Uneasy Money: Illia Polosukhin on Why Onchain Commerce Needs Confidentiality

Hey everyone, I'm Kane Warwick, and welcome to Uneasy Money because what happens on chain never stays on chain.

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Uh, hey, everyone, I'm here with my co-host, Taylor Monnahan, security expert, and Lukea Netz, CEO of Pudgy Penguins.

And today we have a very special guest, Ilya, the co-founder of Near Protocol.

Um, and the co-author, I'm glad this is finally in this line, the co-author of Attention Is All You Need, the Transformer paper that started the modern era, um, of LLMs.

Um, So Ilia, you and I have known each other for a long time, right?

And uh I did not know until two weeks ago that you were on this paper.

Like I've read the paper, I never read the authors, like, I was just like, yeah, whatever, but like, you know, um.

And I was kind of astounded.

I was talking to a clanker, and, and I was talking about some near stuff, and I was like doing some research, and the clanker was like, oh, Ilya is like on that paper.

And I was like, no, he's not.

Like, what, what are you hallucinating?

And, and, uh, the lanker was like, he definitely is.

And I was like, and then I looked at the paper and I was like, holy shit.

And I was like, how is it that I've known you for 5 years, and you haven't brought this up 250 times?

Like, I'm so shocked that this has never come up in conversation.

So, well played.

I think almost anyone else in crypto would be like the first words out of their mouth if they're, if they, uh, on this paper.

Um, so, maybe, maybe even just like, I'm, I'm so interested, like, in the process of how did that come about?

Give us the quick background of like, You're at Google and you discover AGI?

Like, what, what exactly What happened there?

Yeah, so the history was, I always was interested in AI, AGI.

I was trying to build my first neural network when I was 14, and so when I saw kind of first unsupervised learning happening at Google, I was like, I wanna do that on language because language is where the knowledge is, where the reasoning is, and so I joined the team, we were working on question answering, like the most direct.

Place that's most applicable to AGI.

Like if AI can answer questions, it understands, uh, what we're talking about and actually to Google itself, right, because Google is a question answering machine, right.

And so, and so we were working on a bunch of research and, and to be clear, before Transformers there was reinforcement, uh recurrent neural networks, RNNs.

Which affected the way they work, they would read one word at a time, you know, like we do, and they were trying to maintain context and then you ask it a question and it would be like, well, I only have this like 100 floats or whatever, 1000 floats of everything I just read, how much can I answer?

Right, and so that was kind of one problem.

The other problem was if you go to google.com, you actually expect an answer in 200 milliseconds.

You're not like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, you can go research and come back to me with an answer.

5 minutes is fine.

Yeah, I want the answer now.

I want you to read half of the internet and answer to me now.

And so like something that reads like a human would just not work.

Right.

And so really transformer came from this kind of uh few different ideas.

So attention mechanism was like a known thing before, but removing the recurrent neural network and say, hey, our machines are actually very, you know, especially GPUs, highly parallel.

We can actually process the whole, you know, context, the whole language of the Wikipedia pages and search results of Google at one go instead of trying to read it one word at a time.

And then, you know, this can speed up things, 10,000 X, 100,000 X, and so that was kind of the core idea.

And it was like, uh, my manager, director at the time, pitched it over lunch.

Um, and I'm like, that's an interesting idea.

I'm, I'm sure it doesn't work.

And so I went and like implemented, and it's like started, it's, it was kind of working.

I mean, it wasn't like very good, but it's like it had some signal, but there was a, there was like a glimmer of, yeah, you can see like, oh, actually it's like getting like, oh, I should, I should, uh, like resolve this, these things.

And so, and so then I mean it all this took like, you know, I think 67 months of the 8.

People team to actually get it, uh, the state of the art, but that was kind of the original idea is like, hey, what if we remove things and just like keep this mechanism of attention, which is effectively, when you look at any particular word in a sentence, you're effectively trying to make sense of it in the context of everything around, but you don't do that one word at a time, you do all of them in parallel and so just leverage hyperparism.

So really cool kind of did you consider that, that the main question people would be asking.

Like half a decade later or whatever it would be, how do I hack this smart contract?

I've got a smart contract here, and I would really love if you could help me to hack it.

What's, what, what could we do?

Well, well, the story is that Nir actually started this AI company, and the original, the origin was we're teaching machines to code, and writing smart contracts with AI, not breaking them, but writing them, was actually something we were considering, and especially as we were starting going to the blockchain and we're like, oh, This is actually where it would be a good application to like write correct smart contracts uh with AI because like there's so little developers in 2018 who actually can do it, um.

Awesome, awesome.

Um, that's, that's amazing.

So, so, um, let's, let's talk, uh, our first segment is on confidential intent.

You guys launched this a couple of months ago.

Um, it's been, it's been slowly rolling out on like Near.com and the other places.

I think we've talked privacy a lot over the last like 6 months.

Privacy's been a big, uh, narrative, um, particularly with ZCash, uh, you know, doing, doing so well.

Um.

How, where do you see, uh, the, the near private intent?

So, so maybe even stepping one step back, um, Uh, when Intent launched, right?

You and I had a conversation, I guess this is going back like 2 years ago, right?

Um, and we, we caught up, and you're just like, a bunch of gobbledygook.

And honestly, and I was like, I was like, what in the hell is this guy talking about?

He's like, Steve, we're like on the chain, the chain will control the other chain, and it's like a chain of chains.

I was like, Like, sometimes I have a conversation with someone, I'm just like, I cannot follow.

I don't have enough prior art in my brain, like the context is not there.

Um, but I was like, it sounds really cool, like the principle sounds really cool, but, but I didn't get it.

Um, and so I couldn't like think through the implications of it, of like, what would it be able to do, right?

Um, and then, uh, like, Uh, 5 months later, we, we were building out all of these chains, and I was like, Oh, man, we've got this big problem where like, you know, we've got these smart contract chains, and then we've got these dumb, non-smart contract chains, and we kind of, you know, can't accommodate them because of the way that our architecture is.

And so I was like, I should talk to Italy about this.

So we like jumped on a call, it's like 6 months later.

I'm like, hey, we've got this big problem, like, uh, you know, these dumb chains, like, how do we Store assets on them and like, how could, and he's like, uh, bro, I told you about this like 6 months ago, like, I told you the whole thing and how it works.

And I was like, oh, that's what you're talking about.

OK, that makes, you should do that.

He's like, we've done it.

It's here it is, it's there.

Um, and, and so, the, the goal of intense was basically bring all of these dumb chains that don't have smart contracts up to the same level as smart contract chains.

Is that fair to, to say, like, give you the ability to control assets on these chains and do all this cool stuff that we like with smart contracts on, on Bitcoin, Dogecoin, etc.

I mean, I would say goal is way broader, but that, that was like the that was the first PMF goal, yeah, yeah, that was your goal, yeah, I mean the first PMF definitely was like, hey, look, you have, you know, Bitcoin and Dodge that people wanna hold, but there's no good bullets, it's really hard to find things and, uh, really hard to trade if you wanna go like Dodge to Solana, for example.

And uh and so that was kind of the first PMF and then obviously ZCash was like very natural, yeah, like even harder to get to it, the exchanges were delisting it, etc. and we're like, yes, like ZCash works perfectly here, uh, you can move anywhere, you can exchange it to anything, decentralized, but I mean the broader idea behind it is effectively combination of indeed through near, you can control any other chain, any, any other, uh, Account on any other chain and we're actually having now first examples of people doing this on Solana because Solana's smart contracts are very tiny.

And it's hard to make like a contract that runs for a long time.

On Near you can actually run the whole other blockchain as a smart contract.

So we have a lot of capacity for writing complex logic, and so you can write the complex logic on Nir and then push just the exact execution on, on Solata, you know, not calling it.

