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DevNTell - Reimagining the Future of the Web with @PsyProtocol feat. Founder @cmpeq | Host: @narb_s
Recorded: Feb. 27, 2026 Duration: 0:33:28Space Recording
Full Transcription
GM, GM, welcome to what's going to be another fantastic edition of Devontel.
So if you didn't know, Devontel is a 30-minute podcast held every week,
allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between the opportunity to come on the show
and showcase what they built.
And today, I'm ecstatic to welcome Carter Feldman, who is the founder of SciProtocol.
If you're not aware, SciProtocol is a reinvention of what it means to be a blockchain
built on first principles.
So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll get to meet Carter, learn all about SciProtocol and how you can get started using it today.
All right, let's get into it.
GMGM, welcome to the show, Carter. I'm excited to have you on today, man.
Good morning. Good morning.
Doing great. Thanks for having me, man.
My pleasure. My pleasure. I know we had to reschedule a couple of times with time zones we jank, but I'm happy it finally worked out.
I guess before we get into all the great things, SciProtocol related,
would you just like to give a brief introduction about yourself?
Sure. I'm Carter Feldman. I'm the founder and CEO of SciProtocol. I've been in the blockchain industry for quite a long time, like since my early teenage years when I was a rather well-known gray hat hacker, you can say. But yeah, I've been around
for a while and we've been reinventing the blockchain and trying to bring those blockchain
values back. So I guess a brief intro for me. I'm also on the board of ninjas in pajamas. I don't
know if there's any e-sports fans, you know, if you like to watch LPL
or anything, you've probably seen us. Oh, wow. Awesome. I had no idea. I guess I'm curious,
like the brief, I guess, side quest that you've had leading up to you becoming a founder. I guess,
what drove you to deep dive into the field of tech and crypto
itself?
Well, like when I was a kid, I had like a fine motor disorder.
So I was always typing everything in class.
And like the reason I learned to program was I wanted to automate my homework.
Like there are these stupid flashcards where you have to like write down the definition
or I just scrape it from dictionary.com.
Right. So it would take me two seconds to do. So like things like that.
And also I like to cheat in video games because I wasn't particularly good at them.
So I was probably the best known Call of Duty hacker on the Xbox 360.
And around then, people started paying for our hacking services.
I was a member of a group called Xbox Underground, which later was everyone was arrested.
Fortunately, I left the group like shortly before everything kind of fell apart.
And then I joined a group that later everyone was arrested too.
But I was on a study abroad trip in China when that
happened. So lucky me. So yeah, but around that time we were receiving payments in Bitcoin.
I remember that that was like, it's got to be like 2012, 2013, somewhere around there.
So yeah, like I got interested in the crypto stuff. I'm kind of a cyberpunk guy. I'm also a little bit of a libertarian.
I'm a big fan of Javier over here.
Actually, I got a signed book from him.
It's pretty cool.
But, yeah, so I'm libertarian.
I'm a hacker.
Naturally, I like crypto.
And that's kind of my villain's origin story.
Hey, man, everyone's origin story. Hey, man.
Everyone's origin story is different,
and I'm glad yours is so unique and feelingly so.
Being in the crypto space,
everyone has a bit of a character
behind them, which is awesome.
I guess, kind of deep diving
into it a little bit,
what would you say is your description of what Psy protocol is?
What problems does it solve? Why was it founded?
Sure. So like Psy is a new blockchain that is super scalable and has privacy.
So like I'm one of the very few people who believes in Web3 and building like an internet which is
decentralized and privacy preserving. So basically like this user-centric or
yeah, I would say user-centric internet where like you are not the product and the internet is a tool
for your betterment rather than a tool for large companies to make
money off of you. And I'm a capitalist, right? But the problem, of course, is that
we're pretty much spending most of our lives, or at least me, because I'm a nerd.
And I think most people, especially with AI coming around, this is happening.
I spend most of my life on the internet and I don't want to live in a digital dictatorship. So I'm going to be on my computer all the time.
I don't want to like be in Elon Musk's fiefdom, even though we love Doge and we love Elon.
Um, I don't want to live in anyone's fiefdom, right?
