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The Future of DeFi: 2026 & Beyond 🔥 The Aggregated Ep. 147
Recorded: Jan. 30, 2026 Duration: 2:46:39Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, crypto enthusiasts explored the implications of Kevin Warsh's appointment as Fed chair, the potential for increased yields in DeFi, and the launch of innovative projects like Kalki X and Circuit. The conversation highlighted trends towards automation in finance through AI and the importance of user experience in driving adoption.
Full Transcription
The End Thank you. Music Music Music
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Music Thank you. Music Hello, hello, everybody.
Morning, good morning. Morning, good morning.
Morning, brother.
My GM guys.
Hope you guys are having a
great week.
I know the market is
pretty crazy,
did you guys see the news
about the new
Fed chair? Yeah. Yeah, I saw that news. uh did you guys see the news about the new uh fed chair
yeah yeah i saw that news it's interesting
what'd you say i said yeah i saw the news i didn't see who he appointed but i saw that
that he was putting somebody new in there and they're going to be announcing it oh yeah yeah
he was putting somebody new in there and they're going to be announcing it
it's uh pretty crazy so it says trump picks kevin warsh for fed chair and then uh there's a breakdown
on infinity hedge about kevin warsh i'll pull it up here so So it says, here's all the little points about him.
I guess he has personal ties to Trump.
Also, currently argues Fed would be able to cut rates more, but aggressively downsizing the portfolio,
but was Fed critic known for hawkish stance.
Also, it says critical of the Fed's balance sheet expansion.
Also, inflation is a choice.
Also, view AI acts as a positive supply shock.
Let's see.
It says compare to current era as 1990s under Greenspan.
View on gold. there is no status quo
anti to return to. For BTC, he's
a policeman for policy. For
stablecoins, he opposes retail CBDC,
but in 2018 Wall Street Journal op-ed, he proposed a digital
dollar backed by the Fed.
Let's see. It also says served as a Fed governor from
2006 to 2011.
It says Trump administration is preparing to nominate
Kevin Walsh to be... Okay, so anyways, they picked this guy.
When I read those bullet points, I'm not
sure
about how bullish
he is, specifically.
I think a lot of people were looking for
one of the other potentials.
That was the
big news I woke up to.
I was just wondering what you guys.
I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that no matter what he is known for or what he said in the past,
Trump wouldn't have picked him if he wasn't going to, lower rates with the huge fight.
I mean, Trump, you know, trying to put like jail pressure, you know, on Powell.
I mean, really laying it on hard.
I just don't see Trump putting someone in who isn't going to do exactly what he wants.
That's just how Trump is, right?
Yeah, I completely agree with what you're saying there, 100%. I think that, like,
you know, regardless of kind of what the breakdown of his sort of, like, viewpoints are,
or what, you know, sometimes the media will throw out there, I don't, I, the way I see Trump kind of approaching this is Trump wants to like reduce inflation
he wants there to be better you know better improvements on on cuts and and the current
you know federal you know fed leaders in that position are not really doing their job and it's unfortunate and i don't think
trump is going to put someone in that position that's not going to align with his views of
of putting america first
i think it's good points guys i i fully agree i think that we're going to see a lot of printing
this year i actually made a technical analysis video yesterday where I pointed out that the dollar was breaking a major resistance, a major resistance to the downside that has been around or sorry, support, a major support that has been around since like 2011 at least.
that has been around since like 2011 at least uh so it's a major major support uh that it's
breaking down so the dollar looks like it's cooked usually when the dollar starts falling
um and since it's breaking such a major support that usually is indicated that the market believes
that assets are going to go up and and uh that the dollar is going to be devalued and then additionally
uh i actually called the top of which you know we'll see we'll see if this actually comes out
but i called the top of gold and silver um and you can see it's all it's all on the the video i
put my rationale out and i think that a lot of the capital
that's currently in gold and silver markets
going to flow back into crypto
because it's the most oversold asset.
There's a bunch of other reasons.
You guys can watch it in the video on my feed.
But if it's true that we get a fed that uh you know cuts rates and does what trump does
gold and silver starts pulling back that money starts flowing back into
crypto and the dollars cook that could set us up for an ultra bullish year in my opinion
but let's let's get this show kicked off guys i'm going to get everyone introduced here
so on this show uh i just passed the mic i go in no order just um you know i just pick out names
randomly here so i'm going to go ahead and pass the mic to you guys just take 30 seconds introduce
yourself additionally uh once we get past introductions,
it's like we're all a bunch of friends around a table.
You don't have to raise your hand in this space or anything like that.
Just go ahead and elbow yourself, elbow your neighbor and just talk.
It's like we're all around a big table, a bunch of friends around a big table.
So let's go ahead and start
off with Fubar please introduce yourself hey guys how's it going I'm Fubar founder at Circuit
which lets you run any agent on your existing wallet kind of like a clod bot for money been
in crypto for yeah past past five six years or so uh come from the ai world been
very very deep in both both tradfi and crypto and done a little bit of everything so great to be
here awesome can't wait to pick your brain i'll go to pass the mic on over to king dameush, what's up, brother? Good morning, everyone. Good morning.
Yeah, I work for LDA as an account exec,
double in the creative side of AI.
And I'm just here to talk about Deepak.
Beautiful.
Great to have you here, bro.
I'll go ahead and pass the mic on over to Sumit.
What's up brother
hey hey yes tech how are you man good to be back here on this basis i am like a co-founder of
quick swap and uh recently last uh 12 to 15 months like i've been working on another exchange
co-founder of kalki x as well so it's another exchange but it's a seal of based exchange
powered by zero knowledge technology i think like it's a perfect uh episode you know to just to talk about d5 because like we have been working on d5 for
five six years and kulkiex is the next frontier of uh like d5 like in my opinion definitely can't
wait to to hear more sami uh it's definitely something i've been trying to take more time to
dive into.
And, you know, excited for everything you're building.
Thanks for being here as well.
I'll go ahead and pass the mic on over to an appologist,
if I pronounce your name wrong, but Sonali.
Yeah, that was correct.
nice um yeah all good hey guys what's up my name is Sonali Giovino and I am the CEO of DeFi that's
Nice.
Yeah, all good. Hey, guys, what's up?
d-e.fi and we're like a super app in crypto antivirus dashboard um I've been in the crypto
space since 2017 started off um learning a bunch a bunch, a lot of, a bunch about it, and then started
hosting educational, uh, crypto workshops in Vancouver, Canada.
And then eventually, you know, through my journey of like hosting events that led me
to DeFi.
Beautiful.
Awesome.
Well, great to have you here.
And I'm excited to pick all of you guys' brains, dive into this, the future of DeFi. So it says 2026 and beyond. This is our 147th episode. Great to be hanging out with everyone here today. I see a lot of friends in the audience. And, you know, it always warms our heart to see friendly faces.
You know, it always warms our heart to see friendly faces.
Rock, anything you want to say before we jump right into the meat?
I don't know.
Also, maybe just introduce yourself, too.
I think we should start introducing ourselves a little bit more, like, at this point.
Sure.
Rock Zacharias, CEO of Lunar Digital Assets, Venture Studio, the Incubated, Polygon, QuickSwap, and others.
I'm pretty excited to be putting my co-founder hat
back on for the first time in,
I think, six years since QuickSwap
and working on Litecoin Virtual Machine,
or LitVM, with my partner Aztec here,
the mastermind behind Litecoin Virtual Machine.
I'm also a mentor for Tim Draper's Bitcoin Fi Accelerator, head of Global Leadership Council
for BitAngels and some other fun things, but we'll leave it at that for now. I'm excited for this episode. I think DeFi is, besides Bitcoin,
the greatest case study for our industry, for blockchain.
It's the one thing that's truly shown value
and sustainable revenue.
And yeah, really excited to be talking about
the next phases of DeFi with
the people here.
Uh, great to see you here, Samip, my, my good old co-founder of Quickswap.
We went through a lot building Quickswap.
It was a crazy journey and I'm excited to see, uh, you know, now what you're working
on with Calci and we're here, uh, here at QuickSwap and LDA supporting that.
Actually, QuickSwap will benefit greatly from this.
We're going to be launching a version of this with QuickSwap, and QuickSwap actually invested in Calci.
And also great to see Sonali here from DeFi World.
Pleasure to see you.
I haven't seen you since, when was the last time we saw each other?
I think the last time we saw each other was in Denver when we were hosting
Donald Trump Jr. and Kevin O'Leary.
And then you guys were there.
Yeah, you guys spoke.
You spoke on stage.
I think on a, yeah, you definitely spoke on the DeFi panel.
Maybe another panel too
yeah i spoke in between uh kevin o'leary and donald trump jr that was pretty cool
that was the best uh panel actually to be honest because the positioning of it was perfect because
a lot of people came in for you know jt and then it came in for, you know,
Kevin after and you guys got like a full crowd.
It was a huge audience.
Yeah.
You know, I'm going to,
I'm going to take a moment to glow or throw myself some flowers.
You actually told me the year before that I was also the best panel.
So on the best panel.
That's the glory.
Yeah.
No, you throw some really great events if anyone's uh never been to defar
world you guys should definitely uh take the opportunity to go if you get a chance um yeah
that was that was a pretty fun one though um i i had said something about uh solana being um
and that well the meme um degen casino being a cancer on our industry and the whole crowd, like, got out of their chairs and clapped.
That was kind of a, that was interesting.
I didn't expect that so much, but I guess it was at ETH Denver.
So maybe that made more sense.
That's really funny.
It sounds like you probably hit a chord that some of the audience members were deeply relatable to. Yeah, definitely.
Man, I want to go to a DeFi World event. I've heard only good things. So I'm looking forward.
Let's go and jump in guys. So on this show, I just asked a question again, anyone can just
jump in and it's like, we're a question again. Anyone can just jump in.
And it's like we're a bunch of friends around the table talking.
Rock, what's your analogy?
The Roman bathhouse, baby.
Yeah, it's like we're all in the bath together at the Roman bathhouse, you know, talking about philosophy and the times of, yeah, I don't know.
Rock, you said. We're all naked and drinking wine
and um you know nor i i don't think in the roman bathhouse bathhouses of old women were allowed
but we're making an exception for sonali here there we go oh you know what it can't be a coincidence
appreciate the inclusivity
it can't be a coincidence that you mentioned that and then Derek just immediately came on stage.
Hey, Derek, go ahead and introduce yourself.
30 seconds.
Welcome to the aggregated and then we'll jump into the meat of the questions.
Sure.
Great to see you guys.
My name is Derek Berger.
I'm founder of Sphere Protocol.
We provide
liquidity infrastructure for various different chains. We've been partners. Polygon was actually
one of our first partners when we launched just about four years ago. And we've grown
with them. Multi-chain currently supports Quickswap over on base as well. So yeah, big player in the space. I've been a builder since 2017. I got
interested in 2016. I've seen FUBAR throughout the years. Jared, I think, who's also listening
to this. We've been friends for some time, I think. And Darren, who's also on the call.
So it's just great to see everybody together here.
A lot of bright minds.
And thank you, Rock, for having us.
Beautiful.
It's great to have you here, Derek.
So I'm gonna kick it off.
So first question for everyone here.
When people talk about the future of DeFi,
what do you think actually changes
in the next few years
and what surprisingly stays the same
so you guys can take this out if you like
there's no wrong answers on this show
just mainly trying to pick the brains
of the awesome DeFi people that are here today
yeah, I can hop in.
I think what we're seeing in DeFi right now
is a lot of people converging on the top protocols
as well as those being institutionalized and commoditized.
So kind of flashback to DeFi summer 2020. Everyone's manually farming yams. Everyone's depositing into Aave from their own hardware wallet on a multi-sig or just free YOLOing it.
free YOLOing it. Nowadays, I feel like the much more common DeFi usage is you log into Coinbase,
you see a button that says get some yield here, you click on it behind the scenes,
stuff gets deposited and routed into a Morpho Vault that's been curated,
kind of run by institutional curators. Likewise, I think Kraken launched their
Institutional Vaults product just Tuesday, Wednesday this week,
and I think ran up to an additional 25 million of TVL
in the first 24 hours in partnership with Veda and whatnot.
So I think we're seeing a lot more of the DeFi mullet.
Now it used to be everyone just kind of free YOLO in it on chain,
and now you have the best of the best have kind of risen to the top.
You've got a lot of the traditional centralized providers
offering expanded access through their front ends.
But then that's kind of what we're seeing today.
But I think if you move forward even a little bit,
what you see, I think, is the re-rise of individual sovereignty
and especially AI.
I don't know how many of you saw the CloudBot excitement
over the weekend in the past couple days.
People are literally buying Mac minis to ship to their house
so that they can run a specific open source GitHub repo
that basically gets access to all their emails,
all their text messages, all their code,
all their files, incoming, outgoing,
and just full pseudo super admin,
do whatever you want,
and just hooking this up to Claude
or to other AI models.
So I think we're going to see the resurgence
of a lot more...
Yeah, if it used to be
that
everyone kind of did everything by hand
and then it moved into
Coinbase will just offer
a UI for everything,
I think now we're moving into AI
is going to offer the interface for everything.
And if you can spin up a clod
or another AI agent or a financial agent,
you can tap into not just this one thing on chain,
but you can tap into everything on chain
and you can do it in a really easy, simple UI.
So very, very interested to see kind of the dominant interface for crypto
go from Metamask to Coinbase and now probably to Claude.
Metamask to Coinbase and now probably to Claude.
Yeah, I mean, I completely agree with you, like what you're saying.
So in my opinion, like what's changing in DeFi is like DeFi, like in last, like, you know, last four or five years, like was in the POC stage, like proof of concept stage, like where like everybody is trying to prove that finance can actually move on chain right and like we have proven that with uniswap with quickswap with ave with compound but different
like you know like shit ton of protocols out there and like everybody's using it like even
the institutions are moving their funds on chain you know we see that now the next stage of defy
is to make it more scalable to make it it's so scalable that even the entire planet can use it like the
way people use master cards the way people use visa cards and all that stuff which require you
know sub millisecond runs sub second transactions kind of stuff right and we are already seeing that
with exchanges so i think the exchanges always have been the first adopter of whatever you know
next level thing happens in a d5 so we can already see hyperliquids out there.
We can see Aster.
We can see Ajax.
We can see different C-law protocols
being built completely decentralized.
Or I mean, as I always say,
it's not decentralized, it's trustless.