A, uh, not a smart chain, but, uh, just like the level of complexity of, of logic, you know, recovery systems and other things you can do.

Right, but the trade-off space there on, on Solana is like, you know, they're optimizing for a kind of a different, uh, set of things, right?

Correct, yeah, they're optimizing for like immediate latency, but this allows to have like a lot higher, yeah, uh, kind of capacity of execution and intelligence, uh, but only like sort of just in time, right?

Like you only use it when you need it, and then you can get the fast meme coin trading that we all need.

Um, you know, uh, kind of on, on the primary chain so you can offload that, right.

Um, and so, so, uh, you know, the, the intense thing, I think worked, um.

A lot better than maybe people were expecting.

Um, you know, there was, there was like, the initial launch, um, and it was fairly quiet, and, and then it started to kind of blow up as there was, obviously, there's a lot of kind of threads kind of weaving together here, right?

Like everyone wanted ZCash all of a sudden, they realized it was really hard, and you guys had a, a great solution for that.

And so, um, but that, that started to get some traction.

Um, at what point did You internally go, uh, we should like vampire taxi cash and just like replace their technology.

What was, what was the I mean that that wasn't the thinking and, and it is not, uh, the cash as as a it's a different thing as a sovereign asset is very much, uh, has its place and, and is important, uh, I mean, honestly, like as usual, uh, you know, I was talk, I was thinking and we were trying to build private, uh, ethically shard back in 2022.

Now back then, as you can imagine with regulatory environment and all of the fun stuff going on, that effectively was a no go for actually launching it.

Um, But yeah, we kind of my thesis in general, confidentiality is a key unlock for actually crypto becoming truly day to day use.

Like you cannot imagine a business doing commerce on chain.

Where everybody can just go into Blog Explorer and see how much revenue they're getting, how much they're paying their suppliers, what are the salaries are, right?

This is, this is why most of the crypto still does, you know, fiat payroll, because nobody wants to show how much, um, like payments of salaries, etc. are going.

And so, like privacy always was like, hey, this is a key.

Enabler, but you know we needed a regulatory positioning that actually worked. um, we needed to have enough liquidity and kind of flow through this to actually like because like we build privacy but nobody's using it like you know it's it's not private, right so, so we needed enough like liquidity going through it and I mean it's obviously helps when there is like a broader market acceptance as well that hey this is.

Actually needed.

And so that was kind of, yeah, the motivation is like, OK, actually now it's time like that's off the thing we built in 2022, you know, uh, updated to, to some of the kind of intent-based, um, infrastructure and let's launch it and then let's make the experience really rock, right?

And, and that, that was a lesson from ZCash.

Like the, the Zashi Zodel wallet is just like really good experience, uh, and you actually want to hold your assets there like privately, like you feel good about it.

So like that's what Near Near.com is, uh, kind of for, but obviously we're opening up this API for everyone to use as well, so obviously Infinex and everybody else can, uh, can actually do that as well.

Yeah, I think 11 thing for like, you know, there's like the theory of how something work, and then there's like, practically when you actually encounter it, right?

Um, and, you know, it had been a long time since I've held ZCash.

The, the last time I held it was, uh, like probably on finance or or uh like ages ago, um, in, in.

Like 2019 or something, 2018, 2019.

Um, and I went down the ZCash rabbit hole, and I was like, Oh, I'm going to, you know, try and like figure out how to like implement my own wallet, and like did all this stuff.

Um, and the challenge, obviously, and like, this is well known in the ZCash community, but it's not really talked about outside, right?

It took me like doing a bit of research to figure this out, um, is the cash is somewhat volatile, lately?

I just noticed that.

I just noticed it, uh, maybe losing millions of dollars trading in on hyperliquid was the, was the thing that, uh, was the giveaway for me.

Um, but, but, uh, the core asset is the only one.

That is private on ZCash, right?

Um, and so in order to have privacy, like, it might feel really good to hold your ZCash privately shielded on bottle wallet, right?

Um, but it might not feel great.

It might feel great one day when it's up 30%, then, you know, the next day it feels bad when it's down 30%.

Um, it, it seems to me like really obvious that like we need private stable coins.

Like, you know, and, and ZCash has thought about this, uh, the community's got like, multiple proposals of like ways to do this, but, um, you know, that, that to me seems like the obvious thing that no one's really land, like, I mean, you know, tornado. had a USDC pool for a long time.

Um, you know, uh, but, um, but to your point, like, it's not enough to just have one pool, you need enough demand, like there's all of these different things for it to actually work and be scalable.

Um, so yeah, how, how are you guys thinking about that in, in terms of like, what are the assets that you think should be, you know, private by, by default?

Yeah, so everything is private.

So over, we have 150, I mean it's changing every day.

I think they're launching something right now.

Uh, 150+ assets, all of them can be private.

I was just checking, there's like a few million USDC.

8 million near, uh, actually a couple million Z cash as well, um, stored in confidential intense, uh, you can actually check it out on Done now in the intense uh analytics, uh, they have a, um, kind of dashboard for all the assets that are in confidential chart, and, uh, yeah, I mean, I think, as you said, right.

If I want to pay for coffee, I probab, I mean, yes, if I'm Zash bull, which, you know, I am, like it's, it's a great experience, like the crosspay is actually pretty cool because you can go and like pay, you know, I don't know if you, if you tried, but Square has a Bitcoin payment and so you can pay from your ZCash into a Bitcoin QR code and it's facilitated to your intense, right?

And so, you know, the merchant doesn't see where it came from.

Uh, and, and you're paying ZCash, but like that, that's still, uh, a little bit jank experience, you know, the ZCash time like latencies, yeah, the the time is high.

I mean they, they gotta hopefully fix it 200 millisecond, yeah, wait times, right?

Like if you're standing in line at a store trying to waiting more than like 50 milliseconds, you're like, oh fuck.

Yeah, and so, so with, with intense with, we are with confession intense, the, the thought is indeed this is like uh execution confidentiality, right?

Like we're running a full near ethically shard, uh, that's confidential and we're running intense there we get, we planning to have more applications running there as well, like lending, uh, etc.

And with that you, you know, you get all the benefits of near, which is 600 millisecond blocks.

You can have your assets there to pay directly with, you know, stablecoins, with, uh, Solana assets, etc.

You can pay out into other chains directly as well, and Fiat, uh, is coming, and so you can actually be like transacting normally as if you were on.

Uh, you know, your neobank app instead of, um, kind of feeling.

Now, importantly, the trade-off is we're explicitly Uh, fighting against crime, right?

And so it's not, yeah, I was gonna say, hey, you, you got to jump in here because we were talking about this before, and, uh, and Elliot was like walking me through like all of the stuff that they're doing, and I was like, this feels like the inverse Thor chain.

Uh, Tay's gonna love this.

So, um, yeah, and there's been, there's been a couple of incidents.

One of my favorite money launderers was, was trying to use near and uh.

Didn't have the best time, let's say.

And then took to took to Twitter and I was like, come on.

But I think I told this story, Kate, like a couple weeks ago.

Um, the, yeah, the money launderers, they, they revert to like the most core OG Bitcoin maxi.

Why isn't this? blah blah blah blah blah, like every single dare you, yeah, they're doing like social pressure, yeah, like, hey, you know, isn't this supposed to be unstoppable money?

We're like, yeah, when your money is clean, it's unstoppable.

Yeah.

A bunch of stolen funds, and he was like, and now I am poor, I am poor.

And I was like, I took 2 seconds.

I was like, bitch, you still have 1000 stolen Bitcoin.

I feel like you couldn't find 10 of the 1000.

I was like, you need to go yourself, um, but yeah, I think it's OK.

