Aleo: Privacy First Blockchain, Financial Sovereignty and Data Security with CEO, Alex Pruden

Transcript

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Welcome to the Index Podcast hosted by Alex Kahaya.

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Plug in as we explore new frontiers with Web3 and the decentralized future.

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Hey everyone and welcome to the Index, where we talk with the leading entrepreneurs, builders and investors building the future of the internet.

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We do this because we believe that people are worth knowing and we want to share their stories behind why they are here striving for a better future.

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I'm your host, alex Kahaya, and today I'm excited to welcome Alex Pruden, ceo of Aleo, the first decentralized, open-source platform designed to enable private and programmable applications.

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Aleo brings together an ecosystem of expert technologists, developers and digital rights advocates who use zero-knowledge proofs to build a better, more secure internet for everyone.

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Alex, thanks so much for being here.

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I want to start off by just saying we've talked about having you on the show since we met each other in Vienna.

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We were at this niche infrastructure conference, like future of the internet type thing.

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It was actually put on by Daniel Huang and then you guys were a sponsor.

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Solana Foundation was a sponsor.

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Daniel's going to come on the show later next year, so everybody's going to get to hear from him.

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That is the future of the internet.

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The back is the thing that most people don't know about.

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Is that the hardware, that actual physical hardware, the wires that connect everything together, and we had the top 100 or 200, so people working on that in our space in the same room.

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It was so interesting.

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But first I want to start off as like, why are you here, not here on the show, but why are you here building in this space?

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And then we can get into Aleo and talk about that.

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Yeah, no, thank you very much for having me on the show.

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I'm really excited for this conversation.

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Maybe I can just start off and answer the question of why I'm here and give a little bit of background on myself to introduce myself to your audience, and hopefully that'll answer the question at the same time.

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So I actually don't have a technology background at all.

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I was from a military family growing up and I joined the army shortly after 9-11 and had a 15-year army career, and in the early part of my army career I was at the military academy, and so that's like effectively a college, and so you pick a major, and my majors were international relations and Arabic, so decidedly non-technical.

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I technically do have a bachelor of science, because every graduate of a military academy gets one, but I just didn't focus at all on technology and I basically thought that my future was just going to be as a military officer.

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After I graduated from the academy, I had the remainder of the next nine years in my army career.

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I spent across three deployments in the Middle East one to Afghanistan, one to Iraq and one to Turkey, where we were training some of the Syrian rebels who were fighting me Assad regime.

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At the time I got interested or I got first introduced to crypto, actually working with those folks, because cryptocurrencies, I think a lot of times in the West, and particularly in the United States, we have the benefit of all of these very robust systems, financial in particular, that we as American citizens enjoy.

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I mean, the most obvious one is the US dollar.

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We're like I can kind of go anywhere in the world and just whip out a dollar and it's good for some good or service, basically anywhere you go, and that's just not true of most places and I think it's something that is very easy to take for granted.

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And when I was working with a lot of these Syrian folks, the particular problem that I kind of witnessed them facing is like these are people that for the most part play their whole lives by the rules and we're just kind of working every day for a paycheck, put some money in the savings, put their kids through school standard kind of every human dream of a typical life arc.

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And then one day civil war broke out in Syria, got it.

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Lines got a bit arbitrarily drawn and if you were on the wrong side of it, whether or not you were kind of part of it or not, you were just blacklisted from the financial system in Syria effectively, which means your bank account was frozen.

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Your house became a legitimate target for bombardment, so your real property was basically under threat, and the people that could got away with their lives, but for the most part, lost almost all of their wealth, and part of the reason for that is because the Syrian pounds that they earned their living in just didn't mean anything when they crossed a border into Turkey, or if they had identity documents that they couldn't, for whatever reason, take in time, or if they lost them in the process of fleeing.

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Now they literally are stateless.

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They have no ability to ever cross another border anywhere.

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So that's kind of how I got interested in blockchain technology, particularly Bitcoin.

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In the beginning, I was kind of like saw these people who lost everything and I'm like, wow, bitcoin.

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You know.

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The first thing that I was introduced to is like this is an amazing technology.

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I was an army guy, right.

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It's a simple dude.

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So I'm like, okay, I memorized the password and now my bank account goes with me wherever, right.

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It's obviously a very simplistic way to look at Bitcoin, but I think it does get it what really the value proposition of that particular network is.

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It's just self-sodern money that you can take with you wherever you're going as good wherever you go, and that's what got me into the space.

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So, yeah, so that's that, for me, is really why I'm here, and I guess it's kind of reflecting back on and I gave a talk about this when I was still an investor at A16Z and I guess maybe just to complete the story.

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So I left the army, went to Stanford, started the Stanford Blockchain Club, got a job working at A16Z on the first crypto fund, so I had got some investment experience in the space and decided to go build an alio, which you already described, and now I'm the CEO.

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You know, reflecting on my military career and the time I spent overseas in particular, just gave me an appreciation for all these systems that we take for granted and I think the potential for decentralized, permissionless versions of many of these fundamental systems, like money, I think, have the potential to really transform our economy and society honestly in a way that makes life a lot better, that in a way that ensures the values and liberties that we kind of take for granted but really deeply value in the West.

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So for me, that's why I'm here and that's why I'll never leave this industry?

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Because, first off, it's just a very exciting industry to be in, but, second off, it feels like there's a very fundamental reason or fundamental way in which this technology is helping to improve the world.

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In my view.

