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Syscoin zkSYS & Edgechains: Scaling with Bitcoin's Security
Recorded: March 26, 2025 Duration: 0:39:07Space Recording
Short Summary
The discussion focuses on Ciscoin's advancements in blockchain technology, including the launch of ZKSys and edge chains, which aim to scale Bitcoin's capabilities. Innovations such as decentralized sequencing and merge mining are introduced to enhance security and efficiency. The conversation also highlights the growth of the Bitcoin ecosystem and strategic partnerships to support infrastructure development.
Full Transcription
Hi, so I think you are going to go to a listener.
I've just sent you a request to become a speaker if we just accept it.
We're waiting for Jagip and Kimu to join in so much.
Hi, Jackie Payne. Hi, Ravisa. So I think we are a minute past the starting time, so I think we'll start off.
So, everyone, welcome to Wehrie Watch By Thief, where we talk about all things, Wehrie,
Roll-Ops, D-Fi, gaming, and similar interested industries, of course.
I am Karthik, digital media manager at Thieves.
Today's discussion will be on the topic of Ciscoin, VKSS, and edge chains scaling with Bitcoin security.
And our guest speaker today is Mr. Jaggi Pirsidu, who is the Ciscoin co-developer at SISLabs.
And the session today will be also by none of the other than our CON co-founder, Dr. Bavichambia.
and welcome to the Web3 Voice, Jagdip and Dr. Ravi.
So, Dr.Vee, if you can just introduce yourself,
followed by Jagdib's instruction, we can be on the way with DM.
Yes.
Hi, everyone. My name is Ravi. I'm the co-founder CEO of Z.
Today on Web3 Voice, we are very excited to welcome Jag,
Jagdib Siddu, from SIST Labs.
one of our very critical and prominent partner.
And it has been a very exciting journey in Web3 for me in the last seven years.
Started with the enterprise space, working with enterprises navigating the blockchain tech.
And then started Zeev about four years back, helping enterprise as well as crypto native startups as well as organizations to
launch their blockchain infrastructure and manage it without any challenges or hazards.
So Zeeve has been known to manage 55 plus app chains and roll-ups in production and almost 400 plus test nets across different stacks.
So it has been quite an amazing journey so far.
and we are very excited to welcome Jack today on the Web3 voice.
So, Jack, before we know, we talk more about Ciscoin and some of the exciting developments happening in the Ciscoin ecosystem.
We would love to know more about you and how your Web3 journey has been so far.
Hey, guys. Hey, Dr. Ravi. Yeah, thanks for doing this.
And my journey's sort of an interesting.
I got involved with Bitcoin Core early on, you know, just on Bitcoin talk and in the code
and realizing I was already very pessimistic about the direction, the economy was going
long term, although I was optimistic by, you know, the...
how the central rate targeting mechanism was going to enable growth for us,
but it's going to hit a breaking point at some point in our life,
and we need to have answers on new monetary-based systems that will solve some of these problems.
And Bitcoin came, and it was one of those things that made sense.
Some of it was...
you know, we had to solve some of these challenges like the deflationary monetary mechanism versus inflationary and, you know, the gold story makes sense.
And so that's where my journey sort of began was more on the philosophical side and getting involved in the code.
And then realizing that, you know, you could do a lot more than just gold.
Obviously, the vault aspect of Bitcoin is...
the most important aspect of any of these chains and that's why
BTC is where where it is but we tried to
extend the capabilities to
think about you know making a general purpose computer
logical computer possible
such that, you know, things like Bitcoin can be in there taking advantage of the defy landscapes and the Web3 aspect of things.
Autonomy, IoT, and Smart City, AI, all this stuff is going to be within Web 3 and less of just PTC and more of Web 3.
But I think both are very critical pieces to put together. Our journey has been...
one where we put those two things together and make a cohesive secure system that scales on top.
That's pretty amazing.
And I think the thoughts that you have mentioned,
I think echoes with quite a few other people who actually entered into the blockchain space
because of philosophical reasons, you know, believing in the whole core tenets of decentralization
and how it can transform some of the existing business models and bring in some transformative new business models.
And that what we have seen has been realized in last few years.
Jack, you know, we know, Siscoin is a pretty big name.
It has got a massive ecosystem.
