I can hear you. Yeah, let's go. All right. I am the king of technical difficulties on
spaces. So it's not just you. I have to ask. There we go. I was looping to sorry. Can you
still hear me? Yes, sir. Okay, gosh, I was like, wait, how come I can hear me? Oh, GM.
Is it Friday yet? How are we doing? I have no idea. Why Matt? Yes, I am. I'm happy to
see you here. It's been a bit man. It's been a bit. I'm happy to be seen here. I'm happy
to have a second to be in one place and relatively isolated from outside sounds. And I'm in the
middle of the move. Still, you know, the move is a multi month move that is also a career
change and I'm going to pick out an apartment in two weeks and I'll be in my own space permanently
or as permanently as permanent can be within one month. I'm going to be traveling for three
weeks leading up to that though. Yeah, I love that, man. Well, I'm happy for you in terms
of like your it seems like you have a lot of stuff happening in your life, you know,
a lot of really good things happening. So I'm very happy for you. And yeah, but happy
to have you here too. Matt, we have Polaris too. GM, GM, everyone. How is everyone doing?
I am great. Thank you. And I am back in England chilling out and just paying a hefty tax bill.
Oh, gosh, right. Yeah, here we go. Tax season. It's tax season was started a long time ago.
So at least here in the US, tax season started starts at the beginning of the year and for
businesses ends in March for personal reasons and or personal taxes ends in April, but still
tax season. Well, we have my network here with us today, which I'm actually pretty pumped
because I'll tell you right now, I went through their website, I went through their document,
documentation. I barely understand what's happening there. There's an upcoming collaboration
between them and ontology. So, you know, actually, I don't even know. Did I drop some alpha? Is that
already out there? I don't know. But I mean, I just want to learn about a lot of stuff. And I,
I just really love fully homomorphic encryption. That is such a rad combination of words, man.
And I think we have Christian behind the mind network account. How are you doing?
Well, thanks, man. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, Christian here on the founding team at my network.
I'm head of BD and marketing. So I'm with you Humpty today. We don't have to go into the actual
coding for a say. I'm happy to do that. I can talk features and benefits. Yeah, I mean, yeah,
we could keep it high level. Because I'm telling you right now, for some reason, my brain is stuck
in fifth grade mode right now. It is not waking up. I really try to kickstart it with two coffees
and now black tea. We'll see. Maybe I'll get smarter as we go. But yeah, let's let's do let's
do some introductions. Just generally, especially for you, Christian, because I think for anybody
who tunes in regularly, we know Donny is hopefully if you don't know, gosh, what's wrong with you?
We know Polaris is and you definitely know who I am. But we don't know who Christian is. And we
don't know what my network is. So why don't you give us a very brief intro and then we'll dive
into some of the features and functions. Awesome, cool, cool. So I will do so my network is one of
the first FHE projects in web three. We're about to be the first tokenized FHE project for asset
transfer. So what FHE is, those who don't know, fully homomorphic encryption is is considered the
holy grail of cryptography. Not my words. It's been that for about 30 years, but it wasn't scalable
for a long time. But Vitalik's been writing about this. It's kind of considered like the the darling
encryption method. And it's considered that because it gives us the ability to run computation on
encrypted data without needing to decrypt it. So where zk offers a proof of raw data without
actually under revealing the underlying data, that computation is happening off chain. So that's been
the problem with zk. Now, we're not competitive to zk, we actually use zk. But with FHE, if you think
of having this kind of like magical box where you can put data into it, and it never needs to be
decrypted to run any kind of computation, AI computation, anything with smart contracts,
anything in DeFi, you now basically reduce the attack vector on data. Because if somebody even
does, if there is a breach, they don't have the ciphertext, they can't understand the ciphertext.
So they can't actually see what's happening. So it's considered basically a new paradigm for end
to end encryption. That's kind of the high level. Yeah, I mean, so I mean, I want to dive into a few
things that you just talked about one of them specifically, you brought up Vitalik. And so I
think for anybody who's building on Ethereum specifically, but I think at large, Vitalik is
certainly a thought leader in the space in terms of like, blockchain development, privacy, I know
he's talked about, you know, decentralized identity at times. Interestingly enough, he talked about
so bond tokens, too, which is, I think that they're kind of polar opposites, some might say. But still,
I think he also talks about like zero knowledge proofs. And now you're mentioned, him talking
about, you know, FHE. I wonder if you wouldn't mind maybe just giving us a very high level in terms
of like, what some of the problems have been historically, and how and you use the word scale,
and how FHE is allowing, I guess, solving for scale?