So, uh, size and attempt to build a blockchain that can support internet scale applications
while also preserving privacy and having smart contracts,
which is kind of a tough little thing to do. We're also, I would say like the other sort of
really exciting thing about SAI is, you know, frankly, in a world where, where, like all these
companies are trying to replace you with, by training models on your data.
Sai is kind of a refuge for that. And I think the privacy movement in general
is going to be picking up a lot of steam as people realize that losing their privacy wasn't just a
matter of, oh, if you don't have anything to hide, then it's fine. No, actually, you'll lose your job
and they're coming for you and you'll lose your way of life.
So privacy matters.
And hopefully people find out before it's too late.
So I guess I'll end my introduction of Psy on that wonderfully positive note.
I mean, I don't know.
I know you might have just woken up and I don't know if you've seen the news yet,
but Jack Dorsey actually laid off like 4,000 people from the block.
I saw.
Yeah, like fresh off the press.
I guess like what's your reaction to it kind of is somewhat of a segue into what you just mentioned.
All right.
This is unpopular.
What exactly do they do
i know they hold bitcoin anyone use some payments yeah is it popular uh i think they do like the
square space stuff with like the payment processor thing i've seen it sometimes sometimes in like
mom and pop shops um but beyond the square i've seen a lot of yeah is it yeah is
it square or is it a blockchain thing uh i think it's square um is one of their more popular
products blockchain wise i've i've seen him doing some like open source things around it i don't
know how far the chat thing was cool like during during the Bluetooth or whatever. That was cool. That was cool to hear stuff.
I'm a fan of that.
No, and I love Jack Dorsey.
And, you know, while he looks a little strange and seems to be sort of going in an interesting direction in that respect.
And sort of like the libertarian or isolationist vibes or Doomer kind of a situation.
Which I'm not.
I'm not an AI Doomer.
But, yeah, no, it's definitely telling.
Like this layoff stuff is coming.
So, you know, hold on.
Get ready to hold on.
And like I think the only way – AI is probably, right, like not a good thing, right, like for humanity.
Like this is a Pandora's box situation,
but unfortunately it does seem more and more like you kind of have to just get with the program
or, you know, there's, there's no use fighting it because you'll just end up getting flattened.
Which is why Psy Protocol is so important because we can build like provably fair applications that no AI can manipulate.
You know, if you have an agent that's working for you, you can ensure that it's not doing
things it's not supposed to do.
And especially when it comes to the most important thing that agents will be doing, which is
spending your money.
So, yeah, I would say Psy is very we we've decided to deploy at a very interesting time not
not only um in the market which of course you know positive sentiment is higher than it's ever been
for crypto um uh but also in the in sort of world history so so yeah i hope that sort of answers
your question in a meandering way yeah no no yeah yeah for sure for sure i mean it's just like uh it just it just happens so everyone's reactions are fresh and yeah i mean i i i see like both both
sides of the coin for for ai like i i think it's a really cool it feels like an alien tool almost
like when you're using it to code and it can like spin up things that would have taken people like big teams like half a year
to ship in like an hour or 30 minutes i i that that's like the wow the wow factor but the other
side of the coin is is kind of situations that happen like today um whether it's like the
unemployment stuff or god forbid anything worse um but yeah it's it's going to be certainly
interesting year to see how things unravel and i guess uh shifting years back uh to sci protocol
you mentioned it's a layer one uh which i think is really cool um in the sense i and i've taken
a look at the docs uh and you guys are really heavy on like this ek stuff and whatnot and uh it's interesting
the sentiment that vitalik has also had recently where it basically says oh do we need l2s anymore
so i i think we're kind of going into this world where you'll see more l1s come back that narrative
where it's like oh we don't need more l1s. We have a couple of them already. And then you got the L2s, and now it's coming back.
You're getting all these L1s.
I guess from your perspective, being in this space for quite a while,
what do you see as kind of being more important,
more of these L1s perhaps being niche,
catering to specific needs of different users,
or do you still see a world where we
still need some of these L2s? So I wouldn't say like, oh, we need more L1s, we need more L2s.
What we need is we need more chains that solve problems that people actually have.
So like on Cy, people have a problem where, okay, let's say I want to have some like raft Bitcoin or some USDT and I want to have private payments.
