest and David Phelps. And we've got um Matthew and uh O Espresso from Wormhole um Subgraph and Reika. So, a lot of guests in a shorter period of time today. We're already a bit behind. So, should be okay, though. No biggie. Um, and yeah, looking forward to this. So, guys, let's get um Shiv and Brett uh back in up in the back and we'll get them on. Bang, bang, bang. I'm I'm waiting to get some music integrated with this, Jacob.

It's It's coming, man. >> The content's been good on here recently. Appreciate it, man. All righty, we got Shiv and Brett uh in the backdrop. Um they are here and we are ready to bring them up uh into the stream. Shiv is the CEO of Boundless. Brett leads a lot of the product stuff. I recently was with Brett in New York City with you guys for that dinner, Jacob, which was great. Um but I haven't seen Shiv in a while. Actually, last time I saw Shiv, I put a freaking camera in his face and he was a little bit sick and he was like, "Dude, I think I'm going to look green in this video." And So, all right. Just waiting to to get them up and then uh we'll be ready to

go. Jacob, any just uh just thoughts from from your side on on kind of what's what what the last week has been, man? How is the how's the process been? How's your how's your like workload been? What's been kind of on your on your docket? >> Yeah, workload unsustainable. Uh work absolute trenches war zone. But I'm I'm just incredibly thankful to be surrounded by the teammates um we have at Boundless. Every single contributor is like, you know, it's sort of cliche to stay at this point, but is a 10x contributor. Um I don't think we could have made it without anyone not being there. And people have pulled miracles.

Um it's incredibly hard to launch a novel protocol like we've done with a brand new incentive mechanism that no one's ever, you know, attempted before. So just a lot of moving pieces, not really anyone we can copy. Um, so there's not like a boiler plate for us to use. Um, and incredibly happy to to be here. >> Yeah, I mean it really is a new a new frontier of of development. I mean you guys have built a lot of this just a lot of the code, a lot of the Rust code by like you know from from scratch is you know is my understanding which has taken a lot of lot of years.

>> Yeah. started with, you know, the risk 5 ZKVM, which I think is, you know, becoming industry standard. Um, and then building a brand new network design from the ground up while doing things in like a decentralized manner, having to build a lot of new software um to get this end product that I think we're incredibly excited about. We're already seeing some of our thesises play out. Um, you know, one of those being open markets dominate innovation. Um, you know, we just saw in mainet beta over 2,700 approvers compete with one another. They drove down mega cycle costs that are, you know, less than 1% of what we were charging customers on AWS. They drove latency

down faster than what we were proving in a centralized manner. Um, so really excited for starting. >> All right, Jacob, we have uh your colleagues Shiv and Brett up. Shiv, Brett, welcome to the show. It's been a it's been a good good couple months for you guys. It's been a busy time. Uh but you've made it. Um so welcome on and would just love some reflections guys on the trajectory of building boundless. You know you guys have separated from risk zero launch boundless. It's been an entire new brand a new process from all different lens all the way up to mainet day. Uh how are each of you guys feeling?

>> I mean definitely thankful. Um I like that Jacob used a a public platform to complain about how unsustainable his workload is. Um um but it is it is sort of true. Um um we've asked a lot of each other and we've given a lot as well and it shows in the work. Um it shows in how the team rallies around issues and fixes and ideas. Um, so I'm I'm just grateful to the team, to the community, to everybody who's been involved in this really long journey. Um, I think Jacob pointed this out as well. Um, that we struggle with innovators dilemma all the time. We the we are consistently the first to do a thing. Um, that is unique,

that is powerful. Um, and that always, you know, it's very easy to create doubt in your head around like, oh, is this going to work? Um but yeah, I think uh it's good to have such a strong group of positive, intelligent um and capable people uh who ask all the questions up front and we get to a point where we convince ourselves, no, this this is going to work. Um so yeah, it's it's it's uh it's great to for all of it to come down to one day, but like yeah, it's been amazing. >> It's it's been crazy. It's a big day, right? This is um like how many times in life do you get to sort of conceive of an idea and then full circle you know spend years getting people on board and building it and um so yeah today's a today's a really big moment feels like a

lot of uh the vision that we had sort of set out to build is actually live the functionality is available today you know on on mainet which is incredible you know a lot of projects make major compromises when they launch which is understandable it's a valid strategy right like include a bunch of centralization or take shortcuts just to sort get a token out. And that wasn't our approach at all. We built a real protocol that's unique in a lot of ways. And I'm excited to get into that with you all. >> Yeah. Yeah. Guys, I mean, this is kind of for for all you guys now, right? I mean, I've got like the entire brain of boundlessness here on on the stream all at once. I don't know how I pulled that off, but so 2021, you guys were the first risk 5 ZK VM perfected that four

years. you know it didn't scale to serve all the blockchain ecosystems as you you know either thought or may have imagined or just kind of played out as it was then you kind of came into balance vision had this early test net with partners we we went through the mainet beta which you know we've talked with shiv about you know regarding his philosophy towards launching mainet uh you know rather than really kind of doing a incentivized test net etc we went to the signal now we're on mainnet we have a highle protocol designed for making blockchain's internet scale each of you guys that you know I would love to understand how you guys see boundless as being completely unique and differentiated from other solutions before you know in including the some of

the tokconomics stuff some of the incentive mechanisms and just how you see this unique differentiator pushing your vision forward Jacob maybe we can start with you even though that you're a co-host today and then we can roll into Shiv and roll into Brett and I'm sure that there there might be some repeating but try to try to say something Yeah, I actually I'll I'll pass it to first. You can go first. >> Um I think um from my perspective there are a few things and and and I I definitely want Brett to uh you know cover things like proof of verifiable work and the tokconomics design. Uh mostly because uh he held the pen um for long parts of like you know trying to write it and uh indeed also convincing me took a little bit of time around all the nuances uh which also tells you how

deep the idea actually is. But from my perspective, my entire career has been building markets, marketplaces, marketplace design, um, in quote unquote web two, in physical services at Amazon, you know, Lyft, all of that stuff. Um, I can't tell you how impressed I am. Um, I'm I'm completely blown away by our ability to harness the power of markets. Um, I I I think um I'm an economist uh to some extent. uh do have a degree in economics and I can tell you Jacob Jacob loves laughing at this but but it's uh uh it's it's unbelievable what we've been able to do with like uh 12 months of time and getting 2700 provers

competing over um providing these services and reducing prices by 99% plus right our median price was $0 um stuff like this doesn't really happen um it's never actually even been studied properly um cryptoeconomics we have tokconomics but like cryptoeconomics or um you know uh token powered economics hasn't really been studied formally uh because most economists don't really understand crypto um I actually think we've laid a template for how future market designs are actually going to you know be laid out um how we can harness uh the power of crypto to um uh subsidize onboarding u for users is we we're basically laying out that template

uh it makes us both unique um and also shows the power of market design. Um so yeah, I'm I'm just over the moon with about that. But you know, Brad should definitely talk a little bit more more about verifiable work, which actually makes us specifically uniquely suited to be the world's best uh marketplace. >> All right. Yeah, I might get a little bit preachy, but um yeah, this is this is um I think like even going back though, just a little bit, I think it's worth it's worth acknowledging. like it it seems like the sequence was naturally like oh ZKVM and then prover network right like we realized this ZKVM thing in and of itself was not enough so we had to sort of build this this other network what's funny is I think like personally for me the realization that um sort of a verifiable compute network

or prover network whatever we want to call it needed to exist I actually like I realized that before ZKVMs even existed and so shout out shout out to Mina um I think a lot of people respect like Mina protocols like very beautiful design for blockchain but they were very early the proof system, you know, is like sort of a really early version, very limited in the capacity, but there is like a tiny little proof marketplace built into that blockchain. Doesn't doesn't quite work. Uh, but it was a really powerful concept that I came across, um, probably 2020. And then it's funny, too, just to give give credit where credit's due and it's fun that we got to, you know, airdrop some of these teams and things, but um, the Snarkified team, uh, O Yang, Dr. Dr. Oang from the Snarkify team um was raising a round

basically was like raising financing to build a prover network and I was like wow this is a fascinating idea this is like so novel and and why was it fascinating why was it powerful um you know like up until really up until today and I think this is a incredible milestone that we have to appreciate like every new blockchain network that launched all had the same characteristic which is it has this fixed capacity and as nodes join the network um the capacity doesn't go up right it actually goes down in some cases or or stays flat, I think, is the easiest way to think about it. Boundless is unique. Like boundless is an incredibly new novel type of network. It's not a blockchain, right? Like we settle proofs on the blockchains. Um and and I would describe boundless, I think the best

term to be honest, is not even proven network, but verifiable compute network. And it has this re really beautiful and amazing characteristic that's never been true of a decentralized protocol before which is as more nodes join the network the throughput the capacity of the network increases right and so like I think we were talking about this phrase decentralization and boundless decentralization is power and I think a lot of people have slept on decentralization because in a blockchain it doesn't really help you that much right it's like you get to 200 nodes and oh that's good enough and now like for the first time we've launched a protocol whereas more people join like it actually gets more powerful. It can do more and we've demonstrated that I think in a really compelling way. I you know

poor Jacob like his job consists of like you know me waking up and I check the charts which is not token charts but like the boundless explorer right and I see how much we proved the day before and then I nag him about the number not going up right it's like what like why aren't we proving more than we did yesterday you know it should kind of continue to go up but we have that luxury it's this really unique opportunity and because of that we've been able like I I can't believe this but we've just been proving base on the side sort of as a side quest right like the highest throughput L2 in all of existence since Boundless just like swallowed it. The provers just picked it up. Um, and so yeah, I think I' I've been thinking personally about, you know, prover networks and this idea for,

man, going on at least four years plus and it even predated a ZKVM. So then, you know, I see risk zero pop up. Um, incredible idea. It I'll be honest, it took me like a month to grock, right? It was like, wait, okay, like you know, circuits and like what is risk five? I didn't understand ISAs, you know, not a computer scientist by background. And um you know when that finally when it finally clicked I was like oh this is the thing that actually makes ZK accessible right so now you have like sort of this supply side like you know we can sort of server request for any proof but now developers have a primitive in which it's actually accessible for them to build ZK protocols and so putting those two things together is such a beautiful and powerful combination and that's really what we've done in balance. So yeah,

happy to get into the tokconomics and proof verifiable work a little bit, but uh yeah, it's a it's a it's a big day and this is a a first of its kind protocol that we've launched here. >> Yeah, Brett, I just want to do a quick follow-up for you. Um a lot of a lot of the current dialogue in the space is centered around uh you know different ways of like generating uh effectively you know revenues or you know just any form of of of product market fit from customers back to tokens back to Dows using just like really just have enter this practical era of like building real businesses on chain. When it comes to Boundless, how do you see the Boundless business model today, in a year, two years, how do you see this thing growing out uh and creating a sustainable

flywheel in such a competitive environment that is, you know, basically uh you know, ZK? >> Yeah, it's a really great question and um you know, it really when it comes to any blockchain, a proven network, you know, these protocols, you're really like under the hood, this isn't the sexiest way to describe them, but you're really creating a two-sided marketplace. you know, you go to transact on Ethereum and you're really sort of on the consumption side, right? Like you're you're using the protocol. Miners on the other side, you know, are sort of providing supply or, you know, generating, you know, security for the network. And Boundless is um there's a more direct relationship. It's a very direct market where we can make an individual request for proof and an individual approver fulfills that. And so two-sided marketplaces are notoriously difficult. They're really

hard to bootstrap to sort of get the network effects, you know, we call it the cold start problem, right? like how do we get you you've got not only do you have to like build a great product for one customer if you will, you have to build it for two. And so um it it's it's really like we we decided to go with a cheat code which is um you know in in crypto incentives really drive behavior and they they really drive adoption. It's incredibly important. I think you can look at um networks like Bitcoin. I'll use Bitcoin as like sort of a quick example which we look at the revenue model of Bitcoin. There's two ways for for um a node, a minor on Bitcoin to generate revenue. Uh the block reward and uh the fees for payment, right? When you send a Bitcoin transaction, you

include a little bit of fees so that your transactions prioritized like a pop quiz. Shiv and Jacob know, but like Andy, do you have do you know what the split is between those two? Is that something you're familiar with at all? >> No, I'm not at this moment. >> Okay, cool. I think this is like this is a I'm glad. Um, people don't realize the block reward is depending on the time frame you look at about 95 to 98% of the revenue for miners. 95 to 98%. Only 5% is fees for payment. And so you can see how like Bitcoin not only was it this incredible like first of its kind decentralized money decentralized money but it was it also meant for the first time ever you could run a computer participate in the network contribute to it and a subsidy uh would would be given

to you for that participation and if say it's like a you know 98% uh we'll just assume it's 98% of the fees are the block reward you can think of that you know as me like being a markets guy I'm not an economist like shiv but like you know being around crypto for a long time being a markets guy I'm like you guys this is a 50x optimization we could focus on ZKVN performance and get another two 3x 4x 5x and we're doing that right there's the risk zero team is is now focused on that and they've got some really great innovation in the pipeline but you know it was really important to me to communicate to Jacob and the rest of the team like we have to focus on this market optimization problem and you couldn't do that until we invented proof of verifiable work you

could not incentivize the generation of zone launch proofs without verifiable proof of verifiable work and now that we've launched that it's live today. You know, this isn't something we're talking about in the future. This is now provers have officially transitioned to a fully decentralized incentive mechanism where they mine ZKC or ZKCoin. It's the first ZK proof mine token ever in existence. And now we have that really powerful subsidy effect. So, we've kind of isolated that side of the market. That's why we have so thousands of provers who can prove anything right now. And now the the game for us going forward is now that we have the cheapest by like orders of magnitude pro proving supply is to plug that into basically every blockchain and and we're having a lot of traction there now.

