Paris 2023 Recap with Uma, Zaki and Tarun

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

This week I host a spontaneous catchup with Uma and Zaki. Tarun joins us partway through the interview as well. This was recorded near the end of the EthCC Paris Week, and in it we talk about the topics that were discussed at the events, our favorite talks, our favorite parties, and generally what the sentiment is in the space as we round out the week. Expect some spicy takes off topic, rambles inside scoops, and more. A bottle of fine French champagne may or may not have been polished off during this interview, so hope you enjoy. Now before we kick off the application to attend zkSummit10 is now open. This time around, we will be hosting the event in London. It's happening on September 20th. As always, we aim to bring together the top researchers and engineers working in ZK to share their latest research and new findings. Check out the show notes for the application form. Please note, spots are limited and only folks who go through the application will be considered to attend. So hope to see you there. Now Tanya will share a little bit about this week's sponsors.

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I am here with Zaki, Uma and we might have a special guest coming soon to join us. And we're here in Paris near the end of the EthCC Paris Week. Welcome.

Hello.

Hello.

Alright, so let's kick off with a little recap. You know, we're, we're not quite at the end of the week, but we're far enough in that. I think you might have some thoughts on what's been happening here. So just overall, generally, what's your week been like?

This has been a very sort of intense and chaotic week. There's a conference, there's like infinite side events. Every place of my calendar, like three simultaneous things I was supposed to be at. Paris has been lovely. Paris accommodates a large, you know, 10,000 blockchain people really easily.

Yeah, very similar experience. A lot of very fun side events. I think most people I've talked to have not even been to the conference or maybe don't even have a ticket. And the side events have been really the highlight, which seems to be always the case.

Yeah, like every, I mean, EthCC is an event itself, but I kind of called it the week of it because at this point, I think even during those, that four day period each day will have, I don't know, like 6, 7 other full day conferences happening. Yeah. Did you get a chance to check out any of the other ones?

Yeah, I went to MEV day, which I thought was a really high quality event. There was a lot of discussion around like DEX design Intents, the future of like the transaction and MEV supply chain, which is interesting. And then there was 2 ZK days/events and yeah, those are the ones that I've been to so far.

Yeah, I mean I think a lot of investors also through events have been, is a big thing here. So like of funds that have either invest invested in my projects or I've LPN or like done all had events. And so it was just, and like one of the things that like the VCs have figured out is it's actually better if they like throw their events like parallel to a blockchain event that like everyone else is going to. And so the old thing, which is like everyone fly to San Francisco for 3 days or like this ran, you know, some resort or whatever it's actually like no one really wants to do that anymore. So like a, you know, half day event in parallel to a crypto conference, you know, you can get a lot more in.

That's interesting you say that because we've actually experienced almost the opposite, where like we're so exhausted and you then try to tack on some sort of workshop or retreat, like where you're actually trying to solve a problem and yeah, you're sort of out of it. I guess it works if you put it beforehand.

Yeah, I did a topic specific retreat before

Before yeah, that's fair.

And then did some investor events sort of in parallel.

Yeah, I think before must be the trick because we've tried in the middle...

Before it worked really, really well.

All right. Is this your first time coming to the EthCC Paris Week? What's your impression?

I mean, Paris has been really wonderful. People really warned me about the weather, but from my understanding this year it's really nice. So it's been super nice and I think there's still like a lot of activity going on. Like, even though I think everyone acknowledges, oh, we're in the bear market, there's still a ton of like activity going on, especially at the infra level of the stock. So, and there's a ton of people here and I think a ton of excitement. So it actually feels really good. It's really, it's always very nice to hang out with like a bunch of very excited crypto people. I feel kind of bad for the Parisians, but it's really fun for us.

Yeah, I actually we've really kind of taken over the city or maybe some neighborhoods. I had a very strange experience yesterday where I was in a taxi, there was stuck in traffic and there was these like people biking by in scooting by, and at one point I saw Alex G from Matter Labs, he doesn't know this, but he will maybe now just like scootering by. And then I was like, oh, that's funny. He's there. And on the same car ride I see Aymeric from Celo biking by and then I get out of the cab and I see Jenny Pollock just walking through and I'm just like, like do we own this town at this point? Yeah.

Yeah. Again, Paris has been good because there've been plenty of space and venues and everything for side events. You know, food reservations has been easy to get, so it's just been like a very pleasant.

Yeah and also Uma what you were just saying about like being warned about the weather, I think that was really last year, two year.

Last two years.

So it was like, it was like 90-100 plus.

Oh yeah. In the middle of a city. And like you can see it's not like an, I mean, yes, if you're next to the river it's airy, but most of the streets

I'd gone to an event that was like in this restaurant that had no air conditioning and it was like a greenhouse and it must've been, you know, 115 degrees Fahrenheit inside it was like like a sauna.

So this year, like everyone was warning everyone like, oh, why would you go back there? But to me, this is what Paris in the summer is like in the past when I've been here. It's kind of nice. Alright, let's crack in then to the themes of Paris. What are people talking about here this week?

So I think everyone has like a different experience. Like I sort of cross the world of like L1s, DeFi, Cosmos, Eth, Eth DeFi, Eth staking. I've been talking a lot about, you know, financialization of Eths staking yield and like the general like Eth staking stack that is being built, like where interoperability is going, value capture. And then Intents have been, which I'm sure we're going to talk a lot about have been, the intent apocalypse is continuing.

By the way, as you describe the scenes that you're in, it reminds me, when I was younger I was in a lot of different music scenes. So I was in like the house scene, the drum and bass scene, the indie rock scene, the electra scene. This is very dating me to a certain era in time. And my favorite thing about it was I would like go from party to party in one night and it would be like just a different vibe. Do you feel like that's kind of similar?

Oh, absolutely.

Like at like the, you're going to these different conferences, different dinners, you get to wear a different hat. Can you give some like texture to that? What are the different crowds like?

