Alex is Lisa joining soon
Well, she was supposed to hey everyone
Not 100% sure I guess yes, we haven't talked
Early morning for them, right?
Yeah, let's wait for a couple of minutes for Lisa to join
Yeah, no worries. I think we'll start first and hopefully Lisa joins us in a bit
GM everyone welcome to the seventh episode of FX cast. My name is pain. I'm the marketing lead at function X
Today we are very special topic. We'll be chatting about privacy in cosmos with Alex from secret labs
And color from shape protocol. Welcome to FX cast everyone
Thanks for having us on appreciate it
Yeah, so so happy to have you both and thanks again Carter for joining us for a second time
Yeah, so just to quickly kick off maybe for our listeners who might not be familiar with
Secret network and shape protocol. Could you just briefly introduce yourself what you do and your project?
Cool so I'll start as a newcomer. So my name is Alex. I
Joined secret labs as CEO in August last year Alex
You want to kick us off here since we're built on top of you guys
Can you guys hear me well
Yeah, yes, I can okay cool
Yeah, so so as I said, I joined secret labs as CEO and secret labs is actually the development Alex breaking up on us here
Color we can hear Alex fine
Okay, Twitter space is glitching on me then I can't hear Alex
So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna leave and I will read you. I know hopefully that yes
Actually lately Twitter spaces has a lot of like sound problems
I'm at all with the gigabit connection and there's still some issues, but
So, uh, so secret network is a
Relatively unique blockchain. It's it's a confidential computing blockchain. We're a layer one inside a cosmos ecosystem
And the unique thing is that all of our execution layer all the smart contracts execution is running
inside a secure amplay, which is a
sitting inside a lot of Intel processors and what this black box does it actually has its own
Pair of keys its own like
capability to encrypt and decrypt things and
That lets our system send encrypted inputs into the black box and then the black box the enclave actually executes the
calculations and produces the results and
Nobody can see the encrypted inputs and encrypted outputs and the encrypted state of the smart contracts
Except for the black box itself, which sits inside the Intel processor and it's not accessible
To to anyone not even to the administrator of the machine not to the into law to anyone
So and that allows a lot of a lot of very very interesting use cases, which we'll talk about
But for now secret is probably the oldest confidential smart contract blockchain out there. We've been running
For over three years now home to a lot of applications
A lot of activity on the network and I'll pass it to Carter who is actually
Representing shade one of the more important apps
Thanks for the rundown Alex Carter Wetzler here from shape protocol
Been in the space really since 2017 to 2020
spent time researching and actually writing a book on cryptocurrencies and during that three years it became
Decentralized finance was lacking privacy
The ability to consent what can and can't be seen in terms of your data
There was massive problems emerging with minor extractable value with front-running
with leveraged products you have
millions and millions of dollars billions of dollars in leverage that are
Naked invisible that that people can chase that leverage and try to cause liquidations
And how are we gonna bring?
On chain when everything is totally transparent. It's a it's a very PvP
Environment and so our thesis has always been that privacy is fair
It doesn't care if you have $1 or if you have a billion dollars
that encryption is going to protect your your data and your DeFi activity the same and
Build that privacy preserving DeFi that we thought was gonna be the future and secret network was the only place
Where you could you know, you we had the freedom as programmers and builders
To build these primitives that protected our users. So we've built for over two years on top of secret network
We've launched a decentralized exchange of privacy preserving stable coin
One of the world's first private liquid staking tokens. We have a privacy preserving money market on the way
We have this whole privacy preserving DeFi ecosystem that's merged and it's all powered by secret network
Awesome and I remember Carter if I've done my research correctly you used to work at secret
Network as a marketing and community manager
Correct. Yeah, so I it was it was it was grassroots
Education committee lead at secret network. I helped actually write the secret network gray paper
Which got noticed by the court team so I got an invitation to join the foundation
worked there for just over a year and then it became apparent that the biggest value ad I could bring to the network was to
Go build decentralized applications and continue to create value there
So yeah, I've been embedded in this ecosystem for three four years and that's loved every second of it
That's great. And just to set the context this might be a very obvious question, but why is privacy important?
