Tim Galebach: Uqbar – Smart Contracts on Urbit #491

Transcript

welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution I'm Brian Crane and I'm here today with Maher Roy and today we're going to speak with Tim lock mipteff who is the founder of ukbar ukbar is a ZK roll-up and ethereum ZK roll up that's built on orbit and you know probably a lot of people are going to be like what the hell so we're gonna like uncover all that and you know get to the bottom and hopefully you'll come away with an understanding of what Opa is up to which is pretty exciting so thanks so much for joining us teamwork yeah it's great to be great to be here thanks for having me guys

cool well um maybe she'll also make me a brief disclaimer here so my hair and I of course uh are a co-founders of course won and we have invested in oakbar and also personally and have been sort of involved in partnership with them as well so I want to mention that not that much though so a little bit a little bit minor disclaimer all right so let's get into it I am actually one thing I'm curious about is did you first get involved in crypto or in orbit and what was sort of this journey that you had into this into this

world okay so the answer it's actually like a better question even than it sounds because I think the answer is first into crypto for sure so I was like one of the people who bought Bitcoin near the top in 2013 at the end and was like sort of into it sort of around and like I remember actually in 2016 getting back in and like investing in it then and actually listening to epicenter at the time I remember taking like random walks around I think it was in Estonia or something a small town listen listening to epicenter trying to sort of boot myself back up on um where crypto was at then and as that year went and through like the Ico boom I was like programming in solidity doing a lot of stuff there and I think um I actually remember encountering Urban then uh sort

of looking it over and doing the thing that I sometimes do which is something I try to stop myself from doing which is sort of dismissing it too fast for a simple reason or dismissing things too fast for simple reason so I looked at it and I was like oh this is cool I see what they're trying to do in terms of having this you know Global peer-to-peer Network that can coordinate easily but I can probably just do that with ethereum like I think this was at a time before uh like in 2018 if you remember ethereum just had all these scaling issues that were unanticipated uh like with plasma and stuff like that and people ran into a lot of challenges there and but in 2016 2017 it was like okay probably we'll figure this out this will be great I think also at the time the challenges

of kind of stitching together peer-to-peer apps with lots of pieces weren't known so with all that I was like I get whatever it's going for but you know I think ethereum is new um it's like seems to be on track to solve those things if not it some other similar like blockchain system and so I basically just put her a bit to the side to then and did not look at it again until I think it was late 2019 must have been October or so okay cool and then you joined uh so and then you joined clone as well like what's the story of how you ended up at loan yeah so I got back into orbit or checked it out again not even back in I wasn't in it first in late 2019 because one of my friends who was friends with ravnus rickfer one of the main core

developers at Clan was like oh yeah I'm hanging out with you know Ted robness rickfer he's really into orbit um and doing it but I think it's stupid and it's not gonna work so then I checked it out again at that point just to see where it was I had more free time and I was just like an outside Community member um I started I got really into it in May 2020 uh during like the covid stuff when I had a lot of free time I started first uh figuring out how their sort of Assembly Language knock worked wrote a tutorial about that then decided like okay I want to write a tutorial for how to just write programs on the system in general because there wasn't anything like that so did that on my own as a community member at this time there were

probably like four or five Community programmers who weren't working for Talon in urban it was very small uh kept doing that over the summer um then coin wallet in late 2020 mid-2020 something like that um and after I sort of finished up with that in the beginning of 2021 I joined what became the orbit foundation so it wasn't exactly Twan I was working for like uh Josh who's now the head of the Urban Foundation kind of was like do you want to come with me and sort of be I guess more or less technical director of this New Foundation where you sort of you know figure out um things in the ecosystem um like help people on board show them how to program it figure out what kind

of Technical Resources to make and so I did that for most of 2021 and I think the biggest sort of achievement of that time was like uh up until then all the people who knew how to write orbit practically or most of them were working for Clon and it was very much like in order to program her but you had to become a clone employee or very closely Affiliated and kind of be taught uh the secrets and I think what we did successfully is we were able to kind of prove the hypothesis that you could onboard programmers to orbit uh fairly straightforwardly and there wasn't anything overly complex about it which people definitely worried about uh before then so yeah I never worked for Twan but I guess at that time the foundation and Talon were so close and

the foundation was just splitting off that you know I may as well have I was on like their um you know all hands calls and things like that but we were very much trying to make this like outside thing that would be able to successfully onboard people without them needing to go and work for Talon and I think um you know looking back it's just a very proud achievement like it worked like you know the foundation became its own thing soon after I left um people keep learning it there's way more you know when I started there were a few like five Urban programmers not into lawn now there's probably a couple hundred so yeah that was what I did and I was yeah pretty happy with how it all went like more so than most things go in life you know so we've done a few podcasts

about orbit we did a podcast actually a long time ago in 20 17 I think my hair and I did the podcast with Galen which is sort of how we you know learn about orbit and got kind of involved a little bit and then more recently we did one I did one with Josh that you just mentioned who's the executive director of the Urban Foundation and then also the one with uh with till the tobus and uh with uh who you mentioned uh Ted uh who's the technical director of the foundation so with that being said still most people write in crypto don't really understand Urban they're confused so

um how do you explain orbit like there's kind of two directions that you can come at it from one is sort of taking Urban and saying how this has good features for crypto and how it works well I actually prefer the other direction which is you take crypto and you start to say okay why do we not have very rich like daps um what's standing between us in there and what do we wish we had to make better ones and I think as you do work through that you almost start to independently invent Urban like you know leibnitz and Newton like both doing calculus like on the side you can actually sort of reinvent Urban in this way which is you say like okay we don't

have great daps why is that well let's look at what kind of daps are successful um definitely like the biggest successes are things like um like swapping and lending by far like uh Ave uni swap things like that there's uh we could also look at uh nft like trading protocols like open C or blur and in all these cases almost all of the interesting action is happening on chain uh like uniswap is like amazing because they were actually able to take something that people thought had to be done mostly off chain and get it all on chain similarly with like the lending protocols and how they handle you know liquidations and things like that um which is very very cool the thing is in all of this they're trying not to have heavy off-chain components which I think if you talk to people in ethereum

and crypto in general like in like the cosmos ecosystem like probably seven eight years ago they would have said you know what we all know that like blockchains have this limited capacity so we're expecting going forward that uh that we'll find ways to do lots of action off chain and then settle the main things on chain and to some degree if you even look at like the like successful l2s they've done that where they've been able to do like do that somewhat but in general for applications it's very very hard because the problem at the end of the day is if you want your application to be decentralized not even for like religious reasons or like you know privacy reasons but just for you know if you do a centralized service it's easy to shut down you can't offer all the features you want it's it's

harder to iterate on if you want to do a decentralized app you now have to distribute this app to all of your users and keep them up to date in the right versions handle all this stuff and if you don't do that or it falls apart at all it's just kind of gross and so because that's so hard I think people thought it's hard like okay some whiny Engineers need to work harder for three or four months but it's hard like stuff takes years or just doesn't happen at all and so if you want to solve that when I say that you would sort of reinvent orbit you start to think of things like okay I need to have some kind of operating system that I can guarantee or some kind of virtual machine that all of these you know spread out peers are running so

that at least when I deliver them software I know they're talking to each other in the right way they can handle versions changing well they can get it distributed cleanly they can know who the other peers are and their networking IDs not just their like crypto IDs and you start to go sort of further and further and you end up basically Reinventing Urban which is a peer-to-peer operating system that's just trying to make it so that you can predictably say what all these different nodes in your network are running and how you can deliver software to them and so I think kind of the proof of that is it took us a while but as we've built out with ukbar this kind of crypto layer on top of our bit where you can start to like actually realize this and be like

