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RAC FM🦝 Welcomes Ika MPC & d3h3d.sui to the Studio 🎙️😎
Recorded: July 2, 2025 Duration: 1:04:18Space Recording
Short Summary
Excitement builds as Ika prepares for its token launch this month, backed by over $20 million in funding and strategic partnerships with major industry players. The innovative D-Wallet technology promises to revolutionize decentralized custody and interoperability in the crypto space.
Full Transcription
all right morning guys we'll just get the uh the room set up quickly okay i'll get me co-hosts in
uh david and then we'll get her kicked off i'll get the mics out uh i've just got to dm a couple
of people broke here so literally i'll get the mics out get the co-hosts in and then we'll let we'll get fired up yeah I'm
excited hello man oh good morning good recommendation son thank you for that
all right I'll be with you guys in a second yeah aha he's a co-host coming in Manor if you're interested Manor and you want to grab a mic by all means just request one dude
you know we normally have closed mic shows but uh if you do want to grab a mic by all means just request one dude you know we normally have
closed mic shows but uh if you do want to jump up you're more than welcome yeah good morning red eye
you all right son good morning yeah uh i was up early today i was excited about this space was
listening to a little bit of uh podcasts earlier today so i'm pretty amped for this
little bit of uh podcasts earlier today so I'm pretty amped for this yeah man it should be a
good one it's the uh it's the first time I've just realized it's the first time we've ever had a suey
project on the show you know I was thinking like have we had anybody else and I'm thinking no we
haven't actually considering all the like protocols and stuff dude we've had on the show it's quite
surprising we've never had a sort of suey based project before right yeah yeah yeah actually thinking back on this um
yeah i can't remember i can't remember one so great to great to have ica here or however
maybe it's heiko well we're gonna we're gonna find that out aren't we we're gonna find that
out so i'll do the uh i'll do the quick beginning the intro because obviously this will be it's recorded so
it'll be archived and it'll be up on all streaming platforms like our other shows
uh over at fm.org so spotify google itunes wherever you get your podcasts it'll be edited and archived on there for a while. So for everybody joining us, good morning, Rack FM.
And it is a good morning.
It is Wednesday, the 2nd of July, 2025.
And we're pretty buzzing.
We've got, yeah, I don't know if it's Ika or Ika.
We'll find out.
But we've also got David, one of the founding members, I believe.
And I'm dead excited. So, David, is it it good afternoon for you, is it? Hello there.
Hi, yes, I'm in London. It is the afternoon here, early afternoon. Yeah, and I'm David.
Ika is pronounced Ika. It's squid in Japanese. That explains the logo as well.
And yeah, this is a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having us.
Oh, mate, the pleasure's all. That was always a pleasure, never a chore, you know.
And when I saw London in your bio, I was thinking, oh, I hope he's a fellow Brit, you know.
So, yeah, I mean, my mother is British.
I actually grew up in Israel
and most of the team is based out of Tel Aviv.
But yeah, myself and Illumi,
who is the person behind the Ica account,
we're both based in London.
Oh, David, that's a good point actually is there anybody else that you recommend that we bring up as speakers for today any other
audience any of your guys in yeah should we bring the official account in yeah you can you can bring
on the official account um we're uh i usually talk more about the technical stuff and ilumi is in charge of the vibes in the
community oh we love vibes we love vibes in community you know
there we go the official account's in hello brother welcome to you as well yeah yeah good
morning good morning pleasure to be on yeah man i'm excited about this i mean god almighty the
amount of technical data like david
says he's into the technical side of stuff right but the uh the amount of technical data associated
with this project is is quite uh quite a lot you know we're not like uh kind of technical uh noobs
so to speak you know we've had like mpc wallets and stuff on before uh but there are some things that are
slightly above our peer grade a little bit maybe not for red eye but certainly for me you know
you know david the the one of the main reasons we got you asked you on was because manor recommended
you but he's like this dude just has ridiculous like ridiculously good like crypto takes you know
do just has ridiculous like ridiculously good like crypto takes you know and obviously we've
just kind of met you you know david normally if we're interviewing a project we know you know we
don't have to go in any history but just give us a quick overview of where did your crypto like
journey start i mean how did you end up being a degen if you don't mind me asking i think degen
might be a bit of an overstatement. We have Illumi as our resident
Degen. That's his official title to take care of that side of the things. But I can maybe talk a
bit about my background and also the team's background and how we got to where we are now.
are now um so i've i've been a tech founder for um very long 17 years now um and uh i mostly did
things uh around deep tech cyber security ai um those were kind of the worlds i i operated in
on the personal level i was always um very interested and engaged with different types of blockchain-based projects and crypto, less on the financial side and more just on the tech side.
Although I played around with a lot of things, and especially DeFi as it came out, obviously I played around with it.
And although this was always something in the back of my mind, and also my co-founders, like this was something we wanted to do.
So my co-founders also come from cybersecurity.
One of them started a new category in cybersecurity and created this cybersecurity unicorn.
The other one was is also a cybersecurity and cryptography expert on the nation state side of things.
So we have like very deep expertise and we always kind of were interested in crypto and blockchain,
but we couldn't really find something that we felt was big enough and interesting enough for us to really,
you know, dive into and dedicate, you know, a decade or two of our lives to solving.
So this changed just over three years ago, three and a half years ago, early 22.
We came up with this new concept.
new concept it's called the d wallet i'll explain what that is maybe a bit later but um essentially
It's called the D-Wallet.