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Thanks for sharing that, and you know that I have family members in the military and so I understand the sacrifice that it takes to do that job, both for you personally and also your wife and kids and all that stuff.

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So thank you for your service.

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I appreciate it, thank you.

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You kind of glossed over this, but I feel like and we can edit this out if you want later but you were in the special forces, you were not just in the army, Okay, so you know, for people listening, like he's legit.

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I was an infantry officer, which is like you know.

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So I got combat experience in Afghanistan as an infantry officer and then I, when I was training the Syrian guys, I was a green beret.

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So that you know, as a green beret, the mission of a green beret is like you go, you get dropped in, there's 12 of you and you basically like create your own army with whatever, whoever is there with you.

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In this case, it was the Syrians, right?

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So part of the reason I'm so interested in the layoffs because I worked at Orchid and I got really close to the privacy sector and that whole conversation and I started my first podcast when I was at Orchid called Fall the White Rabbit, and so many people that I had on that show that were from Awesome name for a podcast, by the way.

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Yeah, it was great, I loved that name.

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So many people that I talked to, like I talked to this one Ukrainian guy, guy from Venezuela like Bitcoin equals freedom.

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That is what it equals for them.

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That is what crypto and the values of web three are about.

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Freedom it's about, like, I think, most of the values that America stands for being able to securely own your property is a human right.

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You should be able to have that.

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Things like privacy this is now technology driven in a way that can't be revoked because we're using cryptography.

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This is kind of getting into.

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Why I kind of obsess over a layover is because, so you talk about Stanford, right?

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Am I understanding that?

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The founders of Aleo?

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They're PhDs.

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They're some of the lead Berkeley guys.

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Berkeley guys.

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I'm the only Stanford guys.

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We have a little rivalry internally in Aleo.

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My point is, though, is that they're like some of the leading minds in zero knowledge proof technology, which I would argue that, if crypto hadn't become so big, zkp, which is the acronym for zero knowledge proof would not have gotten nearly the funding that it's gotten.

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It's kind of interesting to think about, like how crypto has pushed cryptography and things like zero knowledge proof to the next level through billions of dollars in funding.

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It's created this economic flywheel that's made it make sense to do that from a private sector perspective.

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First of all, for people who are listening who don't know anything about zero knowledge proofs, let's start at the bottom here and work our way up.

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Explain what that is, why that's so important.

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Then I would love to get into the advances Aleo is bringing to cryptography and the general ZKP area bucket.

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Let's start at the beginning.

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I just want to respond to some of you said earlier because I think it's important.

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Again, I talked about my motivation to bring this base and these sound like we share several of the same motivations, these values, these freedoms, these liberties which are important.

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Again, I think it's easy for us, for people in the US, in America, in Western Europe or just generally the developed world, to kind of just take all this stuff for granted.

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It's like everything's kind of fine, my life's okay.

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Actually, if you look at the advent of the internet and how the paradigm of how information is shared and used, compared to pre-internet, actually the world and your personal space has collapsed massively.

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Every time you press enter on a keyboard, in fact you don't have to press enter, you click on a page and you move your mouse one inch.

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Oftentimes all of those interactions are recorded in a way that is candidly very Orwellian and you don't notice it.

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You don't feel it in the same way like you drive your car and like carbon dioxide goes out the back.

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You don't really feel it, but it is bad.

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I think people have just kind of gotten used to this new paradigm that, honestly, even since the 70s with the Bank Secrety Act, has kind of made the new normal where it's like hey, you actually have to give up all this information that you didn't have, that people a century ago would view shocking in terms of the amount of information you have to share.

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And crypto, I think, is part of it and I agree absolutely.

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I think one of the most exciting technologies that has kind of come out of cryptocurrency, of blockchain, is zero knowledge cryptography.

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It's an application for zero knowledge cryptography that has caused there to be a lot of funding come in, which is great, because I think zero knowledge cryptography in general has a ton of application for the internet in general.

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And now we're going to answer the question what is zero knowledge cryptography?

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Zero knowledge cryptography, but simply as a technique for proving a fact is true without revealing why it's true, like the very simple layman example I like to give is like poker, right?

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So, alex, you're playing poker, I have a hand, you have a hand.

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It's like okay, time to show our cards.

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I'm like, hey, I have a full house, right.

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For you to believe that I have a full house, you have to physically see my cards, right?

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So I have to show you my cards In the physical world.

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There's this tension or there's this always this kind of spectrum between trust and verification.

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Right, you either have to trust me that I'm not lying or you have to see it for yourself.

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The reason why I kind of I think people equate zero knowledge, crypto, to magic, is that, like it breaks this spectrum.

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Right, I can cryptographically prove to you that I have a full house and you never have to see my cards.

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Like that's the physical analog but there isn't.

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It doesn't exist in the physical world.

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It's this uniquely cryptographic construction which uniquely exists in the digital world.

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So, again, it's proving a fact is true, without revealing why.

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And it's like you know.

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Poker is a simple example.

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There's other examples.

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Another one I like to use is like you go to a bar, you show your ID are you over 21 or not?

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I mean, there's a ton of information on your ID that's irrelevant to the question.

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Wouldn't it be nice to kind of just prove, yes, I'm over 21, without showing your birthday, right?

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Same idea.

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So all of these things seem simple, toy examples, but the reality is you can build a ton of really interesting systems that give you all of the benefits of like the internet and digital technology without forcing you to have to reveal everything as a rule.

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So to me, that's the reason why I'm very excited about it.

