Strange Water February 2024 Announcement

**Speaker A:** Foreign. **Speaker B:** Hello and welcome back to the Strange Water Podcast. Once again, thank you for joining us for today's conversation. On this show, we've spent a lot of time talking about the recent developments in the ZK cryptography ecosystem as we take our first steps into what we all hope to be the next great crypto market cycle. We've gotten the opportunity on this show to speak with many of the companies who will eventually join the giants of the previous cycles. Giants like Coinbase or Alchemy. And this is happening now because now, in 2024, it's becoming painfully clear just how transformative ZK is for blockchain. Briefly, here's how I'll summarize it. ZK cryptography can be used to prove that a specific computer program generated a specific output. When the program runs, it also generates a proof which when validated mathematically, guarantees that the result was valid and produced honestly. Computationally, proof verification is orders of magnitude simpler than actually running the computation. And so ZK allows a resource limited system to access the resources of a non limited system. Blockchains inherently are resource limited systems because keeping system requirements low is essential to decentralization. So to put it all together, ZK can be used to augment the resource limited environments of blockchains with near unlimited computing power. And with modern resources, the world is wide open because it doesn't matter how much computation your application needs, as long as it's got a ZK proof and it can exist on chain. As I said today, this insight is clear to so many people that we're seeing an entire subcategory for venture capital. But for O1 Labs, developers of what would eventually be called Mina Protocol, this vision was clear back in the pre pandemic Times. Founded in 2017, Mena Protocol answers the question what would happen if you designed a blockchain with ZK woven directly into its DNA? Which brings us to today's guest, Steve Pack, Head of product at O1 Labs. After walking through Steve's background at Cloudflare, we learn what Mina Protocol is and how it works. Then we'll talk through how Mina and Ethereum will continue to grow and to grow together. And make sure you stick around for the end where Steve talks through how O1 Labs will bring ZK technology to optimism and the op stack. This is a super fun episode and I know you'll enjoy it. One more thing before we begin. Please do not take financial advice from this or any podcast. Blockchain and ZK cryptography will change the world one day, but you can Easily lose all of your money between now and then. Okay, let's bring on Steve. Steve, thank you so much for joining us on the Strange Water podcast. **Speaker A:** Hey Rex, happy to be here. Thanks for having me. **Speaker B:** Of course, man. I've been so excited to be talk, talking to you guys at 01 and about MENA protocol. I mean that's like the OG like beating heart of ZK and blockchain. So super excited to dig into it. But before we get into, you know, crypto and blockchain and all that stuff, I'm a huge believer that the most important part of every conversation are the people in it. So with that being said, can you give us a little bit about your background? Like how did your career start and how did you find crypto? **Speaker A:** Yeah, sure. So I've had a varied career. I was a full time software engineer and engineering manager for between 15 and 17 years. So definitely come at it from that like you know, hands on keyboard tech guy. But I always had interest in various things. I was an entrepreneur after that, shipped a hardware product and it was after that that I got into like really sort of Silicon Valley product management, I would say with five years, five years at Cloudflare. So that was kind of like the professional road leading to a full time career in crypto. But yeah, like many of us, you know, had been sort of in and around the edges and like experimenting, observing, you know, all of that sort of throughout that, that period. Actually if I remember back the first, the first sort of crypto thing was colleague of mine at a, at a finance startup saying, Steve, there's this new thing called Bitcoin and its value can't go down because there's a limited support. Why? And, and I quite patiently explained that like well it can because there's supply and demand and the demand can go down and that could be because of technology risk or because of regulatory risk or people just don't want to use it. And one of those things, like I, I was right but was, was kind of wrong in terms of like those, those risks don't matter, you know. And it went on to be wildly successful obviously. So that was my first little exposure. I remember actually at that same role, someone into crypto generated Ethereum addresses with like people's names in it. You know, I've got an email somewhere with a, with a wallet with my name in it. Like, or at least whatever ones fit into the, you know, the letters that. **Speaker B:** Used like yeah, five for S. I don't know what a T is, but yeah, yeah, exactly. **Speaker A:** With, with an eth that is like in some email server. Yeah. And then like, just like, you know, like I said, I was a, I've always been a tech guy. Right. Like, you know, before I became more product focused. And so I'd always observe the, the technology and I'd like take a look and be like, okay, this, this stuff's cool, like, but you know, what, what can I do with it? And you know, I kept sort of dipping in and out I guess like each time there was a new wave, honestly like, you know, like many, like I was a bit of a victim to the hype cycles early on and yeah, it just became this trend that like each time I would dip my toe back in, there was more and more, you know, real world utility, more interesting use cases and more and more stuff happening. So yeah, that was the sort of crypto on the side before it became crypto full time. **Speaker B:** Well, that's super interesting. So full disclosure, I joined crypto in 2021, so I'm very young, but thank you. And I entered, you know, I have a corporate finance background. I entered thinking that like this technology here was here to change finance. And the kind of deeper I've doven into it, the more I realized like, yeah, I don't know, I mean maybe this is here to change finance. But like, quite frankly I think like the interesting parts are about like literally transferring value and immutable ledgers and not like crazy esoterics. But I'm still here and like even more passionate and, and believe more in this because to me the story of really Ethereum, but let's just call it blockchain is the story of decentralized computing. And it sounds like you, you, your finance friend, who by the way, I would love to know where he's working so that we don't put money there. But it sounds like your finance fan, really, your finance friend really tried to bring you in from the, you know, hard money store value, like all this stuff and you were not interested in that. But with, with each hype cycle came more and more of the capability and this vision of distributed compute that is quite frankly kind of obvious today. And so I'm curious, what was the first moment where you realized like, oh my God, this is going to be an important primitive and an important system, just like the Internet is. And I need to pivot to this as opposed to kind of like a fun toy that you may or may not be willing to spend some free time on. But like you also have a job. **Speaker A:** Man, that's Hard to answer because it's like, you know, it wasn't sort of an epiphany or, and you know, I think a lot of people may be in crypto, maybe this is true for a lot of people, but not everyone maybe says it. It's like there