Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
Edge & Zano AMA: Unlocking Privacy and Security in Crypto
Recorded: June 3, 2025 Duration: 2:06:45Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion, Sal Mayweather, Paul Pui, and Andre from Zana explore the future of privacy in cryptocurrency, emphasizing the growing demand for privacy solutions as government surveillance increases. They highlight the integration of Xano into Edge Wallet, the potential for tokenizing real-world assets, and the importance of decentralized finance in empowering users.
Full Transcription
Thank you. I think you guys are going to have to add me as a host, Paul.
There you go.
Space isn't ready yet? Cool. You might have to add me as a host.
Ah, okay.
And probably Andre as well.
And somebody has their, well I heard an echo, but I don't hear it anymore, so maybe somebody
just muted their computer.
My Twitter froze.
There we go.
Join space.
Start. How do I...
Cool. mic check can folks hear me okay yes all right cool cool
getting this thing started we're just making sure we got the recordings all
ironed out doing both audio and video here. Oh, did we lose Sal? You lost me. For
some reason it told me to, it kicked me out. I'm hopping back in now though. Okay, cool.
Yeah, if I want to join back in the video recording. Oh yeah, I got to see it. Andre,
are you on a Xano or on your personal account?
Paul should be.
I think he's on both.
Perfect.
Cool.
Okay.
Just a reminder to turn down the volume on your computer for the Riverside recording so it doesn't have feedback.
I don't hear any feedback. Does anybody else?
Are we good to go? No, I think we might be good to go.
Excellent.
Cool. Can I do the honors and kick things off here, or can we get going?
Please, go for it. Andre, you're good to go.
You look a little bewildered.
Are you all right?
Everything is firing as it should be.
I can't hear anything you're saying, bro.
Are you on mute?
Andre, if he's on Xano, he's muted on spaces.
I think...
He did hop in. Andre was in under his Zoidberg account, but I don't see it anymore.
Let's see. Maybe we can chat with him real quick and give him the heads up.
Where is our chat box?'m not gonna lie I am so
pumped for this though this is the space that I've been this is what we need to
do more often this is the kind of collaboration that we have to put
together like all the time let's do it for sure
studio chat here we go Andre Andre says your mic is muted.
Showing the spaces again.
That's right. His mic on Riverside is also muted.
For those of you listening, thanks for your patience.
We're just getting through a few AV hurdles.
Blame Andre.
There he is.
I wonder if he's using a Unix computer.
He's probably running Linux, isn't he?
Probably.
Can anyone hear me?
Yes.
Yeah, there we go.
Andre, your mic is muted on Riverside, if you want to unmute that,
because otherwise we can't get you recorded.
There you go. All right. Cool, cool. All right. I think we're all good.
Okay. Kick it off, Sal. All right. Let's keep going here. All right. So basically the way I envision this going down is that maybe we'll do some quick little introductions, standard
operating procedure, then we'll maybe do some, you know, foundational
softball questions and we'll get into the weeds as the conversation progresses.
Cool?
For sure.
Awesome.
All right.
So obviously I'm Sal Mayweather, Salvi Agorist.
And basically all I do is I'm an anarchist who hates the government and I like to live
free and cryptocurrency is one of the primary tools that I use to do that.
And I'm here with Paul Pui from Edge and Andre from Zeno.
And these are two of the builders that create the tools that degenerates like me use.
So if you guys want to give a quick little introduction as to who you are and briefly just, you know, what you guys do, that would be a great way to kick things off.
Andre, take it away.
I'm co-founder of Zana.
I hate this to explain what I'm doing,
but we are building layer one blockchain
with privacy enabled by default.
We've been building this technology for ages, for almost decades now.
And ZANA is something that we are dedicated to.
This project reflects our vision of how blockchain should be.
And that's it.
What a modest guy.
He's a modest guy.
Yep.
What about you, Paul?
I just don't know what to say else.
I want to extend on Andre's intro and intro him a little further.
on Andre's intro and intro him a little further.
He's being so modest he hasn't shared that he also worked on,
if not invented, I think CryptoNote.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
Which is the foundational...
I was the one who implemented first version of CryptoNote.
I wasn't invented it because there was another mathematician,
I was the one who was working with him
on implementing first code base
got it and for those that don't know
CryptoNote is the technology
underpinning Monero
and so Andre was very very
key in some of the first implementation
of code that eventually turned into Monero
so thank you so much for that Andre
I appreciate it
yeah thank you for a nice introduction of me.
At least I can do. And so for myself, I'm Paul Poi, CEO and co-founder of Edge. We've also been
building for, gosh, about a decade in the cryptocurrency space, originally a Bitcoin
directory that allows people to find places to spend Bitcoin with an integrated wallet.
That was AirBits back in 2014, and then now Edge,
which we pivoted to being
a very privacy-focused exchange wallet,
allowing people to buy, sell, and trade
with a high level of privacy,
both through supporting privacy coins
like Xano, Monero, Zcash, and Pirate Chain,
and as well by being open-source, transparent,
and not tracking users.
And so a combination of those two really helps achieve privacy for the masses.
And I think that's what we've been trying to aim for over the past 10 years.
Cool.
Okay.
So guys, it's 2025.
If you have nothing to hide and you have nothing to fear,
why do you guys care about privacy
like why can't we just let the government like watch everything that we do and surveil us what's
wrong with that any either one of you take it away you want to take a stab and Andre? Well, I think it's a really bad stigma that privacy crypto is about hiding something illegal.
I mean, of course, some people do it, but our perception of privacy comes from a very different angle.
comes from very different angle.
And I think it's a very basic demand
when it comes to many things in your life,
especially when it comes to money.
And for us, this is so natural.
So I'm even wondering why people ask this question
and why people have doubts about this.
Why people...
I mean, that probably comes with some confusion that people
assume that uh any any blockchain is a uh private by default it's it works not this way and uh
we're actually working on privacy a lot of other projects are actually doing this as well. It's a concern for many people.
And I just believe that as we are now in the early stage
of whole blockchain technology,
we just see how this terraforming,
all this industry shape is just getting into something.
And I think in 10 years, all blockchains, all blockchain technology will have some certain amount of privacy.
And the times that we live right now will be considered as something really strange.
People will send transactions and everybody can see what you sent, where you sent, see the history of your previous transactions,
see how much you owe to some DAFI protocols.
That's a lot.
I think it's going to be changed all.
That's my answer.
Yeah, so like you said, we're in 2025,
but it doesn't take much to look back in time and in history, like in the 1950s, 1960s,
and the Cultural Revolution over in China during the Hundred Flowers campaign, where China tried
to openly invite people to give feedback on the government. It doesn't sound like China today,
for sure. But when people did give feedback, and they gave it very openly and not privately, attached their actual names to what they were saying publicly,
a lot of criticism came out about the Chinese government. And they basically flipped. They
did a complete 180 and said, shut down that campaign. We don't want to hear all the bad
stuff about us. And then actually imprisoned people, imprisoned, got people fired from their jobs
that had spoken poorly about the Chinese government.
And so I think the thing to kind of reflect on this is that
what people were doing at the time, right, was actually not just legal,
but it was invited.
It was actually encouraged and then became illegal.
So something you're doing today might be legal today, but illegal tomorrow, and you can get
prosecuted for that. And so there's an aspect of privacy from the viewpoint of thought and speech,
especially those that can be incredibly controversial, that could be key for us.
And second to that is some things that you don't even think are controversial, that you're just saying about yourself, not in private,
could then be used against you in different ways. I have a friend I was just talking to over at the
Bitcoin conference. And he's actually currently on a case where he's indicted for traditional
transmission of funds without a license. And a lot of his communications over
SMS and email were subpoenaed. And many things that he had said that had very little to do with
the case were used against him. Stuff like, oh, we should go check out this car. It's a really
cool car. Oh, it happens to be like some $200,000 car. And that was used to imply that he had made significant wealth through the business
that he was operating, supposedly without a license. Even though he had never purchased
the car, he had no interest in purchasing the car. He had only mentioned he thought it was a
cool car. Let's go check it out with a friend of his. And so that communication was meant to be
private. That was between him and a friend of his. And that was then surfaced in court proceedings
as a way to
kind of nudge the jury to say, hey, this guy's living wealthy, he's living large. You look at
the cars that he's checking out and look at how he's achieved that is through the sale of Bitcoin
through his ATM network that he had actually built, but didn't have a license at that time.
Although that's a longer story, how he didn't have the license,
even though he did.
And so that was a clear-cut example to me of,
wow, what you're saying today could be,
that was just meant for a private communication
can be misconstrued
and then used against you in actual court.
Yeah, no doubt.
Saying that if you have nothing to hide,
then who cares about privacy is like saying, well, if you have nothing to say, then who cares about privacy?
It's like saying, well, if you have nothing to say,
then who cares about freedom of speech, right?
The whole thing is just absurd.
It's that your rights are not predicated
on a reason to use them.
You don't have to explain to a government or a politician
why you should have some right.
You have them by virtue of being a human being.
So that's my take on the whole thing and guys by the way if
you're listening share this around and at the end of the conversation we're gonna jump to like
community questions and you guys can we'll have a chance to ask paul or andre crypto royalty guys
anything that you want um all right uh just it was what last month right just the end of last month paul that um you guys integrated
xeno into edge wallet what's the story behind that partnership how did you what motivated you
to bring xeno into edge well meeting andre we met over i think at monerotopia last year is that right
andre um and one of the things that I liked was,
I felt like I was talking to a developer that knew some of the pain points of software, of mobile apps, super sharp guy. I love that Xano wasn't just yet another privacy coin.
For us, it's the kind of compelling user experience features that are baked into it.
kind of compelling user experience features that are baked into it.
Number one, first and foremost, which got me really excited,
are the privacy tokens, the confidential assets.
Being able to mint and create assets that are transferred
just as privately as Xano itself, similar to Monero,
was a compelling feature that I hadn't really seen.
And I know that many other privacy, not many,
but a couple other privacy chains are working on. I know that many other privacy, not many, but a couple
other privacy chains are working on. I know it's been widely talked about in Zcash, but they just
simply haven't been able to ship it. Plus they're not privacy by default. So I appreciate the privacy
by default, the privacy tokens, and then the chatter around confidential layer, which I know
is not specifically a Xano project, but one that would enable Xano and its confidential assets
to really achieve what I'd call true
utility because now we're going to take assets that exist in other chains that already have value,
Bitcoin, ETH, possibly algorithmic stablecoins, get those onto Xano such that we can now transact
a lot of the value in these other chains, but now transact them privately. So that makes me
really excited. I want to be able to pay people in a private version of Bitcoin. We pay people here at Edge and we have been paying people
since 2014 entirely in crypto and specifically Bitcoin for now. But being able to do that in a
private way to not compromise, obviously, their earnings, where the money moves after that would
that would be tremendously key and that was one of the big motivators in getting xano integrated
be tremendously key. And that was one of the big motivators in getting Zeno integrated.
so so xeno has this confidential assets layer um well why don't you explain it andre you're
we'll go right to the source here what what is confidential assets layer just break it down for
us quickly uh there is a confidential asset it's a technology that implements basically private tokens and there is a confidential layer
which is another project that building basically it's a bridge that will be bridging tokens between
i would say exotic chains if i can use this term including Zana will be first integrated.
