WEBVTT NOTE Open Interest — howard-wu-aleo. Draft: automatic transcript (faster-whisper small.en) of the released edit, automatic speaker assignment (resemblyzer, 2 speakers), corrections applied from the editorial glossary and OCR of the burned-in captions. Not yet reviewed line by line. 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.080 Welcome back to the content suite in Singapore. 2 00:00:02.720 --> 00:00:06.140 Today, we have Howard from Aleo, one of the co-founders. 3 00:00:06.900 --> 00:00:10.840 Before we get into Aleo, tell me a little bit more about your background and how you got into crypto. 4 00:00:11.820 --> 00:00:12.020 Sure. 5 00:00:12.040 --> 00:00:13.440 Well, first off, thank you for having me. 6 00:00:13.640 --> 00:00:15.140 I've been in crypto for a very long time. 7 00:00:15.220 --> 00:00:17.980 I first got into it when I was in high school, it was about 15 years ago. 8 00:00:18.840 --> 00:00:22.720 At the time, Bitcoin was still very early, and that was my first experience in foray. 9 00:00:23.640 --> 00:00:27.120 During my time in university, I got really into cryptography, so I was doing research. 10 00:00:27.680 --> 00:00:33.420 The lab that was a part of all of my advisors are co-founders of Zcash, and that was my first foray actually into the 11 00:00:33.420 --> 00:00:34.220 Cryptography side. 12 00:00:35.040 --> 00:00:40.740 Over the years, we then started doing research into private smart contracts using zero-knowledge proofs. 13 00:00:41.080 --> 00:00:42.500 We published that work in 2019. 14 00:00:42.820 --> 00:00:44.220 That was also when we started the company. 15 00:00:44.860 --> 00:00:47.460 We've been now working on Aleo for the past seven and a half years. 16 00:00:47.900 --> 00:00:51.600 We launched in 2024 and now are building out all of the layers on top. 17 00:00:52.160 --> 00:00:52.700 Very nice. 18 00:00:53.680 --> 00:00:58.260 How did you guys get from, it seems like, more cryptography research to creating Aleo? 19 00:00:58.500 --> 00:01:00.480 Tell us a little bit more about what Aleo is. 20 00:01:00.940 --> 00:01:01.140 Yeah. 21 00:01:01.340 --> 00:01:08.560 When I was an undergraduate, actually, I did not know what zero-knowledge proofs were, and I learned about it by reading the Wikipedia article. 22 00:01:09.360 --> 00:01:16.980 It sounded like moon magic, being able to convince someone that you know something without revealing it to them or showing them how. 23 00:01:18.240 --> 00:01:19.960 I got really fascinated by that. 24 00:01:20.700 --> 00:01:27.640 What was this really niche thing, this really small corner of cryptography actually caught my interest. 25 00:01:28.320 --> 00:01:31.940 I ended up joining this research lab at Berkeley on this subject. 26 00:01:32.760 --> 00:01:36.740 They were working on this thing that we now know as Zcash. 27 00:01:37.020 --> 00:01:38.760 It was a zero-cash protocol. 28 00:01:39.480 --> 00:01:41.500 I'm trying to productionize that, take that out. 29 00:01:42.260 --> 00:01:46.280 I was on the research side, worked on a lot of the proof systems that were being used for that. 30 00:01:47.480 --> 00:01:51.220 When that was finished, I like to say that Zcash is like private Bitcoin. 31 00:01:52.380 --> 00:01:55.620 Then we are all thinking, okay, how do we go on from there? 32 00:01:55.840 --> 00:01:57.640 That was where Aleo was actually born. 33 00:01:57.780 --> 00:02:02.700 We decided to try to build private Ethereum and enable private smart contracts, basically. 34 00:02:02.980 --> 00:02:04.800 That was the transition on that front. 35 00:02:05.600 --> 00:02:05.800 Nice. 36 00:02:06.420 --> 00:02:13.620 If Zcash is the private Bitcoin and you guys are the private Ethereum, I would love to learn more about what are the use cases 37 00:02:13.620 --> 00:02:17.900 For private smart contracts and how do you see Aleo being the most useful? 38 00:02:18.520 --> 00:02:24.120 I think the main thing to point out is that, look, when you look at crypto today, the UI/UX of money in Web3 is 39 00:02:24.120 --> 00:02:24.480 Broken. 