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The State of Telos with John Lilic
Recorded: March 14, 2025 Duration: 1:49:45Space Recording
Short Summary
Telos is actively working on launching new projects like the ZKVM test net and ZK super chain, while also focusing on strategic partnerships such as the Binance Link Partnership. Efforts to secure venture capital for TelosX are underway, and the network anticipates growth with the introduction of new stable coins. The organization is also innovating by using the L2 ZKVM to meet project requirements, indicating a forward-thinking approach in the blockchain space.
Full Transcription
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All right, welcome everyone to this Talos X-space.
It looks like we have quite a few people joining already, so we'll get started.
I do believe this will be recorded and available for people as well to listen afterwards if
they can't listen live.
So today we'll be talking about the current state of Talos, the plans throughout the year
and everything that's going on.
And in this space tonight we'll have John Lillich, the CEO of Talos.
I believe this might be the first space that we've had you on, John, since your promotion to CEO.
Can you hear me all right there, John?
Okay, it looks like he's muted at the moment.
What we'll do is we'll walk through quite a few things with John.
Like I said, we'll get an update on where Telos is at, especially at the start of the year,
and where we are today and where we are moving forward.
And then we'll open up the conversation for community members to put their hand up
and feel free to ask questions for John himself.
And that's how we will go through the process.
Looks like he might be having a few connection issues, so we'll just wait a moment.
We're just inviting John up to be a speaker.
Okay. I'm not sure if spaces is being buggy, but if you can hear me, can you guys just, I don't know, give a thumbs up or something so I can see responses?
Yeah, we can hear you now there, John.
Oh, okay, great.
Sorry, I got kicked off spaces. I missed kind of like what you were saying.
I don't know if we're jumping into questions straight away or...
I pretty much I didn't hear anything you said.
Yeah, no worries. Look, I basically said, we'll have a chat with yourself about Talos and everything, Telos, including Telos X, the ZK side and where we're up to with things.
And then we can open the floor for questions from the community shortly afterwards.
I think this is the first space that we've had you on, John, since your promotion to CEO.
Look, I'll let you have the floor and kind of just speak on the current state of things with Telos and where we're at with everything.
Sure. Actually, I think we have had other spaces before. I feel like we had one a month ago or something. But in any case, always very happy to do spaces. And it's really great to connect with everyone.
Yeah, so I would say that currently, you know, there's a whole bunch of stuff going on.
There is a lot of really great, let's say, technology or technological development that's happening.
And then, of course, there's probably some more challenging market conditions.
I mean, obviously...
the last three months for pretty much the entire alt market has been pretty tough. But that being said,
you know, it is what it is and really all you can do is just keep building. So in terms of like the current
sort of thrust and the things that we've been focused on, I guess, uh,
starting with the EVM.
So we deployed, obviously, as everybody knows, the RIF implementation some time ago.
I think the team's been doing a great job of continuing to kind of monitor, maintain,
and ensure that the EVM performs as best as it can.
I think we've been doing some work in terms of full compatibility
with the most recent releases from Paradigm and so on.
I think there was on their end, a memory leak issue that was kind of one of the technical issues we were working through some months ago.
and so on. So as far as the EVM goes, I think there was some stats put out recently, but basically, you know, it's growing and, you know, we're just going to keep grinding away. There's a couple really exciting new deployments coming. I'm not sure if I can say right now or not. I probably not. But, uh,
I guess probably in the next week or so.
And just to be clear, one of the things that happened,
obviously with the SAFE hack was in addition to by bit losing a billion and a half dollars,
pretty much the entire Ethereum ecosystem on the development side was affected
because there's lots of lots of deployments that in some way, shape, or form rely on SAFE.
And obviously they had kind of like shut down the front end and pretty much I think everybody was on standby.
So I think that caused us some delays with some of the stuff that we're about to were announced in terms of new deployments.
Two in particular that are very exciting.
We did also deploy Theory of Mattestation service, EAS.
I guess that was about a month, a month and a half ago, if I remember correctly.
And that part of it is very exciting, I think, because I think the attestation layer will continue to grow.
And so as we kind of keep moving forward with some of the stuff that we're planning on deploying, I think attestations will...
become more and more relevant and important.
So that's kind of the EVM side of it.
On the ZK side of it, pretty exciting stuff.
We deployed the ZKVM test net,
and I guess we're kind of marching along towards Mainnet.
We did receive some news in our...
In our kind of technical group chats with respect to some stuff that kind of like is a third party dependency that was deprecated.
I'm not sure if I'm allowed to mention anything specific about that at this time, but essentially we're working through that.
And I think deployment is realistically something like three to four weeks away in terms of the main net launch of the ZKVM.
But the test net has been up.
It's been producing blocks.
Jesse, JT have been doing a phenomenal job,
and that's moving along really nicely.
We also deployed, obviously, the SnarkTor TestNet as well,
the Battleship game as a demo, which I think is pretty fantastic.
I don't know if anyone's had a chance to play around.
And then a topic we'll probably maybe talk about a bit later,
but essentially,
You know, we've been doing tons and tons of research and work over the last year and a half,
Alberto and his team and others as well. We've been, I think, I would say, honestly, probably the most,
and I've said this before, capital efficient, CK team in the space. I mean, when you look at
What we're competing with, we've got teams that have raised, you know, in some cases hundreds
of millions of dollars like ALEO, I think they raised like $300 million and so on.
Scroll's most recent raise was that like a $2 billion valuation, et cetera.
And we've been doing it for, you know, a tiny fraction of that, which I think is really important.
And the reason the reason for that is because in my experiences,
is very hard to do innovation in a tremendously abundant environment.
It's very, very hard to innovation in that environment,
particularly when you have lots of big overhead from big VCs, etc.,
who have different opinions, and maybe some of those opinions can shape product development.
And very often they do, certainly go-to-market strategies and so on.
And really, when you look at the ZK ecosystem, I've said this before many times,
it's extremely dynamic ecosystem.
And it's very, very hard to do ZK, particularly as it relates to the EVM.
And there's a few reasons for that.
And I wrote some stuff.
I wrote, you can check on my Twitter timeline or my next timeline maybe like a week ago or something, some of the limitations of the ZK VM.
But essentially, like I said, I have a tremendous amount of respect and admiration for all ZK researchers and people working in this space because it's very, very hard.
Right.
And so really when you look at Ethereum, you've got a fundamental throughput problem.
And that throughput problem is a very hard problem.
You can do things in other ways, for example, on the aggregation side, I think our benchmark.
And so, the aggregation side, you can do a bunch of different
or acceleration side as well,
but in terms of actually increasing throughput,
that's very, very hard, okay?
And that's a fundamental kind of limit that Ethereum faces.
And so thinking beyond that,
and this is something that
Alberto and his team have been doing for quite some time,
you know, and this kind of like a really exciting,
I would say development that we're going to be sharing a lot more information about.
You know, how do you take a fundamentally different approach in order to paralyze
some elements like execution and computation such a way that you can actually
tremendously increase throughput?
And the reason that's important is because when you look at, you know, in Alberta said this many times, when you look at the like rest of the world, okay, not the kind of narrow scope that our crypto ecosystem services, but really the rest of the world, all the multitude of use cases that exist in, you know, the corporate world, in the business world, etc.
Very often the fact that everything is on chain is...
is a limiting factor, like for everybody to see.
You know, you've got data protection and compliance requirements,
you know, GDPR, et cetera, et cetera.
And so for a lot of business use cases,
you can't really, can't really go on chain.
ZK gives you that opportunity because it enables,
you know, data protection, obviously.
But when you have this throughput problem,
then it's sort of like, well, if you can't do much more than a handful of transactions and, you know, and those are going to be expensive and slow in any case, then you're still sort of back back to square one.
And so when you look at the entire ZK ecosystem, particularly around the ZKVM and the Ethereum space, you've got like tremendous, like very, very smart people working very hard and.
You know, it's kind of like Frankenstein solutions, okay?
And it's like a patchwork of attempts at like working past some of these hard fundamental
limits to the Ethereum phases to try and improve performance.
And again, I respect all these people tremendously.
I admire them all, but like the gains are incremental at best.
At the same time, obviously there's a really strong incentive to be part of the Ethereum
ecosystem.
I mean, frankly, that's where all the TVL is.
That's where all the stable coins are, et cetera.
I mean, obviously, that's growing in some other ecosystems.
But for the most part, that's pretty much where the majority of the asset base is.
But it's stagnant, right?
And it's stagnant because this is a hard technology with some hard throughput limits.
And so progress is challenging.
So you can think about how to move beyond that.
And so that really looks like a nudge.
And that's something that I've been talking about for some time now,
as far as, you know, not only the limitations of
of ZK, but also I think some interesting, interesting experiments around potentially even new types of consensus.
I mean, really, when you look at it, the direction Ethereum is going in is offloading ZK computation to A6.
That seems to be the direction it's going in, and it seems like there's going to be an FPGA interim step.
But ultimately, that's where it's going.
And I was actually in Shenzhen last year.
And I think some folks might have seen me holding up.
the ZK proving chip for the axial ASICs that they shipped,
which is kind of the first generation,
still very inefficient, expensive,
and unlikely to go into mass production,
but it's going in that direction.
And that's obviously really when you look at the beam initiative
and some of the stuff there,
they're looking at the Ethereum Foundation itself
in terms of re-architecting the poor protocol.
It seems like that's the direction.
It's going in inevitably in any case.
