[00:00:05]: Anna Rose:


Welcome to Zero Knowledge. I'm your host, Anna Rose. In this podcast, we will be exploring the latest in zero-knowledge research and the decentralized web, as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online.


This week, Tarun and I chat with Hart from UMA & Across. And just a note, this episode basically has two parts. For the first half of the episode we explore Hart's project, Across, a cross-chain interoperability solution, a.k.a a bridge, and a sister project to UMA. We explore how Across is constructed, how the different actors function in the system, the trade-off space, the choices they make, and how Across compares to other interop solutions. Then, as we are in Brussels in-person recording this, we pop a bottle of champagne and very much shift gears. So it is becoming a bit of an every six months or so tradition for Tarun and I to grab a bottle of bubbly and a friend for a candid drunk episode. This time, Hart is that friend, and we begin with thoughtful observations about our week in Brussels, during EthCC, events we've been at, talks we've given, research that's coming, but very quickly we devolve into somewhat drunken ramblings and interrupting one another a lot. Classic. Please forgive us all, we were drinking on an empty stomach. Hope you enjoy it.


Before we kick off, I want to let you know about ZK Hack Montreal, an IRL hackathon happening on August 9th to 11th in, you guessed it, Montreal. This is the fourth ZK focused hackathon produced by ZK Hack, and it's a great place to learn about ZK tools, meet fellow ZK builders and build the next generation of ZK applications. You can already apply over at zkmontreal.com. It's set to be the ZK event of the summer, and it's heating up, so get your application in soon.


Now Tanya will share a little bit about this week's sponsors.


[00:02:08]: Tanya:


Namada is the shielded asset hub, rewarding you to protect the multichain. Built to give you full control over sharing your personal information, Namada brings data protection to existing assets, applications, and networks. Namada ends the era of transparency by default, enabling shielded transfers and shielded cross-chain actions to protect your data, even when interacting with transparent chains. Namada also introduces a novel shielding rewards system. By holding your assets in a shielded set, you help strengthen Namada's data protection guarantees and collect NOM rewards in return. Namada will initially support IBC and Ethereum-based assets, but will ultimately serve as a single shielded hub for all assets across the multichain. Learn more and follow Namada mainnet launch at namada.net.


Aleo is a new Layer 1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup. Driven by a mission for a truly secure Internet, Aleo has interwoven zero-knowledge proofs into every facet of their stack, resulting in a vertically integrated Layer 1 blockchain that's unparalleled in its approach. Aleo is ZK by design. Dive into their programming language, Leo, and see what permissionless development looks like, offering boundless opportunities for developers and innovators to build ZK apps. This is an invitation to be part of a transformational ZK journey. Dive deeper and discover more about Aleo at aleo.org.


And now here's our episode.


[00:03:38]: Anna Rose:


So I'm here in Brussels, our favorite city in the world, with Tarun and Hart. Hi, guys.


[00:03:45]: Hart Lambur:


Hey, Anna.


[00:03:46]: Tarun Chitra:


Hey, excited to be here. And for the record, even though I'm gonna get impaled by our pair of Canadians on the show, Belgium really is France's Canada.


[00:03:55]: Hart Lambur:


I thought you were gonna save this joke for later in the pod.


[00:03:59]: Tarun Chitra:


It's okay. We might as well pull the knives out. It'll get spicier faster.


[00:04:03]: Hart Lambur:


So, for context, Anna and I are both proud Canadians.


[00:04:06]: Anna Rose:


Yes.


[00:04:07]: Hart Lambur:


And I don't think we take kindly to Belgium or Canada being compared to... What's the joke?


[00:04:14]: Tarun Chitra:


Belgium is France's Canada.


[00:04:14]: Anna Rose:


Belgium is France's Canada.


[00:04:16]: Hart Lambur:


Belgium is France's Canada. Yeah, I don't like it.


[00:04:19]: Anna Rose:


Yeah, I'm not sure. Also, Canada's so much bigger...


[00:04:22]: Hart Lambur:


And wonderful.


[00:04:22]: Anna Rose:


Than America, and Brussels is so much smaller than France. It doesn't make any sense, actually.


[00:04:32]: Hart Lambur:


Tarun, I came here from a beach in Canada on the west coast, where I saw humpback whales flowing through our gorgeous oceans on my way here. Belgium doesn't have that shit.


[00:04:41]: Anna Rose:


No.


[00:04:41]: Tarun Chitra:


All right, well, I'm just the messenger, but then I just heard this joke so many times, so.


[00:04:48]: Anna Rose:


And he thought it was really, really funny. This is the second time we're hearing it. Anyway, for today's episode, the plan is we're gonna do... I think we're gonna try to do this in two parts. The first part is actually getting to know Hart and getting to know the project, Across. And, Hart, I've tried to have you on the show, I think, now for a few months, and it's just cool that we're in the same city, and so we figured we'd actually sit down and do this interview now. The second part, maybe we can do a little review of what's been happening this week in Brussels, because we're here for the big EthCC extravaganza that happens every year. But this year it's here in Brussels, which is kind of unusual.


[00:05:24]: Tarun Chitra:


I ate zero sprouts so far.


[00:05:26]: Anna Rose:


Is sprouts a thing? I thought waffles...


[00:05:27]: Tarun Chitra:


Brussels sprouts.


[00:05:29]: Anna Rose:


Oh, yeah.


[00:05:31]: Hart Lambur:


Your dad jokes, man. What is going on?


[00:05:35]: Tarun Chitra:


No sugar-free Red Bull here. It's been impossible to find. So like...


[00:05:37]: Anna Rose:


Oh, no. This is what happens. He gets so sweet and dorky.


[00:05:41]: Hart Lambur:


Tarun, there's an unlimited supply of sugar-free Red Bull in my hotel. I'll treat you later.


[00:05:45]: Tarun Chitra:


I'll take you up on it, because I kept finding Red Bull zero, which is a poor imitation of sugar-free Red Bull.


[00:05:51]: Anna Rose:


Really?


[00:05:52]: Tarun Chitra:


Yeah. I think sugar-free has this particular anise-y like after taste that I love.


[00:05:56]: Hart Lambur:


You feel so unfocused because I think you haven't had enough sugar-free Red Bull.


[00:06:01]: Tarun Chitra:


It's true. It's true, it's true. It's truly a drug.


[00:06:04]: Anna Rose:


All right, Hart, I think we're gonna start in on a little bit of an intro to you. The audience may not know you. What have you been working on for the last few years?


[00:06:14]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah, actually, I know Tarun from before Gauntlet actually started.


[00:06:18]: Anna Rose:


Oh, wow.


[00:06:18]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah.


[00:06:19]: Anna Rose:


What year?


[00:06:20]: Hart Lambur:


I guess this was 2018, Tarun?


[00:06:22]: Tarun Chitra:


2018, yeah.


[00:06:23]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah. We paid you as a contractor at one point. Do you remember that?


[00:06:24]: Tarun Chitra:


Yeah. I remember in the Two Sigma office.


[00:06:27]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah, in the Two Sigma office, which is one of our investors. Anyways, this was back when I found it, so. Okay, I'm like, I joke that I'm the second oldest guy in DeFi after Chris Dixon. Tarun is touching his head.


[00:06:40]: Anna Rose:


Tarun is thinking about it.


[00:06:40]: Tarun Chitra:


Yeah. It's probably. I don't know. Egorov's kind of old.


[00:06:44]: Hart Lambur:


Huh?


[00:06:45]: Tarun Chitra:


Egorov is old.


[00:06:46]: Hart Lambur:


I don't know him.


[00:06:46]: Tarun Chitra:


I think Egorov is actually probably might be older than both of you. He finished his PhD in the early 2000s.


[00:06:52]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah. Okay, well. And I worked in finance. As a young Canadian, I went to university in the US, in New York, then worked in finance for eight years as a bond trader, where I met my co-founder of UMA, who went to MIT and knew friends of Tarun. That's kind of how we originally got connected. I started a fintech business that was from 2013 to 2017, and then got sucked into crypto in 2018, before DeFi was a thing and made a protocol called UMA. The goal there is to try... We were trying to bring derivatives on blockchains, and our problem there was, how do we get data? And we meant more than just price data, but like arbitrary data on blockchains. And we built something called the Optimistic Oracle, and that's been really cool and really fun. But the thing I think we're going to talk about today is the second protocol, our sister protocol we created called Across, which has really morphed into an intent-based interop tech mainly thought of as a bridge. And maybe we can talk about why bridging isn't a thing too.


[00:08:02]: Anna Rose:


Sounds good. But before we do that, like UMA, that project, where was it? What ecosystem is that in? Where did it live?


[00:08:10]: Hart Lambur:


All Ethereum.


[00:08:12]: Anna Rose:


Oh, it's all Ethereum. For some reason, I thought it was Cosmos, but it's not.


[00:08:14]: Hart Lambur:


No, I like Cosmos, but we're not on Cosmos.


[00:08:17]: Anna Rose:


Okay. Okay.


[00:08:18]: Hart Lambur:


It's actually quite possible that if Tendermint existed...


[00:08:20]: Tarun Chitra:


Canadians are too nice to be founders in the Cosmos ecosystem, because...


[00:08:24]: Anna Rose:


Wait, there are a ton of Canadians in the Cosmos ecosystem, actually.


[00:08:28]: Tarun Chitra:


Well, they're all... Do they fight as much?


[00:08:28]: Anna Rose:


No, but I think everything was founded for Cosmos in Toronto.


[00:08:32]: Tarun Chitra:


Okay. Fine fine.


[00:08:32]: Anna Rose:


From Jae and Ethan, and I think they're all from there.


[00:08:34]: Tarun Chitra:


That's true, that's true, that's true.


[00:08:35]: Anna Rose:


Henry.


[00:08:36]: Tarun Chitra:


I'm just thinking about all the people who fight with each other in Cosmos. I'm like, the stereotype is you guys are really nice.


[00:08:41]: Anna Rose:


Guys, Canada's a country. It's a big country, and people are people. They're nice Canadians, and there's a lot of assholes. They just hide it better.


[00:08:51]: Hart Lambur:


It's true. And I've spent enough time in both the US and in crypto to become less nice. That's been my goal.


[00:08:59]: Tarun Chitra:


All right, you heard it here first.


[00:09:00]: Anna Rose:


You're still pretty nice. Okay, so UMA was an Ethereum project?


[00:09:05]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah.


[00:09:06]: Anna Rose:


Was it an application on Ethereum?


[00:09:08]: Hart Lambur: 


Essentially, yes. So UMA, you can think of as an implementation of Vitalik's SchellingCoin blog post that he wrote in 2014. And this has other intellectual predecessors in like Truthcoin and Augur, actually. And the idea is, how can you build a game theoretic machine that will tell you whether... Tell you a truth, really?


[00:09:30]: Anna Rose:


Oracles.


[00:09:31]: Hart Lambur: 


An Oracle?


[00:09:31]: Anna Rose:


Yeah.


[00:09:32]: Hart Lambur: 


But not like a price feed Oracle. Not like we're going to take the API data from Binance and CoinBase and put it on-chain. This is like, I want to ask a question, like, who's the president of the United States? Or like an arbitrary question, like, is this set of data valid? And the origin story here for Across actually was we were actually looking for use cases for UMA. And this was sort of before any type of cross-chain messaging existed, and we realized that transacting across-chains or sort of verifying things across-chains is a form of an Oracle problem. And we realized we could use the UMA Oracle to help with that, which we then do in a very specific way that we can maybe get into.


[00:10:15]: Anna Rose:


I want to just check this, though, because you were saying sort of it was the first message passing, but had IBC been spec'd out, or are you thinking more in the Ethereum side?


[00:10:24]: Hart Lambur:


In the Ethereum world. We're talking more like Arbitrum and Optimism sort of had just launched, and they had a way to send messages. They still do. The canonical message bridges go from Ethereum to those chains in like 20-ish minutes, but take seven days to go the other direction, even though everyone can kind of see that they're correct well before that seven day finality. And so we were trying to use this UMA Schelling point Oracle to do messaging faster.


[00:10:51]: Anna Rose:


So you build Across for that particular use case. And what is it exactly? Like you're talking about this message passing bridge, but yeah, maybe can you go in a little bit of what that looks like or maybe what it was and also how it's evolved?


[00:11:07]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah. The origin story might actually confuse what it's become now. So Across is an intent-based bridge.


[00:11:14]: Anna Rose:


Now.


[00:11:14]: Hart Lambur:


Now. And so the way I like to explain this is if you think that you have... Imagine you have two blockchains. We have no video, so I can't use my hands, but you have blockchain A and blockchain B, and you want to send value between the two of them. What... Naively, the way you think that would work is, okay, I'm going to have blockchain A, I'm going to send a message or send a deposit into blockchain A. I have to wait for finality on blockchain A, and then I send a message from A to B, and then I release funds on B to the user.


[00:11:45]: Anna Rose:


Oh, wow. Okay.