okay we're you know we're having applications um we're delivering them easy easily to people we're letting them compose off chain and then do their high value things on chain it actually is working like better even maybe than we would have thought so the way if we kind of Step all the way back and say how I would explain it to people it's that if you actually want to have cool Rich daps that kind of Drive the new meta of crypto like the new narratives that push people in uh you need to take a step back and engineer something a lot like a peer-to-peer operating system so if someone in the last five or six years had built something like Urban in another language or in sort of another stack I actually probably would be looking at it and we will probably be hedging our bets to Nuke bar and like

developing on that thing as well or making sure we knew it the thing is no one's like no one's on it it's like a daunting project that's hard to do and at the point where someone starts doing it I will take it very very seriously I just don't think it will happen until Urban and nuke bar prove concept enough that that becomes like economically desirable like where investors are think okay we just saw that work now we're gonna you know throw we're fine to throw money at you I'm actually curious if you could take a like practical example of what you're saying like like let's imagine like a tap that does X and then you put something on the blockchain and be like okay what are the

constraints that emerge and why do we need a sort of an off chain operating system is is that possible yeah absolutely so I'll take an example that I don't think is super Advanced or exciting or just like the the start of what we can do but when we were playing around in November December and wanted to be like okay what can we show people for what this is doing we're like okay let's make a poker game and what does that involve practically if you want to make it peer-to-peer uh you need to have let's leave aside mental poker for now or some Advanced algorithm let's say you want to have a server uh that kind of decides timeouts in the game who won Etc you want you know at least two players who

connect to that server uh you want them to be able to put money in escrow before you know each match and you want it to get paid out appropriately so suddenly you're looking at all these operations that sound easy but everything I said there hides a lot of complexity which is first deploy the server right if you're if you want it to be running all the time you would have to maybe deploy it to like a cloud service or something like that configure it make sure it's running then have that connect to a blockchain be able to take events coming in from people who say here's like the money that I want to put up and like lock it until uh the end have like those people read those events and this is all doable in you know a basic web 3 format but

when you start putting all the pieces together the friction gets quite bad both from okay This Server isn't working I want to make my own let's go deploy that oh now I'm following all these instructions for how to deploy it in the cloud that's actually quite complicated with orbit it was lit it's literally like you know push a button to say install the hosting software push another button and now it's running and so when we actually had one go down and I wanted to start up another one for our test games uh it was actually like remarkably easy and just sort of slots in then you go to everything about you know we want to deliver updates easily uh Urban lets us handle that to all the peers so they can stay they can stay synced and then we can even start doing and then even the wallet interactions

where you're like okay I need to send money uh to the escrow then have it be detected have that come back that's like something that you want to have done like pretty seamlessly and by putting it inside orbit we're able to have that happening all you know on our back end when the action happens you can spit it out and the end result at the end of the day is you have something that just works now we're expanding that a lot to actually a use case that I think is much more practical and close to home which is we wrote um we have chat and we're expanding it now to I guess something that is it basically becomes Dow tooling but in a very full-featured way where you're

like when you say what is a group of people excuse me um in urban it's traditionally been okay I have one server and that server keeps a list of who's in the group and you do that but there's no reason that that can't be an on-chain entity that it couldn't be like a Dao or some kind of group that records its various permissions or members or things like that um you know on chain the only thing is you have to be able to easily query that you have to be able to update it let all that stuff happen and we're going to release that pretty soon but in a format where you can basically say my Dow is an on-chain thing but all of this off-chain stuff like chat uh documents like blogs people are sharing sending money doing applications that involve assets sort of

just works based on the permissions of that Dao so I think um it's those are some of the concrete examples but I think the coolest thing about it is that all of them extend very very easily and it's almost like all the stuff that is either a sort of a programmer who hasn't done web3 and thinks stuff should be doable now how it is stuff that you intuitively think or as a user where users will often think this stuff about okay I have all these things why can't I combine them like I have a chain that could store this Dao State why can't that also integrate easily with they would think like you know my telegram groups and manage permissions there do things like that or and now it can so I think that that's really the main answer

is all this like we can keep giving these concrete examples but they extend easily and all the stuff you think you should be able to do kind of naively uh you can so in your in your personal story you told about the time when you dismissed orbit and then and then you revisit it orbit again worked with the orbit Foundation and then how did you end up at the idea for oakbar and yeah how did you end up finding the team for it yes so this part is the idea was actually very straightforward because all of 2021 I was dealing with people

coming to Urban and saying I want to learn how to build the system and I want to try to do this kind of project like actually I was just describing the poker game that we did in ukbar that was actually The Apprentice project of the guy who's now our lead developer he came and was like okay I want to see if I can quickly make uh a poker game on Urban and just taking that as an example what happened is he was able to do it very quickly handling all those pure aspects I talked about but you know poker is kind of boring without real money and the kind of Step that he got to was how do I have there be real like you know real money in here and the answer was ah you have to do all this kind of gross stuff interoping with you know an

ounce of an outside blockchain that was not an isolated case I would I would say like probably 90 of the projects people did when they came to Urban sort of spiritually wanted to be crypto projects they wanted to have especially because when you're dealing with these like decentralized uh applications you very very often want them to be able to coordinate on some piece of state or have some kind of economically meaningful thing update something like that and so people over and over again wanted that and the answer was always ah you could do it but we've kind of sold you on this like amazing operating system that integrates everything inside it except for crypto that's not like integrated you have to kind of go through this sort of gross process all over again and so it became

very very clear that orbit needed a in also like an integrated crypto system and the question was I think it was obviously desirable there were questions over how to achieve it but we basically started the project by finding everyone in urban who was interested in that idea and was good at stuff um and saying you know we probably have a job for you if we can you know raise money against this idea and because I think a lot of the people who were in urban at the time got that it was this very almost like funding of early e thing where a lot of people sort of saw the desirability of this were in like a community and decided to you know get in on it and so we were able to fund it

based on them sort of understanding Urban and what it would need and then there were a number of people around uh we we hired like I'm trying to think how many on our team like most of our Dev team is people who I was working with as like sort of new programmers to orbit during that year or who I onboarded um and same with people on our like business team or people who got interested in it from other you know from the like that something is going on here and I want to be in on the community aspect so and then we had some really great people who had been heavily involved like working at Tuan like um like Tech right so gripe uh like Logan Allen um who worked with us like part-time to

onboard all of our people and kind of get them really up to speed in writing Hoon in writing orbit programs uh he did a great job and has since gone on to sort of take the crypto side and the that side even farther by starting a ZK oriented Urban company that's doing really well I'm zorp and yeah it was just this like I think we kind of collected everyone who was talented interested in crypto uh just getting into urban and wanted to just like sort of be in on that and we at that point we were like okay we have some team we have some money now we sort of have to figure out how all this will work and that was sort of its own we've gone through a lot of different sort of changes and ideas since it started well let's get a little bit into the

details here right so because you're basically saying like Okay in urban right you have a lot of things such as part of the stack right so you have you know identity messaging a lot of things are just like in there software distribution and now he's saying okay the go the Google look for making crypto part of the stack as well like what does it mean because it because in the end right these other things are actually part of the core orbit like operating system whereas ukbar is something that's building on top so what does it mean to sort of you know make crypto okay just like yeah this part of the urban stack or there's like fundamental primitive