And so,
that's something we've been we've been working on for some time now as well lots and lots of
experimentation and we're going to be sharing that with the community soon i think probably in the
you know, in the next month or two or so,
we're going to be sharing a white paper and a prototype as well.
Now, the thing that we've been able to kind of work into that entirely new ZK,
kind of like super chain, if you will,
is a tremendous, tremendous benefit that will only be available to TELOS token holders.
And that's going to be something that I think the community will appreciate tremendously.
And so it continues with this kind of like, let's call it Telos Ventures approach,
where we're going to be building things that we think are really important to fill an innovation gap in the market,
but that ultimately tie into the Telos token in our community.
So that part of it is, I guess it's like a little mini announcement now,
but there's going to be kind of like a pretty full-fledged,
proper sort of announcement about that coming very soon.
And I'm very, very excited about that because it's a combination of lots and lots of tremendous research efforts from our entire team.
And then so that's kind of the ZK side of it.
And then with respect to the TELOSX side, yeah, we've continued grinding away.
It's a little bit challenging and I know some folks are kind of like, well, I wish they
talk more about it, but like you got to understand it's like what we're trying to do is
aggregate liquidity, you know, from other exchanges, okay?
And the reason that's important is because bootstrapping liquidity and security is very, very hard.
And that's kind of where most things either fail and our most vulnerabilities happen.
And obviously, even the best...
sometimes get hacked. So I would say that our approach is the right approach. And, you know,
there's a couple things I can kind of say right now. So first of all, when you deal with other
exchanges, it's super NDA. Like they don't want you talking about certain things. And that's like a
restriction or rather a constraint that we have to deal with.
Excuse me.
And the reason for that is because in the past,
there's been many, many, many examples of projects that have kind of like
either improperly, you know, marketed certain types of partnerships and or worse.
I mean, in the past, there's been lots of projects and examples of teams that knew that they
were going to get listed.
And then they told some people and then they pumped and then it got listed and then
it was like insider stuff and everything.
And so for that reason.
And basically for the reason of like the extent to which leveraging an exchange with, let's say, things that you shouldn't or aren't really allowed to talk about for the purpose of ostensibly pumping your token is like one of the things that they care about the most.
And so whenever you try to work with them, you know, this is kind of like a big constraint.
So obviously talking about marketing and stuff.
is a little bit, I mean, we're not live yet,
and so we can't like free flow
and just stare everything.
And you know, you got to realize also,
When you're dealing with exchanges, you're dealing with companies.
You're not dealing with like foundations or networks or, you know, that are kind of beholden to communities.
You're dealing with like private companies.
And so that puts a constraint on what we can and cannot talk about.
What I can say is that in addition to, obviously, everybody knows about the Binance Link Partnership.
It took a long time to make that happen and it's still an evolving process because
With that program, it's not a global program.
It's not like you get a Binance link agreement and it covers the entire world.
It's like you have to get that for each individual region that you want to open in.
There's a lot of countries in the world where they operate.
And so it is a slow process that takes time.
And that's kind of one thing I wanted to communicate now.
Now, the other thing is, and I want to share with the community, but again, I hope everyone
can understand what I just said as far as, you know, the limitations.
But we have actually onboarded with other exchanges, okay?
And that's been something that's also been a painstaking slow process that takes time.
So really, you know, the vision of this becoming a centralized exchange aggregator, aggregating
liquidity from...
you know, multiple exchanges, some of the biggest in the world, is from that standpoint,
starting to materialize. But it is a process and it takes time and it's not easy.
It's also very competitive. I mean, there's lots and lots of groups around the world that
want to participate in these broker-dealer programs. And there are examples of this kind of a model,
but really more on the institutional side or the OTC side. For example, if you look at a
Let's say like Bitcoin Swiss, for example, which tends to be more on the institutional
side, although they have retail customers as well.
They have like a smart.
order routing system and that basically finds best execution,
uh, you know, through a multitude of exchange link agreements across multiple exchanges.
Um, but it's not like a dynamic, you know, exchange experience like what you would get when you, for example, login Binance.
Um, and so.
That's where this is a little bit different in terms of what we're trying to build because we're trying to aggregate that tremendous pool of liquidity for multiple top tier exchanges and then serve it up in kind of like retail experience that users are.
familiar with and I think that's that's kind of a super unique value proposition.
In terms of development, I mean, I, you know, I've shared some kind of little hints on online.
One of the issues is like obviously as we plug in other exchanges, like if I were to show some other screenshots, it would show the names of other exchanges.
We don't have permission yet from them to publicize that. So that's a bit of a constraint, as you can imagine, right? Like, so it's sort of like,
The way you can picture it is, you know, okay, so let's say you're,
you have accounts on five different exchanges and now you have five different tabs open on your
google chrome or whatever browser you're using and you're kind of toggling through everything and at
each step with each exchange you've had to do all the k yc stuff and so on and so forth and so
you know we're going to give you one place where you can log in one place where you can make
your deposits if you have five bitcoin you know and you want to put it on five different
exchanges you can do that through us and then you can trade that
on five different order books that can be kind of overlaid into one visual representation for the user.
Now the challenge there, and this has been one of the like, let's say technical hurdles that we were working on,
which is also a bit of a hard problem that's, you know, slowing things down a bit is what we discovered recently was that there is like,
certain arbitrage opportunities that could result in the exchange losing just just basically losing money all the time
You know depending on how certain things are configured and so
You know you wouldn't want to get into a situation where you're pulling in the liquidity serving it up in a certain way and now
basically you know a smart trader or bought or whatever can
successfully arbitrage that and essentially you hemorrhage money.
So that part of it is probably one of the key technical issues we're working on right now.
But, you know, we're making progress.
I think it's realistically going to be difficult or basically not realistic that we're going to launch by the end of Q1.
for the reasons I described. I mean, that was sort of always an optimistic goal. It's something we've been working very hard towards.
But, you know, as we've been kind of moving forward, there's been some progress for sure in terms of like expanding the partnership network.
And, you know, like, so if you think about it, it's kind of like the way the business development process works is, you know,
You know, you go and you start talking to exchanges, you start pitching that, hey, I want to be part of your broker-dealer program.
And then they hit you with like a ton of paperwork and you start going through that process.
And then that process takes weeks and weeks and you have to do this, that, the next thing.
And then you have to do that for each individual region that you want to open in because, again, these broker-dealer programs are not typically –
global in nature, pretty much they never are.
And so you end up with like tremendously huge amount of work
that you have to do for each individual region.
But we've been doing that and we've been able to kind of get across the line for
for a number of regions with multiple exchanges at this point.
So we're going to keep grinding away and keep working on that as diligently as we can.
And hopefully, hopefully things will, you know, accelerate going into
the next few months. One of the other things too is also going into kind of Christmas season.
And then basically there's most of the exchanges are Chinese operated. I mean, I think a lot of people know that. And so it's after the lunar cycle reset that things really pick up again. So.
You know, you also kind of have to deal with some slowdowns.
And then they have a lot of staff turnover as well, which is a pretty common thing.
And so now like the people you're dealing with aren't there anymore.
And so you have to restart with new relationships.
I mean, this is just how the process goes.
It's very difficult to articulate this stuff like on, you know, just posting on X or whatever.
So it's good to kind of talk about it.
And hopefully it's a little bit of an insight into how.
building something like this goes both from kind of a business development and a technical standpoint.
Yeah, I don't know. Am I, I guess maybe I'll stop there for now. I don't know if we want to jump to
questions or if you want me to keep going or...
Yeah, I think what we'll do, you've already answered quite a few of the questions that I know
that the community have been wanting to hear, especially with Talosix itself. Before we jump onto the questions, everyone
everyone that's listening, feel free to pop your hand up now and we'll slowly work through them by inviting you to come up and ask a question one at a time.
But I guess what you've just explained there, John, you know, Telosex being almost like an interface where you can trade on multiple exchanges for a lot of people that they might be quite
quite a new piece of information for them. We have been releasing some tweets recently.
Does that mean that Telos X won't necessarily be its own independent exchange, or is that
something that's in the plans for the near future?
So, you know, it's kind of like, let me figure out how to navigate that question, and I'll tell you why.
So, you know, it's kind of like Telesex aims to be, you know, like this kind of like next generation centralized exchange that leverages third party APIs from existing exchanges.
You know, and then these exchanges, you know, they support sub accounts, which is very flexible for us.
And then we can integrate additional exchanges based on, you know, like our preferences or business needs and so on.
Now, yes, that is a new piece of information as far as there are other exchanges that are now that we now have agreements with and are close to finalizing agreements with or have been in discussions with for some time.
But again, I can't get into the specifics of that because I don't have permission yet. So that's kind of one thing.
Yeah.
In terms of the second part of the question,
will Telesex then essentially build its own order book?
I mean, it's a delicate question because on the one hand,
we want to obviously be a good partner for the exchanges,
okay, and we want to sell as much of their liquidity as possible
through our system.
And when we do that, we share revenue.
Right? And so that's how it works. There's trading fees and for each trade where there's some revenue, then there's a split, right? And our corporate policy for the Telosex exchange is that
it will use its revenue or its profits to acquire Telos, right?
So basically just like micro strategy, if you will, in some ways, right?
And it chooses to do that because it's obviously incubated by the Telos community and it's for the Telos community.
And so that's kind of one revenue model.
Okay, now there is obviously another revenue model,
which is to build your own order book.
