From Theory to Practice: Ethereum's ZK Evolution w/ Kartin Wong (Hyper Oracle)

Transcript

[Music] hello and welcome back to the strange waterer podcast thank you for joining us for another awesome conversation we've spent a lot of time on this show talking about ZK cryptography we've gone deep on implementation and have been far out with how ZK is going to be the backbone of an automated Internet of Things world and we spent a lot of time thinking about the conceptual purpose of ZK in searching for this conceptual purpose we keep coming back to the idea that ZK is a technology that allows us

to project computation across different Computing environments this is particularly important important in the context of blockchains which can be thought of as Computing environments that sacrifice performance for credible neutrality and trustless before ZK only the most basic computation was possible in the extremely limited blockchain environment but with ZK we can use high performance modern computers and then send the answer and a proof into the blockchain environment if the proof verifies then we can treat the result like it was computed within the trustless blockchain environment

itself and so that's the basic idea of how ZK interacts with blockchain and a glimpse at how it will forever transform how we use it but the gap between that idea and an integrated automated distributed system is very wide fortunately we have the perfect guess to help us see the future carton Wong is the co-founder of hyper Oracle a company taking the very latest ZK technology and actually building out the infrastructure that drastically changes what the world computer is capable of now based on the name of course you know that hyper Oracle is

capable of delivering prices and other data into a blockchain environment but just wait until you hear about ZK automation or ZK machine learning and you'll quickly see that hyper Oracle is about so much more it's about bringing modern computation and with it modern capabilities and modern adoption to the world computer one more thing before we begin please do not take Financial advice from this or any podcast ethereum will change the world one day but you can easily lose all of your money between now and then all

right ladies and gentlemen carton Wong carton thank you so much for joining us on the strange water podcast yeah hi nice to meet you R of course so um before we get started talking about ZK and about hyper Oracle um I'm a big believer that the most important part of every conversation are the people in it so with that being said um can you tell us a little bit about who you are how you found crypto and I guess once you found crypto why did you not run away yeah so I'm Carton and I um I'm the founder of like hyper Oracle which is like a programmable ZK Oracle protocol so basically it will Empower this on

Oracle will Empower smart contract to perform more computation and have accessibility for more data so about more computation we can enable Smart contract to do statistic computation AI inferencing and uh and like for data we can have like internet data and on historical data for smart contract and we use dkp to you know like compress the data and computation and then get the res and proov to the smart contract so that's what we do so and uh I actually got into crypto quite long ago in high school and I uh I co- offered like one of the Python Library python Bitcoin mining library with my high school teacher and

then uh we we are kind of dumb back then we don't think it's real money so what we do actually we didn't use the script we test the script and got some Bitcoin it was like 50 or 25 Bitcoin per block like back than 2011 but like what we all we do basically sell the script for 10 USD and then and then and then that's like how we do so our client got really rich but like we are kind of like broke still and then uh so so after I get some money I go to like uh us for school and um and then I um study astronomy and physics back to the college and then after I graduate I just go to uh Google uh and go become a software engineer and

go to Tik Tok to become a tech Le on like the tech side for the Privacy department and then um I come back to Krypto because like obviously the bull market and also like the uh tto was have a plan to you know cut the department of piracy preserve and then um because like they just spend Bunch Budget on the Privacy team but they find out American government no actually they don't really care about that at the actually because like like a political pick for them so like so this kind the budget no matter how good they do it doesn't matter really and like so I just like okay then I should go to some like industry that actually care about this like cryptography technology and stuff and

then um so I go back to crypto and uh back then 2021 that that's once I decided to come back to crypto and then I check how many solution architecture and layer one layer two like Bunch architecture solution and then I find out it's like a this like a r Market I don't want to join the docf amount the layer to so an alternative layer one so that I just like begin to think if there's so many layer one layer two all of them will need a Oracle right like so so I want to well position my business and then like I just like see Oracle it would be a good industry and begin to do research on Oracle and I found out like majority I was say 99% Oracle like

basically is a for is a fork of Chan link so that I find out like uh it's like that's why they always like claim them themselves a chaning killer but they never is because they're just a fork right there no innovation there why you win the market no sense and then I see like CK technology is getting more and more sophisticated and now is the time that we can use dkp to do like approving on the Oracle industry so that like was like I see this two like a uh uh cycle is overlapping each other once a business cycle there like a blue ocean for Oracle and then also the technology is facing a paradigm shifting

so that like um we will be able to use the new technology to do Oracle so this two Factor Together made me put down the decision that I I have to do a company now or to start a new protocol I mean like not company because a crypto industry is a protocol now that to uh uh uh to revolutionize the uh Oracle industry yeah so we'll talk about a lot about what you're building and like the opportunity that's so clearly ahead of us but while we're still in your background so you said that you were working at uh Google and tikt right were you working on cryptography yeah kind of it's like trusty Hardware so basically in Google it was like um it's a trusted