[00:11:46]: Hart Lambur:


Okay, so that's like, typically how... What I'll call like Gen 1 bridges work.


[00:11:51]: Anna Rose:


Was this the lock, unlock?


[00:11:54]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah. Then you can get into... There's sort of a different parallel conversation like, okay, am I locking and minting assets?


[00:12:01]: Anna Rose:


Oh, yes.


[00:12:01]: Hart Lambur:


Right? Or you could imagine you have a pool of assets on chain A and chain B, and you're going to use this message to release assets that are canonical assets on chain B. Kind of ignore that for now. That's sort of like depending on your use case. But this sort of bridging framework is how I think a lot of people thought that value should be moved between blockchains.


[00:12:22]: Anna Rose:


For sure.


[00:12:23]: Hart Lambur:


And in something like IBC, actually, this kind of works pretty well because you have pretty fast finality, and you can send the message pretty quickly, and that all kind of works. But for a lot of EVM rollups, that's not the case, and it becomes quite tricky.


[00:12:41]: Anna Rose:


Got it.


[00:12:41]: Hart Lambur:


So you go back and you think about this native framework or this naive framework of trying to send a message from A to B and wait for finality on A to do so. And the problem is it's slow. Like, you have to wait for finality, and then sending a message is expensive and slow and kind of scary from a security perspective too. And so our approach is actually to do something quite different. And this is the nature of these cross-chain intents. Our approach is to not send a message, but to rather have a network of third-party solvers or relayers or fillers, use the words interchangeably, and those third-party solvers will observe blockchain A for when a user makes a deposit, and that deposit goes basically into an escrow contract. They'll observe blockchain A, and then they will front money to blockchain B, front their own capital to blockchain B, and fill the user extremely quickly. The user's happy, they get their funds fast, and then the protocol can take its time in verifying, "that that intent was filled" before releasing the user's initial funds to the solver.


[00:13:49]: Anna Rose: 


I want to really understand what these third-party solvers actually are. Are they actors on one blockchain, one of these two places, or are they really sitting outside of the entire system?


[00:14:00]: Hart Lambur:


So they're kind of actors on every blockchain that they fill transactions on.


[00:14:04]: Anna Rose: 


Okay.


[00:14:05]: Hart Lambur:


So you can think... Let's make Tarun be the third-party solver here. And so, Anna, you want to bridge from, I'll make it Arbitrum to Base, so it's A to B, right? So Anna's bridging from Arbitrum to Base. Anna does a deposit transaction on Arbitrum of, say, 1 ETH. Tarun is the off-chain actor that observes that. So he can see you did that deposit on Arbitrum. If he trusts the Arbitrum sequencer, which he does, he can say, okay, Anna has definitely done this deposit on the Arbitrum sequencer, I am going to go and fill Anna out of my own inventory on blockchain B, on Base.


[00:14:42]: Anna Rose: 


Base, yeah.


[00:14:43]: Hart Lambur:


And he can do that extremely quickly. Like, our median fill time is 4 seconds, depending on the chain. It's down to less than a second on some of these fills. And so he does that for a small fee. And the fees here are really small, which we can also get into too. But he does that, and he makes this loan to you on blockchain B, and then the protocol verifies that this fill happened and pays him back later.


[00:15:08]: Anna Rose:


So is it that seven day kind of like fraud proof, or is this a different kind of settlement?


[00:15:15]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah, so it's not the seven... So the protocol, like from the Across perspective, all Across has to do is get comfortable enough or be sure that the fill, the intent was filled, which we can talk about how we do that, but then they can immediately release funds to Tarun on the origin chain. We can send a message to Arbitrum in this case, and say, release funds to Tarun. We do a bunch of optimizations to help Tarun manage his inventory. He can actually request the protocol pays him back on Base because that's where he lent his funds, but this is sort of like an optimization to help Tarun, the third-party actor, with his inventory management. And, yeah, so we're not waiting for this seven day finality period. We're sort of this fast fill layer on top of the L2 in EVM ecosystem.


[00:16:12]: Anna Rose:


The thing I still don't get, though, is how does a solver see both of these things? I've always had this impression that if you're working in one blockchain, it can't really see into another blockchain. It doesn't know the state of the other space. I know you said this, so the solver will be on both of these chains, but still, where's the information being connected, and how is it being connected?


[00:16:36]: Hart Lambur:


It's a really good question and insight. So, blockchain B, Base cannot see what's happening on blockchain A. But Tarun is not on A or B. Tarun is his own independent special person. And so Tarun, he's not making a decision on behalf of a protocol or consensus mechanism. He's making a decision on behalf of his own money. So all he cares about is, does Tarun think that deposit transaction on A happened? If he believes it happened, then he can go and make the fill on blockchain B with his own money. And so, basically, by introducing these independent third parties that are observing and making their own judgments on what happened between blockchains, we can shortcut all of these messaging latency problems. Does that make sense?


[00:17:25]: Anna Rose:


I think so. I just... I still don't... I think this makes me want to dig into who the third-party solvers actually are.


[00:17:31]: Tarun Chitra:


Well, one important thing to think about is that when you rely on solvers, you can lose liveness. Right? In theory, all the solvers could not want to hold the risk because they don't want to hold the risky asset and then no one fulfills. Right? That's a little different than a blockchain where a Layer 1 where someone can always step in and sort of costless or low-costly earn part of the network for participating. Here you're earning fees, but you have to stay live and so. So it's a little more like market making.


[00:18:03]: Anna Rose:


That's what it sounds like, actually. And that's why when you're talking about these solvers, I'm really curious like what form they take. Are they a company? Are they a market maker that's just using a software that you've provided but has already checked, like I trust all these things, and it's sort of happening in the background?


[00:18:24]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah. So people actually think Across is either us running our own solver or, like Wintermute running a solver for us.


[00:18:33]: Anna Rose:


Okay.


[00:18:33]: Hart Lambur:


And neither of those are true. We do run a solver much in the same way, if you think of, like Aave or Compound, they at least early days, they ran a liquidation bot to execute liquidations on their protocol. We kind of do the same thing, but most of our transactions, like 80% of them or more are filled by third parties.


[00:18:53]: Anna Rose:


Okay.


[00:18:53]: Hart Lambur:


And these third parties, it's actually kind of quite cool, they're grassroots folks that are like we know them by discord handles and, or we don't know who some of them are. And we've... Across has written a reference implementation of how to be, we use the term relayer in our system, of how to be a relayer in Across. And other people have taken that and heavily optimized it. So they like out compete our reference implementation by a lot. And we really don't really know who these folks are. It's permissionless.


[00:19:23]: Anna Rose:


Can they cheat?


[00:19:26]: Hart Lambur:


No.


[00:19:27]: Anna Rose:


How do you make sure they don't cheat? They have to lock their funds or something? Is that why?


[00:19:33]: Hart Lambur:


So let's... We'll step through it. So you, during your transaction on Arbitrum, you deposit 1 ETH on Arbitrum with instructions that say, and this is your intent, we'll go back to this intent concept. So you deposit 1 ETH on Arbitrum with your instructions that you want to have 1 ETH on Base, less a small fee. Let's say the fee is like, I don't know, a dollar. That's your instructions. Any one of these relayers can observe that deposit transaction, and those funds go into an escrow contract, into the Across protocol escrow contract, which I generally call our settlement layer. You used the word settlement earlier, and I think it's very appropriate here. Okay, so that happens. And then we have Tarun as one of the solvers, he goes and he fills you on Base. His fill transaction goes through a contract that basically nonces it, that makes sure you can't get double filled.


[00:20:32]: Anna Rose:


Okay.


[00:20:33]: Hart Lambur:


And he records and says, okay, Anna on Arbitrum said she wanted 1 ETH sent to her on Base, less a small fee. And he fronts you money. The protocol then verifies that that happened, but won't pay Tarun back if he screwed up. So Tarun has a huge incentive to -- because he paid an ETH out for this fee, he has a huge incentive to not get it wrong. If he gets it wrong, he doesn't get paid back your 1 ETH on Arbitrum, and you might get double filled by somebody that does it right, and you'd be happy because you get twice the money.


[00:21:06]: Anna Rose:


But he doesn't get slashed or anything. There's no punishment. It's just he's already handed it over.


[00:21:11]: Hart Lambur:


Exactly. He fronts money, so there's like the slashing is sort of built in, if you will, where if he did it wrong, he doesn't get paid back the money he fronted.


[00:21:20]: Anna Rose:


And it's your... It's like the overall protocol that's verifying. It's not this reference implementation.


[00:21:27]: Hart Lambur:


Correct.


[00:21:27]: Anna Rose:


Okay. Because the minute you said that, this reference implementation that people have optimized it, I start to think like, if they dramatically changed it, couldn't they like...?


[00:21:36]: Tarun Chitra:


Well, they still have to follow the rules of the smart contract. Right? How they come to the inputs that they send on-chain is up to them, and that the reference implementation basically computes inputs, given some state of the world. You could write something that maybe takes other inputs, like you take in Binance data and you compare prices, and you lower your fee because you're using some off-chain data. But that's all you doing it yourself. But all you're doing is really constructing inputs that go to a public smart contract, and you can only kind of take your money out if some covenants the contract holds are true, and that's secured by the validators.


[00:22:11]: Anna Rose:


Wait, there are validators?


[00:22:13]: Hart Lambur:


He means validators on...


[00:22:14]: Tarun Chitra:


Validators of Ethereum.


[00:22:15]: Anna Rose:


Oh, the Ethereum validators. Okay, okay. Talk a little bit about that protocol, then. The one that's doing the verifying. What have you had to do to make that happen? Is that just like a series of smart contracts? Is that like... Is it run from a central point? Is there a validator set there?


[00:22:31]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah. Okay, so conceptually, what we're trying to do is verify that Tarun's fill. So we go back to our example, right? You were filled by Tarun, you're happy, you as the user, move on with your day, and like you got filled in a few seconds and you don't have to think about it again. So that's great. Now, Tarun needs to get paid back. So what we conceptually need to do is just verify that Tarun's fill was in fact valid before we release the funds you deposited on Arbitrum, on the origin chain, back to him. So that's kind of naive way you do this is you would like send a message from Base back to Arbitrum and say, yes, this fill did happen, and release the funds that way. But then it kind of go back and like, well, we're just sending messages again. Like, it's not -- didn't really... It's faster, but there's just as much overhead.


So what we do is we actually batch together thousands of fills every period. Periods right now are about an hour. So over course of an hour, and this could be changed as a parameter in the system, but over the course of an hour, we batch together all of the fills off-chain. So a bundle of fills is constructed, and anyone can construct this bundle of fills because you can observe all of these blockchains. Right? And that bundle is then proposed optimistically. This is now using the UMA Oracle, back to what we talked about at the beginning. It's proposed optimistically to Ethereum mainnet, and anyone can then dispute it and say, actually, I disagree with this construction of fills.


[00:24:05]: Anna Rose:


And is this... Is there a fraud proof in here somehow? Or is this just like, is there a timeframe?


[00:24:12]: Hart Lambur:


There's an hour long, roughly hour long challenge window.


[00:24:16]: Anna Rose:


Okay, it's very short.


[00:24:17]: Hart Lambur:


It's quite short, but again, this is deterministically verifiable and we have people that run dispute bots to verify this. Anyone can kind of run infrastructure to reconstruct these bundles and verify it. And then provided that the bundle is, this sort of bundle of repayment instructions is not challenged, it then gets processed as kind of this batch repayment to all the solvers over that period.


[00:24:44]: Anna Rose:


And is this why you were saying before that you could actually repay it over on Base or something like because it's batched, because there's action happening in all directions that you could just say, well, somebody was sending it this way, somebody was sending it that way, instead of doing those two, we'll just cross them out and you can actually receive it on the one you sent it on.


[00:25:03]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah, you're jumping ahead, and this is like... No, it's really smart. It's like this other optimization in the system where basically you can think left-hand, right-hand. If you, Anna, were going from Arbitrum to Base, and I was going from Base to Arbitrum. Right? Well, if Tarun filled you on Base and then filled me on Arbitrum, and then kind of just has funds all over, like you can kind of net these off. And so the Across protocol has people that provide liquidity. So we do have LPs in the protocol, and that liquidity is used so that if Tarun wanted to, he could ask for his repayment to happen on the destination chain. And we kind of do some netting and some sort of financial optimizations to minimize the amount of money that actually has to get bridged between blockchains, basically with the understanding that if you have offsetting flow, you don't need to send funds between Arbitrum and Base. You just have offsetting flow and kind of net users out.


[00:26:04]: Anna Rose:


And the reason you would do that is because of, I guess, when you're sending money back and forth, if you actually do it, if you actually have to do those settlements, yeah, are you saving money? Are you saving...? What would you do otherwise? You'd be like, would you actually be moving the funds off the L2 onto the L1 and then back on the other L2? Or is it even just calculating the repayments on each side would just be annoying. What are you saving?


