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tribute labs x octra: privacy hivemind
Recorded: July 29, 2025 Duration: 1:04:48Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, the co-founders of Oktra unveiled their innovative project focused on fully homomorphic encryption, highlighted strategic partnerships with ZeroDAO, and shared insights on the project's successful testnet phase, indicating a promising future in the crypto landscape.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Hi, everybody.
Hey, good morning.
I've been there.
Spaces are, it's a very, very finicky app.
And they should make a standalone app, I think, for managing them,
for how important they are.
It's crazy.
Yeah, anyways.
Well, good morning and good afternoon, everybody.
Whoever, or all the time zones.
Good day, I guess.
Good day of Tuesday, July 29th.
Thanks for joining us.
This is a special hive mind slash tribute salon slash Octra space.
And yeah, let's get into it.
Everybody else, feel free to intro yourselves.
Guys, can you, yeah, before we start again,
could you retweet the right link to the account?
Because now it has the old one.
Yes, just did that.
OK, cool.
Let me just double check.
I still see the old one in the Tribute Labs account.
It was posted one hour ago Hello.
Hey.
All good now?
Hey.
Yeah, yeah, it should be fine.
I'm trying to get David as a speaker as well.
David, can you accept?
Okay, yeah, definitely technical difficulties this time.
Yeah, I've been there.
OK, and now finally I need to add Tribute Labs as a co-host,
please.
Can you accept that as well?
Nope.
Yeah.
Yeah, finally. All right. Thanks, okay. Yeah, finally.
All right, thanks, everyone.
Thanks for the coordination.
It takes a village.
Yeah, all right.
So, yeah, great to finally have this.
I think we tried to schedule it, what, two weeks ago?
Yeah.
No, it's great to finally do this.
Yeah, and sorry, everyone, about the technical difficulties.
Yeah, Alex and David, do you want to just start introducing yourselves?
Yeah, Alex and David, do you want to just start introducing yourselves? Yeah, sure. I'm Alex and Lambda is David. We're two co-founders of Oktra.
David's experience comes from, he was in the early team of VK, which is
more commonly now known now as Telegram. So it was the
Pavl Durov's first company which later kind of semi-evolved, semi was I guess taken from him by
the by the government and yeah so he pivoted to Telegram full-time and that's when the team kind of split.
So, yeah, our experience mostly comes and yeah, most of the developers today mostly come from these times.
So, his time in Russia was quite influential in shaping it as one of the leading, I would say, developer communities in the world.
And so now, especially since the event started,
a lot of ex-Soviet guys are still influenced
by his work back in the day, and we are no different.
So I'm also from St. Petersburgburg where of contact it was founded and
functioned so yeah we were quite quite close like everyone was quite close to it
um since 21 uh we we left russia as well uh we're now living in london and well yeah building octra
well yeah building octra i uh yeah my experience after this was mostly crypto focused um not really
like much to share i was just building mostly on the community building size uh worked with a few
big big projects back in the day like yeah did marketing for yes some some integrations and promo for Binance Georgia and Flow and Oneinch and so on.
David, on the other hand, since 21 has been building Oktra full-time and that's also when
we were introduced to each other and kind of decided to work on it together, I guess.
to work on it together, I guess.
He told me back then, back in 21, about FHE.
And yeah, it was not even like a narrative,
not even not a narrative, but also like nobody even knew the word.
So it was really novel at the time.
I think most of the projects you see today,
which tried to develop FHE, they either didn't exist
or they were really low-key, probably like 500 followers or something.
Now it's the big thing suddenly, but yeah, we've been working on it for four years now.
What about you guys actually?
It would be interesting to hear about Tribute Labs intro as well.
I guess I can take it. Yeah, we've been in the DAO space since 2017.
And yeah, we're more recently pivoting to AI and venture capital.
Yeah, I think like one of your DAOs is Red DAO, right?
Yeah. Yeah, I remember hearing about it at DAOs is RedDAO, right? Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I remember hearing about it at an event back when I was living in Moscow in 21.
And yeah, they were saying like they're going to bring like consumer luxury goods or something on chain.
So yeah, it was an interesting concept.
And I think a really important one to mention that we facilitate is ZeroDAO, which is our ZK-focused DAO.
Which, by the way, invested in Octra.
Yes, big props for that.
So yeah, Tribute Labs has like a unique hand in kind of every new developing field.
Amazing.
Where are you guys based?
Like New York mostly?
Yeah, we're mostly in New York, but our DAO members are everywhere.
Sure. So what do you guys do there, Jiggy and Daniel?
Yeah, so I do, I guess, various things. I run spaces like this sometimes. I also then am the lead for Metropolis DAO,
which is the AI investment sub-DAO. And for that, I just sort of keep on top of all the latest AI
developments and news. And I'm also a scout for AIDAN, our new fund. So looking for new investment opportunities. And in that case,
it's really wide ranging. There's no specific theme or sector that we're looking in. It's any
kind of early stage venture opportunities or in theory on chain stuff too. With Metropolis though, it's AI with a focus on decentralized
and crypto, you know, crypto intersection of AI, but no limitation to that.