>> Then maybe that segus sh into the last thing that I have for you. It's a marathon today. We got a ton of guests coming. Um Shiv, what is the next big milestone for Boundless um over the next year? And maybe you could just share a bit of your vision to kind of close us out here in this opening segment. Yeah, I mean so I think uh immediate next two three weeks I think Jacob has his hands full with um um you know there's a bunch of things we want to improve. There's a um a little bit of finessing that we want to add a little bit of sex appeal to the uh uh public facing elements. Um but really we want to focus on a few things. One of them of course is making boundless the home of ZK. Uh and that means a few things. Uh making sure we

are adapting to the new learnings that come in. uh make sure the tokconomics and the token design, you know, reflects that. We've uh left a few questions uh sort of open-ended to be adjusted after, you know, the market responds and like make sure we're adjusting all of those things. Um next thing is like how do you become the home of ZK? We need to have better uh ZK offerings. Uh, one of the key things that, you know, Brett's kind of talking about, but from a business perspective, uh, you don't want to make the same mistakes that maybe some of the other protocols have made where you try and sell, um, raw elements to people.

It's like you can't actually just go sell ZK. It's not a thing that you sell. You don't sell the engine, you sell the car. So, finding and working with like partners, some of them you will be talking to today as well. Uh, making sure we are manufacturing the car. um so that we are uh giving businesses the boost that they want, protocols, chains, everybody the boost that they want with CK in a well packaged product that they can utilize and use and you know immediately inject into their um business model really really quickly. So that's going to be like the focus. Um and we want to make sure we uh we are being aggressive with ourselves but also you know not just um um overdoing it. We want steady aggressive pace. A lot of people you know immediately jump to the

we are building a cloud, we are going to compete with AWS. Um I think um um boundless is set up in a way to sort of grow steadily. Um and we want to go deep and we also want to go wide. Um adding more ZK offerings gives us depth and going wide is like I I'm talking to more L1s, talking to more chains, talking to more uh you know um users. We want to keep broadening that as well. um bring all our experience to bear. Um and of course a personal goal for me is to keep growing the team as well. Um you know just as Jacob said, everybody is doing three jobs at the same time. I'm going to bring it down to a manageable one and a half jobs.

>> It's but you know it's a hungry team. Everybody wants to uh um grow. So I want to make sure we keep it a little tight but also definitely want to hire some great people. So anyone's watching you know send me your ping there as well. Yeah, man. Please do. Please close us off with some uh Yeah. >> like spew this stuff out, but I did get I did get the blessing to say this one. Um yeah, you know, we we talk about uh you know, we had a hard time sort of describing what is boundless. You know, it's not a blockchain, right? I think verifiable compute network proof your network. But we we just we landed on the term universal ZK protocol. And it's really powerful for a number of reasons.

We can prove any program. That means if it's an L2 right we can prove their state transition we can prove you know consensus for bridging right we can prove uh you know D5 protocols and sort of ZK co-processor use cases so it's really powerful in that regard it's also universal because it works across chains so you know we can deploy boundless onto any chain right now it's running on base test netia it's going to be on Ethereum mainet here soon and we can deploy these markets to any chain so that they can make their own sovereign proof supply chain so like an L2 doesn't have to depend on another L2 they can just make a boundless market directly on their network. So, there's all these really cool and interesting reasons that the word universal applies. People don't realize or we haven't we haven't really communicated yet. We'll just leak a

little bit here for anybody, you know, who's on the stream or watches the recording. There'll be, you know, more will come out about this, but it also means we can support any ZKBF. I think like historically we've talked about, you know, it's been assumed for good reason that, you know, risk zero is like uh and and the risk zero ZKBM would be the only one supported in boundless. And when we tell people, "Oh, no, no, no. We're going to be adding support for multiple ZKVMs," their mind kind of explodes. That's a good reason why we separated risk zero or boundless from risk zero. It's really important as a market to offer the products that there's demand for. And so, yeah, I just want to be clear that, you know, it will boundless is also universal and we've made it modular such that we can plug in

other ZKVMs. And so, that's a really important upgrade that we're working on post TGE as well. Brett Carter, Shiv Shanker, we've got the full the the brains, the minds, the the speech, the mainet, the launch, the token, the ZKC. I mean, it's just been a day, guys. Thank you for joining us, being a part of this. Thank you for uh, you know, being on this journey and sharing that with the entire space. And I think the signal campaign that we had really alluded to the mindset that you guys share with regards to bringing this technology to market and the way that you think about actually, you know, making this a reality for everyone. So, congratulations. Please get some rest, spend some time with your families, um, and, uh, get back to shipping right after.

>> Thanks, Annie. Thanks. >> Thanks, guys. >> Thanks, guys. >> All right, Jacob, you're stuck with me, man. We got Justin Drake up next. What is your uh first reaction to that segment from Shiv and um Shiv and Brett? >> Yeah, if I'm listening, I'm taking like two big key takeaways from that. One is decentralization is power. I think you know on mainet beta we had over 6,000 machines online at one point. Um and the network had reached you know a throughput of a few gigahertz. Um we were estimating in the four to five gigahertz range which is a lot >> of proving to be done. Um and the second thing is um we're going to prove all chains right um I know Justin we're going to talk about this but you know in

the mainet signal campaign um we started proving Ethereum consensus which is really useful for these bridging providers. I think we have over five integrations confirmed now. A few will be announced uh in production very soon. Um but we can also just start proving more chains. Um, we're proving, you know, 100% of base right now. >> I'll leak some alpha. We're also proving 100% of some other chains. We just haven't. >> Um, so we're going to speedrun ZK. Um, and sort of what I tell people is, you know, come and join us or get out the way because it's just going to happen. I don't need your permission to to prove your chain.

>> Well, we got Justin in the back. We're going to get him up. Uh, I love the enthusiasm. We'll we'll we'll hear what he has to say about this. Um, and we'll pull him up onto the stream. And man, you know what I thought was particularly interesting about the Ethereum Foundation, the way that they've started to kind of view uh this technology is for for the first time at ECC um I believe it was this year, you know, Justin gave his beam chain um talk, but in addition to that, Justin Vitalik and others actively supported ZK teams like like Boundless, you know, others I think it was like Jolt or um Cain, Chainbound or a couple others that were just and they were actively pushing external

teams into the limelight for Ethereum's actual L1 design and like you know thinking of it in this way of let's kind of take what some of these great teams have built and just plug it into Ethereum and I thought that was extremely positive kind of directionally correct from the Ethereum Foundation. Um all right so we got Justin in the back we're going to pull him up now. Uh he's been waiting for a bit. You know, I think this is probably his first time on this stream. He's been on podcast with us before. Um and yeah, I mean um we have just questions and thoughts around Ethereum's long-term plans with regards to ZK, with regards to the snarkification, um and just kind of his vision for it. So, uh we'll go ahead and get Justin up here shortly. Um and

Jacob, what I'm going to let you ask the first question and lead us off. It's boundless mainet day, so hope you're ready. Um, and I hope you have something good for Justin. We'll get him up uh here in a sec. And we are so close. He is coming, man. was fired up. And so is Brett. Brett Brett could talk for hours about boundlessness, man. For hours. >> The problem is The problem is we can all talk about boundless for hours. >> Yeah, man. It's so good. >> You can't you can't let us go down that rabbit hole, man. we'll just uh you won't have any time left in your day.

>> Yeah, I hear you. No, it's great. I mean, it sounds like that there's a good dynamic within the team as well, like different personalities, different types of character, uh you know, you know, that kind of setup. Like, it just seems like there's a good dynamic internally. I mean, it sounds like you're working a lot though, Jacob, to be honest. >> Comes with the job. It's fun, though. >> Yeah, I hear you on that, guys. We're just going to get we're just waiting for one one more minute here on Justin. Appreciate the patience. Um he's in the back. Uh just uh we have like one set of two guests and then one guest and then two guests and it's just like trust me when I say that there's a lot more that than meets the eye that's going on in

the back. And uh we've we've had this thing dialed for sixish months and it's really coming together. Uh but every every day is a is a new learning experience. Feels like we're building a more of like a software product here. It feels like like like we've gone from like this media company kind of product thing to like building a more of like it really feels like an iterative development test, you know, launch development test launch. Whereas media can be much more just kind of like launch launch launch go um content content content. So, all right, Marcel, let's get uh Justin. He's been waiting for quite a bit, please. Um that'd be great. And he's almost ready and we should be good to go. All righty, Justin, welcome to the show. Good to have you on. Um, and it's been it's been

a while. >> Yeah, long time. >> Yeah, thank >> thanks for having me. >> Thanks for joining us, man. >> Absolutely. >> Um, so Justin, I want to kick you off with a question. I've been around in the ZK space. I've been like a novice. I did some research for about like four years now and I remember your name from these early like ZK days. I've I saw you in in group chats snooping around um ZK tech and whatnot. I want to know like sort of what got you so bullish on ZK in the first place and then clearly I think over the last 12 months you've been going pretty hard and advocating for this technology. What sort of brought you back in into the fold of being bullish on ZK?

>> Yeah, so I got into ZK in the days of of Zcash. I looked it up. Zcash was launched uh in October 2016 and just a few months later uh in mid 2017 I I wrote this article talking about Z Ethereum which was basically uh taking Ethereum adding all of the ZK tech and uh hence the name Z as a hat tip for for for Zcash. Um and you know one of the ideas that I had was uh let's just sync the whole history by verifying one. Uh, and then another idea was let's just have one single up code, this universal up code that would verify a snark and that would be flexible enough for for all of the smart contracts. Um, when I

wrote this this article, I sent it to Ellie Ben Sasson and uh he invited me to a conference in Tel Aviv that that he organized and it was kind of this surreal experience where one thing led to another and on day two or something I was having dinner with Zuko, Vitalik, and Ellie and a bunch of other people who uh later became founders of of uh of stockware. Um and that was even before I joined the firm foundation that was just lurking around and part of my curiosity was peaked because I just found it so mind-blowing that you could take computation uh just prove it in a very

succinct uh proof but also kind of hide the hide the inputs and have and have privacy. Um and then uh to a large extent what happened is that I I joined the foundation and worked on all sorts of other problems unrelated to snarks because the technology was not mature enough but I think we're now reaching a point where finally the technology kind of eight years later is mature enough and vitalic had this um item in his in his road map with the merge the splurge the verge etc. One of which was um let's snifify everything. Snockify all of the things and basically snarks solve a lot of

remaining open questions. So one of the big ones that I'm working on right now um stockifying the L1 EVM that gives us two things. One, it allows us to dramatically increase the gas limit. I talk about the gigas frontier which is one gigas per second on the L1 EVM. It also really helps with decentralization. The validator sets can now be verifying proofs of validity uh on much smaller and weaker devices that they have today. So the the meme that I'm pushing forward is the Raspberry Pi Pico uh which is a a $7 piece of hardware um an order of magnitude cheaper uh than the Raspberry Pi and that should be sufficient to participate as a validator and consensus

participant uh on Ethereum. Um going back to the roots of Zcash, there's actually this very exciting um thing called a a privacy wormhole. Um so the idea here is you have privacy at L1 where the way that you you you opt in is by sending funds from an Ethereum address to another Ethereum address which is provably unspendable. So from the point of view of the blockchain, it looks like a normal transaction, but actually you've just in some sense destroyed the balance associated. And the way that you would um have your your your funds um be recreated is by submitting a proof of burn. So proof

that your funds were sent to an unspendable address. Um and that that could allow us to have privacy uh at L1. Um, snarks also help us with composability. I've I've been talking about this idea of the united chains of Ethereum where instead of having fragmented and and siloed L2s, we can have them all come together even with the strongest form of composibility which is known as synchronous composability. Um, that's something that we're going to see more and more as the tech uh matures. And another very exciting thing I'm excited about is this idea of removing the security councils for the for the L2s. One of the big reasons why we have security councils

and governance is because um there first of all there's there's there's bugs in in in the software. It's very complicated. And two, if you want to remain EVM equivalent, you need to have the governance to stay in sync with the L1 EVM, which is itself an evolving beast. Um, so there's this notion of a native rollup. Um, and we're going to have vast amounts of of L1 gas, which the L2s are going to be able to reuse uh, and by construction is going to be uh, bug-free uh, and EVM equivalent. So you won't need the security councils and you won't need uh the governance. Um and then another thing that I'm very excited

about just a final point uh is postquantum security. So today if you look at L1 we have various places where we use non-postquantum secure cryptography specifically BLS for the aggregation of signatures and KZG for the blobs. And both of these primitives can be replaced by SNOS which are postquantum uh secure. Justin, when you're when you're thinking about the uh implementation of some of the uh actual details and these uh actual mechanics for Ethereum L1 and I kind of started this before you came up speaking about how it was great that the

Ethereum Foundation has really kind of taken this approach of of using the the amazing work that some of the teams like Boundless and others have done. when you're thinking about actually implementing this this work, um how do you how do you envision the collaboration between the Ethereum Foundation and teams like Boundless to actually get these this type of uh you know progress forward to help the Ethereum road map you know accelerate. Everyone always wants faster. You you know that better than anyone else but just generally how do you view this kind of collaborative effort actually unfolding?

Yeah. So all of these teams that are external to the FM foundation are helping in two ways. First of all, in terms of performance, they're constantly coming up with new innovations and they're learning from each other as well, which means that they're lifting the all boats uh and moving at an extreme pace, you know, roughly, you know, 5 to 10x per year of of performance improvement. And that is absolutely fantastic. And it's it's something that, you know, deaf could not even dream of or or even think of of paying for just a few years ago and now we're in some sense getting it for free.

