Why The Intent-Centric Future Is Extremely Promising with Anoma

Transcript

do you try to make a statement of self-expression by having red hair um because I think not enough people actually try to understand how all these things fit together our graphic designer has a lot of fun with them too can't please anybody these days huh my goodness GM what's up guys welcome to another episode of the rollup today we have a long awaited podcast episode with our friend Adrien Brink co-founder of anoma this one is super super cool because because we are going into the depths of aoma which has been building for a really long time and is finally coming to fruition this one was really really fun and I learned a lot I think you will too hope you guys enjoy before

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[Music] singularity cartey is your home for app specific rollups at the Forefront of developing new tools and platforms that enhance the capabilities of block chain technology cartey enables applications that are flexible and built to scale build on a full Linux environment and use traditional software libraries but in blockchain development go to cy. that's cy. iio to learn more about building your own app chain today what's going on guys welcome back to the rollup uh today a conversation around intense privacy scaling many of

the topics we've been covering on the channel so I think that we'll have a fresh perspective today from Adrian Adrian I think we might have met or done a podcast in like 2020 or something it was so long ago um whether it be it might have been at a conference um but remember eth Denver way way back oh yeah yeah I remember the room I don't remember which venue or which city that was in but I remember sitting in a room with you guys um your hair was much more red back then yeah yeah okay this is s like this is the it's returning back to Natural uh for November it be all read again I think um so just prior to Devcon I'll redo

it is is is this like um is this are you do you try to make a statement of self-expression by having red hair no people read way too much into this uh so the the original story for this is really in 2 17 I was at SF blockchain week um and for some reason I think I was wearing red hoodie and I was the only like we like 200 people there I was the only person with a red hoodie and then over time I just kept wearing red hoodies and at some point it started getting too warm so it's like okay red hoodies are like not happening anymore it's way too warm in these venues nowadays so it's like let's try the hair that's really the only story um it worked horrendously well like for some

reason no one has copied this um I've no no idea why I really didn't expect this to like last this long without other people try to go for other colors yeah so you mentioned kind of uh back I mean some years ago um in in San Francisco and just kind of your previous work with tendermint uh one of the first core developers and then also working at the web 3 Foundation which is that is that polka dot is that web 3 Foundation thought nice so how did you find Tender polka dot how did you get interested in kind of validating like like what was the light bulb moment for you where you were like okay like I'm gonna start developing in crypto did you

have a previous Dev background uh so I wrote my gra thesis on U sensor sensor resistant EV voting um back in 2016 um and in 2016 there was nothing right like there was nothing available so I build it on ethereum so vote a couple of smart contracts there to and this really came from the idea of the Arab Spring and the Catalan independence movement and like what does it look like in a world where people can vote independent of central government right that are sort of the basic thesis behind that behind my gr thesis um so build that along and like I mean in 2016 we were very few people we were very few people um so like a lot of these like cool ideas like pbft started

floating around I came across the I don't actually remember exactly why but I came across the ten paper the consensus paper during my research uh for the gr thesis um ended up really liking the paper I was like sounded cool joined the slack messaged J I was like this looks dope do you need help um and then joined tender and like yeah I was like you help me know how to code we can like this this looks cool joined tenament back in like early 20 like I think January 2017 um and then sort of started building from there out so like I really started off in the ethereum community then like went s of the pure consensus route down um towards fast

finality and my basic thesis always has been that like it seems unlikely that there will be a single Global Security model um because I find the UN terrifying I think everyone that like wants more centralized governments they're all statists um and I think like you want to be Sovereign right like you want to have many levels of sovereignity and you want to have the ability to like pick your level of sovereign and like be able to exit from these systems so I was never that a single consensus syst never appeal that much to me um because I I think they're easily capturable no matter how decentralized they are like if Bitcoin is the only thing out there in existence that seems just terrifying I think that 99% of every of the industry agrees with this by the way

because I think no one here goes like should we have a really decentralized one world government does that sounds like a good idea to you like no one says yes to that um so like it was always about like giving users Choice having the ability to move assets around um having these very interoperable systems um yeah then just build build up tenament from the ground up um started one of the very first validator companies back in 2017 like end of 2017 and like again people weren't around then really don't remember this but like people thought we were crazy like proof of sake was not a thing that any reasonable person thought was going to work um everyone was very skep even pbft was very skeptical like everyone was

like well maybe we should have like things like CAD Nako Consensus These kinds of things um and so I build up one of the very first Valley comes because there's nothing around and um in that move I also moved to Switzerland um because I figured you know like where do you store hotkeys with lots of money on them well Swiss Alps historically seemed like a very good place to do this um I need a new place to live anywhere because I was just like pinging around it's like at some point you want to have at least like some closet where you can put things right um so moved to Switzer and we ran everything on physical hardware and the Alps um as like I think the only validator it was cool but also very annoying and now understand why AWS exists your physical Hardware is like

fun for six month and after that you got like [ __ ] me I should have not wed B Serv was this was a terrible idea um no and then like from that all spiraled um and then really like this all ended up in AA um sort of with because in the summer of 2020 um me and my two co-founders were pretty depressed on the state of crypto um because you know I mean everyone was like doing the same thing it's like well let's like copy these three smart contracts to this new thing and for some reason this is like going to make my parents want to like use these systems so it's going to advance on sort of like some fundamental criteria um and so out of this came I which was really the idea that a um

users had intents they didn't have transactions like no one ever has a transaction unless you go to a store to buy some milk with Bitcoin because then like your Bitcoin transaction true that's a transaction but like the other side of the trade is f settled in the physical world so in the digital world pretty much everyone there wants to like trade an asset or like I want to be part of this multi sick I want to be part of this um public goods funding effort these are all intents they're not transactions they're not directly settable in consensus it made no sense to like dump all of these things in consensus because it was highly inefficient um and so that was the first key inside the second key inside was like um you really need decentralized counterpart Discovery so like how do you discover other people with whom to do

