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Solving Web3's Cold Start: Why Build in the Agglayer Ecosystem
Recorded: May 19, 2025 Duration: 0:56:30Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion, leaders from Billions Network and Myden unveiled groundbreaking projects aimed at revolutionizing decentralized identity and blockchain scalability. With a focus on user-driven solutions and strategic partnerships, both projects are poised for significant growth and adoption in the evolving crypto landscape.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. GM, GM, everyone.
Happy Monday.
Happy Monday to everyone.
We will get started momentarily, but if everyone could do me a favor and just give a thumbs up if you hear me,
if I am coming to you and the sound is coming through.
There we go.
Thank you, Diana.
Awesome.
So we will get started.
I'll play a little bit of music while we get our speakers on stage, and then we will get going.
So enjoy, everyone.
Okay. Sometimes in our lives, we all have pain, we all have sorrow but if we are one we know that there's always tomorrow
oh yeah Lead on me When you're not strong
I'll be your friend
I'll help you carry on
It won't be long till I'm gonna need somebody to lean on.
Please swallow your pride if I have faith. You need to borrow for no one can fill those of your needs that you won't let show. When you need a hand, we all need somebody to lean on.
I just might not have a problem that you understand.
We all need somebody to lean on.
Lean on me when you're not strong, I'll be your friend, I'll help you carry on, it won't be long, till I'm gonna need somebody to lean on You just call on me brother
When you need a hand
We all need somebody to lean on
I just might not have a problem
Then you'll understand
We all need somebody to lean on
If there is a load
All right.
Well, let us get our speakers on stage.
How are you, Diana?
I'll check in with you first.
Yeah, Jim, good, good.
Happy Monday.
Had a good weekend here and excited to jump into things.
I like that we do these on Mondays because it feels like fresh week, fresh start.
Always fun scrolling through the crypto Twitter noise on a Monday morning and getting to talk bullish news, all things Aglier on Monday.
So, yeah, happy to be here and super excited for the team from Provado ID and Maiden to join us today.
They are both teams respectively are building some amazing things and i'm really excited to hear
more from them i am very excited as well we have evan on stage dominic i think i sent you a request
but if you didn't get it you can just uh hit the speaker request button um and come on stage but
before we get started if everyone could do a favor, if you are on
desktop, it'll be in the top right corner. If you're on mobile, the bottom right,
hit that little quotation button. Please like, retweet the space, get everyone in here. We
want to talk to everyone. So looking forward to it. But Evan, how are you?
GMGM Legends, thank you so much for inviting me to the party. It is another beautiful day on chain here at the billions network.
My name is Evan McMullen, co-founder and CEO.
And billions network is the first universal human and AI network built with
mobile first verification.
So what that means is that you can prove who you are,
how old you are, where you're located,
different traits, capabilities, preferences that you have,
all from the comfort of your phone.
No proprietary hardware,
no trusted centralized server in between,
just you, your device, expressing your identity,
whether that is backed from a government entity, backed from an enterprise,
backed from your own biometrics in a privacy-preserving, legal, and secure way.
So for all things client-side proofs, for all things cold start solutions, really excited to be here.
So thank you again so much for everyone taking time out of their busy Mondays to join us.
Awesome. You have amazing energy for Monday morning.
So congrats on that. And then let's check in with
Dominic from Myden, the Myden team.
So if you want to introduce yourself, Dominic. Hey, for sure.
I'm Dominic. I'm working
at Polygon Maiden.
Basically, I was with Polygon for the last three years and then we spun out.
And Maiden is basically somehow like blockchains should be built. So like when users create their own transaction proofs or we call this concept an edge blockchain basically so state and
execution uh is at the user side and this uh leads to um way better scalability and privacy
so you get privacy for free and um so blockchains that scale and that uh private per default um
is actually how they should work, we think.
is actually how they should work we think
Awesome.
Yeah, no, I am super excited to dive into that as well.
Evan, do you know if Javi's going to come up and talk as well?
I see he just joined our audience.
Always invited to join the party, but I think we've got a couple brand accounts here.
However, I'm happy to hold it down from the Billions Network side, powered by Provado
ID, which is our underlying infrastructure.
So I think we can rock on.
All right.
Fantastic.
So yeah, I mean, you guys kind of already did this, kind of what you're building and
what you're doing.