Well, so Eths staking has revived DeFi and so like DeFi has sort of made a comeback I think at this point in the year. And it's basically been revived by Eth's staking yield and like different things you can do with Eth staking yield in the past and you know, other events this year, like people hadn't really wanted to talk about DeFi. It was actually, I found that like people wanted to talk more about applications in general in Europe than in the US like Eth Prague. It was the same way. It was like people were, but it's even more now and then like the infrastructure scene is like somewhat distinct from applications, DeFi, et cetera.

Like, which is more vibrant right now? Because there's sort of this, I mean I've seen criticism that like, you know, we spent so much time on infrastructure and almost like not enough time on application. There's like not enough users, there's not enough things for people to do. I don't know, maybe I'm not in those circles enough.

I think one of the things that's been exciting is just like in Cosmos a lot of new applications have been launching. So the application space has gotten a lot more exciting. I think in general, applications are coming back is like kind of like a theme I would say, but you know, there's limits to it, right? Like there's only so many things you can build on top of Eth staking yield.

Yeah, I think one of the themes I've seen is like, as Zaki mentioned, like staking and then also restaking like a lot of people are pretty excited about EigenLayer and like what restaking will do and the design space it opens and like the new stuff it brings. It's also funny being here with Zaki who's from like, you know, OG Cosmos and seeing kind of like a lot of those themes and visions around app chains and shared security. But it's all coming to life on Ethereum as well with like app rollups now. Everything is basically an L2. Every app has their own L2 and then yeah, you obviously have like shared security with EigenLayer and restaking. So yeah. How do you feel about that to see like the Cosmos vision, like kind of copy paste it?

Well my vision related to Ethereum has always been, not to kill Ethereum but to Cosmos-ify Ethereum because I've always thought what, like what Ethereum should be is basically Cosmos. But like part of the goal in like building Cosmos is to like lay the rail tracks that like Ethereum would travel and I think over the last 2 years, like we've really seen Ethereum start to travel those. So like I can, I kind of view the like rollups, the rollup stacks, especially more open source rollup stacks, app rollups restaking with EigenLayer is like the Cosmos-ification of Ethereum.

Yeah, very much agreed. And then I think also another interesting theme we've talked a lot about is interoperability, especially in this very multi rollup world, like the interoperability situation is kind of a mess and then you see for example with Cosmos, you guys thought ahead about that and you put it in protocol called the IBC. And then I think in the rollup world there has also been a lot of talk about putting interop in protocol because they are starting to realize it will be a huge problem. And I think you see this with like Polygon's ZK EVM L2 roadmap where they have this unified liquidity layer for their new pole token across all their rollups that's basically going in protocol to their ZK EVM rollup stack. There's been like some talk or proposal of like doing something similar with like shared validity for OP stack and like maybe other ecosystems but yeah, I've heard the words unified liquidity a lot, which I interpret as putting interoperability and protocol.

Yeah, I think the Ethereum people have a lot to learn from the Cosmos experience, which the unified liquidity is not nearly as unified as you think.

Oh yeah.

Like, and Cosmos took on a little bit of I think the Polkadot with the ICM stuff and I think Polkadot took on a little bit of the Cosmos with the XCM stuff. But then you see like all of those ideas being really like brought to light with liquidity in Ethereum. It's wild.

And so Polkadot now supports IBC.

Cool.

So you know, Cosmos and Polkadot are the same thing.

Good. Those two projects had at their, at their start the vision for this. Yeah. In the Ethereum's case it's like adoption post launch post, you know, being very, very live. But with a lot more mind share. And I feel like it's, I mean at least in this snapshot in time it feels like it's very powerful because you have so many people looking at it and working on it. But do we think there's also like openings for chaos because it's kind of piecemeal, like there is no larger architecture. There is no IBC.

Yeah.

I mean unless I guess the zk-rollup might be that

I mean

I dunno

It shocks and horrifies me that like every single rollup is writing their own bridge contract. Why is this not the same bridge contract and then like the validity or fraud proof piece is just swapped based on like what your roll-up is doing. Right. It's insane. Conversations about security have been a big part of this for me too but there's been a lot of industry-wide conversations about security is like a huge gating factor also at this event and like it seems like only a matter of time before there's a major bridge hack in the Ethereum rollup ecosystem. You know, there's been so many near misses.

That really, that's interesting. Because I think the rollup narrative is all about, oh, this is so much more secure. We're inheriting security. Our bridge is totally safe. So I'm curious what makes you say that

Rollups architectures enable in a future in which you can have stronger bridges that do more things that enforce more properties than let's say the like client model of IBC. But that reality is we are nowhere close to it. And so I think that the reality is is that like there's a lot of fragility in the cryptography layers of these bridges in the software stack, especially on the ZK side. There's a lot of fragility in like the smart contracts. So yeah.

I'm not sure if you know this, you probably know this Uma, but I don't know if you know this Zaki. The fact that there's like kind of an, like a huge conversation going on right now in ZK about security and that exact thing. Like each one of these systems potentially using different systems. So it's different types of rollups, different types of like using ZK you're yes, you're auditing them with like a pretty small group of auditors who can even handle this tools to audit that are still being developed, not quite there and they're going to start having a lot of value attached to them. Like I'm nervous that like there is something that happens in one of these EVM kind of zkEVM thing where it's kind of disastrous and it casts like shade on the whole scene. It's definitely something I'm worried about and I don't really know what to do about it.

Well I think Vitalik has a really good pragmatic take on this, which he, I think him and maybe Justin Drake have written about this on Eth Research where they really advocate for two factor kind of authentication for zk-rollups. So you have the ZK proof, maybe you've even have multiple proofs and then you also have some sort of TEE or SGX based solution. One really interesting thing is, I know FlashBots is really interested in using SGX for Suave and they're doing a lot of work there. And so I think like they're going to do a lot of work there and I think SGX will become, I know it's controversial, but like in the short term at least we'll become like a good kind of like two factor stop gap for a lot of these security issues.

And then I think one really nice thing about ZK is that at the end of the day, these ZK circuits are just functions, right? They're like F(X) equals Y. There's a really clear spec. And so compared to a smart contract actually for a ZK circuit, you can have many different implementations because the spec is so well specified and it's a pure function. Whereas like for a DeFi protocol like Oiler or something, they're state. So like it's hard to imagine how a two factor would really work there. But for ZK you can have many different implementations. I kind of view it as like client diversity and I think that's something that also the ZK industry, maybe they're not talking about it a lot. I've heard it a little bit, but I think will become more prevalent and more important.