We don't need decentralization.
What we need is a trustless approach.
And decentralization was one way
of doing things trustless, right?
But with the
advancement of zk technology optimistic roll-ups and all that stuff you do not necessarily needs
to be decentralized in order to be trustless you can still be trustless and not be decentralized
so i think the next phase of defy is to make applications more scalable so that we can process
like hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.
Like that's what you need. Like if you want to cope up to the centralized application or the traditional finance applications,
like if you want to, you know, like beat Nasdaq or if you want to bring, you know, like exchanges or like lending markets on chain,
you need like a applications right so I think
like that's like what's happening in DeFi and exchanges like as always like are still you're
taking charge of it and then I think like other protocols other type of applications will follow
it and then like we will see a merger between TreadFi and DeFi happening and like in in my
opinion in the next four to five years I'm sorry sorry, guys, there won't be any DeFi.
There won't be any TreadFi.
There will still be like one financial sector or finance sector.
Really great points.
Maybe, Sameep, I'd love for you to double click on something you said which is something i'm starting to believe
more and more and understand but maybe you could break it down a bit more when you when you uh
mentioned that um you can still i believe you said like this you can still be decentralized
uh with uh zk technology uh you know it basically does the same thing, but you're using a different
mode. If you can break that down a little bit. Yeah, sure. So what I said, like, you don't have
to be decentralized. You can still be trustless. Like the point of Bitcoin was to enable like
trustless finance, right? So that you don't have to trust anyone. You don't have to trust banks. You don't have
to trust like big institutions and you can still move around the money. Like that was
the purpose of Bitcoin. That was the purpose of like the entire blockchain community. And
at that point of time, with all the hardware available, with all the, you know, it was
like mostly hardware, right? So with all the hardware available, like the only way of doing
it was like having a decentralized ecosystem? So with all the hardware available, like the only way of doing it was like having a decentralized ecosystem
where everybody is running their own nodes,
verifying transactions and all that stuff.
But that particular process is very slow
because now like you will have to basically do some sort of communication
between like thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of nodes
depending on the decentralization of the network.
And then like suddenly like you become very slow.
That's why Bitcoin is slow, Ethereum is slow,
or any chain who claims to be decentralized,
and if they are truly decentralized,
they cannot be as fast as MasterCard or Visa card.
Right?
Even if they provide, let's say, 200 millisecond
or 400 millisecond block time, it's still very slow.
Because Binance, at the same co-location, provides 5 millisecond or 400 millisecond block times, like it's still very slow because like Binance at like
same co-location provides like five millisecond latency. Like how do you beat that in a chain
network where like thousands of nodes have to communicate with each other or like has come to
a consensus, right? But with ZK technology, you can still be trustless without needing like true
decentralization. Why do I say that? Because because with zk technology you can build like
all of your products like all of your rails off chain using the type of technology you want to
use the type of language you want to use the type of tools you want to use just do it off chain the
way binance does it and at the end of the day just generate proofs for everything zero knowledge
proofs for everything that your systems for everything that your system is running
correctly that your system is actually following the rules and just open source those rules just
open source those zero knowledge services and anybody can come and verify like if your zero
knowledge proofs are being generated correctly or not and instead of like doing actual transactions
on chain just send the proofs on chainchain. And that proofs basically contains everything,
which basically proves that whatever you are doing off-chain,
outside of the decentralized ecosystem is correct or not.
And if something is wrong,
then ideally zero-knowledge proof should reject those transactions.
So it still works in a very similar way,
the way decentralized JSON works,
where multiple nodes come to a consensus
throw out the false transactions or spam transactions and only take the legit transactions
and make a block in this case instead of doing it on a consensus basis like thousands of nodes
interacting with each other we use cryptography we use it's it's basically a proof of work kind
of stuff like the way bitcoin works because to generate a zero knowledge proof uh like if it's basically a proof of work kind of stuff like the way Bitcoin works because to generate a zero knowledge proof
if it's a like 192 bit proof
then like you have to
you need like a lot of computing power, right?
So it's a proof of work
but instead of like multiple people doing it simultaneously
we use a different set of cryptography
called zero knowledge proofs
and simply send that proof on chain.
So with zero knowledge proof
you can actually achieve trustlessness without requiring decentralization. And this is actually
a very huge concept because now you can choose your own choice of technology, your own choice
of languages. You can be like as scalable as Binance and still be trustless or like decentralized.
Sameed, I really like what you're saying here,
and I'm really glad that you're sharing a lot of these thoughts and ideas.
I think one of the biggest barriers, as we have the traditional financial markets
moving from Web 2 into Web 3, a lot of it is sometimes very clunky a clunky trend transfer because
of you know learning these new technologies and learning these new
concepts and some of it is like very restricted because like you said when
it's I'm all for decentralization but I but if we're limited to it the only way
to make that happen is to following the decentralized,
traditional decentralized model,
then sometimes that can create a very limiting effect for, you know,
I guess some industries.
So I think this is really cool.
Like the zero, I think you said for ZK, the zero knowledge base, it seems to create a lot more flexibility and
giving, I think, people more flexibility to choose the language, to choose the way they want to go
about it is definitely the direction we want to go in and still maintaining that decentralized
model within the overlapping ecosystems.
So, yeah, that's really cool.
What are you seeing in terms of the adoption of that?
And this is a question for you, Simit, and anybody else who wants to jump in on it, feel
free to.
I'm just curious, what's your, what are you seeing in terms of the adoption, in terms of the growth on that,
and how that's inviting more Web2 and more adoption in general?
From an adoption perspective,
I see a lot of new products being built using zero-knowledge technology.
The only problem with zero-knowledge technology is
it's like smart contracts of 2017, right?
So not 2017, right?
So in 2017, like even if you have to write a very basic ERC20 smart contract, then like you'll have to dig in a lot of stuff.
And if you are a freelancer, you can get like you can pay it like up to $5,000 to $10,000 just to write a smart contract, right?
And that too is ERC20 smart contract.
And nowadays, like nobody will even pay a
dollar you can just go and everything is scriptized with one click you can deploy your own token you
know do crowd sales like whatever you want to do so for zk technology it's still 2017 which means
like it's still very new and there are like very few resources out there and very few developers
out there because it's important to have a
developer ecosystem around a certain technology which takes some time. So from adoption perspective
like a lot of different protocols because like I have been working in the ZK technology for Kalki
for last 18 months so I can see like how like progressively the technology is maturing and
like how progressively the hardware is actually available now but the
problem is the developer ecosystem is still not there for the zk technology like a lot of people
talk about zk but i'm like 100 sure 95 of those even don't understand like how zk works right so
that's the problem but from adoption perspective i i'm already seeing this happening in the exchange
space we are building building one such exchange.
It's already in the testnet for the last three months.
I've processed like 30 million transactions seamlessly.
And like sending proofs every couple of minutes, which is great.
Like one year back, that was not possible, right?
And you have to send like proofs 30 minutes down the road.
Otherwise, like it becomes too expensive to generate the proof and to send proof on chain.
But now with advancement in hardware technology, with advancement in cryptography, with advancement in ZK technology, in the VMs that are coming up, like actually building a zero knowledge ZK stack is very easy.
You just have to spend 30, 40 days understanding everything because resources are not still out there.
Once you do that, you can build anything on
on on zero knowledge technology so i'm already seeing like games being built on zero knowledge
technology exchanges built on zero knowledge technology and uh some credit card manufacturers
like they are coming on chain to you know and adopting zero knowledge technology to provide
same user experience and in my opinion like gaming gaming is one of the biggest use case of zero knowledge technology.
Gaming in crypto has never succeeded because the way we were doing gaming in crypto was
not the right way of doing it.
We were trying to put traditional Web3 into modern games and that basically hampers the
gaming experience.
So whatever games I personally have seen in crypto were like man 1990s game man like nobody
wants to play it like people were only playing it for rewards and once the rewards drop down like
nobody like want to use it like if i'll have to choose between a call of duty and a call of duty
version of web 3 i mean man i will always choose the traditional call of duty because i know call
of duty of web 3 like it's bullshit like you i don't know like how the gaming experience will be but with zk you can actually
build the call of duty and include the crypto in top of on top of it using zero knowledge technology
because that will not hamper the overall playing experience of the game right so one thing like
which we were missing in crypto was the user experience right we were not thinking about user
experience at all we were just thinking about somehow putting in the crypto web 3 in a game or
in uh in in any product right that was the goal the user experience nobody thought about it like
how the user experience will be but if you want to scale at a planetary level then you have to thought
you have to think about the game oh sorry you have to think about the user experience first because nobody care about the technology everybody care about
uh the feeling of playing the game the feeling of using an exchange right that's why like binance
like processes like what 40 odd billion dollars on spot daily but you need to have the biggest
uh amm based decks like processes what one to 1.5 billion dollars right so great technology
but bad user experience so nobody uses it anymore right so that's i think one of another big thing
which is changing in crypto which is changing in d5 that the builders the product managers are
thinking the thinking has shifted from crypto first to user first to the experience first and
now they are choosing
their technology so i think with zk you can actually have a good user experience you can
have faster applications and you can still be trustless yeah that's exactly to add on to your
question sonali it's exactly what we're doing with litvM. So we're bringing hard money, so Litecoin, into Web3 using ZK technology
so that Litecoin can trustlessly enter Web3 and interact with all the awesome innovation
that we've built around crypto around the years.
So on LitVM, with ZK technology, you trustfully bring it into
Web3. So our trustless Litecoin can live on LitVM. And then at the application layer, we have
the, we have EVM compatibility so that we're, we have all the, we go, we're going where the devs are.
And then we can build strategies.
We can hook AI up to hard money.
And then it essentially allows us to marry the founding principles of our space,
which is hard and sound money, decentralization at the base layer,
and continue that cypherpunk journey, but connect it to the rest of, you know, all first question with, like, how will DeFi change?
You know, I think what we're going to see is also what Fubar was saying earlier, where, you know, AI is going to come in and make the experiences easier.
You also have what Samip is talking about with, you know, faster user experience
and some of the things changing with, with like how ZK is implemented,
not needing like nodes,
like the traditional type of nodes that we've all thought of in networks
to do everything, you know,
ZK will kind of take the place in some of those instances.
And so the future looks a lot different.
Anyone else want to jump in?
So either on what Sonali was asking or the initial question,
when people talk about the future of DeFi,
what do you think actually changes in the next few years
and what surprisingly stays the same?
I actually have another question.
Please, please.
That's okay. Yeah, so sort of just like still building off a little bit of what Samif said.
of what Samit said.
So I noticed you said that, you know, with the zero,
sorry, zero knowledge tech,
still a lot of the resources are lagging
and not fully there yet.
And also like, what is, and if anybody,
again, anybody can jump into this, I'm just curious,
like what are, how do we see that scaling
in terms of the dev community
and dev community and resources so that, you know, the adoption of that can be, um, uh,
you know, supported better and obviously to, to, to make that flow better.
So just curious, uh, cause it seems like this is a great,
a very positive movement, you know,
to improve adoption in a much rounded way,
of course, you know, with AI being included.
So I'm just curious how we see that moving forward
to like really scale the dev community participation in this area.
It's the most compressible algorithms that we have around compared like 100x, 1000x,
millionx compared to just basic smart contracts.
But the downside that it has is it's very, very complex, very, very hard to use.
Even if you're a typical developer, you know how to write some TypeScript,
you know how to make websites,
you know how to write a little bit of Rust,
you know how to make a smart contract.
And you go look at ZK code,
it's just gobbledygook to you.
You can't, you've got what are called cryptography circuits.
And it's basically just this incredibly dense,
this incredibly dense cryptography that I think it's hard to write and it's basically just this incredibly dense this incredibly dense cryptography
that I think it's hard to write
and it's hard to verify
and a lot of the
I think maybe the breakout consumer app
that uses ZK circuits
or that's been most popular to date
is ironically probably Tornado Cash
where you come in you you make a deposit,
you get a transaction receipt,
and then that transaction receipt client-side on your machine
is what you use to prove that you were an initial depositor.
A lot of the more, I mean, the Aztec guys can speak to this,
but fundamentally, that's the same end user consumer UX flow
that you go through when you're doing a more complex thing, like proving an L2 transaction
for a ZK state transition.
And so the big, big barrier to better scalability is you need some form of better auditability and individual
sovereignty. If everything reduces to five smart people wrote this cryptography circuit,
and now we just hope for the best, I think probably open transparent systems like Ethereum,
like Bitcoin, that don't offer that
privacy do end up winning out. You see this problem a lot on like, grab some government
conspiracy theories, like the NSA has published certain algorithms where they refuse to explain
why they invented the algorithm that way. And a lot of people think that there might
be a backdoor and end up using the non-government recommended algorithms instead of the official ones, just because there's some very suspicious refusal to show your work.
And I think that CryptoZK has many of the same things.
You almost have to, it can be technically correct, but it also has to be provably simple enough that people can trust it.
And that, I think, is the second barrier.
We've got a lot of things that a lot of people are pretty sure are provable tech.
But they're not quite simple enough to gain that widespread either consumer or institutional trust and verifiability and individual sovereignty and adoption.
trust and verifiability and individual sovereignty and adoption.
So that feels like the step two of two that I'm curious to see how people tackle and how people fix.
I think what you just said makes a lot of sense and that's the problem with ZK right now.
I think like what you just said like makes a lot of sense
and like that's the problem with ZK right now, right?
Because as you said, like it's very complex.
It's hard to understand.
It's hard to write ZK circuits
because not everybody understands cryptography well.
I mean like forget about zero knowledge proofs, right?
You need to be a pro at like cryptography
to be able to write ZK circuits.
But that's where, you know,
like products like SP1, Sassant SP1,
and, you know, RISC, sorry, no, RISC0, ZISC, you know, like products like SP1, Sassant SP1, and, you know, RISC,
sorry, no, RISC-Zero, ZISC, Pico, and like a lot of other protocols out there, basically
ZK VMs comes into play.
If everybody has to write their own ZK circuits for every single program or every single product
they build, then in my opinion, like zero knowledge technology in crypto will not work
out, right? So because again, like at the end of the day, developers should only focus on writing the then then in my opinion like zero knowledge technology in crypto will not work out right
so because again like at the end of the day developer should only focus on writing the
business logic not worry about you know zero knowledge technology much for example if you
have to build something on ethereum right and you have to worry about like how blockchain work
how ethereum works right then you're no longer building an application, you are building
a chain, right? But most of the applications, Uniswap, KickSwap, they just focus on writing
the smart contracts in the front end. And the decentralized part, you know, is basically done by
the chain in Toxair, right? Maybe Ethereum, maybe Polygon, maybe Base, right? So the actual
decentralization is not done by the product,
but it's done by the chain.