But we'll start with you, Evan. So first, what inspired the initial vision
for the project? And then if you can kind of speak specifically about Privato ID and Billions
and how those two are connected together. Certainly. So I'm sure all of us here today
are well aware of the fact that about 50% of online traffic today comes from unaccountable bots.
That means, you know, no ability to recognize one another, a challenging circumstance if we want to understand our counterparties, and incredibly complex if we want to coordinate on-chain.
counterparties and incredibly complex if we want to coordinate on chain. In fact, let's say, you
know, the only thing I know about Diana is her public key, is her polygon address. Then there
are basically only two things that she and I can do together. We can do over collateralized lending,
we can spend a treasury, we can send tokens back and forth. But if we want to build a product,
if we want to coordinate a Twitter space like we have today, if we want to play any other kind of coordination game outside of those two, we need to know more about one another.
And so the impetus for our work with the Billions Network is to enable trust-minimized coordination of all kinds based on more information than just the tokens in your
wallet. And so, of course, this extends not only to human beings, but also to the instances of AI
agents that they create. So accountability requires identity. And to have trust-minimized
coordination systems that facilitate many kinds of accountability
and trust, or rather, and reputation, we need to be able to prove more than just our token
holdings.
And we also need the ability to assign a unique identity to an instance of an AI agent so
that my agent knows it's interacting with your agent, or swarms of agents can recognize one another
and collaborate in the same beneficial way that we can as human beings wielding our own keys.
So in this era of decentralization, we have pushed everything to the edges,
which means we've created a discoverability problem, right? How do we find one another?
How do we tell who our counterparty is enough that we can coordinate these different types
of collaborations, whether they are for work product creations, whether they are for new
kinds of DeFi primitives, such as under collateralized lending, or whether they're
for different kinds of incentive systems, such as volume-based incentives, which today are impossible without appropriate civil resistance.
So we are here to save the internet and bring that layer of verifiability to our interactions
online, on-chain, and in real life. Our team's legacy of development actually is rooted in the development of client-side proving, meaning creating zero-knowledge proofs on your mobile phone, and being able to use sensitive data, such as information from your government IDs, information about you as a person, where you can prove those traits without having to disclose the underlying information. And so, ProvadoID is
the underlying infrastructure and protocol layer upon which the Billions Network is built. So,
you can think of ProvadoID as infrastructure, and the Billions Network is made up of human beings
and the AI agents that act on their behalf. I absolutely love that. It's really funny. I think there's going to be a whole bunch of, call it synergy,
between Privato and Miden like this, like ZK proofs and all of that.
I think it's absolutely huge.
But no, it was, I do think you kind of hit the nail on the head with like a
on-chain is great, but it's very limited in what we can do when
people are basically anonymous. So I love that. Like, it's almost building the internet into a
way where it's like, okay, we can actually use it and use it to power many other things in our
lives and make it better. So that is fantastic. But Dominic, kind of the same question to you about Maiden.
What was the initial vision?
And then also, how has that vision evolved as you guys kind of went from the incubation stage to now spin off and being an independent blockchain?
yeah so basically um initially um when bobin first discovered blockchains uh uh or when i had my first
touch point with blockchains like um like we all realized they don't really scale and um like there
were many different attempts to scale blockchains um but like no attempt yet uh can solve this problem of um
you stay uh decentralized and uh basically on the same hand you can serve uh in the end a
billion people or so and this um with the advent of ck and clients that proves the same thing that PrivatoID uses or the same technique, you would say,
you can finally scale blockchains
because you only need to execute every transaction once.
So we have built a blockchain design
around the idea that users prove their own state transition.
And that leads to the network only needs to verify these transactions
or these transaction proofs, but they don't need to re-execute them.
So this paradigm, the core paradigm of blockchains,
don't trust verify before you had efficient ZK proofs, was always linked to transparency.
So people or like whoever produced the blocks and wanted to verify stuff, they needed to re-execute every transaction.
And this just didn't scale.
And like, even though there were many attempts and it always led to centralization.
So if you want to keep the promises of cryptos, cryptocurrencies, the initial promises, like the cyberpunk ethos, but also like this super important property of decentralization, then you kind of need to pivot to client side proofs. So we think if Bitcoin and Ethereum would be like,
if they were invented today,
they look a lot like the Maiden design.
And this is because like,
it's just modeled after the actor model.
So actors would be our users or smart contracts or agents,
and they are responsible for their own state
and they can prove their state transition to the network.
And that scales, but it also gives you privacy for free.
