#citizenweb3 Episode link: https://www.citizenweb3.com/secret-network Episode name: Drones, smart contracts and secrets with Tor Bair Anna: Hey, it's Citizen Cosmos. We are Serge and Anna and we discover cosmos by chatting with awesome people from various teams within the cosmos ecosystem and the community. Join us if you are curious how dreams and ambitions become code. Citizen Web3: Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Citizen Cosmos and today we're going to chat with Thor from Secret Network. Hey man, how are you? Tor Bair: I'm phenomenal. Thanks for having me on guys. Citizen Web3: Thanks for coming on. This is going to be exciting. Excited about privacy and I think you're going to have a lot to tell us about privacy as far as I understand. Tor Bair: I will do my best. It's a complex topic and you know, sometimes it's a little opaque, no pun intended. Citizen Web3: Before we kick off, just wanted to congratulate you because we saw on your Twitter that you had an exciting life event. I don't know if it's a secret or not. I hope it's not. Tor Bair: I put it on Twitter so I don't consider it a secret. Yes, thank you. Obviously, you're talking about the fact that I got engaged a couple of weeks ago to a wonderful lady and the pictures are on Twitter of our quarantine based engagement. We're very excited. It's been six years in the making so some would say it was time. I'm very excited though because she's been an excellent quarantine buddy as well. Citizen Web3: Congratulations, right? Tor Bair: Thank you very much. We appreciate it. Anna: Maybe let's start with a small discussion about privacy and to definitely one of the most frequently used words in the crypto space now. Let's make sure that we are on the same page. Could you explain the term privacy in your own words and how you think about it? Tor Bair: Yeah, great question. So privacy is one of those words where depending on the context, depending on who's saying it, it can mean 100 different things, which is why it gets particularly complicated. Just like the word decentralization, you know depending who's saying it in which context, it could mean 100 different things and you can fight endlessly over whether something is more decentralized or more private than something else. So when I think of privacy, I also try to think of what is the opposite of privacy? So the opposite of privacy to me is when you don't have control over how data is being used or exposed. If you're not private, it's like living in a house with all the window shades open, all the walls are made of glass, anybody walking by can see what you're doing. You can't control who walks by. Like to me, that's all obviously not privacy. But privacy is not necessarily hiding in the dark, shutting all of the shades, never like venturing out into the outside world. Like people think privacy sometimes they think you know a hacker sitting in a basement, you know there's all this very dark imagery associated with privacy. But when I talk about privacy, I try to emphasize for people it's just about this idea of consent and control and empowerment for the individual. Having a say in what people know about you or don't know about you, like what you are willing to share or not willing to share. There are things about yourself that you're willing to share with people provided that you trust them. Then there's some things that you may never want to share with anyone. And the way that I see it, privacy is having the right to make that determination yourself as an individual. Citizen Web3: Very thorough description I would say. Anna: It's a very smart way to describe it starting from the opposite side of the things. So today if you live in a city and especially big city and just involved into digital world, it looks like you have only two options. You refuse the most of the services or you accept that the most of information about you is available to a large number of corporations, governments, etc. Do you agree that there are only two choices or maybe something more to this? Tor Bair: The way that I describe it is if you think about who this is a word that also gets used a lot in the blockchain space. Who has the incentive to protect your privacy? If you're a government, generally speaking, you want to know as much as possible about what your citizens are doing. Most of us live in surveillance states of one fashion or another. And then if you're a company, you want to have as much information as possible about what your users are doing because you can either repackage that data into advertising platforms or you can sell it to the highest bidder or you can track users around the internet or around physical space as well. So if they don't have incentive to protect your privacy, then you sort of end up at all times careening towards the extreme where there will be a surveillance state and there will be surveillance capitalism. Now the alternative, if we're saying that there's only the other extreme, would be everything absolutely private. No ability to collaborate with anybody else because everything about you is private at all times. And that's not really a viable extreme either. We all generally speaking would prefer to live in societies where there is a transfer of goods and services and that does require to some extent trust in a counterparty. It requires you to reveal your address to at least one person so that Amazon drone can land on your porch. You have to decide at which point like what you're willing to make private what you're not willing to make private unless we all want to go back to sort of like a barter system or hunter gatherer society. So there has to be a middle ground. And I think the middle ground really is when it's just that the control is in the hands of the users. But not only that where we can create technology platforms that are privacy by design. And when I say privacy by design, I didn't come up with that phrase. But when I say it, what I mean is rather than designing for what corporations or governments would prefer, which is not privacy by design, not privacy by default, transparency by default, defaults are very powerful. Users generally use whatever the default on the platform is. Users usually click agree before they read the terms of service on any software product. So if that's the case, we need to change defaults for users. We need to change expectations that products that get built are private by design, protect privacy by design. And then if there's a reason to deviate from that, then you need to be able to communicate it to the user or the citizen and explain why it's to their benefit. I think that that is still a middle ground, but it is a healthier one than maybe the middle ground we're seeing today, which is very far towards one extreme. Citizen Web3: I liked it because I had a question that I was going to ask you, do you think that privacy should be offered by design? Because a lot of the times, and we see it with crypto projects, right? We see crypto projects and I don't want to like, oh, let's go names, right? Like Zika, right? We're privacy is not by design. And then suddenly