were various times where like it was clear to me that there was something here, whether it was Bitcoin as a, you know, store of value or as in a hedge against, you know, fiat mismanagement and then the sort of like, yeah, decentralized computing, you know, all that stuff, right. And my commitment is tested, right Each time like, you know, there's a blow up, whether it's regulatory or whether it's, you know, just the, like the, the Celsius types of things, you know. But I guess like yeah, as time goes on, right, like my not commitment but yeah like my level of belief that like this is here to stay and it solves real problems, you know, gets stronger each time and you know, I'm, I've been based in the US for a number of years and you know, all it, at least in the, for the bitcoin use case, like you know, all it takes is to go onto the treasury website and take a look at the, the level of issuance to think that like, yeah, like people are asking real questions about like is, you know, is this sort of way of managing a budget like sustainable and if not like what is the hedge against it? And I think their answer that many, many part answer to the problem and many part answer to the like how to hedge against it. But I think more and more Bitcoin is part of that answer. **Speaker B:** Yeah, makes a lot of sense. And I guess before we like really transition into crypto, I would love to talk a little bit about your time at Cloudflare because I think that what we're building here is about core infrastructure and the next evolution of the Internet. But since I have the opportunity, I have to ask someone who like really saw the insight of the current version of the Internet, what insights and what lessons did you pick up at Cloudflare that you think are really applicable to building in web? 3 and yeah, how did that experience really give you a leg up versus people who maybe didn't work at these big tech companies or maybe came to crypto straight out of university or without real experience? **Speaker A:** I think there's three like three things that really come to mind which is like, you know, product management at a big company, there's the like crypto insights I got and then there's like just being at the sort of pointy edge of like the big bad Internet and like the technology. So you know, firstly, product wise, like, you know, like as I said, I'd be in software, I'd run a company. Like I knew something about product management but just, you know, Cloudflare had great discipline of like, you know, like sounds obvious but talking to customers and over and over and over again. And like any doubts you had, like you answered by talking to more and more customers until you got that feeling in your belly that like, this is the thing that I need to build. And you know, I sometimes talk to PM candidates or other product folks in the industry and it's like there are insights you get from looking at data and it's like, you know, does the blue button or the red button convert better? And like, you know, those are nice and that's fun. It's nice when you can like really just do. But most insights come from like, you know, talking to developers, talking to people like whoever your customer base is and hearing the same thing 10 times, getting that feeling in your belly, like turning that into a product insight that you share with those people and then you go build it. And so just that like, you know, relentless customer focus and prioritization. Right. You can only, you know, of those things that you find out, you can only work on a few of them. You know that, that's what I got I guess from that. It was kind of my like, you know, Silicon Valley product training I think, and very, very grateful for another one was. And this, this helped make the jump was like crypto companies would be Cloudflare customers but like not in the same way that many other companies are. So like, lots of like Cloudflare started as this self serve, you know, like individuals could use it. There's a free plan, there's a $20 plan and then there enterprise, I use it for free. Yeah, right. Like it's great service. But like so many crypto companies started by putting down a credit card and then all of a sudden like that credit card was running up like thousands and thousands of dollars of usage fees and like the sales team were like, what the hell is this? And you know, they kept finding like RPC Gateway and like you know, Block Explorer and what. And, and they didn't know what it was. Right. And so there was kind of like this, who knows about crypto? And you know, a group of us obviously who did. And so we sort of, sort of like, you know, the company discovered crypto as a good customer base and a Rapidly growing one kind of by accident, and then, you know, started to invest, like, a bit more in it. So I guess I could see, like, the growth trajectory just by. By that, right? That, like, this whole new customer segment came up. And then, like, the longer I was there and as I was in more senior roles and started to look at, like, strategic sort of partnerships with crypto companies, we were getting asked to look at what would it take to add sort of some of Cloudflare's distributed compute footprint to the validator set of some crypto companies. And as part of that, it was like, okay, what is a crypto validator workload compared to the capacity of the Cloudflare network? And as part of doing that, we needed projections. Where do you see the volume going? And just seeing some of the projected volume from a number of these projects, it was just clear to me then even more commitment gets stronger each time, each cycle. But it was like, yeah, this is here to stay and it's going to keep growing. **Speaker B:** Yeah. And out of curiosity, no need to disclose anything that's sensitive, but when was the era in which you. On the inside of Cloudflare, which, for those who are not knowledgeable, is basically like the, like, skeletal system of the Internet? Right. At what point did. At what era did you start to notice that there was actual, like, serious, like, you know, global levels of usage from crypto companies? Was this the ICO boom? Was this, like the 2020 era? When was it? **Speaker A:** No, it was more 2022. Like, that was the sort of that. That bull market run up. You know, we. We had crypto customers before then, but they were kind of just like individual customers. But this kind of, like, where is all this usage coming from? Like, who are these people putting down credit cards that go from $20 a month to thousands of dollars a month? Like, you know. Yeah, that was. That was more of a 20, 2022 era, actually. I said there were three things. I think I only covered. Covered to the third. And yeah, this one's. This one's kind of different. Like, yeah, Cloudflare is at the edge, right? Like, literally often described as an edge network between the Internet and some web service. And as that, you kind of get to get familiar with what's on the other side, like, what's out there in the big bad world of the Internet. And the answer is scary in terms of a whole lot of abuse, a whole lot of bots, a whole lot of attacks, a whole lot of the worst possible content you can imagine, and people doing the most terrible things. You can imagine. And you got to find out a way to navigate that to protect your customers from it. But Cloudflare tried to also walk this line of free speech and following the law and complex thorny issues, and crypto also has to deal with them. But I feel like there's kind of two camps, right? There's the kind of like we're going to ignore that because we're full scale libertarians versus the like. Well, in the case of if we're a U. If you're a U.S. regulated company, then, you know, you gotta follow the law. And yeah, I guess that's one thing that I