How and Why to Scale ZK Proof Generation w/ Alex Pruden (Aleo Foundation)

**Speaker A:** Foreign. **Speaker B:** Hello, and welcome back to the Strange Water podcast. Thank you so much for joining us for this week's episode. Today we are speaking with Alex Pruden, executive Director of the Aleo Foundation. Aleo is a privacy focused layer 1 blockchain. Using the magic of zero knowledge, cryptography users are able to interact with the Aleo L1 completely privately while still maintaining all of the benefits of blockchain like permissionlessness and verifiability. But Aleo is not just a general purpose L1. It comes with an embedded prover network, which is something that you'll quickly discover has massive implications for the entire ZK ecosystem. During this conversation, we dive deep into understanding how Aleya works and how ZK completely transformed both crypto and really the broader Internet. This conversation has something for everyone, from the economics of ZK proving to the viability of all L1s to, to the applications enabled by these new paradigms. One more thing before we begin. Please do not take financial advice from this or any podcast. Ethereum will change the world one day, but you can easily lose all of your money between now and then. Okay, time to start the show. Alex, thank you so much for joining us on the Strange Water podcast. **Speaker A:** Yeah, it's awesome to be here. Thank you for having me. **Speaker B:** Of course, man. So I am a huge believer that the most important part of every conversation are the people in it. So with that as a frame, can you tell us a little bit about who you are, how you found crypto, and like, what eventually led you to Alia? **Speaker A:** Yeah, sure. So I grew up in a military family and then ended up joining the military and spent 10 years in the US army, kind of late oughts to, kind of late teens, I guess. And kind of in the middle of that process, I discovered crypto working in the Middle east with people who, generally speaking, have a lot fewer choices than, than we do growing up in the first world. So specifically I was working with Syrians as part of the Syrian. You know, we were working with some of the Syrian rebels at the time to fight isis. And you know, that's when I discovered Bitcoin and realized that Bitcoin is just a really amazing, powerful technology, you know, specifically for people to preserve and transfer their wealth in cases where, like in refugee type scenarios. Right. And that's, that's what got me into the space initially after my, my military career. Yeah, so I had this 10 year military career, had no computer science background, I guess, maybe important to mention and you know, discover this technology which I was fascinated by. And so I wanted to get into the industry. I was just transitioning out of my military career, wanted to get into the industry, had no idea where to start. Like most people who don't know what to do in the next step of their career. I applied for an MBA program and was fortunate to get to attend, to get to attend Stanford, where I did that, where I, you know, completed my MBA and was also just moonlighting and all these different places where I thought I could get relevant experience for crypto. So that included I helped found the Stanford Blockchain Club. And you know, because there wasn't a pre existing blockchain club. So that was great because we got to invite people who are experts there to kind of teach us what was, what was the latest and greatest in the industry. I took a number of computer science courses from, from some professors there to kind of give, help me have it, you know, build a technical understanding of how this stuff worked under the hood. And then I ended up working in a couple of the companies, you know, early days in the industry, including Coinbase. So I was an intern at Coinbase. I actually worked for, you know, Emily Choi, who's now the president of Coinbase. I was, I was her, her intern. And then Max Bransberg is the head of product, that was his intern. So yeah, anyway, so I worked there and then ended up being fortunate to land a job at a 16Z Andreessen Horowitz, which is a crypto fund. I was fortunate to land a job at their first crypto fund after graduating where I worked for Katie Hahn, who now has her own fund, Han Ventures. But yeah, that was my start working for her in vc. So I got kind of my start in the industry, I guess if you don't count my Coinbase internship. My start in the industry was working as a venture capitalist, looking at different projects and, you know, assessing, you know, whether or not they were good investments and then, and ultimately investing in and following these companies or these projects. And that was fascinating, incredibly fascinating just mainly because of the time the era that crypto was in. Right. So you kind of had, you know, early Bitcoin era, early Ethereum era, ICOs. I was just kind of getting into crypto right before the ICO boom, enduring kind of as a hobby and personally. And then I entered a 16Z right before what we now call defy summer, you know, so it was kind of like there was a big bear market and then everything was kind of picking back up and a lot of these protocols that are now household names, you know, these were these were kind of, you know, these were projects that we saw, like, I remember we saw one of the first pitches for Solana. We saw one of the first pitches for Avalanche. We saw Uniswap. Uniswap ended up being in the portfolio. So anyway, it was. It was really fun to get to meet a lot of these entrepreneurs and founders and, and communities at these times before they were big. And I really enjoyed that. But I ultimately was looking for a different experience. I found investing was very educating and enlightening, but I found it less fulfilling for what I wanted to do. I wanted to be on a founding team. I wanted to be at some, you know, in some working on some protocol that was going to make a first order difference. And so I was sort of contemplating what I wanted to do for the next step in my career. And you know, like I said at Stanford, I had. I had kind of taken some time to educate myself in cryptography and some of the Trends there. And ZK0 knowledge cryptography was one of the areas that I was really interested in. And there was an acquaintance of mine named Howard Wu and we had. We had worked together at a couple of different spots, but most recently at. At. At Libra or we worked with the Libra project, which was Facebook's ill fated cryptocurrency. And he was a country. He was a, I believe, a contractor. And I was working with Katie just as she was with her board level kind of engagement. Anyway, so Howard was a cryptographer. He was starting this company called Alia, which was based on a paper called Zexy, which is basically Zexy or zeex. Some people say Z E X E is basically an implement. It was an extension really of zcash or Zero Cash, which by the way, Shout out. It was a good shout out for today. 20 years or 10 years ago today, the zero cash paper was published, which really was the, you know, really the genesis of ZK and cryptocurrency. Seminal moment there. So anyway, so but those several of those same authors from the Zero Cash paper collaborated, right, The Zexie paper. And ZEXY was basically an extension of zcash to support smart contracts. So anyway, Howard was one of the co authors. He was starting a company, Aleo, to build a protocol around this. And I got really excited and jumped in. And so that was kind of my start. And I ended up, I guess just to finish. Finished quickly. I ended up holding multiple executive positions there. I joined as the chief strategy officer, became the chief operating officer and then ultimately the chief executive officer before leaving. And we Actually split the company into a foundation, nonprofit foundation, Alien Network Foundation. And then Howard went on to as remained at what is now called Provable Incorporated, which is like the labs entity. **Speaker B:** Oh man. This is the first time I've ever regretted asking the background question because I'm not sure if we're going to get to Alia with the amount of questions I want to pull apart of like the, the most like, compelling background I've heard so far. But I will control myself. **Speaker A:** Hey, this is your podcast, you know, so you go any direction you want. **Speaker B:** No, thank you. But I want to talk about crypto. So the one thing that I will ask about, like, and to ask you to elaborate on from your background is this moment in Syria where you realize the power of crypto. Because, look, like, I think for, for, for most Westerners, first worlders, especially Americans and especially like, my cards on the table, I went to Stanford too. Like, us of this, like, part of society, like, we get involved with crypto because we see some interesting technology and a shit ton of upside and like, you can kind of like, put your own little spin and spice into it. But, like, that's really like kind of the main channel for people getting in. And, and I think that as you spend more time here, as you have more experiences in the world, as the world starts to fall apart more and more, like, you start to understand like, the real values and see why crypto is important. But, like, you actually saw it and experienced it and like, saw the promise of crypto long before, like, crypto got to a point that can deliver on that promise. And so I would just love to, like, can you tell us a little bit about like, what were you seeing in Syria? How