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Tune in this Thursday 🎙️ Crypto Front Lines ep. 11
Recorded: Feb. 19, 2026 Duration: 1:02:15Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, crypto enthusiasts explored the critical importance of privacy in the cryptocurrency landscape, highlighting trends towards enhanced privacy features in projects like Ethereum and Edge. The conversation also touched on the launch of new assets on the Edge platform and the growing demand for privacy solutions, signaling a shift in user expectations and industry standards.
Full Transcription
Thank you. you
What's up guys? Hello. Thank you. How's it going, everybody? Let me know if you got your co-host invite.
Hello, hello.
How's it going?
I think we're waiting on RJ. RJ, did you get your co-host invite?
Send it again. I'm going to cancel and send it again.
Hopefully he gets it.
Then as soon as he's ready, we'll play the video and get started RJ can you hear us?
RJ, can you hear us?
Oh, he declined.
Let me see.
He might be having technical difficulties.
Invite again.
There we go. Nice. Cool.
All right. Welcome, everybody.
I thought we'd start off maybe with listening to this video.
I think it's super relevant just for today's conversation.
I would love also your opinion on it.
Sure, let's start.
What is the role of privacy in crypto?
One of the things that I struggle with,
if you ask me, am I a Bitcoin maximalist? I would say no.
Even though I was early, I think my biggest issue with it is that there's a lack of fungibility,
which I think is problematic to get to mega scale.
And then there's a lack of privacy.
I agree.
It's probably the biggest thing that will hold Bitcoin back from being ubiquitous.
Where does privacy play as the world evolves as you see it?
I think privacy plays a very fundamental role in our society.
But right now, as you said,
I also think that Bitcoin and most cryptocurrencies
do not have enough privacy features.
Yeah.
I think when Bitcoin was designed,
it was going to be pseudo anonymous.
But the fact is,
every transaction on the blockchain you can trace,
especially now you have a centralized exchange with KYC.
Exactly. And, you know know if you have like it's actually very easy. We go always
back to the same argument which is it always goes back to the corner case of well somebody's using
this for something to listen and I say there are those use cases but the overwhelming majority is
you buy a pack of gum but tomorrow you may buy know, you may want to buy a certain movie or a video game.
You may want to buy a cigarette.
And it's not for me to judge.
Yeah.
And dollars are fungible in that sense.
There's complete anonymity.
We have no idea about what it was used before that I got my hands on it.
Well, there are actually real applications where privacy is extremely important.
If you book a certain hotel and people know that hotel address,
like blockchain hotel address, the receiving address,
they will know that you will be in that hotel.
That's right.
That's a physical security for you.
That's right.
So there are real use cases where privacy is very important.
This is why people don't publicize their home addresses online.
That's right.
In many countries, if you review somebody,
in Japan, if you review somebody's home address, that's illegal.
So there are real use cases for privacy,
which most cryptocurrencies currently do not provide.
All right.
I think they kind of hit some good points.
Welcome, everybody, by the way. hello hello hey guys how's it going all right so let me pull this up real quick
i agree with the video by the way that's that's kind of the whole point um so welcome to crypto frontlines 11
is that correct yes i think it's 11. yeah i'm michael head of the customer success team over
here at edge i'm joined by rj head of the qa team and alberto the man of many hats um
marketing qa and support.
Do you guys want to say hello?
Hey, how's it going, guys?
I'm the man of many hats.
My name is Alberto.
Happy to be here.
Nice.
Yeah, actually, I think we should get that business card.
Like yours says, man of hats.
Yeah, many hats.
That'd be pretty good.
All right, so Edge, if you're not aware,
I would imagine you are,
but if you're not aware,
it's a self-custody exchange.
We focus on privacy.
We're open source.
It's kind of the ethos of crypto
all bottled up into one application.
Does anyone want to take announcements or I'll just keep rattling stuff off?
Yeah, sure. A couple of announcements. I mean, we have a port release out for 43.2.
If you haven't installed it already, a few minor modal fixes for 2FA and security modals,
and also for Xano.
444 is in the works.
So we're supposed to submit that maybe tomorrow,
so that might come out next week.
You guys will be excited.
There's going to be four new assets coming out on Edge,
Kakao, Moenad, NIM, OPB&B.
So that's planning to come out next week.
So keep your eyes out.
And then also, if anyone was curious about the brand ambassadors,
just so you guys know, the selections have been made,
interviews are being done, and the final announcements will be done pretty soon.
So if anyone was curious about that.
Awesome.
Cool, cool.
So as usual, if you want to speak, just raise your hand. You know, this is podcast light, but we're more about user engagement and want to hear questions. If they're completely off topic, that's totally okay. It's not really about staying on topic. It's about engaging with you guys and taking questions or concerns and just, you know, listening. I want to do that quite a bit.
Being head of customer success, I actually find the need to hear what users are saying. In fact,
the app has evolved over time just based on what you guys have given us input wise. I can speak
to that. I've been here going on six years. And a lot of my role actually has
been taking input from the community, packaging it in a way that I can deliver it to the devs or
Paul, the CEO, and iterating on the application because of it. All right. So to kind of jump into
the topic today,
I almost want you to take this Alberto because I feel like we have conflicting vision
on how it starts, but do you want to start
with Ethereum or go over NIM?
Well, this is an edge space, right?
So let's talk about NIM, I guess, right?
So it's more relevant to-
Sure, sure.