Hardware basically you need to do like formal replication and do like uh te stuff and ckp stuff for the hardware and for the cloud computation that's like the job in Google and later on the Tik Tok is like uh uh it call uh trusted computed department and then it's for the Tik Tok Cloud Tik to have like Cloud but they never just never public it just like another big tech company they have their own cloud that's why I did I guess you've already a little bit answered this but I would love if you could expand on this I think for most of us who kind of came to cryptography organically or at least through crypto we have This Magic Moment that happened in the last two or three

years where we've all realized that ZK while it has application to privacy is like not really about privacy it's much more about uh like being able to yeah succinctness and being able to compress and then project computation uh in and out of blockchains I guess my question for you is um while you're working on all of this stuff at Google and Tik Tok is are these paradigms and these visions of what cryptography are for like really clear and do you think that these big companies are kind of ahead of us on understanding how ZK is going to really no okay okay yeah yeah the web two perspective for ZK right like it's really interesting dynamic in like this

web two company they want to do ZK and te stuff actually because they want to uh do to to do two thing one is like uh uh because normally in Google and Tik Tok they call trusted Compu why it called trusted Compu is because like uh it's a cloud computation you have a client that the client will worry about like let's say if your client is like the competitor of one of the Google's product and then you worry about that if you use Google Cloud platform to run your computation Google will know steal your stuff and mess up your computation and so the Google Cloud platform need to prove to the client that they're executing a computation privately even Google doesn't know what the heck is going on inside the computation that's

the first one to preserve the Privacy for the computation job for their client and because some of them some of the client will be some bank right they have a multiple different bank and you don't know if have Google invest on some bank and you would prefer another bank over another and steal some information for another bank right so you will want to Google to prove that like they are running that executing the computation fairly without like snooping your uh data and computation process that's the F first one privacy and the second one is that uh they want to um they basically they want they want to tell the user that like all their computation are safe and nobody can snoop can back door the program database and stuff like

that um yeah it's like another one is like security like it's just like the two main purpose for doing like the ZK cryptography te in we to company but like um from long times ago why ZK Tech is like was being invented right it's because like in back to 1980 like there was like a time that like the computer was super slow in the in in like some military devices right so like they will want that if you have like a commander Center that can have a perform more complex Compu and send a command to certain super slow computer and then then we can execute and decode the stuff

like verify the information quickly that's the original like uh uh purpose for doing ZK to like uh prove to a super slow machine that like you have a you finish a super complex computation right for Commander Center you got a cluster of computer you run all the computation and now we decide to go to this place and then like you need to send this information with the proof into like a super shy devices that the soier have in their own side so to confirm that is like not a fa message from the enemy and stuff like that it's like you need to prove the super slow machine but like because like but this situation kind of got Weare because like later the compu the the the PC or like the private

devices just develop so fast this technology no longer there there's no super slow computer in the world for a while until the blockchain right the blockchain essentially is like a super slow computer so that we can um use the suus to complex complex compute and then have the resolve and the proof to the blockchain yeah I mean there's something super interesting about how Mo's law really took a lot of like the hard interesting problems that we were working working on and just made them irrelevant when we thought forever but it turns out that like all of that really cool re like I mean the more you know about ZK the more it literally is Magic and the more you're like hiding

numbers behind curves and like doing all this crazy stuff and it's just it's like totally I don't know if weird is the right word but just interesting how we found ourselves like moraw took care of the computational differential problem and then 30 years later we decided to reintroduce it yeah exactly and and like also in web DK like you don't really need to care about the performance that much because like the verifier is not a blockchain the rier essentially is like another server super beefy server so you don't know you don't need to worry about the proof size you don't need to worry about like how much the efficiency of the polinomial and stuff you don't need to worry about that so that's why in web

2 they doesn't really lean on the technology like it doesn't really Deval anything uh until crypto is like yeah and I um I just recently had a conversation with someone about like kind of the more fuzzy thoughts around like ZK and security and like open source verifiability right and let's say for 99% of the applications that you and I use on a daily basis on our computer like we they're probably open source we probably could go find the source code we probably could download it we probably could build it ourselves and we could check it against the hash and that the website put up there and make sure that everything's fine but like who who does that nobody md5 whatever it happen

that's why like the supply chain attack is like a thing in the open source software like you can just like poison like some open source library and then like all the library they rely on that Library they will be wreck yeah yeah and it just um I think a question that like we all need to really wrestle with is like how much of this like decentralization permissionless stuff is like us really just like masturbating each other on like like thematic things that we care about versus things that actually matter yeah yeah I I I would say like um like the zkp today is like really efficient already compared with like 10 years ago it's like it's not the

even the same era so we can use of course use like this new Tad to apply on morphing not just Oracle and also like Bunch new kind of stuff like transaction for modification a bunch technology can be appli on yeah well I I think there's always a really important thing to talk about in technology where it's like getting 100x or THX efficiency improvements aren't just important for the technology but they make the technology applicable to fundamentally different yeah fundamentally different exactly and so I think let's pause this part of the conversation we'll return to it once we understand more about what hyper Oracle is and does um but but to suffice to say it's like very clear that

we're now we've just in the last year or so hit the point where ZK has hit its first THX Improvement and we can start to perceive applications and we're you know still have at least one or two or three more thousand X improvements to come until it's like real technology but with that with the background as it is now and especially where it was when you were starting hyper Oracle can you talk a little bit about like what did you see and like what were the problems that were you were seeing and before you even got to the solution being I need to build this protocol like what were the the things there that needed Solutions so before I buil hyper Oracle like and also I feels like smart contract really

