Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
Nillion X Sarcophagus Fireside Chat
Recorded: Nov. 16, 2023 Duration: 1:01:10Space Recording
Full Transcription
I'll pass it off to Tristan from Nulian.
Hey guys, I'm Tristan.
I do a lot of different crypto slash Web3 stuff for Nulian, whether that's product or, you know, marketing or mechanism design.
I'm excited to be here and talk about sarcophagus.
I actually think that we've chatted before, over a year ago, about building and bootstrapping MPC networks.
Yeah, yeah, I think I remember that. I think it's something that's a challenge that a lot of projects are going through, right?
Like there's a lot of projects that require a third-party node network, and we're all just having to build them ourselves right now, which is just time-consuming and expensive, right?
We'd rather just have it be, I guess, easier with the same level of security.
So, yeah, I'm excited for what you guys are building as well.
Awesome. Thanks for that intro, Tristan.
And then I'm Steph. I lead developer relations at Nulian.
I started pretty recently last month, but I love to hear that the two of you have been collaborating for over a year.
I think that's really exciting.
Should we get into what each of our projects does?
Or, sorry, I cut you off, Zach. What were you going to say?
Oh, no, no, it's all good.
And sometimes I need to be cut off.
So, yeah, it's something that I think has been a core problem around crypto.
And, you know, I always try to find people that are trying to solve more of those core problems,
and especially before they become so obvious to the rest of the market.
So, yeah, I was very excited to see what they were building.
And I think Nulian had just launched at that time, or was that some party in New York?
But either way, I'm happy to intro Sarcophagus and kind of what we do.
So we are an on-chain deadman switch.
Currently, we're running on Ethereum, Polygon, and Arbitrum.
It is an omni-chain protocol, so we don't have any one chain that we have to stick to.
The application is meant to grow and branch out to multiple chains as long as the value can compile down to Ethereum, which is fairly easy.
We don't require the value to compile, you know, immediately.
It's not like a trading application or anything like that.
But in short, a deadman switch is a switch that triggers based on lack of action from the user.
So, you know, a standard switch, you turn on the light, the light goes on.
But you had to do that action.
A deadman switch would be saying something like, turn on the light in 10 minutes if you don't see me inside the room.
Or more accurately, turn off the light, turn off the AC if you don't see any movement in this room within 25 minutes, like a lot of hotels have.
So they're everywhere.
They're in every piece of heavy equipment, trains.
They're in every lawnmower has a deadman switch built into it.
So our goal was to try to build this and build this functionality in a decentralized and robust way using the power of cryptography.
So, yeah, instead of using metal pulleys and cables and heavy doors, we've started to use smart contracts and permanent file storage.
So, yeah, it's something that has a lot of applicability in a lot of different fields.
But we tried to do the hardest part first, which was build this decentralized network, build all the logic, and then build, you know, really the game theory to keep it going as a token project that wants to have some longevity, not just a token project that's meant to exist through one cycle and then disappear after people have made some money.
So one of our biggest things is longevity, robustness.
We don't really focus on speed.
It's just not really as relevant here as it would be on something like a trading application.
We really, really want that focus on finality and robustness.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's awesome.
That makes a lot of sense.
I mean, with what you guys are targeting and we can talk about use cases later, but also I think just makes a lot of sense in the tradeoff space where often one of the things that you give up when you want kind of, you know, security and privacy is latency.
So the more use cases that don't require those really high latency things that I would say the space is mostly trending towards, the less we have to worry about some of the traditional blockers.
Yeah, you can't get everything at once, right?
Like you can't have all, I guess you can't have your cake and eat it too, but it's just like any machine, you know, any machine is going to have tolerances and it's going to have a certain amount of air or fuel that can come into an engine and a certain amount of exhaust or power to be outputted.
So, you know, we like to think of the blockchain as something that has that kind of statistical variability, but, you know, we're very lucky because we work in human timescales.
So, you know, our minimum tech size for the way we think about things is five or 10 minutes, which that's an eternity in a computer's timescale, right?
That's an eternity for something like Solana or other blockchains.
But for us, we're dealing with humans.
We're dealing with people with, you know, fat fingers and, you know, that gets sleepy.
So that timescale works really, really great for what we're doing.
And I think it's what's allowed us to do things like using EBM networks and our weave, where we're bridging between the two and we don't necessarily have to have everything settle out immediately or get arbed to death before that happens.
So, yeah, I'm excited for where this goes, especially as we're able to decrease that latency through our efforts and development.
Something we have in common is dealing with high value assets.
Tristan, you're our Nillion OG.
Do you want to introduce what Nillion is?
Sure.
Yeah.
So Nillion is, I'd say it's a new type of distributed computing platform that's focused on, you know, high value data, as she said.
So that's, you know, securing, storage, sharing, processing, compute over high value assets.
That means that it's not just, you know, crypto assets, which is, you know, what brings a lot of these people in the space together, although that's definitely an interesting thing.
I mean, the primary private thing in our industry is private keys, right?
But also all sorts of things that right now maybe don't exist as much on blockchains or in Web3 just because, you know, they weren't onboarded because there was no infrastructure for them.
So we're really trying to build out this kind of new piece of infrastructure, new network that will help onboard new commercial use cases or maybe even whole verticals that right now aren't served by decentralized networks.
And I guess for all the listeners, the thing that we really have in common and kind of one of the things that brings us together with Sarcophagus here is some of the underlying tech is relying on similar cryptographic primitives, which run into some of the same problems, you know, when you try to put those into production.
And I don't know if you'd agree with that.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, even things as simple as or questions that seem as simple as do nodes equal each other, right?
