XEN Token & Beyond: Founder Jack Levin’s Blueprint for the Future of Crypto and Blockchain

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1:54 Welcome to the SVM. I'm here with Mr Jack Levin from Zen. We'll get into talking more about what they're building in a second from Zen We'll get into talking more about what they're building in a second. But before I do that, I just want to thank our sponsor, mantis. They're now an official sponsor of the index podcast and the everything SVM live stream. If you're a developer just into DeFi, you want to pay attention to Mantis. They enable trustimized transactions across different chains, letting you trade or execute actions seamlessly while getting the best possible outcome, all without the usual complexity. Like I said, they're an official sponsor. You can find them at mantisapp and follow them at Mantis on X.

2:36 Jack, thanks so much for being here. We got the chance to catch up a couple of weeks back and your story is pretty incredible. Do you want to maybe just tell people a little bit about who you are and why you're here building in this space, and then we'll kind of get into what Zen is. Sure, so definitely got into the space I would say mostly by accident, and when I say the space, into the crypto world itself. So I learned about Bitcoin in 2011 from my former Google buddies. We actually had lunch and somebody was making jokes that you can use Bitcoin to buy bazookas and do other crazy things. Back in 2011, I was running this company called ImageShack and I still run it.

3:17 It's still live and functioning, but I had a number of data centers that I figured I could use the excess power of to launch mining operation, and so I started to mine Bitcoin with GPUs from 2011 for about two and a half years maybe three years, I actually forget and I joined the bitcointalkorg and I'm still like a member there, like junior member or something like that. I don't post a lot, but it was a cool experience to get into proof-of-work mining and moving forward in like. Basically, a couple of years ago we launched the project on Ethereum and actually within the Ethereum ecosystem, we call the project Zen.

4:00 The project Zen and Zen X-E-N is basically modeled after proof of work with Bitcoin, but except it's using a smart contract where you get to choose how long you should be waiting until you get your tokens, and also, based on how much gas you pay, you can actually get more tokens on the initial investment. So if you look at it from a traditional finance, it almost represents a model of tokenizing the block space plus how much you have paid for the block space. So, like specifically, when the gas is low, you can get a start on your minting and mining operation for Zen relatively cheap.

4:45 And then if you're willing to wait, let's say 400 days, then you can end up with a lot more tokens that are fairly minted. And when I say fairly minted, the contract dropped 2022, october 8th. There was no pre-mine, pre-mint, no admin keys. The contract is fully immutable. It follows first principles of crypto. There was no pre-mine, pre-mint, no admin keys. The contract is fully immutable. It follows first principles of crypto and if you get in into it, you basically compete with the rest of the people out there for the allocation that the contract basically prints for you or mints for you, which is very similar to Bitcoin. So with Bitcoin you have difficulty of the network, plus you also have the expense of electricity. So that's the bitcoin's configuration approval work.

5:27 With zen. On ethereum, you have your gas costs, which is basically electricity, or the difficulty of getting in into the system by paying either medium amount of dollars or you obviously pay with eth. The, if you pay for gas, obviously gets burned. So it's actually very, very healthy for Ethereum because it burns a lot of ETH. And you get this Zen derivative at the end of your minting period and you also specify the minting time, like how long your minter is basically functioning, and you can go as short as a single day or as long as like 500 days, and so you compete with other people to get in into the system at the lowest possible gas, where Gui is the lowest, and if you're lucky, like last weekend, I think the Gui was 0.5.

6:14 And now it's 2.5. But during the bull cycle it goes up to 100. I would say on average it's about 50. So you can imagine you can basically get into the production of Xen at very, very low cost, like 100 times less or 10 times less, based on the time of the day. After we launched Xen on Ethereum, we actually saw that it got quite popular. It pushed the gas cost for pretty much everybody on Ethereum and it exposed Ethereum's weakness. It pushed the gas cost for pretty much everybody on Ethereum and it exposed Ethereum's weakness, obviously, because Ethereum has this thing. It's based on Nakamoto consensus, where every block is sequential and the execution of your transaction flow is run by a single thread, and so you have this global block competition to be included in the block and if there's a lot of Zenmints coming in, basically people are trying to compete for the cheapest gas, but they push the gas above the nominal condition.