So I was actually, I had a conversation recently with an auditor on the show and we talked about like under constrained ZK systems, which is like, that's a place where vulnerability can happen, but that sometimes teams will do that because there's sort of like there there's going to be some sort of validator set that's going to make choices about governance, about upgrades, about stuff like that. So like there is some backstop that is supposed to be decentralized, but that, you know, means they can be a little bit more loose and fast with some of the constrained stuff. I just don't, I don't know if like, that still doesn't make me feel super confident.

I do think as someone who has deployed like a ZK protocol to production, like our protocol or ZK like client is running in production, honestly running it in production feels a lot better to me than having to manage the keys of a multisig because you have that like math and cryptography. So yes, while thinking about circuit security is like stressful, I think the alternative is that, oh, you have like, I don't know, some like maybe 3 out of 5 multisig. You have to worry about keeping the keys safe. You have to worry about who has access to your AWS account or wherever you're running it, you have to worry about not losing the keys and so I think compared to the trade-off actually, like if you just even viscerally feel it deploying a system, it feels a lot better than just like a pure multisig. and I do think like it's important to not be purist. Like I think it's important to have like both kind of like this validator set plus ZK or like ZK plus TEE plus, you know, all these methods like security is very additive and I think that's like important to, you know, be okay with and think it's valuable.

I actually want to talk a little bit about the big announcement by Gnosis. Because are you, I'm just curious like Gnosis release this Gnosis Pay and I know that Succinct is now it's deployed, right? It's part of the bridge. It's not the full bridge. This is what I kind of learned recently. It's like there's a number of multisig signers, but now Succinct, a ZK agent is one of them. Yeah. Are you also involved in the, in the new product?

I actually don't know too much about Gnosis Pay. I think it's super cool. I think it is like one of those applications that we really need. So I'm really excited they're working on it and personally, like we use Gnosis Chain a lot as like our testnet, so I really like using the chain. But yeah, we are involved, Succinct is involved in securing the Gnosis bridge. So like Die is locked up on Ethereum, it's minted as xDie, that's like the gas token on Gnosis. And then we help secure that through our ZK like client but yeah, Gnosis Pay from my understanding is like an L2 on top of Gnosis to make it even cheaper but yeah, it seems really cool product-wise. I want to try it out.

Yeah. Zaki, you and I got kind of like pilled by Gnosis pilled last time in Prague.

Yeah. I continue to be

Friederike was telling us all the stuff they were doing and we're like, how is it that you're doing all of these things?

The infrastructure that they've built is like seems like a breakthrough. Like it's the ability to like actually have something that you can use at a payment terminal. Like just like boop your credit card, boop your phone and have a signature get relayed like through like an account abstraction. Like you're basically you're integrating account abstraction directly into the payment infrastructure. Which is just such an amazing piece of infrastructure building from the best infrastructure building team in the game, which has been Gnosis.

Cool. Any other themes? Maybe themes even like outside of what you normally pay attention to?

I think just it's been so reinforced that L2s are the new thing. I think in Ethereum world, like so many people have adopted the OP Stack, they're making their own rollups. Like especially in the infrastructure world, it just feels more and more consensus that building your own L two is like the way to go, which is very interesting.

Binance.

Now the story is, you know, Mantle and Bybit and Base both doing OP Stack

Is OP Stack is the new Cosmos SDK?

Yeah.

Okay. It is the is there, but like as we say this, all the other big L2 projects, I mean doesn't zkSync, have a new thing coming out? Arbitrum probably is going to do it.

Yes. Arbitrum, Orbiter.

So they all created a Cosmos SDK/substrate/whatever like this building environment framework.

Yes. There's a building environment framework for every

To a roll kit, I guess falls under that category.

Yes which brings the cosmos SDK to Celestia to well to rollups in general. I mean, so like that's very much the narrative here but DYDX chain is the other side of this. Like, which is an L2, which was an early adopter of an L2. Which said, I've gone to the limits of what we can do in the L2 world and now we need a Cosmos chain.

Well also I think another theme that we haven't talked about is speaking of the limits of the L2 world. I think there's a lot of DA layers that are popular right now. Celestia, Avail. I know Espresso I think is also going, to

Eigen DA

Eigen DA is another one. Yeah. Espresso is also going to make their own DA layer. And really, like the true cost of making a rollup on Ethereum is putting your DA on Ethereum. That is the main cost. And yeah, there's like, seems to be a ton of new solutions for DA for these like validiums that are settled to Ethereum, have their off-chain DA which I think is pretty interesting.

What I would say about that. I think, another theme that I've seen on this event and in the future in other events this year is the block space surplus theme. Like we have so much more block space now.

Than we thought we would.

Than demand is. Like, you know, you have these roll-ups as a service. Yeah. You have these Alt DA layers. Like we can produce petabytes of block space, right. Like so much block space now. No one has a good answer really for like, what's going to consume that. Like the recurring theme is gaming. I know like everyone's

Oh you need something that uses a lot.

The games are going to come and the games are going to rescue us for the block space surplus.

It's so funny, I have heard from other people that there's so much happening in games. I don't know if I've just been at the wrong events or looked in the wrong direction at a certain time. For some reason it has not hit my radar correctly. Like I've seen cool experiments or I'm, mean maybe this is something I should be exploring on the show. So like, I feel like maybe there's just places I've not been looking.

On the gaming front. I think like one of the biggest things that like we in the blockchain space don't really appreciate is like how much bigger gaming is GamesCon, which is going to be in Cologne in Germany in like a month. That's like 400,000 people.

Oh my God.