And this is like the vision,
it was only possible to develop
because you have efficiency or knowledge proofs
and like also thanks to Polygon, but also like to other people in the space.
The crypto space basically funded zero knowledge research by a lot and like 10 years ago, maybe even five years ago,
something like that would not be possible.
But like because we have now very efficient ZK proving techniques, you can in theory run that on a mobile phone or like on a MacBook Pro.
It only takes one second for a maiden transaction to prove.
And with that, you can build just smarter blockchains actually where you don't need to reveal everything to everyone.
to reveal everything to everyone, but it also just scales way better.
But it also just scales way better.
And so, yeah, that's the vision basically to come back to the roots
and build scalable blockchains with the core ethos at heart.
It's so fascinating because you would almost think that with ZK proofs
and with this added privacy, it would involve more steps, but it actually helps scale better.
Which is, I don't, personally, I wouldn't expect that, but was that something expected from the get-go or was that just a discovery?
from the get-go or is that just a discovery no like um like in the maiden design itself
privacy is a means for scalability so and this is completely different to when you add privacy to a
transparent chain um afterwards then it gets way more expensive and it gets more complex but and
this makes sense right so like normal or transparent blockch, they need to verify by re-execution.
And so everyone needs to know, like at least all the data you need to have to re-execute
this transaction.
And if I add privacy on that, like on top, then I need to encrypt stuff or I need to
like somehow make it way more complex to still have this property that I can re-execute this
transaction, but somehow I need to hide all the stuff.
And like with zero-knowledge proofs,
you have a tool at hand where I can verify something
without needing to know the underlying data,
just the public inputs.
And this means that in the mind design,
privacy is a means for scalability.
And that's why, basically privacy scales better in that sense.
But it just makes more sense to not put all the data and all the transactions on chain.
Because then you have way leaner blockchains.
And that leads to many more people can transact at the same time
on a blockchain so yeah that's probably the key difference yeah no i i absolutely love that
concept i think i'm super excited uh for the whole project so um no that is fantastic to hear um now
maybe if you can talk a little bit about the early stage and what... So,
Miden recently spun off. You guys had... It was very exciting. I think you caused a lot of
conversation across all of Web3. But what was it like going from an early stage sketch. I know I saw a post a while ago about basically just like Bobbins
penciling out his ideas to like growing within Polygon
and then reaching independence so that it's a self-sustaining project.
Can you talk a little bit about what that experience was like for you
and kind of how it came to be?
Yeah, for sure.
And maybe we start with like Bob and my co-founder or the designer behind the system.
He actually started even before, but he developed Winterfell at Facebook, at the Facebook Novi
Labs.
And the goal was to develop a very efficient or fast zero knowledge version machine.
And that is just like a pseudo computer
you can think of that where you can put in a program,
and then you get out the result of the program
and approve that the program was executed correctly,
or that it was executed.
And this led to the idea that um this program could be
a transaction and so facebook basically never used that technology and they um discarded the the the
novi um labs i guess and never made their um blockchain but then Bobin joined Polygon, and around this super efficient mine virtual machine,
which is, I think, still one of the most efficient ZKVMs out there,
but it's hard to compare them from time to time.
But around that, he developed the idea that you can build a blockchain
that, like, around this extra model
paradigm so users create proofs of their own state transitions and this is only possible if
like users don't need big beefy machines right as you would need them in a zk evm for example
which is way harder to prove so uh you need to design a
whole um like different state model different execution model and um basically also redefine
what a transaction is on miden a transaction is the state transition of a single account
whereas another blockchain a transaction most of the time time means that Alice sends something to Bob and
you need to change the accounts of Alice and Bob at the same time.
Whereas on Myden, a transaction is always just a state transition of a single account.
And that's why you have these parallel, you can have parallel transaction execution that
are independently provable, so to speak.
And at the core of all this is this uh mydn virtual machine but yeah like after like
he was polygarden basically allowed him to develop this um uh mydn vm and the the blockchain protocol
around that and then we built up a team over the last three years and uh like we had to build a lot
of stuff that's also the problem like when redesign everything, then like, you need to
build like, starting from, I don't know, we had developed our own hash function, for example, and
up to like, we have, because you, like you have a very efficient zero node version machine,
we don't target like these common risk five or anything else, but we basically need to own our own instruction set.
And that means we also have our own assembly language of some sort.
And obviously, we don't want users to use this assembly language,
so we need to create a compiler.