I'll explain what that is maybe a bit later.
the problem that we wanted to solve was the interoperability problem or we called it the
sovereignty problem uh and essentially that means that you have a lot of a lot of different block
chains um and you know even early 22 we realized the world is going towards many, many, many fragmented different blockchains.
And the more blockchains you have, the more this problem is prominent where, you know, every blockchain in itself is its own zone of sovereignty.
You have like these very strict rules about ownership, about security guarantees, about trust assumptions.
And those kind of those very strict guarantees that you have and assumptions that you have
fall apart the moment you want to operate across different blockchains.
And you have things like, you know, bridges and, you know, a lot of different solutions that
everyone agree are, are not sufficient, are not good enough. And we need something better. But
the tech just wasn't there to create that something better. And this was kind of an
opportunity that we identified and said, okay, this is like a pretty big problem to solve that the tech just doesn't exist to solve.
And if we are able to develop that tech that can be the foundations of solving that problem,
then we can really do something big in crypto and not just another, I don't know, another
DeFi platform or another custody, wallet custody.
These are good.
It's nice to have, but it's not like solving this really big fundamental problem,
which is what we wanted to do.
So this is kind of the background of how we got into crypto.
And early 22, we founded the company, The Wallet Labs, around this new concept.
It took us over two years to do the initial research cryptography research to
actually create the cryptography that can solve these problems um and uh yeah early last year
we published our first uh cryptography research paper uh to pc actually was the second paper but
like the first uh you know, full cryptography
protocol since we published a few more papers. And yeah, I'm happy to try and break it down
in a way that is very friendly to people who are not deeply technical in exactly what we
created, how it solves this problem, what is is the novelty the innovation here um and also how we we
see the future changing with this tech available well dude i mean the tech side of it is absolutely
fascinating because i went through your you know your 15 day countdown that you did uh like leading
up to the new year right and i was like holy i mean I mean, if this Product does what it says
On the tin
You're sitting on something big here
So we'll dive into that in a second
Do you consider yourself
David, like a privacy maxi?
Are you one of those guys, like a typical
Cyberpunk privacy maxi
Or what?
I mean, on the individual level
Absolutely, 100%.
I also
think, in general,
privacy is just something
very fundamental that even
people who are not very radical,
no one wants their shit
just publicly available for anyone,
right?
If someone told you now
anyone can see your bank account balance
in your transaction in your bank account, you'd be horrified. Like, this is, people want privacy,
right? This is a basic, basic fundamental requirement that everyone has. I also think
that, you know, as much as personally, I am all like, you know, down with the system and fuck
the man and all that stuff, you know, at the end of the day, we need to be practical.
And practically, there will always be forces that we need to kind of deal with and accept.
And what we can hope for with crypto and blockchain is to be able to take away as much
power as possible and give it back to people.
Because, you know, it's nice to have these like fantasies of, you know, toppling down
governments with crypto.
But, you know, we need to kind of realize that probably, you know, countries are here
to stay, governments are here to stay.
But if we can create a more autonomous and a more sovereign infrastructure for people
to have more freedom and sovereignty than
then we've did our part in in you know making humanity better yeah well you might you might get
a privacy question or two from uh red eye he's uh he's part of the secret network so he's our little
privacy maxi you know i've got no doubt he's got some questions coming up just a quick couple of
things on the team and the funding
How big is your team David?
How many guys all together have you got
Working on the project?
Altogether I would say
About 20 people
Slightly more
If we're also counting part time
And in terms of funding
We raised over $20 million from investors.
And yeah, like that was like kind of the, let's say that the VC part of it, we also have had a very successful kind of community-based NFT campaign
that the community on Sui was very enthusiastic with and participated,
actually in a way that kind of caught us by surprise
and really showed that there's huge interest also in the community side.
But yeah, that's that in terms of the the team and funding etc
yeah well yeah i mean you're right about that uh suey's got like i would say but not a cult
following but quite close to that i mean this perfectly leads into the next question and i
already think i know the answer this is just like for our audience you know why why suey and and why
now why why is sue i mean i think i know the answer but why is suey
the right home for you and why is now the right time to be bringing in a product like this
i mean honestly the the timing part uh you know if if the tech if we had the tech five years ago
then five years ago was the right time right like? Like this, this tech has been, you know, sorely needed in this space. The moment we had smart contract
networks, you know, more than one popping up, this, this, this became like a very, very clear
need. By the way, you can also see, you know, some of the, probably most of the biggest hacks
in crypto history were bridge hacks like this.
This has been a very, very visible and painful point in crypto for many, many years.
So that's in terms of the timing. And we, as I said, we needed to do over two years of research with some of the top cryptography researchers in the world, by the way.
We have a Godel Prize winner on our team,
which is the equivalent of the Nobel for cryptographers.
We have multiple PhDs in cryptography,
a really, really serious research team.
And even when we started, we didn't have certainty
that we would be able to actually pull it off.
The research is kind of an unknown.
So in terms of the timing, the moment we had the tech and we built it off, right? And research is a kind of an unknown. So in terms of the timing, you know,
the moment we had the tech and we built it out, and now we're ready to deploy, then this is the
right time. Regarding SUI, when we started early 22, SUI didn't exist. And we knew we had two big problems to solve.
One was the cryptography research problem.
And the other was to find a high-performance, scalable, secure platform in order to deliver that tech.
And we decided to tackle, we knew a lot of people are tackling the latter problem, right?