it turns out that 90 or five or whatever percent of the transactions were in private, right? And then we have Monera, we will have privacy by design and every single transaction is private. So yeah, I totally agree with this. Yeah. Tor Bair: Yeah, And again, you can see how that nuance gets lost along the way because when you talk to a typical user, first of all, they have to be a cryptocurrency user. So they're already like familiar with a very niche esoteric technology. And then you're saying, okay, here's Zcash and Monera. They're like, oh yeah, two privacy coins. Well, what's a privacy coin? What makes it more private or less private than another coin? What are the protections actually? Maybe they have or haven't heard the term anonymity set. Maybe they don't actually know like how Monero's privacy protections actually work. Maybe they don't know that governments around the world have contracted people to break Monero's privacy by design and they have. It doesn't mean that there's a better solution than Monero for transactional privacy already. It just means that people aren't aware of the trade-offs that they're making even when they use something that they would consider a privacy coin. And without that level of education in the blockchain space, I think it's going to be very hard to make progress towards a future that where all applications are privacy by default, privacy by design. Anna: Maybe let's go to the some personal question. And my next question is going to be why are concerned about privacy so much? Why are you thinking about it? Tor Bair: That's a great question too. I think everybody who follows our project on some level, privacy is personally resonant for them. But we definitely all come from different angles. For example, there's a lot of members of the secret network community who come from communities or backgrounds that are traditionally marginalized. Maybe it's a group that's oppressed in certain countries. Maybe it's their artists and they always feel on the fringes of society. Artists have a very strong emphasis on personal identity, empowerment, and ultimately privacy. And historically, artists have been attacked for their ideas and how they're expressed. So I think it comes back to like, I never thought I was a privacy advocate or somebody who cared deeply about privacy. But I did know that I cared very, very deeply about individual empowerment, cared very, very deeply about human freedoms and consent based technologies and designing technologies that were human centric, as opposed to like algorithm based. The stuff that I hate is when systems just get designed only to trap the user in that system for as long as possible. And I realized how extractive so many of these platforms like Facebook I pick on all the time. So I'll do it again. Like it's such an extractive platform. It's only optimized to keep you there as long as possible, clicking on things as long as possible. It's not human by design. It exists to feed you directly back into the news feed, serve you as many advertisements for the highest cost possible. It's not for you. And when they realized that they could just show you a bunch of really enraging news stories and your time on the site would increase 10x. It's not like they had the ethical discussion to not become a news platform. They tried to figure out how they could cram as much news on the platform as possible. So I can see a direct link with how privacy has been eroded, especially in the last couple of decades, especially with surveillance capitalism. And I can draw a direct line between like these monopolistic platforms, what they've done to their user bases, and like where that's going to go and is already going in the near future. Everything from like threats to democracy, threats to elections, etc. I didn't realize that was a privacy issue until I realized how deeply our own ability to protect data online, our ability to give consent to corporations or to give consent to governments, this is all linked. This is all part of the same problem. So that's the long answer to say like, I care about privacy, but it's because I also care about all of those other things even more. Anna: Fair enough. I think all people in such a degree care about it. And where you discover that is a real problem for the first time? Tor Bair: I don't know about for the first time, but one of my earliest memories was I was an economics major in college and I don't mind saying my attendance record was not exemplary. I had a bad habit of not attending my classes and just sort of reading the book. Citizen Web3: That makes both of us. Tor Bair: Yeah, but I had a good reason for that. I spent a lot of time actually, this was during the poker boom. So I spent a lot of time in my dorm room actually playing online poker. There's a lot of poker players in this space, but I was just drawn to it because I was studying game theory. I was studying economics. It was just such a fascinating game. I had been a chess player before that. But I remember poker was just one of those things where it's like, I really want to play this game against people around the world. And then one day I woke up and the account that was holding like all of my money online by no means like a large amount, but it was frozen. And it hadn't occurred to me at that point that people could just do that. I think I was like, you know, like 18 or 19 or whatever it was. It didn't occur to me that you can just freeze an account if you don't like it. I had never like tried to do anything that the government didn't want me to do. And I didn't consider it to be breaking a law. I just wanted to play a game with friends, a game that I thought I was good at and a game that was paying for my pizza on the weekends. At that point, I realized like, maybe this is more how I got into like cryptocurrencies more generally, but I think it's again, related to the privacy issue. If there were a permissionless platform where you could just be able to do this and no one was going to tell you how to do it, I would have much preferred that. I just wanted to be able to do it where like people were opting in again. So there was consent and nobody was forced to play poker that didn't want to play poker. And yet suddenly everything that was happening like we realized could be taken away in a minute. And like a few years later, they did come and shut down like all online poker within the United States. I think that's probably where it came to my awareness. Before that, I don't think I had any sort of relationship to the world. And after that, maybe it was a little bit more cynical than I had any right to be at a young age. But at least I did something about it, or at least I'm hoping I'm doing something about it. I want to try to build the world that I'd rather live in so far. I finally feel like we're making a little progress, even as we make very rapid declines in other areas. Anna: So just quick question. I am a good poker player. Tor Bair: If I told you I was, you shouldn't believe me. Citizen Web3: That was the part of the question. I like that. I like that. Anna: You know, because