I think it's critically important.

Like let's ignore the ideological side of things just for a second, right?

Cause we can like debate that all day.

I think it's critically important though that people understand, like, you cannot have a really good useful protocol and find real product market fit for the market, not criminals, right?

But like, you know, the actual market that has huge tam, right?

You can't do that.

If right off the bat, the criminals take over, right?

Because it, it impacts you in every single way.

Most importantly though, as you're iterating your product, as you're iterating your protocol, as you're finding the product market fit and understanding what users want, if you're only serving criminals like thieves and money launderers, their needs are actually dramatically different than average users' needs an average user.

Dramatically different.

Like they do not care.

They're very price insensitive.

They're up to a point.

They love like 1% fees.

Amazing, amazing.

1% fees and no questions asked.

Like, sign me up for that.

If it takes a while.

Normal people don't appreciate paying 1% of their wealth to move their money around.

It's, it's just a completely different use case.

Their needs are different, their desires are different, etc.

And so, and I've seen this play out time and time again with protocols, especially when they get flooded, when DPRK especially like just comes in and floods them right off the bat, they get excited about, oh my God, like we have users, and if they don't fit, baby, let's go, yeah, but it's, it's really hard for them to then.

It's like you're serving this one customer, and they're like quite a loud customer, by the way.

Like like people think that money launderers are like hiding, they're not, like they are in, they're in your freaking Discord preaching to you, like loudly, um, and it's just a, it's, I think people, I think it's, it's definitely like underrated, and so, um, you have to get.

Good core users that that sort of like are a different demographic, in my opinion.

Because then as you're iterating your protocol, as you're deciding the next features to launch, as you're prioritizing things, you're gonna be doing so for a much larger market.

Right?

Because at the end of the day, money laundering, it's capped, like, and it's, it's a pretty good in crypto terms, like it can look like pretty good product market fit in the short term.

But when you're thinking like, big picture, long term.

You can't, it's nothing, right?

Like it's nothing.

Like if you don't have the trade-off is so bad as well, right, because you end up getting pushed to the margins, your, your structures are undermined, and, and you end up, you know, being like a, your brand is terrible.

Yeah, you can't, you have every time you get on a plane, um, you should, you know, and then, and then I think also.

Again, it just goes back to this like what you're prioritizing, um, and if, if you're not prioritizing like real users are have a whole diverse set of things that they screw up, things that they have to get right, and if you don't hone the user experience, if you don't hone right, like all these little details, you're never gonna sort of like like.

You're actually get escape velocity, you're stuck in this, yeah, hellscape of money laundering.

But you know, I mean, the problem is, I think like as a startup, um, in crypto, especially, you know, in, in a bear market or something that like you're trying to survive, and there is pressure of like, you know, we've got a, a team, we've gotta pay bills, etc. and like, you know, this feels like product market fit, you know, especially when you can kind of squint at it and go, they don't feel that bad like.

We're not 100% sure that they're laundering money.

Like they're not telling us that they're DPI like, so yeah, yeah, I, I, I like, yeah, yeah, so I mean, so we, we took a pretty strong stance here for a couple of reasons.

I mean, obviously personally I don't wanna, um, I don't wanna facilitate that in any way, um.

And then the other reason indeed is we think and you mentioned like intense, you know, for, for dumb chains to become smarter.

The reality is intense is for facilitate all the economic activity in the world.

That's, that's really the goal.

Like not just crypto, we, you know, we're adding fiat, we're adding all kinds of other assets, but we're also adding work.

You will be able to hire, you know, agents and people, you know, buy goods, etc.

So that's really kind of the broader vision and if you want to achieve that vision as they said, we cannot be stuck or and like we cannot touch and, and in any way facilitate money laundering or, or any other illegal activity.

And so for us it was a pretty strong stance.

It's like, hey, we want to figure out how to balance between Like this is a non-custodial protocol that is accessible to everyone that unites liquidity across all those chains, and at the same time, we don't want crime here, right?

And these are two very hard problems that's a tough to balance and so one of the things we've been, uh, working internally and we kind of starting to roll it out, we call it shield.

This is our AI system that effectively is scanning other chains, uh, and the transactions in real time, and it's trying to detect when there is illicit activity happening on those.

Like if, you know, an account that historically didn't have a balance.

Just got $100 million.

That's probably suspicious and we should not.

No, it's great, what are you talking about?

That's amazing.

Like one of our customers is rich now.

It's gonna be great for us.

Yeah, and so, and so, uh, so a lot of it is affecting anomaly detection on, on all kinds of criteria.

Same for chains, right?

We, we were the ones detected the Litecoin has been attacked and actually informed like other exchanges that they should pause Litecoin because we, we, I mean, we had like a few transactions went through, but then we're like, hey, something is wrong, right?

The finality of coin didn't just suddenly get.

Right, like something's going on.

Well, I mean, so the, the, the actual attacker exploited their Mimble Wimble.

Uh, there was a vulnerability in Mimble Wimble, and they effectively withdrew money from their privacy pool without any, like was effectively fake, uh, proof, and, and then, and then DDoS the rest of the network to drop the hash power, so only the like invalid, like the blockchain was invalid, the code.

Uh, build blocks.

Yeah, it was a, that was, that was, hold on, that was a, that was a good attack.

Like I was gonna say I was gonna say it was a good one.

OK, so they basically use a vulnerability in the core, like one of the core features of Litecoin, right?

They use this vulnerability to essentially be able to do a double span, which typically, let's just say it's not actually a double span.

They literally withdrew fake money.

So they withdrew money that they didn't have.

It's not even double, double spend, you use the same money.

They literally withdrew somebody else's money from the privacy pool.

Oh, OK, yeah.

And then because they were able to, and there was like 3 bones, like, or 3 sort of pieces that stacked on top of each other, because you essentially, you had the the first thing, which is the Mimble wimble, being able to pull this money out.

And then they found this other one that DDoSs half the network, right?

But the whole thing was, right, correct me if I'm wrong, the whole thing was racing, and that's why they went through, they tried Thorcha, they tried near.

To get these funds out while this side of the network was like offline, was basically DDoS.

Yeah, so, so, so what happened is Litecoin core developers knew about this vulnerability two months ahead.

They patched it, and they then sent it to their miners, and so a lot of the network has upgraded.

They did not let anyone else know, like, you know, intense exchanges, Thor chain, anyone else that this exists.

Just the miners, just the miners, miners, and so it seems weird to me because the miners, I would have thought they don't know them, so I'm how, how strange.

Yeah.

This is one thing about crypto.

Like whenever you say somebody doesn't know anyone, there's probably, uh, there's probably a telegram group they're able to get in touch with them.

They must have their emails.

Yeah, it was definitely, I mean, that was one of my first times where I genuinely said like in the age of mythos, this is unacceptable because the, the like sort of rollout disclosure timeline was.

Months for vulnerability, yeah, for vulnerability that they themselves found with AI.

Oh, they found it with AI.

Yeah, and so then they patched it, but like they were as, and you know, this is like, I'm not, I'm, let's be clear, like, when you're rolling out a fix.

To to keep it in a privileged thing and try to get the network like, and then ramp it up.

But you, you have to understand, like, it's still like a, like, let's say like a zero day, meaning that you, you're, you're racing against someone else finding the same vulnerability.

And when it's something that AI found originally, you have to know it.

Someone else's AI, someone else's clinker is gonna find this.

2 months was a wild, like when we started going through the time, it was a wild one.

Um, there's a lot of things like this that I think it's like everyone's scared of AI right now, like.

Rightfully so, but in weird ways that we don't necessarily talk about, right?

Like 2 months, and to be clear, like this is where you, you, you find this thing, and then the next, next thing is like you need to let everyone know who can be potentially off-ramp because they need to be able to detect this and be aware of it.