that's like easily available for people building Urban applications I've thought about that a lot because you definitely ask yourself while you're doing a project like for like is what I'm doing necessary is definitely a big thing and so when I was giving the stories earlier about people wanting crypto in their apps but not having it that was sort of to motivate that but practically how you make it a part of it is you make sure that everything ukbar does as a chain and I'll explain this in sort of high level technical where it's easy to understand but just even without technical to start everything it does is like Urban native so let's say you have a I think most people in your audience would be familiar with like L2

sequencers so you have this machine sitting there that's taking you know transactions and then settles them with whatever chain it's let's say rolling up to right so upar has a sequencer we have it set up actually so you can have multiple sequencers it's actually pretty similar to you know how arbitrum has proposed doing multiple you know multiple chains that interop so it has its sequencer and that sequencer has to interact with ethereum but no one else inside the urban network has to interact with ethereum everything that that sequencer does is like you know an airlock that's sealed off tight and you can send it interact and all the interactions you do with it sort of produce Urban native data Urban native events that are easy for orbit programs to handle so

that doesn't mean that we're exclusive like someone else could go and make something like bar where so we're not exclusive in the way that something in the kernel if you can actually imagine a version of urban where they basically built ukbar as like a core part of the operating system I don't think that would be the best design because you may as well there's no technical reason for it and so you may as well compete on that layer but we do have to compete with anyone who wants to do the exact same thing as us in their own thing uh although we do have like you know business licensing on the codes they wouldn't be able to just copy Us in most cases they could try to make a really good layer for calling out to like you know ethereum or Cosmos or eth layer

twos or something like that um they absolutely could do that it's hard it's it's like a lot of engineering so I think what makes us crypto on orbit is that we're the only people who are doing it particularly seriously right now and who have anything remotely well engineered there and we're also doing all the engineering such that from a developer's perspective you don't have to think about how it interacts with like let's say like ethereum or anything like that everything is like fully contained inside Urban in this model right so basically a developer can write their application right in its own in in urban there's a programming language called Hoon might use this sort of the

the main development language is this functional language so and you can build your Urban application in hoon and so basically what you guys are then offering is that as I'm writing this application I can write some sort of smart contract logic uh in that application in hoon and then it will sort of like you know can like create a transaction it can you know and and it will send that transaction to the sequencer which is again just a orbit uh it's just on orbit right so just sending a message to basically a particular shape on orbit no an urban node yeah and then that orbit node kind of sequences it and in the end it settles to ethereum

so you have sort of the security of ethereum and at the same time yeah you can kind of access that smart contact functionality from within normal Urban app that's right and we could get more into the orbit app side because there is this question of why are you doing all this work so that you can let's say write smart contracts and who to integrate them with Urban apps like what's the win there I think we've sort of we've sort of touched on that but that's that's another big part of the story where I guess one the way I would say it is right now when you develop let's say ethereum contracts or evm in general you use something like hard hat or something like that and you get this full environment that lets you do all this

testing and stuff for your on-chain application so we talked like you know maybe 20 minutes ago about how um for just on chain stuff uh the current Paradigm works pretty well you can make some pretty some pretty cool apps that work that work well and I guess the one way you can think about what we're doing is trying to extend that feeling of being inside you know hard hat or found what's the rust one like Foundry like something like that and extending that to your entire application so that when you want to test your you know full application and say it's getting you know events coming in from other peers or starting them up having the blockchain events coming into is also part of that so really trying to unify everything into this hole and we wouldn't be able to do that if we

weren't writing it um you know as one Urban application if you didn't have that if it was just the ukbar chain and then you were writing with all in JavaScript or something that would be very hard and if it was just Urban apps and you had to interface with them in like you know native evm form that would also be very hard and the way we the reason we know that's hard is that Urban people have wanted to do this for a while and like they haven't and blockchain people have wanted these kind of you know very rich apps for a while and also have had a very hard time doing them whereas we're starting to find this like intersection to be like a lot easier and sort of you know more fun to write let me dig into this a little bit of just observing that for example if we

wanted a poker poker app the hard thing about building a broker app on ethereum is well if Financial logic there's a natural house for that Financial logic but poker also requires um it's a game of incomplete information I need to have some secrets from you and secrets are not naturally supported in on the blockchain so I need something with privacy and lacking uh and what might be something with privacy well you might say that okay the user's browser is is something that has has privacy so we could have the application run on two users browsers and then if they settle on

ethereum maybe somebody could imagine something like that and yeah I think I think even you know virtue poker or true poker were pretty much doing things like this like I don't want the people in our audience to scream at us like I know what mental poker is you absolutely there there are ways to solve it I think mayor's point is more about the logistics yeah yeah but of course like when you when you start to do do that you you come to the realization that you are almost trying to use the browser as kind of like a computer right uh you try to do peer-to-peer networking between users uh between two browsers and then what if you had a persistent long-lived computer rather than a browser to represent the

the user and like that's kind of that's kind of um orbits orbits jump in fact if we go back to the beginning of the discussion where we said you almost independently reinvent orbit you're about like you know 10 of the way to Reinventing Urban already because you start to say yeah this would be great okay I'm going to put like you know the applications living in my user's browser okay now they need ways to talk to each other uh okay we'll make like you know a stack for that they also need to be able to know like the identity of the other one and like encrypt it and make sure they're doing that man my app also might have some like software updates over time like I better make sure they're running the same version of the operating system and and what you do is

I'm not saying this in a bad way you actually absolutely could make sort of a version of something like Urban or an OS that lived in browsers this is basically what people want to do with wasm it's just that no one's done it and so like Urban is the only thing out there that isn't a form that can be used but you're absolutely right that you start to go down this road of needing to maintain the software deploy it somewhere have places it can talk to to handle identity networking between the things and that's all the stuff that herbit is giving us for free and then we need to make sure we can do is in that model um also have it be as clean as possible for those let's say in browser programs uh to talk to the blockchain and do that

cleanly because right now orbit is the sort of sealed off thing where it can do all of that stuff and solve all those problems but it doesn't have like without ubar particularly clean ways to talk to talk to the blockchain and so that's been a barrier for you know on the urban side it's been logistically difficult to develop those kinds of programs yeah and then now the next government environments that works to develop applications in natively in orbit should be the same as the development environment that you use to build your smart contracts running on a blockchain on Earth yeah like that's the that's the that's the unification you're trying to

do because in the end what you want is for the developer to to have very little difference between something that is on blockchain and like something that is that is exactly and we can even go further which is in terms of what we're developing internally which is we we um we want the blockchain to be inside orbit we want the program to be an urban native program and we even want the testing and orchestration of those like let's say if you're testing and you want to you're testing a poker game you need to have three or four different fake peers running fake nodes running to test it and keep doing them we also want to get that running inside or a bit so right now it's run if you're actually building an urban program the way it looks is maybe you fire up four

different terminal windows and each of them is one of your nodes you know your sort of fake nodes that you're testing with and you have to cut and paste commands into them to get them into the right States as you develop it and so one Insight we had which is not unique to us ton had started some work on this a while but never took it that far was what if we put all of that inside Urban what if we have in you know an urban program that can create four or five whatever different orbit like nodes and an orbit blockchain nuke bar blockchain inside and run you know sort of run all this stuff and let you sort of automate that app development process so again it actually feels very much like you know for any of our evm developers here if you use something like hard hat where

you fire up a local uh node and run stuff against it and then reset it it feels like that but for everything in your application where you're almost simulating this you know Galaxy of different peers uh who you put into whatever States you want and run through a program and then the next obvious step after that that we've just started to look into is sort of further powering that up at the next level will be to like you know integrate like AI assistance with it is like a very obvious Next Step because the thing we haven't that you haven't asked me yet is but isn't sort of Hoon weird and how will you get developers to use it and so there are some answers to that even without that but we're seeing some really promising uh Avenues with you