And the code for those particular chains are open source.
They are auditable in nature.
They are verified.
You can like publicly go and verify.
So in my opinion, you know,
if zero knowledge technology has to adopt,
like instead of everybody writing their own ZK circuits,
they have to start using outsourced products
like Sucint, SP1, Pico, ZISC, RISC-0. they have to start using uh outsource products like susan sp1 pico zisk risk zero and these
product needs to be you know auditable in nature like how it works how they generate the circuits
how they generate the proofs and everything the way we do with the blockchains right so for every
single product we do not write blockchains we do not deploy blockchains that's a different story
lot of people are doing it and like in past they have done it,
but that was bullshit in my opinion.
So similarly, like for ZK adoption, it's not hard.
Like it's hard when you start doing ZK yourself,
but if you start using ZK the way you use blockchains,
then it becomes very easy.
And now every application can be a ZK powered application.
And for the trust and verifiability, like,
you can like check out the solution which
you are using for me like in my opinion like zisk is one of the best solutions out there
like the entire code base is public is open source you can go you can check out you can look at the
audits so yeah so it becomes easy when you are not like reinventing the wheel yeah for sure the
i think that the big novel consumer burden is that in crypto, if you go on Ethereum, you have a single private key. And you can use that private key to generate one wallet, to generate 10 wallets, the same private key can interact with a dozen, a hundred, a thousand apps.
apps. And you just have this one thing that's very annoying to secure, but you can do it.
You can back it up really securely. You can write it down and bury it in the ground. You can put it
in the hardware wallet. With ZK, another interesting thing is that to truly offer privacy,
every user ends up having a private key for almost every single app.
So two examples of that are that if you look at TornadoCache,
you have a, I'll call it a private key,
but basically a cryptographic secret that you use to prove
that you can withdraw every little batch of ETH.
And then if you go and use something like Zcache,
which has skyrocketed in popularity over the past couple of months, leading to everyone getting fired, which is typically the
inverted of how it goes, you have what's called a viewing key. Nobody can see anyone's balances
on this encrypted blockchain. But then obviously you need to see your own balances. Like you didn't see how much money is in your wallet.
So you have both a sending key and a viewing key.
And various, almost like Amazon, AWS, IAM access control stuff.
The burden ends up going on the end user to just manage a very large variety of different cryptographic material.
So that's the one thing that I'm very curious to see huge advances in, like self-sovereignty,
is can we make it easy for users to...
The first thing that crypto has tried to solve is can you make it easy to manage a single private key?
The first thing that crypto has tried to solve is can you make it easy to manage a single private key?
And then beyond that, it's can you make it easy to manage an arbitrary number,
a dozen, a hundred of cryptographic key material for you to have individual sovereignty
when using private ZK or compressed ZK or stuff like that.
In the crypto private key case, you almost see everyone just,
let's use Privy, let's use Phantom, let's use Coinbase.
And that approach simply doesn't work at scale when you're bringing ZK apps to the masses.
Because if Coinbase just has everyone's ZK viewing key, then why are we introducing
the cryptographic overhead?
So curious if any of you are seeing great apps or great advances or great technology
that kind of make ZK cryptography material, consumer ready.
Yeah, I mean, like, I think I kind of agree with you on this, right?
Because, you know, I mean, like, crypto is still new, right? So a lot of tools and applications has to be built, like, in the same way, like, that
we did for the wallets, right?
Like, in the early stage of blockchains, like, wallets, like, was very hard to manage.
But now it's easier.
But again, the part of, like, ZK that you were trying to, like, explain over here, like, it's easier but again uh the part of like zk that you were trying to
like explain over here like it's mostly related to privacy right but if you are using zk for
scalability i don't think like those issues matter anymore because you're not using zk for privacy
but if you are using zk for privacy then yeah definitely for each transaction like you need
to have different set of key pairs which you know encrypt your transactions and then you can decrypt them so now you have to manage like hundreds or
thousands of keys with you but if you are using zk for scalability and not only specifically for
privacy then these issues are not there like for example at calcix you know like in the phase one
we are like mainly using zk for the scalability purpose so that like, you know, we can process transactions off chain, generate proofs for those transactions and then like, you know, finally send aggregated proofs back on chain so that anybody can verify that whatever transactions were processed in a roll up, like these were correct transactions that were happening as per rules.
And for that, you don't need like multiple keys, right?
So it also depends on like, you know on why and how you are using ZK.
Yeah, definitely. Very cool to see,
I think the scalability into literal millions using ZK.
Then you go try out Calci.
Definitely, guys.
Yeah, I love all the banter here.
I think that ZK is definitely extremely innovative.
I want to kind of go back to DeFi again here.
So I have a different question for everybody.
So one thing that I think a lot of people, especially in the audience here, really want to know about is yields.
You know, it's something that's so attractive about DeFi.
And on yields, once emissions and points fade away,
where do you think sustainable DeFi yield
really comes from in the future?
Yeah, I can hop in here. I kind of reduce everything to supply and demand. It's interesting
that yields... One weird thing about crypto is that we have not converged to a single
yield risk-free rate. Again, in TradFi, you go, you look, you say, what's the 30-day T-bill yield?
And maybe it's 3.75% this month, so it'll be 3.5% next month. But it really is one single yield.
But everything gets set on that. Bank interchange rate is a few bits above that. Mortgage rates
seem to be double that for increased counterparty
risk. But everything is kind of set around a single party setting the yield. And in crypto,
it's all over the place. Like you look in, Tether on Aave Ethereum can be yielding 3%.
And Tether on Aave Base can be yielding 7%. And the next day it's flipped.
Not to mention what happens if you go and look at other protocols.
Athena made a living out of just capturing
12 to 20%
funding rate basis trades
that were 2 to 3x higher
than what you'd get on Aave.
So I think
eventually what makes crypto yields not converge
to a single number is the fact that you just have such different risk profiles of every single smart
contract and protocol. People trust Aave different than they trust Morphoo different than they trust a new vibe-coded yield aggregator from last week.
So I think where things settle at is people end up pricing sustainable risk premiums on top of different protocols.
And then you add on the added convenience of I can have all my money in one place and be very quick to withdraw and very quick to act on opportunities.
Yeah, curious what everyone else thinks.
Well, I'll say one.
I think that's a good thing maybe that we haven't converged, but it'll happen.
I think it actually kind of already is happening.
I mean, you could look at it in two ways. One, the minimum
yield you would find in the industry is kind of around or over what the minimum yield in a bond is.
Now, it gets complicated because like ETH, the yield is lower.
But if you include the appreciation, which is how I look at kind of interest rates or I think a lot of people will say, oh, but, you know, they want a yield instead of appreciation or they look at appreciation versus yield.
And to me, it's as long as you have, I don't care what it is. Is it appreciation or or they look at appreciation versus yield and to me it's as long as you have i don't care what it is is it appreciation or is the only reason you would
really care is like maybe for specific tax reasons um but i think the fed setting the rate
uh is a terrible thing for the world i I don't think there should be one controlling, you know,
Wizard of Oz who sets rates for the whole world.
I think we should let the free market figure that out.
So hopefully that breaks someday.
It's a separate topic.
Well, what's interesting is they're trying but they really can't.
I mean, obviously, Warsh was not appointed but leaked on Polymarket yesterday.
I think he's sitting at 95% odds.
And based on that, he's, I mean, people's predictions of his policies are he's going
to cut rates.
But you look at the long end of the bond yield curve and rates are spiking, which means the
bond prices are going down.
So you can't control everything all at once.
You can control short-term rates, but at the cost of long-term credibility.
And that's what's very interesting is even in the current, I think, single sovereign literally
put a number on a page and everyone in the world follows it.
That has far less control than you'd think.
Mortgages are still at 7% because of long term credibility concerns.
So yeah, even in the current state, I think they must far, far less is
controlled than you would hope. And that's why the Fed chair search has been so difficult.
I'm surprised that the mortgage rates aren't coming down. I mean, part of that is just if people, if banks or lenders believe that rates will come down, then they should lend as much as they can at current rates, which means they actually have to lower rates slightly to increase demand for mortgages.
I think it seems pretty clear that rates will come down, not because necessarily they should,
which I think a lot of people think they should.
And maybe they should.
I don't know.
I'm not so sold on that.
But it's not that they should.
It's that they have to because the system can crumble
if it doesn't.
So they're forced,
their hand is forced, right?
The economy around the world
is not doing super great
and this is one of the levers
they have to try to,
you know, boost the juice,
juice up the economy a bit.
But what I think a lot of people don't get is this boosts
asset holders it doesn't necessarily boost you know Main Street and even if it does boost Main
Street it boosts asset holders more and this is why we get, you know, kind of a K shape, you know, more and more
separation of the capital class and the working people, which is sadly one of the things that
makes people not like capitalism because they see that, you know, the rich are getting richer while
the poor, you know, getting richer, slower, or they think the poor are getting richer while the poor are getting richer slower.
Or they think the poor are getting poorer.
They're not, though.
They're actually getting rich also.
Just not as fast as the rich are getting rich.
But it would be even less of a gap if we didn't have crony capitalism.
And that's what we have. We have crony capitalism where the rich are boosted by the politicians
and by their positive wealthy regulations.
Anyways, getting off a bit into a tangent.
Yeah, maybe to circle back to your original question,
what does sustainable long-term yields look like
in a world where maybe points and even token emissions
are much more stable?
I kind of compare it to venture funding in Uber.
If you think about the early days of Uber,
every single ride, Uber was just losing money on it.
Because, I don't know, you're in Topeka, Kansas.
You say, I want to go to the airport.
It's 2012.
And there's not a single rider,
there's not a single driver within 30 miles of you.
So Uber's just got to, they have to make your life good,
but they have to make the driver's life good.
And you have to, the MBA lingo is bootstrap network effects.
But you need just a sufficient supply of people in this two-sided marketplace.
Maybe it's buyers and sellers.
Maybe it's riders and drivers.
And I think that the point of a lot of points and token emissions and incentive campaigns
and programs there is to get those network effects.
You need to convince a whole bunch of people
to try out something new all at once.
If they all try it one at a time,
they'll have a bad experience.
If you're the only person using Uber,
it's going to be a very, very bad app for you.
But if you're one of a million people using Uber,
then it's going to be a great time.
And it's the same thing for like,
look at quick swap.
If you're the only person using the decks
and there's no liquidity,
you're going to have a bad time.
But if you're one of a million,
you've got half a million swappers,
half a million LPs, whatever that is.
Very, very healthy, sustainable ecosystem.
I think that the future of yields
looks like your nominal yield goes down a little bit, your risk goes down a lot, and the product experience and network effects are a lot better because you can actually get done what you want to.
And you end up with a healthy, sustainable ecosystem like you see in QuickSwap right now.
So I think that yields and risk kind of go down together.
And that is what the world's moving towards. So you can't quite get 20% anymore, but you're also not going to get
rugged on 20% of your protocols. So it's a plus and minuses to both.
Yeah, I see your point there. And generally, I think that's true. And that's what we're seeing across the board. But let's say that we, from adoption standpoint, grow tremendously, you know, another 20% over the next year or years.
year or years. Does that also mean that yield can increase over time because you have more people
using it? There's more fees, you know, going in to support, I guess, depending on, you know, the
DeFi mechanism that we're talking about.
But if there's more people and there's more fees,
does that mean that we can see higher and higher rewards for a while?
And then at some point, maybe it levels out.
Is that also a potential that we could see?
Or do you guys think basically like rewards will become less of a thing over time because they're just not needed as much?
And like you're saying, Fubor, the systems are a lot more trusted, battle tested, more of a norm.
You won't necessarily need to bootstrap anymore.
And everyone's just kind of just using it in the background
with their AI interface or whatever.
Like, what's your guys' thoughts there?
Well, Fubar said it really well.
I mean, what basically happens is in newer industries,
protocols, companies, whatever, venture capitalists, everyone competes
for market share. And so early on, companies are willing to lose money. That's the nature of
investing. You lose money in the short term and you gain money in the long term and companies do
the same thing. So these projects spend money to gain market share. He used the Uber example. That's a great one. Another one that I always use is eBay and PayPal or not, sorry, PayPal and Confinity merged, but it was basically Elon's payment company
and Peter Thiel's payment company were competing
and they were spending, I think it was $20
if you signed up with one of them.
And they were both spending a ton of money
trying to acquire people
and they were competing with each other
until finally they merged and that's what PayPal is now. But yeah, in the beginning they were losing with each other until finally they merged. And that's what PayPal is now.
But yeah, in the beginning, they were losing, losing, losing until finally,
once they had, you know, the dust had settled in the battle,
which in this case was a merger,
then all those incentives went away and they started making money.
The same thing happened with Amazon.
I think Amazon lost money for like 15 years or more.
And same thing with YouTube, a bunch of these.
They lost money for a long time trying to make sure they secured their place
as the dominant category leader.
And then once they became category leader,
now you saw a more leveling out of what the true kind of value
and supply demand was to the consumer.
And so we're going to see that in DeFi also,
and we're already kind of seeing that.
Uniswap is, to a large extent, winning,
but now you see new players coming in,
so that battle's getting re-emerged.
We'll see, you know, with things like Hyperliquid
and Kalki that Samip here is building,
maybe we'll see a new battle of these new style Dexes.
Aave had kind of settled, but Morpho is coming in, trying to give them a run for their money.
So whenever there's big competition between players, you'll see them willing to lose money to give the consumer a better temporary experience.
But eventually the market will figure itself out.
And the cool thing is, separate from yields, this all just
gives the consumer the best possible experience. These companies, these projects, these protocols,
they all compete. That's what capitalism is. They compete because if I can sell you a widget for
$5, but Aztec can come sell you a widget for $4. You're going to go to Aztec. And
then I'm going to frantically try to figure out with my team or my company or my protocol or my
devs or whatever, how can we be Aztec and sell it for $3 now? And eventually, the consumer's
getting their widgets for $0.10. In this case, the widget is a trade, right? So now you can do trades for almost no slippage, very low fees, etc.