And we'll see where the conversation takes us. So for those that are not aware uh nim mixnet has been added to edge so
essentially that's a vpn that you can toggle on per wallet um it's it's i don't want to call it
beta because that's not really true because it's live but but it's in the early stages. So feel free to test it out if you're on the newest version of Edge.
Essentially you can go into your settings, privacy settings and toggle NIM on to privatize
transactions, meaning your IP location, things like that won't be tracked on that send when
you're connecting to nodes and things like that.
Yeah, for that particular transaction.
For that transaction, well, and for activity
of that wallet while it's toggled on.
Yeah, that's right.
Now, one thing that I will say about it
in the current iteration, it does slow down the send.
I mean, I know Alberto and RJ can speak to this.
I actually haven't tested this since the one try,
but it's
like a minute or two right like it takes a long time to send yeah i think about a minute or two
so when you slide to confirm after you send if you have that setting on it might take a couple
minutes where it's just spinning right and sometimes it may air out so we're still kind
of working on improving that we're working with nim to kind of improve that. I think they have some fixes coming out soon. Right, and that's the big thing. We are iterating it. I promise we're trying
to speed it up, but it's one of these things where it was implemented, we tested it, and then kind of
found the slowdowns. And I believe the NIMM team has actually promised us that they're going to
iterate on it as well to speed it up, correct?
Yeah, we mentioned like an SDK update.
Okay, perfect.
Yeah, so it will be sped up, but if privacy is a concern of yours, this is just another layer that you can put on top of it.
Not that it makes Bitcoin on chain private, but it does anonymize the location and the node that you're connected
to and things like that.
So with that said, once again, you can toggle it on.
Have you guys used NIMM?
Anyone in the community, have you used it?
Is this something that would be interesting to you?
It's totally new to me.
So I'm kind of like almost curious to ask all
these questions I've never used MIM and it's almost like a power up privacy
power to want to write in a sense right like for a privacy power user yeah what
is like what other wallets has that implemented also like if there's other
wallets out there that has that new integration the per asset um like vpn i don't know of any wallet
besides edge actually that does that i i do know some wallets will use like onion routing and
things like that right but i don't i don't think there's any wallets that you yeah per asset and
i'll admit like once it's sped up i'll probably have that toggled on at all times.
You know, I don't know how we're going to iterate on it in the future.
If it's going to be like, can we have it on account wide?
I know I had mentioned this idea of having it per transaction, just privatized transaction before you send.
I mean, there's a lot of other ways we can tweak it to make it more useful or more broad sweeping.
I would love to do it account-based personally,
but I know there's limitations because of how slow it is currently.
Yeah.
And if it does get faster,
maybe that's something like later on way out there in the future.
Maybe we just have it on by default for users.
You know, once it's more reliable, right?
Exactly.
Just on by default.
That sounds great.
Yeah.
Your whole account is private.
I remember a long time ago I had asked Paul about wouldn't it be cool to have a privacy mode or a privacy toggle
or a privacy settings.
We talked about it and there weren't a lot of tools that you could really use,
but this is one that he had brought up.
You could technically, your connections to the the blockbook servers like that could be made more
private and so it's like almost like the first edition of privacy tools or more privacy power
tools are coming to edge in a sense like as it as they become available or as things become
possibilities like uh it's pretty cool to things like we're we're hopefully going to add more
tools as they as they become available.
Right, yeah.
I didn't really talk to Paul much about NIMMix.
What was the vision by adding it?
Did the NIMM team reach out to us?
Was it just Sam?
Because I know Sam has been really high on NIMM.
How did it get implemented?
Yeah, I don't know the whole story, how that got implemented,
whether we reached out to them or they reached out to us.
But yeah, that's something worth asking when Paul comes back.
The story of it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because I know we had talked about doing Tor a long time ago.
And that is totally in line with how Edge would want to do things.
Nim is great, by the way. I'm not
discounting that at all.
It's just Tor is kind of the standard for
obfuscation.
But Nim, I know
Sam had talked about Nim, like, what was that?
Like, shit, a year ago or something like that?
So I was just wondering if he's the one that
kind of got it in line or not.
Yeah, maybe.
I'm kind of a noob to all this.
From what I understand, NIMH is just basically the opposite of Tor.
It's a competitor to Tor.
It's just a different Tor.
Not an onion service, basically, right?
Onion servers basically, right?
Like they're competitors essentially.
Like they're competitors, essentially.
NIM is, from the reading I've done, it's a VPN.
They have a token and things like that.
I mean, everyone does that stuff now.
But the big thing is they do like a fragmented server
instead of it being like a VPN where like Nord.
Like I use Nord all the time.
So Nord, you connect to a server,
you route your traffic through that.
NIM fragments that from my reading.
I mean, correct me if I'm wrong,
I could be completely off base.
But it takes it and it routes your traffic
in a fragmented way where it's across different servers
so that there's even less way to trace what's going on.
So basically it's decentralized.
And then also one that I did see when I was looking at the website that looks like there's no logging done.
So compared to other services, there's like logs that exist.
And from my understanding, there's no logging done.
And then it's also open source compared to like NordVPN, you said.
I think NordVPN is closed source, ExpressVPN, I'm not sure.
ProtonVPN, I think they're open source.
ProtonVPN is open source.
Yeah, Nord, Express, all of the big players are not.
They're closed source.
Yeah, I imagine.
They're closed source.
Yeah.
So NIM would be like the next good one out,
like right there with ProtonVPN, where they're both open source.
Something that's really cool about NIM VPN too,
which this is something I'm debating,
I'm debating switching over to NIM like on a personal level.