40 00:02:25.340 --> 00:02:32.080 Right now, when I'm going out and tapping to pay with a stablecoin card, I'm revealing everything about myself because the merchant and the vendor 41 00:02:32.080 --> 00:02:33.140 Learn my address. 42 00:02:33.460 --> 00:02:35.220 With that, they can see everything about me. 43 00:02:35.260 --> 00:02:37.700 If I take my salary in crypto, they can see how much I make. 44 00:02:37.700 --> 00:02:42.340 If I go out and shop in other places, they can see where else I spend and how much I spend and how often I'm 45 00:02:42.340 --> 00:02:42.660 Spending. 46 00:02:43.020 --> 00:02:44.520 All this detail becomes public knowledge. 47 00:02:44.620 --> 00:02:45.660 That's a huge problem. 48 00:02:45.880 --> 00:02:53.180 To me, I think that this is an opportunity to create a much better UI/UX that an average person would expect. 49 00:02:53.380 --> 00:02:55.880 When I sign into my Web2 bank account, 50 00:02:56.900 --> 00:02:59.160 Only me and my bank can see my information. 51 00:02:59.620 --> 00:03:04.580 No other strangers can see how much I'm making or how much I'm spending or where and why. 52 00:03:04.940 --> 00:03:06.140 They don't see late payments. 53 00:03:06.400 --> 00:03:09.240 They don't see any of the debt or whatever that people might have. 54 00:03:09.780 --> 00:03:11.100 That's something that is private. 55 00:03:11.700 --> 00:03:14.480 This experience doesn't exist in Web3 today. 56 00:03:14.680 --> 00:03:17.080 You see all these people right now talking about stablecoins. 57 00:03:17.260 --> 00:03:18.860 No one's talking about confidential stablecoins. 58 00:03:19.160 --> 00:03:28.060 There's all this interest around these crypto neo banks, but no one is addressing the problem, which is that the emperor has no clothes right 59 00:03:28.060 --> 00:03:28.260 Now. 60 00:03:28.660 --> 00:03:30.780 Everyone's walking around just exposing everything. 61 00:03:31.220 --> 00:03:36.600 This is the reason why we decided a private smart contract layer is necessary. 62 00:03:37.540 --> 00:03:39.380 In terms of the use case, there's all sorts of use cases. 63 00:03:39.780 --> 00:03:41.520 I've already alluded to here with payroll. 64 00:03:42.340 --> 00:03:46.020 Imagine if you're paying your employees in stablecoins and we're seeing this a lot more in emerging economies. 65 00:03:46.880 --> 00:03:49.740 This is a huge problem because you can then see how much your boss makes. 66 00:03:49.880 --> 00:03:50.840 You can see how much your colleagues make. 67 00:03:50.960 --> 00:03:51.540 It's an HR nightmare. 68 00:03:51.940 --> 00:03:52.660 That's an issue. 69 00:03:53.580 --> 00:03:59.060 As I mentioned, you go to a coffee shop, you tap the pay, the barista sees your wallet, sees [unclear], but you can also see 70 00:03:59.060 --> 00:04:00.160 Everything about the coffee shop too. 71 00:04:00.560 --> 00:04:05.940 You can see how many customers they have, how often their customers come back, how much they spend on average, how much they made today 72 00:04:05.940 --> 00:04:08.700 Over yesterday, this week over last week, this month over last month. 73 00:04:09.640 --> 00:04:15.700 Your competitor down the street can walk in and for the price of a cup of coffee, learn all that information as well now. 74 00:04:16.240 --> 00:04:22.140 This is the challenge is that all of this business intel is just being revealed openly out there. 75 00:04:22.880 --> 00:04:26.820 I think that now we have the opportunity to actually fix this problem. 76 00:04:27.820 --> 00:04:33.760 I don't think I'll be the first to admit when I've sent money to someone on-chain and then you naturally look at how much 77 00:04:33.760 --> 00:04:34.760 They have on their balance. 78 00:04:35.160 --> 00:04:39.940 Sometimes you're surprised by different shitcoins they might be allowing or different investments that they've made. 79 00:04:40.400 --> 00:04:43.260 That privacy makes a lot more sense now. 80 00:04:44.780 --> 00:04:48.920 Are you guys building out these apps yourself or are you guys working with partners? 