need something new and not Enterprise have a huge attack weter so before hyper Oracle I think all the Oracle Services is pretty much like fully centralized like it's no way they're not centralized because the traditional or Oracle me mechanism that basically introduced by Chan link is basically everybody just wo to a Smart contract right so like if you have 900 people W for smart Contra the gas fee is unscalable the gas fee will be like you know per minute it would be a few thousand per year would be like $6 million something like that that's like basically it's it's basically it's like unscalable so like which will make all the Oracle provider try to like make things

aggregation happen in the own server but when the hacker had their own server aggregator server it basically had every voting so it's like it's super dangerous to have that it's like what's the point of using that why not just have a server just directly report to a Smart contract right so like um I see the problem is that like uh even the D app still rely on the centralized server provider so I was thinking about can we put like Oracle system fully on chain make it become protocol and then to make it safer faster and cheaper to use and then um so so that's like the problem exist before hyper Oracle and now through like the most sophisticated like ZK

technology we have and also um the open source Library we open source just recently called opml that will enable like any AI model and um uh any onchain historical data and internet data into the smart contract and do the computation inside the oracle but the Oracle is on chain because the Oracle trigger is on a smart contract and it settle in a smart contract it's like when you start a transaction from a EA account it's like that kind of experience and the whole network is fully decentralized and then it's like no we we don't even want run the run our own no and like so so that's like let people have like incentiv mechanism

along with like the layer one or Layer Two so that every time they run this node they will just run hyper Oracle note together so that like they would be able to perform more value to the smart contract so let's talk about like the actual construction here so we have can you actually just walk through all the pieces starting with like what's what did you need to deploy on chain when uh actually let's just walk through the life cycle of like let's say the most basic Oracle uh process is I want to know the price of eth like what how would I interact with Hyper Oracle yeah that is like super simple one this is like a price Oracle usage so basically you in hyper Oracle transitional Oracle let me just use transitional Oracle as

an example transition Oracle basically you just call the Oracle provider and then like I say I want this and then make it in your image so that like right so that I can have that in my contract but in hyper Oracle is different the reason why we call them programmable is because like you you just program it you just in ZK graph and just say hey I want this data from binance I want the token price of ethereum from binance from Comas con okx and then you just you just write it you don't need to call us at all and then like you just write it and then with JavaScript assembly script super simple and then uh uh and then you deploy this job make this job become an nft and then put it in ethereum and then you put down a bounty for whoever

execute this job for you on CH on on CH they will be after they pass the verification they will be able to have the reward let's say I put down like a 0.1 e per 100 block whoever can provide me this data per 100 block that would be worthed 0.1 e and that is something mechanism like this and then uh uh and then and then you probably as like operator Oracle operator you see this job on on chain and then you want to you begin to execute the proving from from the oks binance and combase and then provide this data with the proof and submit to the verifier smart contract if it passed the verification you will be

rewarded and you do it for 100 block you reot it like1 e and stuff like that so the the fundamental idea behind hyper Oracle is that instead of this kind of the current Dynamic where like we have our Oracle contract and that's great if the data that you want already is in it and if not you need to like hope you know somebody yeah hope you know somebody important enough to get your data in um but what hyper Oracle does is flip that Paradigm on its head and say all hyper Oracle is doing is providing a like smart contract that that accepts uh basically requests with bounties and then um it's up to like the hyper Oracle Network to look at those requests if any

individual hyper Oracle operator says like oh that's actually pretty interesting for me I'm willing to do that then they go they run it it's more like economy economy uh reason right because if the cost for you to run it is like cheaper than way way cheaper than your reev most likely you run it and also the whole process is on like the layer one layer two it's not nothing called hyper Oracle Network exist it's like the whole thing happen on chain the communication got it got it and I think there's like a couple interesting things under that but like really what you're saying is that there's not a hyper Oracle separate blockchain that also needs to be Main ched in parallel to like the the chains

in which you're actually using the Oracle yeah yeah yeah you don't you don't need a chain to do that so like you start the Oracle code inside the whatever chain you want to settle the result let's say if you want to do on polygon just start the Cod on polygon the res be settled on polygon if you want to do it on ethereum you start a call on ethereum and then res settle on ethereum so I think let's like jump from a super simple thing like a price feed to something that's like super complex and interesting so I saw a couple examples of um I guess like hypothetical uh ZK daps that you could build using hyper Oracle could you just pick one of those uh explain us to what it is and then um I kind of want to talk through like the specifics of how it works so

like the requester are they actually writing out the lines of code that they want executed or and and then all all the life cycle so can you pick a um what's an interesting application on hyperoral yeah oh we got a lot of application but like most recent one is like something called zkm it basically is like a I see the the potential of this application can change the whole defi dynamic because like as we know amm is one of the most important application in defi right so but the problem for amm is that like for such a long time the market making efficiency for amm is quite low let's say because like you need x * yal to K right it's a straight line right it's not even like

protic Market making um so every time you use Dax you will need to pay for the alpha for obit trust Trader who is like try to balance the value between the token pair in Unis swap V2 and Unis swap V3 and um so you will actually have the worst rate than when you trade in the Dex than uh when you trade in the centralized exchange so people will prefer to use centralized exchange because they have proactive Market making you don't need to pay for the alpha uh for for for Arbitrage Traders in centralized ex change and um so the problem is essentially the problem is because the market making efficiencies for traditional de is limited the reason why it's limited is because traditional