Uh you know paid by the VCs in some sense. Um the other amazing things about um the diversity of the ZKVMs is security. So these pieces of software are complex. We we're assuming that each individual ZKVM has critical bugs, has vulnerabilities. And the way we hedge against that is in the exact same way that we have client diversity for the consensus layer clients and the execution layer clients. And the the great news is that we actually have more diversity at the ZKVMs than we do for the EL and and CL clients, which is kind of remarkable because you'd think that a ZKVM is a much more complicated beast

than a CL or or an EL client. So in this very luxurious position, um yeah, does that answer the question? >> Yeah, I think it does. I wanted to Yeah, I wanted to plus one on ZKVM diversity. I think we've realized this as well like you know working zero network to boundless that we just need many ZKVMs to make these systems you know practable to secure tens of billions of dollars in production and something we're really focused on at boundless I hope to you know soon have an offering to deploy a rollup with three ZKVMs soon all at the same time we have seen from partners like Taigo that this is incredibly difficult to do in production so really trying to make it you know out of the

box to where these popular roll-ups tax um can do this multi-proof system as soon as possible. >> Jacob, you mentioned, you know, $10 billion. I'm thinking 10 trillion. So on Ethereum today, we already have a trillion dollars of assets if you count ETH and all of the other assets. Um yeah, we're planning for much bigger numbers. >> Yeah, I I agree. I do have this internal saying. It's brick by brick, right? We're going to hit one milestone. You know, we hit, you know, onetenth of a cent to prove an ETH transaction. I think we're about 1 billion TVL right now securing ZTEC ZK tech you know let's build it up and compound that success >> yeah and in the article that I wrote eight years ago one of the lines were was in the last few years we've seen

incredible orders of magnitude improvements in performance so even back then we were on this exponential curve um and when you think back then a single Zcash transaction would take minutes to even produce and now we're at a point where in a matter seconds. So we can prove entire blocks and as you said it costs about one cent where an individual transaction is either a tenth or hundth of a cent. Yeah, it's it's really incredible to work alongside these other teams um and sort of adop you know adopt this risk five standard that we originally came up and just see this compounded success um seeing incredible numbers recently from for example uh ZISK which is the team you know Jordi Bina is leading right

now. They've given a over a 20x improvement for everyone's executor and they've open sourced it from the beginning which is just incredible for the community and then super excited about air bender as well um where they they're posting you know industryleading numbers right now on top of you know I think Chris Zero is cooking some things as well. Another thing that the ZKVM teams have been very useful at is illuminating the right path forward from an a design and architectures perspective especially the the ISA and you're right risk zero was literally the pioneer uh that brought risk 5 and now it's an industry standard and from our perspective you know we want to be picking the simplest and most

credibly neutral tech um and we don't want to be making the these hard choices but now you know what you guys pioneered is an industry standard and it makes the decision so much easier. >> Justin, I'm curious from from the Ethereum roadmap perspective, what is the what is the next kind of big milestone that you have in mind that we need ZK for like in order to get to why you know we need ZK and that's that that is a big thing that uh is very impactful for the protocol. Uh you know you know it could be at any part of the of the protocol. curious like what is the big thing that we're waiting for that will be unlocked by you know the work uh from teams like boundless and others.

>> Yeah. So I think at this point people are familiar with the gigas frontier and you know bringing more decentralization. I think two things which are new is one this idea of the privacy wormholes like for a very very long time you know Ethereum was saying just do privacy at higher levels of the stack and I think the technology is becoming mature enough that we can have full end-to-end verification of these systems so that we have very high confidence that there's literally zero bugs in those systems. If you rewind the clock and uh look at at Zcash a few years ago, they had this critical bug which allowed anyone to mint the Zcash token and and be

undetected. Um and that is extremely scary for EHA, the asset which is trying to be a monetary asset at global scale. And so we need to have this high conviction on on security. And on that point um one of the next big frontiers of kind of ZKVM technology is going to be simplicity like Mogarov complexity like how many lines of code is your whole thing um and you know how aminable is it to formal uh verification because right now we're leaning on client diversity but in the future there's definitely a possible uh outcome which is that we pick a single ZKVM we end to

end and for formally verify it and and that's the one um and instead of diversity we lean on forification. >> Will that be boundless? Will that be others? We will see. But I I appreciate that answer. curious um Justin as well uh when you're when you're thinking about um the the recent let's just say like shift in mentality w within the Ethereum Foundation as well as just broadly with the sentiment of the community. We've seen obviously institutional adoption of Ethereum. We've seen a lot of these players want to come in and tokenize assets on Ethereum. uh Fidelity recently uh just you know came in is now

looking to challenge Black Rockck potentially with their uh US treasuries on chain >> still muted >> and you've mentioned privacy multiple times in this call and I think this has been something that you've been prioritizing you know mo more recently as you've said uh you know deeper in the actual Ethereum protocol versus kind of either outsourcing it or putting it at a higher layer of the stack when you're thinking about the you know the institutional adoption of the Ethereum protocol. What are some of the more important technical lifts that are on the agenda on the road map that you think are particularly appealing for institutions who would like to allocate to buy ETH knowing that these are coming or would like to

tokenize assets on ETH or on Ethereum or you know are doing things with stable coins etc. when you're when you're looking holistically from the institutional perspective of using Ethereum, what are some of the most important updates? And you know, we may have covered them u but you know, I'm just curious what are some of the specifics that you think are appealing to large capital allocators who operate, you know, within their own set of regulatory environment, within their own set of compliance, etc. Uh how how how are we making Ethereum an institutional friendly protocol?

>> Yes. So you're right. Um there's been a flurry of institutions that have started to look in into Ethereum and one of the the common tropes I guess is that uh privacy is a a real pain point and at this point no one has has solved it. But if I were to say something about Ethereum is that at least it's trying to solve the problem and it's trying much harder now than it was a year ago. And we also have pioneers like like Aztec that have had this large amount of conviction and have been you know building for for over half a decade now.

In terms of DEF putting more of an emphasis we uh just announced a rebrand of PSSE. So it used to be privacy and scaling explorations. Now it's privacy stewards uh of Ethereum. And so we're just focusing only on privacy. So that's a team uh of um of roughly 50 people and um there's going to be some some some big announcements related to PSC. Uh possibly uh some changes to leadership. Uh we're also going to see much more transparency. So right now the whole Ethereum Foundation is on the ORC chart with the notable exception of of PSSE.

We're going to have an orc chart for for PSSE uh and we're going to see all of the different sub projects and I think um the this cluster of people of 50 people is is going to be shifting gears um and um and I'm I'm I'm hoping for very good things to to come up first of all in the short term and be announced at Defconnect but also looking forward uh in in in 2026. I want to I want to double tap on that is like I'm super excited about anything there because the reality is that ZK is not going to stop at like scaling blockchains. It is this fundamental gamechanging privacy technology for the rest of the world where I truly believe

that you know we saw this shift from like if we remember HTTP to HTTPS that allowed you know online payments to happen allowed more secure um business to happen on the internet. I think we're headed for HTTP ZK. Um, and it's going to be just a safer world for everyone to live on the internet. I really view ZK as this counterbalance to AI the same way you saw like modern key pair cryptography be a counterbalance to this sort of big data movement in the early 2000s. >> Absolutely. Yeah. HTTPZ is coming. Um and from a tying perspective I think it's perfect because you know now we have you know the nation states the the

regulators the institutions comfortable with blockchains. I think to a large extent it's because of the lack of privacy. It's because we had full transparency uh that we were able to get our foot into the door and it's a little bit like a Trojan horse and now that in some sense we're comfortable in our position uh we can uh start pushing the boundaries with HTTPC. >> Yeah. And like a little insight here is you know many of our team members they go to open source cryptography conferences and they go to internet standard conferences and when they go to these conferences these are the same conferences that you know the early ideas of HTTPS and and modern key cryptography have happened people are describing the properties of ZK in the

next generation system they just don't realize that this technology is coming along um so fast and you know you see big players like Google starting to use it you see big players like Facebook and Microsoft have these giant ZK research teams. Um I think you know Microsoft has a research team of over 100 plus people at this moment. Um the technology is is coming for the internet. Another topic that institutions are interested in is uh quantum >> like they are extremely risk averse and the I basically have a meeting with an institution every week to talk about postquantum and the great thing here is that uh Ethereum is arguably like the most advanced blockchain pushing forward

postquantum cryptography. One of the things that we're doing is looking to replace BLS, which allows for a million validator signatures to be aggregated in one single epoch with a postquantum equivalent. And here we're actually using the snark machinery to do the aggregation of hashbased signatures. Um, and we're in a very privileged position where effectively the vast majority, let's say 90% of the ZKVMs have hashbased snarks at their core and we're able to reuse that technology and enshrine it uh at the filament one and this is part of the lean consensus uh effort that that we're working on right

now. Justin, one last thing for you. Uh, and I appreciate the the the institutional focus and just like this this kind of framing. It's it's an interesting paradox where, you know, we've built a lot of this open source technology, you know, in an industrywide perspective. And people are arguing, you know, the how institutions are going to come use it, whether they're going to extract all of the value from it, some of the value from it, none of the value from it, how they're going to be kind of planning about it. Regardless, uh, everyone is very clear that everyone needs an institutional strategy. We've we've al we've obviously got etherealize which has been amazing. Um and we've al you know and we've seen just you know guys like Tom Lee and uh you know Joe Luben get out there and put their necks out publicly for everybody. Um so that's

been great. And just to kind of wrap this up it's obviously Boundless mainet day. Uh you know I'm not asking you to tell us that boundless is the best thing since sliced bread but I'm going to ask you what excites you about the boundless protocol? Why why are you as a as a deep Ethereum researcher excited about the protocol? >> Absolutely. So, um, one thing that I'm excited about these these these proven marketplaces is the opportunity for them to become collaborative in addition to competitive. So right now the marketplaces is basically an auction house uh where we can have the most efficient the most you know economically efficient uh provers uh win out and

compete against the less economically efficient ones. What I'm hoping for, and I believe this is something that Boundless uh has been working on for a while now, is this idea of collaborative marketplaces where you have multiple provers that are working together towards the exact same uh proof. And the reason why I'm excited about this collaborative aspect is it will allow us to dramatically grow the the gas limit. you know, the last the last 10x, you know, might require this collaboration to go from a 100 mega gas per second to one one gigas. And the reason we might need this collaboration is because for decentralization, we're putting this hard constraint on the uh prover power

draw. So, we're limiting it to 10 kilowatts. That's the equivalent of a home Tesla uh charger. And um you know it allows us to have let's say 16 uh GPUs. But if if to get to one gigas per second requires let's say um 64 GPUs then we might need four such uh clusters to work together to to generate the proof. Um, and so just selfishly from the perspective of FML1, I'm hoping that we're going to see more of these these collaborative aspects.

>> Justin Drake, our our local uh Bitcoin security researcher in the house. Uh, appreciate your your time today, man, and uh looking forward to uh more of your talks and just more of the development from the Ethereum side. Um, and thanks for being a part of this this awesome day to push Ethereum's ZK efforts forward with Boundless and many of the other ZKVMs. Uh, it's always a pleasure to have you on and look forward to having you back. >> Absolutely. And congratulations, Jacob. >> Thank you. >> All righty, Justin. Speak soon, man. All right, Jacob, takeaways, thoughts. We got Forest and David coming up, but you know, I I was really trying to get into some of the institutional stuff, trying to understand how he's thinking about like some of the value. you know what was your takeaways?

>> Yeah, the takeaway is ZK everything right like they're going for this you know Ethereum is the largest blockchain by you know assets on it. It has an incredible amount of developers and users um within its ecosystems on various L2s. Um they want to snarkify everything. Um you know the Bitcoin ecosystem wants to snarkify things. Salana teams are starting to look into ZK as a scaling solution as well. And again, we look farther, the world's going to get zked. Um, it really is that next generation security um framework for the world to just be a safer place. And the best thing is Boundless has built into its tokconomics to start to capture some of this value. Um, anyone generating CK

proofs um will want to be a part of our ecosystem. And not only can we bootstrap, you know, blockchain ecosystems, we're going to just start proving more and more chains. um we can start to bootstrap this this real world adoption um or this you know more sort of web 2 adoption with uh ZKC and the boundless tokconomics as well. What did you think about his um his uh multi-zkvm into the protocol thought like you know and then he ended up saying oh we might just pick one. >> Yeah I think timelines are important to understand that um doing an endto-end formal verification of any ZKVM is probably over a fiveyear journey. Um, we're really focused on, you know,

delivering working products today. And the reality is is that that probably means multi-ZKVM support. Something we're really focused on. >> Um, another thing here is I don't think anyone in the ZK industry could tell you >> what that one ZKVM will be in a few years. >> You know, it's it's very similar to the the chip architecture wars that you had um in the early 80s. Where did >> anyone actually pick x86? No. Um, so we want to derisk from that and I think there's just so many great teams working on this. You know, he >> Jolt, you know, is a good candidate for that because it's so simple. Um, and has gotten like good.

>> Don't you think he said that because like it be easier in the future just to have one standard, one protocol and not have to be trying to navigate across all these different teams, different codes, you know that, you know, or >> yeah, if you can end to end formally verify one, it's simpler, easier to maintain. >> Yeah. >> Um, overall I would say we're still quite far away from that. So, wanna want to provide people the the best product today. >> Cool. All right, we've got Forest and David in the back. Um, they have been uh patiently waiting. We have we are running a full marathon today. Tons of different guests, awesome perspectives.