know training like llms uh to know basically to know who and better and kind of let people do it the lazy way rather than having to take this sort of religious journey into a new programming language okay great I did I exactly I wanted to ask about that question right so because hoon is something that when people see it first it looks really weird it doesn't look like any other programming language so a lot of people you know including let's let's say correspond right but basically uh Hoon looks like very strange and uh for people one of the most common objections you know we get is like people see that and it's like well people are not going to want to learn

this thing right so you really have to do something that's more close to programming languages that developers already know uh that's the only way to get like mainstream adoption and get like you know hundreds of thousands of developers building on it and of course you have like solidity which is kind of like JavaScript similar uh and so that's a very very common objection and then of course you have a lot of people in orbit that are like no who's the way and like once you learn it there's no going back and it is the one you know the one true thing even if in orbit right there's a little bit of like division where you had like I guess a project uh holium right has now been trying to get more like JavaScript into orbit so what's what's your fault uh on on hoon and sort

of its suitability for application development mainstream adoption and smart contract development so okay so there's a little we can we can use the stuff we've talked about already to kind of frame this so first of all I'm kind of an urban atheist uh I'm not religious about it I'm doing this in a very sort of 20th century empirical scientific sense where I'm using it because it has specific properties that I want and so that if there's principles uh I sort of like them because they help me develop better I'm not you know religiously intellectually married to like having to have weird characters on the screen that doesn't you know it's like sort of it's a fun thing but it doesn't matter to me that much so if we start out like why are we using Hoon the first reason is that like

practically right now that's the only way to get access to the urban operating system and as we said earlier the urban operating system is the only thing that has these properties that we need in order to cleanly build these systems but then as Brian said that leads into the next question of okay you can have all your reasons but will people use it so I think there's two angles to come here from that are very like we have a lot of empirical evidence as to how this goes so the first angle we can go from is have people become more likely to learn Hoon over time and as I said I think people don't really appreciate this who are in orbit but um because a lot of them are either have come in the last two years

or when they were there earlier sort of weren't directly involved with education but I can tell you for a fact that if we were talking about like June 2020 I would have long conversations with people and the subject of those conversations was is it possible to teach normal developers to use hoon or is it just too hard and too weird and my hypothesis was it's not too hard it's just being taught badly and some people thought it was sort of you know too hard and they had to go through the secret like cult like initiation to want to in the first place and the it's not too hard people have one hands down convincingly so we now have like you know when the foundation runs people through Hoon School there'll be like 100 to 200 people doing that a

pop there's way more you know Hoon repos on GitHub than there were there's far more Hoon programmers like than there were there's not even enough jobs for them like necessarily there's probably not as many companies as there are them and the biggest issue people have now is like I think because it's missing stuff like crypto it's almost like okay what do they build once they have this so that's one angle is that I think um hoon is not particularly hard to learn but you are correct that it's still a new language and what's the point of learning a new language you have to convince developers to do it so I think there's again two aspects there the first one is if we think about right now um for sort of non-evm L2 stuff uh or

even l1s there's a couple projects and they're very very successful um if we take like obviously like you have Solana which uses rust um now that's already an existing language they get to onboard people who know that uh but then you have starkner which has is probably sort of the most um nerd sniping developer attracting like projects like you know in crypto it's like they're like they get a lot of developers and sort of organic attention and people wanting to do it even though the language is way harder than Hoon especially to reason about doesn't look like they've made it some superficial things to make it look different but it's very hard to think about and people still use it and they still will do it because it lets them do something that

they want to do and I think bar is very much in that vein of if we can let you do the types of apps that we think we can you'll go through the work of using Hoon that said so that would have been my answer until about you know March 15th or 20th or something like that and now because we're living in like the singularity like gpt4 came out everyone's on what it can do and can see how this is going to head for other like you know llms and people have been making a ton of progress in um you know training non-gpt llms and doing like llama and things like that and it's very very obvious that if we put the work in we will be able to have computers that make it much

much easier for you to write in hoon and let you get in like sort of have a superficial understanding of it but be like do this for me or show me how this is done and things like that and I think so we start basically we start with this thing of can you learn Hoon yes it's possible to learn hoon and it's not particularly hard as languages go uh do you have desire to we've seen that if there's enough like economic reason there's like um because we're providing enough applications that you can build that will be there and then can we make that as easy as possible and the main worry now is that like you know I guess it's interesting I think actually the main competitor of sort of bookbar type stuff now is actually super powerful llms that let you take

all the stuff that mayor was saying is hard and like gluing together things or putting their browser and just make it like essentially I think the only way to sort of make that stuff go really well is like maybe maybe even AGI or something like close to it and we can see a path to that now but you know before the computers kill us all there will be this beautiful moment of being able to use hoon like very very easily and I think we're sort of explicitly targeting like I guess 2024 should be the year and then 2025 will all be dead so it'll be fun though it'll be programming in hoon and Rich but then dead soon after so this is one thing I didn't think I was gonna this has not actually been on my mind for a while but I have thought

about it a little bit in the past so the topic of like Ai and if you have like AI becoming like super powerful I'm to me it feels like because in orbit you know you are kind of like owning your own like Network identity um and because you have this sort of like governance structure because in urban you have the the Senate right basically you have a bunch of nodes like 256 notes that make up this Galactic Senate and they are basically like a doll like a governance Council right and these are people who own basically it's

cryptographic identity and then can make some decisions so one thought I've had with regards to AI is that this feels like something that could be a pretty resilient structure that like you know human beings could keep control of even in the face of like AI becoming like super powerful so I'm just curious like what are your thoughts with like AI becoming uh you know AGI and those kind of things and like how that will sort of like interplay with orbit as a as a network and as an alternative to the internet so there's so many possible Futures there that it's hard to catalog them I

think the only thing that's clear now is that absent maybe massive government or self-imposed like private uh restriction um AI is going to get very powerful I would uh and like already especially in the area of programming is much more than people thought so then you sort of play that out and I think there's like these different Futures where you know maybe very powerful models are out there but they're only owned by a few corporations in the U.S and so then maybe herbit plus crypto becomes this platform for people who want to you know access powerful AI models outside of that or have them like you know interact in that way um and run sort of these alternative

economies like outside of that uh if you know AI is restricted heavily which is very possible in terms of like you know size of training runs like gpus being restricted in some ways not not at all inconceivable you know then I think Urban has this and especially ukbar has this massive role to play where uh because in that if AI is restricted it's very hard to make all these systems work together AI enabled bar would be one of the best ways to have a large computer system that does work together you know for economic purposes Rich applications uh easy for developers to make all of that stuff um and you know then you do have like we sort of these weird Futures like where uh AI get super powerful models are out

there for everyone um you know in that in those cases I don't even know how like if Humanity survives we'd have to you know we'd have to see but I think there's a broad range of outcomes where AI assisted orbit is very very powerful for letting people I guess like access the you know the products of the products of models to assist their programming and also to like make throwaway programs that operate like in their orbits and orchestrate their stuff related to you know crypto applications things like that and then possibly things like training but it's when there's this much uncertainty I think the main thing you have to do is

make sure that you're you kind of lean into the power and make sure you can do enough in all of those scenarios and so I do know like at ubar we're taking this very very seriously as a kind of bull case for urban in general and especially for like bar with crypto being under a bit um and just trying to make sure that I I guess there's this thing you could do of like making excuses where you're where you say like where people fall back into a sort of urban pure like uh Purity thing of like okay we're orbit we don't use Ai and to me that's um we just you know do hand crafted artisanal programming like you know ourselves or something right