Right. Like we were like our like 10,000 blockchain people showed up at Paris and we like, took over the city and like a GDC or a GamesCon or like these things are like orders of magnitude larger. So like, I think like one of the things that like is interesting about the gaming stuff and like, there seems to be like quite a bit of innovation and there's projects in in the Cosmos ecosystem that are going like Saga and Argus that are going after these markets and like, they don't make a big splash here because like, what's the point? Like, oh, like we like have, it's not like DeFi where like a couple hundred accounts can move a hundred million dollars. Like gaming is going to be, is like the long tail of users. So if it works, it's not going to be because we, like, we convinced the crypto people to use this. It's like we went to GamesCon we went to that like gamer audience. We got on people's Xboxes, we got on people's phones. Like, and that like onboarded it.

Except sadly right at this very moment, the word crypto in gaming, in gaming land apparently is quite tainted. I don't think they like it. I don't think that's what I heard. I think they find it quite yucky and yeah, I think there needs to, I mean, I think for that to happen, the thing is the marriage makes so much sense because those games are creating their own economies anyways. Like they're creating these little, you know, inner game trading, all this stuff and it can get kind of sophisticated and it's totally just living on one company's servers. It's kind of ridiculous. The users don't own it. The game shuts down at some point. People have like put so much time and energy into this. It's quite sad. It's like having a career that like, at some point's just taken away from you. I mean, gaming is maybe not the healthiest, but you know what I mean? Like, I mean,

It's a huge part of so many people's lives,

It's so much time into it and it's kind of crazy. Like when, but at the same time I think crypto went too far on the other side. It was like, let's gamify it and pay you immediately and you're just going to like mine and farm and do these things like in game just to like get immediate tokens. And it was just such a like immature model. You need an economy, you need a community, you need like people who give a shit about what you're doing.

I mean, a lot of, a lot of feedback that Sommelier has gotten from like investors is that like, we should be gamifying it aggressively. And I felt that it's too early.

Yeah.

Trust is more important. Yeah. Than like, oh, like look here's, but like I am thinking also of things we could do.

Yeah. Although gamifying what you're talking about sounds more like gamifying Robin Hood or something. It's like you're gamifying financial app

Robin is quite gamified,

But I think of, I think of games proper and like they hate crypto, but the combination is so inevitable and yet they have this sort of bad taste in their mouth that we need to fix.

Yeah. They hate crypto now, but I feel like all this stuff they'll like crypto when it, you know, has its time in the sun again. So I feel like they're sent in general, I've seen this, I live in San Francisco and like, you know, I go to parties and I tell people I work in crypto and I get these like, horrified books. Like honestly people are quite rude about like, oh, what is crypto? But then you just know that all these people, you know it whenever like crypto takes off again, they'll be like, oh my God like crypto's amazing. And in general, I feel like the outside sentiment tracks like crypto's adoption quite like closely. So I'm sure they'll they can have their mind change or like, I'm very optimistic about that.

So what worries me about is like the blockchain surplus is arriving today, like now, right? Like Celestia is launching soon. EigenLayer is launching soon. Like this massive surplus is like coming, right? Like right now I believe gaming can work, but it has to be like a little bit more organic. Like, you can't just like knock out a partnership with some giant game dev company or like some giant publisher like Activision or whatever and be like, oh, we've just like produced enough transaction volume to like, to like fill the blocks. Right? I mean I've been following what's been happening like on SWE right. And right now like, oh, they have like this like very simple like mobile phone puzzle game that is like producing an enormous amount of transaction volume and it's great. Like, you know, they have an enormous support amount of block space and they have to find something to do it and they've created a little game that does it and they have like, you know, tokenized incentives and they've gamified things and stuff like that but

It's still short term, it's mobile

It feels very

Short term like mobile games. Yeah. Yeah.

Whereas like, you know what teams like Argus and Topology and I'm sure there are like lots of others are, Lattice, Keystone. I think there's like, all of these teams are like really trying to build like authentic experiences.

The thing about that authentic experience though, I feel like what has to happen is it's so hard to work in the short term mentality of like create company, get investors, get return in X years short term, like that kind of thing. Like if you really had like the blockchain native game growing over time, you'd have to have people doing it for nothing for a really long time. And like genuinely having people who are just like into it. Because that's like, this is sort of going back to my music scenes or whatever, it was like very indie. It was very like, you had to have people who were genuinely into it because that was what made it cool and it took a long and the long, it's almost like the longer it was underground and before becoming cool, the more like backstory you had.

I mean, I could actually give a, something closer to the blockchain. It's like the crypto an the cryptoanarchists. The Bitcoin early people, they worked under the radar for many, many years before they were recognized. And I think that legacy adds sort of like strength to a community.

Oh yeah.

And in the environment we're in right now, you want the big hit real quick. I mean then you sell out immediately. Like you're going to get the pressure to gamify so quickly and then you don't have any of that backstory. You don't have the legend, you don't have the Messiah who disappears. You don't have any of that.

A lot of this stuff is descended from the Dark Forest team, which, you know, does have a lid of that organic mythology

That definitely had it.

They're all just descended from the Dark Forest team right

I mean, they never monetized. I mean they did some NFTs, but I don't think they,

They never monetized, they monetized by like, starting companies.

Well, and do 0xPARC. I mean that's so kind of giving, it's very altruistic I feel still. Like it's about kind of like funding other people.

What I'll also just say about the gaming stuff is so like, I, I do think that we're going to have, like, I think there are applications coming that can like, like Gnosis Pay, like gaming, like that can like actually consume this massive amount of block space that we've created. But I think there's a gap.

I want to bring it back for a minute to Paris. What was the best talk that you've seen?

I am going to more talks at the like latter half of the week because like, there's a lot of Cosmos stuff. So I'm doing like Osmocon, Modular, Nebula, which are all like sort of Cosmos adjacent. And so I'll go to more talks there. Ethland, I didn't go to that many talks.

There was a lot of panels, which I think I find pretty interesting because it feels like more interactive, more live, like more fresh, more spicy also. So MEVA was actually just all panels and yeah, those were really fun. But it wasn't like talks.

I was also, I did some of the talks for DeFi Security Summit, there were some really good talks about, you know, trying to improve, like the way we interact with audits. Like, you know, how hard is it to like know what code is actually got audited? There was a really good talk on that. Yeah. Like DeFi Security Summit I think was like one of the sleeker events that like some subset of the population got to, but like didn't get hyped up. There were no like big fancy announcements, but like a lot of conversations about security in Paris.