81 00:04:49.560 --> 00:04:53.240 We'd love to learn a little bit more about what are the apps that I could start using on Aleo. 82 00:04:53.780 --> 00:04:55.240 We're definitely building out an ecosystem. 83 00:04:55.920 --> 00:05:03.840 Just this past year we've gotten Circle to issue their first confidential USDC on us as well as Paxos issuing confidential stablecoins on us 84 00:05:03.840 --> 00:05:04.240 As well. 85 00:05:05.560 --> 00:05:12.460 We also have now gotten hardware wallet support with Ledger and we've also gotten embedded wallet support with Dynamic. 86 00:05:12.840 --> 00:05:15.820 We're building also custody solutions with different teams out there. 87 00:05:16.040 --> 00:05:18.280 This is starting to become a broader ecosystem. 88 00:05:19.160 --> 00:05:23.120 I like to say like every L1 is like its own island until it's connected with the rest. 89 00:05:23.420 --> 00:05:28.680 We're very proud of you working with NEAR and also with Hyperlane to connect to over 30 different networks. 90 00:05:28.920 --> 00:05:32.320 You can now route ETH and ERC20s and Solana and all these coins over. 91 00:05:33.600 --> 00:05:41.020 Our goal is very different from a lot of privacy chains like your Zcash and your Monero of the world where they are trying to 92 00:05:41.020 --> 00:05:45.240 Prop Monero or prop Zcash as like the primary asset. 93 00:05:45.820 --> 00:05:48.220 For me, I think crypto, it's Web3, it's a web. 94 00:05:48.500 --> 00:05:49.660 There's all sorts of assets. 95 00:05:49.820 --> 00:05:50.680 People have their preferences. 96 00:05:51.140 --> 00:05:54.840 We want to make sure we can support confidentiality for all types of assets out there. 97 00:05:55.520 --> 00:05:55.720 Nice. 98 00:05:55.840 --> 00:06:00.440 Giving users the flexibility that Ethereum also enables as well. 99 00:06:01.700 --> 00:06:02.100 That's amazing. 100 00:06:03.640 --> 00:06:09.060 I want to take a step back in terms of how much privacy has seemed to matter in the last year or so. 101 00:06:09.060 --> 00:06:12.000 I think Zcash, like you've mentioned, is the obvious winner. 102 00:06:13.160 --> 00:06:22.700 Throughout your research of doing ZK proofs to now, what do you think outside of Aleo or even within Aleo is the most exciting or 103 00:06:22.700 --> 00:06:25.160 Where do you think privacy is really needed the most? 104 00:06:25.720 --> 00:06:30.260 Well, I think people haven't realized that there's more to privacy than just confidential stablecoins. 105 00:06:30.360 --> 00:06:34.640 We've seen a lot of interest in this particular sector because stablecoins have been having a moment. 106 00:06:35.460 --> 00:06:42.480 But what I like to say is that I think we're entering this era of confidential finance, actually, because now you're starting to see RWAs, 107 00:06:42.780 --> 00:06:44.880 You're starting to see things get tokenized and move on chain. 108 00:06:45.360 --> 00:06:52.080 The reality is that as institutions come into this space and as retail starts to shift over into this area, it's going to become obvious 109 00:06:52.080 --> 00:06:57.660 That everything that you're doing from a financial standpoint is public, it's transparent, it's visible, it's exposed. 110 00:06:58.800 --> 00:07:02.540 And I think that all finance on chain is going to be confidential then because of that. 111 00:07:02.900 --> 00:07:09.040 For us, what we're really looking at is saying, look, right now there's a privacy narrative, it's moving really well. 112 00:07:09.560 --> 00:07:17.900 I think that the reality is that for a lot of these businesses, they're going to start to transition from public rails or transparent rails 113 00:07:17.900 --> 00:07:19.480 Into confidential rails. 114 00:07:20.280 --> 00:07:26.540 And I think that when that happens, what you're going to start to see is this movement that's what we saw with HTTP to HTTPS, 115 00:07:26.780 --> 00:07:31.860 And it's going to unlock a ton of value for crypto that was previously unrealized. 