The scalable, secure infrastructure.
So we wanted to tackle the cryptography problem that no one was kind of making a lot of progress in.
While we were doing that, you know, Sui launched.
We were very, very impressed by their tech, even back in Testnet.
And when they launched, it's not just the performance.
It's also the architecture, the object-centric design that really fits with how we're thinking about security and how we're thinking about the architecture of what we created, the D-Wallet part.
So it kind of made a lot of sense.
And, you know, then basically your options are either you fork Sui
and you try to compete with them and, you know,
with your tech plus their tech,
or you create something that can be coordinated on Sui,
which is also something pretty unique to Sui.
Sui already has Walrus,
which is a storage
network that is coordinated on SUI. Now we're going to have Ica, which is an MPC network that
is coordinated on SUI. And you really need this very, very flexible architecture plus super high
performance in order to be able to take off-chain activities like storage or MPC and be able to have them coordinated on a L1 network
so I hope that kind of answers why sui and why now yeah perfect bro absolutely perfect
red are you you've got anything before we we could carry on anything you want to chip in with
no not right now I just you know appreciate the
you know the technical detail that David's been able to share you know I've always been uh since
coming into this space I've really found uh multi-party computation really interesting
especially when combined with other uh sorts of privacy solutions like hardware based privacy solution but
I'll ask some questions later I'll let you keep going for now no worries me
so yeah David when I when I was reading through sort of you know a lot of your
posts and stuff like that I noticed you've got like a lot of emphasis on
builders you know being able like use your framework etc would you say you've
created the product uh
were you more kind of like builder centric in your thinking in your process or was it like a
a user and a bill you know were you split between the two with your way of thinking
so i think um there there are two parts i guess guess, to this answer. So the first part is IKA is very low-level infrastructure.
It's not a user-facing product.
So definitely our, let's call it the natural target audience, is builders. Because end users will, I think only very, very specific, super technical power users would be able to use Ica directly.
Everyone else will utilize Ica through something that is built with Ica.
and targeting developers and letting them know what they can build with this new unlock
that the ecotech creates.
But I also think that one of the interesting things in our strategy,
and maybe Lumi can also talk about that a bit more,
is that we understood that in order for even to reach more developers,
but more than that, for developers to
know that people are excited about this tech, and, you know, if they start building, then they
already have, like, a pretty engaged and enthusiastic user base. We also need to create some sort of,
let's call it a retail brand. And Illumi has been in charge of that.
And I think it did a really amazing job of creating a very, very entertaining and engaging
brand that people love to be part of and love to engage with, even if some of them don't
really understand the tech.
Some of them along the way, you know, became more technical and understood the tech because
they cared about the brand more.
But I think like this striking this balance between creating a very, very technical,
low-level infrastructure product that only can be used by real developers,
but also keeping the, let's call it, the masses engaged,
I think it's kind of a very delicate balance that we were able to strike.
And yeah, maybe, Ill lumi maybe you want to
add something on that yeah sure happy to tune in i mean uh we've been in this like i've been in
this space for a couple years now and i think um there's there's a lot of great infrastructure out
there but i've always felt that the brands were very dry like um very holier
than thou just didn't really know how to engage in like fun and if we've looked over the last like
18 months you know we've seen a very vibrant culture around meme coins and nfts that made
web3 accessible to just normal people right like a lot of uh this most recent wave of Web3 people being adopted in has been
around like a meme coin culture where there's been less of an emphasis on utility and tech
and more emphasis on culture and community. And when you are building deep infra, you know,
you're on one end of the spectrum. So my approach was like, well, let's the marketing be on the exact opposite end of that spectrum.
Like David gave me the autonomy to effectively run marketing like a meme coin.
And my basic philosophy was most projects work on the premise of educate first and then excite.
And I was like, no, we will excite first and then educate.
If I can capture your attention, you'll give me the opportunity to kind of explain Ica to you
And I think it's working. I don't know. We'll see but I think we've got a pretty exciting community and they're very vocal
They tell us what they love they tell us what they hate and it's great. It's you know, it's when you're building
for an audience
Having that active communication is important and then I think my final two cents on this is that at the end of the day, like having been a builder in the past, working alongside a number of foundations, I think foundations fall short in a lot of regards when it comes to builder support.
Grants are great, right?
Getting financial support from a foundation is a fantastic thing to have.
I don't want to downplay that at all.
But it's a very small part of what a team and a project needs to go to market.
And so my goals with building out an Eka community was that if you go and build on Eka, you know,
I, as a part of Eka, want to drive the first 10,000 users to you, the 10,000 brand champions to you.
You know, people that are loud and will
tell you what they like and they'll tell you what they hate, but you've got all these mini,
you know, product champions going out and telling the good word of your product out there. And I
think that's something I'm not seeing with other infra projects or other foundations really focus
on. So we'll see how that plays out, But that's kind of been my two cents on community.
And maybe just to add to that,
I think one of the most interesting things we saw is,
and we can see like, you know,
IcaVietnam account is like in the crowd listening right now.
And there are multiple like regional Ica communities
that kind of popped up very organically it's all grassroots
by the way we uh we spent like basically nothing on marketing kols you know all of these things
that um a lot of projects try to kind of kick start with with some funding this was all like
completely grassroots people get excited want to create something local, want to, you know, spread the word local.
Like these are kind of really amazing things that we've seen.