Does one node have full replicability of another and able to play on the same field in the same way it would work in, say, a proof of work system?
And in our case, no, they're not right.
Like nodes have reputations.
They have histories.
They have resiliency.
But then they also have off chain dynamics as well, right?
Like a node that is run by a bank in Germany is probably going to have a higher profile and an ability to charge higher fees than, you know, a node that's running on a Raspberry Pi in someone's basement.
Both of them have the ability to do the same thing.
But we can start to tie in some more off chain trust metrics to make this work better, right?
To make it so that people are able to actually choose their desired security profiles and also to match their budget profiles, right?
So, you know, we know that layer twos are less secure than layer ones, but they're dramatically cheaper.
So there is a tradeoff between those two things.
And I think allowing users to make that tradeoff or at least to open a market to release the tension between those things is really something that we've put a lot of work into.
Again, like I just love that from a personal perspective, too.
There's tension in an industry.
And rather than fighting it or doing SLAs or whatever around it, you can just create a market to alleviate that tension.
And if there's users, if there's a legitimate use case for it, that market will normalize very quickly.
Totally.
I definitely agree with that.
I think, you know, we feel similarly in the longer term vision, that's the only way around things.
I'd say that one big problem in implementation between here and there that we are kind of thinking hard about is how to present things to users in a way that is understandable.
Because I totally agree to get to that correct tradeoff, that Goldilocks space for every person where they're thinking about the privacy implications, the reputation of the people that they're trusting and how they're decentralizing their trust and costs and all these things.
They need to be able to understand those concepts and the risks that they're taking.
And I think what we see, I don't know if you would agree with this, in the space with different chains, with, you know, the way that things rug, with different, like the places people are willing to put their money.
I think there is some misunderstanding of where trust exists.
And so how do we be as open as possible and make sure that our users are always well prepared, right?
Yeah, just like, you know, the original open source idea that the most secure code is code that is in the open, right?
So I'm a big believer in that as well.
Obviously, you know, none of us, I think, would be in this space if we didn't have at least some of that ideology of transparency equaling security.
At least, you know, via cryptography.
I don't know if that works in a lot of other industries.
It works very well here.
If you look at critical systems in any other type of, any other industry, like say you look at critical systems in aviation or, you know, trains, traffic, whatever, you're seeing a lot of the same code used over and over.
You're seeing a lot of the same systems.
You know, they have started to use mission critical or they have been using mission critical code forever.
Since computers have been flying airplanes, we've had very, very good code written for those.
And, you know, as the web has emerged, we've had not so good code because the computers keep getting faster, right?
The consequences are lower.
If a button on Facebook doesn't work when you press it, it's not really a big deal.
Maybe it throws an error.
All right, we'll get someone to fix that error.
But if you press a button on an airplane to disengage autopilot and it doesn't disengage, you're in a very, very different situation.
So I like to think that blockchain or at least, you know, the kind of stuff we're building here is a little bit closer to that aviation code or a little bit closer to mission critical code than what something like a Web2 application would be.
Yeah, totally agree.
I do think we're, you know, we all kind of, or a lot of this, this industry was built off the back of the cypherpunks and, you know, the Bitcoin community.
And that was maybe harder aligned towards what you're talking about, where it's stronger feelings about immutability.
We have moved as an industry a little bit more towards, you know, some tech adages, a little bit more moving fast, depending on how far out the risk curve you want to go.
But I think that over time, like you said, it's all markets, right?
The market will decide the happy medium of where we should all end up.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think it's inevitable.
You know, the way that we do things like, for example, like when we need a user to attest to their liveliness, right?
So a dead man switch, right?
You set a timer and you say, if I don't talk to you until then, or if I don't talk to you at all, after that timer expires, flip the switch, right?
So our attestation methods can be matched to whatever that user has for the gravity of their attestation.
So the gold standard is a crypto signature, right?
A crypto signature from their wallet is about as good as we can be, knowing that no one else is doing this.
But if you have a dead man switch that's just running something fairly simple, that's maybe not necessarily a life-changing release, you could have your attestation be a text message, right?
You could have someone call you and say, are you still alive?
You know, these methods with less gravity, but dramatically easier user interface.
So yeah, that's something we're working on.
And I hate to go so far on one side, right?
To say like, all right, you can do crypto signature or SMS because those are vastly different.
But there is a good happy medium in there, right?
Like something like Face ID with an Apple iOS app is pretty secure.
You know, I'm not going to be storing millions of dollars via Face ID on my phone.
But it is possible.
And I know there are people that do it out there.
So we know that it works pretty well.
I like that you give optionality for that user experience, especially for people who might not be crypto natives.
Maybe it's more accessible to just answer a text message and say, yes, I'm still alive, rather than figuring out how to sign a message.
Yeah, I mean, everything on Earth or in life is the same.
Like there is a spectrum, right?
There's a spectrum from having no security at all, of having, you know, no logins or no passwords or whatever, you know, the way Web 1.0 was.
And this full Web 3, you know, private keys and public keys with full anonymity, like even moving into ZK tech.
So, yeah, I think that we have to create an anchor point, though, that is above the median or further to the right on the spectrum towards the more perfect security and then have people push us down that.
I guess I'm a little bit of a libertarian paternalist in that aspect that we want to try to set good anchors, but allow people to change those anchors to be whatever they want.
Right. So you always will have the option, but we're going to suggest a pretty good default when you first get started.
Yep. Fully, fully aligned with that.
So I guess I was going to say that's maybe a good segue into kind of what types of things you were you're thinking about this network or you've heard from users or whatever you see for this dead man switch.