um to me that's a lot less interesting than saying uh we have this really powerful integrated system the biggest barrier to its adoption was that the programming language is a little bit weird now we have machines that can just knock that out for us and so that's a little bit scary because you're definitely going in the direction of making some very powerful systems uh but you know I don't think there's sort of any other way to go from your description it feels a lot like the Oak bar system can be thought of in the best case as similar to to Apple right all of us have this experience that when you buy into the Apple ecosystem you get one device and then the next device becomes

apple and then you're kind of trapped into like 10 devices inside the Apple ecosystem and if God forbid you ever need an Android device and interoperability is going to be really bad so do you think do you think that that's kind of like the future for hook bar when it's successful that if I'm an orbit user and I'm an upper user um I'll have a very good experience when I am interacting with just having all my finances there Etc but if you consider the other cases which is like a developer that's kind of I don't know building on the cosmos SDK

and trying to ship to a trying to ship their Cosmos SDK application to a user that is on orbit uh that interoperability may be very weak all right look because there's a few different cases embedded in your question and so we should like one is like sort of duh if ukbar is successful does it sort of take over lots of computing um and then the other one is if there's stuff outside of ukbar's exact settlement system how does it work in that and so those are those are pretty different let's start with the second one which is the cosmos SDK developer who has I don't know maybe like an evm

compatible app or something like that done on it using like their own um consensus system right I think in that scenario what happens is because they're only building the consensus portion um and the blockchain portion on Cosmos um a world in which bar was very successful would be one in which developers were very used to uh developing these Urban applications uh in which users were very used to like installing and using them and we could try to imagine but let's imagine that like for whatever reason that developers Cosmos SDK application has become very popular like running outside of that I think it's very likely that someone will which might even be us

will make a very strong let's say evm compatibility layer where if someone has substantial assets and or like interactions they need to do with an outside an outside chain that they can do it actually in a similar way to how ugbar does uh which is you know you have some kind of like you know node reading that chain you can do read and write um or some kind of like graph style indexing through there um and I think there would be a lot of economic incentive for that to get built but I do think that it is the case that in that world unless the developer was like deploying something that really needed its own consensus uh or that was

like a legacy application that needed to get deployed there uh in that world where ubar was not successful they would probably deploy it on you know in ubar town that said I do think that like sort of already written and audited evm type code will be with us for a while and so I would expect at some point there will be some like compatibility layers that make that ingestible in orbit where maybe you're not writing new contracts and deploying them but you are getting other ones now the other one though you correctly you know got our goals which is if ukbar is successful it will accrue lots of network effects like sort of apple style um we try to mostly have in terms of our economics uh have the way that we

monetize that mostly be them like people transacting on the like you know using the uke bar chain um and we try to make everything else like very very open like the application so you know while I you know while becoming Apple would be a great outcome financially I think um we do have a bit of a different ethos because we have a different way to monetize and so everything we've done so far in terms of like you know chat stuff the things we're doing with Dows um social like groupings things like uh social applications coming out uh We've made all that open because the entire goal is just for people to use bar in a way that like and also um you know I guess to some degree that would also to if we were settling on then like flow

through uh to ethereum somewhat as well we'd see which assets were used on the thing but we are trying to build very very strong Network effects in up bar and have that be the place where you go and have that also make Urban apps like sort of the go to apps and this is why I sort of mentioned um the AI angle because I think without that to assist developers and also to make it easy for like really easy for users to make these sort of throwaway programs that can just operate on all these you know Urban apis in their life I think it's a little bit it's harder to imagine that future happening obviously until recently we were trying to make that future happen uh but I think um AI really increases the odds that we can you know that we

can do such a thing so I always imagined right that the way Urban would work is that Urban as a whole would be this sort of like apple-like system right because you have this fundamental thing like networking identity stuff that's like unified and like everything will kind of work together like that but then I I think what we have seen interestingly is that actually and I I don't well so you have like some companies that now have built more and I think pursuing more of a philosophy of this kind of like you know vertically integrated stack that like all works well yeah each other and and you know for example there's a

whole bunch of different chat apps on uh on Urban now and they're like you know separate chat laps right so if I if I'm like messaging you know with you teamwork right and then on one app then it's going and I'm messaging the same username right like you on another app then it's like a separate conversations so where do I think that's going or how do I want it to how do I want it to go yeah I mean my actually I I would sort of say that like my impression of bookbar is much more that is much more trying to be this like thin transaction layer of like you know uh basically covering like the smart contact portion and then sort of you know because I think that's the other that's so a

little bit the other approach right you can say like okay I'm going to try to build like some some component and then you know lots of other people can build and stuff versus like being this building this kind of vertically integrated full stack thing that it ends up being a sort of like Walled Garden a little bit Yeah so we're very uninterested in the wild garden we very much like that vision of urban as this like open system that a lot of you know that a lot of different applications can build on and compose and one reason we're sort of we try to make our own programs that maybe look a little bit vertically integrated when we sort of don't see something out there that does what we want so like we did do our own chat that

we use uh just because there wasn't anything else like that good out there um and I think when we drop the next version of like where it includes groups like on-chain Dow type structures I think people will see that but our goal is not to be like you know a vertically integrated chat company uh we're mostly just trying to I think we see this moment in Orbit's life where a lot of these uh Primitives and protocols haven't been made and instead of like trying to round people up and make a standard and tell them they all have to follow our standard we've just been like okay let's try to get the best thing out there that we can if people start using it and we can build on it easily that's great uh we do try to leave them so they're very very

open so actually a great example of this is we have like multiple other projects now building with our chat Primitives with some of our social graph and like grouping Primitives and we actually do work to sort of support them and make those happen because it's not again it's not really interesting to us to have that be in there it's just that we think that that base layer of Primitives extends Beyond just the chain and we have to do a little bit of work to get other stuff out there which actually it makes sense if you think about what we've been saying this whole time which is that we just want richer dapps to if they're not there uh we have to show people them and we're seeing a lot of people get interested specifically because of things that we've made and

then want to build richer dapps and that's mostly what we want but in the that's the short term and maybe medium term in the medium to long term I want you know herbit to be its own kind of Walled Garden but for that inside that wild garden to be uh very very open and for that to be this like you know Universal Computing system which isn't it's not that crazy to think about uh because everything else is so centralized and hard to build on and compose which is sort of another topic we could hit if necessary yeah I mean the the the fascinating thing in a way is that you can have both right you can have people built like evolved Garden type system on orbit which is is going to happen and then you can have others built kind of open

system and and everything runs on the same OS I think the walled Gardens they'll be under pressure including the ones that like you know the things we're making that are internal I think at some point some of them will get popular they'll become Open Standards people will fit like build their own like let's say front ends for accessing you know the chat apps that are dominant the those and we're just so early that people in urban have tried to do it like for a while it was like this social thing where someone would start building maybe a new app like in chat and people are like oh but don't you know tlawn is making that or this other group is uh or something like that and after a while we're like this is stupid we're so early it's just people like you know a couple

hundred people fighting over this let's just like build it and like let that process happen so let's uh let's talk about another topic uh so it's kind of like another big topic so you guys decided to build a roll up I guess another path would have been to build basically like a sort of layer one orbit chain what was the reason why you guys decided to go the roll-up path and not to build their L1 to pump my youth bags [Laughter] um nah the the reason was it lets us when we understood our core

value proposition better which is about this like being able to enable these like very rich applications better experiences for developers and users uh you start wanting to focus everything on that as long as possible and if we did our own chain with our own consensus uh initially we would have a couple issues right off the bat uh which are fine and other chains kind of validly want to do those right off the bat but for us they weren't as interesting which is one you have to build your validator set and like get that you know get that all going um and another is that you do have to bridge if you want to get in assets from other ecosystems and so which again you know it's fine it's a valid choice I