[00:26:30]: Hart Lambur:


All the above. The dumbest way you would do this is Tarun has filled the user on Base, he gets paid back, or the protocol releases the funds on Arbitrum, bridges them over the seven-day slow bridge back to Ethereum, and then uses the faster Ethereum to Base bridge, that's like 20 minutes. And so Tarun gets repaid in seven days and 20 minutes type thing. And obviously that doesn't make sense. So when you have this type of netting or all these advantages, you could, first of all, repay Taruna on Arbitrum itself, and then Tarun has this cross-chain position where he's short on Base, long on Arbitrum, or you could do other kind of inventory management type tools to say, okay, maybe we have LP funds in Across, which we talked about Across does, maybe the Across protocol has some funds, some sort of, I use the concept of working capital. There's some working capital in the protocol that could pay Tarun back on Base. Or maybe Tarun is like a sophisticated solver that has his own inventory management going on, and he's just doing sort of his own netting, left-hand, right-hand, where he's doing fills from Arbitrum to Base and getting paid back on Arbitrum while making fills on Base. But then he's got other fills going the other direction, and he just does his own netting. Anyways, all of these systems sort of work and are possible.


[00:27:56]: Anna Rose:


But those are the less... Like the optimized one is what you're actually providing.


[00:28:00]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah, and I think it's... One of the things I've actually thought is very cool and kind of been exciting about Across is the architecture itself really hasn't changed in almost two years.


[00:28:10]: Anna Rose:


Oh, wow.


[00:28:11]: Hart Lambur:


It's just had all of these improvements and optimizations made to it, really in terms of how we net flows and how solvers in these third parties operate and how they do their own inventory management.


[00:28:23]: Tarun Chitra:


I think for the user, I think it's actually quite intuitive what Across does. But maybe given that Across was created to, in some ways, dogfood the UMA protocol, or be your own customer of your own protocol, maybe it would be good to talk about where you use what parts of building one protocol first and building another one beside it, how that influence your design choices and the fact that you have had the architecture frozen maybe is one of them.


[00:28:54]: Hart Lambur:


There's actually probably a bunch to respond to there. So, first off, our team does have a financial engineering background. And generally speaking, I thought that was useful or has been useful for us to come up with this whole intent framework in the first place. So it's almost like if you think from a very engineering first or kind of computer science-y first perspective, you think of the idea of, oh, I need to send a message to be able to bridge funds. And it's a little bit more of a foreign concept to say, wait, let's have a third party make this loan. That was kind of useful for our own financial engineering background. Then all the other things we've learned from building UMA is, first of all, build something that has actual demand and traction. And so in this case, another learning is there is no demand to send messages between blockchains except to move value. Right? And this is one of those... This, I think, is a spicy take. Like all of these arbitrary messaging protocols, they don't get used for anything other than moving value.


[00:30:02]: Anna Rose:


Really?


[00:30:03]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah. It's like 95% of the use case here of moving between blockchains is moving value.


[00:30:09]: Tarun Chitra:


It's good we're going to... The next question is going to be a comparing Across to other protocols.


[00:30:13]: Anna Rose:


Although wait, I had one question before that, which is actually about fees, but maybe that could tie into comparing them.


[00:30:19]: Hart Lambur:


Well, we can get more spicy takes on fees there too, because I actually think the economics of sending messages aren't particularly good. The economics of moving value are much better, which we can get to as well. But there's another really important insight here too, that I actually tried to hammer in my presentation at EthCC as well, which the fact that 95% of the use cases are moving value between blockchains does let you take advantage of the fungibility of money. And so if you are moving value, you don't care whose money it is that gets there. This is where the third-party solver works well. So, like Tarun, if... Anna, if you're trying to move money from Arbitrum to Base and you get filled by Tarun, you don't care that it wasn't your money on Arbitrum. It's just money, right?


[00:31:11]: Anna Rose:


Yeah.


[00:31:11]: Hart Lambur:


And so that fungibility of value is what lets us shortcut a lot of the latency issues around messaging by, again, having these third parties do that, and then Tarun, the solver, gets paid back by other money somewhere, and it's all fungible. So the point that I tried to make at my presentation at the conference it's, people have traditionally thought about interop as equivalent to TCP/IP. We want to connect servers with network pipes and send messages between them. When I think in the blockchain concept, that's not true. The thing that we're moving is value, and so you're moving money around and you have access to different ways of doing that, that actually shortcut many of the problems with -- the hurdles and trade-offs that you face in arbitrary messaging.


[00:32:04]: Anna Rose:


Would that also be in even the software development itself and maintenance kind of? There's always a way to fund this kind of work. Like that thing you just described with the relayer or the solver, they're all of a sudden incentivized because they can get a fee, whereas if it was just info, you're sort of relying on these altruistic relayers of info.


[00:32:25]: Hart Lambur:


Okay, you want to be funny? It's almost like arbitrary messaging is like communist, and what we're building is like capitalist, but...


[00:32:32]: Anna Rose:


Or the messages is like the roads. It's like city infrastructure, which doesn't make any money.


[00:32:40]: Hart Lambur:


That's a better analogy. It's public good-ish. Right? So we do have to have these roads between blockchains, but they kind of get built, and they have limitations and da da da da... I actually like this analogy a lot, and I'll extend it into like native interop and where this is going, for a split second, and we'll get back on topic.


[00:33:00]: Tarun Chitra:


Is the base layer, the sewer system in this analogy?


[00:33:04]: Anna Rose:


Ouch.


[00:33:07]: Hart Lambur:


But so, okay, so we have this intent-based protocol that incentivizes off-chain actors to compete to fill users as quickly or cheaply or both as possible. That seems good. That just seems strictly good. And as they get more competitive, the protocol gets better, users get better fills, which is really cool. The messaging we have to do to verify those fills, you can think of as your roads analogy here. And what's really cool is, like to Tarun's point, we use the UMA system because that was one type of road we could build to send messages between these blockchains. But we're not at all wed to it. And we are... I think it's very possible that we'll move off it, at least in some ways, in the near future.


[00:33:54]: Anna Rose:


Oh, wow.


[00:33:55]: Hart Lambur:


And where this gets really interesting is you start thinking about all the native interop systems that L2 ecosystems are building. So Optimism has a design for native interop, for their Superchain. And what they're effectively doing with how this affects Across is it's like building a better road between those chains. So now we have a highway that allows for faster messages and more efficient messaging between, let's say, Base and Optimism here. But the Across protocol and the solvers, they can do exactly the same thing they did before, however, now they get repaid faster since there is a better road connecting those routes.


[00:34:37]: Anna Rose:


Oh, interesting. And I guess you'd extend that past the OP side. Would this be where like the AggLayer...


[00:34:41]: Hart Lambur:


Exactly.


[00:34:42]: Anna Rose:


The Hyper.. What is it? ZK --


[00:34:44]: Hart Lambur:


Elastic Chain.


[00:34:45]: Tarun Chitra:


Elastic Chain.


[00:34:45]: Anna Rose:


Elastic Chain.


[00:34:46]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah.


[00:34:46]: Tarun Chitra:


There was so much beef on Twitter about that.


[00:34:49]: Anna Rose:


Recently, I know.


[00:34:51]: Hart Lambur:


The AggLayer versus Elastic Chain.


[00:34:53]: Tarun Chitra:


Yeah. And like claims over TPS or whatever, which are always gerrymandered anyway.


[00:34:58]: Anna Rose:


But I guess in your case, where you're sitting, you're happy if these things exist.


[00:35:02]: Hart Lambur:


So it's worth zooming out and thinking about this from Vitalik's perspective. So Vitalik wants a unified Ethereum, and yet you have these ecosystems within Ethereum that are very knife fight-ish right now. So Arbitrum, Optimism, ZKsync, Polygon CDK and others are all fighting for dominance. And none of them are going to dominate in my opinion. There is going to be use case for all of them, and tribalism and token incentives and everything else. I think it's pretty cool from Ethereum's perspective that we have these different ecosystems, but they are all building their own form of interop and they're not compatible.


[00:35:47]: Anna Rose:


No. Not yet.


[00:35:47]: Hart Lambur:


If you take this intents standard... Well, they're not going to be compatible. I'm pretty confident about that. But if you take this intents standard and you think of it and... Delete Across from this, don't even think about Across. Think about this architecture of specifying an intent to go from one chain to another and define it as a very lightweight standard that then allows these solvers to interpret these intent orders and fill users very quickly wherever they want to go. What then happens with all this native interop is if the origin and destination are both within native interop, the solvers just get paid back faster, which makes it cheaper. So this intent standard becomes this simple unifying layer across these native interop systems. And Tarun, to your point, the UMA way of sending messages maybe goes away.


[00:36:46]: Tarun Chitra:


I was going to ask you if the UMA way of sending messages goes away because you want to support Solana or other chains.


[00:36:52]: Hart Lambur:


Well, we can... We do...


[00:36:54]: Tarun Chitra:


Sorry, was that spicy?


[00:36:56]: Hart Lambur:


No, that's not spicy because we really do want to support Solana, and we actually probably are sooner than later. It doesn't... It's actually weirdly compatible with that, the way we are, because we can use the UMA way of verifying all of these intent fills. We can verify intent fills on Solana too, in exactly the same way. The only thing we're missing is a bridge to send occasional messages. We're talking like one message an hour from Ethereum to Solana, but there are people that have built those bridges so we could use them.


[00:37:29]: Anna Rose:


I have two more points I definitely want to cover here. One is I want to go back to fees because one thing I didn't even get from the original example was like, where does the fee actually get paid? If going really, really back to I'm depositing 1 ETH on Arbitrum, but I want to get it on Base, aren't I paying the fee on Arbitrum? I'm paying the fee, so wouldn't the fee be when I'm at the site where I pay, or is it on the other side?


[00:37:55]: Hart Lambur:


So if we're being precise, if you do an on-chain deposit transaction, you pay that fee for that on-chain deposit transaction.


[00:38:02]: Anna Rose:


There.


[00:38:02]: Hart Lambur:


There.


[00:38:03]: Anna Rose:


Yeah.


[00:38:03]: Hart Lambur:


Right? There's a gasless version of this too, where you wouldn't pay that. But let's ignore that.


[00:38:08]: Anna Rose:


But the fee is for the solver, right?


[00:38:09]: Hart Lambur:


The fee... Well, you pay... You were saying, I want to bridge 1 ETH from Arbitrum to Base for as little as possible, basically. And so who do we have to pay along the way? We have to pay the solver for the service they're providing.


[00:38:24]: Anna Rose:


And the gas, if there is.


[00:38:25]: Hart Lambur:


And the solver then has to pay the gas on the destination chain to send you the message. So they're going to bake that into what they charge. And in our version of some of this more fancy inventory management, if the solver borrows money from the Across liquidity providers, that's kind of this extra convenience function, they pay that fee too. But basically, from the user's perspective, they're just paying a small fee to get funds from A to B. And I'll add two points. So this is compatible with the user, not just moving value, but they could, first of all, also swap between assets. We don't do this today, but it's not a far stretch. So this could swap from ETH to USDC, and...


[00:39:10]: Anna Rose:


In that bridging. So it'd like show up on another chain. Okay.


[00:39:13]: Hart Lambur:


Exactly. And the solver can also execute code on behalf of the user. So they could also say, hey, bridge... Anna, your transaction could be bridge 1 ETH from Arbitrum to Base and execute this arbitrary code that, for example, buys an NFT. So the thing I'm pushing for is for us to adopt a standard for what these intents look like. We've published one that we built with Uniswap. It's called ERC-7683, and it's an open standard that we want people's feedback on. And you can go to erc7683.org and read about it and comment on it, but we want to have an open standard for this intent structure that would unify Ethereum and also allow bridging to Solana and all these other fun things. And just creates this... It sort of emulates this seamless one chain experience, even though it's powered by solvers under the surface.


[00:40:12]: Anna Rose:


Interesting. The last thing about fees is I still don't understand where the solver gets paid.


[00:40:18]: Hart Lambur:


Oh, I'm sorry. So the solver simply, when you were bridging the 1 ETH from Arbitrum to Base, they don't pay you 1 ETH. They pay you 0.999 ETH or whatever the fee is.


[00:40:30]: Anna Rose:


And they take it on the way.


[00:40:31]: Hart Lambur:


And then.. So they pay you less than 1 ETH, and then they get paid back 1 ETH. So their fee kind of gets extracted that way.


[00:40:39]: Anna Rose:


Okay. So it is kind of on the destination chain because they're paying you less and they're sort of taking it there, I guess. I don't know why I'm stuck on... I'm just really curious. But while I wrote it out, I was like, where's the fee? So now I need to figure this out.


[00:40:53]: Hart Lambur:


You have one unit on A and you get 0.99 units on B, you the user, and then the solver gets back, depending on where they wanted to get repaid, they get paid back one unit wherever. Right? So.