things like unisoft like to ha in credit right unisoft is like the smartest way to do this on Ching we have an amm that's just like the central counterparty for everything uh this does not scale this does not like is very hard to generalize um it's super inefficient because we have to like dump all our intents for some reason consensus um but you needed some way like you need some way to discover who are the other parties that I want to interact with um and then also like how do I do multi like multi-step proving uh multistep composing effectively like where I have an intent from A to B you have something something B to C I can collapse it from a to c and then at some point later someone else can come along um to actually finalize this um and this

led into this really interesting third thing which was privacy guarantees like um generally like we saw this trend of like everything was going to be ZK ified and it really means not even on the Privacy side but also on the computation and compression side that data moves to Edge devices so like right like instead of having this like large data blob in the middle you end up in a world where well all my all our phones kind of like hold a lot of our personal data on them directly and only on demand do we then reveal things and we actually need to coordinate with other people and so intents really fit really well into the ZK world where you do proofs over local data then how do you uh com compose proof so like I prove over my local data you prove over your local data someone

else combines this and this is I think also the fundamental unlock um that actually going to happen which is none of the ZK Tech really works without intents Because unless we are willing to tolerate having a single senal approver that just does everything for us you need individuals to have the ability to reason over their own like to make statements over their own local data and S of more on a practical perspective I was terrified of financial systems that were fully transparent um I like cash I'm from Germany like in Germany the East German Stars e still like a very vivid memory having fully transparent government- owned F B's rail seems like a bad

idea um so I think like on a very human level good privacy guarantees that go to just be needed because otherwise the world would look terrifying yeah yeah I think that I think that um you brought up several good points with regards to the state of kind of the transaction based uh Paradigm that we're living in right now in crypto which has its certain set of tradeoffs but what I'd like to kind of further understand from your perspective to lay the foundation here I think that you guys may have a different definition or at least your own definition of like what intents are with regards to the way that anoma works maybe you could just illuminate how you're you are thinking about what this intent Centric uh Paradigm looks like

what the and what aoma kind of definition of this intent engine really is I think that'll help lay the groundwork for the listeners as as well as further the rest of the conversation yeah let's see um so intents are just partial State transitions that's S at the very simp at the simplest level it's a partial State transition it's like I some State a and I like to be in state B um and generally in order to settle this someone else needs to be in state B and wants to be in state a you can think of this in a very specific example like a trade I have some eth that I want to trade for Bitcoin you have some Bitcoin that you want to trade for eth those two are those two things individually are

partial State transactions once you combine them that forms a transaction that can be settled somewhere um this of course sort of like extends this is not limited to directly two intense this can be an intense and again two intense can compose into another intense so if I have some e for Bitcoin and you have some Bitcoin forol for example this intent can be collapsed into e forol um and I don't have to care whether there's one other intent 100 other intents and the other really important thing is so this is all about State layout and really like an Nora intents are just about State layout like an Nora an Nora doesn't really care about like the specific instruction set or the specific

message passing model for example like when you think of the evm the evm does three things that does like some sort of State layout it how you access contract data it does some instruction set as in like evm bite code and it does some message passing modelis and like how do other contracts call into other contracts like how do contracts call into other contracts right and so in I know my intents I just focus on state layout this is the only thing you have to agree on if you agree on the state layout you can use the evm you can use the svm I actually don't care um whatever execution environment you want to use you can do this um and nor just really cares about the state layouts here um and this again can also mean that like an intent can be issued in zero

knowledge if you want to so like instead of attaching some like specific data to prove that you so for example like you own things in some State you own some e uh you are free to decide whether you are willing to reveal that you directly own the e or you reveal a ZK proof that attests to the fact that you own e to the intense this actually is completely transparent like they don't care this is just like I have some State and I'd like to go to some other state and I have an authorization that I am allowed to make this transition of course these two listeners will sort of realize that how do you get Tri intense like you need to find the counterparty so if you want to find a counterparty you have to reveal something uh but you can be much more

pragmatic about this you don't have to like yell to the world that you're willing to trade these two assets at that size you can go let me first see who is willing to trade in this range for example and then you can sort of like do much more optional disclosure things um where you reveal less or if you have if we like three of us are in a room we can just reveal to three of us our intents and then just settle them in zero knowledge fully and not reveal anything else to the world um I think that's quite important to realize with intent uh the other thing is they're fully program programmable so like we getting the same power that we got with ethereum over Bitcoin sort of like when we move from Bitcoin to ethereum we like holy crap I can like program I'm not

limited Bitcoin script and currently like I think everyone is starting to think about intents a little bit more like in comparison like three years ago everyone thought we were crazy um but they're all still thinking on like oh like an intent is limit order that's just like but that's very limited right it's like in noral intents are just programmatic any code you can write it's an intent you want to do a trade that's dependent on like the US election and the weather in China at the same time sure if you can write it in code you can execute this kind of intent yep it's starting like the three pillars that you described and the way that you kind of outline how this works from like a state perspective it really it really sounds to me like a like almost like what salana is calling Network

extensions what ethereum is calling Roll-Ups it's almost like this intent machine you guys are like building these programmable extensions for people to use within different ecosystems and then simultaneously you've been kind of taking the taking the uh the torch to copy and paste EV ml2 saying that kind of like there's not a lot there's not a lot of programmability upgrades here there's not a lot of things going on that are really changing that are kind of pushing the the needle how are you seeing this intent machine and this way that you're describing intense in relation to kind of other scaling solutions that you're seeing out there and kind of like the trade-offs between LTS and aoma design yeah so they're just different things really uh AA it's a