And a lot of the conversations that these regional communities are having are technical conversations and are explaining what Ica is and are getting developers engaged, which really I think is just such a power multiplier when people are excited about a brand and are willing to, you know, put in so much effort and time in order to make it more successful.
Yeah, I think it's so far it's been playing out really, really well.
And hopefully it continues to after we launch.
Well, DJ, I think I saw a post where you were talking about devs so you're not just trying
to target blockchain devs right you're trying to bring sort of existing web to that's your aim is
to bring existing sort of web to devs uh into the web 3 space as well right so you're like i read
about you know you're not building for the day you're building for you know five years or whatever
but you're looking to be able to bring sort of high level devs into the blockchain world is that
right yeah and you know um i mean obviously i know disrespect for you know blockchain developers
today but um a lot of the very high quality developers don't choose to go to blockchain today. They choose things like AI,
cybersecurity, cloud, right? These are like the areas where you can find a very high concentration
of high quality developers. And I think, you know, especially considering how novel and interesting
and challenging and, you know, let's call it cutting-edge tech blockchain is,
you know, compared to that, like, there's a lower percentage
of what you would expect of high-quality developers.
And I think there are a lot of historical reasons
of why that's the case, but I think this should be
one of the main focuses of especially infrastructure projects, but
in general, our focus needs to be
bringing in more high-quality devs.
Even today, with what
AI can do, most low-quality
or mid-quality developers are going
to be pretty redundant very, very soon. And what will really move the needle and will move the
industry forward is, you know, the 10x developers, whatever you want to call them, that can really
create super high-quality, very scalable things, things that can lead to institutional adoption,
things that can lead to mass adoption, things that can lead to
mass adoption, you know, the things that are very, very difficult to build. And so, yeah, definitely
that is one of our main focuses. I think also what we're trying to do with specifically with Eka
is to create a lot of things that will allow connecting real world value into the blockchain,
which I think is also something that's going to attract very high quality developers.
Because when it's all kind of like a POC experiment that, you know, you're running
within your little bubble, it's nice, but that won't attract like the real talent, right?
The real talent will come when they can feel like real value from the world can actually
move to the blockchain.
So, yeah, definitely that's a big focus.
I also think Sui are doing a phenomenal job at bringing very high quality developers from all over the world into blockchain.
A lot of developers who joined blockchain in the past year didn't start from ethereum as a starting point they
started from solana or sui which i think is a super interesting kind of shift uh in where we
are right now in blockchain yeah my mate fantastic i'm loving this conversation by the way red eye
it's a great convo this is right up our street isn't it we love this shit man we live yeah this
is this is awesome um i feel like i could just sit here and let you run
this i i do have uh a few questions you know i read through uh the white paper went through
as much documentation as i could for uh both eka and d wallet and you know i my background uh in
crypto is uh primarily focused around defy and so in thinking about, you know, EKA as well as
the D wallet, I was curious from you guys' perspective, are there any use cases that you
think EKA is particularly optimized for? And how does, you know, the D wallet, your NPC wallet,
help optimize the UI UX for thosex for those users for that those uh
particular use cases yeah so maybe maybe it will be uh helpful if i just uh give like a very high
level overview of what exactly is eka and how it works and what exactly it solves. Also, very important to demystify the notion that D-Wallet is like an MPC wallet.
I'll explain exactly what it is. And yeah, so maybe I can start with the very beginning, right?
We talked about the big problem, the sovereignty problem, right? You have a lot of different
blockchains. Each one of them is kind of a zone, its own zone of sovereignty. By the way, this is a term that Vitalik coined.
And within every zone of sovereignty, you have, I think, the most basic fundamental guarantee that you have is that you do not have to trust anyone.
And what I mean by that is that every single user can reconstruct the entire state from
Genesis until now and verify the state of the blockchain.
So you don't need to try and you can verify that every single transaction included was a valid transaction that was signed with the private key that corresponds to the
public key of the address, right? Like you don't have to trust the validators or the miners or
anyone, any network operator to tell you what is the truth. You can actually verify everything by yourself. And we call that a zero trust guarantee, right?
So this is like probably the most basic guarantee that you have in a blockchain.
And it actually what gave blockchain its name, right?
It's a chain of blocks that you can follow back to the source, back to Genesis.
So this is something very, very fundamental.
And the moment you started having multiple blockchains and people wanted to do things across those blockchains don't have, you need to trust someone,
right, to tell you what is the state of Bitcoin on Solana.
Because the operators of Solana are not the same operators on Bitcoin, and it's not the
same users, it's not the same ledger, so you can't reconstruct everything and have, you
have to trust someone.
And that is, like, that basic problem led to things like bridges, right?
Where you have some type of intermediary that you trust.
And bridges evolved over time.
It used to be very centralized.
Then it became like multi-sigs.
Then it became MPC-based bridges.
But at the end of the day, you always remove that
zero trust guarantee. And when we were thinking about how to solve this problem, we thought about
a lot of different ways. Eventually, we chose MPC and we needed to create a new MPC protocol
because we felt that one of the basic things that you do in every blockchain
is you authenticate with a signature, right, with a key.
And that is kind of the basis of the zero trust guarantee that you have with every blockchain.
So what we thought was, what if we could create a network that allows you to generate signatures in a way that both keeps the zero trust guarantee.
Right. So, you know, as a user that a signature can't be generated without you.
So that way, you know that every signature that is generated will always include you cryptographically,
will always include you cryptographically,
but also includes a smart contract platform
that can enforce logic
on whether or not the signature is generated.