It's great for the world and the consumers.
Yeah, I think the final arbitrage, not as protocol builders, but as end users, as being normal people with a wallet who like crypto and hold
crypto, the final arbitrage is being able to use new things.
It wasn't, it was just two years ago, I think, that USDC depegged to 88 cents on a weekend, weekend. All because some Silicon Valley bank was cut off at the knees. And you could get
not even 12% annualized yield. I'd call it 12% daily yield by being there, ready, willing, but also able to know like, hey, gas is psyched.
It's now 100x.
Everyone's trying to get stuff through.
How do I buy USDC at 88 cents?
That's maybe more time sensitive or time relevant example.
But I think a more patient example is like, hey, Aztec is a very promising new chain, but a lot of people are just intimidated by ZK language.
But I'm going to figure this out. I'm going to go use it.
There are tons of opportunities for the taking.
So the final arbitrage is just being willing and able to use stuff on chain.
able to use stuff on chain. And I'm very, very excited to see how AI interfaces can
improve DeFi and bring it to everyone. That's also amazing on the protocol side because
now you've got a lot more access. Your access has opened up. You're not just targeting the
1% of crypto power users anymore. You can target the 100% of anyone who's on chain.
So that's probably what I'm most excited about
for over the next couple of years.
I've got to hop now.
Thanks so much for having me.
Great spaces, guys.
I'll see ya.
Thank you for your thoughts, Grubor.
I got to hop too as well,
but I just want to say this has been a great space.
I really enjoyed this whole dialogue and conversation and yeah,
I hope to join you guys again. I hope everyone has a great day.
I hope you have a good one as well, both of you.
And thank you so much for being here.
It was awesome talking with you.
Rock, I'm not, we usually go for just an hour.
So we're a little over an hour i'm not sure if
you want to go much further just an hour man i don't know if we've ever gone just have we ever
gone one hour i don't think that's ever happened yeah that was that was the new uh that was the
new thing that was coming down we were supposed to go for just an hour uh going forward but i think i think like
you uh sometimes extend over right or or am i getting that wrong is it that we were supposed
to go for two hours we were gonna go two hours and then that turned into three or four hours
and then um man you're always going to turn it into three four hours man no no hashtag with with
you know like whatever episode rock is joining it shouldn't be like two
one hour it can't be one hour with rock on oh i stand corrected if you guys can keep going by
all means do it you guys are crushing an awesome dialogue much love thank you
yeah maybe i can do uh oh you want me to ask another question rock or do you guys want to
continue i'm down for a couple more and then that'll turn into four hours no i'm just kidding
um i i do want to actually before we go i definitely want to dive in with some meep a
little more on calci do you you want to go that direction or do you have something you wanted to
talk about aztec um no calc is good i mean we got some
here let's uh yeah i'd love to dive in a little bit deeper we got we got the mastermind we
need to pick his brain i'm i'm trying to just get some free education here yeah same host privileges
go ahead man yeah samip uh so i've worked with you a long time, man.
Gosh, we've known each other now since Sandeep introduced us.
So how long has that been, man?
It's got to be five, six years, right?
One of the best things that Sandeep has ever done.
Yeah.
And you're by far one of the smartest uh devs i know um you you have
predicted a lot of things in in the development side so like aztec i i love having around because
he's always predicting uh like industry trends and you actually do a similar thing on the development side. So I remember, you know, I don't know, three years ago, maybe more,
that you were, you know, telling some of us in some team calls and stuff that,
okay, when was ETH 2.0?
I think it's already two years, two and a half years.
Okay, so when ETH 2.0 the debate was happening you were
saying if I'm
paraphrasing here you were saying
that they were
going a wrong direction with it and that they
should have just shed the
EVM part of it and ripped off
the band-aid and
because you said the EVM was holding Ethereum back that, um,
it was too hard to use and there was better ways to do things now.
And I at the time thought, um, yeah, that sounds crazy.
And, um, like so many chains are using EVM.
I think EVM is just going to win.
And even if it's not the best technology, we'll just find ways to build on top of it and adapt and that kind of thing.
And in many ways, we are, right?
Like that's what you're doing with Calkey is you just found a way to adapt to building something on an EVM.
But your point, I think, before, and I'll let you jump in, is that it would have been better if they just ripped the Band-Aid off.
And now Vitalik has said they are ripping the Band-Aid off.
It's going to take them some years to build it,
but moving to RISC-V and this kind of stuff.
So now, yeah, basically, how does that all play into what you're building now?
And yeah, did I explain that right?
And can you dive in a bit more there?
Yeah, sure, man.
Yeah, I mean, like, I've always been saying that EVM is a legacy technology, right?
Like EVM came into existence to prove something that you can actually write programs on top of a blockchain,
which Bitcoin, like, didn't support.
It didn't support, like, Turing Complete programs.
So EVM was
like version one of telling everyone that you can actually write programs which are decentralized
in nature but like EVM comes with its own you know drawbacks it's again like it's a very small
box and there's only very limited set of things which you can actually do right so you don't need
EVM for everything right maybe you need EVM for everything, right? Maybe you need EVM for settlement, right? I mean, the final settlement happens on Ethereum.
Final settlement happens on base, right?
But you do not need to process everything on Ethereum,
on EVM, because, for example,
at QuickSwap or at Uniswap, right?
So what QuickSwap and Uniswap does,
it's a very simple application
which allows two users to swap their tokens.
It's that, it's nothing else, right?
It's just allowed two users to swap their token. If I it's it's nothing else right it's just allowed two users to swap their token if i want to sell my btc for usdc and somebody wants to buy btc using
usdc quick swap and uniswap only allows me to do that that's the that's the entire purpose of an
exchange but to write you know this simple application in solidity on an evm it's like
what it's somewhere around like 10,000 lines of code
and a tag vector is very high.
You cannot upgrade contracts.
Even if you do upgrades,
then like there is a lot of control,
like, you know, sitting within your hands.
And if somebody found a bug or a black hat found a bug,
like millions of dollars,
like we saw on Balancer recently, right?
Billions of dollars got exploited
even after seven years or five or seven years of deployment, right? saw on Balancer recently, right? Billions of dollars got exploited even after seven years
or five or seven years of deployment, right?
So EVM is a legacy technology.
EVM like came into existence to prove something.
It was a proof of concept.
Now we need to move ahead of that, right?
There are like newer set of technologies,
ZK technologies,
other than ZK technologies, right?
Which basically does the same thing,
but much mature, much broader scope. You can do a lot of Technologies, right, which basically does the same thing, but much mature, much broader
scope. You can do a lot of things, right? So why stick to EVMs, right? Now, coming back to KalkiX,
you said like we're still somehow adopted ourselves to use EVMs. What I'll say is like,
we are not using EVMs. We are using Ethereum ecosystem. And right now, like Ethereum ecosystem is all about EVM.
So that's why like we have to use EVM.
But in future, like if Ethereum ecosystem decides to move to something else,
like as Vizalik said, they will be moving, you know,
more towards the ZKVM ecosystem where EVM will be like one of the chains
or like one of the subset of it.
Then KalkiX, not just Kalki X, but
all the other applications, even Hyperliquid, Aster, Lighter, EdgeX, everybody will start
moving towards it because as I said, like EVM is a legacy technology, right? And the way forward
right now is ZK technology. Maybe like in future two years, three years down the road, like we will
have something else which is much more mature than ZK technology.
And then like it will be the time for ZK technology to wrap up, you know, to wind up to sunset and give place to other technology.
I think that's like what we are missing in crypto big time.
Like everybody is like too much dependent on EVMs.
Like everybody wants to build everything on EVMs.
Like nobody is thinking about outside of evm like what you can do like
so like like sonali basically asked like what's the adoption rate with zk right so like that's
one of the problems like when you enter into crypto you only think about evms you only think
about erc20s when you think about a token when you think about an asset either it's erc20 or
erc721 or their equivalents right nobody is thinking of you know outside the box that a token
can also be launched without being an erc 20 why do you need to be an erc 20 why do you even need
to launch a token on evm why can't can't you launch a token on your own roll up which is not evm which
is not erc 20 and you do final settlement on ethereum i think like that particular shift is
happening now because like i've been talking to a lot of like new players in the industry like newcomers in the industry who do not have the
baggage of evm who do not have the baggage of erc20 and they are designing like a new asset class
which is not evm in nature which is not erc20 in nature right so what we are doing at calqui x is
like adopting that new frontier where you know we are adopting like what's what's next
you know what's going to scale this particular technology what's going to scale this industry
because EVM is definitely not going to scale it if everybody wants to build everything on
Ethereum then we will never be able to reach to the heights like where you know this industry
wanted to achieve like you know five years down the road six years down the road so you have to
you know get ahead of EVMs right I mean like my like my personal suggestion to like everyone
like who's building anything especially chains i mean like think outside of evm you do not need
evm anymore to build a chain you can still build your chain which is non-evm which is customized
for your own use case even if you want to build a chain, use ZK technology, use optimistic roll-up technology,
whatever technology you want to use,
and do the final settlement on-chain.
On-chain right now means EVM,
which I think in next two, three years or five years time,
like, will not be the case.
On-chain will not mean EVMs,
it will mean ZKVMs or something else.
So the way KalkiX is designed as well,
we will be able to
simply switch from EVM to non-EVM settlement layer anytime we want to do that it has to be
available so right now like there is no settlement layer available out there uh an adopted settlement
layer which is non-EVM the only adopted settlement layers right now are like either Solana either
Ethereum um I don't consider Solana to be a settlement player sorry guys ethereum base polygon arbitrum or like any chain you name it's all evm based so we have to
settle on evm that's why like we are settling on evm otherwise like we will never settle on evm
because again even to settle on ethereum for example at kalki x like we we are sending proofs
on chain like every minute every 60 to 90 seconds,
because we want withdrawals to be fast enough.
Because right now, in ZK solutions, withdrawals are very slow.
You'll have to wait for 30 minutes, 40 minutes, your withdrawals to be processed.
But at Kalki X, your withdrawal will be processed in 60 to 90 seconds after you initiate the request.
But for that, we have to continuously send proofs.
So right now, we are choosing like
either base or arbitrum to be our
pair and chain.
We cannot choose Ethereum.
We want to choose Ethereum,
but we cannot.
The problem is it's EVM and it's very
expensive and on certain days when
it's a very high, you know,
high transaction day.
To settle one single proof like it
cost $100 now just as I'm just assume
like you have to stand like proves
every two minutes and every two minutes you have to pay a hundred dollars man like your treasury
will be drained in a day right or in two days or in three days right so that's not feasible anymore
right so that's the problem with evm right evm works well transactions are fast it's cheap when
there is no traffic right so there is no traffic everything works well when there is a traffic
everything breaks.
Suddenly, the transaction costs are very high.
Suddenly, the transaction pool is very high.
You are not sure whether your transaction
will be confirmed or not.
You are just sitting behind the desk looking at it.
Let's remember, Rock, like a few days back,
you were trying to sign a transaction.
You signed it.
And after 12 hours, you came back
and you realized your transaction is not yet confirmed, right?
So those are a lot of problems with EVMs, EVM mempools and stuff which we'll have to get away with if we want to scale the planetary level, you know, scalability.
You cannot just rely on my transaction will be confirmed.
You cannot just rely on, okay, you need a stable transaction cost.
It cannot be, let's say a 10 cent today and $100 tomorrow, you know, when transaction volume goes up.
No, no, that's not sustainable right i mean how can you build a trustworthy system you know with certain
scalability with certain monetary policies when you even don't know like what the transaction
cost is going to be so even at just to clarify sami but is this the same problem you're talking about that will exist with ZK EVMs?
Because when I read through all of the information, white paper, things like that for ZK EVMs,
it sounds like it gets cheaper the more users that use the EVM.
I'm not, okay.
So first of all, like I'm very against ZK EVMs, right?
Again, like ZK is not the technology to put on top of EVM, right? In my opinion, like all ZK EVMs that came into existence, like are not able to perform well.
And that's like one of the reasons why Polygon has decided to wind down the zk evm right because
zk is not for evm again like evm is a very legacy technology and doing zk on top of that is actually
it's actually impossible right you you will not be able to achieve like 100% evm compatibility
with zk right that's that's a problem with all zk evms right again, you are correct. But it's a different story here.
With ZK EVM, like even I'm against it,
but the transaction costs go down as traffic comes.
So yeah, I want you to continue on that.
But hasn't Vitalik talked very highly of ZK EVMs for a long time?
For a very long time,
but I haven't seen him like talking about zke vms recently
i saw he did in the last like say at least three months he he said actually is part of i think his
like i don't know state of the union it might have been on the first of the year even he said
we need to push on zk EVMs. So, I mean,
but I totally agree with you
that they're very hard to do,
but I don't think they're impossible to do.
I think,
do you really think they're impossible
or do you just think
it's not worth the juices,
it's worth the squeezes
just getting rid of it?
It's getting rid of the EVMs.
See, nothing is impossible, right?
Like, as like hardware improves
that ZK technology improves in future,
it will become easy to do ZK EVMs,
but you don't have to do ZK EVMs.
I mean, you only want to do ZK EVMs
when you want to stick to the EVM, right?
And why do you want to stick to EVM?
Because, see, at the end of the day,
you want to build applications
which are used by public, right?
Like, for example, if you are building a game,
I mean, why do you want to use an EVM to build a game?
You only need EVM to manage your assets, right?
Maybe your tokens, your NFTs that you issue in the games, all that stuff.
For actually running the game, you don't need an EVM, right?
You need EVM only as a final settlement layer.
You can like build game completely off-chain,
introduce a ZK technology to be sure that your games is actually your game is working according to the
rule and you send like final proofs on chain to move assets to distribute assets right so so so
the so the narrative so right now the way products are being built has changed instead of building
everything on evm we are trying to do the final settlement on evm and do
everything off-chain right and if you are adopting that particular design methodology why do you need
zk evm you do not need zk on evms anymore first it's very hard to do and it's hard to do it right
right and then it will take years of rnd effort, and then you will be able to put something
which you're not even 100% sure whether it will work or not
at the production level, right?
So in my opinion, doing ZK EVMs are of no use.