116 00:07:32.080 --> 00:07:35.960 And what I mean is when you look back at the early internet in Web2, 117 00:07:36.940 --> 00:07:37.500 With HTTP, 118 00:07:39.040 --> 00:07:42.480 When you went to Hilton.com, for example, what did you see? 119 00:07:42.560 --> 00:07:47.880 It looked like a phone book, you saw a picture of the hotel, you saw the address, you saw their numbers, you said, call us, 120 00:07:47.940 --> 00:07:49.040 Make a reservation, right? 121 00:07:49.380 --> 00:07:51.840 It was very kind of basic, like a phone book entry. 122 00:07:52.180 --> 00:07:54.580 And when HTTPS came around, what was the advantage? 123 00:07:54.800 --> 00:08:00.200 Now you could start to punch in a credit card on a website and you didn't have to worry about revealing your information and having 124 00:08:00.200 --> 00:08:01.980 It be stolen along the wire. 125 00:08:02.200 --> 00:08:08.340 And so that was something that was a fundamental shift and it unlocked e-commerce into the form that we now know today. 126 00:08:08.500 --> 00:08:14.320 And so billions of dollars, maybe even trillions of dollars of value was created because the internet economy became a thing with that. 127 00:08:14.560 --> 00:08:17.680 And that was only possible when encryption of the web became possible. 128 00:08:17.860 --> 00:08:23.780 Now we're starting to encrypt Web3 as well and basically making data on chain itself encrypted. 129 00:08:24.040 --> 00:08:29.140 And I think that that is going to open up a whole new set of landscapes that are going to create value that we don't 130 00:08:29.140 --> 00:08:30.160 Even recognize yet. 131 00:08:31.400 --> 00:08:32.360 That makes a lot of sense. 132 00:08:32.540 --> 00:08:38.720 I think a lot of the information that you've been talking about about transactions now is actually a lot more consumable with AI. 133 00:08:39.520 --> 00:08:40.820 I would previously have to 134 00:08:41.640 --> 00:08:49.020 Give my best ZachXBT impression and go through addresses and transactions to kind of get a good financial picture of an address. 135 00:08:49.220 --> 00:08:54.500 But now that whether that's through tools like Surf, you get much more comprehensive data. 136 00:08:55.520 --> 00:09:02.840 How else do you see AI or agents kind of trading or impacting how crypto or cryptography is moving? 137 00:09:03.660 --> 00:09:09.920 Yeah, well, AI has done a lot of things for the crypto and for the privacy-spacing crypto. 138 00:09:10.100 --> 00:09:10.460 For one, 139 00:09:12.080 --> 00:09:13.640 It has broken a lot of schemes. 140 00:09:13.900 --> 00:09:15.260 It has found a lot of bugs. 141 00:09:15.500 --> 00:09:18.620 We even saw this with Zcash earlier this year where there was an issue there. 142 00:09:19.580 --> 00:09:21.460 So AI is definitely very smart. 143 00:09:21.460 --> 00:09:23.560 These agents are able to find that. 144 00:09:23.700 --> 00:09:29.320 But also, on the good side of it, agents are also helping to improve the performance of cryptography. 145 00:09:30.200 --> 00:09:34.440 And we're seeing this not only in our stack, but also in some of our peers. 146 00:09:34.640 --> 00:09:42.620 They're seeing speed ups because they're finding these theoretical optimizations or these practical optimizations in code to make their systems more performant. 147 00:09:43.340 --> 00:09:45.440 And additionally, they're also making our systems safer. 148 00:09:46.000 --> 00:09:52.280 Because now formal verification is becoming a thing, AI is able to write that stuff at scale and it's able to allow us to actually 149 00:09:52.280 --> 00:09:53.920 Vet the systems that we're building. 150 00:09:54.360 --> 00:10:00.340 I'd say on the other side of things, AI is also making a huge impact when it comes to, for example, agentic payments and agentic 151 00:10:00.340 --> 00:10:02.380 Finance as a whole, agentic markets. 