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I want to give a couple of examples, too, of the way the internet currently exists.

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Back to your like earlier thread there Two things go take a look at TikTok's terms of service and understand the level of surveillance that they have on you.

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Okay, that's number one.

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And then just throw away your phone.

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After you read that, you might as well just throw away your phone.

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Like, yeah, break your phone, get a new number and start from scratch without TikTok on your phone.

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Like I distribute content on TikTok mainly to reach people, but I do not use TikTok on my phone.

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It's not on my devices.

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The other one is I like Discord.

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I think we all, especially in our industry, we use Discord a ton.

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But I reinstalled Discord on my new MacBook.

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I just got a new MacBook, like the other day.

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Like Apple has gotten a lot better about their privacy protection stuff, so they started learning me.

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For example, like this app has access to your you know all your photos for the last six months.

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Do you want to revoke that?

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Well, they gave me this alert that said, like hey, discord wants to track all your keystrokes across all applications.

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Do you want to allow that?

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Keystrokes mean like every button you push back to Alex's example, like literally every button I push, discord has been tracking that stuff and yeah that I gave them my permission without really knowing that that's what they're doing.

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The optimist me wants to believe they're doing it for reasons that help them provide a better service or something.

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But like dude, they'd have no right to track.

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Every keystroke means they can track when I type in my password to my bank account.

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Okay, everything that is a problem.

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And zero-dollars proofs will allow companies to provide whatever level of service they think they need to provide to you with that data they can.

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They can do that with actually seeing the data, so they don't actually get my password.

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They just can know that, like I went to Bank of America or something I don't know, and maybe I don't want that, but I'm just saying it's better than what the current state of affairs and, and to be clear, like you know, obviously like there's a very dystopian Possible world where discord is just recording of our tick, probably more likely tick-tock.

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It's, like you know, creating AI powered avatars based on our conversations, whatever right, like so.

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It's like, obviously, very dystopian fears.

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The more mundane reality is probably like what these are?

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Businesses.

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They're trying to make more money and they're like how is Alex spending his time?

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Let's like cater ads to Alex, right, is that bad?

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I mean, it's annoying, is it?

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But not necessarily bad.

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But you know, the question is what could you do with that?

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And once you've given up that information, you can never make it private again.

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This is kind of the interesting thing about privacy is like once you reveal information, well, it's out there.

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It's not you gonna hide it again.

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It's like, again, there's not like a parallel in the physical world.

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I can like put a mask on my face and then take it off and then put it back on and then I can go back out in the world.

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That's not how information works, right, like information is out there, it's always out there and it can't be hidden.

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There's the aspect from the individual on the right side, but there's actually a very practical business aspect here too, because a lot of companies you know Take visa, for example, or like financial services companies you know, thankfully, in the West particular, we get to take advantage of, you know a robust legal system and there are laws around.

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Hey, you have customer data or sensitive I personally identify them for information like you need to protect that and, honestly, it costs companies a Lot of money to do that.

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And if you have conversations and we've had many conversations in the context of partnerships at alio we're like, hey, you know what, if you want, what if you want to let consumers KYC or prove their age or something without revealing information, they're like, wait, we don't have to cut, we don't have to like put this on our databases.

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And I'm like, yes, and they're like well, that sounds awesome because that saves us a ton of money.

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There are other KYC providers right, but that data lives on someone's database.

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It's somewhere someone is paying to secure, it Right, exactly and so now the technology you guys provide means that it lives inside of this cryptographic proof, so it's safe.

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I would love to dive deep into the security because, like, how does that work?

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Like there's no way to get the actual data once it's in the black box, like you can actually see that it's me, like my name and my address and stuff like that.

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Like, are there security risks where?

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Like, is there a private key somewhere that if someone gets that private key, then you know they have access to all the data?

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How does that work?

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Yeah, yeah.

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So let me let me describe alio in a little more complete way so we can kind of contextualize for everybody what it is.

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So there's two aspects to alio.

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There's a blockchain right, which I define as a permissionless network of nodes that are kind of following some set of rules, and there's some concept of a virtual machine where, like you know, one node says, hey, I want to change this entry in the ledger, I want to do this action, and then everybody comes to consensus about that.

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And then there's this what is being come to consensus about?

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It's like, basically, actions taken in the context of these zero-knowledge proofs, right?

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So this is what we call our VM Right, and the equivalent here is like you have the Ethereum blockchain, which is kind of just about tracking state and state changes, and you have the EVM, and that's what determines how those state changes happen.

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Same concept in alio we call our blockchain layer snark OS.

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This is the logic of the nodes, and snark VM is like the logic of the basically the world computer in our case, or in this case, and so how it works is let's take the age verification example, right?

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So potentially you want to have some kind of age verification type flow where I don't want any Server to have my data.

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What do I do?

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In the identity context we need, like a route of truth.

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So let's, in this case, let's say, like a government issued ID, my driver's license, right?

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So what you would do effectively is you would scan the RFID chip on your driver's license and then Cryptographically verify that signature against the pki provided by the government agency.

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You would, in zero knowledge, inside of a zero-knowledge proof, inside of alio snark VM, you would prove hey, I have an identity document with a valid signature from the issuing authority and then you're basically adding that to a set of Valid encrypted identity documents on the blockchain, right, so only you can read it.

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So there is a private key there, right, your private key decrypts this.

00:17:35.884 --> 00:17:44.851
Right, we call them records on the alio blockchain, right, and then, once that record exists, you can then Prove facts about that record been, how does that look?