Just had Justin on. We'll get Forest and David up in a second. Um, and yeah, I mean, Forest is obviously working with Conduit. They are pushing the limits on the rollup side of things in terms of performance uh with some with with their sequencer. They power some of the highest DPS chains today, at least in the Ethereum verse. And of course, uh, David is reaching massive product market fit with Joe Race and won't stop DMing me about it. So, uh, I'm excited to Well, dude, that day is probably coming and it's going to be a sad day.

Well, we've got Forest and David up. Um, yeah, guys, great to great to have you. Happy Boundless Mainet Day. Happy uh Ethereum institutional adoption. Good prices number go up tech. Everything's looking good, guys. How are you doing, >> Jacob? What did they miss? Come on. Yeah, live right now. [Laughter] >> Yeah. And then um with it, you know, we now are going to start saying partners, hey, use this completely robust stack.

People can also start to enjoy incredibly low proving cost um as for verifiable work is is now live. Um you know, we want to bootstrap CK adoption magnitudes past where we are today. I think a good example of this is, you know, we're just proving 100% of ZK or 100% of base blocks right now and that's because we have spare capacity. So, come hang out on Boundless. >> Jacob, can I can I ask a quick leading question, which is uh you were talking about Jolt before. What what do you see as your relationship with like Jolt or Succinct, you know, um SP1, like all these other ones out there?

>> Yeah. So, so we really view in sort of our vision for boundless, right, is we want to build these like full ZK stacks for certain use cases that have product market fit. One of those currently are L2s. You know, currently we support the Rzero ZKVM. We'll announce some more quite soon. Um, and that works for some people, but the reality is is that it's incredibly hard to pick a ZK stack. I have seen teams go through benchmarking wars >> internally for three months. Um, and it's incredibly convoluted. It's hard for us to tell. It's hard for them to tell. You know, everyone tells them to do something. Judge, judge it by system.

Um, and we want to remove that decision from the process where, you know, we sort of say come to boundless. We are, you know, I would consider us CK experts at this point. Um, we'll choose the best stack. You know, it's the best stack because you have the cheapest cost on a live market. Um, and you know, instead of delaying your launch for three months, here it is. Also going forward, we are not married to any one ZK stack. We'll continue to update and support the best CK tech out there for >> not just RZero, right? You'll you'll >> Yeah, not just RZero. Um there's so many great CKVM teams out there. Um we'll announce a few here soon.

>> Leading question. I was really hoping you were able to say that because that's actually the thing I'm really excited for about Boundless and I know it hasn't totally been public yet. So um really cool. >> Forest man, how are you? It's your first time on the show. I think maybe your second time. Um let's talk about some of the roll-ups um that you that you guys are working with with Conduit and just generally your your uh perspective on this ZK landscape. Uh famously Uma from Succinct, Jacob's best friend, has a has a line that says every rollup will be a ZK rollup. Uh do you agree? What are some of the biggest uh you know kind of ZK uh frameworks that you guys have from a a a new chain perspective for performance, privacy, these types of

things? How do you how is your current mental model with regards to ZK when it comes to scaling? Yeah. And let's real quick, let's make

sure that uh I think some of the the new guest >> I think we got it solved. They should be good. Just double check um on X. But yeah, I think we're good. >> One thing I would like to add there to Forest, right, is like we're going to prove, you know, every rollup's going to be ZK rollup. 100% agree. I think the reality is becoming that every chain will be proven. Um there has gotten to a point to where um proving your chain regardless of being an L2 and L1 plasma side chain whatever you want to be um you want ZK proven for reduced bridging cost for easier liquidity flow to your chain for uh acquiring users from other chains. It just makes everything and we're past the point to where the cost of ZK are now below uh those benefits and we're going

to start seeing a lot of L1's proven. So I always, you know, I am, you know, sitting in the little corner on CT. It's ah, should, you know, plasma or um, tempo be in L1, L2? I actually don't care. Um, right, because we're we're going to prove all these chains and, you know, as these chains grows, we'll continue to grow as well. >> I I like that lens of Go ahead, David. >> Go first. No, no, you go first. I was just going to say I I want to double click on the all proving all of the chains and I think the lens I'm trying to look through this uh at recently is just any sort of smart contracts that interact with something off of their the chain that they exist on that whether that's a price feed something like an

oracle whether that's a bridge and it's something that you are going to you know you're on plasma you're uh you're trying to get this to assets to Ethereum mainet. I think these types of off-chain actions are going to be proven ultimately. So, I go even underneath chains and just say uh all of the different uh I I think things that are out there are going to be uh Oh, looks like I'm having audio issues. One moment Jens. >> Yeah, I I mean I can hear you just fine.

Um obviously, and I think in the meeting, so I think you're all good now. >> I'm too. >> Thanks, guys. >> Sorry. So to summarize, I think any smart contracts that talk to offchain systems are going to be proven, not just chain. So bridges, certainly things with like RK assets. You're already seeing this with like a lot of proof of custody and proof of issuance things. But I I think the the total addressable marketing as blockchains creep into our regular everyday lives and have to deal with offchain sources. Just >> Jacob, I I have a I have a question for you, which is if if we can get full cryptographic security for blockchains, what happens to crypto economic security?

>> Yeah. Um, you know, the general sense I I I get is that these lines between chains are going to start to blur. >> Yeah. um you know for once there might have been a reason to launch another general purpose blockchain for specific reasons. I think those reasons will cease to exist. There will be many reasons to like want to own your own state and do something very application specific um that you know requires you to have your own ledger something like tempo where they're going to clearly write permission >> permission which makes sense. It's a complete trade-off that people should make in my opinion. Um, but we're gonna see way less just general purpose permissionless chains. Um, and then, you

know, bridge much more easily between those two. >> I actually think that that's one of the things people almost never highlight about ZKPs is like how they enable permissioning um in new ways. That is like because we think of permissioning, we think, oh, there's somebody manually gatekeeping this. Um, but it actually you it just enables any sort of rules, right? where it could be like, well, you have to have this score in order to participate in this level of the game. Um, and that's a form of permissioning, too, right? That can all be done, I think, with proofs. So, like, um, even in entertainment kind of, you know, those purposes as well as the, you know, stuff we hate, like the KYC for stable coins. Um, there's actually a lot of applications that rarely get discussed because, you know,

the word permissioning, I think, sh sends shivers down everyone's spine. Yeah, I think I think Justin on the last segment put this really well is that the full permission list of ledgers has almost held us back from institutional adoption at times >> and one thing I love about ZK is you know ZK means zero knowledge and zero knowledge is you know in in layman's terms sort of perfect privacy >> um however with a system like boundless we can really start to like work on a spectrum of privacy where maybe yeah I just you know have this verified roll up and whatnot and I just let a few people see or I let you know a set of banks see it or I let people see it after the fact. Um, in this sort of gating protecting users I think is going to be a really popular pattern people start to

fall into. >> I like I like David's lens there. I think another way I'd put it is people hear permissioning in this space and they think censorship is where they're jumps to. And then last week I was on a a call joking with some folks that people in in our industry in crypto are willing to put basically their entire lives out there uh publicly on chain that anyone can go read from and track but they're going to send Venmo transactions privately uh when when they make so we still have a hard preference for privacy in our daily lives and yet we just because of this current state of the technology we are putting everything out there, so to speak.

>> I I also hear this argument all the time that like privacy has no no PMF. And I think that's one of the worst arguments I've ever heard because literally almost everything that's taken off in crypto took off because of privacy. And that could be stuff that we don't like like moneyaundering, but you know, or Silk Road or whatever. But it was like it wasn't KYC is very recent in crypto. Like the idea that you have to go through a centralized exchange and actually dox yourself in order to use crypto is only some a product of the past few years. like there were ways around this until a few years ago and so like we crypto was private until until KYC was was mandatory a few years ago. Um and that's where it was taking off and that's why it did really well. Um and so

like to actually be able to do that you know in a form formal way now uh is it's groundbreaking right um it is it is in many ways I think the original dream of the whole space and I agree with you forest it's like kind of wild that it's you know this technology developed for privacy is we somehow are now hearing is not useful for privacy at all it makes no sense I saw this tweet I think Zuko from Zcash reposted it and it was like there's some magical feeling that you get from holding Zcash in like a Zcash wallet. I forget what it's exactly called. And he's like, it's just, you know, just you you have to try it. And I was just like, okay, cool. Kind of takes you takes you back to the core core idea. And and I

think I think what we'll see is we'll see the changes in the way liquidity and users actually interact on chain once we get more you know we'll one you know abundant compute for just maximum throughput really high quality apps and and you know chain performance but in a private world I think user behavior likely changes quite a bit as well. Yeah, it's the equivalent of like, you know, um when geoloccation uh was added to the internet and the way that was done was mobile, right? It's like once you have an iPhone, now you have geoloccation and then every app we know basically like comes out of that, right?

You get Uber, you get Door Dash, um you get Airbnb, like you get um all of these apps out of geolocca, the mix of geoloccation plus internet. And I think it's like the mix of privacy scalability plus crypto is like pretty similar to that where it's like, okay, we had the rails for vision one, but now we're adding kind of a killer feature that's going to enable, you know, vision two. And this is where I think we're going to see lots of really interesting apps take off, especially in gaming. Um, to be honest, I think that's still like really under indexed because what's a fun game you play where every move is fully transparent and you can all see each other's cards? Like good luck finding that game. But now imagine you actually, you know, can like hold

your cards and your opponents can't see it. Like suddenly a lot is possible >> game. But the answer to that question, by the way, is whales extracting on purposes. >> It's the game that's fun to play where everyone can see each other's cards. >> I was gonna >> Yeah, chess. Yeah. >> Or chess. Yeah. One or the other. Yeah. It's >> So, how do you guys actually see the implementation of of ZK, which brings this privacy, brings this scalability? How is this going to you know the title of this panel is how will ZK change the role landscape think about like actually change like L2s as they exist today um maybe you know I'm curious like what will the implementation look like in your eyes of some of this privacy technology or of ZK slowly into each of

these chains like how will this be implemented maybe like what is the priority you know how how do you see this actually playing out over the next you know three to fiveish years you know Justin Drake came on and said you know they're prioritizing from the foundation perspective a lot of actual uh or a lot of different ZKVMs at first and then likely we'll consolidate down into using one you know that's just more of a broad kind of like technical setup but maybe more from the implementation side of things for us I'm curious from your perspective to start how you see this actually being implemented >> definitely and and I'm very keen to hear what what Jacob has to say here as well I think I know we just had an exciting discussion on privacy I I think the pragmatic

way to roll this out is just going to be starting getting any sort of proving system live for the L2s that are out there today. You know, tens of billions of dollars on L2s, a small percentage of that is being proven and even, you know, microscopic percentage of that is like stage two, the classification that we decided years ago is is really what we're working towards as an industry. So I I think getting these proving systems out there first is going to be a big So how does it look like from an implementation perspective? I think it's going to be these intermediate steps. Uh Jacob is here to tell you and and shill his low unit costs. Uh but the reality is for a lot of teams full execution proofs and full validity proofs for rollups especially certain use cases are

pretty expensive. Uh so if you're trying to do full execution proofs on top of something as high throughput as base today, I'm here to tell you it is going to be relatively expensive in the factor of like the total cost of operations of what you're paying to operate this chain. So I think that things like Kyalua and these intermediate like hybrid uh steps where you can have these ZK fault proofs are going to be the first thing to proliferate and you've seen the major rollup stacks like optimism like arbitrum already start to roll out official implementations or announce official implementations of these uh of these type of intermediate steps. So I I think we're going to have these intermediate steps that frankly in the next 12 to 18 months I think will

just proliferate the front page of L2B. Certainly, we're working hard with Jacob and team to go ahead and roll out things like Kyua to more folks. Uh so we we'd recently just uh helped secure the Ronin L1 migration to an L2 deal together. And that's another rollup that we'll be working on. Uh where you have a chain that's done 1.3 billion transactions, I think uh and and does I think over a million a day on average. And we're going to work on getting that chain live with this hybrid proving technology from day one as soon as they become an L2.

That's what the move in the next 12 months will be is do we start with proof from day one and can we start with these like intermediate flavor hybrid proving systems from day one and basically get to a point where we're sitting here next year saying no one launches as rollups is I I think the real goal that that conduit is rollup operators other self-hosted rollup teams maybe other rollup platforms providers should all be working towards no one by is stage zero by default Yeah, I I I like two points Forest makes there. One is right, it's not as simple as just like, oh, hey, I like generated a proof of your L2. I'm you're a ZK rollup now. Right. That that that's not

how it works. It's a lot more on the operational side. Teams like Conduit, teams like the alternative DAS, um are really having to do a lot of work here to stand these chains up. And we want to work really closely with those teams to again get that out of product out of the box product solution to where a chain is just you know launching a rollup um and they're just able to focus on their product. The infra is abstracted away. We really have this you know sort of mindset at boundless networks right now where we how can someone deploy in you know less than 30 days. That's a typically good target for um any sort of product. The second thing is to force point is that for some chains it does not make economical sense yet. Um, I agree. I do think, you know, starting

today with proof of verifiable work, we can incentivize and bootstrap CK adoption to sort of like continue to kink out some of the things, but also like cover some of those economics. Um, we can incentivize proving directly now and that's going to be really powerful. Um, that's sort of how we're proving base today. We pay a few hundred a day. Um, it's it's not very expensive. Um, and you know, teams like Ronin or other L2s that are launching soon can start to capture this and be the first adopters to where you know, even once this incentive is taken up, ZK technology will be at that same price point. Um, and the unit economics all work out to where we can really start today instead of in 12 months.