Once my Nord, I bought Nord for like three years or some shit.
So I'll have it for a long time, but once it's up,
I think I'm going to go to like NIM and Bitwarden,
but as my, you know, password manager and VPN.
But that's one of the big things about NIM.
That's really cool is they even have anonymous signup.
So you don't even like need to give information about yourself whatsoever to
use it,
which that I find very impressive.
They got a,
look at the site.
They got a good deal.
So like NIM.com is N Y M.com.
If anyone wants to look,
look at them,
but right now they got like a, like a deal going on, 70% off,
two years or $57, which is the equivalent of $2.39 a month, right?
So like $2 a month for two years.
Promotion going on right now if you want to use Nym as a VPN.
Something to look into.
There's like a free trial in seven days or so.
Yeah, it's definitely worth checking out.
I haven't used the, like if you're on Windows
or Mac or anything like that, I haven't used their
desktop versions yet.
So I don't know if that's what the speed looks like
and things like that, but it is a good VPN choice.
I can't imagine that
most people here or
that follow Edge don't already use VPNs
of some sort are very
familiar so this could just be another tool in your toolbox to try out alberto for our test devices
are i know i think we were using um what is it like like tunnel bear or like this bear vpn
or are we still using that one for the test devices
for the best devices.
Roberta, I think you're on mute in case you're speaking.
Oops, sorry, just muted myself.
Yeah, we use TunnelBear.
I just use it because it's free, literally.
Okay.
Great.
It gives you two gigs every two weeks or something like that.
But it definitely runs out fast, and it's pretty good. I actually kind of like it um but i don't have a lot of experience using like a bunch of
other vpns like yeah so maybe something we asked paul for approval let's just get a two-year plan
on a you know an account with them we support our partner and we can test the hell out of it
looks like we have actually a speaker dash
yeah yeah like is this dash dash like the yeah yeah
nice you better believe it nice welcome business development marketing with dash and um yeah i was
just hanging out with the rest of the edgelings at the narratopia oh hell yeah nice week so uh shimmy and sam and of course paul so nice go way
back i personally go way back with paul since before edge since the air bits time air bits days
yeah awesome which there's uh seemingly air bits was incredibly ahead of its time um i don't i
don't know if you guys are paying attention to Cash App, but they've pretty
much rolled out AirBits inside the app now. So it's time to relaunch. We're so early, as they say.
Well, actually, what's nice is you could relaunch the same. So really, I mean, for those that don't
know what AirBits was, AirBits was just a Bitcoin wallet. Just. i use air quotes there you can't see my air quotes
um but essentially it's it's what edge is but it was exclusive to bitcoin but it had
um a directory in it so you could spend your cryptocurrency i feel like man put that back in
the app you know multi-asset directory whoo yeah i mean there's one the thing about that and i've
been sort of seasoned in the map again for a very long time.
The maps are a fantastic idea.
And the problem is so many different people have so many different apps and they're all poorly maintained.
And just the actual maintenance, getting that data right is just super hard.
So what we have in our own app, Dashpay app, is the map where we draw, and we're still building it.
It's very kind of early days on that.
We're building out based on API data from merchant payment processors directly wherever we can.
So it sort of auto-updates with like real information.
Obviously, you can't do that for every mom and pop who has like an Edge wallet as their P device on their little little store but um it's
it's kind of the best we could do for now i think that eventually meaning within the next five years
we're going to get to a point where we don't need a map at all where it's going to be
oh well just anytime you see a little sticker on the window which will be half the country
whatever country is movements it'll just take it. So the map days of nostalgia
might be behind us before you know it.
It could be. Yeah, you're right. You know, love or hate Cash
App with that implementation. Cash App is owned by Square. So
they can easily identify the companies and businesses and
things like that that are accepting
it. But what's nice is it does allow the public to start using it and encourage it, even if it
is a big player. We can talk about that and how it's self-custody or not self-custody rather.
But that's a conversation we all know. But it is introducing people to spending it which i'll applaud that whenever
absolutely um it's good it's a start you know and i do like i have experimented with cash app not personally but with a friend and it does let you send and receive actual bitcoin like from a
non-custodial wallet so that's always good i think that once we get these a little bit more
common i think that we can um really start to get into peer-to-peer digital cash era where if
no you can send your friends in crypto for whatever as long as they can just get it right
into their venmo or cash app or whatever and it just works the same way and right that's kind of
the way i work right now that's kind of the way i work right
now that's kind of the way things work when i'm hanging out with the edge crew of course but like
as far as like everyone that's that's that last little missing bit right yeah just this idea that
you don't even realize you're using crypto right it's just money just like everything else that's
that's that is the hurdle not having to look at crazy addresses to send back and forth or check an obnoxious transaction ID to see the status as a transaction. Those are the missing parts for the average person. I mean, people that have been in it for a long time, we can just go on an explorer. It's common language for us. But, you know, I, once again, I work in support. So I've walked people through reading a block explorer. and for an average person that doesn't have a lot of experience, it's just like, what the hell is this?
You know, like a confirmation.
What is that?
So, yeah, that's the missing component is just make it easy.
Make it seem like you're using a credit card or Zelle Venmo.
Venmo is a great example.
We can just make it like Venmo.
It's perfect.
I feel like, you know,
obviously it's a buzzword,
but AI is honestly going to make it a lot easier.