And then you need to have incident response effectively while it's rolling out at least to like.

You know, whatever percentage of the network, they just sent the patch out and they just sent the patch out and waited and effectively, yeah, waited, network was upgrading, but then the new new version had the bug with DDoS, and so like effectively the old version had the Mimble Wimble bug, the new version had the DDoS bug, and so the, the attacker with withdrew money from Mimble Wimble, effectively DDoS the rest of the network, so only old nodes were staying.

And producing blocks and then use, and then started trying to withdraw this money on different exchanges.

So, so, like, this is, this is something we've talked about a lot, right?

Like this, this, uh, AI assisted hacking situation, right?

Like, you know, um, what's, what's your take, like, obviously you've been watching this, we've been talking about all these hacks, the hack, you know, number of hacks have come, come through.

This is an example where like, The good guys found it with AI.

Uh, maybe it was just a leak, right?

Like, you know, that was, that was the question is like, hey, is this an inside job, because like it's been two months.

Like, by this time, you know, internally in any of these organizations, there's a bunch of people.

It's gonna leak.

People are gonna know, the miners know you've sent.

It out to people like, did, did they tell the miners that this was like, did they tell them what they were patching, or they just send out the patch and they said I, I, I haven't seen the exact communication.

We are not the minor, um, but, uh, yeah, you're not that guy, the guy that they were talking to, yeah, it was, it was super enlightening for me.

To realize, you know, obviously, like I spend most of my time in EVM land, like I started on Bitcoin, but I don't live there.

It was, it was surprising to me because in EVM land, we naturally prioritize the integrators, the, the sort of the UI layers, the user layers, the exchanges, right?

Even, even before, like, Yeah, from day one, really, it's not it was never just about the minors on Ethereum.

It was quite surprising for me to to learn that some of these chains, like Litecoin, for example, the might like everyone else, like the your guys are just like not seen as like a, a thing that matters, which is wild because Guys, the only reason people are using you is that they can get to and from your chain.

Why are you spoiling the minors, right?

Like, Yeah, so that's kind of why we're doing this shield is like we're trying to build almost like an information network as well as AI detection so that you can actually subscribe if, if you are an exchange or kind of partner and you can get advisories like you will not get the actual like what's happening, but you at least get advisory that I mean in different scenarios.

Yeah, you get an alert.

Like, yeah, I mean, including like, hey, we think you should shut down this network right now, like up to that level, right?

Or like, hey, this, this hashes of addresses are like suspicious, right?

You, you know, you can, you don't, we don't know, like you will not know which ones, but you will be able to check your deposits against that list, right?

And so like we can push bloom filter, like you can do a lot of interesting things where like we preserve privacy, we don't reveal the underlying, but we actually give everyone an ability to check.

And you know, and then decide on themselves, right?

And so that's kind of the like general approach we're taking is how can we use AI, how can we use kind of cryptography to really route this information and then also build the network, right?

We're working with Zero Shadow, we work with like a few other uh kind of professionals in the space.

How can we make sure that we have a reaction speed as well, because that, that is the other thing right now, like every time it's almost like everybody's learned from scratch how to do incident response with those things, right?

Because I mean, and we, we've been on the other side of this where like, you know, like I mean like drift, drift got hacked, right, like, you know, my, my like signal lights up.

U factor like, hey, war room, let's go, you know, I, I'll go to my team, like war room, let's go.

It's like, you know, OK, let, let's actually like, we, we should have like a, you know, information highway where like they can push really quickly that gets propagated everywhere, and then we can like figure out, OK, then you can have time to analyze what happened, but like at least we like, you know, like at least like slow down the propagation and can like take time to investigate.

I mean, I think, I think, you know, the, the challenge with this, right?

And like, it's easy to, to say, um, you know, people should have done this before, that are, like, you know, there, there's a bunch of proximate causes of why we're so bad at this stuff, right?

Like, you know, the centralized exchanges don't have necessarily like the expertise to be able to To monitor, like deeply a chain, whatever, like they've got services they can subscribe to, but, you know, they're much more concerned historically, at least, on like their internal infrastructure, making sure that that's secure, right?

Like, what's happening on the chain is like, yeah, like, not really a problem, right?

Like, we don't care about the chains, we're a bucket shop here, that's like, you know.

Moving tokens around.

Um, and then the people who have been at the center of like these bridge issues, you know, like the, the Thor chains or whatever, um, have like a perverse incentive to, like, not be monitoring this, or like, you know, be like, oh, we could never know who's using the thing, you know, whatever.

Um, it's, it's kind of unusual that Um, a team that has, like, the domain expertise, as well as like a stated goal of not accepting crime, is kind of, you know, in the epicenter of this, like moving funds and, you know, bridging, etc.

Um, so, I do think that like, this, this feels like a bit of a shift in terms of The, the setup here is slightly different to, um, you know, someone who needs to work cross-chain, but also is trying to, you know, uh, uh, be aware of this, but also has their own chain, that they're, like, they've got that domain expertise.

So, um, yeah, it feels, it feels like, uh, the right group of people to be thinking about this problem.

Yeah, I mean, for context, obviously, we, uh, sorry, yeah, we, we've, we've interviewed most of the, you know, modern blockchains and like know actually exactly how they work.

We broke some of them, you know, we had Solana actually paid bounty for to us for breaking it back, back in the day.

Uh, so we're, yeah, we, we indeed very well aware on all the kind of risk factors and, and general design of all the systems.

Yeah, I think a lot of people approach, and it's a very, it probably stems from like, just the Like the compliance people and stuff, but it's like their approach is sort of this, like, we need to be compliant or we need to like stop bad guys.

And it's like not really from first principles, right?

It's this add on where you're like, I want to do this thing.

I have this goal that I'm trying to build for.

But in order to do that, in order to not go to jail, I need to like slap a thing on so that I don't go to jail.

And I think that that's always been.

Very problematic because like with anything that you build, if you just slap something on it, it's not going to do, do anything well, and it's all gonna work against your goals of the protocol.

But if you think about it, right, if you think about like, What are the goals of the protocol long term?

What are you're, you're trying to give your users, you know, it, it actually is more about like security, risk, where, where is the danger?

And when you approach it from that way, which I say like that's like first principles, right?

How do we de-risk this for ourselves, for our partners, for our LPs, for our users, whatever it is.

How do you de-risk this very quickly, especially in crypto.

You have to confront the fact that um like things break and things get hacked.

And if you're uh sitting at the center of that, you're also going to be impacted by that.

And it's not because like law enforcement is going to come and arrest you, like, maybe, right?

In some cases, maybe, but the bigger issue uh is everything around that, you know, um, and so like, especially with the bridges and stuff.

The first principle is don't.

Uh, like, don't get hacked yourself, but a lot of times that's relying on a huge number of other things.

And if you don't have any detection in place, you have no way to monitor and react to this stuff, you have no circuit breakers.

That's how we have, you know, name a bridge hack, right?

And there's been.

A lot of bridge hacks, like a lot of really, really, really big obvious bridge hacks.

Um, and a lot of them, like Ronan is the, is the infamous example, but a lot of them didn't even notice that their money was gone.

It's crazy for like two weeks.

It's nuts, right?

Like, you know, and so that's the thing is like, I get, I get the pushback where people are just like, I don't want to know what the, don't tell me that Lazarus is using my thing.

Like it doesn't matter like what is.

Bad.

What is good?

I get it at the same time, like, it's bad, but it's good.

When it, when it like devolved into like the philosophy of like evil, you know, you're in a good place, right?

Like, is it really North Korea?

Like, are they really bad?

Can anything be bad?

I mean, this is like code is law until code is wrong, right?

That's like what do we do when code is wrong.