It's going to be EVM networks.
As far as I know, Ethereum.
It's going to be Bitcoin.
It's going to be Zana.
But it's not limited to Zana.
I think there is a discussion with Fira project about integrating Fira into confidential layer.
FIRO project about integrating FIRO into confidential layer.
And as far as I know, they're basically
open to different chains.
And that's the idea of the project,
to make different chains that gives you different values.
Some of the chains give you the faster transactions,
especially Solana with the latest uh updates or evm which has
like a huge liquidity a lot of a lot of different tokens are basically
leaf in the terium uh or bitcoin which is uh just historical blockchain figure, I would say, if I can say it this way.
Dinosaur.
Yeah.
So that's the point.
Yeah, confidential error is basically a breach that trying to create,
trying to move in a safe way tokens between different blockchains.
And especially it's valuable for ZANA.
As Paul was saying, that we realize that building tokens,
tokenization technology itself is just a part of the job.
We also have to attract other builders to breach some tokens from real world,
from Ethereum or from Solana,
something that already has a value there.
So that's a big part.
For Zana, it's a really big part,
and we're really looking forward to this.
So essentially, you could take a pseudonymous chain,
like BTC or something like that,
and you can wrap it up on the Xeno blockchain and trade it privately.
That's what you're saying.
Yes, you can wrap it with this bridge.
You can also wrap it with some other tools.
Anyone can build, by the way, same or similar or something
that we want in a better way, platform that can wrap on Xeno.
I'm just trying to avoid the misrepresentation.
It's a monopoly.
Confidential layers, it's just an early project of building it.
But yes, you can wrap and have a wrap Bitcoin on ZANA or wrap Ethereum or wrap it, whatever you want.
And Paul, Edge will be supporting this confidential assets layer.
I'll be able to trade these tokens, these private tokens on Edge.
Well, for sure, we will, we for sure intend to support the bridge,
meaning you'd be able to take Bitcoin and ETH and whatever assets
are supported on confidential
layer and bridge them back and forth
between the native chain, assuming
we support that chain such as ETH and Bitcoin,
BCH, whatnot, and
the tokens that are on Xano.
So that we definitely intend to support,
no question about it, and make sure people can get
back and forth between those assets.
Okay. There are
some really awesome tools
that I think are not discussed enough
in the Xeno mobile wallet app,
like Ionic swaps and peer-to-peer trading.
Does Edge have plans to integrate those sorts of features
into it for users?
So the Ionic swaps, not at this point
because of the way the UX works and how it fits
or kind of doesn't fit into the edge user experience.
I know we talked about this quite a bit, Andre,
regarding the Ionic swaps.
And for now, not currently on the roadmap,
but there could be some improvements that
might happen in the protocol for swaps that make it a bit
more seamless for users. Atomic swaps, just so people are aware, and Andre, you're the technical guy,
so correct me if I'm wrong. Atomic swaps, generally speaking, require individuals to
put up an offer for how much they want to sell a certain asset for what, right? And then that
person that puts up the offer is basically a maker
and they put a certain amount of an asset for sale
for another asset.
And then someone else is the taker that says,
oh, I want to take that offer.
And then they go and grab it.
With Ion...
I'm sorry.
I think Ionic swaps,
which are kind of a form of Atomic swaps,
require...
Yeah, Ionic was already taken.
Yeah, exactly.
And so that requires both users to be online at the same time.
Once again, correct me if I'm wrong, at least I'm referring to the original atomic swaps that I'm aware of.
And so if the maker isn't online, the person that made the order, put it on the order book,
the taker can't
actually create the swap. And so there are some atomic swap protocols where the makers have to be
online using like desktop computers and servers, and the takers can just swap much like you swap
with a swap exchange or an AMM DEX like ThorChain, where right now I don't know that there's enough liquidity
in the makers to be online consistently,
such that it's easy enough for the taker to take an offer.
And so it's a bit of a chatty protocol
where it needs the maker and taker to be online,
send messages back and forth,
very unlike decentralized exchanges like Uniswap and ThorChain,
where the person that wants to make the swap just sends some crypto in one direction,
and back comes crypto in the other direction.
And so I love that it's available,
because otherwise you have these tokens that are just kind of stuck, right?
So it is at least possible to go and trade from one token to another
and achieve some level of price discovery.
It's just a bit of a difficult user interface for now,
especially when the liquidity isn't quite rich yet.
Well, one of the things that I thought was really cool
about when Xeno...
Can I quickly comment on that?
Please, please, yeah.
Yes, please, Andre, please.
Yeah, I have a few comments.
I actually totally understand the problems
that you're explaining.
And the way we have IonicSwap is not a complete protocol for ready-to-use.
It's just underlying technologies that can be used in different protocols in XanaTrade
that we created as a first experimental feature,
which actually started to get some adoption surprisingly really quick.
But the reason I understand that it's really bad user experience.
I mean, it's ridiculous from modern perspective.
If you look at this, both people should be online.
And we actually could do it the other way we could do it.
And we still can do it that you shouldn't expect uh other party
counter party to be online the reason why it's made this way is because if you remove so the
the first part uh that maker that creates proposal uh it creates in a very specific way uh with a
for for he started some specific address when he created proposal to keep everything
that is inside this transaction in private in a secure way so on the other side can uh open this
proposal look into it and uh and see if he if he likes so he can see actual condition uh we created
this for privacy reason because if you don't have this privacy,
and technically we can make open proposals.
So when you just say what you want to exchange for what,
and you put this proposal online,
but then what's going to happen
if some counterparty can constantly scan these proposals,
and then when transaction went to the blockchain
it could be really easy to de-anonymize this transaction in terms of amounts in terms of
what type of tokens was sent maybe some else information will also leak about rigs probably
not but it could be and from that perspective it will create a lot of harm for the overall privacy of the network.
So we know that this issue is existing, but we spend a lot of time brainstorming this.
And so there was like a privacy on the other side and I would say it to have this feature to be able to not have online a counterparty on the other side.
So we decided, okay, let's preserve the privacy first and create this not perfect, very interactive protocol that could help to build something and see if we can improve it later somehow to create some sort of approach
to create matchmaking for the orders between each other
without compromising privacy, which is quite challenging.
But what I'm trying to say is that we are actually very open to innovate
and continue to build this protocol to deliver more or deliver better user experience.
It's just our main concern is to preserve the privacy of the network,
to not compromise it in any way.
That's a long explanation why it's been done this way.
That's good to hear, actually.
When we were in Amsterdam, I kept calling it iconic swaps.
And Andre's like, no, it's not iconic swaps.
It's Ionic swaps.
It should be called iconic swaps.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it is cool because Edge will allow you to...
I can swap.
They don't have the Ionic swaps.
But I can swap from Xeno to over 130 different assets.
Is that correct?
Yeah, no, you should be able to swap to quite a few assets.
We have at least one of our swap exchange partners.
We have like 16 to 20 different swap exchange partners, including decentralized exchanges.
Currently, Zeno isn't supported in a decentralized exchange, but within the C5 partners, we have
at least one that has support for it with chats with a few others, adding support.
And that partner currently, Xcelix, supports hundreds, if not thousands of assets.
So you can go to and from Xano to many different assets, at least like the top 10, top 20 easily.
That in and of itself is a game changer. Like the fact that we have such a simple way to trade privacy
coins and come in and out of privacy tokens is huge. That is a game changer in and of
itself that we haven't spoken enough about. But what makes like, how do you determine
at Edge? How do you guys determine like what projects to integrate and what coins to continue adding?
How does that process work at Edge?
It's definitely a balance of many different factors.
A balance of consumer demand, of which Xano was definitely achieving a decent level of consumer demand.
It was getting support by a lot of the big names in crypto saying, hey, we're really excited about this project.
I love that they actually are showing some presence.
Sometimes the privacy coins have anons that you never see and you don't know what's going on.
I actually talked to a privacy chain.
I don't want to throw them under the bus, but it was one that was gaining a little bit of popularity. But I could never get the developers on a call.
All they wanted to do was chat on like discord.
I mean, you know,
sometimes you just need to get on a call and talk with a person to be able to
understand what they're building.
And from the brief chats I got,
I could not convince myself that the chain actually didn't have a major flaw in
the way it was implementing its privacy.
And now that chain
has somewhat collapsed and people are no longer supporting it. And so being able to have Andre
and his team really show up, explain the compelling nature of what they've got, and then a lot of
other people in the ecosystem really back and support it is a major factor. And of course,
the feature set is it's like,
I genuinely want to be able to send Bitcoin, BCH, Litecoin, ETH in a private manner and be able to
support bridging into those privacy tokens. So it's a compelling feature set. It's got people that
demand it. And then probably the last thing, which people underestimate is how difficult is it to integrate the chain
um it's to say the difficulty level of integrating privacy coins um is easily 10 20 30 times harder
than other coins and if these were not privacy coins we simply wouldn't do it edge cares enough
about privacy that yeah we'll do it for privacy coins but definitively not if this was just another
you know bitcoin fork bch fork the effort just isn't worth it. We care enough about privacy,
so we'll go through that extra effort for these type of chains.
So one of the things that I want to ask you about is like,
you have a lot of competition in the mobile wallet space, but, and I want to know what you think sets edge apart from some of your competitors
but in my opinion that you just hit that you just hit the nail on the head um
for whatever reason edge seems to be much more dedicated to the ideals of the cypherpunk ethos
and privacy so like i know you know we spoke about this a little bit um when we were together
but like what made you uh like how did you come into like what made you uh what's the word i'm
looking for be so um enthusiastic about privacy and the cypherpunk ethos like how did like how
did you get into that because the fact that we have a player in the game like yourself making these mobile wallet apps who is so dedicated
to privacy and the cypherpunk ethos is huge so that in my opinion is what kind of sets you all
apart so i mean i guess it's two questions in one how did you get into privacy and the cypherpunk
ethos and also besides that what sets edge apart from its competitors
um let's see how do i get it's it's been a long road and i don't i can't think of a single point
in time where i'm like oh cypherpunk ethos right it's like little things in life just start to
chip away or add to either chip away or build up right it depends how you want to look at it
build up some of that ethos.
And definitely discovering crypto is one of them, right?
When you discover crypto and you realize, wow,
and you start listening to the people that say,
yeah, why don't we have financial privacy?
Why are all our financial transactions
just completely out in the open?
When I say out in the open,
out in the open to the banks, the governments,
the fintech partners,
that starts to just ask the question,
right? And so I wasn't bred in a household of anarchists and crypto people and whatnot. And so
it was from my own learnings and surrounding myself with actually people like yourself,
Sal. And so it was a piece of that at the point when I discovered crypto. Now, why did crypto itself align with me was because years before I discovered crypto, I had already felt what I would call a distrust of large establishment.
And of course, the largest establishment of them all is governments.