7:13 And so what happens on Ethereum is that if you're doing swaps for some meme coins or you're participating in DeFi, all of a sudden the gas is very, very high for you, no matter what you do. And so after we saw that, after a couple of months, we just decided to launch on Polygon, and Polygon was a lot less expensive because it runs somewhat different consensus. It only has like 100 nodes. I believe it's not as decentralized, obviously, as Ethereum. And so what we saw? We saw a different problem. We saw that we pretty much killed all of the RPC nodes. The RPC nodes could not handle the onslaught of all of those Zen minters that were coming in trying to grab as much supply as they could.

7:56 The other thing I want to mention that Zen supply is not infinite. It pretty much ends after eight years, from October 8th 2022. It has the formula that basically decreases the inflation rewards to you as the time goes by, and actually I just saw a chart posted where you could see that there's a deflationary or disinflationary curve affecting the release of the tokens. And so, after we launched the Polygon, we just decided that maybe it's a good idea to launch on all of the popular EVM chains, and so we launched on Phantom Binance, moonbeam, which is the Polkadot ecosystem EVM compatible chain, also EVMOS, which is the Cosmos compatible EVM chain as well, and there were like many others and they're all listed on Zennetwork, you can see them and that allowed people to basically get into a choice to participate within the ecosystem in a chain that they liked and obviously, like Ethereum, mainnet was the most popular one because that's where you could make the most money, but it costs you the most one because that's where you could make the most money, but it costs you the most.

9:06 And so a couple of months ago, the community that have grown quite a bit, which is, I think, over a million people right now they asked to see if we can go to the first non-EVM chain, which was basically Solana, and so we took what we learned from the rest of the EVM universe out there and designed a system that allows for mining of Xen on Solana. That's called SolXen, which is basically running Because Solana does not have the Nakamoto consensus single threading that actually ends up doing a global auction for all of the transactions. They actually have the local fee markets. What we decided to do is not to create a contract that competes on the fees, because the fee is going to be kind of low anyway.

9:55 So what we did instead we designed the contract for the users to compete on the compute units, and so in Solana, the block space is measured in a couple of things, and one of those most important elements is CU, or compute units. And so in Solana, the block space is measured in a couple of things, and one of those most important elements is CU, or compute units. There's about 48 million of the units there per block. Every block ends up being produced every 400 milliseconds, and so the contract that we call Solzen, that you can find more details on solzenio, runs a calculation to find a hash with a particular target on the validator itself, and specifically in Solana, speak, it would be a leader that's currently taking transactions, so that leader will receive your transaction, execute a search for a target within the cryptographic hash that's currently running CASAC256, which is like one of the common hashing algorithms.

10:47 If you find the target, you get a report. If you don't find the target, well, better luck next time you run another transaction, like you can run a bot or you can just click a button. Point is is that the hashing algorithm actually takes quite a bit of CU, and this CU is the difficulty. So like CU is limited to 48 million and you cannot have more than 48. And you end up competing with the rest of the ecosystem to mine Solzen on Solana, similar to how you're mining Zen on EVM ecosystem, and so that's kind of like where we are today. Yeah, so one of the things I got really excited about. There's a lot of things that I like about your project, but one of them is just like how huge your community is and how small your team is.

11:31 How many people are on the team? So it's myself and three other people. So four people built a million person community and a token that is one of the top used tokens on Ethereum. I mean, if we just share this screen, we're going to pull up that EtherScan. What are we seeing here? So this is the today's snapshot of EtherScan. You can go to etherscanio, go to resources, top stats, and they have the link to the top tokens by the total uniques. In this particular case, total uniques are the number of addresses that are currently holding Zen in their wallets, and this number 175,000, basically is the number of wallets of the total holders.