Building your own order book is
clearly a much bigger prize, right? But at the same time, if you're aggregating liquidity,
you don't necessarily want to be in conflict with your partners because you're not trying to
cannibalize from their business as well. So it's a bit of a delicate issue. Now, in my opinion,
I think the way that path could play out,
will definitely take some time.
So you could imagine the exchange launches.
It's been operational for, let's call it a year or two.
It's acquired a robust customer base.
And let's say you kind of log in and you have five boxes.
One box is Binance and the other four boxes or other big exchanges.
And as a user, you can choose which box you want to kind of like source your liquidity
from and execute your trades.
or maybe we can offer you some best execution,
best effort kind of option that we'll just pick
from whichever one has the best price or the best execution.
So now it's like, like I said,
a couple years later, we've demonstrated we're a good partner,
we have more kind of standing on our own,
then it might make sense to add a sixth box.
Okay, and that sixth box would be our own order book.
Okay.
Okay, now that part of it I don't think is going to happen in the near term because
Like I said, we're committed to being the best possible sort of broker-dealer partner for for our exchange partners
Excuse me and and for the reasons I mentioned earlier that makes the most sense because bootstrapping liquidity is very very very hard okay
It's very hard and you know you wouldn't want to go on to an exchange and
go through the KYC process and then have very thin liquidity, right?
Like nobody wants to do that.
And in any case, it would be very hard because even exchanges that have good liquidity,
they offer different types of subsidies and incentive programs just to get people to sign up.
So from that standpoint, it's very competitive.
Building your own order book is very hard.
I think there is potential for that, but realistically, it's some ways away.
And, you know, it would, it would really be contingent upon how things are going.
And, and, you know, for example, how big is the customer base?
How, you know, viable is our own standing to potentially spin something like that up, etc.
Right. So, yeah.
So that's kind of the best answer, I think at this time I can give to that question.
And frankly, I think, like I said, if we tried to do that from the get-go, that would be very hard.
It would be very hard and it would probably not lead to like a really good user experience.
And likewise, you know, resources are always limited.
I mean, it's not we're not operating in like an unlimited resource environment.
um so we have to be as efficient as we can so the extent to which we delegate resources to that side of it
which you know not only does that mean building up the order book uh you know and like which in
itself is hard and probably requires a bunch of incentives but it also means custody right because
at that point um the custody is in your control and so
That part of it is also in and of itself a very large operation on an ongoing continuous basis.
And so from a resource standpoint, you know, I think we just have to be very efficient, which is why the aggregation model in the first place, I think, makes the most amount of sense.
All right, and probably just one more question I have in terms of Talos X before we move forward to opening the floor to the community's questions.
As you said, you know, there's a lot of work going on and there's things that have come up that have kind of slowed things down in terms of launch.
Do you have an ETA roughly at a new target launch date that you would like to aim for?
And if so, would that be more of a regional launch rather than multiple regions at once for TELOX?
Well, yeah, I mean, I think so in terms of like kind of delivering the MVP,
I think realistically, that's kind of like a four to six week effort from this point on, given, you know, where we are.
In terms of lots, so there's a couple ways to separate this problem, or this question rather.
One is like in terms of technical development, okay, and building a product that works.
And of course, ensuring the product is robust and safe and secure.
And that kind of goes back to what I was saying before in terms of like this arbitrage issue that we recently discovered.
And so a lot of this, I mean, this is like new, right?
It's new for me. It's new for our team.
Right.
It's kind of a new category of exchange in general.
So there isn't like a whole lot of precedent or like a well understood playbook like,
you know, just creating a token or whatever or even a Dex.
So that's that's kind of it from the technical standpoint.
I think we're making good progress there.
On the business side, you know, there's also curveballs that come into the mix, which are hard to predict.
For example, you know, like I said, there is very high turnover at exchanges.
That's kind of one of the things that we've discovered, you know, and for a lot of reasons.
And I'm not making judgment on it. I'm just kind of conveying what we've learned essentially
through experience, which is that. And so,
you know, they compartmentalize different departments, different people, etc. So suddenly, you know, the person that you've been working with for the past two months, you know, moving this forward isn't there anymore. And so you kind of have to start again, basically with a new person. And so that's been, I think, another...
A tricky, tricky part as well, right?
So that part of it is very hard to predict.
I would say that hopefully now, particularly given year end, I think most of the turnover tends
to happen at year end, like around the time people get bonuses and stuff.
And then there's the lunar calendar reset, et cetera.
So there's like a pretty intense period of like activity from that standpoint.
But I would say that right now probably less likely to be the case just because the new year started and it's kind of like now everybody is into their own grind mode and trying to obviously hit their targets and deliver on their roles and responsibilities.
So I think it's going to be more stable going forward.
Yeah, and then the other part of it is from success, kind of like giving yourself the best chance of success.
probably means that you should, as best as you can, get to a point where you can open in as many regions as you can.
Right. So if we launched in just one or two regions, that might be very disappointing because many users would discover that they can't sign up, right?
Or they can't use the exchange or whatever.
And so, and then you also have the same problem, which is that, you know, it takes time to kind of onboard each exchange, each agreement, each region.
And so even if you launch a type of like MVP, if you will, right, you've got a product and you're in one region and you have two exchanges.
Okay. And then you say, okay, our roadmap is over the next six months, we're going to open up this many regions and this many new exchanges.
but then you know that ends up being also a grind and so now it's kind of like you're
puttering along only in one or two regions with like you know one or two exchanges that's why
i think it's better to kind of as best as you can get to a stage where when you launch you have as many
liquidity partners as possible
in as many regions as possible.
So I think probably that magic number kind of for
for launching is maybe 10 to 12 regions.
And that part of it is just kind of like a business development effort.
And I mean, you know, and probably pretty much everyone in the community, people have jobs.
They work in business.
They know how things, you know, the speed and cycle, which things operate.
And so yeah, that part of it is a little bit out of our hands, which is just kind of the tricky part.
Obviously, if you have your own exchange, your own liquidity, your own order book, then you go at your own speed.
But we're a little bit constrained by that.
Now, that being said.
I do think that, you know, our exchange partners up to this point are definitely looking forward to kind of this, you know, this launching and so on. So I think there's a really good opportunity for things to accelerate over the next month or so. But it's very hard to give, you know, definitive date.
But, you know, we're diligently working as best as we can to kind of position Telesex so that when it does launch, it has as many regions as possible with as many exchange partners as possible so that, you know, we can offer as robust of a product as possible.
Right. Okay. Thank you for answering the questions there and giving us the updates.
I will pass the microphone onto the community's questions now. So feel free to raise your hand in the X-space if you do have a question for John.
We'll start over with yourself, Narak. You are a speaker already, so I'll pass you the mic.
Hey, guys. Hey, John. Thanks for taking this call and giving us a great in-depth update and explanation on everything, Telos currently. I do want to switch the topic just slightly into something you've been talking about lately, which is about quantum research and development.
I know you work with Never Local.
And so the question that I had is related to Quantum and Telos.
How do you see the research and development happening with quantum being applied to Telos?
Can you talk about how this is going to be applied to our Telos product suite?
And if you have any plans to do that, because I'm eager to know, like, would...
Tellos potentially be one of the first to market with any technological on-chain advancements with quantum?
Sure, yeah.
Thanks for the question.
Great, great question.
By the way, Stephanos is in this chat.
I'm not trying to put him on the spot, but if he wants to talk, just request and...
I'm sure we'd be happy to hear from you as well, but no pressure.
So it's kind of like this is something I've said, probably maybe folks have heard me say this, but, you know, advancements in this space, like I had a panic attack last June, okay?
I didn't sleep for like a month because I felt like...
You know, it was sort of like when I, it reminds me when I first discovered Bitcoin and then when Ethereum, when all this stuff was starting, it was just like tremendous excitement about like the world is going to change and oh my God, everyone needs to know about this. And this is so super exciting and amazing. It was a little bit of that. But then it was also like, okay.
I'm now starting to realize, and this is just my opinion, you can all take a look at what's going on and form your own opinion.
But the reality is when you look at all the advancements happening, and I say this all time, AI driving algorithm,
when you look at companies like Cy Quantum,
When you look at this photonic wafer platform stuff that they're doing and others as well, when you look at the way nation states are positioning for this stuff, there's already like very strong legislation that's been introduced.
For example, exporting computers with 50 cubits or more is like totally legal at this point.
And so on, when you look at the tremendous amount of money that's gone into, and I'm talking about smart money.
I'm not like crypto VC, you know, funny money.
Like big, big.
huge investments from the biggest funds and companies in the world.
Obviously, the pace of news events and updates recently, Google Willow and the Microsoft stuff
and everything else, it's starting to kind of hit the mainstream.
I realized and started the form of very strong belief, the elliptic curve cryptography is
at risk much sooner than we realize.
And I talk a little bit about that.
It's kind of like we rely on this form of cryptography to protect everything that basically
we care about, which is to say you can go to sleep at night.
and feel good because you have safely stored your private keys.
And just because somebody knows your public key does not mean they will be able to derive your private key.
Okay? That is what we're talking about here. We're talking about reaching a point, I personally believe, much sooner than
what has previously been the consensus.
And by the way, I would also point to,
you look at DARPA, okay, you look at Riverlane,
you look at IBM, you look at all the big companies,
and you look at like their roadmaps, okay?
We are on target.
We're actually ahead.
And these are roadmaps that were produced many years ago.
for how this stuff is going to play out, what kind of critical components we need,
what are the pieces that are missing, and when those pieces are likely to kind of like manifest,
be produced and manufactured and so on. One of them, for example, is error correction. And this is kind of like
You've got these qubits and they're very unstable.