I work with a few dollars that tribute mostly NFT and art side.
I do spaces like this too um or like daniel um
i also help run some events uh like tonight we have an ai engineering meetup um at pubkey with
plastic labs and um they're like solving for personal identity um using ai and have some
really interesting um applications and things that they've built.
Yeah, I used to cook before that.
Yeah, it's been deep down the blockchain rabbit hole since.
Cool.
Thanks for the context.
Welcome.
Let's get into Oktra.
Hello?
You muted yourself.
Oh, yeah? Okay.
Or no, Jiggy did.
My bad. Sorry. Just for context, if you guys could briefly explain what fully homomorphic encryption is, just so that I know many know what it is. But I think coming from you guys that are being experts in it, I think would be great.
And then we can dive a bit deeper into more technical things.
dive a bit deeper into more technical things.
Well, from a general perspective,
fully homomorphic encryption is any type of encryption
which allows to perform computations on encrypted data.
So you can verify the inputs and the outputs,
and you can verify some of the process,
but you cannot see the underlying data so essentially like you own
the key to your data and you can give it to third parties for for computations for any kinds of
applications that would modulate or use this data for training or yeah pretty much any
mathematical operations over the data and then return to you the correct result
that you can later decrypt with your own key.
So I guess that's the short.
I don't know, David, do you have anything to add?
You're muted.
Okay, I guess not.
So my understanding of how it differs from ZK is like ZK is just, you can...
You said it very well, by the way.
Go ahead.
So, yeah.
David?
Yeah, I think it's first time using the spaces,
so it could be running into issues.
The way it differs from ZK, again, in the general sense,
I'm not a cryptographer, and I'm not, okay, he left the space.
It is a really hard interface.
Okay, let me add him back.
Can you, yeah, who, Kira, right?
Is it Kira on Tribute?
I think, yeah.
Could you ask her, could you ask him back to speak?
Because I don't have any settings on this account.
You're the listener now.
I see speaker.
Same.
Okay.
Yeah, so the difference...
The general...
Generally speaking, approach to ZK today is you put these computations somewhere else, which could be a server or some sort of a distributed network, it depends.
You perform these computations off-chain and then you return a proof on-chain that the computation is correct.
that the computation is correct.
But the data itself doesn't stay encrypted at any point of time.
So it actually leaves the chain to a server where it's stored and processed in plain text.
It cannot be visible on the blockchain, to be fair,
because, well, computations are done off-chain,
but at no point is it encrypted.
So it is only technically invisible to the blockchain,
but not to the handler of this data.
Right, that makes sense.
So it requires a trusted intermediary, basically.
So it's sort of like there is a custodian for your data
there with ZK.
Yeah, yeah.
Again, I'm sure there are more or less private ways of doing it,
but from the general perspective, it works as a custodian service for your data.
When I first heard about Octra, I guess it was fall of 2023, I think is when we, I think we first got in touch
then. And I was just asking around about FHE and everyone's like, oh, FHE is cool, but it doesn't
exist or it won't exist for years. And I've run into that sentiment a lot. And I don't know
into that sentiment a lot.
And I don't know where that comes from exactly,
but it felt like that was sort of the ubiquitous feeling.
So what changed that sort of allowed for Oktros
to start working if that was the kind of common sentiment
around FHE even a year and a half ago or two years ago?
There is a limited amount of approaches that FHE traditionally encompasses.
Most of them are lattice-based and the most common scheme, which is also the most adopted today, was invented almost 10 years ago.
And it was invented as an academic kind of work initially.
It was not meant to be used in production, especially at the scale that is required today with more than ai systems or um yeah or even blockchain for what
it's worth wait uh what happened oh shared by jiggy okay i thought it finished again okay and
so um today's attempts like not today's but but one year and a half ago, attempts at bringing FHE on-chain to AI
were mostly around taking this technology, which was academic,
mostly academic, and trying to apply it to real-world use cases,
which just didn't prove to be realistic. So that is why the halo of kind of, you know,
low performance follows FHE everywhere it goes.
What we did instead is,
so we developed kind of infrastructure first, I guess.
We are not academics,
rather the experience is mostly applied.
So David was responsible for building all of VK's database, for example.
And he had experience with homomorphic encryption at another of his jobs, which is more secretive.
So I cannot talk about that in detail.
Okay. Interesting. Drinking, but... Okay. Interesting. Intriguing, but alright.
Well,
wait, is he... Like, I see him as a listener still.
I'm sorry to keep focusing on that, but it's just...
No, no, no. He's a speaker.
David, can you say something?
He's muted.
Can you just hi at least?
Did he say something?
Okay, whatever.
Yeah, I don't know.
It's weird.
I see him as a listener and I don't hear him.