152 00:10:03.760 --> 00:10:10.840 There is currently no easy way for an AI agent to be able to transact without revealing their data. 153 00:10:11.240 --> 00:10:13.620 And everyone can just stalk and see what it's doing. 154 00:10:14.080 --> 00:10:21.700 I think that the concept of giving an AI agent its own wallet that only it can see and control is quite a unique phenomena 155 00:10:21.700 --> 00:10:25.000 Because you've now just kind of unleashed unstoppability there. 156 00:10:25.740 --> 00:10:27.480 So I think people are going to play with that idea. 157 00:10:27.480 --> 00:10:29.260 They're going to take it into the next dimension. 158 00:10:29.780 --> 00:10:34.380 But it's certainly fast tracking a lot of the progress in crypto for us. 159 00:10:34.560 --> 00:10:35.360 That makes a lot of sense. 160 00:10:36.340 --> 00:10:45.080 Already, you've mentioned this concern with public blockchains and data being available for people to see your financial history or your transactions. 161 00:10:45.600 --> 00:10:50.720 But I think most people watching haven't been affected necessarily personally. 162 00:10:51.160 --> 00:10:58.600 I'm kind of curious if you have any stories of people getting taken advantage of or situations that you're kind of trying to decrease. 163 00:10:59.360 --> 00:11:02.040 Yeah, well, I mean, the first thing that I'm going to say is that like, look, 164 00:11:03.280 --> 00:11:07.620 Crypto can't go mainstream until confidentiality is a default. 165 00:11:08.060 --> 00:11:10.000 And that, I believe, is actually the last mile. 166 00:11:10.140 --> 00:11:11.460 It's the final frontier in crypto. 167 00:11:11.600 --> 00:11:14.560 You know, 10 years ago, we were all comparing TPS of our chains. 168 00:11:14.880 --> 00:11:21.400 And you know, this thing is faster, it has more throughput, this is cheaper, more gas efficient, you know, that was the game back then. 169 00:11:21.740 --> 00:11:28.520 It's all been solved now, you know, like you see with all the modern chains, everyone's doing either like one or two second transactions, or 170 00:11:28.520 --> 00:11:29.800 They're going sub second as well. 171 00:11:29.940 --> 00:11:31.200 I think that this is a solved issue. 172 00:11:31.720 --> 00:11:38.080 But I think that the challenge now is that, you know, why isn't this being adopted by people like my parents, you know, or my 173 00:11:38.080 --> 00:11:38.520 Mother, right? 174 00:11:38.820 --> 00:11:45.500 Like, it's because that this stuff still has not reached the same level of guarantee and the same level of protection and security that has 175 00:11:45.500 --> 00:11:51.900 Been in Web2, you know, and that's why I say like, I think there's an opportunity here to actually, like take this into the 176 00:11:51.900 --> 00:11:52.340 Mainstream. 177 00:11:52.680 --> 00:11:59.180 And in that process, I think people are going to realize, oh, there's like, there's genuinely a lot of gaps that were under explored, you 178 00:11:59.180 --> 00:12:01.460 Know, I would say, like, it's been kind of toy use cases. 179 00:12:01.720 --> 00:12:10.460 So for all these altcoins that have been on the market, have all been kind of entered this new era where, you know, there is 180 00:12:10.460 --> 00:12:18.120 RWAs, RWAs are managed by large firms who have a lot of capital, you're also looking at a lot of these types of algo traders 181 00:12:18.120 --> 00:12:24.000 Or quant funds, right, who are managing large books, they don't want their information to be seen, they don't want people stalking their wallets, 182 00:12:24.180 --> 00:12:30.160 That when they go and trade, they don't want their strategies to be copied or reverse engineered, they've poured so much money into building out 183 00:12:30.160 --> 00:12:35.900 These models, back testing it, hiring PhDs in physics to develop it, they do not want this stuff to be just out in the open, 184 00:12:35.920 --> 00:12:36.160 Right? 