And so the extent to which you can marshal together a sufficient number of cubits and stabilize them for a brief period of time,
you can ask those cubits and they will leverage physics to give you an answer that otherwise a classful computer would take a long time to calculate.
And they can do that in a very short period of time, such as,
Here is John's public key. Tell me his private key. Okay. And so, so, you know, it's kind of like, I think this stuff is accelerating tremendously. It really feels to me.
And I've gone deep with this.
One of the things I said when I started at Telos is I have to keep running my venture fund.
I've been doing that for years before Telos.
I have to keep doing that.
And obviously constantly looking at things and quantum is one of the things that we started
looking at very seriously.
And I've been talking to like physicists, okay?
And it's different than talking to like a solidity developer or whatever.
And I'm not trying to denigrate anyone.
I'm just trying to say that like.
It's a different kind of conversation because you get into deep mathematics, deep physics, deep, deep, deep research that a very small number of people at this stage are like, you know, adept that, right?
It's not as easy as learning solidity, let's say, you know, to be kind of a quantum physicist particularly.
you know working on this tech at a prestigious institution or whatever and so on right so there's a
small number of these people they're phenomenal people and my learning curve has just accelerated
tremendously and i'm very grateful for these people but like along the way as you talk to these people
the credibility around this stuff starts to grow and and i've been getting so much shit from
bitcoin maximalists i mean maybe somebody you knew me before when i was on twitter when i'm a bit i
used to fight the maximalists all the time
And you know, you see guys like Jameson Lopp, I admire him.
He's out there saying Bitcoin's in trouble and so on.
We have to take this seriously.
And he's getting hate from those people as well because they just like don't believe
They're like, this is a total scam.
But on the other side, you're talking to people who are physicists at like MIT and they're
telling you this is going way faster than we thought.
Okay? And so going back to error correction as an example, that's what Google Willow shows.
It shows that we can have error correction at scale, which means that you can do things like when you look at these side quantum.
Basically, they're building much smaller devices, 1,152 cubic each, you network 6,000 of them together.
And you have this error correction piece in the middle, okay, which is a key component because it's very hard to kind of stabilize this stuff for any determined period of time.
Now it's like the Lego pieces are coming together and you don't need a gigantic machine anymore that only like, you know, the NSA can build.
Okay.
And in fact, Cy Quantum is like going into production.
I mean, this stuff is happening right now.
I said this several times.
Governor Pritzer, I'm not making political commentary.
I'm just saying Governor Pritzer of Illinois, Brandon Mayor Adams, whoever the guy is in Adelaide or rather Brisbane.
Yeah.
in other places around the world, key political leaders, if you look on their X account,
they're shilling side quantum like crazy.
They just built a, they're building a multi-billion dollar massive facility in Illinois.
Illinois is competing to become like the hub of like this advanced high tech industrial
manufacturing revolution.
Like this isn't, this isn't like all in my head, right?
Like this is stuff that's happening on a tremendous scale.
you know and recently there was stuff from china and you look at the stuff these guys are doing
with all the a i i mean i get some of it people say is copy paste and they make some improvements
but nonetheless they produce um you know a i that from from a retail consumer perspective is
objectively very good right like deep seek is like objectively good the new one i forgot the name
is magnus or something is objectively good it's a little bit slower but it's good so
Everything is accelerating.
And we're sitting here as an ecosystem,
comfortably going to sleep every night,
knowing that our private keys are safe.
But that's not the case.
And then you kind of look at it and you say,
well, what needs to happen to mitigate?
And the scope and scale of the effort is tremendous.
It's extremely huge.
This is one of my big...
I like Justin Drake a lot.
I think he's a brilliant guy,
but it's like the Beam roadmap...
And the stuff, the Ethereum guys are saying, oh, like, 2020, we're going to debate this stuff in 2025 and 2026.
And maybe by 2028, 29, we'll start implementing something.
And I'm like, guys, that's crazy.
We need to take this seriously right now.
All that being said, you start to look at telos and you say, tell us everywhere.
Every facet of telos is completely vulnerable.
It's completely vulnerable because it's based on LiptoC curve cryptography.
That's it.
It's just totally vulnerable.
So the reality is we're going to need to come up with a plan.
And that plan.
Excuse me.
It means that ultimately, if we're going to have a tell us community post-quantam,
and by the way, I say this all the time, but like when these attacks start coming,
you're not going to know it's going to be like these threads you see on Twitter,
this Gigacad held Bitcoin for 15 years.
And now there's like, you know, a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin moving to somewhere and,
That's going to be a quantum attack.
You're just not going to know.
It's not going to be like advertised.
What's going to happen is as the frequency of this stuff, you know, as it gets better
and better and better as like Cy Quantum scales out or whatever, the frequency at which
you see old Bitcoin moving will increase.
Okay.
Or if it's a nation state attack, for example, I've said this before, you look at micro strategy
and what these guys are doing, strategic Bitcoin reserve everything.
Imagine Bitcoin pumps to the moon.
We get $3 million Bitcoin, and now there's a multi-trillion dollar, basically, derivative
layer on top of that across US corporate balance sheets and including the government, or more.
because they basically leveraged up with Bitcoin as the base,
that becomes like an incentive for adversarial nation state
to attack Bitcoin itself and absolutely nuke everything.
And the other thing I would say is,
it's not that when, in my opinion, again, just this is all my opinion,
but it's not when the quantum attack start happening
that I think the market goes to zero.
It's the moment at which the market realizes,
this stuff is like six months away so you know to me it's kind of like somebody does a 32-bit
elliptic curve act or break as a demonstration okay and and then the market realizes holy shit
All that needs to happen for a 256 bit elliptic curve break is to just scale this up.
And then you look at it and you say, okay, well, scaling up really means, you know, this, this,
this and this needs to happen on the manufacturing side.
And you calculate that and you say, okay, that's six to nine months away.
And then you look at it and you say, well, what does Bitcoin need to do to become quantum
resistant?
And I posted a thing on my ex a while ago.
And I think it's like a four to seven year roadmap in an optimistic case.
So then you're sitting there and you're saying this stuff is going to be capable of breaking
LiptoCurte 2506 billion lifted curve cryptography in six to nine months and Bitcoin is four to seven years away.
you know, from being safe, let alone Solana, let alone everything else.
That's the moment where everything goes to zero, okay?
And it's going to be getting stable.
The redemption on tether and everything else is going to go through the roof.
Because listen, banks can update their SSL certificates basically pretty easily.
This isn't like decentralized network where you have to like take all this action and so on.
And sorry if I'm kind of going fast here and excited, but like this is very, I'm very passionate about this stuff.
And I think so for Telos, the reality is we need to kind of take this stuff seriously from the beginning.
So, you know, different types of cryptography, thinking about how we can basically we need to what we will need to re-architect everything at some point.
Okay.
Full stop.
And what that looks like is hard to say at this time.
We have some reasonable ideas.
You can look at anchor wallet.ca,
a N-T-H-O-R wallet.ca.
That's my buddy Pierre Luke.
He's a leading quantum physicist in Canada.
He built the first Lamport implementation of Ethereum wallet, so using Lamport signatures.
So you can kind of move assets into these types of signature schemes.
But the thing is, if the value of the asset goes down, who cares?
Right?
So all that to say, I think this year for us is an important year as far as like we recognize
the risk.
And then we do our best to, you know, partner with or work with or learn from, you know, the people are at the cutting edge of this.
In my opinion, that's people like Stefano and the never local team.
These guys are Oxford PhDs.
They're both physicists.
Stefanos a fellow at Oxford.
Fabricio as well at Oxford.
And, you know, they've got some other folks from like prestigious institutions, very smart people who are like working extremely hard.
Right.
And there's others as well.
Like there's other,
and so we learn as best as we can.
And then I think going into 2026,
we need to have a pretty strong idea of what we're going to do in terms of re-architecting tell us because in my opinion,
By the time we get to 2027, that's when I start to get nervous.
So just full disclosure, like on the VC side of it, I'm doing no more deals now where I get tokens after 2027.
Like, I'm not doing that.
I've stopped that.
That's when I think it gets risky.
And yeah, that's kind of my view on it.
Maybe I'm crazy.
Maybe I'm totally off base.
Maybe this stuff doesn't get cracked for another 50 years and I look like an idiot.
But, yeah.
That's what I believe right now.
Thanks, John.
Yeah, no, I think it's a fascinating subject.
I think it's a real issue.
The only thing that I would add to this is that I think based off of your connections and network,
I know you've been communicating with physicists and also like,
people in the crypto world, I'd be super interested and I think the entire community would be
interested in, you know, having open table conversations about this issue with these different
people, like having a debate, because I'd want to hear from the physicists, I'd want to hear from
the blockchain experts to hear their input.
And...
It could be like an incubation style conversation on how we approach this and what are some of the negatives and fallback issues we might be facing.
So I think the best thing that we can do as a community is to keep the conversation alive and talk about it in a way that everybody understands in a way that it's high level on the technical aspect.
So that we could garner more support.
We could garner more understanding.
And I think that's going to be the path for people to really recognize the gravity of what this truly means.
So thanks for that.
Yeah, that's a really excellent idea.
And honestly, that's a spectacular.
Maybe we could try to organize like a Telos X-Spaces and I'll reach out to some of these folks and it'll just be on this particular topic.
And then there was an event at DevCon in Thailand.
So there is the Quantum Punks team.