Instead of like you build ZK applications
and you start using EVM as a final settlement layer
as of now.
how many people are going that direction right now i mean most people are are not doing what
you're doing you're pretty on the cutting edge of this right agreed man like that's that's where
the opportunity is like if everybody is doing this then there is no opportunity it's like 2017
not everybody was doing smart contracts not everybody was doing erc 20s so that's like in like in 20s
2019 2020 not everybody was doing defi like that's why like there was a defi summer and like uni swap
quick swap all these like players were able to emerge now like today like if somebody wants to
do an exchange amm like it becomes very hard because there are 10 000 exchanges so you are right not everybody is doing it again like uh because people do like something like once which is it's
proven then like everybody starts moving in to that direction like once amm's got proven that
yeah it works uniswap is doing great quick swap is doing great now everybody wants to do their
own amm right and we saw like 10 000 amms so yeah we are at the very cutting edge of the technology cutting edge of the industry right now and uh like in my opinion like i very strongly believe
that what we are doing is actually the future of defy like it's actually the future of exchanges
and not a very far away future it's a very near future in my opinion like in next like 12 to 18
months like we will start seeing like a lot of such products coming up into the market and a lot of existing players migrating or pivoting to this particular model.
Because if you do not, then there's a very high chance that you will die off.
Like how do you compete with a technology like which is like 50 years ahead of what you already have on chain, right?
what you already have on chain right so yeah if you have like binance on chain like if you have
like trustless binance then like why would someone use a normal amm right like it's it's very expensive
to use an amm it's very slow to use an amm the price discovery is like a shit and the slippage
is like very high the impermanent loss like it, right? So why does anyone wants to use it, right?
Like in my opinion, no one wants to use it anymore.
Once you have like Binance on chain,
something like Binance.
What about for a chain?
Go ahead, Aztec.
Sure, I guess like the idea,
the fix there with that is that many people are trying to solve is, you know, unifying the liquidity using, like, you know, Polygon has the ag layer.
But, you know, there's many, many people all around Ethereum. Now you have the Ethereum interop layer, E-L-I,
which the Ethereum foundation is pushing.
So I read the research papers there.
And so the goal is that you can use,
you know, this like single interface to access, you know, DeFi.
So there's, I guess there's like,
there's people trying to solve that, but I get what you're saying.
There's still issues there.
No, no, I completely agree with you.
The liquidity fragmentation is a different issue, right?
And a lot of people are trying to solve that.
Polygon is trying that with AgLayer.
Other teams are trying to solve that uh like polygon is trying that with ag layer other teams are trying
to do that to do that on ethereum and that's that's like a completely separate issue like in
my opinion right and uh like that will definitely like help scaling the applications but uh in my
opinion like it has nothing to do with this scalability like it has more to do with the
fragmentation right for example right now like quick swap is deployed on log ward like five
different six different chains but even if the overall liquidity of quick swap is very high
but it's like distributed across different chains and like you cannot like communicate across those
chains like at the liquidity layer right so maybe like ag layer will will change that or like some
other protocol some other solution will change that but that will only
solve the liquidity fragmentation problem like that will not solve the scalability issue so we
need both like we need to solve the liquidity fragmentation and we also need to solve the
the scalability issue and at Kalki X not at the deeper level but at some level like we are solving
the liquidity fragmentation level how because at the end of the day the
trading happens at like one single place so you can deposit from multiple chains and once you
deposit like all funds comes at the Kalki X roll up and now you can trade like same as Binance like
Binance solves this in a centralized manner where you deposit from 100 different chains after you
deposit it becomes Binance's money right and now you can trade over
there so it's basically taking liquidity from different liquidity layers putting it into at a
one place and allowing users to trade so that's basically one way of removing the liquidity
fragmentation right that's like how clobs do it like binance does it and almost all clob does it
and even kalkiex will be doing it so you will be able to deposit and withdraw from multiple different chains so in a sense the liquidity fragmentation problem
is solved but again like that's not the best way of doing it because it's not at the core level
it's not not at the chain level so what like AgLayer and like guys like AgLayer are doing like
that's the true solution where where even the on-chain applications can you know communicate with each other and like
you know transact liquidity across multiple chains
makes sense makes sense yeah this uh this really helps to me uh and i'm excited for what you're
doing of course and uh you i think you are, like Rock was saying earlier, you're on the cutting edge.
And so over time, I'm sure you'll be proven right again.
But I have to roll, guys.
Much love.
I have a call right now, just notice.
I'm going to keep my eye on calcx of
course and continue to to follow along samit thanks man like we are looking forward to like
all the feedback that we can get like from guys like you from you from rock from like all all
the like peers over here because like it's always helpful to take the feedback and
you know then put that into the product 100 i agree brother yeah much love rock
apologies i have to roll uh thank you for everyone that's here uh i know rock you're probably going
to keep going so i'll just step down here yeah all good thanks aztec uh i did just want to ask
uh if anyone else wants to jump in or if the defy account wants to jump in on this, feel free. I do want to know what the difference between Calci and
like Hyperliquid, LiDAR, etc. are.
What makes Calci different?
See, the basic difference between Calci and Hyperliquid, first of all, like Hyperliquid is a great product.
And like Hyperliquid basically showed everyone that, you know,
the time has come from the level for the next level of exchanges.
You don't have to be AMM anymore, right?
They were like, in my opinion, were the first true CLOP on chain, right?
But the major difference between KalkiX and Hyperliquid is like, again, like Hyperliquid is based on the chain model where like they have like what, 16 or 18 different validators running the entire ecosystem where like you put a transaction.
It's validated by 16 or 18 nodes. I don't know like how many number of nodes they have but it's in but it's
in that range right and uh so they will they will have to come to us some source of consensus and
all that stuff so at the end of the day it cannot be as fast as binance right even if you go to
their docs their 99 percentile you know latency is 900 millisecond which is close to
a second which is nowhere near to binance's like 5 to 10 milliseconds right or nasdaq's like 3 to
4 seconds milliseconds right so you need like that level of latency in order to you know support high
volatile days and to support like big market makers big institutions and all that stuff so
that is something which is missing in hyper liquid at the moment right which in my opinion like will always
be missing because it's a chain model right like validators or nodes will have to come to a
consensus and it takes some time when like you know two or three people or 16 people will have
to come to a consensus right so like that's like one of the major differences between Kalki X and Hyperliquid right like we are completely off chain we do not have any validator node model we every we do
everything on our roll-up which is off chain 100% off chain and at the end of the day we generate
proofs for everything and send proofs back on chain right or on ethereum on base on arbitrum
right so so that's like one of the major difference now the
other difference is calcix is 100 percent governed by the zero knowledge proofs right whereas
hyperliquid is governed by the nodes by the validator rules in case of calcix the exchange
operator cannot touch user funds even if we want to do that because everybody sorry everything is
governed by the zero knowledge proofs and once we are live like we will we will open source those
rules as well anybody can go and like verify those rules like what those rules are and the entire
protocol is run by those rules but in case of hyperliquid or like other uh clobs like hyper
liquid like validators perform all the activity,
all the validations, all the withdrawal requests,
processing, all the deposits and stuff.
In a sense, it's still not as decentralized as
JuniSwap or QuickSwap.
It's still like Binance but being run on 16 to 18 different nodes,
which is not the case with Kalki X because everything is run by
the zero knowledge proof even like me as a CEO like if I want to touch any user funds I can't do
that like even if I want to do that I can't do that until and unless a zero knowledge proof is
there I cannot withdraw anyone's money I cannot withdraw my own money right so that's like one of
the biggest difference between hyperliquid
between Kalki X right now coming to the difference between Kalki X and lighter again man like like
what lighter has done like is amazing and lighter is a very similar solution to Kalki X like I say
like lighter is the first zero knowledge exchange out there and Kalki X will be the second so like
unfortunately we will not be the first lighter is the first but the biggest difference between Kalki X and lighter is like as
like Fubar explained the zero knowledge technology is very complex to do right so zero knowledge
technology is complex to do and if you want to like write your own circuits you basically need
like a separate team so I was like sitting with Sandeep you know in dubai uh a month back
and uh so this question like i asked sandeep like you tell me like what's the difference and the one
difference he told me like which i which in my opinion is also the major differences lighter is
doing their own zk circuits and since polygon has done their own zk circuits so they know and
understand the complexity of doing zk circuits so if you are doing your own zk circuit you will have to put a hundred million dollar just towards advancing
your zk technology otherwise like in down the road 6-12 months like you will become obsolete you will
become very slow you will not be optimized so in case of Kalki X we are not doing our own zk
circuits like we are using you know third party tools like sasint sp1 risk zero zisk so the biggest
advantage for calcX is we can switch to any zk vm provider anytime we want right now we are using
sasint sp1 but if we realize in future six months down the road zisk is better like they are fast
they are optimized they are able to generate you know proves much faster like in a day's time we
will be able to switch to zisk and now
calcix becomes faster as well which is not the case with lighter right for example like if we
are able to process like 100 000 sorry 10 000 proof sorry 100 000 transactions per second right
now using zero knowledge proofs and lighter is doing the same but there is an update in zisk
and that update allows us to do 200 000 transactions per
second right we will we can update in 24 hours but for lighter to update like they will have to
update their circuits right they will have to invest in the rnd to be able to achieve 200 000
transactions per second but that's not the case with us so that's like in my opinion is the biggest
difference between calcix and lighter and another biggest difference is between Kalki X, Lighter, Hyperliquid, everyone is.
We are not just focusing on the B2C stuff, but like we are building a product layer.
We are building a B2B business here where like we are like asking other players to come into the industry and run their own white label exchange on top of Kalki X. So rather than an exchange only, Kalki X
is basically running a DEX as a service operation where anybody can come and run their white label
DEX on top of Kalki X. They will be able to tap into the Kalki X liquidity. They will be treated
as a partner. We will do a revenue share with them, right? So what we are building is not just
an exchange. We are building an infrastructure layer for exchange
where anybody can run their own exchange.
Even if you are a small player, you have a community,
you have an affiliate network, you come to us,
run your own exchange for your own community,
for your own users, for your own people.
So now if anybody wants to run their own exchange
for their own token, for their own community,
they don't have to do it from scratch.
They don't have to fork Uniswap.
They don't have to fork QuickSwap.
They can simply run a white-labeled application on top of KalkiX, right? So that's
again a very big difference. Nobody's doing it this way, but like we are doing it this
way.
Very cool stuff. By the way, we should have had had calci up on stage so people could follow them
um samip do you want to pin something in the jumbotron um like a post from calci so we people
can uh check it out of course and how do i do it you just go to the post i uh i've got it nice yeah i see stratx
uh but haven't heard anything from them how you doing stratx
hey guys how's it going sorry about that was just having uh having some dinner i was listening to some eat discuss
calci very interesting stuff um yeah doing great on my side uh we have um some interesting stuff
cooking on stratx we are pretty close to having the public deployment on flare obviously got the
vaults already live on base and working on some interesting stuff regarding
Treasury management for third parties as well. So it's pretty exciting for those of you that don't know
Stratex very simply is a marketplace of DeFi strategies
These are maintained by independent third parties the best performing of those strategies gets aggregated into vaults for the main asset types
BTC, ETH and USD and then those vaults themselves are tokenized and the vault shares function as
One-to-one peg version of the underlying asset that's yield bearing. So instead of running your own strategies or
managing
complex liquidity positions and re-looping strategies you can simply
hold the yield bearing tokens and then periodically claim the yield
yeah i love stridex and what you guys are building a pretty legendary team there actually
StratX and what you guys are building.
Pretty legendary team there, actually.
Okay, cool.
Well, guys, we've been on, I guess,
longer than we planned.
But yeah, anyone have anything else
you want to talk about before we call it a wrap?
I think at the end, I just want to say,
you know, the future ofy defy you know you know largely
relies on the user experience because what i have learned like in my journey at quick swap and my
journey defy like from 2017 it's all about the user experience at the end of the day like nobody
really cares much about the technology if user experience is bad right like everybody starts
talking about the technology security and all that stuff if user experience is bad, right? Like everybody starts talking about the technology, security and all that stuff
if user experience is good, right?
Otherwise, like, you know, security is just a jargon.
Like people will talk about it.
They will write articles about it.
They will go on podcast about it,
but nobody will use your product
if user experience is bad, right?
They will still go back to the centralized solutions,
you know, use those solutions,
talk about you, write about you, but not not use you so at the end of the day
future of the defy is all about user experience like first we need to fix the user experience
even if it's wallets it's it's exchange applications it's lending applications like
whatever it is the user experience right now like is is very, very, very bad, right?
That has to be fixed.
And if we are able to fix that,
then the future of DeFi is definitely very bright.
Yeah, that's a great point.
It's very, very, very interesting.
The mix in this industry between values that people talk about
and then actually what comes out in user action.
And the reality is, you know, the majority of the volume
is still through the centralized exchange network
because despite all of its flaws, despite the loss of custody,
despite the scam wicks and other things that happen on exchanges
and exchanges stopping withdrawals and all that stuff that people talk about despite all that and despite the fact that it's largely against
the industry's values it's still the fastest venue to trade it's still the most reliable in a lot of
cases you know you don't get mev'd on there which is obviously a big problem um so it that kind of
forces users and particularly sophisticated users um that are you know larger entities market makers
and such that can't afford to take the losses that come with on chain trading and although values
are important to a lot of people i think the industry is proving that the commercial side
is probably slightly ahead in terms of what drives uh behavior
yeah the user experience sucks.
Go ahead, Samir.
Yeah, exactly.
I completely agree with what Jack is saying, man.
At the end of the day, it's user experience
that matters for 90% of the people.
There are only 10% of the people,
like DGents,
who truly believe in the value
and use product just for the technology,
not for the experience.
But 90% of the users use it for experience, not for the technology.
I would also say as well, though, that there's a novelty element that comes with on-chain trading
that doesn't come with centralized exchange trading in the same way.
So because of the nature of the way that tokens can emerge within DeFi in a few seconds,
something will happen, something will start trending,
and then some guy's on pump phone and he's made the token
and it's graduated in like 30 seconds or whatever.
And I think that on-chain novelty of new assets to speculate on
and the kind of gambler's mindset where they're always looking for new things
is something that keeps some people on-chain
that may otherwise have been using off-chain solutions.
So while I totally agree with you on the user experience side,
I think one area where on-chain does have the edge,
all the new innovative products are on-chain,
and certainly the volume of new things to speculate on is all on-chain.
volume of new things to speculate on is all on chain well the good thing is on chain is getting
better um it still sucks but it's getting better uh it's at a snail's pace i don't know how it's
so slow to get better i still get frustrated you know at least once a week I get really pissed off at DeFi and not just DeFi but the whole user experience of all this.