And, you know, I think that probably informs some of the UX decisions that you've made there.
Yeah. So, you know, one of the one of the things, like I said earlier, like we built the hardest thing first.
Right. We built this this network that's able to run on multiple multiple EVM chains.
We've built the node operators. We've built all this node software.
We've we've built the smart contracts on each given network, all the tokenomics and everything.
So right now, user interface, I wish we could focus more time on it.
It's something that is more use case specific.
So, like I said, we built the base layer and then we built an SDK to allow anyone who who really wants this functionality.
If they want to build a dead man switch into their product, they can just simply use the SDK, configure it to wherever they are in the security spectrum.
But, yeah, in terms of things that we want to store, when we first started this project back in 2018, it was how can we use Ethereum as like a parking meter?
Right. Like how can we just use purely the Ethereum chain?
What if we rather than than store an arbitrary data, we just said we're going to release a key to something on on ETH?
And then it was like, all right, well, not everything lives in the ERC 20 or Ethereum ecosystem.
Like what if I want to back up my Bitcoin private keys using sarcophagus?
And then it's like, all right, what if I want to store PDFs in a sarcophagus or a password manager database?
And we quickly realized that storing raw information like that on chain, at least on on Ethereum L1 or even L2s, is wildly expensive.
Yes, it is highly replicated.
It is stored forever, but it is crazy expensive because using block space incorrectly.
So with the advent of our weave and the ability to store arbitrary files of decent size of arbitrary size with with limits, right?
No one's putting terabytes in single chunks on there, but the ability to store arbitrary files of of any size forever led us to say, like, why don't we just open this up?
Why don't we make it so that you can put anything in your dead man switch to be released to your given recipient later?
You know, this is kind of part of the the ideology that small strings of data have excise power in our lives and have continued to have excise power or their power has grown exponentially since, you know, the late 90s or late or late 90s, mid 2000s.
You know, when online banking really became part of the spectrum, you know, we think of this as more of a generalized solution that will have different applications for specific things built on top of it.
Where if you forget your password for say your 1Password account, 1Password can still have their perfect ZK technology and not have access to your passwords to help protect the honeypot that they that they operate.
But maybe if you just don't log in for two weeks, that printed key that you have or that printed a backup from sarcophagus becomes active, you can now go and reset your password, do all that stuff.
So, yeah, in terms of like what we store, it's arbitrary data, but we encourage or the things we're pointing people towards are small strings of data that have a lot of importance.
A crypto private key or see phrases is obviously a very good example of a small piece of data that if released or if copied has pretty tragic consequences.
It also doesn't tell you that it's been copied.
Right. So if someone sees your private key and makes a copy of it, the first thing that you're going to notice is that.
All your money being gone. Right.
So, you know, there's a lot of other things will entrust lists of accounts, information that you want to be private for a time, but you want that information to go to someone else or go to the public if you're removed from the equation and removed from the equation doesn't have to just mean dying.
It can mean you got fired from a job and your password manager password goes to your boss.
It could mean you're just taking too long to do something and you need to communicate data to someone else because you're you're stuck in traffic.
It doesn't have to always be so morbid, but the morbid use cases are much easier to define.
They have much harder limits.
If I could add something.
Oh, go for it.
Really.
Sorry about that.
I'm Johnny, by the way.
I'm the community manager for Sarko.
Sorry, I didn't get to introduce myself earlier.
I was putting up some posts and stuff for the space, but something I wanted to add that is definitely forefront in the news right now is that there's a lot of protection provided here for journalists as well.
It's a use case that we try to talk about as much as we can, but right now with some of the things going on in the world.
It's a good time to bring it up that a lot of times in many situations warring countries, etc.
You might be doing like a border crossing or you just have some data with you that you've gathered from somewhere that you need to protect in a way where it's not physically on your person, but you still need access to it.
Once you're in a safe place to do so or posting it so that if you're not able to release it yourself or anything that it does get into the hands of the public as you originally intended.
So that was one of the use cases I wanted to add there that we'd like to mention.
That's a really cool use case for like journalists and whistleblowers.
Yeah.
Sorry, Johnny.
Go ahead.
Oh, I was just going to say, yeah, it gives people a level of protection using that cryptographic security, but also giving them privacy that if they don't want that data released too soon or to the wrong people that it is still private until that time and they can even cancel it in the future.
You know, if they end up safe and they're able to get the data and they don't want it released or don't need that dead man switch, they can bury it and cancel it.
Is there an attestation that that data exists while it's locked?
Like, can you as a journalist or whistleblower say this exists and is kind of the time box public?
Yeah, yeah, so absolutely.
Like the the the creation of the dead man switch, the creation of the sarcophagus, all on chain, the the resurrection time is what we call it when that those files will go live is also on chain.
So anyone from from the world, anyone who's who's looking on the chain can see the our weave location ID and everything on our weave is stored forever.
So when the sarcophagus is created, the our weave location ID is given to the user.
So they can go on on view block and on our weaves weave explorer and they can see the actual bytes living on chain.
They can see everything's been confirmed.
They can see like the size of the file, but it's obviously encrypted.
So no one else can do anything with it.
But yes, you can prove that it's there.
The cool thing about that also is we're able to prove that a given document was uploaded and attested to by a given person at a point in time, and we can do it with really the certainty of physics.
So if a document gets decrypted in the future, we don't really have to have any arguments over has this document been changed or has has any bit inside of this this container been changed.
It's like, no, we can do perfect checksums for trivial computational expense.
So, yeah, it's completely verifiable that it that it exists.