It has been there for quite a bit of time.
we have seen, you know, there has been a Ciscoin layer one and then
the Rolex layer two was launched and now with massive traction happening in the Bitcoin
ecosystem, scaling the Bitcoin beyond just being an asset of value to smart contracts
and, you know, make it an education layer to run applications on.
And we see that, you know, Ciscoin is now extending
the current ecosystem with ZKSys and the concept of edge chains.
So to start with, can you give us a brief about what this Ciscoan ecosystem is,
how the journey has been starting from Cisco in Rolex and now the new product line that you have launched and the process of launching.
Yeah, so we're sort of like on the extreme end of modularity with respect to how to scale these chains.
Yeah, there is the school of thought of you put everything on one layer and you scale it up or you put everything on separate layers.
And, you know, we think, you know, just taking a page out of the book of...
TCPIP and HTTP.
And at the start of when Tim Berners-Lee proposed HTTP,
there were better protocols out there,
and there was better mechanisms to transport traffic.
But it didn't really catch on.
And so that's, we see that similar to BTC.
But in the end, the businesses wouldn't adopt something that was not modular and they couldn't make profit margins on.
So the businesses took the existing ATP and took it and grew it and the internet became because of it.
But it was because how things were set up and they were modular and each, you know, each, I guess,
when the links got made between the I like the transatlantic link it was set up in such a way that it was not monolithic it was not one set of servers caring about all the traffic it was very separate and modular the computer itself is made modular with RAM CPU the bus the cache the disk and
You need to think about that to extend it to make it useful.
You can't have one CPU that holds all the memory with cash and run everything in that system and hope that it's going to scale.
So we extended that to the blockchain, right?
Like having the data availability component, having the businesses that can come in and build their own business models in a modular way with the roll-ups, having the security behind it.
So...
making sure that in terms of HTTP, it's like the SSL socket is securing your encryption.
In our case, it's Bitcoin that's securing the mining to make sure that the system doesn't fail consistency.
And then you have the capability of bridging in with recent proposals like BitVM to bring that Bitcoin and vault it into these systems and use it within that autonomous economy.
The edge chains themselves are...
like an innovation that allow people to plug in with their own business models.
You know, they can have their own tokens, their own economies, a meme coin, for example.
Like, Doge is always wanting to do smart contracts.
You could have a Doge economy where Doge tokens are used as gas and has its own, you know, its own chain, for example.
But the problem traditionally with modular approaches are,
especially in finance is that if you create a modular financial system,
then you cut yourself off from the global liquidity pool until you build those liquidity bridges, right?
And that creates a huge friction point to create liquidity bridges.
For one, in blockchain, it's trustful, so those bridges break.
And two,
it just takes a lot of effort to build those bridges and liquidity and so that's why something like salana
took off because it was it was one whole system there was no need for bridges in between all the
liquidity shared and you can access it it was made to speed up at the sacrifice of limiting servers
and centralization it's gone a lot better now but it's still very you know i don't know how many
servers are synchronizing with
salana completely we you know we obviously went to the modular way our edge chains will allow you to
plug in but because of zK proofs they recursively aggregate in such a way that when you have an edge
chain you are sharing the liquidity with all others and that's that's something that only the
zK proofs can allow us to do there are
Like this the technology stacks borrowed from ZK sync, right?
We were always bullish on that concept of how they're going about and doing it.
But Polygon is doing the very same thing with AgLare as well.
However, they're trying to plug in all existing roll-ups and optimistic roll-ups.
What we're doing is basically just saying everyone should play ball within this ZK framework.
It's much easier, much safer, much...
much more secure and scalable to have everyone using the same ZK framework with the same proving system.
And then you have all of the not really roll-ups, but their own chains that will be combined and proved together and settled on CISCoin, which again is
using the DA and settling within Bitcoin.
And as the edge chains launch,
they could basically share liquidity with one another
to relaying Zika proofs.
so zkysys is like the first version of the edge chain within what we're calling the bitcoin plus
ecosystem and many other edge chains could exist but we will launch the first one to showcase
you know what's possible um how it scales uh biometric validation and all sorts of cool stuff
native account abstraction it's just getting to a point where uh
the blockchain becomes almost as friendly as Web 2, yet it scales and is frictionless as a monolithic design like Solana and offers all the friendly aspects of it without becoming centralized in any way.
Yeah, no, I think that's a very, I would say brilliant,
but at the same time quite exhaustive explanation that you have given.
