S17 E28: Josh Swihart on Zcash & ZODL
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0:47Vlad CosteaHello there and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. This is Season 17, Episode 28, and we are live with Josh Swihart, who is joining the show for the first time in 20 months. The last time you were on the show to talk about Zcash. The situation was very different. Zcash was about to get delisted by Binance, and there was a lot of uncertainty surrounding the future of the project. It seemed like you guys were running out of money or something. The price per coin was like $30 or less. Look at you now.
1:20You're one of the hot shots in this space. A lot of people want to work for Zcash, and it's like the project has been reborn or something. It's really good to have you. We have a lot to talk about. Welcome.
1:35Josh SwihartThanks. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, a lot has changed in the last couple years.
1:40Vlad CosteaSomething that I want to say from the beginning is that to me, it seems like Zcash is in a class of its own, which is good, but also means that from time to time, it's self-defeating. I don't think I've ever seen anything like this where it's so good that it makes mistakes that end up costing the momentum for a while, but then it all gets rebuilt. I guess this is how evolution happens. You stumble, and then you fall, and then you get back up. It's been like this for the past year or so.
2:15Josh SwihartIt's stronger each time.
2:19Some wobbles, but the resolve is there. We've done really well. Things continue to grow. Things continue to harden. The community is getting bigger. All that stuff is up to the right.
2:35Vlad CosteaFor the people wondering why there's a QR code on the screen, you can use Zcash to send shielded notes. You don't have to actually send an amount, but it's nice if you do. What I'm trying to say is that if you want to ask questions to Josh, the ones that you send with a shielded note are going to get prioritized. You already have one, which I'm going to read from someone who actually sent 0.1 ZEC, which is really nice. Thank you very much. He says, is there anything more key people like Josh and Zooko can do to alleviate the current run on the orchard pool?
3:09What are the consequences of three million plus ZEC withdrawing to transparent addresses ahead of Ironwood? To some extent, we have to hope cool heads prevail and people see the collective importance of staying put until this migration, but individual selfish logic tells people to withdraw. A Twitter campaign similar to Pass the Torch could perhaps give people the confidence they need. This is signed by Chewbacca.
3:37Josh SwihartYeah, I don't know that there's anything to do or that we should do. People need to make their own decisions about what they do with their money.
3:52And we're not like — I'm not gonna — but everybody's pretty transparent about what's going on and people have been watching the chain and watching the flows and trying to determine if there's any patterns. There's no heuristics indicating that there's any exploit, but people have to make their own decisions about what they're comfortable with. And some prefer, like me, I prefer to stay in the orchard pool and have my privacy there. Some people have a preference for moving it to a transparent address and revealing some privacy. And that's a trade off. That's a trade off everybody needs to make.
4:27So I fully respect everybody's decision to do whatever they want. So I don't know that we would mount a campaign.
4:34Vlad CosteaI guess some people will feel like we jumped into a topic that they know nothing about, maybe if they've been living under a rock or something. But what I'm trying to say is that maybe we should define what is the orchard pool and what happened to it and what is Ironwood and what this guy Chewbacca is essentially trying to say.
4:55Josh SwihartYeah, so basically, you know, they're so for those that may not know, Zcash is a code fork of Bitcoin. And so when it launched, it was Bitcoin plus zero knowledge cryptography. But you had two options. You have a Bitcoin UTXO style address, a transparent address is what we call it. And then you have a shielded address, which is protected by cryptography. Every time there's an upgrade in the cryptography, the protocols using a new cryptography, we call that a new shielded pool. And so we had one, the initial one was Sprout.
5:35The cryptography was very slow, we upgraded to something called Sapling, which was much more performant and faster. And then Sapling was upgraded to Orchard. And Orchard is the current cryptography, the current Zcash shielded pool. And so that there was a vulnerability discovered just a little bit ago by a security researcher, Taylor Hornby. And so that was since been patched. But that's kind of that that's what the pools are. And so it's the it's the cryptography that's used to shield your Zcash.
6:21Vlad CosteaRight. So some people will be confused right now asking themselves, why is there a podcast about Zcash in the middle of a show that's about Bitcoin? Well, this is the reason. Originally, there was this paper in 2013 that was called Zerocoin by a bunch of cryptographers who wanted to bring privacy to Bitcoin. And then there was an improvement of it called Zerocash that came out a few months later. And Zcash stands for Zerocash, not Zionist cash for the Monero Bros in the chat. And basically what it accomplishes is to bring this ZK-SNARKs library for zero knowledge proofs on top of a Bitcoin fork.
7:01That's what Zcash is. The plan has always been or has been in the beginning to prove this technology to show that it's good enough for Bitcoin and mature it. I think in the meantime, Bitcoin has lost interest in adding it, even though I hope there's still some interest down the line. And Zcash has made a lot of progress from the beginning. Like there used to be a trusted setup of six trusted nodes, compute nodes that were spread across the world. And that was 2016. That was the original ceremony.
7:36Then you had another ceremony of many more nodes that were used. And then I think 2021, Sean Bowe figured out with Halo 2 how to remove the trusted setup and do Zcash without it. And ever since we have been in this post trusted setup world where everything is in a much better state, is much scalable, that was also one of the issues because Zcash started out with very good privacy, but limited scalability. And even today, I synced a node a couple of days ago and it took me three and a half days to get from Genesis block until the current block height.
8:19And I still think I could have done some optimizations like giving it more RAM maybe, but it is what it is. And it's going to become more scalable with future upgrades. And that's what's exciting about it. Yeah, that's right. That's a good overview. So tell me the secret, Josh, like how do you go from being threatened by Binance that the coin is going to get delisted for low volume and a price of $30 and very low hope that this is going to get revived to the point where it's almost I think it's almost top 10 in coin market cap.
9:00And it's being discussed by some of the biggest names in the industry and everyone wants to get a piece of this technology.
9:11Josh SwihartYeah, I think the convergence of things. So some of it, it just takes time. And as I mentioned, and as you mentioned, it wasn't performant out of the gate back in 2016. It was too slow. You couldn't run it on a mobile, you couldn't create a zero knowledge proof on a mobile device. That changed in 2018. But then there's all the infrastructure around it that has to be there. People were uncomfortable with the with the trusted setup, although a lot of projects still use sapling, which is, you know, a trusted setup for for creating privacy.
9:52But so we were able to move away from that. One of the things historically with ECC was like producing SDKs, but relying on the community at large to be able to support shielded Zcash. And you have this weird kind of dynamic where hardware wallets, for example, if the coin price isn't doing well, or there's not enough market demand, then they're not going to add shielded support into hardware devices, for example. So the demand had to be there and, and some wallets, some good wallets, edge, unstoppable, added shielded support.
10:35But I felt pretty strongly we needed a few things in the ecosystem. So I was pretty vocal back in 2023 about changes that needed to happen as it relates to governance within the ecosystem. The way that governance happened was effectively a 2-of-2 multisig between two leaders of two organizations. And that's how I characterize it. That's how I believed it was. And I think it was leading, and we were receiving, I was at ECC at the time working for Zooko. We were receiving dev funds directly from the chain.
11:10So some organizations had their addresses embedded into the chain. Felt like that was inappropriate for a public good. And it led to some perverse incentives, where, regardless of how we performed, regardless of how Zcash did, we still got paid. And so we needed to remove some of those things. We needed to kill the governance structure. We needed to kill and change the funding structure. And we needed to be opinionated about what the user experience was for using ZEC. And so I left ECC at the time in mid 2023, and then came back as the CEO of ECC at the end of the year.
11:56And we refocused. And we said, look, we as a team can't do everything. And there's kind of a crowding out if we try to do everything. And that we need more developers, more orgs, more people working on things. And so we're going to say this is what we're going to do, and everybody else can focus on other things that they want to see happen for the protocol. But we're going to be very opinionated about the user experience. We're going to drive adoption. And we're still going to focus full stack.
12:26So we'll still work on core protocol. But our protocol work is going to be driven by user experience. There was some research that was done. She goes by Peacemonger. She ran a project called Jur that was doing user interviews with Zcashers around the world prior to 2024. She now works at ZODL, where I'm the CEO. And that illuminated a few things. One is people wanted a good user experience for ZEC and they didn't have it. She did some NPS scoring and the NPS net promoter score was negative.
13:10There was nobody in the community that was happy with the user experience that they were getting with ZEC. And so we decided coming into 2024, we're going to focus on just 100 people. Let's get 100 people happy with actually using Zcash, not as a speculative asset, but as storing it as it was intended, as spending it as it was intended. And we did that. We got the first 100. We released Zashi, which is now ZODL. We saw the adoption start to increase. The size of the shielded pool started to increase.
13:45We added capabilities that users said that they wanted, like hardware support with Keystone. People talked about... They said Zashi at the time couldn't be successful because it was a single currency wallet, not a multi-currency wallet. And so it didn't effectively allow swaps. And so I'd worked with the team at Near and with Near Intents to show that you can actually could. You could actually swap in and out of ZEC. You could take your Bitcoin with a couple clicks and convert it into shielded ZEC. And it was easy.
14:19And we made that easy. We saw... With each of these updates, we saw the pool size start to increase. So it started going exponentially up with Keystone in the end of 2024. And then by October of 2025, with swaps, when we had enabled that, it had gone vertical in terms of increasing. And we had, at the time, gone from about 11% of all circulating ZEC was shielded at the beginning of 2024 to over 30% just recently prior to this latest kind of incident. And then people started to talk about it.