Alex do you want to go first? Yeah
You can make a very very long
Philosophical discussions about privacy and a privacy being a very very basic human rights. So maybe let's start with some
common and misconceptions about privacy, right? So
There are people maybe even some of the listeners here who think well, you know, I'm a good person. I'm not breaking
I'm not doing anything wrong
So I don't care. I don't need too much privacy
Right, but then if you think of it a little bit more and think if you really want to publish your
And I'm even talking about financial privacy not you know other kinds of privacy about personal things
Talking about financial privacy
So so and even people who think that well, I'm a good guy. I don't do anything wrong
just, you know making my living and this but but
If you could just imagine your all your credit card, you know details and bills
Sorry, like the the list of all your purchases and also how much money you're making
Being published on the internet for anyone to to to look at and to criticize and to make fun of and
Ask questions about that's kind of a nightmare, right? Because then people can start. Oh, you're buying too much sweets
Oh, you're making to too much or the little money or you're not spending your money, right?
I mean all kinds of things, right? Just just doesn't happen, right? We as
Human beings we want our financial things to be
Visible to us and maybe to others who we trust but not to just everyone else
That's that's very clear on a personal level, but now now think about a business, right?
So if on a personal level, it's maybe a nuisance that your finances are visible or it's it's
Not pleasant for a business. It can be just
detrimental and terrible because you mentioned a business whose
Accounting is out there in every little detail whose employees know exactly how each one of them
Is making whose suppliers know how exactly?
Are getting paid and whose competitors know exactly what's going on with this such business cannot exist really for a very long time
Right. We'll just get ruined very quickly. So
That's why essentially we need
financial privacy and now
Carter started talking about DeFi
Which which is a very very practical application of blockchain technology and and and a wonderful wonderful
Technology ready to think of a DeFi is essentially the biggest single application of the smart contract
And you can build real businesses on DeFi, right shade is an exchange, right?
The same way as NASDAQ is an exchange, right? And while NASDAQ requires, you know thousands of employees
Shade actually is a bunch of smart contracts
Running on chain and even if Carter and his team tomorrow decide, you know to do something else
the smart partners are there but and that's just to say that I wanted to pass it to Carter and
Elaborate on the point he already made
And why privacy is needed not just broadly in a broad business environment as I that I described or personal environments
I sure but specifically in DeFi
Application and in DeFi, which is one of the primary applications of the blockchain technology for now
Before I before I kind of laser in on the DeFi side of things
I'll I'll I'll kind of say at a high level that privacy is a key form of security
And just like Alex was saying, you know for me personally, I was actually
Pretty pretty embedded in the the Terra ecosystem
Pre-collapse and that that whole ecosystem was built around like a decentralized world needs a decentralized stablecoin and
As we saw a lot of use cases and builders kind of flocked to that ecosystem
It was all built around a totally transparent
you know crypto to everyday commerce and
Have our transactions tied to our real-world identities. It becomes a legitimate security risk
Every time I buy something someone could correlate that transaction
With a block Explorer and suddenly everyone knows this person has a bunch of
Money, right? I guess that's a legitimate
Security risk and and just like Alex said on the commerce side of things
It is having your competitors be able to see
When who the customers are when they bought the product for how much they bought the product and my competitors balance sheet
Like it's totally like a non-starter so much value has not been brought on chain
Because these data protections and this confidential computing does not exist in a mature and accessible way
But see your network see your network fundamentally is changing that right?
So to kind of zoom in separate from the security and the sovereignty and the consent
Component and the freedom component, you know separate from all those philosophical and also very real tangible values you have
and if I'm an institution and
I'm looking at crypto right now and I want to bring
200 million. Let's let's say 200 million dollars on chain. You try to do that on aetherium right now
Institution I know the whole world is watching my
You know 200 million dollar position. That's that's insanity the amount of risk
I'm taking on within that totally transparent environment is extremely
It's extremely dangerous and then for the smaller user
It's this very strange asymmetric world when you're not totally transparent blockchain
Because you have all these programmatic actors
Parsing through the mempool. So when Bob goes to uni swap to buy a token
Someone knows that because they can see everything and they can they can front-run you they can they can buy the asset and sell
The asset to you before you have a chance to do anything because you're not a programmatic user
You don't know how to deal with that kind of value extraction. So it's just this type of
Asymmetric world that transparency creates that it hurts retail and it scares off
Institutions because there's just so much
Money and so much leverage at stake you bring those apps
You bring that world of decentralized finance
You have those protections the money can come in and then the cool part too is there's these powerful decryption primitives
Where if an auditor wants to come along and look at those transactions
We have the tools for you to be able to decrypt that and hand it off to them
So for Alex, we know that secret network is a smart contract layer one platform and
Features that you guys have
Is a very special type of smart contract called secret contract. Could you explain what secret contracts are and how they work?