was more exposed to there than I think a lot of folks maybe you know, who have been crypto natives the whole time. **Speaker B:** Yeah. And recommendation for the audience. For me, something that was incredibly eye opening was reading the book Tracers in the Dark, which is really a puff piece of the founding story of Chainalysis. And, and so we can have discussions on if they're good actors or not. But like, you need to understand what goes on the Internet and like how crypto is involved in it. And I don't even really understand how like cloud, how involved Cloudflare is in, in trying to stop that. But like the, there's a lot to like really understand about what's going on. And if you want to be in this space, like, it's important to know what we're floating right at the edge of. But yeah, very, very interesting point. **Speaker A:** It's like everything, life's in a trade off, but you got to know what you're trading. Trading off against. **Speaker B:** Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, good point. So, sorry, last question on Cloudflare and then we'll move on. So you said that they were first starting to notice, like, oh my God, this is like something real around the 20, 212 time frame. Same time I did. Right. And so my question to you is like, are you able to kind of like register SBF happened to all of us and we all experience it in different ways. And for true believers like us, like, that was just, well, like there's going to be Bernie Madoff, there's going to be Elizabeth Holmes, like we had one, like, no big deal. For a lot of people it was like, this is the proof we need to show that not one single valid thing happens in this community. How do you think Cloudflare understood not just sbf, but the entire like bear market and like the crash and what was it like for Cloudflare to go through their first cycle? **Speaker A:** It's kind of A non event, like crypto as a. As a percentage of, you know, Cloudflare is like, not. Not large. And, you know, the Cloudflare service is, you know, like, dealing with traffic. Right. Like, rather than TVL or trading volume, whatever. So, like, honestly, it was probably some customers saw a. Saw a dip, you know, like, in usage, not really an event. **Speaker B:** Wow. Well, I think that's also a lesson to us that, like, within our own echo chambers, like, we're still thinking about sbf, and literally no one else has ever thought of him since he was arrested. Right, Cool. All right, so let's talk about, like, crypto. And I think in order to get us to Mino Protocol, can you tell us a little bit about, like, how did you end up at 01 Labs? **Speaker A:** Yeah, O1 Labs. **Speaker B:** O1 Labs. Big O. Yeah, got it. **Speaker A:** You know, as I was sort of, you know, looking for opportunities to, like, go full time in this thing that I was, you know, passionate about, you know, there's a lot of chains out there. There's a lot of projects out there, you know, so O1 Labs was very closely tied to the MENA foundation, were the original incubators of the MENA protocol and still the primary contributors. And I just. Excuse me. I respected a lot of the, like, you know, the technologists. So the people that I met there, that there was. It was a true crypto. Crypto and ZK OG company that, like, had launched a chain that, like, was working on, you know, the. The newest of the new and, like I said, you know, product guy, but from a tech background, like, I've got to. I've got to be interested, you know, in the technology. And, you know, Mina is. Is. Is fascinating. And so, yeah, it was just a good mix of, like, a, you know, a really interesting technology base with an amazing team, good culture, and, you know, I saw good opportunities for Mina Protocol to really, like, you know, make an impact in. In. In the crypto sphere. **Speaker B:** Yeah. Awesome. So I guess now is a great moment to, like, anyone listening to this podcast is already familiar with what blockchain is and definitely familiar with, like, what ZK Proofs are. But can you talk a little bit about what Mina Prot is and how they use ZK Proof as a primitive within the protocol to, like, really change how we think of blockchains. **Speaker A:** Sure. Or maybe, like, start at a kind of high level and kind of go down from there. Like, you know, if you've sort of interacted with Ethereum, your experience is like, everything's in the open. Right. Like, you dox yourself every time you make a transaction. You know, you pay 5 to $100 in fees depending on congestion. You probably send your transactions through a centralized service like Infura or something and you know, very large validator set, very large proof of state network. But you know, maybe some questions about how decentralized it is and how many, like how much of that validation is done by, by small, by parties. You know, don't want to be all negative about like, you know, like there's a whole lot of positive stuff but like that's, that's also the experience. Right. Like today. And so Mina uses ZK to address some of that. So one, you don't pay for gas in the, in the traditional sense that you do on Ethereum and we can depends how deep we can go. But one mental model is in Ethereum like you send a transaction and validators execute it. And so if it's complex, you got, you got to pay in gas in Mina, you do the transaction locally, generate a proof so it can be as complex as you like. The, the trade off is it'll take a bit longer before you can submit the proof, but once you do is like a constant size verification cost of that. So you know, you don't have these huge spikes in fees according to how complex the thing is you're doing. It's, it's pretty constant. There is some variability based on traffic but you know, not, not to the same scale because it's okay. There's optional privacy at the application layer so applications can define like, you know, these parts of this transaction are private and so you don't dox yourself every time, you know, every time you do it. And there are still like RPC gateways like similar to Infura in Mina, but they're kind of optional. It's a lot easier to run a, like your own node and soon there'll be like a. Well, there is already a fully in browser node but it's not widely used yet. So yeah, it sort of uses zero knowledge to like address some of the core issues, you know, that a lot of the, you know, crypto community sees I think with blockchains today. And you know, and did it, did it super early, you know, which is, which is very cool. **Speaker B:** Yeah. So early you had to go through a name change. **Speaker A:** Ah, yeah, yeah. Coda was how it started. Not a super interesting thing though. It was just like it was too similar to some other product and it was early enough, it was better to change. **Speaker B:** Yeah, cool. So I think the best way to understand what is different and also magic about Mina is to first, let's talk through how Ethereum works. Right? So I love the metaphor, the world computer because like really what's going on in Ethereum is you have the evm which is just like a computing space and then you send developers send their code into the space. We call that a smart contract. And then like in order for someone to interact with Ethereum, they're basically saying, hey Ethereum, remember that code that was deployed before? I want you to run it. I know it's going to cost computational resources to run it, so here's some gas money that represents those computational resources. Run it within the Ethereum, place the answer with Ethereum and then I will see what was ever placed in Ethereum. Now that's not how it works with, with Mina, Right? **Speaker A:** Right. **Speaker B:** And I guess I don't want to give the punchline, I'll leave it for you. But can you talk a little bit about how the paradigm is