is bitcoin being used? Why was bitcoin like, the only channel where the traditional financial rails weren't helping? Like, can you just like, help me understand in this moment where you saw that bitcoin is like an incredible technology that matters to real people's lives? Like, what was happening that gave you that insight? **Speaker A:** Yeah, so just, I guess maybe just something to, to be clear on here. So there wasn't. First off, for me personally, there wasn't like a moment where I was like, oh, bitcoin is the future. Wasn't, wasn't. And, and secondly, bitcoin wasn't that used, frankly, in Syria, I think this is like, this is a misconception a lot of people have is like, in these third world countries, it's very common to see this stuff. It wasn't commonly used. It was used a Little bit. And the way I got actually introduced to it was very random. You know, we were working with. We were. So we were American Special Forces unit working in Turkey, training Syrians who would go fight ISIS in. Within Syrian borders. And there were no Americans in Syria at the time. And so we basically had to fight ISIS by proxy through these rebel forces. And, you know, these guys would go. They'd come over and they'd train. They'd go back over, and then they. You know, we gave them weapons and trucks and stuff, but they inevitably needed to, like, support themselves with food and fuel and things. And so they required cash. And so they're like, hey, is there anything you guys can do for us? You know, American military, You know, like, you're fast resources. You know, we're this ragtag group, and we're like, yeah, sure, just come. Come back to the border and we'll give you cash, basically. And, you know, there was some hesitance on their part because you could imagine driving around the lawless area of northern Syria, driving around with a briefcase of cash or a bag of cash is like, reasons. You know, there's reasons why you wouldn't want to do that. And, you know, and one of our Turkish partners who we're working with, who was from the intelligence community, was like, like, why don't you try paying them in bitcoin? And, you know, this is a bunch of American Special forces guys who are like, you know, we're not. You know, we're not PhDs. So everyone was like, what is. What is a bitcoin? You know, and so that. But that was kind of how we learned about it. And then the whole conversation ended up being moot because, you know, long story short, Russia intervened. The. You know, basically on the American. The flavor of the American inter. Kind of contribute. Contribution there changed drastically. And a lot of the folks that we were supporting kind of ended up either permanently becoming refugees in Turkey or being killed. And. And I actually kind of. That was the second piece where it clicked for me. It was like, a lot of these folks who ended up becoming refugees, some of whom who we'd worked with previously, you know, their stories really struck me in that, like, they were, like you mentioned, you know, the cohort that we inhabit in our society, right? Like, there were several of these people who were in Syrian refugee camps, were in the similar cohort within Syria, right? They were well off. They were well educated. They had plans to send their kids abroad for school, you know, their doctors, dentists, professors. And then they were in, you know, One day, the Syrian civil war broke out, and there's effectively two sides of the line, you know, and if you were on one side, you were cut off entirely from the. From the system, right? Banking system, financial system, legal system. You just were considered Persona non grata within your own country. And then those people, it was, you know, they were fortunate, effectively, that they were actually able to flee. Many weren't. Right? And they were able. They were able to flee, and then they end, but then they end up in a refugee camp where they're living hand to mouth, literally, and they have no access to their bank account or their wife's savings, which in many cases is tied up in real property. And this. And this is when it started to really click for me, because it's like, bitcoin, okay, should we pay, guys? And I learned a little bit about it through that. And then I saw this, and I was like, wow. Like, this is shocking, really, to see people who had basically played by the rules their whole lives. The rules changed and they lost everything. And. And then in that moment, I kind of had, like, if there was an aha moment, it was a little bit of like, you know, if you had something like bitcoin, if you were a refugee from a conflict, you just basically put your whole life saving, theoretically put your whole life savings in your head, memorize a past, you know, a private key or a seed phrase, and then go anywhere, and then you could start over. And to me, I was like, holy shit, this is amazing. This is revolutionary. And that's what sent me down the path of really getting into the space. And then as I kind of was reflecting, I guess in closing, I'll say, as I reflected upon that experience, I was thinking about the rest of my military career too. And I deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan as well, and those places also. There's enormous poverty, lack of basic systems to enable people to participate in the economy, massive corruption. All these things I think blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies can directly address. And I think when you do see places where there is high bitcoin adoption, like look at Venezuela, for example, you see this relatively. And Turkey is another one, right? Turkey, I think, is a relatively developed country, but a lot of issues with inflation, like, people there, are rabid for this technology, and I think they much more close, you know, much more than many people in the United States at least, understand its relevance. **Speaker B:** Awesome, man, that is. That is so incredible and, like, interesting and eye opening, and I'm forcing myself to stop here so that we can talk about like today's crypto and like the things that we're building. But I do think it's important for all of us to remember that like this isn't just like a VC merry go round. Like this has like real implications. Whether it's like these most like devastated, war torn places or just like regular moms and dads who like want to like give a good life to their kids in Argentina but like literally can't because their savings gets eaten up faster than they can earn it. And so I just actually this is a good segue. I think that the ZK era is kind of like the herald of this new era where we move away from just like VC speculation and into like true applications and like things that people want to do with this. But it's important to remember that like that if you're not in the space for that, honestly, like there's more legal ways to make a lot of money. **Speaker A:** Yeah, well, but I think, I think we're getting to the point where these products that crypto enables are going to become essential. And in particular I'm very bullish. I mean obviously where you stand is where you sit, I guess, but I'm very bullish on the combination of ZK and crypto nerfs particularly. And we can get to this more later. But like in the era of AI where content is going to be generated by all kinds of agents, mostly non human. How do you know who you're interacting with? Right, like it's already a huge problem. Spam calls, spam emails, spam, everything. I mean just like that problem is about to a million X and understanding who and who you're communicating with, under what rules you know, the conversation is guided by that are cryptographically guaranteed. And those two things being cryptographically guaranteed, that is exactly what crypto and ZK can do. And I think that's why we're just at the beginning of the beginning of this technology. And while it is very important, all the use cases you mentioned that I also was passionate about in the third world, just to be clear, there's very relevant use cases coming for all of us, I think. Yep. **Speaker B:** No, no, point taken. And you go on crypto Twitter right now, there's clearly some sort of intersection of AI and crypto just based on the amount of money going through it. I think we all have opinions on that and it's like whatever, we all have opinions on that. But what I do always say is that I don't know what the intersection of crypto and AI is But it's so clear that these are the same size. Sorry, different sides of the same coin. And that's because the crypto is about, like, a. Is about scarcity, and it's about slowing things down and about identity and. And AI is about abundance and speed and just, like, creating as much as possible. And so, again, I. I'm not sure how. Where these exactly come together. I think the guy that does is, you know, the next Hayden Adams. Right. But actually, hopefully it's the next Alex. **Speaker A:** Or this Alex, ideally. But, you know. **Speaker B:** Well, yeah. **Speaker A:** Only. The. Only time will tell if it's me or the next me. Me or Hayden Adams, you know. **Speaker B:** Yeah, yeah, no, but anyway, okay, so let's talk about Elio, and I. I want to go back to this moment of. Of, like, the inception. So can you talk a little bit about, like, from first principles, like, what were you trying to build? Why was. Like, why did you decide to go Specifically? The two things I want you to address are one, as. Like ZK as a core primitive of this L1 blockchain, and then two, why an L1 blockchain? **Speaker