[00:41:04]: Anna Rose:


Cool. Okay. Question answered. Thank you for that. I'm sorry for being so pedantic. But the last one that I definitely want to cover, I think you wanted to cover this too, Tarun, is the comparison because there's a lot of bridges out there. And actually, Hart, I don't know if you know this, but the reason I reached out to you is I had a friend who was working... He was using a lot of different bridges, and he cited Across as the one that he really liked to use, and it was the one that was sort of gaining steam. People were kind of noticing that this one worked really well.


[00:41:35]: Hart Lambur:


Oh, that's nice.


[00:41:35]: Anna Rose:


But there have been a lot of bridges out there. There are a lot of bridges out there. I feel like I've had a bunch of... I think I might have even done a series at some point about bridges in 2022 or something.


[00:41:45]: Tarun Chitra:


Well, a lot of the people who are working on bridges don't work on bridges anymore. We had...


[00:41:48]: Anna Rose:


True. True.


[00:41:49]: Tarun Chitra:


Let's be real. 


[00:41:50]: Anna Rose:


That's for real. Yeah, that's true. But let's talk about the existing bridges. We don't have to go do the history of all of them.


[00:41:56]: Hart Lambur:


We'll keep this short to not lose all your listeners. Right? But first off, let's talk about how bridging is not a thing anymore or shouldn't be a thing, and we'll keep this short. So in my example of what I call Gen 1 bridging at the beginning of the episode, that's like the, I send a message. And a lot of those bridges were also what I'll call, lock and mint or mint and burn bridges, where they create a synthetic representation of the asset on some other chain. I hate that structure because in that structure, you have perpetual forever risk to the underlying bridge protocol. Right? You, the user, when you have a wrapped representation of that token, at any point, if that bridge gets hacked, you lose your assets.


[00:42:44]: Tarun Chitra:


And the Wormhole hack in particular was about a malicious operator figuring out how to control the mint function, and then they just minted a ton themselves and then traded against it for real assets. Right, so.


[00:42:55]: Hart Lambur:


And maybe this gets solved in the far future when we have really good ZK proofs like this is the Zero Knowledge podcast, maybe we can really securely prove these minting and bridging functions, but it just scares the shit out of me. And so LayerZero has their OFT standard, which is effectively this, Wormhole has their version, Axelar has their version. On Twitter, I'm known for picking on LayerZero, but I actually don't like any version of this standard because I think this lock and mint thing is just scary. But anyways, that's this kind of message based lock and mint token standard. Delete those. Those are things that I don't think are ideal. The...


[00:43:41]: Anna Rose:


Hyperlane.


[00:43:41]: Hart Lambur:


Hyperlane is a message bridge that is intelligently designed, that also has a lock and mint and a OFT-like standard. They call them Warp routes or Warp tokens too. And I think their code is pretty good, but if you do have a wrapped version of the token, you have perpetual risk to the underlying security of that bridge, which I don't like. But Hyperlane as a messaging protocol, I do like a lot, and I think they're quite great. Yeah, Axelar again, they're not a token bridge, they're a messaging bridge, but they have a token, like lock and mint standard. Yeah, could keep going there. In terms of token bridges. Stargate is a bridge that actually blurs these concepts too, but...


[00:44:32]: Anna Rose:


Where is that? Where is... What is...


[00:44:33]: Tarun Chitra:


That's LayerZero?


[00:44:34]: Hart Lambur:


LayerZero has a... Yeah, so they're big. They use this send message to release tokens from a pool on the destination chain. And, I mean, I war with them a lot on Twitter, so anyone listening to this will be like, okay, Hart is warring with Stargate on the Twitter, but I think their architecture is inferior in the sense that you have a minimum 40 seconds. You have to wait for a sense of finality on the origin chain and send a message every time to do a bridge transaction, which I think is inefficient and slow compared to this intent-based framework. Yeah.


[00:45:13]: Anna Rose:


What is your take on IBC?


[00:45:14]: Hart Lambur:


IBC, I think, is great within like Tendermint chains and Cosmos chains. Right? IBC has always been explained to me as it's not specific to Cosmos, but I feel like the actual integrations for everything outside of Cosmos just haven't worked very well. Tarun, you probably understand this better.


[00:45:34]: Tarun Chitra:


I guess like other people who've weirdly spent a lot of time implementing IBCs, like Avalanche, the Subnets actually communication protocol is IBC.


[00:45:41]: Anna Rose:


Oh they do.


[00:45:43]: Tarun Chitra:


There have been all these people have tried to do it between rollups, but it's just so expensive to have a light client... I think, without modifying and having extra precompiles and stuff to make it gas efficient to have a light client in Ethereum chains, it's kind of dead on arrival in Ethereum, or you're just like, stuffing into a client and making... And so it never becomes standardized. So I think it's very hard to get adopted as a standard unless you're starting fresh. That's kind of where I... 


[00:46:12]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah, so I'm maximally bullish on this intent-based framework, right? Where...


[00:46:18]: Tarun Chitra:


Well, how do you compare to other intent-based frameworks?


[00:46:20]: Hart Lambur:


So, okay, let's talk about this for a second too. And you also have good views on this. So intents can mean a bunch of things. Some people hyper generalize this, and they think of intents as like...


[00:46:32]: Anna Rose:


Anything I want, and I get something.


[00:46:34]: Hart Lambur:


Exactly. I'm going to describe in natural language that I want Uber Eats Sushi delivered at 05:00 p.m. at my house. And this is like...


[00:46:41]: Tarun Chitra:


And please pay users using my USDT on Tron and figure out how to convert it to whatever the pizza place takes.


[00:46:46]: Hart Lambur:


Exactly. Right. So okay, I actually think some of this is kind of cool, but like not now type thing.


[00:46:54]: Tarun Chitra:


Look, everyone... You know, people love making that... We were promised flying cars, but we got X meme. But honestly, this shit is flying cars, though. Because it's like, hey, you're asking for everything...


[00:47:07]: Hart Lambur:


You want, like an AI to interpret your natural language request and then find out a way to have competition for it to... Yeah, exactly. So when I say intents, I'm specifically referring to cross-chain intents in a much more constrained way. And it's really simple. Like, my mental model is it's an order ticket. Your order ticket says, I have asset X on chain A and I want asset Y on chain B. I'll pay this much for it.


[00:47:36]: Anna Rose:


Do you give it time?


[00:47:38]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah, sure. I want it by this time, and I maybe want you to also execute this arbitrary code on the destination chain. That's it. So it's heavily constrained from this generalization.


[00:47:48]: Tarun Chitra:


Wait, wait. But execute arbitrary code does not exactly constrain, buddy.


[00:47:54]: Hart Lambur:


But it's like buying an NFT or, like depositing an Aave or something like that.


[00:47:57]: Tarun Chitra:


Yeah, but you have some computationally bounded code...


[00:48:02]: Anna Rose:


Arbitrary code.


[00:48:03]: Hart Lambur:


It's bounded in more ways than just computation too. Like you... There's another example, like, I can't send governance parameters that might be worth a billion dollars, right? I could like send a dollar bridge transaction with the code to execute the governance... That doesn't work. There are constraints here on what you can do, but I'm basically saying from the perspective of I'm sending money to buy something or deposit it somewhere, you can do that. So anyways, the intent thing... Tarun, what other intent frameworks do you want to compare it to?


[00:48:38]: Tarun Chitra:


Well, we can start with Anoma, I guess they invented the word of, and then we can kind of go downwards through everything from CoW Swap through... 


[00:48:47]: Anna Rose:


CoW Swap invented it, didn't they? They invented...


[00:48:49]: Tarun Chitra:


Anoma used the word intent first, though. Like the Anoma blog is... Yeah, that is.


[00:48:56]: Anna Rose:


It was the... What is it called?


[00:48:58]: Tarun Chitra:


Vyvern. No, Vyvern.


[00:48:59]: Anna Rose:


Wyvern?


[00:49:00]: Tarun Chitra:


Wyvern, yeah.


[00:49:01]: Anna Rose:


Yes, yes. I know. I see it spelled, but yeah, it's hard to say.


[00:49:04]: Hart Lambur:


So maybe I should say cross-chain intents every time I say intents, but I don't know.


[00:49:09]: Anna Rose:


Okay, fair.


[00:49:09]: Tarun Chitra:


Yeah, I think it is a kind of word that just got like, in the same way that like rollups, there's always a new adjective in front of rollup, there's like x rollups. And the lexical complexity is just growing over time. There's like a million new fucking words for things that may not be that different. I kind of feel the same thing with intents, except they're hugely different in some ways.


[00:49:33]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah. Yeah. So I'm saying cross-chain intent from this bridge or swap or call. Those are what I'm kind of constraining it to. And I think there's other protocols in that sphere, so I don't think that's Anoma.


[00:49:48]: Tarun Chitra:


What do you think about UniswapX? Because it's close to that, right?


[00:49:50]: Hart Lambur:


Uniswap, it's very close to that, but we worked with them to write this standard for 7683. I mean, long story short, I thought UniswapX was going to eat our lunch when they announced at EthCC a year ago, they announced cross-chain UniswapX and the cross-chain version hasn't shipped yet. But they've actually figured out that there's useful ways to work with us, which we've been working really closely with them on developing a standard, because we realize that the best thing for all of us is having a deep and liquid solver network. And our solver network, we want to be the same. And there's more I can talk about here too where I... Yeah.


[00:50:26]: Tarun Chitra:


It's a great time to move into talking about EthCC, because we just spoke on a panel about where the audience was all solvers. So how deep is the solver network at EthCC?


[00:50:35]: Anna Rose:


Well, so before we do that, why don't we... We have a bottle here that we've been eyeing and waiting. Waiting to pop.


[00:50:42]: Tarun Chitra:


This is a...


[00:50:43]: Anna Rose:


So why don't we actually pop it and we can keep talking about intents, actually because I think it was a topic of this week. Let's do it while we drink. Shall we?


[00:50:50]: Tarun Chitra:


This is now the third annual Anna and Tarun drink and record a podcast episode, always recorded in Europe, apparently.


[00:50:58]: Anna Rose:


Wait, I think there was another one, wasn't there?


[00:51:00]: Tarun Chitra:


There was one with Zaki and UMA.


[00:51:02]: Anna Rose:


That was last year.


[00:51:03]: Tarun Chitra:


Last year. Then there was DevConnect with Guillermo.


[00:51:06]: Anna Rose:


That was...


[00:51:06]: Tarun Chitra:


Where that one was...  We drank way too much. That was gross, yeah.


[00:51:07]: Anna Rose:


That was tequila. That was way too much. Yeah.


[00:51:09]: Tarun Chitra:


Yeah. That's too much.


[00:51:09]: Hart Lambur:


Wait, you guys drank a bottle of tequila?


[00:51:11]: Anna Rose:


Yeah.


[00:51:11]: Tarun Chitra:


He brought a bottle of tequila, and I was like...


[00:51:13]: Anna Rose:


Brendan was there too.


[00:51:14]: Tarun Chitra:


Oh, my God. I was so... My head hurts so much because I don't... That is one liquor I try to avoid. But Guillermo was so enthusiastic.


[00:51:22]: Anna Rose:


Yeah. Since then, we know better, and we stick to bubbly...


[00:51:27]: Tarun Chitra:


We just stick to champagne, yeah.


[00:51:28]: Anna Rose:


And it's fine, and it doesn't hurt us too badly. So, yeah, I'm gonna... You guys keep talking intents. I'm gonna pop the bottle. The audience might hear it, but...


[00:51:36]: Hart Lambur:


Do we record it?


[00:51:36]: Anna Rose:


I'm gonna try. I'll put the mic near it, but you guys keep going.


[00:51:40]: Hart Lambur:


So where were we?


[00:51:43]: Tarun Chitra:


Uniswap standard.


[00:51:44]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah, the standard. So we worked with Uniswap on this. I actually think Across and UniswapX are complimentary, since UniswapX is focused on swapping, so... Whoa! I hope that got recorded. That sounded great.


[00:51:56]: Anna Rose:


I see a pop. It seems to have worked. All right. 


[00:52:00]: Hart Lambur:


So UniswapX is focused on swapping, cross-chain version is focused on swapping. We're focused mainly on same asset bridging, and I think there's a sort of speed. Are you optimizing for speed versus optimizing for price? And... Sorry, there was a small debate between little cups or big cups, and the little cups won. So, yeah, I think that the other intent-based bridging protocols, like us, I mean, they're all pretty complimentary. It's like one of those things where I want to push for standard because the solver network like... Okay, Anna, what we didn't touch on is like what is the biggest critique of this architecture? And the biggest critique, maybe Tarun slightly mentioned it earlier, it's just what if no solvers show up?


[00:52:53]: Anna Rose:


Oh.


[00:52:54]: Hart Lambur:


That's the biggest critique.


[00:52:55]: Anna Rose:


Actually, I did have this question I forgot to ask, which is like, how many solvers are there?


[00:52:59]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah.


[00:52:59]: Anna Rose:


So how many solvers are there?