I think another thing has been, account abstraction seems to be really breaking through. Like Vitalik gave a talk about it, but like, I think we have to come up with something new to call it, which may be just intents, which might be better branding, but the sort of like, you know, augmented wallets right? Is a big part of it. And like the too many clicks problem. The too much waiting so you need, so like UX I think has also been like a big, there's probably more of a focus on UX now than I think in, than in previous areas of blockchains.

Yeah. Strongly agree with that. Yeah, I have heard a lot of stuff about account abstraction and then also like the UX of interop and I think everyone is kind of now on the same page that it really sucks. Like it needs fixing. Whether that's like putting it in protocol or using account abstraction or whatever to fix that I think has been definitely another theme, which I think is really positive for like actually getting real adoption.

All right. We did best talk. What about best party, it could be best party, best crowd, but it could also be like best venue.

I mean the food has been amazing in Paris

Just generally across the board.

Yeah. I didn't go to any of the Catacombs parties, but those were pretty cool. I just like watched, I saw the photos, but there were a bunch of Catacombs events. You know, Paris is generally I think a pretty good city with a lot of good venues in it. And I think like we've had a lot of like classy less generic blockchain events.

I love how in Paris you can be walking around doing a walking meeting, you turn the corner and there's this like very historic, very beautiful, like amazing building and you're like, oh my God. And you didn't know about it. And it's literally every corner.

So there was a party I'd wanted to go to but didn't make, which was in the Eiffel Tower.

The zkUnconference tomorrow is in the Eiffel Tower.

Whoa. I like, that's where, I mean I've been around it in the past. I've not gone up to it in a really long time, but I was like, oh my God, there's something you can do in it. But I didn't make it. I did go to the EigenLayer drinks dinner, which had a view. It was like the venue was fine, but like the view from the venue was like the river and the Eiffel Tower and it was all green and it was blue sky. It was just incredible.

I mean, because I got here early, I got to do Bastille day in Paris

Oh the Bastille Day. Yeah. This is their big celebration.

Their big celebration. They do like huge fireworks show in front of the Eiffel Tower. Like the French take fireworks very seriously. They like budget for fireworks at like the federal level. Yeah. Like it is a matter of honor that like the Paris Bastille Day fireworks show be ridiculous. And so that

Wait, someone just walked in

In a puff of smoke

In a puff of smoke. We didn't say his name three times, but we could've

We're not in New York which is a city that is literally covered in smoke nowadays.

I know, why.

I mean, so we

No, but not anymore, isn't this over?

Not just Canada, who I think we need some reparations from personally. Like I distinctly think the US deserves reparations from Canada for all the smoke. But secondly no, New York is in this very weird state with weed legalization where they like the state fucked up and they didn't come up with the licensing agreements, which was the tax law for how to split the revenue. Then basically they'd said it wouldn't be illegal for six months to be unlicensed and sell weed. And there's been this mad frenzy to buy any retail space and turn it into a smoke shop. Oh my God. But also the smoke shops are all selling drugs, like in general.

Oh dear. Oh dear.

So it's like, it's like everything went from, like, everything was illegal to nothing is illegal in like a very large city overnight. So it's been kind of crazy.

Welcome to the show, Tarun. Very nice.

Sorry for the trivia.

Very nice intro there.

I'm sure it had a lot to do with the rest of the episode.

We, we had not been talking about New York. We had actually been talking about Paris. But yeah, welcome. It's nice to see you.

Thank you. It's good to be here

Just to kind of bring you up to date on what we've been talking about, we have done a little bit of a Paris recap, talked about some of the themes, but now I'm really curious, what's your Paris recap now that you're here?

I read somewhere that someone wrote this on Twitter, but I thought it was a great summary, which is like the future of crypto is off-chain is like a lot of the announcements have been like pseudo off-chain stuff. Like there are things that are on-chain components, but they're like and settled on-chain, but there's a lot of off-chain logic around them.

That's probably so true. And for the short term.

I've been thinking about it. I like, I think a theme of like the talks I'm doing later in the week is that like kind of we figured out a lot of the limits of the on-chain pieces and like preconsensus, peer-to-peer layer, like order flow, Intent dissemination, like all of these things are like the future and so yes, I agree with that take that like trying to do the off-chain things but get them to be decentralized, to get them to be constrained. To get them to be secure I think is is a big because like the past of crypto is off-chain too, which is like everybody uses centralized exchanges.

So I'm going to pause at a spicy question for you. From my perspective at at least it is spicy, which is the idea of doing a lot more off-chain logic that settles or has some proof of correctness on-chain is actually really bad for the Cosmos app chain thesis because in some ways the chain itself needs to be like as secure as possible for the settlement. You can't have like 500 chains with the varying levels of security and doing like all the off-chain logic and treating it at one-to-one on many different chains. Right. Like doing the same thing on different apps

This is the bull case for Polkadot

Bull case for rollups in some sense, right? Because like they're still going back, but, but like yeah. How do you feel about that? Do you think the off-chain version of the world impacts the pure app chain? I call them the pure and adulterated app chain thesis. The adulterated one is the rollup one because it's not the true

One of the things though that we've seen right now is that the people who are like flexing, decentralized off-chain the hardest are like people like DYX who needed the Cosmos stack in order to decentralize the off-chain components that no one else could give them how to so like

But isn't their order matching still done off-chain?

Yes. That's what I'm saying is, and they're using the Cosmos stack to facilitate decentralizing that off-chain system. I think there's some version of the app chain future that like is being, is becoming less relevant because of like moving to this like intent centric world and stuff like that. But you have a lot of people building, like they need a toolkit for building decentralized off-chain pieces and the Cosmos toolkit becomes very relevant there.

Can I ask you one of the questions we just were talking about best party and that could be because of crowd or location.

Honestly, maybe it's because I've been in this industry long enough now.

No parties are good for you

I kind of am like all crypto people kind of have shitty parties

Oh no.

They're just like, I feel like the NFT

Was better?

Rage was a scourge on this industry because it allowed people to go for like the least common denominator where they like they went for the shittiest anything as long as it was golden looking and so

And it stuck do you think it still there? Don't you think the tide went out with that?

