S17 E3: Zano Devs on Private Tokenization

0:47Vlad CosteaHello there and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. This is Season 17, Episode 3. We are live with the two core developers, like the main core developers of the Zano project, which is something very interesting because Roger Ver has been promoting it for a long time. He first mentioned it on the show like two years ago when he was on and he seemed very bullish about it. And now, I think the last time he actually did an interview, he was saying that he is once again bullish on Bitcoin because you can totally tokenize it with privacy on Zano.

1:19And I've become intrigued with the idea. And part of the reason why we're doing this today is also that I've asked Tyler Spalding about Zano. And the way in which I described it in my conversation with Tyler Spalding was that it's a fork of Monero and you guys got angry at me. And you wanted to get the record straight. We're here. We're discussing. We're not going to do any PR marketing. We're just going to throw punches if necessary. And what else? Yeah. The two guests are Val and Andrey, who, as I said, are the core developers of Zano.

1:54Val wrote the brilliant research paper behind the whole tokenizing everything with privacy project. I think it's called Zarcanum or something. And Andrey is also well known in the space. He worked with Nicolas van Saberhagen and he created what was it called? Bytecoin.

2:19Andrey SabelnikovBytecoin. Yeah, Bytecoin. CryptoNote, the base. Yeah.

2:22Vlad CosteaWhich you're still using right now for Zano.

2:26Andrey SabelnikovI prefer to call it CryptoNote because Bytecoin is associated with a project which has a very negative association and it makes a lot of sense, I agree, with the negative feelings about Bytecoin. And the CryptoNote is technology and I'm the one who was in charge of technology. So I prefer to call it CryptoNote.

2:48Vlad CosteaOkay. But for the people who are not aware, what's wrong with Bytecoin?

2:53Andrey SabelnikovThe way it was launched, it didn't felt fair for majority of community who was observing it. And it wasn't felt fair for me, myself. That's why I left it right after it was launched to do my own thing. So, yeah, association with the Bytecoin is very negative both from my perspective and from the perspective of majority of the privacy coins community, I guess.

3:31Vlad CosteaOkay, fair. So for the people who don't know, Monero is basically a fork of Bytecoin. It's a community fork of something that had like 80% premine and people were not happy about it. So they launched Monero, which doesn't have a premine, but it has like a turbo mine. In the first year, I think a large chunk of the supply was mined. They don't like it when you say this to them, but it's fine. That's why we're here on the Internet fighting strangers.

4:02So what are you guys working on? You are the core developers of Zano, but what is it that you're really building here?

4:14Andrey SabelnikovWe want to answer this because...

4:16Vlad CosteaI mean, you're the first one to speak, so go ahead.

4:23Andrey SabelnikovWe work on many things, actually. We have strategic directions that we're trying to focus on, and we're constantly distracted with ongoing problems that pop up here and there always, constantly. Especially during last year, we started to get more and more integrations and it brought some problems we didn't know existed. And we're constantly finding some problems that were like some time ago or new problems. And we also have an Immunefi bug bounty program. And this is another thing that causes a lot of distractions and actually a lot of AI agents working, trying to get to us through the Immunefi.

5:12And, you know, the reality for blockchain developers or for whoever building something that requires security, I changed it because of AI tools became insanely smart and when they use this collective power of all AI tools, they try to penetrate the security of the project. It's put a lot of stress on us and we work with Immunefi and we are pretty happy with them, but we have a lot of reports coming from this side also that's also distracting us a lot. So there is a few things going on in parallel, which we actually don't like, because me and Val, we prefer to focus on something, especially if it's like a rocket science part of it.

5:59We have to do research. But in reality, we slow it down by a lot of these distracting factors. But if you speak of strategic actions, we have two directions right now. My interaction is a new consensus that we've been working for the last year and a half, I think. And we're also trying to figure out how to integrate full-chain membership proofs, which is Val's piece of cake. So that's the major directions. And we also have to improve the privacy problems on the network layer that was discovered in 2035.

6:44And we did a few steps to mitigate this, like I said, quick fix, just to not expose our stakers. But a more fundamental decision is also our concern and we are trying to address it. The best we can do. But we are just a few guys at the core team, so it's really, really hard to focus on everything at the moment.

7:18It's just lack of manpower. But I think it's a problem for many blockchain projects. I've been watching other projects, even Monero, the big project, but they also say that they have a lack of hands and I think it's a problem for everyone.

7:41Vlad CosteaOkay, what about you, Valeriy? What are you building?

7:46Valeriy PisarkovWell, from the inception in Zano, I was just a developer. And we met with Andrey at the company that actually started the project that is now called CryptoNote and Bytecoin. But I was in different departments and I was doing different things, just internal products. And so that's how I became familiar. And later, like a few years later, Andrey invited me to join the project. And at the beginning, I was just a developer because we have lots of stuff to do. And because this was a proof of stake implemented on top of CryptoNote, that idea that was implemented and designed by Andrey.

8:45And later we started developing more and more, building projects and moving forward. And at some point, we decided that we need to catch up with the modern privacy tech. And this privacy tech is hidden amounts in CryptoNote transactions. So that's what Monero did when they forked CryptoNote and started improving. At some point, they did this and it's extremely good. I think it's a huge milestone in the history of the cryptocurrency. And so at some point, we decided that we need to catch up.

9:34We implemented this, but at that point, we already had proof of stake and hybrid consensus, proof of work and proof of stake.

9:43And it was a challenge for us because in that model of proof of stake that we actually used, you need to disclose the amount, the stake amount when you publish a staked block. Because the more amount you have staked, the more probable that you will find actually a block. And that's why... That's why we started to find out how it could be done. And eventually this task was unexpectedly difficult for me because it looks like it's not very difficult, but actually it was very difficult.

10:32And by the end of the day, we came up with a technology that's called Zarcanum and koe, who at that time was core developer at Monero and a brilliant mind behind the Seraphis protocol.

10:47He helped us with the comments and I invited him to join the work, the paper, and we came up with the paper. After the paper, we presented it at MoneroCon and Monerotopia, I think. Yeah, it was both conferences. And after that, we implemented it in Zano. We started looking forward for other things. We came up with the idea of confidential assets, so you can transfer arbitrary assets in the transaction in an anonymous way. So it's not clear which amount is being transferred and not clear what type of assets are being transferred and even how many different assets are being transferred in a single transaction.

11:37So it's indistinguishable, basically. And after that, we decided to implement this. And it was another huge challenge for us because we needed to support the previous tech that we already have. And at that point, it was a hybrid consensus and Zarcanum. And so now we have this running in the mainnet and it works okay. So we still have a long list of tasks to do and we are looking forward to improve privacy and to improve consensus as well. Similarly, it's like a never-ending story of improvements.

12:25So, yeah, that's basically where we are at that point and what I'm doing. My position in the project, I'm a lead researcher, so I'm doing math mainly.

12:40Vlad CosteaThat sounds nice. You guys mentioned an incident that happened last year. And I remember very clearly I was attending BTC Prague and I met a bunch of Monero guys there. And they're like, ha ha ha, you idiot, you bought some Zano and I saw you tweeting about it and it's dead. It got owned. The privacy is broken. It's going to zero. Sell before it goes to zero. I was like, what are you talking about? And it was exactly what you mentioned, that basically the stakers were not private.

13:11And some Monero guys who are very passionate for some reason about Zano, they decided to look into this. And they realized basically what are the top addresses that receive staking rewards. And because of this incident, because the whales got sort of exposed, even though you don't know who they are, you can only see their IP address and their actual blockchain address.

13:40Andrey SabelnikovYou cannot see the blockchain address. You couldn't see this. They were using a rate of the block generated from some of the IP addresses. And even before we were giving a recommendation how to properly configure if you're doing staking, that you should hide your external IP address. And after this, we created a more comprehensive guide how to not get exposed in terms of IP addresses. But yeah, of course, people who hate Zano, who hate us, use this opportunity to attack us.

14:34And the whole thing was planned because we have an open bug bounty program for a quite long time.

14:43And there are people who are actually researchers who are trying to do research and they get paid and they found some problems. But those were the attacks. There were not ethical researchers, there were some people who just basically created an attack on Zano and just hurt the project, which is totally fine. The blockchain industry is quite a wild thing. That's what makes it actually strong because there's no regulations and it's wild west. I think it's fine. And yeah, we just had a really a wave of hate related to this. But I think we addressed this problem with a few manuals, how to not get your IP exposed.

15:34But we are coming with a more fundamental solution at some point, probably next year, I think.

15:44Valeriy PisarkovWell, I think we need to clarify a bit what was the finding and what the attack was about. So it's not about the math, not about the anonymity and the privacy that is actually in the math protocol and in how anonymous proof-of-stake called Zarcanum works. It's just behind the network level because if you're staking your coins and you produce blocks, the number of blocks that actually you are able to produce per time period depends heavily on the amount of coins you've been staking.

16:32Because if you have like 10 Zano and you have 1 million Zano, you will get proportionally more blocks for that.

16:45And just looking at how many blocks a certain IP address is generated, you can guess, not exactly, but you can just guess more or less accurately about what stake is being staked behind this IP address. If all the stake is accumulated in one place, just calculate the number of blocks. So it's not about the math, it's about how the network is working and how blocks are propagating and about hiding the IP addresses behind the nodes being connected to the network, which is a separate issue. And we totally agree that it should be addressed and we addressed it in a hotfix way right now, but we have plans to try to address it in a more clever way to mitigate all this.

17:41But yeah, I just would like to emphasize that the math is still working and uncompromised, but the reality in which you're sending from your actual IP address and someone can say, oh, I see you find the 10 blocks of Zano today, so I can guess how many coins you have. So that's how actually they did it.

18:10Vlad CosteaOkay, I guess this is part of the reason why it's more delicate and complicated to have privacy with Proof-of-Stake. In Proof-of-Work, there was a lot more work, to call it so. I Disagree with this.

18:28Andrey SabelnikovI mean, you just don't have this habit to keep Proof-of-Work blocks private. But it's also, I mean, if you look from the decentralization perspective of Proof-of-Work, it should be also private. You should know where all the mining facilities are located or controlled by this IP address because it creates a threat. But it's traditionally a blind spot for the older projects. And even, I think, Monero maxis realized that Proof-of-Work itself is not that it's more private. It's just a blind spot.

19:10People are just assuming, okay, we have a Proof-of-Work. We don't care which IP it's coming from. But, I mean, if you look into this, from this perspective, it also matters a lot. So it was just nobody bothered about the Proof-of-Work part. Also, pool addresses are public. Everybody knows who is running pool addresses because they have an infrastructure open for the miners who use Stratum protocol.

19:40Vlad CosteaOkay, but let's take this to Zano. You have a hybrid Proof-of-Work, Proof-of-Stake system. And my question is, which one of them has better privacy? The miner who gets the fresh coins via Proof-of-Work or the staker who gets the coins from basically staking?

19:57Andrey SabelnikovProof-of -Work miners have zero privacy at all. They expose IP addresses. The pool that controls the hash rate, its IP addresses are exposed. They have zero privacy. They just don't think it's a problem, probably. But if we answer the way you asked the question, Proof-of-Work have zero privacy.

20:22Vlad CosteaOkay, but if they're mining using a VPN from their own home and they're not using a pool, isn't that pretty private?

20:30Andrey SabelnikovIf you use VPN, yeah, but it's the same for the staking. If you use VPN, it's fine. But actually, the way you asked, hold on, let me rephrase it. The problems that you actually brought is more deep and more layered because, as I said, we recently spent a lot of time working on the pure Proof-of-Stake protocol and we tried to address these privacy things from different angles. For Proof-of-Stake, there is also a problem for that actually, even if you don't have a direct link, the rate of the blocks that are generated, it's actually itself some sort of information that can actually reveal something and we were actually putting a lot of efforts to solve this problem as well.

21:27Yes, I agree that this, at some extension, Proof-of-Stake introduces more risks, even on the math level, even if you don't speak on the level of network propagation of the blocks or transactions. But the situation on the math level is way better in Zano right now and it will be also better with the new Proof-of-Stake protocol. I believe it will be better in terms of our math or statistical analysis related to blockchain itself and it's a fair point that network privacy in Zano should be improved and we agreed with this, we agreed.

22:16It's not at this scale that it was presented by some Zano haters probably, but we admit that we have to work on this and we will address this in the future. Also from the perspective of the protocol on the blockchain level, Proof-of-Stake is way more complicated and it creates more complications and we also look into this. So far, I believe that the new proposal is coming. We solved this pretty good on a pretty good level and we'll ask a third-party company to do the analysis, what kind of information is possible to extract, just looking into the blockchain, just looking into the outputs and all these details that you see on-chain.

23:06Vlad CosteaOkay, fair. So, let me ask the question that basically is the reason why we're doing this interview. What would you say are the differences between Zano and Monero

23:26Andrey SabelnikovAnd why isn't Zano a fork of Monero, as I mistakenly said?

23:26First of all, Zano has never been a fork of Monero. We don't have any lines, any code taken from Monero and it's opposite. I think most of the people who know the history know this, that Monero is a fork of something that had been created by me ages ago and it's just not fair, calling Zano. We are very similar projects, but calling someone a fork of another implies that we just copy and paste what they have and use it without, which is opposite. We created the whole foundation, the whole 11 years of my work was building this whole thing myself with my own hands and with Val's hands from the ground and it's just not fair calling Zano a fork of something.

24:12It's true that it shares a lot of technology, but if someone who is familiar with Zano code base, it's also actually, you can see that there are so many differences at this point that Zano is so different from Monero code base. Even Luke Parker some time ago was messaging, I think, to Val or to you or to me, someone, he was saying, why is Zano code base so different from Monero code base? He was surprising that we haven't touched so many things developed in a different way.

24:48And yeah, it's just a different project that lives in the same universe of technologies available to create privacy and to create consensus and we use something that was invented by Monero researchers, Val can comment on this more. It's true, we never hide this, but even if we use something that was invented by Monero, we implemented, Val implemented all the cryptography, everything with his own hands, he didn't copy anything. Actually, for very healthy reasons, just to know exactly what we're doing, to understand the full DNA of every component that we put into Zano code base, so it was also the right thing to do.

25:39Val, if you want to comment something on this from your side as well.

25:42Valeriy PisarkovWell, yeah, I would like to say that actually there are some, maybe several lines of code that actually was copied from Monero because it was a fix that was at very early stages with the credits, of course, because we always put credits if something happened. But for the huge things, for instance, ring signature scheme Pedersen commitments, range proofs, we share a lot with Monero, but we diverged at a very early point, and now we have all the technology implemented differently.

26:29But, for instance, Monero, have CLSAG, which is great technology, and it was a kind of ring signature that was invented and suggested in 2019 and at some point in Zano we decided that we need to use good ring signature and we decided to use this technology but eventually we came up with an extension and I wrote a paper that is called d/v-CLSAG because we need to extend the existing technology from the scientific perspective to put it as a paper, as a contribution to the ecosystem. I hope. I don't know. But this is my hope.

27:15And after that, we use it in Zano, we implemented it, I suppose, differently. Because we have few hands here and we really, really need to understand very well what we are doing and the needs of understanding our own code base is enormous. So we actually applied to understand fully what we are doing. And that's why this work is going fully in-house, so we maybe incorporate ideas, maybe we like, convert it to something new.

28:02And then we implement ourselves to make sure that we fully understand what we are doing. And if something went wrong, it's not on ours. But if something went good, it's also ours.