A:** So, starting off with ZK. So I think, first thing, to me, I think ZK was as magical of a technology as I could have imagined. And I think it's often conflated with magic, which is sometimes unhelpful, but it really is amazing what you can do with it. I mean, it's this mathematical. It's basically a set of mathematical algorithms that let one party prove something is true without revealing why it's true. There's really no physical analog. It's kind of crazy if you think about it, where it's like, if you and me are playing poker and I'm like, hey, I have to pair, and you can just trust me. Like, you would never trust me if we were playing poker. You want to see the two pair before you're going to hand over the money. But in this paradigm, using cryptography, you can actually be cryptographically assured that I do have to pair without having to see my cards. There's no physical analog. And so to me, just that fact that there was this new capability that didn't exist in the real world got me really fascinated by ZK before Eliot. And then in particular, I think, as it's relevant to cryptocurrency and blockchains, I think one of the major drawbacks. There's two major drawbacks in my mind of most early, certainly crypto networks. I think subsequent crypto networks have addressed this or have tried to address this. But one of them is just a lack of data confidentiality. Right? A lack of privacy. Like if I send you $10 right now in USDC on Ethereum, that transaction's there for all time that everyone can see. It's searchable by anyone. Right now you may or may not use an ENS address or an ENS name, so maybe it's harder to figure out who you are. But the bottom line is this ledger is fully public. And for any number of real world use cases, that's a big problem. And this is why I think, you see, I mean, my favorite question to ask at every crypto conference is how many people here take their full salary in crypto? And the answer is inevitably no one. Despite the fact that everyone is talking about how this is the future of finance. And like, and it's because there's a social norm around salaries, like, how much do people make? You don't want to publicize that. Right. And so that's, it's kind of a silly example, but it just gets to the heart of like, why I think you're not seeing as much adoption for crypto for real world use cases. Now what is crypto been, what is the killer use case for crypto up to this point? **Speaker B:** Yeah, speculation. **Speaker A:** It's gambling. It's a, it's a very, it's a different form of casino. And by the way, like, I have nothing wrong with casinos. I've been to Vegas, I like playing craps. But like, the point is like, we can't pretend, I think that we have somehow created the future of finance yet because we haven't solved these fundamental problems. And one of which, like I said, is, is the fact that we can't have a financial interaction and not publish it. Right. So ZK is a solution to that. ZK enables us to have a financial interaction, not publish it, be assured among each other that the fact that the transaction was valid and within the context of the system. Right. By the way, you can apply a whole bunch of compliance to that too. And we can come back to that later when we get to the inevitable criticisms of this model. The. But yeah, so that's, that to me was like, was was one aspect. So zk, I think really solves the problem of privacy. And then the other problem, it helps solve the scalability. Right. The other big early blockchains in particular suffered was, you know, you just limited transaction throughput. And zk, as we've seen with ZK roll ups, provide this nice paradigm because in addition to being able to prove A fact without revealing why it's true. It's a nice mechanism for compressing a bunch of computation into a single succinct proof, which is how most layer twos that commonly referred to as like, like ZK EVMs, like, this is really what they do. It's not really about protecting or preserving the confidentiality of a computation or of an interaction. It's more about, like, compressing a bunch of interactions into one succinct proof. But you get both with ck, right? So that's, I think, the cool part about it. Now, why a layer one? I mean, to me, the three fundamental principles that we wanted to achieve was, you know, was data confidentiality, the privacy, and. And then scale, like being able to do perform, you know, computations of scale, and then permissionlessness. And I think permissionless, like, for me, permissionlessness is a really. I mean, it's funny to have to say this in a crypto podcast, but I think it needs to be said like, it is a fundamental principle that differentiates cryptocurrency from many other tech stacks. Right? And I think if you look at most of the other L2s out there today, there's a lot and even many L1s, there's kind of a theoretical roadmap towards a decentralized layer two. And I think the reality is these things are pretty much run on AWS servers, right? And there's not a lot of real interest in progressing that roadmap. In fact, I had a tweet last year where I was like, I was joking, you know, is. Is the road to L2 decentralization going to take longer than the road to Eth2? Right. Need to. People were famously upset for how long that took, but I think, frankly, in fact, that kind of looks fast compared to a lot of these. Like, you know, a lot of these L2s have launched four years ago and still don't have fraud proofs enabled, for example. So anyway, so I think for me, permissionlessness, like L1s are nice because, look, the. The assumptions around permissionlessness are well studied and very explicit, right? It's like, you know, there's actors that aren't related to one another. They do work according to some, you know, according to the protocol, and then they're rewarded according to that same protocol, and then everyone checks each other, right? And so the economics, I think, are pretty simple. And, you know, I think that from that you do get the best guarantee that we know of. Of a decentralized system there, which therefore gives you permissionlessness. Right. As a User I can go interact with. Like, let's take a very permissionless system, Bitcoin. Like, I could just, you know, send a transaction to your node, and if you don't, if you just reject my transaction, I send it to someone else's node or I run my own node. Like, there's no, there's no gatekeeper. I don't have to, I don't have to rely on AWS keeping a server up or relying on a cent on a company or my bank to decide that I'm bankable. Right. Like, we have all these systems that, by the way, work great if we don't care about permissionless. Like, you know, when the rules are set and nobody, you know, there's no ambiguity there. Banks are fine for financial transactions, but if there's any ambiguity. And by the way, in cases where there's like two different banks trying to interact with each other, that's where we see it. A big opportunity for crypto. But to have to solve that, you need permissionlessness. So that was really why we went the route of the layer 1 and ZK in particular. **Speaker B:** So I want to get back to the layer one thing in a second, because this is just too dense of a conversation. But so put the layer one thing aside and just to talk about ZK real quick. So I am so with you that if magic is real, it's zk and no one who doesn't already understand this stuff will understand what I'm about to say. But, like, the idea that you can take a number and somehow, like, hide it behind a, like, relatively simple equation and then use that to like, access that information, but it's also lost forever. It's like, it is one of those things, the more you learn, the more you're just like, I think magic might be real. Like, I think God might be real. Like, this can't how you know. And so I, I feel you with that and that sense of awe and wonder. And the other thing I wanted to say about zk, so I think it was about a month ago, sorry, Anna, I can't remember. But on Anna Rose's Zero Knowledge podcast, she had a guest come on who basically came out and talked about, we're in this weird situation where we have this term zero knowledge. And what that formally means is about a prover being able to generate a proof without a verifier having any information about it. And yet in blockchain, about 90% of the time, what we mean has nothing to do with that and is really just about succinctness. And, and so I went, I started this conversation being like, oh my God, this is so pedantic. Who cares? But by the end I'm like, you know what? Like there's actually something profound going on here where like maybe zk, the two letters kind of refer, are a category or maybe ZK refers to succinctness, while zero knowledge refers to this like privacy thing. And I think with what you're talking about with Alia, like that distinction kind of collapses back down again because you want those things. But I do think it's like kind of important to put out there because like you kind of really can't understand the, the all encompassing nature of this technology without realizing that like zero knowledge is super important. But like, that's not even really half of the juice. **Speaker A:** Yeah, yeah. And I think, look, so first off, I strongly agree that I think there needs, you know, it, it does feel pedantic, but it is true. I think it's important to clarify what we mean by different terms and. Right. Zero knowledge, as you pointed out, has a very specific academic meaning. Right. And you, you, you stated it and that's not