All right, let's, uh, let's take a quick ad break, uh, here, and then we'll come back and talk about, uh, the EF and, um, AI drops.

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All right, everyone, we are back.

So let's talk, uh, Metallic's smaller ship EF uh.

I guess we still need analogies for what the F is, because we can't actually talk about it directly.

So, um, the, the, so for like, first of all, so Metallic dropped the 1500 word X post, um, which should be illegal, in my view.

Like, we have articles, we have threads, there's many options.

Don't drop a 1500.

I don't, like, I read the whole thing, I saw a bunch of people like, no one's gonna read this.

I was like, I'm reading this whole thing.

Um, I'm a masochist, um, but like, why, why are we doing this?

Like just put it in a thread, bro.

It's not hard.

You can get AI to do it for you.

Uh, it can slice, it can slice it up.

Um, anyway, so, so, um, I think the, the reality of the situation is there's been a bunch of people who've been leaving, um.

And, you know, tip, the funny thing is, usually when people leave, right, you get the like vesting cliff reached meme.

You know, it's like the person jumping off the, the cliff.

Uh, no one posted that in the app because, uh, I think they know they're not given any tokens.

So it's like that's not the problem.

It's not like that they were paid too much money.

Um, that's actually such a good point, that like that's part of the confusion with everything else when people leave, there's like 3 reasons and you know immediately that they need a job, um.

So, so, obviously, uh, you know, it's a bear market.

Everything's, everything's been, uh, been ripped pretty hard, um, except for N and Z cash.

Um, so, so, you know, it is still struggling, you've got like the, the people like David Hoffman capitulating.

Um, and, and I think there's like a, a very, uh, like direct question of like, what is the EF for?

Like, what is, what is their purpose?

What are they trying to do?

Um, you know, there was a period where they, they, like the 2025 EF I guess, right, where they tried to do a bunch of things.

Um, I know, like Luca, like, you know, you talk to Vitali.

Um, for the first time, I remember I, I introed you guys.

Um, they were like, boarding builders and, and all of this stuff, and it seems like, um, you know, that, that era is over.

Um, but At the same time, the bullish thing for me, right, is there was at least some clarity about like, what is, what, what is Ethereum for, even if it's unclear what the EF is for, and what the purpose of the EF is.

Um, and I, I was very, uh, I was excited to sort of see Vitalic saying, like, we're going to lean into being the most impressive chain from like a technological perspective.

Don't get too triggered, yeah, OK.

Um, but, but, you know, uh, the, the, the fact that, you know, they have all of these properties that are like, you know, very unique to Ethereum that they've worked hard for, that metallic push for, and those are the things that people will ultimately care about.

Um, I think it's right.

And, and I think like, you know, the thing that probably people have been frustrated by is that there hasn't been like a clarity of purpose.

Like, You know, what is Ethereum for, right?

Like, you know, there's, we've had so many different narratives, the world computer, and, you know, in, in absence, in a vacuum, people will invent their own things, right?

Like ultrasound money and like nonsensical things that, that have been, uh, you know, markets come up with to try and explain like what is the.

Right?

Um, you know, and, and so Vitallic stepping up and saying like, no, no, this, this is going to be like a technological thing, but the best technology, we're working towards it, etc. um, at least feels like a, a, a good response from my perspective to the market.

What, what did you think, Luca?

Did you read this thing?

Yeah, I read parts of it.

I didn't read the whole thing like you did.

I, I, I, I, that's like, yeah, you know, so I can't speak on it just to, to, to, to the T, but I mean, I mean, you're seeing it across all blockchain guys except for Ilya.

It's brutal out there, right?

And Ilya had the foresight to at least like See where the puck is going, kind of, or at least like build something that was like novelly different, but I mean, you're also seeing some of the things with Toli and Solana, some of the tweets that he's been dropping lately.

I don't know if you've been seeing that, Kane.

I think it's just hard there across the board, right?

It's just, and, and I think they're feeling it, and It's interesting because when price is up, you kind of just become in this like lull, and a lot of people try to pretend that like they don't care about price until everyone starts caring about price and starts punishing you for it.

It's like a fascinating dichotomy, but Look, I, you know, my stance on it is I, I personally just think it's a mistake.

I think when you look at communities, like what is a perfect example of a community and an ecosystem, like, look at your local town, right?

Your local commu your local community in, in your, you know, in your neighborhood.

Like, there's police stations, there's fire stations, there's the municipal, like, there's the courthouse, like, these things all need to function, and they all need to support each other, and, you know, in this case, You know, Ethereum acts as, you know, the town town mayor, and the EF at least acts as the town mayor, and whether they like it or not, like, that's just the nature of owning an ecosystem and an asset as an ecosystem asset.

And I've always taken the stance that you have to just treat it like you would a town or a city or a country.

Um, and I think taking a different approach, uh, is maybe more in line with, I guess, the cypherpunk thesis, but I just don't think that that's how these things win and succeed.

But frankly, you're seeing it across the board.

Uh, I think a lot of guys are starting to feel the pressure, specifically in blockchain land, maybe the exception of Ilya, who seems to have, uh, figured out where the puck is going and is capturing a lot of that mindshaft.

Yeah, what was, what was your take, Ilya?

How did, how did you, so, so I mean we, we, we have a long history with Ethereum because we actually pitched in 2018 to build these 22 Ethereum Foundation.

Because I actually like if we could just build this to make it work, we would go back to AI in like 2020, uh, and uh because that was like the whole thing we're like we needed a blockchain for our new AI stuff and we're like looked around, we didn't find anything that would actually match our needs, right? scalable, easy to use, kind of abstracted.

Um, and so we're like, OK, well, Ethereum is, you know, was talking about charting back then, was talking about web assembly, was talking about, you know, faster slot time, was talking about better user experience.

We're like, we assembly, you don't hear that very much in the Ethereum land these days.

Uh, and so we're like, cool, we can just build all that.

We have a team, you know, we're VC funded, we just need an upside.

That was the thing.

It's like, hey, we need a way like, whoa, whoa, whoa, sorry, I'm gonna stop you right there I don't know if you're familiar with the concept of communism, but we're not paying you shit.

You can, you can build us the two, but we will not pay you a red cent, my friend.

And so that that was kind of where, where that conversation went, um, and, and so, and to be clear like I've, I've I've pitched, I've pitched this idea multiple times so like before launching Mainnet.

I've pitched it again because like hey look we've built it now right we had bayonet, we had charting we had web assembly all of that, yeah, we had a kind of abstraction.

Let's figure out like what, what this could look like.

We do have VCs.

We need to pay them money.

I have a team that, you know, wants upside they work, you know, 24/7 effectively for why would you have VCs?

What were you thinking?

I know.

And so, and so I think like, so there, there's like fundamentally to me there's a few things.

One is I, I don't think decentralization needs to mean disorganization.

And so this is something I've told my team over and over again.

We can be decentralized and organized at the same time, right?

We can have a system that is supports a decentralized set of like near is actually whenever people join near.

They were like, holy shit, I didn't realize there's so many things.

Like we have, you know, dozens of companies working together at all times.

Like you go to our Slack, there's like 20 Slack connects, you know, that you typically join by default, right?

Because we actually have lots of different companies working together in close coordination.

When we did have, we had a hack as well on Nir with Rhea.

We had 5 different companies effectively working together.

They tracked down exactly who did it.

They had all the forensic evidence and effectively returned all the money.

Right.

And it was done because all those teams can come together whenever there's a need and figure out how to work together.

And so, and that, that is like I see the function of leadership and, and I mean, not perfect obviously, there's a lot to improve, but that is the function of leadership of both, you know, the kind of spokesperson and the vision setter of the ecosystem, right, which is Vitale in Ethereum and like this is not gonna change.