But I was already having distrust of various companies, whether large establishment meaning large companies, including governments. And the more you kind of go down that red pill path, you start to realize, wow, we're kind of being lied to a lot of the stuff that we're being told to do for health and wellness are primarily a liar,
very misleading, and misleading for the sake of, well, dollars. It's just money is king,
and money is what drives a lot of that misinformation. And so seeing Bitcoin originally,
at the time that was all it really by and large existed when I discovered it,
made me realize this was kind of the rug to pull out from under the feet of large establishment. If people, users, individuals,
and, you know, we're 2025 where it seems like the big guns are entering Bitcoin,
but hopefully the little guns, the little guys can get it first. But seeing that this was the
rug that we could pull out from underneath the feet of government large establishment made me hopeful because then it gave back control of the wealth to the rest of us
as opposed to large establishment. So that's what aligned me with kind of that ethos.
And then the privacy side of it really came from that was what Bitcoin's original vision
was supposed to provide. Privacy was one of the tenants, but then we
realized it wasn't that good at it. Well, great. We can build on it. We can build other chains,
build tools either on top of Bitcoin or some first attempts. At this point, it's now build
other chains separate from Bitcoin that actually give us the privacy that many people promised
or felt that that was the narrative of Bitcoin back 10 years ago.
Well, yeah, I'm one of those guys too.
I at one point thought that the pseudonymous nature of Bitcoin
would be sufficient protection from the statists and the prying eyes,
but the government's war on crypto has proven that fungibility and privacy are no longer optional.
We need base layer privacy and uh andre you had said earlier that you
believe that i think you said in 10 years you expect most if not all blockchains to incorporate
some degree of privacy why i i mean i hope you're right but why do you say that um actually for very
Why do you say that?
Actually, for very practical reasons,
because it's just simply unsafe to show trace of your wealth
to everyone.
And I think privacy will be appreciated more and more
by average crypto holders and by average person and also from like regular routine of using money
from this perspective people don't expect to be to have the transaction transparent when they use
bank card when they use something it goes to government okay they can see it but at least it's
not for public and i think uh mass privacy will be coming from very practical reasons, just people won't
be willing to have all the digital tracks are public.
So it's probably going to be some, especially for EVM chains, probably it's going to come first with some sort of regulated privacy
where it's going to be hidden from someone by default,
like for anyone,
but still I think some authority may be having access to
or some specifically developed tools
to try to trace some specifically developed tools to try some activity or it's going to be some
sort of trade-off between all these things probably it's going to be some sort of
uh regulation rules that will change uh the vision of privacy and they'll be
kind of approved the privacy from um so it's not going to be
public but if you want to be complained you have to provide some uh particular keys for your wallet
that you can uh show it to regulator or to some agency whatever like this they want you to they
force you to do this so you can agree to share information about your financial transaction in this way.
But it's going to be this under your control.
So I think it's going to be one way or another, but privacy will be a default in a very close
future, like in seven or 10 years.
So from your lips to God's ears, I hope that you're right. You know, my personal thesis has always been that as the government grows increasingly oppressive, the demand for privacy and other tools that libertarians and agorists use is going to grow and grow and grow until we finally reach mainstream adoption. That is eventually, in my opinion, how we're going to achieve mass adoption in the crypto ecosystem.
So again, I hope you're right about, although the part about authorities requiring a backdoor,
they can go fuck themselves.
I hope that doesn't happen.
Actually, so there's a lot of projects that are building exactly that.
It's kind of scary.
Actually, backdoors.
Well, basically, they're building chains. So there's a project that projects that are building exactly that. It's kind of scary. Action back doors. Well, basically they're building chains.
So there's a project that I saw at ETH dam.
I don't know if you, you'd talk to, talk to them, but, um, um, privacy pools is the name
of the project, which effectively allows people to enter these pools.
Um, but by KYC first.
So your KYC first, you get to enter the pool.
The pool is private.
I remember.
Yeah, the pool is private.
And there's different pools.
So you can create different pools for different communities.
So you could have a community pool
for the people over there in Tampa or whatnot.
The government can create a pool and say,
hey, this is the government pool in order for you to transact,
you use this specific pool.
And you can have varying levels of privacy within a pool. So the pool can say, okay, we whitelist before you can
enter, but then it's fully private. Or we can say we whitelist before you enter, and there's one
entity that can see the transactions. And so this is being pitched as the kind of good enough to
governments to say, okay, we're giving people... Exactly. That's what I fear. And so for me, I think we need to,
I hate to say it, but not support those
projects to a very strong degree.
But more importantly, we need to gain adoption
of the true privacy protocols at Xano.
The flip side, I do like the idea that
okay, there is a key that I can share
and expose my transactions.
But that's my choice. You've got
to subpoena that over me.
And you have to know that there's something
wrong that I have already done, such that you can warrant to try to get that key from me to expose my transaction.
Or maybe I'm a nonprofit and I just want to share the transactions to be transparent with where funds are moving.
That's great.
That to me is privacy by default, transparency optional.
Not the transparency by default, privacy optional,
or privacy by default, but with a backdoor key,
any of that nonsense.
So let's gain adoption for the protocols such as XANA,
which are privacy by default,
sure, you know, expose transparency optional.
Those are the ones that we need to gain adoption with.
And if the entire economy is running on these protocols,
then governments won't really have a choice.
It'll be shooting themselves in the foot if they try to move us away from that on some
you know backdoored uh currency that hopefully will get stomped down by a lot of the you know
the true crypto anarchists and cypherpunks the the problem is that most of the people
don't have this strong ideological beliefs as you guys, and they will be choosing very practical solutions,
which is not true privacy.
And that's what I'm afraid,
that actually a market will choose practical solutions
that will remove public privacy,
but still have a backdoor to the governments.
And that's probably that they're gonna
try to encourage yeah but i would say andre though like again as the government gets increasingly
oppressive the market will demand more and more private more and more strong privacy solutions
and and i think you know as you get things like cbdc'sDCs and social credit scores coming across the EU and the US,
and the demand for base layer privacy is going to go through the roof.
Who wants the pedophiles in Congress to surveil them?
Nobody.
Nobody wants that.
So we need things like these tools.
So I would be surprised if the market – yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if like in
a very near term, people were like, all right, yeah, we want privacy, but we also want it to be,
you know, user friendly or whatever. But in the long term, I think, you know, the demand for just
pure privacy solutions is going to skyrocket because people don't want to be surveilled.
You know, we just had Donald Trump pay Palantir a billion dollars to
assemble a database of all Americans on behalf of the IRS. I don't want to be part of that. I want
to opt out of that crap. And using something like Zeno combined with a privacy-focused wallet like
Edge allows me to have that mobility, that liberty. All right, you got me all fired up.
Let's move on.
Well, I think we have a hope.
I think we have hope.
We have these two directions.
The hope of us actually using privacy by default,
no backdoor chains, exists because in a way,
some of these backdoor chains are pitching
the whitelist style solution,
which is KYC to enter.
And the good thing for us is that KYC is friction.
Even if you don't care about privacy,
just having to provide the info is a pain in the ass.
How many people like having to go and enter their contact information
and verify the email, verify the phone number,
and take a snapshot of their ID?
No one I know, even if people are absolute opposite of cypherpunks, like doing that.
They just don't like the process.
So we have a core advantage with the true chains that offer true privacy is that, yeah,
we don't have that quote-unquote free user experience.
You're just on board with nothing, right?
That's what I like.
You're free to use it.
When we were in Amsterdam and you were like, I don't want to know like i i don't want
the information like i love that oh yeah it's just like it's a liability you know like as a
company it's true we we don't want to know information because it is a liability and
coinbase got breached because there's a huge incentive and getting just even personal
information is valuable right so if you have personal information you have millions of people's
personal information you have a honeypot and then now you have personal information, you have millions of people's personal information,
you have a honeypot,
and then now you have to pay money to protect it.
And you have to train people and all of the process you go through to protect data
now just gets amplified
because you have something pretty valuable.
And so by not having that info,
that is a security measure,
just simply not having anything sensitive.
Speaking of security measures,
one of the sickest features that I have heard of in mobile wallets, I mean, you blew my mind when you told me about duress mode.
And I've been all over social media telling everybody about it because there are so many stories.
Have you guys seen the rash of stories of people in crypto being kidnapped, held at gunpoint, extorted? Oh, man. It's nuts. And as somebody who's from New York, I can tell you, I'm not surprised to hear the NYPD was involved in a robbery.
That's another story for another day. But duress mode, it's so cool. Tell us what it is, man.
Yeah, so duress mode is not so much a mode, but a setting that allows you to set a secondary pin in your account at Edge.
in your account at Edge. And when you're on the login screen for Edge, if you enter that
secondary pin, that duress pin, it logs into what we call a sub-account of your main account.
And within that sub-account, you can create wallets. And these are real wallets with real
separate private keys. And those wallets, ideally, you just fund with your small kind of spending
money. Those wallets show up in your main account.
You can still use those wallets as your normal small spending money out of your main account.
When under duress, you're forced to unlock your wallet and someone's trying to steal your funds,
you can instead enter a duress pin, which goes in that sub-account,
which only has your small funds and smaller transactions.
If you think about it, what Andre said earlier is very relevant.
You know, so we need privacy
so that people don't know how much we have.
That goes hand in hand with the duress mode
where if people know how much you have,
then all they see is the small amount,
then that's what they take, right?
If people know how much you have,
then of course they can try to force some other path
to gain access
to those order funds.
Although that could be much more invasive and not what you'd get as a small side street
robbery.
Is there any chance you can make that when I enter this wrong secondary code, it will
send emergency signal to my friends or someone that I'm in trouble.
So we thought about that,
except that that would require us to have some level of knowledge of your contact information and whatnot.
So what we would do if we ever did implement that
is it would send a message to other edge users,
which we wouldn't
know the person, it wouldn't know the accounts for, right? It would be anonymized keys that we
could see on a push notification server and say, okay, these, the hashes of these accounts,
or these devices go inside a push notification. And so long as you have other friends on edge,
then we can communicate and let them know, hey, this person's in trouble.
Now one thing that would be an optional thing thing because there's some people that say,
oh, we love this.
I think I would basically live in duress mode
where they would just go into duress mode
and use that over and over and over and over again
because they're usually spending small funds
and then only go out of duress mode
and you go out of duress mode by entering your real pin.
They go out of it when they need to transact larger funds.
And so for some people that might not work so well, right?
Because they're constantly, they're basically reusing Dressma.
But definitely, Andre, it's a great idea.
It's something we've talked about and something maybe we implement from within the ecosystem of edge users that other people you know.
And you can maybe even use a handle to communicate to them, such as like a FIO handle to be able to identify who is it that you want to receive this notification that, hey, you're in trouble,
help me out. And maybe even, you know, with permission, of course, here's my location.
All right. So that way, hey, here's where you got to go to make sure I'm safe. But it's a great idea.
This is how, this is why Edge is the leading mobile wallet, because not only does it have these innovative features like the rest mode, but it also, you know, you can swap.
It has support for all these different privacy coins, which you can swap.
I mean, no KYC.
It's just the list goes on and on.