14:58People loved the experience. People started using it. The price started to go up. The shielded pool was up and to the right. Some KOLs came out very publicly in support of it, started re-looking at it, looking at everything that was happening. We had this roadmap. So Sean Bo figured out a way to very gracefully scale the protocol so that we could get this actually in the hands of billions of people. And everything was reflexive. Yeah. It just started building on itself as well as the broader macro environment where we saw what happened with the Canadian truckers, people being able to seize, governments being able to seize Bitcoin, the risks around the world of people seizing assets, needing to have mobility in the assets that they have and wanting to self-custody.
15:54And so I think it was a convergence of all of those things that got us to kind of this new energy over the last couple of years.
16:04Vlad CosteaYeah. You listed a few wallets and I got to inform you that Cake Wallet has been sponsoring this show with the sole intention of giving people Zcash because they wanted to advertise the fact that they added shielded ZEC. And the CEO of Cake Wallet, Vik, sends his regards and says you're a really great person. But at the same time, I remember at the time when he launched this integration of Zcash with the Orchard pool and also near intense, I think he was very upset that he doesn't get recognition from any of the Zcash organizations.
16:39He's like, oh, I put all of this work. I put my team to build this and it's not going anywhere. Nobody's even saying, hey, thank you for doing it.
16:50Josh SwihartWell, Vik, thank you for doing it. I think he added shielded support in the middle of a lot of chaos. So we went through a governance battle internally at ECC, which resulted in the company forking and becoming ZODL. And it was in the middle of that corporate fork that Vik launched support. And so I think part of it probably was timing. But I know there's a lot of fans of the Cake Wallet and appreciate them adding support for Zcash. I've known Vik for a while.
17:29Vlad CosteaYeah, I think for a while he brought peace among privacy coins by adding Zec because the Monero guys were very aggressive. And then suddenly when they saw that their favorite wallet is now supporting Zcash, they sort of stopped for a while until recently when they came back swinging and taking their best shots, trying to bring the price down. It's quite interesting. But narrative, the new powerful narrative in the space is privacy. And it seems like every privacy project is having a renaissance and it all started with Zcash.
18:04And it's amazing.
18:06Josh SwihartYeah, it was amazing. I think there's just some inherent... Monero is a cousin. I found Monero because it existed well before Zcash existed back in 2016. But there's always been this tension between the communities. And I think there's been some mudslinging on both sides. But a lot of mudslinging from the Monero community and things that are just not true. A way that you opened it up when you talk about this is the paper was not Diana's coin or something like that. A lot of that stuff has come out of the Monero community, which I think that kind of trolling, or whether it's sincere or not, but this kind of Reddit style engagement, I think turned off a lot of people in the Zcash community where anything then associated with Monero has that taint to it, unfortunately.
19:08Vlad CosteaYeah, and I think the way in which they operate, their criteria for dismissing Zcash is rather silly. There's even someone in the chat right now, SkunkHD, who says, I'm reluctant to use Zcash because it doesn't feel cypherpunk. It had massive institutional investors. It had insiders who benefited from a built-in reward structure. And I think the other side of the argument from the Monero people is that nobody went to jail. They expect if you're building something with privacy that the government should come after you. And they say, well, if there are no criminals using this and nobody goes to jail, then it's not really private.
19:49It's just a narrative for VCs and whatever. But they also don't understand that the way in which you frame your privacy product and the way that you promote it is very important. And I've seen that in Bitcoin with Samourai Wallet and Wasabi Wallet, which was their competition. Samourai was very aggressive in telling people, well, Russian oligarchs, you can come and launder your Bitcoin with us. We're open. We're blah, blah, blah. Wasabi had pretty much the same technology and they were saying, well, it's for everyone who needs privacy.
20:20We're not going to tell you whether or not you should use it. We don't know anything about our users. We don't care to know. It's for grandmas and people who care about privacy. And the difference is that the Samourai devs went to jail because of their speech, which was very aggressive. And the Wasabi guys, even though they're not working actively as a company on the project, they're still out there, roaming free.
20:53Josh SwihartThis kind of claim that cypherpunk means criminal is ridiculous. We have the idea with, you know, with Eric Hughes and the cypherpunks — the fight at the time was that privacy actually should be normal and it should be normalized, right? That we have protection through encryption on the internet and we're able to use that encryption, that everybody is able to use that encryption, not that criminals will use that encryption. And so I think we have a truer vision of those cypherpunk ideals, out of which Bitcoin was born, out of which Satoshi came, who was promoting privacy, but not for criminal activity. And it's never been about that. And that's kind of — the whole thing has been co-opted by largely people that weren't even around, maybe even not alive, during the initial crypto wars. And so yeah, our narrative and our framing and our narrative has been very different.
22:03Our engagement has been very different.
22:08There's conversations with regulators and policymakers and that kind of thing. And we do and we engage there. The technology is completely neutral. It's zero knowledge. It works. The cryptography is world class, best in class. And ultimately, our goal is to offer privacy to billions of people around the world.
22:36Vlad CosteaI also had someone from Railgun in the previous interview, which was like a couple of weeks ago. And I've asked him, what's the difference between Railgun on Ethereum and Zcash? And he was like, yeah, but with Railgun, you can anonymize tokens and you can do much more than just the base currency. But I think the difference that he didn't explicitly mention is that Railgun is working with a, what do you call it, blockchain analysis firm to make sure that it's not just a blockchain analysis firm. Sure.
23:08The coins that entered their anonymity pool are quote unquote clean. Whereas in Zcash, there is no such mechanism. It's not like you cannot enter the orchard or ironwood or sapling pool just because they came from some transaction, which is suspicious. You are part of this system, no matter where you come from. And it's something that I hope will stay neutral because it's part of the value proposition of Zcash. Yeah,
23:36Josh Swihartand the fungibility is really important, right? This kind of idea that all coins are created equal, everything is equal. One ZEC is one ZEC. And because some criminal down the line chose to use it for some bad purpose, it doesn't mean that your coins are tainted in any way by that previous activity. All those properties are really important for money.
24:06Vlad CosteaI wish we had more of this on Bitcoin. Anyway, I've been receiving some more shielded notes from people. Look at this. That's awesome. You'll be rich. Some of them are just zero and that's fine. I didn't ask people to send me money. So someone says Josh is a sweetheart and this emoji with hearts in the eyes, like very much in love. That might be your wife or something. There's an actual question. Will zemaps.com be included in ZODL? I
24:43Josh Swihartdon't know. Maybe we. What's ZeMaps? ZeMaps, they started, I haven't spent a ton of time with it, to be honest, because just things have been so crazy with everything going on. And I need to. But ZeMaps, I believe that they're trying to map out all of the different retail locations around the world on a globe that allows you to see who is natively accepting ZEC. And I just got a note from them. Maybe a couple days ago, they added the Flexa locations. So Flexa allows you to spend cryptocurrencies at various retail locations and it's integrated with ZODL so that you can spend your shielded zec at Chipotle or Ulta Beauty or Regal Cinemas or Barnes and Noble or things like that.
25:35So I think ZEC map is mapping all those locations so that you can know where you can spend zec. So it could be a kind of a cool integration so that you pop up in your wallet and you say, you know, I'm hungry for lunch. What's nearby where I can go buy lunch with my Zcash. But we'll take a look.
25:54Vlad CosteaWhen I was in Vegas a month ago, I've actually had lunch at Chipotle every day and I paid with Zcash. It was amazing. And no regrets. Like the price was like $300 and then it went up to like $600 something. And I still have no regrets. Like it was so cool. It was much better than tapping my card like most of the other Bitcoiners were doing.
26:17Josh SwihartYeah, I bought a truck some months back. And I paid is somebody that I know. And I paid half in cash and half in Zcash. I way overpaid for that truck. So What kind of truck is it? It's a Ford. It's an F-150.
26:37Vlad CosteaOh, the big one.
26:39Josh SwihartThe big one. Yeah. But yeah, that's like, that's one of the, you know, the, the things with, you know, where you have a limited supply is, you know, as a payments mechanism, you kind of get get past this idea or this notion that, you know, it's gonna stay, it's now stablecoin. So things will go up and down.
27:05Vlad CosteaWell, yeah, you have another question, but before I take it, I just want to announce that there's going to be a giveaway of 0.1 Zcash. And if you want to win, you have to guess the number that Josh wrote on a piece of paper. Don't show it yet, Josh. Basically, it's the number from one to 100, and you only get one shot in the chat to type the number. If you type two numbers, I think I'll only consider the last one that you typed. Or if you try to spam the chat with numbers, I'll just disqualify you.
27:37And there's no way you can win. So yeah, take a shot, win some Zcash. And also, the sponsors of the show, I forgot to mention them. There's SideShift, which is a place that used to support Zcash. I hope that they will support Zcash. But right now, the best way to use it outside of the US because of regulations that I don't understand, is that you can swap your stablecoins for Bitcoin or for Litecoin, Ethereum, whatever it is that you consider to be better money. And that's not going to be taken away from you.
28:08Because every month, there are millions of USDT and USDC that get seized for various reasons. Just because it's stable, or whatever that means, because I think it's also subjected to the inflation of the US dollar. But you might think that it's stable, but it can also get seized. So don't hold on to that. I understand that some people prefer to pay you in that, but swap it as fast as you can and SideShift.ai is a good way to do it. There's also CakeWallet, which I mentioned, and they have support for Zcash.