distributed operating system that's it's distributed in 10 cent comp if it's an intent machine it's you can really think of this as it's kind of like windows currently we live in this world where everyone is running like these barebone CPUs like everyone has their specific execution and as it develop I go like well I either stick to the same CPU or I now like rewrite my entire application for this other CPU like if I go to the svm I now rewrite my entire application and with no just it doesn't matter which CPUs are running under the hood if you can implement the operating system on top of the CPU it just works and so like your application just become portable this way um plus it networks all these different CPUs together um I think the reason why people get a little bit confus not

confused but like why they think like rollups and network extensions are kind of similar to like require intense because well intends are like when you think of what intent is right like I have a to B someone else is B to C I do this a 100 times and then sort of the loop closing like closing the loop is then a sequencer signature that makes this entire thing settable on L one um and so really like intents are just rollups on demand like this is what you can build with intense just on demand rollups uh they does that come for free because like the architecture allows for this that you can say well I have if you have 100 people that all like want to have some sort of sequential State transition we can collapse this all into one bit of compute and this is the nice

thing like aoma is incredibly flexible it aoma does a thing that is really hard and that no one else wants to tackle on like how do you give stable developer apis to people how do you Network all these many different things together um like to me it's really a user CH like where does a user want to keep their valuable state do they want to keep it on L1 do they want to keep it on L2 that's the hard question like who secures your state who like provides like long-term data retrieval guarantees for your state and this is really like the battle on the L2 side I think that I have like no stake in which is it seems that like there are many places where nowadays I can like offload my data to um and Ana doesn't try to compete with this like it I think this is like

whether it's useful to have yet the same VM in a slightly different color at a slightly different speed on a centralized server it's that's very questionable to me I don't know like to me as a developer I can do exactly the same thing I want to be able to do new things I want to be able to do new things also as a user where I can say well honestly here's my program here's my intent I would like to trade some e for die I don't actually care whether it get settled on E ethereum on optimism arbitrum just giving me whatever is quickest or cheapest right like and this is a kind of level of distraction that I'd like to be able to use and I think that's going to unlock the next 10x um because it like it gives you something new where like you all of a sudden you

start writing against the operating system and you go like well users pick the security preference execution preferences um and then the system figures out how to get them this right um I think this is sort of the position we're coming from the other thing is it's all about the state it's all about the data um like rollups on scaling Solutions if you define scaling Solutions very strictly um because like in the past like we always defined scaling Solutions as like we wanted to have some amount of like we wanted to have constant cost on the L1 and uh for infinite user interaction on sort of like in a scaling solution this is not

currently true like you're still bounded by how much data you can push onto the L1 um and this is really like onto some other da but like it's fundamentally bounded right and so I gave this great talk at least I liked it I think uh it was a fun talk um at um Plasma conon in Tokyo U like three weeks ago or so um where I talked about resource plasma which is just this idea that you like plasma constructions were correct um and that you want to enable everyone individually to hold their state and this like starts looking a lot like intense again where it's like well if everyone individually keeps their state these systems become incredibly scalable because we actually only need to verify

the compute on these systems they they like there's no particular reason why the fact that my like that I've X mind of e needs to be tracked in some database on ethereum there there's no reason for this like we should have a single Merk room to which I can prove I own some key in the system um that like represents x amount of e and I can like modify this key under the under some conditions um and then like we actually get to this constant scaling factor of like there's just a couple of Merle roots that we track um on whatever security system we want um but like scaling is completely unbounded from this and like from time to time we just need to update the roots I think we've heard people sort of allude to this idea

where state is is uh localized to the user and not stored on some database somewhere and people have had kind of fuzzy names for this which is like user uh Centric rollups or a user Centric view of the chain and so you know what the name of this podcast is the rollup we we tend to also believe that there's no Central chain that is going to be like the the the one chain to rule them all there's going to be a million chains people kind of end that you know to to different orders of magnitude but the the kind of extreme example is that every user is its own roll up and and from from what I'm hearing I'm this

their own change so like yeah could you kind of just expand on that a bit like what does that mean in practice Yeah so currently we live in this really weird weird abstraction world right like where there are chains and then they have some RPC notes and like there's some full notes that like serve rpcs and then as a user I have like my RPC client and I talk to this chain via some process via some like RBC calls and in an ideal case I get like cine proofs and so on and I've done like some security considerations um but the first thing to realize is State should only be collocated if it's valuable together like my personal data is not valuable if it's next collocated with Andy's data that's no point like so state only needs to be collocated if it's valuable

together as in for example if the three of us do regular trading we should probably collocate our um but most people don't really do regular trading with a billion other people most users like most people like need collocated state for their local community like when I think about my parents they need like collocated state for their like with the people in their Village that's like 2,000 people kind of thing they don't like it doesn't when every month they leave maybe and then they like need to take some part of the state to some other system where then collocation like has performance benefits but generally speak like they need fairly local state and the other really important component here is um we will not be like you will not

beat localized state or localized settlement unless you can violate the law of physics and speed of light constraints right like it is and this is like I'm going to share a little bit on the Solana like speed of light things here but like you can never build a faster Solana than we can do local settlement unless totally figures how to violate the laws of physics around speed of light right because we always have to like uh like around the globe consensus around the globe Network hops if the three of us are in a room we should just do local area networking um and then sort of like figure out what we want to do and then settle this wherever we want to take the state um and so my view of the entire system is that it is much cleaner as an abstraction when you start thinking of