But again, everyone in the world can see that something is there, but they they can't see what's in it.
Right. That's that's one of the kind of core technologies here.
The core ideas is that it's open to everyone except they can't do anything about it.
There's no actually seeing through until the creator wants either the public or a given person or a given Ethereum key pair to see through and be able to actually decrypt that data and download it themselves.
Cool. Yeah, I think that that kind of stations of an interesting feature and can probably have some some, you know, unlock some cool things.
And I think there's that's like there's a possibility like I think that are we is really cool and kind of really focusing on on the storage aspect.
That's part of what we do, but maybe a little bit removed just because we're a lot more focused on the kind of security and privacy side of things, you know, not traditional key pairs, this like quantum proof storage, all of that stuff.
But one thing that I think, you know, our real value is less in the storage and more in the in the usage.
So those are the kinds of things where I think that for a lot of use cases, like the traditional dead man switches cases, it just makes it they're relatively interchangeable as storage stores.
Right. But potentially, if there if there is like underlying data that can still attest to itself live in some ways, that's that's where, you know, MPC or technology, PTs in general, become become more interesting than pure encryption.
Yeah, I agree with that. I think that, you know, are we for us is a very specific use case.
You know, it's not good at a lot of things. Right. But it is very good at exactly exactly what we need.
You know, we could use AWS, we could use Google Cloud, we could say, hey, the Dow owns a an account on AWS, all of this is stored, it would be cheaper and faster.
But then we still have a Dow that has to make recurring payments through centralized entities, you know, and whatnot.
Filecoin did just release their their smart contract, smart contracting language that will allow endowment based payments.
And so I think endowment based payments are going to be huge in the future of crypto just because of their inter or their non interactivity.
If I want to say pay for a domain name that doesn't have an expiration, I would like to put an endowment with that smart contract, whether it be in wrapped Ethereum or whatnot, and have the the periodic payment be the interest on my on my value.
Right. So are we've does that it's I think they're one of the first to do endowment based payments for for, you know, decentralized projects.
Like I said, with Filecoin, it's now possible.
I don't know if anyone's built endowment based payments on Filecoin so that the user doesn't have to go in every six months, a year, two years and make a payment.
Again, our longevity aspect and robustness aspect kind of bars us from doing things to have that interactivity.
Yeah, so we could use anything here. I think are we just the best.
And the second that something else becomes available, we'll also be doing that.
Right. Like we are not. We're not locked into any one network.
Our goal is to have this spread like, you know, a fungus through through the forest floor and have it communicating with everything while still coming back and compiling value back to to where it should be,
or compiling value back to one one point in the game theory.
I think that's very important for these kinds of applications, especially with like fixed supply tokens.
You know, you can't just submit forever or really emit at all.
It all has to come back to one place, but there's no reason it can't, you know, put spores all over and then connect underground.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me.
And the endowment based payment thing is pretty interesting and something we've been looking at.
I think there are some implement implementations out there that we use already as tools in crypto variously.
I mean, I think of Solana like state rent, right, for their storage system or whatever.
But the I think the way that Filecoin did it is interesting where just basically it's like programmable streams.
Right. And this is one way that you can program things.
And we plan to also support something like that, probably.
Yeah, I think I think it's one of those things that if we're trying to build things with more permanence.
You know, Web 2 is really good at a lot of things.
Obviously, it's very fast.
We use it every day for almost everything.
But there's a lot of serious issues around like link rot and, you know, news agencies just completely changing articles after the fact, not posting retractions, that kind of thing.
And we have the ability to fight that now it's slow, right?
Like it's a it's kind of like dial up Internet where, you know, you're going to have to really, really want to do it.
You're going to have to put some time into it.
But I think what comes out of the other side is a much more powerful Internet in a much more trustworthy one.
Right. I think we're all seeing kind of that the lack of trust that comes around when things aren't verifiable or things are not permanent just because we do have the power at will to go and change a piece of software like the airplane example.
You can't do over the air updates when the plane's flying.
Right. Like that's not how it works.
So I think the things that we're building try to use a lot of those same type of characteristics to to help solve human problems or help solve problems in the physical world, not just problems of, you know, how to make X database read or write faster.
I think those those kind of problems are solved as well as we can solve them.
But there's still this whole other set of problems that exists more for the human side of things, the ten fingered side of things.
I wouldn't say that we've solved. I mean, there's still very good work being done.
You're right. You're right.
We're not ready for the next billion users, I don't think.
But but, you know, yes, for sure.
I think that there is, you know, block space, depending on what block space you want, is plentiful.
And, you know, the human problems are are in focus of like sometimes it kind of feels like we need to.
There are certainly things in crypto that have product market fit, but like let's let's find the things that, you know, prove out our industry more broadly than maybe just the pure financial use cases.
And I think you guys are a great example of that. Right.
So that's that's definitely one of the things that we we hope to enable.
Yeah, thank you. I appreciate it. It's always, you know, it's nice to hear some kind words and think that, you know, we're trying to solve a problem that is a little bit outside of the standard.
You know, like you said, the financial applications, you know, but again, we stand on shoulders. Right. We couldn't do this without, say, decentralized exchanges.
We couldn't do this without the ERC 20. We couldn't do this without Ethereum.
We couldn't do this without Bitcoin. So, you know, if I would say if we could have built this on Bitcoin, we would have.
But Ethereum was the next best thing. It's the it's the thing with the next best longevity and trust.
And now the L2s are supplanting that a little bit, but they're still very, very good for, I think, where we are in the market right now and the cost of the block space so that we can actually get users from the real world to do complex on chain operations and not have a cost of fortune.