And yeah, basically, with a fairly small team, I would say,
we built a lot of stuff.
And now it's out in testnet and we hope things break fast and
yeah that we can make good progress there but it was a great experience to work with Polygon yeah.
Now I love that I kind of have the same question for you Evan I know Privato ID initially started as Polygon ID, and you guys have been around
kind of doing your own thing for a little bit more time, but kind of what was that project
like for you guys? And then with that, yeah, if you can just kind of same sort of question going
from early stage incubated by Polygon, and then now you're a self-sustaining project.
And you guys have, I think I saw recently,
like an absolute ton of users coming on.
Absolutely.
Happy to talk about that.
So, you know, I think we have grown a lot as a team
from the incubated GigaChad research practice
that, you know, that initially existed inside of Polygon.
One of the awesome things that Dominic was noting earlier
is the Herculean effort and transformation
that has occurred in client-side proving
over the past handful of years.
When I first started working
in the decentralized identity and verifiable data space, this is,
gosh, almost a decade ago now, if you wanted to create a zero-knowledge proof, you were
going to be sitting at your desktop computer and clicking a button, crossing your fingers,
and waiting for like 30 minutes, praying that something was going to happen. Now, today,
that process happens in under a couple seconds on your device with the speed and simplicity and nearly invisible nature of clicking a button in a regular app like you would normally.
Now, that massive shift occurred as the result of some pretty spectacular research, mathematical, I like to call it, in terms of the development of some core
libraries and continuous improvement upon those. And so in the course of evolving from a leading
edge, bleeding edge research practice into a sustaining business with revenue, nearly a million
users, and, you know, the ability to support not only on-chain ecosystems in things
like, you know, preparing for TGE, ensuring that there are unique human beings on the
receiving end of incentives and asset distribution, as well as being able to serve governments,
being able to serve enterprises at global scale.
And so essentially, you know, that journey of, you know, initial exploration
for a technical act that many people said was never physically possible to today, bringing it
to global scale, that has been, you know, the sort of adventure and quest of our team's most
recent practice. Now, of course, identity is not limited to a single blockchain, right?
Your ability to express your assets and your capabilities and your privileges now with
the ag layer can reach as far as chains go anywhere on earth and space with an internet
connection.
And so that's also part of why our practice, you know, though incubated inside of, you
know, inside of this focused environment,
best serves the ecosystem, best serves the ag layer, best serves our partners in a protocol
agnostic way that can be deployed and engaged, proving data, proving capabilities and unlocking
new kinds of coordination anywhere that the chain touches and even places where there are,
where there is no internet or cell service, being
able to prove that off-chain in a verifiable way.
I think one of the awesome parts of being alums of the Polygon ecosystem, you might
call it, is that we have a unique vantage point, appreciating challenges that exist inside
of specific applications and specific protocol environments and being able to compare and contrast those with others
to bring and broaden the knowledge that we have,
the best practices that we have to take the guesswork
out of a lot of these difficulties for other teams.
And so I definitely think that the unfair advantages
of learning and growing in such a way
have positioned us to, you know, to, to, you know, transform into,
I think, you know, one of the, one of the more interesting potential outcomes of, of such a
practice. No, I have two points. One will be like a point where you're saying like, it, it's funny.
And I even just, I feel like the impossible is almost like literally taken as like a very much a challenge, especially at Polygon.
Like, really, you're saying it can't happen.
Like, well, I'm going to prove you wrong.
And it's super inspiring to be surrounded in an environment where everyone's like impossible really doesn't exist.
And it just, we can do it.
We just need to figure it out.
And then we have great stories,
kind of like Privato and Maiden just coming out.
I'm like, no, like you can see it.
So it's super inspiring.
But I kind of wanted to double click in on your comment
of like the exposure and seeing the apps.
Like what, if you could be specific
about anything that comes to mind when you said
it, where it was like, you have this insight that you, if you were just a regular startup,
you wouldn't have gotten like, is there anything specific that you can think of where it gave you
an advantage, especially working with other protocols? Oh, most certainly. So I also want
to say that you may have accidentally had a great pun in there. You know, people say that things may be impossible. Well, we will prove it. Client side proving, you know, included there certainly are making me crack up here. unique understandings of protocol or dynamics that are relevant to different protocols.