28:42And I think they have a really nice user experience. And I do believe that it's better for more wallets to support a coin and offer swapping features. I think in Cake, you can actually swap Monero for Zcash or vice versa, which is not something that you can do in ZODL, as far as I know. So check that out. If you want to take sides in one of the tribes, you can actually do that in CakeWallet. There's also OrangeRock, which is a trading platform without KYC, where you can trade between coins, also privacy coins.
29:17Zcash is supported. And you can also gamble with leverage, I think up to 30x. I don't recommend it, I'm just saying that you can do that if you're crazy. But stay away. If you want to trade with privacy, with an all-in-one experience, check out OrangeRock on your phone. And last but not least, Layer 2 Labs, which is building the drive chain, which is going to have a Z-side sidechain, which is quite interesting, coming to a Bitcoin hard fork this summer in August. And you're going to be able to try what Bitcoin could have been like if we were a bit more sane and not paranoid about every possible upgrade and so conservative that it's convenient to bankers.
30:02Anyway, check out Layer 2 Labs and ecash.com, you can find more information. And now a question for you, Josh. It says, and it's not signed by anyone, it says, I've noticed that Zcash has lied about a ton, and ton is with capital letters. I wonder what you both think about this and why you think this is. Lied a ton? Like, why do people lie about Zcash? A ton. Lied about? Lied about, yeah.
30:38Josh SwihartI mean, why do I think, I don't know, I don't know what's in people's hearts or why they... Why they do what they do. I think there's a lot of people that are, especially on the internet, that are zero sum. And so, you know, I don't, I believe in a world of abundance, not a world of scarcity. And so, you know, whether or not, you know, Monero or some other privacy project or, you know, something out there, I think more is better. This is all kind of a grand experiment and we have to, we have to win at the end of the day.
31:11This kind of alternative, like you were talking about moving out of a stablecoin as quickly as possible because it can be frozen. I mean, the stablecoin is essentially an outsourced CDBC. And so it's completely in government control. And if we want systems that are not, that can't be controlled and manipulated and completely governed by governments, whether you believe it's a good government or a bad government or a certain, you know, party or whatever, then we need these options and we need more of them in more places.
31:39So, unfortunately, I don't think everybody thinks that way. They aren't looking at it from, like, we haven't historically been, like, we're not cryptobros. That's just not been our thing. It's about what we bring to the world in terms of privacy and private money. But you have people that are just so concerned. And because that's where their incentives are, like, I understand, they're so concerned about the price. That they believe they have to win in order, or everybody else has to lose. And so I think then stuff gets made up, narratives get surfaced around, FUD gets created, lies get told.
32:16In some cases, I know historically, people have admitted to being paid to lie and deliver false information and things like that by other groups and other communities, which I think is disgusting. But, you know, free speech, and people can say whatever they want. Even if they're saying things that are untrue, they have the right to speak.
32:44Vlad CosteaI want to acknowledge that Tyler Spalding is in the chat and he picked a number. Hi, Tyler. It's good to have you here. He was also on the show in the second episode. And he also did, like, this advertisement for Flexa and you're in it.
32:59Josh SwihartYeah, that was super fun. I was with David Covingey. The guy from the X-Files, right? The guy from the X-Files, yeah. So that was pretty amazing. So yeah, a number of Z-casters were in that video. But that was a lot of fun. I'm really grateful for Tyler for allowing us to do that.
33:20Vlad CosteaI think he's responsible for the whole Chipotle affair. Like, the fact that we can do it at all is because he created Flexa and he's very much into these privacy coins. So thank you very much, Tyler. But to answer the question that the person who did not sign the message asked us, I think that Zcash is the subject of lies because it's very easy to misunderstand Zcash. It's very new math. It's novel in its design. And people will say something like, well, it has a very low anonymity set because there are not too many people who use it.
33:57But they don't know how the accumulator system works in the shielded pool. Once you enter there, you're basically enjoying the anonymity set that adds up to everyone who has ever used the pool in the past. So you have a very large anonymity set, which Monero is trying to copy right now with full chain membership proofs, which I believe is going to come this year. And also the fact that they said, well, nobody accepts Zcash, which is partially true. But at the same time, they're not aware of the DeFi integrations like Maya and Near Intents and stuff like this, where basically you're performing a DeFi swap into a currency that's already widely accepted.
34:41And you're enjoying the privacy of a shielded pool from which you're unshielding so that the party that receives your money is going to get maybe some BTC or USDT or Litecoin or whatever directly from this DeFi service. The coins have no identity. There is nothing tying the coins that they receive to the ones that you send. And the DeFi service doesn't know anything except for the amount of coins that you unshielded. So I think it's really cool and there's a lot to it, but most people never actually tried the technology before they tried to criticize it.
35:21And as you said, there are some incentives there for people who just want their bags to pump. I've also seen some main character syndrome in the Monero community where they say, well, of course Zcash is pumping now because the Jewish elites are trying to do a cover up to take away the attention from the wonderful stuff that's happening in Monero. And I'm like, OK, so you think that all your project is making advancements and breakthroughs and the market should only care about this? It's a bit ridiculous.
35:53And I do like the competition, though, like the fact that the two of them are constantly flipping each other. I think yesterday Monero actually flipped Zcash. I don't know which one is on top right now, but the fact that this is happening is healthy for the market and keeps the developers engaged and I guess fuels the imagination of communities. By the way, you mentioned some people getting paid. And the classic response to that is that you guys also pay influencers, right? Like who's paying? Arthur Hayes and Barry Silbert and the Winklevii.
36:29Josh SwihartWe've never paid anybody. Exactly. Nobody has ever been paid. That hasn't like employees have been paid for sure. Right. But like these kind of KOLs, there's none of that. None of that has happened. It's never happened. Why would Barry Silbert, why would the Winklevii take a few bucks to, you know, shill a coin? It makes no logical sense. Or Arthur Hayes, why would that? It makes no sense. But yeah, that stuff has been out there. I want to come back because the thing that you mentioned, I think, is really important because we live in a multi-chain, multi-coin world.
37:12And we, there isn't, you can't mandate. You can't say, nobody can create additional coins. This is like antithetical to freedom. People can create whatever coins they want. People can accept whatever coins they want. If they want privacy, if they don't want privacy, if they want ZEC, if they want Monero, if they want Bitcoin, just USDC, that's their choice and they should have those options. But you get to make the choice in terms of what you spend. So if somebody wants to, you know, sell a bike and they want to sell a bike for $1,000 and they're willing to take USDC or maybe they're willing to take Bitcoin, you can send exactly that amount in shielded ZEC and say, I want to send 1000 USDC to this person.
38:00They receive exactly 1000 USDC. You have, your ZEC is, balance goes down by that same amount. And you have complete privacy, right? They can't see the source of funds, the person that is selling the bike. You're not at risk of them seeing your balance, your transaction graph, that whole history, any of that. Nobody is. You've stayed private even though that they don't care about privacy and they just want USDC. It's a really, really powerful kind of capability and it matches the reality of the world where there is no single winner for all of this.
38:42There's a very long tail of preferences for people.
38:48Vlad CosteaYeah. But at the same time, we live in this very tribal space where people want their own bags to pump. And if anything else, like to be honest, Zcash was very uncorrelated to what's happening in Bitcoin. The price of Bitcoin went down a lot but Zcash was hitting close to all-time highs only a week ago or something. So, I guess this attracts the hatred of a lot of people and then when there was the incident with the bug that was discovered in the orchard pool, I've seen people like Samsung now and other Bitcoin maximalists saying, well, this is going to zero.
39:26Oh, we're so happy this never came to Bitcoin. Oh, this is never coming to Bitcoin. The price of this is zero. You can print unlimited Zcash. And once again, the reason why this was propagated is that they didn't even take the time to read what went on, what happened, what the vulnerability actually was, which sounded more like double spending using different un-updated states. Like you could send the same money to different addresses and that's the way in which you could create the inflation. So, it's not unlimited per se.
40:01It's limited by time and the fact that the rest of the network is going to catch up. But it was possible and people were actually questioning the ethics of the person who discovered the bug. I think even Yonatan Sompolinsky, the guy who created Kaspa, was implying that no developer would not actually exploit it. Like every person would, even out of curiosity, try to exploit the bug and then wait a few months and withdraw small amounts like one ZEC at a time or wait until the migration to Ironwood and see which coins or how many coins are not moving out and just quietly get out of the pool.
40:48Like he was presenting this scenario. And I tend to believe that security people, especially the ones that you hire for white hat operations, tend to be ethical. Because I remember an incident in Bitcoin in 2018 when a Bitcoin Cas developer found... a serious inflation bug in BTC. And he disclosed it honestly, did not exploit it. Of course the difference is that in that situation you can see on the open blockchain that it never happened. In this situation people like to speculate because apparently the Zcash privacy sucks, right?
41:23And it's just theater for VCs and whatever. But it's so good that you cannot see if there is actual inflation. So you gotta make up your mind, like is the privacy good or does it suck?
41:35Josh SwihartYeah, there's logical fallacies. It's amazing to me how many people speak with authority without actually knowing what they're freaking talking about. Or taking the time to do it thoughtfully for the sake of engagement or whatever their intention is. With Taylor, yeah, you can play the game theoretics and like what somebody would do and it is all speculation. You have to verify if it has been exploited, there will be proof that it has been exploited because the Orchard pool will go to zero. And other people will be in the Orchard pool and not able to move funds.
42:17So we'll soon know, we'll have an upgrade next month. But as it relates to Taylor, like I've known him for a long time. He was a security director at Electric Coin Company. He's been working on the protocol, he knows the protocol very well. The whole discovery of the exploit is a combination of AI and his depth of knowledge and experience. It wasn't just throw AI at a repo and see what it finds. So he's very gifted, very skilled, very loyal and a high, high character. And so I know you needed to be able to verify the turnstile and Zcash will allow us to have a verification of the circulating supply.