00:17:44.851 --> 00:17:53.692
You're basically like, hey, I'm proving that I have the private key to decrypt this record without revealing that private key, and then I'm proving that this record is one of the valid records in the set.

00:17:53.692 --> 00:18:00.674
And, thirdly, I'm proving that, like, whatever the question being asked is alex over 18, 21, under 35, whatever it may be.

00:18:00.674 --> 00:18:05.925
I'm definitely not under 35, by the way, I'm not Great, you can just prove it right.

00:18:05.925 --> 00:18:07.714
So so that's how it works at a pretty low level.

00:18:07.714 --> 00:18:11.044
So, in short, yes, there are private keys and and like it's kind of.

00:18:11.064 --> 00:18:23.375
This isn't really like Removing the danger of like a private key loss or removing the fact that couldn't be a breach of what, but the way I like to paint it Is like the way the paradigm works today was secure and for me, or with information, it's valuable is it's all in a bank vault.

00:18:23.375 --> 00:18:31.089
Think of the bank vault as like I mean you could think of it as literally your bank with all of your private information, or credit bureau.

00:18:31.089 --> 00:18:33.700
Imagine what would happen if one of those got hacked.

00:18:33.700 --> 00:18:36.106
Unthinkable, right, but like all of your poor.

00:18:37.636 --> 00:18:38.701
Who would have thought right yeah?

00:18:39.717 --> 00:18:55.586
Yeah, it was equity equifax equifax right, yeah, it's like yeah, I was in the military, so I had a tie to top secret clearance, which required not only all of my personal identifying information, but names and addresses of closest necks, of kin and fingerprints, and that was the office of personal management.

00:18:55.586 --> 00:18:58.577
Handle all that, and they were hacked in 2013, right so?

00:18:58.920 --> 00:19:04.203
dude that makes my heart Sink so dangerous exactly.

00:19:04.263 --> 00:19:04.384
So.

00:19:04.384 --> 00:19:07.894
The point is, there's, like you know, the OPM equifax visa.

00:19:08.355 --> 00:19:10.862
There's a billion dollar customer right there for a Leo.

00:19:10.862 --> 00:19:12.865
If you're listening, anybody at that agency.

00:19:12.865 --> 00:19:14.719
We're not mad, just call up.

00:19:14.719 --> 00:19:16.920
Do you have malice, please?

00:19:16.920 --> 00:19:17.461
I?

00:19:17.662 --> 00:19:19.508
mean, if they're listening this podcast, I'll be very.

00:19:19.508 --> 00:19:21.615
I would make my outlook on life a lot better.

00:19:21.615 --> 00:19:23.180
So I'd be very happy to hear that.

00:19:23.240 --> 00:19:35.083
But I'm actually gonna send this, so you know, my first guest ever was Rich stairpole, on fall the white rabbit, and he was a CIO of the Department of Homeland Security Under Trump first, oh really.

00:19:35.083 --> 00:19:41.156
So he's gonna get this episode and I'm gonna fast track him to this Mark here.

00:19:41.156 --> 00:19:41.859
He's got to know a guy.

00:19:42.675 --> 00:19:44.488
Nice well so yeah, so you have these bank.

00:19:44.508 --> 00:19:53.878
You have these bank vaults right, and what alio is effectively allowing you to do is take the bank vaults and go from the bank vault world to Everyone has their own locker.

00:19:53.878 --> 00:20:06.019
Right, and you have a locker with a lock on it and the the key thing here is that the bank vault is only marginally harder to crack into than the individual lockers.

00:20:06.019 --> 00:20:10.633
Right, like someone can do a phishing email to me, someone can do a bunch of stuff and and recover by private key potentially.

00:20:10.633 --> 00:20:14.866
But you got to remember hacking and Computer security is all about the economics.

00:20:14.866 --> 00:20:18.398
It's the cost of attack versus the profit of success.

00:20:18.398 --> 00:20:24.619
Right, in the bank vault case, the cost to attack is like zero and the profit of success is massive.

00:20:24.619 --> 00:20:41.277
So that's why, inevitably, and that's why you see systems like the OPM, equifax that are theoretically Defended with hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a year get hacked because eventually, because the cost of attack is zero, the attackers will find a way and give enough time.

00:20:41.277 --> 00:20:43.443
I mean even very one very recently, octa.

00:20:43.443 --> 00:20:52.564
Right, octa is like this OAuth provider, for, like every major tech platform, they got hacked right, that's, they really were entrusted yeah, that's like a couple months ago, their.

00:20:52.564 --> 00:20:54.799
Their whole job was to not get hacked, right.

00:20:54.799 --> 00:21:05.828
But again it's this concept of the bank vault the kind of the payoff for for getting in is so high and the cost to just Continually try to get in is so low that it kind of like just you would expect this.

00:21:05.868 --> 00:21:23.798
Now, in the world where everyone's information is in lockers, you got a matter like the cost to attack is still low, but the payoff is also super low and maybe if you have to attack it a billion or a billion times per locker To get in, then the economics start to break right, because if someone breaks into my locker, they only get my information.

00:21:23.818 --> 00:21:24.644
Now, that's bad.

00:21:24.644 --> 00:21:26.794
But also like my locker is like encrypted.

00:21:26.794 --> 00:21:30.078
My name isn't on the locker, so like how is someone actually gonna know it's my locker?