You know, I think our practice has allowed us to see and hear directly from teams to understand what are the blockers to flows of capital and value, to compliance and regulations that keep
these teams up at night. You know, of course, it is not any one team's job
to be perfect at everything,
to be aware of and expert in every possible aspect
of every possible practice.
And so having the empathy and humility
to go to our colleagues and listen to them,
to understand not only how their business flows
and what those value flows look like,
but also to understand what the blockers are, the areas of friction, not only for their operations,
but also for the users who they serve. And it is through that human-centered design practice,
where we are product and research-led, continuously validating our ideas, that I think has been most
beneficial. So to get really specific here, let's talk about
pre-TGE teams, teams that are preparing to offer tokens to the market for different roles, whether
that is for governance, whether that is for yield bearing, whether they are focused on productive
TVL or velocity, whatever those objectives might be. But very few of these teams, you know,
have had the opportunity to spend a decade surrounded by, you know, the leading edge standards and technical implementation discussions that benefit both on-chain ecosystems as well as the institutional counterparts who want to bring their liquidity on-chain.
Or the government counterparts who are the originators of, you know of compliance and identity data that then ends
up being consequential on-chain. And so in our role kind of as a conduit between these environments,
because of course identity is not limited to one chain or one web page or one corner of the
internet or corner of the world, that we are able to bring those insights, for example, directly
from the European Commission in Brussels to our partners in the AI space where we are able to bring those insights, for example, directly from the European Commission
in Brussels to our partners in the AI space, where we are helping to guide regulations around
AI safety, or directly from the European Commission blockchain sandbox, where there are laws that now
or legal frameworks that now permit the use of zero-knowledge proofs in practice for things like
age verification. And so because we have kind of one
foot in the spaces where decisions are being made from, you know, legal and compliance and
enterprise adoption perspective, and we have another foot in this on-chain space, we can also
help to bring the swift and rapid iteration cycles of, you know, of the on-chain ecosystem
to our partners in the broader world and vice versa.
So in that way, I think that makes us very different for many other practices.
Like our framework is flexible enough that we have integrated with more than 100 company, more than one source of information or source of reputation that can be relevant
to our coordination and effective value flows on chain,
then the sort of diverse nature of our inputs
and the types of systems we can support,
I think have served us really well.
That's fantastic.
Now that's a really interesting point.
I love that you talked about
like first off working with the applications for the users because that's really a super
important part but then you just it's almost like you get experience in dealing with all of these
different uh frameworks and it's just something that as you scale and get bigger, you get better at, and then you have this advantage that becomes very, very powerful.
Now, this is kind of a some like big advantages that you guys see
as starting out on the ag layer to just start the process yeah like for us a couple of
benefits i would say the biggest benefits might be a quicker go to market. If I would need to build my own on chain verifier on Ethereum or on Solana,
wherever I want to connect to, then I need to audit this, I
need to, yeah, to build it first, I need to think about
many different attack vectors. And this is just easier to
connect to the Arc layer. There are even other projects that can do that for me, actually.
And it will help me to connect to more chains faster.
So hopefully there will also be a Solana integration,
or at least I can tap into the ArcLayer ecosystem
to also get initial liquidity quicker and i don't have to to pay initially a lot for
these common bridges so to speak like wormhole or layer zero that might come later but i can
already validate my hypothesis by a quick and easy connection to the ag layer, I would say.
So from the product perspective, it makes a lot of sense.
And from the liquidity perspective.
So from a liquidity perspective, like what, and maybe you don't know the answer and that's
fine, but I'm like super curious because you're kind of going through it is do you have an idea of how much time would have been spent
trying to build up your liquidity layer versus
like how much projects spend time obviously because I feel like
you talked about not having to do that which means there's
time to do other things on Midem and build
but what is like why does a chain need that liquidity?
And then how much time does it save?
Well, yeah, like I cannot really talk about the time maybe,
but what you need to attract initial liquidity
is some sort of a trusted bridge, right?
Or like a trusted ecosystem.
And like with the ArcLayer, I get this for free.
So the question is like whether it get a lot of initial liquidity that is then deployed
on Myden, or if it could also be that the ArcLayer is as fast that people can just use
applications on Myden and then bridge back.
And this already gives me a lot of um more usage and more data
points how to improve miden right if i would have my own bridge to ethereum uh or my own uh connection
then um i would first need to build this trust and i um people cannot like as quickly um
And people cannot, like, as quickly go on Myden, try out an app, go back.
And then you need to rely on all these other probably more unsecure solutions,
but, like, or inter-roll-up communication layers.
