All right. Are you doing that?
Yep, I'm here. All right. Well, I think we got enough people in here now. It's like 103 people in a hair. Something like that.
and start to kick it off. You'll see that lift music was turned off, so you can get going.
Kind of like the energy of the whole music though waiting on a collect call, you know Exactly
Okay, so let's get off. So you've done one of these before, but it'd be great if you could like introduce yourself again. Are you going to evolve a million? What position you do? I can't stop the work you're evolving.
Yeah, for sure. Hey guys, I'm Tristan Lietre. I'm the director of Crypto for Nilean, which is maybe kind of a meaningless title, but basically all things touching crypto or web3 if you prefer. Be that, you know, stuff around governance or
questions around the community protocols product in the crypto space. That's my domain. I got involved with Nilean because I kind of by chance at a conference met Andrew Missanto, one of the co-founders, and it was just starting up at that time.
he was explaining it to me and the whole, you know, no communication thing sounded like magic. So kind of initially I didn't really believe him, but he got me in touch with Miguel, who the gig of brain that he is and with all the patience that he has kind of talked me through it. And I thought it was pretty, pretty cool and I've been here
you know, almost two years working on this beast. Yeah, getting sucked in by like a mason toysum is always the second oldest and then you get the the bone chilling reality from the gale at the end and then even more again from Conrad when it talks about it from an engineer perspective you get
real grounded in the magic then. Totally. What was the event that you said that way you just randomly met Machinto? It was yeah through a coworker at the time that told me to grab coffee with him and it was at NFT NYC at the time. So not really related to
But yeah, it was still fun, you know. In our very first meeting I explained to him how Olympus Dow worked and how it was going to eventually, you know, not work. That's fine, that's fine. Okay.
So we've had a bunch of questions come in. I think because we've all most recent appearances with Andro as well in the podcast it's spread on quite a few more technical questions. So if I pass through pulled a few that you can go through and
trade restaurant so we've obviously you're not the con ride so it's not fully on the engine inside and not Miguel in the math side so obviously people understand that you're built to answer the same level of death that say Miguel would pale towards questions it but there's been some really interesting questions so from one of our more
active developer sides of the community. I call Luciferus, who's been involved very early on and helped review some of the papers and that kind of stuff. Yes.
He's had this question a few times because he answers a lot of questions as well. The way the way Nilion works, the whole network acts as a single server. And what he means by this is that for each calculation, you need all nodes, then how does the network scale? The whole network can only handle
there's much calculations as the average note. There are a few ways that he can think about the scale but he wants to hear from the team and what you think about that. Yeah, so it's a good question. I mean, what he's basically describing is kind of a pretty common affliction for a lot of decentralized systems.
If you think about how those blockchains work, that is one limit on scaling. Usually, at this stage of the scaling game, it's not traditionally the bottleneck, but the reason that this scaling problem doesn't really affect us the same way.
it does other decentralized networks is because of the lack of a need for uniformity and singular consensus across the whole system. You hear in blockchain design people talking about sharding.
different types of parallelism and stuff like that. Well, because we don't promise a single state across the entire network, the network can scale horizontally, you know, functionally, infinitely, right? Because if
say there are 100 nodes and you decide 100 nodes is the safety that is necessary. Well, if you have 1000 nodes, then you can make a lot of different subgroupings of 100 nodes within those. So it can just be 10 of those or it can
could be many different ones, taking different pieces of those nodes and creating what we call clusters. So really it's about scaling horizontally because you don't need to come to one single solution at the end of the day. You just create these clusters and that scales.
That's been a more recent advancements, hasn't it? From our side of things, the exploration around clusters and how they fit into the network.
We did mention them in the original white paper. Like it was always the vision to scale horizontally like that. But the way that we like I think we're we've really started to polish out exactly the way that we're imagining, you know, that system to work.