One sec, Alex.
And he's not responding to me either.
He's unmuting. I didn't hear him and he's not responding to me either.
He's unmuting, but yeah.
Okay, so he was responsible for developing the database. So all of his experience came from mostly like low level
interactions with data and keeping it encrypted.
So we started with, when we started Oktra, we didn't start this academic project.
Instead, we focused on building it out specifically for these very applications.
So there is just some sort of, I guess, like, yeah, infrastructure first approach in it.
And we developed it with blockchain in mind.
So the way we reach this performance is also because we use a distributed network to distribute these traditionally heavy
loading works on encryption across many nodes. So really it's just because we didn't conceive it
as something to test on a centralized server, but rather to to apply specifically to a distributed network.
Yeah, it's really interesting. I think like the yeah i listened to your last spaces and um
they were talking about how like privacy funding was uh not prioritized and i think
it's kind of like uh these lego blocks and like time uh and just with due time finally came uh it finally came
into place where uh technology like fhe and the blockchain and what you guys have been building
for many years um can exist and come to fruition i i've been following like your recent updates and things
that you're sharing and i think what uh what you've solved is like this design aspect or
or tell me if i'm wrong in this regard because um i'm curious about it and i'm seeing uh at least
from like a theoretical standpoint a lot more like hyper hyper hyper, and then hyphen, uh, XYZ of, uh,
we're in this like hyperactive age and like, there's crazy amount of attention and things,
but I'm curious with this hypergraph, um, that you show here and, and in this design, how it,
that you show here and, and in this design, how it, uh, works. And like,
I don't know if I'm asking maybe like the sauce or like how to make the sauce of,
um, Octra. So I don't want to, if I'm asking like, like a trade secret or something like that.
Um, yeah, I'm curious, um, what makes this different than just like a simple connected network?
Yeah.
So hypergraphs, they basically just allow us to encrypt and encode
relationships between data points more efficiently.
So essentially we achieve parallel FHE, so to say,
if you think of like why Ethereum is like, you know, reasonably slow today, but then like Monad does something like 10,000 TPS, then, you know,
it's because of the parallelism of operations. So what we managed to achieve is
one locality of these computations, so specifically to the intersection of any relevant data. We do not grow.
So usually FHE, one of the aspects of why it is considered so slow is because of the noise growth.
So when you do operations on encrypted data,
there is a specific amount of noise which is added there to preserve encryption.
So it keeps growing at every operation,
especially if you use lattice cryptography,
as I previously said,
because the noise grows not only locally,
but for the whole state.
What we managed to achieve with hypergraphs
is localized this noise growth
and map operations more efficiently
and add parallelization to them.
So there isn't any trade secrets.
It's nothing that we actually invented.
It's just, it's very,
homomorphism of hypergraphs is a widely studied subject in math.
And there's a bunch of papers on it.
So while, actually, even when we were raising last year,
we spoke to a few technical investors
and they told us there was already research it so while actually even when we were raising last year we spoke to a few technical investors
and they told us there was already research on going into using hypergraphs for FHE so
again like it's not some kind of you know we like to say that we didn't really invent it so
it's it's just something that we found as a um found experimental application of it to our
specific case and and well yeah so that is the result
let me know if you I might have lost part of the question.
Because I'm still trying to get...
to see whether he can join.
I see that he has purple dots.
I see the purple dots.
Yeah, but he's just...
He's not reading the message.
And I don't understand.
I'm here by the way.
Yeah, okay. can you add something?
We can, yeah, great.
Alex put it very well.
Hard to add much, by the way.
I mean, I think there's actually something.
Sorry, to be honest with you, I'm not a great public speaker.
But I'll jump it later if I have something to add, sorry to be honest with you i'm not great you know i'm not a great public speaker but uh
i'll jump it later if you if i have something to add especially related to mass of or clarify
anything important great yeah i i think there's something probably comforting that you didn't discover it and you're just applying it because you can kind of trust the underlying basis of it better that way and probably convince others that up because I guess like much of the criticism of any new technology always ends up being like, you know, what if it's not safe and what if it's not battle tested and whatever.
Like what, you know, there's just a bunch of things that you can, you can, yeah, I guess like find to critique.
So the first part is absolutely right,
so there is nothing new that we invented.
It's all covered in existing papers.
And actually in our upcoming paper on Hypergraph FHE,
we link all of them, so it's not entirely original research,
it's just something that we put together. Secondly and that is also like you know going back to why we started as a more of an applied project
we managed to launch the network before we could actually focus on publishing all of the academics
behind it and we are better testing it right. So we now have real world data to support
not only the claims of performance,
but also the claims of safety down the road
when we end up publishing the paper.
And yeah, thirdly, I guess like,
you know, crypto is never really academic.
All of the stuff that works, it sometimes just works
and ends up changing lives.