43:06But the the character of the security researcher Taylor is unbelievably high. And so I would take issue with anybody that would challenge that about him. But I know you ultimately at the end of the day, you know, don't trust verify. So we'll see.
43:30Vlad CosteaYeah, I think even in the first shielded pool, which had an inflation bug, which was hidden for a long time until Sean Bowe and Zooko and the rest of the team were able to fix it. There's still an amount there that was never withdrawn. And I'm not sure if the coins were lost or what that's supposed to mean, the fact that these coins have never moved.
43:54I don't know.
43:56Josh SwihartProbably they're lost. I mean, that happens a lot, right? I suspect there'll be, again, I can't know for sure, but I suspect there'll be something similar with Orchard. Maybe less so because it's a newer pool. Still, it's years old. I know that I have given my children multiple Zcash that they have lost in phones. So there will always be some that remain behind in some of those legacy pools.
44:36Vlad CosteaI think this question that I received from someone who actually sent zero ZEC is very profound. He says one issue we inherited from Bitcoin is the security budget issue. How should we secure the long term security of the network as fees asymptomatically, asymptotically? Sorry, I had a PTSD from the pandemic. As fees asymptotically approach zero.
45:02Josh SwihartYeah, well, there's something that's been proposed by Shielded Labs, which is another development group, engineering group within the Zcash ecosystem called the Network Sustainability Module. And then Network Sustainability Module will or has the potential to help with that long term to be able to effectively collect ZEC that can be used for the security of the network over the long period of time if that ever becomes an issue. So people are thinking about it. You know, I think it's a problem that's not too hard to figure out as long as we can continue to innovate on the chain, right?
45:48If we don't, you know, one of the challenges with Bitcoin and it's kind of a big debate right now around with quantum computers as well is just the ossification of the protocol and saying like it can never change.
46:05The spirit of Zcash is not that way at all. Technology, everything changes around us all the time. There's new problems to solve. And so it will continue to evolve and it will continue to evolve such that I think the security budget issues will not be an issue. Well,
46:28Vlad Costeayeah, I think it takes a lot of transaction fees, which hopefully Zcash will have. I'm actually more curious about the scaling aspect of it because once Tachyon is going to come out, hopefully this year, we're going to see basically a much easier way to validate. But I'm curious how this is going to look like or what it's going to look like to nodes that store everything. From a light client point of view, I think it's going to be more easy to transact and it can scale much easier.
47:01It's sort of like client side validation. But with nodes, I'm actually curious if you're running a full archival node, if there's going to be much of a difference with this.
47:12Josh SwihartAt Tachyon? Yeah, so I think part of the theory there is that you shouldn't overload the chain with information it doesn't need, that some information, some services can be done off the chain. And so you're just essentially managing state change on the chain itself. With Halo 2 introduced this idea around effectively recursion. So we just need a proof actually of the state, the prior state of the chain, plus whatever new transactions are coming in. So we can minimize the amount of data and we can minimize so you don't have to go back and like relook at the entire history of the chain.
47:57You have a mathematical proof that is a valid state and then you've got additional services that support it. So, you know, today we have like client services. There's the Valor group is adding PIR, Private Information Retrieval Services. We've started to use that for voting mechanisms or polling mechanisms to the community. There's new services with Tachyon, the oblivious syncing service, things like that, that will happen off chain that allow and facilitates some of this. And so it's not just node operators who are not running these other services, they'll only need like a very minimal set of information.
48:41Vlad CosteaThat sounds cool. I think at this point, so maybe we should announce that in 10 minutes, we can do the giveaway as we will be approaching the one hour mark. And I'll pick the next question that I've received, which is not loading. Actually, would you say that these shielded nodes are bloating the chain and they're sort of spammy in this regard?
49:08Like they do take data.
49:11Josh SwihartIt takes data. It can be a limiter in terms of some piece of scalability. It's not that much data. It's like 512 bytes right now. So we have it's also it actually is nice. So one is that you can send because you can't see when you receive a transaction, you can't see where it came from. And so that information can be included in that payload if they want to do that. There's a there's a proposal on the table for something called memo bundles that would actually allow you to bundle the memos together.
49:48And in that case, you could do authenticated reply to so that you you'd be able to authenticate who sent. You know, you could say I'm the person that is sending this to you. So it remains part of it. But but the receiver would be able to respond effectively or send a transaction back to the person that sent. So there's some there's some utility there. There's some mimetic value. People pass around notes. Zooko's talked about shielded love notes on the blockchain.
50:18And so it can actually help with onboarding people. And like what you're using it for right now, like people aren't sending money. They're sending you zero ZEC transactions. But
50:30Vlad Costeathey're paying for the transaction fee to the miners. So it does help.
50:34Josh SwihartThey are. Yeah. They pay a little bit.
50:40But yeah, there's obviously the more data you're storing on chain, the more difficult it is. To scale, it's not an issue currently. I know there's different people, different people in the Zcash community have different opinions on whether or not memos should be supported for how long or whether they should get allow for these things like memo bundles for a bigger payload.
51:04Vlad CosteaThere's another good question that comes from someone I suspect might be working for Shielded Labs.
51:15It says, thanks for having Josh on your podcast. What are Josh's thoughts about private stablecoins on Zcash, assuming it would be KYC'd at on-off ramps, but not thereafter, and with no ability to surveil or freeze transactions while used on-chain? I think this goes back to the conversation about shielded assets, which I think we're going to be added in the next big hard fork or the previous big hard fork that happened. And then the community decided to postpone this or not have it so that you can focus on turning ZEC into a better asset and not have something that competes with it.
51:56I think there are two layers. What do you think about shielded assets and what do you think about this stablecoin idea?
52:09Josh SwihartSo just to give some context, a group by the name of Kedit built the capability to launch Zcash shielded assets on top of the Zcash chain. And so Zcash shielded assets require an issuer. So somebody has to stand in this gap and say, I'm going to issue USDC or I'm going to issue Tether or something like that. So Circle would need to say, I'm going to issue this USDC and it's going to be ZUSDC. So Tether, both of these organizations have some different requirements. So one of the requirements is that they're able to KYC people that are issuing and redeeming coins.
52:57So you have to give up your identity, you have to give up privacy. The other thing is they need the ability to freeze funds. So even though it's shielded, if they say, oopsie, like somebody in this train was a criminal and this came out of a hack or something like that, we're going to freeze the funds or they get a warrant from the government or something like that. And they need the ability to blacklist certain addresses. They say these people are not allowed to send and receive ZUSDC.
53:25So you have these kind of challenges and these kind of run counter to a lot of the ideals that I have personally. And my personal beliefs are that there's a whole bunch of different beliefs in the Zcash ecosystem about some of that and whether or not they should be allowed. But the capability was built. There was a vote or polling done, not a vote, but polling done amongst coin holders and polling among different community members. The Zcash Foundation runs something called the Zcash Advisory Panel. Different groups express an opinion.
54:06And we have rough consensus within Zcash, which just means that unless there's clear consensus that everybody wants to move forward with something as significant as a network upgrade, then unless there's clear consensus, it doesn't move forward. And if somebody wants to advocate for it, they can continue to advocate for it until there is clear consensus. And so what has happened is there was not clear consensus around whether or not Zcash shielded assets should be enabled. Some people felt like Zcash itself was good enough and the right thing.
54:41We didn't want to top load it. Shielded stables really haven't taken off on other chains. Other chains have done this already and nobody cared. And is this the right time? Some people are believers in the store of value narrative. And so let's not clutter the chain. Let's not increase the hackable surface area by unnecessary complexity. So there's various different opinions and trade offs of people. So I think what the current plan is, is somebody will stand up a test net. Somebody can come in and use the test net and try it.
55:19And maybe they're able to build up some momentum. I spent time with, and others did, with the Tether team and with the USD and with the Circle team. And there was just no path with them. No strong interests. They didn't have a lot of demand. And they had these complexities as it relates to, again, freezing funds, whitelists, blacklists, KYC. They just kind of run counter to Zcash and you can add some layers of that onto Zcash shielded assets without compromising Zcash. But it's like a hard no on anything that compromises the core protocol that would allow for some of the kind of activities they wanted to, or they would have had needed to do.
56:16So it's still an open question in the community. Again, I think there's opinions on both sides, but it's not active on the chain and there's no, it's not slated for any network upgrade. Alio is working really heavily. So another privacy project on shielded stables and moves. We see how things go, but like my focus is not on Zcash shielded assets. Our company's focus is not on Zcash shielded assets. We're focused on driving adoptions there.
56:54Vlad CosteaYeah. Something else that I heard is that this idea for shielded assets was being promoted in a time when Zcash was in a bear market. And it also had this identity crisis trying to basically get more users with something that apparently had a lot of market traction, meaning stablecoins. Right now, it doesn't make as much sense when the asset is in much more demand, but we shall see.
57:23Josh SwihartYeah, that's exactly right. There was a lot of that kind of conversation and debate is like, look, in some of that debate, there was debate around smart contracts. Should Zcash be programmable? Should we have these other assets? Why not try it? Because like at the time, there wasn't a lot of attention on Zcash and the price was way, way down. And so people, some people had that kind of perspective that we needed that kind of market attention by enabling that capability. But there's some people that still want it today.