what a lot of people, you know, who are, who have protocols that are some way referencing ZK do. Right. And it's not, it's not necessarily a bad thing. But I do think for the industry it is important that we have some rigor around how we, you know, how we refer to things. And I think this is unfortunately one of the things that I think holds the industry back is that because a lot of the use cases are speculative in nature, there is a deep desire to tap into trends. Right. In order to like. So like you kind of were joking about like the, you know, crypto AI thing earlier, right? Like everybody, you know, it's like there's always a desire to like, you know, trying to tap into trends, which at some level is fine. Right? You want to make sure this technology is relevant, that's okay. Right. But I think done too liberally, I think it kind of dilutes what these things actually are. And, and I do and I think it confuses rather than, you know, empowers people. Right. Even the term zero knowledge, I think is, it's honestly even, even that is like too pedantic. And you know, the AI, to be clear, I'm not, I'm not knowledgeable about AI very much, but I kind of see some similarity between like, you know, I vaguely remember six or seven years ago people talked about Transformers, right? Like people like got in the level of like How Transformers work, right? I don't know anything about Transformers. But now it's like people are just kind of like, hey, we have LLMs, right? I'm assuming somewhere in an LLM there's like Transformers or things. But like we've abstracted that right now there's a layer of abstraction. Everyone's like, oh, LLMs and GPTs, right? And that's where ZK is ultimately going to exist at some level of abstraction, right? Where you're like, you have a product. You're like, hey, I want to log in without using my passport, without revealing it. You're like, okay, I do it. And then it's like, oh, I use cryptography. And ZK is one of the things you use. But like, it maybe is like, you know, you don't. We, we, once we get to that point where there's real products that solve real problems, we won't have to worry about having these debates, which I agree are pedantic but, but nonetheless important for sure. **Speaker B:** No, I, I'm a huge believer that yeah, like right now we're, we're essentially touching bare metal. Like, this stuff is so low level and like I never ever think that grandma is going to touch crypto anything. But I also don't think that like grandma knows anything about like hardcore like Internet networking or routing and switching. Like, but she does know that you have to type in HTTPs, colon, slash, slash. And like that's where I think that crypto is inevitably going, is that like, you'll see some artifacts that gesture to the technology we're building. But like chains defi all this shit. No, like it'll, you'll feel like a. **Speaker A:** Banking app a hundred percent. And I just to touch on that quickly because I think this analogy I use all the time for Alia, like crypto today from 99% of protocols, theory and Bitcoin, many others is HTTP, right? HTTP. So, you know, and I, sadly, I'm old enough to remember the Internet before TLS. And like @ the time it was a lot of message boards, right? People had message boards and that was basically what, what was done on the Internet. People communicated with each other, universities, et cetera. And then Netscape famously created, you know, ssl, which ultimately became tls. And that enabled encryption and that enabled credit card transactions. So merchants could then sell online and people could buy things online without having to wor parties snooping their credit card data. And that was the moment which unlocked the web in terms of economically unlocked the web. Right. And of course there's a ton of economic, you know, already tremendous economic value in crypto. But I think that moment we still haven't had. And this is what we're trying to build @alie and this is what I think ZK in particular can enable is the HTTPs for web3. **Speaker B:** Awesome. All right, so let's go to the layer one conversation. And I want to just throw something out there as like an embarrassingly, but I'll call myself like an Ethereum maximalist, right? Which is I actually don't think that the point of anything that we're doing is building technology, right? Like, I think at the end of the day we're building like, like Turing complete machines that are about as capable as like the, the computer that got us to the moon in the 70s, right? Like, if you were actually interested in building high performance computing, stop with all of this and like start working on like centralized computing. I think what's interesting about crypto is that first through Bitcoin and then my opinion is that bitcoin got like so politicized and so like stuck on this like gold money issue that it like we had to try again. We created Ethereum. And like the, the special thing here is not the technology, it's not any of that shit, right? It's that it is a credibly neutral shared space. And like that going back to the stuff we were talking about in Syria or like, whatever, the point of crypto, I believe is to create a shared space that like, can serve as like the substrate for property and identity on the Internet. And so like, every time I like look at a crypto project, my thought is like, if you start at like, okay, we understand we have a shared space, we're going to get rid of that one and start over. I like automatically struggle because like one, it's like, again, not necessarily congruous with how I think, like the point of crypto is. But two, it's just like, if that's our attitude, why in two years when there's newer ZK tech, shouldn't we be like, ay, Leo, that's cool, it's a shared space, but let's trash it and start over. **Speaker A:** Great question. And just to be clear, I love Ethereum. Ethereum is amazing. I was an Ethereum community member long before I was at Aleo. And I still am. I still proudly am, but I. And it's interesting you pointed out Bitcoin. I think these are, these are communities, right? So these are not only technologies, these are communities. And this is one of the most fascinating parts about Cryptocurrency is like, it's the amalgamation of like kind of the most technical things and the most social things. It's like, it's like the, it's like the, you know, PhDs from like computer science and PhDs from, you know, social science got together and created a thing. But anyway, yeah, so, you know, different community, like the, the technology in many, in many cases kind of represents the values of these communities that birth them. And, and to be clear, you know, this is technology, right? So every choice has trade offs. So Bitcoin for example, would criticize Ethereum for the trade offs that it has made around block size, right? They're like, hey, you have all these like these blocks, they're very big. You know, everyone's doing smart contracts. But then how, how is anyone going to run a full node right when it's 20 terabytes big? That's what a bitcoiner would say, right? And they're right. At some level, if you think that running a full node is really the key thing to permissionlessness, then that's a valid point of view. Right now the Ethereum folks are like, well that's great, you know, I can't do anything with Bitcoin, so what's this like, who cares? We're going to have to, you know, buy it and hold it and scold again. Like what are we even doing here? Right, those, that's fair too, right? You know, and I think for us with Elio coming into this, like, why do another layer one? First off, I would have absolutely, we would have done a layer two if it was possible. And by possible here what I mean is if we didn't have to make the trade offs that we would have had to make technically. And I think fundamentally that some of those trade offs that we're living with were made in the early days of Ethereum at the level of the evm. Let me just give one great example. You know, could check. So could check is the basis of the SHA2 hash function. It is used everywhere in the EVM, right. The eat like, you know, kachak is almost 90% of, I feel like the EVM, right. Because every, all of the state is represented in these different state tries. You know, Kachak is used every time there's like, you know, generating an address or something like that. So it's just constant everywhere. Now what is the problem with Kachak from the perspective of zk? Well, ZK operates over circ. You know, these things are, you know, you basically have a program that's encoded as a circuit, you could think of like a, you know, like a circuit board, zeros and ones, right? And, and when you're encoding a program like that or a statement, you know, that kind of the, like that the size of that statement kind of directly correlates to how long it takes to prove something and, or verify it, depending on the proof system you're using. Right. And a problem with Kachak is that when you take that algorithm and you put it inside of the ZK circuit, it's massive in size, right? So which is to say that it's very expensive to do in zk, right? That's why if you look at all these teams that have taken, they're like, hey, we're doing zkevm. That's why Vitalik wrote this great blog post, which you probably remember. It's like types of ZK VMs and you know, people like kind of increasingly contort themselves to say they're equivalent. But like this is one of the areas where universally no one is equivalent. They all remove the jack hat function to use something