I'm not sure like having 50 PhDs or I don't know any amount of PhDs for those words on your team
has helped much of the stuff to succeed. It's always network effects and accessibility and
the focus on developers and so on.
So yeah, we're happy to kind of take the, you know,
knowing inside, but we know we're happy to take some FUD
and just prove it wrong down the road.
Yeah, I mean, there's a more general tendency
in technological development of like techno preceding epistema, whereas like, you
can figure out how to make a steam engine before you understand the, you know, underlying math of
what makes that steam engine work. And I think that applies even in this case. Yeah, but that's
also like the basis of engineering, isn't it? So, you know, yes, yes, yeah, yeah, yes, exactly.
So, I mean, yeah, I don't think
there's anything wrong with that
approach at all.
You will
be surprised because this is the most of the
critique that we get.
We always read
subtweets on us, like, you know, all the new
stuff isn't battle-tested, all the new stuff isn't
this and isn't that. Well, if you don't battle
test it, then, I mean, if you don't launch it it then it's not going to be battle tested then you cannot adapt
right yeah i guess i probably do underestimate uh how controversial that uh that it's okay to
just kind of it requires a faith uh a faith in a progress in progress or in and processes
that this is a yeah Yeah, speaking of faith,
you know, not focusing exclusively on EVM, for example,
back in 21 was highly controversial
because everything was EVM.
Then we said, no, we're gonna focus on general purpose stuff,
which you can plug it into both Solana
and Ethereum and Cosmos and so on.
Then all of a sudden, you know, svm became a thing in 23 and then
and yet again we were like okay now we're going to focus on general purpose because we don't know
you know a year ago we were asked in in full seriousness why don't we launch as an eigenlayer
avs because that was the default uh way to launch you know so now nobody even knows what eigenlayer avs is unfortunately this is very much a crypto
thing for sure there yeah so it's it's always better to i think like stay i i think it was
philosophy our philosophy from day one to always stay flexible and just like see where it's where
everything goes and just you know see where we can plug in um rather than just staying rigidly within one ecosystem.
Because many of the projects that we're building alongside us,
they did.
And yeah, many of them are pivoting now.
Yeah, that is such a problem in crypto
where you're preaching interoperability and decentralization and flexibility and sort of championing user, being able to port data portability and all this stuff.
But there's the most intense forms of vendor lock-in ever when you launch a crypto project in any specific ecosystem.
It's like so much worse than any other technological stack. Like if you're just a t-shirt company, you can switch out from Stripe, you know, to some other payment processor. But if
you like, once you launch a token, you're, of course, yes, you could relaunch or do anything
like that. But you're basically just completely locked into
whatever narrative happened to be dominant when you launched and yeah i don't know many many such cases of casualties from that so it's it's it's important oh absolutely and in my opinion it's
just philosophically more coherent to stay flexible and then adapt rather than pivot every every for every taste of the season because now everyone that pivoted to general purpose TE stuff to cater
for Solana they may not be future proof for whatever comes next and yeah it's
just I don't know like until your life and until we have really users it's
better to be able to adapt, in my opinion.
I'm curious how it's, I mean, the testnet is live. I just shared a tweet from like a month ago,
and it's been some time since then.
I know there's like lots of B2B applications with FHE and Octra that the technology solves for.
And I'm curious how it's been going thus far.
And yeah.
So we are currently at stage like 1.5 I would say of the testnet so the
first stage was trying testing out just basic if you read my recent stuff that I
published today on one two three DS then we just we were just testing out the
first DS so that's simple transfers and then we added encrypted transfers a week later.
Since then, we've been mostly busy building out the virtual machine.
So we added a new task just yesterday, I think.
Let me double check. Yeah, I think it was yesterday.
And it includes actually running math on the Octa virtual machine.
So this gives us... We're at the stage of collecting data now, and some, what happened?
Oh, I just added some co-operator of yours.
Oh, no, it's, wait.
No, it's, yeah, let's just keep us and David until questions.
Okay, sounds good.
Sorry.
Cool.
Sorry, where was I?
You were mentioning what you just shared a couple of days ago.
You were mentioning what you just shared a couple days ago.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
So we're starting to actually test complex math.
So you can check the scope of operations.
So we ask them to do dot products, vector, magnitude, square roots, and so on,
to actually see if the math is sound underneath. And once that is done, we will be switching to our encrypted virtual machine
where you can already run pretty much any complexity of logic
that you can either route through Octra or you can route through from Octra
on other chains or bring in some other variables in the mix.
But the testnet has been a great success, to be honest.
Yeah, to be honest, like almost unexpected,
especially considering that it was quite difficult to set up.
So it's not just something that you connect MetaMask to
and then you click a couple of buttons.
You need to actually run the CLI and generate keys.
I think all of it is pretty complex,
but also it's like, yeah, from first principles, I guess.
We do realize that much of the interactions are not organic,
but also it's not our goal right now for them to be.
What we want to do now is to test the load and see whether we can actually deliver this at scale.