00:21:30.078 --> 00:21:37.660
Right, so you make it effectively, from a hacker's perspective, way less attractive to go and pack it all this information.

00:21:37.660 --> 00:21:40.740
So that, to me, is like when I talk to cybersecurity professionals.

00:21:40.740 --> 00:21:43.587
This is how I describe alia right, this fundamentally what it is.

00:21:43.587 --> 00:21:51.594
You have this permissionless platform which lets you own your own information and therefore secure your own information and have access to it and then prove facts about it.

00:21:51.594 --> 00:22:00.150
Right, so you can still get access to these services and products that you want, still benefit from a personalized experience Without having to like give up control of this information that we value.

00:22:00.571 --> 00:22:03.220
Yeah, I mean, this is why LAO is is so exciting to me, right?

00:22:03.882 --> 00:22:15.393
I think that the enterprise path is actually the way to mass adoption for this kind of technology, because it solves a real business problem that most users are not really that aware of.

00:22:15.393 --> 00:22:23.722
Still, right, like, we all still just sign up for the app, we all just still click in that login with the Google button on this, whatever it is that you're signing up for, we don't really think about it.

00:22:23.722 --> 00:22:38.420
So I even I'm guilty of this and I and I'm like pretty educated Because I'd like the convenience, you know, but there's real risk for the companies financially, right, if they screw this up, and maybe that's the way it should be, maybe it should be on them, you know, it shouldn't be on the consumer to have to really think about this.

00:22:38.420 --> 00:22:45.461
And it kind of goes back to what you're talking about the economic impact, like the economic incentives have to be there for them to want to do it, and it sounds like they are.

00:22:45.461 --> 00:22:47.025
You guys are launching.

00:22:47.025 --> 00:22:51.594
What can you talk about as far as that goes, like where everything is and what's coming?

00:22:52.480 --> 00:22:54.627
Yeah, so you know, we've been on a long journey.

00:22:54.627 --> 00:23:00.044
We started a Leo four years ago just about, and I actually wasn't there at the very beginning, I was still at a 16z.

00:23:00.044 --> 00:23:02.329
I actually knew the founders.

00:23:02.490 --> 00:23:24.007
Jet is a guy by the name of Howard Wu is one of the four original co-founders and he's kind of like you know, as you mentioned before, he's like one of these like geniuses who kind of helps like Build up this space to what it is, and I heard he was launching a company you know and I got to know him in the process of the seed fund or his seed fund raise, which a 16z Didn't end up participating in, but I was really inspired by.

00:23:24.007 --> 00:23:37.192
So I left a 16z to join the company in late 2020, so about three years ago, since I've been here and then we've been through multiple iterations of like what the network looks like now, everything you know should be built, etc.

00:23:37.192 --> 00:23:42.420
And and we're finally at the point where we're getting ready to launch mainnet in in January, january 31st.

00:23:42.420 --> 00:23:47.271
So really excited about being able to set a date and I feel pretty confident about the state at this point.

00:23:47.299 --> 00:23:48.224
Less than two months, man.

00:23:48.224 --> 00:23:49.128
That's a line in the sand.

00:23:49.128 --> 00:23:51.359
Y'all must be ready, let's go.

00:23:51.740 --> 00:23:56.880
It's simultaneously exciting and terrifying, you know, because like the closer you get, the more work there is.

00:23:56.880 --> 00:24:01.380
I think anybody who's worked in this space and these networks knows that this is just a lot.

00:24:01.380 --> 00:24:21.193
It's a lot that goes into these things, and I definitely have a newfound respect for every single founder of every single network that's ever launched, because it is a highly non-trivial thing totally talks about this a lot, like you know on Twitter about Solana and how interesting it is that these networks are really about social coordination.

00:24:21.315 --> 00:24:28.913
Your creating economy around Validating the network, writing the transactions on the blockchain that that prove all of these things.

00:24:28.913 --> 00:24:36.884
We're talking about that like actually run the network and that's a bunch of people it's like a huge amount of people you know and starting that engine.

00:24:36.884 --> 00:24:45.185
Getting it going is like the first really hard thing to do because, like you can kind of look at Alio and the people involved and how much money you've raised.

00:24:45.185 --> 00:24:53.270
You kind of extrapolate the value that's going to be created, the economic value that's going to then create all of this functionality and capability.

00:24:53.270 --> 00:24:57.652
But you still have to like make people believe they have to invest time and money.

00:24:58.260 --> 00:25:03.073
Any entrepreneur who's built like a traditional business will understand how hard that is to like pre-sell.

00:25:03.073 --> 00:25:11.194
But also it's like you're pre-selling to them building a business on Alio, not like they're not buying a product or something.

00:25:11.194 --> 00:25:15.875
They're building a business that's contributing to the network and that is just like a fundamentally different thing.

00:25:15.875 --> 00:25:19.944
Your bootstrapping like an entire Many country of people.

00:25:19.944 --> 00:25:22.651
It's a crazy experience to be a part of.

00:25:22.651 --> 00:25:26.945
I feel like we're such a unique time in History to be even able to do it.

00:25:26.945 --> 00:25:28.872
You know it feels very lucky.

00:25:29.661 --> 00:25:31.067
Yeah, you know it's fine.

00:25:31.067 --> 00:25:59.790
I'm really glad you brought up the social aspect because I think it's so true, right, I think, because the reality is, like you take a typical web 2 product or like let's take the latest and greatest one, like chat gbt, right, chat gbt's like exists in kind of the paradigm, like you know, the financial and technological paradigm that we've all kind of come to take for granted, right, whereas this, like web 3 and blockchains like Solana or Ethereum or Alio, right, are kind of trying to rebuild that entire paradigm.