>> And Andy, I think there was another part of your question too that is what is the what are the second order effects? And I think there are going to be two things that users focus when they're hopping around and using applications on L2s once we have this ZK proliferation. Uh and I think one is faster finality is you talk to anyone institutional anyone doing anything in the payment space right now and finality is the glare of L2s. It's not the speed, but it is this finality that even in the best we either h inherit the finality from Ethereum and we have these 7-day bridges on on major networks like base or even

if we're like at full throughput proving on on networks like B, we're getting it down to like an hour, which is like kind of what the safe amount of time to generate proofs as well as post them on L1 and get finality from Ethereum. So I think it's a concerted effort of we're bringing down the block time on L and we're working towards things like single slot finality proving is getting faster where all is in one to three years is going to me mean going to be significantly faster finality for rollups on top of Ethereum even just through the canonical bridge. And so the two things that I think different types of users in crypto will seek day-to-day interactions are one if you're using a

fast bridge something like a cross or relay or socket to jump across L2s those relayers and those liquidity providers are going to be able to provide much much lower fees and better rates because they don't have to take on same duration risk that they do today. I know it's good enough and it's better than maybe bridging was five years ago when I made my first transactions. It was it was back then. It was terrifying. But I think it's fast enough today. It's going to be even better in a year when solvers have pretty good guarantees that they're going to be able to unlock things on either side of a bridge within an hour. That's the kind of everyday

crypto user. Now, let's think about an allocator. If I'm managing nine figures of u of digital assets or a trading firm or maybe some big financial institution and I'm looking to deploy it into some strategies across L2s, I can't just willy-nilly hop through centralized exchanges or these fast bridging protocols. No one no one can meet me uh with nine figures of liquidity. So, I I have to rely on the canonical bridge. If I'm going back and forth to base or or arbitum or or what have you with a 7-day bridge with nine figures when I want to exit my position, I'm giving up a week of yield and my my risk team is never going to if I'm a capital allocator. So,

I think it's going to be better for whales and overall allocation of capital across L2. And it's also going to mean like lower spreads, faster bridging across all rollups. That's the kind of, you know, 9 to 12 timeline of second order effects here. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Forest gets at what I I think is still probably the most underrated >> thesis in the space, which is interop is really only going to happen with ZKPs. Um, and uh, everyone's kind of sitting on this thesis right now. Um I think uh because there's been so much questions around Celestian data availability but like you you look at like what Celestia is doing for example right with like lazy bridging which is really ZKP I

think they're working with boundless too um but like building out really a native interop protocol where you have the single point of proof right that can operate across any system and so you always know where your funds are and it's always verifiable um in a way that lets you move between these and at that point. I mean it really changes things a lot because as for said there is a reason to build an L1 right now which is finality um right uh as well as you know token value but that's a whole other conversation um but you know like like once once you really have native interop for any system then it really is a no-brainer to build a roll up on top of that because you can you're essentially getting the network effects of the

liquidity from the rest of the ecosystem and we've seen this play out a lot and kind of fail a little bit I think OP originally had this idea of like a shared sequencer that everyone would be able to opt into and that would be a value draw and there's a lot of reasons to build on OP but I don't think that's really been the major one right and Celestia had this vision and I think Delta's working on this so like there's a lot of skepticism about this thesis and whether it can work um and I think I think like many things in tech it the thesis often you know struggles the first time and in the tech is good enough for it really to work well and um yeah interrupt is real and it's coming and it's thanks to ZKP's Um, on on that note, because I have to

run. Um, but I really >> Thank you, David, >> for having me on and giving >> just one last question, David. Is there ever going to be a joke race chain or no? >> Uh, there there are currently no plans for for a joke. >> What about a token? What about a joke race token? >> There's currently no plans for a token either. >> Thanks for coming. >> Uh, I Yeah, there's a whole question around whether apps need chains. And um, there's a lot of apps that I really think do need chains. Um, but I'm not sure we're one of them. Thanks David. Thanks Forest. Uh we actually have a good interrupt panel coming up next. Uh Forest appreciate you you hopping on as well and uh thanks for being a part of the balance mainet.

>> Yeah. >> Peace. All righty. Jacob, takeaways, thoughts. >> Yeah, one thing I note I loved that we ended on there was um the fact that interrupt is not solved and ZKPs are the solution. And people have been talking about ZK bridging for years years at this point and we're finally to the point to where it's making economic sense. And the really nice way I you know or nice property of of sort of this signal campaign where you know we're proving Ethereum, we're proving base now we're going to continue to prove more and more chains is that it's not opt in >> to other ecosystems. We you know can retroactively fit existing chains. it does not require for us to, you know,

use a standard or have people plug in to our thing. Um, we can just do it and they can start reading the proofs um and build contracts around that. So, I think we can sort of speedrunning versus sometimes I think in the interop community it can be a little bit of a struggle to get >> like BD struggle and stuff, >> everyone to agree. >> Yeah. Like >> it's just just a struggle for everyone to like agree on a standard, right? you see this mass proliferation of layer zeros like of standard now which is dominating the space but it's not perfect either um and now we want to do intent based stuff and account abstraction and instead of doing that let's just prove the chain prove the chain you can read the state if you can read the state you can build stuff on top

>> you guys are just like full on like I mean they call it gorilla marketing but this is just more like gorilla shipping like you can just go and just prove bass and like bass isn't going to do anything about it they can't it's just it's just happening ex >> exactly Right. And you know it also shows these people that um you know proving base right now is really helpful for interrupt. It doesn't help for the withdrawal time right but it shows these teams like a base or you know these larger chains that hey ZK is here man and it works and here's the cost. Think about adopting the technology and overall I think you know a lot of teams are incredibly excited about doing such that. Well, we we ended that last segment off talking about Interrupt. And luckily for us in this segment, we have

uh Matt Rice from UMA and OS or Oz, I think I'm going to call him. We'll have to ask him. Um uh from Wormhole and and I think the topic for us is is just about ZK bridging. Um and I think as David was saying, right, the I think this thesis is pretty consensus with regards to where this interrupt space is headed. you know, fortunately powered by awesome teams like Boundless and other ZKVMs and just general, you know, generalized ZK proofs and now we're able to see that actually play out slowly and like, you know, Forest talked about the benefits for solvers and for institutions with finality. And it was actually funny. I had the circle CTO on and he answered the question of why build an L1 rather than an L2 with a lot

of the finality jargon as well as just you know thoughts around um you know generally control and uh their kind of client base and and and that sort. So without further ado, we've got Matt, we've got OS uh in the back. We're going to pull them up uh in just a moment and keep this boundless mainet. It's not the signal anymore. It is the mainet stream. Uh Jacob's got a trillion things, I'm sure, on Slack in addition to managing a live stream, in addition to managing a semi- angry Reika. I mean, it just never ends. I mean, it's it's it's Monday.

It's mainet Monday. Like, it's just how how could this ever end? Like, I mean, what's next, Jacob? You guys are going to be working 12-h hour days and and uh shipping the next product. >> Yeah. Well, next is to hear about Oz and Matt, why they're bullish on ZK. >> Stoked. >> Um, >> yeah. >> Yeah. You want to open a question? >> Oz, Matt, welcome to the show, guys. Uh, I think it's your first both of your first times. Um, actually on. Uh, so would love to just get a super brief intro about yourselves. Um, and then let's talk ZK bridging.

>> Amazing. Yeah, happy to go first. Um, hey, hey guys. I'm Oz or Aussie. Um, I lead up strategy at the Wimhole Foundation. Um, and I've been working on uh this very topic for a very long time. Um, so very excited to be here and uh be part of this. >> Sweet. >> Yeah, I'm Matt. I uh so I'm the CTO at Across. Um, we also work on UMO as well, but uh but but mainly for the purpose of this conversation, I'll probably be talking about Across. Um, and yeah, we've uh obviously spent the last three, four years really dedicated to making interop uh really easy and frictionless for users.

>> Beautiful guys. Well, welcome to the show. Uh, we're celebrating boundless midnight, just generally the progression in ZK. And I think to really set the stage for understanding the interrupt side of things, it's important to understand first some of the problems in the current space. So, I'm curious from your perspectives, what are some of the the, you know, bigger difficulties right now in the crosschain landscape? specifically I think wi when it comes to working with this next generation of crypto which is not just like all the onchain DeFi power users but really like the next era of institutional finance institutional adoption um and and kind of bringing this technology to to a more mainstream type of of user base. What are some of the biggest complexities and challenges uh today? Matt, maybe you can

start and then Oz can follow up. >> Yeah. Um so I there's a lot of big challenges. Um I think probably the single biggest challenge that uh interop faces today is uh the sort of at least within the Ethereum ecosystem is like the uh 7-day bridges um like that you know we we run a network of solvers and um we have to sort of help them manage their liquidity or sort of our protocol is intended to sort of help them manage their liquidity across different chains and like the fact that they uh try to pull their funds you know they want to pull their funs from arbitrum domainet or whatever and they have to hit this 7-day bridge is a really big problem.

Obviously, I know you know wormhole has solutions to this as does CCP and there's a lot of different ways to to attack this problem but but I really think like long term if you take the really long view uh just to go with the theme that that I know Jacob is pushing on, you know, ZK being able to prove chains in real time sort of I think can go a long way to getting rid of this really painful 7-day bridge liquidity problem. I'll follow up there like um for us I would say there there are a couple of angles there's probably um there's probably scale um one is scale and I'd say one is like complexity of um you know having myriad runtimes um across so many different ecosystems we connect seven different um VMs today by next year it'll be 10 uh this is this is

highly complex and you're asking people to manage you know 10 different runtimes multiple different chains and if you're looking at from an institutional perspective you just want your maths to work you want it to work offchain onchain. Um I think in the near term uh or sort of midterm the product surface and design space with ZK can broaden to allow applications that can reference state from any chain. That's absolutely fantastic. That's what we want. Create a unified developer interface to enable fully programmable transfers and tailored risk tolerances. Um I would say also then you know finality is also an issue. Um you've got myriad across all those different chains. You've got nondeterministic chains with fast finality. You've got slow finality. um you've got heavy infrastructure costs all around. I would say infrastructure

cost is also like prohibitive uh for integrators as well as interop. So a lot of these factors all come into play. >> Guys, I'm curious right now there's a certain set of user behaviors in the liquidity flows happening on chain. Um and they exist within this uh paradigm that you guys describe with the challenges that we face. Uh right all you know a lot of us you know I've seen relay has some had had some weird draining issues recently. I've seen uh you know that's not their fault. I've seen other uh you know people complaining about wait times. I've seen aggregators have issues, things get like there's just a clunky still UX, but it's still better than and far better than it has been in the past. And I I know it's because uh my dad has been operating on chain recently on DeFi Llama's Meta

Aggregator and I had him trading on it in 21 when you know before the uh before the merge and when gas was still high and you know transactions were failing and it was just he was like this product sucks and now he said to me the other day he's like wow Ethereum's gotten way better like it's like way more you know DeFi Lama works now like way better. I'm like okay that's cool. Um anyway, when it comes to actually seeing user behavior uh change in an environment where ZK, you know, is much more proliferation uh proliferated in terms of interrupt, how do you think about uh how do you think about where liquidity will actually flow and demand will uh you know be driven towards like is there a certain type of of of liquidity flows that you would expect that would change

as a result of having uh you know faster finality or you know cryptographic guarantees. How do you see like a post ZK interrupt world? >> I can jump in first here. Like maybe this answer is sort of overly productive, but I really see that if you as interop becomes more frictionless and as you can do things like chaining transactions together across multiple chains, I think people are going to um think of where they hold their liquidity more like you would think of a bank, right? and you hold your liquidity where on the place that you trust the most.

And so I think it's you know the funny thing is like you have all of this this proliferation of many many chains with you know some are app chains you know some chains are really really fast or whatever but like people are going to flock back to the chains that are most trusted and because they can get their liquidity to those other chains really really quickly and really really cheaply. So it really, you know, the most hardened consensus protocols and the chains with the most TVL are sort of going to there's going to be a lot of sort of power law distribution of where liquidity is held even though there's tons of activity on the other chains, right? And and so I think you're going to see more of this sort of splitting of where people do stuff versus where people hold stuff. Um sort of my my

rough thinking. >> I think I think a great example of this thesis already playing out is for the first time um you know sort of a new thing that's happening are these like pre-market periquid. is a very specific product that they can offer um and is and is unique to the space and what you're seeing is people that you know are traditionally in the Solano ecosystem um you know second largest system by TDL users liquidity went up they just want to bridge over to hyperlquid for six months or not not six months six hours trade this pre-market per for half a day and then come back um we've seen it three times now to where you saw close to a billion dollars go over a hyper liquid real quick and then come back. It happened with the pump ICO. It happened

with uh the plasma ICO which is currently happening uh um as well. And then there's one I'm forgetting about. So you're already seeing Matt's thesis, right, playing out. And if we can zk prove both of them um then it's going to make this process a lot more frictionless. Um to route over to from Salana to arbitrum to hyperlquid is just not very fun right now. >> Yeah. Yeah. I probably second that. I think in terms of like um mobility and you know I think in the in the crypto space we're very good at um you know having this kind of um uh very virtuous connection between like user experience and user demands and where the tech starts to go and we've seen you know faster than finality fills um being like

a huge space which is fantastic for the user experience. We're creating margins on that front. we're creating, you know, like um market forces there and to be in a space where we can start to reference state routes uh across different chains. I think we can start to rival the kind of per application submission patterns that we've become used to and have a foundation for trust minimized application interactions which will ultimately I think there's there's one on like the kind of UX front will will improve like greatly like the guys are saying and the other one is I think it really will unlock a lot of institutional flows and it will unlock a lot of off-chain data to come on chchain right now we're seeing like for interop about 75% of all interop transactions on on our side are

token transfers. So, it's all about tokens, but we're seeing the amount of arbitrary data transfers go up and up over time and ZK will also have a huge part to play in this in terms of transmitting high value arbitrary data. Right now, we're starting with kind of like off of, you know, off of Ethereum, we're able to to match the same velocity with um uh you know, reaching the milestone of per block scale block time scale proof generation on Ethereum, which is fantastic. um as we start to kind of reach that for other chains, I think we'll start to see highv value data flow at the same speed that we're kind of used to. Um so I think that's going to be really interesting.