have there have been a number of issues with security of that and there's so there's challenges in doing it but it's you know people do it and it was just we didn't want to if we don't do it as a roll-up initially then we have to spend more money and like take longer because we have to do all that stuff we have to set up like things facilities for bridging we have to set up um and be confident sort of the game theory and security there uh we have to like build validator sets and figure out like you know the economics of that plus like you know finding them and the valid like the validator approach lets us sorry the the roll-up approach lets us just focus on okay let's have this sequencer or a set of sequencers that are running and that

we can sort of just keep out of our mind while we're doing it which has been great the last few months um to be able to sort of hold that steady as we iterate on other things um and I guess also I did have this kind of feeling back in early 2022 that Roll-Ups were gonna get hotter and all l1's were going to lose some of their premium just for purely sort of technical uh economic reasons which I think is like most if you look at the you know the fully diluted valuations of uh the top like l2s or things that try to pretend they're l2s like polygon um you know they're generally done better than Solana avex like you know Luna rest in peace

um so yeah and I think um in terms of the base layer and getting that right I do think like ethereum is doing really really good work there and I don't want to um you know mess with that for the moment now of course there's the moment that will come along in every successful l2's life like down the road which is okay now you do have a lot of money on here uh you are very successful you very easily could build you know a validator set out of you know what your token is um does it make sense for you to keep rolling up to ethereum and I think anyone who says they can answer that like you know one way or another right now is lying and I think we absolutely

could see for example like you know arbitrum uh or well optimism has their own stuff or they probably wouldn't but like you could use um starknot have that decision down the road and make that in that direction um we're it would be it would be a nice problem to have to to think about where I think we would be doing really really well and the first goal is just to get maximal like bar uh and urban adoption without distractions so I'm actually really happy that the sort of Base roll-up architecture has been I guess like worked out enough now that it's kind of boring and there isn't my I know I've gone over the various you know the literature seeing what people are doing and there's nothing very new or

interesting in most cases which is great it's like somewhat commoditized and we can sort of just go to it slowly while knowing that'll be there as an option and then if we're super successful we can have those discussions down the road as will everyone else who is you know very successful with an L2 so in in going down the roll-up path uh of course the massive Branch point is between optimistic roll ups which ensure your security through Game Theory and ZK Roll-Ups which ensure their security through zero knowledge cryptographic proofs and you've you've chosen the ZK roll up path so sort of

sort of okay so so yeah so tell us like what path you have chosen and kind of what are the major technical decisions or business decisions you have you have taken on that path ZK Roll-Ups in my opinion are obviously desirable in the long run because as you said you don't have to secure anything with Game Theory which gives you a lot more options for things like data availability um it's a lot safer to do various let's say like validium type schemes where you're not writing the data to layer one ethereum or whatever layer one you're doing if you're using ZK because now you have like sort of two pieces of Game Theory to get right uh there if you're trying to do an optimistic roll-up that

uses validiums it's very hard and generally it hasn't been you know hasn't been done um that said um ZK stuff is advancing very fast and if you put too much work into getting it all right right now you can put in a lot of work and then find out that like one year later you wouldn't have had to put in nearly as much work for the same result and so you've basically wasted a lot of time and money for something which isn't really our core value proposition which is um you know creating this like developer user ecosystem uh natively on Urban so the best balance we found for that so far is to have a progression that's kind of as rapid as we can make it so first part of the progression is you

know what our value proposition is making this like Urban developer user ecosystem um we'll start our roll up on testnet in proof of authority mode like we just say this is the state and this was the state transition then but while we're architecting that it's not like a dumb proof of authority where you just like write this new state and that's it you also make sure to implement data availability at the same time and also you know the various sort of mechanics making sure that you know deposits and withdrawals work right and can be proven and so that you can switch that to in optimistic mode now if you go to an optimistic mode then you have the question of like do you turn your fraud proofs on like optimism still hasn't done that arbitrim has but with

permission but optimism is still proof of authority like just trust me bro but just with billions of dollars um which is which is fine I actually get their reasoning which is that their main value proposition is being this thing that can become an optimistic roll up um and that like people trusted enough to be like it's basically you know an ethereum side chain that people like the tooling on uh and that's good that's it's working for them the thing we can do next though a lot of progress being made on sort of urban native ZK proofs uh we did that internally uh in ukbar and then some other guys doing that spun out to form zorp which is a separate Corporation doing ZK proofs of like knock and Hoon code um and their stuff is going really really well and we talk to them a lot uh

work with them closely and we'll probably be able to jump from instead of going from proof of authority to optimistic it's very likely we'll be able to jump straight to I guess I would say optimistic ZK where it's optimistic but instead of having a long challenge procedure for resolving a fraud proof you just submit a ZK proof for the fraud proof uh the reason you can do that when ZK might not be ready yet is that for if you're doing a typical ZK roll up you have to prove every transaction and so you need some they need to be faster if you need to be doing those and like whatever it is like a second per transaction a tenth of a second per transaction proving them fast enough if you do this optimistic ZK thing you only need to prove the batch

um when there's a problem and so in that case like if someone Flags it and there's a problem you actually could take like three hours to prove the batch of like let's say 100 transactions or a thousand transactions and it's totally fine in fact it's a lot better from a game theory perspective because you then only need one on-chain transaction to prove it so it's very very likely that when we launch book bar on mainnet it will probably be proof of authority but ready to turn immediately to a um ZK optimistic system and then from there it's literally just a matter of marching through the optimizations to get regular ZK uh fast enough which were pretty pretty optimistic on but were extremely optimistic on optimistic ZK so this is

all very pragmatic and it's just focused on how fast can we get people interacting with our core value proposition which is this sort of orbit ecosystem where you're doing stuff on it for real money um and we're probably more limited even by audits than by uh ZK or optimistic and so what we'll probably do is that system I was talking about throwing out on mainnet probably early this summer um we'll probably have it deposit limited where it can only take a certain amount of ether erc20s just so that you know people don't put in hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of tvl and then something happens and then gguke bar uh I think we'll you know try to have it be like okay you should be

responsibly putting on like you know a couple thousand dollars or something or whatever you can afford to lose um but yeah that's that's sort of the way that we think about that and the the way to sum it all up is you have the technology and The Game Theory plus technical Primitives and you want to make that sort of maximally accelerate your core value proposition and so when I see other l2s that are making decisions like we said with optimism of not enabling fraud proofs yet I actually don't hate on it at all and I get exactly what they're doing which is they can kind of see where things are going they've also thought of you know going from optimistic to optimistic ZK which makes sense and they're just trying to like you know have that make sure they do have a plan at least in the long run to have it

intersect so you know our situation is very similar it's just we'll probably get to something secure or maybe faster uh minus on its I have a question here in terms of like the finality so if if this optimistic ZK if let's say uh in new example you say okay maybe you can take three hours I mean I I guess there's like some time needed for somebody to say hey there was an issue with this transaction and then sometime needed for like someone to to create the proof and submit it and and then that is kind of like whatever window you have to sort of be able to live with that until you have finality

or like how do you think of this sort of like you know the the finality time that guarantees obviously the pure ZK is the best because you can just be final uh once you're on within whatever the batch time is that you're doing it um for optimistic people usually have done a week uh the reason is that you often have to do multiple challenges like the way our B trim does it is like a bisection thing where tldr you could maybe have to do 15 30 uh different transactions uh to sort of complete the fraud proof and so you have to make sure there's enough time not just to find the fraud but to get through all the transactions in an adversarial environment where someone might be doing