So so I think you're just referring to to to contract on secret network, right? So
So again secret network is smart smart contract blockchain where anyone can develop smart contracts and
Smart contract development techniques and technology is very similar to other cosmos chains
So you just use it you create your contracts in in the rust programming language
And you run them but once you get them secret is because this enclave or
Another name for the enclave is the trusted execution environment because of this trusted execution environment TEE technology
the contract runs inside this black box and
Nobody can see its state and by state I explain
Let's think about a pool. Let's say an AMM pool or
Or or you know what a token like ERC 20, right? That's a good example
So in a theorem if you look at an ERC 20 token contract
You can get all the data about all the people who are holding all the addresses that are holding the token token and how much they're holding
Okay. So on secret network, we have exactly the same kind of
Technology similar to ERC 20. It's called snip 20
The only difference being that nobody can see
Okay, and the same goes for any other contracts you can imagine
use cases like confidential voting
Like auctions with sealed beads like confidential order books
or confidential lending positions
That all would work in a very similar fashion than on any other blockchain with it one
Inside a black box and nobody can peek in and see your positions
your stuff your holdings your votes your anything and
I want to say here about a very important distinction that I like to make and it's
Transactional privacy is about passing money from one person to the other and people thought about that a long time ago
as early as 2014 when Monero appeared and then Zcash and then others and then I was also CEO of beam
Which is also it originally a transactional privacy blockchain
So transactional privacy is about me sending funds to somebody else and nobody being able to detect this
Okay, or to see or to and also not to know how much money I have so that's that's transactional privacy
Computational privacy and that's what I was just talking about
It's the way to have some
Computations on blockchain run some smart contracts on the blockchain in such a way that the smart contract state is
Confidential and I think today transactional privacy. There are several solutions out there, you know Monero being
I think the biggest by market cap
But this I think transactional privacy has kind of limited appeal and
Computational privacy, I believe is really the next frontier and the next thing that will drive this crypto economy and bring
Institutional users onto those platforms and make and then with them other people will come as well
so secret contracts are actually
An example of this computation privacy technology that is robust and that is also
Relatively simple for developers to grasp because you don't have to learn some arcane math and some very very
Complicated things like you do with zero knowledge proofs and in a way with them with MPC
But you just write your contract and almost magically
Everything that happens inside becomes invisible and and that's why I believe
That the trust use use environment technology and secret network
Has a very important role in the future of web 3
Going to you Carter. I know that shape protocol has a whole suite of different products
But one of the core products that you guys have is the silk stable coin, which is a privacy preserve
Preserving stable coin. Could you explain to our listeners?
You know what silk stable coin is and the goal and the eventual goal of the stable coin
Absolutely, it's that's a that's a big question
So the majority of the stable coin
Has focused on pegging stable coins to the US dollar
and as our as our team kind of
Examined the stable coin landscape three years ago
We kind of paused and from a first principal standpoint said what what is this? What's like? What's the industry doing here?
we have the opportunity to make new better forms of money and
Yet over and over and over again these decentralized ecosystems are pegging to the dollar and being very
Country and and representation of value
Now like granted like the US dollar it's it has great properties and great adoption. So I'm not saying we don't need any
But we wanted to build something even better and more stable than the US dollar
which is a very bold claim and so what we what we set out to do is
Make an over collateralized stable coin that uses the kind of maker Dow
Model that's tracking a diversified peg
So silk is not pegged to the US dollar. It's actually tracking
The Canadian dollar the euro the yen
So the net result of holding silk is you're not the thing is when you hold us dollars
You don't realize it, but you're actually taking a kind of you're you're taking in kind of like an investment decision
It's it's like the US economy versus everything else in the world versus when you hold silk you're holding this
Basket that represents the whole
Global economy and so when silk initially launched it was pegged to a dollar and five cents
And in almost over the course of the last year it has
Appreciated in value up to a dollar and nine cents. So it has outperformed the dollar. It's inflation
Resistant and volatility resistant and it's over collateralized and then from a first principle standpoint
Even better than just having this diversified peg and this over collateralized component
We also have privacy. It's one of the world's first privacy preserving stable coins. So we've
It's a truly remarkable thing that silk exists today and as on main that is on secret network