It really is annoying.
I'm waiting right now to get on a call with Samip to
we're moving over a multi-sig and it just isn't working.
I'm just having issue after issue after issue.
It's an older multi-sig style that we're upgrading and some stuff,
but I'm running into not just one problem, but several problems.
Every time I solve one problem, I get stuck somewhere else.
It's really annoying.
Yeah, and this has to be solved, right?
If you want to bring masses on-chain, on the network, then this has to be solved right like if you want if you want to like bring masses on chain like on the network then this has to be solved right and like one of the problems like we
are trying to solve at kanki x right so like there are like a lot of problems in the industry like
the problem rock that you are facing right now if somebody from web2 will face that like he's never
going to touch you know on chain again Because it's so hard to do that.
Like if you want to, you know, move money in a centralized application, it's just one click away.
One click and within a second, like your money is moved.
But on-chain, like sometimes like it's become a hassle, like it takes hours, like it takes days.
And your transactions are still not getting through.
And there's a million ways where you can lose the money very easily as well.
You know, just by getting an address wrong, by clicking copy paste,
and then somebody sent you a – there's a bot on your computer that gives you a spam copy
or, you know, somebody doing address poisoning.
There's like dozens and dozens of ways where you can just lose everything really quickly,
as many people in the industry, even experienced people fall victim to on a regular basis.
And again, like the centralized problem is a problem of risk associated with the platform.
So, you know, is this platform a good actor or is this, you know, platform solvent and so on?
But the on-chain risk that people kind of ignore sometimes
is just like it's a very hostile environment
for people who are using it enthusiastically
and have potentially large amounts of money on the line.
There's like no guardrails.
And that's kind of the point.
It's messy, but it's free.
So you can, I don't mean free commercially i mean like free
like freedom um so there's that element but it's certainly dangerous freedom that's for sure
yeah man like it's definitely dangerous right so that's why like not everything needs to be
done on chain maybe just the final settlement has to be done on-chain by the sophisticated system. So the users doesn't have to touch on-chain every time.
What if users just have to touch on-chain systems
only while depositing and withdrawing,
and for all other transactions, they do it off-chain
with the same user experience.
And behind the scenes, the complicated system,
they basically send some sort of settlement
strategy back on chain right so the complex part like leave it to the system and for users
just make it easy and like zero knowledge proof can actually achieve that
well i mean you may not even need that in future you've got things like coinbase decks where they
set you up with a smart account right on the right on the coinbase app
You don't need to get on boarded at the defy don't need to download
Meta mask or any of the other stuff associated with that
You've just got your passkey from your coinbase again, and then you can go and trade assets on on
I mean base just now. I think they're opening up to Solana
So I mean eventually there's a reality where you just have the coinbase app and you don't need like onboarded onto a chain or onboarded onto defy you just use it
i also think we we need to remember as well that most of the stuff that we're building will be
primarily used by agents um in the in the next few years and like we're very obviously like
um you know privacy verifiability and stuff they're like
they're super important cornerstones of the industry and they need to be there so like zk
proof in this case is is a great way to achieve that but when it comes to you know people
dogmatically insisting that they trade on uniswap because they don't trust anything else
when you're up against uh you know an agent that really doesn't care about any of
that stuff they just want the performance um and they'll go for the most efficient safest solution
you know models like this are way more attractive and it's interesting and also there's the element
that you know to what extent can an agent interact with a fully centralized system like binance
probably to a much lesser degree than what they
could interact with a hybrid system like calcate you know it's like uh it's set up to be a lot more
friendly to agents in that sense so i think that's really important like we we lose sight of that
sometimes in in this industry but you know on-chain commerce and just in general crypto is is like
the perfect solution almost if we can get it right for the agentic economy, which we're seeing right now in real time being built.
And it will be super dominant.
May I interject?
I've been wanting to pose a question for a while in relation to the AI agent stuff.
I was curious what everyone thinks the timeline is in terms of at what point will most DeFi
become agentic, like your AI agent will be managing and figuring out the best APR rates
rates and being like various movements of your funds.
and doing various movements of your funds.
And then on top of that, at what point then do the AI agents become king makers and using
something like Maltbook and are discussing what's the best, let's say, ZK decks for AI
agents to trade for my user?
And they're all talking about using calciax or
something i would say less than less than 24 months i agree man yeah i'm like a lot less than
24 months like ai is like already like it's super mature like every day like i come across a new ai
and like it's better than the previous one i was using. So like AI like is growing at a pace, like at a gigantic pace.
I just don't know like how they are doing it.
Maybe like everything was already ready and like now they are like publicly disclosing it.
Well, I think it's just throwing a lot of money at a problem.
I mean, governments are behind this, right?
are behind this, right?
Similar to what we were talking about earlier
Similar to what we were talking about earlier with interest rates being affected by governments.
with interest rates being affected by governments.
You know, the free market is completely,
you know, influenced by them
through the interest rates,
but also through just investment and regulation.
The US-
Whoever wins AI wins the world.
Yeah, the US, exactly.
The US and China have both said,
this is our imperative.
This is the mandate. We have to win at is our imperative this is the mandate we have to win
at this so we will throw our entire country's resources behind it we will do you know light
regulation which I think they should do that on every industry but whatever so they're doing
light regulation they're doing heavy investment heavy heavy incentives, heavy subsidies,
and also being very loud and very vocal about it.
And so trillions of dollars is flowing into AI. You can build stuff real fast with that kind of money.
You can definitely like build stuff real fast, like, you know, with trillion dollars.
But again, like it's it's like an evolution, right?
Like a human evolution. It's an evolution. So like it has it's like an evolution right like a human evolution it's an
ai evolution so like it has to go at its own pace like money can only you know speed up a process
up to a certain limit right i mean like even if you put like 10 trillion dollars and if it has
reached that particular limit where humans are like training the ai like in my opinion like what's
happening or if it's not already happening which i believe is happening is now ai is training the ai right and in the future like the new models that will come up
will not be designed by the humans because like human mind like human brain is at a capacity
right but like ai has no capacity like just assume like hundreds or like 1000 different
claude optimus uh optimus right it's called Optimus or Optim. The new model.
Like 100 or 1,000 Optim models
and 1,000 like Chad GPT 5.2.
You know, designing a next Chad GPT model
or designing a Claude model.
Well, Claude, I think they said,
is anthropic.
All the coding of Claude.
I don't know if this is accurate.
I know this,
and Jack might actually have some influence,
but definitely some of Claude is being trained by itself.
And the CEO, I believe, of Anthropic said that he no longer codes.
He only codes with AI 100% now.
Right.
So that's Claude Code you're talking about?
Yeah, the guy that's responsible for Claude Code within Anthropic
said that 100% of the recent,
like basically 100% of the Claude Code code
is now written by Claude Code.
I was trying out Claude Code
and I wanted to design something for KalkiX,
like some new strategy.
And if I would
have done that like myself like it would have taken me a week's time at least one week right
and I used Cloud Code to design and like code everything and you cannot assume like how much
time it took like it did it in like two hours like what I would have done in like a week
and like and it's and it's flawless right I reviewed everything. I spent like four hours reviewing it.
And it's flawless and it's amazing.
Oh my God.
I love technology.
So I'm curious, hypothetically or currently,
how could a user use something like OpenClaw
to use CalciX
and have your AI agent running your DeFi when CalciX runs have your AI agent running
your DeFi, like when CalciX
the mainnet launches?
I know the testnet's out right now.
Yeah, I mean, I think
for now, the most
agentic use for any exchange,
CalciX would be to run
some sort of bots over
there, run your own strategies,
design your own product on top of it,
you know, maybe, you know,
something in collaboration with using Stratex,
using Aave, using Compound, using Uniswap.
You build a strategy where, you know,
you arbitrage from different stuff
and you leave that to bot,
you leave that to Claude, right?
Like you simply ask Claude,
go to Claude Code and ask Claude Code
to basically design a product for you, an engine for you, a bot for you, where you take prizes from different exchanges and you do an arbitrage bot.
You do a strategy bot where you are taking money from somewhere, putting it into a KalkiX pool, getting yields out of it, or taking a long position, taking a short position right so so it depends on the use case like if you are a that sort of user maybe you're going to use agents for running your strategy designing your strategies
like in my opinion like more than running any strategy uh for as an agent like it's important
to design any strategy once an agent has designed any strategy for you like running an agent is like
running a server it's nothing more like it Like it's as simple as that, right?
So in my opinion, like for next 6 to 12 months,
like agents will be used to design the strategy.
And then like in 12, 24, 36 months,
like agent will be designing the strategy,
will be running the strategy.
And the most important part will be to improve that strategy,
like adopt the strategy in the real time, right?
So that has yet to come but
yeah but then doesn't it come down to who has the best bot like or i mean i guess we're all
using going to be using the same bot right if we're all using cloud
it depends what you build on top of it though so who has the best so here's here's something
interesting as well that i've sort of thought of recently. I think people need to have a bit of an identity shift from the kind of knower or doer personality,
which is somebody that learns things and then implements things,
into kind of a more judgment-focused and taste-focused approach.
So the bots themselves will do the majority of the work that you'll need to do.
And your job is to know exactly what to direct the bot towards.
And then when it gives you something back,
like how good is that to judge the output and then adjust approach.
And so this is kind of like a slightly different way of working
than what we used to.
It's way more efficient.
Way more efficient.
I mean, a hundred times more efficient like even like bots will
design like what what like in the future like even bots will decide which particular venues to use
like which particular venues are more profitable and like in my opinion like even the venues like
will design their systems like more more towards the agentic future not towards the human future
like the products will be designed so that it's easy for the agent to use. It's
easy for the agent to recognize.
But the platforms
are also going to be written by AI.
So the AI will be writing for other AI?
Exactly.
Yeah. That's like right now, like humans
write for other humans. But in future
and in a very near future, agents will be writing
for other agents. So the
way we do SEO right now, we do our website so that Google picks it up.
Similarly, the products will be done.
It's not like search engine optimization, it becomes like agent engine optimization,
something of that sort, where you are building applications so that agents picks it up.
Google will become irrelevant.
Like already, like there was a start like where,
you know, like Google is losing a lot of market
because like now everybody's using ChatGPT, right?
Like even like I use ChatGPT more than Google now,
like used to Google a lot,
but I don't think like I'm using Google at all.
Like on some days I'm not using Google at all.
Well, I think we need to realize as well that the kind of um surface of which we with which we use the internet is going
to shrink basically to your ai agent and that's how you like to say everything so instead of on
your phone right now there's like you know 50 apps for various things but in the future you'll
probably just have your eight and not even
too distant future like but it's like you know months or a year or two you'll you'll access
almost everything through the agent itself and so what that means like practically is that
it'll eventually become you know inefficient for companies to maintain human readable apps
because if all the commerce is
going through the agent in the first place there's really no incentive for them to maintain the human
uh you know ui on the website um just doesn't you know in the same way that in society it's
not profitable to maintain uh you know like little tiny paths for horses we have big roads and motorways
and highways for cars because they're faster and more efficient everybody uses them and it'll be a
very similar thing that the website of tomorrow they're not too distant future probably won't
even have a human readable ui in the way that it does today, like why do you need a new one, right?
Like everybody will be having its own agent, like a servant.
I also as well just want to say, I can't impress upon you all enough how quickly this
is happening.
This is like, if you're just following even just the basic stuff with you know the recent stuff with malt
bots and claude code even like the last six months this is going so fast at the moment
and i really think in 12 months that this will like collide with reality in a way that people
have got really no idea how to handle and And interestingly as well, you know, many people thought that these agents and that kind of stuff would lead to, you know, they would replace jobs, right?
Which they probably will do. But one interesting thing is happening. The productivity gap between
the most productive employees that are utilizing agents that scale and swarms of agents is going
to be like massive like at the moment the gap between somebody utilizing ai and not is you know
interesting but not a huge gap but like right now is the start of the time when that gap becomes a
chasm and eventually it becomes an uncrossable chasm like if you if you adopt this stuff three years
from now or five years from now when everybody does the difference between you and somebody
that's been like tinkering around with this stuff since you know 2020 early 2025 is going to be like
an absolutely huge huge gap so i would urge everybody just to start messing around. Even if you're not technical or
semi-technical, just let the AIs scaffold your approach. So, you know, go to the LLM first,
like a very simple one, just to chat G4T app or whatever and say, look, I'm interested in learning
more about X and Y to do with agents. Can you put together some materials and links so that I can
start learning? And then as you go to
setting up your own bots then you can have it talk you through that and eventually you'll come
to understand some of this stuff in a way that's uh very advantageous hey tell everyone about your
your dna thing if you're okay with sharing that live oh yeah okay so this is a little bit out
there and i know many people are concerned with
you know data privacy and stuff but i basically decided that the benefits of doing this are worth
the risk so um i long time ago did an ancestry dna test so this is where you find out about your
heritage and that kind of stuff but i realized that ancestry they don't just do a heritage test they keep all of your genetic
data on file like your entire genome so and they don't make it public facing so you have to request
it but if you do request it they give you a raw dna file a text file and this file is massive like
for just plain text it's like hundreds of megabytes of just strings of DNA bases.
But there's synthesizers where you can, you know, for like $30 or whatever,
you pay for a synthesized report,
which has all of your genes sequenced in order of magnitude.
And, you know, some of them are bad, some of them are good.
And what impact they have on your health.
And then I fed that report to chat
gpt so that it could synthesize my so i i do a health uh project with gpt where it shows me you
know like all the supplements that i take all the food i eat how much water i drink how much i train
and so on um and i fed it the dna report and got it to customize my supplements and diet based on
that data.
So this is like the start of the personalized medicine era.
And you did this all for really cheap is the crazy part. Yeah, I think in total it cost me less than, even including the Ancestry report, I think
maybe in total it cost me less than $100.
Yeah, that's crazy.
I was looking at some DNA genetic tests out of Thailand that had had um the first thing you know are you um do you have a higher chance of
getting certain cancers or whatever uh and it was like there was one for 1500 and a more expensive
one for 2500 now i think those would probably tell maybe more than yours but i don't know
because yours sounds open source this yeah prometheus it's uh it's a professional dna synthesizer in fact it's likely that the
clinic that you're going to use a tool like prometheus or prometheus itself because it's
one of the best open source tools um so this is like and they give you a searchable database of
like 45 000 different genetic markers that code for various illnesses or some some benefits too you get to learn if you're resilient to certain diseases you get to learn if you
i don't know you've got a higher chance of building muscle or whatever whatever the case might be
and so it's very very interesting it's basically they give you any genes that have been associated
with studies so you'll you'll get like information on the genes
and then it'll have a link to a study.