And so far, it's been more than successful at that.
Starting to onboard first developers as well.
to onboard first developers as well um yeah and some of the services that exist on other chains
like oracles i guess are a major example i think running encrypted data feeds through octro is a
is a huge potential unlock because some of the data as we yeah as we know it's you know what the
We, yeah, as we know, it's, you know, what the, again, something that I said in the article,
so fintechs, they have the access to data on all their clients, so they actively train models on it.
But in crypto, we still miss all these models, even for advanced crypto applications,
notwithstanding AI or some of the complex futuristic stuff,
just even like, you know, credit
scoring is absent now.
So FAG could bring
that on chain as a beginning,
and that would be great. Then we can take it
from there.
Oh, credit
score is interesting. Is that a
specific, are there any projects that you
know that are working on that?
No, I don't think so, because again, like right now there is just that you know that are are working on that no i don't think so
because again like right now there is just i think that the um i think the attitude towards privacy
in general is quite um yeah cautious because not a single project has actually delivered anything
that was promised so far and so and even when they when they do, it's mostly not as programmable as is required to build something
complex. So for developers to waste time right now on Oktra or anything else, just to find out that
it doesn't work down the road, I don't think it makes much sense. Unless you just want to announce
and get some money and then not do anything.
But yeah, we're hoping that it's not going to be the case for projects on Octra. So not really pushing for that.
We try to verify the claims, at least if some teams come to us,
if they want to build something.
So I guess a lot of this is down the road,
and once it's truly unlocked,
it will accelerate much faster than it is today.
Today it's mostly just, yeah, we can talk on spaces,
but at the end of the day,
what we need to deliver is an actual encrypted virtual machine
that is capable of running arbitrary logic.
I just wanted to add that we're currently getting dev tools and debugger ready for release.
Yeah.
And plus update to Octroscan. It's not working very good, by the way, for now.
Yeah, can I ask a question as well?
Of course, yes.
Yeah, I'm interested in your guys' view of privacy.
I guess it's more of a philosophical question.
So why is privacy bad?
I'm happy to take this, actually, because I had a pretty interest.
I think I actually just tweeted.
And yeah, also, Daniel, I appreciate that you're versed on all the, you know,
on all the milady stuff and land stuff and Borgia styles.
Yeah, sure.
So I'm really interested to see your philosophical because we need these inputs.
Well, this isn't going to be, I don't know if this is going to be philosophical, but
more just about my personal beliefs about privacy.
Personal privacy and anonymity and being able to maintain a pseudonym online um i i i have an yeah i i
respect that i respect people who choose to to do that um i do think that um
it's it should be considered a privilege i guess and not a right um and if you
a privilege i guess and not a right um and if you i don't think it's an inalienable right
to have uh privacy online i don't think that's something that uh is like not natural necessarily
and so i think that if you if if one abuses your anonymity or pseudonymity or you know does fraud
with it or whatever then i don't think you keep the right to anonymity.
And I think if anybody, if you get doxed for committing fraud under an anonymous identity,
that seems like fully ethical to me.
So I think it's more like, yeah, the ethics of anonymity online.
So I think it's more like, yeah, the ethics of anonymity online.
Yeah, it's yeah.
I don't like I don't like sociopaths that use this type of technology basically to do evil sociopathic stuff and then get away with it.
And that is a risk.
And it's a similar thing with sort of just the freedom of speech.
I do think that generally it's an important right
and a privilege that should be respected in most situations.
But it can be abused, I guess.
So in your view, is privacy a spectrum?
Or is it like whether, you know, if we are equal, and if we can all equally use private tools,
then, you know, everyone can do whatever they want.
And maybe we let them vent, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
No, I mean, I think if what you're doing is just speaking, sure.
I think then anonymous free speech,
I think has very limited effect,
but anonymous action or anonymous computation,
I think that necessarily is more than just speech.
Like obviously speech can have an impact and effect.
And there's specific types of speech,
like, I don't know, for instance,
impersonating somebody else to commit fraud
or something like that.
That doesn't seem like,
that seems like a very different application.
When do we walk back?
Because, for example,
Bitcoin was initially thought to be just,
you know, notor initially thought to be just you know
notoriously be used for crime but then we found out that the banks are the ones committing crime
then ethereum um yeah latest example tornado cash like you know sanctioned them jailed them
now all of a sudden ethereum is good and tornado cash isn't that bad and uh you know stable coins are in the
white house so where is this limit like how do we set it yeah no I don't think um I certainly
don't think it should be set uh through some sort of back door that somebody gets to access like
that I think it's more about um some kind of of informal social layer that keeps people accountable.
And that's why I think that the credit score thing is interesting.
Having the Erbit system, you're not anonymous, but you have a pseudonym, and that doesn't preclude there being some sort of social credit system or reputation system.