So just to break it down, we have been operating as a RAS provider in the Rol-up space,
and we have seen that modularity brings in some massive benefits to how the
blockchains operate because we have seen that, you know,
whether it be transaction throughput or whether it be cost of running chains,
especially when you start processing millions of transactions,
then running on a public chain, on a monolithic chain becomes super, super expensive.
UXUI suffers a lot.
And plus, you know, if you want some custom features like privacy or
data compliances that's such as very difficult to manage.
So modularity has definitely changed that,
and we have seen massive traction going on in the roll-up space.
But yeah, you're right that
At the same time, different roll-up stacks,
different roll-ups have lead to some kind of fragmentation,
especially on the liquidity side.
At the same time, complexity of navigating the space
from a startup standpoint, because there
are a plethora of modular players now,
and they still do not work like a seamless machine.
which is anticipated and that it is moving there.
But as of now, that is still a challenge.
And what I think I see is that with at chains,
you are trying to change that.
So leveraging the benefits of modular blockchains,
but at the same time,
doing away with some of the challenges which are there in the current roll-up ecosystem.
So you have launched not just a ZK stack,
but at the same time bringing sentry nodes with decentralized sequencing,
DLA, put them together so that any startup who want to launch their own app chain,
it becomes super, super easy for them.
I'm right in summarizing this.
yeah exactly um you touched on decentralized sequencing and i think we didn't
really cover it it's a little bit technical but one of the the biggest challenges of any
blockchain that's offering computation more than just like uh what bitcoin is doing and bitcoin
doesn't have this because it doesn't need its its story is simple transfers um is miv the
like minor extractable value so basically the
There are auctions early on that you could basically,
there was a pseudo-anonymous person on Twitter
that started an auction system on Ethereum
where you could just purchase blocks reorganizing
because there was interesting front-running,
in the early DeFi, there was interesting front-running opportunities.
If you roll back Ethereum and then front-run liquidity,
you'd make a lot of money.
And MEV is grown, and that's whether calling Ethereum the dark forest or the smart contract mechanisms, and that it could ruin the benefits of the smart contract mechanism in general if MEV keeps flourishing and...
I think some of the research has been trying to turn MEV to be a net positive.
So like an Ethereum, PBS, or the separation between the building of the blocks and verifying them and packaging them up.
into the chain helps a little bit, but there's no real way to completely solve it.
The best thing you could do is economically align the actors within the ecosystem to have the best interest of that to prevent harmful MEPV and give you the good one.
In Bitcoin, the reason why a lot of people are resistant to covenants and other things that will bring direct commutation into BTC, first of all, it has limited space for that and it's not really meant for it.
But even so, the biggest pushback has been because of MEV, right?
Because we don't know if you open up the base layer of BTC to...
random computations and incentives to roll the chain back what that looks like
because it may ruin the proposition of just the store value of gold on the chain
so mv which was coined m e v i l mevel on bitcoin is was one of the reasons it didn't happen so
aligning the actors, it's not possible in BTC,
because there are no, I mean, other than the Bitcoin miners,
there are no sequencers or proposers
or this sort of thing in Bitcoin.
In Ciscoin, you do have that sort of thing.
In Ethereum, you have that sort of thing with validators.
On Ciscoin, you have, they're not really validators,
there's something called sentry nodes,
and they basically are only responsible for,
creating finality and offering full node,
basically allowing the propagation of blocks and transactions
and creating the decentralization of the peer-to-peer network,
the healthy peer-to-peer network.
and they also propose finality when they all agree they agree on a chain tip and the chain tip gets locked and basically prevents a rollback once you have finality you could start to prune data like the data availability layer starts to prune because you can't roll back
and it enables the modular approach.
But it also allows us to do decentralized sequencing,
which helps alleviate some of the MEV attack vectors, right?
Because now,
If someone is sequencing and it's a sentry node, they have to, obviously they have stake of CIS coin and they're thinking with the best interest of CIS and the ecosystem within it.
And there's a pseudo random protocol that would choose which sequencers are next to basically propose the next blocks.
It's much harder and you could gamify the system to make it harder for,
very big M.AV attacks. You can't completely solve it and there will be positive MV that the
sequencers will always maximize revenue with. But I think the best you could do when
you get into that approach of trying to solve for that problem. And you know, even monolithic
blockchains, they will always have MEP. It doesn't...
going modular doesn't introduce M.A.V.
It's a function of smart contracts rather than anything else.