28:17Vlad CosteaOkay, let me spice this up a bit. So my next question is why do Monero bros say that Zano was a scam? And maybe that you need to process what I just said, you need to think of a good answer. Let me plug a couple of sponsors in between your answers and my question. And then I'll just let you address this directly. I'll start with Braiins, which is the oldest Bitcoin company around. They started around 2010 as the first mining pool called bitcoin.cz and then they became Slush pool and then they rebranded as Braiins with double I and basically the ad for Braiins right now is that they're gonna launch something big next week it's an announcement of an announcement and they wanted me to really present this so, props to Christian from Braiins for wanting to make the announcement of the announcement.

29:12Keep your eyes closed, follow Braiins on social media. I think they're on Twitter and Facebook and whatever, and Instagram. And make sure that you catch, not tomorrow, but next week's big announcement, because it's gonna be a game changer for proof-of-work mining in general. It's really big. I know what it is, but I'm not gonna tell you what. And also, I'm gonna plug Bitcoin.com News, which is a very good place to read news even about Zano, if you type Zano in their search box, you're gonna see that they covered a lot of the development that happened. And what I usually like about them is that they're more balanced than their competition, where Bitcoin magazine is too political nowadays and CoinDesk is too institutional.

29:58Bitcoin.com News is more... In the middle, they also cover community news. They also cover lots of projects you don't hear about. They cover gold sometimes and geopolitics, and it's just a good place to find some balanced journalism. And they're no longer the website that tells you to use Bitcoin cash because it's faster and it's cheaper than Bitcoin. So check it out, it's news.bitcoin.com and I'll do another one, LayerTwo Labs, if they do succeed, we're gonna have a Zano sidechain on Bitcoin, no offense guys, but the point of this is to create a sidechain for every interesting altcoin out there. And what it takes for this to actually happen on Bitcoin is BIP-300 for drivechains which is still being discussed it's still controversial.

30:45Maybe that Litecoin will do it first that there's a conversation around this. But basically, I think it's the best way to pay the proof-of-work miners in Bitcoin because the security budget issue is gonna become real in a few years, miners are not gonna be profitable anymore, so they do need to find a new source of revenue. And securing these sidechains to collect the transaction fees seems to be a pretty sustainable model for them. And today, if you want to try Drivechains, you can go to layer2labs.com slash download. They have all the software for sidechains. They have a sidechain of Ethereum. They have a sidechain of Zcash, they have a sidechain of Namecoin, and they have a lot of interesting stuff that you can run on the Bitcoin Signet today.

31:33So check it out. It's layer2labs.com slash download. And now Andrey and Val, let's talk about this controversial question. Why Zano is scammy in the eyes of the Monero people and why do you think it's not a scam?

31:50Andrey SabelnikovI think you have to ask them why they think it's scam, not us, the people who make the claim.

31:56Vlad CosteaI mean, just for context, you were on a debate on Monerotopia with some Monero guys and you're trying to defend Zano to explain why it's not a scam, so I think you know what they're saying.

32:10Andrey SabelnikovI mean, I was never, you mean, on the Monerotopia show, I mean, the guy was making the claims that he was contradicting even himself, he was saying that if Zano will burn the fees, starts to burn the fees, he changes the emission. So I don't like Zano and I said, okay, Monero changed the emission model. Are you stopping like Monero and he said, no, they didn't. I said, no, they did. After one year, they changed, put this tail emission, which is actually a good thing, but they changed the emission. And he was like, no. When it comes to Monero it's a different standard applied to Monero. So that's what I got from this. The guy came just to attack project.

32:55I think I can comment on this. You have to ask these people why they think it's a scam, I don't care actually much about what they think. But what we noticed is Zano getting more traction, we get more hate no matter what we do, it doesn't matter. And I feel that some of the Monero maxis, not everyone, but some of the Monero maxis are getting threatened because existence of Zano kind of breaks the narrative that they push. And we kind of break the monopoly of Monero on this unique technology because everyone else, if they are fork of Monero is like superior in any way because they built.

33:41But we are a unique project and we built everything we built with our hands and we are rooted to the legacy of this technology. And because of this, I think a lot of Monero maxis feel that if Zano will be successful and will be growing and more and more. It will create a threat to Monero in terms of just success. I mean, at some point, maybe flip Monero on the market cap or something, if we will be like super successful. And I think this, is the reason that's the main reason why we get attacked because most of the attacks are absolutely unreasonable. Just hate in our direction for like whatever reason they come up with.

34:30And I'm not saying everyone, Monero has a really great people on board as well. And they may be, some people may still dislike Zano but they see our point, they see, agree to disagree and still act respectfully. And there is a people in Monero who like us as well as the project. Maybe they don't agree with the direction we go or don't understand that, but they see us as a legit project as well. But mainly I think that's because of the some sort of fear. I think that's the same reason why Ricardo was attacking me wildly at the very beginning of the Monero history.

35:16That's still the same reason, it's still here. That's my comment.

35:21Vlad CosteaBy Ricardo, you mean Fluffy Pony? Yes. Wasn't he saying that you're tied to the Russian mafia or something?

35:27Andrey SabelnikovHe was saying many things, he was saying that I'm criminal, tied to the Russian mafia, at the time i'm a botnet developer and I'm a spy agent. Also he was saying constantly that I am incompetent and I mean, I don't even remember what I was, I was not reading the Twitter, just some guys from our support was sending me the screenshot and I was like, okay, what I'm not going to Twitter. I'm not going to Reddit, I will be just coding, which was absolutely stupid back in this time and that's why I didn't make it through it. But yeah, I think that's what was happening

36:15Vlad CosteaOkay, Val do you have an answer for this claim that Zano is a scam?

36:21Valeriy PisarkovWell, I don't have any better answer because it's a bold statement and mainly because I'm a technician, I'm not a marketing and not a Twitter warrior, so it's not my field. I was never actually challenged by this type of question in, for instance, conferences and when within my interactions with Monero developers. I have very pleasant experience and I'm really grateful for them for support and for being able to discuss interesting things and to share interesting ideas.

37:08It was very very meaningful and was very good for us and for our projects, so to me, these claims live in different universes, I never see it actually. So some people in Twitter say something. So yeah, we see it every day. But I don't take it seriously.

37:37Vlad CosteaOkay so I'll play the devil's advocate in this situation and present the two main reasons why Monero bros will say that Zano is a scam. The first one has to do with Boolberry which was your project on which you worked and they say that you sort of abandoned that one to start Zano and they think that you'll do the same with Zano, just move on, pivot into something else.

37:59Andrey SabelnikovThat's how it makes Zano scam, if I'm not abandoned yet, when I abandon it then it will be a scam, it's not a scam yet.

38:06Vlad CosteaI don't know, I'm just presenting the arguments here.

38:09Andrey SabelnikovYeah I don't understand this argument because I mean there's a lot of people who was in charge of Monero but then they left and then other people in charge of Monero but they left in charge and other people. How it makes Monero scam? I don't think so it's maybe if I will like somehow abuse the project and take all the money in the future and walk away with this, that's going to be a scam. Yeah I agree with this but I think someone stole the money from Monero Foundation a year ago man there's a there's a people who are scammers.

38:50Vlad CosteaWait, which foundation because they say they don't have such an entity?

38:55Andrey SabelnikovNot foundation, there was a dev fund or something that was Monero donating money for development and at some point the money was stolen, I think it was a couple of years ago or a year ago, but then some of the donators donated more money and it was okay. I don't remember exact story but I felt bad at this time because I mean it put the project at risk and at the stress of developers who don't have funds for the future which is like a sad situation. But anyway the comment is Zano a scam because in the future I will scam, it doesn't make Zano a scam, Zano become a scam if I scam everyone.

39:36Vlad CosteaOkay but what happened to Boolberry?

39:40Andrey SabelnikovThe Boolberry failed, I failed at this project. It's true, that's a fair point and also I think even if we speak about scam I did my best to take the holders of Boolberry and make them to get them profited from Zano and because we did the coin swap. So you cannot call it a scam also and I don't think there was, I don't know if any other developers were doing this, they stopped working on the project, there was a burnout or something that stopped working on the project but then they found a way to create another project and created the coin swap from old projects.

40:29I don't think it looks like a scam to me at least.

40:33Vlad CosteaI think I've read some Monero guys complaining that the time frame in which you could exchange your Boolberry tokens for Zano was very short and they sort of claimed that only insiders could actually do the swap.

40:48Andrey SabelnikovOne month, it's not short, one month I think it's enough but the problem was that we couldn't get Zano listed on any exchanges without a clear supply explanation and while the swap is not over yet, we couldn't show what is the supply of the future of the project. We have to conclude it. There was a lot of people saying that we have to make it faster and we have to like stand and say okay at least a month we should do this, don't let everyone process all the transactions.

41:26And after the swap was over, we burned the leftovers, the something that was not left, and then we went to exchanges to get first listings. That was the reason. I agree that there is an opinion that was fair or not fair, right decision, but that was at the beginning, the way we operated the project, there is nothing... I mean, what is scamming about this because we were transparent about this all the time since the beginning. We did our effort to make our supporters who supported my work a few years ago to profit from the new project who wanted and we did our best to do this, to make this happen.

42:18Vlad CosteaOkay, fair. But the other reason why Monero bros. Will say that Zano is a scam is that you guys had a premine and some of the coins from that premine you're still using them to stake.

42:31Andrey SabelnikovAbsolutely, Yes, and we will be using them for stake. Of course, I don't see how it's a scam.

42:36Vlad CosteaThey say they had the pure launch and they never had any sort of premine.

42:41Andrey SabelnikovYeah, because they never did the launch. The launch was done by another guy. They didn't have to choose, so you cannot say that they decided to have a fair launch. They were giving this fork and they were using what they have. Also, my point is it's absolutely wrong. It's completely wrong what is happening because what's happening in a project like Monero, they also have a struggle to raise the money for the development, for ongoing or whatever they do, and they do a lot of stuff. But from the position of those people, it's fair that the biggest holders of Monero are just giving the money for this and others are not.

43:29So you have a few holders who care about the project and donate their own money, but there are also big holders who just lay back and see how other people contribute and build something. There's something profiting from this. I don't think it's fair that some of the people give and others are just profiting from this. And I know there are a lot of generous donators in the Monero community. I don't understand why we or whoever else should spend his own money to build Monero and other guys just profiting from this.

44:09I don't think it's fair. I think premine is a very fair way to fund the project because it comes from emission, which is basically from the pocket of every single holder of the project. And it's kind of a fair model. I don't think, I probably do not believe in socialism or something. That makes me feel it's not realistic, but I think it's not fair to build a project on donations. And exploit some good people's feelings and other people are just profiting from this, sitting in the shadows.

44:48Vlad CosteaDo you have any opinion on this?

44:50Valeriy PisarkovWell, to be honest, it's not my piece of cake, it's economics. And this is the area that I'm really not very interested in. So I was there in Zano when these things happened, but I was too focused on the technical stuff. So I just agree what Andrey said. Because that's to me how things work. And I'm sorry, I can't add something substantial to this.

45:27Andrey SabelnikovI can comment a little bit more on this. And I don't think those people who are staying and saying that Zano is a scam because of the premine actually think this way. Because we've seen a lot of people who believe the premine, who was saying this also support Tari or other projects with the premine. So it's just a matter to find an excuse to blame Zano in something. It's been so many times we've seen this. So I don't believe in this argument that it comes from the beliefs of the person.

46:03It's just used as an argument, as an excuse to blame Zano or something.

46:11Vlad CosteaYeah, but sort of Tari is from the inner circle, right? They look the other way. They could rug pull all of their users or whatever, they would still act like, oh, it wasn't such a big deal because it comes from Fluffy Pony. And they sort of embraced Tari and they were fans of it before it even launched. And they were announcing it like seven years ago or eight years ago, which is a long time. Took them a while to build it.

46:40Andrey SabelnikovYeah, I mean, that's what I was saying that they have a, it's not the matter of the fact that they bring and the argument that they make. It's a matter of the blame, to put the blame on the project that they hate. So I don't think this should be taken seriously as a premine thing. It's just something that they tried to attack on our project.

47:04Vlad CosteaWell, yeah, but I guess that's the lowest hanging fruit. If you find something that you perceive as a competitor, you're just going to appeal to virtue. Because that's the easiest way to get people to feel negatively about something. You say, well, they're not pure, they have their premine.

47:23Andrey SabelnikovThat's actually what happens a lot in most of the blockchain projects, especially big ones. People are getting tribal a lot and they get involved in the tribal wars, especially if they invested money and have a stake in the game. So they are getting very polarized. And then what happens, doesn't matter what your project has, even if you don't understand it, you defend whatever your project has. And if, for example, if you see the two projects that compete each other, they will look at what is different in those projects and attack it.

48:01It doesn't matter. That's how other projects have been attacked all the way in the industry. That's how tribalism was working in the blockchain. And it's kind of interesting environment, quite aggressive environment, which makes some projects stronger and better. But also because of these tribal wars, the people build identity around some project and put into this identity some of the technical features. They will have problems to improve the project or overcome some problems to see that there is a going evolution in the industry and the projects are moving forward by improving something and getting better.

48:53But the projects who tried to build not only technology, but also ideology and they put whatever they have inside this ideology, inside this identity of the people who follow this project. It creates a trap in the future to hold the project back from the improvements in the future. And Monero was one of the projects that was building really great ideology and they have a great following because they were really good at this. But now it plays a really sad joke with Monero because of the consensus, for example, if we take it.

49:33They've been saying for ages that the proof of work is the only way and they were building this narrative about decentralization, about security, blah, blah, blah, which was false. It was not true from a technical perspective, but to win against other projects, they have to do this ideology thing more and more and more. And now they got in a very complicated situation. Even if, for example, some adults in the room, developers of Monero, will say, okay, we have to do this, guys. We have to change consensus to something better.

50:10We do it. There will be some idiots in the community who will fork Monero and create Monero Classic with the old proof of work and will be chanting the same thing. And that will just basically tear apart the project and split it into two different parts. They will split liquidity, split community. That's going to be a mess. And it's going to be a terrible situation. And I think what should happen now is that they have to start working on changing the narrative and educating Monero community about future changes that Monero has to do.

50:46So to avoid these problems, I don't think it's going to take a few years of this. And I'm not even sure if it's going to work at some point. But it's a big problem. Probably if we look better in ourselves, we probably can find something like that we were saying. Probably we were caught on our instincts to defend something that we do. But we are trying to always reflect and say that whatever we build, we have our goals. We clearly declare our goals, what we are trying to achieve.

51:23And then we're trying to build technology and technology is never perfect. You can always build, improve and do something better. And we're trying to look into other projects, what they do, just to get some ideas.

51:39Vlad CosteaYeah, just for the record, since I asked you this question, your token price went down by like 5 cents. I don't think it's correlated, but it's interesting. I was just checking the price and I noticed, okay, there is like a small dip here. Something happened. People got cold feet, they got scared. Anyway, to finish this introspection into the past, what would you say are the differences between Boolberry? I keep thinking blueberry in my head, but it's Boolberry. And Zano, what are the differences and why do you think that Boolberry failed, as you said?

52:18Andrey SabelnikovI was doing Boolberry alone with zero experience, with a very minimal understanding how, what is the project running actually is. And I was under the impression that I will just do the great coding and everybody will like it. And it will be enough, but running a project, it's a lot of different things. And I just burned out at some point, being alone, being all constantly actually attacked, under constant attack from the Monero tribe. They did a great job on this, actually. I have to admit this.