smart contract cannot perform a complex computation in it right so now we have TK Oracle how we can resolve this problem how about let's move the market making strategy and computation into the ZK Oracle now you smart contract just need to have a verifier and and then the verifier will be able to verify the computation from the Z Oracle so let's say I can change the market making strategy in the ZK Oracle from x * yal K into some like fancy AI model we can make AI model as a market maker or we can just do a linear regression for Market making other sprad computation stuff like that and then and then no matter what way you will made it way

more efficient for the market making and then uh that so that people will prefer to use stxs more than centralized Exchange in possibly in the future because you have like a good Market making yeah and I think like a way to visualize this for those of us who aren't like actually building this stuff is unis swap versus curve right curve has a fancier like more nuanced curve right of um exchange but the problem with that is it requires the evm to do more computation and be that gu higher exactly right and so I think what you're trying to describe by the zkm is you can jamack it with 10 times as much computation to get more sub do

the same yeah and then how it work yeah how does it work oh yeah so basically how it work is that like you basically like uh put down the model of whatever the competition you want as a market maker as like DK graph and deploy it as a nft into the blockchain and just mark on Che basically your um Dex smart contract basically run along with the N smart contract and then every time you want to have a computation code let's say somebody want to swap in the current block highight and then I submit the uh request and then like see orle Compu because they see the bounty in the nft and then submit the res to the verifier to your smart contract and your smart contract do verification if you pass the

verification and then it will execute the order basically it's like that and and this is going to be tough without uh charts to to really get this down but I want to visualize this so so the idea in this example is you have the ZK amm and that's a pretty simple smart contract that's just holding the assets and has basically a pointer that says like hey um this is the nft which we all know an nft is really just a smart contract so the smart contract is going to have the code that it wants to have executed and the Bounty that it's willing to pay and so the the ZK amm will say hey like let's on every block I want somebody to like this bounty is active yeah all you

need to do to win this bounty is perform this computation and then I guess like the magic of the ZK is that we can verify because we have the nft smart contract and therefore the code and we have the solution and the ZK proof provided by the hyper Oracle operator with those three pieces of information we can ZK prove on chain that the computation was run the result is valid and because of that we can release the bounty to the hyper Oracle operator exactly yeah yeah I that like that's super cool and it's interesting and I think like the one thing that I'm like a little bit curious about is like at least today and I you know we're all hoping for an ethereum that fixes this right but at least today like we have

this uh problem of uh the the fundamental difference between eoas and smart contract accounts and like what's cool about uh the way you just described this hyper Oracle system is it's super modular it's super um flexible you can build whatever you want but it does sound like you're adding all these different points where external actors need to create um external actions um that maybe so can you talk a little bit about when you're comparing hyper Oracle construction versus a traditional chain leak forked Oracle um H how did these systems compare in terms of like the

amount of external actors that are required and the amount of eoa actions that are needed yeah so um the it's from three aspect mainly the first one is like decentralization right because like uh now like any uh Oracle provider they no longer need to go through the aggregative services like channeling restone and and this similar type of Oracle services so they can just directly communicate with this SM contract because you no longer need the aggregated server anymore so you don't need to go through the Enterprise Oracle provider first and then aggregate the reserve into the smart contract you can just directly send to Smart contract that's the first one to make it more decentralized so everybody can

participate and join and second one is safer actually the reason why it's safer because every computation have the proof so even the Oracle note is hacked right because like the even you hack so like you can your proof didn't match the the res you still cannot pass the verifier for the smart contract so the worst case in here is not it's worst case that you just don't have data and or doesn't have a computation res and the smart contract won't lose anything for it and that's like the security part and the third one is like the um the programability so so you no long because like no operator right they just like download the FD basically check the FD data and then and

then run the program and then like according to the NC right and then and then submit the result back to the smart contract the whole process is like permissionless so it's like I should phrase that as like permissionless programable it looks like nobody have used this term like permissionless programable so that like uh uh uh the anyone can just like if you want to use C to perform something for smart contract you don't need to ask anyone to do it so you just just write a program and deploy it put down the reward and people will do it for you it's it's like the concept we propose I call it like Pro of Oracle work it's like Pro of Oracle work is just like you do the job generate the proof but it doesn't generate consensus between the no the

thing that jumps out to me is like scary about permissionless programmability is um you know just when you're running other people's code your machines at risk right and I think yeah you're right yeah so can you talk a little bit about like what let's say I'm interested in being a hyper Oracle operator like what do I need to be worried about just basically running arbitrary code in exchange for you know small crypto bounties yeah so so like small crypto Bounty like you just need to compute the uh do a calculation between your cost and like your with r right if it's positive you should do it if negative just don't do it so we will provide a

calculator like because the same logic as a gas fee right so basically if the reason why you don't need to worry about someone have like a torion or wirus like deploy in a smart contract because the gas feed for running that is quite really high so like we have something like that to in case uh the so the cost computation is like G computation is same same thing it's just like how many B you're executing in the whole workflow so you in case like people just write w true and then they will end and then wreck the computer up by The Operators machine uh we will have like the that kind of analyzer uh analyzer uh for our no operator so that we can dodge that