Like right before the spaces,
I was messing with MCPs for like block explorers
and you can take an MCP for a block explorer,
put it into cursor
and now you can just feed it an address
and ask it
questions and and that's already like monumental like that's huge just just being able to ask like
talk like a human to something rather than being like read ether scan and you're just like oh man
like what the hell am i looking at i mean i'll summarize it for you yeah i could definitely
riff on the AI part.
Sorry, I didn't catch Dash.
What was your name?
This is Joel.
Also, the Desert Links, you can look him up here.
Okay.
So you said you talked to Paul.
Did he mention the CLI version of Edge that might be en route soon?
No, but like, could i just ask why sure um so
i i feel like this is like the the way that we're kind of getting like kind of giving people what
they want people have wanted a desktop version for a really long time so at least it's a way to do
that and the the buzz around at least the office
is this idea that it will allow us to just kind of build whatever front end you want for Edge as
well. So it's kind of like those are the purposes to have it. And it seems like it's not that
difficult to do. So it's just another version of Edge that we can give to people, especially more
tech-oriented people that can just manipulate it and do whatever they want with Edge and still have the security of our platform.
Yeah, I mean, I guess that makes sense.
Having a desktop wall does help.
I'm not a big fan of CLI for, you know, already as a Linux user, I'm forced to use it against my will a little bit too much.
I'm forced to use it against my will a little bit too much.
But as you mentioned, the age of AI,
I mean, I wonder how quickly someone could build a GUI wrapper
kind of around the edge CLI and just be like, here, there we go.
Made it pretty now.
Yeah, exactly.
For a person that doesn't know anything,
for anyone here that hasn't used something like cursor,
I know Claude has a couple too,
but cursor is the big one that we use in office. that is so powerful that even someone that knows nothing about code can
go in there and build something like a graphic interface for a cli tool yeah for sure um sam
was showing off his uh claudette or whatever it's called, the in-house little bot, and texting her over dinner.
Is that your significant other?
He's like, well, not really, kind of, maybe.
Yes.
But yeah, so that's, I don't know if I'm breaking news,
or I swear Paul's talked about it enough
where I don't have to worry about breaking news on that.
But yeah, CLI tool incoming.
That kind of also piggybacks back into the whole privacy.
It's also like, you know, Venice AI is like we've been like that's been brought up a lot today as far as like people having to go to Venice and just use Venice because we're running out of credits on cursor.
But like Venice is trying
to do a private AI. They're trying to
build an AI that doesn't
track you, which is
very difficult to do in a sense.
AI also has a privacy
issue in a sense. Now we're going to
put AI and crypto together.
It's just really interesting. i don't know enough about venice to speak to how private it can be but
i'm i'm on the side of i don't get how it's actually private i have to i have to read more
about it it doesn't make sense to me that it's private at all it's it uses regular models so
though that's not private obviously right but uh it has an like a native model and i believe that model tries to do something where the because the entire mission
of the venice uh dev or a creator founder is to uh and he's the guy who founded um like a few i
think a few big crypto projects i forgot his name um but he's like very privacy centered and he's
like that's his whole mission is to make an ai that doesn't like constantly track you basically which is how do you do that because like
they have to like in a way like keep tabs on you who you are like what you do and like learn from
you right right so it's just like how's that even going to be possible i mean it could be instant space but or stored locally i guess yeah cloud-based yeah
that's what i mean yeah yeah yeah locally it makes sense because for sure it's local in the i mean i
mean chat gpt already has ads i guess and you can foresee that in the future these ads are gonna be
targeted right and then in the far future it's gonna be just pre-generated like it's gonna be
like a tylenol ad for some reason.
It's just catered to you.
Like for some,
like whatever it might,
it just going to be EDM music for you,
Michael,
just like,
well,
I've always said this since we started doing these even back before I'm the
biggest hypocrite of edge.
So I have Google homes in my house and,
you know, I, I'm all in on that. So
I care about privacy until it's inconvenient.
I think that's everyone's argument. Yeah. That's it.
You know, Gemini, I've been using Gemini when it was back when it was barred, it's been my favorite since the AI thing started taking off.
They recently toggled on this feature called personal intelligence for anyone that hasn't been in Gemini at all.
That one I really felt hypocritical toggling on, but I didn't hesitate at all.
I was like, eh, it's fine.
So essentially what that does is attach all of my Google accounts and everything and feed it into AI.
So I can actually go into Gemini and ask it about an email from a year ago and it'll find it.
Wow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Is it? I don't know.
But at the same time, like, yeah, it has all that access, right?
Like your email was 10 years ago, maybe.
My argument for it was, like, they already have all the information anyways it doesn't
actually matter that's also true you kind of pick your platform and you pick the company that you're
going to associate with and just hope that they don't do anything too egregious um or you make
sure you do all your crime offline which i do so i don't have to worry about that. Right, exactly. Be smart. I mean, before in the pre-show,
we actually talked about Tornado Cash and mixing
and how many steps you'd have to go
from a Bitcoin transaction to go into Monero
so that you have plausible deniability.
I mean, we do it over all this.
Right.
That's the same reason, though,
I won't leave ChatGPT.
Even though they say Cloud's a better model
and Opus, and I agree.
I started to use them and they are better, but, like, ChatGPT just knows me now.
Like, it's like a friend that knows everything about me.
All the good and the bad.
All the conversations we have, like, the last few years.