57:55Vlad CosteaSo, I'm going to ask this question right here, which is rather long, which shouldn't take too long to read and answer. But after this one, Josh is going to reveal the number that he picked from 1 to 100. So this is your last chance to pick a number in the chat and participate in this lottery where you can win 0.1 Zcash, which is like $40, I think, right now. So do that. So the question is, it's more of a statement first and then the question. But I got to give you some feedback.
58:30I'm running ZODL right now on my phone and it's getting very hot. Like I'm keeping ZODL on. Wow. OK. It's so hot. I'm actually afraid it might blow up. If someone wants to kill me. It'd be great entertainment.
58:44Josh SwihartIt'd be great entertainment.
58:45Vlad CosteaThat's how I get a million views. OK, so he or she is saying, I am a new user and love Zcash, thinking to increase my holdings significantly over time. As a non-technical person, I understand the privacy in the incoming and shielding phase. But if when I want to actually spend my holdings in Zcash, I have to cross over to the non-shielded territory. So where is the privacy angle here? Am I missing something?
59:13Josh SwihartOh, it's a great question. So we answered this a little bit before. But if you are spending from if you have shielded Zcash, nobody except you can see your balance, nobody except you can see your transaction history. If you swap out to USDC, a non-shielded asset, a transparent asset, you can see that that swap occurred. But again, with the transparent, you can see you can see the whole kind of transaction history of those transparent chains. You can see what the person's balance was. Maybe they've created multiple wallets or multiple accounts or done things to try to obfuscate it.
59:52But that heuristic analysis can also be done. So there's these companies that will be able to look at these addresses and say with a high probability that this is the person and this is what they're doing. And this is how they spent their money. And you can't do that within the shielded pool. That capability is just completely hidden. So if you spend the money, you remain private. Even if your counterparty who accepts the payment on the other side is not private. Your balance, your transaction history is all private.
1:00:19Ideally, everybody just accepts Zcash and everything stays within the shielded pool and everybody stays private. But you can stay private regardless of what your counterparty wants to receive.
1:00:34Vlad CosteaI think we should also explain what a transaction looks like when it's shielded to shielded or shielded to unshielded. When it's shielded to shielded, you can only see within the shielded pool that a transaction happened. But you don't know the amount. You don't know the sender or the receiver. You just know that this gets counted as one transaction that took place. Could be any amount that's inside of the shielded pool. You can make lots of assumptions, but your odds of guessing are like one in billions. In shielded to unshielded, you can see the amount that leaves the shielded pool.
1:01:15It looks like you have this large pool of, let's say, millions of Zcash right now, which withdraws, let's say, one that you used for paying for, I don't know, what's like $400, your fancy shoes. So, if you did make that purchase, you're gonna see that one less Zcash is part of this pool. It went into this transparent address. It can be further tracked, like if the receiver is gonna do something with it on the unshielded side, or the transparent side, then you can actually track it and get more information.
1:01:51But if it gets shielded once again, it's very difficult to track anything. If it's a legal business, it doesn't really matter if it's shielded or unshielded, because if you're ordering something online, you're gonna give like a shipping address, a name, an email, like all of the data that's required for the business to take place, and the shop will have to store it according to the laws of the jurisdiction where it's based. So, it's like this. To a degree, if you're buying something from a shop online and you're ordering it, it doesn't really matter if it's shielded or unshielded.
1:02:28It does matter for you, because you're not revealing how many coins you actually have in your wallet, but for the shop, it makes no difference.
1:02:40That's a good explanation. I did my best, but I've been thinking about this for a while. Anyway, could you please show your number to the camera?
1:02:55Drum roll. Can you see it? No, not really. Oh, you disappeared. Oh, that was a magic trick, I understand.
1:03:05Josh SwihartOh, yeah, you have my background. Can you see it now?
1:03:09Vlad CosteaNo. I guess you need to hold it close to your face. Oh, yeah, yeah. I still cannot distinguish it. No. You just want me to tell you? Oh, it's 23. Yeah, it's 23. Okay, let's see. So, if someone says 23 right now, it doesn't count. Let's see if anyone guessed it. Tyler wrote 99, I think, so I don't think that Tyler is the winner. There's a 25, which is the closest so far. There's a 21.
1:03:49Did anyone guess 23? 24, so this guy ripped me a good one. It's the closest right now with 24.
1:04:02I'm scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. 17, 79, 22. So, we have a situation where there's a 22 and a 24 by Nakamoto666.
1:04:16Come on, I believe in you, maybe there's a 23. No 23 as far as I can tell. No 23? So, I guess we should choose whether or not there's going to be one or two winners. And if we get both 24 and 22 since they're in the middle. Oh, there's another 22. No, it's the same guy, sorry. So, there's 22 and 24. Do you want to choose a winner from the two or should I give the award to both? I think they got both. I think you got to give the award to both.
1:04:57I can split it, I guess, or... Yeah, you split it. Like, nobody had it exactly. I can ask the sponsor to give the remaining 40 bucks.
1:05:08Yeah, Nakamoto666, you did win. One way to do this is to put your Zcash address, preferably shielded, in your YouTube description. Like, in the description of your YouTube channel and I'm going to find that and send it to you. And the other person, I mentioned the name, the 24 one. Where was it? Rip me a good one. You do the same. Put your Zcash address in, yeah, they're both in the chat. Put your Zcash address in your description for your account on YouTube and I'll handle this after the show.
1:05:45Thank you all for participating. I hope you had some fun and I hope you're not going to drop out now that I announced the winner. That was not the only reason why you were here. If that's the case, I'll be depressed.
1:06:00And that's fine, that's life. Anyway, are there any other questions? I see that someone just sent one. It's loading. What do both of you think about the mixing of the fiat system with the crypto system in the form of crypto, Visa and Mastercards? Do you think it's naive to desire direct payments via ZEC in stores by rogue hashrate? I think he's referring to these debit cards that you can use to spend your coins.
1:06:35Josh SwihartYeah, do you want to answer first? Do you want me to answer first?
1:06:38Vlad CosteaI think that's like a way of admitting that you lost the battle. I don't
1:06:45Josh Swihartthink so. You do? Why do you think that?
1:06:48Vlad CosteaIf you look, for example, at the response that Satoshi gave to the person who said that Bitcoin doesn't scale, and this was back in November of 2008. And Satoshi said, well, you can scale this to Visa's transaction throughput, and he was referring to Bitcoin. And for a long time, the point of this technology was to replace banks and create this parallel system. And then you sort of embed the system inside of the machine that you are trying to compete against. I mean, it doesn't feel much like winning.
1:07:27For some people, it's convenient, of course, because you can make payments. But I don't know, it feels like we lost the battle if we just accept this. And I know that there's this Gemini card that gives you ZEC for spending money with your card. I'm just a Puritan when it comes to this. I'm not a big fan of banks.
1:07:52Josh SwihartI think so. For me, it's a little bit of a means to an end. So, you know, I believe we're building the parallel financial system. The reality is that you, in order to use this parallel financial system, while the rest of the world comes along, you've got these edges. You need to be able to get in and out of fiat. It's why we have exchanges. I don't like having a KYC. But for some people, that's the mechanism for onboarding. It's the same with onboarding. I mean, an exchange is essentially a bank.
1:08:25It's just the same. And so, to the extent, you know, as we kind of build up this whole parallel financial structure, where we can completely live inside that network state, for lack of a better term, we've still got to kind of be able to cross over into the traditional financial system. If it becomes the means, then I think we've lost. I think you're spot on. But there's a part of me that's like, it's pragmatism in saying that the end goal isn't to have debit cards that are managed by Visa and KYC in order to spend your Zcash.
1:09:13That's not the goal. But it does make it easier for some people in some places where it's just not feasible yet to completely live outside the traditional system.
1:09:28Vlad CosteaYeah. To me, the whole point is to create a parallel economy and an alternative to the banks. And if we become too entwined and we give too much leverage to the money printer to control us, I've already seen what's been happening to Bitcoin and the fact that we can't even get a meaningful, harmless upgrade via soft work because there are financial interests which are much greater. And you even see people like Adam Back who has all the cypherpunk credentials, but he will say stuff like, well, we don't want to do that because it's going to scare away the people who invested a lot of money into this project.
1:10:11And that's when I sort of lose interest in having this conversation. It feels tiresome. And I wouldn't want to see the same. The whole point, and I think Russell Brick made it very well during his speech last year at the Las Vegas Bitcoin Conference, is that altcoins are part of the decentralization. When something appears to be captured and gets very big, you can have something which is going to take up some of the use cases or experiment with the technology that maybe could not make it to the largest of the beehives.
1:10:47And Zcash is contributing to this. I think Zcash is building a very nice bridge between... mainstream finance and privacy. It's normalizing the fact that privacy is used by everyday people and is desired. I think this narrative that AI has pushed the need for privacy is very good, because it's also true. Like, you put an address from Bitcoin or Ethereum or something into Clod or ChatGPT and you're gonna get a lot of information that otherwise would take you like 30 minutes to look up on a blockchain explorer.
1:11:22Like, click a lot and make some assumptions, but you just ask the right question, you're gonna be able to get a lot of interesting information. And I also believe that in chapter 10 of the Bitcoin whitepaper where Satoshi described privacy, he was just being a bit naive, but also hopeful, because that was the best technology that he had at the time. Like, everyone doesn't reuse the same address for receiving transactions. I mean, it's good enough for a while. But I do believe that privacy was all along an aspiration of the project.