snark friendly like Poseidon, right. You know, so it's up, it's up to the listener whether or not you consider that equivalence. But nonetheless, the point is that like there is very much that's just indicative of the trade off that's made, which is that if Ethereum was built without the ZK in mind, right, it kind of evolved in a direction where this was desirable, but it was not built with that in mind. And of course you can't just switch everything because you've got Uniswap that's deployed, right? You've always deployed programs. And by the way, it's even worse than like traditional software where you just like push an update here. These things live on a blockchain. There's a smart contract that's there and it's long lived by design. So it's very non trivial to do any kind of migration. I mean, I actually think, speaking being complimentary of Ethereum, I think the eth2 merge was incredible. I mean people do not appreciate that accomplishment enough, given the number of parties involved and the number of interests. Anyway, for Aleo, we decided to take the approach of like, okay, look, starting with this technology, which you and I consider magical, zk, we think that it can enable a lot of really interesting user interactions. I agree. The identity is one and it enables these properties of privacy, data confidentiality, permissionless and programmability. So how do we start from first principles and build a VM just for this. And then how do we build a blockchain around that and build from the ground up? And then I think there's still, I mean it was and still is a desire to interoperate with every other crypto network that's out there to the extent that it's relevant. Including Ethereum. Right. I mean day one we're planning on having multiple bridges over to Ethereum, et cetera, just like many of these other networks do. Solana is another example of a network that took a trade off of like, hey, you know, this could be way faster if we all didn't run small, small computers. What if we had like a handful of people running really fast computers and data centers? That was Solana Base. That's, I'm sure Anatoly would kick me for saying that, but like that's how I think of Solana. Right. And so these are trade offs. So anyway, we decided to make the trade off like, hey, build this thing from the ground up. Support zk. That means we're not going to be support Ethereum. Smart contracts out of the box. We'll have to figure out other ways to interoperate. But I think that's how, if you look at a lot of traditional web technologies, that's how it started too, right? You had a bunch of these competing standards and then you kind of over time like overlay different ways for them to interact and, and then ultimately what you end up with is, is the web and it works pretty good despite the fact that honestly at a pretty low level, it's pretty, you know, Balkanized. **Speaker B:** No, I think that's fair. And when I'm trying to make the Ethereum maximalist argument, like I often go straight to JavaScript, which is like this like really weird language that like especially 20 years ago, like it didn't really work. Like it was super idiosyncratic and strange and like if I had a dollar for every single team that were like we're gonna do a JavaScript killer, it would like I would not be having this conversation from you and from this like kitschy home. Like I'd be on my yacht. **Speaker A:** Right? **Speaker B:** And I think the, the lesson from that is like, it is not about the best technology ever. It's about like, this is what we have and this is what the community uses and let's like collectively push it forward. But I think the point that you're making is that like, yes, while this maybe like core, that is the community pushing JavaScript forward. The reality is there's like a ton of different languages that you can write web programs in and like maybe compile down to JavaScript or maybe have reached a big enough size that browsers support it or whatever. And like, the point is that all of this is abstracted away from users and, and they just experience it as like websites. And so I still believe what I believe, but like I the your analogy or your, the way you talk about like this Balkanization underneath the hood, but like because of the interwoven ness of these technologies and how they are ultimately supporting applications and like user interactions and not like just technology for technology's sake, like, gives me a clearer picture to what a more diverse world looks like. **Speaker A:** Exactly. Because you think about a web app, I mean, like just this one we're using right now. I mean, under the hood I'm sure there's JavaScript, but there's other web technologies too. There's probably some database somewhere in the back end. Like you or me don't have to care about that, right? We're just like, hey, we're having a conversation. This is a podcast getting recorded. It's magical. And that's great. And that's, that's ultimately where crypto will get and that is where we have to all continually focus. And my view is that Ethereum, I remember when I started a 16Z, I remember there were critics of Ethereum, they were like, no one is going to want to learn a new smart contract language. Solidity. It's like no way. People swore up and down, it was, it was dead on arrival. And now, of course, now that's the argument that people make today about other languages. They're like, no way anyone's going to learn anything other than solidity. And of course those are both overstated. Right. But the reality is these things are going to grow towards the direction where there are real world applications. Right? And these technologies need to start evolving and will inevitably start evolving in that direction to serve an end use case. Because right now there's like a lot of investor money, there's a lot of speculative frenzy. Ultimately, at some point this will have to find a place that this will have to find a problem and be the solution for it. Right? And that, that will ultimately be what drives what this looks like. Whether it's Alia, whether it's ethereum, whether it's JavaScript, whether it's Python, you know, like that's, you know, ultimately these things have to be tools to solve problems. **Speaker B:** Yeah, I love that, man, I love that. I love that. Like, it's not just about speculation. Like we actually have to go find problems and solve them. So let's, let's move out of like Debate Lord World and go like straight into Alio and like, help me understand, like, what. So let's start with a generic blockchain and then help me understand because ZK has built into Aleo. Like what? Just on first principles, like, does Alio provide both like end users of the blockchain apps and like developers who are trying to build those apps on them? Like, what is special about Alieo? **Speaker A:** Yeah, so let's talk about it and let's, let's, let's. Just one way I like to describe this is kind of looking at like the history of blockchains, how they evolved and kind of where Alio fits there. So let's start with Bitcoin, right? Bitcoin's big innovation. And people forget There were like 50 protocols that preceded Bitcoin that all failed at trying to be digital money, right? And Bitcoin's innovation was this concept of economic security, right? So you have this economic security guarantee where it's like, hey, we're all miners and like, you know, we're going to do this grind shot, you know, 256 and then earn rewards and if anyone screws up, we'll take their money or they'll forfeit it, right? And so basically everyone was kept honest by the rules. Of course. Protocol is like able to have this byzantine network of actors work together, right? Downside, well, you couldn't really do anything but transfer money around, right? So then Ethereum came along and Ethereum's innovation was that, hey, wouldn't this be cool if instead of we just had value transfer logic, we effectively kind of built a virtual machine on top of this. Therefore we could do smart contracts and have real like functioning programs, right? Which requires some kind of a reimagining of how Bitcoin worked under the hood. I mean, it's very analogous in fact, what I was just saying about it, Ethereum, it's like, you know, bitcoiners would be like, well, you can write smart contracts. Just write Bitcoin script. I don't know if you ever tried to write Bitcoin script, but it's, it's not as user friend, not as developer friendly as JavaScript, let's put it that way. But anyway, so Ethereum took, Ethereum took that direction, they said, hey, we're going to build a, basically build a blockchain around this vm. And that's what they did. And that, you know, enabled the world smart contracts. Now, zcash actually went a different direction with Bitcoin. They were like said kind of similar things to what I said earlier in this, in this podcast around, hey, you know, real people, real businesses need some level of confidentiality for their interactions because otherwise dead on arrival. So they basically said, okay, we have this Bitcoin model, let's use ZK and basically have this so, you know, everybody doesn't have to share every interaction. And that was the direction that zcash took. And so Aleo is trying to merge those two directions back together, the programmability and the. And the privacy piece. Right. So what does it look like fundamentally? Well, we started with a vm, right? And this VM is, and this is, by the way, I referenced a paper earlier in this, in this podcast, Zexie. That is what this is. Zexie is describing