So you would need both the user
and a decentralized network
that is governed by some sort of smart contract
in order to generate a signature.
And if you're able to do that,
then you can start operating
across multiple networks
without removing decentralization,
without having to trust a centralized entity,
but also without removing the control
and the zero trust assumptions of the user.
And that kind of theoretical,
let's call it theoretical understanding
or theoretical system, led us to develop our MPC protocol that we call 2PC-MPC.
So very, very briefly, MPC is a way to generate a signature without having a single private key.
But the signing power, let's call it, is distributed across multiple parties.
The signing power, let's call it, is distributed across multiple parties.
Today, you have centralized MPC providers like Fireblocks that allow you to generate a signature for custody purposes.
So you have part of the key, Fireblocks has part of the key, and then you can generate signatures with them and they enforce access control and permissions and things like that.
with them and they enforce access control and permissions and things like that.
And then you have MPC networks where the user is not part of the process.
It's just the MPC network.
And the MPC network controls generating signatures and they kind of aggregate all of the users'
assets and control them and the users trust the MPC network.
And you have examples like that with ICP and TorChain and NIR and things like that.
And what we did with 2PC and PC is we kind of combined those two concepts.
So you have at the high level a two-party computation, that's 2PC,
between the user and the network.
So the user is always required cryptographically.
That means you don't have to trust anyone
because if a signature was generated,
it's because you were part of it.
And then the second part of the 2PC is a nested MPC.
That's why it's called 2PC-MPC
of a massively decentralized network
that decides whether or not to sign based on some sort of
smart contract logic. So now you have the best of both worlds. You both have the zero trust guarantee
and you have the decentralized smart contract platform that can enforce logic. And combining
both of those things, we created this new primitive that we call a D-Wallet.
So a D-Wallet is not an NPC wallet per se.
It's not like user experience or user interface or anything like that.
It's more of a building block for developers.
It's a new primitive.
Like you have, you know, D-Apps, smart contracts, you know, these primitives that builders can build with,
they now have a D wallet.
And the D wallet is a decentralized signing mechanism
that requires both the Eka network,
based on some sort of the smart contract logic that you write,
but also the user to participate in order to generate a signature.
And so this is kind of the fundamental primitive or capability that we're giving builders is now you can incorporate this wallet within your architecture.
And then the question that you actually asked, right, is like, what are the use cases that we feel that this primitive is useful for?
And the answer is, honestly,
the list is endless. But if we focus on some of the big categories, so the first big category
is decentralized custody. Today, custody is either self-custody, which is very, very problematic.
either self-custody, which is very, very problematic. I mean, anyone here who ever
did anything with self-custody knows how problematic that is, you know, how many people
get hacked or lose their keys or, you know, it's definitely not a mass adoption thing, right?
Self-custody. It's very, very radical. Or you have centralized custody options. And centralized
custody means you trust some sort of entity or maybe some collection of entities together with
NPC. But you have to trust some parties in order to help you with custody. And what you can do with
IKA for the first time is have decentralized custody. So you can think about something like
fire blocks, but now it's decentralized. And there are people who are building these type
of solutions, right? The decentralized fire blocks are multi-chain Gnosis safe, right? Like you can
build your own multi-sig, but that will be able to control any asset on any chain. So, you know,
this is like one, and, you know, if we take it a step further, there's like, you know, these wallet as a service solutions, like Privy and Web3 Auth and all these guys, you can now build that in a decentralized way.
Instead of trusting, like, their centralized server, now you have wallet as a protocol instead of wallet as a service.
their centralized server. Now you have wallet as a protocol instead of wallet as a service.
So you have all these like very cool custody use cases, which I believe are going to be huge with
Ica because being able to create the level of access control and user experience that you're
used to, you know, in Web 2 and like in centralized settings, but have it actually decentralized is a huge, huge unlock.
So that's one category.
The second category is Bitcoin.
Bitcoin doesn't have smart contracts.
And for the first time, you can basically write any logic you want
on a sweet smart contract and have it enforced on native Bitcoin
using this D-Wallet primitive.
So you can do lending against native Bitcoin.
You can do trading with native Bitcoin.
You don't have to build super, super complex, expensive, inefficient systems to try and
do stuff with like Bitcoin scripting language.
And we all see how the solutions look like.
They don't have nothing even close to like the, you know, the experience and the efficiency that we expect from,
from a DeFi protocol.
So doing things with native Bitcoin in a way that is completely decentralized
and also operates on native Bitcoin itself,
I think is a very big category.
We have a lot of builders that are focusing on Bitcoin right now.
And then the third is just in general, interoperable DeFi.
You know, you have a lot of change,
you have a lot of fragmentation in liquidity
and being able to start building a more unified layer
of liquidity, of trading, of leverage, of lending,
you know, across even things like stable coins, right?
All the different stable coins
in all the different chains.
You need to have a good way
to abstract that fragmentation
or to solve that fragmentation.
And to do that through the wallets
and through Eka gives you a very, very clear interface,
generic interface across any network in a way that is
completely decentralized. So I think these three categories are probably like the biggest ones
that we're seeing builders building right now. I'll just add that, you know, as I said,
the potential is really massive. Even for some Web2 use cases, signatures and threshold signatures is something very fundamental that we all use all the time.