53:04And that was pretty much it.

53:07And now Zano, that was a project of one person. Zano now is a team of people, great people. Zano has support, strong support of quite successful people in the industry. Roger is very vocal himself, but there are other people that we know are supporting us. And I hope, we still can make a terrible mistake in coding. L1 blockchain is a terrible job. It's really very stressful and it's very risky.

53:58But I think if we're not going to make some fatal mistake on the code base, I think Zano is in a pretty good position.

54:05We've been pursuing our vision, pretty successful. And I think the whole industry started to recognize it. I think a lot of other people are noticing that it's right direction, especially with a secure consensus. I think it's now clear that proof of work is a dead end. So everybody will be looking into proof of stake at some point. I've seen that Zcash was talking about proof of stake. And also, I think we had a really great direction with confidential assets. This is really that people like a lot.

54:49I think we are in a pretty good position. And we've done an amazing job. I mean, I'm not in a position probably to say it's amazing, but we've done a lot of hard work to build the foundation of the future technological success for Zano. But I think Zano is a really great project. And I don't know how to compare it with Boolberry. Boolberry was just a quick fail. That's it.

55:33Vlad CosteaOkay, why do you keep calling it Zana, by the way?

55:38Andrey SabelnikovThat's how we call it between each other. But some people call it Zano.

55:47Yeah, Zano. We never had a strong opinion how it should be called. So what do you call it? Zano?

55:56Zano, yeah. Zano? Mm-hmm. Okay.

56:01Vlad CosteaBut I've heard Aaron Day and Roger call it Zano.

56:07Andrey SabelnikovYeah, they do it this way. And as I said, we don't have a strong opinion how it should be called and how it should be pronounced.

56:17Valeriy PisarkovNo, whatever works for you guys, call it whatever you want.

56:24Vlad CosteaOkay, so I spent basically the first hour boiling you guys, trying to give you crap for the stuff that the Monero guys are saying. I think another reason why I'm intrigued about Zano right now is that you guys have had basically the best wallet support over the last couple of years. You got listed by Cake Wallet, you got listed by Bitcoin.com wallet, you got supported by Edge Wallet. I know that Unstoppable Wallet is working right now to get you guys added. And in spite of all of the support that you had on the wallet side for users to claim self-custody, you didn't get very good exchange support.

57:09There is support on some swapping services, which is really amazing, by the way. But something that I did notice is that you don't really have support from centralized exchanges. I think one of the big ones went down. There was TradeOgre and that one was shut down and a lot of the action was happening on TradeOgre. And right now MEXC is the biggest exchange in terms of volume for Zano. And it seems like your daily volume and I don't want to misquote or misrepresent, so let me actually look at this.

57:45So your daily volume is about 1.5 million dollars right now and about 500,000 dollars, so more than 35% is on MEXC with the USDT pair. And my question is, why do you think that you're not getting listed on more exchanges? And the suggestion that I want to add to this question is that Monero and Zcash went up after they got integrated with NEAR Intents, Hyperliquid and all of these DeFi protocols where people started trading the token because the privacy narrative is so strong that they are happy to trade this.

58:23And it seems like on DeFi, privacy is much more popular than on any of these centralized exchanges.

58:32Andrey SabelnikovWhat is the question? Why we suck at marketing? Sort of.

58:37Vlad CosteaNot just marketing, but exchange listing. I think marketing is good. You guys go to conferences, onboard people, have very good presence on social media.

58:46Andrey SabelnikovWe actually suck at marketing, it's true. We go to conferences because we can go to conferences and speak with the people. That's no problem with this, but marketing is a tricky question. I think about integration, it's better to ask Quinten probably because he's handling integration parts. I don't know, can we put Quinten on the stream to make him comment on this? Is it possible?

59:23Vlad CosteaYeah, he's trying to join right now. I wasn't sure what's happening, what's up with that sound. I will let him join, admit. Now I have to redo the layout for this, so just a second. Hey guys.

59:38Andrey SabelnikovSorry about this.

59:39Vlad CosteaHey, I need to move everything around the screen. Just give me a few seconds to get this right.

59:49So Quinten is here. He's known as Mr. Kwibs within the community, and I'm going to put him in the picture. So my question is, why are you guys not listed on too many exchanges in spite of being listed on pretty much every non-custodial wallet that's popular out there?

1:00:13Quinten van WelzenYeah, it's a very relevant question. And I'd say it's a little bit of a circle that is very hard to get out of, because for many exchange listings, you need certain requirements, such as more volume. But without the big exchanges, you can't get more volume, right? So this is a common issue for us. For example, we've been in touch with KuCoin over the last few weeks to get listed there. And they were actually quite enthusiastic about it. But they have certain stages of getting approved by certain teams within the exchange itself. And we usually run into the same issue always. And what KuCoin gave us is that due to the ring signatures, they cannot list us.

1:00:59So basically due to privacy concerns like for them it's a risk to list privacy assets and then I told them, I said, well, Monero is listed on KuCoin so why can we not get listed? This sounds like a bit of a silly reason and then he said that he couldn't really give me an answer for that, but I already know what the answer is. I know that Monero has a lot of trading volume on KuCoin and KuCoin basically makes a lot of revenue from the trading fees, right?

1:01:30So in case they get sued, they can basically pay their expensive lawyers from all the trading profits, the trading fee profits that they make. In Zano, if we would get listed on KuCoin, we would maybe get, I don't know, a million dollars in daily trading volume there, many more on the tier one exchanges. So, you know, without them, we cannot get much higher volumes. So it's a bit of a circle, which is hard to get out of. But with the upcoming Hard Fork 6 with the gateway addresses, which I would love you guys to touch base on as well.

1:02:07Hopefully integrating Zano, spoiler alert, yeah, will become a lot easier here. So and that circles back to what you mentioned, NEAR Intents, for example, we've been talking with them as well. But at this moment, we lack some technical pieces to get integrated there. But from what I understood, but Andrey and Pavel can tell you all about this, hopefully, it will become a lot easier, hopefully, to get integrated into services like bridges, payment processors, centralized exchanges, maybe even as well, and also decentralized exchanges, because that is actually a part that we would like to focus on a lot in 2026.

1:02:44Because we see it as basically the way out of the situation that we're in, that we have a hard time and struggling to get on more exchanges and getting our volumes up, basically.

1:02:59Vlad CosteaOK, I'm pretty happy with the answer. I do hope that you guys get the DeFi listings on time. And I did see some conversations about having a special kind of addresses for exchanges. What's that about?

1:03:18Andrey SabelnikovThat's something that we want to announce on your stream. So we've been recently, as we got listed, let's say it this way, as we got Zarcanum hard fork, and as people got excited about confidential assets, and we got a lot of interest in integration Zano, and we have a lot of frustrations. We're observing a lot of frustration from the people who wanted to integrate Zano with the integration process and all complexity of the privacy wallet custody.

1:04:04And a lot of companies or projects were just walking away, saying, we cannot do this, guys.

1:04:12We cannot implement or we cannot use a Zano wallet, because nobody knows how to do MPC, like multi-party computation or secure custody for that type of thing. Or it was very expensive to integrate, it was taking a lot of time, and we got a lot of frustration with this. Also, we got a lot of requests from DEX who wanted to integrate us, but they didn't know how to do this. And also, as an experience from the Bridgeless team, they also did some integration of Zano assets, but there are limitations.

1:04:57And so to overcome these limitations, we came up with the idea of gateway addresses, something very similar. It's going to be, we introduce a specific type of address in Zano, which will look pretty much similar to how an Ethereum address looks like. In terms of technology, it's going to be a balance tree address, so you have a balance available immediately, you don't have to synchronize it for a long time. And you can control this wallet in a similar fashion as you control EVM or Solana address or Bitcoin address.

1:05:35And you can use whatever exists in terms of infrastructure in the outer world for secure integration of this type of assets. We can connect, plug Zano into this. And there are some problems also with this related to privacy, and we don't want average users to use this address for a regular basis, because it may poison a little bit the privacy of the regular transactions. So we'll be using this, we'll be making this address expensive, so only some actual entities that integrate Zano can afford this and put it and use it.

1:06:24That's something that we are working on right now, and we're planning to deliver it at the Hard Fork 6 in a couple of months, I think.

1:06:33Maybe Val, do you want to comment on this? Because we're working together with Val on this right now, like literally this week we've been building this.

1:06:44Valeriy PisarkovYeah, I just would like to highlight some features maybe and some decisions behind that. So we have a roadmap on this and we would like to pursue privacy. This is our goal to make everything that has Zano private by default. We would like to do this, but sometimes we need to find some compromises. And we would like to make this feature be convenient for services. So, for instance, if a shop or exchange service or maybe other things they would like to integrate Zano, they can do this more easily.

1:07:40And even they can opt for, how to say it properly, for KYC for instance. For some services it may be important and some services may require this and they may use kind of auditable addresses that we already have in Zano, but they can use these new addresses that will give instant balance and will have open balance for version 0 as we call it. And then we have an idea how we will be improving this and how we will make it more private.

1:08:34In the next version, we would like to make it with hidden balances and with hidden assets inside these addresses.

1:08:42So the external observer can't guess what the address actually contains. But just for the start, we decided to start with open amounts and this is only for services, intended for services. And this privacy feature actually is quite hard to implement because it requires very new math and very difficult. And we need to make sure that every bit of code, every bit of mathematical operation is very well done and there is no risk at all.

1:09:31So that's very important and that's why we decided to split it into milestones and render it this way.

1:09:43So this is what actually will be in the nearest future. And after that, another huge milestone will be going for full-chain membership proof and adopting the ideas that guys are actually developing very actively. And we're watching closely and we're excited about that because this will be another huge milestone for every CryptoNote-based project and we would like to use it as well. But for us, it will be very difficult because we have proof of stake and because we have confidential assets that makes all the math way more complicated.

1:10:37So we have no way just to get in use, we need to reinvent it in-house. So this will be our next milestone.

1:10:49Vlad CosteaRight, so to summarize, you're going to have a hard fork of the network where you're going to add a new address type, you're going to go from hybrid proof-of-work proof-of-stake to only proof-of-stake?

1:11:01Andrey SabelnikovNo, it's going to be with the next hard fork, sorry, it's going to be with the next hard fork. Hard Fork 6 is going to be in a few months and it will introduce new type of addresses that will help to bridge the access, easily integrate Zano and get the confidential assets more accessible over the DeFi infrastructure. Proof-of-stake, pure proof-of-stake, it's a big work, it's a lot of research still ongoing and then it's going to be a lot of coding, then it's going to be test network running and then it's going to be a lot of engineering problems that we have to overcome and then it's going to be main deployment.

1:11:42Valeriy PisarkovYeah, we're actively working on this right now at the parallel track.

1:11:50Vlad CosteaBut you also have the full-chain membership proofs that you're planning to add whenever they're ready.

1:11:55Valeriy PisarkovYeah, it's like its future, so now we're not actively investigating it, we just need to focus on the things that we need to implement and to make first. So this is our goal and we need to make a proper decision right now just to make it align with our future and our goals in the future.

1:12:28Vlad CosteaOkay, so these are basically the three big improvements that people who are interested in Zano should look up to. I was going to ask you about the main use case, which I find interesting, which is bridging Bitcoin and basically having a tokenized version on Bitcoin issued on the Zano blockchain that you can trade with privacy. But before that, let me plug two more sponsors. First of all, I'll go with noones.com, which is an exchange whose CEO is Ray Youssef, and you might be familiar with Ray because he's quite a character.

1:13:03And I think you might be actually interested in listing Zano if you talk to him because he already has Monero on his exchange. He has TON and BNB and a bunch of other coins, which I think are less interesting than Zano is. So you can reach out to him or I can get you in contact if you're interested to talk about potentially having Zano on noones.com. But what it is basically is a peer to peer marketplace where usually people from the global south are trading. So if you decide that you want to register and sign up to trade on noones, you're not just making money on your investment, but you're also giving liquidity to these people who really need it because their fiat currencies are failing and they need to hustle these cryptos on a daily basis to be able to make a living.

1:13:53And I think that's a pretty nice cause, to be honest, like you're going to sell to people who are going to sell it for a premium at some point and you're supporting their struggles. Basically, they're trying to make it out of their system and improve their lives. And it's really beautiful. Most of their users are from Nigeria, from Latin America, from the Middle East. And it's such a cool platform. They also have a spot marketplace. They also have a swapping service. They have a debit card for spending your coins if you're into that.

1:14:27I think they have a lot of stuff, but I come back to this use case of just empowering the global south through the peer to peer marketplace. I think that's really beautiful. Check it out. The URL is noones.com. And last but not least, there is SideShift. I don't think you guys will ever get listed on SideShift because they're very cautious about regulations and they don't want to list any privacy projects, essentially. I think they had Zcash and the Lightning Network, they delisted them.

1:15:24But it's very cool when someone wants to pay you in stablecoins and you don't want to hold stablecoins for reasons which concern the fact that we might still be in a bull market.

1:15:30Or maybe that you're concerned with the fact that stablecoins are not censorship resistant. So Tether or Circle can decide to freeze your address, freeze your funds and make them basically worthless. So the fact that you're not in charge of your funds is good enough of a reason to swap them for free market money like Bitcoin or whatever you might prefer. Ethereum, Litecoin, they have it all unless it has privacy on SideShift. And the URL is sideshift.ai. And they have good liquidity, they have low fees and you can do these swaps.

1:15:54Also, if you think that we reached the top of the market and the prices went the highest that they will be and you want to swap for stablecoins, you can also do that. So check it out. It's sideshift.ai. And thank you to everyone who sat through my ads. Now let's talk about basically what you guys are building here and the fact that you can tokenize Bitcoin. I think that's the interesting use case that I find. I know that you also have a stablecoin now, which is sort of like DAI on Ethereum, algorithmic.

1:16:29Which one do you want to talk about first? Let's discuss what you have.

1:16:35Andrey SabelnikovIt's up to you.

1:16:37Vlad CosteaRight, so bridged Bitcoin. You have something that's called a Confidential Layer that lets people send their Bitcoin through this bridge to tokenize on Zano. How does this work?

1:16:48Andrey SabelnikovIt's not that we have it. We don't have it. Someone built a project that does the bridging. It works pretty much similar as most of the bridges works with distributed custody. I don't know if I have to go into details. I'm quite familiar with the protocol that they use, but I'm not sure if it's worse because most of the bridges, the good ones, work by using shared custody with a shared key. They're using pretty much the same. And we made it possible because we specifically left in Zano a specific plug that was possible to connect the bridges like this.

1:17:36In the form of an asset descriptor operation that could be controlled by trivial keys from a blockchain like Ethereum or Bitcoin. So that's what they use and that's how it works. It's still problematic to bridge the token that was created on the Zano blockchain, to bridge it in the outside world. And that's where the gateway address will be rolled out. It will help to implement this and solve this problem. But basically right now it works because we left a specific plug for this in the asset descriptor operations.

1:18:26I don't know, do I have to go into more details? But I don't have much to say here about this. It's just a technical solution, a technical idea that we had a few years ago when we were just implementing Zarcanum. To make able Zano to host tokens that come from outer world. That's what it is now.

1:18:51Valeriy PisarkovI can highlight overall technical how it works. So we have confidential assets in Zano. So it means that everyone can create their own confidential asset and control their emission. And the transferring of this asset inside the Zano blockchain is anonymous. So you can't see from the outside what assets actually have been transferred.