Okay, that makes sense. So if we take a step back and look at this in comparison to other things, people are asking, so how does the NFC preventive compared to existent decentralized storage and process solutions such as
A lot of the architecture is going to end up being similar and some of it's going to be different. But I think that the main one here, like the kind of obvious answer, is NMC itself. So whether you use any centralized or decentralized kind of peer storage solution, like the ones they mentioned, but you
even looking at pure centralized solutions like Amazon S3 or whatever it is, right? The way that people are getting security at this stage is using encryption. And we will be, and when they want to use that data, the underlying data, they have to kind of take it out of the
that is encryption, have it be plain somewhere, sitting on some machine, whether that's locally or on a server, and do the thing they want to do on top of it. Now, there are maybe ways around that using other privacy preserving technologies than what we have. If FHE comes down to line and becomes more usable for certain use cases, stuff like that, but I think, you know,
When comparing to storage solutions, that's really the thing we're bringing to the table that isn't out there at all right now, which is that we can do the storage and While it's still stored in this highly secure state, you can run circuits. You can run computations on top of this data super securely.
Ascension is up, when we block that it.
internally one of the questions has been what are the projects that we look at the most in comparison to kind of what we're working on in the NPC space? What are the projects that we look to and keep an eye on in that space? Not as, say, competition because we don't really look at it from that perspective.
But what projects do we keep an eye on what projects do you pass and keep an eye on in this space? Well, to the latter question, I think it's kind of part of my job to keep an eye on every project, you know, I look into every new race and I try to keep an eye on it.
on everything that's happening because you never know what's going to be helpful. And then for the former question, I mean, at the end of the day, that is actually a thing that makes our jobs a little bit harder, but also more exciting is that
There isn't super great comparables out there to look at and build towards and be like, try to reach a feature parity with X or Y. I think it's a little bit easier. It's not easy.
It's easier to imagine the build out and the path forward if you're building something like an Alt L1. Because you're like, well, we need to have an ecosystem that has a deck and has all these things. This is going to be our killer advantage, whether it be speed or
or use ability or focus on a vertical or whatever it is. But here we're trying to do a new computing paradigm thing to not block chain. It's going to the application built on top of it. A lot of them are going to enable things that don't exist right now.
We really are looking at all sorts of different projects that take elements of it. So you can think of people who are working with ZK from a privacy perspective or some amounts of NPC like the wallets and signing companies or also
people who are doing data manipulation. There's some really cool protocols out there, you know, ocean. And taking a look at all of those and seeing what works and yet what there's the man for.
Yeah, that's a really interesting part of it. It's not just looking at companies or projects in our space. It's also looking at the general space and seeing where there's friction issues that potentially nearly could potentially solve in the future.
or the technology could solve or help or support. And that's a really interesting path to the space. Also, I just want to clarify because it didn't expect this. There's 525 people in this room right now with us, which is I think that's a emerald emerald pulling in.
It's just bad day today, so we should be alone with something right now. But you know, it's great. One of it one of it is
interesting questions that we got that would be great to get your opinion or your own or your own. So put nearly a build out its own distributed validated technology for like a very more or the L ones with NFC to compete with a major projects like SSV or evolve that rely on MPC.
So I think this is a really interesting vertical and I mean like look fundamentally what we're trying to deliver here is a platform that can enable new things and those are things that can be built with MPC. Those are things that can be built with that MC. So could that stuff be built and will it be very exciting?
You know, yeah, for sure The the question with with that type of stuff is like well, what what do we want to do for ourselves and you know what what's going to get other people external Developers excited to come and build on our network So so the answer is like yeah could and I would bet you know
know, it would be a great project for somebody to build. I can't tell you if that's something that we are going to shoot to do ourselves or not. It is an interesting, there are interesting implications to being able to do it in NMC, and especially for the network itself. I watch those projects closely and also
stuff like eigenlayer that I think will have implications for crypto-economic security moving forward. And I'm looking closely at this, you know, we're all the team looking closely at this if we can integrate some of those ideas into the crypto-economic security of our own network.
I'm sure they're interesting.