And so the ArcLayer gives you a solution out of the box for that.
No, that is great.
Kind of same question to you, Evan.
I mean, you guys have been around for a little bit longer,
but what advantages did you guys have in launching as an Aglayer connected chain?
So we are currently in the process of doing just that.
But one of the exciting
advantages that I think we bring to the party is our ecosystem of, you know, of nearly a million
users. And so one of the awesome things about, you know, our practice is that we have grown
organically, building strong connections with, you know, communities and folks around the world.
We have not spent a dollar on marketing yet. And so, you know around the world, we have not spent a dollar
on marketing yet. And so the traction that we have and the success that we have found
is entirely due to our team's hard work and understanding of the business problems and
opportunities that other protocols are bringing to the table. Now Now to perhaps comment on the subject of today's space,
what it means to solve the cold start.
We see not only liquidity,
but also active usership and engagement across protocols
as one of the benefits that comes from a strong community
that is anchored around identity that can be brought anywhere. And so whether that is
enabling new discovery of protocols for new sets of users who they might not engage otherwise,
whether that is enabling continuity of data, being able to bring not only representations
of your assets and tokens across the ag layer ecosystem, but also ensuring that
the identity data, the data that describes what you're addressed, kind of what you can do, what
you can prove, should have the same fungible liquidity as your financial assets. So anywhere
your capital goes, so too go the rules around it that you impose as an individual. And we also extend that capability
to agents, as we are starting to see in intent frameworks and solver networks,
that being able to extend privileges to agents based on the parties who they represent
is another capability that we have not really seen a lot of in a multi-chain world.
But as users explore beyond their home chain, presented with ZK interoperable solutions such
as the ag layer, that I think that this is going to be kind of a new avenue for both
the movement of capital and the movement of usership and attention.
movement of capital and the movement of usership and attention.
No, that is, I love hearing that. I think the idea of like you, I think one thing that
projects need is like, they do have that cold start and then you need users. And really right
now, it seems like there's very few options to get involved in a community that's built almost around this like shared ethics and shared ethos.
Where it's like, no, we believe in this interoperability solution to build versus like, oh, we need to raise a whole bunch of money.
And 50% goes into marketing so we can get users and run these
campaigns and all this stuff where it's like, no, you get these users right from the start.
And sometimes they may not even know that they are using your product. So I think it's
really, really interesting. And like, personally, and I know I am very biased, but a huge advantage
to connecting to AgLayer. Now um now moving on and we'll start with
you evan like as the ag layer breakout program evolved what do you hope that the community
takes away from your story and then how do you see that shaping the future of an aggregated Web3. I hope that how we proceed with the Billions Network, you know, powered by Provado ID,
is that the second your team starts to think about distributing value, about acquiring users,
about growing and scaling your protocol or application, I want to be the first set of
DMs that you hit.
So, you know, our messages are always open. Our team is always excited to support and contribute
to others. And so to the extent that those opportunities arise, we are ready and willing
and here. Beyond that, I would also note that, you know, and this is kind of just a general
observation that I make a lot, but especially in this context, you know, and this is kind of just a general observation
that I make a lot, but especially in this context, it's important for us to remember
that blockchains are multiplayer games.
You cannot have a blockchain by yourself.
That is a database.
And so, you know, in the pursuit of continuous liquidity and continuous and, you know, effective
user experience, especially as we start to abstract away the complexity of
the underlying protocol, exactly as you said, you know, we have the opportunity to move into a space
that is, you know, looks and feels a lot similar to where we are right now, right? We're having
this wonderful conversation and not once has anyone mentioned, you know, TCPIP or HTTPS or
VOIP or any of the underlying protocols. We are simply doing the
thing that we got up this morning to do. And so, you know, similarly, I like to say a lot that
no one wakes up in the morning with dreams of logging in, that, you know, your identity is the
thing that gets you to the thing, the objective that you wanted to accomplish, the outcome that
you were seeking. And so I would encourage everyone to think about that outcome orientation. What is the experience that we want
to deliver? What is the end state that we want to achieve? And if we work backwards in an efficient
manner, I'm willing to bet that many, many of those roads lead to the discussion that we're having here today. No, that is beautifully put.
What about you, Dominic?
What do you hope the community takes away
from the Maiden story?
And how do you see your project shaping the future
of an aggregated web theory?
Good question.
I would say come and try Maiden.