1:19:20Then we created a technology that Andrey called Ionic Swap. So basically we can construct a transaction that on one side has one pair of assets and on the other side has another pair of assets. The same pair but in different order for different parties. And basically that means that you can in one transaction exchange one asset to another asset in one party in quite an anonymous way. That's really interesting and efficient way to do this. And then external services like can build using this technology can build a bridge on top of this.

1:20:14Andrey mentioned that we at some point we allow controlling the asset you created in Zano. Not only by Zano internal public key cryptography but also using more ECDSA and more familiar for Ethereum-style cryptography as well. And it's much easier to implement for services we suppose. And using these instruments external service can build for instance a bridge or whatever. And yes bridge can utilize technology called for instance multi-party secure computation and to share between many holders this ownership of these assets.

1:21:08So to mitigate the risks and to swap it in a very secure way.

1:21:14So this is highlight like from top view how it works.

1:21:23Vlad CosteaOkay you guys decided I think you had a community vote or something. And right now when you open the Zano node client you're gonna see that you have some assets listed there even if you hold zero of them. You have if I'm not mistaken the bridged Bitcoin, you have the bridged Ethereum and you have the Freedom Dollar.

1:21:51Valeriy PisarkovYeah, that's that's correct.

1:21:54Vlad CosteaBasically the reason why you created this network was for people to be able to build these to be able to bridge other assets into Zano and also create something native to Zano.

1:22:06Andrey SabelnikovAll right. Yeah, but what is the question?

1:22:11Vlad CosteaSo are you involved in any of these directly? Do you work on bridged Bitcoin or on fUSD?

1:22:20Andrey SabelnikovNo, we're not working on this. We are advising the projects because we but we will be helping any project that will be bridging or trying to build a bridge to Zano.

1:22:34The reason why we put it this way right now so you can see it like highlighted in the in the wallet. So we want to show the users that Zano already have assets that they can use assets and they can actually bridge it to the Zano wallet right now. And it already exists and a legitimate project. But later, for example, if you have more bridges, more assets deployed on the Zano network and whitelisted, we'll review this approach. And only if you have coins, you will see the balance on this.

1:23:13Right now, we just want to entertain our community and show them, okay, you see that the magic of confidential assets is already here. See it and enjoy it. That's why it's highlighted right now. But so far, we don't have any other useful, legitimate assets as far as I know on the network. At least no one contacted us and showed something.

1:23:41Valeriy PisarkovI have a Vladcoin.

1:23:44Andrey SabelnikovYeah, I see. But the point of Vladcoin is not whitelisted. Maybe that's what he's trying to ask us.

1:23:54Vlad CosteaThat they have zero Vladcoin because I think I only made like 69 of them.

1:23:59Andrey SabelnikovYeah, but that would be hard to explain to the community what is the use of the Vladcoin, why it's so what is the significance to put it on the wall? Because it's not we decide to whitelist, we're trying to engage with a, I wouldn't say community, we engage with Zano holders, because in Zano, we believe that Zano holders have to have saying in decision making process, because community is tricky as community. You never know, like there is a vocal people who maybe have a much stake in the game.

1:24:33And we want to just give the saying to people who actually own Zano. So that's why it's, we still kind of control what is going on proposal. That's, that's the way it works now.

1:24:52Vlad CosteaYeah, so do you imagine a more decentralized way of deciding which assets are going to get whitelisted? Or do you think it's better to just let people manually whitelist what they think is legit?

1:25:04Andrey SabelnikovFirst of all, it's applicable only for Zano wallet that we, in the scope Zano wallet, for example, Cake Wallet can use their own whitelist and can use their own process. And we actually talked with them explain it how they can do their own whitelist, Edge Wallet can do their own whitelist for Zano by default, or have their own process, how they were listing bitcoin.com wallet, they can do their own wallet. So, yeah, that's applicable only for the Zano wallets itself. And we now we use this as a, as a voting proposed by team.

1:25:50We can consider something more decentralized in the future. Why not? I don't have right now anything on top of, from the top of my head that can be more decentralized and still secured against some hijacking of or introducing fake assets or something.

1:26:09Valeriy PisarkovYeah, I would like to highlight that it's not on the blockchain level, because on the blockchain level, all assets are like the same, there is no good assets or bad assets, it just processes in an anonymous way and like when they're transferring. So, the stuff we are discussing right now is how to show them in the user application, the user interface and whatever service, whatever wallet is doing it can do it in its own way.

1:26:45Vlad CosteaDo you think you could potentially maintain a list like a community list of assets which were issued and people can just whitelist what they find on that list?

1:26:58Andrey SabelnikovIt would be really risky because people, I mean, how, if someone will introduce fake stablecoin and will go scam people, that's why we're trying to secure this against potential frauds. We will have, the more traction Zano will get, the more it will be used, the more attempts to scam we will have. So, that's the main reason why we would be having the whitelist and the process of custom whitelisting is quite, like, we have to make sure the user understands what he does. And when we were trying to come up with a process how we do it, we were looking into how the practice works in, for example, in Ethereum, in a MetaMask wallet or some other wallet.

1:27:47So that's what we used as an example, how we're going to operate this, at least at this time. I mean, we don't mind about decentralization at all, we actually ourselves don't even want to do this whitelisting ourselves. The only thing we care about is to not get into whitelist some malicious tokens, that's it, that's what we care about at all. We don't charge for getting, we never charge anyone for getting into whitelist, this works just as a protection of the users.

1:28:25Vlad CosteaOkay, so you mentioned something about potentially having scammy stablecoins getting issued that will rug users. How do you know that fUSD, the Freedom Dollar, is not a scam?

1:28:37Andrey SabelnikovWe established quite good connection with the team and we've been seeing that they put a lot of effort on actually listing this project. They spent a lot of money on getting Freedom Dollar listed on many exchanges. They maintain a transparent wallet that shows that there is a, how do you call it, in the custody, a backing by a native coin. And we see this as enough effort to consider it as a legitimate, enough, under given circumstances, legitimate enough for Zano to be seen as a legitimate stablecoin.

1:29:29Of course we cannot guarantee anything about this, but that's kind of our opinion also and that there is a reason we brought it to voting and also opinion of the community that it was to be in the whitelisting.

1:29:48Vlad CosteaYeah, the reason why I might be concerned is that they started out with this 10x peg. Basically they were holding 10x the dollar amount of Zano and this peg gradually lowered.

1:30:33And right now, let me take a look on their website, it says right here how much of it they're holding. So the point is to be over collateralized and now they're only 1.54x over collateralized. So that's like 50% more than what their supply is in dollars. Yeah, and they started from like 10x.

1:30:34Quinten van WelzenStill over collateralized.

1:30:34That's because they deposited, I believe, initial 100,000 Zano at the start. Something like that, 10,000, 100,000 Zano and there was only 100,000 fUSD minted at that time. So I think that's why the over collateralization level started off so high. Of course anyone can have their own opinions about how over collateralized it should be. Higher is always better, of course, but I do think that the fact that they are transparent about their collateralization level and also the fact that they stake it, which contributes to network security, but also improves their overall holdings is beneficial for the Freedom model.

1:31:20Vlad CosteaThe reason why I'm asking you about it is that I don't know who is their development team. I don't know who I should talk to to get on my show to ask more questions. I just know that someone from a wallet, which I'm not going to name because this was like a private conversation, told me that they're a bit concerned about this and it sounds shady and they're listing it on their wallet. So it's one of the mobile wallets that actually supports fUSD and he was like, wait a second, this doesn't sound right.

1:31:53Andrey SabelnikovYou said it's another wallet that's listing Zano and considering listing Freedom Dollar?

1:32:00Vlad CosteaNo, they already have it.

1:32:02Andrey SabelnikovOkay. Both. And they're concerned about Freedom Dollar reliability, right?

1:32:08Vlad CosteaYeah, sort of.

1:32:10Andrey SabelnikovYes, I mean it's a healthy concern to have and they have to address it with all level of, let's say, responsibility of the standard that they have in this wallet. So I would suggest to take it very seriously and do the due diligence to see how the reliable assets and if they are put in the white list, it's their decision, I think. But it's a very healthy approach actually to see what are these, how it works behind this, what is behind this, how stable it is, what are the chances that the owner will walk away with all the backed assets.

1:33:01That's a very fair concern, I agree with this.

1:33:05Vlad CosteaYeah, I'm looking at their website right now. They don't list any dev team or whatever. I don't know how you're supposed to contact them. But I'm in principle not a huge fan of stablecoins. I understand that this is a big use case of having tokens and it's cool that basically you can have a stablecoin which supposedly or hopefully is going to always be worth $1, which you can transfer privately, having basically the same privacy primitives of the protocol that backs the Zano network. It's just that there are lots of questions about the reserves, about the policy and the way in which this is handled.

1:33:52If I understand this correctly, for every dollar that gets minted, they have to buy more Zano, so it's supposedly very good for the price of the asset. I guess.

1:34:07Andrey SabelnikovBut I mean, these are very healthy questions and we on our side are also thinking how any stablecoin that was created on the Zano side, how we can improve transparency and how we can improve the reliability of the stablecoin, so people can see how it's backed, how it's operated, what are the machinery behind this. Can you hear me?

1:34:41Vlad CosteaYeah, I can hear you. Sorry, I just got the magazine because there's an article in this one from more than a year ago about the future plans for Zano and I just want to check it out. Mr. Kwibs wrote it.

1:34:55Oh, you're raising your hand because you want to talk?

1:34:57Quinten van WelzenNo, no, it's on the wall here. Look, that's why I was pointing towards it.

1:35:05Vlad CosteaYeah, sorry. So I just want to look here because you have a description of what's next with the Zano network and I just want to see to which extent you guys followed up with your promises.

1:35:20Just ignore. OK, I found it.

1:35:24So you have some mentions of how does Zano achieve privacy? For the people who are curious, you can actually download this PDF for free. It's on bitcoin-takeover.com slash privacy mag. You type that in your browser and you can access the free PDF. I do remember there was a mention of the bridged assets.

1:35:54I just need to find it.

1:35:55Andrey SabelnikovYou know that, right? So the bridged assets are quite transparent about actual custody assets. You can see as much as assets are bridged and wrapped inside Zano, you can see how much are held in the custody of the bridge. It's a little bit different that we speak about Freedom Dollar right now.

1:36:20Vlad CosteaYeah, it says here, so it's the article that was written, if I'm not mistaken, by Mr. Kwibs himself. It says Zano team, but I think it was him who sent it to me. It says to...

1:36:32Quinten van WelzenGo to Gonzalo. Not me, but Gonzalo.

1:36:37Vlad CosteaSo I got to give him credit now. To an outside observer, whether it's Zano itself, ZTH, ZBTC, ZUSD or any other Zano confidential asset, it's simply impossible to determine which specific assets are involved in a transaction. With regard to transaction analysis, they're completely distinguishable. The token identifying information is blinded with commitments in the same way as transaction amounts are. Each new asset contributes to the same anonymity set. That's not a thing to glance over. Could you imagine a pool of privacy as big as ERC-20 itself?

1:37:14So this is basically what's written about Zano at page... I'm going to tell you the page number 56 for those who want to read. It's interesting because you guys foresaw that you're going to have ZTH, which is the Zano tokenized Ethereum, Zano tokenized BTC and ZanoUSD. It was here from, I think this was November of 2024.

1:37:40Andrey SabelnikovBut we don't have a ZanoUSD as far as I know. It's not tokenized inside Zano. We have a Freedom Dollar that is not bridged from outer world. It's created inside, originated in Zano, which is a different story. And that's why it's way more complicated and that's why there is a reasonable question to this. Quinten?

1:38:05Quinten van WelzenYeah, what was written there was, this was written at the time that it was all just still a concept, right? Confidential assets weren't like live on the mainnet, I believe, or they just became live on mainnet. So we already understood that people could use this technology to wrap BTC, maybe stablecoins or ETH. So that's why it says ZBTC or ZETH. Well, now there is Confidential Layer who they named it BTCX and ETHX instead of this name. But also the fact about that all these confidential assets share the same pool for the anonymity set is correct, right?

1:38:46I mean, I think that's a really cool concept. There are some other projects, I believe, that also have confidential assets, but the pools for the tokens are like separate from each other. So then that, of course, hurts the privacy. So I think that's a really cool fact about Zano's confidential asset design that probably should be, you know, getting more spotlight.

1:39:13Vlad CosteaI mean, you sort of envisioned that this was going to happen. It's just that there was no Confidential Layer at the time. And on the topic of Confidential Layer, I did notice that Andrew Tate tweeted about it. I thought it was very odd, like, of all the things I could read from Andrew Tate. He says, your government is tracking your transactions. AI can be used for blockchain analysis. Reclaim your privacy. Use Confidential Layer. Like it sounds so much like an ad. You guys made it.

1:39:44Andrey SabelnikovNo, we didn't make it. Someone did, but we have nothing to do with this. I can promise you this. 100%. Zano team has nothing to do with this. I completely.

1:39:56Vlad CosteaBut what is the relationship between Zano team and Confidential Layer?

1:40:00Andrey SabelnikovWe work together because it's mutually beneficial what we're building when we help them from a technical perspective. But they have a different team working on the Bridgeless project and different background. They build it on the Cosmos chain. We help to make it just consistent from the terms of technology. And we are interested in this because it's the project that will bring real tokens from the real world into the Zano universe. So that's our motivation to help them and to work together.

1:40:43Vlad CosteaCan you explain how the bridge works?

1:40:46Andrey SabelnikovHow the bridge works? Yeah.

1:40:52Well, do you want to explain this?

1:40:55MPC part, you mean?

1:40:57I don't know. The high level or the math level?

1:41:02Valeriy PisarkovI think I covered. So that we have confidential assets on support and we have external server that can connect and can send the transactions through the API. And then on the bridge side, there's a technology called MPC that can allow us to share the responsibility of opening the private key that actually controls the asset that was made in Zano among many participants. So to reduce the risks. So this was a highlight that I made. You can go deeper if you want.

1:41:42Vlad CosteaMPC stands for multi-party computation?

1:41:46Valeriy PisarkovYes, it's multi-party secure computation. It's a technology that is necessary to actually split your private key. Imagine you have a private key that controls your asset you made. So for instance, when Vladcoin on Zano has a private key that controls all the emissions and all the stuff. So now, if we are talking about serious multi-billion projects, we need to mitigate the risks and we need some way to spread this private key ownership among many participants. MPC is a technology that allows to do this.

1:42:28So no one of many participants who are actually involved in this network actually have the whole private key. And at no point in time, these private keys get assembled together. And exist as a real thing. So some malicious actor or malware can copy it and then use it. So it's just non-existent because of the math. And this very complicated math that uses all this multi-party computation to, by the end, make a signature that looks like it was made by this private key.

1:43:15And it can be verified in a very easy way by everyone.

1:43:19For instance, in the Zano network, each node can verify it extremely easily, just a Schnorr signature. So like a similar thing with ECDSA. So that is why this technology is important. It is a very interesting way how to implement it.

1:43:41Andrey SabelnikovI can add a little bit of context of high-level picture of this. So Bridgeless is L1 itself. It's built on Cosmos blockchain toolchain that exists for whoever is trying to build a quickly built blockchain. It's not private, it's L1. And Cosmos has a lot of machinery for building very customly developed blockchains for these specific goals. And bridge itself is L1 that has its own token and its own validators.