Yeah, like, from what I'm cooking to, like, my, like, therapy moments
to my whatever, like, dev devian moments i'm just like oh
god this thing knows me it's kind of scary yeah so um let's kind of move things a little bit along
into what you were mentioning alberto um ethereum i guess has stealth addresses in in root is that
yeah yeah what's the
ETA on that one, Albert? I did read up
a little bit about on it, like how
an ETH address can generate a
one-time use stealth address. You receive
money, just like a normal payment, but
you don't see it on the blockchain. So it's like
pretty private.
It feels like a normal transaction,
but it uses a one-time address.
When's that coming along?
I think it's fairly new,
like literally weeks old announcement.
They were working on it,
but as far as the actual announcement,
like ERC5564,
that's the actual,
they're going to develop this.
And yeah, it allows users to receive funds
at a one-time address
instead of their public wallet address.
So what it does, it breaks down address linkability,
protects recipient privacy, no mixture required, works at the wallet level.
So it's, I don't know when it's coming out, but it's for sure official.
It's been announced and it's like actually in works,
which is kind of like just the overall theme of today.
It's like privacy not
just privacy i know it's an it's a you know an evergreen topic we always talk about it but like
uh you know obviously institutions are larger you know large i would call it ethan institution at
this point or whatever it is it's a staple of crypto are moving towards privacy kind of like
picking back on the video we watched like major players CZ, if you didn't know who was speaking, CZ from Binance and Chamath, a major just investor and capitalist, like a lot of money behind them, are talking about the need for privacy.
So it's like this, almost like this movement.
It's almost like the last 10 years, 20 years, we gave up our privacy willingly just for convenience and totally understandable.
But we're starting to realize like, hey, we need some of the privacy back,
and especially when it comes to, like, financial transactions.
And I feel like that's where the industry is going,
where the general, like, consensus is going.
And ETH is kind of proving that point in a sense.
Like, they're actually debbing this.
having this, they're working on it, and they're bringing it to life.
They're working on it, and they're bringing it to life.
Interesting.
Looking through your notes on it, was there any release date?
I don't think there was a release date.
I grabbed the GitHub doc and I kind of just researched it with AI.
I just know it's official. It's coming out, but I don't know it really.
And you know what ETH is.
If you know anything about ETH 2.0
we'll probably be waiting a few years
to be honest but they're
working on it it took a long time
for ETH to switch to Stakey maybe it'll be
maybe it'll be
faster but who knows
to be honest
yeah
it's an interesting feature I
the ERC 5564 that's the protocol
yeah that's their uh that's i guess you know they make amendments to the chain or whatever
that's the they're calling it i wonder just kind of since we have dash here i wonder if dash is
like i told you so like 10 20 how many years ago at this point? It's just like, yeah, I told you guys.
Yeah, definitely 12.
And that is kind of interesting because we had a pretty big announcement today
that I sort of dropped up on the Jumbotron there
that we're getting a very significant overhaul in privacy,
hopefully like next month.
So we're not running on each timelines over here
good but the name like dash right
yeah i gotta be so brand for something fast yeah right right right you got the dad joke i wasn't gonna elaborate i wasn't let it sit um no well i mean i'm reading about erc like in the middle of this i'm trying to understand the
556 like how it actually works i think it's just literally a road it's rotating addresses
for a one-time address basically for you for your wall like but then it becomes deprecated or is this
like a private address that kind of like how Monero works?
Whatever.
Derives a one-time stealth address,
generates an announcement.
I grabbed the GitHub, I don't fully,
it was pretty dev heavy, but try to made it consumable.
Well, that one I will elaborate on more
when I read more about it.
As far as Dash, I mean, you're here.
And that's a big, we always talk about privacy. Give us a little more about it. As far as Dash, I mean, you're here. Yes, and that's a big one.
We always talk about privacy.
Give us a little bit about that, if you don't mind.
Yeah, for sure.
So what we've had sort of for our entire history kind of
was the first great feature,
sort of like an integrated coin join
that's built into the network
that just keeps everything transparent on the chain, but sort of obfuscates the origin, breaks a transaction graph. And that's
been improved over the years, but not really majorly overhauled. And as we were, we added
some other stuff like the username and contact list setup that works like a stealth address as
well, where like you don't actually have address exposure when you get a new one.
So stuff like that.
But this is the first really big major thing.
So it gets a little bit complicated in some ways,
but Dash has a second blockchain we launched in 2024
that runs parallel to the main chain
that does data transactions, things like that. And that one
is a very different sort of model. And that one, you know, looks more like some Ethereum style
thing than it does like the usual kind of Bitcoin style of the main chain. And because it's all
written in Rust, and it turns out that Zcash Orchard, which is the latest implementation of Zcash's privacy tech, is also written in Rust.
It turned out it was a reasonable enough lift with some heavy talent, I should say, to kind of get that working on that chain.
So now there have been some initial success in getting that working, and hopefully'll hit mainnet next next month or something
that but basically it's sort of the top of the line privacy function in all of crypto I should
say I mean the Zcash team has really been cooking really hard on that and to date I don't think
there's any other cryptocurrency that uses that that exact protocol I know there's a lot of Zcash
forks that use older versions such as sapling
and i think we might be the first on that so that would be that would be really cool
and is it going to be i'm kind of skimming through it you're going to have shielded and
unshielded or just going totally shielded yeah we'll have optionality, of course. Okay. That's the thing is when you have, like,
when you're building a very complicated blockchain system
that does a lot of different things,
you have a lot of different needs for different functions.
And some of that can be different levels of privacy, for example.
So, like, for example, in DeFi and things like that,
you definitely want a lot of transparency as far as funds.
You want to see proof of funds. Are they there all the time?
Did you just get a major hack? Those kinds of things.