I don't think the the party planning event planners have adjusted. I think they're still living as and during these parties as if it's like, and if it just doesn't feel, it feels like pre-NFT boom was a different universe, then trashiness and like Miami-ness was like kind of somehow became acceptable everywhere. Always. I was like

Yeah yeah

With the Lambos.

When Arthur Hayes showed up with Lambos.

So I don't know what you're talking about exactly. Was it classy? Because I do not remember that time.

No this is theoretically a developer conference, right?

EthCC, ah fair

Mainnet and consensus were are like money conferences.

Yeah.

Right. Money conferences have been trashy since the beginning of history.

Okay.

That's almost their definition.

Okay.

But developer conferences being trashy only it really was accelerated by NFT.

Okay this a bit of a question and I really don't mean this in a bad way, but it's like, is EthCC still a developer conference itself? Because I think there's deeper technical conferences happening around it. I just don't know if it's there.

I can't say because I haven't been to EthCC, but I feel like all the events and side events we've been to have been very developer focused so yes. There, there's literally not one app specific side event that I felt like was super popular. Correct me if I'm wrong.

I'm not sure I totally agree with that. I think that there's, Paris still has a lot of like nebulous stuff like Web3 fashion shit and like there was like tons of parties of that form

One product like that

I was not invited to the Web3 fashion parties.

Me neither.

And there's a lot of like that type of stuff that, like, I think those of us who are focused on adding numbers instead of adding apes, are kind of avoid on purpose

Is there anyone here who edit who's into apes? Actually? Like you lived in New York, man, you were like the closest to this thing

I know. This is what, this is why I'm saying I take, I can see across the chasm of like, this exists and we are all very oblivious because these things are happening, but we are just like not, it's not

Do you think we're sliding towards it though?

No, I just think that like the trash, like remember like the event planners for these things are shared and a lot of them are picking the same venues, they're picking the same whatever fucking shit DJ and it's

Let's not shit on the event planners, man, I'm an event planner. It's hard

No no no. True true true. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

It's hard. You're trying to do events in different cities, like all over the world. It's very, very challenging

Yeah. It's that's fair. It's fairs fair. Sorry, I didn't mean to, to, to give them a hard time as much as the fact that there's a lot of repeated effort.

Okay, now I I have a more superficial question. What was the best swag on that theme? We actually have

I find swag cringe. There's actually like one amazing party I went to where they said, you're not allowed to wear any company logos, t-shirts or whatever. And there still were all these people doing that

Oh wow.

I thought that was funny to me. I was like, I was like, wow. It became like the burned of banned books.

Okay, so you just dissed swag. But wait

I was planning on going to that party, but then I got back to my hotel room to change and then I went to sleep. Okay.

Okay. But can I still ask the question to the non-swag hater? I mean I think if teams are trying that's cool. I have, I think I mean Uma and I've seen a cool

Socks are always handy and useful.

For sure.

Water bottles always handy and useful.

I take it back. There's actually one so swag piece that I thought was very on point and very good, which was at MEV day which is hosted by Frontier. There was a sunscreen from MEV Protect and I thought that was just like both useful. So brand, so like accretive and not trashy in that you like look like you're in San Francisco.

I didn't actually see this for real, but I saw like on Twitter with like some random Twitter person, they tweeted like, what was it? What what are they like here in France? The little colorful macaroons with scroll on it. Yeah, that was cool. I like that.

Yeah, food is great.

Yeah. Yeah,

Food is good. And the EthCC did its soap.

Oh, soap, okay. And I think, wait, we saw a really good one. Uma and I saw a good one.

There was these EigenLayer, Nike Air Force ones that were, had the EigenLayer logo on it. Yeah, Tarun's cringing, but I thought it was really cool.

I thought it was cool too. Can we, you know why it was cool? Because it just looked like cool design and you did not notice the logo until you looked closely. It was actually cool. I want that now.

Yeah. I saw someone from EigenLayer with it and I think as long as the one I saw had no text, but then I saw a picture online that looked like it had text and I would,

You don't want that

I don't the text one, the text is like a little too

But the thing is, if you have no text, why is that company, how does the company justify?

It's an amazing logo

Well, just the colors you have to have, I mean the, EigenLayer words logo. It doesn't have to have the tagline maybe

Yeah. You know, I might be the wrong person to talk about this. It's like my company gives out swag. I have absolutely nothing to do with what

You had actually Gauntlet had a cool orange cap. I saw that.

I just like, I never want to wear it. Sorry, I know Zaki is here, sitting here wearing a piece of swag that he can describe.

I'm just, you know, the Sommelier swag distributor. I just have a bag of Sommelier swag that you're

It's in a Near bag. That's amazing.

But Tarun the other day you were telling me about some kinds of swag you really like, which are kind of like bags that like middle aged women in New York would be carrying around.

Yeah. So I love the irony of, of wearing carrying bags, although I hide the logo as much as possible. In fact, sometimes I put duct tape of the logo and I'd rather, and I like carrying bags that just look like you're going out to the beach and

Or to yoga

Or to yoga or something. Yeah. And just because, it feels very ironic to do that, but I think some of the best swag is candles.

Ooh. Although you have to get good one. I've seen those. But like cheap candles?

No, not cheap candles

You like don't want that either

You want like a BYREDO or something like that. You don't want some, yeah,

I'm actually sitting next to an Anoma bag. It says Intent-centric architecture. And actually this is a topic we have not fully dived into on this show yet. And I feel like since we're all here, we might as well do it. We're talking about themes of the week, things that have been talked about. Would you say, I know that like at the research day, that was the

Well before we even talk about Research Day, Uma got a shoutout from Brian Armstrong for her talk about Intents on Twitter.

Intents are going mainstream. A public company CEO knows about Intents and Suave. We're really going to make it

Crazy. But yeah, let's kick this off, shall we?

I mean, there's no better person to start than Uma I think.

Yeah, I think so Zaki was the original one who intent pilled me. And just from a group chat

Zaki is a super spreader.