There's three point six million silk in circulation right now and it continues to
Steadily grow as we roll out more and more DeFi primitives and demand centers for silk
Where primarily silk stable coin is being used right now and what are your
ongoing plans to encourage adoption of the stable coin
Absolutely, so right now the majority of silk usage
So a lot of people like to you know trade to silk and then if they like another cryptocurrency
And they want to get out of a stable position and hold a volatile position
They can do that on shade swap with a lot of the liquidity pools there
That have silk pairings, but we've always said if you want
For a stable coin to really be used and leveraged you have to start to get it integrated into
Commerce that's it's a huge vertical that I think we're gonna be seeing more and more of is not just DeFi
But but commerce real-world usage
And so we've partnered with FINA, which is this
That's totally self-custodial
FINA debit cards are specifically going to have support for silk
So imagine when your yield farming and on Seeker network in this shade protocol DeFi ecosystem
Imagine converting your silk to yield
loading a debit card up and then going to the grocery store and actually
Buying things with a card that has silk on it. That's that's gonna be coming like in the next two two months
We're super super close to that it's and and the FINA debit cards need to be integrated in the shade protocol suite
So that's that's one side of things debit card adoption real-world usage. The other category is
Lending and borrowing shade swap all the trading there that that's seeing great usage
But money markets will essentially allow people to you know deposit silk into this money market
And then with privacy borrow things like Bitcoin borrow things like Adam borrow things like
Once we kind of launched that we have all the key DeFi verbs, right? You can move it
You can trade it. You can lend it. You can borrow it
You can spend it and we've been spit
This is like year three of building out all these key verbs to create an economy that makes silk
Actually useful and then once we've done that we're gonna be much more aggressive
About pushing silk out into the cosmos ecosystem into the ethereum ecosystems because all the building blocks are ready to go on
Seeker network to scale with privacy
Yeah, I just want to add that I think silk is really awesome
And not just because you know, we're here but because stable points are
Stable points in general are probably one of the key more important elements of our ecosystem, right? Because
With stable points people can really do commerce. They can do accounting they can pay salaries
They can do a lot of stuff. But today's stable coins are
Well, the biggest ones and the smaller ones
They are not confidential which again is the same problem, right? Again a business paying salaries to two boys
In stable point has a problem because all the employees can know how the next guy how much the next guy is making and this
Is not really well and all the other problems. So we do need we do need privacy and stable points and
Also today those US dollar peg stable coins are
getting under more and more
attacks from governments with demands to
Transactions it may be good to a certain extent, you know when they're censoring some some thieves or hackers
But we never know where the government appetites stop. Actually, we know they don't really stop
They just grow and grow and grow and you know, maybe at some point
Or say some things that the government doesn't like will not be able to use USDC or you know
Usdt is also kind of slowly caving in in this pressure. So so it is important to have like a confidential
way confidential stable coin and I also like
What Carter's described this kind of diversification of assets, which I know
Kind of from the inside that is done in a very I would say
Conservative way Carter would be like or risk-averse way
And that's one of the things that shade is to me at least is characterized by I mean, they're very very
Serious and very meticulous about you know calculating risks and making sure they're not too risky in any way
So so this idea of having a multi collateralized
And over collateralized table coin, which is not only relying on dollar but in multiple
Coins, it makes it more resilient
And also less less susceptible to attacks by a specific, you know government or banks or whatever
So it's it's it's a very cool building block for the web tree economy and it it continues to grow which is great
Yeah, very well said and given that Alex's mentioned government regulation, could you both share?
Your how do you guys plan to navigate regulation when it comes to?
Privacy tech in crypto, I mean we have all seen what's happened to tornado catch example
So I can start so actually
secret network has built in
Opt-in auditability features and that's you know, that's a mouthful. But what I mean is that you know, when I transact in silk
Nobody sees how much silk I got or who am I sending it to or how much I'm sending it to but I can generate
what's called a viewing key and
I can give that key to my accountant or to the tax man or to anyone I choose to and then they can see all
my transactions and then you know, they can
You know make me pay taxes or whatever, right? So there is this built-in auditability
exactly mimicking the real
World right because you know those of us who supply their tax reports
They supply they disclose information to the authorities like once a year or whatever your government requires and the same thing is
Available is being done by users of silk, right?