users just as one out of one chains yeah um that just have some data themselves and maybe they sometimes want to move this data to ethereum and maybe then sometimes they want to move this data off ethereum and like for example if like we want to trade a bunch of assets maybe we have to move a bunch of the data to ethereum to be able to enable this kind of like like synchronous trading right uh but most of the time I'm very happy to secure my data locally um this also comes down like my parents will never trust Global Bitcoin or Global ethereum no matter how decentralized they will always trust the local community more so they should keep their local their data with their local

community um so I think this is the entire idea like once you start thinking of users as one-on-one chains you break this weird distinction between this is a user and this is a chain and you start arriving well all of these things are just controllers and we call them controllers which is really like consensus providers they're controllers they control some state it just controllers interacting with each other and then how do we enable a number of controllers to be able to connect to each other to like gossip data between them so that for example if two users come together and just want to do like pair wise trading they can just form an on demand chain in the middle that they both move the data into do the synchronous trading on that system and then move it back out um because Global consensus is really expensive right um

and so yeah I think it's a much better abstraction to think of users as oneon-one chains and they're just like chains talking to each other um yeah yeah couple of things there we had a podcast with uh Stephan from one balance and he was pretty adamant on global consensus being silly from the lens of like listen like if I'm going to go to Starbucks and buy a coffee why does the whole world need to verify that this transaction was like accurate done and and settled by a global distributed set of validators when it's a transaction that is so minuscule in the grand scheme of the broader transactions so I think that thesis with regards to local consensus being more impactful

paired up with also another recent pod that we had with Ilia from near which was with regards to user owned accounts and and kind of we were going back and forth on like this app chain thesis and he's kind of like no you don't need app chains because you know ethereum built it wrong where they they they built it without interoperability first whereas Cosmos kind of built it with interoperability uh kind of baked in from the beginning instead of doing that this way you should just do shine of sharding and have every user account be its own kind of chain its own kind of uh contract cont and then have the applications and other users interact directly with that user's kind of contractor that that user's chain and so this trend I see happening and I think

that like some of the leaders in the space are pushing this idea forward so from a more practical lens how does anoma push this forward from your perspective and kind of bring this together where does anoma fit in this puzzle or even more broadly like where does the concept of generalizable intents uh fit in to this to make this a reality or how does that kind of play in vertex Edge is now live on say Network say users can now trade 50 plus spot and per markets with the unified order book liquidity of vertex Edge across arbitrum blast mantle and S the next 6 weeks 850,000 say tokens will be

up for grabs as trading rewards every single week exclusively on say join vertex onay Network now on vertex Edge that's vertex protocol.com yeah so we I stop there um I think yeah I agree with Stefan here it's like it's silly to say and like close like physically close doesn't really like that's not hard requirement but more like culturally close this always the way I think about it like uh you because you can cut these examples a number of ways you could say well there should be like a Starbucks specific settlement system that handles all Global Starbucks traffic or you like do a local economy specific cut where you go like well the

economy in zuk gets its own settlement system and like actually both are valid this is kind of the point which is like the people in World of Warcraft will do lots of activity between themselves so they should have even though they're geographically distributed they should have like a like logically collocated State effectively that represents all of World of Warcraft uh because that's the state they do lots of tight interactions with right um I think a little bit on the example with Ilia it's like where like sharding does this to some extent but like the thing is it's still like a single Global Security model and like I'm still not convinced that this is the right call um also if it's near like this doesn't really change the idea that I still don't want want a One World Government inra um yeah

that was my push back as well I know it's still like a scaling a single machine it's just a different flavor like I understand the core design principle but like it doesn't it yeah it's not it's not as appealing to me in theory as more kind of distributed networks and and having you know ethereum as a settlement layer and scaling kind of horizontally or even like like like the way that Cosmos SDK and tenderman have built their models yeah um and like so how does this work specifically with anoma so anoma is very agnostic to the specific security model to users care about if all users want Global ethereum Security this is totally fine uh this is fine like I mean I don't

personally agree with that like some of these choices right like on the individual users but if let's assume we live in a hypothetical world of like everyone wants Global ethereum that's great this like Works super well with the Noma as well U it ji having this ability to have heterogeneous trust zones that connect with each other um and so really like what this offers to users and developers is that it giv gives you this generalized intent where you can say well I'd like to do a for b um and I'd like to send it to like my local trusted solers first like and if they can't solve this within the first I don't know 10 minutes then this gets like free for all um and then anyone can start solving this right and like or I only want to like talk to my two trusted

friends so I see if they can trade me this nft um and it's a lot about this flexibility and building networking stacks and like distributed system stacks that can like that aren't because currently all these systems are designed as like single Global consensus systems because they all started with this and that's like fine but it's very hard to Pivot a single Global consensus system into like no this is a very Loosely connected H unus trust model with a very uh with a completely novel like intent Centric execution with the intent machine right and so our approach has always been you know if users want to use ethereum that's amazing right like I use ethereum for like probably like 85 to 90% of the things I do um because

like this is my preferred Community Alo than have my assets but I just want like a Nora on ethereum um and then I can put a Nora also like on an L2 just the intent machine and now like on like optimism and ethereum the validators or the full noes can decide to run small side cast effect which are just processes and like here you have all the flexibility on like you can connect to the same P2P stack so I can gossip transa just raw transactions um to one P2P stack and then the P2P stack figures out well this is designed for optimism this was destined for ethereum or you can have a so high level integration where you start having the the intent machine on

ethereum as well as an optimism and then you go well uh now I have this like expressive generalized intent and maybe sort of the most tight integration is that you get some amount of Shar sequencing between uh these different security this these different trust zones and so noral is really just designed like it plugs in also with like near for example or like one balance like a normal really is not competitive because it's like it's doing something that is very difficult but I think it's going to be fundamentally the like fundamental unlock to connect a lot of these currently separate systems together into a coherent execution environment as well as a coherent not execution like coherent operating system that as a developer I just build