So at Succinct we've been thinking a lot about interop, better ways to deal with interop, mostly from a security perspective, but then also from a UX perspective. And when Zaki had mentioned this intents concept I just went down the rabbit hole and it seemed, it's one of those ideas that seems like more and more obvious in hindsight in a way. I think you saw throughout this conference a lot of teams converging towards it. Like UniswapX for example, is this like Intent-based RFQ or request for quote for you know, trades. And then I think Skip recently released this like Cosmos DEX Aggregator, which kind of also looks like an Intent-based system. So you see it across ecosystems, you see it across domains, you see it like single domain. You see it across rollup and so it seems like a lot of those ideas that we were even discussing like 2-3 months ago at that research day where there was a talk I gave on Intents and account abstraction and Suave and cross chain bridging and how all those things are related and how all those things are important for UX.

A lot of those like visions are coming to life, which is like actually really cool to see.

I have such a question here because when you talked about the rabbit hole, because like I think for a lot of people the intent conversation, research, the rabbit hole is your talk. So what was and like other talks that happened on Research Day, so like what were you looking at in building this? Like who were you reading?

I think I was reading like Zaki's messages in group chats. And I think also a lot of it was just, I think I was in this really interesting spot thinking a lot about interoperability. But then I think also just personally I care a lot about UX and we'd been thinking a lot about like how existing wallets suck and existing bridges suck. And so I was just at this intersection of like, personally I was like, oh my God, I have to bridge to operate my protocol and I dread it. And then, oh, also I like work at the infra layer. So I just was thinking a lot about those ideas. And then honestly it was a lot of like me and my co-founder just getting in a room and like jamming and being like this cannot be the way, like this has to be better. But yeah, there wasn't a lot of like source material. Like to this day I think a lot of people ask me, oh what should I read about intents? And yeah, I think the talk is a good start but there isn't a lot of written material, so I hope that changes.

There is Georgios' post on the Paradigm blog, which is a

That's new.

Which is a very, very good intro to Intents.

This is since those talks though, right?

Since those talks

Like in the last few months?

Yes. There's Georgios' Paradigm Intents blog that came out after the talks. I mean I think like if people ask where like this Intents conversation came from Anoma started 2 years ago. Like Chris Goes who you know, built the system that like OpenSea used for their marketplace, which is essentially like a proto intents system. He built IBC. Yeah. Like he was like two years ago Zaki Intents and I was like, I don't really know what you're talking about but like really for me what it was was the experience building Sommelier because I'd never built an end user dApp before. Like Tom is my,

So different

Is like my first end user dApp. And then we like realize this enormous problem that people had, which is like, I want to use your app, but I don't like, how do I bridge, how do I, like where do I go? And like all the answers that we've given people are like, people can like struggle their way through it, but like, and like so people use the app, but like you can't just like expect a like,

And you feel like the intents centric architecture, something like an intent would be better in a system like that, but you can't do that yet.

Yeah. And I think like one of the other things that I think is intriguing about UniswapX, which is their new RFQ system is it very much is like in my mind of like what you could build without solving any of the researchy problems around intent. So like we have like the research problems of intents are like programmable privacy, there's like a programmable privacy problem that we don't really have a solution to. There are like, how do you do price discovery? How do you do like multi chain settlement? Like all those things are like the research problems of intents and like, I think Uniswap, I think what things that's like intriguing about UniswapX is just like build the thing that like you don't have to solve any of those research problems to build and like put that out there

Just want to do a quick call out because what you're talking with Chris's work, like we actually Tarun and I just did an episode.

Came out today I think.

Yeah or like this week. And yeah, so I'm going to, we're going to put the link to that if people want to hear a little more of that backstory.

One thing I guess that's worth calling out about this is intents do feel like the first piece of infrastructure that people care about from purely UX reasons versus some like theoretical efficiency gain reason, like most things that people have always proposed infrastructure-wise are like efficiency gain or it's cheaper gas wise or it's easier to do X Y or Z action. But I think the interesting thing about the intent architecture in some ways is it has a lot of empirical proof that it works. Even though like the empirical proof it works is not the one that people would cite. People usually would cite the fact that 0x, which did or has still runs RFQs is sort of, you know, non controversially has done significantly less volume than non intent based systems and indexes and so people always point out that as something not working, but the fact that OpenSea worked for many years is a much better signal that like this is an architecture that people like.

Now one interesting thing about Chris is I feel like he did not come up with this architecture for UX reasons. He came up with it for completely opposing reasons. In fact, it's research day talk gives his like philosophical reasons for why he thinks this architecture is the best. And it's exactly almost anti UX. He has like an example in that talk of a problem that finding a fixed point of a particular system and the finding a fixed point of that system is actually like very hard computational complexity problem. Like, it's like the opposite of UX. So it's like funny how something that started for pure reasons is actually now being co-opted for UX reasons, but perhaps that's a much better way of getting it built.

UX is the go-to market for intents? No, I do think it does help with scalability though. Like, I feel like a lot of the reasons Uniswap people cited, they did UniswapX was for moving a lot of the computation off-chain and like, you know, saving users gas costs and things like that. And the RFQ system implicitly does do this, right? Because you have these like sophisticated actors who are the fillers or the quotas who you know, are monitoring the price on Binance or wherever else, and they're very sophisticated. They're quoting you a price and they're doing a lot of off-chain logic. So I do actually think it does help quite significantly with, you know, scalability and basically leveraging off-chain compute to do like on-chain settlement.

A lot of the problems that we'll get are like going to, I think going to be like the key features of like sort of blockchain development in the next 3 years have not previously really been hyped up. Like I think a lot of the problems are going to be things like, oh, like how do you do exception handling? Like how do you do like, oh, this bridge, oh, like the chain halted or the bridge halted or like the key disappeared. You know, how do you deal with exception handling? How do you deal with routing? Like, hey, like my portfolio, like I hold this set of assets, but I want to use this app and I need to use, I need to like get into the entry asset. So like each Sommelier seller has like an entry and exit asset, which is like, might be a stablecoin or Eth or or Weth or something like that. But you have a user and they hold like all of these like liquid stake token like LSTs and all this stuff. How do they transform that? How do they do that in an efficient manner? These are going to be the big problems rather than just like, how do we make more block space? Because I think like we basically have made more block space than anyone really needs right now.