So in this way, you know, we can fend off any attacks on
You know and saying that you know, this is something for bad people know
This is something for people who value their financial privacy, but people who can and do
Reporting to the government. So I think actually the system that we have here is
The system that is ideal for both businesses and and for compliance
for the government agencies to kind of come to terms with
Confidential blockchain, but I think it's kind of slowly
Happening right? So people start, you know, people start to realize that well, yeah, we understand it's confidential
But here we get those viewing keys for that particular wallet and then we can validate that the person is really disclosing
Everything that they did and then we can you know do our thing we can
You know charge taxes or do whatever whatever is needed. So the compliance is
Is there in the secret network? It's not
It's not fully transparent as
As you see in a Bitcoin where anyone can just check you without even knowing and they're checking you
So so I feel pretty good about
Regulatory world by the way, and it's also an important thing about secret network. The secret coin itself is not confidential
Okay, it's it's like it's the gas token for the blockchain. It powers the whole thing
But the coin itself is not a confidential coin. It's you know in that regard it's same as
You know your atom token or any other token on the cosmos networks and we did have and we did get some questions from
You know larger exchanges who you have you might have heard who are now trying to de-list all the privacy points
and we were able to clearly explain what I just
explained here to all those big changes and they understood our position and you know as you can see we're listed still on
Most of the major exchanges and there is no compliance regulation issue whatsoever
Yeah, I'll jump in here as a great really thorough rundown by Alex
I guess I guess well, I'll add is like a little personal anecdote and the opportunity to kind of go to a privacy
Actually go to Capitol Hill and the world is of course more than just the United States
So this anecdotal story is kind of specifically for the US
Was able to talk with people at electric coin
Electric coin company with Zcash and actually talked to
various regulators and politicians in person about the value of privacy
And I actually think it's it's it's more optimistic
Than people than people think there's there's a lot of people there that know
Fluid financial ecosystem that is you know decentralized finance and blockchain is absolutely
the future and the data privacy is something that most of them also
Understand is something that's key for commerce and absolutely needs to you know, integrate it into crypto
So I think 10 years from now
data privacy for for smart contracts where there is
Specifically kind of an opt-in opt-out for for decryption and encryption
I think that's actually going to be enforced like that that
HTTP in the upper left hand corner of your your web browser
Like I think that eventually crypto is going to have kind of like an equivalent
Expectation around data privacy, but but in the interim
The largest risk that you'll hear is about
Security interests right there. They're worried about kind of the illicit cross-border payments
They're worried about you know, terrorist organizations
They have all these different kind of like national security interests that are quoted and it becomes a really interesting and difficult
Philosophical conversation and it's it's it's one that we've kind of all collectively agreed to on the internet
With the internet we've there are really bad things
That happen on the permissionless worldwide web of information there
There are terrible things that happen on the internet and yet as a society
We've collectively said that the value of permission lists and globally connected
Information is a net positive to a society
And so we've embraced the internet despite the fact that it can be misused
powerful protections is the same thing that can be abused for bad things and in a similar sense like
Protected confidential decentralized finance. Um, it's that same
Paradigm as a collective society. Are we gonna say that the value of
Finance is that more important and more valuable collectively to the world
then the negative trade-offs and the negative ways that that money will be used and that that is the
crux of the decision and I think
Freedom loving people in the world and maybe this is me being overly optimistic, but I think over the course of time
Because innovation wins people want the better
form of money the better form of finance so it leaves me incredibly optimistic and
secret networks technology is designed for that paradigm a decade before it becomes the
Expectation this is the place that saw that vision
This is the place where the builders get that vision and I think we're gonna see the fruits of that labor payoff over
the course of the coming years
Really looking forward to a future where privacy in crypto is by default and widely accepted by
Even mainstream politicians. I want to quickly get to the other products and services offered by secret network and also by shade protocol
I think for Alex all the interesting things that secret network has is
Privacy as a service in which secret network is able to export private computation to other layer one chains
Could you roughly talk about that? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So this this thing is actually
One of the core one of the cornerstones of our strategy for the coming couple of years at least and the idea is the
We have a lot of a lot of blockchains out there, right?
Ethereum we have Pauling oh we have Solana. We have all kinds of L2s
We have tons of blockchains and there's a lot of activity going on there, right? But most of those blockchains they lack
Confidential computing features, right? So you cannot do a confidential order book on Ethereum
There are billions of dollars traded, but you cannot do a confidential order book or confidential lending protocol
Just cannot do that right now
So what we thought was a good idea was to position secret as a confidential execution layer
For all of web 3 and actually this privacy as a service
Idea is about offering developers on other blockchains offering them ways to create
applications that have privacy
Okay, and we're actively working on
Developing that we're developing this we call it the EDM developer toolkit
That has a lot of different examples. Like how can you encrypt something on the blockchain using secret network?
Because right on Ethereum on its own you cannot encrypt anything because there's no way to place key right on chain
And with secret you can do that
So we have examples like confidential voting or we'll have examples like but sorry the confidential voting
I mean, let's say we all here vote for some proposition. Yes or no, but there is no way to know who voted which way right?