12:21 If you go to Zen contract on the EtherScan and click on it and go to holders view, you will see 175,000 holders of Zen. And the reason why there's so much is because, well, it is basically free crypto. Nobody's selling it to you. You're using the blockchain itself to generate it, which is very unique in the smart contract world, because usually there aren't really that many fair launches. Fair launch meaning that somebody does not actually pre-mint, pre-mines the assets and then sells it to you as if it's an ICO, or makes the market for you by having some sort of like a liquidity pool that sells to you.

13:04 Here there's no sellers. You're making the crypto yourself and then you can make the market yourself. If there's buyers, well, you can make profit if there's no buyers, so you can hold on to it. You can also stake it for yield. There's like a way to do it where you get like 15 percent per year. So it's kind of like true DeFi, borrowing the conceptual elements of Bitcoin implemented in the smart contract. And so we have been the number three token on Ethereum for the last two years, next to USDT and USDC. So USDT and USDC is kind of like the funnel tokens, where, ultimately, people end up holding a lot of money there and they're using it as a transitional cryptocurrency to move between tokens, right.

13:49 So there's a lot of pairs between USDT and USDC, and so ZEN happens to be the number three just because it's really capturing the sort of desire of the people to get into the project fairly and to produce this cryptocurrency, similar to how you have done with Bitcoin. So, anyway, for anybody out there who desire of the people to get into the project fairly and to produce this cryptocurrency similar to how you have done with Bitcoin. So, anyway, for anybody out there who did not get a chance to get into Bitcoin, this is your chance to make crypto for yourself, as if you step into a time machine and mining Bitcoin back in 2010. Yeah, it's pretty cool and because it's open source, I mean, you guys have had a lot of other people contribute to it and do things with it, right, I mean? And that's been part of your growth strategy.

14:30 Can you talk about that a little bit more? Yeah. So community is pretty large and a lot of people are actually contributing the resources, whether they're running the dashboards or some sort of like analytics software elements. So, for example, zenpub is this giant resource that's pulling data from all of the Zen related projects, presenting charts and, you know, data tables where you can learn more and glimpse into the activity of the Zen universe. And there's like one guy in Canada that just loves data engineering and loves just getting things polished so that it could be visualized on the webpage.

15:13 So that's basically the website right there that we're looking at. There's another one called zenturboio, I believe, or maybe it's com, I forget. And so, ultimately, because this crypto, literally you know your own, you made it by yourself, nobody sold it to you. There is no the sort of feeling that the, the founding team, should be doing everything because, because it is, it is a common cryptocurrency. Everybody kind of holds it, they can get in into it by developing interesting tools and you know various things. So it's basically like an ecosystem, similar to how you would launch a blockchain. Effectively, if you launch a blockchain, blockchain, obviously your thesis would be is publicly accessible, decentralized platform where anybody can build together, and so that's what XANA is today, except in a smart contract that kind of like belongs to the people.

16:07 Just build together. That is actually the why of APK Labs. That's like our tagline, because we believe open source is the purest form of innovation and I think your approach is really incredible and a great example for other people. It's one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on the show. Let's get into like the SVM piece of this a little bit more. You guys launched onto the Solana mainnet and then now you're working on this thing called X1. What is X1 and how did you get to the idea to even work? What was the inspiration to actually build your own L1? So it actually basically community inspired project, just like Zen was. So Zen was community inspired because I was just doing streams with the Hexagon community, hexcom that was the people that got me into streaming with them, that community that was, just like you know, commenting on my stream saying when's new token launch, or something like that, which I thought was always like a joke.