185 00:12:36.440 --> 00:12:38.920 And so this is where I think serious finance is coming in. 186 00:12:39.020 --> 00:12:41.920 And with serious finance, that's where the mainstream is actually going to start to pick it up. 187 00:12:42.220 --> 00:12:46.060 It's not going to be one of those B2C type of situations, I think it's going to be more B2B to C. 188 00:12:46.480 --> 00:12:53.840 Because for most people, crypto still is pretty difficult to use, the user experience is not great, it needs to be hooked in correctly on 189 00:12:53.840 --> 00:12:58.940 The back end, and then served to the user with a convenient front end, something that they're already used to, you know, with normal passwords 190 00:12:58.940 --> 00:12:59.600 Or logins. 191 00:13:00.420 --> 00:13:02.020 And I think that that is going to happen. 192 00:13:02.300 --> 00:13:08.880 And similarly, you know, as the as these kind of RWAs get tokenized, and you see new financial products being crafted there, I think the 193 00:13:08.880 --> 00:13:14.200 Vanguards or the BlackRocks of the world are going to recognize, wait a second, like if I leave this stuff out in the open, 194 00:13:14.200 --> 00:13:20.180 When I'm rebalancing these, these portfolios, or the ETFs or whatnot, people are going to front run us, and we're going to get really bad 195 00:13:20.180 --> 00:13:23.100 Price on this, it's going to be slippage, it's not going to be a fun time. 196 00:13:24.220 --> 00:13:26.520 You know, this is this is how modern finance already works, right? 197 00:13:26.620 --> 00:13:29.160 You know, people don't broadcast their data on the open. 198 00:13:29.360 --> 00:13:32.960 Every other medium where this stuff is traded has confidentiality in it. 199 00:13:33.280 --> 00:13:39.180 And you could even argue that like a Visa or a MasterCard network actually a little bit, it's more confidential than your Ethereum variables, because 200 00:13:39.180 --> 00:13:41.120 It's not just open for everyone to see. 201 00:13:41.280 --> 00:13:43.860 And so this is what I say is like, there's a big gap. 202 00:13:44.020 --> 00:13:49.680 But when this gap gets closed, it's going to create a lot of interest and demand for what we've been working on in this industry. 203 00:13:51.340 --> 00:13:57.600 I think the way you've mentioned is correct, this blockchain trilemma has in many ways been solved. 204 00:13:57.780 --> 00:14:04.280 And you guys are working on how do we get our industry to be basically feature complete as much as traditional finance. 205 00:14:04.980 --> 00:14:06.780 And privacy does seem like the last sector. 206 00:14:08.180 --> 00:14:15.980 For all the potential Aleo users, Aleo token holders, but even actually taking a step back, I know you've mentioned that you guys have launched 207 00:14:15.980 --> 00:14:16.360 A token. 208 00:14:17.020 --> 00:14:19.360 You had great day one listing partners like Coinbase. 209 00:14:19.920 --> 00:14:21.600 Tell us a little bit about the journey for you. 210 00:14:22.280 --> 00:14:27.360 From working on the project as no token to now token, kind of want to hear about the founder journey. 211 00:14:28.080 --> 00:14:33.500 And yeah, where do I begin, you know, I could I could go on for an hour about the founder journey. 212 00:14:33.500 --> 00:14:40.500 But I'll say look, like it's been an interesting experience, you know, like, starting anything is difficult. 213 00:14:41.100 --> 00:14:48.340 And we've certainly had a lot of challenges developing our technologies, I'd say, you know, when we first started, we actually thought, oh, this is 214 00:14:48.340 --> 00:14:49.280 Going to be a piece of cake. 215 00:14:49.360 --> 00:14:54.320 We really did the research, we really built up the model, the programming model, we're ready to take this out there, let's just go. 216 00:14:54.820 --> 00:15:01.100 And then, you know, we hit our first test, and we realized, oh, shoot, like, the network is incredibly difficult to manage and maintain. 217 00:15:01.300 --> 00:15:06.200 And so that actually forced us to take all of our work down, go back to the drawing board. 