1:44:26And its validators are also tailored for some amount of tokens. And these people who bought these tokens and became validators, they became part of this MPC calculation, they became part of this threshold signature generation.

1:44:49And they all together collectively share these pieces of secret key that control the custody of whatever is bridged from one chain to another, are held between all these validators who invested in buying these chunks of tokens. And they became also part of the TSS signature, some of them as far as I know. And they have a tokenomics, they have a profit-sharing model that makes this whole thing profitable. And basically this is how it works. It's another L1 that connects other L1s and makes secure transactions between them.

1:45:41Vlad CosteaAll right, so someone using Bitcoin or Ethereum, sending their coins into the Confidential Layer contract address, how can they be sure that they're going to receive the tokenized asset on Zano? Is there any mechanism for them to verify? To be sure, to verify.

1:45:59Andrey SabelnikovI mean, look into this. There is a set of open source software that guarantees that this is going to happen. So, I mean, theoretically, if I am the one who is trying to do this, I'm trying to send Bitcoin to the one to make sure that it's going to work. I go to the open source, see, okay, this looks legit, maybe even launch my own network, see how it works. And then I send because I believe software is good enough. They have also peer review of, someone did the peer review of the technology that they have and confirmed that it's a legitimate technology.

1:46:43But it's, anyway, it's open source. So how you know that when you send Zano, it will arrive at some point to the other address? You just see it's an open source project and see what other people say, trust opinion leaders, or look at yourself. Oh yeah, but bridges are different.

1:47:02Vlad CosteaLike using an L1, you know that the network is going to do what it's supposed to do. But using a network to basically bridge an asset into another network, I think there's a degree of trust that's required.

1:47:14Andrey SabelnikovNo, no, no, no, no. That's the same. No, it's not a matter of trust. It's a rules, it's a network rules. The way it works, it's encoded in the consensus of Bridgeless. They cannot break it and ignore deposits. Okay, this one we will not transact, we will ignore it. As far as I know, I mean, I'm not, I'm not the building, but if it's not built this way, I mean, it's probably not really, it's something that space for improvement. But the way I understand the bridge, they see the work as a state machine without like options.

1:47:47They have to transact the way other blockchain brought these assets to them. That's my understanding of how the bridge works. I believe every bridge is supposed to work this way. It's not optional. It's just like a core rule of how it's operated.

1:48:09Vlad CosteaCan you imagine a better way to bridge assets into Zano, which is different from what Confidential Layer is doing?

1:48:20Andrey SabelnikovBridge into Zano is actually not that big of a problem. We're already quite happy with what we have with Bridgeless. I mean, we specifically did this plug for this, so it works pretty much good. So whatever assets are supposed to be bridged, for example, Bridgeless, if it was to bridge some assets into Zano, it creates a wrapped asset on Zano's side, basically creating its own asset descriptor. And as more coins are coming, it mints these coins, and if the coins are going back, they burn. So it's quite trivial and high level, and it's good enough.

1:49:10It's really good for the bridging that we have. Bridging outside of Zano for the token that's created inside Zano is more tricky, and it's less convenient, it has more side effects, I would say. But for the bridging, I think it's pretty good right now. The only potential problems we have with Zano is a slower blockchain compared to the modern EVM blockchains or Solana blockchains. I'm not talking about Bitcoin at all, we don't consider it a real blockchain.

1:49:59But Zano is a little bit slower, so you have to wait more for confirmation time, but it's just the nature of the privacy coins, we are slow by nature.

1:50:08At least now, maybe in the future we will fix it, hopefully.

1:50:12Vlad CosteaI've heard some people, and I might be responsible for that myself, comparing Zano to Ethereum, and saying that Zano is sort of like the Ethereum of the privacy coin space. It's not far from true.

1:50:30Andrey SabelnikovIt's not far from true, we're trying to… I was saying it before, I think we have the same goals as Ethereum have probably, to build useful tools. And Ethereum now, as you can see from the latest statements of Vitalik, they also aim to the privacy. So I think we're going to the same point in the future, but Ethereum will come from this EVM, super flexible but very transparent network to some degree of privacy in the future and some degree of functionality there. And we will come from the other side, from privacy, with a smaller level of functionality to a better level of functionality.

1:51:18But we also go to the same direction, we want to build tools that will be really reliable, quick and useful for the real world.

1:51:32Vlad CosteaAssuming that you're going to have a lot of Bitcoin users bridging their BTC into Zano, how much throughput can the Zano network handle and the Confidential Layer bridge?

1:51:46Andrey SabelnikovThe bridge can handle, I think, I believe the bridge. They have also bottlenecks related to TSS signature because it's not that easy to scale it. They work right now on integrating Merkle tree into the sign operation, as far as I know. Zano is kind of slow right now. I have to be honest with this. And even new consensus, where are we going to have it and the way we expect it's going to be way faster blocks. We will have a block every 15 seconds, likely, and it's going to have a really quick confirmation time, really with a high guarantee, it's close to finality in less than a minute.

1:52:36But the TPS itself won't become better because the transaction processing time is still a bottleneck. And because of the nature of the privacy technology, compared to other blockchains, it's relatively slow. So yeah, we are slow, unfortunately.

1:53:01Vlad CosteaDo you think that transitioning to Proof-of-Stake is going to make the network any faster?

1:53:06Andrey SabelnikovIt depends what you call by network. Because there is a wide range of ideas about what is a fast network. We will have a fast confirmation time. That's what we aim for with the new Proof-of-Stake. It's going to be an absolutely winning side. But it doesn't mean that we will have more transactions going through the seconds on the network. We will also have a better situation with the handling spike of transactions because every block will be going more often. We will reduce a little bit the payload of the block.

1:53:45We will reduce the number of transactions every block holds because we have to reduce the latency problems in the network with more often blocks coming.

1:53:56But overall, it will be nearly the same TPS, maybe a little bit better, and it will handle spikes way better. But on the global aspect, TPS will be the same, but the confirmation time will be way faster.

1:54:16Vlad CosteaDo you know how much faster?

1:54:19Andrey SabelnikovYeah, I think my projection is that we will have a block every estimated 15 seconds. And with this new consensus, it's going to be very strong guarantees after three or five blocks already. You will have so much confidence that the transaction is never going to be reordered or the blocks will not be reordered. So you can consider it, confirm it after one or two minutes. And that's why we want to make it the same as modern Proof-of-Stake blockchain works. That's basically the reason why we are doing Proof-of-Stake to make it work like people used to.

1:55:11The best networks in the industry handle transactions. That's what we're trying to do.

1:55:17Vlad CosteaIt does sound a lot like Ethereum right now, to be honest. 15 seconds, three blocks and it's a permanent transaction.

1:55:25Andrey SabelnikovNot only Ethereum, a lot of networks, the best networks work this way. If you can see that what people actually use for the everyday transactions, they use those networks that finalize really quick because it's just useful.

1:55:49Vlad CosteaOkay, so let me ask you this. Zano has been around for as long as my podcast, pretty much. You guys launched in 2019. I also started in 2019, so about seven years old. Where do you see this project in another seven years, given the amounts of research that you've done and the knowledge that you've acquired over the years? Or do you think Zano will still be around in seven years? That's another question.

1:56:16I hope.

1:56:18Andrey SabelnikovI hope it will be around. I mean, everything can happen. I actually hate this type of question because if someone would ask me back in 2019, where is Zano? I wouldn't be able to see the projection that we went right now. And I think we did above my expectations, actually. I wouldn't be that optimistic back in 2019. And I just see that we'll be doing our best to just deliver our vision or something that is really good and do the best project we can do.

1:57:07I probably couldn't have something to say about this.

1:57:12Quinten van WelzenYeah, well, I wanted to add that you're always very honest. And that's great. But I mean, we cannot predict the future, right? But at least the project is in a way better shape and state than it was a couple of years ago. So if we continue that way, I definitely see us still around in seven years. Also the plans that Andrey and Pavel and Val have. I actually doubt that they would actually be able to release all of that in the next seven years. Also, in terms of the amount of work, I think they need at least 10 more years.

1:57:55Andrey SabelnikovYeah, we screw up deadlines often. That's true. It's a fair point.

1:58:00Okay.

1:58:03Vlad CosteaBut the final form of Zano and the way that you envision it is going to have full-chain membership proofs, which gives the sender much better privacy. Right now you have the ring signature. I see.

1:58:15Andrey SabelnikovYeah, I got the question.

1:58:17Vlad CosteaHow many decoys do you have in the ring signatures? Is it also 16?

1:58:23Valeriy Pisarkov15 decoys, so in ring size it's 16, yeah.

1:58:27Andrey SabelnikovI think the strategic goal is to solve the problem of TPS. That's the biggest problem for the most private privacy blockchain and scaling this. I don't believe we will be able to minimize, I don't believe we will be able to significantly decrease the time of processing of transactions because, I mean, likely it's not going to happen, but probably it's going to be the way we can scale or do some sort of sharding or introduce some sort of parallelization that can take or do something else, because this is problem number one.

1:59:15We know how to improve the privacy, we see the direction, we know how to improve the consensus, we see the direction, we actually have a pretty good technology already at our hand. We have actually two technologies for this, as I can leak a little bit of secrets about our research. And that's going to be the direction to improve TPS and introduce something like parallelization or sharding for the privacy, which is super challenging for privacy because it's not that hard for the pseudonymous blockchains like Ethereum or Solana or TON network, but for privacy, it's a lot of problems.

2:00:04Valeriy PisarkovYeah, I would like to add that a fast network and a huge TPS, as we see, nowadays it's often required to be extremely open and sometimes very strong hardware requirements and sometimes very strong limitations on the transaction size, for instance, matching the transaction to the size of the Ethernet block and so on. So all these things are extreme optimization. And I would render, if you ask me about how I see the future, I would answer from only a technology perspective.

2:00:52And to me, this full-chain membership proof will be necessary for privacy to bring up to the level when you don't care about this anymore because problem solved and nothing left behind in this.

2:01:15And also, I think that after achieving these goals with proof of stake, full-chain membership proof implementation and gateway addresses with an anonymous version of them that is convenient for services to use and they align well with the privacy nature of the rest of the project. I think that next topic to look at will probably be quantum resistance because we don't know what is the future. No one knows, but this maybe in next few years we will know more about this and how likelihood maybe it will be more clarity on this topic.

2:02:16But from that perspective what we can do now is take an approach to mitigate harvest now decrypt later because this is a huge topic actually and all the data that is circulating on the network on the internet right now could be stored and then be broken using a quantum computer in the far future, for instance. And I think that after all these mentioned milestones, perhaps we will be looking at this thing, and also at the optimization, and maybe extreme optimizations, to achieve high TPS and sharding, as Andrey said.

2:03:10So that's my perception.

2:03:13Andrey SabelnikovActually, I forgot to mention the elephant in the room. Quantum computers is a really big thing.

2:03:18Vlad CosteaI was going to get to that, but thank you. Keep going.

2:03:22Andrey SabelnikovThat's the difference. Val is a cryptographer, he knows the weak points. No, that's it. I don't have any comments. Val commented on this pretty much everything.

2:03:39Vlad CosteaIt seems to be a very trendy topic nowadays, even though I believe that actually threatening quantum computers are at least 10 years away. But people are trying to prepare for this in advance. We have these Winternitz signatures and we have the Lamport ones. And there are a lot of in between schemes. And the trade off is always the size of the signatures, like the amount of data that they're going to take into the blocks is going to be much larger, which means users are going to pay much higher fees per transaction.

2:04:12And the blocks are going to fail much faster. This is the price that we have to pay for quantum resistance. And I'm not sure if we're going to be able to come up with something which is actually reasonable in terms of size.

2:04:28Valeriy PisarkovI think there's some interesting findings will be on this field. And for instance, I would like to mention the Carrot address protocol that guys, Monero developers are working right now. And it will be the part of the full-chain membership proofs++ upgrades in the future. As far as I understand, I'm not maybe not up to the most recent changes because we have so much task to do in Zano. But they have an interesting approach with these compounds of private key spend private key in address that is actually a bit like from some perspective is a quantum resistant.

2:05:18Because if you have a private key, for instance, in a CryptoNote project and you would like to do, no one knows it, but you have a public key that is shared as a part of your public address. So the future quantum computer will be able, knowing your public address, actually find out the private key that belongs to this address. And having this private key then analyze the whole blockchain and harvest all the necessary data. And they have a very interesting approach by splitting this spend pub key into two parts and quantum computer, as far as I understand, it's not working that way.

2:06:04So because of the unlimited possibilities of how two keys can be added to each other to make a new pub key, because of these unlimited possibilities, it will be impossible even have a very smart quantum computer, very capable to break this. And I hope because of this, I hope that when we start closer investigation of full-chain membership proof support and reinvention on the Zano math on the Zarcanum and confidential assets, we will be covering this topic as well. And maybe some little changes like this one will be helpful in order to preserve future secrecy of the network.

2:06:57So this is my perception, it will go this way when we start actively developing this.

2:07:11Vlad CosteaI was thinking that there is a lot of competition in this field. I know that Zcash is also trying to do shielded assets and Ethereum themselves are adding zk-SNARKs as a way to add privacy, which of course, adding privacy to something which has been public for many years is not going to be as strong and opt-in privacy is not as strong as privacy by default, but they still provide something along the lines of what you're building. And I was going to ask you, do you believe that the tech stack that you're using is the optimal one, or maybe that zk-SNARKs are better scalable?

2:07:48They're working on something that's called Tachyon right now, and they're going to have sort of like a client side validation that makes it much more scalable than it currently is. Do you feel threatened by this? Would you be able to adapt your tech stack to include some of that? Or do you think that the way in which you're going, which is full-chain membership proofs and CryptoNote and Zarcanum is the best way to go forward?

2:08:12Valeriy PisarkovThis is a very good question and a very technical question. Actually, there is no definite answer to this question right now, but I really do believe that this approach that we are looking for and using full-chain membership proof plus plus, because plus plus is a set of technologies, actually, and a set of the optimized technologies, quite recent. Zk-SNARKs are existing for quite a long time. This is very advanced technology, but it's quite bulky and heavy. And I think that I can answer definitely at that moment, but I think that for us, this approach with Zarcanum and confidential assets and adopted and tailored full-chain membership proof, that's very important, will be beneficial, more beneficial.

2:09:07But I don't know, maybe at some point I will change my mind and say that no, zk-SNARKs are better and we will implement this technology or we will use some part of this technology to make better consensus and better technology for us.

2:09:26Andrey SabelnikovOr we will be saying that, oh, it doesn't matter, our technology is better anyway, for marketing reasons, like many projects does. We're trying not to do this, but this happens. Even if we see something is better, it's really hard to admit, oh, this project is better than us, but we still will be doing our thing. I think it would look bad.

2:09:49Valeriy PisarkovSometimes you have technical reasons to keep your existing technology running, because the price of the change in the whole technology stack and going to the whole other universe of technology is maybe higher than the benefit you get. So it's a very complicated question, but from what I see now, I believe that no, we've chosen this approach for a reason and I hope that we will find out that it's a good way to do things. But yes, it's possible that I changed my mind during the extensive investigation and during the tailoring of full-chain membership proofs.