You know, even right now on this space where we all have like signatures to and from our phone to the Twitter app or from the computer and the browser to like the Twitter servers. Like these are things that happen all the time in the background and adding resilience in the form of a threshold mechanism is something that I think can be really relevant to a lot of use cases even outside of Web3.
Dude, I absolutely love the nuance that you provided there.
And I think it was definitely worthwhile to give all that background. And I just want to work with your this signature generation method to basically
determine or like set what contract interactions can even generate signatures as a way to kind of
provide like this extra level of uh custody security am i understanding that correctly
security. Am I understanding that correctly? I'm not sure I understood the question.
Yeah, maybe you can rephrase it. Yeah, so you had mentioned that there, you know,
this signature generation, this 2PC, MPC, you knowC is able to work uniquely
with smart contract logic.
I guess, could you maybe give a little bit more detail
about some of the programmability there?
Yeah, so as I said, 2PC-MPC has two-party computations.
So the user part is completely independent
from anything on-chain, right?
It's completely dependent on the user,
just like a private key would be.
But the network part,
so the other side of the two PC,
that is governed by the ECA operators, right?
The ECA and PC operators.
And basically what the ECA operators would do
for every D wallet,
there will be a user share and a network share.
So the user shares for the user
and the network share creates
half of the signature from the network.
And the decision of whether or not
the Eka operators will generate
the network share side of the signature
will be based on a
smart contract so on sui technically the way that works yeah technically the way that works is we
have on sui is based on objects so we have an object called a type of object called a d wallet
cap a d wallet capability and only whoever holds that object can tell the Econ Network to complete the signature for the deWallet.
So then if a smart contract holds that object, then that smart contract can determine whether or not a signature is generated.
But on Sui, because everything is an object, a user can hold that object, An NFT can hold that object. And essentially, we're basically being able to give this account capabilities to any type of object on Sui.
So an NFT can have an account on Bitcoin that it controls.
A user can have a multi-chain account.
These accounts are also transferable.
There's like a protocol to transfer these D- wallets so um this is basically how it works i hope this is a bit more
clear no that was that was absolutely perfect i really appreciate it
yeah david because we always try to keep these interviews to round about an hour you know uh
we've learned over time
right we've done like 225 shows or something uh when they're on the streaming platforms or the
replays on twitter the shows around an hour i don't know why just always hit the best numbers
you know i've got a few things for you mate test nets live at the moment did you say that you're
launching this month is that correct is that the time frame yes yes you're launching this month? Is that correct? Is that the time frame?
Yes, yes, we are launching this month. We're very excited. We're actually supposed to launch last month, but we had to push it because of the war and everything that was happening. But yeah,
we're excited to be launching very, very soon. Superb, mate. And you know, you mentioned about
all the research and everything that you guys did before uh and obviously you know you've been talking about the interoperability we're like
originally cosmos kids us you know uh i think i think red eyes the same as me we first got into
crypto through cosmos so i guess you guys looked into what they were claiming as you know inter
operability but like you were saying earlier about blockchains being like an individual zone you know the cosmos you couldn't really kind of do anything really
interoperable like outside of the cosmos you know but they relied on their traditional like
railing we we discovered like a lot of kind of issues and problems but like traditional railing
but you guys are avoiding this by using the
message broadcast situation, right? So, I mean, we're bypassing a lot of the issues. And by the
way, I love Cosmos, one of my first loves in crypto. And one of the prominent teams that
is building right now on top of IKA, the native team, One of their founders, Robert, he was the technical architect of Cosmos SDK.
And we, yeah, I'm a big fan.
I think what we were solving, you know, even IBC on Cosmos has, still doesn't solve the
basic problem. And the reason is because still the basic way to
authenticate to a blockchain and to enforce your trust is through signatures. And IBC still requires
you to trust, for example, you know, the validators of another network. You're still trusting some
sort of quorum. It's more trust minimized, right, than just a centralized bridge.
But and it's more, you know, it's better, like because it's native, it's a better architecture.
But, you know, as I said, first of all, it doesn't solve the problem.
And the second big issue with things like Cosmos and Polkadot and Ethereum, right, is that they all say say if everyone in the world does exactly what i say
then i can solve these problems but the world doesn't work that way right the world doesn't
work in a way where i create something that i think is best and then everyone just there's the
the famous xkcd um comic about the standards right like, oh, we have 14 different standards for this thing.
We need to create one different, like one very, like the best standard.
And then you have 15 standards.
It's like, this is how the world works.
And that's why when we designed a solution,
we wanted to design it in a way that will be completely generic.
And no matter, you you know what even future
type of blockchain type of vm whatever it is right it will support it out of the box because we're
using the very basic mechanism that every blockchain uses in order to authenticate which is
the signatures and perfect mate and have you have you i mean are you guys like best in class right?
Because I was like having a look around, I mean have you guys got any competition or is it just nobody in sight?
I mean I don't see anything that we can, I can think of as competition for Ika, there are, you know, different competitors for, or maybe a better way to say it is, I believe a lot of people will start building competitors on Ika to existing players, for example, you know, bridges, right? Or NPC networks, or custody solutions, or, you know, things like Bitcoin L2s or things that want
to do things with Bitcoin, right?
So people will be able to build better, you know, more centralized, more secure, more
performant competitors to those, you know, to those projects on top of Ika.