shifted and like where the code lives and like I think that's really how you understand where the ZK comes into it all. **Speaker A:** Let me answer in two parts, right? The first part is that model you described with Ethereum, right. Like that kind of broke down in terms of usability, in terms of how expensive that was. Right. And that's what led to layer twos as the kind of scaling solution. And so to understand Mina, it's maybe worth understanding how a layer two on Ethereum works, which is exactly the way you described in terms of say you deploy a smart contract, someone executes the transaction, you know, it gets executed. But like what you just what? Like the first, the first thing to note there is that for Most of the L2s today, like they're centralized, right? So instead of having this, you know, half a million computers out there, you know, in proof of stake, it's like a trusted party. So now you got to trust someone. So you lost some of the trustlessness. And they execute the transactions depending on whether it's a ZK roll up or an optimistic one, they send the results of those transactions to Ethereum. So in the layer 2 version of Ethereum, what's Ethereum actually doing is it's just verifying some zero knowledge proofs from, from a layer two and saying like, yep, all those transactions check out, checks out, it looks good, but still with lots of trade offs. So like it's interesting that like, you know, the way you described Ethereum, like it's still used like that today. People do, do like execute Smart contracts, of course, but like the volume is shifted to layer twos, right? And the reason is it wasn't scalable in the way it was. Now that sort of layer two model is much more similar to Mina, except that Mina's a layer one and you're not having this trusted intermediary that are all at various stages of decentralizing but no one has got close to being there yet, whereas Mina already is. So like what I mean by that and what's different? So if you are in Ethereum, you deployed a contract to Ethereum or you deployed it to a layer two in Mina, you're a smart contract developer, you create a contract and when you compile it you get a verification key which is kind of just a way to later prove that some transaction was on this smart contract and you send that key to the chain. So you're not sending the whole smart contract, the whole code, you're just sending, sending a key and then you create a website and that it's like a regular looking website. People log in, they do things and at some point they're going to execute a transaction. So when they click like Go, instead of sending their name and their balance and everything like we described before via an RPC to Ethereum to be executed, they have the contract that the developer wrote there in their browser, they click Go. And the browser does incredibly complex mathematics to generate a zero knowledge proof that can cryptographically prove that I ran this contract, I put in these inputs and here is the result. And that might be like I did a trade on a Dex and I had a high enough balance and you know, I like I have a valid wallet that might be like what's, you know, what's in. And then the proof goes to the chain and so the chain, now there's no executing that transaction. All the chain is doing is verifying that the zero knowledge proof is valid. And all it needs to do that is the proof from the browser and that verification key that the DAPP developer created earlier. And so it verifies the proof. That's a constant size, you know, constant complexity operation, an O of one operation. I think maybe it's. Oh, I'm going to look back close enough, close enough. But, but what you'll notice is that what I just described where it's like the proof goes to the chain, the chain like verifies it and using that distributed validator set, that was kind of like what Ethereum does Now for the layer 2s, but without, of this, without this trusted trade off of Having an intermediary, like with Mina, it's already a layer one with very distributed validator set, you know, in the full security of no. 1. So, yeah, I, I think I hit the main things right. You could make your inputs private. The compute happened locally, only the proof was verified, so you get way lower fees and you don't have the trusted intermediaries like you do in the layer 2 world. Crypto as it was meant to be. **Speaker B:** It's really incredible. We'll get back to this a little bit later. But what is very fascinating that we're seeing now across all, most like legitimate L1 blockchains, is like, we're all kind of conversing, converging on the same like, end state roadmap, which is like, you have your base L1 that is really about verification and you invest as much resources in decentralized trustlessness, incredible neutrality. And then we're finding that the magic of ZK allows us to move the actual work away from that L1 network, whether it's in the Mina paradigm or the rollup paradigm, or what is very clearly coming, the app chain paradigm. The idea is like, move the computation away and just use the magic of ZK to project the entire computation into the trustless space. **Speaker A:** There's details, but I agree there's definitely some convergence there on the models that are finding to work. **Speaker B:** So while we're still in this kind of walkthrough Mina phase of the conversation, one of the things that has always been an interesting question for me and one of Mina's key selling points is that it is not only the world's most lightweight blockchain, but the chain, I guess, or the data load always stays at a constant. I think it's like 22 kilobytes right now. I was just watching a video about how that could drop down to 11 or. Uh, but. But my question is like, how do you achieve, you know, a, like, growing dynamic, like constantly changing state without, like the, you know, the data you need to track changing with it? **Speaker A:** Very good question. Let me. Yeah, let me answer it in two parts. Like, one is like, obviously like the details of every transaction that's ever executed, like over hundreds of thousands of accounts and, you know, years of state. It's not all. It's like the state itself isn't in that 22k, right? You can't say, give me all of the details that were in this transaction. So it's not like. It's not. It's not magic. Magic, some magic, but not magic like what it does do though is allow you to like generate a proof. So as a user to say like, hey, like I did this trade a year ago, I traded this for this. Here's the proof that I sent to the blockchain. And just with that 22k, you can verify whether I'm telling the truth, right? So it's like it's enough state there to, to verify that any, any transactions that ever happened is included. And as I said, it's not magic magic in that you can't, you can't store terabytes of data in 22K. But it's pretty incredible that you can verify that anything within this terabytes of data set does fit in that 22k. And there's a great video like, or at least analogy our CEO uses actually where it's like, it's kind of hard to believe, but it's like if we took a, like if we took a Polaroid of this conversation and then like held up the photo of that Polaroid and took another one, you would see that this conversation was included in the state of the photo, right? And if we kept taking them, it's going to get harder and harder to see what's in each Polaroid. But you can kind of conceptualize that some part of the data of this conversation or the transaction is included in this Polaroid and it's kind of like that. And that's where the math gets sort of magical. **Speaker B:** But. **Speaker A:** That'S the sort of the 22k part. But the reason that's really cool is that Mina has a state bridge that's getting pretty close to production