I think darknet markets is a pretty interesting thing to talk about here, actually, too, where, of course, the vendors are anonymous, but they have a really elaborate system of reviews that you you know, you could fake it,
but it would have been hard,
would have been hard to fake a lot of those reviews because it would have been
a big financial burden to do so.
So some kind of like hybrid approach like that.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Feels like the best way.
I definitely don't think it should be through.
I think actually maybe I should ask you, you the UK? Because it feels like out of any country in the world,
besides authoritarian, besides China and Russia,
let's say, or other, North Korea,
it's probably the worst on privacy, right?
they just passed this new law.
They just passed this new law.
How does that affect your business?
How does that affect your business?
Yeah, that's a good one.
I need to think about it.
But yeah, in principle,
so I mean,
Oktra itself is not UK-based.
Oktra is based in Switzerland
and Switzerland has stringent laws on privacy.
They have very good privacy laws.
Whether I will pay the price of simply contributing to it, I don't know.
I'm happy to die on that hill.
I'm a strong believer of, yeah, I think like full sovereignty, you know.
Don't tread over me and stuff.
I'm not American. I've never been in America by the way yeah but I don't know I'm just like I was never really
attached to any as yeah I told you previously I was born in Russia but I'm
Georgian and I lived in Italy and then in Dubai and now I live in the UK. So I was never really
attached to any specific location. And I guess UK is no different. So as long as Octra itself
functions and is well off in a privacy preserving jurisdiction, I'm happy for it.
preserving jurisdiction, I'm fine. I mean, I'm happy for it. Me, myself, I don't know. I just
like UK. Maybe I will move to US someday if I have the chance, but yeah, for now. But then again,
you see, everything is tied, right? Like, I mean, the fact that we have, we've been able to witness
these like 20, 30 or whatever years you live on this planet, as they are and like as they are now.
Yeah, I guess like we should look more, yeah,
into the past and when talking about the future
and, you know, vice versa.
And yeah, if anything,
I guess like, you know, whatever is happening right now on the crack, yeah, this crack, like global crackdown on rights and privacy on private individual privacy.
And yeah, in this.
Sorry, no, I just gonna jump in quickly. I think I agree with your
All right, I think you posited it as a question, but I do think privacy is like a spectrum. I think it's
It's I think this is like a wide-ranging question
But I think we want agency or we don't want to lose agency and we have agency when we have privacy.
Yeah, but that's another aspect. That's why you keep it verifiable, right?
So you can verify what happened, you can prove it.
You don't need... Yeah, it's not like it's lost in the clone forever.
It's just... It's still there. You can find it if you want. And there will be new tools to pursue those who don't play by the rules.
But I guess, yeah, I was finishing the thought previously.
So we are now in the bear market of privacy globally.
We are now in the bear market of privacy globally.
And yeah, it's just like these things actually push for a change, not the other way around.
You don't just lay down and give up, I guess.
But that's what concerns privacy individually.
What we're more focused on, I I guess is on the privacy that you
actually want as a group. So again you don't go around exposing all of your
data, hopefully, unless there are leaks and there are leaks all the time. So what
we were envisioning within Octre initially and originally was rather a
cloud that you can trust because it's
It's not centralized, it's distributed. It doesn't have the possibility to give out your data
Even the validators don't see it and so on. So I guess that's the more of the philosophy rather than just
individually protecting every guy who wants to
want to
cooperate or like individually do some bad stuff.
Maybe this is going to be too general,
but why do you think there's such a tendency
for Russian developers to be focused on privacy tech
and stuff like TornadoCash and you guys.
And I think of trust, but verify it's a Russian proverb.
It feels somehow like it's very intrinsic to the Russian mind.
Oh, I never thought about it.
There's an interesting in Russia.
What'd you say?
We've seen a lot of heat.
You've seen a lot of heat in Russia.
Yeah. Very dangerous place. We've seen a lot of heat. You've seen a lot of heat in Russia.
Very dangerous place.
Is it just as simple as like to survive in Russia and especially in the Soviet Union,
there's a sort of a dark forest mindset where this type of technology is really important?
And also, I guess, the state is... I wouldn't say I was affected.
Yeah, I wouldn't say I was radicalized by growing up in Russia, honestly.
Although, of course, it's a very big issue there.
And, you know...
Yeah, even now, like,
sending money back to my family
is a huge issue.
So that's certainly an aspect.
But, yeah, I don't know.
Like, honestly, I have never thought of this.
I guess, yeah, it's just like, it's just natural resistance to any oppression.
And if we, that's also why, you know, like, I mean, like, on a very basic level, if you watch any interview with some Russian oligarchs, like Tinkoff just released his interview about building a startup in Mexico, I think.
He was one of the founders of the biggest bank,
biggest individual,
like private bank in Russia.
And you can feel a lot of
contempt, I guess,
towards the government.
I don't really have that.
I don't really care.
But...
My main take is my former company,
But from VK, you mean? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, for sure. It's sad the way from VK
which I loved very much and which made me who I am now,
was destroyed by stupid laws.