So in a way, we don't really have have competitors but also we're competing with
in essence with a lot of different projects
superb mate and something i was fascinated with right there's so there's a couple of things to go through uh david with you right before we get to the end when i look through the 15 days you
know yeah sui nami uh tweet that you did in the build up to new year right
there was a lot of stuff in there i found uh interesting you know about rwa's etc but
you mentioned in one of the countdown tweets about uh being able to sort of take away the need for an
lst so you mentioned about staking positions and being able to leverage a stake position, say, for example,
as collateral or whatever, right? But without the need for having to create an LST. Was that right?
Did I get that right? Yeah. Yeah. And it goes back to this very cool, interesting capability
of a D-Wallet, which is the first in Web3, which is the transferability of an entire account.
So a D-Wallet is created in a process called DKG,
a distributed key generation
between the network and the user.
So no one ever has the private key.
And that means for the first time,
you can actually trustlessly change the ownership of an account, of the entire account and all of its history and all of the assets on one go without even having to perform an action on, let's say, Bitcoin or Solana or Ethereum, right? You only have to change the ownership and the permissions
with the ECA and share the user share and then do something called a resharing. But
like it's all cryptographic operations that eventually what they do is they change the
ownership of an account. And then once you can do that, you can think about a lot of interesting
things, right? So one of them is, for example, taking an account that has a staking position in
it, and then using the entire account as collateral, because the account can be transferred.
So if the loan, if it needs to be liquidated, then you just transfer the account to the lender.
And so that's one way of doing that. Then you can also think about you know performing uh transfer of ownership
of native bitcoin without having a transaction on bitcoin itself and so if i have native bitcoin on
an account and i transfer the account to you now i transfer the bitcoin to you but i never actually
submitted a bitcoin transaction so that is not only good for the purposes of, you know, saving time and money, which,
you know, we know Bitcoin specifically is a big deal, especially if you're thinking
about things like quick liquidations, things like that.
But it's also very useful for institutional adoption, because one of the biggest problems in crypto in general
for institutions is the provenance, right?
Following the chain of ownership and making sure no bad actors ever touched the specific
money, right?
This is like a big, big concern for institutions.
And if today, by the way, institutions are paying a premium on what is called virgin
Bitcoin.
So Bitcoin that was mined directly and no one ever transferred it or touched it.
But what if you could have virgin Bitcoin that stays virgin forever and transfer the account with a smart contract that holds a record of everyone that ever held the account?
So, for example, it doesn't allow you to transfer it to someone who wasn't KYC right if that's the the requirement of the institution
and then you know you have a chain of ownership of any type of asset because
you're doing it on the account level and you know that your policy whatever your
policy is you know maybe it's like an automatic chain analysis kind of report
that you know you it's all whitelisted or maybe it's like actual KYC or KYB.
But whatever your policy is, you can enforce that on the ownership of the account level.
So I think like this account transferability,
it allows for things like leveraging entire accounts and entire positions
without having to create a derivative like an LSD.
But also it allows for very interesting things that weren't
possible until today in crypto. That's cool as shit, that like red eye, isn't it?
That is super fucking cool. That is so cool. I mean, there's so many use cases I was thinking
of outside of the ones you mentioned, but yeah, that account transferability is is really really cool and
especially you know mentioning this for institutions that you know want to be able to prove that
whatever previous owners of an account had done kyc or like they have to go through kyc i think
yeah it's just super cool idea that was dows is a classic use case as well, isn't it, Red Eye, if you think about it, right?
I mean, that, it could be for, you know, wills,
you know, for
handling of financial assets
after death. I mean, there's all sorts of
interesting things. I mean, there's
I see Legacy Link in the
audience. I think that's exactly what
they're building with Eka. Yeah,
this is like the perfect time for a plug.
Legacy Link is sitting in the crowd, and that verbatim, like, we know, we even are talking about this,
like, this is like one of the most straightforward use cases for Ica,
and lo and behold, these guys were already building it.
Oh, I tell you what, man, I'm loving this interview.
This has probably been one of my favorites of the year so far this is right up our alley eh we're getting a shitload of comments guys
in in the chat there everybody's asking about a tge now i wasn't gonna go down that route because
i'm like well you know they've just secured their funding blah blah blah but it seems as if there's
a lot of community that's listening in uh david that
want to ask about the tge normally i would have you know veered away from it but i thought i would
ask on behalf of the audience you know any any plan on a tge i know i know i even trust me uh
our community as as ilumi said are very vocal. Everyone wants TGE, and I get
it. Also, the fact
that we had to delay it was
pretty unfortunate.
It is coming this month. We're super
excited. We'll have
more details soon on when
exactly, and
also publish some things that we promised we'll publish
before TGE around tokenomics,
etc. It's all coming. Bear with us. It's going to be this month. Bear with us. It's going to be amazing.
Well, yeah, on that note, I was just going to say, you know, we've just finished quarter two.
What does the rest of the year look like for you guys?
Because obviously it's going to be huge for you now, especially when you go live, right?
How are you seeing these like next these next six months play out?
Yeah, honestly, it's both very, very hard to imagine what is going to happen in the next six months.
I mean, with EcaLive, in general, in the market, the markets are so crazy right now.
It's very hard to kind of predict. But we do have some pretty amazing plans moving forward,
both in terms of the tech and updates to the tech, but also in terms of very big partnerships.
And, you know, what we're doing is solving a lot of problems to a lot of big players today.
And a lot of them are already, you know,
have been in touch with us and are talking to us about things.
A lot of them are waiting for Mainnet to see how it works and when they see it works are going to, you know,
continue or progress these conversations.