actually. And what that means is that when that 22k gets synchronized regularly to Ethereum, then anyone who has a distributed application in Ethereum, adapt in Ethereum but wants privacy aspects, they can build that on Mina and the privacy centric parts happen on Mina. And because that sort of, that 22k state flows along back over in Ethereum land, if the user wants to say like I did the trade or I did the vote or I burned the NFT or whatever it is, they can supply the proof of that to the Ethereum Dapp and it can just look up that 22k and say, is this proof in the 22k? And if it is, I'm good to go. And so yeah, it's this like bringing together the, like the sort of privacy and magic of ZK over in Mina land to the, you know, the broader Ethereum ecosystem, which, you know, the bridge isn't in production yet, but that's going to be amazing when that lands. **Speaker B:** So I really want to talk about how Mina will like interact with Ethereum in the end game and like where you see these two ecosystems coexisting but before we get there. So what you just described makes a lot of sense, but I have to ask like, what in Ethereum would be called the data availability question, which is like, let's say like, okay, so I have like this, this, let's say like private key on Mina. I've done thousands of transactions, I keep my entire net worth on Mina, and then like my computer for whatever reason is incinerated and I still have my private key. I get a new computer, I load in the private key, I'm ready to boot up. But like, I don't have access to like all the state that I had like generated before. I don't have access to the previous transactions in Ethereum that today exists directly in the call data. We don't need to get into that. But my question to you is, how does Mina make sure that the data needed in order to generate these proofs is available for people that need to generate proofs? **Speaker A:** That's a good question. And it's one that kind of gets pushed to the application layer. So like Ethereum, there is some state on, on Mina. So like if, if the state that you need to like recover is, is on chain, then you're okay. But like, it's so limited that for like complex applications it's kind of, it's kind of not. And so yeah, it's down to the application layer as to how they solve that. And excuse me, like that's in the past been something like ipfs. You know, there's lots of DA solutions coming out now and like the community's kind of figuring out what's the ideal. So yeah, I guess I'd say application specific and the community and the ecosystem are still working out what's the best approach there. **Speaker B:** And without picking any names or committing Mina to a future roadmap, do you just think it's realistic that Mina adapts the kind of modular data availability paradigm and might, you know, just send that data to somebody like a Celestia? Is that like kind of what an end game looks like? **Speaker A:** Yeah. Yes, there will be, there will be, you know, multiple DA options for developers to choose from and yeah, of course Celestia will be, will be one of them. Yeah. **Speaker B:** No, no. And again, so got it. It just sounds like the answer to this is like whatever data availability paradigm that's coming out of Cosmos and Ethereum will find its counterpart in the Mina ecosystem? **Speaker A:** Yeah, yeah, I think so. **Speaker B:** I think now would be a good opportunity to pivot the conversation into the application layer. And specifically I'd like to talk about at least from your perspective or maybe from the research that O of 1 Labs has done. What are the use cases that you guys are particularly excited about that Mina is going to be able to service excellently from day one, that kind of the rest of blockchain and especially non ZK blockchain is really not able to service. **Speaker A:** Good question. I guess I'd take it in two parts. One is, I think there's a tendency in the industry to look at ZK and just say like privacy, right? And it's, and that's fair because it's like a big problem in blockchain and it's kind of magical like how it does it. And so privacy is a huge, huge deal. And I'll talk about that in a second. But like at least today if you put like your you know, hard product hat on, like in terms of capital deployed and like usage powered by zk so far it's actually been in the scaling aspect like scaling compute and specifically like know scaling compute for Ethereum, you know, like ZK roll up. So this concept that you can compute like arbitrarily large amount, like not unlimited but you can, can compute large amounts of you know, data. So execute a lot of instructions on a lot of data and in the end just have a little proof like that is a scaling kind of magic and you know, so that's, that's been the biggest impact I would say of ZK like today and you know, in Mina for many years and then in Ethereum in more recently as the ZK roll up start to like get more and more traction. So you know that's, that's a big one, the scaling, the scaling thing. And yeah that's you know, 01, you know, does, does some work in the area as well. But I think like the privacy one is more interesting at the, at the application layer. Right. And there's lots like, you know, you can go down the sort of list. Like some of the ones I find interesting. Well, let's just say privacy in general, right? Like that you can execute a transaction on a blockchain without doxing yourself. Like that's, that's kind of nice, you know, other like cool things that I like. Drug, drug discovery is one where not the discovery part but the proving. So like if you're a, like a, if you develop new drugs and you want to prove to a pharmaceutical company that you have a drug that like when, when that drug is put in this model of the body or whatever organism, you know, it's, it's in that it has this effect and that you can prove that without having to give up all the details of your drug. Like it's such a nice like fit of, of zk, you know, I really like that one, you know, but all of the ones that get listed off I think are important, like surveys and voting. Right. Like, you know, you want to be able to, you know, like vote without giving up your identity sometimes. Same with surveys, you know, all of the identity use cases. Right. Like, why do I have to give up my passport like and whatever every time I want to interact with something. That's one there though, where I do think that there are two types of entities there. There is the sort of crypto native, like give me a ZKP and I'm good. You can do anything. And then there's the like, okay, what are the regulations in my jurisdiction? And is that ZKP going to help if the law enforcement's knocking on the door and saying, prove to me that you've verified this person. **Speaker B:** It's like, oh, here's a field element. **Speaker A:** Yeah, but you know, no doubt that like this is the way sort of identity like should be done and it'll just take time for the other systems to catch up. But you know, being able to prove aspects of yourself without having to give up everything, you know, Oracle you mentioned, I know you said chainalysis, not changeling, but Oracles is another good one. Right? It's like, you know, we have this, such a convoluted system now of like bringing web3 data to web2. Both like with financial data where it's like have this whole separate proof of stake network that people put stake at risk to promise with their stake that they got this data and it's real and they make it available on chain versus the zero knowledge version where it's like, here's proof that I got this data from this place, I got the price of Apple from the nasdaq, or I got this trade feed from Kraken and Coinbase and here's proof that I took every one of those trades, you know, and put that in a, you