And so you said if you would do this, could do this on Bitcoin, you would. That makes sense to me.
So it always kind of seemed like like Bitcoin private keys or like kind of that whole community would be really into what you guys are building.
Have you guys found any penetration in that direction?
You know, just as much as we have with with Ethereum, to be honest, you know, I'm not a maxi of any type on any network.
I've seen too many things come and go to start believing in one thing and not give it up.
But, you know, we came from the Bitcoin community. This you know, that's where I started here.
So I think the backups of those kind of things, if you can get people to trust Ethereum and to have them know that this isn't, I guess, necessarily reliant on the price of Ethereum.
It's reliant on it still working as a as a global computer, then it gets easier as a cell.
But, you know, it's always hard to convince old school Bitcoin people to pick up any new tech.
And I think they have a lot of good reasons for that. Right. Like you see how many bridges get hacked.
You see, you know, kind of the anything other than holding a private key yourself tends to be more risky.
And I think the OG Bitcoin people have just been around it too long to start trusting things right away.
So our our goal is and what we have been doing is just continuing to execute day after day, not worrying what the market's doing, but trying to build something that doesn't care what the market's doing.
And it will still work. You know, there's no there's no sarcophagus token price wherein it breaks. Right.
There's no trigger price or liquidation price or anything like that. It continues to work as everything flows.
It's just the prices within the network change. So, yeah, I think that, you know, I love the Bitcoin people.
And again, without them, we wouldn't be here. You know, Bitcoin was the first and I think it's still the king.
I think it's where most value is going to accrue. But we do have a lot of other cool toys to play with.
We have a lot of other alternative L1s like Solana that that are very good networks that are well built that we will be expanding to.
It's just a function of do do we have the longevity and robustness to where we can go out and sell this to people and say this will work when you need it to work.
You know, mission critical software is or mission critical promises are very important to us.
Totally. You touched on kind of, you know, your token, let's say your mechanism design and you talk a little bit about game theory.
How do you guys approach those problems? I know we've talked a little bit about before.
I think I mentioned it already that that bootstrapping this kind of trust is really hard.
And it's one of what we see is one of the big problems. So kind of what what are you guys thinking about when you were first designing the system around this?
And, you know, how have your thoughts changed as you run into roadblocks?
Yeah. So the the bonding mechanism we use for the nodes is fairly standard.
You know, I've done just so much research just over the years on on different proof of stake networks or like bonding based staking networks or even things like Bancor.
Right. Like really novel mechanisms for for getting trust out things like RIN network.
I don't know if anyone's ever played with REN before before it shut down after the Alameda crash.
But knowing that that nodes have something to lose if they do things that they shouldn't do, but then also building the node software so that it's really hard to do things that you're not supposed to do.
You know, we want node operators to to be making money.
We have certain requirements for them like we don't want them to have a huge infrastructure cost for this application.
It's just not necessary for us. We don't need crazy amounts of bandwidth or low latency or anything like that.
You know, our nodes hold trust, whereas, say, like a another node would hold dollars like a bridge would hold dollars.
And it's just very, very fragile.
So, yeah, we like to think of, like, how can we punish people for the things they're intentionally doing wrong?
How can we allow things to fail gracefully or how can we build the network in a way that lets someone choose their level of security or their level of fragility?
So we use an M of N arbitrary signature scheme for for the payloads.
So when you're creating a sarcophagus, you can choose however many nodes you want, but then you can also choose what threshold of those nodes have to be active when the sarcophagus gets resurrected or for it to be resurrected.
So you could choose five nodes and say, I want all five of them to publish their share of the key, or you could say, I want just one of them to publish their share of the key to be able to resurrect my data.
So giving that kind of sway on the base level is very important for us.
But then, as always, if we build a super robust and inflexible base layer, we can always pare that down.
We can always have a simple UI that the user doesn't even know they're using crypto.
They can use a credit card.
It can default to two of three nodes.
You know, there's all sorts of little things like that that we can move away from from the perfect and make it a hell of a lot more easy to use.
So, yeah, the game theory here is really, you know, a couple of core tenets.
One is that Sarco tokens can only do one thing at a time.
You know, you cannot have your tokens locked in the governance application, helping make decisions for the DAO and in receiving fee income.
And have those bonded as a node.
You know, those tokens, they speak.
And when they speak, it's it's a loan.
So if you have a bonded in a node and you have a bunch of sarcophagi that you're responsible for, those tokens are being spoken for by those sarcophagi.
So that if you do something wrong, you'll get slashed.
You'll lose money.
It's not good for you.
However, if you're voting and you want to help control where the DAO spends funds or you want to receive fee income from from the network fee.
Those tokens can only do that.
We try to do these things so that the math is really easy to solve on the back of the napkin rather than something that you have to build a full spreadsheet to see.
All right.
What's this thing actually worth?
So, yeah, while there's still a bunch of floating values and there's a little inconsistencies as everything matures, we'll be able to see kind of where those those things sit.
Right. So like if gas prices spike, sarcophagus or sarcophagi are more expensive to create.
Right. Those kind of things as they kind of flow through the network will get better and they'll just get arbed out over time.
You know, we kind of use the market people who do arbitrage as labor here, very much like curve.
So we expect people to be looking at tokens and knowing where the value is.
And we want to make that easy because we are using those arbiters as labor.
So hopefully that makes sense in terms of the game theory stuff.
But yeah, happy to answer any more questions there.
No, that covers it. I guess the one question I have and one, you know, this is a hard question.
I think we it goes to what we're saying of we all have to bootstrap our own security in this and something we're hoping to change.