applications and when I user wants to move to new system I just have to build the operating system once for this new system and then all applications just work and as user I don't have to pick whether I always want to be that like I have to don't make a fundamental Choice like I can only be on ethereum I like I can never be on a roll up um but as a user I can just say well I currently have some State on e i current I'd like to have some State on on L2 I describe this as an intent I send this to the same common PTP stack and then solvers can just figure this out right um and this is really the way I think about this for like how AA um interfaces with sort of a lot of the existing infrastructure and I think this is sort

of the hardest thing because everyone ask me like oh isn't it competitive to X or Y I'm like no like I nor actually just tries to do something that's very needed because like this is a fundamental need of like how do we defragment a lot of the state that's on all these random things um and everyone else is just currently building like another execution right it's like I have no interest in this we have like 500 of them and it's very unclear that we need 500 of them um because I mostly care about local things so yeah yeah and the way to fix the state fragmentation issue is actually to like fragment it way way more and then tie all the pieces together uh and and so V put out an article the other day uh glue and

co-processors and that's sort of the way that I'm thinking about this because anoma provides that generalizable intent framework for these different applications co-processors data hubs in order for them to communicate with one another and so I you started to to to get into how aoma communicates with some of the existing architecture are are there any infrastructure changes that are required like do we need all users to have their own account in order for aoma to sort of mesh and merge that data together or can we start by anoma as the glue between rollup and then we can start to use aoma as data starts to go more into these user owned accounts then we can use aoma

to tie those together ah yeah I should I I'm have to explain this a little bit better I think um there's no Central anoma user account there's no like Central anoma chain that you must interact I think these are like kind of like my I have some amount of problems with the chain abstraction thesis and movement here because I think it's always like let's just like build yet another layer on of abstraction that everyone must sit at in terms of data and state um there's no anoma chain you need to interact with like if you just want to use anoma as a environment on ethereum great no anoma chain ever required just like directly use this on ethereum if you just want to be two rollups that connect anoma just sort of like this P2P substrate this execution

this operating system that you can leverage to do this um so there is no really like we don't have to and I also think this is like a terrible deployment strategy when you actually think about it because this is kind of like what we had with the L1 Wars where everyone went like or even the L2 Wars right now where everyone goes well move your valuable piece of state to new my new shiny thing and it will fix all your problems yeah like that's not going to happen like so and with anoma it's much more well the infrastructure comes to you where you already have valuable State um if over time there's maybe a local anoma chain because you do lots of things in World of Warcraft and you want to have this like unified um like optimiz CPU for your World of Warcraft consensus

instance yeah maybe you decide to like move some State into sort of an noral native CPU run by the World of Warcraft Community but this is very much like an optional eventual thing it's not everyone like just generate your new account over here and we will like direct everything from your new account um so the onboarding path just looks much like much easier in my opinion where it's like the state can remain where it is because and like moving the state is actually the hard part so like it's much easier to bring infrastructure to State than to bring state to infrastructure yep that it so it reminds me of some of these different players of a chain abstraction landscape that are doing um you could say like permissions or orchestrations where it's kind of

like this idea of facilitating different cross chain and multi-chain transactions different types of interactions across a variety of execution environments um where where you guys fit appears to be more at the application kind of layer if you will where actually we got in trouble for asking we we were trying to figure out where to put aoma on this map that we did and like there was no category I saw that map and I was like autoflow action that's not it mate yeah so what so what was wrong with the uh with the map or better yet what was where does okay so let's just start with your view of chain obstruction like what is the chain obstruction stack to

you how does this how is this going to work what is your vision for this CH of struction let's start with with the bare bones then you can roast us for the map and then we can we can kind of discuss how this is going to kind of play out yeah so I think I don't think like users should still know which chains they're on this is now going to go away because the chains are what the things that secure their state like it's very important that you understand where your state is because that's your fundamental security mod right like you can never live in a world where you go like well my state lives somewhere but I'm fully stracted on this like super obstructed chain and like my state now lives in like two data Cent like two servers somewhere essentially right uh like

users need to fundamentally care about this otherwise this is going to be horrendously insecure and people lose SS of money right um so the way I think about this is more we want to give users the ability to it's it's not chain abstraction in that sense it's more like we want to build like there's an operating system abstraction so that users can go that like applications can roam I always like to use the example of mobile phones like my phone that I bought actually I think I bought this in the states in New York um like I can use this in Switzerland this is amazing uh I can use this in China I can use this in Australia I can use this wherever I go it's actually quite nice um but this only works because we have a um like we agreed on the Bas layer protocols for

how phones interact with the network and so I think of this much more like this is the kind of operating system like I can take my word program and decide that I want to run this on a Mac or on a power PC um or on some like esoteric CPU uh wherever like for example Windows just runs my application runs and this is what I want for users that users go like well I would like to do some trading um and I can take this like trading capability to a number of different chains and I don't have to worry about like reprogramming my like device or my application on my phone to work against this new chain I just get a common abstraction but users still know

about which chains they're on because this is like this is the value these systems provide like if users don't know that they're on a chain or which chain they're on this just seems like the easiest way for people to lose tons of money because they start moving to insecure systems and and this is very different than like I think people think about this kind of abstractions like well we want to hide this complexity from users um and like no this is like the fundamental thing you can do this for servers maybe because you can go like well whether this is in this AWS data center or that St Pro makes very little difference but whether you're on terror or whether you're Ona makes a ton of difference um and could better know this as a difference like this is going