And this is this is very important in a lot of different voting scenarios, right?
Because you don't want people to attack you because of the way you voted so you wanted to be private
So so in privacy and service, we're literally offering developers on other blockchains
We're starting with EDM, but we will move to Solana and others later on but we're offering them
Little building blocks or not so little building blocks which allow them to extend their applications or build new kinds of applications
Another example, you know confidential NFTs right today. I know and actually we have just granted a project called page Dow
To do that so they they're developing NFTs for authors, right? So people publish their books and you can buy the NFT
but today in their product the
Contents of the book is out there on the blockchain
So whether I buy the NFT or I don't I can still read the book
so the book is because I can't just just without even buying the NFT I can
Connect to the blockchain and see the contents of the NFT and read the book. So with with secret the contents of the NFT
Can and is confidential. So the NFT itself can live on
associated content can leave on
On secret and be encrypted and that opens up a lot of use cases like paying for watching videos
Paying for reading books paying for consuming
Content and not being able to to consume it for free. So this is another very important use case
So so this is about privacy as a service, right?
This is about offering those building blocks developer toolkits for people elsewhere
On other blockchains to to build to build privacy aware applications
And I think secrets mission in this world is really to be specialized in
privacy have a set of privacy
Privacy focused apps like shade like stash like many others on our chain
But also to export those privacy features to others because not all of the apps
Need to be private confidential all the time. They might need just a little tiny feature
Maybe a Dow just needs this voting component to be private and all the rest. They're just fine being fully transparent
So that's that's our move and it starts to bring
Results we see people, you know very interesting in that interested in that and the first project starting to build on top of that
And we'll see much more of that in 20 24
Could you just quickly explain the two other products that shape protocol has which are the privacy preserving liquid staking derivative?
So liquid liquid staking is really interesting
Right now in crypto, you know to make the choice between do I lock up my crypto
You know yield farm somewhere else and the cool part about liquid staking tokens is you essentially get to stake your assets and then get a kind
Of liquid fungible representation of that stake position that you can then go use and defy
And that liquid stake token is passively earning yield from staking while also being usable
In decentralized finance as as collateral to mint out stable coins or to borrow again
so it's a really powerful financial primitive and
Stake secret. It's ST KD dash secret, which was launched by shade protocol
Is the privacy preserving liquid staking token which people which means people don't know how much of the staked position?
You own so you can privately
Acquire and accrue a staking position without revealing that to the world
And we and where we see that being important is this kind of goes back to the trading strategy paradigm
Imagine you're on aetherium and you have a specific trading strategy
We have this whole portfolio of 20 plus assets and let's say it's generating a really good, you know
It's a really good yield strategy. It's creating a much of return
But the whole world can see it so people can copycat trade you
And when people copycat trades you then kind of your alpha your asymmetry you've created with your kind of
Financial expression and strategy that that creativity gets kind of diminished because of that total transparency
so we view private liquid staking tokens as being part of kind of a broader category of
Being able to privately create yield bearing strategies that are unique to you and it's also kind of tied to
Protecting your the governance side of things. Maybe you want to take a very large position in the network kind of governance
Without the whole world kind of being aware of those precise details. So that's on the private liquid staking token side
world's first privacy preserving kind of bonds
Sell their governance token for other assets
And that whole process that whole exchange is kept private. That's super strong primitive
I think we already mentioned shade swap. We already mentioned silk
we have the bridge page which is
essentially connects to all of
IBC also connects to ethereum and people can bridge in
And then on this bridge page they get wrapped into their privacy preserving equivalent using that secret network technology
So that's kind of the rundown of the rest of the primitives
Awesome and for both of you alex and carter could you share with us?
Where do you see secret network and shader protocol in the next let's say three to five years? Like what's your vision?
What's your long-term vision?