So it's just so wonderful to have people like you guys in this space providing the tools for people like me to live I want to switch
gears a little bit I'm not like a very technical I'm stupid I'm the dumbest person on this call by
far Andre they know is a proof-of-stake proof-of-work hybrid why number one and number two uh any plans to move to like a full proof of stake model
or or what do you have in store for the future uh yeah so why originally like back in 10 years
ago my first project was launched as pure proof of work um Proof of stake didn't... proven proof of stake scheme didn't exist back in 2013.
It was still considered as very experimental features. Then we started to experiment because
building proof of stake in a crypto node is challenging itself.
So the answer is why is because the, very simple,
the cost of double spend attack is way higher.
Proof of, pure proof of work system attacked very simply in a very deterministic way.
You can calculate how much the price of double spend attack.
You can calculate it for every price of double spent attack you can calculate
it for every project by using block rewards and uh yeah that's that's and then when i was running
my first project it was very small project called bulbury back there and it was really small and
And there was also a very popular attack against proof of work.
They did it shaking the hash rate.
So the big pools come to the project.
They mine a lot of proof of work blocks,
and then they left after the difficulty rises.
And when I was looking into this shaking difficulty graph of my project
and was like in a lot of stress
i made a lot of calculations and i saw how fragile is this consensus by nature especially you can see
it especially in the bright lights when you from a smaller project bigger projects i keep a kind
of blind eye on this because it's kind of heavy.
Most of the people don't bother to attack them.
But you can see the problems of consensus when you're running a small project.
So I was making a lot of research on building something.
It was not possible to build pure proof of stake back there.
So we started to experiment on creating hybrid consensus
with uh kryptonote and um we we build this at stakes a lot of a lot of re re-implementing of
the core we managed to build this for zana uh then we had a few tweaks because we found some issues with this.
It was not as secure as we expected.
So we had a few hard forks that fixed these problems.
Then, like a year ago, I started to explore a potential way to improve security of hybrid protocol.
uh security of hybrid protocol i started to work with different researchers uh we had a multiple
I started to work with different researchers.
we have like six iterations of different proposal how to improve and secure uh current protocol
which has a kind of well known problem it's this this problem described in the in the white paper
that you can uh basically use proof of work hash power for
multiplication proof of stake power.
So theoretically,
even if you have a,
for example,
10 or 5% of whole blockchain supply of XANA,
which is a lot,
by the way,
just numbers.
And with only this amount,
and you have a,
for example,
a hundred times more hash power, proof of work hash power of current ZANA network, you still can take over the network.
It's quite a lot if you convert it into cash numbers, how much it's hundreds of thousands of dollars or maybe 15, depends on the price, but it's still doable. It's still doable.
And when it comes to the network of high market cap,
you see that you have to improve this.
This is like not that secure as we want.
So we've been trying to solve this problem, this multiplication problem, and we came up to a few ideas that I brainstormed with a few of my
colleagues and we had a few iterations and the consensus is very tricky. Even if you
think that something is secure and convinced yourself that it's secure because you don't
see any problems, you always have to find the smart guys who will look at this from
different perspective and break it.
So we have these few iterations of breaking the system.
Then we had a very promising scheme, and then we hired a company that was suggested by Ruben
from Firo, by the way.
Thank you, Ruben, for this.
The company Common Prefix prefix they have a uh very good team of uh very experienced people
uh experienced specifically in consensus so they started to help us we hired them for peer review
so they uh found issues on on this later scheme and they also were sending uh different materials
to me to explaining how these ideas can be implemented in other projects.
So what are the other approaches?
Because they have, like, a lot of experience in this.
They have, like, you know, people already haven't on the top of their head a lot of ideas or papers they can reference to.
of their head a lot of ideas or papers they can reference you so uh while there was while
at the time they were breaking another iteration of our consensus i was reading these papers and
i came up that i came up to idea that it's actually possible to build a proof of stake
for pure proof of stake uh on top of zana by using time slots ideas and
epoch ideas that was also used in aroboros browse consensus that this team created that's consensus
that uh you uh used in cardano project they've been these people behind uh behind this consensus and they've been creating multiple iterations of this protocol.
And interesting part of this protocol, why I became so curious is because they not only
built a consensus system, they also create a mathematical proof and explain why this proof of stake secure.
Not only from, like, we don't know any other way to break it, but they actually mathematically
prove it, that this particle or algorithm is secure and safe.
So this is really a strong approach, and I really like it.
And what I found out that XANA privacy models,
a privacy model based on key images,
actually very well aligned with this approach.
And we think we're going go with work with together with uh this company with common
prefix with the researcher to they're gonna help us to build this consensus we already had a few
calls and we put a basic principle how this can be working so i made some basic proposals okay
let's use key images for the evaluation.
If anyone can have a right to create a block, key images are private.
They're not revealed only on their notice.
So it gives you the same security guarantees as a script to note in the same privacy guarantees.
And they say that they had internal brainstorm session.
They said it's doable. It's possible. And we like, you're going to start work with them. and they say that they had an internal brainstorm session.
They said it's doable, it's possible,
and we're likely going to start work with them.
We're just finalizing negotiations.
They're going to help us to write the paper,
to put the formal proofs that now this protocol in terms of XANA cryptography is secure and safe,
we'll be in a more safe position.
And of course, proof of stake gives you insane cost of double spend attack.
So it's going to be, I can finally forget about this problem.
And we can reduce confirmation time also.
And we also going to likely change the block block timing so
it's gonna be likely block every 10 seconds or every 15 seconds and with the
five to six confirmation we get we will be getting very strong security like
very strong security so confirmation time strong security. So confirmation time on transactions
would be a minute or two or a couple of minutes,
very close to what you see in the modern EVM network
like Ethereum or Solana.
So in other words, it'll be more secure
and it'll offer almost instant finality.
Is that correct?
Yes.
Yeah, in terms of security, it's going to be a proof of stake way more secure
if it's properly implemented.
If you have a proper protocol behind this,
it gives you way more security than proof of work, of course.
Now, one of the more common criticisms you hear about proof of stake,
by the way, we're coming up on an hour.
I want to be respectful of y'all's time. Are we, I have more questions for both of you.
So if you want to hop off and leave,
feel free to go, but I'm, I got more questions for both you guys. So, um,
okay. Um, all right. So one of the more common criticisms of like a proof of state,
state network, Andre, is that they can sort of tend towards oligarchy.
How does Zeno get around this criticism?
I actually, if you look into this from a technical perspective, proof of stake is the, especially the way we see it based on U2XO, not validators.
I mean, I'm not against PBFT, a family of protocols.
It also gives you very strong security.
But the way we do it, it's way more decentralized than any proof of work
with all its pools, accumulated hash power of the factories
that create the hardware or the big.
The same oligarchs are building the mining farms.
They're doing the same oligarchs are building the mining farms they're doing the same this this argument is whenever you i have it i i had like a lot of conversation with
people believers in proof of work that's because they believe they cannot explain why it's why it's
better so no it's it's not it's i, it's way more decentralized than anything else, especially proof of work.
And actually, the second, which will be controversial to my first response, it's a little bit none of my concern, because the job of consensus is to secure transaction history it's not about fair
money distribution it's not about who get richer or who get uh like more and more richer it's the
the consensus in the network has only one job is to seal transaction history secure transaction
history that's it nothing else is related to consensus.
And we are looking at this from this perspective. We're trying to make it as possible, as
decentralized as possible, and privacy only contributes to decentralization like a lot.
And we're trying to make it very secure. So about who is getting richer or oligarchs, I don't even think it's
argument in this conversation. It's not related. Richer, people getting richer anyway. We're
not trying to solve this problem. I think the argument for that, even if the richer
are getting richer within a specific cryptocurrency because they're acquiring the tokens, they are now also highly, highly motivated to keep the network running, keep the network secure, not pass invalid transactions through.
And so they're almost handcuffed.
In the world of startups, we call stock options golden handcuffs.
If the company does really well, you're kind of like handcuffed.
It's like, I don't want to leave because there's money there.
Same thing.
You're basically giving the validators golden handcuffs.
As they get richer, they actually have more tokens.
As long as they're valuing the network, right,
they are doing a good service for the network
and keeping the value of those tokens high versus compromising networks,
which would collapse the value of the token. Yeah, no doubt. You know, you can't really 51
and attack a pure proof of stake network. You're just going to drive the price up. But
Andre, correct me if I'm wrong here, on Zeno, as it stands out, anyone can stake any amounts
that they want for any period of time that they'd like.
Yeah.
Right?
So that right there eliminates the whole question of oligarchy because anybody can stake any amount that they want.
So it's not like you're confined to the five richest coin holders.
You know what I mean?
mean yeah yeah the the way we do the proof of stake is uh we eliminate uh option for the big
Yeah.
Yeah.
major holders to do the any sort of censorship of course they can ignore some specific transactions
that they don't like for whatever reason even they manage to figure out what is this transaction
about it doesn't want it uh there is always smaller stakers that will pick up this transaction at some point and mine this.
So it's really, I don't know the way you can do the censorship in terms of transactions in Zeno network with proof of stake that we are building.
And by the way, if and when Zeno moves to a pure proof of stake model, that feature will be retained, correct?
Which one?
That, in other words, that anyone can stake any amount.
No, no, it will be eliminated.
It's still going to be anyone.
It's still, okay, so we're going to hold on to that feature.
Yeah, yeah, it's going to be actually uh the beauty of this consensus why i really excited about this and
why i uh trying to uh push down into this because uh we don't need to change our privacy model we
don't need to change a lot of things we just will we'll change just uh uh the way blocks the way
validators are selected to create the block.
But it will be the same key image
as a cornerstone of this technology.
So it will be still absolutely the same approach.
It will be still same Zarkanon protocol
that gives you the ability to stake on top of hidden amounts.
So yeah, everybody will be able to create a block
all right um i guess this one might come off as like a softball but it's not really meant that way
zeno has had crazy adoption in like the last i don't know year or two um
we've seen things like uh you know, Zeno.cash,
which is like a point of sale tool for merchants to use.
A big one is Zeno Bay.
I don't know if you guys are familiar with this.
It's like this sort of decentralized marketplace that's built on Zeno.
How has adoption, Zeno Bay in particular,
how do you guys view sort of projects like that?
I know I'm sure, you know, you guys both love it, but like talk to me a little bit about like retail adoption and merchant adoption and how that's sort of driving what you guys do.
I'm kind of wrong person to ask this because Pavel is mostly handling this part.
to ask this because Pavel is mostly handling this part.
It's a shame that I didn't even go to some of the website
that was built for Zana.
I'm really sorry about this.
Recently, we've been really overwhelmed
with a lot of exchanges that decided to list us.
And we never faced that number of exchanges before and all of them had all
their own framework of the way they list.
So we had a lot of problems last month, I would say.
So I'm not sure how does it work.
Andrei is like the crazy mathematician just like stuck in his room just like crunching numbers all
day he leaves the business guys to do he leaves the partners we have a mathematician yeah i'm
more like a coding and trying to help everyone running and ask are you okay what can i help you
how can i help you okay i'm gonna make this for you. I'm going to build
little tweaks for you. That's basically
my job. I'll remember that. Next time I have a
question, I'll just go right to the source
on Telegram.