a virtual machine meant to be run on a distributed network like Blockchain, that uses ZK to affect state updates. Now, the mechanism by which it does those state, by which the virtual machine does state updates is very similar to how zcash does it. Although you can think of zcash effectively as a special case or a product program within a broader ALIO context, right? So zcash only handles value transfer in the same way that Bitcoin only has value transfer. And ALIO enables all of the many of the rich interactions that you could expect on Ethereum. And so that was what we started with, with this, with Snark. VM and I can talk at length if you want, about the Zexy model and why it's different, why it's not actually that straightforward to port over Ethereum to zk, but leave that aside for a minute. Then we built out this blockchain and we said, hey, what do we want? What properties do we want this blockchain to have? Well, fundamentally, it needs to be permissionless. So we adopted a version of Narwhal Bullshark proof of stake consensus, which is an iteration of hot stuff, a version of which is what powers Ethereum. So it's kind of like basically taking the modern proof of stake architecture. And then the only kind of twist we added in is to achieve another goal was we want ZK to increasingly become practical, right? And one of the powerful things about a network like Bitcoin is it drove enormous investment into the generation of SHA 256 hashes, which I think is pretty useless. But you can imagine that that economic incentive is powerful, right? There's a lot billions of dollars been poured into that. And so what we wanted to try and do is really to create a form of useful work and an incentive for which people to invest in this low level kind of ZK hardware, basically to make it better. To go from like, hey, because, you know, theoretically, you know, for a ZK proof that you do on Aloe, you probably do it in your browser. Might take a few seconds depending on what you're doing. You know, if you had it on gpu, it could take a fraction of a second. Maybe if you have an ASIC someday you could do thousands of proofs in a fraction of a second. Right? So just like semiconductors have kind of advanced over time, miniaturized, more specialized, faster, faster, faster. You know, I think there's still an arc. There's an ARC for that in zk. We wanted to bootstrap that process by building in this incentive mechanism. So there's effectively what I'm saying, so we have a proof of stake network with kind of this like rewards mechanism that operates alongside, which is basically a proof of work network where provers generate proofs for the protocol to receive rewards, right? So that, and that is really there, not really for the security of the network or anything, but as a matter, as a means to bootstrap or create a business for provers who ultimately can also serve consumer use cases too. So if you imagine like a common go to market strategy for a lot of rollups and you know, ZKVM providers, is this like, hey, our software is going to power proving as a service stack, right? So it's like you, Rex, come to me and you're like, hey, I want to prove a statement about myself, I want to prove I'm over 18 or whatever. And you know, Alex, you generate the proof and I do that for you and then I give that back to you and you send it onto whatever blockchain or whatever authentication service right now the reality is like that would be great if that service existed, you know, because you could basically take advantage of the, you know, same reasons why the web went to client server model. Servers are powerful, clients are weak. You could outsource the power, the heavy computation of the servers. The issue is though, like there's not really, there's no market. Like a market kind of needs two sides, right? There needs to be suppliers and people who want the thing, right? And right now there's just not that much demand for proofs. Therefore there's no incentive to invest in this market, which is what we're trying to solve with this coinbase puzzle. This is exactly the thing we're trying to address. So that's the, so that's the vm. Then there's the blockchain, by the way, the VM we call Snark vm. Snark stands for succinct non Interactive argument of knowledge. That's kind of a ZK wonky term, but if you hear snark, that's what it is. And so Snark VM is our EVM equivalent. Snark OS is our blockchain. It's like our node implementation for this node running our bullshark consensus and the EVM or the snark VM on top. And then we have leo, which is our equivalent of solidity. Right? So LEO is a language by which you can write these kind of JavaScript Rust combination of like syntax and you can write human logic, you know, high level logic that will be compiled down into what are called ALEO opcodes, which then themselves are synthesized into these circuits which are fed into SNARK vm. Right? And that's, and then those circuits. And that, that logic is what defines how value transfer happens. Right, According to whatever logic you encode. So that's leo and that's kind of really the last step or the last bit. **Speaker B:** Alex, why did you let me go on and on about like Syria and L1s when there's so much interesting stuff here? I can't even believe we have like only 15 minutes left, so. **Speaker A:** Well, we can do a sequel. **Speaker B:** Yeah, no, we're doing a sequel, but let me try to keep this succinct. So, okay, first let me try to pull out like the most interesting thing that you said to me in describing what ALEO is, which is. And correct me if I. Let me know if I got this right, so what you said is, for Bitcoin, what, like the core difficult thing there was like doing this sha 256 #. And because like that was both like so critical, because it was so critical to Bitcoin, we For the last 15ish years have seen VCs, publicly traded companies like pension funds, whatever, just dump investment into making that Shaw256/, like faster and faster and faster as possible. And what the realization was is that work, that SHA256/ass is only useful in the context of Bitcoin. And the aha moment is like, okay, what if we design our protocol to do a similar thing in that we have this core primitive that's going to need to run millions and millions of times, so it's going to require and incentivize a ton of investment. But let's design our protocol so that that core primitive is useful beyond just this protocol. And the idea is that now this investment will not only go towards ALEO and like bootstrapping the system, but will also create investment and infrastructure into general. **Speaker A:** Purpose ZK proving that's exactly the idea. Now for anyone of your listeners who may be hardcore Bitcoin maxis, let me just acknowledge that the trail of trying to take a useless proof of work algorithm to a useful one. There's a trail is littered with bodies, right? There's so many attempts that have failed at this. And this is actually like maybe it's an important point to know. I mean ALIE has been around five years. An earlier version of ALIO was actually entirely proof of work. There was no proof of stake at all. And what we found is that it's very difficult to design a puzzle that is fair in terms of like the amount of work you put in is proportional to the amount of rewards you get out that is non amortizable, which is for a variety of reasons we won't get into a very important property of these, of these schemes and actually gets you to like the end goal that you just described. So this is kind of why like we went away. Just a bit of a history here. We were proof of work and the entire coinbase puzzle was our equivalent of shot 256. And then we had a test net where this was broken very publicly, where like one team just dominated it and it was clear that we was going to be insecure going forward in this model. And, and that's when we switched to a proof of stake consensus but kept. But kept and iterated on this coinbase puzzle such that to achieve exactly what you described. But in the event that someone with billions of dollars understands how to like, you know, ultimately exploit this, the consequences, while severe, will not be the same as like destroying the protocol. Right. So it's basically a risk mitigation mechanism. Anyway, just a side note. **Speaker B:** No. Awesome. And so this like, so is it. I'm just going to say that like maybe ALEO consensus, it's like got this proof of stake path that is actually about securing the blockchain and it has an independent proof of work path which help me understand. So does this independent proof of work path is completely independent of crypto economic security for alio, but does provide services that are relevant within the Snark vm. **Speaker A:** So let me, let me try and elaborate. So there's the. So the. What are the crypto economics. So there's a starting supply of ALO credits, ALO credits are inflated or there's inflation through one of two sources. One is these proofs, right? So if you submit a proof that's above a certain difficulty threshold, then you get basically paid out for that work, right? In the same way that that bitcoin kind of works. The only nuance difference between this and Bitcoin is that actually like kind of natively in the, in the proving logic, we, we, we, we pay out proportionally. So Bitcoin's winner take all. And then for us it's proportional by block, kind of just a little nuance, doesn't really matter that much. But I thought I'd mention it. That's one source of inflation proving worse. But one. One