1:12:00Even if some people downplay it nowadays and they say, well, Satoshi didn't want real privacy, he just wanted you to use different addresses. So, the fact that we have new research and new math that can be used is a net benefit for the entire space. And if we have it, we should use it, because that's the only way that we can actually win. If we just tap our cards and larp on Twitter about new technology and being sovereign or whatever, it's really not gonna happen. And I feel ashamed of myself sometimes, because I know all the stuff that I've said about Bitcoin to other people in the past, and it hasn't played out that way.
1:12:46And I do hope that eventually we're gonna get to that point where it becomes like the global money or whatever. So far, it just seems that we created this stock or digital gold or whatever, which is only used for making more US dollars. But otherwise, it's not very powerful, doesn't have teeth anymore.
1:13:11Josh SwihartYeah, I think that the path, I think it's been co-opted. I thought it's been co-opted for a long time. You could kind of see it coming. Even the conversations I've had with on the policy regulatory side, you know, there's two paths to kill an asset or something like that or a threat. One is you just outright try to ban it and you say you can't do it. But Bitcoin is too big to ban, so what do you do? You co-opt it. When you co-opt it, then you take control in your traditional financial kind of boxes.
1:13:40And then it becomes your asset. And it's not an asset that's the people's anymore. It's not a network. It's the people's anymore. And financial incentives are the biggest trap. Everybody wants to be able to, regardless of where you kind of sit financially, right? It's like everybody wants to kind of take care of their family and do better and save for their retirement. And, you know, and it became the meme was the laser eyes and the orange coin going up and all of that kind of things, which gets very excited.
1:14:11And it speaks to somebody, you know, something being deeply primal within us about, you know, what, in terms of meeting our needs. And so the incentives are there to create the capture. And we willingly go along with the capture because of money. And we're not in our own self-interest. And so you can see that happening. And that's going to be the challenge for any of these projects is to be kind of staying true to the ethos and what is it we're actually trying to do and actually trying to not make everybody rich.
1:14:43We're actually trying to free the world.
1:14:47But it gets very, very difficult when people start making real money.
1:14:53Vlad CosteaI've been thinking about this because it seems like now that Zcash has gotten bigger, there are more miners, which is really cool. For a while, I know that there was a proposal to switch to a hybrid proof of stake system. I'm not sure if that one is still in place or maybe one day it will happen. There are more stakeholders, which means you have people like Mert who come from the Solana world. And he has different expectations about what Zcash should be, which are, I think, more in line with the store of value narrative than payments or whatever.
1:15:26He wants it to be useful for savings and for private savings inside of the shielded pools. So that's one category of new users, because I don't think previously people wanted to save in Zcash. Now suddenly they do want because the price seems to be going up. And I wanted to ask you, what is the mechanism that prevents Zcash from being co-opted just like Bitcoin?
1:15:57Josh SwihartIt's a good question. I think one of the big things, one of the things that's happened over the last couple of years is some of the decentralization of voices and the ability to, I mean, ultimately governance happens at a fork, right? And so at any time, any particular group could fork Zcash and add kind of whatever capability that it wants. I think there's a decentralization in the developers as we've seen coming together around Ironwood upgrade. There's things that all the developers agree on, like this Ironwood upgrade.
1:16:39There's things that they disagree on that may be related to payments versus proof of stake versus proof of work, payments versus store value. And so there's some people that really want to spend and it's all about a medium of exchange. And there are people that say, no, it's a scarce asset. It's a really store of value. I really don't care personally. We do have some of the financialization things coming in, right? So good friends with the Winklevoss twins and what they're doing with Cypherpunk and with the DAT.
1:17:16But it's much more than a DAT, right? So they're looking at heavily investing in the ecosystem because they believe in the underlying asset and they believe in the ideology and what this means in terms of being a free people with agency. DCG is, you know, through Grayscale, is offering financial products, right? So people can get exposure to Zcash and their 401k. That's great. That's great for some people. That's not what I'm building for and that's not what we're building for. And so we'll continue to like not ossify the chain.
1:17:51And I think it's important not to ossify the chain to continue to evolve it so that it is if, you know, if these different folks can express an opinion through code and we kind of keep the ethos moving forward versus like it all has to be right here and it will never change. And the only way that it's going to continue to grow is if we get more money and the only way that we get more money is we get institutional players to come in and then you get the kind of Michael Saylor situation.
1:18:26It's just a very different ethos in the Zcash community than I think it has been in the Bitcoin community for some years.
1:18:35Vlad CosteaWell, yeah, but I think the argument is social and it's good to build culture. But on the other hand, it's also much better to build systems that are much more difficult to co-op. And of course, when you're listed on exchanges and you have to deal with financial institutions, you're going to pervert the incentives and maybe stall progress just because the numbers going up and people feel like this is a good metric for the network being useful or in demand and working as designed. But I feel like honestly, Zcash has done a good job improving over time and not becoming complacent, not saying we're already the best in our class and we should stop improving or thinking about what comes next.
1:19:25And yeah, there is actually a very good question in the chat from someone named Paul Marr ZK. He hasn't sent a shielded note, but I think the question is good enough to be addressed. He says, will there be further efforts to deepen Zcash's decentralization, such as moving away from the Zcash trademark agreement? If so, what would be the next step?
1:19:47Josh SwihartYeah, so that was something is Paul, right, Paul ZK or something like that. So we talked about a little bit at the beginning is that I believe that we needed for the government's changes. So one of the things I did very early on when I came back as the CEO of ECC was to kill the trademark agreement. So ECC backed out. You can still get that old blog posts on the Zcash Forum or ElectricCoin.co still has the old blog posts up there. So we killed the trademark agreement and then the Zcash Foundation agreed to continue to hold the trademark to use it to enforce against scammers or something like that, that might try to use the Zcash name to bilk other people, but not use it to enforce any kind of governance.
1:20:35So that has gone away. And by doing that, we opened the door to like more voices being able to be involved in the governance process. So now the Zcash Foundation does its polling, ZecHub does polling, we now have coinholder polling. So. There's some other I think the engineers on the last one got together, all the core engineers across various worlds kind of did their own poll in order to gauge sentiment. And so already we're seeing that decentralization. When Zcash was born, basically the only organization that was working on Zcash was Electric Coin Company, it was then called the Zcash Company.
1:21:12Since then, now we have the Zcash Foundation, we have Shielded Labs, we have Tachyon, we now have the Valor Group, which recently got engaged with the protocol over the course of last year. And more and more developers are entering the ecosystem, contributing. There's also Cypherpunk
1:21:31Vlad CosteaInc. or something.
1:21:33Josh SwihartYes, so Cypherpunk is a new org, but they're not doing core development. But those organizations I mentioned are all now core developers when it used to be just one. And now it's many, which creates other kind of coordination problems, for sure. But that's good. And there are more and more people have been entering since we kind of broke apart that governance structure that was there.
1:22:05Vlad CosteaYeah, it's really cool because in Bitcoin we have Blockstream, we have Chaincode, we have a couple more of these large development companies that hire developers and get them on payroll. For a while it was MIT until the Epstein scandal sort of put an end to that. And yeah, there are lots of different developers with different incentives and we like to see that this makes it decentralized. And the developers, I think there are even developers paid by exchanges directly. Because they have their own interest to maybe do some upgrades or make sure that everything operates correctly and they pay their own person.
1:22:53Did you have similar involvement from exchanges in Zcash offering you money or mining pools deciding that it's important for good developers to work on the core code? I'm not sure if it's called Zcash Core. I think the node software is called Zebra, but you get what I mean.
1:23:13Josh SwihartYeah, the legacy consensus node, zcashd, that's still what majority of nodes run. The foundation released a new version of zebrad, new Rust based consensus node. That's where we're all moving to. And so our plan is to deprecate zcashd as quickly as possible and move everybody to zebrad so that will happen, the intention is for that to happen by the end of July roughly with Ironwood. But to answer your question, no, we have never received any funding from exchanges. We have not received any money from mining pools. Nobody's even asked or offered.
1:24:01For the longest time, even just kind of getting some of them to weigh in on opinions on governance things, they just haven't. In some cases, it's policy that they don't. And so there's nothing like that within Zcash.
1:24:18Vlad CosteaBut I do remember that the Winklevoss twins sent some money to, I think, Shielded Labs when it got created. Was it from an exchange or was it just from a large holder who does it on a personal level?
1:24:36Josh SwihartI don't want to speak for Shielded Labs. I mean, so Shielded Labs was stood up, Swiss based nonprofit, to engage in certain projects. And they got some donations from, I think it's all various people, but I'm not 100% sure. So they would need to answer that question. But I think it's from the individuals.
1:25:03Vlad CosteaYou are now the CEO of ZODL or ZODL. I'm not sure what people actually refer to it as, but it's the Zcash Open Development Lab. Okay. The first question is, why was it necessary for ZODL to break away from ECC, which is the electric coin company? The second question is, you said that this is going to be a for-profit company. What is the business model behind it? How can it work as a for-profit?
1:25:37Josh SwihartYeah. So to answer the first question, there was a time, so towards, you know, when Zcash really started taking off, I landed in, I was going to token 2049 in Singapore. I was actually on the plane, I think, when Deval tweeted something like, Bitcoin's a hedge against US dollar, Zcash's a hedge against Bitcoin. And the price is really starting to move. I saw that on the plane. And by the time I had landed, I had a request to get in touch with Balaji, who was running a network state conference adjacent to token 2049.
1:26:17And Balaji asked me to speak. He also asked me to go to speak and then come out to visit the network school, which is his project just off of Singapore. And went out to visit, was talking to him. And the long story short is he said, look, Zcash is one of the most important projects in the world, not just one of the most important projects in crypto. Do you have enough funding for the season that's coming? Because things are going to get geopolitically, things are going to be very difficult.