I think all the things that are getting built, though,
are super critical, like, you know,
XanoBay, XanoCash, because
it's like Xano isn't just
saying, hey, here's something we built.
Please buy it and make the price go up.
Instead, it's here, let's actually use it.
And I've promoted the use of crypto for a long time,
much to the dismay of other people that say,
oh, great, you caused me to spend some Bitcoin back in the day.
And I know we were kind of reminiscing
about some of the old spends from way back
when I saw you, Sal.
But with every little sat or way or whatever small amount of unit that you've spent in the past,
that's someone else that's been onboarded and sees the value of crypto.
And so I'd like to hope that we've contributed to the value going up by actually using it
and onboarding other people and merchants to accept it and use it as a currency.
I mean, it's called cryptocurrency.
So I like that I'm seeing that level of adoption in Xano that I don't really see in many other
currencies that just build and then just, you know, work nonstop with just getting exchange
listing.
That's all they work on.
Just, oh, let me get an exchange list so people can buy it, so people can buy it, so people
can hodl it.
You know, Xano is actually trying to get some good utility in use well um you know part of the one of the benefits that um you know edge has in the early sort of adoption of zeno
and i say early because i know you've been around forever andre but like it really is just sort of
becoming a mainstream coin in the last yeah yeah it's totally accurate actually um but like you have that early mover advantage you know if you compare
to like a lot of the the top coins edge has a lot of room for growth here and uh you know early
movers like ourselves sort of have the ability the advantage advantage of like riding that wave from an earlier point.
So like as Zeno continues to grow and the ecosystem and the infrastructure gets built out,
you know, companies like Edge and influencers like myself are going to have more room to
grow with the chain like that.
So I think that's also pretty awesome.
No, for sure.
I think in the crypto space, it's kind of weird the mentality of mentality of you know what are the projects that you align with and support you
know there's much like people that are not builders but are investors they align with some
projects from an ethos level and they align with projects from a financial level and in a way that's
also true not as an investor but as a builder. You align with some products on an ethos level like we do with privacy coins.
But then there's also that financial benefit, as you mentioned, early mover.
And sometimes you don't even have to be that early.
If projects have really long, good trajectory, good utility, and keep growing over the years,
then, heck, a mid-level, even a late adopter, has a lot to gain.
a mid-level, even a late adopter, has a lot to gain.
And so I do think there's a good, bright future ahead of this integration,
both for Xano and for Edge.
I'm looking forward to some of the upcoming functionality,
such as bridging, that we can integrate.
We're really rich in supporting decentralized exchanges, bridges, DEX aggregators.
So this should be what I would call, not a walk in the park,
nothing's a walk in the park in building software,
but it's right up our alley is the best way
for me to describe it. It's right up our alley for us to support
things like the bridging of
the transparent assets into
the privacy layer into Xano. So I look
forward to that.
One of the
best things about being
a crazy anarchist and an agorist is that I'm always looking for the new tools to help us live free.
One thing I found over the last, I don't know, 12, 13, 14 years is that if you try to get rich in crypto, it's likely that you're going to eat your hat.
crypto you're it's it's likely that you're gonna you're gonna eat your hat but if you try to get
free and you follow the technology that's actually useful and has some sort of utility the money
falls behind it so like if you if you follow projects like this uh eventually um you know
my goal is my goal is not to get rich my goal is to get free but it just so happens that by trying
to get free you do kind of make a little bit of money every now and then.
So, yeah, I think that by being an early adopter, like, you know, I was able to when I found Bitcoin, that was like a huge godsend for me in 2013.
And then I found Ethereum in 2016. I'm like, oh, my God, we smart contracts have the ability to disintermediate government courts.
That is another topic for another day.
But then we had the ICO boom and there's always been something.
NFTs, meme coins.
And now the game is privacy.
And I strongly believe, just as strong as I believe back in Bitcoin in 2012,
I strongly believe that privacy is the wave of the future in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
And I guess the next question I have here is that, well, this kind of wraps into both of you a little bit, but Xeno aliases are an awesome, awesome feature that I love about Xeno that I can just send to a username. I don't need this stupid long string characters and, God forbid, somebody gets a hold of whatever.
But do you have any plans, Paul, to integrate the use of Xeno aliases into the Edge wallet?
Yes, actually, on our roadmap. We already estimated the work.
I think it's in probably a sprint
after the current one that we're working on.
We're working two-week sprints.
So it's definitely on the roadmap.
Here's where I'm going to take a second, though,
to pitch another project of similar functionality,
but extended, which is the FIO protocol.
We've been supporting FIO since 2020, 2021.
And it's similar, but it's chain agnostic
right the goal of fio is hey we're not trying to be a coin of specific value there's no
programmability on this chain we want to be like the switzerland of of cryptocurrencies where all
we all our chain does is register aliases handles are they're called handles and domains, and then link addresses
such as a Zeno address,
a Monero address,
a Bitcoin address to them
so that people can send and receive.
And what I like about this too,
there's one little nugget of FIO
that goes above and beyond aliases
on like Ethereum,
like ENS or like on Zeno
is that not only can you send to an alias,
you can request money from an alias.
And when you do that, the request is transmitted
over blockchain fully encrypted.
So no one sees the request.
You don't know how much you're requesting,
what asset you're requesting.
And then someone can pay that request
and send metadata with it.
And that metadata is fully encrypted on the FIO blockchain.
So it allows you to have some level of improved privacy in this kind of handle name ecosystem, even with transparent chains such as Bitcoin.
So with Bitcoin, it's not ideal to link a Bitcoin address to an alias because it's public.
It's like, hey, that alias maps to this Bitcoin address.
Better to use a privacy coin.
But with FIO, you can actually request funds
to a FIO handle.
And that request transmits an address
encrypted on the chain.
So no one sees the address for that request
other than the recipient of the request.
And the recipient can then pay it.
So it extends the layer by a little bit more
than just an alias.
But like I said, the aliases are still super helpful,
and I like that they're tied specifically in Xano
to a privacy-based address,
so you're not doxing your entire balance with your handle alias.
And so we will support it, much like we support ENS
and how we support FIO,
but I do invite people to check out the FIO protocol
independently of Xano.
It's just a way to be able to transact
in a very Venmo-like experience,
but with everything encrypted as far as all the metadata
and payment requests and payments
that you would do within the protocol.
And that's what?
FIO?
FIO, yeah, FIO protocol.
And it's baked into Edge.
You can register a handle on the Edge domain for free.
So the handles are handle at domain. So, you it's baked into Edge. You can register a handle on the Edge domain for free. So the handles are handle at domain.
So, you know, Paul at Edge.
You know, if it's available, you can register Sal at Edge
and then link a bunch of different assets to it.
I like to link the privacy coins to it, obviously,
because you don't dox your balances and transactions by doing that.
Andre, from a privacy perspective,
and maybe you can talk a little bit about
matrix in this answer um what are the benefits of having an alias from a privacy perspective
or just in general what are the benefits of having of using aliases aliases right for some reason I can't say that word.
Yeah, we set up a matrix server,
federated matrix server on ZANA just to give anyone who has an alias in ZANA system
a secure way to log in into the system.
And yeah, we needed for ourselves to have a conversations uh kept that much privately
that we know 100 that nobody reading this it's a 100 open source uh on our servers open source
open source software installed in our server so we we know it's not getting really available.
So we need it for us, but then we decided, okay, let's do it for everyone who uses XANA,
so people can use this as a messenger to chat between each other.
It's kind of, I'm not sure if I can call it project, it's a side thing that we created,
and we decided to use alias for this.
And as well, we were planning to use aliases in other things for out-infit,
out-infit, oh, sorry, to login to the website or any other source
that you need to prove that you're on this
or prove that your identity, I mean, digital identity.
I know that Pavel uses in the extension,
in the extension for XanoTrade,
and he liked to use this for other things.
So we just...
What, the Xano companion for chrome is that
what you're talking about extension yeah it used for authentication on the website uh okay okay um
we don't even know what what's gonna be next we just see that people really like use aliases as it happens everywhere and we try to not entertain them but
to try try to create something that they will have fun using not it's not only just like a
soulless crypto we try to make it something something that they will enjoy using this and
i think alias is kind of created this give it's like a human touch for uh hardcore crypto that
we're building well uh so just to summarize that point matrix is like a a signal like messenger service that's built into uh on
the xana blockchain and you can access it no no it's not built it's not a built-on zana blockchain
it would be a waste of uh the blockchain space and uh uh it's we're just using the zana keys
that are associated with the alias uh because, it's built into the mobile wallet app, right?
Yeah, so you just create your account on the matrix server
with your keys, out-intificating by this key,
by confirming that you're owner of this alias.
And then you use open source software for encryption.
And the matrix is a protocol that encrypts everything that you type everything
that you send and uh it doesn't you cannot read it on the server even if we would want we cannot
read it uh on our server that we host well what's cool though i think is is cool from a cypherpunk
perspective a libertarian perspective is that you can sort of authenticate somebody
uh using their alias so like like you you can sort of authenticate somebody but in a private
way that makes any sense like i know who i'm talking to but it's all done uh making you know
retaining that that layer of privacy yeah one of the scenario was that if you're trying to make a deal with some merchant
and have his alias only and don't have any other information about him don't have his telegram
which is linked to the phone somehow or whatsapp which link it to telegram and your social networks
so you have just just the alias and you want to deal with
him about about something so you just can find him in uh by using this alias uh in the in the
matrix network and chat with him and then you know 100 sure that you're speaking with the exact
person that you'll be trading to okay That's one of the scenarios.
Yeah, fundamentally you're using the keys
that secure cryptocurrency.
You know, when you create a transaction
to send some Bitcoin
or some Xano, you're signing proof that you
own the private key for the public
key that owns the funds. In the same sense,
now, you know, they're using it as a method
to authenticate onto a server
by saying, hey, here's a signature that proves I own this alias, right?
And then the way the alias becomes a username,
but instead of there being a password to the server, it's a signature, right?
The signature is the one that then says, okay, I own this alias, log me in.
And so you have a high level of confidence that you are transacting
and sending messages to the true user of that
alias because they had to secure the key that actually proves that they own that alias.
So it's a great use.
And it's one of the things that I've said about crypto.
Crypto enabled us or put private keys in the hands of normal people.
Regular users now have private keys.
Now, granted, for some people, that's hard to manage.
You know, I'll give ourselves a pat on the back.
We've made that far easier to manage private keys.
We're very different.
But by crypto having done that and giving people tools to manage private keys,
we can now use private keys for more than just sending crypto.
We can use it to prove what we call like a digital identity,
which really is nothing more than logging into services.
We can use those private keys, which we're already seeing in things like FIDO protocol, which is used in key pass type of use cases.
Or passkey, sorry, passkey type use cases.
So it's very similar.
And I'm excited that we are actually, we are actually adopting public, private keys
in technology, generally speaking, for the consumer
that kind of goes beyond just cryptocurrency.
Yeah, no doubt, no doubt.
I don't know if I lost your mic there for a second or not,
but I think we're back.