kind of like filter out all the problem code from the TK graph yeah got it so sorry let me repeat and tell me if I got this right that your solution to this is the same solution that um basically we have in blockchain or within the evm which is to simulate the transa or simulate the computation like look out how much much work that actually costs and then provide that to the operator beforehand to allow them to make kind of a coherent decision um and then it becomes like yeah like things could change in that moment and like it is what it is but like the idea is um we just try to like front as much of the

economics as possible and then let the actors decide yeah yeah yeah if like they see it as negative and also have like a kind of suspicious code but they still run it their own problem right you cannot really stop that yeah yeah what about do I need to worry about things like um somebody putting in code into a hyper Oracle Bounty and then running that code and suddenly there's something malicious in there and they've gained Rude access to my machine uh yeah that would be like a security problem into concern to be honest is like a good question really good question because I we have think about this question for a while and right now we don't really have like a perfect solution for it but like uh hosting a running the whole V image

inside isolated environment is like our suggestion because like you never know what's going on inside but if you just like you know create a virtual machine even they got a rule assess doesn't really matter so I guess my next question is like with with that being said like what kind of computing environment is available to uh people that are like creating hyper Oracle bounties like are they writing python code are they writing like what kind what kind of code is it they just need to write assembly script assembly script basically is Javascript that compil into Wars some binary code so just JavaScript is a same syntax with JavaScript it's pretty simple every programmer know it basically so like yeah so you're you're basically saying if we simplify

everything we've talked to talked about down to you write your programs in JavaScript and then a hyper Oracle like node will run it for you that's you've essentially brought JavaScript to the blockchain yeah basic basically I but every like ethereum developer know how to use assembly script anyway today because they need to set up the self graph no right you know when they use the graph for indest for their own protocol they need to set up something like that so I would say majority of like senior BL developer already know like how to set up this kind of thing yeah got it and so um I think like for me we can talk all day about how this enables and like gets us to the multi-chain Future which I think we all

believe that the multi-chain future still has like ethereum as the important chain but and then all the l2s and things outside of that I think if you have um any like interesting insights or any ways that hyper Oracle is going to solve that problem I'd love to talk about it but the other thing hyper Oracle is like clearly here to solve is the bridge from the evm into outside environments whether that's the internet or um real world assets or that kind of thing so before we get to that is there anything we should talk talk about in particular about what hyper Oracle is really going to do to like supercharge the um the rollup Centric road map yeah so I mean like hyp Oracle is free to use right so every row up basically just

come with like a free organic Oracle services that do they don't need to pay for any subscription fee and then which also use their token as like a new gas metric so I I would say every roow up would like that and uh they can empower them a lot yeah mhm yeah cool yeah and I think especially like through this bounty system what's cool is that it enables anyone to have this functionality without like really freaking out about your token and and like those kind of economic yeah pieces so uh big fan of of the system you're building so let's talk about the um yeah again like what types of things um hyper Oracle allows in in regards to

connecting the blockchain to the real world so like I think the the big thing is like you're adding an internet connection to the world computer like you are get giving connectivity so can you talk a little bit about um either the visions that you guys are having at hyper Oracle or some of the projects that are already starting to be built on like how this technology will like kind of bring us out of Casino land and into like really supporting the financial system yeah so um there's a many way right so uh I would definitely say like AI will be the gamechanging like uh technology here because like when people talk about AI times crypto is like it's like a kind of no use case and like kind

of but like uh uh in our development and when I think about use case we find out many thing that might actually bring us like a message adoption meaningful application because like right now um just like bringing more data into a SM contract is not enough because the you need like strong computation you need a CPU strong CPU to process this amount of the data right but like if your computation ability is quite low even you have all the data in the world doesn't it's just meaningless for you and like so uh we also have the computation part in hyper Oracle that will Empower smart contract to do more computation or like help them to digest all this data before they receive it and

then uh so that we can see many interesting application like AI gcft basically that will make the whole Creator economy like mve to blockchain so that the every inference word for the uh aigc model will be able to become a financial asset because like in let's say five to six years from now majority of the art in the world will be produced by AI right like like that's just really clear Trend and then U but like before and before uh when we develop nft technology like obviously nobody really expect that will happen that quick so so so nft is more about like a Creator economy and

the artists got the Loyalty fee from like the future trading and all kind of stuff right we can actually parallel migrate the whole business business model from the ft to the AI so the AI itself become empty and that all the influencing or all the artwork that created by the AI model will be also the sub nft for that aift model and this kind of like a new innovation will actually help to Boom up the technology for open source AI because right now like open source AI does not really have like a sustainable weight for the business model the only way for majority AI company to make money become profitable is that they close source for

their model and then uh provide the API right and charge 20 Buck a month something like that and uh it's like basically blocking the knowledge gut like propagation right the knowledge propagation so we by deploy aigc they open source the AI model but still make huge amount of the profit through the AI model so it can help the AI industry to evolve faster and quicker and more open to the world uh that's like the first one and then like the second one is that like um the the landing protocol let's say you can basically like if somebody put down collateral through like some organization like the bank