Like we are on Testnet.
There are a couple of tutorials. you can just download the wallet and it is like a new way how to um use a blockchain
build a blockchain and um i'm eager for your feedback um this is what i would love the community
to do no fantastic i'm going to pass the mic over. I know she's been hammering the reactions,
but Diana, do you have any questions for these teams? Yeah. First off, this has been a really
great discussion on both sides. I think one thing I would love to tap into a little bit is just the
future outlook for both projects. I mean, you guys are, you know, both
Provado Billions and then Myden, you guys are really ramping up into this like growth mode. But
I'd like to think about like where we're going to see things in five years from now. So maybe
Dominic, starting with you, like where will Myden be in five years? How will users or institutions or other key players interact with Myden?
Kind of what's an ideal future state five years from now for your team?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a good question. In five years, hopefully, client-side, your knowledge proofs are as efficient such that
no one will actually notice a difference whether you execute something on a normal blockchain
or on Meiden, even on mobile.
But let's see, our vision for like, or in five years, the optimum would be that a medium-sized
country would run Meen as its financial backbone
like mine is basically built to like for asset exchange like every blockchain but like being
used by hundreds of millions of people uh at the same time right now we are not there yet with the technology but like from the design and they've zk proofs catch up and we don't hit major roadblocks it is basically designed for that
such that people can transact in a private but compliant way for example using clients and proofs
like at the same time on yeah like in a medium-sized country that would be awesome
yeah absolutely I'm excited to see how client-side proving will evolve in the next
couple years but certainly like I think as we all know this industry changes and moves so quickly
and I always look back to like the early days of the internet and how far
we've come now today.
It'll just be so cool to see where we'll be at in five years.
But anyways, I'm going to pass the mic over to Evan.
Same kind of question for you.
I know like you guys with Pravato are looking very much from like a user and
identity perspective.
Where will, you know, users and Pravado ID specifically be in five years? And how do you
think they'll interact with things like Billions Network or any other various blockchain networks?
Absolutely. Great question. And also, side note for everyone here, you should follow Diana. She's awesome. It is always a privilege to have the opportunity to field your questions and to speak with you on these subjects. Super fan over here.
talking about right now. So for example, with our work with with a variety of government entities,
both you know, sort of aggregated or I guess collective entities, I guess also aggregated
entities like the European Commission, like the Ministry of Labor in India, like like, you know,
government entities in the UAE with whom we are all working right now, bringing capabilities into
production that nearly invisible infrastructure integrated with government systems and bringing capabilities
to life for citizens around the world is already underway. But what this means in five years is
that I believe we will erase the lines between what we think of as on-chain specific identity and capabilities, and our traverse of the
internet and connected physical spaces.
What I think this means is that in five years, you will never fill out a form again.
And that for the Ag Layer Summit five years from now, you'll get an invitation from Diana
and you could get off your couch at home, walk through the doors of your building, take your ride share, go through airport security, border screenings, health screenings, landing on the other side and arriving at the event without having to bring anything physical with you.
Just a device or a way to prove these capabilities.
Maybe we'll even have, you know, physical implants or neural links at that point to be able to communicate it.
So the, you know, the expressive platforms upon which this data can, you know, can unlock
value, I think are, you know, are reaching nearly infinite at this point.
And so then the question becomes, what is the experience we would like to have?
Not what is the experience we are forced to have? Not what is the experience we are forced to have
as a function of our technology?
Absolutely.
It's funny, Evan.
Like a couple years ago
when I did a little bit of marketing work for Polygon ID,
we made like this really cheesy,
I don't know, it was like a 30 second commercial bit
where we talked about all the annoying things that you had to do to verify your identity.
And it was kind of like a it was like a joke info, Marshall.
But like the CAPTCHAs, the scanning your retinas, the, you know, scanning your thumbs to prove your identity.
And even then, it's like you're, you're giving away your,
your social security number and your passport ID and this and that. And so
I am very much looking forward to a future where we do not have to do that because that's crazy.
But yeah, that is an, oh, that is an awesome call out. And, and for anyone who has not seen
that absolutely hilarious video, definitely encourage you
to dig through the YouTube archives and check that out because it will hit you extremely
hard.
And as one thing, I just wanted to jump in and note, as you had described some of the
existing kind of methods of identity verification, biometrics that we use every day, I want to remind everyone that, you know, your fingertips are a really great username
and not a great password because you can't rotate them. And so in pursuit of more sustainable and
flexible verification systems, I think, you know, a good reality check of what is safe,
what is scalable, what is economically efficient is where we are right now.