>> Yeah. Yeah, I'm I'm curious like when wormhole is um you know interacting with some of the institutional partners. I think that you guys are working with Apollo with their Acred product as well as some some of the others when you're thinking about um the the impacts of you know moving towards a more kind of ZK based operating system and I've talked to uh Robinson in depth about this as well where a lot of bridges just are essentially asset issuers at scale. Now you can't really call yourself that and I don't know if you want to describe yourself as that but essentially bridges are basically you know the the equivalent of a asset issuer at scale and I'm curious when you guys are thinking about the uh the the institutional framework of of actually

moving crypto assets from different chains also on on and off uh in terms of on crypto and off. How do you how do you uh you know reconcile with their needs in the in today's you know era and then how do you imagine that their needs will be better solved if if there is ZK if it's just finality if it's just kind of like you know this the similar stuff that's that's okay but I'm just trying to get a bit more of an understanding as to what their like true crosschain or interrupt kind of requirements maybe or needs are and and how you guys are fulfilling those and you know how Zik could help.

>> I've seen it shift over over many years from you know institutions uh you know governmental to financial institutions looking at um private private chains um you know completely away from public chains to slowly shifting towards trust in um chains like you know core chains like Ethereum to now understanding that you might want to use different public chains for different purposes. There might be speed purposes. There might be um user bases. There might be applications that you want to issue on. You might have specific reasons for going across those chains. And I think now we're seeing you know the advent of um financial institutions launching their own L1s which is really interesting era as well. I think this is going to be super interesting and seeing

those use cases kind of coales back to the kind of fintech space which is really interesting and fantastic but with this powerful PMF through all the product improvements we'll finally start to see you know the advent of these chains replacing correspondent banking flows which was going to be incredible. We're starting to collaborate with Swift, you know, they're starting to understand, they move five trillion dollars a day and they don't mind if we take, you know, one or two percent of that kind of flow and they're trying to say, "Hey, can how can we be involved? Can we be, you know, um, uh, can we be the standard for um, you know, naming?

Can we be naming conventions? How can we be involved with this type of thing?" And so we're seeing these real world use cases which trickle all the way down from, you know, your sort of funds being able to access their understanding now. They're like, "Wow, I can service, you know, 5x larger user base because I can do all my reconciling and compliance for 50 times lower cost on Stellar, but if I'm on Stellar doing these things, which is great. We love Stellar, you know. If I'm on Stellar doing these things, how do I reconcile and how do I access the liquidity from Ethereum? How do I get it from Optimism? Oh, shoot. We've got, you know, we've got offchain um, you know, we've got offchain solvers and liquidity pools. That's really interesting.

They're starting to get to grips with how those flows all work. I think that's great. that's got a strong PMF for now. But I think obviously you know what the across team is doing for example in this space is great. These guys always pushing forward. I think that's what we really really love to see. We're looking at what are the next gen what is the nextG look like for making these flows highly stable, highly compliant, highly predictable and that level of predictability is really what these guys are coming back for. And that's why we're seeing this advent of alons come out. Highly mature tech PMF is there. I think we'll start to see the same with crosschain institutional function flows.

So, I would really love to see that future come in. >> That got me fired up. >> I love Yeah. And I love Oz's like direction here is like his example is not just right like Ethereum L2 to Ethereum L2. It's bringing in these like alternative VM ecosystems which have decided to like make a tradeoff between doing their own thing and an EVM for for good reasons. And you're really going to start to see, again, I'm going to say this over and over this stream. It's like we're going to prove all the chains, right? And people like Oz can bring these institutional assets that are like, you know, worth trillions of dollars on chain. And then you're going to have people like across really, you know, be good at doing these more like longtail user experience. If we prove the chain, it just makes life everyone

better for everyone. Um, we get, you know, faster bridging, um, faster finality, lower fees. >> Yeah, Matt. I mean I you know I had originally thought that ZK was going to be a threat to uh interrupt models like across but have you know came to quickly realize you know several months back uh if not I think it was at a conference I asked I asked uh it might have I don't know who it was but basically you know and even earlier Forest mentioned that it's just super impactful for solvers in terms of you know duration risk and just being able to execute better with knowing that there's a 7-day withdrawal window on a lot of the optimistic roll-ups obviously products like across are very very useful you know given given the the the state of ZK as it is today I'm curious what time what

timeline across is operating on with regards to uh implementing some of the work that you know boundless and some of these other teams have built to make your system better like realistically you know is this like a multimonth thing is this a year two-year timeline I know I'm asking the dev for a timeline it's like a ticking time bomb here but like give us a bit of your thought process as to how you want to build this out >> yeah I mean the The technical timeline here is uh negative negative 3 to six months uh because we are already using this tech right we already we already using proof systems uh at a small way and across um for for some message bridging to L1's so >> um you know we we care a lot obviously we care a lot about making sure that re

that relay repayments are secure um and so you know we want to go further than trust trusting a few signers on on some multisig somewhere to sign off on it we want to make sure that we have an actual proof that says look this this thing happened on this other chain and so you can make this repayment. Um and so our vision here like so far we're using this in a limited way and across just where we absolutely need it where we don't have a canonical bridge. Um but we we we see this expanding everywhere. um we want to be using this um as much as possible um and replacing sort of canonical bridges um as much as possible with this with this tech because there's a few reasons why it's really really beneficial for for sort of smart contract developers um every single

canonical bridge even amongst L2s but even some L1's have cononical bridges uh and I think Oz was sort of referencing this before they have their own like sort of interface and you got to like you got to deal with their own the way their particular bridge works and some of them you pay ETH you you pay ETH on the front side sometimes you pay past. They're all different and they create complexity for smart contract developers. If you just have like one interface where you say, "Look, I have this CK proof uh that I'm just going to and I'm going to interact. I'm going to use the ZK proof to prove the origin chain in every in every place." Um, and then you have sort of the same interface for um for sort of making a send on one chain and then doing a receive on the

other chain. Um, and you just have to have somebody submit this sort of, you know, proof um when you want to do the receive. It's really, really powerful. And we've already seen this sort of on across you know our v4 architecture. We've already seen this sort of uh dramatically uh you know improve our scalability because we can just roll out to so many chains much faster because it's the same interface. We just deploy the same contracts everywhere. No audits, no nothing. We just we have the same contracts, same proof system no matter what chain we're going to. Um and so like yeah I mean CK proofs uh we I can't give you specific timelines but like as soon as possible we want to get this uh you know into our protocol because we we think it's just a really really powerful technology for scale.

>> Beautiful. Well Matt Oz we appreciate you guys joining the boundless mainet stream today. We're celebrating ZK. We're celebrating just the growth of obviously the boundless team all the work that you guys are doing together on on the interop side. Uh thanks for joining. It's been a pleasure. Uh it's been short but sweet and uh looking forward to the work that you guys are both doing on the interrupt side wormhole and the institutional front across much more on making it better for all of us onchain users. Um yeah guys, thank you so much. >> Thanks.

>> Peace out. >> Well, that was the interop section, Jacob. Um, probably the one of the most important parts of uh the ZK ent like the entire ZK puzzle. Um, curious curious on what you think is the biggest unlock of proving the full Ethereum consensus when it comes to interop. What is this going to enable for us? Yeah, it's going to end up being, you know, cheaper, faster bridging from, you know, it's sort you can imagine as like a sort of outbound signal from Ethereum. Um, cool thing is Ethereum is sort of the hardest one to do. Um, you have to check and like verify a million BLS signatures >> um in CK, which is expensive. Um, good

thing we raised quite a bit of money to do that for the foreseeable future. Um, which is really nice. >> And then, you know, we're going to start doing it for more and more chains. You can really like sort of imagine that you know every chain you prove you now have like an outbound gateway to every other ecosystem. So you know we're proving Ethereum right now we're proving base as well. Um now if I just post that proof to optimism I as an OP developer or bridge or solver can read both those chains in a trustless way which really starts to illustrate how we're going to do it. Now let's prove all the chains.

Okay, now I can read the state of any chain, any user, any transaction and sort of act over that state >> and it's going to make in Ethereum much more interoperable with the other kind of L1s as well as broadly as well as solve that finality issue for some of the L2s as well. >> Yeah, I mean it's like you know a lot of time people are talking about silos of like L2s, right? And I think one thing we can expand on the idea is that ecosystems are siloed >> and this not only is >> you know bad for users and liquidity right um it's bad for developers and I now have to choose one ecosystem so now you know >> we get into this idea of the signal putting all these chains I'm now an app developer that can access all these

ecosystems and I I don't really have to enter what has been sort of like a tribalistic process of like wow like I'm now Salana live or die right this this is the only chain that matters right which is not the case or Ethereum live or die or um Avalanche liver or die or Cosmos liver or die and all these things. You can just build an app that interacts with it all. Um not only will that be a better app, more efficient um will be a better experience, faster go to market, a lot of things. >> Well, we've got your core dev, Victor, coming up. We're going to let you introduce him. Uh we're going to bring him up. Victor is looking proper fresh in in his place. Big day. I'm sure this guy's not been sleeping. So, uh, good to see you. You do look properly rested.

I'm glad that that, you know, you're not, you know, looking too tired out here, but, uh, welcome to the show. Welcome to the rollup. Um, welcome to Boundless Midnight Day, obviously. Um, Jacob, pass it to you, man. I would love for you to give us a brief intro. So, let the let let the peeps know and then we'll have Victor do it on his own as well. >> Yeah. So, this is a really special introduction for me. Victor is so special in so many ways. Um, one I think he might be one of the only like full stack ZK devs out there. He can write circuits. He can write a ZKVM. He can also write a novel protocol and lead a team almost all the way to mainet. Um, Victor has been um he was the tech lead from the very beginning for Boundless. um he has

transitioned to riser to go do some more ZK wizardry over there in the future but really has been a core member of incubating this protocol holding us to our core values of design decisions um and is yeah he's amazing I don't know what we would do without him um Vic sure I will start you with a question I want you to give us you know a little origin story of boundless what were those early experimentation days >> like Um and then why did we skip building our own blockchain >> which is absolutely >> typically typically a popular decision nowadays that we you know went away from.

>> Yeah. Um yeah. So the I guess the you know design what you see now kind of is not the was not the original kind of idea. Um I' although maybe you could say that though kind of is a synthesis of a few a few ideas we had. So when it started out, we were kind of unsure what path to take. We actually ended up just splitting it off into three teams that explored three different paths simultaneously. We kind of called this like trident internally. And the three paths were uh one kind of build a a fully custom L1. This was the idea was basically to build one that was fully based around the ZKVM as its core and basically really optimized it. in fact even optimized it onto the the way it

did consensus or was going to consensus for ZKVM. I thought it was a really really cool project. Um that was one option. Option number two was basically to um you know go to a rollup provider and spin up like an ETH rollup and basically then tune it just by adding a few pre-ompiles and other tweaks to make it kind of like a customized rollup and use that as our market basis. And option number three was deploy a smart contract uh either onto L2 or onto Ethereum mainet. Uh what we ended up doing was kind of a a combination of the second two. The first one although extremely

cool became uh it became clear that like actually creating your own L1 is not the right way to build a market like this which I can go into much more detail. Um but the the second two kind of provided both kind of interesting paths available to us. um in particular kind of the design you see for balance right now which is kind of rooted in smart contracts which are deployed to one to multiple different L2s and Ethereum mainet combined with kind of a few a just the the a little bit of offchain infrastructure to make the whole system efficient and fast and that design basically kind of maximizes

the value of the underlying ecosystem. So basically it doesn't you know split liquidity across many places. It's the only design we can think of that would actually m that actually preserve the full verification guarantees we wanted. So basically people if you're developing an application you want to use zk proofs you want to verify those zk proofs on your target chain. There's nothing else that is the same level of security. And so we we our design didn't want to compromise on that. So I see no fragment liquidity, no secondary like no reduction in the security of the zero knowledge proof verification and then uh additionally basically we wanted to inherit the speed and inherit the characteristics of really high

performance chains like uh base mainet for instance while simultaneously also inheriting the strong availability guarantees of Ethereum mainet. And the only way to do that that we could see was to deploy to both places and have a contract that basically roots the market in multiple places while having this kind of a shared pool of like prover liquidity that kind of lives outside of any one chain but then has like these multiple um kind of roots in different chains. >> Yeah. One one weird side effect right about this is that like the livven livveness of boundless is now a one of assumption to all the markets that we're deployed to. Right. So, you know, we're deployed to base right now, some test

nets. That's our trust assumption. We'll deploy to Ethereum quite soon. Um, and then some more chains following up uh towards the end of the year. And now the market is not just like on a single person, right? It's actually on all of these chain operators to where the market only goes down if if if base, Ethereum, other L2s, other L1s go down, which I think is is incredibly cool. Um, one other point here and I think Victor was alluding to this is that, you know, decentralization can be sort of a LAR. I think it's been a hot topic, >> hot take.