But, you know, bonds being associated to token price means that secrets are kind of if you're using pure economic security and not taking into account all the things that you should and that help with this problem that we did that you mentioned before.
Right. Like reputation, but pure economic security suddenly.
The total price of the bond becomes important and you start trying to price secrets, which is this really mind bending exercise that that we have internally gone down, where when you try to start pricing secrets that you don't know, you know, you have to start looking at, OK, well, what's built on top of you?
What kind of information do you think people would use us for? In your case, maybe there's some private keys in there, you know, wills, whatever, you know, those those state secrets even potentially.
Right. So how do you start pricing individual secrets? Thinking about the threshold.
Yeah, that's that rabbit hole is deep.
So like when we when we first architected Sarcophagus V1, we had this concept of a bounty and we would allow the user who was creating the sarcophagus to set an arbitrary bond limit or an arbitrary bond requirement for the node operator where they would say, all right, this is how much it's going to cost on chain.
This is how much it's going to cost for just pure operation and monitoring services from the node.
But then the user was able to go in and say, but I want them to put up a thousand dollars in bond in order to to to host the secret.
And the the node operator, if they have that available, they would they would receive a large bounty if the sarcophagus was resurrected, meaning it wasn't buried, it wasn't forgotten, it wasn't deleted by the user.
So we tried that. But from an on chain signaling standpoint, I think we decided that it's more important that all sarcophagi look the same and have the same economics than it is to say which ones have bigger secrets in them.
Right. It dramatically reduces the collusion probability when a given node has no idea the value of something. Right.
It could be family photos or it could be a Bitcoin private key and they have no idea.
So, you know, again, this is one of those things like we want to reduce the ability for nodes to collude.
We want to make it really hard and really we just want to make it not profitable.
So, yeah, I think like it's an extremely hard problem and, you know, we decided against it, but it wasn't a really easy decision.
Like another thing we thought about doing is just making every sarcophagi a constant size where you wouldn't be able to tell on chain if one was bigger or smaller than the other that we would just, you know, do padded containers and say every sarcophagus is is one or, you know, 100 megabytes or whatever.
It's inefficient, but it's still it works kind of in the same way that like a lot of ZK stuff works, you know, again, something we ultimately decided against but could implement in the future.
So, yeah, I think all these they're just hard problems. Right.
And like you said, you have to choose a path. And I think the path that we chose is more for trying to spread the the risk out amongst multiple players rather than to to try to concentrate on making the theory perfect for for one bad actor.
And there's also a bunch of weird stuff, too, like sometimes collusion resistance, like it doesn't it's not as needed, like for a while, the the holdings of Ren BTC were three times the market cap of Ren, the token, and no one no one colluded to flip it, even though it would only take 33% of the nodes.
So like, you know, that didn't happen. And I'm looking at on screen, like, why isn't this happening? It's like the economics are broken, but no one's colluding because there's a lot of friction and collusion.
So, yeah, I think excellent rabbit hole to go down. And I think it depends on which network you're or which solution or which problem you're trying to solve to see if if everything on the network shouldn't be equal. Right.
And just like the nodes shouldn't be equal or they should be equal. So it's a hard problem.
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that's I mean, that's interesting. I think I forget somebody tweeted out the other day, but I think it's a sentiment I see a lot in the in the crypto space is like the we are designing for these kind of rational markets systems and and you know,
it efficient like game theoretic security requires on requires like these rational agents.
But in both directions, that's not true, which is to say that attackers can sometimes be irrational inside of the economic game, but also people who are playing inside of it, especially because we tend to abstract away exactly things like reputation that are extremely hard to quantify.
Right. Like is Google going to collude for $10 million of Ethereum?
Probably not, but really hard to quantify some of those things.
So, you know, the the nerd stuff, the white papers can only get us so far towards these kind of real world problems.
Exactly. You know, the the best crypto recovery scheme, and I'm sure you guys have seen people build these before where it's like, all right, I have 15 keys and they're buried in 15 places.
And in the different 15 national parks or, you know, whatever scheme that they've come up with.
And then, you know, once you hit them in the head was saying more crypto is lost and it's stolen in your recovery process is so complicated that no one in the future could ever hope to figure this out.
That's not you, let alone you figuring it out when you didn't take good notes is you've created a much bigger problem than you're solving.
So, yeah, I think like the middle ground there really works. And I think trying to help people with those those defaults and say, yeah, if you want to ramp up security, we can do it.
But, you know, the one one spectrum of security is assets that are inaccessible by anyone.
And the other spectrum is assets that are accessible by everyone. So it has to be somewhere in the middle.
But I think a lot of people when they're trying to build their own systems or when they're trying to do the white paper version, the nerd version of this is they end up with something so complex that they don't even know how to use it themselves.
So, yeah, we're really trying to push back against that. But it's tempting. Right. The nerd stuff is fun.
The pure mathematics is very fun, but it's just not the world we live in.
So true. One thing. Yeah.
One thing that I really loved that you did in your FAQ was came up with terms and ideas for each of these things that could be a really complex math thing.
Like the sarcophagus is the file or the corpse that's wrapped in the layers of encryption.
And then the embalmer is the user, the party who creates the sarcophagus.
Excuse me. Did you come up with all of these things before you kind of created this?
Or did you realize that humans need analogies to understand what's going on behind the scenes?
Like how did you manage this communication aspect so that people understand what's actually going on?
So that's it's funny that you ask that because we went way too far with the analogies.
Right. So when I first like sat down and wrote the light paper, it was a really good way to communicate something.