I feel that you really care about privacy and you're a good poker player, you know, that you can do a poker face in terms of anything you do inside your project. So I just joke. But still. Tor Bair: Well, online poker, the best thing about it is you don't need a poker face at all. I generally have a very expressive face. I tend to wear my emotions on my sleeve. But, you know, when you're behind a computer screen, nobody can see. Like when you get a good hand and you like pump your fist, you do that a real life poker table, people are probably going to know what's up. You do that at your computer screen, they don't have to know. Anna: Then it's more about counting. Tor Bair: Yeah, it's the math. I think the math was never necessarily my favorite part of it, but it's probably the part that kept me from going broke. Citizen Web3: I have a bit of devil's advocate question, but it's not a trick question as well. But I guess it's a bit of a more complicated questions in terms of just a yes and a no answer, because I really do dig into what you're saying, right? I've been into privacy quite a lot. And even though we have our own podcast and so on and so forth, we still like our privacy and a lot of the things we do, at least we think we like to think they're more on a private side. Here's a question. What do you think about projects who are obviously about privacy, like for example, Zcash, like yourself, like Monero, there are quite a lot. And let's stay in the crypto space for now. And about foundations that aren't incorporated in some jurisdiction whenever they are, right? And obviously, I'm talking about the case, let's say there's a privacy project who has incorporated foundation behind him, I don't know, whatever, in Malta or whatever, they keep some kind of information, doesn't matter what it is. And at one point, the government comes to them, doesn't matter for what reason, because it's the government, right? And they do come without any reason. And that foundation has to give the information away, whatever the information the government is asking for. So my question is, do you think that those foundations, especially in privacy projects, serve as a point of failure? Tor Bair: Well, now you're asking a question again, not only about privacy, but about decentralization. So obviously, if you don't have any foundation at all, and you just have like 500 individual contributors scattered around the world with pseudonyms, and you don't know where they live, and they're all behind VPNs and things like that, you can start a project, you might even get some adoption for the project. But it's hard to say that it's going to get global adoption and become a meaningful project, especially if it's that hard to coordinate people. And especially since individuals have their secrets as well, they have the ability to abandon the project at any time, you know, without that kind of structure, where's the accountability, especially if everybody's behind a pseudonym, is their accountability? I would say that if you want to build anything, not just in the blockchain space, but anywhere, there needs to be some degree of accountability for somebody somewhere. Because otherwise, you have no way of knowing whether things are either going to get done or whether they're going to be sustainable. That's kind of the concept of an exit scam. Could somebody who holds the keys to a single address with thousands of Bitcoin, but they've marketed it as like a wrapped Bitcoin project, I'm just like using a hypothetical, but it's like at some degree, there's always like a bit of trust, whether you know, whether it's an individual or anybody else. But in some cases, you can have more accountability. So speaking directly for myself, I helped found the secret foundation, that's where I am. We're incorporated in the US. We haven't offshore, we haven't tried to go anywhere, Zcash Foundation is also incorporated in the US. US is not the very friendliest place to try to build a cryptocurrency project. But I still do believe that there's no point trying to run away from the idea that at some point, you're going to have to have transparency and accountability for what you're doing to support a project. If you want that project to be adopted by millions of end users, if you want corporations to look at what you've built and decide that they want to invest some of their own resources in expanding that platform or moving some of their own products onto your platform, ultimately, you just can't run away from that. It works maybe in the short term, especially if you find the right unscrupulous people to work with you potentially. But in the long term, and I talk a lot about the link between privacy, decentralization and sustainability. In the long term, I don't think that's the right way to go. You asked a different piece of the question also, which was like, is it a central point of failure? Well, if you're being transparent and you're being accountable, then it's at least understood what the attack surface is. If the foundation is responsible for like holding massive amount of funds on behalf of the project, or if everybody depends on the benevolence of the foundation, if they want to get any project funded in your ecosystem, then yes, you've created a central point of failure. You have. And it's not usually a good thing. It's almost only a bad thing. The only time it's a good thing is when it's a coordination problem. But a lot of the time in this space, things that we think are coordination problems, and they could be solved by a decentralized community and in a more robust and sustainable way. So the way we've designed the foundation is such that we're not a central point of failure for the project, we're just an accelerator for the project. Everything that we do serves to make everything else better. We identify leverage points in the ecosystem. We apply resources to it, whether it's, you know, actual financial resources or our own time. And we involve the community in every possible sense, so that all of their resources can be brought to bear on the project as well. So rather than positioning ourselves at the center of the project, we just sort of see the project itself as the product and as the fire that's burning. And we're just the accelerant getting poured on the flames. We're the lighter fluid. Citizen Web3: It's a good way to put it. I do want to jump into what you guys do a bit more obviously. But before we do, I want to ask a question about privacy, although I could talk about privacy all day long. Tor Bair: Me too. Citizen Web3: Yeah. I do want to find out a bit more about what you guys do. And I'm sure everybody who listens to us does so as well. Who would you recommend to somebody who's just getting familiar with privacy? Or what would you recommend to watch or who to listen to some kind of, maybe you have a personal privacy guru who you're obsessed with or anything like that? Tor Bair: That's a great question too. I should prepare for that better in the future. But I can tell you, I had one wonderful guest on my podcast. I used to have a podcast called Decentralized