>> Um, it Yeah. Um, the problem is that decentralization means that a very different thing when it comes to ZK proving infrastructure, right? I think it's completely appropriate for a chain to decide, I want to be the sole operator. You're my livess assumption. I'm running sort of this L2 architecture. I think it makes a great trade-offs from the users of latency and cost and whatnot. Um, however, with proven, you can't just like launch an L2 because you're now critical infrastructure on on other people. And you know, we have certain protocols that are using us for DeFi use cases to where the proof if it doesn't show up, not only is like you're losing livveness of your protocol, your funds actually start to be at risk. Um, and if you have single points of failure, regardless if

it's just you and you think you're the most robust, you're going to have downtime. um and we can't have that. >> So even you know launching with mainet today um we don't operate any single points of failure within boundless. We actually had um a little issue about two weeks ago to where our infra had gone down. Um really cool thing is um there was zero missed orders on the market. There was zero downtime for our customers. Um which is a real testimony that we have to build something decentralized. you do not need to count on a single team um in this case the boundless networks team for the protocol to continue to go. Um we want to have that unstoppable protocol thesis that you know they sort of had in the old

crypto. >> Can I add on what what Jacob just mentioned basically about like liveness being critically important for many of these D5 protocols. >> You take the case of of op kyua one of the biggest use cases of risk here right now and the many chains that are adopting it. When you consider for example like Bob mainet that's live now or base mainet as they go forward like they if you're using ZK fraud proofs you cannot afford to have liveness failures you absolutely need to have fraud proof show up on time and that's basically taking ourselves out of the loop in that case basically having just if you're in mainet essentially be the the livveness assumption is a really powerful thing to do >> and so is it that is a big reason as to why not launch your own chain because

then you have your own consensus and your own basically livveness and your own uptime to deal with. But you know if you ran like a simple kind of like the take one out of circles playbook and run a proof of authority L1 then you kind of give up a lot of the censorship resistance properties that you guys are inheriting just by you know as as you mentioned the one of then you know assumption for whatever chains whatever that chain's rules are effectively are are the rules that you guys are abiding by and you know uh are submitting to as a result of proving that chain and so you know this design also uh allows you to not have to play a lot of the same proof of stake staking token inflation games and you you know then have been

able to create this kind of more dual-sided marketplace model with proof of verifiable work for the token as well. So kind of solves a couple you hits a couple birds with one stone. >> Yeah. Um you know quick primer and then I'll pass it off to Victor for some details as he's been you know a key architect of proof verifiable work. is proof verifiable work for the first time allows us in an efficient manner to incentivize proving. If you generate one proof, we can sort of tell how much work you've done for that proof um and give you a retroactive reward. This is the same bootstrapping you saw with proof of work systems when it came to security and then proof ofstake systems when it came to security. But now we get to do it for CK proving and you know those same systems that got the bootstrap for

years this adoption sort of emitting a token to to get people online we now get to do that for proving uh and you know as we were talking with forest earlier we can just start proving chess um which we're going to continue to do and which is so cool um you know the other part of that is we really wanted it to be permissionless and accessible um you only get the benefit of ZK mining when you have a lot of provers competing on an open market to be the most cost-effective person. And one way we've done that is, you know, our proving note is incredibly accessible. Um, on Maynet Beta, we had over 2,700 approvers complete a proof. Um, we had teenagers fresh out of high school place top five on the proving leaderboard. Um, and then

we're also constantly seeing a current cycle between, you know, our first phase of mainet beta and the second um, in the top 25 provers. There's a complete almost a complete turnover. There's only three people that have remained. Um so yeah, we're making it completely accessible proving um on top of you know providing this additional incent. Victor, could you um give us you know maybe a little more detail on how proof of verifiable work um operates and how you see it impacting the the ZK world. >> Yeah. So proofable work essentially gives a way of right of having a what I call a verifiable work log of how much work a given prover has done over the course of a certain time period of time.

So the main period of time we can consider is in our system is one we call it one epo epoch or two days in our case. So it's not this not the epoch this is kind of the balance epoch um and over the like while proves are doing work. So these could be jobs that take from the market. These could be jobs that they receive on a private order stream. Or these can be jobs that that they complete uh just for what's called like mining work, work that is done solely for the just to prove that they have these resources available to them. All of these proving jobs go into what is called the work log. And that worklog basically at the once every epoch gets compressed to prepare for submission.

and then gets sent to the blockchain basically to attest that like hey during this period I proved you know five trillion cycles for instance over the last two days and when you actually take all of those in our we then basically use that as the uh core metric for distributing rewards as you as you mentioned to incentivize more and more provers for the network. Um. >> Mhm.

>> You know, um, Victor, I'm curious. What are some of the the the features that we haven't really talked about too much outside of proof of verifiable work? I mean, if if you want to close that loop, I think you did a good job. Um, you know, what are some of the the features that kind of go under underappreciated in the boundless protocol that that you know, for some of the less technical folk would would appreciate? and and specifically Victor, you know, we know we've been on this sprint for like six months and I think there's a lot of like tiny details in the protocol that make it just a resilient infrastructure. Um >> yeah, >> I I can share one real quick. like you know we were working with a partner uh it was about January February um and we sort of you know are one of the only

proving networks where there's like a slashable amount and if the proof doesn't show up um that collateral is is taken away from the prover >> and something we realized is you know traditionally on a blockchain it's really hard to automate submission of transactions for signature reasons and also because there's gas you have to have sort of a pre-approval what we end up doing is you know we can take that collateral amount and if approver fails it turns into a race and sort of a reward to claim that collateral. So it opens up to all provers um and then they can sort of claim that. So now you know ideally your prover is fulfilling the request but upon it doesn't you're going to have the second the sort of the race of secondary provers um and we've seen some crazy races. I think one you know

proof we saw 100 people try to get it. Um and then you know of course the first person is the only one that gets it. Well, basically this idea of having this like collateral based essentially retry mechanism. So this we we went back and forth on many different ways of doing retries and like ensuring high high availability. And this is the one we landed on that seemed both very simple and kind of and very automatic and also pretty quite effective. And we saw that through the through the course of the mainet beta where um we had extremely high success rates often 100% from for you know days in a row. And the reason for that was not because a proof like the first prover to lock a proof a

request in which is complete permissionless. there's no way to like guarantee that a given prover is actually going to be able to deliver. And of course with you know kind of incentives at play people often lock things that they can't actually deliver on. But this mechanism basically when they locked in they they you know committed let's say 20 20 uh USDC in this case. uh now it's DKC on the main on the on mainet but they committed that that those funds and when they fail to deliver then there's this bounty like Jacob was mentioning and we see we saw a very reliable delivery of proofs from high quality secondary like basically bounty provers call them people who are looking out for these missed requests and fulfilling them so that's a I think that that that mechanism is something

that we took a while to land on and I think in the end I is works quite Well, um, of course there's always room for improvement. We're looking looking forward to seeing the live like, uh, as mainet goes forward, seeing, you know, as the market progresses, people learn new strategies, people optimize further and further, both reducing latency, reducing costs, increasing reliability even further is going to always be our goal. Another feature I'll mention as well is that actually because of the way it's structured the fir we we have the ability to uh ensure that at most one transaction ever occurs for a given request. Basically in the

minimal gas mode basically a single a request can be basically be propagated offchain. We run one example of one of a way to broadcast uh requests to all provers. the prover can choose to take that request, fulfill it and then submit it as part of a batch. So a single cross exceeding proof that advertises that what that large verification costs across many different proofs and then in that single batch of proofs basically they can include um requests that were never before seen on chain.

The reason this is very important is because obviously every every transaction has potentially significant gas costs and minimizing gas is extremely important to ensuring that the market doesn't just work for super high value ZK proofs like block like ZK roll-ups but also works for smaller ZK proofs uh that that only that might only have you know a dollar or$2 dollars worth of value in total. So that they if you really want to bring cost down, you have to minimize the amount of onchain interaction. And even though our trust assumptions are all based on the EVM itself and basically based around this this core smart contract, we're able to

fulfill proofs with in the on the fast path, the like the cost optimized path in a in one single batch transaction, which is I think also pretty cool. >> Yeah. And to put that into context of like how much cost we're sort of talking about is is a a token transfer is about 20,000 EVM gas. Um a DEX swap ranges anywhere from like 180K to 270K. Our our best case scenario here is just 35k EVM gas. We're practically at the cost of a token transfer for getting your proof on chain in which something we didn't touch on. we can now do like an automatic call back to where we deliver this proof to your chain um and

your protocol on whatever chain you're operating on to where you don't even have to run info for that. So you're really depositing ETH into a smart contract, hosting an image somewhere which is, you know, sort of a URL and uh you now have proving infrastructure >> and really to get down to those like that that 35k number to get down to that level, you need a lot, you do need a lot of amortization, you need a lot of like people on the market together to kind of pull that verification costs >> um which having like balance already hitting uh in beta north of 60 60 trillion cycles a day. Basically we're showing that basically by going to centralized first we are achieving that level of like proving liquidity and you know in mainet we're it's only going to increase.

Victor, man, I um I really hope that you find yourself uh some some rest in the coming coming days, man. I um I I have a feeling you've been in a dark room with clawed code up in one tab and some rust in another and a slack in another and Jacob's in your ear cuz Shiv's in his ear and Brett's in his ear and everyone's in Jacob's ear and then he's coming to you and it's just madness. So congratulations on on the launch Victor and um really uh really great work that you've done for this space and just pushing pushing the entire ZK sector forward today. Um and this is the culmination of a lot of years of work.

But you know I hate to break it to you buddy but it's starting all over again. So the job's not finished. I appreciate you you joining and uh sharing some insights today. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. Thanks Victor. >> Thanks. Thanks, Victor. Bye, man. >> Yeah, man. I mean, there's just a lot going on behind the scenes, isn't there? >> Yeah, it's it's like sort of a shame because we've had all these like sort of technical innovations >> and I feel bad for the engineers because, you know, they spend a lot of time doing this. They build really quality and we just haven't had to talk about it because we've been going so fast. Um, we're definitely going to talk about it, but you know, the culmination of all the work is you get your approves for very cheap

>> and you get them all the time. Um, which, you know, partners are already starting to feel. It's really sick. >> You know, ZKVM benchmarking has been an absolute hot mess, right? It's like, oh, I can I can prove this Fibonacci sequence faster or, you know, my my prover is, you know, faster on this like 300 gigabyte 10,000 core CPU machine, right? And those days are gone to where what really matters, you know, if you're actually taking Zuk seriously and going to production is you should be asking about operating cost and proving cost >> and markets never lie, man. I can just send you uh a link to the market. you can look at the price. Other competitors

can send links to their market and they can look at the price and there's no arguing about that, right? Um yeah, the market will decide the price. Um we want to keep it open. >> That's that's the beauty of these systems. How are you doing on on this marathon, man? Is this the longest uh podcast you've ever been on? >> Um maybe podcast. You know, I I said earlier we can talk about boundless all day. This is this is this is nothing. We we've gone deep into nights about boundless before. So >> I'm uh we're survivors. >> What What was the craziest last like couple days?

>> Yeah. >> Last couple days. Um, yeah, we went we went live with proof of verifiable work on mainet on Wednesday of last week because we wanted to test an epoch first >> and then I will say once that first proofs hit the market, we filled them, submitted the claim to proverifiable work and everything came in. That was that was a pretty good feeling. And I know that the uh I know that the listing processes on exchanges is a pain in the ass too because they wait till last minute. Also just with partners is last minute.

>> I mean did you sleep at all last night? Um last night wasn't too bad, man. Right. Like when you're when you're doing this big of a project, it's really about the 12 months leading up and and setting yourself up for success. Uh again, I always say this internal cheesy metaphor, right? It's brick by brick and we've laid so many good bricks of success between this experimental testing private devets with partners um you know our mainet beta campaign with the with the signal um that really made these last weeks stressful right we had to hit a deadline but you know we got the recognition from exchanges the community um the broader um CK ecosystem and

whatnot that really you It doesn't come down of like being restless last night. It comes down from all the hard work we put in over the past, >> yeah, >> two, three years at this point. >> Have a quick look at what's going on in the market. A little bit of a red day across the board. I think people are getting a little bit skittish before uh CPI this week and good old J Pal is going to come on there and lower some rates, I think. Um, who knows, right? these days. >> We >> Yeah, the best thing about our team is I really don't think we care about what does 91 little air drop Kaido dump pressure.

Those damn yappers. >> N man. Um yeah, man. I mean, we're really here building for long-term success for the next three, four years at a minimum. >> Um so we could be we could be unbothered. We're happy to get this out the door and now we can focus a lot more on products. >> It's compelling that Justin was like, "Okay, in the beginning we're really going to keep um you know, we're going to keep using a ton of ZQVMs, but then at some point we're just going to choose one, which is just like that is just that is going to be a wild fight. Yeah, I think you know, right? But like the context there, right, is he just wants EVM blocks >> versus I think, you know, we're really starting to see the proliferation of

many ZK use cases. Sort of like a lot of ZKVMs look really similar because the main use case is proving EVM blocks, but that's going to continue to proliferate and do other things. Things like client side proving, the ZKVM that's best for client side proving is not going to be the ZKVM that ETH1 chooses. Um, and we want to be a part of it all, man. Like, we really think that ZK is this thing that takes over the world in the next decade. Um, and Boundless is going to have a role to play in that global adoption, not just the proving of Ethereum.

>> Dude, we had so we had Forest uh like he came on either his mic was muted or we had him muted or something, right? And then you called it out, dude. Conduit main account just trolled us so hard, quote tweeted the entire stream and said, "For Forest is so bullish on ZKPs, his insights drop in stealth mode." Just completely trolled us. >> He talks uh he talks in ZK. >> I mean, Reika's up here. She She threw me a freaking entree last Thursday and a whole We we pulled it together. We had the whole full three course meal. It's the final course. It's the dessert coming up. Uh we got Reika coming up on the stream here, guys. Um and yeah, I'm

excited to talk to her about some of the uh marketing and go to market stuff. I feel like uh I feel like Reika was tasked with the job of taking Jacob and Shiv and the team which kind of had some like it had an interesting development over the last couple years. a bunch of just giga Chad, for lack of better term, just trench devs, just full cracked out, but like not in the GTM brand market sensation narratives, kind of trying to figure it all out. And I feel like she kind of took you guys and really took you under her like aura riz kind of uh you know in tune with what's what is like popular and stuff and kind of really just because I remember when we

were talking about the boundless brand we were like it's going to be very separate from zero right because zero is very like kind of like dev and like web 2y if you will and balance has came to be its own entire being. So without further ado we're going to get Reika up here in a second and she will close us out. Reikae, welcome to the show. It's good to have you. Let's do a triple check of audio here. I will not hear the end of it if your audio is not working. Hello. Hello. >> Hey. Hi. Can you hear me? >> I actually can't hear her this time. Can you?