00:25:59.790 --> 00:26:08.208
Like you're kind of like you think about you're renovating a house, you take it to the studs, like that's one thing and then it's another thing like dig up the foundation and build a new foundation, like that's kind of what.

00:26:08.208 --> 00:26:12.567
This is right and, as a result, the social aspect is critically important.

00:26:12.567 --> 00:26:29.202
And the thing that I love most about my journey into crypto is like, typically, people that like start out there, like okay, I have a gap in the technological understanding, like what is what is the tech, what is what is consensus, what is DKL stuff, and then like eventually you kind of realize, like because you're talking about commodities and assets that are being issued by this network, and Kind of you realize.

00:26:29.242 --> 00:26:32.662
Another gap in most people's heads is like what is money Like?

00:26:32.662 --> 00:26:36.920
Honestly, most people do not understand the concept of money, like the dollar bill in your pocket.

00:26:36.920 --> 00:26:38.325
What is it valuable for?

00:26:38.325 --> 00:26:49.469
And if you stop and think about it for a second, you're like because everyone else values it, right, and that's really basically the answer is everyone around you thinks it's worth something, so it's worth something.

00:26:49.469 --> 00:26:51.606
Same principle applies here right?

00:26:52.200 --> 00:26:53.505
This code is open source.

00:26:53.505 --> 00:27:00.086
You could literally go to our GitHub repo right now, start your own Alio and be like this is the canonical Alio, everyone.

00:27:00.086 --> 00:27:01.826
This is my idea, whatever, right?

00:27:01.826 --> 00:27:04.163
I could do the same with Toly, right, and so on.

00:27:04.163 --> 00:27:06.222
I could be like hey, guys, I'm the real genius.

00:27:06.222 --> 00:27:08.088
Toly stole this idea from me, right?

00:27:08.859 --> 00:27:10.224
And the question is will this have value?

00:27:10.224 --> 00:27:13.008
And it only has value if people believe it, right.

00:27:13.008 --> 00:27:26.744
And so that's why it's fundamentally there's like a level of like missionariness that you have to take to this like, because you have to convince people that like, hey, the existing paradigm that you're operating on has its flaws and I'm asking you to take a leap into this new paradigm.

00:27:26.744 --> 00:27:37.486
And it's a bit of a leap of faith, right, in many cases, because, like all these applications that we talk about that enable this new world, don't exist yet right, but they could exist and they will exist in this new paradigm of giving enough time.

00:27:37.486 --> 00:27:44.345
But you need to get the people alongside you to build together, because there's no way for any individual to do it alone because of the social aspect.

00:27:45.119 --> 00:27:54.090
Yeah, and this has been probably for me, one of the most exciting parts of crypto is like how do you bootstrap the physical infrastructure of a network?

00:27:54.090 --> 00:27:58.148
Because these networks are run by should be run by like thousands of people someday, right?

00:27:58.148 --> 00:28:07.346
Individuals who are operating hardware, running open source software and essentially powering all the products that you're offering to these enterprises.

00:28:07.346 --> 00:28:18.604
If you look at how web 1.0, web 2.0 were built, it's in centralized data centers controlled by a few companies, right, like a handful, maybe less than a dozen Control all of the internet.

00:28:18.604 --> 00:28:20.866
There's two of them that control.

00:28:20.866 --> 00:28:23.782
One controls like 60% of the internet goes through their pipes.

00:28:23.782 --> 00:28:27.423
There's another one that has a third of the internet going through its pipes.

00:28:28.140 --> 00:28:43.586
So when you think about that and then you are now that's the foundation that you're talking about and you ask like 10,000 people to run that business essentially individually, I'm almost intimidated even talking about it, but that's also why it's so exciting.

00:28:43.586 --> 00:28:44.605
It's like how do we do this?

00:28:44.605 --> 00:28:49.444
You know, how do we get that physical infrastructure spread out all over the world and run by these individuals?

00:28:49.444 --> 00:29:05.884
And the reality is you're never gonna get completely away from that centralization because you need data centers, you need interconnection, you need wires and stuff, but the economics change pretty significantly and is our spread out between a lot more people, which is, I think, better.

00:29:06.700 --> 00:29:10.270
This is a very complex stack of technologies, right?

00:29:10.270 --> 00:29:17.248
You've referenced the physical hardware several times and like even inside a computer or a server, there's like a stack of different hardware.

00:29:17.248 --> 00:29:25.926
There's like the silicon, there's like the wires connecting the different parts of the chip, there's different chips and there's like even specialized chips like GPUs, of course, these days for AI.

00:29:25.926 --> 00:29:27.747
There's like just this huge stack of things.

00:29:27.747 --> 00:29:31.948
Within that stack there's different parts that obviously have very clear returns to scale.

00:29:32.460 --> 00:29:40.269
You know, tim Woo is very famous for his, like the master switch book, where it's like whoever is like laying the cables basically just gets a free monopoly because no one else really is.

00:29:40.269 --> 00:29:49.205
Instead of isolated cables after that, right, there's always gonna be dynamics at certain kind of layers of the stack or you know, parts of the chain, right, or parts of the, I guess, the business chain.

00:29:49.205 --> 00:29:58.704
But I think the cool thing about the participation of everybody and honestly, like what you described about like everyone kind of owns a piece of this this actually isn't that different.