And all developers were forced to literally run away from it.
That's why, by the way.
JOHN MUELLER
you mean
yeah for sure
it's sad what happened with VK
but no for sure it's just a natural
resistance to oppression
and I guess
yeah I guess it just
explains it all
but also
but also I think like
you know like one of the that's the negative side.
But then there's a positive side.
There is a, you guys are mostly, like, American or Western or whatever.
Like, most of you guys are used to proper surveillance and proper financial controls and proper, you know, like you cannot really like withdraw cash right
now and just go to Moscow city and buy whatever amount of crypto.
Russians have always had access to it and I think they still do now.
And we were inspired a lot by developing markets because of the flexibility that they offer when it comes to all things P2P.
And P2P to us is a very useful tech.
We've seen it actually change lives.
So when the thing started in Russia, a lot of people left.
And the only way they could actually still get money because all the banks
were banned was through crypto and that's when yeah i think i published a few um in one of the
original kind of intro articles uh when we started one of the premises was that we are big believers in P2P and you know true P2P requires some sort of privacy as well
that was my bull case for Tron by the way because oftentimes people in the west don't
realize how big of a market USDT on Tron is for developing markets.
And yeah, if we can globalize this, that would be great.
That is interesting.
I mean, I think this is actually kind of related to that is, you know, like WorldCoin and Proof of Humanity.
and like proof of humanity.
I feel like that's going to clearly become a more and more of an important,
just a primitive for building economic and social networks
because there's going to be very soon,
probably like an order of magnitude,
more AIs out doing things on the internet than there are people and you know
like dead internet theory and all that stuff is is rapidly coming true um wondering how you think
about that um how you think about just um using using this type of encryption to to sort of like
have verifiably human only social networks.
And why I brought that up from that is, you know, WorldCoin already, obviously that's their goal long term,
but I feel like their, just their go to market was sort of airdropping money to, you know,
developing nations where there'd be a lot more demand for that um just to kind of
get a user base going and there already is a lot of of users in in latin america and other places
for world apps but but not at all in the west or anything like that um so i kind of feel like it is
a sandbox for this type of technology just to, because there is this P2P informal economic networks
there. Sorry, a lot of rant there, but anyway, wondering what you think about just kind of like,
yeah, proof of, proof of humanity and using FHE for that and Okta for that.
I don't really have an opinion on WorldCoin specifically.
Alex, one second. Sorry. I, Tribute and myself have to go to another spaces. I definitely want to hear and please continue, uh, chatting and also the, in the next space, um, one of the projects is raising money for Roman storm. So I just, uh, I wanted to add that little bit, but yeah, sorry, Alex, come on. We have to go. Thank you both so much.
Oh, thanks. Yeah. I, I have a few more minutes, so minutes, so I'm happy to stay on for another 10 minutes or so,
and then I'll have to go too.
I don't have an opinion on WorldCoin specifically.
I guess if I would have to pinpoint it,
I think we're more in the Accelerate camp.
And I think WorldCoin could end up being part of the problem, not a solution.
And part of the problem is absence of privacy. But again, I don't really have an opinion on it.
I think that there is nothing inherently bad in AI dominating more of the space.
And in fact, Octra seems to be the perfect rails for it because it supports complex computations rather than just proving something and, again, enabling transfers, all the usual crypto use cases.
again, enabling transfers, all the usual crypto use cases.
I think we need to bring more AI on chain, if anything,
not less, but not AI as in, you know,
forks of chat GPT, but rather
actually useful stuff that can benefit the humanity.
And if we bring more of this,
of private human generated data on chain,
then we can make more accurate predictions
and influence decision-making in a more efficient way.
Yeah, I don't think Octra is a good...
I mean, Octra here is, to me, I guess,
is more of an alternative to this camp,
which would include proving humanity and, again, some sort of control.
Yeah, I.
Yeah, I get that.
But do you think, like, AI agents have the same right to privacy that humans do?
have the same right to privacy that humans do?
The data they trained on deserve full privacy
because it's human generated.
And so from this perspective,
proven humanity is irrelevant, I guess.
Rather, like if you can bring your private data on chain
and you can use it in your everyday interactions with the network, either in the digital or physical world, then.
Yeah, then you can have just better models.
That makes sense. Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, being able to train AI on personal data is a huge moat for companies like, well, in theory, Apple, they haven't used it yet. But I do think that people would be interested probably in being... Yeah, the unlock here is that you stay the only owner of your own data that you provide
to the network.
What better proof of humanity is there than actually owning it and having the encryption
key to it?
Yeah, makes sense.
But yeah, if I would have to kind of uh categorize I would say that's um yeah
October would probably be on on the uh on in in another camp rather than um something like World
Coin or something like CBDCs do you think of them as the same thing I feel like if World Coin not
as being also counter to CBDCs I mean mean, obviously, yeah, because it is very, very well funded and connected to a SAM element.