So we're expecting to have a lot of very, very major announcements
over the next few months of pretty big partnerships
and a lot of you know
very well-known big projects adopting our tech as well as amazing new builders that are building
you know very novel things from scratch that we're super excited about. Yeah I'm gonna have
to slip this one in you had any conversations with Babylon by any chance?
I mean, I've been pretty critical of Babylon publicly. I think the big problem with Babylon is actually not a tech problem. I think it's actually a product market fit problem. I just
don't think anyone needs shared security um and the whole
staking restaking agon layer babylon all that stuff it's all nonsense it's all uh kind of
things that are pushed by vcs uh to you know to create narratives to just pump tokens but i don't
think anyone needs it any no one is using it. Everyone is putting in Bitcoin or Ethereum because they want to have yield,
but no one is going to pay for that yield.
So it's basically just a very, very overcomplex Ponzi.
That's kind of my take on that.
Based.
That's all I'll say about that one.
Based as fuck red eye, right?
Oh, yeah.
Mano did put in the comments,
don't forget to ask him a sandwich question at the end. And I have also one final question. Just if people wanted to join your community, where can they go and join and chat with other users and talk with developers and stuff?
So X, we have our main account here.
You can find also the official links for the Discord and Telegram
where you can join the community.
And we have the website.
But all major announcements go through X, Discord, et cetera.
Awesome. Appreciate it.
Yeah, I will say it's probably one of the best explanations
we've had about a project for quite some time you know sort of very uh explanatory without sort of
like being over technically over technical do you know what i mean oh this is awesome i mean
i think that you guys at least from my current understanding,
I think you guys have built something that has a real clear product market fit.
And I'm excited to watch you guys continue growing in the future.
Yeah, man.
I mean, I'm glad I was able to do it in a way that wasn't too technical.
That sometimes something – I'm getting better at it.
Illumi is coaching me.
So, yeah, I'm glad that was useful.
Oh, we love this stuff, dude.
And like I say, we've been into kind of this sort of stuff for quite a while now.
I think we interviewed Zengo probably about two years ago or something like that.
Right, dude, we're going to wrap it up it up but mano is on the money actually uh we would have normally started out with this question but uh you know it's a more serious interview david what's your
favorite sandwich my favorite sandwich um so there's this like really great Italian place near my house and they make, they call it Dante, but it's just like fucking chef's kiss.
It's like very, it's like basic Italian stuff, right? Like really good ingredients, basic stuff like prosciutto, buffalo mozzarella, oil you know some basil like it's just
uh and they they make like the the bread right there and then it's always like super fresh
yeah that's like hands down the best sandwich i've ever had oh bro we should have had joe on the
show he'd have loved that man he never stops talking about pecorino man joe's our italian partner uh i'll tell you what dude mind that's uh
i don't know if you do actually uh podcasts yeah but uh joe our friend dead cat joe he's got a
really good crypto channel but he generally does sort of more video format you know on youtube and
stuff uh i mean i don't know if you're a non or not but uh yeah i could joe could maybe give you
a shout out when he listens to this interview and maybe get you on after launch or something you know yeah for sure i do a lot of
podcast interviews i'm happy to to yeah i'll hit joe like he's got a decent good show and a good
audience as well we'll ask loomy loomy what about you brother you can tell a lot about a man by his choice of sandwich you know that's a good question um okay so i always have a challenge
where i have to make sure things are halal but like a cold cut right so what you'd expect in like
uh you know salami um uh all the different kind of cold cuts
and there's just being beef and turkey
but just like a cold cut sandwich
on like sourdough bread
cheese, a bit of sauce
not too much
simple sandwich
you can tell a lot about a man by his choice of bread
good sandwich
always starts with the bread
but we often have sandwich debates on Rack FM
you know
Guys, absolutely fantastic, I'm just going to say your messaging is so clear
Your branding is like super clear, we hate projects where they overcomplicate their branding, you know
Really easy to get the whole concept, the whole idea so i do take my hat off to you guys and
i sincerely wish you guys all the best mind thank you very much and thank you for having us uh was
great uh great time and um yeah let's uh let's talk again after launch oh yeah mate well don't
worry rack fm's always going to be kicking around we'll get you on more maybe like towards the end of the year or something when you've got a few months under your belt you know
and you've got uh you've got builders putting out stuff for fun you know yeah sounds good sounds good
yeah nobody can knock stewie i have to tell you at the beginning i was a little bit skeptical you
know because i'm a i'm a rust or you know go go land kid through and through but when when i knew about
uh obviously what happened and how move came around i was i was a little bit skeptical at
the beginning i don't know why but i've been incredibly impressed by like you know suey
speed uh you know the lack of latency etc it's uh i definitely and i think red eyes the same
definitely listening to you guys i'm gonna
put a lot more eyes on suey moving forward you know but yeah i yeah david and uh loomy highly
appreciate your time gentlemen right thank you very much have a nice day being on yeah have a
great day yeah take care guys good luck with the launch okay cheers take care right everybody this has been rackfm all
right i hope you've enjoyed the interview it'll be up oh it'll not be up on streaming platforms
for a short while our archiver and editors just uh moved from oregon to montana so he's got to set
the studio back up but the audio's grabbed uh we'll get it up as soon as we can and we'll post
the link out i just want to thank the co-host red eye and everybody else guys for listening in it's been
an incredible space this has been rack fm okay july the 2nd 2025 over and out take care everybody
we love you loads bye bye