There's not that many good ways to do it.
Especially like in some of these privacy things, like you've got to go through KYC, like what the fuck?
Then what's, what's, why would you, you know, oh, let me just tell this random blockchain company what my passport is so I can finally get my privacy.
Right.
So, like, I think, you know, if there's a layer one that solves a problem that users actually have, not an imaginary problem, which we've seen some blockchains doing, then I think whether it's a layer one or layer two, it'll be successful.
So I don't think this whole distinction. It's like for the users, it doesn't really matter because, you know, folks don't really care or even really know about like consensus.
Most they've heard of the word. Perhaps they've been to the conference, but they don't understand what it means to settle on Ethereum and they don't really care.
They don't understand what it means to settle Ethereum and they don't really care.
So I think if your product is good and solves that utility, people won't care whether it's a layer one or a layer two.
A hundred percent. It's only like the super nerds that are interested in like picking apart the little details or whatnot.
We're a layer one because we're proof of work blockchain and there's no good proof of work blockchains. And, um, except for like for smart contracts, there's no, we, we love Dogecoin as you can see,
which is another proof of work blockchain. Um, uh, you can probably see that I've got
some Dogecoin art. I'm a bit of a fan. Um, but, uh, yeah, we're fans of proof of work.
And, um, you know, we think at least on our team our team, that it's nice to build a blockchain where everyone can be a part of it or anyone can make a block or participate in a block.
And that's also like really important for something that we don't really talk about that much anymore in blockchain, which is censorship resistance.
And censorship resistance, of course, is like more than just, you know, oh, you don't have
freedom of speech. It's also things like sandwich attacks. What we've seen, you know, frankly,
on these proof of stake chains is that the nodes have turned into PVP servers where you're playing
against like the people that operate the infrastructure.
They are trying to profit on your behalf.
They're trying to exploit the fact that there are infrastructure providers to squeeze extra money to steal from you.
And those are called sandwich attacks, right?
Or MEV, maximum extractable value from you, right?
So we think that's kind of fucked up.
And, yeah, proof of work is superior.
So that's why we're a layer one.
And we believe in proof of work and proof of that.
But, yeah, certainly I am not under any illusions
that normal folks care about that, even though I do.
Yeah, I mean, that's fair.
That's fair.
But this is a developer-heavy show, so we're free to nerd out.
Yes.
And you mentioned it.
You guys are a proof-of-work chain.
But it seems like you guys have a slight twist on it where you guys call it proof-of-useful work.
Just wondering if you can go double click into that a little bit.
So, yeah, proof of useful work is all about not wasting work.
So normally on blockchains that are proof of work, we're going to be hashing, hashing,
hashing. Everyone is trying to solve the same problem.
Right. So it's basically just a question of who solves it faster.
But adding more hash power, for instance, to the Bitcoin network doesn't make Bitcoin's user experience better or capacity higher.
And, you know, in the traditional Web2 world, when you add more servers to the network, your capacity for users and speed is going to go up.
Right. People are going to wait less time.
Actually, I've got a little animation that perhaps explains it even better than I can.
If I could share my screen real quick.
Certainly. That might be interesting. But I could share my screen real quick. Certainly.
That might be interesting.
But yeah, so proof of useful work.
Everyone chips in and we split the work of building a block.
So you can see over here, this is an actual block that we did on Cy.
It had 9 million transactions in it.
And if we zoom in over here, let me just keep zooming.
Sorry. There we are. And here we zoom in over here, keep zooming. Sorry.
There we are.
And here we go. So these are actual transactions from users, right?
And we'll have our network start proving those transactions.
And as you can see, what we do is we build a tree of these zero-knowledge proofs.
we build a tree of these zero-knowledge proofs.
So the useful work that our network does
is that miners around the world
will take users' transaction proofs
and aggregate those zero-knowledge proofs.
So as everyone in the audience probably knows,
if you build a binary tree out of something,
its height is going to be log of n.
So because of that,
we're able to build our blocks in log of n times.
So we have a special state model that also enables this.
But basically, the main idea is that we're able to build these very, very large blocks,
which prove millions of transactions in just a few seconds.
So yeah, and anyone can participate.