But we could help it by doing the decentralized sequencing mechanism.
Yeah, so I just wanted to touch on that because I think it's something that most of the,
at least the blockchain researchers are always wary of and trying to solve for.
But, yeah.
Ethereum is going towards based roll-up base sequencing as well to help with this,
as well as just general alignment of...
The fees are two people are proposing external data availability services and not even settling to Ethereum at this point.
So they're trying to solve for that and bring that back into ETH.
Well, we from the external perspective, see all this and we plan for this.
And we, instead of getting into that issue, we avoid that issue by doing the base sequencing.
I absolutely agree.
In fact, we have been quite bullish on the whole decentralized sequencing piece.
As you rightly said, MEDEs is definitely one.
The second is cross-chain composability itself is a big challenge.
As we see a future with so many app chains in the market,
so there's a massive cost involved when we talk about the L1 gas cost or DA costs.
There are significant costs today.
and that cuts down massive margins for the roll up,
especially in the initial journey,
where the cost of infrastructure and cost of element gas costs,
they may not cover using their limited transactions on the chain.
And we, in fact, had launched a project called CERO,
which is a decentralized sequencing network,
again targeting how to bring in decentralized sequencing
in the modular area.
we've already launched the alpha test net.
So I think, yeah, we are very, very bullish
on having decentralized sequencing.
And I think it's pretty cool to see that you have thought of,
while designing the whole Z-KS and the edge chains,
I think you have taken care of and thought of each and every aspect of the modular architecture.
So, Jack, now,
As you said, ZKS is the first edge chain.
So what is the roadmap looks like?
As I understand, it's an ad chain.
It inherits all the benefits of the ad chain stack.
So when can builders start using it?
And what are your plans for 2025?
Yeah, yeah. So I think the immediate plan is launch Ciscoin5 Nexus release, which is in about
two weeks, a couple weeks now. And, you know, we'll have some information on that shortly. And
then from there, we will introduce a few really important pieces. For one, the right now, the century
nodes, we separated the,
the validators in Ciscoin running on the UTXO chain.
It's very similar to like the beacon chain,
Ethereum beacon chain is a separate chain that sinks into the execution layer.
Like in Geth, for example, is the execution layer.
They have the beacon chain with the validators.
We have the UTXO chain, which is merged mine with Bitcoin.
as are quote-unquote beacon chain and they have validators in there to be able to transfer or have those validers have access to smart contracts or say that they are a valid century node.
We needed a registry so we have them
basically say this is my address and the address gets recorded through the protocol and it's available through a pre-compile.
So that's that's one thing that will allow us to do decentralized sequencing.
It allows to create AI nodes and AVS services.
where we want the sequence, where we want the, you know, the people involved would be the base layer validators to run services, like AI protocol services and other things we're looking at.
And we could touch on that maybe later.
And then the other aspects of it are, there are like a bunch of features, but the other important one is,
what we're doing with merge mining and we're enabling a very interesting revelation is that merge mining might be all you really need.
It was overlooked and the benefits of it were underestimated.
We've taken merge mining from 2014 on for 10 plus years and there are certain proposals within the Bitcoin ecosystem to create side chains.
One was called something like drive chains.
Drive chains allows miners to really vote on which if someone is depositing or withdrawing back to Bitcoin,
allows the miners to vote over a period of like three months, which withdraws should be allowed, like as a bridge basically.
Emerging, lets you sort of get there without any changes to Bitcoin.
So Bitcoin as it is can work.
with the miners opting in through merge mining.
And the change that we're making allows us to basically have the miners vote on what the chain,
what the Ciscoin chain looks like and put the hash into Bitcoin.
And once the hash is in Bitcoin, it may not be in the canonical Bitcoin chain because there are multiple Ciscoin blocks per Bitcoin block.
So in the interim Ciscoin blocks, you would see a valid Bitcoin block header, but it would not be the main chain Bitcoin block header a lot of the times.
I think one out of every four or eight blocks are real Bitcoin blocks.
But the Ciscoin chain would validate that the Bitcoin block header has the Ciscoin block back, actually, to remove false positives.
The 10th block back has the Ciscoin block hash in the Bitcoin block header, right?
In the Bitcoin blockchain, the first Coinbase.
That allows us to do something really interesting.
Right.
Because with the new research around bridging Bitcoin, there's something called BitVM.