This, which has been shut down and now has been rebooted. We can talk about it later. I'm very excited about the reboot. But one of my previous guests was Bruce Schneier. Citizen Web3: Ooh, I know who that is. Sorry to interrupt you. I'm excited. Tor Bair: Yeah. That was one of my favorite episodes. And he's on the board of the EFF, a very famous privacy and security researcher. So our episode was wonderful because he had just come out with this book. I believe it's called Click Here to Kill Everyone. It's either everyone or everybody. I have it on my shelf. But it was talking about this idea that privacy used to be like threats to our data. It was just like, oh, now somebody hacked my spreadsheet. Now they know what's in cell C2. And he was saying, well, now you can hack people's pacemakers and kill them. And now you can hack an electrical grid and shut down a city. And now you can hack a nuclear butt. Like the more we've hyperconnected the world from a technical perspective, the greater the attack surfaces become. And so listening to Bruce's perspective really got me thinking about, okay, maybe privacy is even more existential than I thought. It's not just a principle. It is a property of secure systems. He's a wonderful author. So that book was great. He's somebody that I would definitely point people to. Also, Ann Kavuki, and as somebody who's followed our project for a while, I spoke with her a few weeks back. She's the one who talks a lot about this concept of privacy by design. Jameson Lopp also came on my podcast. Jameson has an even more extreme perspective on privacy, but like the stuff that he's done for CASA and for the cryptocurrency space at large is really wonderful. So if you're curious about privacy in particular in the cryptocurrency space, I would definitely read his stuff. And of course, Zuko. Zuko and I are the person to look at. Citizen Web3: So basically, let's talk about Secret Network. Obviously, before I do ask you questions about Secret Network, I have a noob's question, right? When I go on new websites, the first thing that pops into my eyes, the first thing that I see is other words, privacy, preserving smart contracts. Now in layman's terms, what are those and why should I care about them? Tor Bair: Got it. Should I approach this question assuming you've never heard of a smart contract or should I assume you know what that is? Citizen Web3: I think most of our listeners know what smart contracts are. So let's go with the privacy preserving smart contracts. Tor Bair: Okay. Usually when I answer these questions for like the broadest possible audience, right, it's a complex series of what is a blockchain? Okay, what is a cryptocurrency? Okay, what is a smart contract? Okay, why does it need privacy? And like only five questions in do you really get to what is privacy in the context of a blockchain? So the way that we describe it for Secret Network, is we have this concept of programmable privacy. So I want to distinguish transactional privacy from programmable privacy. So transactional privacy is like, okay, I want to obscure the sender, I want to obscure the receiver, I want to obscure the amount of like a value transfer. If I send you a certain number of coins, I don't necessarily want people to know it was me, you might not want people to know you received it, you might not want to see how many coins it was. That's transactional privacy. But it's actually a very trivial example of a computation that a blockchain can do. So the relationship between the platform like Bitcoin and a platform like Ethereum, Ethereum has this concept of smart contracts, which are programmable. And you know, you can have smart contracts that can be activated via payments, and then it can trigger some sort of other action, or they can be triggered by another smart contract, so on and so forth. It's programmable. It's the idea that you've moved beyond a trivial computation, like a computation of send something to somewhere else. And now it's like a fully programmable platform. So programmable privacy is the idea that you're not just hiding like who's interacting and how much they're sending, it's hiding everything about interactions with that smart contract. So all input data is encrypted, all output data is encrypted, and the actual network state is encrypted as well. So that's what we call privacy preserving secret smart contracts on our network. And that's why we're really excited about their capabilities. Citizen Web3: I think an obvious question that comes out from that is, again, let's pretend that this is a complete noobs question. How would one trust a smart contract if it's so secret? Tor Bair: The code of the contract, and this is, I think, the important distinction that people lose when they hear a private smart contract. They're just like, oh, I can't audit it. I can't know things about interaction with the contract. Well, that's not true. What's hidden is the raw data. The data is encrypted at all times, but you can still cryptographically prove things about that data. The actual code of the smart contract is not encrypted. The smart contract code is auditable. Contracts on our platform are written in Rust, and you'll be able to see the code of the smart contract. The difference is you can't actually see the user data that's being used in the contract. I can give an example if it helps. Who listening has heard of DeFi? Anybody ever heard of DeFi? I'm so sick of saying it. DeFi is a word that triggers me in some ways. I prefer other things like open economies or universal finance. That has a little bit more meaning to me. Let's talk about decentralized financial application, like lending, for example. Let's say you wanted to scan a user's credit history effectively to figure out if they were eligible for some sort of blockchain-based loan. With a normal smart contract, the only way to interact with the smart contract would be the user basically has to upload their data effectively for everybody. It's public on the blockchain. Like, here's my entire transaction history. Here's how you know I'm credit worthy. Please give me some sort of loan. Maybe you don't want to do that. That's not the way the real world works. I would argue that I would not want to upload my entire credit history publicly for the entire world every time I wanted to qualify for some sort of loan. I have a very hard time seeing how blockchain-based lending would be disruptive in any way in the real world unless there were privacy protections. So with secret contracts and with programmable privacy, you don't have to do that. You could interact with the smart contract, the secret contract, by providing an encrypted form of all transactions. The idea is that the smart contract can keep the data encrypted, but still be able to credit score it effectively. It would be able to say, provably, here's the credit score of this user. You have a 1,000 credit score and you qualify for such and such, sized flash loan or whatever else. You can generalize that basically to any DeFi application. Any DeFi application where a user wants to use it has access to that account, that