right I put down my house as collateral in the bank and then I want to land something in the on chain I want to get some usdc because I put down the collateral and then also the M Modo can analyze to help to do the fraud detection like to see is this uh collateral is real it's like a credit card right it's like so you do the fraud detection so that people on chain will able to land the stuff to another people easier to increase the capital efficiency for the world so um that's the changing I'm seeing because like for Mass adoption for blockchain technology you need to use blockchain to do more things right it's the same logic that like why smartphone and iPhone is like dominating the world now you have more

smartphone than people uh that's because like uh uh you can use phone to do a lots of stuff right and then the reason why you can use phone to do a stuff is because like your phone have a stronger and stronger CPU and GPU every year so like so that you'll be able to have it to do many application that was impossible before and so same as smart contract if you want to use Smart contract for more stuff you will need to like have a smart contract to perform stronger computation and more data access man you said a lot of like really interesting stuff there I think like first and foremost um I so I came to crypto like through the lens of finance

and I came heing to D5 first and like for my first like I joined in 2021 and for my first let's say year here I thought like the point of all of this was a better Financial system like we're going to replace everything and um you know like just to cut to the chase like I found ZK and like that's when I realized that this really is the story about distributed computing and not about finance and if anything I think like while all the finance talk the money talk has been great for like bringing people like me in I think it like really clouds what we're doing here and so you know my big Insight was we all can kind of recognize that nfts were this crazy fad that went from nothing to like billions of dollars and then like

came back down and maybe boor apes or crypto punks will be worth money like that again but we all know that that's not coming back and that's okay though right because like this this different cycle have different like asset and like what did we take from it we took these like core Primitives like nfts like ERC there's there's a few of them right but like we took these core Primitives and like exactly like you're saying in just the basic structure of hyper Oracle like we're putting them to use I just love that like these bounties and the code that you're running are nfts like that's exactly how I think that um what we took away from the nft boom really

matters with nfts actually mattering and so like I so um am on board with you there and and I know I am so confident that crypto and AI are part of the same story like crypto is about scarcity and it's about provability and identity and and just slowing things down while AI is about speeding things up and about like abundance and creativity and chaos and like I know that those two they both is like a complimentary like relationship yeah for sure and I think on the show we've talked to uh Jason Morton from uh e Ezekiel and we've talked to Dan Shore from modulus Labs like there's we've had

a couple conversations about Ai and ZK and how they come together and again like I I don't really know yet but like I can totally imagine that like maybe the point of blockchain is just to give the AI that we're building identity and like elevate to the level where it can actually change things in the world um and like it's again these conversations and exactly what you described uh that like helped me start to like really piece together like how we get there yeah how we get there it it's fast like we already enable any AI model on ethereum and any L2 like any literally any and then uh it just like um right now all the piece of the technology is

like is there it just like need somebody to know assemble them together and we are assembling it so I think next year like they're going to have a boom of like AI application on chain and then uh we will see okay man I I let you get to the like big brain part a little too early but I want to like take us back to um hyper Oracle and how it actually works so like one of the things that I'm thinking about like in this AI empowered world where like at the end of the day we actually do need people to be running the like plugging in these computers and like servicing them and like downloading the software and like opting into the system so like like I said huge fan of

the the bounty system and like how that makes much more sense than like the direct like token based system um but how can you talk through like how you are thinking about bringing hyper Oracle operators to the table and like building a community of people that like want to participate in this kind of work yeah I I think it's just like we need to have a really good tooling for the uh operator so that they can avoid to being attacked and they will avoid the malicious software and stuff like that and then beside that um I think the most important is that like we uh made the whole mechanism smoother and like uh people will like easier to participate like you can just have a phone and then

reveal like what's job is happening on chain and then if you even your phone do a proove right and that you can contribute a computational resources on your phone and make earn some money through your phone so everybody be able to you know like contribute to the network and then like work to assemble the world computer yeah man yeah again I I love the world computer metaphor and like what you're talking about really does bring it to life a little bit more do you have any concerns um both on just like the realities of building uh like a a community but just even on a theoretical level do you have any concerns about centralization at the hyper Oracle layer like imagine a world in which T-Mobile is the only person

willing to do this like is that a problem uh good question it's not a problem at all because like uh hyp Oracle is fully open source and like everybody can download image and run it without permission at all it's it's hoc is like a it's not a blockchain but it's like a protocol it's like a way how you communicate with blockchain smart Contra so that like the centralization definitely is not an option at all for us it's like it's basically the whole design there no element that is like centralized because when you talk about centralization it's like only it's like talking about permission dat a wi listic operation right only certain people can do certain thing right but in the whole protocol design everybody can deploy any computation including maybe you know

like dangerous suspicious uh uh computation into mainly as nft and then like they can another people anyone in the world we'll be able to download any uh uh CK graph NST to their own computer and then run the computation and submit to any smart contract that they want to submit to we don't really have the control for the whole process it's fully like onchain and so like that's why it's kind of like onchain Oracle it's not Enterprise Oracle do you so I guess um you know with all things ZK uh and all things I guess blockchain at the end of the day like you're relying super heavily on the