218 00:15:06.280 --> 00:15:13.060 And that's where we came up with Testnet 2, where we had a system that actually, from a VM level actually worked, but we realized 219 00:15:13.060 --> 00:15:14.400 That there were some shortcomings there. 220 00:15:14.580 --> 00:15:20.040 For one, you know, the system itself didn't have any on chains, private state, everything was was managed off chain. 221 00:15:20.120 --> 00:15:25.660 In fact, a lot of our peers actually are still using the model that we did in Testnet 2, it was not a scalable approach, 222 00:15:25.860 --> 00:15:30.080 We were trying to build back then, NFTs were in a boom, roll ups were being a thing. 223 00:15:30.140 --> 00:15:36.280 So we started building that stuff to validate our design, our programming paradigm, and realized, oh, shoot, there's a lot of shortcomings there. 224 00:15:36.460 --> 00:15:38.900 So we had to tear that down, go back to the drawing board. 225 00:15:38.960 --> 00:15:47.140 And we came out with Testnet 3, where we basically built out on chain state, that was fully encrypted, offered end-to-end encryption, and allowed 226 00:15:47.140 --> 00:15:48.200 You to interact seamlessly. 227 00:15:48.420 --> 00:15:51.660 And that actually ended up becoming the final model that we have in run today. 228 00:15:52.380 --> 00:15:57.120 When we were launching, also, we had to go through a lot of the regulatory challenges that are inherent with any crypto project. 229 00:15:57.400 --> 00:16:04.560 And being a US based founder and a US citizen, we also had to walk the correct line in terms of how do we design 230 00:16:04.560 --> 00:16:10.140 A solution here, that can be easily used, not only in the US, but abroad as well. 231 00:16:10.260 --> 00:16:14.900 And so we had to set up a foundation, we had to move assets and people over, we had to figure out all of those 232 00:16:14.900 --> 00:16:18.000 Logistics, it was not an easy process, you know, it took a lot of time. 233 00:16:18.720 --> 00:16:22.160 Fortunately, we had some really good investors and really good partners with us. 234 00:16:22.320 --> 00:16:24.220 And you know, they help us navigate all those challenges. 235 00:16:25.080 --> 00:16:30.040 And you know, I would say since then, now that the network is live, and has been live for the last two years, you know, 236 00:16:30.060 --> 00:16:36.480 We've been really focused on how do we make this chain as usable as possible, you know, I have a very strong thesis that 237 00:16:37.540 --> 00:16:42.200 The more usable and the more developer friendly your chain is, then the more adoption you're going to have. 238 00:16:42.840 --> 00:16:46.300 And, you know, I think that especially in the privacy space privacy is very hard. 239 00:16:47.000 --> 00:16:51.900 It's very hard to begin with, because most of the people working on it have PhDs in math or cryptography or computer science. 240 00:16:53.340 --> 00:17:00.360 And, you know, I think that to get the average developer to be able to adopt it, and then the average user, then to appreciate 241 00:17:00.360 --> 00:17:06.440 It, you have to go the extra mile for it, because it's very deep tech, you know, like the average person doesn't know what zk 242 00:17:06.440 --> 00:17:08.760 Is, they don't write a zero knowledge proof is they never heard of this thing. 243 00:17:08.780 --> 00:17:13.620 And like, it's kind of like the internet, like you shouldn't have to know how TCP/IP works, you know, you have to abstract it 244 00:17:13.620 --> 00:17:16.100 Up to a level where it becomes actually usable. 245 00:17:16.400 --> 00:17:21.960 So, you know, that's in that founder journey for us, it's, it's now shifting our priorities into going higher up in the stack. 246 00:17:22.060 --> 00:17:28.240 And this is where in the past year, you know, we launched this thing called Shield Wallet. Shield Wallet is basically a privacy first multi 247 00:17:28.240 --> 00:17:37.240 Asset wall, it supports Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, obviously, Aleo, USDC, USDT, USDG, we're now going to add even more altcoins, we're also going to 248 00:17:37.240 --> 00:17:40.340 Start bringing stocks and generally RWAs onto it as well. 249 00:17:40.800 --> 00:17:45.680 I mean, it's to allow people to be able to hold any type of asset that they're used to confidentially. 