user's entire transactional history. And I just don't see a sustainable, here's that word again, a sustainable decentralized financial system that doesn't provide these kinds of privacy protections to users. It also, and this is a different topic, but it also makes these platforms much, much less secure. Especially if we start talking about decentralized exchanges and having all liquidity providers like deposits public, which right now they have to be. It creates a massive front running risk. So there's two pieces to privacy. One is like as a user, this is a terrible experience and it puts me at risk. And then as a platform, it puts the platform at risk because too much about the platform is known and then that's how you end up with these massive DeFi exploits. Citizen Web3: Let's get a little bit more technical, not too much, but a little bit. I know you guys use Intel SGX, right? Which is probably one of the cores of what you guys do in regards to smart contracts. A lot of my technical colleagues would say that Intel is Jax, isn't the perfect technology. Now I'm not going to be like the judge here, but the question I have, is that a permanent solution that you guys doing? Or is that something that you guys want to change in the future? Or is there any other possibilities other than using an Intel based technology? Tor Bair: There's a lot of different privacy technologies out there that are being explored, that are being researched and probably listeners may have heard of some of these other things. So you've got things like zero knowledge proofs, you've got things like MPC, fully homomorphic encryption. There are privacy technologies that exist. And generally speaking, the way that they've been implemented to this point in the blockchain space is either they've been applied towards very, very narrow solutions, like certain forms of transactional privacy, or they're still very early in the research phase if you want them to be applied towards general purpose computation. So our focus has always been how do we enable a platform with private general purpose computation? And if you look at the landscape of technologies that are currently available, what works in production today is the use of these secure enclaves, the use of these trusted execution environments. They're much faster. There's security properties, I think, like in terms of the trade off between security and performance, it's a very easy decision to see why so many people have gone the route of exploring TEEs. And in particular for us, a lot of the initial research done for the project by the development team at Enigma was focused around multi-party computation. That was the subject of the initial white paper in 2015. But MPC is not what we use in the current iteration of the network, because at the end of the day, that's not what's performance, that's not what's usable for general purpose, like programmable privacy. In some narrow cases, it's being implemented. But even when people claim it's being implemented in the blockchain space, as we're seeing, sometimes it's not being implemented in a secure way or in a robust way. So that's the decision we've made, at least as it relates to secure enclaves. As it relates to SGX specifically, Enigma has been working with the Intel team since at least 2018, directly, with that SGX hardware team. And they know what it takes to make these sort of technologies usable in production. And right now, we've been running public test nets for the last six weeks, where people have been connecting to the network using SGX machines, who are also experts in the use of deploying these SGX enabled machines. And we've also introduced bounties for people who can break SGX in our network and use it to attack the network. So far, nobody has claimed that bounty. A lot of the attacks that have been proposed for trusted execution environments are speculative, are not going to work in practice, or especially in the context of a decentralized network, they just would not be viable. They would require direct access to the machine itself. So there's a lot of things here where we believe like this is the best option available today. And it's not like we can afford to wait another decade before providing privacy to the blockchain universe and beyond. But we are constantly exploring as an ecosystem, like what are the groundbreaking technologies that we can use, what other types of enclaves are available or should be made available to users, that's going to be ongoing and iterative. And whatever the best practices are, you can be sure like we'll be some of the first to try to implement it. Citizen Web3: I'm not going to try to give you hard time, but I will ask more like one question in the direction, because I want to play the devil's advocate here. So sorry if I'm being too harsh here. So obviously you mentioned Enigma and you mentioned their partnership with Intel. Now the question that I will ask, and I think a lot of people maybe probably have been asked that before, right? We know that in the sort of privacy-orientated space, some people opt out for Intel ME cleaning, right? They flush out the chips from the motherboard. It's a harsh procedure, it's probably going to turn your notebook into a brick, but some people do that. And you know, for obvious reasons, they don't want Intel to spy on them. Now Enigma firms a partnership with Intel. So the question is, is that a keep your enemies closer step? Or is that because Intel is, does know what they do, like you did say they are a great technical team, have the working technology. So which one is it? Is that like the first to the latter? Tor Bair: I'm not really sure there's an acceptable answer where I would say, oh, it's definitely the former. No, come on. Intel is a massive company, obviously, and they want to stand behind their own technologies. And as a public company, they have to stand behind their technologies. So they know how their technologies work. They are constantly patching these exploits. They work very hard to make sure that if an exploit is found, it is patched and then made available to the OEM. So I personally believe that where we are in the space today, this is what we're working with, right? They're not the only provider of the Secura Enclave technology. It's what we utilize to date in our network. And part of that reason is because there's been such direct access to Intel, but also the OEMs, we've all learned a lot and they've learned a lot from us. And as we've explored trying to utilize their technologies in production, it's actually an extremely fruitful collaboration. We learn about the sort of like cutting edge research and exploits, and they're learning about what happens when you actually try to deploy this in a decentralized setting. So that's really nice. But as I said, if there's ways in the future to explore more open source options, or even from like other suppliers, again, it's just about giving users choice, giving developers choice, and in that choice, making sure they're protected. If somebody doesn't want to trust a certain chip set, if they're the kind of person who's