All they have to do is prove that they're doing useful work for the network.
And the most important useful work for any blockchain is making it very easy to verify
the blockchain from Genesis, which in the case of Psy, you just have to verify the latest
proof.
So you can think of the useful work as being something like, okay, we start with 9 million
transactions and then we make it into 5 million proofs and then 2.5 million proofs. So as we reduce the number of proofs that
are required to verify in order to verify all the transactions in a block, we're doing useful work
for the network by improving its ability to reach consensus. And by the time we've reached one proof,
which recursively verifies the previous block proof, well as you know the two proofs which prove the left half of the transactions and the right after the transactions we've actually
generated a single proof you can verify on your computer in you know half a half a half a millisecond
that's proved every transaction is valid in the you know entire chain starting from genesis so we
find that work to be useful. And yeah, that's
proof of useful work for you. Although the longest chain of blocks, and this is kind of an interesting
one, is determined by the most amount of gas fees paid. So the more total gas fees have been paid
by the network, that's how we do like a canonical consensus for ordering. I hope that makes sense.
But I thought I wanted to share our cool animation. And by the way, if anyone wants to try out our
prover, you can click on any of these proofs and do a little time trial to see how long it takes
for you to generate on your computer. So if I come over here, you can just copy this command
and you can actually reproduce it it locally so it'll like
run the prover on your own machine generate the same proof and you can see if we're lying about
our our tps figure because i know a lot a lot of people kind of bullshit on the tps stuff but you
can you can like you can you can pick any of these nodes in the tree and write like walk your way up
the tree and see how long the total time is and see if it actually is, you know, like 13 seconds-ish on your machine.
And yeah, so you can check our stuff.
But yeah, I hope that that makes sense.
I know it's difficult to build a block explorer
for a privacy-preserving blockchain, right?
So we're kind of doing some interesting experiments in UI.
I like the animations, though, but yeah.
Yeah, it looks amazing.
Those are certainly some
monster numbers there.
Are you guys...
Yeah, exactly. And we'll have
that block explorer
so you guys can fill around with that after
the show.
Are you guys live on
Mainnet or are you guys still on
Testnet? We're on testnet.
We're going to be launching mainnet soon without a token.
We'll probably be subsidizing the token or the gas fees in the beginning.
Because obviously right now, frankly, the market is not in the best place that it's ever been. But we also have a lot of these privacy
applications that are very eager to deploy. So we want to kind of get them on board. And some of the
AI agent stuff that we're doing with agentic payment, because one of the benefits of the ZK
and just having everything ZK is that our public public keys are just, you know, the hash of the
verifier key for some arbitrary zero knowledge circuits. So you can build like programmable
keys where your AI can do transactions on your behalf, but it has to work in these parameters,
right? It's like Turing complete keys. And we'll also be releasing, if there's anyone that wants to
not be an AI doomer and wants to get on board the AI bandwagon,
but in a safe way, you should come talk to us.
Add us on X.
We're releasing a bunch of tooling
for like agentic toolkits,
basically like programmable guardrails
for your agents built on Psy.
Let us know.
We've got some cool things coming.
The privacy stuff is really killer,
and we would love to have you in our dev community. Awesome. Again, we'll have those
details for you to get on that side protocol trade. I guess shifting gears just slightly,
you mentioned at the beginning of the show that Psy Protocol also supports smart contracts.
Is it different
in terms of the development experience
if somebody's coming from the EVM
side of the world?
Yeah. So we are, in fact,
crab people.
We are Rustations at Psy.
So the
smart contracts are written in Rust.
We may change, we may add support for other things in the future.
If you've written a Solana program, I can promise that it's easier than that.
Although I guess perhaps that's not saying that much.
Right, right.
The bar is low.
But we've got like browser ID. We actually,
so for the EVM devs out there, we made what we think is an under, an underappreciated tool.
Shout out to Remix IDE for people that are kind of first picking up a chain for the first time,
just the ability to kind of like see what the state of things is on and just quickly hack up
a contract. But to be able to have like multiple blocks
in different states
and see how contracts interact with each other
without like running a local environment
is like such a big win.
And we just finished it for PSI.
So that's going to be going up soon.