17:02 But then I thought about it seriously and I said, well, if community wants a token, we should like do something, but it really should be following first principles, because there isn't enough of the like pure crypto projects that follow the core innovation of Bitcoin. And so with X1, which is our blockchain that's currently in the works, community also asked to get the platform off the ground, where the idea is that you have all these end ecosystems out there across different blockchains and we want to actually have those people given the choice to upgrade their Zen tokens to X1 native cryptocurrency, and that's like one of the most organic ways to onboard a very, very large million people community into a blockchain without hyping the blockchain first.

17:56 So there's a lot of blockchains out there that raise a lot of money and they're like hey, you know, we're going to give everybody dollars, just come and most of those projects they pump earlier due to some sort of like narrative that's getting wins and then when the VCs dump, well, the chart will end up looking like Celestia. So if we look at Celestia chart, before Ethereum got their blobs out, celestia was pumping and I think it was above $10. Now it's back to $2. And that's because there aren't really that many people on Celestia or on Aptos, for example. So Aptos has really really cool innovations behind their technology, but they really don't have community.

18:38 And so what we're doing with X1, we're kind of like approaching an universe. We have this large group of holders of Xen assets that we want to give a path towards X1 and bring everybody together across this one relatively large platform that can basically consolidate everybody in. And, of course, that is not enforced. If you want to stay on Ethereum, if you want to stay on Fantom or Binance or Polygon, by all means stay there. Polygon, by all means stay there. But we want people to have an option to go into X1 through the paths that we'll be creating across all those chains.

19:19 You've got this huge community. They were like when token, and at first you rejected that idea and then you were like, well, maybe we should give them the token. There was this story you told me last time we talked about like you posted some video to Twitter. You were like hacking on the validator code or something and you posted a video of it. Can you talk about that? was that the solana solana? node yeah so, anyway, as zen landed in all those chains, it literally pushed all those chains to the limit. So ethereum's gas just went through the roof and ethereum turned deflationary from october 8th 2022. Polyggon's RPC servers died. Binance just got stuck. Nobody could transact on Binance, and there were a couple of chains where they just actually started to censor Zen contracts, exposing themselves not being decentralized.

20:09 So the community quote unquote decided that Zen is bad, and ETHMOS is one of those examples. They basically said that, look, your community came to ETHMOS and you took all of the block space. There's nothing else that exists now except Zen on ETHMOS, and we really like to give capacity to the rest of the builders, which I kind of get, but the problem is that they have initially underpriced the block space, and so Zen obviously came and ate it all, and so, should they have done a better economic design, it would not have happened, and maybe their validators would have gotten paid through either burn or some sort of like other feature, but anyway, so EVEMOS basically now censoring Zen, and so, looking at this whole EVM ecosystem, we thought that, well, definitely we could maybe make a better EVM, and so we decided to work with Phantom Codebase, and as we worked with it.

21:04 We actually pushed the TPS to about 9,000, which is pretty great. I don't think there's like any EVMs out there, maybe Monad will have like 10,000. But we pushed the Phantom's TPS to about 9,000. But then, like I kept thinking, if I were to tell anybody, tell my friends, hey, we have this really really fast EVM it's 9,000 TPS. Somebody would ask well, what about Solana? They're like doing a lot more than that, or could do a lot more than that, like 65,000. That's what the marketing material from Solana was indicating, and so I thought that well, at the very least they deserve a much deeper look into the code and into the architecture to see can we learn something from SVM that we can implement in our EVM chain, which was like the Phantom Fork at the time?

21:48 It was like the Phantom Fork at the time. As I looked at it. I ran a benchmark on the Solana's SVM node and I actually did achieve 65,000 TPS pretty much day one. So for the naysayers out there that it's all not true, it actually is true. It can do 65,000 TPS on a beefy server straight out of the box. Whether the cost of the servers lead to centralization, that's like another topic we can get into. But for me, as a code monkey, I just thought that, well, hey, this is actually pretty great that you can do that many transactions per second. And so what I decided to do is I decided to tweak the node to actually run a little bit faster, and one morning I just like discovered a way to rearrange the way that the transaction scheduler works and I ended up pushing it to about 100,000 TPS, and so I published those results on Twitter, on X, where I basically said that, by the way, here's like a demo of an SVM that's doing 100,000 TPS.