1:26:56He's got his kind of predictions about what will happen. He's been very vocal on Twitter. And he's like, we are going to need Zcash. And I said, no, we're not. We have less than a year's worth of runway. Our team size is probably 30 to 50% understaffed, just based on the demand to date. And he's like, well, we need to build a coalition. I'll help you do that. And so that started the process of raising funds, raising money. So we started that in earnest, the fundraising in November.
1:27:34It came at odds with certain members of the board of directors at Bootstrap. Bootstrap was a 501c3 and electric coin companies wholly owned by that 501c3. There was a lot of inner turmoil and disagreement about the direction of things. And then they took some unfortunate actions that made it impossible for the team to stay. And so very quickly, over a period of less than a week, my team is very good at mobilizing very quickly together, as we've seen this last week and that week. Within a week had created a new company.
1:28:22Everybody had moved over. 100% of the team at ECC had moved to Zcash Open Development Lab. There was a lot of chaos as people were trying to figure out what was going on in terms of the crypto Twitter. So there's some crypto and we couldn't talk about a lot about it at the time. But it was a move that was forced, ultimately, by that board of directors. And so we had to fork the company. So that's what we did. In terms of its business model, we currently charge 50 basis points on the swap within the wallet.
1:28:58So we're not profitable right now, but we do generate revenue. There's more services and capabilities that we can add that users want that are willing to pay for. And we'll continue to add those into the wallet and into the financial infrastructure, decentralized financial infrastructure that we're building. So the product and the set of products will be more than they are today.
1:29:25Vlad CosteaI see that you even have a referral code inside of the ZODL wallet for the hardware wallet that's called Keystone, which is compatible with the Orchard pool, if I am not mistaken. That's right. And also have one of these promo codes. So if you use BTCTKVR, you're not giving money to ZODL, you're giving that 5% to me. But support these guys. Like, how much is 5% of like $100? It's like $5.
1:29:57Josh SwihartWell, yeah, it's 50 basis points. So like on $100, we would make 50 cents.
1:30:05Vlad CosteaNo, but I mean for the promo code. Oh, for them. Yeah, for the promo code. I don't even know. I don't
1:30:09Josh Swihartknow what we're getting on that promo code.
1:30:13Vlad CosteaI'm not sure how much Keystone costs, but... It's a couple hundred dollars. Okay, so you make 10 bucks for every Keystone that gets sold with promo code ZODL. Use that if you want to put your Zcash on a hardware wallet.
1:30:30You will also have something here which is called, and I'm not advertising or trying to promote the competition or whatever, but I've received this one. It's called the Passport by Foundation Devices. It looks sort of like an HTC phone from 2010 or something. And what's cool about it is that they have an open source app store. So you can deploy your own wallet or application on it. And I know that the Cake Wallet guys are trying to bring cake to this one, which means that there's going to be...
1:31:01Zcash also. But I think you can also bring ZODL to this device. I'm not sure what it takes, what the specific hardware is, and whether or not this is powerful enough. But I guess we can look into
1:31:15Josh Swihartit. Yeah. And then some of the work is actually done by the mobile phone. So Keystone is air gapped. And so the device does some of the work, and then kind of the signing or the creation of the proof happens on the phone. But I'll have to check that one out.
1:31:41Vlad CosteaI remember meeting the Trezor guys last year. I think it was in October or November when they launched. I actually have this on my desk. Just a second. I have too many hardware wallets that I honestly don't use. I mean, I just test them. And then I'm like, okay, what should I do with this one? So the Trezor, I think it's called safe seven. It's somewhere. Oh, found it. Trezor safe seven. They launched this one. And I've asked the Trezor people if they're going to list shielded Zcash.
1:32:16And they said that they previously supported this with their model T. But it was one of the previous shielded pools. And that's not true. It's not true?
1:32:26Josh SwihartNope, it's not true. They started work, they actually had a grant from the Zcash community grants to build shielded support. And then I believe what happened was that the person, the primary person that was working on it, left the company. And then the work stopped. So it was never, they were working on implementation, but it was never finished, never supported.
1:32:57Vlad CosteaThis is a really nice device that they launched last year. And I think, so I spoke with Stick. Stick is Pavol, he's the co-founder. And he told me that in the past, the hardware for the Trezor was not powerful enough to do all the hashing that is required by the Zcash cryptography to sign transactions. And that now maybe they finally have the right specs for it. And maybe it's useful. I'm not sure how many of these were sold, but I suppose a few thousands of them.
1:33:29And there's a user base already. Could be interesting to look into. But I also know that Slush, the creator of the first Bitcoin mining pool, Slushpool, and also the co-creator of Trezor, found out about Bitcoin from Zooko, actually. There was an internal email that Zooko sent to his Tahoe. I'm not sure how you pronounce that. Tahoe. Yeah,
1:33:57Josh SwihartTahoe-LAFS. File sharing system. LAFS, yeah. And I think Slush was working for Tahoe-LAFS at the time. And he saw that Zooko sent an email that said, hey, try this Bitcoin thing. It's really cool. Internet money, whatever. And what happened next is that this guy Slush discovered Bitcoin. I think it was 2010. And then he started
1:34:22Vlad Costeamining and he was thinking about ways to mine collaboratively to get more rewards. And that's how he launched the first pool. It's a really nice story. And much of the development that's happening in Prague right now surrounding Bitcoin stuff is mostly owed to the fact that they had the mining pool very early on.
1:34:45Josh SwihartYeah, I didn't know that part of Slush's history.
1:34:48Vlad CosteaThat's also why I guess Slushpool was supporting Zcash when it first launched.
1:34:55I think they changed ownership. It's called Braiins and they don't mine Zcash anymore. Or at least not yet. Maybe they're going to change their minds.
1:35:06Josh SwihartYeah, I don't think they do. I don't recognize the name.
1:35:09Vlad CosteaBut what I want to tell you is that I did an interview with Summer Meng, who is the main distributor for Bitmain ASIC miners in North America and Europe. And I've asked her about ASICs for Zcash. And she said that the demand is so high that you cannot find them anymore. They've been pre-ordered a long time ago. It's very hard to get your hands on one.
1:35:35Josh SwihartYeah, I think there was a shipment out to some people just this last month. I haven't looked too closely. I think the hashrate is sitting at an all-time high. But I think there's much bigger shipments that are scheduled for later in the year than everything is already spoken for. I
1:35:56Vlad Costeathink it's encouraging. But at the same time, I was thinking of ways this could be commodified. In the Bitcoin space, you have all of these people who take chips from older ASIC miners and they repurpose them into smaller machines that can be used for running them in the background at home. And maybe something similar could be done with Zcash. Like to make a box that you just plug to the wall, you put the Ethernet cable or you connect with Wi-Fi. And then you're going to be able to mine from your home.
1:36:27This makes the network more decentralized and gives people a greater purpose of participating. And I was also thinking of ways maybe. So I've started syncing a node with zebrad and I've added lightwalletd on top of it to be able to connect my phone to that. And I was thinking, why isn't this like an app that you just double click and it installs everything. You don't have to worry about installing Docker or something like this.
1:36:57Josh SwihartI think that will come. I think that's just a matter of time.
1:37:00Vlad CosteaYeah, like now it's so easy. You can vibe code it, I guess, but I don't think anyone will trust that it needs proper auditing.
1:37:10Josh SwihartYeah, I think some of those building blocks or some of those pieces will get packaged up here pretty quick, I think, and then made available.
1:37:21Vlad CosteaI got another shielded note from someone. I'm not sure if this is useful, but he paid for this message. So he says, or she says, can I still message you, sir Vlad? Bad emoji, vampire emoji. And like this laughing text like, mwahahaha. So I had to do it. Sorry. And I don't think there are any more questions. I have more questions. If you still have the time for it, you have to run because I see your answers becoming more brief, which usually means that you're getting close to saying, Oh, I have to go.
1:38:00Josh SwihartWe're I mean, we're getting near we're getting near that time, but we're not there yet. We've got a few more minutes.
1:38:05Vlad CosteaOkay. So behind the scenes, I see a lot of narratives that are being shaped around the events in Zcash. And I do have to say over the last year there's been a lot of progress, which meant also some divorces like the fact that you had to leave the ECC behind. First of all, what's going to be the role of the electric coin company going forward? Because I think they still, if I'm not mistaken, they still collect 25% of every block reward. No.
1:38:37Josh SwihartSo yeah. So the electric coin company and then it's starting to cut you off in the middle. Do you want to finish or? It's fine. Go ahead. Okay. So the electric coin company is we reached a settlement with Bootstrap after the departure. And in the settlement, part of that was that ECC would be formally wound down. There weren't any employees left, right? Everybody, everybody had left to go to ZODL. So the employees are all here. ECC is being wound down as an entity. Bootstrap still has their board of directors.
1:39:14I don't know what they're going to do with the assets that are remaining. Zero idea. They're not really active and they haven't historically been active in the Zcash community or that active for years. So they don't currently. So the other thing that happened with the governance changes, I talked about some perverse incentives associated with having our address baked into the chain. So I rejected any new dev funds coming to the electric coin company. So basically there was a development fund. There was an initial thing called the founder's reward for the first four years.
1:39:56For the second four years, there was something called the dev fund of which ECC received about 12%. I have this right. The community grant was about 5% and then the foundation was like 8% of the block rewards. That's not quite right, but basically that kind of math in there. So after that time, after that four years, the dev fund was going to go away. So that was November of 24. And the default was, well, the orgs will just continue to receive funding as part of this dev fund.