to be problematic if users do not know this difference anymore um okay so that's kind of your general worldview of chain abstraction which I think there's a lot of points that we've heard heard and agree with and I think some with regards to users caring I think there's room to disagree with regards like some users just some users just may want to have security but may not care if it's base optimism or arbitrum or if it's you know X Y and Z the chains themselves have very similar security models they might not care exactly about the name or the dynamic of the community I agree with that by the way like um to some extent if you can like abstract security away and go like well these four systems

roughly the same security then users can just pick like this is kind of why intens are nice because you can also say I'm willing to be in any security uh environment that has at least 100 validators uh with no validator with like no more than the top 10 validators owning two-thirds of the Stak right like um and this is kind of like the way to do this I think uh that and I think it's on the applications maybe like on the or well intents provides you with this constrained set of tasks right like that's the key breakthrough of intense is like you get these restrictions almost so um if you can if you can if solvers are only uh operating within a certain uh set of longtail uh l2s or chains or whatever it is then you can

kind of have these public disclosures as to like different levels and I see like almost to a certain extent where you go on like Robin Hood or something and you can choose like conservative aggressive or medium there's there could be a path where like you could choose the where you what apps you're using on different chains based on like a certain risk tolerance um and perhaps that's provided by these apps or by the solvers in some in some ux um capacity um I could see that that be interesting um could be like different I have to say like the Robin Hood thing is like oh conservative or aggressive and the difference is like make it hacked but probably won't get

hacked so we put this Market map and for those who are just listening on Spotify or on the website we have the map up here that's pinned on our on our Expo on our X profile and yeah I think we [ __ ] up um anoma's front in the right in the middle beautiful I think that's the old logo so two fuckups here but maybe you could describe what orderflow sources and auctions means to you uh and what that is and then why aoma may or may not fit there and then perhaps if if a was to be somewhere else on the map where you kind of see it yeah um I think autoflow is really like how do you and auto autoflow sources and auctions is

like autoflow tends to originate from users so this tends to be like high level apps this tends to be like unisoft that's the source of autoflow um and then these auctions on like how do you auction off this autoflow I'm not a big fan of this idea that we've made m in like an in an an inevitable component rather than and bu to like fix um because why does lots of M exist well it exists because you sign over an execution Trace not over a state update like and so I mean if you come from computer science you will know that like depending on how you inter leave your database updates they will result in like um or depending on how

you sorry could you just Define an execution trace for oh yeah sorry um so an execution Trace is think of it as like recipe like um a smart contract on a theorum is an execution Trace you go first do this then do this like 2 plus two make the crypto Kitty blue send it somewhere right like that's it's a tra it's like you go step by step and you executed uh that way uh and you must know exactly which compute you want to run uh this is actually kind of difficult and you have to a number of bugs s from this problem that like you define that like these are execution Tres and what actually happen s when a user sends a transaction on ethereum they don't sign over a specific State update they sign over an execution phase

they go like this is my Inter Point and this contract is is allowed to like run its individual steps and I get some State afterwards like you can simulated and you kind of know what kind of state you're getting but you don't get in protocol guarantee whereas with an intent with a generalized intent you sign over the specific future State and then you don't care like whether there's like one like that there's like a ZK proof involved or that there it's going by an amm to compute the ex eventual State this is by the way the really big unlock for a noral intents which is you sign over State updates you do not sign over execution traces um because again if you sign over an execution tra you

must kind of know which other counterparties you're interacting with because yeah you need to call them in your execution trait so they must be piped in whereas in a nor you can go well I have a for B someone that gives me the other side of the thing yeah that's settled and then so in protocol you just check do did did the did the updates adhere to the signed State updates as in like are the State updates uh like fulfilled or violated and it's violated you reject the update um so this is uh the way I think of exec or the way to think of execution traces um and so a lot of teams have started like designing around well we have all this orderflow that's really execution Trace that I can inter leave in various ways

uh let's try to monetize this by like auctioning off the ability to [ __ ] ordinary users um is this a good idea I'm not sure like no one likes the fact that Citadel does this with Robin Hood like I don't know um it seems bad um so and aoma doesn't provide this aoma just provides and this is a little bit I think the problem with this map like honestly the right answer to this problem is like the background the like light back black background color should just be a Nora colored because a Nora provides like hooks into all these different components it's not like it's not just a simple one thing and like it's not just selling your orderflow it's not just like providing you an

execution environment or consensus system it's like how do you get a sort of like fully flet operating system that you can deploy on many different settlement layers um and then how do you have the infrastructure to connect all these things and then how can Sol us read this data compute some so like transactions and settle them then wherever the user want to settle them um and so for example like solvers can also be used for orchestration here um because I can have an intent that says this is only valid in a month from now and if in a month from now you claim it like you said you execute this you can claim I don't know 0.01 e um right and so that means that now I'm just pricing data availability cost on like does someone is someone willing to keep

around my inent for one month in exchange for 0.01 e um and so like I normal provides this kind of orchestration um but again it's like people always think of these systems as like as tokens as like oh like I must have like this is my price Pony and like you must write my price Pony kind of somewhere um and I charge you fees for this and like Ana isn't this aa's just like there's infrastructure and you are free to use it please go ahead and like use it right it's not that there's a normal chain you must interact with um or like there's a network a specific RPC you must talk to um yeah on this diagram I think the sort of most preferred thing

is like probably settlement in infra um because this is like I think where it has a very big impact uh where it just like provides very good execution guarantees to people and like for example like and standards maybe and like solver solver networks for example right like that just like it's an application it's a thing that you build on top of AA for example like sve or like even aori it's like something that just like integrat super well with AA because it's like not the same as aoma it's like they just provide a specific standard for like how solvers can sort of coordinate with each other um and the noral provides a lot of like the backing P2P infrastructure um and again then on like commissions orchestrations