Okay.
Quantum Punks.
Check that out.
These guys are kind of like, you know, avant-garde.
Like they're at the cutting edge and, uh,
we should definitely engage that community and I think you're absolutely right like
we should we should endeavor to kind of like you know as best as we can have
have those kinds of conversations because you know we're gonna need so so
things like lattice-based cryptography okay hash-based cryptography
multi-variate polynomial cryptography you know we're we're gonna need
fundamental re-architecture of Telos in order to be in a position to have this network survive.
if we believe this stuff is a real threat.
And that in and of itself, when you sit down, I mean, you know, like imagine, imagine I just call Jesse and I say, hey, Jesse, I need you and Tj to make TELOS quantum resistant and you've got three months.
Like, there's a multi, multi, multi, multi year problem that we need to start addressing soon.
And that's a fantastic idea.
Maybe we can take it offline and try to organize something.
I think that's a fantastic idea.
Yeah, very good points. Thank you, Narik. And it's good to see that, you know, TELOS is looking forward.
Like John said, there are certain communities out there in crypto that kind of look a little bit too far into the future with some of these things or think that they may not happen.
We do have someone that has come up as a speaker. We've got Stee here. Now, Stee, did you have a question for John?
Yes, thank you for let me speak.
And I think this space like this, we have to do it more often because the community asks many times a lot of questions to guardians and to have John to reply to the community is always nice.
I have some questions about TILO6 because it's been years that I try many centralized exchange.
I spoke with them, I saw the affiliate program, the deep program, the new user program.
So my question is why someone would use TELO6 and who is the team behind TELO6?
Yep, great question. So to the first point, yeah, I'm always happy to do spaces. You know, I said that many times like in telegram stuff, you guys organize something, just organize it and let me know. And it's it's great for me too because.
you know, I probably get like 50 to 100 DMs every day asking questions and stuff.
And, you know, I don't want to be an asshole and not like reply, but I just can't because there's not enough time in the day.
So this is great for me too.
And, and, you know, it's so let's definitely do it more often.
You guys just organize it and I'll be available.
In terms of why you would use telesex, that's a very good question.
So I think there's a few things there.
First of all, when you look at, and obviously the regulatory regime and everything has changed, so a lot of the assumptions were based on kind of
probably or definitely the most hostile crypto, you know,
regulatory regime we've seen the last four years,
especially the last couple of years.
And so when you look at that in practical terms,
you see these big exchanges,
many of them don't have fiat solutions in most markets.
I mean, you know, and so what that means is as a user,
you if you want to like have fiat settlement in your bank account you have to rely on these peer-peer markets okay and one of the things that that we know for a fact
And I won't mention any names in particular or exchanges, but there are many users who in
many regions have had their bank accounts frozen because they've relied on P to P peer-to-peer
markets to receive transfers into their bank account and they get a transfer from somebody for
For whatever reason, the bank says is high risk and then they freeze the account.
Okay.
So that's one kind of issue.
Our approach has always been, and this is kind of another variable in terms of like why this is so hard to build.
Our approach has always been to like from the start.
Right.
engage regulators, okay? Because when you launch an exchange, I mean, you can launch products.
Well, for example, EOS, right, Brendan Bluber. I give him a lot of credit. He did a $4 billion
ICO over the course of like a year and then negotiated, I think it was like a $24 million
fine or something. I mean, there was like ads in Times Square and on taxis in London, etc. And
obviously that was a very good move financially right with crypto exchanges it's no longer the
case I guarantee you this that you can just launch
without, you know, regulatory approval and then later, like, ask for forgiveness or pay some fine.
And in fact, many exchanges have been having a difficult time for some for a while.
Now, obviously, in the U.S., things have changed and the SEC has dropped a bunch of cases,
but that's not the case that's in many other jurisdictions.
In many other jurisdictions, they still have severe restrictions and, you know,
And in fact, many of them have been even facing disgorgement.
Okay.
So kind of like having to give back money they made and so on in addition to fines.
On top of that, you know, was kind of like poor Fiat options for their users.
So the extent to which we can go into a region from the start, do it the clean way,
and then based on that and obviously business development efforts have Fiat partners, that's
kind of been a key target and something that we've been working towards.
And so being able to launch in these regions and have Fiat partners is like, excuse me, one of our key goals.
Okay.
And so now as a user, you can go in and you can trade on exchanges that you would normally trade on, but then you have this Fiat option, right?
That would be one reason to use TELAX.
Another reason is...
You know, it's like you can do KYC in one place and sort of manage all your different trading activities in one place without necessarily needing to, you know, do it in so many other places, have so many tabs open, et cetera.
So there's a convenience factor as well in addition to that.
And then and then really, I think the extent to which you can go into one place is,
and whether ultimately later you end up setting up trading bots or whatever that just, you know, like seek for best execution based on what's available in the various order books at any one time.
It's also kind of like very convenient from that standpoint as well.
So, so those are sort of some of the some of the key, let's say, advantages that we think make a lot of sense.
And, and the extent to which we're able to execute on.
Now, obviously.
The regulatory regime has changed significantly.
So I'm not sure how much kind of being super clean from the start is going to matter anymore, frankly.
Obviously, we're seeing, you know, big settlements and things like that.
And that changes the dynamic a little bit.
So we'll have to kind of see how that plays out.
In terms of the team, so we have...
I mean, it's also a little bit of a delicate issue because, you know, there are definitely people who want to work with Telesex and maybe they're in the past have worked at other exchanges and they have great experience and so on.
So, you know, we've been doing our best to kind of recruit a team.
Internally, we've had some of our team members working on it and then we have –
a very reliable kind of external technology partner that we've worked with in the past.
I'm not sure. I need to like double check if we have an NDA on this part or not,
but that technology partner is actually delivered on some other stuff. They're really,
really well known and they have like an excellent team of high quality engineers that are based in Europe.
And so that's kind of been our, that's our current delivery partner in addition to
We've also used some internal resources as well.
So that's that's kind of the development side of it.
And then just to be just to be also totally transparent, the Telos Foundation hasn't paid for any of the Telos X development.
I have.
So I've basically not made a not not made like a VC investment, but basically a loan, extremely, uh,
a extremely favorable loan and I've been basically funding it up to this point.
But it is an entity that's, you know, attempting to do fundraise as well.
And so that's one of the other things that's been kind of going on is in the background.
Also the extent to which we can secure venture capital.
And to that end.
You know, we've obviously talked to the VC arms of different exchanges and so on and other VCs.
In a perfect world, I would say our exchange partners whose liquidity we're selling are also become shareholders and support the network, or rather the exchange.
But, you know, that's a bit of a unknown at this time.
And then we got obviously...
like a bit unlucky because I would say that towards kind of like, I don't know, let's call it November, going into November, December.
We had a bunch of robust conversations with VCs and so on. And it looked like, you know, things were going well.
And we were going to kind of like get to a stage where we would.
not only close on the round, but then also close on some of these deals with other exchanges
and get their permission to like talk about it publicly. And then the market just tanked.
And then when the market tanks, the VCs disappear, they don't reply. The exchanges, you know,
all these things start happening. End of ear comes. They start staff turnover, etc.
And so that was a bit of bad luck in terms of timing, but hopefully, hopefully we're on the kind of rebound in terms of the market itself.
And that, that'll definitely, if that's the case, then that'll definitely help accelerate things as well.
That's something else, John, you did mention there that, you know, the Talos X development hasn't been funded by the Talos Foundation, but more so yourself.
You also, as the CEO, you're not taking a paycheck. Is that correct?
Correct. I don't have a salary at the foundation. And I'm not the CEO of Telesex. I mean, I think the CEO of Telesex should be somebody who has deep experience at Tier 1 exchanges. And we've talked to candidates about that. And there's ongoing conversations about that as well. But no, I have not ever taken any salary or anything like that. No.
Right. And look, we've just gone for an hour now here on the space. So I think I'll wrap it up with just one more question to kind of bring everything.
I'm happy to keep talking for a little while longer if there's more questions.
Yeah, if there's more questions, we'll carry it on.
Just one question that's come from one of the community members, T.J. on Telegram.
He's asking, once all the TALS products are live, are you able to elaborate on what specific aspects within the ecosystem will derive value to TALOS?
For example, like the TALOS X buy-in and send it to the Dow idea.
Yeah, sure. So let's start with the EVM. Obviously, we're going to keep trying to grow that ecosystem.
So there's, like I said, there's two big deployments coming. One of them, I think, will result in lots of new assets, particularly stable coins coming onto the network.
And so as we continue to grow the EVM, then hopefully, obviously the usage increases, and of course,
Of course, there's a deflationary mechanism with burning Telos, just like with Ethereum.
So that's kind of one. I think everybody gets that. I mean, that's a pretty obvious one.
So with respect to, you know, when you look at Snartor, the aggregation fees would be paid in Telos.
Now, you know, as that kind of continues to spin up and also as this kind of like new
ZK Super Chain, I would say, I would call it,
although that's not going to be the name,
spins up as well, then TELOS holders will have a very unique opportunity,
which will elaborate on once everything is released.
But essentially, that's going to give tremendous incentives
back to the TELOS holders and also likely have a very strong impact
on the token as it'll constrain a bunch of supply.
And then obviously with TelosX, the extent to which we generate revenue as a function of having a robust exchange, the exchange itself, even though it's a corporate entity, the reason it has to be a corporate entity is because you can't sign it, you can't sign these broker-dealer agreements unless you have a corporate entity. And actually, you need entities in different jurisdictions, so you have to kind of do it that way. But
That entity has in its mandate that all of the money it makes, it will use to buy telos and have a strategic telos
view in terms of what it does with its revenue.