going to like burn out their notebook, trying to protect their own privacy, I don't think that there's anything private enough for them in the cryptocurrency space. I don't even think they'd trust a ledger. You just have to be careful. These are all the people flying around with brain wallets and good for them. Citizen Web3: Well, you know, I mean, after all, a ledger is an open source. No, I'm kidding. Okay, let's not go there. It's just like I said, it was a devil's advocate question, but it is, I think it's an obvious question where we plan on that space. I think it makes sense to ask those kinds of questions. And I think the answer that you gave is perfectly marmalade perfectly makes sense and explains what you guys do and why you do that. What about secret nodes? I mean, how do they differ from a normal mode from a user perspective and also from the perspective of somebody who wants to be a stake in provider? Tor Bair: Secret nodes are the nodes on secret network. That's like the easiest explanation. And as of the mainnet upgrade, which is upcoming on September 15th, I don't know when people are listening to this, but on September 15th is when we're expected to do the network upgrade that will introduce secret contracts to mainnet. They've been tested for the last six weeks on a series of internal and public test nets. So everything's working. It's ready to be proposed. And we're super excited to see it happen. And when it happens, every mainnet node is going to be required to have this hardware compatibility, right? They're going to have to have SGX and not just SGX, but they have to be able to certify that it's patched against all of the most critical vulnerabilities. We're not just being like, Oh, if it exists, you're fine. Like, no, there's actually a series of checks that go into this. So a secret node actually does have some hardware requirements that wouldn't exist for other cosmos chains. But it's also the source of how we can have this extremely powerful vision for programmable privacy. As you said, this really is where the magic happens, because these contracts are executing inside these secure enclaves. So secret node does have this higher barrier. But then again, our network is currently capped at 50 active nodes, it'll be the 50 nodes with the most voting power in the network, which is, you know, their own stake plus delegated stakes. And these nodes all have to be running compliant hardware in order to connect to the network at all. And of course, this means that more experienced node operators gravitate toward the network. It's not the sort of thing that you can just kind of do on a Tuesday. So we've got staked, figment, chorus one, dokiah, capital, be harvest, like a lot of these big validators from inside the cosmos ecosystem and beyond who have taken a strong interest in what we're doing, because it is unique. There are no networks that have this capability for programmable privacy, where the compute itself is decentralized like it is with secret nodes in our network. But because these are really experienced node operators, like we've created a high barrier participation, but what that's also done is now we have really high quality participants. So it gives us even more confidence to say, as the network evolves, as we introduce more types of privacy solutions into the network, I firmly believe that secret node operators in the network are going to be able to support those types of solutions as well. Anna: It's quite interesting because you are a project that mostly concentrated on privacy issues. Do you have some special way how you communicate with your validators and how you support your ecosystem around your project? Tor Bair: Morse code, all Morse code. Citizen Web3: Just Morse code. I thought you were going to say it's an encrypted Morse code, you know, with a SHA3 whatever. Tor Bair: No, it's just a Morse code with a basic Caesar shift. That's it. Citizen Web3: Just a secret handshake. Tor Bair: No, I mean, the way that we try to communicate with the ecosystem is, and again, this is part of the function of the foundation, we know that there's people who were permissionless network. There's people who are going to want to run nodes for the network and then not like raise their hand and say, hey, here's my address, like my physical address. And we want to be able to allow for this. That's how you create a sustainable and like permissionless open source network in perpetuity. So the foundation where I am is like, we're trying to be this megaphone for the project. We try to speak for the entire community, the entire ecosystem. We help to manage a number of community committees. We have a governance committee, infrastructure committee, education committee, all these different types of committees that are community led and community operated. But it comes, it rolls up to, and again, here we're not trying to be a central point of failure, but we're at least trying to be a central point of truth where it's like, here was a proposal that was made on chain. You can verify it on chain. It was voted on on chain and approved. Therefore, here is when the planned network upgrade is going to occur. And all of this is visible on chain, but we help to amplify it, put it into human language, make sure people see it on the appropriate platforms. You want to make sure that there's, again, it's weird for a privacy project, but transparency around what's happening to the network, make sure people are involved with governance, both off chain and on. That's something that we exist to ensure. So not encrypted, not encoded in any way. We just try to use as many platforms as possible to make sure that people have up to date information when they're interacting with the network, either as a node, as a developer or as an end user. Citizen Web3: I think it's important info for everybody who wants to maybe join the secret network. As a validator, right? Or maybe just looking out to do that, to understand your flow of work that it's not different from any other network. And this is what we're trying to get it here. What about the, I'm not sure how to pronounce the SCT token. I'll just call it the secret token, I guess. Tor Bair: Yeah, Citizen Web3: The basic use cases, as far as I understand, obviously governance and network security and painful fees, right? Tor Bair: Yep, just like if you're familiar with other tendermint chains, obviously you are, but if listeners are, we are tendermint-based chains. So secret, which is SCRT, yeah, but we pronounce it secrets. So I stake my secrets, I send you secrets. So it's used for staking, yes, and delegation. If you're slashed, you're slashed and denominated in secrets. If you're voting on on-chain proposals, you're voting with secrets, but yeah, primarily also transactional fees, but also computational fees, like interacting with these privacy-preserving smart contracts, those fees are paid to the validators in secret. Citizen Web3: I think the a lot of power of your answer is the fact that those are also computational fees makes a hell of a difference to evaluate the value of the token, at least to