Yeah, for sure. That's a great question. Well, I think right out of the gate, let's just talk
about all data and web3. So anybody who's been in web3 for a few years, if you go look at your
wallets, there's a lot of identifying data in there, right? If you have NFTs that are worth a
lot of money, that says a lot about your net worth. You can see your financial transactions, you know,
DeFi, like everything, all web3 is made for public data. And so that was never really meant to work
for the masses. Like when we really get to full on adoption, and we've got billions of people around
the world using web3, people, you don't you don't want your grocery bill completely transparent on
a scan. You don't want everyone to see exactly what you're buying all the time. Or if in the case
of deep end, you don't want people seeing exactly where you're going in your car and, and all the
different devices that you have, and all the data from those devices, like your steps counter, or your
heart track, your heartbeat tracker, we don't want all that to be public, right? So, and this is what
Vitalik Buterin talked about specifically is there are three challenges to Ethereum. And the big one
that he identifies is that the challenge that if Ethereum doesn't solve, they it might be the
existential problem for them, like they might not survive is the privacy one. And so, you know,
he's published quite a bit about this. And so this is a problem that we set out to solve and
that FHE can solve in the right applications. You know, I think that what we're finding is that as
we're definitely in the part of the cycle, I think of this next cycle is certainly seeing a lot of
TradFi come in, we've got the Bitcoin ETF, you've got banks that have their own chains, they're now
trying to get access to public chain liquidity, it's great that JP Morgan's got their own chain
and like countries have their own chains, but they do want the masses to interact with these
with their private chains at some point just to bring in liquidity. And why would anybody really
want to do that if by doing that, everything is transparent, everybody can see the assets that you
own, everybody can see what you're doing in the government that has access to it, like, that
doesn't sound right. So this privacy layer is not only solving the web three problem of the fact
that all data is public, but in order for web two and web three, for web two to graduate into web
three, we also need to help TradFi and web two companies keep some layer of privacy over their
data. Now, privacy is a bit of a four letter word right now. There's definitely we're seeing a kind
of cross jurisdictional attack on privacy between what's happening at Binance and tornado cache and
knock turn everything else. And it's unfortunate because even in web two, we have privacy. I mean,
all of your data isn't completely public. I mean, we still need a better privacy infrastructure in
web three than we have right now, because it's not even sufficient to web two. So we do need to have
these layers built in to web three text backs. But the real feature of FHE is the security it's,
again, there's never a need to decrypt the data that's really, really key. And it's also
quantum resistant. And this doesn't get talked about as much because the problem that's four
years away, and so many problems that we're solving web three are problems of today, right now.
But within a few years, we're going to have quantum computing at a level that it can actually be
harmful to networks. That's probably only a few years away. So FHE is quantum resistant. And
that's a really huge feature set. That means that we're building a new paradigm of end to end
decryption that can actually exist several years into the future. Yeah, I'm trying to formulate
some questions here. And by the way, Donnie Polaris, if anything pops up in terms of, you
know, what Christian is sharing here, please don't hesitate. Because you know me, I can just keep
going. But one of the things that, you know, kind of, in my mind, connected the dots is
decentralized identity, right, which I think is something that ontology is known for.
That kind of is the proposition there, right? And this is not just ontology,
this is like the W3C and anybody else who built it like that open standard DIDs,
which do use, you know, zero knowledge proofs, by the way. So there is a relationship there to
something that we talked about earlier. The kind of the proposition there is that
DIDs allow for some of this information that currently lives on chain, that it's public,
to be basically, to add a layer of privacy to that, right, where there are things that can be
shared and verified probably or attested to probably better said, that don't necessarily
live on chain, right. So removing them from this public ledger, things that you can think about are
like your driver's license, your birth certificate, a deed of a house. Tell me how, you know, working
with, you know, these fully homomorphic encrypted primitives is similar or is dissimilar and
improves upon maybe some of these open standards like DIDs and ZKs? Yeah, that's a great question.
So here's the analogy that ZK uses quite a bit, which I think is really good. So you and I are
going bar hopping, we go to a bar, the doorman needs to see that we have legal drinking age to
enter the bar. So you pull out your ID and you're not just showing them your birthday, you're showing
them your height, your weight, your address, all this information doesn't need to see. So the ZK
solution says, no, you don't need to see any of that, we're just going to give you a proof that
verifies that we are of legal drinking age. Awesome. You don't have to reveal any more
identifying data to get into the bar, but we're bar hopping. So we're going to go to the next bar.
And now that doorman has to run that computation all over again. That's the ZK analogy. With FHE,
the second doorman actually doesn't need to talk to us at all because he can verify the compute
that the first doorman did. So that on-chain computation piece is really critical. So the
difference is that when we talk about the word scaling, it's not just that we're scaling the
technology to be faster in terms of like TPS. It's the fact that we're reducing the work of compliance
so that that part is actually getting faster, right? Because the second doorman doesn't actually
have to interact with you as much. They can just verify the third party compute. So a specific
real world example that isn't just you and me going bar hopping is that all banks pay this KYC
fee. Like they all have to KYC at AMLU, right? Just regular customers, just talking about
traditional commercial banks. And the cost for that is just under $60 actually per person.