So that's kind of how we align.
The extent to which then the community decides what to do with that.
I mean, we've talked about sending those tokens to it down and the community can decide,
repurpose it for whatever grants or whatever the case might be or just burn it.
I don't know.
I mean, at that point, it's really up to the community.
But essentially, you know, it's kind of like you build products that people want to use.
And as those products gain traction, basically it all ties into the Telos token.
And so that's kind of like what I said before as far as Telos being almost like a venture production studio.
Because really when you look at it, okay, we have to innovate.
And the reason we have to innovate is because
Even though we have a robust L1, it's produced hundreds of millions of blocks, it hasn't had any downtime, etc., etc.
Like, there is no Antelope ecosystem, right?
It is a more performant VM.
I don't think that's a controversial thing to say at all.
But unless you have standards and unless you have developer momentum, you know, building, I mean, look at all the ERC, you know, all the different EIPs and stuff like that.
Unless you have that, then it doesn't matter, right?
There's a lot of other VMs out there that are way more performant than the EVM.
And I know why the EVM was chosen because I was around then.
And it was, you know, just basically at that point, there was a multitude of things going on.
They had to launch the thing.
They had to do.
I mean, it was an unprecedented thing.
And they just basically picked a pretty straightforward, simple, rudimentary thing.
virtual machine.
And, you know, it had probably, you could say,
mass market appeal because solidity is, you know,
pretty pretty straightforward to use and so on.
But it's not robust.
I mean, even at consensus,
Like probably in 2016, we were building financial products, like we built this total return swap and some other things.
We had the limits of Solidity pretty quickly, and it was kind of like, wait a minute, you know, it is what it is.
You know, and so Antelope, I think, is a much better VM, but it doesn't have any momentum.
And it doesn't really have an ecosystem.
So that's exactly why Telos, long before I had any do with Telos, went into the EVM ecosystem.
Right.
But of course, with the EVM ecosystem, it's kind of like this, you know, abstraction layer
sort of.
It's actually an emulation, but nonetheless, we're not like anchored on Ethereum, so to speak,
right?
So to get TVL to come into the ecosystem is hard because there's like potentially additional
risks, like using bridges, like the multi-coin or whatever that thing was called hack, and
so on.
You know, we have to innovate.
Now, I do think with our EVM, particularly the Reth implementation and some of the great work, Jesse, DJ and
others have done.
We've stabilized things quite a bit.
And we have a lot of great applications and partners,
and we have a burgeoning kind of growing ecosystem
that we're going to continue to move forward with.
But you also have to be realistic about certain things.
Like, for example, particularly in a down market,
when ETH becomes very cheap,
or other gas fees become very cheap,
then that kind of competitive edge goes away.
I think that when the market pumps again and fees get very expensive again,
then it's kind of like, you know, TELO starts to look a little bit more attractive.
But is that enough, right? Is that really enough? Or do we need to innovate beyond that?
And so, question is, how do you innovate beyond that, but still, you know, like keep your community at the forefront, right?
And so that's why building these kind of like, you know, additional products that are not necessarily within the EVM ecosystem that we have, but tying them to the token is a way of like engaging with the community and giving back to the community and, you know, expanding our reach.
Like I think the way Tellos becomes successful.
is as a venture production studio that through innovation launches, you know, products and services beyond its initial scope and mandate, which is exactly what was going on even before I joined because the initial
you know, arc of telos was like the antithesis of EOS and all the negativity and stuff
that came with that network and everything that happened.
But then anteloped in gay momentum.
So the community decided we have to innovate, we have to go to the EVM.
Probably they should have done that a bit sooner, frankly.
But in any case, you know, continuing with that same, I think I'm just continuing what basically
this community has always done, which is kind of innovate beyond.
So that's kind of, I think the vision, I think is the right vision.
You know, you look at a guy like Alberto, you look at Danielle, a lot of people don't really know him too well.
He's very quiet.
He's like a brilliant PhD mathematician.
He's a brilliant guy.
He's an incredible mathematician, great cryptographer, Apollo, you know, some of these other folks.
you know, on that side of it, as far as the ZK research team, we have a phenomenal team,
and they've been doing incredible work. Like the stuff that they've published so far,
it's like within the kind of ZK community, particularly around, you know, a lot of the researchers,
and this stuff that probably happens in the background, but like people are amazed that we've
been able to achieve those kinds of results, like the Plunky II Goldie Bear stuff, the
the aggregation, the speed, and everything, all the things with like basically no money relative to the competition, which, you know, has raised billions of dollars.
I think that is incredible. That is the thing to leverage or one of the things to leverage.
And so, you know, the extent to which Tellos becomes a venture production studio beyond its, you know,
very kind of and by the way the L1 I think will just continue to run forever.
I mean we have to make a quantum proof but it'll continue producing blocks.
It will continue generating tokens.
I think governance could be a lot more robust.
I mean, that's something that like really the community has to be more involved in in terms
of like voting.
And I get there's demand for EVM voting, but it's like a hard problem and there's limited
resources.
But you can also go back into the L1 and vote.
especially if there's proposals that are tabled and there's nothing stopping anyone from doing that, etc.
So there already is kind of a mechanism there, but on the governance side and also in terms of the resilience of the L1, it's robust.
It's been robust for many years, but there's no demand for that.
for the antelope ecosystem there just isn't and our evm you know it's continuing to grow but it's
still a fairly new ecosystem as well relative to how old ethereum is and so on so you know moving
beyond uh i think is the right thing to do and i think we're doing it in the smart way it just
takes time it's hard
We don't have tremendous resources.
That's one of the drawbacks of not doing an ICO and instead air dropping all of your tokens to many, many small accounts.
But nonetheless, we're moving forward and I think the ZK results in particular are really spectacular.
And it's just a matter of like getting there.
And once it's there, we'll see the results and we'll see how this stuff plays out.
But I strongly with all my conviction believe that the right thing to do is to go beyond rather than to kind of like
focus entirely, let's say, only on our EVM ecosystem or worse to try and, you know, burn resources developing the Antelope ecosystem, which, you know, I think it's going to be very, very, very hard to do. So yeah, that's my take on that.
Awesome. I think if anyone else has any other questions they would like to ask, John, put your hand up now or request to speak.
This has been good so far, though. I think this is something that we should maybe look at doing once a fortnight.
Might be a good way to do this, John. We do have someone that's just requested.
We'll just bring an iceberg up.
Much is a fortnight, by the way? Is that like every two weeks or something?
Every two weeks. Yeah.
Okay. Okay, cool.
Cool.
Iceberg, do you have a question there?
Yes, I've got a question.
A couple of things.
First of all, thank you for bringing me up to this space.
And I appreciate that John is very specific on what he's doing with Telos.
After he took over Telos, and talking about the development
and going far beyond reach to not only
the consensus that uses that the different EVMs are using like VFT and parallel EVM, but go beyond.
But another thing that is attracting, this is the now level of the EVM attract liquidity, as you say.
It's been made by a base of DFI summer and different protocol and lending protocols and turf exchange on chain.
So how can you catch that market and convince them to go over to innovation and try to come over like bringing in different...
protocols like Ave and Euler or good lending platforms that can create a liquidity to tell us on chain.
Yeah, that's a great question. So, you know, there's a couple hard problems there. One is, you know, if you look at, for example, stable coins and I won't mention any names, but most of the time, I mean, actually, I don't even think this is a secret. I think a lot of people know this. But like, for example, with Tether, you know, it was like a $20 million fee to get native deployment or something crazy like that. Okay. And so, you know, short of
paying those, and I don't blame anyone for doing that. I mean, it's business, but short of doing that,
it's hard to get that kind of native deployment. And really, the stablecoin side of it is where
basically everything is happening. And so that's kind of one issue. Now, we are, like I said,
going to be, I think we've taken...
steps to address that and there's going to be an announcement sooner on that, which I think will result in more and more stable coins.
And actually, that's really great because, you know, Telos is so cheap to use that it's a great use case.
It's just up to this point.
And in the past, we haven't, you know, Telos has not been a place where stable coins are abundant, right?
That's the reality of the matter.
So that is kind of the first thing.
Isn't that an optimal way to scale up when you have a liquidity as a PayPal coin into your
exactly and then and it's a dilemma too because what can you do will you choose the centralized
stable points or would you try another route to invest on itterium on liquidity liquid
or or fracks or whatever you know so it's kind of like you have the regulations also
you're going to pound on the net net
that stable coins who's going to issue stable coins or not issue stable coins.
I mean, it's a dilemma.
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of chicken and egg problems in all of this, but I do think that...
what we'll see is a trend that will start soon as far as
you know more and more stable coins. I think that's like a big focus. That should be
kind of like a big strategic focus from that standpoint. But then you also look at
for example, you know, like I think a lot of people know this through my fund. I was a seed
investor in Morpho and I know those guys very well and I know Stanley from Ave well. He's a great
guy and I've trust me, I've had conversations with all these people.
When you look at Morpho, and actually their documentation is very clear, they have certain strict requirements for stablecoin deploy for deploying their vaults and their infrastructure.
And so when you have this like emulation of the EVM, which, you know, and then also for us to be compatible with Ethereum or to be connected to Ethereum, we have to rely on bridges, that is one of the areas where they're.
like in their case, it's a hard no, right?