important note though is that anytime a prover finds a solution, actually part of those proving rewards go to the validator that created the block. And that's important because if you don't have some kicker to the validators that are ultimately creating blocks, the validators have no incentive to include those blocks, right, because they're just being inflated. So there's kind of this kicker. So it's like 2/3 of the prover, third of the validator, then the second source of inflation is for actually validator rewards themselves. So validators, just like other proof of stake networks, need to be compensated for the risk they're taking, for locking up their capital and for also for doing the work of creating blocks and running consensus for the protocol. So that's the second source. There's this staking kind of validated reward. There's this proving reward, the proving reward. Provers could stop doing anything and the blockchain would progress as normal. So the proving reward, you can kind of think of it as like one way to think of it is basically like a lottery for which there's an on chain smart contract and to get tickets you got to submit proofs of higher and higher difficulty, right? So it's almost like that's sort of the economic way to think of it. And ultimately the proving rewards start to be, start out to be very lucrative. They're the majority of the inflation, but over 10 years they decrease to zero, right? So again, and now back to your question of how is this relevant. If I'm a proverb of any of these rewards, what else can I do? Well, the nature of this puzzle is such that it's a large majority of the steps that are required to generate a zero knowledge proof for like an alio transaction, right? So theoretically, if you get really good at generating these proofs, you're going to be really fast at generating Aleo transactions, or maybe they'll be really cheap for you, right? And so then that has effectively bootstrapped your, like, your natural pivot after the coinbase rewards go to zero is going to be like, hey, users of Al blockchain, of which hopefully there are many, use my service. I have a fast, cheap proving service where you could basically, you know, work with me and then I'll, you know, submit proofs for you. And then that makes the barrier to entry for users lower fees are lower, things are faster, and then it enables a bunch of other applications on top of that. Right? In the same way. Like, again, this is kind of pie in the sky future, but like, you think about all the things the iPhone enabled, you pack a computer into a small package. It's not really like none of the pieces themselves are novel, but it's just the fact that all these things are together and then because those things are together now, there's a bunch of new applications that are possible that then people can build towards. If that makes sense. **Speaker B:** Yeah, it does make sense. And I guess my question for you is like, so totally hear you, like on the role of this proof of work network directly to Alio and like, how this, you've created this like natural pivot that like, is very useful for like these inflationary dynamics that you're creating. My question to you though is like, this work again, that is being done in the proof of work side of Aleo, like, could I conceive, let's say as a user right now, like, I want to go generate some transaction on starknet, but I really don't want to use like the starknet, RPC or whatever because I know that my transaction, if I have to give them all the information, will leak so much information that like someone's going to move on it. Maybe instead I could take all of the components, send that to Aleo, have them generate the proof, and then even though that proof is like completely irrelevant to the Aleo network, it's still like using the Alio service for proving, and then I can take like that final proof and send it to starknet. Is that like at all part of the system you're building or is it really like the proof of work for Aleo is really relevant to Aleo and not so much else, it's just that the investment in the R and D will be relevant to other stuff. **Speaker A:** Oh, there's so much in there. Let me Try and let me try and pick apart and take like the. Yeah, answer succinctly because it's a really important question you asked. So first off, I want to distinguish one thing between starknet and Alia, right? This is important distinction. Starknet, you can't generate a proof for yourself, right? Like they, you have to use their API and that's, that's a requirement, right? Because their prover is closed source A and B it's actually pretty intensive. So even if they open sourced it like a Stark proverbs not something you're going to run on a client side device. Most likely in Aleo. And this is one of the reasons why we built ALO the way we did is that we very much wanted to ensure that you could generate the proof for your transaction alone with your device, whatever. Like there was no barriers to you doing that. The reality is, you know, it's just like I use Gmail from I could run an SMTP server, but I use Gmail. It's like the reality is most people are going to choose convenience. But I think that that ch choice of what of being able to interact directly with the protocol is to me gets back to the core of permissionlessness. Like if we're not going to keep that, then what are we even doing? So anyway, but that, so back to the question about could an ALIO prover generate a stark proof for startnet? That is an interesting question, but I think it's. They're actually a little bit of two concepts, right? Like Aleo, the network has its own like encoding of transactions and like what validators are going to check and then there's like a theoretically off chain service that could have been bootstrapped by the Aleo approving rewards, right? That then could offer services to multiple networks. And I think that's very, very true. I do think it's likely, at least in my mind that you're going to see specialization around specific use cases for different proof systems, right? So Aleo has kind of, you know, we've chosen a specific proof system. Starknet has a seven proof system. Other, you know, Planck Polygon that uses plank E3 has their own. So you've got all these different things that are kind of incompatible. And whenever you're optimizing something, you want as few choices as possible, right? So you want to like, you're like, I want just like shot 56. You're like this thing and this thing only, right? And that's really how you get the real kind of juice from the squeeze for optimization and so my gut is that, like, I think certainly that Alia will drive a lot of investment in ZK hardware. In fact, we're already seeing that and I think a lot of that will translate over beyond a certain point though. I think if you want to talk about asics, you're not going to see ASICS get developed unless it's specific for a use case, specific for a proof system, and those will not translate across ecosystems. **Speaker B:** Yeah, well, let me throw this big one out there. Maybe we can walk out on this. But the way you've kind of framed Aleo, like the holistic system is that like, it's really an L1 blockchain and that's what you're building and like, you're creating this, this parallel, like, proof of work structure that like, not only, like, has some, like, interesting properties, but is really about bootstrapping. Like the, the ALIE blockchain. **Speaker A:** Yeah, the prover networks. Exactly. **Speaker B:** Yeah. My question to you is I, now that we're an hour into this conversation, am almost seeing the reverse. Like, we have so many blockchains and like, honestly, we're getting to the point where we have so many ZK blockchains, like, to even the point where it's just like, who care? We need apps, man. Like, we need apps and reasons to use this. And so why I am like so bullish on what you're building now at the end of this conversation has really nothing to do with built like a Snark VM or any of that stuff. The problem that this industry is about to face is that even once we optimize all of these ZK proofs, it's not casual to do them. And we're going to need to come up with infrastructure and services and systems in order to make a ZK powered world. Whether it's related to blockchain or completely independent from blockchain, we're going to need something to make that work. I guess my question to you is, is Aleo really a general purpose L1 blockchain that is bootstrapped by a prover network or is it a prover network that's bootstrapped by an L1 general purpose blockchain? **Speaker A:** Ooh, wow, great. You know, I think it's both. Ideally it's both. I mean, right, we're at the beginning to be. And just, just, I guess to maybe as a, as a quick note before we end the show, like, Alio is currently in Testnet Beta, which we just launched this week. Mainnet's launching later this year, and then We'll I think ultimately know the answer to your question of like, what's the prover network? What's the network like, how do those two interactions? But I think in the perfect world, it's both. And I totally agree that ZK has application beyond just a leo. I think, I mean, in general, I mean, this is why I got into the industry. I think 20 years from now, ZK is just going to be part of the fabric of the web. And I think, I think, you know, something like ALIA will be too. Mainly because I think blockchains are great when it comes to value. You mentioned identity and property. I think that's like your framing of blockchains as