know, to calculate a price and that's what's on chain. And you know, one of our partners, DIA is actually, you know, doing this. So yeah, there's, there's lots I don't know. We can, we can Go deeper into one particular one. But you know, there's. Yeah, definitely a lot of use cases unlocked by zk. **Speaker B:** Yeah, well, I'll just drop this in here now and we will get back to it at the end of our talk. But to me this is a little bit in the weeds. But like, to me the most interesting short term thing for ZK is to like just go back and look at all the things that we did optimistically or like in some sort of trusted mode while, you know, for scaling or whatever and just say like any of that, if we re architect it with zk, like not only will it work better and faster, but we'll actually get the properties of blockchain as opposed to just decentralization theater. **Speaker A:** Yeah. If we did it like Mina from the stunt, what would it look like? **Speaker B:** Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I honestly think that's fair. And I think that if we were starting, if Vitalik was here and we're. Ethereum wasn't created and we said like, we got to create some sort of credibly neutral computing space, like it would be so obvious that this would be the direction we were going. I think. **Speaker A:** And to be fair, like, I kind of, I kind of joke, right? Because the reality is ZK was a, was a, like it existed as an academic paper. Like it wasn't a usable technology. And you know, like all of the projects out there, especially Ethereum, you know, went off and created something amazing with the tools they had and to their credit are like, you know, constantly evaluating what comes up and you know, retrofitting the parts of the stack in, in the order that they think is right. So for sure. **Speaker B:** So I think this is a good moment to like kind of zoom out a little bit and maybe look forward and talk about like, what is the end game relationship between. Let's say we'll make a special section for Ethereum and Bitcoin. We'll make a special section for all other just like L1s that will come and go. And then we have Mina, like what, what is the endgame state once things stabilize a little bit? Like, how does the technology you're building interact with the world computer? **Speaker A:** Yeah, good question. Hard to predict the future, I think, just to sort of paint the whole picture, I think. And I kind of hope Bitcoin sort of stays as it is. Right. I know there's innovation around the edges with inscriptions and stuff, but to me it serves a very good use case of a kind of like, you know, a hard, a hard money, like not operated by a Central party that, you know, print turns on the printer when, when it needs to for political reasons. I think like Bitcoin is, is a good use case as it is Ethereum, like you know, it is called the world computer but the direction it's going, it's like it's not really the world's computer. It's the world's like you know, settlement layer or the world's like data availability layer which is a terrible name because no one, you know, outside of understands it. But like that's kind of where it is going, right? Like that it, it is the place where everybody else, you know, of the, you know, the L2s, you know, settle, settle their data too. So like you know, is that still the world's computer or is it the world's database? Does it matter? Who cares? Like, but you know, yeah, it, I think, you know, has sufficient gravity that like it's going to stay where it is in that super important like role. But maybe less compute gets done on Ethereum like it gets done elsewhere and more it just gets good and efficient at verifying transactions from other layer twos and then layer threes and whatever else. And Mina, like Mina I think is two things. I think Mina is different enough in the ways we described earlier in terms of the experience of privacy, of low fees, of being truly decentralized that it will have its own ecosystem of dapps and people that just do their things on Mina and Mina will also have L2s, right? Where if for a certain use case it's acceptable to have some partial trust in a layer two operator to get faster block times, more throughput like whatever else and they settle to Mina, that same thing will exist in the Mina ecosystem. But I think the big part is Ethereum. It's going to be a long time, if ever that it has true privacy. Right? And so I think any app on Ethereum or Layer two that wants privacy in the sort of short or medium term mean is going to be a really good choice for that. And that succinct 22k of data being available on Ethereum does bridge those worlds together. And then once that's done too like token bridges and et cetera will come, there'll be like a standard bridging thing. But the fact that you'd be able to have applications in Ethereum that have privacy features that are implemented over in Mina world, I think that's going to be a really important part of bridging those worlds together. **Speaker B:** Yeah, yeah, no, I, I think that makes a lot of sense. And if you'll indulge me for a moment, I will sell you on the world Computer vision. And I, I understand, as a caveat, I understand what I'm about to say should not be said to someone working on Mina Protocol because you're already ahead of, of Ethereum. But I understand Ethereum as the world computer first, starting with the EVM being Turing complete, right? Yes. Like, it's resource constrained and it's not very good and it's not efficient at all, but it is capable of doing anything a computer is capable of doing, including your MacBook, including, like Google Cloudflare servers. Like, if a computer can do it, Ethereum can do it. Then we say, like, okay, but Ethereum is slow and terrible and expensive and like, all the things. And then the idea is, okay, like, if we keep this space credibly neutral and slow, but we have this magic technology of ZK which allows us to project outside computing into the evm. Yes, technically, Ethereum is not doing the computation, but you can call it the world computer because it's not valid until it kind of passes through Ethereum. And that is exactly what Mina Protocol is doing. **Speaker A:** I don't disagree. Like, you know, it, it, I, I think that's, that's totally fair. And my point was kind of like, you know, okay, let's, let's use this analogy. So two types of computers, an application server and a database server. Right? Like, one runs lots of business logic, one is really good at storing data. Right. And today it's true, Ethereum can and does do both, but the application server part, it's getting real, real, really, really expensive really quickly. Right? And so that's why that has moved elsewhere. And as you say, it gets projected back. And look, even verifying zero knowledge proofs and storing them, that's still doing the work of a computer. It just kind of looks more like a database. Right. Or more like a distributed ledger accounting system. And that's sort of all I meant was that its world computer role is like, yeah, becoming more focused on the data availability and the verification rather than the computer itself. But I agree, it is still the world's computer. **Speaker B:** No, no, for sure. Yeah, for sure. No. And I don't mean to like, take a counter position to you, but just because I think it's helpful, I'd love to tell you what I think is the end game of Mina and how it interacts with Ethereum, and then you tell me what you think. But a couple weeks ago on this podcast, we had the CTO and co Founder of Space and Time, Scott Disktra. Sorry Scott. And one of the conversation we had was turns out that if you are to actually do the verification of a snark on Ethereum mainnet, turns out even at a full block 30 million gas, you can only verify