the calculation of I'm fine to dos the ethereum network with this many transactions and pay this much money because I'll be able to withdraw more than that from the roll up if it gets through in that window if you have this like optimistic ZK you only need one proof and so that should reduce the finality window by a decent amount because you don't have to calculate it so you don't have to worry about them dosing it for like 15 to you know new transactions uh you only need one transaction to get through but you know off the top of my head it would probably be more in like the you know one to three day range for find out for finality on it but even that would be um

a little bit of a stop Gap while we go to full ZK because I just I don't really like the you know sort of multiple time finality that said within ukbar if you're talking about transferring from one ook bar like let's call him Shard we call them towns to another you can get faster like as long as you sort of trust that the main thing on chain won't get rolled back you can let those uh shards talk to each other pretty rapidly um because you don't have to worry about if one gets rolled back they all like they all get rolled back uh but again another good reason to get to ZK as soon as possible but also worth keeping in mind that even if we got there tomorrow

and had a full ZK system we would still have to audit the rest of the system so it's not sort of worth it uh we're trying to like make everything go together a little bit later in the year or early next year so we can stitch a few things that you have mentioned together um earlier in the episode you talked about how the developer experience of hook bar and orbit will be the same or or similar which means people will be able to write smart contracts in hoon and deploy them to Upper and then later you mentioned that eventually you would like hook bar to be a ZK roll up and in the short run an

optimistic ZK roll up where if something goes wrong on upper it can be proven on ethereum that something went wrong so if you put this two things together it feels like the essential primitive that you need is for a developer to be able to write a program in Hoon and then have that program be executed somewhere and then generate a zero knowledge proof for the results of the of that program's execution because absent that primitive could neither be an optimistic ZK roll up no no be a full ZK run up in this year

so how and and this is like a novel challenge right like you have you have the Hoon language so you want a program in phone if you want to execute it somewhere you need to generate a zero knowledge proof uh that that the program's execution resulted in this particular Resort so how are you solving that problem that primitive so specifically like just executing the zero knowledge proofs you have a transaction a nuke bar and you need to do it meaning meaning how do you generate the proof and how do you verify the proof and how are you attacking the problem of you know building or developing a proof generator yeah this is the answer is

sort of boring um unfortunately which is for verifying the proof there's pretty standard stuff that you can roll on with whatever system you're using um to put it on to deploy it on ethereum uh and have it verify that for generating the proof this is where uh we did a lot of sort of initial feasibility research and then uh have some of that internally but zorp uh this other Urban company has made such fast progress on specifically proving orbit programs of actually any kind not just uh bar transactions but since bar transactions are orbit programs uh they get those and they've made such fast progress on that that we actually can just we've been you know negotiating a

deal with then contingent on them getting it uh working which seems I think we're going to be demoing the first version on today's Wednesday I guess on Friday but literally you throw in an urban program uh it spits out of proof uh you throw in you know a Thousand Oak Bar transactions uh it spits out a proof of those that you can use for this validation and so well that answer is boring uh the implications of it are really interesting which is that not only will orbit be this like place where you can write these rich applications that interact with the blockchain there's one other thing that's sort of catnip or nerd snipey to blockchain programmers and people around that which is the

ability to do like easy zero knowledge proofs and we will likely have the ability to Eve not just for your on-chain up bar transactions but even stuff that happens off chain that you want to prove um you know make these proofs that something was done right so an example of that off chain would be and also you can vary on hook bar so we can deploy not just a program on ethereum that can verify proofs we can deploy a program on ookbar that can verify these zero knowledge proofs and so what that would look like is imagine I don't know you have like a game world that someone enters and puts in Assets in order to like do fights or something like that and at the end of it they just uh they need to like run a proof or run approver

on all of the actions they took and the code that happened and proved they followed the rules of that game world and then they can you know withdraw more assets potentially or lose some you know depending on how it went and I think there's this whole world of verifying Computing uh completely off chain stuff that happens and then using that to trigger on-chain events but having that be at consumer scale uh that we're really really excited about so we would there's actually these like to the the blockchain aspect is actually maybe the most basic and simple which is literally we license um you know I think from them we probably do some kind of license where it's open for people to use as long as they just use it for Luke bar so they

don't have the you know starkware problem of not being able to access the provers um but then they have this whole other world of you know they can go and you know license proving or do proving um that lets them do all of these arbitrary off-chain interactions so they can prove on chain that they followed some set of rules in order on like in order to unlock things and so we're very excited about that it's definitely something we want to Market really heavily as this additional capability of urban programs um but it were sort of just we didn't know until very recently that it would happen basically the timeline was it must have been March maybe 13th 14th we had the conversations uh with zorp where we saw how far stuff was getting and how

this would be a thing that we could also offer to Luke bar developers uh you know then we're thinking about that then all of the uh gpt4 stuff hit and we had to also think about AI at the same time and figure out like that strategy uh but I don't want to downplay the the ZK side it's like one of the most interesting things happening on orbit and like in ubar and we think that you know kind of if you liked uh Stark like starknet like you'll love um you'll love this because you can everything you learn in terms of writing Hoon programs or having a computer right for you uh you will soon be able to just prove in ZK and it's really wild and people aren't don't really know about it yet and probably just have to show them

in order for them to believe it because it's kind of a wild claim so in the in the rest of the ZK ecosystem there's broadly broadly like I'm not talking about or uh there's broadly two two approaches to um to building you know smart contract capable ZK system so one approach is that you develop your own virtual machine which is different from the ethereum virtual machine has a different set of instructions but you architect those instructions in a way that creating zero knowledge proofs is easier and then you have some kind of domain specific language built to utilize that

virtual machine so the most famous example of this approach is is darknet which virtual machine is different and then the domain specific language on top of it is Cairo which is different from from solidity and then uh so that's kind of one approach and then the second second kind of approach is all of these projects that are trying to build a ziki ZK and evm of sort so so this would this would be polygon but then there are uh then there are other projects as well maybe three or four of them that are trying to build a zkevm in which the virtual machine the instructions of

the virtual machine are the same as as ethereum and you're trying to develop a kind of proverb that can kind of reuse those instructions and um and and build the proofs so given that there are these two approaches um and you're you are just by you may just end up buying the technology of Zorb um what camp do you belong in and what kind of constraints does that imply for the future we're very we're very obviously in the old VM like uh starknet type approach where we're not like making our smart contracts evm because we have a good

reason not to which is that we want them to be maximally integrated in urban um so that's that decision sort of already made for us and then the fact that you know parties like zorp are making a lot of progress on proving those native Urban transactions makes everything pretty smooth in terms of ZK evm I think it's important to just say how I think about the evm in general uh because it's been very successful it's very widespread there's a lot of audited code uh that runs on it for like large amounts of money and I think about it's going to sound negative if I say this but I mean it in a very positive way it's a lot like Cobalt where you have like lots of uh and Fortran where you have like a lot of code that runs

billions trillions of dollars that runs on COBOL still like for banks uh they know it works uh they use it it's hard to find you know people who want to like program on it or do it but it's you know it's there and that's going to be with us for some amount of time and I think that the evm is very similar and so I think that steps towards having given that that we're going to have evm code with us for some time managing billions of dollars whether it's on you know ethereum Cosmos obviously Avalanche did that like heavily but everyone who uses the evm wants access to those programs um given that we need zkavms because this is better than the optimistic setup and those projects are all making great progress there and