You know, here you have a three party problem and it's it's really hard when you're doing like, especially for dyslexic people like me, like where Bob, Alice and Tom use, you know, keys A, B, C, X, Y, X, Y and Z.
Right. Like it gets really confusing very quickly.
But then also for like, say, non English speakers, embalmer, sarcophagus, payload, corpse.
Those things are confusing, too. Right. So we tried it.
We tried to do the analogies in a very limited way or we tried to make it all analogies.
We went too far in that direction where people are like, what is this like?
Is this even like a real crypto project where they're just using these these names like pulled from an Egyptian book?
It's like, all right, let's let's back off that a little bit, but let's keep the ones that work.
Right. Let's let's keep the sarcophagus as something that gets buried that has something secret inside of it.
You know, let's keep the archaeologist someone.
The node archaeologist node is the one that's going and searching for these and resurrecting, you know, these these secrets.
But we've tried to abstract away some of those.
But yeah, I love the analogies. Right. Like the idea is we want to get people to understand what a dead man switch is.
And we want to do it in a way that is a little bit more fun, I guess, than than how a lot of these papers are written.
And also like just purely like that's not me. Right. Like I'm not an academic.
It's much easier for me to understand things in these terms.
And I have taken a lot of help from from people on the outside that have helped me academic or academic.
I don't know what that word is to make it more, you know, book learning and make it more accessible to to the more hardcore people that want to do tokenomic evaluations.
So, yeah, I appreciate how everyone, you know, they like the brand and everything, but it's something that we're always trying to, like, ride that line between recognizability and fun and going too far into our own heads or our own ecosystem.
Right. We still need to build this for someone who's landing on the website for the first time.
And we don't want to get make it overly creepy, but we don't want to make it overly boring either.
Totally.
Yeah, it reminds me of, you know, maybe maybe there's a lot of other, you know, slander that goes their way justified or not.
But one slander that I think towards the phantom ecosystem that is unjustified is that people hated on the fact that all of the builders on that ecosystem decided to really get in theme.
Right. All the DEXs and the loan protocols and whatever are like spooky themed.
And I always thought that was hilarious. That's that's that's a decentralized coordination around a silly, goofy idea.
I mean, that's I think that's a lot of what it's all been. Right.
Right. Like all Bitcoin was one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard when I first read it. Right.
And I was wrong. Like, I think like even Dogecoin, its whole identity is being stupid and it works.
It continues to work to this day. I can't speak for it being like a good thing or a bad thing, but I can tell you definitively that it does work.
So, yeah, I like the spooky stuff. I think it's hard to say, like, if you're selling to someone in like a will and trust scenario, like put, you know, you're the embalmer, put this in your sarcophagus.
This will be fun. Right. It's like, no, they they kind of want, you know, security protocols and they want it to be easy.
Like they want to be able to read everything and, you know, not have it look like all computer programming monospace text.
So, yeah, that's it's been a challenge. But like I said, the base layer is sarcophagus.
What gets built on top of that and what that looks like can go any direction we want.
That can be, you know, with trust and will dot com, very traditional, very trustworthy.
Or it could be, you know, spooky phantom dot com, whatever they're doing, if they want to say, you know, reset down permissions upon a certain upon a certain trigger or use a dead man switch for something in a more fun fashion.
So, yeah, like I said, it's not all death related, but we need to be able to pair that that branding down for a given user.
So, yeah, I think the core, the base layer is always going to be sarcophagus, but what gets built on top of it will be definitely market dependent on who the target user is.
That makes sense. Yeah, we have we don't have one that's at our core like that, but we often use for kind of explaining MPC this or rather more like secret sharing this idea of horcruxing, you know, taken from Harry Potter.
And that that tends to hit pretty well with most people, I think that gives them some idea of exactly what's happening here.
So, you know, metaphors can really do the heavy lifting. So you mentioned a little bit, but but I'm curious what you see is kind of, you know, what's next, right?
You know, what's next, right? Like you guys have built this core infrastructure. Where are your where your effort cycles going now?
Is it about getting it out there and getting more people, you know, aware of this tool? Are you building out more features? What what's happening?
Yeah. So, you know, we're getting our tendrils into more layer twos. We're starting to build some more tools on that base layer that make it easier to use or easier to integrate with.
I'm just like an example of this is like for for application. Now, you don't actually have to have the sarco token in your wallet to use it. We built in a zero X like auto swapper.
So however much sarco token it's going to cost to create your your dead man switch, if you're on it's expensive, right? But on L2s, it doesn't matter.
If you're on, say, Polygon, all you have to have is Matic in your wallet to use this sarcophagus will get purchased and transferred to the the bonding contractor, the curse contract.
But you as the user don't need to take any part of that.
So it's just a lot of little things like that to make things easier to use and easier to integrate with.
That's that's up next. We refactored the way our nodes work so that we can add new networks pretty much at will as long as they're EVM based right now.
We don't want our node operators to have to run a different node for each individual network, but we also don't want it to be monolithic where they have to run every network at the same time.
So, you know, we've made a lot of progress on that.
You know, as we we move into into Q1 of next year, we'll be releasing some more some more abstracted versions with more of the will and trust use case or more of the the idea that you want to back up private documents or important documents.
But you're not a crypto user. So thinking kind of like Web to rails with account abstraction so that the user doesn't know they're using crypto at all.
They can say pay with a credit card five bucks a month, ten bucks a year, whatever it ends up costing for for what they want to have done.
And they don't have to understand this concept of nodes or threshold signatures or anything like that.
They know that they know that their documents are stored forever, that they can get some help in probate court, that they can give their will and trust to say their heirs without actually giving it to them right now.