spaces by public spaces by which identity and property are managed in the digital world. I couldn't agree with more. And to me, I think identity is one of the use cases I really like to focus on a lot because I think to me you need the combination of programmability, permissionlessness and privacy to do a good identity protocol. Right? Like imagine even just take, let's take a problem on the web that's still unsolved to this day. Age verification on the Internet. You want to go buy, you know, go to a beer website, it's like, are you over 21? You literally just click a button. There is no check and there's literally no check at all, right? And you can imagine all kinds of other content on the Internet that like, you know, I have kids and I would prefer my kids to not be able to just wander into. Right? But that's not, it's, it's very difficult to solve without giving away all of your identity information. Right? And people don't want to do that. But I think you can imagine a ZK protocol like this where it's like, hey, I upload my, my identity document. It's somehow validated by a smart contract logic, verify the signature or whatever. Now this is there and I can make proofs about it to whatever third party service. And that third party service is like, well, I got this proof. Here's the proof. The proof says this is a valid identity document and that these, these, you know, these, you know, kind of aspects of this person are what they say they are. And that is mind blowing. That's revolutionary. I think we talk about applications like that going back to blockchains. Like we're at the beginning of the beginning of the beginning and I hope that that's where we ultimately get to. And I'm super excited about the work we're doing at Aleo. That, you know, of course I'm very bullish on what we're building, but also I am very confident that ZK is part of the future and I'm confident that the work that we're doing, you know, will help hopefully inspire others to leverage this technology to achieve those things to enable real world applications. **Speaker B:** For sure, man. Like I, my most like, provocative like so, you know, people ask like, okay, well fine, like we, if we believe in blockchain, like what, what's the killer app? Like what's going to change? And like, honestly like you go to someone like a 16Z and they talk about like all of this just like crazy stuff and like particularly crazy stuff that they can capitalize on or someone can capitalize on. But like really like between true believers right here, like the actual killer app that I think that crypto, but like maybe specifically Ethereum is going to be is like passwords, man. Like passwords don't work. And like, look at the way that I need to prove to like a bank or to an employer or to like literally anyone that touches money that I'm a US citizen is to give them my Social Security number. And that is the reason why mine and yours and everyone's Social Security number is available for purchase for like five bucks for like 30 billion of them. And so like, yeah man, I'm with you that like we're, we're in the short term. That's how humans live. Like, we need to be thinking about VCs and incentives and like generating bags and like all this stuff for sure. But and to be clear, like, I. **Speaker A:** Mean it's, it's amazing that you know, ZK has gone in the span of 10 years, it's advanced 50 years. And the reason is that for that is naked greed, right? People want to make money on crypto protocols like Helio, right? Like investors who give us money. And like, I mean, of course, like we, we have many investors obviously care about the long term vision too. But like, look, the reality is like the money that's coming into the space is absolutely going to ultimately enable all these cool things. And so it is, I just like your call out that you know, even though it's like short term, long term, both can be important. It's possible for two things to be true at once, right? And so I very much agree with you there. **Speaker B:** No, and you're right, I was, I was painting with too broad a brush or shooting with shotgun shells when I shouldn't have been because like, yeah man, like I believe in some VCs and I believe in like some projects like Aleo that are trying to transform things. I just like this industry's tough, right? Because like for every ALIO there's like 45 pumped out fund coins, there's two terras, there's a, you know, like there's Sam Bankman fried running around. And so like it's hard not to be like really skeptical and nihilistic about the capitalism side of this. But I appreciate the pushback because you're totally right. Like we are not moving forward without that energy. **Speaker A:** It's the best and worst part of the space. It's the marriage of the Internet and money and like that enables powerful things that most people haven't even been able to imagine up to this point. And it also attracts this all of the scammers that humanity has ever produced and they're in the same place, right? That both are true. And you know, it's unfortunate sometimes to have to live with that. But I do think going back to maybe the beginning of this conversation, like I remember when I first found about bitcoin when Ethereum first launched. I mean even though like, you know, if in the interim we've had SBF and we've had terror and all these bad things, I mean just honestly it's amazing the number of people that use USDC every day. Even if it's not for like salaries, like people do use it. I mean banks now like, like BlackRock has a Bitcoin fund. Like it's crazy. And even like in the ease of use for all these things, like products like uniswap have enabled NFTs which I think kind of went high and then died. But like actually it's like still a lot of use cases for marketing. I mean like compared to 10 years ago, the space is light years bond what it is. And 10 years from now I think we're going to marvel at what we collectively have been able to do and I can't wait. I think it's going to be really cool, man. **Speaker B:** I we need to close this off right now so can immediately go to our calendars to schedule the follow up podcast episode. So man, before I let you go, I just first let me say thank you. This, I'll say it like definitely top five, maybe top one episode. I think it was just like so enlightening and interesting and awesome. So thank you so much for your time and like your energy and like your contributions to this space. **Speaker A:** Thank you very much for saying that. Thank you very much for having me on and letting Me gush about, you know, all of, all of this that I'm very passionate about. And thank you for hosting the show and for informing the wider world of why this technology is important. **Speaker B:** Well, I appreciate it. And before I let you go, if anyone listening is interested in finding you, finding Aleo or if they've been inspired to like really think about what does it mean to be building in blockchain ZK and how to get started, where would you point them towards? **Speaker A:** Yeah, sure. So I think, you know, at the highest level I'll, I'll give a shout out to my, our mutual friend who you mentioned, Anna Rose. She has a great, great show called the ZK Podcast. And from, from there also there's a bunch of ST that she publishes through ZK Study club, et cetera. Those are great resources for people just kind of looking in to learn more about zk. I think with regard to Aleo. So natural starting point is our website, aleo.org if you're a developer. Also you can go to our GitHub organization Alonet, that's the Alienware Foundation's organization on GitHub. We have two repositories there, Snark, VM and Snarkos. You can actually get your hands dirty. Run a node, you can check out Leo, which is our language. We talked about leo-lang.org that's where you can kind of understand and learn a little bit about what it's like to write a program in ZK using our domain specific language. So that's that one. And then lastly, I would say for anybody who's really hardcore interested in the proving as a service kind of, you know, future of hardware, we didn't get time to talk about this, but I run this org called zprize which is all about basically accelerating zero knowledge cryptography. And we just, we publish all the results in. All the results are open sourced and we've had some incredible breakthroughs over the past couple years. So that has its own. We have zprize IO and then also if you go to our GitHub organization, z, I think it's zprize. I think it's just zprize. Well, I'll give you the note and you can put in the link. But anyway, zprize is its own org and all the open source results there are published and we just published the 2023 submissions that are represent some real breakthroughs in ZK proving times and efficiency. So. So for those who are really wonky, you'll have to accelerate GPU implementations of algorithms and GPUs. Have at it. That's it. Yeah. Oh, and I guess lastly for me, I'm on Twitter aprudin08. At some point I'll probably get on Farcaster and other places, but for now, 8prudent08 on Twitter is the place to find me. **Speaker B:** Awesome, man. Well, you already had me before, but fine, we'll do it again. So we've got the Aleo follow up conversation and now we have a Z prize conversation conversation that we need to have. **Speaker A:** Cool. All right, well, sounds like we'll be. We'll be chatting again soon, Rex. I'm looking forward to it for sure, man. **Speaker B:** Thank you so much and have a good rest of your day. **Speaker A:** Thanks.