But then when you're actually making purchases or your own personal funds, you want that to be fully private.
So a lot of times, for example, if you're sending people some tips on social media, you want that to be fully transparent
because you just want the whole world to see,
look, I gave to this.
But then if you're doing any serious payment,
you want that to be private.
So basically what we will have is a unified shielded pool for credits
and then probably a shielded pool for tokens.
So if you want to send tokens privately,
you will be able to do that.
There's some extra discussions about having the ability
to use your own individualized shielded pool per token,
which would be, you know, still, again,
all the same as your knowledge attack,
you still can't see what anyone's doing.
But as far as, like,
any time you have to sort of aggregate things across the whole, right?
That's something that I think a lot of people don't talk about with privacy is that it does have costs and trade-offs,
even though, in my opinion, they're always worth it.
But so, for example, if you have a like Zcash, for example, I believe if they activate zsas or zcash shielded assets
you have one big shielded pool for everything for all tokens for all regular transactions
everything and so everything kind of has that shared anonymity set now if you're doing you
have to have some extra costs associated with that. It costs more, it's more computationally intensive,
et cetera, to do that.
Whereas if you could have an individualized shielded pool,
like, hey, I'm going to go,
like we have the Starbucks Rewards Point pool
for a token like that.
If you don't want to pay a lot of money and fees
to the blockchain to be able to efficiently transact
like that, you might be like, look,
I don't want this to be indistinguishable from someone sending money or someone sending a target reward point or
whatever. I just want it to be like customers. You can't see who's sending what reward point
on this specific pool. I don't care if people see that, oh, you entered into the target credit pool
and then you came out and maybe that's you.
So there might be like use cases for different things
and different privacy levels for different things.
So that's kind of as far as I'm understanding
it the way things are today.
Okay, so individual pools,
I believe you're right about Zcash,
if I recall how that functions.
And speed, I know Dash actually, that's one of the big parts of Dash, right?
Actual speed of confirmation and things. Is that going to be affected at all?
Yeah, so I'm sure generating proofs on mobile devices always takes a little bit longer, but we should have like three second permanence or something. So you could send within three seconds, you have a fully private transaction that can't be reversed and just within
a couple seconds. And that's something that like, again, part of the reason for that is the,
because of our dual or hybrid architecture, we don't have the limitations of like a pure proof
of work system where things do have to take a while to get at least one confirmation.
And then you have to hopefully wait for a few more to make sure it's really secure.
It's like we can get instant finality and instant finality with the top level privacy is something that I think is good.
Now, of course, all these systems sort of there's tradeoffs between all of the different ones and it seems like zcash is going for you
know privacy first like the maximum level of privacy without a shadow of doubt for everything
and that on a roughly bitcoin based system or experience of a like a proof of work blockchain
and i think that for some people that want very high privacy but don't necessarily need it to be space age to that extent, even though it uses the same underlying tech, they're like, well, I'd rather just have things work in like a second.
And then I'd rather be able to send my friend some money and then he immediately goes and pays for something with it and it all just works rather than, oh, we got to wait a few confirmations, wait for things to work, and then you have to wait again.
So I think it should be something that works for all kind of all groups.
And yeah, it'll be one of my personal ambitions is it would be really cool if this ended up
being one of the larger shielded pools anyway, even though it's not, you know, the only,
even though it's not necessarily as focused of a system on that,
because at some point you do have like Bassett option
and you do want to cater to as many different people
and use cases as possible.
So definitely I believe that Dash has one of the best chances
of bringing actual like good high level workable privacy to as many people as possible and many use cases as possible.
Love it.
privacy is kind of the the next the next big thing that we have to actually achieve across
which i don't know if bitcoin will ever be able to actually adopt that outside of you know lightning
and things like that um yeah i think it's the next chapter like the next four years it's going to be
like privacy focused all these privacy assets and functionality one pet peeve i do have with privacy
assets you know like zcash or whenero, is waiting for the confirmations.
You can't do back-to-back sends.
Do 10 different sends, you have to wait for that 10 confirmation finality.
So I think there's more privacy assets that can do those instant or in seconds at least to confirm,
so you can do quick back-to-back transactions on privacy assets
you said your name was joel or joel joel sorry joel joel what was like the thing i'm so like uh
when i started working at edge like a year year and a half ago i started finally like opening my
mind to like why privacy coins were needed why why privacy was needed. It wasn't just like this like revolutionary thing or this nefarious thing.
It's really just a logical thing.
Like, how did you guys foresee that?
A lot of projects obviously didn't or they just threw it out.
I like to joke around and like say it's not a trilemma because, you know,
it's debatable here, but, you know, the trilemma of like decentralization,
security, scalability.
They also just like threw out a non-privacy.
They just like, we're not even going to bother because it's just too hard.
So we're just going to worry about the three.
Like, I don't know if that's a good analogy or not, but like you guys have this foresight.
Like how or why, I'm curious.
Well, first let me hit on the trilemma thing.
I've talked about it before.
I called it kind of like the quadrilemma a little bit because it's kind of like scalability, decentralization, security,
and then features as far as like what you want to do
because privacy, for example, takes a lot more data
and has a lot more, I guess, considerations.
So like, for example, I don't remember what a standard Bitcoin transaction is.
It's like two to four hundred bytes or something like that.
Whereas a standard Zcash transaction is something like nine kilobytes.
So like way more data involved.
And so also you can scale a UTXO based pure payment chain pretty well to very mass market levels.