All right, guys, we have almost 3000 people watching.
Give me a like and a retweet.
Share this around.
Send it to your mother, your brother, your sister, your aunts and your uncles,
because this is how we win.
This is how we take back control from the political parasites through financial
sovereignty, the heart of the beast, the beating heart of the enemy is the money
printer, and we take that power back through financial sovereignty.
And that's what we're here discussing with Paul Pui from Edge Wallet.
If you're just tuning in and Andre from Zeno,
dl.app.edge.sal.
If you want to download the Edge Wallet, I think that's correct.
I hope it's correct.
If not, just go to the App Store, look up Edge, you'll find it.
Zeno Mobile Wallet App is also available. You can get Zeno from 100 different exchanges out there.
There's a lot of them that you don't have to use KYC payment platforms. I think Ascend EX is one.
Get Zeno and Edge. Right inside. Yeah, you can get an edge, right?
Yep. Right now you can't buy Zeno directly from fiat, but you can buy Bitcoin, Ethereum, stablecoins, and then swap those into Zeno all with an Edge.
Yeah, beautiful stuff, man.
I mean, that's how we win.
These are the kind of tools that we need to win.
If anyone's in the EU and doesn't want to do KYC, we also support being able to buy up to $1,000 of Bitcoin without KYC through one of our partners there, Biddy.
So you can literally do like actual fiat transfer, no KYC, and then take that Bitcoin and swap it into Xano.
Do you see why I love Edge Wallet guys?
Do you see why?
We need guys like Paul involved in as much of the ecosystem as possible.
involved in as much of the ecosystem as possible.
Okay.
Andre,
NFTs.
I know you guys are talking about
there's this upcoming launch of the Obscura platform,
which I'm super excited about.
I'm going to keep it real with everybody.
A little teaser.
I'm actually working on an NFT collection for and for obscura as soon as it's ready
for release i want in on it so what give me the update when is it going to be available when can
i use it and uh yeah i mean anything you can tell me about the incorporation of nfts into zeno
i'm really wrong person to ask about come on bro honestly yeah you have to get pile on and speak
about call him up get him on the phone uh i'm just kidding i'm just kidding he couldn't make it today
but i honestly i myself not an ft person at all i not that i don't, but this is something that I wasn't really into.
So, yeah, I think it's better to give Pavel to give a chance to speak about this.
He has more NFTs and he has more vision behind this.
I'm curious about one thing.
Maybe, Andre, could you answer one thing?
Would the NFTs at least be private?
Like you can't see the NFTs that I own based on my address.
Yeah, yeah.
That's the point.
Okay, cool.
I figured as much.
Yeah, they tricked our confidential assets thing
and figured out how to make an NFT from it.
It was even made without me.
They figured out.
So there's no change to the protocol
for the nfts it basically you just you just create you just deploy uh one a new asset that
you have a one coin in supply okay basically this coin and the coin transferred absolutely
privately but whoever can got it whoever can prove so it's not fungible but it's totally private
think about like the the application from just from my perspective is like an anarchist you know
lord someone who like you know spreads propaganda for a living like this is wonderful like i know i
can't be tracked or traced we can have have political art, political commentaries traded privately.
I mean, that's huge.
I cannot wait for something like this.
I mean, music, all sorts of shit.
The possibilities are actually endless.
Andre, do you know if I'll be able to include metadata with NFTs?
include metadata with nfts yeah yeah they they even came up to some sort of standard uh for
Yeah, yeah.
obscura uh and that's amazing that they did it all by themselves they getting excited from this and
i'm really glad to hear something was building on top of zANA protocol without my actual involvement.
That's great.
Actually, I see this as a really great sign that we are doing something right,
that people are managing to build something without involving me
or someone else from the core team to build this up.
I mean, of course, we are up for help and trying to build, make it like way better, but this is something that like,
I'm, I'm, I'm really happy to see this happening.
No, it's like seeing your own kid finally running on their own without your help.
One of the things that we spoke about Andre in Amsterdam was, you know,
for years as an, as a agorist i've been
talking about this this explosion of tokens that that's coming i call it the to cambrian explosion
like we had the cambrian explosion of life yeah there will be a there will eventually be an
explosion of tokens like if it can be tokenized it will be tokenized, it will be tokenized. And I think that that is going to do more,
unleashing capital to the world is going to do more for human development than I think,
you know, maybe since like the creation of fire or fences, it's going to be like on that level.
I mean, if you think about when, you know, somebody in sub-Saharan Africa can invest a small amount of money in a project in Europe or the US or Asia.
That is a revolutionary concept.
Is it possible or can it be done to tokenize not just digital assets, but real world assets on the Zeno blockchain?
Is that possible?
And then maybe transact them in a permissionless fashion.
I mean, think about the potential there.
If all of a sudden I could tokenize stocks and bonds
and hard assets and trade them
without the political parasites at the SEC
or the dirtbags from FINRA spying in on my transactions,
FINRA spying in on my transactions?
is that possible or is that going to be possible?
Is that possible or is that going to be possible?
I think it's a question not about technology.
It's a question about connection real world rules to digital assets.
And I don't have much background here.
Maybe Paul can say something.
Andre is totally right here.
So the technology is 100% there.
And it really is, when you connect a real world asset to a token on chain,
what are all the rules that you want your government to have or not to have
with respect to that entity upholding their promise?
If I spun up some tokenization of Tesla stock on, on the Xano blockchain and boom,
you've got like a Tesla token. Well, how much do you trust me to make sure there's actually
Tesla tokens behind that Tesla? I'm sorry, there's actual Tesla stock behind those Tesla tokens.
And are you going to want me to follow some kind of rules? Are you going to want some rules put on,
you know, the RWA type tokens to ensure that I don't just go run away with
the funds you use to buy these tokens and not actually back them with the real world
assets.
So it's the tie between blockchain and real world that is so difficult.
And admittedly, since I can't remember what class of Bitcoin you were, I've been in since
2013, we've been talking about tokenization of real world assets for now over 10 years.
Forever.
Forever.
But I feel like the only thing that actually has achieved any level of success are basically stable coins.
Right?
Specifically non-algorithmic stable coins have achieved success.
Because algorithmic stable coins are not RWAs.
They're not real world assets.
Right?
They're synthetic.
Don't get me wrong.
I want them to exist and we need them to exist,
but they're not requiring a trusted third party.
Any type of RWA does require some, you know,
trusted third party that, well, how much do we trust them?
Do we want government to like hold them accountable to some rules or not?
Or is there another system we can use to hold them accountable? And so that is the real blocker. Like, yeah, it's 100% possible.
Just how much do we want to trust third parties with these real world assets and whether or not
the government would even let us do that for certain types of assets, such as stocks and whatnot?
types of assets such as stocks and whatnot.
Well, you know, I mean, like I look at something like, uh, uh, not to, not to,
you know, put too fine of a point on it, but I look at like, uh, FINRA,
which is essentially a cartel of brokers.
So if you want to, if you want to buy a stock or an asset in the U S you have
to go through some broker that's registered with FINRA.
And this of course drives up the costs of that.
People have to spend, to spend to invest and things
like that. And I think by getting rid of these people and doing this in a permissionless fashion,
trading these assets in a decentralized way, I mean, it's going to be absolutely huge. It's
going to be the most revolutionary thing ever. I mean, imagine a world in which, you know,
your car, you can tokenize a car can we can divide the cost of the car
into three pieces and we can all own one third of the car and like we can like use it for like an
uber or something like that we don't even ever see the car we just get paid dividends or something
like that like that's real estate like i mean businesses it's all the the possibilities are
absolutely endless so um yeah yeah no i've
agreed with this i'm excited about too i think the closest that i've seen and i i would love for
a similar project to finally come out is synthetic assets that represent things like stocks and bonds
and whatnot right we and these are basically the equivalent of algorithmic stable coins, but not for coins such as dollars, but for things like shares.
So if you could take a business, chop it up into shares, and those shares trade on the
FINRA regulated exchanges that don't give people access and their full KYC, blah, blah, blah.
But now you have price discovery. You know what those things are worth.
Then you create a synthetic asset that tracks that price, but doesn't require a third party. That's what these algorithmic coins are. They can track the price of another asset. And if you can do that, now we can take those coins, bridge them into Xano, and be able to trade them freely and privately, independent of the FINRA stocks and the actual shares.
And then someone in sub-Saharan Africa, like you said,
can actually gain price exposure to Microsoft, Tesla, NVIDIA,
without actually owning the real shares,
but they're owning a token that tracks the value and tracks the price.
That, to me, is our future that actually opens up this digital economy to the
global population. No doubt. Again, I think it's akin to, it's going to be as big as the invention
of fences or fire. It's going to be a revolutionary moment in humankind. Now you mentioned stable coins,
excuse me, and I'll be honest, stable coins scare the shit out of me.
And there's a couple of reasons for that.
Yeah, right.
I mean...
Well, the way they've implemented today, where they're backed by someone with a bank account,
treasuries, those should scare you, which is why I keep saying algorithmic, right?
Where they're not actually backed by a third party.
But you're right.
They should scare you.
Well, you know, I think we all have a mutual
friend here uh aaron day the great aaron day who um has this idea for a gold-backed stable coin on
zeno which is just you know brilliant this is the kind of shit we expect from aaron but like
um one of the one of the challenges there is that it is confiscable.
It is confiscable.
So it is this sort of middle of road that you have to find between the algorithmic coins and the commodity-based coins, privacy, or I'm sorry, stable coins. I mean, you can make an algorithmic gold stable coin, but that can't be confiscated and could be backed by a basket
of different assets, including XANA. But then you have the problem of like,
but then you got to audit reserves. No, no, there's not. No, you wouldn't have any reserves.
There's no trusted third party. You use smart contracts on other chains like Ethereum
to mint this coin. And that coin is purely created by a smart contract, a smart contract
that has the other coins as collateral
that over collateralizes the minting of these coins and then those coins can get bridged over
into xano and then transacted privately freely anywhere in the world with obviously no kyc and
no no trace so that fundament and i know if aaron's listening i know i've had this debate with aaron
numerous times and saying like yeah as soon as there is a trusted third party that's backing the coin,
those funds can be confiscated.
You nail it.
You said it exactly.
And the only solution to that is an algorithmic stablecoin.
I just don't see any other solution to that than a full algorithmic stablecoin with a
smart contract specifically.
You have to have a smart contract because a smart contract executes autonomously.
There's no one that has control over it.
It's the one that can mint and burn the coins as necessary with collateral that it holds.
Is it involved the price oracle, the gold price oracle on the blockchain, or it's not involved?
It may need a gold price oracle, which at least could be contributed by thousands of token holders
on a different protocol as opposed to a single entity.
The whole point is take that single entity that you're trusting
and take whatever trust you need in it
and distribute it across thousands of people
that are financially motivated by a token,
which is effectively, at the end of the day, that's proof of stake.
If they have a token in order for me to contribute the price of gold or the price of the the dollar to
bitcoin you know or the price of tesla shares then i um i am in essence contributing to proof of stake
i stake some coin and i contribute the info as long as i don't lie i don't get slashed right
that's that's mirroring what proof of stake chains do,
but at a smart contract level
for a specific decentralized app,
such as the minting of a stable coin.