00:29:58.704 --> 00:30:01.008
So you said web one and web two and I would actually disagree.

00:30:01.008 --> 00:30:05.928
I think web one, the pioneers of web one, like Tim Berners-Lee and the people who started the internet.

00:30:05.928 --> 00:30:13.859
Actually, the vision was actually like you run an SMTP server for email, like in your house and like everybody did it.

00:30:13.900 --> 00:30:15.981
I can see that like web zero, that was like.

00:30:15.981 --> 00:30:17.688
Yeah, that was like web zero.

00:30:17.688 --> 00:30:22.064
My business partner, brian Fox, the original technical co-founder of Orchid, like wrote the bashell.

00:30:22.064 --> 00:30:25.946
He has told me you know war stories of being like in a cafe using email.

00:30:25.946 --> 00:30:38.743
You know there's like internet cafe back then and like the people using internet in their in like email, whatever the first version of SMTP powered email, they like all knew each other Like they were all like researchers at different universities.

00:30:38.845 --> 00:30:40.803
Yeah, exactly, it was like ARPA.

00:30:40.803 --> 00:30:45.905
The internet came from ARPAnet and it was like a bunch of universities are basically connected and people just ran these things on their computers.

00:30:45.905 --> 00:30:48.982
Like, why did you go from that to like the web two?

00:30:48.982 --> 00:30:54.027
Google runs everything world Because there was no economic incentive, like, basically, you're doing it for free.

00:30:54.027 --> 00:31:09.948
So, like you know, basically the limit is how charitable an individual feels and you mentioned, like before, and I do the same thing it's, like you know, as consumers, often time over time, people are driven to choose convenience, right, and that's why web two kind of happened the way it did, where you have these big centralized architectures.

00:31:09.948 --> 00:31:25.064
But now that the amazing cool thing about web three is that you have inherent in these networks this concept of value that can basically now incentivize you to run your own SMTP server effectively, right, like in the simplest way.

00:31:25.104 --> 00:31:28.660
That this first happened was, like you know, mining back in the day, like Bitcoin mining.

00:31:28.660 --> 00:31:32.724
Now I get Bitcoin mining to be clear, it's like an obviously transform on big business returns scale.

00:31:32.724 --> 00:31:46.727
But, like in the beginning, there actually was like a lot of this like people ran like GPUs, like they're basemen, just like ran in their basement, their garage, right, and like, in a sense, it was actually very much that and I think you can still rep, even though Bitcoin mining is nothing like that today.

00:31:46.727 --> 00:32:02.287
I think that principle can actually be replicated and at least the idea of like having real ownership over not only these applications but the infrastructure that they run on, and I think, as a result of the total value created is much, much greater and it's also much more democratic.

00:32:02.740 --> 00:32:15.540
Another I think really important way to tie this all together is that these economic incentives, they're token driven, usually on chain, with cryptography proving the programmed economic model.

00:32:15.922 --> 00:32:20.751
That, plus social coordination, is how open source software accrues value.

00:32:21.660 --> 00:32:45.271
There have been some successful open source companies like Red Hat, right Multi-billion dollar company, but the use of open source software to power an economy that has like on chain economic policies essentially that's what I think the real revolutionary thing of crypto was and is still to this day, and there have been a lot of projects that have not built anything really that useful.

00:32:45.271 --> 00:32:53.407
There have been a lot of projects that have built things that are useful or money making ventures, but really only for crypto native people.

00:32:53.407 --> 00:33:00.970
And then there's things like Aleo, and there are very few of those things Like I have high hopes for you guys and the enterprise value you can bring.

00:33:00.970 --> 00:33:13.027
So not that many projects that I see that I'm like okay, this has real enterprise value where there's a huge pain point and you have a unique solution that is like orders of magnitude better that companies will switch to.

00:33:13.027 --> 00:33:14.285
Is there any alpha there?

00:33:14.285 --> 00:33:17.441
Like I know you've been talking to partners like is there something things you can share about?

00:33:17.441 --> 00:33:19.645
Like who's going to be using Aleo?

00:33:19.645 --> 00:33:21.170
I guess you keep calling it.

00:33:21.329 --> 00:33:21.971
I call it Aleo.

00:33:21.971 --> 00:33:25.048
So I guess, like at this point, this is a decentralized network.

00:33:25.048 --> 00:33:26.465
Everyone can have their own pronunciation.

00:33:26.465 --> 00:33:28.023
So is yours better?

00:33:28.023 --> 00:33:28.646
Is mine better?

00:33:28.646 --> 00:33:29.342
We'll find out.

00:33:29.342 --> 00:33:36.532
The founders call it Aleo rhymes with paleo, but we even have advisors who have a different pronunciation.

00:33:36.532 --> 00:33:38.045
So I would say, yeah, we don't.

00:33:38.045 --> 00:33:39.390
Yeah, it's not worth quibbling over.

00:33:39.450 --> 00:33:40.334
But we're not going to split hairs.

00:33:40.334 --> 00:33:40.855
I got you.

00:33:41.839 --> 00:33:45.589
But, yeah, look, I mean I think, like for for the applications and what are people using on this today?

00:33:45.589 --> 00:33:52.347
I mean, look, I think finance is an area that people are really interested in, right, I mean, it seems simple because you're like, okay, well, blockchains kind of cover finance already.

00:33:52.347 --> 00:33:53.510
So, like, how is Aleo different?