It's very easy to parallelize the signature validation for that. Whereas if you have an
account-based model that's doing some complex smart contract behaviors, then that ends up
being a lot more challenging to scale, which is why you have stuff like sharding and stuff
at the higher levels.
So just a little bit of clarification on that, I guess. But also, as far as like foresight,
the timeliness of things in foresight is more of like a marketer business kind of thing that you take care of, where you're saying, oh, this is going to be huge. Let's make sure we're here. It's like positioning. But as far as like when you're building a base level infrastructure for the
world, you can't really be super timely on everything. You have to build timeless things.
You have to build things that just work, that have eternal value. I don't know, eternal,
maybe that's still being a little dramatic there, but like it have long-term value. And so who doesn't want a chain that's secure? Who doesn't want something that
just works in one second? Who doesn't want something that protects your actual privacy?
And so working on all these things, I think is making sure you get them all right is something
that I think that every good chain should have. And over time, we've sort of seen like a migration of a lot of things to have like overlapping feature sets, right?
Like you have, there's very few pure proof of work chains anymore.
And there's very few that are ASIC resistant because, you know, we're seeing the attacks that happened with Monero and why that might not be a good idea.
And we're starting to see more and more chains with a very fast finality,
like a sort of sharded architecture or a block DAG or something like that,
like Caspa and Kwai and stuff like that.
We're starting to see a lot of things move in the same direction of you kind of have to have it all.
And then how many cryptocurrencies have zero new ones i should say especially have
absolutely zero programmability zero tokens zero like zero apps built on it that are just to send
and receive money not very many these days because you kind of realize you have to start doing more
things so as far as like one of the biggest glaring things that our founder Evan Duffield figured out in 2014 is, oh, yeah, this is all just public.
And as soon as people know how to look at a block explorer, it's over for everyone.
So maybe we should start looking into this.
And then, of course, Monero came a few months later in 2014, Zcash a couple of years later.
And then now the privacy narrative is starting to hit.
But it's something that everyone's been working on for a very long time. And now I think we're
going to start to see the problems with radical transparency as the only mode of transaction.
I think we're going to start to see we have seen this before as well right
in the early days of bitcoin people didn't have rotating addresses all the time they
they sometimes just had one then hd wall came out and did that and no one got in trouble everything
was fine i don't say no one but for the most part is fine fast forward to today and there's like a
five dollar wrench attack in france like every week where someone gets attacked for their crypto and robbed.
And it's like people, the criminals are starting to figure out how this stuff works.
They're starting to figure out how to use the Block Explorer, how to trace it to people, how to find out how much money they have, and how to beat them over the head and so it took a long time for people to catch up but my opinion is i don't think any um any project that doesn't have robust privacy
will survive over the next five years
yeah i agree and actually you mentioning that you know kind of pat edge on the back a little bit you
know we did release dress mode and things like that for this scenario as well.
Do you have someone with a wrench coming at you?
Yeah.
You can put $5 in there.
Or maybe it's like a couple hundred dollars,
so they think it's your real account.
And then we have, obviously, NIMMixNet,
so they can't track you as well.
Yeah. We think about the regions that actually have to worry about that as well.
In the U.S., we're spoiled, and terribly so.
But there are a lot of other places that it's more commonplace.
I always debate what I want to put in my duress wallet.
Sometimes I want to give them a coin that's been deprecated.
I'm like, no, sorry, dude.
All I got is BSV.
You can have it.
Smart cash, bro.
That's it.
That's all I got.
Take it.
Take my private seat.
As soon as you get that node working, I'll send it to you.
I promise.
Did you actually have smart cash back in the day
i have i still have some like a large chunk of it i'm sorry i i have some funny stories about
smart cash if you don't mind sure yeah let's hear it let's hear it so well first of all
i sort of got into dash sort of in the middle of 2016. And around that time, there was a schism in the community.
It was not most of it, but it was a good schism over a bunch of stuff.
Some of it ended up being privacy-related.
So I guess to a certain extent, maybe they were right.
But they left and joined the PIVX team.
And so the same group of people who were a little bit toxic
kind of and left Dash to go to PIVX didn't last long there either,
and they ended up in SmartCache.
The lead dev of SmartCache was a Dash developer I knew, in fact.
And so there's a sort of shared history,
a little bit of antagonism that happened there.
And so in addition to that, there a um i don't do you know who
ben swan was does that name familiar it sounds very familiar but yeah swan's a face to it yeah
he was a like a legacy media journalist who ended up becoming like a a very like investigative
journalist kind of like a james o'keefe or whatever and ended up having to
go independent because he uncovered some like really some basically a lot of this epstein
stuff that's circulating around today he was uncovering way back in the day and so after he
got sort of kicked off his platform um he got sponsored by dash i kind of helped make that happen for a little while.
And eventually Dash couldn't afford him anymore
and he had to go elsewhere.
And I said, I was looking at other cryptos
that had treasuries and I was like,
you know what, why don't you go work for Smart Cash?
I don't really like those guys too much,
but you know, paycheck's a paycheck.
So he did.
And unfortunately, Smart Cash had some really weird tokenomics where
something like 80% was the treasury. And basically, Ben Swan's salary was, or sponsorship or whatever,
was almost the entirety of the coin emission for a little while. It was like a big chunk,
like 50, 60%. I don't remember the exact numbers.
And he wasn't really a smart cash believer,
so every time he'd get paid, he just dumped and just precipitously crashed the price every single time.
And people in the community are freaking out.
They're like, oh, no, this guy's sending us to zero.