[00:53:01]: Hart Lambur:


We have about 15 to 20 solvers in our network.


[00:53:04]: Anna Rose:


Okay.


[00:53:04]: Hart Lambur:


And we have seven or eight of them that are very meaningful, and there's no one dominant one.


[00:53:12]: Tarun Chitra:


I like...


[00:53:12]: Anna Rose:


That's good. But it does mean that's a number of people that could maybe stop solving too.


[00:53:17]: Tarun Chitra:


Do you remember when Layer 1s would always fight about like...


[00:53:21]: Anna Rose:


Validator sets.


[00:53:21]: Tarun Chitra:


We're a blockchain, but our blockchain favors safety over liveness. Or our blockchain favors liveness or safety. And there's... it's kind of the marketing speak was one or the other, but really it was like something in the middle. You could think of intents as being favoring safety over liveness. Like it can lose liveness if all the solvers show up, but you're never losing funds. Right? There's nothing minted or burnt, or you can remove from the escrow contract after a certain number of blocks if it wasn't fulfilled. But in the other case, the ones that try to give you safety and liveness, they generally have to make some other trade-off. Either there's an intermediary who's running both blockchains, or there's some control over wrapped assets. And I think it actually reminds me a lot of L1 design decisions. It's just that in L1s, you really can't tolerate loss of liveness, whereas here you kind of can, because what do you do? You retry the transaction. It's not like the end of the world in the same way where if you lose liveness in Solana, it's like, oh, shit, everyone got liquidated because the off-chain stuff moved so far.


[00:54:29]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And the other thing I just push on is it's like the liveness properties are pretty good. Like competition is a wonderful thing, and it...


[00:54:42]: Tarun Chitra:


Well, empirical liveness, not theoretical. I think that's a key distinction. Right? Whereas in Layer 1s, you actually need the theory and the empirical to be the same because your threat model relies on the theoretical thing. Right? Like of all the possible attacks, I show that none of the attacks work. But here, I mean, the attack is like everyone suddenly loses the Internet at the same time, and it's unlikely.


[00:55:07]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah, I think that's right.


[00:55:09]: Tarun Chitra:


Even though it's possible, it's very unlikely compared to in cryptography or industry systems, where you need not only does it need to be basically impossible, but the likelihood needs to be effectively zero in some very controlled manner. Here, it's not that, but it's like statistically...


[00:55:26]: Anna Rose: 


You feel like it's super unlikely. But what if it was slower that like you kind of threw that out there, that solvers just stop solving, they just take their money out.


[00:55:35]: Hart Lambur:


But this is the thing where it sort of breaks the entire concept of a blockchain in the first place. It's like, what if Bitcoin miners just stop showing up?


[00:55:43]: Anna Rose: 


True, yeah.


[00:55:44]: Hart Lambur:


It's like why do they show up, well...


[00:55:47]: Tarun Chitra:


Money.


[00:55:47]: Hart Lambur:


They're economically motivated to. And so I get slightly frustrated when people push in weird directions on this. I'm like, no, man, blockchains work because they incentivize actors for economic reasons to show up.


[00:56:01]: Tarun Chitra:


So, I'll take one other side of this, though, which is like, I wrote this paper on intents, and it sort of was really trying to analyze the UniswapX style intent, not necessarily this...


[00:56:12]: Hart Lambur:


And the single chain version.


[00:56:14]: Tarun Chitra:


Yeah, well, actually... I'm not sure, actually if... I think our result probably still applies to...


[00:56:20]: Hart Lambur:


I'm not sure that it does, but that's another debate for another time.


[00:56:22]: Tarun Chitra:


But I think it doesn't affect your use case because your use case doesn't have this idea that the action that's being taken implicitly changes the price of the fee. So it can go from being uneconomic to economic depending on the actual asset traded. Right? If it's just the same asset crossing, you don't have this problem. But the problem that we point out is if the solvers are competing, but they're sourcing inventory from somewhere, and they all go to the same place, then they all push the price up. If everyone went to Binance at the same time to buy the asset to give fulfill to you, then, well, their profit goes down. In that case, competition is worse. You may want oligopoly and fewer participants. And so the swapping example is much more complicated to reason about than the single same asset. Same assets is like basically hard to get around.


[00:57:16]: Hart Lambur:


There's something else we're working on that I actually think might solve that, that we're not ready to talk about, but I'll tell you after the podcast.


[00:57:21]: Tarun Chitra:


Okay.


[00:57:22]: Anna Rose:


Whoa. Teaser.


[00:57:23]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah.


[00:57:24]: Tarun Chitra:


Spicy.


[00:57:24]: Anna Rose:


Damn.


[00:57:25]: Hart Lambur:


Did you spill champagne?


[00:57:27]: Anna Rose:


I picked... I pushed for the small cup and I regret it.


[00:57:29]: Hart Lambur:


The small cups are too small, Anna.


[00:57:31]: Anna Rose:


They're too small, and I just spilled on myself. All right, thanks, Tarun.


[00:57:36]: Hart Lambur:


So the only last thing I'll say on liveness, and then let's talk about EthCC, it also gets better over time, or the liveness guarantees get better over time. Like more volume, more order flow means more solvers in the network, more liquidity in the solver network, and just better guarantees. So I feel very good about the general direction of that quality. And you also look.. Like our data and our stats in Across right now, our 90th percentile fill times are under 10 seconds, which we're pretty proud of, and we're going to push those to under 5 seconds this quarter. And we're doing that because there's enough solvers and we've made the protocol easy enough for them that they show up and do their job because they're economically motivated to.


[00:58:24]: Anna Rose:


Nice. Okay. We are at the 1-hour mark recording.


[00:58:28]: Hart Lambur:


Whoa.


[00:58:29]: Anna Rose:


I don't know if it'll be that on the final, but I would love to take some time to do part two of this episode, which is to talk a little bit about Brussels, the city... Let's not talk about the city.


[00:58:41]: Tarun Chitra:


The city without the sprouts.


[00:58:43]: Anna Rose:


Let's not talk about the city. Let's talk about the events and things that we've seen this week so far. We're kind of halfway... Well, yeah, I don't know how far you are along. Are you almost done, Tarun? Are you like...


[00:58:53]: Tarun Chitra:


I think tomorrow I view as my last day. And then I'm like...


[00:58:57]: Anna Rose:


I'm in the middle still of everything that I'm doing, but this is something we have done every time. Right? So we get together, we usually have a guest or two guests we haven't had on before. Hart, you're the guest this time, and you're also a fellow podcaster. We didn't say that early on. You're the star of a popular podcast called...


[00:59:17]: Hart Lambur:


The star of popular…Bell Curve.


[00:59:20]: Anna Rose:


Yeah.


[00:59:20]: Hart Lambur:


Well, no, I did a season with my buddy Mike Ippolito, although we did record another Bell Curve episode yesterday. I'm recording eight different podcasts this week.


[00:59:30]: Anna Rose:


Wow. Yeah, I'm doing nine..


[00:59:33]: Hart Lambur:


But you're... But I'm not a professional podcaster.


[00:59:34]: Anna Rose:


But you are now, Hart.


[00:59:36]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah.


[00:59:37]: Anna Rose:


Welcome to the club.


[00:59:36]: Hart Lambur:


It's fun. I like it. Tarun is also a professional podcaster.


[00:59:41]: Anna Rose:


He's on two podcasts.


[00:59:42]: Tarun Chitra:


Not really.


[00:59:43]: Hart Lambur:


Come on.


[00:59:43]: Tarun Chitra:


Compared to...


[00:59:44]: Anna Rose:


I feel bad I'm only on one podcast. You're on many, many podcasts.


[00:59:50]: Tarun Chitra:


Yeah. You know...


[00:59:50]: Anna Rose:


Do you remember that time... There was this one year where you were guest on every podcast? 


[00:59:54]: Tarun Chitra:


Yeah, yeah.


[00:59:55]: Anna Rose:


And I started to get jealous.


[00:59:56]: Tarun Chitra:


You know, that's the sign of a bull market. We're back in a bull, if you see me on too many podcasts. That should be your astrological sign of hit the buy button.


[01:00:09]: Hart Lambur:


Sell button.


[01:00:10]: Anna Rose:


Sell.


[01:00:10]: Tarun Chitra:


Oh, sorry. Yeah, it's bull, you should start selling, unless...


[01:00:13]: Anna Rose:


Unless you want to be the exit liquidity.


[01:00:13]: Hart Lambur:


Sell after the...


[01:00:15]: Tarun Chitra:


Yeah.


[01:00:15]: Anna Rose:


Okay, so, yes, let's set up the scene, though. So I said this earlier, but we're here in Brussels kind of partway through this week of events or for some people close to the end. So let's just share with the audience like where we've been and maybe... Actually, let's start with that. Like, what did you see? What did you actually go do this week? Because I feel like we've all been in slightly different scenes. I was in a lot of ZK events, I feel like maybe you were over in the restaking, Tarun. I actually don't know where you were, Hart. DeFi stuff?


[01:00:48]: Hart Lambur:


Some of DeFi stuff. Some... Yeah. Yeah.


[01:00:52]: Anna Rose:


Okay. Why don't we start with you, though? Where were you then?


[01:00:53]: Hart Lambur:


Well, I showed up late, which was great. So I basically got here Tuesday afternoon, rolled off the plane, off of a Red-Eye flight, and did my EthCC talk, which was great. And apparently I was a clear enough speaker, which I'm personally, I'm impressed with myself by. So, yeah, thanks for the support. But...


[01:01:17]: Tarun Chitra:


Was that like pat... You just did the Obama giving himself a medal meme, buddy.


[01:01:24]: Anna Rose:


I was tired,. I got off the plane, and like I did a really good job, I think.


[01:01:29]: Hart Lambur:


I did it in sarcasm, guys. That's sarcasm.


[01:01:34]: Tarun Chitra:


Canadians are too nice for real sarcasm. Note to self.


[01:01:38]: Anna Rose:


We're not nice. We're not nice.


[01:01:39]: Hart Lambur:


I'm less and less Canadian these days, but I love my country. We are not the Belgium of France.


[01:01:46]: Anna Rose:


No.


[01:01:50]: Hart Lambur:


You just love that joke so much. Okay, so I rolled off the plane, gave my EthCC presentation, had a bunch of meetings, was at Modular Summit today. But I've been like, I'm kind of annoyingly been more focused on the multichain interop type. How do we solve interop things?


[01:02:12]: Anna Rose:


Yeah, that's where your head has been at.


[01:02:13]: Hart Lambur:


That's where my head has been at.


[01:02:15]: Anna Rose:


I have been at... I was at a RISC Zero event on the first day doing a panel. It was kind of state of ZK. I've been very state of ZK, actually, not even before this. ZKV put together... We do this every quarter. I don't think I've ever mentioned it on the show, but we do this state of ZK report once a quarter, and we've been doing it for about a year. It's a great review of everything that's happened. And so the first panel that I did was about that sort of reviewing it. And then I.. Oh, I was on an investor panel. Me.


[01:02:45]: Tarun Chitra:


But you are an investor.


[01:02:47]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah.


[01:02:47]: Anna Rose:


I know, but it was very... I don't think of myself that way somehow.


[01:02:51]: Hart Lambur:


Maybe you should.


[01:02:51]: Anna Rose:


And I was like, I thought I found it very funny to be there, to be like, oh, I'm giving advice. Yeah, it was strange. I was the only angel investor on the panel too, though. So I got to be the one who's like...


[01:03:03]: Tarun Chitra:


Fuck, the big guys.


[01:03:05]: Anna Rose:


Don't trust VCs.


[01:03:08]: Hart Lambur:


They're evil.


[01:03:09]: Anna Rose:


But yeah, so I would say, but still very, very ZK. So yeah, my world was very ZK. What's going on in ZK? I mean, one of the big topics was like sort of this emerging... I know it's a bit of a meme, but it's the ZK supply chain. I've had a few episodes kind of leading up to this too that touched on that. This is like, I think we've always thought of the zkRollup just connecting to the main chain, but what is actually happening in there? And can we break down some of those things and decentralize some of those things? And I think it's still a question mark if we can or should, but I know there's teams that are trying. And so these are things like prover networks and then the verification aggregators, and maybe there's even going to be more things in there. So that's where my head's been at.


[01:03:49]: Tarun Chitra:


Where has my head been at? The last six months have been... Less than six, four months have been me kind of really running into brick walls many times on this research problem I've been working on for restaking, but I finally think I may have solved 99% of it. And so I actually gave the same talk twice, and maybe I'm going to give the same talk thrice tomorrow with this tiny edit because I think it's one of my favorite talks I've ever written.


[01:04:21]: Anna Rose:


And what is... Is this all on restaking. Is it, you figured it out?


[01:04:25]: Tarun Chitra:


I think I figured out the thing that I think is the most important part of the security model for restaking.


[01:04:30]: Anna Rose:


Okay.


[01:04:30]: Tarun Chitra:


So I don't want to take too much time, but I can give a little detour.