2:10:41Andrey SabelnikovI also have a comment on the note that Val made about privacy by default and that it's a problem that hasn't existed in Ethereum since the beginning. I think it's actually, privacy is a very tricky thing and my perspective, any blockchain that gives you privacy guarantees, you shouldn't take it as granted forever. Privacy will be broken at some point in Monero, in every private blockchain, at some point in a few years, maybe in 10 years. Everything that they have now will be de-anonymized likely, one way or another.

2:11:29Or, it's going to be better crypto algorithms, or better stat analysis, or exchanges that have poisoned a lot of Monero blockchain will be giving up one of the decoys, another decoys, another decoys, and then there's going to be less decoys left in the ring, in every ring. And with time, privacy will be decreasing for all the records, for the one that was at the beginning. And I think the perception should be that the privacy is a temporary thing always, due to technology growth, due to evolution of the industry, a very rapid evolution of the industry, especially with the new AI tools.

2:12:14I think all cryptography that we use now these days, or the privacy tools that we use these days in the blockchain, because it stays forever in the blockchain, will be de-anonymized in 10 or 15 years. So, I think, after all, at the end, we will be in the same position, privacy blockchain and some other blockchains, we have to keep this in mind.

2:12:38Valeriy PisarkovI would disagree. I think that privacy things and privacy tech is a fast-evolving field. And it's not always like a cat-and-mouse game, and I believe that there exists encryption technology that is extremely hard to break and will be extremely hard to break, indefinitely. And I think that, for instance, in the past, we have false assumptions about, for instance, MD5 hash that is unbreakable, but then, like, a collision was found and now it's not secure and not used for secure purposes anymore.

2:13:31At some point, we believe that discrete logarithm problem on elliptic curve, for instance, Schnorr-based signature are very secure. But in the future, quantum computers probably will be capable enough to break this. But I think that there will be an area of technologies that will be secure enough and we have it now, for instance, we have lattice-based cryptography that is very secure and quantum-resistant, absolutely. And even we have XOR-based encryption that is actually quantum-resistant, because it's proven that if your key and your ciphertext has the same size, so you have a perfect encryption.

2:14:30So I believe that if you are paranoid and you follow the checklist very closely, you can actually get the privacy, but the cost of maintaining this privacy may be too high just for a random guy.

2:14:52Andrey SabelnikovCan I ask why you believe it's never going to be broken? You said yourself that there was a hash function, there were other algorithms that believed it to be secure, but then it was broken. And even if there is an example that is not broken yet, why do you believe it won't be broken in the future?

2:15:12Valeriy PisarkovWell, because I believe in math. So for instance, in math we have group theory, and group theory looks at symmetry that actually naturally happens in nature, in the groups, and recently, it was like the last 20 years, it was proven that all kind of symmetries that can happen in the universe can be divided by a small set of, I think, 26 specific groups and no more.

2:15:57And these groups are not natural, so it was very hard work for mathematicians to actually find them, and after that it was extremely hard work, it's thousands of papers of proofs that there's enough, so there's a full stop.

2:16:19So the universe is no more complex than this. And this is mind-blowing actually, but this is an example of a point when you can actually reach the infinity. So that's why I believe the same approach could be applied to some extent to cryptography.

2:16:45Andrey SabelnikovI don't understand this, that's why I don't understand cryptography. Okay, I was looking into this from a very user perspective, as a person who uses tools, and I was just seeing that whatever is used is getting old, is at some point not recommended to use and getting obsolete. So I was, that's my, I still believe it's going to be happening and the progress will be improving, and I think, I still believe, I cannot explain it in a scientific language while I'm making this point, I just have it, experiencing this industry this way, and I think that's what's going to be happening at least.

2:17:35What I was saying about rings in Monero, rings will be de-anonymized anyway. In the old Monero transaction history, it will be de-anonymized one by one by one, with time, it's like no question.

2:17:51Valeriy PisarkovThat's why they do care about the quantum.

2:17:54Andrey SabelnikovNot even the quantum, I'm not even talking about quantum resistance.

2:18:00Valeriy PisarkovJust by analysis, you mean?

2:18:03Andrey SabelnikovYeah, the more data they gain, the more exchanges give up the history of transaction, the more decoys, they have, de-anonymized, so the less decoys stay anonymous in the rings and they will be doing this more and more some people will be sharing their wallets, opening their wallets, losing the keys, stolen wallets, more and more with time. It will be happening more and more at some point. It's going to be easy enough. And it's going to be just left few decoys in the set, it's going to be easy enough to run overall analysis and de-anonymized at all, that's why I believe it's just a temporary thing.

2:18:43Valeriy PisarkovYeah, but that's why full-chain membership proofs is actually a thing, because it solved this issue forever, you don't even have rings anymore.

2:18:58So I think yeah, I agree. Because I'm also talking not from a scientific perspective. I'm talking from how I feel, I just feel it differently because of different backgrounds I tried to explain. And you feel it differently because of your background and what things you see. So this is just how we feel it because for sure it's very complicated.

2:19:31Vlad CosteaI'm actually happy we had this conversation and the reason why I asked the question about the tech stack is that basically in the case of Bitcoin, I do like to believe that Bitcoin is an idea more than it is a specific network or technology. And at some point in the future, we can agree that this implementation in particular failed. And we're going to move the UTXO set that keeps basically the ownership of all the coin users. To another network which is more robust and even though it's a controversial idea to present today, I do believe that Bitcoin is going to transcend its current home to put it like this. And in the case of Zano and other networks, there are a lot of these situations where the developers are basically married to the technology and they say the project will live or die with this particular technology that we're using.

2:20:26If it succeeds, then we're going to win big time. If it fails, well, it's just another experiment. And I was curious if you believe that Zano is an idea or is one specific technical implementation on which you're working.

2:20:40So that's why I've asked the question about other competitors doing something similar, trying to reach the same result, and whether or not you would be open to adapting to new market conditions or new technological landscapes.

2:21:00Andrey SabelnikovAs far as I know, what I hear that actually Zcash is trying to implement proof of stake, and also trying to implement confidential assets, and I think this idea has been around in the industry, but I'm not sure I got the question right, because there was interrupting at some point, and I'm not sure. Can you rephrase? The question is about Zano.

2:21:32Vlad CosteaRight, so is Zano an idea, basically something that you are trying to achieve, but it doesn't matter how, so along the way you can make very drastic changes to the technology, or is it just a continuation of the CryptoNote protocol and will live and die with CryptoNote?

2:21:54Andrey SabelnikovNo, of course no. No, no, I mean, it may happen. We can find ourselves in this situation because I mean, it's quite, you find yourself in a struggle and you don't want to easily give up on something that you've been doing for a long time. And I hope we won't be caught in the situation when we have to give up CryptoNote as our base, very fundamental technology. But if we'll face the situation now, Zano itself is not Zano is not CryptoNote evolution. If you ask me this way.

2:22:41Zano is a group of individuals with common goals, with a common vision, and with different backgrounds. We all, the people behind Zano, we all have different backgrounds, and we actually can build this project only when we are consolidated around this project together. None of us would be able to do it alone, so Zano is a group of individuals who are like-minded, and we're trying to build a great tool for the industry, but we're not married to specific technology, we use technology, we see technology as a tool to achieve something, to build something that we think will be useful, helpful, we'll find some support.

2:23:35This is my answer.

2:23:38Valeriy PisarkovYeah, I think that the story for our project and the history of the technical decision that we made shows that, because we started from a CryptoNote base and then we added lots of things that go to new technology, and we experimented a lot. And at some point we believed that escrow on the blockchain is a good idea and we need to put lots of effort on this, but then we decided otherwise, that confidential assets is an interesting idea, and we implemented this. So we are in a constant search, and we are looking for how we can make it efficiently and secure.

2:24:32Not a CryptoNote evolution, because CryptoNote is quite a simple idea as I see it now, because now things are so much complicated, so CryptoNote white paper looks like it's a very nice, tiny and easy, but very important piece, historically. But now things that we are actually doing are much more complicated.

2:25:01Andrey SabelnikovI actually want to remind you that back in 2015, the whole CryptoNote thing was an anti-Proof-of-Stake, the whole CryptoNote thing was a Proof-of-Work maxi, and the whole domain of privacy blockchain was a maxi. And even back there we were flexible enough to look around and see how we can improve it and take something that was very unnatural for a privacy-focused blockchain back there. So I think we'll have this flexibility with years, and we'll be able to take the best that exists in the science or create the best in existing science to just deliver the best product we can do.

2:26:02Vlad CosteaThat's a good answer, and I'm really hopeful. So if you were to tell Zano holders why they should be bullish about Zano, what's your short answer? What is it that should get people excited?

2:26:19Andrey SabelnikovBe smart about your investments, don't do risky investments.

2:26:22Vlad CosteaNo, but they already did that, right? The people who hold Zano already and they don't want to sell, they want hope for the future or something.

2:26:35Andrey SabelnikovFor now, I will tell you that Zano is switching from a hybrid consensus to a pure Proof-of-Stake, which means that Proof-of-Work part of the emission will be gone. We don't know what we're going to do with this yet, but at some point Zano will have twice less coins dropped on the market every day as it does these days. Every day, Proof-of-Work generates 740 coins. Proof-of-Work miners drop these coins immediately on the market.

2:27:23There is a pressure on the market.

2:27:26We calculated every month to support Zano price, to maintain their price, someone has to buy $200,000-$300,000 worth of Zano from the market. At some point, Proof-of-Work is gone. Proof-of-Stake miners, stakers, they don't drop coins in this fashion. So I think this is a very practical thing that the pressure will be removed as soon as we deploy pure Proof-of-Stake. So this is a very straightforward argument about Zano. It comes from just an economic perspective. I don't know about the future.

2:28:12I don't know. And again, we realize that at least at this point we suck at marketing. We better build the technology, but we will try to learn this part as well. We don't know how things will turn out for Zano in terms of appreciation of the price, awareness about the project, perception of the project. We don't know this. This is the major thing that influenced the price. Often people don't even care much about technology. People care about how those people are invested in Zano. Public people or those people invest in some project, I will invest too because it's going to be pumped at some point, blah, blah, blah.

2:28:55So we cannot control these things. We cannot even influence much of these things. We are just building technology. And from that perspective, I cannot tell you. I don't know. I never understood the way the market works. I never understood how the price works. So that's my only comment on this.

2:29:17Quinten van WelzenMy TLDR would be that Zano adapts really quickly to whatever tech is best, right? We're not married to some kind of technology. And on top of that there, we have some major catalysts coming like Hard Fork 6 and 7, which are going to be breakthroughs for the project once again. And what you can also say is that Zano is still very early, right? If you compare it to Monero or Zcash and you look at their respective market caps and you look at Zano's market cap, I think there is a juicy potential there.

2:29:57So that would be my answer to why should someone look into potentially investing in Zano. That was not financial advice.

2:30:09Vlad CosteaNo, it was not financial advice. I'm not recommending anyone to buy Zano right now. If you can and you have some GPUs, you can mine it still, even if you guys don't like miners. That's still part of the network security and that's a fair way to get some coins, get your hands on them without actually influencing the market price. I think that's an interesting approach. And I'm actually very interested to see how this is going to evolve. I might have said during the Tyler Spalding interview, which is the previous one, that Zano is a fork of Monero, which is wrong.

2:30:47And I'm sorry for that. But there are some technological similarities, but also some philosophical differences. I don't think, I mean, it was part of a conversation last summer that Monero might switch to proof of stake because they were under attack at one point. But right now, it's not a serious conversation that they're having. And you guys are sort of leading the way in this direction. And you're also focusing on tokens. You're trying to build basically a base layer, which is optimized for the creation of tokens that have privacy and is trying to enable other use cases, like building stablecoins or bridging other assets onto Zano, which I think can be beneficial both for privacy and for scalability for other projects to move to a network, which gives privacy and also has a different throughput and different kind of tradeoffs because you're not going to get anything perfect in this world.

2:31:49And I do appreciate that you're builders. I do appreciate that you guys have this Eastern European honesty or realism where it's very hard for yourselves to see something nice. Like, I feel like if I interviewed a bunch of American developers, they would be like, yeah, we're building the best stuff ever buy our token. Not financial advice, but buy our token. This is what they would say all the time. And I also appreciate your time because you are very patient with this. I was like 30 minutes late with starting the livestream, but everything went fine.

2:32:23And I also want to thank you, Mr. Kwibs, for joining in. What are the conclusions of this interview? Like, what should we do? What should people look forward to when it comes to Zano? Should I take it?

2:32:44Quinten van WelzenYou were quiet for quite a while. No, I mean, I think I said it earlier, right? Hard Forks 6 and 7 are, in my opinion, like I personally look really forward to what those will bring to the table for Zano. So yeah, I'm personally really looking forward to that. And there's all reason to be excited about that. And especially Hard Fork 7 with a proof of stake upgrade. I think it is probably the most exciting upgrade that Zano has had since the Zarcanum upgrade.

2:33:18And there was a lot of hype around that and a lot of buzz around that. And I'll do everything I can to bring that sentiment back to Zano with Hard Fork 7. So yeah.

2:33:38Valeriy PisarkovI would say that I would like to thank you a lot for inviting us and for making this interview. And I would like to thank all the people who care about the technology and not just looking for another pump and dump coin. But looking into what teams are trying to do and following teams and being supportive. I know that this kind of people exist in every project.

2:34:23And I would like to thank you, not only the people who are Zano supporters, but I would like to thank you, all the people who just care about the technology.

2:34:33I think that it's really nice and technology will win eventually.

2:34:41Vlad CosteaI mean, let me show off my gold chain and say I'm in this for the technology.

2:34:48Anyway, I also promised that I had this secret conversation with Zoidberg, with Andrey before we started. And it turned out that Val was the silent one. So I promised I was going to ask a specific question for him. So he doesn't feel like he just sits for the interview and doesn't say much. So I promised I was going to ask you, who are your favorite cryptographers or mathematicians?

2:35:22Valeriy PisarkovThat's a bunch of people. I have to say so. It's very difficult to pick one. I guess.

2:35:37I don't know. I think I think that we like every project that we in the in this field. In CryptoNote, extensively used Pedersen commitment and that it was invented back in, I think, 1985 or so. And I think that this invention was was very insightful and meaningful for all the things that we have now. But there's a bunch of people that are involved in this area. So I don't know. That's difficult.

2:36:25Vlad CosteaOkay, so you like Pedersen? And how about you name three people? Just two more.

2:36:36David Chaum, are you a fan?

2:36:42Ralph Merkle.

2:36:43Valeriy PisarkovRalph Merkle, yeah, for sure. Yeah, for sure. What about Bernstein? That's a very good. Yes, that's a very good option. I think, yeah, I think Bernstein, the person who is behind elliptic curve, that Ed…

2:37:03Andrey SabelnikovDaniel Bernstein.

2:37:05Valeriy PisarkovDaniel Bernstein, yes. And 25519. And one of the advancements that his team actually achieved is making a very fast elliptic curve. So we can now afford all this beautiful technology because back in the days, elliptic curve cryptography was quite slow and less people were interested in it. And this person and his team actually made it possible to run on slow CPUs. And it was a huge point, turning point.

2:37:52And I think it was actually one of the reasons it was chosen for CryptoNote. I'm not sure because I wasn't around at that point, but I think it was one of the reasons.

2:38:04And it has a huge impact on CryptoNote.

2:38:08Andrey SabelnikovI think CryptoNote was the first blockchain project who switched to this elliptic curve and used it. There was no one ever using this before. And I remember we were looking into his libraries and basically took the parts of the library of his. And I think someone even contacted him and asked if he didn't mind if we take the part of his library. He said he didn't care, do whatever you want. I said it was open source. Yeah, I think we were the first who started it. Then also Solana used this elliptic curve.