Um, how about we do it the other way around where uh, i'll say where I see shade and carter will say about
Secret, I guess it can't make it fun
So I see shade definitely in the list of like top
10 or maybe top 20 DEXs in the world
Confidential computing and the understanding of the need for that is gaining track
And people will start appreciating it more and more
And all the primitives are there right? So shade is actually, you know a one-stop shop for for all the DeFi needs
Applying and even improving on some of the more advanced DeFi technologies like stable swole
I think that is the way right. I think it would be too ambitious to say it'll shape over number one
Maybe not, but I think uh a place in in those top top DEXs out there
Is something that is very reasonable with all the dedication and with this unique advantage that shade has over
Uh over most of the other DEXs, right? If not all of them, right? It's one of the very few, uh DEXs that have
You know any confidential features and shade has, you know, this full confidentiality
So it's it's pretty cool and the product is very solid and is developed is being developed very actively. So
I mean the future is bright
Love it. Love it. Love it. I will now return the favor
Four years just kind of wild. That's a lot of years that have gone by but one one thing has held true
Through these last four years, which is that there's we're headed towards
Uh secret network has been building and building and building the the tooling every year gets easier and easier for developers to come in
And build these applications the community
Becomes increasingly, you know mature in in their understanding of the philosophy behind seeker network and its values
And I think the broader industry
As time goes on the problems of total transparency are becoming
Harder to ignore and so you'll actually see this on the venture capital side you'll see venture capital
Seeding and spending, you know millions and millions of dollars of investing into new
privacy technologies, but meanwhile
seeker network quietly in the background for four years has been grinding away because
This it's technically even older than 2020
um, so all of this experience all of this wisdom of the village of of building
An amazing layer one technology that can export private compute that can also support
Native decentralized applications that range anywhere from you know, medical data
To defi to nfts and entertainment to access controls to trading strategies. I mean and to auctions. There's there's just this
Everything in crypto can benefit from confidentiality. There's there's so many use cases where that's the case and and
so three to five years from now my prediction would be
The inflection point comes where adapt developers realize that if you don't adopt confidential computing
Into your decentralized applications. You're actually operating at a competitive disadvantage
Privacy becomes the standard that users say wait, why don't
This isn't this is a non-privacy preserving death. Like why would I use that thing? That's that's old-fashioned. That's old school
Privacy's new school encryptions new school. Um, and so then there would be
hundreds of decentralized applications thriving on seeker network. It becomes
Titan in terms of the amount of developer adoption not just natively on itself
but all the other massive layer ones that have all this institutional support they start to point to
I will only use your dapp if you have if you're using privacy as a service
And seeker network will be the largest exporter of private compute in all of web3
It's going to have a massive outsize impact because that is what happens
When you spend, you know, four or five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve
However, many years it's going to take seeker network
Keep building and building and building getting a little bit better every day. It's had conviction through every step of the journey
It's not just uh, oh we got funded we built for two years and disappeared. No the people here have
Conviction they have the work ethic and it's going to pay off
Wow, thank you carter. It's uh, I couldn't have said it better myself, you know
Yeah, it's it's really moving to here and carter
I also want to take this opportunity to congratulate you for accepting the invitation to join the strategic committee at atom accelerator
I think uh, it's also relevant to ask what is it about cosmos?
That continues to excite you maybe we can start with alex
Like why did seeker network choose to build in cosmos in the first place and what about cosmos remains exciting for you?
Well, so as I mentioned, I joined relatively late when when the basis was was already built
so the choice of cosmos may be for me, uh, but
Uh, you know, I have some development background. I used to work as a developer. I'm still coding now here and there
And I have had experience with other blockchains like you know, therium and also the beam blockchain which has its own protocol
And what I really loved about cosmos when I started playing with it and I started playing with this ignite, uh toolkit
What what I loved was how easy?
Cosmos makes it to build things
To build new blockchains to build so you actually it's this platform, you know
Now everybody's talking about the modular blockchains out there, you know with data availability and execution and consensus layers of cosmos is essentially
built like this modular blockchain so you can really easily mix and match things and that's why we have I think about 200
blockchains, uh built on cosmos because it's just so easy to take
Uh, you know all those cosmos modules and just changed what you want to specialize in
and for secret actually secret to to the cosmos, uh
Code base and we're using the cosmos consensus and we're using this inter-blockchain communication modules and a lot of other stuff
Which maybe is even too technical from my understanding, but we just built our like our contribution was this execution layer, which we built
Based on this trusted execution environment
I love cosmos technology for this great modularity
The ease of mixing and matching to create your new blockchains. I mean in cosmos you create blockchains like in other
Systems or ecosystems you create applications. So so it's very easy and intuitive. So it's really very cool
That's on the technology side
And there is also the human side, uh, right? Uh, and there was this very nice, I think bankless podcast with mike polito
Who said that you know ethereum is for philosophers. Solana is more for engineers. They're
cold engineers and cosmos is for tinkerers
And I really love that and the cosmos community and you know, i'm mostly exposed to secret communities
We were talking to cosmos people as well
Very active very passionate and very let's build things
Uh, let's let's try things. Let's play with things to treat it the stinker mentality, which I think is uh,
And it suits me as well. I mean I I like it
So while on ethereum some change might take three years or in bitcoin
It may take five years and people would argue about some some things and they have their great reasons for that
I'm, not saying it's bad, but but in cosmos, you know things can just happen quicker, you know, let's do that
okay tomorrow it's done so
Even if it's not perfect, even if it's not like the best it could be but it's just quick and working
So so I like this uh, this ethos of this culture. So
So I I have two things i'll touch on
The first one is kind of the first principles of cosmos
And then the second one is the decentralized governance aspect. So
What do I mean by first principles it goes something like this?