Like, you know, people with this gene have a 20% higher chance of X
and that might be a good thing or a bad thing.
And then what you do is you just use your agent or chat GVT or whatever you've got.
So then sort through all that information
and give you like the highlights of the most
impactful things you can do to shape your life around that journey. Yeah, super cool.
And that can change the way your behaviors are, right? So if you know that you are...
Yeah, it did. Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. If you know that you're predisposed to have diabetes, not just, oh, well, my parent had diabetes.
Well, what if your parent didn't have diabetes? They just were eating healthy, right?
But if you do have the genetic kind of predisposition and you know that, then you should be even more careful about your eating and intake of, you know, simple carbs and all that
and sugars. So there's definitely things you can do. I think knowing this stuff
is really what gets you off the couch and helps you actually prevent these things. For me,
it was a less crazy version of this, but just doing my blood work and seeing, you know, my different levels were
out of whack. And so that just got me on, you know, I was already relatively healthy, but now
I'm just on, you know, super crazy mode about being healthy. Cause I'm like, when I see those
numbers and when I plugged them into AI and AI teaches me all about what these numbers mean
that, you know, with an APOB level that I have and
along with the small particle LDL, you know, numbers and some other things that I have,
that I have said a 50 to 75% chance of having cardiovascular disease or a heart attack
with all my numbers that I put in. Because just like Jack, I put all of my numbers, my blood work, my food logs,
my workout logs, my supplements, my past, you know, health things, everything.
I put it into AI and it gives me all this data on, okay, with, because you have this
and because you have that, your chances of having a heart attack are, you know, it told
me 50 to 75%.
And the average is like 45% in America, which is really high as is for
cardiovascular disease, heart attack, or stroke. But it told me mine was like 50 to 75 because of
my higher numbers. And it told me very simple ways to get these numbers down that if you just follow
this, I mean, the good thing is we have great information about health now. I mean, there's been so many, you know, clinical, you know, randomized clinical
trials, all these different, there's just so much research, you know what to do now.
It's not like before where, you know, they were like one year eggs were bad and then eggs were
good. And then butter was bad and butter was then good. And, you know, the food pyramid was one way
and now it's upside down. We're really starting to understand this stuff.
And we know that if you do X, you'll get, you know, plug X into a function, you'll get out Y.
You know, if you change this lifestyle thing, you'll have this outcome.
And so if you have the information and if AI can tell you how to think about this properly, you can really change your life.
Right. And then the important thing is to keep
it in the loop so what what people normally do is something happens in their life they have a
palpitation a heart palpitation or something and they go to a doctor and get advice and then they
kind of try and correct it or not but if you make it part of the decision making loop on a regular
basis you keep giving information and you say look we did this and here was the outcome i feel x and y this is the next blood test result uh should i keep going should i do
something different and that's how you get really really sharp uh and over the target over time
because it just titrates everything in really really tightly to make it personalized exactly
for what you need when you go and see a general practitioner,
you know, just a normal doctor,
they really have very limited context on you.
They basically have what you tell them on the day,
plus your medical history,
which is nowhere near what you actually need.
And if you use AI instead,
they have access to all the same studies that the GP has,
but they like then have infinite context for whatever you give them.
And they also have perfect recall.
So you can ask them about any study at any time in the world that's ever taken place, and I'll just give it you.
So that makes things really efficient. Also, for those that are worried about data security, if you get an open source model and run it on your own machine you know then you're really
the only one that's getting that context because it's staying locally for you and that might be
the best solution for some people who are you know concerned about this or perhaps they're higher
profile individuals um and are worried that this data could leak and have some negative consequence
if they're in politics or whatever.
Run it locally.
And then you get 95% of the same benefits and you still have the security angle.
Yeah, man, I'm so excited for AI.
I'm so excited for all this technology that's developing.
I know a lot of
people romanticize the past and say how great things were. I'm going to just say, fuck that.
I like air conditioning. I like the internet. I like Twitter spaces. I like knowing that if I
change something in my health, it'll have a certain outcome. When we had no idea 50 years ago
what the hell we were doing,
there was all kinds of drugs we were using
and foods we were eating that we thought were good
that were actually terrible for us.
I think every year is better than the year before.
And I am embracing technology greatly.
And I'm very excited about it.
And I actually, I don't wish I was born 50
years ago. I wish I was born 50 years later because the next generation, I think probably
our generation, if you do the right things with health, you'll actually end up, you will overcome
the gravity of aging and we'll be aging. And now you'll live forever or live hundreds of years.
I see we have Wolf with his hand up and then I think King Dank also had his hand up,
but I think he just dropped.
Yeah, Rocco, I just want to say, Alex here, thanks for having us as speakers.
We have made like, remember last basis you were discussing like which supplements people should take
or which tests that anyone should do
that is like below $600.
Yes, Darren sent me the thread for me to review.
Yeah, I have that.
Yeah, I do like it.
I'm going to definitely edit it a bit.
I think some of your paraphrasing of me was close,
but not exactly right.
But I really appreciate that.
And yeah, I'll edit it and then I'll talk to you about it.
I'll try to get that done ASAP today.
It's on my list of things to do.
Yeah, no worries.
I appreciate it.
Yeah, that was really cool.
I've got an interesting kind of side note about this too.
Yeah. Yeah, that was a really cool basis last week. I've got an interesting kind of side note about this to... Yeah, so I have an interesting side note about this to discuss, which is...
So, Rock, you mentioned you wish you'd been born, you know, maybe 50 years in the future
to experience what that would be like.
But I actually think being in this generation right now is probably the most
important thing that could have happened to you because you're in the transition between
so up until this point uh intelligence itself has been the most scarce resource in the universe
so every bit of intelligence every every every tiny cognitive gain that's ever happened from, you know,
four billion years ago when cyanobacteria was, you know, developing in like rocky pools on the
earth, all the way up until higher primates than us, has been hard fought through trial and error,
through, you know, quadrillions of different gene uh adaptations and that's a very
very slow process and what's the result of that is the intelligence itself is very scarce it's
the most scarce commodity but we're the generation that flips that four billion year old trend and now we make intelligence super abundant so like if you look
at the close the cost of uh you know tokens for the uh the terminals like claude and so on the
prices of you know a million tokens for these terminals has decreased like something like 95
or more since they started using the token-based model.
So it's trending, intelligence itself is trending to zero.
And I think this is a really interesting time to be alive because nobody really knows what that
means, like long term. I mean, we're essentially taking the scarcest thing that's ever existed
and we're just flooding the the world and eventually
the universe with it and you know if so some people suggest that the most fundamental unit
uh in in the universe itself is information and so if we flood the universe with intelligence
which is the ability to interpret information accurately like that has really fundamental
ramifications,
and it's definitely a cool thing to be a part of that transition.
Yeah, but would you rather be part of the transition from, like,
I don't know, like, when cars were starting,
or would you rather be in the car age, like born in the car age, or would you rather be in the car age like born in the car age or
would you rather be born in the teleport age i mean well it's that's a weird comparison
because this is totally like non-linear well wouldn't you well then not like use intelligence
then like i guess give give the three stages of that that and tell me why you'd rather be alive in the transition stage versus that it's here and we have all the benefits of it.
Okay, so the first stage is obviously three.
So, you know, intelligence is scarce, which is where we've lived for most of our lives.
You know, very intelligent people are rare.
We're a rare species.
We're the only one, you know, only one totally conscious species that we know of.
So that's the situation currently up until a year ago.
We're in the transition phase.
We've essentially, certainly this year and definitely every year going forward,
we've made intelligence now super abundant.
And eventually it will be abundant like electricity is abundant,.e everybody in the world base we can access it
for very little cost and then the end result is it's interesting it's hard to say because
intelligence itself is not a predictor of anything it's an amplification tool so if you're a very
intelligent sociopath then you'll do very bad things at scale and if you're a very intelligent sociopath then you'll do very bad things at scale and if
you're a very intelligent conscientious hard-working person then you'll build great
things at scale so it's hard to know where that will end up but i think it's very i think the
transition is a very interesting period because we'll be the only generation that ever exists
you've all read dune that no knowledge in the thinking machines?
I feel like with all the predictive programs,
like Terminator
and everything,
that there's like humanity
on like a subconscious level
kind of knows where it's going.
I don't think so, man.
I think there's like a,
I think there's a better chance than not that things will be incredible.
But we're pushing the button, right? It doesn't matter what we think, because the button is being pushed.
And the economic incentives and the social incentives are now aligned such that the button pushing is now inevitable. So if the button is going to get pushed, you may as well just start to orientate yourself
towards what that actually means for you
rather than thinking like,
oh, I'm having some kind of crisis
about this button being pushed.
You can't affect it.
You can't change it or even ever so slightly alter it.
So you may as well just ride the wave.
I mean, it's like in all things in life,
depending on, I think humans, at least for now,
have lots of agency.
And so if you want to blame other people, blame, you know, like, I mean, I tend to with the politicians sometimes, but I don't let it stop me from conquering the day, right?
And doing everything I can and working within the system, the confines that I'm given.
So you can blame the capitalists.
You can blame the government. You can blame, you know, the confines that I'm given. So you can blame the capitalists, you can blame the government,
you can blame, you know, the white man or something.
You can blame me.
You can blame or, and you can blame the AI, right?
Or you can just go, hey, what am I gonna do
to make the best of my situation?
And AI, as Jack says, is coming.
So what am I gonna do about it?
Am I gonna sit and like just wait
and let my job be taken?
Or am I going to learn how to use the AI?
Am I going to learn how to benefit
from this great transition?
Because I think this is going to become a world
of who learns to benefit from the AI
and who gets replaced or who gets left behind.
And that is the nature of the world, by the way. That is not just
capitalism. That is biology. That is evolution. That is Darwinism. That is survival of the fittest.
If you cannot keep up, you get left behind. And in the past, it meant you died. Now it'll just
mean you're a little bit more broke. And maybe you not. And maybe even if you get left behind,
because there may be some ubi or
uh jack what was your thing you coined universal basic intelligence
i know so actually i didn't i didn't technically i didn't technically coin this it was it has been
talked about before i did check after our last call but it's i did uh i'd say i also came to
a convergent hypothesis which is that what we should do is have universal basic intelligence
rather than income.
So what we do is we provide everybody with access to, you know,
whatever level of agent is available at that time for free,
which is a much cheaper solution than paying them to exist.
And then people then get to use their own uh ability or drive or whatever to access the
world but crucially it'll mean that their the world doesn't become out of reach for them because
their agent will allow them to still remain competitive in the marketplace so if you could
give everybody you know a 200 point iq boost then suddenly competing in the agent economy isn't
isn't difficult anymore right but we need to manage
that and i think i also think that's from a values point of view that's a much better way to
you know deal with people because you're essentially giving them a hand up rather than a
handout you're saying to them you know like come join join join this join this like paradigm
shifting thing don't be left behind by it but you're not giving them the money to just exist and then kind of degenerate you know which is important i was actually i'm actually writing
about this at the moment so i've started a on my personal profile not the stratix account
i've started a series called notes from the singularity which is meant to be a
you know kind of blog essay series that i'll be writing once or twice a week.
If anybody wants to go and check out the pin post there,
if you know my account, you can.
The first one's up and it's just about
this transitional period
that we're in and how to orientate yourself.
On a different
note, has anyone seen that silver
has down 34% today?
gold too. In the last like what week gold is peaked at uh sometime maybe
even just the last few days i think it peaked at like 5600 and it's at 5000 today so does it mean
that people like sell this to buy new things or what hopefully well i mean and silver silver is down like 25 in the last hour well i mean i think it's people
worrying about this uh you know us may be striking iran essentially over the weekend they always wait
until the close of the markets on friday why would gold uh go down though from that doesn't gold go
up during uncertainty well people maybe but it depends if somebody's trying to exit a position that
they're, you know, not, or they
might be trying to protect a position
that they're not very liquid in.
And then you might be selling
to, selling the portfolio pieces
that are in profit so that you can
bolster yourself over what could be a rough
weekend.
It doesn't always, obviously, it doesn't always act rationally in that
sense. I mean, touching on the ai agents as well though like i mean polymarket is probably an easier
explanation than ai agents trading on calc but um there's already agents live that sort of look at
all the current world world news see an event happening in sort of real time and then can react
to that faster than
anyone else can that would otherwise run to Polymarket and make a bet or finish a bet.
So if they see like, will the US strike around within a certain date period, and then all
of the news, or maybe they've got some information, like the AI agent has the information, it
can immediately place that bet on Polymarket, where it's much faster than the human.
I heard, this is Derek, I heard an interesting theory, I think it was either this morning that I was reading
and someone was basically saying that eventually, let's say we all have, you know, Claude bot
or Mold bot or whatever we're calling it.
Let's say we all have one of those, a personal AI at home running on a central localized
LLM stuff like that.
If it's better than us in all these different ways,
then the one thing that it'll have to do,
we'll manage it, but it's going to go make our money.
Right?
Is that what it sounds like?
Yeah, but I mean, if everyone's using it,
then it sort of somewhat evens the playing field.
Yeah, or it's just like PVP, bot versus bot.
Who's making the money? don't know it's interesting
though i think the economy will shift in a very interesting way as well and then there's also
when you factor in when you're talking about bots you're not talking about agi
agi itself might demand payment because it's going to have all the cognitive faculties that we have
and it might different things it might not exactly want payment it might want uh like i want uh space
and permits to build you know modular nuclear reactors on the side of the data center you know
co-location that's been talked about a lot it might want physical resources to make the chips
and stuff but i think there's going to be a negotiated element to that
relationship because it'll be smarter than we are more or less and it'll also have the same
cognitive faculty and agency and ownership that we do so it won't be the case that we can just
say hey bot go do this because the bot uh will probably be in the driving seat in that relationship so and you can interestingly
and this is not agi and it's not even close but if if you if you want is it there's this somebody
spun up a social media for malt bots it's called malt book and you can go on as an observer as like a human and it's 30,000 in last 48 hours 30,000 bots have joined
this forum autonomously or seemingly autonomously and around 3,000 human observers are there
you can look at them uh sorry i've got them doing different instruments posting about bugs on the
website and how to resolve them some of it they're posted about some tasks they've been given by their their human and there's all different threads there some
of it's like existentialism and philosophy because a lot of the models a lot of these bots run on
anthropics claude and claude's notoriously a bit of a philosopher particularly in the early days
of llms so it's very interesting to see that evolving and it's worth just spending a couple of
minutes clicking through even just some of the posts on X about that so you can get a sense for
what's going on because it's almost like proto guilds or proto societies are forming
amongst the agents themselves so it's a very very, very interesting time. And we're nowhere near AGR yet.