[01:04:35]: Hart Lambur:


No, do it. What's the title? What's the title, Tarun?


[01:04:38]: Tarun Chitra:


Well, the title of the talk is How Much Security Does Your AVS Really Need? Lessons From Matching Markets. But the...


[01:04:48]: Anna Rose:


Could we spice that up a little?


[01:04:49]: Tarun Chitra:


Yeah, yeah, probably. And basically... Okay, I'll just give you the really simple version of the problem and then two different versions of solutions. So the problem is, imagine you wanted to attack two proof-of-stake networks simultaneously, say Solana and Ethereum. Well, to do that, let's say I was trying to double spend, and let's suppose they're... I would need to get 50% of both, separately. 


[01:05:15]: Anna Rose:


You have to buy all the security of both.


[01:05:17]: Tarun Chitra:


Now, in restaking, when I reuse stake, I actually don't have to buy 50% of both. I can buy a smaller threshold and attack both simultaneously. So imagine if you could attack Solana and Ethereum at the same time, but you only had to own 20% of Ethereum and 5% of Solana.


[01:05:33]: Anna Rose:


But do you get less? Would it be like you can attack, but it's somewhat less beneficial? Like it's not as good a score. Or is it as good a score?


[01:05:39]: Tarun Chitra:


No, no, no. It's the same profit. Same profit, same attack. It's just that because you're sharing the stake, this sort of attack, you're able to get economies of scale because you're reusing the same stake. So then a natural question you might ask is like, hey, okay, if I can do that, then there should be some kind of economies of scale you're looking thing that looks like DeFi, where you might have some notion of a cascade, where you can attack a set of services. By you attacking a set of services, you now remove a bunch of stake. That stake allows some other set of services to be attacked, and then those get attacked, and then that allows another set of services. So it's the sort of proof-of-stake analog of a lending liquidation cascade, or perpetuals liquidation cascade. It's a kind of interesting security model, because even though it looks a lot like the DeFi stuff, it's still mathematically very combinatorial, like the proofs of safety and liveness and proof-of-stake protocol. So it's sort of like somewhere in the middle of the two.


And formulating that cascade thing correctly is actually non-trivial, and there's a paper that's still not out, I don't know why it's not out yet, because I think they sent me the original version. I heard about this in February, and I read the initial version of the paper like three or four months ago, which is showing that, hey, you have to be really over-collateralized, meaning that the amount of stake people have to stake has to be so much higher than the total sum of all the profits in order for you to be secure in these cascades. So what that means is, imagine I could profit a billion dollars from attacking Solana, and I could profit $10 billion from attacking ETH, and I can profit $1 from attacking Cardano if they were in this restaking world, attacking Cardano, even though I only get $1, to make Cardano secure against restaking attacks, it would have to have 11 billion and $1 of stake, something proportional to that. So it would have to have something near the total sum. So it's insanely over-collateralized, very inefficient.


But this paper, which sets out really nice definitions, allows you to kind of talk about this cascade stuff. It ignores one thing, which is kind of similar to the type of thing Hart was talking about earlier, which is it ignores the incentives completely. It kind of assumes the adversary who's attacking is arbitrarily powerful. They can get arbitrary amounts of stake across all the networks for free, like cost free. There's no cost of attacking multiple. And the node operators, the stakers, they're sitting ducks. They can't change their stake. They can't be like, oh, I saw something get slashed, I'm gonna adjust my stake. So it's kind of this like... You have someone who has like the world's most powerful rifle, and the other hand, other side is like handcuffed node operators. Right? It's like a very...


[01:08:32]: Anna Rose:


So wait, but did you figure out something here?


[01:08:35]: Tarun Chitra:


So what I did is I... It took me a long time to figure this out with me and my co-author, that you can weaken... If you can weaken the adversary a little bit, and by weaken, I mean they face costs for attacking. Like if they try to attack one, well, when they buy the stake to attack one, they actually push up the cost for the next one. Right? And if they face costs and the node operators are allowed to be smart, they can rebalance in response to slashing events, then you can control, you can bound to this cascade risk. And it doesn't have to be as over-collateralized, but you need one important thing, which is you need each service to offer sufficiently high amount of rewards so that the stakers know where to rebalance. You can think of the rewards as a signal of where you should rebalance. Like literal, like yield chasing, but that's all they need. So there's kind of a weird sense in which the choice of security models for restaking is actually, even though on the surface you might think you want the exact same thing as proof-of-stake, if you want the exact same model as proof-of-stake, you need to be so over-collateralized that you might as well have just been an independent network.


[01:09:41]: Anna Rose:


I see.


[01:09:42]: Tarun Chitra:


And so, anyway.


[01:09:44]: Anna Rose:


Cool.


[01:09:44]: Tarun Chitra:


I've been thinking about this for a while.


[01:09:46]: Anna Rose:


Amazing. I'm glad you did that, though. I'm glad you put that together and that people can now see it.


[01:09:50]: Tarun Chitra:


Yeah, well.


[01:09:52]: Anna Rose:


We did just.. By the way, we did just talk about our own talks. We should also talk about other people's talks or other things.


[01:09:59]: Hart Lambur:


No, no, no, no.


[01:10:00]: Anna Rose:


Only our own talks?


[01:10:01]: Hart Lambur:


I like Tarun's talk.


[01:10:02]: Anna Rose:


Tarun's talk is good.


[01:10:03]: Hart Lambur:


I'm joking. I'm joking.


[01:10:04]: Tarun Chitra:


I didn't see that...


[01:10:06]: Anna Rose:


You didn't see any other talk?


[01:10:07]: Hart Lambur:


Tarun, did...


[01:10:08]: Tarun Chitra:


And saw Vitalik's, so.


[01:10:08]: Anna Rose:


You may not have seen another talk, but I bet you talked to people.


[01:10:10]: Tarun Chitra:


Yeah, yeah. No, no. I actually went this FHE summit. That was pretty cool.


[01:10:12]: Anna Rose:


Oh, interesting.


[01:10:14]: Tarun Chitra:


I saw some interesting performance numbers.


[01:10:16]: Anna Rose:


Really? see, I have heard through the Grapevine that the performance is still unusable. Like, who's doing great numbers?


[01:10:24]: Tarun Chitra:


So I will say, as a disclaimer...


[01:10:26]: Anna Rose:


Is it that one company that you invested in?


[01:10:28]: Tarun Chitra:


Yeah. I think what I'm saying is the following. There is a growth rate that people have predicted for performance.


[01:10:37]: Anna Rose:


Yeah.


[01:10:38]: Tarun Chitra:


And then there's real performance.


[01:10:38]: Anna Rose:


And it has not matched the growth prediction.


[01:10:41]: Tarun Chitra:


And it has kept up somewhat, but then in some tasks...


[01:10:47]: Anna Rose:


Okay.


[01:10:47]: Tarun Chitra:


So it's like, it's kind of like a mixed bag.


[01:10:48]: Anna Rose:


You can always kind of point to where it's failing.


[01:10:51]: Tarun Chitra:


Yes.


[01:10:51]: Anna Rose:


But there have actually been some advances that are still cool.


[01:10:54]: Tarun Chitra:


Exactly.


[01:10:54]: Anna Rose:


Okay.


[01:10:54]: Tarun Chitra:


So I thought that was cool.


[01:10:56]: Anna Rose:


That's fair.


[01:10:56]: Tarun Chitra:


The other thing is, I feel I've gone to a lot of things where, over time, I'm becoming much more favorable towards TEEs. I know it's...


[01:11:07]: Anna Rose:


Our audience won't like to hear this.


[01:11:08]: Hart Lambur:


This is a theme I've heard, too.


[01:11:10]: Anna Rose:


Yeah, yeah.


[01:11:11]: Hart Lambur:


I know a bunch of people that are like, TEEs are bad, TEEs are bad. They're like, yeah, maybe it kind of works. It's okay.


[01:11:17]: Anna Rose:


For some things, it seems to work, especially if you combine them with other things like ZKPs and TEEs.


[01:11:21]: Tarun Chitra:


Well, the example I gave on the panel that we were on of like slashing rules, where they become a lot simpler when you could do them in FHE or MPC or TEE. In that threat model, you don't have to write as much code because the adversary can't read the thing.


[01:11:36]: Anna Rose:


Yeah, totally.


[01:11:37]: Tarun Chitra:


And it's like, there's actually a lot of beauty and the simplicity, and I think I've come to appreciate that.


[01:11:43]: Anna Rose:


Maybe you should say the name of the panel we were just on. We were all on it just now, actually, midway through this.


[01:11:48]: Tarun Chitra:


Sorry, I kind of forget the name.


[01:11:50]: Anna Rose:


It was information flow control panel.


[01:11:52]: Hart Lambur:


Panel.


[01:11:54]: Anna Rose:


But control panel...


[01:11:56]: Hart Lambur:


Control panel.


[01:11:56]: Anna Rose:


Itself sort of standard... Like it was on the second line. It was kind of confusing. But that was kind of fun. That was one of the things we did. I want to know, like I think it's hard to not mention us being here. Like the vibe generally, because it's different from last year and the year before. Last year, I remember us saying things like, it's sober, but this year I think it's more sober. I don't know about you. Do you feel excitement?


[01:12:21]: Tarun Chitra:


There were no big announcements? I will say... At least I didn't observe any big launches.


[01:12:26]: Anna Rose:


There were some ZK announcements, but, yeah, they weren't massive. They were actually projects I didn't know, but they had just done something cool. But nothing that would make kind of the mainstream news outside of the ZK space. That's interesting.


[01:12:40]: Hart Lambur:


In a way, it's almost like the game theory of doing a big announcement at EthCC is risky because you don't know who else is going to do a big announcement.


[01:12:48]: Anna Rose:


This time they all didn't.


[01:12:50]: Hart Lambur:


They all didn't, right?


[01:12:51]: Anna Rose:


Or there were none.


[01:12:52]: Hart Lambur:


So we need a TEE.


[01:12:53]: Tarun Chitra:


It is what happens when the solvers all disappear?


[01:12:55]: Hart Lambur:


Exactly. Well, we need a TEE where everybody submits their big announcement and decides who should announce the big announcement. Right?


[01:13:00]: Anna Rose:


Oh, an auction.


[01:13:01]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah.


[01:13:02]: Anna Rose:


Who gets it?


[01:13:04]: Hart Lambur:


Who gets it? Because...


[01:13:06]: Anna Rose:


Yeah.


[01:13:04]: Tarun Chitra:


Yeah, this is the beauty of crypto. Crypto people can be so good at making products only for themselves.


[01:13:14]: Anna Rose:


To pick the TEE, the auction, to pick who gets to do the announcement at the next big thing. Do you think people are waiting for DevCon?


[01:13:22]: Tarun Chitra:


I mean, honestly, I'm excited. No offense, Europe and America kind of suck in crypto land, but every time I go to Asia, it's like, even though sometimes it's like, craziness.


[01:13:33]: Anna Rose:


I hear this, yeah.


[01:13:34]: Tarun Chitra:


Everyone is so much more enthusiastic and excited and I feel like that does not... You know, you're saying it's more sober, but I definitely don't feel like that here.


[01:13:40]: Anna Rose:


Definitely do not feel it this time. And I don't know if it's Brussels and I don't, or if it's this year, or this moment...


[01:13:46]: Tarun Chitra:


But it's like even people... There's something... No one is like, oh, there's some new exciting. Even ETHDenver felt more exciting because, like, people were going crazy about restaking.


Hart Lambur:


ETHDenver felt more... ETHDenver.


[01:13:55]: Anna Rose:


Oh, because of restaking.


[01:13:56]: Tarun Chitra:


Exactly. No, no. But there was like this huge...


[01:13:58]: Anna Rose:


Because we're also living through, and this is something that I almost put into the state of ZK, but realized it had nothing to do with ZK. But there is this, you know, the last six months, there's been like... And it's not really. I don't want to blame the teams doing it because it's kind of not their fault. It's weird timing, whatever, but there's been a very lackluster saying it nicely response to launches. I mean, you know this, right?


[01:14:21]: Tarun Chitra:


For sure.


[01:14:21]: Anna Rose:


And I'm saying, it's actually worse than lackluster. It's quite painful to watch. 


[01:14:25]: Tarun Chitra:


I feel like it's sad when the response to...


[01:14:29]: Anna Rose:


Free money.


[01:14:30]: Tarun Chitra: 


Yeah. And also the meme coin stuff, I actually feel like that's made people very cynical. Like this financial nihilism stuff seems to have bled beyond its borders.


[01:14:39]: Anna Rose:


I know.


[01:14:40]: Tarun Chitra:


And right now we're in the like...


[01:14:41]: Anna Rose:


I feel like...


[01:14:41]: Hart Lambur:


But isn't it?


[01:14:42]: Tarun Chitra:


Takes a hangover.


[01:14:42]: Anna Rose:


Didn't you once argue for this. I feel like last year you were like, is nihilism good or something? And I was like, no. And now it has taken over.