00:33:53.510 --> 00:34:02.006
But, like, existing decentralized networks don't cover all of finance necessarily, though In fact, they only cover a small sliver, in my view.

00:34:02.006 --> 00:34:02.227
Why?

00:34:02.227 --> 00:34:10.373
Because, well, the UX of the existing financial system is privacy preserving effectively right Through a bank, at least.

00:34:10.373 --> 00:34:13.289
Like, sure, the bank may know, but, like the rest of the world doesn't know.

00:34:13.380 --> 00:34:24.112
My favorite question, my favorite question to ask at every crypto conference, whatever I want to panel, like, how many people in here receive their salary exclusively in crypto?

00:34:24.112 --> 00:34:29.079
And there's like one or two and a hundred other people in the audience don't raise their hand.

00:34:29.079 --> 00:34:29.782
And why is that?

00:34:29.782 --> 00:34:31.784
Right, it's not like crypto is just KIA.

00:34:31.784 --> 00:34:32.967
This has been around for 10 years.

00:34:32.967 --> 00:34:33.708
We've all been building it.

00:34:33.708 --> 00:34:34.250
Why is that?

00:34:34.250 --> 00:34:38.476
Why, because there's this kind of like social expectation around what do I make as a salary?

00:34:38.476 --> 00:34:40.387
That, like you, don't want the entire world to know?

00:34:40.387 --> 00:34:43.646
That's why, even though we're building new financial rails.

00:34:43.646 --> 00:34:45.271
No one takes their salary on them.

00:34:45.271 --> 00:34:49.746
Right, Because the privacy doesn't exist there Aside from, like the consumer, what am I making?

00:34:49.746 --> 00:34:51.525
I don't want my neighbor to know.

00:34:51.525 --> 00:34:52.949
There's like businesses, right.

00:34:52.949 --> 00:35:00.130
If you're a business and you're like entering into a contract with a supplier like, you want the supplier to know, like, what the state of your existing contracts are.

00:35:00.130 --> 00:35:08.612
Right, because then they're just going to price to those or higher right, so, like there's a million reasons why privacy and finance has like is important.

00:35:08.612 --> 00:35:12.570
Right, so that, to me, is like one of the immediate applications in use cases that we look at.

00:35:12.570 --> 00:35:14.371
So we've talked to a lot of different stablecoin providers.

00:35:14.371 --> 00:35:19.188
You know we'll be issuing native stablecoins on Alio Day 1, not just for USD, but also for like.

00:35:19.188 --> 00:35:25.692
For example, like, the GCC countries are looking at issuing a CBDC and using Alio as the platform and the backbone for that.

00:35:26.440 --> 00:35:33.005
So the first thing that comes up, though, whenever you talk about finance on a privacy preserving network, is compliance.

00:35:33.005 --> 00:35:36.648
Right, people are like, how do you make sure the bad guys are not using this?

00:35:36.648 --> 00:35:39.010
Right, and you know we talked about my army career in the beginning.

00:35:39.010 --> 00:35:45.532
Like, I spent years of my life fighting ISIS, terrorists and all over the world, right.

00:35:45.532 --> 00:35:49.268
No one wants to not enable those people more than me, right.

00:35:49.268 --> 00:35:55.547
At the same token, though, like I think it's not an either or right, and this is kind of the magic of zero knowledge cryptography.

00:35:55.619 --> 00:35:58.889
So the other aspect I've talked about earlier was kind of all these elements of identity.

00:35:58.889 --> 00:36:00.521
Right, and so you can.

00:36:00.521 --> 00:36:13.510
But you can actually make a payment system where you can basically KYC effectively at the time of payment or you can have some rules around who is allowed to pay for what, when and going to where, and you don't have to reveal any of that data.

00:36:13.510 --> 00:36:24.311
You can just prove that it's correct at the time, right, and so that's why identity is another application area that we look at and actually like identity, if you think about, like, just the web is not even a solve problem.

00:36:24.311 --> 00:36:26.045
Think about age verification, for example.

00:36:26.045 --> 00:36:29.425
Think about let's just take a simple example buying wine online or buying like.

00:36:29.585 --> 00:36:30.548
I'm a gamer personally.

00:36:30.548 --> 00:36:33.248
So if you like steam, you buy a game on steam.

00:36:33.248 --> 00:36:36.467
So, like, first thing, pop up, are you over 18?

00:36:36.467 --> 00:36:42.643
Scroll down to whatever 18 years ago is and click yes, you know, like there's literally no check for that.

00:36:42.643 --> 00:36:43.726
Anybody could click that.

00:36:43.726 --> 00:36:45.523
My seven year old son could click it.

00:36:45.523 --> 00:36:46.746
Is that a good thing?

00:36:46.746 --> 00:36:47.648
No, it's actually not.

00:36:47.648 --> 00:36:48.769
We should solve that problem.

00:36:48.769 --> 00:36:49.532
That's not a good thing.

00:36:49.532 --> 00:36:51.456
I don't want my seven year old son to see that content.

00:36:51.456 --> 00:36:51.579
Right.

00:36:51.579 --> 00:36:52.862
But there's no way to solve that today.

00:36:52.862 --> 00:37:02.990
But Alio, this technology, is a way to do it right, so you can solve these identity problems that are unsolved on the web too, and then that itself can be a foundation for a compliant yet private payment system.

00:37:02.990 --> 00:37:04.826
Basically, it's like better cash, right?

00:37:04.826 --> 00:37:10.648

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