And this allows you to create a ZK proof, BivM2, allows you create ZK proof to unlock Bitcoin based on a light client.
Like client says, I've seen a proof of burn on your side chain.
And I need to know if I could burn that side chain Bitcoin and give you the real Bitcoin on Bitcoin, right?
And that was an unsolved problem.
And the biggest challenge was the side chains could have a 51% attack or it could be
manipulated.
You can, that light client is not a real blockchain.
It could be faked.
But with these, with this merge mining solution, we could detect a fork because you will
have, you'll have the Cisco and block cash put into Bitcoin.
So you can watch the Bitcoin chain to see.
if any of the hashes were part of the wrong chain, if they were not consistent, then you can flag that and say,
sorry, I'm not proposing this withdrawal to happen because there's a potential fork.
It allows you to have a single honest miner stop and attack.
So even if you have 99% of the takeover of that chain,
that vault is still safe because a single honest miner can show that there is potentially a fork happening.
Therefore, the bridge should not be allowed to continue.
And that's specifically because of merge mining and it validates
the thesis that you could securely side chain Bitcoin into another system
if you use this approach so that's uh these are the features coming in cis five that will allow us to
move ahead with with the rest of the roadmap and zkis will launch pretty quickly after i think it's
already ready we're we're just testing it on test net and it's it's like launched and stuff we're just
putting the final pieces together and and we can launch it um on top of cis five
I think great.
This sounds pretty solid innovations are coming in the next few quarters.
And I think you have got a very busy year ahead,
a lot of items in the roadmap that we see.
So you mentioned about BitPM, which again brings
a massive functionality of whether we trust less contracts,
or cross chain interoperability, especially
bridging the BTC and the edge chains.
And then you also talked about drawbin bridge,
which is secure cross-chain transfers,
which again, as we talked about,
Rolups or app chains,
segmentation of liquidity is a big challenge that needs to be solved.
And I think there are a lot of chain abstraction players today, interop players, which are solving it.
And I think having a native bridge, which has been approached, as you rightly mentioned,
about polygon ag layer or elastic chains or super chains, the whole idea has been how to bring in
native cross-chain transfers, not just from the asset perspective, but other features like
you are talking about economic security, make it really easy at the same time safe and secure
for having these cross-chain transfers. So I think it's a pretty robust platform that we see.
And I think with your test net and main net launches, I believe there would be massive traction
because Bitcoin ecosystem is something which people are looking at. We are seeing massive growth
happening in last two years. A lot of
new startups, new platforms, new protocols being launched,
which are leveraging, bringing functionality to expand the Bitcoin ecosystem
into a full-fledged smart contract platform.
So great, I think, Jack, it was pretty amazing talking to you and learning more about Ciscoin.
And we are very excited to partner with you as an infrastructure partner.
And I see as a RAS and as a RAS infrastructure provider,
I think we have a solid partnership and a lot of exciting opportunities to work together.
Yeah, likewise.
It's been really great to work with you guys and learn from your guys' experience on the RAS side of things,
and how the ZCA infrastructure works, how the DA plugs in, all these things.
Yeah, we have a weekly call with the tech teams and we go over issues and work together towards launching ZKSys.
So I really appreciate the insight and the feedback and look forward for
you know, what comes next for us and our whole ecosystem as well.
But not only that, but like for Bitcoin as well, it's a really exciting time because you,
we're doing a great unlock of BTC in many ways, not only the institutional demand and adoption
through just ETFs and governments and big players holding BTC, but allowing...
some of the other players that don't want to just sit on BTC
to get involved and stack it,
stack it in some different ways within smart contracts.
But even besides BTC,
The need for modular scaling generally for Defi and Web3 is something that is needed and should be developed within mind so it can have its own ecosystem within stable coins and all this sort of stuff.
But it gets really interesting once you add BTC to the mix. That's our thought.
Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think it has been pleasure working with SIS Labs.
With that great, I think we have come to the end of our session here,
but I think it was pretty, pretty exciting.
We wish you all the best to realize all the roadmap,
launch the and bring in massive traction of builders who are looking for a platform like this.
So with that, thanks a lot, Jack,
for joining us today on Vetri Voice and sharing your views.
We got to learn a lot about SIS Labs and Cisco and platform,
and especially Zciss and that change.
It's pretty exciting.
Thank you.
Thanks, everyone.
With that, keep building, keep smiling.