>> I can't either. No team. What happened? Hey, while we figure that out, I'll give >> Oh, she's back. >> Oh, she's here. >> Okay. We did do exercises, jumping jacks in the back with the audio before. It was >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I It's just It's a lot going on here. We We have built a a a system from scratch and it feels more like a product business nowadays than it does even like a media company. But Rea, it's your first time on the show. Um who's Reika? How did you get involved in crypto? You have a cool story. Tell us tell us a bit about it and then let's get into some of the work that you've done.

>> All right. Beautiful. Thanks for having us on the show. Um, thanks for also dealing with um, our short notice and >> No, we love you, Reika. >> I do be running a tight ship. Thanks for accommodating. >> Yes, >> I'm Reika. I am the director of marketing at Bless and which is the universal ZK protocol that makes blockchains internet scale. Um, it's been a really really interesting journey. I got into ZK quite late I believe compared to the rest of my team who are I consider experts in the field.

It was last year for me. Before that I've been a veterinarian and a startup founder and then a crypto app builder and founder and then I ended up here. I wanted to build something that lasts and not just one cycle and a solution that's truly universal because I think I do think crypto was lacking that glue and I really was sick and tired of seeing and experiencing of the silo building and I know there's benefit to it and there's a reason it happened but I really believe we should stop doing that and there has to be a solution to help with that make that a beneficial thing for us to do and I didn't see any other way than ZK so here we are and I started working with the team in November. It's been really

fun and yeah, you're right. I joined the team at Bridge Zero originally. >> Bunch of devs just deving around. >> Yeah, but they're really like the smartest people in the planet and you know, I've been in many rooms with the medical field and every other place, but they are so nice and so smart. Um, but I, yeah, I was tasked with something of taking a technologically insanely advanced team and product into the landscape of crypto and make them cool and make them make people like them and believe that it's cool because it is groundbreaking technology and I have proof of that. Everyone has proof of that now. Um, but it also, you know,

it's not just having a good product. It's also having that good product be shown and heard and so that was my job and I have a wonderful team who's helping with me and doing this and I think it's going pretty okay and >> beautiful. >> Okay, so there's going to be some people from like Safari Club who are going to see this this question maybe some other marketers people that really are curious about GTM. I mean, I've seen so many metas go by of like different, you know, types of of points and then airdrops and then, you know, Kaido obviously came in and there's just like a non-stop change of ways to go live and launch mainet which typically is either like a chain, a token or both or you know, one of the

two. you know, when you have just, you know, you've just gone through this process for the last like sixish months. What were some of the biggest wins that you had and what were some of the things that you learned from uh along the way that maybe didn't work out so well uh that you would have changed going forward? >> Um, one of the biggest wins is we tried so hard not to have a point system. So hard. And we didn't. and it turned out great because point systems always end up so messy. It's really actually so hard to avoid not having one. If you're running any form of a test net, incentivized test net or any form of environment where you do ask people to do things, you have to keep track of that. So point system is very second

nature, but it's just it's so messy. We've seen that in the last like five, six years of everything. So we tried really hard avoiding that. So I think that's a huge win. Otherwise, I think we're really special in building momentum and thinking about basically up until today this whole moment and making sure that based on product roadmap our go to market matches that and we have a constant growth cycle of attention and interest and knowledge more importantly. So everything we've built through Kaido that was just one part of the cycle. We did have our manifesto launch, our white paper launch with the reader website that people could copy paste things from and that would we made it into social

campaign. Um then this whole signal where we had 20 plus teams collaborating with us to provide this open source good that you guys talked about quite a bit today and then making that its own thing instead of just ours because that is really important. ZK is doing that and Boundless is the forefront of that. So naturally everything that we're launching has to replicate that mentality and I think we're doing really good at that and I would really advise teams to think about separate moments that build up to one another and teach about each other or one one of the launches that you're doing is pointing to the next one and it's everything is just a stepping stone basically. So you have to do many things. It gives you way more labor but we've learned today that

we we're overachievers in this whole team and we like working a lot so that's okay. Um, and then what we would what I would change honestly not too much. I would have maybe cleaner sheets in terms of the spreadsheets that we were using. There has been it was like last minute cleanup sometimes just when we were keeping track of stuff. Um, and there are things that I would do sooner and honestly sometimes I would just be a little bit more straightforward with my own team and clarity on what things are because sometimes things took longer to figure out what they what we were what we even want to do. and marketing and generally everything forward- facing and

external is in the position if we're kind of squished between product and ecosystem and the executives and kind of having to navigate all of that. Um I would love to go back and be a little bit more mean. >> Well, Jacob, Jacob, that brings me a good question for you, right? Because often >> brother brother more mean, >> dude. Yeah, exactly right. I mean, trust me. Trust me. I mean I mean I'm in the slack >> Andy if you and if you think you felt pressure from Reika.

>> Okay. Well then I have a question for you because the pro like Reika's perspective and marketer's perspective is always like okay we have to you know find things to talk about while product is building and building and like we have to like keep people interested and then product and then Jacob calls Reika and is like hey timeline's two weeks later and Ra is like well my announcements are all lined up yada yada yada. And so it's kind of like this never- ending balance between product and marketing. So, Jacob, how do you manage like how do you manage a marketing team from the product side? Well, like what are the how do you kind of >> Yeah. Like like just curious like advice for other product people like how do you manage that relationship?

>> Yeah. So, f first thing is I wouldn't really describe it as as managing. I would say collaborating. Um, right. Like it's really important as a product manager to just hear your marketing team out and like understand where they're coming from because ultimately, right, they're going to help with your distribution. Yes, you can build the best product. If if no one knows about it, no one's going to use it. >> On the flip side, if marketing, right, market's a shitty product, no one's also going to use it. Um, >> one fundamental thing here is that we have a great product. Um, and that really comes down to engineering. I think something Reika has actually had to deal with early on in her her tenure at you know working on boundless is the fact that we ship too much too too fast

and we actually end up having to be like selective on what we get to talk about. Um, which is why I wanted, you know, last session to talk about these hidden features that we really haven't talked about, right? That could be a whole campaign in itself is like these like >> sort of gold standard SLAs's and whatnot. And it's sort of like, you know, a fight elbows out of like, okay, what's actually getting in the marketing? Because you can't just come out with these, you know, one-off announcements. You really got to tell a story um and why these things matter. Um, yeah. So from a product manager perspective, one ship a good project, make sure your engineering is at at a at a good velocity. Um, but also understand that you're going to have to make a tradeoff from being, you know, 100%

technically precise to where, yeah, it's great, it's right, 20 people understand it. Um, but marketing really acts as this top of funnel of like, oh, I got your eye now. come and learn more about it as a developer, as a user, as someone that's participating in, you know, governance now. Um, and have a really healthy relationship. I think I talk to our two marketers more than anyone else at this company on a daily basis. Um, the the group chat is always popping with product and marketing. >> What I will add to your answer from your side, I'm gonna act like I'm you is hold on glasses. So that's true. um is is you also do it exceptionally well as time

passes is I keep asking why do I care? So we yeah true attest to that we ship something every week basically that should be its own thing but I do truly care of building that momentum and that consistency and things relating to each other and and being in a theme. Um, and Jacob's really accessible and I advise this to other product managers as well. It's really accessible to telling me why is this important for the landscape and then yeah, I understand from his description how the tech works, but why do I care about this? And then if he makes me care, I can story out of that.

>> Um, and then make other people care about it and make millions of people care about it. And Jacob's really really good at that. And so make briefs, make little briefs of what it does and why do people care and the different audience segments that you're working with. Why do each of them care? Why does the devs care? Why does more general blockchain audience care about it? And then we can do magic from that. That's a really part side story here is when Reiko was, you know, sort of deciding on her next project, man, she grew. She's like, why do you care so much? Why are you working on this project? Why do you work so many hours? Like why are you doing this? Like you're all so talented. Why are you doing this instead of something else?

And I will say the moment, right? Like we sort of convinced Reika and made her care about this problem and what we were building, I was like, damn, we might have something here, lads. >> Yeah. >> Yep. >> Well, you know, it's not an easy task either, right? I honestly think marketing ZK is probably one of the hardest uh you know, things in crypto. Like it's it's so so densely deep and technical and like the type of people that really matter are like also like they're the ones that aren't in on even on Twitter and they're like on governance forms. They're like in in freaking GitHub repos. They're just it is a whole another you know uh yeah I mean maybe you could just give us some

some quick like tidbits on to like how to make for lack of better term very nerdy stuff really cool. like how do you you flip the switch flip the script on on crypto as a whole. I think as a as an industry we we kind of have a perception problem you know broadly for many reasons but I think specifically one core issue that I think a lot of us in the you know deeper in the space want to figure out is how to yeah and you know from GTM how to make this stuff cool. >> That's a good question. I first thing I would say it takes a small village and our team's like really so much heart is in this and so much passion and like will unwillingness to give up is in this success but also yeah watch me I like a hard task and the thing is is I what I

truly believe why we could do what we did is you have to take inspiration from not crypto most of the time I'm doing that's I don't know that's just my free time I analyze how musicians, movies, book authors, any how a car is launched, a new car in the market. And that is really really interesting to me. And I think how making things accessible, relatable, and beautiful and educational. Those are the things I need to do at once. and combining all of those with a uniqueness of your point of view and understanding of the landscape and your this special knowledge that for me I'm interested in

non-crypto world things and analyzing that knowledge and bringing that in that is helping tremendously of putting that as a framework over everything that we do in crypto. And so yeah, my main advice is think about the audience accessibility because you're an expert in what you're building. People don't know what that is. That's one. And you have to be edgy. People love contrast. So for us, for example, we are a very nerdy infrastructure project. And I made it beige. And I put berries on it as the kind of like the mascot, but it came from our basically our vertical is verifiable compute and verifiable compute kind of made sense from that, at

least to me. And then I convinced the team and people loved it and it it turned out really great. You the there was some naysayers initially but conviction also really helps because I believe if you bring this much passion and this much passion on a team level people and you just keep doing what you think and believe truly you need to do people won't be able to say no and people will eat it up. I truly believe that. I've done it many times on different things. It so that's so how it works. your passion and your interest will be so contagious. That's most of how marketing works honestly is you have to be so convinced and you have to spread that joy and passion with all your might and then it will

work and you obviously put a very um important and thoughtful intentional strategy over it. But that's the combination that I think is killer and would make any team really successful. Last thing for you Reik you're you're entering a whole new world now post TGE post mainet post it's a different environment what is your strategy going forward next three to six 12 months you know what are you building towards how will you keep the community engaged >> it's very I'm so excited honestly prets like the you kind of know what to do you know like it's just >> people yeah it's it feels >> more straightforward but somehow The

postg strategy that I'm thinking about is so much more exciting to me because it allows us to go way deeper not only with our community, our developers, the teams that are building on boundless, but there will be a little bit of gaps of silence because the the attention that we've been getting, we're insanely grateful for it and it's honest. Well, obviously it's a big um part of our success, but I'm really excited to have more people who want to look deeper and actually want to achieve something together. And that is the time for that to actually happen. And honestly, most of the things were live. I've looked at this as the only thing that wasn't live is proof of verifiable work and secrecy.

Everything else we already fully functioned as a live protocol. Um, so this honestly only changes things for the better because we can have more results, more numbers and everything. And like the teams that were generous enough to spend their time today on this stream and talk about the landscape and ZK and their projects and what they're doing really just shows a testament of how important really this technology is. And so we're in really good company to make this change a thing. And thanks also Andy for for hosting us. It will be a very beautiful next few months and years to make that happen. We're really excited. We're not Yeah, it's going to be

>> beautiful. Rikadith, I was going to invite you to come on the stream anyways, but you made your debut. I'll have to get you back on. I love talking marketing. I love talking branding, all that type of stuff. Thanks for joining today. I think Jacob and I are probably equally uh equally ready to stand up for once. So, I think we're gonna let you go and wrap this thing up. >> Thank you. Bye, guys. >> Bye, Reika. Thank you, Barry Queen. >> All righty, Jacob. Man, what a stream. I uh Yeah, it's been a it's been a journey. My I think my camera overheated. I think I'm uh I'm sweating a bit. It's a little warm in here. I'm back in Florida. So, I think it's time to wrap. I'll give you the floor for closing thoughts. We'll throw you on the solo frame and uh man, close us out like

you were a, you know, basketball coach and, you know, trying to get people inspired or something. Give give us We'll give you the solo frame and close us out, man. >> Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for everyone for for joining us today on the live stream. Couldn't be more excited to be working on this project. Not only do I think that boundless is going to be a backbone of ZK, not just in blockchain ecosystems, but of web 2, you know, I think I and many other team members. Um, think ZK fundamentally changes the world from a security perspective. And that's why we all work here. Um, we don't work here because we make the most money. We could all go work at a f company and make 10x. Um, but we work here because we think we're, you know, really changing the world for the better.

>> Jacob Everly, Boundless Bayet, thank you guys. See you guys tomorrow. We have an amazing stream tomorrow as well. Thanks, Jacob. >> Thanks, guys.