And the foundation as a, as a supporting function.

Like it doesn't need to go and do the actual day to day, even sales function, but they need to organize and, and set the framework for that.

So for example, near intense, all of the BD like for example, Kane, Kane's team working day to day, they're not like, I mean, they're originally, some of them were near foundation, but they're all now in the diffuse company which is like overseeing near intense growth.

And that team is like day to day looking at, you know, growth of intent and growth of all of the incentives.

They have incentives.

They have, yeah, like you talk to them and you're like, oh, these guys seem pretty incentivized to make this work, right?

Like, yeah, and they, it's both like near incentive and they have bonuses based on success of that specific unit, right?

And so same like if we talk about near AI, right, they're not going and selling near intense.

They have their own product.

They have their own the market.

They're still incentivized by near and they incentivize by success of the unit.

And so we're kind of trying to build that architecture like.

The way I think of it is like what if you took things like Google, which I actually think internally is very like there's a lot of issues but like has a lot of interesting kind of organizational structure and opened it up, made it open ecosystem that anybody can join, anybody can kind of collaborate, work on each other, but you had like common, you know, alphabet stock that incentivizes everyone.

You have common like HR finance that you can tap into.

And so like that is the kind of all the cut of scale plus incentives, right, plus incentives and and open like ecosystem, yeah.

The interesting thing is like metallics like, well, you know, Google and like I get this right like when I was a teenager, like I was like.

Don't be evil is like, like, oh, companies are bad, you know, like, because I was poor, and like, things were expensive, and I was like, oh man, companies charge me so much money, like they're such jerks.

Why can't they make, you know, building a computer cheaper?

I want to like do all this stuff and, you know, whatever, right?

And so you had this like antipathy towards these large corporations that, you know, especially like Microsoft charging you for the operating system.

Like, come on, man, like, make it free, like Linux, you don't need to make money.

Like, and, and so, um, You know, there was, there, there was, like, Google was like, oh, we're going to be a corporation, but we're not going to be evil like those Microsoft guys, right?

Um, and Vitallic now, like, seems like has such an ax to grind of like, Google became evil and stopped the don't be evil thing and like did all these evil things.

Um.

And, and like Yeah.

What?

OK, so it's not, this is the thing, you can have the gold and don't be evil.

Like, personally, in my life, I try not to be evil.

Great, it's fantastic, right?

I would recommend everyone operate like that.

Yeah, just try not to be evil, OK guys, like done.

In terms of running a freaking organization at scale that is trying to achieve things, if you're, let's say, bottom line mantra that your employees, your teams, your partners are all living by is don't be evil, what the hell are you doing, right?

And Google, I think, when like they, they explicitly removed it, maybe Elliott, maybe you know better.

I feel like the explicit removal of this.

Was because it, it kept probably clashing with the actual goals and actual KPIs and actual, you know, mechanisms that they were using for their organization, right?

And so when they Stopped say having that as the mantra.

It was mostly just bring it in line because they actually have goals.

The issue that I have with like Metallic and the EF and their approach, again.

Try to do all these things.

Try not to be evil, like that's great, but what the hell are you trying to do?

Because that's, that's like, I, I can go sit on my fucking couch alone, never talk to anyone, never contribute value to anything, never buy anything, never sell anything.

I can go sit on my couch and not be evil.

Right, OK, what ends though, right?

Like, exactly, like, obviously that's not a win.

If the EF is sitting on their couch, not being evil, or Google is sitting on their couch, not being evil, not doing anything, that is not actually a goal, right?

It's just not.

And so you have to define.

You have to find like what you guys are going for.

And I think that this is core to any organization.

If you do not understand what the hell everyone is striving towards and have that like, you know, people call it the North Star, whatever you want to call it, right?

To get people moving in the same direction and working together and understanding like where, again, where the where their peers are sitting, where what their managers are trying to execute, what the partners, right?

Like everyone has to be.

Heading towards that same goal, I mean, I think to your point, like the crux of this don't be evil is not a goal.

It's, it's not a goal.

It's a, it's a non-goal, right?

Like you can't, like, it's like tells you like what not to do, but like not a goal, yeah.

Right, it's like whatever comes from that.

I understand that Vitallic wants the gift to be smaller, but that's actually not what he wants.

What he wants is he wants a flourishing decentralized community of people who are all executing different things, and all have like slightly different incentives, and are all using their talents differently.

That's the goal.

The goal is not to make the EF smaller.

The goal is like the EF is not needed because all this other stuff is flourishing.

But when you define it as like the EF being smaller, I think it just confuses things, in my opinion.

And I think same for don't be evil.

Remember a couple weeks ago we were talking about like how the the skew of morality has just been like totally left the window, and like I would love for him to define like evil, because like, me eating a hamburger with like a vegan sitting across from me, like could be evil, right?

So, like, let's just define evil, at least for the sake of like, if that is the goal.

Like what is evil because evil, evil is subjective, right?

Like you evil.

I mean, you could argue and different than me, you could argue that you could argue that me sitting on my couch doing absolutely nothing productive for society, for my family, for my community, right?

Literally just sitting on my couch wasting away is like quite evil, right? crypto degens that have been trading Ethereum, the price has been the same for the last 5 years to them, that's evil, right?

Yeah, that's true.

I know it's true.

It's, I know we all don't agree with that statement, but I'm sure like there's a lot of guys at their computer like evil.

So, so I mean coming from, coming from Google, right, like you saw this transition, you know, there, there's like a view that it's great to say don't be evil.

The only reason why you could fucking get away with that, right, is the same reason why the EF.

And get away with nonsense, and not having, and having non-goals and not having to like actually execute and do things, because they have so much fucking money because they found this money printer, and they now are like outside of the realms of like finance and.

Right?

Like Google just had this advertising money printer, it's just a money pipe that was just spewing money in, that allowed them to do whatever the fuck they wanted, run any experiments or whatever, like, like what, you were in Google, like, what's your perspective on that?

Like, Yeah, so, uh, the way I think of it, there's mission and there's values, right?

And so when they were saying like don't be evil is values, it's not your mission.

Mission is actually what you're trying to achieve in the world.

And for Google, the original mission was, you know, organize the, the world, right?

Um, And Don't be evil was the approach they were taking.

Now, you're right that also effectively while they had a dominant position and was kind of, I mean, complete monopoly on not even search, but the specifically the advertisement, uh, like the, the eyeballs, like they were effectively owned the programmatic advertisement market.

They could do whatever they wanted.

What happened actually while I was there, there was this transition.

Where, like, uh, the the easiest way in Google to get promoted was to go to ads team and grow some revenue metric.

And so I was talking to one of my colleagues who went there from research, and he's like, yeah, you know, got, just got promoted, got the, got the, uh, like revenue, uh, you know, growth, and like, what did you do?

He's like, well, you know, we're effectively correlating your, uh, maps data to the ads that we scanned from the streets and we're retargeting it on the internet.

So you saw on the highway, an ad, like a billboard.

And they're like, we will retarget you while you're visiting some web page now, this exact ad, this exact product.

And I'm like, this sounds, this sounds kind of evil.

And I'm like, why, why, why is that, why, why are we doing this now?

And he's like, well, Facebook is doing this.

And so what happened is Facebook has effectively pushed Google to become a lot more aggressive in how they were using user data and approaching.

Uh, in general, uh, in general, this, and so I mean we see the same right now.

AI is pushing Google, you know, to be better at AI and everything, right, even though, you know, Transformers were at Google, they were like we had, we had chat GPT, we had chat GPT product in like even before Transformers, to be clear, like we, there, there was a, you know, chat product is not hard to build.

I guess it wasn't maybe that as amazing.