So they get that back from you in fees. But banks have been talking for many years like,
can we solve this problem? Like we don't all want to be running KYC. We have a lot of the same
customers. A lot of users have a bank account at Citibank and a bank account at Bank of America
or Deutsche or whatever. It's like, why can't we just have the same KYC? Well, the problem was in
the old world, they didn't have any kind of web tree solution. There was no way to actually
centralize this in a trustable way. But they want that solution. They don't want to be spending
this like CAC as cost per user to just do a KYC check. They'd love to just be able to compute it.
So DID computed because some, be able to verify the compute from somebody else. So the DID offers
the framework from that. There's structure for this now to happen. Now all we need is that
encryption layer on top of it and problem solve. So that right there is just a really kind of
micro use case, but it actually is quite a bit of money to traditional banks and it's way better
for the user. It makes our lives a lot easier and we get to have more control. The control now is
at the user end of all that identifying information, your bank account, your social
security number, your ID number, all those things. Okay, I see your hand,
Polaris, and I'll go to you in a moment. I just wanted to ask them, does this mean that there's
a hash for every verification, if you will, that then resides at the local level? Like how is this
then stored? Because is this on some sort of ledger, public ledger on chain? Yeah, it's a great
question. We do store currently on the local side. Cool. Polaris, go for it, man.
Hi, and amazing conversation so far. Thanks for sharing so much knowledge. Is it Chris behind
my network? Yeah, Christian. Christian, sorry. Okay, perfect. And also while he was mentioning
these use cases, I could visualize the medicine, for example, utilizing the same technology as well.
Someone like doing some research and then being able to verify that research. And then from that
research, like creating a hash, which can also be shared among everyone else and it's verifiable.
My question would be that how, you mentioned like this concept has been on the scene for
the last 30 years, but only now we've been able to be able to like conceptualize it.
Is it because of the whole scalability of cryptography now compared to like 30 years ago
or 10 years ago? What was the reason why you said that like it wasn't adapted 30 years ago
compared to now? I would like to know that and thanks for sharing. Sure, thanks. Yeah, the progress
and the technology started out with what they were trying to do originally was how do we run
computation on encrypted data? And there are varying degrees of difficulty in computation.
So for example, you're just doing addition and subtraction. That was pretty simple. That's called
homomorphic encryption. And that's how the field started out. But then later on, they wanted to
run more advanced computation. And so running computation on encrypted data creates something
called noise. So there's kind of like a randomized effect that's happening there. And the more scale
you add, the more noise you have. And at some point, the noise can actually metal with the
computation. So the technology, you know, without getting too much into like lattice cryptography
and things like that, which is really quickly outside of my pay level, they had to figure out
how to do that. And so it was around 2009. Greg Gentry actually was using it in the field of
medicine. So they were sequencing genomes, which is considered to be arguably the most sensitive
data. We only have one genome and a very highly sensitive. If that releases, if you have a breach
there, you've got adversarial nations that can use that information in some sort of like
bioweapons attack. So this was like, you know, state security grade had to be applied here.
But since then, we've seen web to companies start to work on this, you know, Intel has an FHE
department. They're working on hardware, IBM, Microsoft, Google, it's all now being developed
and sped up and they're figuring out, you know, ways. So there is kind of a hardware contingency,
but that's more for like really heavier compute like AI. So from a hardware perspective,
with AI computation, we probably are still a few years away. But for a lot of applications in web
three, like DID and DeFi asset transfer, or just adding encryption to your message logs, which the
message message logs are like what initiates a transaction across the network, as well as the
transaction logs themselves. There are solutions now, and we're one of the companies providing
the solutions. You've also got Inco is a really cool FHE, there's another company called Phoenix,
which raised a $7 million round over the summer led by multi coin capital, they're launching
an FHE L1 slash L2 next year. So it's probably from a brand awareness perspective, where ZK was
exactly three years ago. I don't know about you guys, but when I was going to conferences around
the end of 2020 2021, that was the first time I started seeing like a ZK sync booth and ZK fair
and ZK EVM. That's kind of where we're at now. The tech I think is probably a little bit farther
along than ZK was then because it also FHE builds on ZK in many respects. But that's kind of how
early we are. Wow, amazing. Thank you so much. And yeah, it gives me a much better understanding of
homomorphic encryption. It's in layman's terms. Basically, it's the next layer of
inscription, you're creating a hash and then with that hash, you're creating a layer of information,
which can be utilized by anyone who would be able to decipher that hash. Yeah, is that correct?
Yeah, well, it's important to note, so it's not a blockchain, it's just a layer. We are,
yeah, so we currently sit on top of bridges and or any kind of like cross chain D app or D5 D app.
So yeah, important to think of us not really as so much as a protocol or a chain, but as a layer.
So two things, and hopefully Polaris that answered your question, two things. One thing is,
I actually was going to ask exactly that because you brought up ZK Zinc and all these other which
are chains that are basically ZK proof chains, right? So I was gonna ask though, my network
is that either now or at some point in the future planning to be a layer one or a layer
two solution? It sounds like the answer is no, it's interesting. I do want to dive in a little
bit more what that means that you that my network lives on bridges. The other thing though, because
Polaris said inscriptions, and I wonder if that was actually a word that you use, Christian,
that I would say be careful when you're talking about inscriptions, is that gonna hit you see?