And so, and I'll blame him to be perfectly honest,
because Telos has already experienced a bridge hack in the past,
a couple years ago.
And, you know, Ronan had a $600 million hack and so on and so forth.
That's a hard problem, but we're continuing to have conversations.
We're continuing to work through that.
I think also there's going to be another deployment soon that,
I wish I could say this stuff, but I can't yet,
but that's going to bring in another piece that's really important.
I think building up the decentralized exchange ecosystem is also really important as well.
I mean, we've got some great partners, but we need more and we need a lot more variety.
um but basically the answer to the question is we just have to keep grinding away we keep having
conversations we keep making measurable steps one of the reasons why the telos zk avm as an l2 is an
important step for us in my opinion is because
That will be a place where somebody like an Ave, and I'm not saying they will, I'm just saying somebody like an Ave or a Morpho who has these strict requirements, they can deploy on that.
Like the native token of that is going to be ETH.
And so maybe we build up a Telos ecosystem there with some of these partners.
And maybe over time we build those relationships.
Sorry, I just heard some feedback.
And maybe we build up those relationships.
And as we build up those relationships,
maybe we can convince them to then actually deploy on the TELOCVM.
So that's one important aspect of it.
Another part of it is from the TELSEX standpoint,
you know, even though we don't control the order books,
we can,
give incentives. Like if you withdraw this token onto the Telos network, there's no fee.
Right. And so Telos X can serve as a type of bridge, if you will. And so, excuse me, the extent to which, you know, those two things in conjunction, the L2, the ZKVML2 plus TelesX, is
Now, you know, we have tools that form of the basis of, you know,
aligning with some of the requirements that these, you know,
projects have that we want to obviously work with and have on our network as well.
And so, you know, you can start to see how that kind of now becomes something that we can
work into our process and hopefully over time make measurable progress and actually have,
you know, those kinds of stable coins and applications in our ecosystem.
and then of course even though the l2 will uh still have eith as its gas token the telos token
can still govern it right and so um you know you look at a lot of the governance stuff that
happens on other l2s it happens with their native tokens we can we can have that happen with
the telos token and so on so you kind of have to make incremental steps
and build bridges, so to speak, to get to that point where these projects will then deploy on your network.
And that's kind of like part of the strategic reason why the L2 is, I think, I think a good thing to do.
Because when you're facing hard noes, like when you're facing a hard no from a project, because of the reasons that earlier, like bridging risks, for example, or whatever the case might be, you've got to figure out how to try to work around that.
And that's, I think...
kind of our approach to that problem.
Thank you. Thank you very much for your answer.
I know you guys are far ahead when it comes to ZK roll up.
So, so, or ZKP or on ZK when it comes to privacy.
I've also asked that come true also, but you're far ahead then, so it's a nice thing to see.
Thank you.
One thing, one thing that I wanted to add, you know, based off of everything that John is saying, is that I think,
you know with all the products that tellos is currently working on we continue to kind of push
forward with our limited resources one of like tell us has been through multiple bear markets
and one thing that we've done well is innovate like john mentioned and i think we continue to try
to innovate with our limited resources and
I want to mention that, you know, with this upcoming
announcement, the ecosystem upgrade we're talking about for the EVM,
along with these other developments with Telos X, SnarkTor ZK EVM,
you know, we're essentially building the foundational pieces for all of these to work together
in tandem to create a vast kind of innovative experience for for blockchain.
And I think, you know, we've always
face the challenge of limited resources.
And that's also helped us be super efficient while delivering maximum impact.
And I think, you know, I'm proud to say that we continue to do that and that we will continue
to do that for the foreseeable future.
I think we are doing a lot of research and development and building a lot of innovative
products and so I think that's the most exciting aspect about what Telos is currently building.
Yeah, I totally agree with that. I mean, one kind of point to add to that. If you look at a,
I'm not trying to denigrate anyone. I'm just, it's factual. You look at an ecosystem like
Aptos or AptiOS or however, I don't know how they want to be pronounced, but they raise like
$300 million.
And to their credit, right?
Like, I mean, the CEO is a friend of mine from a colleague, great guy.
A lot of the, a lot of the core team members, former consensus people that I know, and, you know, it's phenomenal.
But at the same time, the protocol has generated like, I don't know, last time I checked, it was like a million and a half dollars in fees.
So you're talking about, you know, like basically $300 in spend for every $1 generated, right?
Right.
Is that the right way to do it?
Maybe, I don't know, maybe.
Maybe the thing ends up just becoming a huge monster and it ends up, you know, the token
ends up being worth like $100 billion and the thing ends up being like a massive success
story and that's the way to do it.
I don't know.
I tend to, and like, you know, I came from the like Ethereum ecosystem, you know, from
the beginning and Ethereum itself, even though it raised.
you know, a little bit of money relative to the cost, okay?
It pretty much burned through it.
Like by the time we got to DevCon 1 in London, they didn't even have the money to pay
for that event really is.
So, you know, like Ethereum itself innovated out of like tough financial constraints.
It's not like it raised a billion dollars to then become, you know, a $200 billion network
or something like that.
that's the only way in my opinion maybe i'm wrong maybe maybe these like massive subsidy uh kind of
you know approaches work but tell us doesn't have that option because it never did an icio right so
there is no other choice but to innovate okay and then as the innovation works and innovation is hard
like things fail all the time it's it's like it's not easy especially when you're dealing with hard problems but um
If the innovation approach works, then given the cost basis is so low,
you know, that's when you get, I think, really spectacular results.
And that's just like good old fashioned, you know, just building something and having it work
and turn out to be successful.
But it's hard.
It's like it's hard.
It's not easy.
Especially when like in our case and pretty much in the case of all alt coins, really,
you're at the mercy of the macroeconomic conditions and ultimately Bitcoin, right?
And so when the macroeconomic conditions are tough,
like cost of capital is high, interest rates are high and so on, Bitcoin dominance goes up.
And, you know, but Bitcoin itself, relative to the dollar, may not go up or it chops or even goes down.
And when it goes down, the alts get wrecked.
I mean, like...
I tweeted about this, I don't know, the other day or something, but like, Telos goes first.
It's like, we started to dump first.
And it was like, oh, my God, what's going on?
What's going on?
But then everything else dumped.
And now, actually, when you look at it in terms of, like, the drop over the last four months, I think we're not too bad.
Or we're definitely, I mean, like.
i don't know arbitral polygon optimism they're down like 65 percent 66 percent
and so on right so there's that's the other variable in this too like when you're
basically at the whims of like these other market forces that
So you can't worry about it too much.
You just have to just do the best you can to push through it.
And then I think when the innovation stuff hits and it starts to work and the market really
starts to recognize it at the same time as the market conditions change.
That's when you get the crazy explosive repricing of everything.
And then later everyone says, oh, well, it was obvious in hindsight.
But I mean, if you look at, like I'll use Maddoch as example, Paul Young, because obviously
I was with that project, but like if you look at it prior to, let's call it the end of 2020
or the beginning of 2021 when it went on its like 100x plus parabolic run.
Look at the chart the previous two, three years.
I mean, it was like a half a penny.
It was just like brutal.
It was like having a really hard time.
And that was a similar state where the market conditions on the macro side were tough.
Ethereum went down to like $80 or something and so on.
And then of course, but those guys kept working the whole time.
And, you know, they innovated.
And they came out with this kind of like Swiss Army knife approach of multiple scaling solutions in one network rebranded it.
And, you know, the innovation efforts that they undertook through hard work and dedication,
even when they were like out of money, hit at the right time as the market conditions changed.
And then, you know, the whole thing kind of exploded in a very short period of time.
And I would say that, well, really, when you look at the crypto markets, that's kind of how things go.
You know, it's like the macro conditions change and those projects that are sort of like,
you know, there at the right time with the right product and hit the market in the right way,
they go absolutely parabolic. And then the whole cycle just resets again and again and again.
And I mean, even Solana, I think it was down to like eight bucks or something a couple years ago.
It just was brutal. And then obviously they just kept going and going going. So that's really all you can do.
And then hopefully it aligns with the timing of the market and the things that you're doing are what the market wants at that time.
But that's hard to see in advance.
And that's kind of the game that we're playing right now in terms of hopefully the things that we're working on come together at the right time.
And that's, I think, our best chance.
That's what we should be doing.
We do have a question from Milly here.
Milly, do you have a question for John?
Hello, yes.
Good day to all people and maybe good night to some other.
First of all, before I ask my question, I want to thank John for all the effort and work he has done for the tell us.
We do as a community see you as a savior of Telos.
You know, all this has happened after this game is top and many things.
So thank you, John, for that.
My question is regarding the inflation in Telos, although we have very low inflation and zero unlocked.
And then I just want your thoughts on tying the idea of
tying the price to the inflation or the other way.
How do you see this in the future is going?
Do you see any deflationary plan coming,
or the effect of the Telos X on the price action?
So we don't want to see the Ethereum, like, you know,
after some years,
the Ethereum become again inflationary.
So do you have any thoughts on this, John?
Thank you.
Sure.
Yeah, sure.
So I'm definitely not a savior.
I think Telos is super cool.
I love the community.
It's a lot of fun.
And, you know, I love...
doing this stuff and really you know so so the the people that are like the saviors you look at
guy like j t for example he's been around forever that guy works like a maniac he's always responsive
he's always you know dealing with stuff like that's the savior of telos or you know the the
people that have been here for a long time um you know those are people i admire and uh so you know
in terms of kind of the inflation side of it i mean
Uh...