Just buy, you know, I mean, he can do what he wants with it, right?
But the treasury system was kind of decentralized in name only from my
recollection. Don't hold me to that. I didn't look into it too closely. But I remember some of the
people leading up the project sort of were blocking proposals in probably a centralized way
to get rid of this guy because he was crashing them to zero and he ended up sort of crashing them to zero just by
doing nothing nefarious but just by being way too big of a player on the on the ecosystem and then
just not keeping any of his coins after he earned them so i kind of took out smart cash accidentally
well thanks for that not that it's some enormous bag, but it's like, it's like, damn it.
Well, actually, I mean, they shot themselves in the foot. Well, I appreciate that.
But they kind of shot themselves in the foot anyway. I talked to a few of the devs.
What was it back in 22, maybe? Yeah, that sounds about right. 22 or 23.
maybe 20 yeah that sounds about right 22 or 23 because they had no functioning node and we went
over to um blockbook uh and they had no interest in updating and making it so that their wallets
could sync because i mean we'd still support it today if they would have just done a little bit
of work on their end yeah many such cases uh and this is I think we're still kind of in this era, a little bit of crypto, the beta era, where everything's like vaporware. It's like a micro strategy headquarters. There's just nothing going on there.
around the space and are like who has a wallet who has a wallet that sinks who has a thing just
like some very basic things basic tools are just like not there for the vast majority of projects
i would say even some of the bigger ones have some weird gaping holes in them
all right let's see we are approaching an hour that's wild um anything else you guys want to
talk about otherwise you know i want to give time for shill one of my favorite parts um even though
we've kind of been chilling this whole time yeah you're right i think it's chill o'clock. It's chill o'clock.
That's a good one.
I do want to open the floor for that.
Any questions, concerns, your two cents?
That's what we typically like to close with.
I already said all I needed to.
I guess one question I have is I remember getting to Dash. I joined AirBits in 2014, and I remember getting to Dash once we started adding it on Edge,
I think once 2016, 17, around there.
And there was a person who was really good at speaking about Dash.
I think Amanda B. Johnson, she would have good videos in the marketing side.
I don't know if you remember working with her or she was part of your team but then completely disappeared like went off
grid i i heard but yeah she was really good at educating people about dash back in the day
educating i see what you did there yeah um i knew amanda funny enough i knew her before
she got into any crypto at all she was my roommate way back in like oh wow okay and just a pure coincidence and we ended up a dash of different ways
she kind of did her video series for like a straight year and then like took a break
and then she came back a little bit did some she was actually doing content and stuff up until like
2024 or something just on and off but just that people remember like the it's kind
of like when you if you have like a one-hit wonder band everyone's just like oh whatever happened to
the guy it's like dude he's keeping on putting out albums they're doing pretty well too they're just
not like stratospheric like they were in the beginning and you know it's kind of the same thing where i think that
it was a weird time where you didn't have anything relatively professional at all there was no women
in crypto at that point either right and then you had someone who was a good presenter was an
attractive female and had a little bit of an awkwardness to her that really appeared to this
appealed to the super nerds who were in the space. And it was just like
magic all at the same time. And people were like,
wow, I remember that thing.
And then five years later,
yeah, five years later, it's just, it's still around
but just not the same vibe as it used
to be. Gotcha.
Interesting.
And I guess, Michael,
you want to do it on a kilo clock?
Any listeners requesting? I don't know. I guess, Michael, you want to do it on a kilo clock? I have nothing to show.
No, no one's raised their hand. Download Edge Vault.
Yeah, I mean, that's the obvious one. Try out NIMH.
Let us know what you think. I want to know what people think of NIMH as they try it.
You know, complain. Like, please, don't be shy about that. If you have issues
with it, we want to hear the issues.
As I mentioned early on, that's how we iterate.
A lot of edge iteration has been complaints, community outcry, requests, things of that
nature. So try out NIMH, let us know.
If you haven't tried out duress, since that was mentioned as well, it's a really good
feature for protecting larger sums
behind a smaller amount that obfuscates your actual balance.
Yeah.
So if there's no one else,
we will be back in two Thursdays, right?
We're still good for that?
Yeah, every two weeks.
So we'll be back.
If there's any topics or anything like that you guys would like us to touch on, we try to do a little bit of research before coming in.
So happy to tackle a topic that maybe you guys want us to tackle as well.
Just leave comments or whatever it may be on X and we can do that as well.
Looks like Codex wants to speak.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jim, Jim, guys. Sorry i joined late all good yeah sorry yeah sorry for that so i just
want to give a big shout out to edge and the edge team and dash team and in all the privacy teams
that you know i've been seeing what you guys are pulling up and that's great and it's funny how
I've been seeing what you guys are pulling up and that's great.
And it's funny how Dash was one of the earlier projects I
interacted with in crypto.
Those days, I didn't even know what I was doing.
But it's actually cool that Dash is now pulling up.
I've not seen Dash in my tail very often like before it's very very cool
so shout out to dash and edgewallet especially big shout out to you guys
thank you appreciate it appreciate it thank you
all right well you guys good to close
get back to support yeah daniel's daniel's down on anarcho go he's one of our support agents i'm
i'm filling in quite a bit of support i gotta get back to that i broke the wallet you gotta
you gotta fix it real quick yeah set you a ticket i'm on it Let me just fire up Cursor.
Alright guys.
It's always a pleasure. Thank you.
See you guys.
Thanks for joining us, Joel.
Yeah, thank you.