Like, wait, fully homomorphic ordinals, like, let's go.
Got nothing to say about that. And then every word means so many different things, you know, like,
but we don't own that word. Also, I am not Bitcoin ordinals. I don't own it. I don't own that. And I
don't have anything copyrighted. So you're more than welcome to use the word inscriptions, even
though it definitely means I could see the gears turning like, how can we build on that? Because
you're honestly, it's like, it's super difficult to switch back and forth between these two sets of
because like, there's such vastly different ecosystems where Bitcoin currently, at least
at this state doesn't support smart contracts. So like, everything is built around the concept
of inscriptions at the moment, unless it's running on some sort of like stacks or ICP or something
like that. So like, the mechanisms by which we operate anything we want to do, just require a
totally different framework. And every time I get back on one of these spaces, I'm like, I spend the
first 45 minutes just readjusting to new language. So you called it man, I'm just confused at the
moment. Like in a good way. Yeah, I mean, this is a big topic. This is a big subject. I got to be
honest, like so I've got Claire on the telegram right now. We're chatting, right? Because there's
obviously a collaboration to talk about here. Right. But at the same time, like when she sent
me all the details, and I try to usually to be fair, I can consume enough information about a
project to be okay, I can have an intelligent conversation about this. When I got my network,
and I went through a documentation, that was not the case. I reread paragraphs several times
to try to get a good sense. But so far, Christian, I want to applaud you because you've done a
tremendous job at making this conversation incredibly accessible. So I appreciate you.
You've already gone much further. And hopefully this space is then useful for people who are
coming in, wanting to learn more about my network, wanting to learn more about fully homomorphic
encryption, which, by the way, I hope I say like at least 100 times because I that word for being
so wordy and chunky rolls off the tongue so well. I'm glad I'm glad you think so, man. I thought it
was hard in the beginning, because every time you're typing fully homomorphic encryption,
when you first start using using it in all of your platforms, it auto corrects you to holomorphic
or holographic rather. So I was constantly correcting that word. And I was even saying
it wrong for many months. So I'm glad it rolls off the tongue for you.
Yeah, well, I couldn't type it for the life of me, but I can certainly say it.
But I do like the idea of fully holographic encryption to that brings like some metaverse
thing to the conversation. Yeah, I was gonna, I was gonna mention something, but I think I
shouldn't. But yeah, the you have to mention it now. We can't we can't say it anymore. But yeah,
I mean, interesting word, very interesting word. Yeah, I think is revealing his weakness. Sorry,
go ahead. I was gonna I was gonna jump on that, because Donny brought up BTC. And so all the BTC
L2s are all EDM compatible, which is really cool. For us, we can work with them. And we're really
bullish on the Bitcoin Bitcoin DeFi this time. And we've got some partners already in the space.
But I was talking to Lumavit recently, which are using the inscriptions for asset transfers.
So it looks like an integration that we will be able to do when they do mainnet, where we'll
actually be able to add our FHE layer. And actually, a good way to think about it, guys,
is like an FHE roll up. So a ZK roll up just with FHE. Instead, it's kind of a better way to think
about it. But we can apply that to someone like Lumavit using asset transfer off inscriptions and
just add a privacy layer to that. So now sender receiver public wallets are masked the and the
volume of the transfer. So it's five Bitcoin or 5000 whatever is also masked. Now, the difference
between tornado and the rest of them is that we don't hide that information permanently. It's
untraceable, but it is verifiable. And that's the key with working with regulators and any
company interested in compliance, which as ontology knows, is kind of tricky, because you do have to
jump through some hoops. But that's also why we think this isn't just us trying to push this
into the space, this idea of FHE. FHE is going to be adopted as the new paradigm, the new standard
operating procedure for encryption generally. It's just a matter of time.
Yeah, I certainly want to get into the whole compliance regulatory bit because I mean,
in tornado cache and do a compare and contrast, because that is, I think, probably one of the
more, at least for me personally, interesting bits of like FHE and what mind network is doing.
But before we get too far, because you've said it again, and I want to make sure there's like,
this is very clear, you talked about FHE roll up, comparing it to a ZK roll up,
when we think of when I think of ZK roll ups, I think of a layer two. So why should I not think
of like an FHE roll up as a layer two? And explain what you mean when you talk about like it lives on
bridges. So are you familiar with to answer the second question, you guys are familiar with this
SWIFT interbank messaging system, correct? Yeah. So SWIFT is the biggest, I forget all the numbers,
it's something crazy, like $100 trillion a year they transact, and they work with like 100 banks,
but the messaging network between financial entities is what executes transactions between
entities. So JP Morgan has to do a trade with Citibank, they use SWIFT. And it's a messaging,
so it's kind of like an intent layer. So that's the way we look at it. That's kind of what bridges
really help to do. And there's a lot of different kinds of bridges. Now we just talked to a really
cool project called Connect that has a different take on this as well. But generally, bridges are
there's a message that has to be executed around what the transaction is going to be.