Those kinds of things are what we're focusing on. I really like the will and trust space because there's just a lot of inefficiencies that I think we can we can really help with.
And then just as usual, we we build things in a way that we're making it a little bit better all the time rather than trying to say, here's a huge release.
We're going to be at every conference. We're spending a bunch of money on AdWords and doing, you know, placed articles on whatever site like that's just not really what we do.
So we're more of a slow and steady building, building, building, building every day.
And when good things and when good things happen or the market comes up or whatever, we we can raise more money to to keep building other stuff.
And we we can try to go with more of a slow and steady pace.
Like I said, you know, mission critical software doesn't lend itself to having, you know, big releases and parties and shit.
It's much more about that longer term accumulation.
Yeah, 100% agree.
So one thing I guess before before we get wrapped up here, I wanted to make sure we announce.
So an example of what we do is public disclosure.
So if you're a public personality or someone that wants to to give away some information in the event that you're removed from control,
we have the ability in our our application to share a sarcophagus with the public and then share the key to that sarcophagus.
So Johnny created one earlier today and he'll he'll post it on on the Twitter that will have the location of sarcophagus in our application as well as the key to get into this one.
So this is going to be an example of of a public disclosure.
The data inside that sarcophagus is a prize.
It's a it's a tiny prize, but it's a prize for for anyone who's here, whoever gets it first.
Right. So the idea is where we're using our software, our network to show an example of someone like an Edward Snowden.
If something were to happen to him, that data goes out.
And since it's arbitrary, that data can hold anything.
So whoever gets it first or whoever sees it or whatever, just check it out.
It's a simple text file inside of the sarcophagus, but we'd love people to play with it.
So I'm not going to give any more instructions or anything like that.
But we'll be posting that for anyone who's here who wants to check it out.
We're going to start doing some more of those on spaces because I just I want to show off how this works for public disclosure well, as well as private disclosure.
So you can say any Ethereum key pairs is the recipient, but you can shortcut that and just give the private key to the public, too.
So our addresses don't have to have any value in them as a recipient for them to be able to receive the sarcophagus.
We're purely using the the public key cryptography here.
So I wanted to announce that hopefully someone grabs it soon.
When we've done this in the past and not even mentioned it that much, we've had some fairly quick claims.
So I'm excited to see how fast people grab it today.
That sounds really cool.
And where was that posted again so that people know how to check it out?
Johnny, do you want to jump in?
Yep, yep.
I am going to post it as a response to both of the space posts that we've done.
A response to the Nilian space post and then a response to our space post.
So the people in the space will see it first.
And then a few minutes later, I'll post it on our main profile just to make sure that it gets circulated well.
But even if people are, you know, too late to claim the prize inside, it's a gasless process.
You just take and copy the key.
So it's really good for people even just to try it out.
Wow.
That's awesome.
That's fun.
It kind of feels like an ARG.
Sorry.
Exactly.
What's an ARG you got to translate for?
Sorry.
Alternate or alternative reality game.
It's when people do those kind of real life quests, you know, usually as marketing or whatever.
Oh, okay.
It's like geocaching.
Would that be one of those?
Yeah.
Directionally the same.
Okay.
Okay.
That's awesome.
Well, I guess we're about to run up on the hour here, but I just wanted to thank everyone at Nilian.
I really appreciate this.
I'm, you know, looking forward to seeing how we can work together in a deeper way as well.
But if nothing else, I just appreciate that people are in the space building important shit like this.
Because it's kind of slow when no one's focusing on it.
But I think they're tools that we absolutely need in the market.
Totally.
Thanks again, guys.
Yeah.
And where can we find your communities so that we can stay connected and get our communities together?
For sure.
So sarcophagus.io is the website.
We're very active on Discord.
I guess that would be where I would say if you have questions, check out Discord.
We try to respond to everything quickly on there.
So yeah, it's sarcophagus.io.
Try it out.
Polygon is much cheaper.
And then Discord if you have any issues.
If you want to run a node, all of it's on GitHub.
It's very easy.
It's very cheap.
You can use a Google EC2 micro instance.
It's free as well as a free RPC provider.
So like the only hard expense for running a node is a domain name.
And most people have those already.
So yeah, if anyone wants to come in and play with the application as a user or wants to participate as a node operator, we have those just as open.
There's no secret code or anything like that.
We're all open source and unlicensed.
So please check it out and tell us what you run into.
If you have problems, we want to know.
We want to make it better.
Awesome.
We'll do that.
Awesome.
We'll do that.
And then on our side, you can follow us on Twitter.
We've had a lot of really exciting drops in the last week.
We have a MPC tech paper that we published last Friday.
So give that a read and check it out.
It's very cool.
And then the other thing to announce is that we actually have a naming contest going on with Joke Race.
So we're letting the community name our upcoming networks.
So check that out on our Twitter as well, because you could decide the future of Nilian, which is exciting.
For what it's worth, internally, people are very split and very scared that you guys get to decide.
So, you know, give some of us some anxiety by picking whatever we want.
You can have a network McTrain face or something like the Canadian train.
Odie McBoat face.
Yeah.
That's it.
That's it.
That's why it's not a write it.
That's literally that reason.
That makes sense.
Well, thank you, everyone.
I really appreciate it.
Everyone who came to listen.
Thank you for putting up with me for this time.
And I'm looking, hoping to see more people on Shane and trying this out.
Cool.
Yes.
Thanks a lot for everyone here for being here.
Really appreciate y'all getting together with us and chatting about this stuff.
Thanks, everyone.
Jump off.
Have a good one.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