1:40:40And I said, we will not. So I didn't think for a public good, it was appropriate for any organization's addresses to be baked in the chain, nor to be guaranteed funding. So ECC stopped receiving direct funding and then became reliant on residual capital, plus the anticipation that we could apply for grants. And that all the Dev Fund, the Dev Fund would continue, but it goes into a, or 12% of it goes into what's called a lockbox. And then coin holders can vote retroactively to give grants to people that make contributions or organizations that make significant contributions to the Zcash community.
1:41:28And so our intention was to, and we did apply for grants. It was awarded by the coin holders, but it was never dispersed to ECC because the disbursement was to have happened kind of in that time where we forked the company. And then there was some debate as to whether or not, where that money should go. So the government's funding, everything like that has been, is much more decentralized. There's no guaranteed funding for anybody. And ECC functionally does not exist. And as an org, it's just some legal, I think, process that they need to finish up to formally wind everything down.
1:42:11Vlad CosteaYeah. Also want to ask you, what do you think about ZNS, which is Zcash naming service? It's sort of a knockoff of ENS, which is the way to buy domains on Ethereum. I think the main difference is that this is going to be shielded. So you cannot see how much money there is inside of an address. But at the same time, it does encourage people to reuse their address. So do you think that's fine?
1:42:39Josh SwihartSo I haven't looked enough at the security guarantees of ZNS. It's similar with the map and it's just been not out of desire, but just because of time. So the concern always is what privacy is being leaked and the decisions that are being made in terms of that. If it's not rotating a unified address, I don't think it's that big a deal. There's some benefits, but before commenting on it, I would like to be able to take a closer look. I think that the idea of having a user friendly address that I can send to so I know that I've got Vlad in my address book or I don't know.
1:43:25I don't have Vlad in my address book, but I want to send Vlad some Zcash so I can look it up on another service and I know that it's going to get to him. The conspiracy theory is like I've actually
1:43:38Vlad Costearan for, what's it called, the community grants, I think, last winter. And I lost the election and the conspiracy theories were amazing. Like, I couldn't make this up. I don't think Claude in its latest iteration could make that up. It's amazing.
1:43:57Josh SwihartPeople are creative. Yeah. So yeah, I will spend some more time with it, but I don't have a strong opinion on it right now.
1:44:05Vlad CosteaPeople are now looking at my nose and they're saying it looks Jewish. My grandma was Greek, okay? That's where I got my hair. Yeah. Anyway, it's crazy. There are no more shielded notes as far as I can tell. But I do want to ask you, how does it feel behind the scenes when you see all of this FUD and you get accused of being the Zionist coin and there's this conspiracy of Barry Silbert and Naval and the Winklevoss twins. And they say, well, of course, the price only pumps on this one exchange owned by the Winklevoss twins.
1:44:41And then you look at the volume on Gemini and you see it's like less than 1% of the daily volume. And it's crazy, right? It's so easy to dispel most of this FUD with just facts, but it's tiresome at the same time. And I think you're doing a great job ignoring and just focusing on the signal. I used to enjoy your weekly updates when or before there was actually this split that you had to leave the electric coin company. It was very motivational, like you were using sports and literature and history to describe what's going on.
1:45:18And I hope that you're going to keep going with this because it's really amazing.
1:45:22Josh SwihartThat's good. I'm glad you read them. I have been going with them. I pushed one out last weekend. That was a bit about the behind the scenes and what happened with the discovery, the vulnerability and what took place. I had missed the week before because of we were in the middle of that and I just didn't have the time to sit down and write. But but I get it out most weeks on sometime between Friday and Sunday night. Just depends on what I got going on. But I'm glad you're reading them.
1:45:55Hopefully you'll read them again.
1:45:57Vlad CosteaI will keep reading them because they're entertaining and insightful. But let's close the interview with this conversation about the bug that was disclosed. Why was it necessary for this to be so public? Like you could have patched it quietly and try to downplay the effects like a lot of the industry does. I think lots of players in the industry would have just fixed it and say it was just routine, whatever. Because once you revealed that this happened, you raised suspicions. You made people say, well, this looks centralized because they were able to coordinate a soft fork with the miners so easily.
1:46:40And it made the price go down. So do you think honesty is worth the price always?
1:46:51Josh SwihartYeah, I think transparency I think transparency is worth the price. I mean, the nature of what we're building, the weird thing here is it eroded some trust in the shielded pool. Because people are not sure if there was an exploit because they can't see inside. But it increased the trust of the teams, I think. Now I saw some of the FUD, generally it kind of depends on where it's coming from and the substance of it. If it's just like a misunderstanding or things like that. Or if it's a valid criticism, like fine, bring the valid criticisms.
1:47:33Like we should be criticized and accountable. It's right for people to ask these questions. Like was it hard to coordinate with various mining pools? It would be completely honest about what we did and how it worked. But to be fair, I was surprised at how quickly we were able to move. And in some ways how slow things had to move on the back end. We're talking to various groups and pools and exchanges and people running infrastructure 24 hours a day for multiple days. And back and forth and trying to coordinate.
1:48:13So there was a coordination effort, for sure, with a very small group of people. Those relationships weren't new.
1:48:21So I knew the head of viaBTC. I just met with her out in Miami not long before. I know the head of the Foundry. We've got groups set up with all of these mining pools. In some cases I had to do video verification, liveliness, am I compromised, things like that that various people require. So it was a monumental effort and trying to keep everything like only disclose the information that needs to be disclosed to the right person at the right time. So we're operating very securely over the period of days.
1:48:58And then when it's done and we've responsibly disclosed and notified other projects that may be using the same technology that this exists, then we can provide full disclosure back out to the broader community of what the issue was and what we're doing kind of moving forward. I think that should be the gold standard for how decentralized protocols and their teams work.
1:49:24Vlad CosteaAnd once again, it reminds me of the 2013 Bitcoin hard fork, which was an accident. But it led to a lot of coordination that made people wonder if the project is centralized. Because all the mining pools were basically in an IRC chat saying let's roll back to the previous version of the software because there was this error with the database client that was changed. And I think at the time Vitalik wrote an article in Bitcoin Magazine. It was 2013. He was still the editor-in-chief of Bitcoin Magazine.
1:50:00And he criticized the centralization of it, like how fast the actors were able to coordinate to hard fork. And it was only a few months later that he announced Ethereum. So maybe that in his mind he had already moved on by that point and he felt disillusioned with Bitcoin. Even though I know for a fact that he still likes Bitcoin. But this is the reason why I think sometimes that Zcash feels like Bitcoin in 2013. Like there are events and there are some of these mistakes that happened along the way that remind me of the early days of Bitcoin.
1:50:39And it's really nice. Not the mistakes, but the fact that stuff is happening.
1:50:46Josh SwihartStuff is happening, staying very true. It's our mission. What we want to get accomplished. We've been doing this for a decade now. Zcash will be 10 years old this year. Same people that were involved very early on. A lot of those same people are here in spite of the ups and downs, the bears and the bulls and just grinding. And we'll continue to grind. It's our objective. Our objective is still to get second hands of billions of people.
1:51:21Vlad CosteaSpeaking of billions, when is the Tachyon upgrade coming? And also, what about Ironwood? What's different about it? And I understand it's coming next month.
1:51:32Josh SwihartSo Ironwood is the next shielded pool, is the name of the next shielded pool. It is Orchard. But with so — current Orchard is patched — it is being formally verified, though. So traditionally, these circuits, the kind of the underlying cryptography, the circuits are hand checked, they're hand checked by lots of people and lots of auditors and things like that. Because they've been too to difficult to use formal verification or computers to do the verification, but that's changed. So it's being formally verified so that people can have more confidence in the pool.
1:52:14And then so that the target for that is mid to end of July. Based on a conversation I had this morning with some developers, we're way ahead of schedule and things are moving along really well. There's already test nets that are up and available. And then Tachyon is the next big one. So the circuit, the underlying circuit is radically simplified with Tachyon. The assumptions are much simpler. That will also be formally verified. What the exact timeline is, I don't want to speculate, but it's months. But the Tachyon team is working on that.
1:52:58And then as soon as it's ready, then we'll do another upgrade to Tachyon.
1:53:04Vlad CosteaBefore I let you go, I just want to thank the 1000 plus people who tuned in during this live stream on Twitter and YouTube. You guys are awesome. I hope it wasn't just for the giveaway. And I want to ask you, Josh, I've done this with Sean Bowe. And I think someone else that doesn't come to my mind right now. But would you be willing to do the Zcash dance, which is like this?
1:53:30Josh SwihartIt's going to end up being a meme on YouTube. That's the way it should be. Or on Twitter. Alright, I don't even know, like, what am I doing? I don't know.
1:53:38Vlad CosteaYou put your hands like this and you just flex sideways. I just go like this. It's not very visible, unfortunately. Yeah. It's fine. It's this dance that I did when the price hit $97 and people were making fun of me saying, ha ha ha. You're like signaling the top and whatever. Well, I hope you sleep well at night.
1:54:06Josh SwihartAll right. Thanks for having me on. Thank
1:54:08Vlad Costeayou, Josh. And for people wanting to follow Josh, he is jswihart, S-W-I-H-A-R-T, on Twitter. And also follow his new company, which is called ZODL, and the projects. Thank you very much. We'll see you in the next one. Hope in 20 months you'll be, I don't know, in the top five on CoinMarketCap. We'll get there. All right. Take care.