So we built on top of CCIP bridge, which is Chainlink's their Oracle bridge. And really exciting
project, by the way, it launched right now. They did a test net over the summer with some really
big banks and it all went well. And they got a lot of these banks to Orange Pill basically into
crypto now. So now they're all in development phase of these products. But the problem that
banks had was, okay, so we're not going to use our SWIFT anymore. We're going to use your bridge.
The problem is that your bridge is made up of decentralized oracles. So how do you control
those oracles? Because if I'm going to execute a billion dollar trade, those oracles are going to
see the message first and they can front run my trade. Now Chainlink is one of the most secure
companies out there. They would never let that happen, but that wasn't good enough for regulators.
So for the banks to actually interact, there had to be a way to encrypt that message first
so that when it went on the dons, the dons could run the compute they had to run, but they didn't
actually see the raw data and could not, there was no possibility to front run the trade.
And so this is a really big problem in TradFi is encrypting that messaging layer.
So what we do is we can, we use what's basically just a zero trust data lake, zero trust, meaning
a combination of ZK plus FAG to take in a KYC AML data, any data you need to know to make sure
that it's a good actor. And we encrypt it, nobody can see it, and you can still run the compute on
it to execute the transaction. So that's how we live on top of a bridge. Is that clear?
I think somewhat. No, no, no. I mean, I think I followed you up to like the Swift piece of
things in terms of how that operates. And then I did follow the bit about Chainlink.
But I don't know, maybe, let's see, Donnie Polaris, did y'all get it? Is it clear? Because I guess
for me, personally, I want to make sure that anybody who's listening, including myself,
walks away with a clear understanding of the way that this all works.
Go for it, Donnie. I was just going to say, I think I have a fundamentally medium strong
understanding of it. I couldn't give, I don't have enough of an understanding that I could
explain it to someone yet, but I'm still here to keep my ears open about it.
See, what I've understood from it is that you've got a banking system, and then that banking
system obviously needs the regulators, they need like surety, that when you've got so much money
in trades, and it can very easily be front run. And that is a big issue, especially when you're
doing trades in any sort of industry. With a lot of capital, you can front run the trade,
and you can cause problems in the markets, not only front running, you can cause problems in the
market if you end up deciphering information. So yeah, it does make sense that having a network
or like an encryption, homomorphic encryption in this case, aspect on top of that banking
transaction, where no one can understand that. But if you like, you know, decipher that hash,
you'll be able to understand that, that would make a homogeneity, or if I'm not saying the
correctly, it'll create a homogeneity between the transactions, and it'll be easier for banks to be
able to spot that money. And you can connect KYCs with that as well. So it'll be easier and secure
for even the third party, which is actually transacting or doing that trade. So it doesn't
make a lot of sense. I get it. Yeah, definitely. When it comes to the
Valley proposition, it's very clear. Like in terms of who's the target customer, I think it's
very clear. In terms of how it functions on the back end, maybe some of the tech stack,
it just is going to take a little bit more time, at least for me. But I mean, everything else is
very clear. Maybe we can talk a little bit about because you've talked about banks, you've talked
about regulation, you've talked about privacy. I don't think that necessarily those three things,
like if this is a Venn diagram, they don't always meet in the middle. They don't always
overlap, especially when it comes to privacy and regulation. We've seen what's happened with
tornado cash in the past. I think recently Monero got delisted on Binance. So there's this
resistance, I think probably is the best word in terms of privacy preserving protocols.
Obviously, FHE is an important development. Maybe talk a little bit from the perspective
of like regulation and why this is maybe a little bit more friendly, or why regulators would be a
little bit more friendly to this. Right, that's a good point. All those three things don't always
play nicely together, don't fit on a Venn diagram. Well, the truth is, in TradFi, there's already a
layer of privacy that Web3 doesn't have. So when they do interbank exchanges, that's not available
to the public at sea. We can't all see that. So why would they want that to be different when
they're interacting with public chains? So first of all, there needs to be a level of privacy for
them that doesn't currently exist in Web3. How are they going to achieve that? Their options have
been, like you said, Monero and Zcash and tornado cash. And we're definitely seeing, I don't think
it's any coincidence as a side comment, that the Bitcoin ETF gets approval right around the same
time we see a cross jurisdictional attack on privacy in Web3 between finance, doing its
delisting, nocturne, shutting down, tornado cash founder, getting his home rated. There have been
a series of events that have all happened in the last few weeks. So I don't think that's
the coincidence. And so we're being careful about the word privacy right now because it's
kind of a secondary feature. I mean, there does need to be more privacy in Web3 than we currently
have. But right now, regulators have zero appetite for that. But what they're all interested in is
encryption, because nobody any there's five and a half billion people in the world using encryption
because they're using the internet, whether you know it or not. Obviously, that's why cryptocurrency
is called crypto. But this is a different level of encryption. Because instead of if you're trapped
by or if you're a normie, and you're thinking about exchanging into public chains or buying
digital assets, it feels a little bit to them like putting money into a black hole. You don't know
where it goes. You don't exactly understand how transactions are approved and how mining works.