like yeah a little bit but I don't like the phrasing that like there like we all get this like Central account and the central account coordinates all my things that's like I wanted this for decentralized things not like I to yet trust yet another intermediary even with the intermediary centralized my theme is like self- soverign infrastructure and like people should be capable of running their own stuff um I don't want to have to delegate this we'll make sure for for the next map we send you the invoice for the uh logo to to be on the entire background we'll send the signature block for the allocation as well all right buddy thanks for your [ __ ] recomendation sir God damn dude can't please anybody

these days huh my goodness I I do like these Graphics um I think they provide a good intro especially because that's just a lot of stuff happening nowadays um and like yeah the it's nice that at least someone takes the time to go through all the different things um because I think not enough people actually try to understand how all things fit together yeah our our graphic designer has a lot of fun with them too uh Rob what you got for us let's take some time to talk to talk about namada um okay launching today in and around when this is going to be posted

um and I think it it hits on a lot of the the the ideological things that we were talking about at the beginning of this podcast The Sovereign thesis the no Central chain no Central Prov uh the Privacy elements the local consensus elements as well and so let's just start Broad and then we'll dive into maybe start to tie some associations to some of the other uh Concepts we were talking about welcome to the ignition Mantle's newest campaign to liberate the growth power of Bitcoin fbtc ignition has officially begun with a total token supply of over 2,000 fbtc with a tvl of over 150 million right now you can go on the fbtc website to see

all of the featured campaigns saking opportunities and liquidity pools where you can utilize fbtc onchain today for some of the best yields available on l2s the ignition Sparkle campaign can be found at fbtc docomo D campaign yeah um I can give you a quick intro to Nada I mean NADA was a problem that I have that I think a number of us have um which is I sometimes send money to people uh in crypto and it's very annoying if they all can correlate each other and like all the services and like the various people can exactly tie this all back to me and I think so I do the

same thing that I think most of us do which is we like use centralized exchange to give us new addresses and we effectively use like I mean coinbase is the single lest mixer in the world um so it's like Croc and finance and like it's not a problem right but like just very fundamentally I think a lot of people use this this way um and so to me always the problem became I I I wanted to some amount of privacy guarantees that existed for assets that are already held like it always seemed very nonsensical to tie this to specific asset classes or monetary policies um and so how do you have something that's fully asset agnostic um and at the time when we started NS um this was really like it's an inter it was a personal problem it's

like something at the en noral community like a number of us in the en noral Community really deeply care about like the the ability to experiment with some sort of like data protection guarantees data flow guarantees privacy guarantees right and so NADA was really like um the earlier Noma Community scien experiment like what does it actually look like because we haven't really seen this in practice um in sort of like a fully as agnostic way um and this is really starting it's really taking a life of its own I mean the N Community is huge right now like you said will come out when launch is like cool I don't know the Val is just standing up the network like I'm not involved in that I'm not running a vality I'm not running a note um I hope they know what they're doing

um yeah but there's been some like some butting of heads going on what's going on there what's uh people are upset yeah I think people like I think we tried something radical and uh this is actually much more technologically driven than even well it's a little bit of both I I think uh I think the buing of heads you're referring to is a little bit around um sort of like no locks full unlocks um this is impossible to do in a privacy preserving way um so if you actually want to have a good privacy preserving system or data flow uh data privacy preserving system uh this is very difficult um you like to build this and I actually I know of no system that

has this I know of a couple of systems that have like some contracts of chain that say like oh please don't move your assets around um but that this is very difficult to build if you have a multi-asset shi set right um and this is sort of the first technical reason and honestly if someone wants to propose this please go ahead like the this is all open source like propose a different schedule um to the community and see what happens there uh and I think this is honestly always my answer like these are decentralized systems um and I think over time we've lost this ethos but like I remember very vividly when we stood up Cosmos and tesos and like poar Kosama

and like some of these were more centralized than others like Cosmos was by far the most decentralized Network launch but these are like fundamentally like these are communities like if you don't like something like propose something it's not just and like especially with the l2s that are I mean practically they just look very centralized I think sort of the um Community like people right now sort of expect that this is a clean cut as a product built by Central organization like I don't know what to tell you I I care about decentralization so these things actually end up being decentralized I don't really want to be in charge of running a server that does a thing for you like these are Community projects these are Community owned U So

my answer has always been like if you don't like something change it right like because this is how I got into the space um the other thing on like whether lockups make sense I don't know it seems unlikely that they're like net positive because they just skew the market incentives and just bleed the market in like they split the market incentives over a longer period of time and to me it always seemed like for example when Cosmos like launched it was pretty cheap at launch like for a while uh and so like this allowed a bunch of early inance like same for ethereum like you don't actually like this High FDB low float matter um is horrendous and everyone agrees here but everyone goes like yeah we should keep doing this

because like everyone is currently like um the VCS are getting Filthy Rich over this matter of like FL low flow High FTV and I just don't think it is good for communities uh the one interesting aspect that I didn't think about um when sorry thinking about this problem space a little bit is you know the one the one group of people that really benefits from this is professional airdrop Farmers because the air drops are tend to be really liquid and so if you run an a air drop Farm or like if you are now one of the hedge funds farming these air drops like you have all incentives to like keep the low float High FD meta going right because you're like the one person that's unlocked you like can sell FAS in the VCS and so like I I think a lot of the

sentiment is really driven that by the fact that we have a very poor signal to noise R ratio in the space at the moment which is like dominated by and like I get the economics but if you are 200 people and like a start like people uh kind of like air drop farming operation like one stet air drop is going to be your yearly income like yeah I get why like these economics are kind of like why you like these economics but overall long term I am pretty convinced that um like these locks do nothing except like skew eventual results and I mean we see this like is there a single thing that launch in the last 12 month that's not bleeding um I mean like I don't know