me personally. I'm sure that to a lot of the listeners, it does make sense when something works in computation as well. It adds a lot to the value of economically. In my head, it works like that. Tor Bair: Well, if you look at what's happening in ETH DeFi right now, you could say that the biggest winners in Ethereum DeFi are the miners. Citizen Web3: Yay, they shovel in it. Tor Bair: I know, and honestly good for them, you know, like they've invested in the hardware, they've committed to the network. I believe that that's a level of commitment that deserves, like you want them to operate profitably, because again, it leads to a sustainable network. So a lot of the validators in our network, you know, there's plenty of networks where you can say, like most of the validators are only connected to it because they believe that someday in the future, the value of the token will be higher than today, or they're being paid directly by a development team or foundation to do it. And that's definitely not the case in our network. Like in our network, we're trying to get to the point where people see a vision where they want to operate sustainably on our network because they will be receiving computational fees and that a lot of computations will be happening on our network because our network is essential for privacy. And then it just becomes a question of how many bridges can we build between the secret network ecosystem, the rest of the cosmos ecosystem, like providing this privacy to the rest of like cosmos chains like via IBC or other means, like that's super important to us. Also building a bridge back to the Ethereum ecosystem where there is all of this user activity and it's all public on chain and they might have demand for privacy. If we can build a bridge back to our ecosystem, that's pulling these Ethereum DeFi users over into the cosmos versus via secret network. And now we've interoperated even more strongly between Ethereum, cosmos and beyond. So that's the vision and we do see how like there is value capture for the coin as well. And it flows obviously not to a single development team. It flows to every validator who's chosen to support the network long term. And for that, we're super grateful that they see the same vision. Citizen Web3: What about the monetization behind, I guess the foundation, right? Or is there another company? I don't know. And you're gonna have to say, but what is the monetization model behind those? Tor Bair: Yeah, the foundation is an interesting entity. So there's actually a proposal right now that just got proposed this morning. It's integrating a sub module into our blockchain whereby a certain percentage of all block rewards in the network flow directly to the foundation. And that's the only source of income for the foundation. And it's all denominated in secrets because it's coming directly from the chain. So the foundation uses these funds transparently, invests back into the growth of the ecosystem, like the foundation only exists again, to make the network self-sustaining and also to become self-sustaining itself. So it operates very leanly. It tries to redistribute as many of these coins as possible to like critical members of the community or to the committees themselves, or in the creation of educational materials. Sometimes it goes towards like basic operational costs. But otherwise, that's the point is like, because the foundation is funded directly by the network and exists to reinvest inside of the network, I believe that it can be self-sustaining. And the community has been in favor of it. All of the proposals related to the foundation module and this have passed unanimously, I'm proud to say there hasn't really been any descent from this vision because it is a new vision. It doesn't really work this way in any other ecosystem. The Zcash Foundation doesn't even work this way. They don't take a percentage of the block rewards. In fact, it's like the electric coin company that takes a percentage of their rewards through the founder's reward. So we're exploring a completely different model that I think is much more sustainable. And I think it's going to be, I don't know, so far so good. I hate to jinx it, but so far so good. Citizen Web3: Fingers crossed. Tor Bair: Exactly. Anna: You mentioned that you have an education task in your vehicle. And I thinking about your education, I know that you're a graduate of MIT and we already talked about it a little bit. So could it's maybe a little bit cliche that super smart MIT graduates are moving science forward. So do you feel that your education helps you or it's vice versa? And it locks you within the traditional paradigm and you cannot move forward? Tor Bair: What a great question. I mean, MIT is not going to pay me to make this statement, but I loved my time there. And I do believe that the education that you get at a place like MIT is very different from other places where MIT does have a very strong focus on entrepreneurship and they're disappointed if you get a regular job. They would rather, like on all of their brochures and materials, when they try to convince people to pay them tens of thousands of dollars every year, they would rather say, and this person went on to invent the internet than say, this person went on to become a product manager at Google. So obviously they really want to be able to tell these crazy stories about people who disrupted the world and put a dent in the universe. But that's good because then the education that you get there actually reflects that that's what they want for you. And that's why you're kind of willing to make that trade off. And of course, I wouldn't be in the position I am now if I hadn't gone there because the Enigma co-founders I met while we were all at MIT, one was in my class, another was a guy, the CEO of Enigma who was a researcher at the Media Lab at the time. And I have no idea what I would be doing now if I hadn't gone there, but it wouldn't be this. It would have to be something completely different. So I liked it. I'm not necessarily an American education maximalist. I'll say that very clearly. Anna: Yeah, but still, Stanford and MIT are the most popular university in the traction list of all startup all founders around the world for most successful startups. So it's tricky for the moment. Tor Bair: Yeah, I like to think that again, they don't sponsor any of my statements. I have plenty of life. I have plenty of other things I could say about my education. Citizen Web3: You said it twice. Tor Bair: Yep, I know, but I could go off the rails right now and they would have nothing they could do about it. Citizen Web3: Were kidding, obviously. But talking about you said what you did and we mentioned the podcast once or twice, I think, already. So let us know the podcast story. You had a podcast and you had such great guys on and then it suddenly disappeared. And now you suddenly have it back on. What's the podcast story? Tor Bair: So the podcast, we did 30 something episodes. They were really fun. We had everybody from Bruce Schneier to like we had a lot of investors in the space. Come on, we