But with encryption, with the fully homomorphic encryption, we're encrypting data in a way that
is truly trustless, because nobody ever gets to see the raw data. So even with ZKPs, there's still
this element of trust, because the computation is going to happen off chain. And so with FHE and
on chain computation, and having everything be verifiable, that's the key difference. And I might
have to go a little bit more into that as much as I can to get to get that difference. But that,
for whatever reason, was what turned the key for a lot of these traditional institutions. And you
know, we work with banks, some of our founders defected from some big banks years ago, before
going into Web3 and de-genning, like the rest of us. But I think that that made sense for them.
So yeah, I think I'll pause there before I go on another rant. Is that kind of clear?
For me, it is. It did kind of spark another question. But before I get there and move the
conversation forward, maybe Donnie Polaris, y'all can step in here too and let me know. Is that
clear? Or did you want more clarity? I want to hear the next question. I think that's kind of
important. Okay, fair enough. So my question, because okay, so there are different actors in
this space and each group of personas, if you will, have different needs. And you know, the way
that you get adoption is different across each group of people. And so you have the consumer,
right, you have the institutions, you have the regulators, which maybe you can put under the
government bucket. You know, on the consumer side, I think when you talk about privacy,
it's pretty clear, though, there is no regulatory framework or clarity. You know,
privacy just makes sense. And to be able to use like these kind of private protocols, if you will,
it's kind of a, you know, easy sell, I guess. Though, I think the way that you get adoption,
there might be a little slower, just because I actually don't think comment. I don't think a
lot of people really care about privacy. A lot of people don't care, like, as much as people don't
care about decentralization, right, as much as maybe some might talk about it. Institutional,
though, that's huge. And so you talk about banks, and obviously, to them, that's like a nonstarter,
you don't have any way like to preserve privacy of this information, they're not going to put
anything on the public ledger, it just doesn't make sense for them. For them, their clients,
maybe even to some degree, based on their own regulatory compliance, as well, on the governmental
side of things. That's kind of like on the complete opposite word, like you said, it's like,
privacy is it's a little bit of a harder pill to swallow. How do you see mind network approaching
each? Like, is there a bucket of, you know, of these personas that it's seeking out first,
just because maybe there's less resistance, though, maybe doesn't have the same type of scale
opportunities? Or yeah, how is it looking at these buckets? Is there a priority?
Or is it kind of going for all three at the same time?
Well, within Web3, we have a lot of fast friends, we haven't talked to an L1 or L2 yet that doesn't
think this is a great idea and doesn't want us to integrate pretty quickly. So we're working with
like Polygon, Arbitrum, Finance, and we're we have Ethereum fellows on our team. So we're really close
with Ethereum and all, you know, Linnae Scroll, a lot of the other cool L2s. When he starts talking
about when we start talking about TradFi, it's really interesting to see that the battle lines
have been drawn. There are some governments that are very open and that are going to be,
for example, tokenizing natural resources on chain. So there are a number of countries that
are taking all the gold, copper, all their natural resources, and they want to start tokenizing that.
And that could be a great service because you could offer not just citizens of that country,
the citizens of the world, exposure to really good assets, you're right, and like resource rich
countries. And they understand that they can't have a CBDC that basically has this like complete
transparency factor where they now have a surveillance tool because public users in many
cases will revolt against that. So we've met some countries that are very open to putting a privacy
layer on their CBDC. We've met with other countries that are like, wait, so you guys make
it so that we can see the transactions because we're using this as a surveillance tool. Like
we're launching a CBDC because we want to see, we want more control over our population. And I mean,
I've literally heard almost to the T those words. So that's really interesting to see that at the
national level as we go around with the solution to some of the countries of the world. But it
makes me feel like, you know, we are, you know, you say some people, a lot of people don't care
about privacy. I think that's unfortunately true. And I feel like we're in a bit of a battle right
now. And the lines have been drawn and you've got players on one side and players on the other side.
Yeah, I mean, I've been quoting this a lot, just for anybody who's been listening to any of these
spaces or jumping onto some of the pods that I podcast that I've been hosting as well. But I've
been quoting Chris Dixon's book. So I don't know, Christian, if you've had a chance to read that.