Has this title of the internet of blockchains?
cosmos long before the rest of the the other layer one ecosystems kind of understood that
and seamless interoperability
A bunch of different blockchains is how you're going to efficiently scale
A broader ecosystem in a way where the individual sovereignty and incentives make sense
Um, and they they've been and that was the first principles approach. That was such a zoomed out stance yet
You have to remember that, you know, like three years ago
It was just these kind of monolithic
Blockchains with cosmos kind of building in the corners vision. Everyone's like, oh, what are they doing over there?
There's the the weird engineers over there building this like this
They're too focused on the scale of it. They're almost like too zoomed out to abstract and then, you know serium suddenly
encountered a throughput problem, so then
Rollups start to start to emerge because people need more speed
More throughput and then suddenly there's a problem all these layer two rollups on ethereum
Like how do they communicate to each other? How do they talk to each other?
Why are they still paying rent to ethereum if they're big enough now that they probably could just justify not paying
Security and renting that out, right? So suddenly these layer two rollups
They're encountering all these friction all these problems and and and what everyone is starting to turn to and realize is like wait a second
Cosmos had like this really clean principled approach to scaling the internet
Of blockchains and they built this beautiful open source toolkit
That attracted, you know certain developers that that kind of like understood the vision
So then then like the mind share around cosmos has just been so ahead of the curve and it's and it's yielded such
Amazing creativity and that kind of that tinker philosophy
I think exists here because you can do things here with IBC and cross chain smart contracts and app chain
Development that you couldn't do anywhere else
So you're you're automatically going to draw certain personality type that understands the inherent limitations that exist in other
Ecosystems that don't necessarily exist in cosmos. The design space here is so massive and so huge
So that's one reason I love cosmos. They they just took a first principles approach
To building and scaling the internet of blockchains, and I think it's history. It will will will tell that story
Um, the second piece is the is the community and the decentralized governance? Um
In aetherium kind of like these these very large layer one ecosystems people feel pretty
It's it's it's there's not like the proof of stake voting world there
Was much more later the game and it feels very cold. It feels like you have these large foundations these large
Developers and it's just I think people don't feel like they have as much of a voice
Whereas in cosmos because they everything kind of starts with these small little app chains
They're proof of stake from day one out of the box
I think people people's voices are heard much more here
I think I think the builders are more receptive to the community's voice and and and they have like a strong
To influence the future of these of these individual chains and as a result the broader ecosystem
So I think the discourse is intense
It's passionate the communities care
And the developers care that the communities care and I and I think that's a beautiful level
Of entropy that probably won't last forever. Eventually, it'll be pockets of it instead of everything
But I think it's it has that open source early stage internet feel to it
And that's and that's so cool to be a part of that
Wow very very well said carter
That was really inspiring
Yeah, and before we conclude the episode
Do you have any parting words for our listeners here any call to actions?
Would just quickly say check out app shape protocol.io and be sure to follow the shape protocol team on twitter
Please join the community. We'd love to interact with you on telegram and discord
And get to know you and then i'll let alex of course talk about how you get involved on in the broader secret network ecosystem
Yeah, so I would say guys
I I would recommend reading up about confidential computing about privacy realizing what you are
exposing to the world when you're using
most of the blockchains out there
And then you know go to secret network website follow us on twitter and join our telegram groups. Uh, there's a lot of discussion there
But to me again, the main message is
try to read up and realize
How transparent and not confidential not private
All the existing blockchain infrastructures are and that would automatically bring you to be more interested and join and participate
In what we're doing at secret network
Awesome and with that we've come to the end of fx cast. Thank you once again alex and carter for sharing
your philosophy your projects and
Most importantly, you know why we should keep doing what we're doing and why privacy is so important in this mission that we call crypto
Thank you. Have a nice day everyone