look at your favorite thing like well some people may like are up if they bought the first like two days or so um I don't know this doesn't seem healthy it seems much better to sort of grow communities organically because why are people so bullish on E like why like because when East was launched it was cool it was cheap it was like we just hacked with it um like and this was fun I mean this was like the thing and like as a result a bunch of people sort of like rode up the wave and um are now really like deeply invested in ethereum and the asset and the sort of user base and like the technology and I think this is much healthier way for communities to grow yeah I've been seeing some

interesting research also around growth-based unlocks and growth based vesting schedules tvl uh user count metrics things that uh that can basically alleviate the cell pressure of insiders because of the metrics are like really strong and so it's like there's a fundamental reason there's a fundamental kind of value to this token or to this asset to this network yeah and so kind of uh balancing that with the with the unlock schedule was interesting I I Rob do you have something else there no I mean I I like I like that that model as well and it it reminded me of uh kpi tokens that were around for a little while

um I haven't seen those in quite a long time but I think there's similarities uh and also seems to smooth out some of the Dynamics that that Adrian brought up yeah I mean just uh as we kind of wrap we talked kind of I didn't mean to to to have the whole NADA section go into putting Adrien on the spot because he sh he shat on our Market map but I guess the ti just kind of turn that was return I see but um maybe you could just like allude to the importance of privacy from an ethos perspective for a couple minutes and then we we can wrap because I think that's the big that's the big unlock here yeah so I think when I think about data protection or privacy it's like current

systems have a lot of default data protection right like my bank account isn't readable to the public my bank does a reasonable job like reasonable job um sort of protecting me from leaking a lot of information towards the external World um and I just don't see these systems ever gaining tractions without this um because fundamentally like my parents will not want the syst system where they NE see how much money they make like it's not going to happen like there's no amount of yield farming I can promise them where they go yes I'm willing to give up my entire privacy to the rest of the world forever in into eternity right like that's not happening um so I think outside of like the air drop farming like shitcoin trading use cases

this is going to be a fundamental requirement um and namada really is like it's the first steps like let's try this out let's see how this works in practice let's experiment with this because really historically there has been very little done at this on this front and so like over time this is also where I think of like NADA is just the first project or like it's an effort by the an Nora ecosystem to like start pushing this forward um because over time as we learn more we can start also like integrating more into NADA connecting these EOS like these systems closely together maybe have something like um sort of what NADA is nowos posing with I think um shielded action so like cross chain things when Amar provides a

shielded set um and I think so this is quite important the other thing is I think we should really be more worried about surveillance States than we are right now I think there was sort of a long wave around like 2014 cage analytica where everyone was very concerned about this and then this died down and like to me this is never like this has not gone away um and I think to a large extent the reason why Facebook was in this weird position where they could influence us elections was not because they were bad people but because their business model fundamentally required it right like they sold ads and turns out that a bunch of people were just high as bid us for these ads like they sold the data they

had was like they weren't acting unethically they were acting within sort of the constraints of their business model and so I think if we want to safeguard democracy we just need better data Protection Systems so that people and put on the spot like where publicly traded company has to decide on like do I like follow shareholder code and like maximize profit or do I follow like human ethics and not try to sell all my data to uh third countries um and the other thing is on on The self- Sovereign infrastructure side I live in Switzerland I like Switzerland right like I have no illusion that Switzerland is not prepared for nation state attack in on in the digital world like the idea that the Swiss Financial system will

survive a dedicated Onslaught by a dedicated actor is idiotic to believe like this system collapses immediately and then you just leak a bunch of data to sort of foreign entities and so I think I never think about data protection as like as like against the government I think about this as like data protection for for National Defense I I think like every like person that cares about the local community should care about this because these things are honey pods and it is not like you want to protect this data because like if your financial data fully leaks to some adversary like you're in deep [ __ ] so like I think about this is like data privacy data

protection for National Defense for Community defense and really like allowing people to like Safeguard democracy here like in a fully transparent system I think we're going to have a hard time and I see the authoritarian Trends in Europe I'm like well let's pretend that we can build like super stable systems that definitely won't get captured I'm like yeah I don't know East Germany and the stazi is really like only 40 well 40 years ago I don't know this like seems too recent to make this jump to like start going like yeah we definitely should trust these like totally competent bureaucrat bureaucrats in Brussels to like do the right thing all the time yeah yeah I think a lot of us in this

space share similar ideology like I mean I've just been personally like outside of the US for the last two years or so traveling around and I feel more empowered just you know not being in one country with one place and like just kind of moving around and there's a lot of different ways you can Empower yourself but I think privacy is one of the largest and then having private onchain assets is about as good as it gets for from a financial standpoint in today's world yeah so it will get better over time and like in the future we can start like once you start having intents you can start building not just like transfers or like private preserving transfers but you can also start building like privacy preserving voting systems you can like do actually like um privacy preserving public goods funding things like this where like I may not

want to publicly admit that I'm like Pro nuclear in Germany um and so like being able to do this like privately it seems like a very good first step for me um so I'm very excited about this and I think if we don't solve this like we need to solve a bunch of things at in this industry and I'm really kind of worried that we just running around in circles um because no one is willing to tackle sort of like the hard distributed systems problems on like how do low these systems connect to each other how do you like get reasonable guarantees for end users and was like yeah I'll do the super quick evm based roll up in red and like I like the evm but like do we need another 500 rollups I don't know seems like spend some engineering time on like something that like advances us

a little bit forward if you keep doing the same thing as the next guy we probably not make much progress yeah yep yep thank you for your time Adrian yeah thank you man in a in a world of forks you guys are building spoons so uh Kudos thanks for coming on yeah thank you for having