And I think I get why it feels potentially sinister, something like CBDCs.
But it's not like a centralized database of humans.
It's also like hashes of viruses or something, right?
I mean, I think it's not incompatible with your system.
I'm not trying to be a WorldCoin apologist here. or something, right? I mean, I think it's not incompatible with your system. In my understanding, I also don't.
I'm not trying to be a world coin apologist here, but.
Yeah, same, to be honest.
I mean, I don't know the end game.
And when I don't know the end game,
it's just risky to kind of make some sort of assumptions.
I get that.
Yeah, for sure.
Do you have any other questions or topics
you want to cover before we go?
No, I don't think so, not so much.
It was condensed, but I think it was quite effective.
Yeah, I think we covered some interesting topics.
I wish we had more time and we had a lot
of technical difficulties in the beginning,
but I'm happy to chat more sometime.
Tell us about the new things,
the new thing you guys are building.
Yeah, we could talk about Aiden a little bit for sure.
Especially how it can be useful to funding Oktra, by the way.
Yes.
Well, we haven't run Oktra through it, but we could.
Aiden is a new fund and a new system
for evaluating early stage venture deals
and doing diligence. It's like a pretty elaborate
multi-agent kind of like synchronized diligence process where you have five sub agents that have
different parameters that they're looking for in the deal. Basically anyone who is a network member,
who is anybody who is like whitelisted by us,
but not only people on our team.
So it sort of is a DAO that way.
So if anybody is interested in joining Aiden as a scout,
hit me up.
And so scouts upload a deck
or whatever other information into the site.
You wait a few minutes and then Aiden spits out
this really, really wait a few minutes, and then Aiden spits out this really, really,
really elaborate report, gives an estimated valuation. It talks about a lot of the competitors
in the space. It does an analysis of the founders. There's a lot of other things it can do.
And then it sort of just gives you a confidence score in the deal and what valuation it thinks you should invest in.
And then the way it works is it's like I said, a rethinking of the DAO.
The LPs actually are the people who vote on whether the deals go through. So every week we'll sort of, the team members will queue up a few projects that we
think are investable that Aiden has scored highly. And then the LPs make the final call.
And the other innovative thing about Aiden is we, because we're kind of like saving so much money
on diligence by using this system,
we can afford to share a lot of the upside with the scouts that share the deals with us.
So anybody who shares a deal with Aiden that does get invested, as long as you can make an intro to
the founder for us, it's not just some random project that you heard of, but a project that
you're actually connected to in some way, then you share uh half of the carry so you get 10 of the total upside whenever
you know we exit so this is a multiple year long-term thing you're not going to get paid
right away um there are some vague plans for us to have on-chain components i don't know how that's
going to work but um there will be some other incentives, shorter term incentives that I think we'll start working on.
And the other cool thing about this is that it's actually a really useful founder tool.
So we haven't released that yet, but we're going to have a version of Aiden that's just meant for founders.
You can submit your own deck and information.
You can submit your own deck and information.
You get a bunch of feedback and there'll be an agent that you can kind of talk to, sort of like a virtual VC, actually kind of like practice pitching and all that stuff.
Which I know personally, I tried doing that with Channel a couple of years ago and it would have been incredible to have something like this.
So I see a future where Aiden as a founder tool like that,
it could be kind of the main use case even more than the fund.
But yeah, it's been really cool to work on it and see it.
What is it built on?
Is it just like, I mean,
is there any on-chain interaction at all?
There's no on-chain component at this point.
It's really just a AI deal analysis
system. There will be some sort of on-chain in the sense of there being tokens and incentives.
There will be something in the future, but that's TBD. I don't know if I should have even mentioned
this to be honest at this point. Right now, it's only a whitelist to be a scout, but if anybody on the space is interested, send me a DM.
I think my DMs are open.
You'll have to give your real name and stuff, but you're welcome to join.
And it is really, honestly, it's a great deal. Sharing 10% of the carry like that, like,
that's not something you get unless you're a general partner at a normal VC firm.
Or you run a group on Echo.
Yeah, I guess. Yeah, right. Exactly. So it's pretty good.
Well, thanks. This was a thanks to our sponsor section, by the way.
Exactly. Yes. And we did invest. And I think, you know, maybe we'll invest in the future.
If you have a DAC you want me to run through it,
I'll do it.
I'll send you ours.
Yeah, please do.
All right.
Okay.
Great chatting.
Yeah, I guess, like, as a final word
to offshore people listening,
we'll be adding some...
We'll be adding...
Oh, wait, what happened?
Can you hear me? Mm-hmm. Yeah, so we'll be releasing it. Wait, what happened? Can you hear me?
Yeah, so we'll be releasing the node soon
and we expect to add a lot of new validators to the network.
So stay tuned.
And yeah, as always, during spaces,
new tokens will be added to the faucet.
So be sure to claim them.
Great.
Great chatting.
Have a good day, everybody.
See you.