Yeah, I think so we can't talk a lot about things around this area, but
Yeah, we'll move on. I couldn't think of what it's available. So one of the more technical questions is, why can't Dealer node generate the blind and factors and send shares to all the nodes?
Use cases where you're just storing stuff, especially that's the easiest time to do it like they for sure can And that is an extremely performant way to do things right because you're taking away essentially all the cost and just localizing it at the
edge of a user's computer for what is for them a very, very cheap operation. Granted, you do need to make sure that users are building their randomness in kind of a correct way. Computers
like default randomness computers is often spotty put it that way and so I think our client would maybe still enforce some randomness that's coming in externally but yeah that's definitely a way of
operating the network, but it does have some limitations depending on exactly what kind of use case you're building out. So sometimes you really do want shares to exist in the network that nobody has ever seen, including the dealer themselves.
So when we look at limitations and back end of stuff, and obviously you're close to the engineering club and somewhere close to the maths side and
the more hybrid role that you have. What are some of the challenges that we see and that we face right now in terms of adoption and implementation? Are there any areas that you
not worry about, but are looking to plan ahead for in this space. You know, we've discussed different projects in the NPC space. We've looked at all that kind of stuff, but is there anything from
an adoption side that you worry about. Yeah, so I think here I can do a little, a little, um, shill for, uh, job posting we're going
be putting up for kind of a person to work on, you know, technical documentation, developer experience, and developer relation stuff, which is that
Like we need to make sure that we can hold people's hand through the process of learning to compute inside of the NMC paradigm and more broadly. And I think we're not we're definitely not the only people facing this. This is happening in the actual zero knowledge part of the
But we need to do some computation on top of it. How do we make sure nothing's leaking? We can build a thick SDK that's slick and easy to use. But at the end of the day, the privacy is only going to be as good as the program that
you know, runs over the data. It's not dissimilar to a smart contract, right? Like, even if there's no bugs in solidity itself, smart contracts get hacked all the time, right? It's only as good as the smart contract itself. So I think that's going to be a big, a big lift.
And one, a challenge I think I'm, you know, more excited to take on, which is teaching people to program with privacy, frankly, teaching people to think more about privacy. It's traditionally been kind of a blind spot for our whole space.
I really enjoyed that there. Yeah, there are some stuff we can start to look into. And I think that's also something that when we've done from the market side as well, when we've looked at narrative that other companies are spoken into.
how they treat education complex topics like this and how they break it down into almost like it's like a storytelling aspect but sticking on the side of
challenges that we face. What are some of the biggest challenges now that we face in technically, intanally, that we've solved or are currently solving, because stuff like that, because Conrad describes it really well in that when he first joined Million, he read The White Haters, very excited and he got involved.
and then he realized the actual like zero to one where he'd have to do and he described it as that when he first read the white paper it seemed like a mole hill that he'd have to come in and build and he could do it but then upon digging into it more it turned out to be you know like a Mount Everest kind of
thing they need to build because it's literally taking the math back to gal makes and events and turning it into engineering. So what are some of the biggest technical challenges that you've seen us face and maneuver through and also some of the ones that were currently going through and maneuvering through as well?
I think taking the stance of someone like Conrad or myself more on the engineering side rather than the math side, I think one of the biggest technical challenges, organizationally, is realizing how much of a math project this is.
And there's fresh cryptography like you know you think of a in a lot of of software development companies, you know, however, they're structured there's some sort of give and take some sort of development flow whether using agile or waterfall or whatever it is that that involves products
and involves some amount of executive vision and involve developers and different layers of managers and stuff like that. I and I have a lot of engineers, well thankfully now we have a lot more who are familiar with this stuff but is
When you have also these cryptographers who are baking new math for you essentially when they have new ideas that's going to make stuff faster or you know you run into a snag because of the way the cryptography works which is like oh we can yeah we can do that it's just like how exactly do we want to implement this there's a few ways some are faster than others
There's all this this whole trade-off space that isn't an engineering challenge or even like an architecture one. It's really a cryptographic puzzle. So having that whole other segment of the team is I think really rewarding for everyone. I've learned more about cryptography.