Yeah, and I think an interesting point, sorry, it's a tiny tangent, but it's towards this view of exception handling, which is the multi chain bridge hack. I put maybe bridge in quotes hack in quotes also. But I think it's kind of this type of case where like imagine if the contracts had some exception handling on bridge keys compromised. We actually have never really thought about this in this industry at all. Especially because multi chain whole thing was like, we use MPC, don't ask who the signers are. And I think like one important thing to think about is people building this technology is there's also people who can like misuse it.

Why? How? Who? Who misuses it?

Well they're using it for multi-chain misused acronym MPC to be like, oh look we're really safe. We're doing some MPC thing across multiple signers. And of course you have no way of even knowing how if all the signers are the same computer, let alone like same subnet, right?

Yeah, I think this is why ZK is actually really nice because I mean I think we should strongly advocate or it should be totally unacceptable to have a ZK circuit that's closed source obviously it's like a smart contract. It's like basically the same as like any solidity code but yeah, with ZK you can't really misuse it. Like anyone can look at your circuit and find bugs you, because with MPC, a lot of the correctness of it relies on like the infrastructure which is generally has to be closed sourced, right? Like, oh what AWS box you're running your MPC signer on. Whereas with ZK, if your circuit's open source then you can't abuse it this easily. So I think for example, combining ZK plus a multisig or ZK plus MPC or ZK plus MPC plus SGX or something, that's when it gets like really powerful as just like an additional layer that can't be abused as easily.

Yeah, I mean I guess from your vantage point do you think this, I'm going to keep calling it a hack even though like it obviously it's like this weird security incident, that's probably a better word, this security incident, which you know, had a ton of side effects where there were a ton of protocols where we're just like, yo, we're shutting down because like we just never can get out of the bad debt we have. So yeah, in some sense A) one version of the world is sort of what Zaki was intimating too, where there's like exception handling to particular types of events across bridges. The other is, which is like the klugy kind of duct tape and bailing wire thing, but it will, you can do it faster and the other is like, hey, we get everyone to use ZK. So what's your view on like, you know, in the 1 to 5 year timeframe, how that changed for both of you?

I mean, I'm obviously really biased, but I think hey, let's just all use ZK is obviously the correct thing. I think with exception handling, I don't know how you handle an exception where it's like, oh, now billions of dollars are gone. Like sure you can handle the exception, but the conclusion might still be the same that, oh, our protocol is like completely done. Like it doesn't really matter. And so I just am always like advocating for let's add more layers of security and like make this stuff more secure so that, because usually in the case of hacks, they are very catastrophic and so it doesn't really matter if you handle the exception or not

For sure. But there are things like halting particular markets in response to when the key signing stops happening. Like the the threat response stuff is like actually still quite poor in some of these contracts. Yeah because everyone is gas optimizing, so they're like, oh no, no, no, we can't add this like extra hatch. And my point is like I think there is a lot of value in it, it's just not

Yeah. But if the hack can be atomic, then you're really

For sure like the Beanstalk hack, there's no way around that, right?

Yeah, exactly. And I think there is actually a lot of value to, so I think there's arguments for it. I think there's a lot of value to atomic composability. So I do think it's kind of annoying to have a lot of this exception handling because if you've ever like programmed an even like JavaScript where you have to like do this async and wait and then handle the exception with a try-catch, it just all gets very ugly very quickly. So it is nice to assume, oh, things are fine. One thing I have thought about is like, what if you had a rollup where there, you know, you could fraud proof certain exit conditions. Like for example, oh, none of the protocols are hacked and you kind of have atomic composability between all the apps in that domain, but then the domain itself has kind of like this optimistic challenge period or things like that. Like maybe that's interesting to think about as like a research exercise. But I think it's very tricky because often in DeFi, like the hacks happen and it's like in one transaction all the money is gone. It's not this continuous strip and there it doesn't really help if you like, if you can pause the protocol, it could be because by the time you can, it's done.

I think one thing that the multi chain hack has been a great example of is the way in which the security of your system ends up being reduced to like your like largest or most dominant bridge, right? It doesn't matter that like phantom is like consensus secure. The fact that like, it's still like making blocks securely doesn't matter because like everybody lost all of their money because the bridge was what represented everyone, like all of the meaningful assets on-chain.

I think the other thing I want to say about the security incident, as Tarun has reminded me, say you have a token that you know, you're bridging across a bunch of chains through like one bridge. I think that's really silly and I think there really needs to be a standard for having like a cross-chain ERC20 or a cross chain asset that you can be compatible with many different bridges so that you're not kind of like paying, you know, you're not kind of like a slave to any one bridge or any one like security model and so I think that's like really important to make that a standard going forward because my one worry is like, okay, multi chain got hacked and now people are going to move to like having their assets secured by one other bridge that is equally susceptible by the way to the same security properties. And that's really dangerous for the ecosystem in general. Like if that happens, like I think it's dangerous to crypto in general. So I think builders should just be really aware of like the security properties they're assuming. And then also I think as an industry or in the interop space, we should make this like more of a standard so that you're compatible to many different bridges. There's not vendor lock-in because it is really hard to have good security properties of any one bridge.

And before Anna concludes, I want to say we normally don't have so much doomerism like ZK security doomerism on the MPC or ZK, but this was an incident where it deserved to be talked about

We have been talking about it actually before you arrived

Oh, you talked about multi-chain?

No. We talked about ZK security.

Okay, cool. Yeah, that's definitely, yeah. Awesome.

I wish I could keep talking forever, but I think we all actually have

Forever is a long time.

We all have. True, but we also all have dinners, things we're supposed to go to. So I think it's a really good time to wrap. Thank you all for coming and doing this sort of like the Paris EthCC week roundup, sharing all the ideas and themes, hope hopefully giving folks a bit of a sense for like what's been happening here, what the conversations were like. So yeah, thanks so much.

Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Thanks.

My pleasure.

Cool. And I want to say a big thank you to the podcast team, Rachel, Henrik, and Tanya. And to our listeners, thanks for listening.