22:52 So, like all of the haters out there, you know, I actually have data that I can back up with the real actionable code. And I think totally responded looking at it and he asked me like a bunch of technical questions. We had a conversation and then I think that conversation ended. He's like, hey, you guys really should like fork an SVM codebase and run a public testnet to implement all of those things that you're adding and have people play with it, and that's great for the SVM ecosystem, which I totally was on board with to do. So we decided basically to stop the development of the EVM, and actually what didn't help with Phantom is that they have switched to a different consensus algorithm called Sonic, which they have had the portion of the code actually closed source, and I'm a big proponent of open source.

23:44 I hate when people close source because what Phantom is doing they have forked an EVMm which is open sourced by ethereum foundation, but then they're adding other things that you cannot actually use unless you're working with phantom directly, so you cannot actually innovate on anything that they have produced, and so that was like a big downer and definitely caused us to shift gears towards like alternatives. And solana was like right there with 100,000 TPS with juiced up nodes and I thought that okay, well, definitely maybe we should just like do a testnet and get the community to run the validators and so like. Currently we have about 60 nodes running.

24:25 The website is x1valonline and if you share them, bring it up, you can actually see the network is functioning. It has some minor tweaks. The scheduler works a little bit faster for transactions, so it's a tiny bit faster than solana due to the code changes as well as the fact that there isn't any meme coins and there's no pumpfun on X1. And therefore you actually get faster throughput. Some dev out there right now is starting to hack on an X1 pumpfun for sure. Yeah, and they should. We obviously welcome that.

25:07 I don't know if this is the website you wanted me to show, but this has got some data on it. What was the one you wanted me to show just now? X1Val one word me to show. But this is, uh, got some data on it. What was the one you want me to show just now? X1 val one word. X1 v-a-l dot online right here. X1 nodes yeah, so you can see they're actually switching and like where your mouse is, that's where the blocks are being produced and you can see like the block latency production. So it's. It's a real network with real community nodes running it. We run one or two nodes ourselves, but the rest belong to our technical group and they're running across the world and some people are launching interesting projects on it and we're continuing to test.

25:48 Basically. And it's a testnet phase right now. Yeah, so that's basically a testnet, public testnet. You can get in, get an airdrop, start kicking the tires and like, compare it to Solana. But it's fully compatible with the SVM and Rust ecosystem out there. So anything that you can run on Solana you can redeploy and test on X1. I really love your project because the open source ethos it's one of the biggest things that resonated with me when we first talked. It's the reason I came to Salon in the first place. Like totally his attitude of hey, fork this and make it better, like building together with other people to improve and having that purity in innovation is what gets me out of the bed in the morning. Yeah, that's super great.

26:29 Yeah, that's super great. I totally agree. And it also, like, I think, acts as an anti-Maxi kind of like the tech you know. Like, basically, if you're a Maxi and you're afraid and you don't want anybody to do anything, well, where's the innovation going to come from? You guys have already contributed to Solana right Like to the, actually like upstream. I know we talked about that at the beginning of the show. I don't know if you can talk about it publicly, but can you talk about that? I don't know if Anza wants you to do that or not, it's written in Rust. Documentation is excellent. And so, like, my personal interest is optimization. So I come from Google, and when I was hired in Google in 1999, google had like 20 employees the founders like told me like hey, your job is to make Google run faster and I was 24 at the time.

27:30 I actually, you know, was learning on the go and Google was running faster like within six months, because that was like my 100% focus on optimizing the search engine and optimizing the infrastructure behind it. And so I kind of approached SVM code base and like in Solana, with the same kind of like lens, and so I thought that, okay, so I'm running a node and there's no traffic to the node. Where do I see bottlenecks, if any? And so I immediately saw that the voting handling threads were running hot, even though there was no voting coming in from other nodes, because it just was a single node. And so, as I engaged the ANSI team, they pointed me to a piece of code asking me to take a look at it, where I saw an infinite loop running, waiting for work.