2:38:45Valeriy PisarkovYeah, and I also cannot skip to mention Andrew Poelstra and Gregory Maxwell, because the idea of confidential assets that we actually implemented and we have now in Zano was proposed by these people back in 2017, I guess, for Bitcoin. So it's a huge impact also on our life, on our project.

2:39:25Andrey SabelnikovI think Gregory Maxwell proposed this back in 2014. He's already been saying about this. I know it because I had a quick conversation with him on Bitcoin.com. A conversation that I'm ashamed of.

2:39:45Valeriy PisarkovBitcoin Talk?

2:39:46Andrey SabelnikovBitcoin Talk, yeah. He was the one who was messaging and said, hey guys, you can make a hidden amount.

2:39:57Valeriy PisarkovYeah, I'm just saying that they published the paper in 2017, but obviously the idea was circulating a few years before.

2:40:11Vlad CosteaAnd they actually pulled it off with Liquid, which is a federation and not a proper sidechain like they promised. And I don't think anyone is using that. So I think you guys have more users than Liquid.

2:40:28Valeriy PisarkovYeah, I remember that it was mentioned that it was work for Liquid.

2:40:38Vlad CosteaWhat do you guys think about Liam Eagen, creator of Bulletproofs++? Are you a fan?

2:40:45Andrey SabelnikovI think we met him in person one time. He's a nice person.

2:40:52Vlad CosteaHe was on my podcast like three times. I'm a big fan myself.

2:40:56Valeriy PisarkovYeah, he's an extremely talented cryptographer.

2:40:58And Bulletproofs++ is a very promising technology. And this is just very, very, very good. And they have internal support for all assets in the inside. So that's very interesting. And I think I need to view your podcast with him, because this sounds interesting to me.

2:41:36Vlad CosteaWhat about Fluffy Pony? Are you guys friends? Do you send him birthday cards every year?

2:41:44Valeriy PisarkovMaybe you?

2:41:45Andrey SabelnikovI never met him. Now, I mean, I don't even know what he's up for recently. And we had a quite... Probably we both were quite childish back in this time. I don't know what he's up to, what's his vision of what's happening now. I don't know much about this. Is he still around?

2:42:11Vlad CosteaHe's commenting on stuff. He seems to be focused on hating Zcash nowadays. But yeah, he gave up on the leading role of maintaining the Monero project of years ago. And ever since, he's only commenting. I think it's his friend who created Wownero. John, whatever his last name is, who's the most vicious and active hater of Zano.

2:42:42But he's basically saying what Fluffy Pony was saying before him. So there's not much difference.

2:42:48Andrey SabelnikovI'm really surprised at how much time he spent on writing about Zano. I don't know, it's probably a full-time job?

2:42:59Vlad CosteaYou mean Fluffy Pony or the Wownero guy?

2:43:03Andrey SabelnikovNo, the Wownero guy. I don't know about Fluffy Pony much, honestly. But the Wownero guy, someone showed me that he spent full time working full time hating Zano. And I was like, why does he bother that much about our project? It's so fascinating to see the guy obsessed with other projects. That's really weird stuff.

2:43:27Vlad CosteaI mean, the guy's running a meme coin and he spends time calling others scammers. And I'm like, man, you're having a very hard time looking legit right now. Because your project is a joke by design.

2:43:41Andrey SabelnikovBut I think that's what he does. Probably he's funded by someone to run. He's creating noise, creating hated messages. That's probably a job, I think. I cannot imagine he hates us himself that much. It would be really sick if he just hated us and spent all his time.

2:44:08Vlad CosteaI mean, you'd be surprised how much of this industry is just fueled by pure personal vitriol. Like just hating someone or something so much and wanting to be right that you don't care how you're going to be right. You hope you're just going to convince everyone else that you're right, even if you're technically not.

2:44:26Andrey SabelnikovBut isn't he kind of promoting Zano by hating it that much, just giving it more publicity? Even though it sounds negative.

2:44:33Vlad CosteaI can agree that it does promote Zano, but you have a lot of people in the Monero community who irrationally hate Zano. Like they never tried it. They never sent a transaction. They never actually interacted with anyone from the community, but they hate Zano. And to me, it's a mystery. Like, why? I understand why some Bitcoiners were hating on Ethereum, but I don't really understand why Monero people are hating on Zano.

2:45:04Andrey SabelnikovWell, I think it's irrelevant anymore because everybody knows about Zano in the community. Some people hate it, some people like it, some people neutral. But it's okay, we are not married to the Monero community and I'm not trying to convince them necessarily to like us. We don't care much at this point.

2:45:33Quinten van WelzenWe also have a lot of overlap still. It's not all just haters. I mean, I know plenty of people that are Monero community members and Zano community members. So it's just a few maxis, right? You have maxis everywhere. And I don't think it sticks just to Zano alone. Like, I've never heard the Monero maxis talk positive about anything else other than Monero. So I don't think that's like a Zano specific issue. Maybe they spend more time on Zano because, I don't know, it's CryptoNote based as well and it's growing.

2:46:07I don't know. Who cares?

2:46:09Vlad CosteaI do have to ask you, since you're here, Andrey, because you have more knowledge on the matter. There are a lot of people who honestly believe that Fluffy Pony created Monero. Is that true?

2:46:26Andrey SabelnikovNo. Created in which way? He put a lot of effort in the very early days to make Monero a visible project. He was doing a lot of marketing, awareness, creating awareness and building the network. As far as I know, from this perspective, technically created.

2:46:54Vlad CosteaI don't know, maybe that he's Nicolas van Saberhagen or maybe that he is thankful_for_today or someone who was involved directly.

2:47:04Andrey SabelnikovNo, I don't see. No, he was just the guy who was around by this time. We have another guy who was trying to work with us back a few years ago. He hated Riccardo for some reason. He was telling us some stories about him. But I don't think it's relevant. Riccardo, the person who was around, saw the potential of the project and was trying to... He built a name on top of this project, I think. He built his name and awareness. But technically, no. There were a bunch of people.

2:47:48There were a few people actually at the very early days of the first year of Monero who were not around anymore. There was a guy named othe, a German guy. There were some other people. And those people actually were helping me as well as the early days of Boolberry. They got listed Boolberry on Poloniex. They got listed Boolberry on another exchange. They hired someone to build a mining pool for Boolberry, which was actually hard, but someone managed to do it. So there was a group of people who were actually behind Monero, but they were actually helping me as well.

2:48:27Some of the people, actually. But then, I don't know what happened. Those people just disappeared and said they don't want to be around anymore. I was talking with a German guy named othe, but he disappeared. I don't know where he is now. And Riccardo was one of them, one of this group of the people who were around. And I think the thing is, Riccardo was not trying to be private. He became open, started to speak openly, visited conferences. And other people were trying to stay private, not as anonymous persons.

2:49:12Probably that's one of the reasons Riccardo built his name and awareness. Because he was openly supporting the Monero project and was traveling, as far as I know, was participating in the events.

2:49:28Vlad CosteaI mean, I don't blame the people who were there in the first year of Monero and disappeared. Because about 37%, which means like 7 million coins almost, were mined in the first year of the network's existence. So they most likely got super rich with something that's supposed to be private. And they're just waiting for the market to have enough liquidity for them to be able to exit or actually use it for something meaningful. And to be honest, Monero right now reached a new all-time high, the first one since 2018 or something.

2:50:04Which says something about the destiny of the project and the fact that it does have staying power. But I think this is mostly a DeFi success story.

2:50:14Andrey SabelnikovWell, they're doing a great job on improving technology. We have to give them this. First of all, they are a really truly community-driven project. Decentralized way better than many other projects from my perspective. I maybe don't know everything and I'm not really following a lot of things that happen in Monero. But from my perspective, the way I see it's not easy to run the project like this in a decentralized way, in a donation-based way. And they're building, they're making a lot of work, they're doing a lot of research.

2:50:49They attract, because it's the biggest name in privacy when it comes to privacy blockchains, because it's immediately associated with Monero. It attracts a lot of people, a lot of talent. And it works like a magnet that attracts a lot of talented people. And that people try to contribute and make better technology. And it's a great product. When we speak about history and some clashes and tribal conflicts in the past, it doesn't mean that I don't like Monero the way it works. Now, even if there are people who are toxic or people who are attacking us, it doesn't mean the project doesn't deserve it.

2:51:34It's a great project and I think they deserve it at how it works now. I just want them to be more… Okay, I'm not going to speak about consensus. I think I said enough. I just hope it's a project. I think they deserve it. They have now the price appreciation, though. It's really great news for everyone, I think.

2:52:00Vlad CosteaYeah. We've got to get Quinten, Mr. Kwibs, to basically make some deals for listing Zano on DeFi platforms like NEAR Intents or Hyperliquid or Maya protocol or whatever. And I think a lot of liquidity is going to come to it, because privacy is really hot right now. And it seems like centralized exchanges are making efforts to not support it, even though they could be making a lot of money. Maybe that they're just thinking about the future liability, like how much they have to spend on lawyers and just to be sure that they are in the right jurisdiction to not go to jail or something for enabling liquidity for this.

2:52:41But the DeFi protocols, they're just booming right now. And I think Zcash went up to $700 because they were listed on these DeFi platforms. And then Monero got support from Hyperliquid, if I'm not mistaken. And it went up over the last week. It went up by like 20, 30 percent, which is amazing. Maybe that you guys will be able to also get listed on one of these, because it seems like the momentum is there, the liquidity is there. It's only a matter of being able to get on the shortlist, which is super political.

2:53:18It might be costly. I don't know if they charge anything for listing, but it seems to be pretty worth it.

2:53:27Quinten van WelzenI completely agree. We're in touch with Maya, with the THORChain team, with NEAR Intents. It's just that we need those gateway addresses to hopefully make it possible. So, yeah, stay tuned.

2:53:43Vlad CosteaAbout the gateway addresses, is there a privacy trade-off with them? Are they more transparent than normal ones?

2:53:50Andrey SabelnikovAbsolutely, yeah. It's a trade-off with the privacy. It's open, it's the same way as Ethereum ones. The reason why we decided to do this is because there should be a connection point to the blockchain from the DEX, from some outer world DEX with transparent blockchain. And as soon as you make this connection, there is any way, there is a connection point that impacts the privacy and this connection point. For example, if you have transactions that come from Ethereum or any chain from the bridge, stablecoin or Freedom Dollar, and you see the transaction on this side, you can, of course, assume that this UTXO has this probability.

2:54:48One of these has this type of UTXO. The gateway address will act the same way, but we will put it… So, it doesn't change the situation with the privacy, actually, on these connection points, because the connection point with non-private blockchain will create any way this influence on the privacy of the core rings. But we will make just the plug easier and remove this impact one step further. So, the impact will be from this gateway address into this transaction that comes from it. Anyway, that's why we don't want average users to use this address.

2:55:28That's why we're making this like a paid address, so you have to pay to register this address. But it creates, it introduces implications at this point, but it exists only until we get full-chain membership proof. So, if we introduce full-chain membership proof, this problem will be kind of solved. And at this point, we can maybe review our approach to gateway address. We will see if there is a demand to use this more on exchanges or on other purposes, if people will be interested, because if you see on Zcash, the majority of addresses are transparent addresses, as far as I can see.

2:56:20And if we are 100% sure that it doesn't break the privacy by default, if we are 100% sure that it does not make any impact on the users that want to stay in the private, we may consider some other changes. But right now, we are trying to be very conservative with this gateway address. I think Val wants to comment on this something.

2:56:40Valeriy PisarkovI just would like to say that in two steps, this privacy trade-off will be mitigated. And I think the first step that is implementing anonymity on top of these gateway addresses probably will be made earlier than the full-chain membership proof++ integration, because, as I said, it's not just integration, it's tailoring the whole technology to our needs, and it's a very complicated task. And to implement privacy on gateway addresses is an easier task, but it's also complicated and risky, so we need to make sure that everything we do, we do very well.

2:57:35So we will have these two steps. And after each of them, this trade-off will be less and less important. And by the end of the day, with the full-chain membership proof integration and privacy gateway addresses, I think it will now be with no implications on the privacy, I think. So we will very carefully look at this in the future, and we will do all the best we can do to maintain and to keep this, because it's very valuable and important thing for project.

2:58:21But yeah, that's how it probably will be implemented.

2:58:27Vlad CosteaI think I've heard Reuben Yap, who is like the steward of the Firo project, that he had to do something similar to integrate some sort of exchange transparent addresses to be able to keep his project listed on Binance. But he did it basically for the opposite reason. He was already listed and he wanted to stay listed. You guys are doing it because you want to get listed on other exchanges.

2:58:55Andrey SabelnikovNot only because we want to get listed, it's actually directed mostly to the DEX thing. And for the DEX, it's really hard to implement anything without support of this. It will make things more safe, more secure, and more easier to integrate for Zano to get onto DEX. For the exchanges, we will still be recommending to use Zano privacy addresses, default addresses for the exchanges, because exchanges is a different thing. It's going to be easier for exchanges to use a gateway address in terms of, for example, UTXO in a privacy coin sometimes creates a headache.

2:59:47For example, if you get a big withdrawal that will drain the big UTXO coins, then a second big withdrawal can create a lot of headache because the transactions are getting bigger because of the smaller UTXO included in transaction. It's very slow. It's very big. It doesn't fit into the limits. The transaction fails, exchanges write to us. We have to investigate and explain to them what to do. It creates a lot of headaches. So probably some of the exchanges also will switch to these gateway addresses. I don't know yet, but it's also a matter of liquidity.

3:00:21If it's a big exchange, and they have enough UTXO diversity, UTXO present on the custody wallet, they will not have these problems because we've been listed on many exchanges before and we didn't see these problems coming. So it's a really, really complicated question. And we understand that if we give it to an exchange, the exchange may be poisoning the blockchain before its full-chain membership. As soon as the full-chain membership is there, we'll just give it to the exchange and say, okay, you can do this.

3:01:04If it's an open amount, it will be compliant. So some exchange will be easier or less hesitate to list Zano. Or if it's going to be with a hidden amount, a gateway address can be with a hidden amount in the future. If we figure this out, it's going to be even way better. It's still instant sync. It still has no problem with UTXO managing. It's available all the balance immediately. And it still have a privacy properties with a hidden amount. So we'll see. But at least for the start, we'll be very conservative and we'll be using it only for the DEX integrations.

3:01:44Vlad CosteaOkay, sounds fair. Someone will have to give up on their privacy if they want to use this, but there is a lot of liquidity there. It's very hard to just ignore it.

3:01:55Andrey SabelnikovThey don't actually give up on privacy. That's what I was saying. The poisoning happens if you have this, even for Monero, if someone from Monero were, for example, connected to this outside world service, for example, DEX. If it's DEX, it's open source, it's transparent. You can see, likely you can see transaction that comes out and transaction that comes in. So you can connect. So if you see this, you can assume how much coins on these outputs anyway. And in our case, you can also have asset ID, which is hidden as well.

3:02:34In Monero, you can assume only amount. But it's also poisoning any privacy blockchain that's connected to non-privacy entities or DEX. They have this connection point, it's like highlighting a little bit, creating a little bit of light on the privacy aspects. So we are not in a situation with DEX, we're just creating a better connection point, which doesn't degrade the privacy level because it's already degraded due to the nature of the connection. I'm not sure if this explanation makes any sense to you guys, but I did my best to explain it.