Yeah, and in it, he does a really good job of describing kind of the fundamental values of
web one web two and web three. And I think you're kind of when you kind of are hearkening to some of
that in terms of like what you've just said, or at least what we're talking about now when it comes
to privacy. I think back in web one, like privacy was still important to us. Pre internet privacy was
important to us. I think with web one, some of those values came through and we were we were kind
of consider consider those obviously, like encryption comes from that era of, you know,
the internet development, RSA, and so many other standards and protocols that were developed then
web two, though, I think because of this mass grab of data from institutions like Google and
meta and the services that they provide that then enabled, you know, new functionality connection
with people suddenly, you know, in order to participate in those networks, we needed to
just relinquish any thought of privacy. And I think that then permeated across
a lot of other different things that aren't just social, or internet based. But it's really
interesting to see how in web three, we're kind of reminding ourselves of the importance and value
of privacy, and building towards it again. I had a point.
Well, I mean, off what you just said, I think that is the backdrop right now that I feel like
I'm building and, and, and web three, it's like we're trying to restore the values of web one,
we're trying to take what worked really well in web two, but fix a lot of what went wrong in web
two, like, I think it's 95% of all web traffic goes through the top three search engines. It's like
people don't have a really organic internet experience anymore. You have a curated experience
that's provided by a couple companies, you know, based with all their biases and the software they
make available and don't make available and the functionality they make available and don't make
available. And that's not the way that that's not the way the internet was intended. So that gets a
little bit meta and apologies, but I'm right there with you. I think that is the landscape in which
we're building. That's kind of always in the back of my mind, is and Chris Dixon, I'm only like a
quarter way through, but he's one of the best at articulating that, I think. Yeah. You know,
I think he he's he said a best where he said that the book, the way that he wrote it was for a smart
high schooler. And, you know, I consider myself not to be too, too, too dumb. But when it comes
to reading, it is very difficult to get through a book, just because I'm distracted with a lot of
other things. But this was probably one of the first books that I read in 24 hours, like front
yard. I gave myself time. I said, OK, maybe today is going to be a day that I'm just going to read.
And I was able to sit down, took some time, read through it and still got a lot of value out of it,
even though I would say maybe it was more of a speed read. So I do want to go back and highlight
some areas that resonated with me. But yeah, 100 percent. You know, a lot of this data is being
captured and a lot of the information is being pre prefiltered for us. And so we aren't necessarily
getting the full story because of the way that, you know, the Internet works today. And I would
say this is probably one of the reasons why I've been very excited to contribute to ontology for
as long as I have because of that kind of vision that they have in terms of like privacy and
self sovereignty. And so for me personally, and I know we're getting to the top of the hour here
now, so I do want to make sure I bring it back to this collaboration.
I'm pretty excited to see the potential of what like ontology does with my network, because
I think that, you know, that there's there's two partners there that do believe in the importance
of privacy. Yeah, and that's why we became fast friends, I think. So our mission statements
obviously align. And that's how we came together. And if you go to our getbook, we have a mission
page and it says data rights are human rights. So we're very much caught from that from the same
cloth, I think is ontology. And so one of the, you know, we're going after DeFi, we're going
after bridges, and then wallets is a vertical for us. And so, you know, what you guys are doing,
what ontology is doing with their wallet, we just found really impressive. And so we're finding a
way to basically add FHE. So it would just be the data layer. So the transfer part, I think I
mentioned before, there's two components, we use FHE in two components. One is just for data. The
other one is a stealth address protocol that uses FHE. And stealth address protocols have been around
for seven years. But we use FHE because they're quantum resistant. And that's what generates the
key pair. And now you can store your key pair locally, you don't have to enter every single
time you do a transaction. And by the way, our testnet is live now. So you can kind of play with
this now and see how it all works. But the ontology solution would be more around our data lake.
And so just adding a layer of FHE basically to what you guys have already built really wonderfully.
Yeah, I mean, not to show too hard here, but I will, you know, we're on the ontology spaces
here. But I think what ontology has done in terms of its privacy stack, if you will,
definitely identity stack is quite commendable, because I've been in the space of decentralized
identity and data now for about two and a half, three years. And, you know, since starting to
contribute at ontology, I've dived even deeper into that. And I've seen some of the developments. And
you know, first of all, it's extremely difficult to build in this space. And to build an ecosystem
that works well together is probably even more so difficult. So the fact that ontology has, you
know, a their implementation of the DID standard, that they have a, you know, reputation protocol,
which I helped to kind of expand on with orange protocol, when we built that about two and a half
years ago. And then of course, to make the provisioning of your identity, you know, and
reputation through a wallet, like, like, that's just that's pretty badass, you know, so I to be
able to integrate with players like my network into that stack, I think that just, that's,
that's really great. And I see Claire in the audience, you know, who is kind of leading
some of our efforts here in terms of how we communicate what ontology does, even better
this year, and I know that we're having a bigger focus on DID. So I hope we can do better when it
comes to communicating a lot of these values and the vision and our collaboration with partners
like my network, because I think that that, to me is really how you move or accelerate this space,
even more together, that is. I agree, like mine's coming together with a with a similar vision,
diversity of diversity of talent, diversity of solutions, but unity of vision, I think makes
for even better products. I agree. Rad, well, I mean, anything we didn't mention here, Christian,
I know that we got stuck a little bit in some of the technical complexity. So I'm glad that
we found a way to crawl our way out of there and really just have a very well rounded conversation,
I think. But anything that we missed that we should be talking about? No, I hope it was,
I hope it was, you know, the point of this was, I think, to talk a little bit about about both of
our projects and about what we see as the future and to explain fully homomorphic encryption,
which hopefully I did sufficiently. I might have gotten a C on that. But but I think I think the
audience can definitely look forward to an option between ontology and my network in the near future.