[01:14:50]: Tarun Chitra:


I think it went too far. Like once we got to the celebrities thing, it's like, okay, this is all.


[01:14:54]: Anna Rose:


But we were there already, but it's so much sadder this time.


[01:14:56]: Tarun Chitra:


No, it's much worse. Yeah, yeah.


[01:15:00]: Anna Rose:


And it's in politics.


[01:14:59]: Tarun Chitra:


It's like... I don't know. I forgot Jason Derulo existed. I really would like to go back to forgetting he existed.


[01:15:05]: Hart Lambur:


You guys are getting kind of cynical right now.


[01:15:08]: Anna Rose:


Yeah. Wait, Hart, are you feeling good?


[01:15:09]: Hart Lambur:


I feel great. But I think...


[01:15:12]: Anna Rose:


All right, give us the counter.


[01:15:13]: Hart Lambur:


Well, the counter, I mean, I showed up here on Tuesday afternoon, like halfway through, which I think makes a big difference because these events are getting too long, like...


[01:15:21]: Tarun Chitra:


Oh, another thing related to this, there are too many side events.


[01:15:26]: Anna Rose:


Yeah.


[01:15:25]: Hart Lambur:


There are too many, but...


[01:15:26]: Anna Rose:


There were actually too many side events this time.


[01:15:29]: Hart Lambur:


I think it'll normalize.


[01:15:29]: Anna Rose:


We did two of them. I am responsible for...


[01:15:31]: Hart Lambur:


You did two of them?


[01:15:32]: Anna Rose:


Two.


[01:15:32]: Tarun Chitra:


We've never done an event.


[01:15:33]: Anna Rose:


Two with two different...


[01:15:34]: Tarun Chitra:


This is our first ever event and we did one and it was like, oh my God, this is...


[01:15:37]: Anna Rose:


When did you do one?


[01:15:37]: Tarun Chitra:


On Wednesday. I flew in...


[01:15:39]: Anna Rose:


Oh, I didn't know.


[01:15:40]: Hart Lambur:


Gauntlet had an event?


[01:15:41]: Tarun Chitra:


Yeah, restaking research.


[01:15:42]: Anna Rose:


We didn't know.


[01:15:43]: Hart Lambur:


You didn't invite us? 


[01:15:44]: Anna Rose:


You didn't invite me.


[01:15:45]: Tarun Chitra:


Wait, I did.  It's public. It was on Twitter.


[01:15:48]: Hart Lambur:


Dude, I want the personalized invite.


[01:15:49]: Anna Rose:


Yeah. Harsh.


[01:15:51]: Tarun Chitra:


I'm sorry, first of all, I like came late.


[01:15:56]: Anna Rose:


The Canadians. We're just passive aggressive bullying you. Don't worry about it. It's okay.


[01:16:01]: Hart Lambur:


But I do agree there are too many side events. The incentive structure there is also kind of messed up. Right? Where people want to have their own side event because it's their thing. And...


[01:16:11]: Anna Rose:


I think it's the tradition too. Like, you're here, you're supposed to, but there was definitely too many.


[01:16:17]: Tarun Chitra:


But like I... So I feel like a lot of electronic music festivals have the same thing where one of them gets successful and then people start throwing all these side festivals, and then it cannibalizes the main one and then they like... Because like...


[01:16:29]: Hart Lambur:


How many talks did you go to at EthCC?


[01:16:31]: Tarun Chitra:


Zero.


[01:16:32]: Anna Rose:


I didn't even go to the venue, actually.


[01:16:34]: Hart Lambur:


Did you guys have a ticket? Didn't you go to the event?


[01:16:35]: Anna Rose:


No, I didn't have a ticket. I just...


[01:16:37]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah. I mean, that's kind of like the problem. Right?


[01:16:41]: Anna Rose:


Well, are you supposed to go to the big event? I think DevCon, if I was... I'm not actually going to be there, but if I was, I would also probably not spend much time in the main.


[01:16:51]: Hart Lambur:


I don't know. I feel like everybody should go to some talk sometimes.


[01:16:54]: Anna Rose:


Yeah.


[01:16:55]: Hart Lambur:


Because it's like... And I didn't. I'm kind of full of shit because I didn't actually get to do that because I showed up late, but...


[01:17:02]: Anna Rose:


People should.


[01:17:03]: Hart Lambur:


People should. And like the Modular Summit, I'm going to go to some of the talks tomorrow and on Saturday, and I feel... And I did go to a talk today.


[01:17:10]: Tarun Chitra:


You can see my talk tomorrow.


[01:17:11]: Anna Rose:


Yeah.


[01:17:12]: Tarun Chitra:


I'm only slightly modifying it.


[01:17:13]: Anna Rose:


I might... Maybe I should crash that talk too. I should... Or if you're doing a panel, I should just like...


[01:17:17]: Tarun Chitra:


I have a panel. Which is also like this drinking episode. This is the third annual one.


[01:17:23]: Anna Rose:


What is it?


[01:17:23]: Tarun Chitra:


I have a third annual panel of me, Mustafa and Anatoly.


[01:17:26]: Anna Rose:


Oh, no, yeah. I can't crash that one.


[01:17:27]: Hart Lambur:


You're doing that?


[01:17:28]: Anna Rose:


Again.


[01:17:29]: Tarun Chitra:


Tomorrow.


[01:17:29]: Hart Lambur:


Really?


[01:17:30]: Tarun Chitra:


Yeah.


[01:17:31]: Anna Rose:


That's actually kind of cool.


[01:17:31]: Tarun Chitra:


That's at the end of the day, yeah.


[01:17:33]: Anna Rose:


You did it last year?


[01:17:34]: Tarun Chitra:


I did it last year. I did it the first year. Yeah.


[01:17:35]: Anna Rose:


Nice.


[01:17:37]: Tarun Chitra:


I'm running out of questions to ask them. Do you guys have any ideas of like...


[01:17:39]: Anna Rose:


What's happened in the last year? I mean...


[01:17:41]: Tarun Chitra:


Meme coins.


[01:17:42]: Anna Rose:


Meme coins for Anatoly.


[01:17:42]: Tarun Chitra:


I mean, that's the number one thing I'm gonna ask about.


[01:17:45]: Hart Lambur:


Anatoly comes to EthCC?


[01:17:46]: Tarun Chitra:


No, he does it by video.


[01:17:49]: Hart Lambur:


Oh, that makes more sense.


[01:17:49]: Tarun Chitra:


But respect to all the Solana people who came, because I feel like it's kind of interesting. They are clearly very curious people.


[01:17:58]: Hart Lambur:


Well, on that, what do you guys feel about the Solana vibe here? Like how is the...


[01:18:02]: Anna Rose:


Minimal.


[01:18:01]: Tarun Chitra:


Other than...


[01:18:05]: Anna Rose:


I haven't noticed it.


[01:18:06]: Tarun Chitra:


Kyle and Mert, I didn't talk to anyone who is Solana-focused.


[01:18:08]: Anna Rose:


Yeah.


[01:18:09]: Hart Lambur:


Kyle is here?


[01:18:10]: Tarun Chitra:


Yeah. He was here. He left yesterday. This morning, sorry.


[01:18:13]: Hart Lambur:


Wow. All right.


[01:18:13]: Anna Rose:


Yeah. I didn't see any Solana personally. I didn't see it.


[01:18:17]: Hart Lambur:


Do you think it's getting more... It is getting more heated, right?


[01:18:19]: Anna Rose:


What?


[01:18:19]: Hart Lambur:


Solana-ETH?


[01:18:20]: Tarun Chitra:


Well, oh, yeah, I guess we didn't talk about the make block times shorter in ETH, and like all the Solana people are like, wow, Ethereum is becoming slow-Lana. I thought... I was like, that's funny... I had not until I saw that part of Twitter. I was like, whoa. 


[01:18:36]: Hart Lambur:


slow-Lana is pretty good.


[01:18:37]: Tarun Chitra:


I was like, that's crazy.


[01:18:38]: Anna Rose:


I do think they'll actually be a move over, though. I feel like the people who are in ETH, the real dedicated folks, I don't think they're gonna leave and go there.


[01:18:47]: Tarun Chitra:


But it's a totally different type of person.


[01:18:48]: Anna Rose:


It's the Ethereum fair weather friends that'll go there.


[01:18:51]: Tarun Chitra:


No...


[01:18:51]: Hart Lambur:


But that's not what it's about. It's about like, the new people, right?


[01:18:54]: Anna Rose:


Yeah.


[01:18:54]: Hart Lambur:


And it is the war. I like the war, I like the competition. I think it's healthy. Right? But the next billion people, where do they build? Or the next billion users, where do they go?


[01:19:06]: Anna Rose:


Strange, because where do they... I mean, there are also the sort of Silicon Valley, what do we call them, like those teams that are made of X meta, X sort of legacy, easy to invest in projects, which I wonder if those won't also potentially take... I mean, if you're a corporation, do you want to trust us or you wanna trust them?


[01:19:29]: Tarun Chitra:


No, no, no, no. I think the most important thing that we've learned from the failures of a lot of Layer 1s is that A, the people working on the protocol, core protocol, can't be dicks. Like, they're actually...


[01:19:42]: Anna Rose:


These aren't ass... They're just more like Silicon Valley...


[01:19:44]: Tarun Chitra:


No, no, no. I will say very few have been able to pull off what Ethereum and Solana have, where they have this community that even when there's a galactic... 


[01:19:52]: Hart Lambur:


Dude, Justin Sun, he's a dick.


[01:19:56]: Anna Rose:


He's an exception. He's a meme.


[01:19:57]: Tarun Chitra:


Okay, we'll get to that.


[01:20:00]: Hart Lambur:


Fine, fine.


[01:20:01]: Tarun Chitra:


We'll get to that. We'll get to that. Anna, you have to have a lot of respect for Justin. He's the largest liquidity provider in Ethereum.


[01:20:09]: Anna Rose:


Is that true?


[01:20:10]: Tarun Chitra:


He is one of them, yes.


[01:20:11]: Anna Rose:


Wow.


[01:20:11]: Tarun Chitra:


He is... But a way to conceptualize this fight is people in Solana really care about a very different thing. They care about the end user. They don't necessarily care out all these particular theoretical properties that we've held near and dear. And...


[01:20:31]: Anna Rose:


They haven't nerd sniped the same way Ethereum has.


[01:20:36]: Tarun Chitra:


But they bond over that and they care about the performance stuff, whereas you look at the other high performance chains, and even when they do amazing research or they have this amazing consensus protocol or whatever, they just don't seem to be able to communicate that to their users. Their users don't get that. And that community aspect is actually one of the reasons I think Solana was able to get a big developer community, get users who wanted to use it, was they have a leader and developers who are kind of not dicks and not like, oh, we know everything, right? Whereas like Newsflash, I can't really think of that many Layer 1s that don't have founders or CTOs or devs who fall into...


[01:21:16]: Anna Rose:


Or know-it-alls.


[01:21:17]: Tarun Chitra:


Or like make sure everyone...


[01:21:18]: Anna Rose:


Is Vitalik a know-it-all?


[01:21:19]: Tarun Chitra:


No. But he...


[01:21:20]: Anna Rose:


I mean, he isn't, but he's not that accessible, actually. He's a good explainer to technical people.


[01:21:28]: Hart Lambur:


Wait, who's this?


[01:21:29]: Anna Rose:


Vitalik. But when you look at the SNARK blog and stuff like that, like, yes they're... they're not...


[01:21:31]: Tarun Chitra:


No. But he is still a community person.


[01:21:36]: Anna Rose:


He's involved.


[01:21:36]: Tarun Chitra:


Right? In a way that, like, that's not, you cannot say that for these other ones. 


[01:21:40]: Anna Rose:


No. For sure, for sure, for sure.


[01:21:40]: Tarun Chitra:


They're like we're the dev team, you're the user.


[01:21:43]: Anna Rose:


Yeah, yeah.


[01:21:43]: Tarun Chitra: 


You know like, it has that vibe.


[01:21:46]: Hart Lambur:


His humility.


[01:21:47]: Tarun Chitra: 


And Solana doesn't have... Like Anatoly is still literally constantly in all these GitHub threads, and he's obviously crazy and manic and tweeting all the time, but he's very focused on even the smallest user, which is crazy. A lot of people, they get rich and they tell their user, go fuck themselves. That's all Cardano does.


[01:22:11]: Anna Rose:


He doesn't tell, what was the founder? Who was it who said, do you know who I am, when somebody said... Like directed him to customer service. I think it's Charles Hoskinson.


[01:22:19]: Tarun Chitra:


Oh, and then they said... Yeah, Hoskinson. That's Cardano. That's why I bring...


[01:22:22]: Hart Lambur:


I think Tarun, it's less about being a dick and more about humility. Right? Like...


[01:22:28]: Tarun Chitra:


Aren't those two sides of the same coin?


[01:22:30]: Anna Rose:


I mean, you can be a dick and not be humble, but I think you could be...