cryptography and so can you talk a little bit about the choices that you needed to make when you were designing this system and like I'm always interested in talking to builders about what it's like implementing ZK when ZK is changing so fast yeah that's true ZK does change really fast really fast I remember when I start to do the uh hyper Oracle there was like a paper called hyper plon and that was like a su check protocol for the TK protocol and then it was like deing at that time and after 6 month you got folding and then after another six month you got like cyclick folding all kind of like new T that's there but but you know what like one things never

change is like the kdg plunk is always there like from zcash so that's why we the first primary Library we use to construct the hyper Oracle is actually the uh Halo 2 uh Library which is like Prov by etherum Foundation it's like completely public good no commercial license you can just do whatever you like with it and then uh also that's like the magic and like that's like why open source software always get more success because like it just people can do it without any concern even probably they slower or even like perform it's not as well as another but like because it's like public good so you're just willing to even take the risk that is

lower than another library and still use it so um but in uh yeah basically we just take hello to from E foundation and add our own modification uh with dness SLB to make it like faster and more reliable and more suitable for our use case um so basically we have like a uh Halo to version called Halo to hybrid uh which we de develop and then um it's like have like some feature we need when another project might not need and uh that's what we do and it's also open source many people can use it and also I uh would like to uh want to try another Library called plony is basically develop by uh polygon

team and then uh then plony have like is a hash based uh scheme it's different with like a hello to kggg is like a kggg based scheme and then uh but like the price for it is like you got bigger proof but your proing T way very faster and uh we have still working on the experiment on like try to have like a faster proving scheme and to make the whole Z Oracle system faster although right now our B quite good it's just like five to 7 second to do the proof for the Z Oracle which already shorter than the layer one flot time which is 12 seconds but like for many Layer Two is still not fast enough because layer to right the BL time is like 2 second so

you you would want it faster so um so we still work on like different uh experiment to see how to make it even shorter but right now our Benchmark are already really happy for it because like it's enough for us at least Deploy on the main net for ethereum so I want to get to latency in a second but while we're just still on uh implementing ZK and ZK being an extremely fast changing technology I think the the message that you were trying to get across was that like yes while things are changing the so it sounds like because the way that you're using ZK is all you need to do on chain is the verification and maybe you might need to do some smart contract

upgrades over time if you like other proving systems but um it it sounds like you're able to build this in a way where all of like the infrastructure kind of works regardless of the proving system and then you can kind of like modularly swap in and out like whatever is um the most performant like the the best possible thing at the time yeah yeah so basically we try to make the system more mod modular right because like the uh so that because technology is always improving and changing you don't know probably tomorrow you have like a new uh scheme that like just outperform everyone like 10,000% faster and then and then you just have to use it but you

don't want to redo everything right so like you better to decouple every code the front end back end together and then made it decoupling really good that essentially modulus means like decouple every component the co yeah so um you brought up latency and I I've wanted to talk about that and so I think like your first answer is really answers the big question right which is like how fast can we do a turnaround on you know a hyper Oracle request and like how does that interact with block times and like totally hear you that if today we can beat main net then we're fine and things are only going to get better from here but I guess um taking a step back and

just looking at the big picture of the entire construction and the ecosystem that we're trying to build something that I've noticed as like when we talk about ZK like we really really like power through all of like the Nitty Gritty which is you know like uh round the amount of round trips needed the amount of just like overhead needed uh in you know verifications when that wasn't happening before like I I'm wondering do you worry that like the constructions that we're building are so because they're uh decentralized and have so many different components that we're always going to have trouble competing with like just using AWS and

and then if so like what does that mean about the systems that we're building yeah um using AWS is fine in my opinion like because it's fast and reliable machine right but like I always need like we always need to care about like the asset mechanism right we need to worry about like for desire protocol you to think about like what if AWS do not work all a sudden or just become like some Evo company just ban everyone like so we as a protocal designer you need to like it's just like Bitcoin right it's fine that every minor in Bitcoin is using AWS completely fine but we just need to think about the migration problem what if like Bitcoin is like uh a is no longer function or they just ban all the Bitcoin minor what will happen

what will happen is that like you just need like the difficulty of like Bitcoin mining all the sudden from 60 J down to two and then any laptop computer will be able to run the Bitcoin Noe and then just mine Bitcoin out of it so like that's like a migration problem essentially so in hyper Oracle we have the same concern like what if all the no operator AWS and all of them just like not doesn't exist anymore uh how how how to handle the migration problem actually have a plan B for it so basically like because the Bounty is still there right so like actually it's easier to get the Bounty because if every a machine is running which means like you always have competition whoever got the Bounty first who will be able to settle the uh settle the reward for their uh for their for

their computation right for their wallet and then uh but if you don't have competition which means like no matter how fast or how slow your computer is you just run the job you still got the get the reward for it so like the migration is like a click is like a second once the aw is not functioning all like a hungry like little computer will be able to go jump into it and like do a computation for it it's like similar uh similar computation process of P the migration process could be quite similar so I think what you said is what's what's important in crypto and distributed computing is not necessarily to worry about like okay what does the system look like in good times it's like what do the failure scenarios look like

and do we have a clean Glide path to get there yeah because like that's the secret spice that why Bitcoin is still running for 10 year more than 10 year right like a long time and then like never will have a problem at 15 year and then like it doesn't have problem even once because like it's a migration design really well so like once the operator no longer operated like the the another people can just operate it with lower price but still got the same reward So like um economy designed to make it migrate easily yeah we need to think about the AET plan when talking about centralized decentralized problem with AWS yeah yeah and I'm curious what you think about what I'm about to say um