28:21 So basically, it was a consumer loop that's just like was eating up resources, waiting for work to do. But while it was waiting it was just like spinning so hard it was eating the CPU of the server. And so I introduced kind of like a logic gate into that code and immediately the threads unloaded and the server actually became more quiescent, able to receive votes and process those votes without extra waiting for the CPU to be capable to do it. And so I pushed those changes as a PR to the Solana guys and they actually found a bigger problem behind it. I believe now they have fixed it. So the new code version is going to be ANSA 2.0, which will have the fix that will actually allow the servers to synchronize and run voting consensus much faster and better.

29:14 Yeah, and this is why I'm so excited about the SVM space like this alt SVM space, these network extensions that people are building is because eventually the good stuff, the good ideas that come out of that come upstream, as long as you're building open source. I actually don't know what the validator code base is licensed under, but it's GPL. I actually don't know what the validator code base is licensed under but it's GPL. Yeah, okay, so it's GPL, so anything you contribute to that has to be open sourced in the future because it's GPL licensed, which is what we want. That's the way to do it. I mean, we're looking at the creation of Linux and I was a Linux user from version 0.83b, which wasn't even version 1 yet, and there were so many contributors in like back then.

29:56 We used the net news or forums just basically to share, like, our insights. We actually have built something amazing that now powers internet as a whole, which is just incredible. Yeah, I'm. I'm lucky to have met my business partner early in my career, brian Fox I told you about. He's one of the co-authors of the GPL license and wrote Bash back in the day. But he was like friends with Linus Torval when they created Linux and it started out with just a handful of devs in a room trying to solve some problems building open source, and then today it's like billions of dollars in enterprise value and power is like everything, even on different planets and in our space.

30:38 My point of bringing up that story is you just you don't see the legacy you're building at the time. But open source software to me is a legacy that you're leaving to the world and I think, solana. What I'm really excited to see is there's all these you know, anza and a bunch of other teams, including my team, maybe K-Live's like modularizing the validator code base, because I think it's going to enable what happened with Linux to happen with Solana right, more and more people will be able to contribute because they'll be easier to like break apart the different functionality and work on little parts of the code base for these optimizations that you guys did. What's next for you guys? What's happening next? Well, I think what's happening next is definitely the launch of the Alphanet, and then Alphanet is the next iteration of our testnet that we're running, and there, well, obviously, what we want to do is integrate our Zen ecosystem so that people can actually get onboarded into a sort of like Alphanet system, and I believe it's going to launch actually without having any liquidity on any market, so you can get your tokens.

31:43 They're not going to be worth anything, but that's like one way to launch a system fairly, where you actually don't end up getting Zen holders and then get the wrapped Ethereum on X1 that you can also restake into the validator set and earn yield.

32:26 So, basically, eigen layer, but across SVM EVM chains, basically. You guys check all the boxes for me as far as contributing back to Solana. You're open source. You've already made contributions back to the core. You're a permissionless network, so validators can join who already have experience operating Solana nodes and earn more money, and you're enabling restaking, which gets people who hold Sol more yield as well. Like this is definitely a good example of an alt SVM chain. That is going to be a really big net positive for Solana as a whole, so really excited to see you guys building it. Well, I think we have like a million people in the EVM ecosystem that we really want to get.

33:08 Yeah, you're bringing them over too. Yeah, it is a good thing because Ethereum is getting fragmented and maybe fragmentation is the future, but I kind of like see it as a push away from the original decentralization vision from Vitalik. So, like, ethereum used to be, like you know, really really good asset and kind of like a store of value and also an investment towards the future of sharded Ethereum, right, and so what happened is, with the introduction of blobs and introduction of like so many L2s out there, basically what happened is that everybody left Ethereum. That's why gas is so low. And those L2s they're not really technically decentralized yet, though I think there's hope that they will become.