But I think like, you know,
usually with smart contracts,
there's like the actual like grammar and stuff
with the language isn't so bad because like the logic isn't that much it's more like the integration testing and
all that stuff so um hopefully even those that you know maybe are newer to rust maybe you can
become a crab person too right you never know oh yeah oh yeah and uh interesting you mentioned a
remix um they're actually coming on the show tomorrow. Oh, cool!
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I copied them, but, you know, highest form of flattery, right?
Indeed, indeed.
Indeed it is.
Yeah, that's awesome.
And I guess you also mentioned, like shifting it slightly again,
you mentioned it.
I mean, I totally agree with you.
Privacy is going to be, I think, a much bigger deal in terms of the AI scene and even like the blockchain Web3 space this year. There's a lot of hoopla around like verifiable agents, which I think it still has its important use cases.
it still has its important use cases.
But I think we've seen quite a lot of examples recently
of just people's data just going up in smoke, getting stolen.
I mean, I think Mexico's government got hacked or something yesterday
or the day before a bunch of people's records got stolen
from an AI-centric attack.
So I guess for our developers
here, what are perhaps some useful AI agents that can be built with Psy Protocol and might
help combat some of this? Yeah. So like, you know, I'm more on the practical side, like in, in, in again, not a doomer. So my
optimistic thing is I want my AI agent to do the things that I don't like to do. Like I'm not a
fashionista. You can see this shirt is like 12 years old. This is like my high school shirt,
right? Um, I thought I was so cool back then maybe. Uh, but I would like AI, I would just like to upload a picture to AI and
give me a makeover, just buy the stuff, just have it sent to my house. So a lot of the things that
people don't want to do that they would like to delegate to AI involve buying something.
So on Psy, you can build an account. And in in our account abstraction because we have these like
parambal keys you can set like reasonable spending limits or oh you can only work off of this
vendor list so like don't like send don't like spend all of my money or like send it to some
like random people or something that you know maybe someone's doing some prompt injection on
one of the websites that the ai is visiting like and these things aren't logic that you put into the prompt
for your clawbot or whatever. It's mathematically guaranteed by the constraints of the circuit
that is required for it to generate a signature proof. So yeah, I think honestly, the biggest
thing for AI is just going to be payments and doing it on site.
And one part is the guardrails.
The other part is frankly like, you know, if in the future, like AIs are going to be like doing most of the buying of stuff and like, you know, we're just kind of, it's going to, we're going to be like, oh, I want a so-and-so.
I want a new speaker, right?
Find me a domain name that isn't being squatted, that isn't super expensive for my idea for
a company, right?
And it's just going to do it.
Well, you know, if it's going to be on blockchain, it better have privacy.
Because I think like for most people, they wouldn't feel comfortable like publishing
their credit card history.
Like, I don't know, Narva, would you feel comfortable feel comfortable like just you know throw up the visa statement on stream right now
right and like with blockchain we have anonymity but we have we really have like the worst privacy
like it's it's it's really bad um but it's necessary to make something where everyone can verify it until
you had ZK, right?
Because, as we all know, the way that a blockchain is secured is by just making it so that everyone
can verify every transaction on their own machine.
So you don't have to trust me, right?
You run a full node and you can know what the state of the blockchain is.
you can know what the state of the blockchain is um so like so yeah like i think in the future if
if if if we're not going to be dominated in this like weird situation where it's like visa or
mastercard or coinbase or something you know who knows right one of these uh centralized folks is
is just gonna own all the payment rails um if it's going to be decentralized, it needs to have
privacy if like normal people are going to be using it and merchants aren't going to integrate
it unless normal people use it because you need to have like that scale, right? And then also it
needs to be able to support the scale that would be required for merchants to use it. So Psy is
kind of the only thing that ticks those boxes. So, for us, we're very bullish on this, like, AI payment, and, like, maybe in the doom of the most
privacy-losing, potentially humanity-ending, cataclysmic events that we're all going through
right now, perhaps we're able to at least take some control of our payment system back from like the government's
and Visa and MasterCard, right? Because like, you know, 60 years ago, there was no like, oh,
the government can see every payment that you make, right? Or like, you know, for 100 years ago,
till the dawn of humanity, we all survived just fine without like Uncle Sam looking
over your shoulder and seeing every time you, you know, perhaps rent an adult movie or, you know,
make a payment online. Right. So that's like, yeah, I think, I think hopefully we can bring
some freedom back in this time of, of great loss, But certainly there is a massive attack on privacy
that's going on. And we're all kind of being told that we're too far gone at this point. Like no
one's pretending that privacy wouldn't have been a nice thing for your industry. Like, you know,
frankly, a lot of devs feel kind of like, oh, so you trained all these AIs on my GitHub data,
and now you're, like, going to fire me.