another thing I'm starting to see a lot of to the point that I think it might solve like the latency and the roundtrip issue is starting with like the igen layer moment and then just watching everything that's come from that um it looks it's starting to feel more yeah it's starting to feel more and more like all of the computers that are running all of these services are going to be one computer and they're going to be the ethereum node or put a different way the ethereum stakers have computers that are much more powerful than running an ethereum node and they're going to use that space to be running everything from hyper Oracle to Igan da to um you know like even like um you know polygon ZK

evm sequ it makes sense it makes sense yeah uh actually it's a really good design with staking mechanism is one of the best like I would call it's a D5 design in the space because actually have a utility and uh actually can have like actual usage to pay for the Y right like it's a really good design to be honest but like what I my take for that is like I actually have a dual analy like the note on ethereum actually majority of the ethereum note is like quite weak they don't even have like GPU with it so which means like when in uh this reaking mechanism go into like Ai and related stuff uh most like reaking Note won't be able to perform anything

and if you can perform like a complex computation already you won't able normally they don't care to be like e no because the reward is not that high because the reward for e no is not b based on how strong your machine is it's based on how many if you take in right so like uh you don't really want to do it just with your super BV computer to become e no so majority of the ethereum no is quite like weak no you probably have CPU probably have like 30 or 40% space left over but what you can do with it like probably some simple competition like uh so in our condition you definitely cannot use this kind of Noe to do zkp or AI computation right so

that's why um so far we never really use any reaking in hyper Oracle because like it just uh uh because the no majority of ethereum no is not capable to do it at the moment and the point for ethereum right the point for E to change from POS P to P is that low down the barrier to operate e no so that more people can participate uh more decentralized that's the point for have a etherum 2.0 right so like uh I don't expect like this will work on secet Oracle and AI stuff yeah I think that's a fair point I think you know there's people like me I run a node in my fiance's closet and you're right

doesn't have a GPU like I spent like $1,000 Dollar on it two years ago so yeah it's like a b PIR no yeah I mean it's fine it's like an Intel Nook like yeah I probably has like 50% of capacity left to run stuff and that's definitely definitely not enough for AI but it's probably enough to run the calculations for ZK amm right and so maybe yeah yeah I probably that's a good point that's a good point yeah it might be it might be and like uh uh also that's why I have value there because like they basically utilize the NP space that in like the ethereum node well and then there's like operators like T-Mobile or um or I mean there's so many of them that like are huge and actually

have extra compute power um you know I I I think Ian Lair is amazing of because of like the amount of conversation and energy it's put into ZK and I just love that everyone is talking about what they're going to build I was like super into the idea and then when they launched and it was a like they accepted all these liquid reaking tokens and it's essentially the protocol is the idea is like you don't need to issue shitcoins anymore come give us good quality collateral to farm coins and then and then not now it's all like so you're hundreds of millions of dollars of liquid staking tokens which is De basically delegated proof of stake now

so the node operators if they screw up any of the raking Services it's just like some Rando depositor who is going to suffer like the whole thing has like a little bit Fallen apart for me yeah it's like it's like conflict actually with staking mechanism is kind of conflict with like the P consensus because it just like make it not secure anymore but like it's still so far so good but I just I don't know what's well so far so good all this is a deposit contract yeah yeah yeah yeah exactly and like yeah I think the BAL of a paper to talk about it no so you know I I love how much energy it's brought into the

space and I love how many people have started building really interesting things specifically so that they could be on IG layer um but uh it's like a 8 AA project right it's like a bunch I see AGA like new partnership every day it's like yeah all right man we've been going for an hour I could keep go take I could keep talking all day but um I can see it's dark there so I will wrap this up but before I let you go can you uh please just uh let the audience know where they can find you where they can find hyper Oracle and if they got excited about hearing about all this stuff like where can they learn more and where can they get involved yeah uh you can definitely go to our GitHub just go to our website hyper oracle. click the GitHub button you go to our GitHub with

have a bunch like really good open source software to uh for for everybody developer as a study material or you just want to use it to build your smart contract and uh also you can if you go to ai. hyper oracle. you'll be able to see that like in the first time in history that will be able to perform large model in ethereum smart contract and uh also right now we support llama 2 CH pt2 and St diffusion you can try it all out there and uh you can also have me in Twitter like oh X now which my handle is like a zerox carton and then um I normally in the Bay Area uh I also hang out with my friend in Stanford and

Bluto uh Blue Bottle Coffee in palato all the time so if you guys see me can say hi and uh have he heard about this broadcast uh and then um yeah awesome man well I was a cardinal too I graduated 2013 uh and studyed computer science but anyway carton man this is incredible I I right now there's so much going on in ZK and really essentially what that means is there's a bunch of people building ZK Primitives and just saying like we're building you know tools to abstract away ZK so developers can focus on applications and it's pretty rare that we talk to someone who's actually using ZK to develop something useful so I'm just so energized about um hyper

Oracle and about like the world that you're enabling and um it it's not often that you can start to see the future and like this conversation is one of those moments so thank you my friend really appre yeah I appreciate it appreciate your time n