somewhere between 10 and 15 snarks. And so if we're really believing in this world computer vision, there's an actual scaling problem at the L1 where it's like there's just not enough computation to verify everything we want to verify. I said this to Scott and what he said back to me is like, well obviously there's just like the way we solve this is not an Oracle network, but I'll just use it as a similar frame but like this external network that is completely tailor made to just being doing the ZK proofs, the verification to like blah blah, blah blah blah. But as you describe Mina protocol and the ability for the 22 kilobytes to be like sent and live on an Ethereum smart contract so that Ethereum applications can like look into the Mina blockchain set and like make decisions based on that. Like to me that's the answer. Like we figured it out. Like we are going to need Mina in order to achieve like the ZK future of the world computer. **Speaker A:** Yeah, no, that's an interesting take. I, yeah, I take issue with some of those things there, right? So one thing I've learned in crypto, especially in cryptography, right, because I'm not a math cryptography background, but the details matter a lot, right? So say you made a statement, you know, 30 million gas, you can verify about 15 snarks. It's like, well what type of snark? Like, you know, what's the like how is the snark created? What was the proof system used and how efficient has the verification logic being optimized and the creation of the snark itself. And then more importantly though, it's very easy in crypto to get orders of magnitude changes, right? So that 15 can become 150 and 1500 and whatever very quickly in things you didn't and it moves faster than you expect. The other one is how much computation does that 1 of 15 or 1 of 150 or 1 of 1500. How much computation does that snark prove? Right? And this is where folding incremental, verifiable compute like Minas, like 22k snark shows that that snark is just the output of some arbitrarily large computation size. So yes, there'll always be Some limit to what the layer one can do. But if you're kind of unlimited in what you can represent in that snark, then it kind of doesn't matter. So yeah, there's a lot to unpack there and I definitely don't draw that line where it's like there's some computation limit on how many snarks you can verify. Therefore like some separate proof of state verific zero. Like no, like I, I don't, I don't see that the, the things. Well likely I think is you know, the L1 continues like Ethereum continues to add like snark friendly things like pre compiles, you know, like it, it, the, the EIP 4844. Right. Like specifically makes it more efficient for L2s to submit blobs of transactions. Like there's a lot of things you could do to make it like super, super, super ZK friendly. Right. And so yeah, I, I think we're a long way away from both getting to the. We've fully optimized what Ethereum can do in terms of verifying stocks and that we fully optimized like the creation of those stocks and how much compute can kind of be behind them and represented by, by that eventual proof. **Speaker B:** No fair point. Like totally accept the pushback and I think um, like both sides are totally valid like that welcome to the industry where a hundred X comes at you and hits you in the face without noticing. And also like only one half of the equation is verification. The other half is like what are you verifying? And that can probably grow unbounded. **Speaker A:** Yeah. Plus it's easy to make a point when the, your other interviewer is not here. Right. Then the person you interview after me will just tear down my argument. **Speaker B:** Yeah, no, no, fair enough. So we can keep going down this all day, but I want to reserve the last about 10 minutes here to talk about something very exciting, which is the work that you guys are doing to upgrade the optimism stack. So hard pivot. But would you tell us a little bit about what's going on with Optimism and with O of 1 Labs? And I think risk zero is involved a little bit. **Speaker A:** Yeah, yeah, it's super cool. Happy to talk about it. So you know, optimism, you know, put out an RFP to, to like zk prove the, the OP stack and there's a lot of detail. It's kind of hard to, to talk at a high level but, but at a. We'll do our best at a high level like we talked about right there are optimistic roll ups and there are ZK roll ups and, and the ZK roll ups have some benefits in, in the technology. And you know, I think all of the optimistic roll ups can see that like, you know, like they could also benefit from, from that technology. But you know, they already have ecosystems, like they already have huge amounts of users and smart contracts and you know, it's not like you just throw that away. And so I guess what you know what optimism is doing is like adding what are called validity proofs to the, to the optimistic proof. So old model, right? It's like submit a batch of transactions, someone can submit a proof to show that, that there's wrong and those are called fault proofs. At the same time, why not provide a zero knowledge proof in the same way that sort of ZK rollups do to say hey look, even if we give people another seven days to submit a fault proof, here is a zero knowledge proof right now, a validity proof that the last batch of blocks are all valid and they were executed according to the EVM rules. There was no funny business. Here it is and that maybe you can trust that and it's not going to happen overnight. But you've now got two different sort of proof models and it's early days. That was an RFP both 01 and risk zero applied. And the POC is coming to a close actually and we're starting to talk about what productionizing this might look like. But I guess the cool thing is that it's Mina's proof system which is called Kimchi and the recursion layers called pickles that we already had this amazing proof system that produces these proofs for Mina and is able to provide recursion to then take that and apply it to another chain's logic to be able to prove these transactions, compress it all down into one small proof and then send that off. You know, like it was just really, it was a really nice coincidence in a way that like that same tech stack that we could use for Mina, we can use for op. But another like really cool part about it is we didn't actually talk about this, but the way you write smart contracts for mina is using TypeScript, which is very cool because ZK can be like kind of mathy if you use some of the like older school libraries, whereas we make it a bit more higher level. And so that works great for a lot of people to be able to write smart contracts in Typescript. It's not that different from doing it in solidity, arguably easier in a way. Because you have types and high levels. But no doubt there are folks that are going to want to build applications that settle to Mina that aren't written in TypeScript to run in the browser, but that are just general purpose programs. Part of this OP work was developing what's called a zkvm, so a virtual machine that can execute code. In our case it's a MIPS VM and the code it's executing is Optimism's program, but it could be any executable, basically that compiles down to mips. So even though we're using the Mina's core stack to be able to build something interesting for Ethereum or for Optimism, it's going to reap such huge rewards for the Mina ecosystem because we're now on the path to being able to run any arbitrary program, generate a proof and have that settle to Mina. And so it just opens up the like. When we talked about the arbitrarily large amounts of compute that get hidden behind like a single snark, that's a very cool thing. And it's still early days because the focus