Well, thanks, right?
Maybe I wish it wasn't just there, right?
So I think everyone agrees privacy is important, but, you know,
hopefully we can bring some of it back.
Like, a little bit is better than nothing,
I guess is what I'm trying to say.
100%, 100%.
And yeah, I mean, that's always been kind of the dream,
at least ever since I entered this space
and started reading up on everything.
So yeah, we'll see.
We'll see how it plays out.
I'm hopeful that we do get a shred of privacy back.
But yeah, we'll see how it plays out. And as we're approaching time, I want to get a couple more questions in from you.
One is, I guess, are there any open source opportunities or are you guys hiring at all
for anybody watching today interested to get involved? Yes. So we have some, so specifically, we have a few
like ecosystem projects that we're kind of like incubating that we need humans for. Because,
you know, frankly, smart contracts should be written by humans, unless we want the AI to set
the rules for our lives and our financial infrastructure. So if anyone there out there, Rust Devs,
although maybe we can consider some of it,
we are, again, crap people.
If there's any other crap people that would like to join us,
please contact us on X.
We would love to chat.
Awesome.
Yeah.
And like I said, contact info is in the description of this podcast.
So whenever you watch and have your interest piqued, definitely reach out to Carter and the folks at Site Protocol.
And I guess to end things off, you mentioned that Mainnet is on the horizon.
Is there anything else that you'd like to perhaps reveal some alpha on what's coming up on the roadmap for Site Protocol?
So in the next six months,
we will be having some very exciting partners
coming on board.
Some kind of stuff that, you know,
we aren't a very famous company,
but, uh, you know, we've had the benefit of, um, working with some very excellent partners
that you guys have probably heard of. So, uh, the time to get on board is, is, is now. And I think,
um, you know, and obviously I'm super biased but uh i think uh there's gonna be
a lot of um there's gonna be a lot of uh assets on side because of the privacy part um we've got
some very large partners that are going to be onboarding a lot of assets um just because side
is makes it really easy for you to like bridge over assets from other places and make like privacy wrapped versions. And in any, for like, as all blockchain devs know, like the best place
to build a dApp is a place that has like a lot of USDT and assets where like people could actually
like, you know, it's liquidity for people to use your DeFi or to use your dApps. Like,
come on, build on Psy, be the first one there, build your monopoly in our privacy-preserving smart contract environment.
And, you know, like maybe like the AIs will work for you or maybe you'll be the AI overlord.
You never even know.
But this is the opportunity.
Join the privacy movement, hop on Sai, and take your slice. So there's still many, many things to dominate.
The privacy-preserving version of a DEX, a swap,
like all these things we need privacy-preserving versions of.
And it's sort of the last frontier for people to do something
that no one's done before.
So come on over.
Beautifully said.
And I think that's a great place to end off on.
Carter, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come chat with us today.
I'm really excited to see Psi Protocol continue to evolve here.
And like I mentioned, I think privacy is going to be a big dominating theme of this year and beyond.
So you guys are definitely building in the right space.
Thank you so much, man.
I'm sorry for ranting and raving.
I know I've sort of been all over the place.
I just woke up, but I really apologize for that.
Hopefully your listeners aren't too bored
by what I had to say.
Not at all, not at all.
No need to apologize.
30 minutes flew by.
I feel like we could have gone in like another hour
or whatnot, but I guess for another time.
But I just want to wish everybody watching today and listening today a very happy thursday friday
wherever you may be and i will catch you uh back here tomorrow uh for another episode of devintel
uh to cap off our uh doubleheader uh till then have a good one folks cheers