It just didn't make sense for Google to release it because Like, I mean, multiple reasons, but effective like it wouldn't be good enough compared to Google Search.

You would create like dichotomy and, and, you know, you get, you open yourself up for a bunch of lawsuits and there's, there's actual like legit reasons for startups to actually auto innovate big companies, but now they're like stepping up and really, really ramping up machines.

So competitions always leads to this, but, but I do think there's, there is a natural kind of tendency in.

For, like, I, I also like taking, you know, Vitalics and kind of more cypherpunk side.

I do think corporations in general have this tendency of becoming like extractive, right?

As soon as you effectively achieve your target audience and there's no more to grow, you effectively need to grow how much like how much you're making from a single user and so you're effectively trying to either upsell them or in some way increase how much they're spending on your, on your platform.

And so that I think is actually the problem is that Um, there's no steady state, like cor corporation is either growing or, or shrinking.

There's no way for something to be a steady state.

And I think in blockchain we actually have something where because we can have fixed supply, we can have like a different dynamics when we say this is money, when this is, and, and kind of if our vision is forward enough and, and you know, for us again, we, we think.

The economy is gonna transition to blockchain, right?

Right now it's extremely ineffective, you know, all of the negotiations like actual supply chains, actual work is done extremely ineffectively.

Blockchain will make it, you know, 10 times more effective and AI will make it 100 times effective and so together AI and blockchain will make it, you know, 1000 times effective, and that's a TA, right?

That's, you know, 10, 100 trillion TA of effectively post AGI money is what we're targeting.

And I think that is like when that is the vision, that is the goal, then you still have values, right?

We want to do it in, you know, no crime, for example, we want to do it.

Um, in a, in a kind of methodical way, we do want to be not, like, I actually think of decentralization as a tool, not as a goal.

For me, decentralization is effectively making sure things are redundant, not depending on a single person, not depending on a single organization, not depending on single validator, on single wallet provider, and single RPC provider.

Like all, and all of those things, we want redundancy.

One ability to kind of work around like user benefits and, and, you know, uh, beneficial to the process, right?

Exactly.

No, I have a talk, I have a talk in 2018 where I'm like, this obsession with decentralization for decentralization's sake is the silliest shit and we need to stop.

Decentralization is good, but it's not, it's not.

It's not the decentralization that's good, it's what comes from that.

So redundancy, like, also, um, like I mean competition and innovation comes from this as well, right?

Exactly.

So you have, you have cooperation, which achieves certain things and can grow certain things in certain ways.

You also have competition, which is the same, um, like stability.

Like security, right?

All of these things can come from decentralization.

They don't necessarily do, right?

And that's like the, again, it's like going back to like, what are you actually aiming for to just be decentralized like, OK, so what you kick everyone out of the Discord and make them and don't support them on yeah, you cannot be on, on the same Discord and then when you have zero day, you have no idea how to actually let everybody know, right?

You know, and so it's like, what are you trying to achieve?

And I think, again, I think that this is, this is like a very A very big part of like what contributes to the Ethereum culture, and especially at the app is like, What is, what are you trying to do with the centralization again, you want other people to build up in ways that you would never build up.

You want people to be working together, to be competing with each other.

We want everyone to be leveling up and filling the gaps in the ecosystem and the EF's job is not to do those things.

The EF's job.

Should be to build those people up, but by framing it as like we want to be decentralized and stuff, what it ends up like the execution ends up being is like, we don't tweet about product builders.

We don't talk to product builders.

We're, uh, another one, neutrality, right?

My one of my favorite ones, like, OK, so you don't fucking support anyone.

You don't care about anyone.

You don't incentivize anyone.

We don't have a favorite child.

I would be.

People, that'd be horrific.

We can't pick. favors.

I don't, I don't know I'm saying.

And so therefore, no, therefore, therefore, it's so important that we don't have a favorite child that we actually don't talk to our children.

Yeah, we don't talk to any of the children.

We don't talk to them at all.

They live in a different house in another area just to make sure that it's, it's, it's so important that they are totally they're all neglected equally.

It looks just like, let me in your house, Dad, please.

I just wanna, I just wanna give you a hug.

He's like, please, man, come on.

Um, so I, I really wanted to talk about, uh, like iron claw and some of the like agentic stuff that you guys are, are doing.

Um, but I think we're out of time.

So we might need to, to bring you back, cause I'm, I'm very curious, um, how you are thinking about this from like a practical standpoint of like an organization, right?

We've talked a lot about, like, you know, mission and, and, you know, uh, morals and goals and everything.

Um, we live in a world, you know, that in the last three months has changed dramatically, in terms, you know, to your point, 100x AI, right?

We're in maybe the 5X or 10X period of this, right?

But it's only going to get crazier.

Um, in that backdrop, like, how do you build an organization?

How do you structure an organization?

How do you get people to coordinate?

Um, I'm, I'm Really curious to get your perspective on this, but, uh, but I think we're out of time for, uh, give us like, uh, like two sentences like this, yeah, I mean the, the, the high level where I want to get to is markets.

That, that's the highest level, right?

Like we're transitioning from corporation or foundation or whatever, needing to be the holder of people because you need it kind of to, to bundle.

Because you had trouble doing credit assignment, right?

Like if you know, Infinix done something, it was really hard to like this individual person contributed this much to this product.

I think that actually is a lot easier to solve now with AI, right?

It can actually estimate this.

And then on the other side, each individual is becoming more productive.

So like, I mean, it's, you know, I know multiple people who are working on a bunch of projects at the same time now, uh, because you kind of have a lot more bandwidth.

And so, I actually think we're gonna start transitioning to more organizations almost that are just operating on the market principles where you're effectively hiring.

You know, an individual and their army of agents to do something and you kind of can estimate like how much that contribution would have done to the bottom line of the bigger thing you're doing, right?

So I don't know if you saw, so Jack Dorsey actually like he posted something like which is spiritual and kind of going from hierarchical organization to more kind of uh peer to peer.

And again this is where blockchain and kind of all of the, you know, intent-based stuff that we've been doing is exactly, that's exactly the world we've been building for where you effectively can say, hey, this is intent, like I want this new feature in Infinix, and now, you know, there can be multiple what it's worth to me, yeah, this is what it's worth, or you can have a bidding and an auction and finding, you know, a solver that will say, cool, I'll build it in, you know, 24 hours.

Like this is my expectation of like of quality it's gonna be, and then if you don't agree, right, there's another agent that comes in and reviews it and effectively judges if that was done.

And so this is actually what we're building as uh our near AI marketplace and kind of testing this out right now.

This is still early, so I'm not, uh, but we have like first actual businesses starting to use it like for insurance claim filing for background checks.

For event then like actual real use cases where they're effective hiring agents to do some jobs and it can be like because somebody who is an expert effectively codified the workflow, packaged it up and now offering that for $1 as a surface, right, like disaggregating what would have had to have been inside of a corporation, you know, like you have your that, that function of 345, 10 humans that are.

Yeah, manually doing that all the time and sometimes they don't have enough work and sometimes, you know, you're pulling them to do something else.

Now you can disaggregate all this and then have a marketplace and so that's actually I think where we're going.

It's, I mean, it's not gonna be, it's gonna be a bumpy ride, but I think that like systematically that's what makes sense.

And again this is where AI and blockchain really fits well because they're kind of powering this trustless transaction.

We have escrow.

We have verifiable AI to, to evaluate if the agent done their job well.

You can still have human in the loop, right, to kind of cross-correct if something went wrong.

So it doesn't need to be like, and now everything automated.

It can be like.

You know, I hired, you know, Kane's agent, and, you know, Kane will like make sure that his agent done the work right or like corrected before passes is over, right.

My other agent will make sure that the other agent did, did a good job.

I won't, I won't be involved.