has been on getting the validity proofs for Optimism to work. But you know, once we sort of redirect to make those proofs directly be able to settle on Mina, it's going to be another like big, big happy upgrade for the Mina protocol. So we're looking forward to that. **Speaker B:** Do you foresee this specifically with the work you're doing for the Optimism stack? Do you foresee this as a trans. A long term transition from fraud proofs to ZK with this intermediate time where both are kind of being used? Or is this really Optimism staying as its core infrastructure and Optimistic roll up, but having these new ZK tools that are available to developers? **Speaker A:** Yeah, that's a great question. Obviously I can't speak for OP labs or the foundation or the community and what they're going to vote for. What Optimism have published so far, it's an end, not a replacement. It's that fault proofs and validity proofs is better than just fault proofs. And that over time as the industry, the community is able to assess the different security and trade offs of those things. Maybe one gets trusted more or less than the other and that could mean, for example, that you don't have to wait seven days for withdrawal if there's a valid zero knowledge proof. And like either a bridge trust that sufficiently because for X years there's never been a reorg or a fault proof submitted when there was a valid ZKP validity proof. There, but that takes time. And they don't know the future. We don't know the future. But I think what's clear is adding validity proofs in the form of ZK just is another sort of security tool in the toolbox, you know, for optimistic rollups. **Speaker B:** Yeah, well, it's not even just a security tool. Right. It's actually like a very useful developer hook. And, like, the big unlock is obviously in bridging, but I can think of like, many other applications where just being able to verify with just the block header that something is valid, like, allows you to unlock, like, really interesting stuff on either a sidechain or side program or whatever. And so I think we can talk about the architecture of rollups, but I don't know. I mean, this is just the clear path forward of not only what we need in order to get more secure systems, but in order for the optimism to be able to take advantage of all this incredible computational magic that's coming out of ZK World. **Speaker A:** Yeah, I think part of what you're keying into there is which optimism has spoken about a bit. Their version is this super chain messaging that layer twos can talk to each other. And if you have a valid proof that up until this block, you can prove that you're up to date. And so recipient chain with this proof, can you please go and do something? And that's still a while away, but that unlocks something pretty interesting. And you talked about convergence of blockchains to a model. Zksync has the hyperchain model, and if you look at it, the diagram is exactly the same that you have within the layer twos. You have sort of little ecosystems and then they can communicate via Ethereum. But if you do it within the super chain or the hyperchain, that it's more efficient. So, yeah, ZKP is also, you know, unleashing that. That area of innovation. Super interesting. **Speaker B:** It's not only them, right? It's starkware, it's Polygon, zkevm. It's. Yeah, this is clearly where we're skating. And I'm so excited for you guys to, like, get the first ZK proof of. Of optimism. Because, I mean, like, literally, if you're a believer in the math, which I know you are, I know I am. And I'm pretty sure that everyone listening to this podcast is like, if you believe the math, the second that first, first ZK proof of optimism is done, like, the whole fraud proof system becomes like a necessary crutch of trust that we need in order to transition to like the next phase. But like, I think the second you guys deploy might be like the moment that we herald the end of the optimistic rollup era. **Speaker A:** Yeah, it's going to be interesting because like I said, like the, the way optimism have talked about it in their blogs, like, and I think this is probably following in Ethereum's footsteps is when there's so much value locked up in your system, you have to trade very carefully. And of course they will. But I agree with you is that once those validity proofs start landing and people try to break them and they can't and it's like, well, why are we waiting the seven days? I think it's going to progress the conversation quicker. **Speaker B:** It's like mathematically it's impossible to generate a fraud proof that that is valid or I guess a fraud challenge that is valid. So like, why bother waiting? **Speaker A:** Yeah, yeah. And you know, it will take time before security researchers are happy, the community's happy, whatever. But I agree when people see over the horizon like, ah, like instant ish withdrawals and like, oh, permissionless, like you know, instant ish withdrawals, like the pressure to get there and it's like, okay, what do we got to do to get there? Like how many, how many audits do we need? Like how many? Like how big is the bug bounty going to be? Like, yeah, I think things will, I think will probably accelerate too. Yeah. **Speaker B:** And then once we unlock single slot finality, it's like the whole world is changed again. But that's the start of a rabbit hole that we don't have time for. So Steve, thank you so much for sitting down and sharing everything that you did about Mina, About O of 1 and about your background. I mean so eye opening for me and like really helps me understand just how like the, the greater world computer, like bigger than Ethereum, but the blockchain community is like really skating towards the same goal. So man, I really appreciate it. Thank you. And before I let you go, can you just let the audience know how they can find you, how they can learn more about Mina and if they found themselves like really interested and want to get involved, what should they do? **Speaker A:** Yeah, great. So I'm @ZK_SJP on, on Twitter, you know Mina protocol.com if you want to get like, look at the docs, get started on writing smart contracts in typescript that you know, that have full privacy. You know, we're all in Discord. Both O of 1 Labs, the Mena foundation, you know, just search for the Mena, Discord, all of your questions will be answered. There's a super helpful, super active community. The foundation runs like grant programs. Like, so if you just got a cool idea and you just need a few thousand bucks to get started, like, you know, there's constantly rolling programs. One's called Mina Navigators, one's called Zkignite. So yeah, lots of ways to get started, I think. Yeah, like discord, twitter and minaprotocol.com are good places to start. **Speaker B:** And how much do you need to know about zero knowledge in order to get started? **Speaker A:** A lot less than on any other ecosystem. Let me say that. So the fact that you can develop in typescripts and the docs, you know, take you through the sort of what you need to know to get there. There's learning. It's a new technology. You got to learn something. But yeah, it says it's as easy as it can be. And actually any developer like can can get started with a basic app. And then when you, you know, when you go to the next level, the docs and the ecosystem are there to support. **Speaker B:** Well, man, again I can't thank you enough. And I encourage anyone who's interested in developing ZK or developing ZK based applications, like spend some time with Mina, like they are the OGs of how ZK will interact with Blockchain. And man, I'm just so excited to see what comes next. So, Steve, thank you so much and have a good day. **Speaker A:** Yeah, you too. Thanks for having me, Rex.