working at I will learn you know I think about engineering what I was an engineer so yeah yeah well that really interesting things that I was talking to the gal last week and I was asking about this kind of like how they tackled this issue because these
say he was describing as that like engineering is like speaking one language and being a mathematician is like speaking another language and they need to find these like gradients of people. Some of you know pure engineers, some of pure mathematicians and cryptographers but then every now and again you'll get someone that's like by line by
angle and can help translate across that. I mean, these like these gradients of people and treating these technical problems by hiring like the best people across these different gradients really solves that communication issue and allows them to tackle problems face on and solve them as they come in.
Totally and here's another opportunity to chill we have a research cryptographer role open you would get to work with a sick math team some real gigabrains in there so just saying Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah#
We've actually had a question come in as it is that's been related to a question in front is it is there going to be? Is it going to be possible for like ZK proof projects to use nearly a technology in the future? Is it a way we could integrate into that space? Absolutely. I mean, well, one, it's going to be possible for
Everyone to use million, you know, if we get our way, I think that that's the point of going for this whole public utility style of network, but specifically for ZK stuff, I think that there is a real power in combining ZK
as a primitive or honestly all of the privacy preserving technologies together like there's often mistakenly framed as like this arms race you know of like oh you know the TE people got you know x project to
build on them or like the FHEs moving fast, people move their timelines up on when it's going to be full-purpose SDKs, like whatever it is, I actually think that a lot of these, they also fill slightly different niches for sure with some overlap and ZK most of all because
There are some kind of obvious limitations to what ZK can do because at the end of it you end up with a proof, right? The architecture is fundamentally different. Kind of a client-server architecture, right? There's the two roles. Whereas, you know, MPC, you're doing
you can do collaborative stuff across a bunch of parties that allows for different things, but also ZK is very useful in ways that it can do some things, you know, faster or whatever it is, there are definitely benefits there. So I think that there are a lot of really cool
projects at the intersection and I'm excited to see what the ZK community can cook up once we get our SDK out there because I'm very impressed with the crypto Web3, adjacent ZK community. There's a lot of really smart people there building cool stuff and they're innovating so fast.
Yeah, I think there's like, it's like, it's like, it's like small cults of people. And I think people have put us in that braggar right away to be like, oh, if you're doing X, you must be a direct competition with everyone else. And I think that's something that needs to be done.
broken down because like you said there's so much room for like innovation at that intersection with what we can do. Could you see this is not a question, it's been submissible. Can you see these like groups being broken down as more progress is made in this
space like into it years where now people are like like you said there's like the ZK people and then the other groups of people as well. Can you see those boundaries being like broken down as time goes on and people start to become much more collaborative across different technologies in this space?
Look, yes, the answer is yes, but there's always going to be friction at the edges. Tribalism for sure is maybe a little bit more visible in crypto than it is.
in other industries, but it exists everywhere. I was, I used to hang out on game facts as a kid and people would just yell at each other constantly about PlayStation versus Xbox, you know, Apple versus Android. Like there's always going to be someone out of tribalism when you
When you build a relationship with a product or a service or a brand or in our case a technology But I think that a lot of the people who are actually building these things even today are very willing to listen and very willing to
engage in these types of conversations. And yeah, I do hope that as we start to solve more and more real world problems and as the tech gets more mature and especially as we kind of start moving towards some
some standards. Like right now that's part of why everything is the Wild West, right? Is that semantics are all messed up. Everyone uses different language for everything, everyone, whatever. I think that as we mature as a space, that stuff will clear up, which will help out a lot.
Makes sense the Xbox West PlayStation analogies I think at one overall understanding Because I think we often pass in them 10 years ago, so PlayStation 4 clearly clearly won so I think that ended up a big now, but anyway, I was always a game keep kids