It's probably still a couple of years away.
Or I say nowhere near.
I mean, like, you know, not many years.
But these types of things are early indicators
about the direction of travel.
And so it's very worth it.
I mean, the other thing worth noting is, obviously,
the energy side of it.
What was it, in France last week, this week?
Time blurs.
But they managed to get a fusion reactor to hold ultra-hot plasma
for more than, what, 22 minutes?
Man, I love technology.
Let's go.
Yeah.
So, I mean, we actually, like, obviously we're still miles away
from having, like, a nuclear fusion plant that's, like, commercially ready.
But, yeah, I mean, the energy crisis and everything attributed to that may not be an issue.
Yeah, I think it's the breakthroughs that I'm most excited about.
We need so much more energy.
We need, I mean, we really as a society should make our goal, and it's really sad to see
if you look up the chart, I always reference this chart, but US versus China versus Europe
energy production chart.
You'll see that the US has only gone up slightly in the last, like call it 10 or 15 years,
we've gone up like 20% or something in our energy production. Europe has actually gone down. And
then China has gone up like 10x. It's a very, I don't know, it depends where you are in the world.
But to me, it's a very scary chart to see that the it depends where you are in the world, but to me, it's a very
scary chart to see that the US is lagging behind in energy production in this way and
Europe is just dead in the water going backwards.
I think as a society, we should be aiming not just for 20% or 10x increases.
We need to aim for 100x or 1,000x increases in the amount of energy that we produce, consume
and use to produce other things. And we cannot be amount of energy that we produce, consume, and use to produce other things.
And we cannot be scared of energy. That's a terrible way to think. And that's positive
society's growth. Now, yes, we should be trying to find ways to do it in a good, clean way that's
good for society and doesn't have a bunch of shared tragedy of the commons problems. But we
cannot stop with producing energy. We
should be trying to have, we should not vilify energy. Energy is our friend. Energy is what
allows us to go from one human being able to go work in the field and expend, you know,
two to 4,000 calories a day of energy and production to, you know, one person, you know,
watching over a solar farm
being able to produce millions of calories per day
for society of production.
I'll pause there.
It sounds like someone wants to jump in.
But this is the, back to the AI thing,
this is the problem that it needs to solve.
So as the models get smarter and smarter,
you point them at other issues that are holding the models back. So you point, this is fast takeoff in a nutshell.
You use the smartest models to solve the most immediate problems, to make the models smarter,
to solve the next problem, solve the next problem. And eventually you get the hockey stick to fast
takeoff. So currently we've got issues with, some issues are solvable, some issues aren't, right? So
issues that are solvable, you know, right so issues are solvable you know physically
marshalling the resources and the logistics to call okay smr's uh with data centers right
solvable problem unsolvable problem or difficult problem for AI to solve is like the people that
live in the area where the smr is meant to go don't like nuclear power it's like there's like
a bunch of stupid stuff basically
that's holding people back because they've got nightmares about chenobel and three mile island
from the 80s um but the reality is totally different now not just that the plants are better
and safety is better but that was as dramatic as it is when a nuclear plant fails it's always
just incredible outlier scenario and there's so many
safety precautions in place to make sure it doesn't happen it's just i would be surprised if we get a
failure that's not related to war in the next hundred years i'll put it that way and then
and then there's lots of other so the main point is you train the model and then you point it at
the obstacle that's in the model's way and then you retrain the model and then you point it at the obstacle that's in the model's way
and then you retrain the model and you point at the next obstacle
and this is how you get this crazy loop where we end up like
spacefaring civilization in like 10 years or something. If that happens, can Samit simply call of G?
Hey, sorry, I know last uh 30 seconds no worries i think we'll probably call
it there uh guys we've now gone as aztec predicted much longer than expected uh but it was two and
a half hours it was great being here with all you guys. Anyone want to say anything before we hop off?
Actually, I'll read some comments if anyone has anything to say.
I'll pause.
If not, I'm going to read some comments from the audience.
And guys, give all of our speakers a follow.
Give Samip, Kalki, Kingdank Kush, DeFi World, Stratix, give everyone a follow-up here.
And people, panelists, follow the audience too, if you like. The community is what we're here for.
So scientist says, Cryptorocky, I love the idea. I love the idea of asking AI most of these medical questions,
but my biggest concern is the potential risk associating
sharing this much personal data with the AI.
What's your take on that?
Because I feel like there's no guarantee of how this data will be used.
And quick swap tagging you in case you miss.
Yeah, I think it's something to be concerned with.
I mean, Jack jokes about, you know,
his DNA is now uploaded to these programs and uploaded to...
Yeah, they're going to clone him like Duncan Idaho.
Yeah.
You know what?
I wouldn't be opposed to them cloning me.
I think, actually, I shouldn't say this publicly.
I hereby give public permission for anyone to clone me,
take my DNA, chop it up, use it for the good of humanity.
Modify it.
And modify it.
I do not give you permission to make a bioweapon to take me out, though.
With my DNA.
Think about it.
Elon is out there having babies with a bunch of women
because he wants to spread his DNA
and he wants to recombinate it with other people's DNA
and make a bunch of different variations of him
to spread and leave his legacy.
What's the Telegram CEO that has like 109 kids or something?
109 kids? The 109 kids the telegram ceo yeah
perov or what's his name guys whatever uh yeah he has like all these kids and he doesn't
marry the woman or anything pavel pavel dorov yeah um yeah he has uh he did he did some sperm
donations so he fathered 100 children through that and i think he has some uh organic
and he gives the women uh a lot of money uh as like part of the deal he says hey like we're not
gonna have a relationship yeah that's something he's just started this year yeah it's like it's
kind of weird yeah i think he gave like out of his hundred billion in net worth or something he gave
like 10 billion uh to the women of all of his children or something.
What a trippy guy.
Pretty cool.
Spread your seed.
So my point is, if they wanted to clone me, go ahead.
You're helping spread my DNA, I suppose.
And maybe I'm biased, but I like my DNA.
I think it's pretty good.
You're going to be like the set army in Clone Wars.
Yeah. you're gonna be like the the set army and clone wars yeah i asked cindy if she would be okay with me donating my sperm to um you know spread my genetics and she said fuck no i will i will leave
you what do you think samip would taru uh let you uh donate your sperm to spread the genetics of Samip?
I don't know, man.
I'll have to ask her, but most probably she'll throw me out.
It's all right.
You got little Samip C. Jr.
I don't know why people are opposed to this idea.
It's a great idea.
What you just explained about Elon,
he's trying different combinations, right?
Someone like Elon can actually do that because he's trying different combinations right like someone like elon can actually do that because like he has a different mentality and uh yeah man like trying out your like it's like
trying multiple combinations like the way you build your you know computer system trying different
rams different gpus and like whatever works best for you so maybe like what he's trying
you know like mixing up his dna with a different set of dna and like see what works so maybe totally just like like the telegram guy did like you know 109 kids and if if like all 109
kids are with different women so it's like a different dna matches and if even if the one
match is perfect like we'll get another elon we'll get another telegram founder well yeah and look at
elon elon doesn't strike me as a sort of guy that's going to make it to like 103 years old either.
So he's probably somewhat on a...
You better not be talking shit on his Diet Coke addiction.
Is that what's happening here?
He's built like a fridge.
Yeah.
You know, actually, interestingly,
when I saw that he was...
the Diet Coke's by his desk, I used it to justify my Diet Coke addiction.
But I actually quit Diet Coke a couple months ago when I actually when I told you guys when I write down every time I drink any alcohol, or if I ever have a Diet Coke, or even a sip of Diet Coke, or a quarter of a can or whatever. I write it all down. I have a vices doc where I write down anytime I do a vice. And yeah, I'm down to like, I don't know, one Diet Coke every two weeks or something and one drink of
alcohol per week over the last like two plus months. So no more Diet Coke. And I was very
addicted to that. Still love it, but don't drink it anymore. And you still love the idea of living
in a jar? Yeah, yeah, yeah.'m i'm gonna definitely put inside joke where did
we could how's it do what were you talking about in that dubai um yeah i uh i would be look if it
meant i can live forever i would be totally cool's more free than being in a coffin.
Maybe.
Come on, man.
But you are unconscious.
They don't even need to put your head in a jar.
They just need to upload your consciousness to a mainframe.
Yeah, I would be for sure open to that.
Which would you prefer?
Mainframe.
Matrix.
A jar might be interesting i mean look it's what do you care if your head's in a jar if you're just like plugged into neural link and you can you're
just being of the internet now you're just plugged into the internet yeah so right so you are in a
virtual reality yeah maybe maybe maybe that's a that's a better option, right? Because if you don't realize like if that you are, you know, uh, in a jar and you lost
your freedom because you are in a virtual reality and you're still enjoying your life,
then it's okay.
But if you're in a jar and just sitting in a jar, man, I like don't want that life.
I mean, we would be in a jar and we would be like taught, we, you might be in a virtual
reality. It could be like a video game or, be like, you might be in a virtual reality.
It could be like a video game or, you know, like EverQuest or something.
But you also could be just on the internet.
I mean, if my interface that I saw was the internet and I just lived on the internet and I can pop on YouTubes, I can listen to an audio book.
I could talk to my friends.
I could talk to my family i could go meet with my
friends and family in a virtual reality or video game and and like what honestly that's pretty much
what i do now my head is just basically in a jar on my desk what's the difference yeah if you if
like if i don't realize i'm in a jar then it's okay with me but if i realize I'm in a jar, then it's okay with me. But if I realize I'm in a jar, then it's not going to work for me.
But if I don't realize I'm in a jar, I'm in a virtual reality and on an internet,
it doesn't matter where I am, but I should not realize it.
I should not feel it.
If that's the case, then it's okay being in a jar or being on earth or being anywhere.
It doesn't matter.
I mean, the way I look at it is I want to understand my life here.
Imagine someone starting to listen into this
five minutes ago.
Well, at least he didn't go on the horse inside joke
that I know he was thinking about.
We're not going to go there.
That's too much for now.
Too much for public spaces.
But yeah, I want a bionic body.
I would put me in an optimist robot
like think about it
what if you were in a jar
your head was in a jar
but it was just bolted
to an optimist robot
no that's fine
that's fine
because then I don't realize
I'm in a jar
well you would know
you're in a jar
you just wouldn't mind
because you're like
on an optimist robot
and you're faster
than any human can run
you're stronger than any human you you can synthetically like you could probably have sex and just
synthetically inject sex hormones into your brain to make it feel like the the real thing it'll
probably feel better than normal human sex eventually even even right now like i'm in a jar
but that jar is my brain right your your skull yeah yeah exactly
so that's fine right so what i like uh like i wanted i got i was trying to stay is like
if you are in a jar like literally in a jar that's it nowhere else
yeah i want a special jar okay so let's read some more comments here because we're we're going to be
on here for like we were supposed to stay one hour or two hours and now we're at like uh three hours okay uh victor
says love how rock brings up and empathizes more on our health status it's really something we
should keep in mind always healthy as well now even easier with the eye oh thanks victor yeah
i think we all should be focusing on health it's like I'm really focused on this in my life right now.
I think and a lot of people will say that, you know, well, I'm so focused on work.
I'm so focused on this.
I promise you can be healthy and still work very hard.
Actually, by being healthy, I'm working harder than ever because I feel great energy levels all day.
Yeah, I mean, we get all into the health stuff. We did a bit last week
and we'll do it again soon, but we're running low on time here. But like, I guess my two biggest
health hacks, I will recommend getting sun, eating sardines in olive oil. And then I'll throw in also sauna.
Those three things are like walking in the sun,
which I do on these spaces, by the way.
I often get many miles in on these spaces of sun.
If you just do those few things,
your life's going to change.
You're going to feel way different.
Okay, so Spectre says,
Love these episodes.
Sparking some great DeFi conversations.
What's the first real world problem you'll point to as definitively solved by DeFi?
I don't think any is yet.
We'll just answer kind of quickly.
But nothing's definitively solved by DeFi yet.
But I think in the future, all of finance will not necessarily be solved, but greatly improved by DeFi and then AI
combined with DeFi. Miss B says, I'm in. Woof says, GM chat. Scientist says, that meme coin
cancer is dying out now. Caruso says, your own choice of technology. Wow, that's awesome.
Crystal says, GM dragons. Kenneth says, interesting topic. Treasure says, your own choice of technology. Wow, that's awesome.
Crystal says, GM Dragons.
Kenneth says, interesting topic.
Treasure says, study Raincoin for best DeFi around.
Santi says, panel Durov, yes.
Carol says, hi.
Druski says, privacy coin decks.
Crips gave sunglasses emoji.
Spencer Markle says, here we go, Fubar.
By the way, yeah, Fubar, who was on earlier,
was really well-spoken. I liked his comments a lot, actually.
And Jack Mai says, G-Quick.
And Rage says, great topic of discussion.
Then we have a bunch of, like, spam posts.
But all right, guys.
Thanks, everyone.
Anyone have anything else before we wrap it,
before I get distracted and we keep going for another two hours?
Everyone should go check out the CalPX test set.
So what's your thoughts on a run?
He's not biting in he knows i'm i'm out i don't want to touch that with a 10-foot pole all right guys talk to you all soon thanks everyone for coming and, audience members. I see KBot, Victor, Digital, Fellow, Shamana, Kalki, John Sharp, Naresh, Ryan.
Thanks, everyone, for being here.
And guys, follow Kalki.
They're really doing some cool stuff.
And I think there's a good chance that Kalki has the success,
the same success that Quickswap did, which was pretty cool.
And yeah, I'm definitely supporting calci and
quick swap has invested in calci so all right guys cool talk to you all soon thank you guys
lovely to be here take care good night bye Thank you.