Yeah, I didn't even think about that, but that is that is crazy.
Very good points. Yeah, that's all I had on my side. that part of the benefit of joining the Agler ecosystem and community and all these other
chains or different applications that might be launching on an ag chain is that they have a
direct connection to Provado ID and to Billions and that your DMs are open. So that's super awesome.
Just that shows the benefit of joining a community.
That's kind of such a great thing that we have in this industry.
So I love that you called that out.
But anyways, Timmy, I will go ahead and pass it back to you.
And yeah, thanks for the answers.
Yeah, awesome. So really, before we wrap up, I want to ask you guys where listeners in our audience need to go to find more information.
So, Dominic, where do people go to learn more about AgLayer?
Or not AgLayer, about Maiden. I'm sorry.
Yeah, both probably.
But just go to Maiden.xyz and take it from there, read about myden,
try it out our playground or tutorials, apply as a pioneer, or just shoot me a DM and I'll show you
around. And yeah, the moment we are testing. So just collecting feedback.
Awesome. And Evan, where do people go to find out about Billions and Privado?
So in order to get started, my recommendation is that you go straight to billions.network.
And that will be a welcoming point of entry. You can think of that as the front door to the rest
of your life on chain and online. And so we've got a variety of experiences,
ways to get started.
And actually a little alpha leak here.
We are currently in the process of approval
with the app store to bring some amazing new capabilities
directly to your phone.
So we will be introducing a native application experience
where you can do things like take your passport,
tap it to your phone,
and immediately be
able to pull out all of that information and prove traits and capabilities like where you're from,
how old you are, the fact that you are not included in certain regions, and be able to do
so in a legally compliant, secure, privacy-preserving manner. So we are done with doxing,
and we cannot wait for you to join us at Billions.network.
I absolutely love that. That is super exciting. I know I'm level six on your questing thing. So
no, I am super excited for that. But and this wouldn't be an AgLayer space if we didn't end
with an AgLayer update. So I will pass it over to Diana and you
can give us some updates on AgLayer. Yeah. So one exciting thing that we just launched today
is called the AgLayer Visualizer. So if you are a visual learner and have a tough time grasping
like core concepts that are maybe just written in docs format. You're definitely going to want to check this out.
It is a 3D interactive tool,
and it shows you exactly how the architecture for Aglare works.
So it is a really neat tool for any, you know,
it could be developer, it could be, you could be a user,
you could just be on the business side.
If you want to see how the architecture of Agler is crafted, go check it out at visualizer.agler.dev. Right now, this is just dummy data,
just to really showcase how it's working. It's kind of slow because it's showing you the
transactions and how they kind of all roll up together. But very excited for this tool.
Our DevRel team worked hard on it.
And I just think it's a really cool representation
for something that can be so complicated
or feels very complicated.
So go check that out.
It's only available on desktop.
And as always, follow the Agler handle for any new updates coming out.
We have some big things planned for this spring and summer that we're launching.
So, yeah, just stay updated there.
And for any sort of documentation, you can find that at aglaire.dev.
Fantastic.
No, I love it.
I am a visual learner.
I feel like I'm on a space,
especially with Evan and Dominic,
with people that are very, very smart,
so much smarter than me,
which is always a blessing.
I can use visualizers to see everything.
I was watching it today.
I've done this a lot, and I sort of got it, and then I watched the visualizers to see everything. So I was watching it today and like, I mean, I've done this a lot and I like sort of got it and then I watched the visualizer and I was confirmation like, okay, I do understand
AgLayer, but it was a lot of aha moments when I was watching it.
So it was fantastic.
So fantastic work by the AgLayer team to put that together.
But we are pretty much at time.
It was a fantastic space.
Thank you all for being here.
As a reminder, we are here pretty much the same time next week.
It won't be on Monday.
It'll be on Wednesday, correct, Diana?
If I have that right.
Because a holiday.
But most Mondays we are here, 12 Eastern, 4 p.m. UTC. So follow the Ag Lair and
keep up to date on everything. But thank you all for being here. It was a fantastic space. I
appreciate you, Evan and Dominic for taking your time. And Diana, I appreciate you for helping me
co-host. But all right, everyone, have have a good one thank you all so much we'll see
you on train
you Thank you.