33:52 But, like, at this point, I think the really good reason to be in Solana is because of its monolithic nature and being a pure L1 that actually can't scale, where Ethereum basically feels to me like they're throwing a bag and saying like, okay, well, we're not going to scale the main net, we're just going to make it into a settlement layer and everybody else can build the app chains that are really not the chains. They're just like, basically servers that don't have consensus, they just have the sequences running that will settle on Ethereum and basically it feels to me like Ethereum is being sold short by the foundation itself, where Solana continues to innovate in the L1 monolithic space, which I really really like because it actually follows the decentralization paradigm.

34:41 Yeah, I agree with that too. We're getting towards like the top of the show here and I ask people the same thing at the end of these things but what have I not asked you that you wanted to share with people who are watching? I think Zenblocks. So Zenblocks was launched as this like a weekend project about a year ago and it's coming up on the year literally just in a couple of days. I wanted to experiment with non-SHA-2 or non-SHA-256 related algorithms, and so I found Argon-2, which is a memory-hard algorithm that also produces hashes, or rather, it is a one-way hash similar to CASAC and SHA, but because it's's memory hard, it cannot be gamed by ASICs Like.

35:24 Asics do not have a lot of memory on them and that's like what makes them so fast to do algorithms like SHA, because SHA, like, doesn't really take much RAM at all. So this one is actually memory hard and it brings in more fairness towards the miners of the cryptocurrency. Memory hard and it brings in more fairness towards the miners of the cryptocurrency, and so that like literally launched as a research project, but it has gathered over 2000 GPUs. Wow. And so currently they're running and producing hashes, they're mining Zen blocks, and we thought, well, wait a second, we could actually use that portion of the ecosystem to secure X1's kind of like the monetary layer, or, you know, the economic security can be brought from the fact that the nodes the mining Xen blocks are actually spending their fiat on getting the miners that produce the hashes.

36:18 And so, by definition, xnm and that's what we call the token that is producing it's called Xenium, so it's kind of like similar to Ethereum, but it has Xen in it. So Xenium right, but it also kind of like feels it belongs to a periodic table, and so Xenium is worth the effort you have spent doing approval work with your GPUs out there because you have paid for the compute, and so you're loading this compute into this token, and that token will be liquid on X1, and will bring in more economic energy to the chain when it's live. So what we have is like several ways in. We have the Zen blocks, which is the provable work component, feeding the chain with the economic energy.

37:04 We have the eigen layers restaking, which allows the ability to leverage your stakeable assets on other chains on x1 by converting your zen assets through a burn or maybe a stake or whatever else, and have basically like a third way to feed x1 with the users well, jack, I really appreciate being on the show and sharing your story. Last thing I think we can end on is just how can people contribute and get involved? find me on uh, on twitter actually, or x. I actually do respond to my gms and also I do post links to our telegram channels.

37:48 If you're interested in running a node and learning more about svm, join our validated knowledge group. There's about 2 000 people there and anytime during the week, like every day, there's like 300 people out there that can respond to questions. There's a lot of guides and videos that we have published so far, so you should maybe find X1 explainers from this channel called Zenducation so that's like one of our guys producing Zenducation and there you can learn how to start your first program within the SVM environment, how to learn Rust, how to get into the black ground. Also, if you're interested in just running a node and receiving delegations from the other community members for your node, there's a video explainer how to do that, and so there's a lot of content out there.

38:37 I think Zencryptoio is a news site that actually has or it's kind of like a collection of blogs that explains everything what we've been up to for like the last two years. So yeah, like there's a lot of data out there, just type in, like Zen, into Twitter and you'll find everything. Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on today. Thanks, thanks for having me, it was super fun. You just listened to the Index Podcast with your host, alex Cahaya. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show on Apple, spotify or your favorite streaming platform.

39:18 New episodes are available every Friday. Thanks for tuning in.