[01:22:33]: Tarun Chitra:


You can be a humble dick?


[01:22:34]: Hart Lambur:


But I think that...


[01:22:35]: Tarun Chitra:


Humble dick is a good name for a men's underwear brand.


[01:22:36]: Anna Rose:


You could be a humble... You could be a humble like not...


[01:22:41]: Tarun Chitra:


Dude, guys, guys, we got to start this men's underwear brand called Humble Dick.


[01:22:47]: Anna Rose:


Who's gonna buy that?


[01:22:50]: Hart Lambur:


I mean, you buy it as a gift.


[01:22:50]: Tarun Chitra:


You buy it as a gag gift. It's like...


[01:22:55]: Anna Rose:


Wow.


[01:22:56]: Hart Lambur:


It's a great gift.


[01:22:57]: Anna Rose:


It's good.


[01:22:57]: Tarun Chitra:


Sorry.


[01:22:58]: Anna Rose:


Make it happen, people.


[01:23:00]: Tarun Chitra:


I agree with you. There's probably some difference, but yeah, the humility...


[01:23:01]: Hart Lambur:


But point is...


[01:23:03]: Tarun Chitra:


Humility and accessibility are...


[01:23:05]: Hart Lambur:


Vitalik and Anatoly both are humble people. And that's really very, very cool to see.


[01:23:11]: Tarun Chitra:


But it's also genuine. They're not like... There's a lot of people who fake it and then they get caught, and...


[01:23:18]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah. That's not humility. That's not real... That's not humility. It's fake.


[01:23:20]: Tarun Chitra:


It has to be sort of authentic humility.


[01:23:22]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah.


[01:23:22]: Tarun Chitra:


It can't be Obama giving himself a medal.


[01:23:27]: Anna Rose:


That didn't really happen Tarun.


[01:23:29]: Tarun Chitra:


I'm kidding. I'm kidding.


[01:23:30]: Anna Rose:


That's meme. Poor Obama.


[01:23:33]: Tarun Chitra:


I was just referring to his...


[01:23:35]: Anna Rose:


No, I know. Yes. Pats.


[01:23:37]: Hart Lambur:


He's trolling me.


[01:23:38]: Tarun Chitra:


That's what I'm here for.


[01:23:39]: Anna Rose:


What else do we want to talk about from this last week? Oh, because actually, I did want to say, I mentioned I was all in the ZK world, and then I was at Modular Summit, but I've also... I'm on... I'm going to be doing nine interviews this week. We're actually recording, this is a little hint. I mean, I hope this comes through, but we got a grant to do the second season of the ZK Whiteboard Sessions, which is a series that we created from the ZK Hack side, and we just recorded the first module of the second season today. So I'm very excited that's gonna be coming back. Sorry, I didn't mean to be talking about myself. I actually meant just to get outside of my own chilling... Chilling myself.


[01:24:19]: Tarun Chitra:


That looks great. That's great.


[01:24:21]: Anna Rose:


But what I wanted to say was the things that I've been hearing about outside of the ZK world, and especially through these interviews I've been doing, it's actually about interoperability, about bridges and Across kept coming up. That's why it's also very cool and fitting that we just had you on to talk about it.


[01:24:37]: Hart Lambur:


Such a nice Canadian.


[01:24:39]: Anna Rose:


It kept coming up, and I'm not kidding, it just kept, like there's new bridging, there's new bridge ideas or people who work with bridges, and it's just like mentioned over and over again. So that kind of came up for me.


[01:24:48]: Tarun Chitra:


Simplicity is key in some ways. You know, I feel like that's another thing about bridges, is that there was this race at some point where everyone wanted to make their bridge the most complicated. Right? They wanted every bell and whistle possible.


[01:25:01]: Anna Rose:


Wasn't it always kind of to make it the safest? It was like safety and secure.


[01:25:05]: Tarun Chitra:


Right, right. But they conflated complexity with safety, which...


[01:25:07]: Anna Rose:


Yeah.


[01:25:08]: Tarun Chitra:


Sometimes I think that happens in this space. This happens in AI and crypto more than any other space.


[01:25:14]: Anna Rose:


Yeah, man, it's so interesting now, having been in this space for, I have... You said 2017 was when you got into it.


[01:25:22]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah.


[01:25:22]: Anna Rose:


2018.


[01:25:23]: Hart Lambur:


2018.


[01:25:23]: Anna Rose:


Yeah. For me, it was 2017. I remember having you on the show beginning of 2019. Tarun, that's when I met you. But you see through this, you see these cycles, and there's this moment in a cycle where you don't know what the outcome will be, but there's a couple projects that are pitching you their vision, and you're looking at them and you're like, I don't know how this plays out, but then you get to see it play out. And I think, what's a bit unfortunate, I think people forget to look back and think about what was being pitched then. What were the four bridges, the four bridge ideas, and what actually played through. Because in the moment that they're pitching it to you, you're just like, this looks amazing. This seems really cool, but you have to see it, analyze it, and then see what actually happens. Yeah, do you feel like we just chase narratives a lot? I feel like...


[01:26:12]: Hart Lambur:


Are you joking? In crypto..


[01:26:13]: Anna Rose:


Are we just like...


[01:26:16]: Tarun Chitra:


Anna, can I tell you a little bit about an asset called a meme coin?


[01:26:23]: Hart Lambur:


But this is the perverse incentives, right? Where it's like, you chase a narrative because you want your token price to go up.


[01:26:30]: Anna Rose:


Yeah. And you make the narrative. Sometimes you like craft a narrative, which is, hey, all marketing in the world did that. I mean, like big concepts in the world have done that.


[01:26:41]: Hart Lambur:


So take Celestia, for example. They crafted the modular narrative very, very well.


[01:26:47]: Anna Rose:


It's so nicely done.


[01:26:48]: Hart Lambur:


It's so well done. It's like a work of art, in my opinion.


[01:26:52]: Anna Rose:


Yeah. It spread.


[01:26:52]: Hart Lambur:


But they backed it up with a great product, I think. Or they built real tech, too. And so to me, that's the dream.


[01:27:03]: Tarun Chitra:


Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I think the...


[01:27:05]: Hart Lambur:


There was a way too long a pause right there.


[01:27:07]: Anna Rose:


We might cut that.


[01:27:08]: Tarun Chitra:


I think. I think, like...


[01:27:09]: Anna Rose:


There was too much gravitas.


[01:27:12]: Tarun Chitra:


I just sort of think the narratives oftentimes just run at a faster speed than reality. Right? And that's in and of itself, that's not the worst thing. But I do feel like, in crypto, it's like, we're still a space that needs to prove itself to 90% of the populus. Right?


[01:27:33]: Anna Rose:


100%. Yeah.


[01:27:34]: Tarun Chitra:


Like, it's not like AI in that sense, where you don't need to prove to the average person that there could be something there. I still feel like we still have that issue outside of using stablecoins in Turkey. That's the only thing I could probably conceivably tell my grandmother, and she’d get.


[01:27:51]: Anna Rose:


I just... I do think. I mean, last year, I think it started to dawn on me, the AI... You know, we got really excited Tarun, you and I, on the show. And, I mean, you were into it before, but what was it? 2023 was when Kobi modded my voice and created zkpod.ai, and I got really freaked out. And last year, I was really, like, I think what we're building, I don't know if it was crypto, but it was something like, maybe immutable ledger plus ZK or something. It feels like the human... It's like this creation out of the human mind and the human populus, just the fact that there's so many people that have to be involved, this like, this is the crowd in a way, that it would somehow stand as a guard against the AI, AGI kind of world. But I don't know. Lately I feel, especially with the mood and the focus of a lot of what people are... The focus of the industry, that I'm like, are we gonna be able to be the human counterpart or the human. I say counter, actually, like thing that keeps it kind of in check, or you could actually control it somehow through this mass hive, like what do we call our... Just participation.


[01:29:04]: Tarun Chitra:


Yeah. I think an example of where crypto, like the incentives seem to be kind of poorly made in regards to this, is like there are 5 million AI tokens that are about decentralized training and stuff that's computationally, basically infeasible, not very useful to most people. Most people are going to take a mega model and maybe fine tune it a little bit, but it's not a real thing. But yet there's a million of these protocols for doing this, and they all have tokens and market caps. Yeah, you know what would actually be a much more useful AI in crypto thing is just making it so I can use intents while with natural language. Like, I don't want to fucking...


[01:29:50]: Anna Rose:


But that's incorporating AI into it.


[01:29:53]: Tarun Chitra:


For sure. But that's more honest. The other thing is like computationally useless. Like anyone... Anytime I talk to my friends who work in AI, they just laugh at me when I explain to them these crypto things. They're like, why are you people such clowns? And I'm like, yeah, I agree. It's true.


[01:30:11]: Hart Lambur:


But I do agree with Tarun. It's like, what is the Crypto X AI, kind of...


[01:30:16]: Anna Rose:


Yeah.


[01:30:17]: Hart Lambur:


What is the actual point of it.


[01:30:19]: Tarun Chitra:


Making it easier for users. That's what it should be, right? Like to me, that's what it seems like it should be.


[01:30:22]: Anna Rose:


But I feel like there we're trying to use AI to make crypto easy. But shouldn't it...


[01:30:26]: Tarun Chitra:


But that seems like a way higher value than the other thing.


[01:30:30]: Anna Rose:


I was talking about using all of this stuff as a counter to...


[01:30:34]: Tarun Chitra:


Do you mean Worldcoin style?


[01:30:35]: Anna Rose:


No.


[01:30:35]: Hart Lambur:


I think the way you're supposed to...


[01:30:37]: Anna Rose:


Don't say that one. 


[01:30:39]: Hart Lambur:


But go back... So, okay, so we want to use AI to make crypto easier. That was Tarun's point.


[01:30:45]: Anna Rose:


Yeah.


[01:30:45]: Hart Lambur:


Okay, fine. That actually does make sense.


[01:30:47]: Anna Rose:


Sure.


[01:30:48]: Tarun Chitra:


It's just not a business. The problem is that's like, so no one funds it.


[01:30:50]: Anna Rose:


No, but that's still a thing. But I was actually saying use everything we're building to keep AI in check. I'm like, completely on a doomer.


[01:30:58]: Tarun Chitra:


No, no, fair, fair, fair


[01:30:58]: Hart Lambur:


Maybe don't make it keep AI in check. Although that's, let's say, make AI better.


[01:31:04]: Anna Rose:


Yeah. Or that.


[01:31:05]: Hart Lambur:


Like nobody's come up with anything that uses crypto to make AI better. And I think there could be.


[01:31:09]: Anna Rose:


There are... I mean, in the ZK land, there's a few ideas, but yeah.


[01:31:13]: Hart Lambur:


There are ideas, they seem untractable. They don't seem particularly consumer friendly. And I'm not convinced yet of the use case. I think the idea of like, hey, could we build stuff that I've thought about a little bit? Could we build a marketplace for AIs using crypto-like technologies that reduces hallucinations-type thing? There's stuff like that that might be kind of interesting of like, how could you take what AI does and make it more accurate? Maybe crypto could help there, but nobody's really going down that vein yet.


[01:31:47]: Anna Rose:


Fair. I feel like we're about to get kicked out of the room we're recording in.


[01:31:50]: Tarun Chitra:


Yes. I keep feeling this thing...


[01:31:51]: Hart Lambur:


We did get kicked out half an hour ago.


[01:31:54]: Anna Rose:


We did get warned.


[01:31:54]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah, that was...


[01:31:56]: Anna Rose:


It was actually half an hour ago.


[01:31:57]: Tarun Chitra:


I think this is...


[01:32:00]: Hart Lambur:


Actually, I think it was like 40-50 minutes ago.


[01:32:01]: Anna Rose:


Also we're all drinking this bubbly, or have drunk this bubbly on an empty stomach, clearly, because it wasn't that much. But I do feel like we're being kind of silly, so maybe it's time to wrap up.


[01:32:12]: Tarun Chitra:


It's time to wrap up.


[01:32:13]: Hart Lambur:


Post-production will be great.


[01:32:15]: Anna Rose:


Post-production will be minimal.


[01:32:17]: Tarun Chitra:


Thank you, Henrik. Thank you, Henrik. I apologize for your brain cells.


[01:32:20]: Anna Rose:


Thank you Henrik. All right, thanks, everybody. Thank you guys for doing this episode.


[01:32:26]: Hart Lambur:


Thank you both so much.


[01:32:27]: Anna Rose:


It was so fun to get to know Across too. First time on, but I hope not last time on.


[01:32:32]: Hart Lambur:


Yeah, And I hope so too.


[01:32:32]: Tarun Chitra:


And to our one listener, Guillermo, we're never doing tequila again.


[01:32:38]: Anna Rose:


Unless you're here, then maybe. All right, I think I'm supposed to say thank you to the podcast team, right? Rachel, Henrik, Tanya, sometimes Jonas, and to our listeners, thanks for listening.