250 00:17:46.520 --> 00:17:50.460 And in the last 30 days, actually, we just launched a brand new product, it's called Shield Swap. 251 00:17:50.880 --> 00:17:54.340 It isn't confidential AMM, it's a Uniswap V3 style. 252 00:17:54.340 --> 00:18:02.560 So it's concentrated liquidity, and it allows you to trade without revealing your identity without revealing your portfolio, certainly also hides your trading strategies. 253 00:18:02.760 --> 00:18:05.220 So people can't reverse engineer copy you in that sense. 254 00:18:05.720 --> 00:18:10.880 And you know, these are the things that we think are going to help to drive a lot of the long term needs for for 255 00:18:10.880 --> 00:18:11.780 This chain as well. 256 00:18:11.960 --> 00:18:18.200 And so we're investing very heavily in these, because once you have that, for example, with an AMM, now you have a price Oracle, and 257 00:18:18.200 --> 00:18:19.160 You can TWAP that right. 258 00:18:19.320 --> 00:18:20.740 And with that, what does that open up? 259 00:18:20.860 --> 00:18:25.460 It opens up, you know, your Aaves or Compound equivalent, so you can have lending and borrowing on chain. 260 00:18:25.900 --> 00:18:28.940 Additionally, now you have this Oracle feed, which you can use to now fund perps, right? 261 00:18:29.040 --> 00:18:33.740 And now now perps can rely on that as a signal for pricing things efficiently. 262 00:18:33.980 --> 00:18:36.040 And so these are kind of all the basic primitives. 263 00:18:36.480 --> 00:18:37.960 We want to do it well, we want to do it right. 264 00:18:38.080 --> 00:18:39.760 So we've taken our time to do it correctly. 265 00:18:40.760 --> 00:18:46.780 But you know, I see this as kind of all of the main challenges you have is like, just getting to some of the basic 266 00:18:46.780 --> 00:18:54.360 Things that people appreciate already in crypto requires so much of a heavy lift from the grass underneath and abstracting it into, into a good 267 00:18:54.360 --> 00:19:01.240 Place and working with good partners to get you into the right spot and then navigating the regulatory landscape, especially privacy to make that work. 268 00:19:01.380 --> 00:19:03.460 Well, all this stuff has to come together. 269 00:19:03.720 --> 00:19:04.700 It doesn't all happen at once. 270 00:19:04.860 --> 00:19:05.980 And it certainly doesn't happen overnight. 271 00:19:07.460 --> 00:19:14.140 Yeah, I mean, I've learned so much about how not integral privacy seems like it was in the beginning of crypto. 272 00:19:14.460 --> 00:19:18.540 And now they're there, we really don't know how much we need it until we don't. 273 00:19:18.640 --> 00:19:18.840 Right. 274 00:19:19.160 --> 00:19:23.340 And it's great that we have another solution with you guys building Aleo. 275 00:19:23.780 --> 00:19:29.640 If there's any other last messages that you want to give to our audience or to Aleo fans, please feel free. 276 00:19:30.140 --> 00:19:32.160 Yeah, I mean, I'll just say, look, Shield is live. 277 00:19:32.680 --> 00:19:36.600 We're in the App Store, the iOS App Store, the Android Play Store, and also the Chrome extension. 278 00:19:36.940 --> 00:19:38.760 If you don't have it, please download, give it a try. 279 00:19:39.480 --> 00:19:41.440 We're always looking for more feedback on it as well. 280 00:19:41.700 --> 00:19:45.620 So we have a discord and we also have a telegram group, please join it. 281 00:19:46.480 --> 00:19:50.360 And with that, you know, I would say like, give it a shot and let us know how it is. 282 00:19:50.980 --> 00:19:51.180 Amazing. 283 00:19:51.420 --> 00:19:52.840 Howard, thank you very much for joining us. 284 00:19:53.040 --> 00:19:53.860 Thank you for having me. 285 00:19:53.860 --> 00:19:55.080 Appreciate you.