Guys, give me a like and a retweet.
Share this around if you're listening.
We're up to almost 4,000 viewers,
probably a little bit over
when you include everybody listening all over,
but that's not enough.
I want to double that.
So share it, share it around,
send it to everybody you know. We have crypto royalty on this call. Okay.
We have Paul Pui, the CEO of Edge Wallet,
which is the number one leading multi-chain privacy focused wallet.
And of course, Andre, who is like the inventor of Zeno,
and he's very modest about his work with Monero and Crypto Note,
but he also played a role there. Get in here, share this episode around. If you have questions, we're going to turn to audience questions shortly. I don't
know how much longer I'll be able to keep these guys on the phone for on the call. So get in here
now and ask them around. If your friends have questions about Zeno or Edge or privacy or crypto,
these are the guys to ask. So get in here, share it around. And if you have a question,
drop it in the comments and we will get to it shortly.
Stablecoins, though.
I don't know if you guys saw this, but there is the, in the U.S., at least, Andre, we have the genius and stable acts.
Did you see this, Paul?
This is absolutely ridiculous.
ridiculous um these are essentially backdoor attempts to take existing stable coins and
co-op them uh on behalf of the state and sort of turn them into cbdcs and they're going to
sort of right it seems like at least the plan is to like use that as an avenue to surveil us
and to institute this whole social credit bullshit um so that's really what scares the
shit out of me when it comes to privacy coins and you know i know we spoke about this we have a
different opinion but like uh we have this new uh privacy-backed stable coin on the xeno blockchain
called freedom dollars which admittedly is not perfect but but your funds can't be frozen.
They're auditable at any time.
And I think that's probably a better option than anything that we have now,
like Tether or Circle or something like that.
What do you guys think about like a privacy-backed stablecoin?
Is that a good alternative to something that we have now?
Like, again, like they're taking Tether and Circle and USDC
and they're going to transform them into CBDCs.
We need some sort of alternative now.
Do you think a privacy-backed stablecoin could be the solution?
I think it's definitely a key solution.
The, you know, like I said, we chatted about Freedom Dollar and I've chatted with Aaron about it too. And I know that there are people that highly trust
the people behind Freedom Dollar. I don't know the people behind it. So the core difference between
the Freedom Dollar and Tether is it seems like we trust the people at Freedom Dollar much
more to not compromise our funds. But otherwise, they're basically the same from that viewpoint
of there is a trusted third party that's holding the funds. The funds that's happened to be Xano,
not dollars, which is why Freedom Dollar is able to operate a bit more in the dark and not have a bank account, not have U.S. Treasuries.
There's no KYC.
So by holding a cryptocurrency,
that can skirt a lot of the banking requirements.
And it's quote-unquote algorithmic, but it's custodial.
So they're using an algorithm internally within their group to say,
okay, well, we're going to mint some Freedom Dollar based on how much Xano we've collected.
I think the longer term, I think it's a good solution.
It's a better solution than what we have. But the longer term solution is to take the algorithm that the Freedom Dollar team is implementing in a custodial manner and put that on a blockchain that actually has smart contracts.
So there's no one that we're trusting other than open source code, right? That's the ethos of
crypto. Open source code sitting on a blockchain that can hold, even if it's not Xano, a basket
of assets, mints a freedom dollar that then gets bridged over into xano and we transact that one privately that to me would be the end goal that i'm very excited to see and i know that with the
advent of two technologies that i see coming one is confidential air and then two love or hate
bitcoin it's it's still the largest value most stable of the cryptocurrencies um with bitcoin
entering kind of entering its layer two lifespan,
these programmable layer twos could meet a stable coin that is very stable to the dollar,
and that can then get bridged over. So that's what I'm really looking forward to by the end
of the year is transacting in that style of what I call an actually decentralized algorithmic stablecoin that cannot be censored and also cannot be
rugged from underneath you no matter what.
Would you agree that right now
as we speak, FUSD Freedom Dollar
would be a better option for people out there who need or want to
use stablecoins than something like
tether or usdc or something like that oh it depends on the use case if you're trying to
accept some dollars and send some dollars um and do it privately that's that's your only game in
town right like you actually want to send and receive dollars privately f usd is it exactly
if you're trying to use dollars for a different purpose like for example you're trying to use it in any form of defy like i want to i want to borrow
some dollars not even hold them like i've done this like you know you want to put some ether
bitcoin as collateral borrow dollars and then sell them right into into fiat well you're not
even holding the you're not holding the stable coin you're just like using as a transfer to get
it into the like the trad fi system then it's hard to be tethered in usdc right um but for like transactional means usdc and tether
are terrible because the a the privacy is poor right um and then b there is none yeah there's
no there's no privacy and you're likely you know if you're holding it for any duration of time
that could get frozen um that could get censored and whatnot. So transactionally, I think they're terrible,
but they have at least a high level of adoption from the viewpoint of if you know, if you and
some other counterparty are happy to transact and you want to do it privately, then FUSD is great
because you don't need to worry about, oh, do they take it or not? You already have two parties that
are willing, then yes, then go and utilize FUSD. But I'll be honest, I think it's a stopgap. I don't think this is a long-term solution. It's a
great stopgap until we get to the point of a true algorithmic dollar-based stablecoin.
The point I guess I'm trying to draw out here is that if you're one of the biggest obstacles to
retail adoption that cryptocurrency has historically faced is merchants, you don't
want to be exposed
to the volatility that's inherent within cryptocurrencies so they seek out to use stable
coins and uh if you're out there listening and you're like oh man i want to use zeno i want to
accept zeno at my store number one what you could do is you can go to zeno.cash and there's a there's
a point of sale app i mean it's stupid simple if i can use it anyway if anybody can mean, it's stupid simple. If I can use it, anyone, if anybody can use it, it's that easy. And if you
don't want to stay in Zeno, which I think is crazy, because
I know you guys have seen the price, but it's just it goes in
what's basically been on the rise. Yesterday was a little
blip in the air. But a couple days before that, it, it was
doing really well. That's another story but uh what you can do is
you can you can actually excuse me using the point of sale app at xeno.cash you can go back
and forth or you can accept freedom dollars or or you can accept xeno or one or the other so
that's another little tool out there that you guys can use to uh limit your exposure to volatility and stuff like that.
All right, guys, if you have any questions, if you're in the chat, if you're watching,
let us know.
I'm going to start to wind down the discussion.
I can't keep these guys around forever, but we have some real OGs here.
So, I mean, we're not talking like 2017 get-rich-quick newbies, guys.
These guys have been around.
So if you have a real question, now is the time to ask it.
Let me just see what I got left for you guys here.
Where's everyone going to be in the next few weeks?
Where can people catch Sal and Andre over the next couple next couple months so i'm gonna be at portas
question all right i'll see you there and i can't wait to look forward to it because you're leaving
on wednesday morning right uh thursday morning so i might just slightly morning uh i might barely
see you might barely see a cell maybe maybe you, I'll show you a message on Signal.
Maybe we can, like, get lunch or something before you head out and I get in there.
Cool, cool.
You have to be, like, on the stage.
I'm speaking at, like, 4 p.m., so I have to kind of, I am kind of in a little bit of a rush.
Cool, cool.
I'm looking forward to that.
There also might be at CoinFest Asia in August. We'll see how things play out um cool a lot of stuff by the
way you can go to you can check out you can follow my appearances at saudiwurst.com you can find all
my stuff including a calendar with my different speaking engagements and events and shit like
that so check that out where are you going to be uh where are you guys going to be at so
we'll be at pork fest we're bringing a team over there i personally will be there till thursday
morning although we'll have people there the whole week up until like you know through saturday night
um i have to leave a bit early because uh pork fest overlaps with monero con and so that's in
prog this year so i'll be heading over to MoneroCon on Thursday night,
should arrive a Friday morning,
just in time for the conference to start.
I might be there maybe a couple hours late,
but we've got another team member
that's going to be over there as well.
It's a very technical conference,
but Monero lovers of all sorts come by
and learn a lot about the privacy ecosystem.
And it's not Monero specific in the sense that
there are a few other privacy chains that are represented. And I actually don't have a whole lot of travel plans after that, although I might last minute before heading to Porkfest, head over to Freedom Fest. I was confused between Freedom Fest and Liberty Fest. I think it's Freedom Fest is over here. I think it's right before Pork Fest,
and it's actually in my neck of the woods.
It's over in Palm Springs, California.
So I'm looking at hitting there, but I haven't finalized plans.
If you are heading over to Freedom Fest, shoot me a message.
If you're on X, shoot me a message there,
or you can find my contact info on edge.app.
As well, all the events that we attend or host in our office.
We host a whole lot of meetups, crypto tech meetups in our office.
They're all posted on edge.app slash events.
You can kind of check us out and see where you might want to sync up with the Edge team.
Oh, I didn't know you guys do that.
That's pretty cool.
Yeah, if you're ever in Southern California, Sal, we've got a great event space.
It's just another side of this camera.
Got a little mini stage projector sound system. Yeah, if you're ever in Southern California, Sal, we've got a great event space. It's just another side of this camera.
Got a, you know, a little mini stage projector sound system, a little DJ booth.
And we fit like about 100 people, you know, for a meetup.
So we've had up to 150 people standing room only for some bigger meetups.
But we're big on community events.
We never charge any of these meetup groups, you know, to host an event here.
It's just about giving back to the community.
Hell yeah. Yeah, I was going to do Freedom Fest freedom fest but i was like i'm already doing uh pork fest i'm traveling with
friends after pork fest and i was like i got so much shit going on i'm like let me just pick one
one or the other and i think pork fest is probably the best opportunity like i really want to try to
spread adoption of zeno and like these different tools and there's a new ecosystem and really pork fesses and much more grassroots event
where I think that happens so that's why it's a great event so well we'll be
onboarding a bunch of people on design over there we have some cool swag and
some cool kind of promotions and and games for people to win crypto and get Edge installed.
And so really looking forward to it.
Oh, awesome.
And Ross Ulbrich will be there.
Yeah, that's right.
Saw a speech over in Bitcoin Vegas
and looking forward to see how he tweaks that
for the New Hampshire crowd.
Yeah, yeah.
That's an interesting little point.
We'll get back to that in a second.
But Andre, what are your plans?
I'm not going anywhere.
My life is very boring.
He's going to build.
We want Andre building.
He's going to close the curtains
and just keep doing math.
Yeah.
I'm staying in Dubai.
We probably go to Mallorca
to visit a friend of ours
if we manage
to find time for a couple days.
Not for any events though, right?
Just Mallorca for
friends? Yeah.
There is
going to be an event in July,
but I don't know if we go.
Is that the Mallorca Blockchain Week?
I think yes.
Yeah, I've been invited to that multiple years,
but I haven't been able to make it out yet.
When is that?
I think Andre might be right if that's in July.
It's always in the middle of summer.
Oh, shit.
Okay.
That's interesting.
I'll have to look into it.
That would be kind of cool to attend.
Yeah.