had technologists, we had Joey Krug as the first episode. That one was really fun. I had Josh Cincinnati on from the Zcash Foundation. He recently departed there. I also had Andreas Antonopoulos. And as soon as I had Andreas Antonopoulos on, I said, you know what, I could probably quit now. But he was one of the last episodes we were able to record. I just got super busy. Like you're trying to like help run a project like this where you've got this kind of vision. There's so many things you could do. I could do 24 hours of work a day and there would still be more that I could be doing to try to drive this forward. So it just wasn't after a while like the marginal gains from continuing up that level of content production where there's so many awesome content producers like yourselves like already working in the space. Like what's one more stupid podcast that people have to listen to, I thought. But now we're bringing it back. So with Secret Foundation, I actually have a different vision for how it's going to go. And I think you guys will like the concept. It's called Sharing Secrets. So no longer called Decentralize This. If you want to look up Decentralize This, there were 30 some episodes, they're all still awesome. But Sharing Secrets is going to be a little bit different. It has a focus more on what you usually don't get told about how things actually work in the blockchain space or in the privacy space. Like you usually, when somebody goes on a podcast, let's say it's like a Laura Shin podcast or some venture capitalist podcast, they're going to tell you the approved story. They're going to tell you exactly what they were sent there to say. On Sharing Secrets, you go there to say exactly what you think about whatever we're going to ask you about. And I'm going to ask you questions about things that you probably haven't had a chance to speak about. And I think that that's going to be really exciting. It's not just exciting for me to host it. I think it's going to be really exciting content for people because they haven't heard this side of the guests. And I think it'll be really exciting for guests because they haven't been able to come on and say, all right, I'm ready to share something with you that I've never shared with anybody else in this context and have it be so focused on our space where so much of the time people are behind a computer screen are just like not accessible to the community. So now I've got this new energy behind it. Now I do want to go back to like, let's just do two a week. Let's see how long we can keep that up for while running, you know, everything that I normally have to run. But I'm actually excited about it. I would love to see how many episodes we can crank out between here in the end of the year. Anna: Maybe you will share some secrets with us. What is your secret that you can share with us now? Tor Bair: I have so many diabolical awful secrets. For people who are listening to this, you can't see we're recording this like online. And my profile picture is me holding a giant keytar. So I'm a prolific keytar player. I've been playing pianos and keyboards since I was four or five. And I used to have a band for five years in Chicago, where I currently live. So it's not much of a secret if you hang around with me. I don't carry the keytar everywhere, but I act like somebody who might. So if you ever want to like hang out in jam, I still have it. I don't take it out very often because it tends to scare people away. And you know, for the past six years, I really haven't taken it out very much at all, which is probably why I'm now engaged to a wonderful woman. Citizen Web3: I like the connection. Tor Bair: After we're married, maybe I'll take it out again and we'll see what she does. Citizen Web3: She has nowhere to run after that. So you know, that's another secret, but don't let her listen to the show. Tor Bair: I'm sure we'll see if she has the patience for another hour of my voice. Citizen Web3: That's really great, actually. Just a last summary question that we ask all of our guests. What are the three blockchain projects outside of the Cosmos ecosystem that excite you the most currently? Tor Bair: And when we say excite me, you mean good excitement, right? Citizen Web3: I mean, well, not necessarily, we don't push towards good, but usually people go with the good stuff. Tor Bair: Fair enough. Anna: Yeah, but you can be the first one who mentioned not good excited projects. Tor Bair: Yeah, I mean, I'm here to make friends, not enemies, right? There are so many amazing, there's really actually a lot of great blockchain projects. The ones that I respect the most are always the ones where it's like they tell you exactly how it works. It has that aspect of transparency. If they try to tell you they do something they don't, or if they're trying to trick users into believing in them instead of working with their communities to grow, I don't have as much patience for it. But there's a lot of actually really great product. For example, we've known the Kiber Network team for a very long time. And what they've been able to do, they were pushing on Dex's and stuff in the Ethereum ecosystem long before DeFi was a hot topic. I have a lot of respect for people who build things before they're cool. And they definitely were building things before it was cool. Similarly, for like Aave, formerly ETHLEN, that team also having massive success in the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem. We were talking with them all the way back in like December 2017. Ocean Protocol, another team where it's like people who build things before they're cool. That's what I like. And the thing is, now that they are cool, they're getting even cooler. Now that people have appreciated it, they haven't really changed the ethos of the project as far as I can see. They still all have this emphasis on how do we get as many users as possible into the space using these products, using these technologies, not just using them, but understanding them. So those are three names. I'm sure I can come up with some others, but I really like not only the projects, but the teams. Citizen Web3: I thought it actually digged when you say I like the teams because to me personally, after eight or nine years of crypto, I think team always stood out and I think it will always stand out. And thanks, thanks a lot for joining and for coming onto the show, for taking spare time to tell us your thoughts about privacy and about Secret Network. Tor Bair: It is my absolute pleasure. I don't know if you can tell, but I really enjoy doing stuff like this. And I look forward to doing more stuff in the future. And if we're lucky, sharing secrets has a long and productive run and we can get you guys on as guests. Citizen Web3: Okay, thanks everyone for joining in. Thanks for listening. And thank you, Tor, for joining us and see you next time on Citizen Cosmos. Bye. Anna: Thank you. Bye. Outro: This content was created by the citizen web3 validator if you enjoyed it please support us by delegating on citizenweb3.com/staking and help us create more educational content.