Like, there was a proposal put out.
The community voted on it.
They voted it in.
I definitely think that, you know, look, it's very hard to gain theory how markets will
respond and how crypto economic systems will sort of adjust.
And very often, I think that it's particularly when macro conditions are in a certain state
and very, very strong, like, you know, this kind of massive increase in the cost of capital.
over the last couple years, it doesn't even matter what you do at that point, frankly.
The only thing that can potentially bust through that is really Bitcoin.
And so everything else is sort of at the mercy of that.
And it's really not until cost of capital and quantitative easing returns that these
things then have the opportunity to kind of play out as far as
whether or not the inflation tied to price model will work or not, and so on.
So in terms of Ethereum itself, I personally think Ethereum made a big mistake when they moved from proof of stake to prove work to prove a stake.
That's just my opinion on it.
Maybe I'm wrong, but...
You know, and the ultrasound money approach, I think theoretically is quite interesting.
But again, it's a similar kind of scenario where, like, if you look at the history of
Ethereum, it was like, okay, well, it came out and we had this like world computer meme that
was going to have a thousand, twenty four shards.
Sharding is very, very hard, by the way.
It's extremely hard to do, I mean, in a decentralized network context.
And then it was like, okay, well, a thousand twenty-four, maybe it's too ambitious, let's
And then, you know, the TALIF writes of a blog post in 2018, I think it was March,
2018 or maybe February.
Okay, we'll do like maybe one chart, right?
And so actually scaling the L1 proved to be very hard.
And so it got pushed out to the L2s.
Problem is the way that's played out in conjunction with proof of stake and sort of like, you
know, this kind of like inflationary, deflationary, flexible model thing is that, you know,
Well, if the L2s become parasitic, if you will, which is what some people say, then actually you end up with maybe
less than optimal conditions and, you know, that reflects in the price and so on, right?
I don't know.
I mean, I definitely think that the extent to which the L1 itself has the capability to tremendously scale, have tremendous throughput, and so on, is obviously the more ideal path.
But, again, that's very hard to do.
With respect to Telos, I mean, you know, it is...
Probably the case that in the past, inflation was a bit too high.
I definitely think that the TEDP4, and I've said this before, I mean, I wasn't involved.
I wasn't here.
I was just a TELUS token holder.
I would not have done that.
In fact, I'd love to see a proposal that basically prevents anything like that from ever happening again.
But that's not my...
the community has to vote on something like that.
So in terms of those kinds of shock supply inflation events, I will never be a part of that.
I'm sorry.
That's not something I believe in.
But in terms of like, you know, the proposal of the past recently that reduced the inflation
and reduces as the price goes up.
I mean, it could be very interesting.
It does create some.
potentially weird incentives, right?
Like the incentive is to not let the price go up because obviously the inflation will go down.
So will that play out or manifest?
I don't know.
I do think that strong innovation plus quantitative easing and good macro economic conditions
will overwhelm any attempt to suppress the price.
at that point, particularly if there's demand for the token through various fee opportunities
or basically some of the stuff we talked about earlier in this in this call and this discussion,
it'll just overwhelm that and it'll be very hard to suppress the price.
But that being said, you know, I personally really like the Bitcoin model from the standpoint of, you know, the crypto economic aspect of it.
I understand the argument is, well, in 150 years or whatever, 147 years or, you know, there won't be enough fees to sustain the network and it's going to have a hard time.
Well, guess what?
If it doesn't upgrade a quantum resistant cryptography, it won't matter in five years.
So but for the past, you know, since, you know, for the past, basically since Bitcoin's
inception, I think that model has been pretty elegant and works really well.
So that's kind of my preferred approach.
I would say my default approach.
Maybe I'm a Satoshi maximalist from that standpoint.
But that being said.
I do think tell us inflation at this point is probably okay.
Like I said, if we get to stage where macro changes, quantity of easing reemerges and our
innovation hits at the same time, then any potentially kind of unintended incentives
to artificially suppress the price in order to keep inflation higher will be overwhelmed
in any case.
you know, ultimately that's all that really matters is that the innovation side of it hits at the right time and then and then and then that's it. That's really the bottom line.
Thank you so much. Thank you.
Thanks for your question, Mille. Now, we'll start closing up here, John, but I definitely
think this is something that we should maybe schedule for two weeks time, and we will put it out
early enough so that the community can see the scheduled time if it does go ahead for the same
Friday in two weeks. But just before we wrap up, John, what's your closing remarks on what
the community and yourself can be most bullish about in terms of TALOFs? Well,
what we can be most bullish about uh well i would uh look i i think that uh so we're we're in an
ultra competitive environment okay uh there is unbelievable innovation happening all the time
there's massive amounts of subsidies that we have to compete with uh there's a
tough macro kind of economic condition that still continues to persist.
And so, you know, there's challenges, right?
What we have, however, is I think a great legacy as far as like the way TELOS launched.
That's a very, very hard thing to reproduce.
And I think...
the stickiness of our community, like the people who care about tell us, that one aspect is nearly a pretty strong kind of shared value as far as like, you know, doing it that way rather than some other way, even though maybe some other way might have been probably more lucrative at the time.
But, you know, and that shared value will only get more precious and rare over time.
And I think, like, for example, this meme cycle that we just went through kind of like
probably the people who went through the meme cycle, and by the way, out of all the meme
coin trade, I don't know if you saw the stats on the Salana wallets, but it's like, it's less
than like a thousand wallets out of all the millions of wallets that participated in meme
coins that actually made money. And, you know, out of those thousand probably,
99 of them were insiders.
But, you know, there's a lot of people that experience that,
that I think if they find out about tell us in our Genesis story,
will be more appreciative of it and align with that value.
So we have that, and it's hard to reproduce.
You can't go back in time and reproduce that.
I think that we've got a great community.
We are kind of like,
forward thinking. We've got some really great people as well. Our innovation thrust is moving forward.
I mean, it's hard, but that's how innovation is. I think that honestly, like, just strictly
kind of speaking from a VC standpoint, the fact that we are innovating in a constrained resource
environment is
It's one of those things that if it works out, you look back on it and you say that's exactly what we needed at that time.
Okay?
You know, I mean, Intelis has gone through periods where it had plenty of cash.
It took in $8 million at the end of 2021.
I mean, that was largely from my investor group.
I mean, that's public. Everybody knows about that.
And maybe that didn't result in a tremendous amount of innovation.
So, again, it's one of those things that if this works, looking back on it,
That's what people say, you know, that's when people will say that's exactly what we needed at that time because that's how innovation happens. Okay. It happens out of, you know, your parents garage or basement, right? That's the kind of classic story. So.
Even though we've been constrained, I think we've demonstrated spectacular results, particularly on the ZK side of it.
And I think that's something to be very bullish about. We have a great team.
The results will continue to get better and better.
And I think they're going to be at some point, particularly when these things are live and going into the market, it'll be difficult to ignore.
And so, you know, tell us, in my opinion,
Right now, relative to everything else that's in the market has
pretty much only one place to go and that's up.
So when you look at it, and again, not to denigrate anyone, but just from a factual standpoint,
I mean, Scroll did a raise at like a $1.9 billion, $1.8 billion valuation.
They launched on finance and then their token absolutely newt.
I don't know if you believe in the fully diluted value valuation meme or not, but if you
look at their valuation, it's almost the same as ours.
Just depends on whether you believe in that FDV thing or not.
But we are fully kind of diluted, if you will.
I think the fundamentals on the token are really good from that standpoint.
It's incredibly well distributed.
And it's just a question of can we continue to innovate?
Can we continue to build our brand awareness?
I mean, if you think about it, like,
There's probably during the GameStop moment, if you will, that's when a lot of people heard about Telos.
But in terms of like sustained, like, let's say interaction, engagement and awareness of Telos, that now, especially in the last kind of six months, is probably the most ever.
And it just continues to grow in terms of like...
excuse me, people who know about us who hear about us,
different things and so on.
So I think that is another aspect of it.
We haven't really even cracked into the mainstream of crypto yet.
So we have that opportunity as well.
And really at the end of the day,
it comes back to that innovation story.
If we can put it all together,
if we get a little bit lucky with timing,
and I think if we deliver spectacular results,
you know, there's, there's a very, very, like, Tellos is going to be in a very different place
than where it is now, you know, if we can achieve those goals. And, and so, you know, we just
got to keep working hard. Obviously, it's tough financial conditions, but hopefully those will
improve. And, you know, we just grind through it. And, and that's really, that's really it.
You know, we just get back to work and, and, and, yeah.
Keep at it. I mean, it might sound boring, but it is what it is. And I enjoy it. I love, I mean, the grind never stops. That's kind of the motto. And it's a lot of fun. So I'm very excited about the future.
That's a great way to wrap it up. John, thank you for your time tonight. And I think...
Yeah, based on anyone that's been through crypto markets before, we all know how quick it can turn in the span of a couple of weeks how things can completely change.
So look, everyone, thank you for joining tonight. Thank you to the community members that have raised their hands and come up to ask questions.
Like I said, we'll definitely plan another one of these over the next couple of weeks.
Keep an eye out on the Hello Talos Twitter account, X account. This is where we will schedule these and run them.
So just keep an eye out for the next scheduled space.
But once again, John, thanks for your time.
And I'm sure the community do appreciate the updates that you've put out tonight.
Wonderful. Thank you very much.
And looking forward to the next one.
All right.
Take care, everyone.
Have a good night.
Bye-bye.