So we're excited about that. Yeah, talking about front running transactions, I think we front run
announcement, which is okay. I mean, that's why you come to these spaces, right? You want to get
some alpha, otherwise, just follow the Twitter feed, you know, with the spaces, I think you can
get some really interesting insights. Exactly. Yeah, players, I see your handout, man. What's up?
You're so polite. I've got to say that it's a pleasant surprise.
We've got a guest on board. So like, you know, I'm just I'm on my best behavior.
Chris, Christopher, I was gonna ask you, like, you know, in terms of the future plans for mind
network, what do you see? How do you what do you guys envision mind network like doing, you know?
Well, so so right now, we're kind of head down on product, our testnet is live, our mainnet will
go live soon. We'll have a token. This is a very exciting year for us. We've gone pretty fast, and
we've got a lot of great backers. So the key is to just partner, create key partnerships with
like minds, top projects, like ontology. And so we're, you know, the plants, the, the environment
is moving really quickly. I mean, there are projects that just started in this cycle that
are now really hot and have a brand new solution, don't have the tech debt. And so we're finding
those identifying those and they're kind of changing the game. I mentioned one of them earlier
that I'm really excited about. But um, yeah, that's that's the plan. So this will be a big
year for us. So you'll, you'll, you know, you'll see these, these will hit these different
benchmarks over the next, I think, six months. That's awesome. You know, I mean, this and I'll
say, if you're planning to having having any spaces, please do feel free to invite us. This
crew here, the IntelliJ network account, happy to come in and keep chatting, because I think that
this is a very important topic. And to have these conversations together or to loop you with some of
our other spaces partners that we've talked about privacy and identity and all these other things,
I think it's going to be super valuable. I'm always happy to connect the conversation. Let's,
let's do that after East Denver. That will be really fun. You guys are a great gang to talk
to. So I'd love to have you all on ours. And we'll return the favor. That'd be a lot of fun.
Heck yeah. Speaking of East Denver, I'm going to be there. I'm going to be hosting a DID happy hour.
I'm trying to, you know, tie the last little bits that are loose and loose ends here. But
are you going to be there? Are y'all planning something? Absolutely. We will be there. Yeah.
So I'd love to come in that happy hour. Well, I think three of us, at least three of us from
the team will be there. So yeah, we'd love to support 100%. We'd love to have you there.
We're also going to be sponsoring another event. Just got the green light. I don't want to share
too much yet because I haven't finalized the details, but there's going to be a side event
that we're going to be sponsoring. And I'm also going to be speaking at. So I'd love to send the
invitation your way. And hopefully you can swing by and yeah, definitely connect several times.
That will be awesome. That'll be awesome. Thanks for having me today. And thanks everyone for
coming. And hopefully it was helpful. I had a lot of fun. Yeah. Well, it was a pleasure having you.
I know I heard your calendar go off there. So I'm guessing you got to run to another meeting,
but just want to say thank you for popping in here. Yeah. I got my ears open. I know what's
happening. I didn't recognize that sound at all. Maybe I need to get more organized so that I hear
that sound more often. Yeah, set up a couple of calendar events and you'll recognize it.
I didn't even hear it. I blocked it out. So it's a danger with notifications. I used to
date somebody who had like 42,000 email notifications. And I said, you're not actually
getting a notification now. That part of your phone is just permanently read. So it's like,
just turn them off because it's not even notifying you of anything.
Exactly. If you need, if you have that many notifications, it's, it's, it's worthless.
It could be to the purpose. Yeah. It's like me and having like a hundred tabs open on a browser.
It's like, why? Like I'm not even reading them anymore. But if you're closing, you got to
bookmark them and then your bookmarks become the tabs. And then you're like, I don't know, man. I
haven't found a good solution for that either. Nope. Yeah. Usually I try to read through and
remember what it is that I wanted to get from there, but nope. A hundred tabs open. Anyways,
we're just rambling now. Thank you very much. Everybody's so much popping in today. This is
where my expertise lies though. This is the only thing I can talk about. This is where you came in
and then actually started contributing. So you want to talk about notifications. I got this.
Everything else I'm listening. Well, I'm glad. Look, I like closing on a, on a, on a high note.
I love closing with some humor. So I appreciate this everybody. Thanks so much for joining.
We'll be here again next week. This has been a pleasure hosting you Christian and
we'll keep the conversation going for sure. Absolutely. Thank you very much for having
me guys. You're a blast. Take care guys. Thank you. Thanks Christian. Goodbye everyone.