I I think it will eventually work I think we could have we could see things even like successful or wealthy uh optimistic projects like optimism or arbitrum switch to ZK because I think it's getting very commoditized I would actually expect to see that polygons sort of leading the way there in terms of just trying to go directly to that um so for us like it's just a different Universe I think the most likely Universe if uchbar wins and if evm code is still running is that we'll have we'll probably sponsor or work with some projects to make a clean interface for ingesting evm data from the most popular uh l2s or l1s into uh orbit like bar programs and you know then people you know if they have some

multi-sig with like you know tens of millions of dollars that they just for they want to have on gnosis um you know they can they can do that but as far as we go um there's no reason for us to it would be it would be a lot more work to make our thing evm compatible uh and ZK provable in the evm and at the end of it our payoff would be that people had to write you know solidity or similar programs Insider but which we you know don't really want at all so you know we want to have our own thing get maximum adoption for our alt VM settling to ethereum and then later on do the work to be you know be able to ingest and write to evm contracts on other chains for sure which I guess also sort of

addresses your question from earlier about the poor you know Cosmos SDK developer with a popular chain who has this thing that's sort of the answer for him is that if it's evm compatible we would likely uh do the work to make it you know ingestible from his as long as he used like standard tooling and so this alt alt VM that your stack is based on is it is it the same alt VMS as startware or no no no no so no that's a herbit no it's Urban yeah it's just like a normal rvm is an orbit program it's like maybe a thousand lines of code it's not very big it's like it sits there uh it takes in transactions that are orbit data

um in the in the normal form it processes them with an engine written in orbit and it spits out orbit data on the other end that we can then see realize for posting data availability on a validium or to ethereum and uh because of that we're that's why we're able to take like let's say a ZK proving solution that wasn't developed for ubar in particular like zorbs which is just for proving Urban code in general and say we have Urban code uh prove this and it should you know should just work the only the um for people who want to get really Technical and don't want to bore your listeners but Urban has these things called Jets which basically if you have some piece of code it processes them faster uh using maybe essentially a foreign function interface

um and in those cases you have to make you you have to decide on what your set of jets is uh for the ZK approver but like beforehand and sort of say I'm proving a transaction assuming the existence of these Jets but I don't want to go too far in there the basic message is you have you know we are our engine rvm is just orbit code and uh we prove Urban code when we were using starkware's products uh back in summer what we were doing was using them to essentially write Urban interpreters so we would write a program in Cairo in Star Wars language that would take in urban code and prove and generate proofs that it was done right according to Orbit's rules uh but you know cutting

out the middleman to some degree and having a more native system for it is probably going to be beneficial if we had to go back to that you know we could but it's it's unlikely at this point cool so one question sort of as we get to it was the end so one question I'm curious about when it comes to use cases that you want to see people build and that like you know you're most excited about and that you think would be you know the things that will really leverage hook bar and Urban's capabilities you know the best and that that are kind of going to be the things that can really like take off in the next year two years uh are there particular things you have

in mind do you have a sort of list of like things I want to see built yes I want to say that we need to see them develops to like kind of make our imagination go further but I think everything in the world of social but social meaning everything like related to you know networks where you're posting information and having stuff come in and communicating with people dowels are an example discords um everything in there we want to ingest uh everything like then that can um in the social plus like game type world I think is really is really interesting like and

um and we're actually talking with some like game projects to onboard them because one of the best things that we can provide is this like you know just sort of full crypto plus social plus you know chatting Etc integration into there I guess one way I would say it is that right now a lot of urban people just for coordinating their development use stuff like gather dot town where they can go on and like chat with each other and have like you know some environments to like go play with I'd like to see stuff like that but much much richer I'd like to see things like what people use um Twitter Discord other social for um but much much like much much richer um and dow-like in it the thing that

we're not going for As Much from the start is the typical thing that people do when they launch a chain which is try to you know copy like you know make some amm clones and do a lot of liquidity yeah and like does it and we have one guy who's like has clone like made an amm just like you know for the hell of it because like we can and it's on there but we're we're exactly interested in getting people doing these much more social type game type applications seeing how those actually iterate integrate with crypto in like a richer environment um and then once there's demand for it doing the liquidity type stuff because I think it's yeah it's not our it's a

thing we want to be doing eventually but it's not the new interesting thing in crypto the other way of saying that is that everyone in crypto sort of knows that just doing uni swap clones is kind of a dead end and not very interesting and we're trying to create uh you know this new this new meta like this like just much much richer set of things that you can do um and we don't even know fully what that looks like but we have it's also not just a blank slate so we're like okay I wish we had chat so that we can do these things and see where it goes then once we had chat we're like oh now we actually can do basically groups Dows discords like

things like um much more like that um with crypto and then I think we'll see what the you know what the next thing is after but there's some other projects that we're working with uh that will you know add those I think I won that we were interested in was like what portal was doing which was trying to make like a discoverability thing for everything in all the content in orbit and that has a lot of obvious crypto Integrations and so I think like in terms of incentivizing people to do stuff for it um you know limit you know limiting things in various ways letting people collect assets and so I'm interested to see how that goes but just just in general like I guess the idea of making those applications but then

letting people extend them easily is something we haven't seen a lot since the I don't know probably since the late 2000 um like Facebook like Twitter open API apis phase when people could just sort of build whatever applications they want integrated into those and we want to bring that back to some like to some degree cool fantastic maybe like final question what's the what did what did the timelines look like uh where you at right now what are the main Milestones coming up um right now we are in the process of finishing our main engine integrating it with ZK at least for optimistic ZK and

doing the basic version of the roll up we have a very basic version on testnet but even need to add stuff like withdrawals um we also we talked about a little bit about which we call ziggurat which was basically the thing that's going to let you um pull together all of you know developing for lots of orbit nodes at once checking that against the bar chain doing all of that that will be out in users hands probably later this month or in May and then we'll start iterating it fast based on that we would like to then go to mainnet probably in June or July um where you're sort of doing stuff for real money but deposit limited and start doing you know audits of our code around then having people get familiar Auditors get familiar with our Hoon engine also

the on chain the on-chain portion and as the summer you know as the summer goes we'll be doing more experiments with um AI to like enable human programming but and in terms of having like the actual chain launched with like sort of full tools and everything working that'll be like probably the alpha beta version over the summer and then as the year goes on and we do audits we'll get closer to doing stuff like potentially lifting um any caps on you know the amount of deposits really going after developers very hard things like that so I would look for some action If you're sort of really into if you're into urban

development already or want to get into it um this spring like around May and then the real you know hardcore lots of apps are coming out um and we're moving closer and closer to you know no training wheels uh over the summer and fall cool that's exciting yeah I mean I think a lot of things going yeah a lot of things going on in urban a lot of things going on in Nook bar things moving fast so I I think it's it's going to be pretty mind-blowing I think the sort of experience the user experiences people are going to be able to like enjoy in this world you know in sort of I think you know next year maybe towards the end of this year or some things but I think definitely next year it's going to be

something where I think a lot of crypto people will go and be like that's what I expected it should work like and that's that's what I've been kind of waiting for what kind of thing we say internally that's it's very much like bar can make icos great again um in the sense of like when people were saying all these things over you know 2016 2017 it was based on this idea that we have this Global consensus engine we can do all these crazy things with it and for a variety of reasons obviously there were like you know the issues with you know scams and things like that but also there were like people who were trying to do ambitious things and they were just too hard then and I think they're now finally in reach and so you know ideally we could make another Ico

boom happen and everyone will be happy with us but like that's kind of that's kind of the vibe perfect cool well thanks so much for joining us team luck it was really great to have you on it was great to talk about ukbar super excited about the project and where it's going to go yeah thanks for having me guys really fun great questions and thanks for listeners for tuning in we're gonna be back next week and have a great week