Actually, I'll be in Brussels in mid-July.
Yeah, maybe I'll just hop right over.
Cool, cool. All right. I do have to bounce out now. I've got a 11 a.m. Pacific, you know, stand-up meeting that I do have to get to. But this has been a great chat.
Let's do it again. I think this is the kind of, we need to put the, we need to have a meeting of the minds more often.
Cool, cool.
Okay, before I let you go, before I let you go,
let's just one, two, three, scan the questions.
I don't think we have too many questions here.
Sure, let's take one.
Let me just.
What's the most relevant for me?
We have a lot of comments, privacy is not a crime.
Good morning.
How much is pre-mined?
I guess that's for Andre.
Pre-fi.
A lot of spam in the comments.
All right.
That's it.
Get out of here.
Thanks for doing that, Paul.
We have everything that's structured on the website about pre-mined,
the history of the structure of the funds.
Right.
All the history is there.
Cool. Cool. All right. Well, Andre and Sal structure of the funds. Cool, cool.
All right. Well, Andre and Sal, thanks so much.
Super appreciate it. I'll catch you
guys next time. We'll do it again.
Thank you, guys.
Thank you. Bye.
Andre, are you
leaving me too?
I have something because I have a bunch of
chats, but we have 10 minutes if
you have more questions. 10 minutes. have a 10 minutes if we if you if you have more questions 10 minutes excellent 10 minutes okay cool um all right let me just see
let me just i'm just scanning uh uh comments here she at she is faith i'm here for zeno
tabitha parenti says the mid-continental liberty festival is the weekend of 10 4
um i think i think there's another conference
in october that i might be going to i'm not sure go zeno go go go dotty maxi i heard that zeno can
end the fed that's the that's the prayer and the hope privacy first let's go zeno
uh irish adam is in the chat my co-host zeno is the future of private transactions that guy gets
a like and a follow um okay all right well i don't know man you tell me what's i guess the
last question i'll hit you with and i'll let you go is talking about the future of zeno where you
where do you foresee the chain and
down the line in one year and five years and ten years
we have a lot of um we have a lot like really a lot brainstorming in the team uh about about how we can bring tools that other blockchain has,
for example, Ethereum virtual machine,
because it gives a lot of opportunities for builders to build on top of Ethereum,
and lack of these tools creates some sort of frustration for people
who want to build on top of XANA.
And it's really, really challenging.
And it also can distract a lot of our development process and can create some troubles for privacy.
So we are still going.
There is no, I mean, if you ask me, like right now, there is no I mean if you ask me
like right now there is no clear vision
of what's going to be done in 5 or 10 years
we don't know we really don't know
we're trying to see what's happening
in the blockchain we're trying to see
what people say to us
what they want to build
what other successful projects
are doing and
we're just trying to
try and do our best to,
I don't know, it's going to be,
it's going to sound like very trivial,
what I'm going to say,
but we're just doing our best
in building what we believe in.
Just building private money.
Yeah.
You said you want to incorporate EVms into zeno like do you mean
like not directly right like not want no we want we want to have a more set of tools for
for especially for example for people who want to build uh stable coins um it's not necessary tied to
um it's not necessary tied to a dollar or euro but uh if you want to pay for a coffee that's that's
dream of all crypto enthusiasts since the very beginning i want to pay for the coffee with
my crypto you have to have some asset that will be linked to real world values, right?
And stable coins, the way it's called it now, stable coins,
it's something that people would need.
And there is a custodial stable coins is very risky.
And I think people are getting, like, the more problems we have with these custodial projects,
that more people getting educated and see into what are the decentralized projects
or decentralized options we have.
And I think if we speak about, like, a really long, long-term future,
i think if we speak about like a really long long-term future we would be focusing on
building those tools that would create but let people build uh algorithmic uh stable coins or
give them like more flexibility on building or more tools for uh uh using evm networks from ethereum or
from other blockchains we don't know yet but we want to extend the set of tools for people that
for for make them build truly decentralized projects uh and i think stable coins would be
very big part of it and uh you know And virtual machine is one of the tools that really needed for this.
And we had this conversation like 100 times specifically with Pavel
because he knows really good how tokenization works,
how Ethereum virtual machine works.
And we constantly brainstorming this, but we don't have decision yet
about this so two things like number one i feel like like i don't know about like again the dream
has been to pay with that coffee but not with a stable coin it's the dream has been to pay with
that coffee on the base layer like so i I personally envision a future where people are using the coin
directly on layer one to pay for that coffee.
Yeah, that's not going to work.
I think that's not going to work.
From my perspective, from what I see,
I can explain why I think it's not going to work.
Because if, you know, for example, let's take XANA or any other project, for example, Manera,
just to not be biased.
If I hold Manera, I know, okay, let's speak about XANA.
Let's assume XANA doesn't have any tokens, just XANA itself,
like XANA two years ago.
If I know that I will be paying with, for example,
for goods with Zana.
And I know that more Zana getting adopted,
more people want to pay with Zana.
They need to buy more Zana.
So the price of Zana will be always growing.
And then when I want to pay for the coffee,
I actually don't want to spend my Zana because I know tomorrow
Zana will be twice more expensive or in a year it's going to be way more expensive.
I really don't want to spend Zana.
The way people don't want to spend Bitcoin, people are really, especially now, people
really hesitate to spend Bitcoin.
So it's not another problem is volatility.
If I drink coffee and the price of this coffee dropped or increased twice while I was drinking coffee, it's also a problem for people because you see how price is volatile for assets like Zana or Bitcoin or whatever it is, especially like.
So I never want to spend.
Hold on.
Hold on.
Let me finish
I never want to
even if I
have a Bitcoin
for example
I know
100%
that everybody
would
like don't have a problem
to accept Bitcoin
as a payment
but I don't want to spend it
what I want to
do is
I want to borrow
something
to use my
Bitcoin as collateral and never sell it because I know it's going to be more and more expensive.
I'm never going to sell it.
I will use it as a collateral to borrow something that have a price, somehow link it to the price of real world assets like coffee or something.
That somehow it's not necessarily be connected to the dollar.
Dollar is just a nice example of global currency that link it to not necessary to be connected to the dollar. Dollar is just a nice example
of global currency
that link it to most of the values.
But I need something
that is related to the price of coffee.
And then I will pay with this.
But then I will be paying back
with this or whatever I do.
But I never want to sell
the asset that will be
more and more expensive.
And if you have just layer one, just
one token itself, you will
always face this dilemma.
So for that
reason, I believe that
as builders in the
blockchain, I mean, I'm not necessarily
think that everybody should do,
but what I believe is that as builders
in the blockchain we
create the tools for a payment and uh we by by creating the tools we create the environment that
transact that actually conduct transactions that's our job here so and by by we're increasing the value of Zana. But I don't think it's practical to use layer one coin, volatile coil,
the coin that will be increasing the value as a primary payment.
It's just really not practical as I saw from last 10 years of what I've seen in the blockchain.
Counterpoint, counterpoint, two of them, and then we'll end here.
I'm going to take the liberty of having the last word, my man,
because I already kept you longer than 10 minutes.
But number one, when you read like the old school economists,
Mises, Rothbard, Karl Menger, Hayek,
what they tell us is that a commodity has to be used in order to have value.
Otherwise, it's very unstable.
It's extremely speculative and it won't hold its value very long.
The second point, second counterpoint I would make is that many of us care less about getting
rich than we do about getting free.
Like my goal is not to get rich. My goal is to be
free from the government. I don't want politicians on my back. I don't want to have my wealth
extracted by a cartel of bankers to fund Nancy Pelosi's stock portfolio or whatever they're up
to this week, whatever crime they're committing. I don't want to pay for that shit. And by being able to transact in alternative currencies,
I have an out.
I have an escape.
And I'll tell you what,
I think that there are millions of people like me.
I mean, we were the original people in crypto
who sort of gave Bitcoin its original.
We were the ones who bootstrapped.
Yes, I totally understand you. You know, it's original. We were the ones who bootstrapped. Yes.
I totally understand you.
You're right.
I once spent 36 Ethereum on an ounce of weed.
Okay.
Now, from a financial perspective,
like, poor decision.
Poor decision.
But you know what?
If it wasn't for guys like us doing shit like that,
you know, would it have its value today?
I don't know.
It's debatable but um
yeah i i totally understand what you're saying but the the problem here is that
majority of people not thinking like you and people are driven by greed which is quite natural
i mean i'm not the one who blamed them but this is natural thing and they will ruin your system
anyway they will come and start to buy your coin and create deflationary uh deflationary demand that will be self-feeded self-burned so that's
what happened with bitcoin it's uh it's just increased its gravity in getting more and more
and more which is i mean i'm not complaining it's it's probably a good for bitcoin and for people
who invested for good for investment so i agree it invest it. Good for investment. So I agree.
It's driven by greed and there's nothing you can do.
You cannot let, okay, greedy people don't use my coin, please.
It's only for us, for ideological people who don't care about value.
Now it's just you will face people's nature anyway.
So that's why. Most people, you're right.
Most people are driven by practicality and not not an ideological.
They don't have an ideological motivation like cypherpunks or crypto anarchists or libertarians do.
But I truly believe that as the state becomes more and more oppressive, which it will because it's losing control of its monopoly on the issuance of currency.
It's like a fish out of water, just flailing about.
They're losing control of the system. As they lose control, people will become increasingly
oppressed. And as that impression, as they feel the weight of the government pressed down on them,
more and more, the demand for privacy coins and the tools that we discussed today is going to
grow and grow and grow. At least that's the way i see it
um and that's that's the hope uh all right yeah when i was saying about stable coins it's not
necessary about uh stable coins that link it to dollar or something that government controlled
and paul was saying before that there is a great example of creating algorithmic stable coins that are actually very stable in terms of real things value,
but they are algorithmically controlled by thousands of people to keep the value.
And there's a lot of attempts to build this dynamic system of collateral assets and stable coins, which is pretty much interesting.
And this could be a great solution.
That's why we're considering building some sort of virtual machines.
So people manage to build these mechanics that create your collateral coin that always
constantly increase the value and gives you benefit of investment, of supporting a system,
and create something that they use for actual payment,
for buying shit in the shop,
on the grocery.
Love it.
Love it.
Okay.
All right, guys, we're going to end it here.
Andre, where can people follow you on social media?
How can they keep up with what you're up to?
Drop any plugs you got.
You can follow me on twitter
but i'm i don't often post there um so my account is kind of boring but yeah we post like important
updates there on twitter cryptozoidberg um we're gonna share a link later i guess cool yeah no we'll
maybe we'll drop a link in the the questions here or something like that
at cryptos doidberg crypto royalty guys and founder of zeno one of the original founders
or he's very again he's very modest about his work with crypto note and monero um yeah it's
it's good to pick your brain dude thank you so much for your time and uh thank you for inviting
me and thank you for supporting our project. We appreciate it a lot.
Thanks for coming up with the idea, man.
And set up that chat with Pavel for me,
maybe next week or so,
so I can get to know him.
Okay.
All right.
Cool, man.
Thanks, man.
All right.
Talk to you later.
Bye.
Thanks, guys.