It's going to be fine, guys.

No, it's gonna be great.

Well, so, so like within the near ecosystem, and we've experienced this, right, like you guys are already somewhat.

In this direction, like these smaller corporate entities, like smaller, smaller business entities, yeah, I mean that, that has been my principle from a long time ago.

So it's, I mean, again, to me, AI again is an accelerator, blockchain is coordinator.

The principles are the same.

But so, so very, but from a very practical standpoint, right?

Like, uh, the, this is something that I'm, I'm like super focused on at the moment.

Um, you know, we went from 2025, where like, you could grind your way through and get some like production code.

It was really hard.

Then December 2025 through to like, Maybe March or something like that, you could, you could not just grind your way through, like you could just kind of prompt and get like production mode if you.

Had, uh, you know, enough experience with.

Um, and so, a lot of engineers were like, uh, I don't need to write the code anymore.

I can get agents to write the code and, and have you.

But it was still very much like a synchronous process of like a single person sitting in front of a computer producing code, right?

Um, That doesn't, to me, feel like the final form of this, right?

Like, it feels like we, we need, uh, something else.

And so the interesting thing about Centaur, what, what Paradigm, uh, dropped last week is like, it's trying to move the agents into Slack, so that you have, like, an agentic.

Partner or teammate or whatever that is responsible for the coordination that an individual human would, you know, find hard to, to coordinate, um, and can, you know, deploy agents, and then like, it's really the, the humans in the loop for taste and judgment and, and goal seeking and, and all of that, and then like the execution side is all handled by, by agents, um, like, you know, given how much you guys are, are, Doing in the space and, and how long you've been involved, like from a near orb perspective, are you still in the mode of one person sitting in front of one terminal doing things, or are you experimenting in this like multiplayer space?

Yeah, we're experimenting definitely and so the Iron Claw itself is actually multi-tenant.

So open, open claw and Hermes, they, they're effectively like your system and so Iron Claw actually supports a multi-tenant mode where you can log in with Google, you know, or, or near account, and you're effective joining a single instance.

You have your memory, you have your kind of missions, etc.

You also have shared projects.

You have shared memory.

You have shared.

Workflows.

And so, yeah, we're experimenting kind of designing how we call it the commitment system.

So whenever, you know, we're having a meeting with your cane and like Ilya said, you know, yes, we're gonna ship this feature for you, this should actually go somewhere automatically.

And then, you know, pop up, yeah, well, it also should pop up for the team and then I also like, you know, follow up if it's done, put it on the roadmap, update the right documents.

Similarly, like I actually have workflows that, you know, scan everybody's meeting notes and like give me like decisions that were made.

What I, what am I gonna commit me to?

Well, not, not for me, but like in general for the organization, but also like actually the most useful been finding where decisions were not made.

Because that's actually where organizations taxes is people discuss something and did not make a decision because as a decision maker it is not clear or it wasn't in the room.

And so just extracting that and making sure that's visible, like it's already helping because then I can.

And is that like an org level panopticon agent multi-agent thing like how, how right now it will be prototyped it more like from my perspective just because I have access and but then we are now building this as like a yeah, a system that everybody again the, the main question is permissions, right.

Like for example, there's some HR things, right, they shouldn't be visible to anyone except maybe some HR people and so like you need to kind of configure that, but, uh, otherwise, yeah, like, you know, I may have like full purview and then we kind of can like cross cut it into like specific departments, but yeah, we're kind of building it as like a single near foundation at least right now.

Iron Claw that has everyone kind of as a user and then there's like a common area of his permissions as well.

Yeah, nice.

Yeah, I think this is like the most fertile ground for efficiency improvements, uh, that, that, but it's super hard.

Like it's hard to reason about.

You start building something, you're like, uh, this isn't exactly the shape of it.

Like it's, it's a really complex, uh, design space, um, that we don't have good intuition about.

It doesn't, because it's just like, we've only had humans.

You just like throw a human at a problem and like, they're just different.

We're very bad at the human side of this, like organizations, right?

Especially like running like an organization at scale is like, it is bad.

It's organizations are always broken.

That's always 100%, always.

And so it's like then you're like, OK, let me slap an agent on this bitch, and it's like doesn't solve everything.

What are you talking about?

I mean, so you have to, you have to like either, I think like the approach, right, like.

OK, let's, let's just solve the problem, which is such a common organization problem.

Like, why wasn't the decision made, or like, and also just tracking the decisions that are made.

You can actually solve that and bring efficiency to that, and then you can then sort of circle back around and be like, OK, clearly this area of the org, this team, whatever, yeah, and like non those non-decisions, yeah, I've worked at many companies where Yeah, I mean, my entire life was not making sitting on calls that didn't make decisions and me getting like just fucking banging my head off.

Why are we here?

Yeah, I mean, I, so I pitched this actually nearon 2023.

I pitched this idea of AI CEO, right?

This was before any of this AI stuff started to work, right?

And so my, my vision always there was like, yeah, like working from two directions.

One is how to make individuals more, have more context because like a lot of the middle management and kind of it's just like propagating context from like relevant places and at the same time cutting down stuff that's not relevant because like people cannot just like.

You know, have a feed of everything happening in the organization as well.

And so that is AI like AI can do that very well, right?

Like whatever is relevant to your work, whatever is relevant, you can still query out whatever you wanna know.

And then the other way is like bubbling up indeed information is like what is going on, what decisions are made, what suggestions, what's improvement.

What is like where the trade-offs are like that's the other thing.

A lot of it is like we're operating on a trade-offs.

Like what are the trade-offs?

Like sometimes like people making decisions have no idea what the trade-offs were that actually led to this.

And this is, this is actually, by the way, why I think Dows never worked is because all of this infrastructure is missing.

And so like for Doos to truly work you kind of need to have the system truly working where you don't need middle management, you don't need you have credit assignment embedded into the your organizational design because right now again credit assignment is a very like credit assignment I think actually is the fundamental world problem like like on organizational level in AI machine learning what gradient descent like the training of models is credit assignment problem.

And so like in every, in every place you go it's like credit assignment is the main challenge, but like if you can't assign like oh you know this person contributed this much to this bigger thing we've done, if you can do that, then like again right now like promotions, compensation, all of these things are like somewhat arbitrary, very fuzzy and, and adversarial, yeah, and so and and Dao couldn't deal with them.

Yeah, exactly.

Because then you put rules, like these very hardline rules on things that are fundamentally fuzzy underneath, and then you're like, it's fair, but you have to, you're like, oh, we'll just like, yeah, yeah.

And then you're like, it's fair and then people like.

I mean, yeah, it's fair, but, you know, but this other company gives me like double the compensation, right?

So like, probably it's not fair.

It's probably not fair, yeah, exactly, exactly, yeah, and, you know, it's funny, like, there's the unintended consequences of like how you incentivize people are like so funny to me, like, you know, I, I kind of vacillate between these like communist bonuses, right, that we call them in, in, uh, infinite it's like, hey, Everyone was here.

We can't really attribute, you know, perfectly.

So we're just going to give everyone the same thing, right, for this particular thing, right?

And like, the, the people contributing the most fucking hate it.

They rage so hard.

They're like, this is a travesty.

Like, anyway, so, but, but I mean, I know we're we're over time, but Markets actually solve all of this.

Like, if you, if you forget about or inside organization between companies, there is market.

And so if you don't like the partner, you switch to another provider, right?

If you like markets actually solve all this problem, we just haven't figured out how to do it on a lower level.

And this is again where AI and blockchain and kind of the intent architecture is actually like built for, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, fair.

Awesome, awesome.

Thank you, sir.

Uh, amazing having you on the show.

Um, thanks everyone for joining us for this episode of Uneasy Money.

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