3:03:14Vlad CosteaIt's fine. It's a pretty good one and it's technical enough for the people who know what this is about to actually get an idea. The main takeaway from this is that you're going to make an effort to get listed on these DeFi protocols to be able to bring more liquidity to the network, which is a net benefit. And I'm not sure if this is also good or this can also be done for some tokens that you have on your network. And I'm not going to pick something.

3:03:46I'll just say Vladcoin or whatever. I made that one. If you actually integrate this with DeFi, will that coin also be able to be traded on Hyperliquid or Maya or something else?

3:03:59Andrey SabelnikovThat's the point. Of course, it would be really stupid if you do it only for Zano native coin. Of course, we do it for the platform, for everything with us.

3:04:09Vlad CosteaSo I guess even the fUSD and everything else is going to become more liquid because of it.

3:04:15Andrey SabelnikovYes, yes, yes, yes.

3:04:18Vlad CosteaSo what's the ETA, which is the estimated time of arrival for this?

3:04:25Andrey SabelnikovWe're doing our best this week and last week. We're just literally working our ass off to deliver this because there is some expectations on this also. We have some people are waiting for this and pushing this really hard. So optimistic expectation will roll this out in the test network by the end of January. And if everything is okay, if no complications, we'll start to prepare the hard fork February, March. Probably by the end of March or the beginning of April, it will be in the main network.

3:05:14But I'm being very optimistic, honestly.

3:05:19Vlad CosteaNot financial advice, but there's some alpha here, like that there is some actual very good news to be expected. I mean, there is no guarantee that this integration, like delivering this type of addresses is also going to guarantee listing on DeFi platforms. And once again, there is no guarantee that listing on DeFi platforms actually means that people will buy. So there are two unknowns. But potentially, if everything goes right, there's going to be a lot of trading volume and this will reflect on the price.

3:05:58Valeriy PisarkovYeah, that was an optimistic ETA. We do care a lot about the security of what we do because this is a cryptocurrency. We need to look at what we do very, very carefully. We have lots of guidelines and internal tests and automated tests. And all these things shouldn't be put aside just for the sake of the speed because the price of mistake is very high. So that's why we extremely care about what we do.

3:06:44That's how I see it. Optimistically what Andrey said, but if we find something that we need to spend a little more time just to make sure that no risk is involved, we will spend these additional weeks.

3:07:09Andrey SabelnikovThat's how we actually work. I come to Val and say, let's do it quickly, let's do it quickly, I know how to do it, let me do it, let me do this. And then I start to do it as well. He says, Andrey, let's do it slowly, let's look into this better way, look at this, let's think about it more. And then I say, yeah, yeah, we have to think about this more, we have to do more. Yeah, so we kind of have a different…

3:07:34Valeriy PisarkovYeah, by the end, we have middle grounds, because of opposite forces.

3:07:42Andrey SabelnikovThat's true.

3:07:44Vlad CosteaYeah, so not financial advice, but to the 500 people who tuned into the live stream, maybe get one Zano, it's $10, who knows? Maybe it will make you rich, maybe it will pay your rent one day, who knows? But just for the sake of it, if you sat through this interview, just not for financial reasons, consider it like a lottery ticket or whatever, get one. But the question is where, because I think the largest exchange that supports Zano is MEXC, what else?

3:08:22Quinten van WelzenYes, MEXC, CoinEx, BitMart, there's like 15 exchanges, although there are smaller ones. I think the most convenient way to acquire some Zano is through one of the swap providers, like Exolix or LetsExchange, I would recommend one of those. And also, Vlad, when are you going to pump Vladcoin? Because I have like six of them, I'm a Vladcoin whale.

3:08:45Vlad CosteaThat's like 10% of the supply, man. It's risky, I should not be holding so many of them.

3:08:49Valeriy PisarkovI have only one.

3:08:51Quinten van WelzenYes, I bought many on Zano Trade when you were hyping it, and now I feel betrayed, because it has no value. What's going on?

3:09:01Vlad CosteaI don't know, I think I only have one or two of them left.

3:09:06Quinten van WelzenMaybe we can give some away.

3:09:10Andrey SabelnikovOkay, we're going to make our own podcast and invite Vlad and ask him why Vladcoin is a scam.

3:09:17Vlad CosteaI gave away most of it. I think people gave me one Zano for it on the exchange, just for fun. And one Zano is like $10. If you want your $10 back, I'll give it back to you, full refund.

3:09:29Andrey SabelnikovI can donate you one of the Vladcoins I have.

3:09:33Vlad CosteaIf you don't want to hold it and that's slightly offensive, okay.

3:09:37Andrey SabelnikovNo, it's not that I don't want. I want you to do something. I want to motivate you to do something. That's how it works for open projects. I have a good idea.

3:09:43Quinten van WelzenWhy not have Annie launch an NFT collection on Obscura once it's live because it's going to be private NFTs on Zano and then when you have one Vladcoin you can get one private NFT for it? Something like that? That would be cool.

3:10:04Vlad CosteaNo, I'll take a bunch of butt pics and you get like a different one depending on how many Vladcoins you have. Or feet pics, yeah. There should be some sick fucks listening to this, who are into that.

3:10:21I'm pretty sure there are no kids listening, so it's fine.

3:10:28Did I just destroy the spirit of the conversation? It was so academic and then suddenly it just plummeted. Anyway, I do have to remark that the first hour I sort of tried to roast you, the second hour the conversation became a bit awkward, but the third hour was the best one. So to whoever listened to the third hour, I think you got the best feeling about where this project is heading. If you don't have patience for it, I will add timestamps in the description for the people coming later.

3:11:01I think we started a bit early for the American audience, which I guess is like 90% of the audience for this show, and they're going to come later to listen. Is there anything left to add? Anything that we have not mentioned?

3:11:22Andrey SabelnikovI think that's it.

3:11:25Valeriy PisarkovJust like to say thank you. I previously told thank you for you and for the people who support technology, because I think we are approaching the end of the podcast, but let me repeat it once more. Thank you for all people who do care about the technology, thank you because of this matter. So that's my… I would like to say.

3:11:50Vlad CosteaWhere can people meet you in person? Are you coming to any conferences or whatever?

3:11:59Valeriy PisarkovYeah, from time to time we do, sure. So once we met in person, and I think it will happen, probably when we will be on any conference, but I don't have any specific plans right now.

3:12:17Andrey SabelnikovAre you coming to Monerotopia, both of you, Vlad and Sol?

3:12:23Vlad CosteaNo, I'm not coming, I'm not welcome anymore, sorry. But I might go to MoneroCon, because I'm going to the film festival, which is happening next door from MoneroCon, so I can just sneak in and be like, hey guys, and try to not get stabbed or something.

3:12:44Andrey SabelnikovOkay, we got banned from MoneroCon, I think. We're not going there anyway. Alright, I don't know. We had a meetup recently in Dubai, here, on the Zano team, but we were thinking to create something like a public meetup for everyone, but then we thought probably it's not a good idea, as privacy coins promotion in Dubai is not allowed. So we decided not to do anything like this. I honestly don't know where we're going with the next conference, probably, I really don't know.

3:13:35And we have quite a big roadmap, so we are packed with work anyway, Quinten, maybe you.

3:13:51Quinten van WelzenWell, we're going to be present at Monerotopia, at least some of us, not all of us, so we will be there. We are considering to go to Parallel Society in Lisbon, which is in March. And we will probably be at another PorcFest, if it happens this year, and we will also be at the National Libertarian Convention in the United States, because we have quite a decent interaction with libertarians in the United States, and we really want to focus on that more. But yeah, if you have any suggestions for more conferences, then please let me know.

3:14:34We are also considering ETHDam again, I believe its new name is Common Sense now, which is in my country in the Netherlands, so yeah, that's easy. But yeah, if you have more conferences that might be of interest for us, either you Vlad or someone listening, then yeah, please let me know.

3:14:52Andrey SabelnikovProbably someone will create a new conference.

3:14:54Vlad CosteaYeah, I don't know about that. Europe is not such a great place anymore. Weren't you planning on creating a privacy conference? Yeah, but now you have to hire a lawyer or something and be sure that you're fine with everything.

3:15:33Maybe somewhere not in Europe?

3:15:33I need to do some exploration for that. It's just that people say, you know, that this is a privacy bubble and privacy coins are going to go back to their previous levels. I believe that this technology has been brewing and developing for a long time, and it was mostly for paranoid nerds and for people selling drugs and for, I don't know, very small subsets of users, and suddenly it makes sense for everyone to use this. So all the paranoid nerds were right. They were saying that this future might be coming and it's going to get dystopian.

3:15:54That future is here. It's only a matter of adjusting your mental model and understanding that you do need to adapt to something that gives you privacy. And I see this market only growing from here. There's a great future, unfortunately. Our governments are making it more difficult for us to even talk about it and meet in person to talk about it.

3:16:18Andrey SabelnikovThat's true.

3:16:21Valeriy PisarkovYeah, I agree. Maybe people also realize that it's not very good if you pay someone and that person immediately knows your balance and you know that person's balance. It's not a very good payment instrument, probably. So that's maybe also a reason why people start looking at privacy, because, okay, we need something capable and more suitable for payments.

3:17:03Vlad CosteaNo, it finally makes sense, right? And the technology is also more mature than it was a decade ago when this whole privacy coin concept came around. Maybe, I'm not sure if Bytecoin was the first one to try to do it, but it was around the time that it became a trend.

3:17:23Valeriy PisarkovYeah, 2014.

3:17:25Vlad CosteaI think it was 2012 for Bytecoin.

3:17:29Andrey SabelnikovDash, there was a dash.

3:17:31Vlad CosteaDarkcoin, yeah.

3:17:31Andrey SabelnikovThe project that's called now Dash, it was called XCoin, then it was Darkcoin, or before it was Darkcoin. But there was a project that was trying to use the coin mix, coin join technology, to achieve some level of privacy. But yeah, we were the first who was building the first protocol-level privacy.

3:18:00Vlad CosteaAnd then there was Zerocoin and Zerocash 2013 and 2014, but we did not have Zcash until 2016.

3:18:13Anyway, a decade later, everything is much better than it was. It's been developed. There's even Mimblewimble. I feel like I dropped the ball by not mentioning. There's Grin, and there's Beam, and maybe Mimblewimblecoin, even though people say that's a scam. It seems to be the one that's most successful on markets. But even that one has some merit. And there's mathematicians and cryptographers working on it, and it became a lot better. So, a lot of the privacy technology is more mature, even the network-level privacy. So, something else that I wanted to mention, and I do want to let you guys go.

3:18:54I don't want to hold you hostage, but I mentioned nothing about why you guys are not just adding Dandelion like Monero does for network-level privacy. And what do you think about these mixnets like Nym and whatever?

3:19:11Andrey SabelnikovNym is the one that does VPN service for tokens. Is it accurate?

3:19:21Vlad CosteaWell, sort of. That's where they downgraded. In the beginning, they were going to be a competitor to Tor, but then they decided they need to make money, so they launched a VPN service that's using their mixnet infrastructure.

3:19:35Andrey SabelnikovWell, apparently it's a direction to go with this. The reason we didn't implement Dandelion was the same, it was not implemented in Bitcoin. It doesn't give you, so we were not satisfied with the guarantees that this protocol gives. It makes spying way more complicated, I would say this, but it's still possible. And that's the reason why we didn't go for this, because it creates some sort of problem with the transaction relaying, but the outcome is not good enough for us.

3:20:22And we were thinking, okay, we will work on this later and come up with a better solution.

3:20:28We paid for this later because of the attack that happened in another project. We should have been implementing something, and we'll be doing something, likely at least pretty similar to Dandelion, or if we come up with something better, we can do something better. Yeah, that's my point.

3:20:52Quinten van WelzenWasn't Luke Parker working on something network-related for Serai DEX? I thought he was working on something IP-related.

3:21:06Andrey SabelnikovMaybe, I don't know. You mean recently?

3:21:10Quinten van WelzenYeah, I picked that up somewhere. Are you still in touch with him, Val, because you might as well ask him about it?

3:21:18Valeriy PisarkovNo, I can say that I'm in touch, but if he is involved in development with something network security, it would be very interesting to find out. Thank you for bringing it, so yeah, we will take a look.

3:21:39Andrey SabelnikovDid he re-implement the whole Monero node in Rust?

3:21:45Valeriy PisarkovI'm not sure about him, but I know that there is a bunch of people in the Monero development community who would like to implement, to write a Monero client, Monero node, full in Rust. It has a special name, I don't remember. But yeah, that's…

3:22:06Andrey SabelnikovOxide, something, I think.

3:22:11Valeriy PisarkovI don't remember, but this effort was taking place. I hope they are still active.

3:22:23Andrey SabelnikovYeah, I mean, we have to do this. We're just stuck in so much work right now with the consensus and with the gateway addresses and the full-chain membership proofs, and a lot is going on with the integration that we have and the ongoing problem, bugs that we are discovering and the Immunefi report that we are getting. So we are moving way slower than we actually would love to move, and we are probably going to be hiring soon, trying to address this also, because apparently we have a lack of manpower and we are not making it for a long time if we're going to be working in this mode, basically 10 hours a day.

3:23:13So we're trying to scale the team, but it's also super complicated, because to hire someone who is familiar with the codebase, it's like the chances are not high. And yeah, we just have… It's a matter of priority. We know it's important, but we don't want to wait with the consensus. We don't want to wait with the full-chain membership proofs. We don't want to wait with the gateway address, because it's holding integrations. It's super priority right now. And as we have come up with a kind of, not the perfect, but okay solution with a manual how to avoid IP address to be exposed for the stakers.

3:24:00I think we can live with this for some time. And we recently actually implemented support of SOCKS5 proxy for the wallet. So whoever is staking can actually use Tor network to propagate the blocks and transactions. We just not released it this year, as we just started to test it internally, but it's already implemented. Just, I think today was the last commit on this made by Dima.

3:24:34Valeriy PisarkovYeah, it will soon be available. It's nice.

3:24:41Vlad CosteaThat's actually good news. I'm happy that I asked the question, because there's a lot happening. It's just that I just need to point out to the right issue so that you guys can see. Yeah, we're working on this. We've been considering this. It's not like you're ignoring it. So yeah, thank you very much for the long answers and the fact that you actually started a conversation around the topic and network level privacy is super underrated. You should think of ways to protect it and to also consider what kind of adversary you might be dealing with, because if it's your ISP, most likely your ISP knows that you're using Tor or a VPN, but if it's some sort of third party on the internet, some stranger just lurking into what's happening, it's most likely a very good idea to use a VPN or Tor or a mixnet or anything else that you might have.

3:25:41I wish I had like a ref link for people to get a discount for VPNs or whatever. I don't. I think the legit ones out there are, I'm having a hard time recommending it, but there is ExpressVPN, which does some research. There's ProtonVPN, which is good. There's Mullvad, which provably has the best track record, and there's also IVPN and of course Nym, which launched the VPN. So these are the only five which I think are good.

3:26:16Andrey SabelnikovI believe the best VPN you can use is the open source VPN that you download on the server of yours and use it. That's my take because anything else is not safe.

3:26:29Vlad CosteaHow does it work? You put it on a Raspberry Pi or something and you run it on your router?

3:26:34Andrey SabelnikovNo, you can rent a VPS for $5 per month or anywhere. But you install your own open source software there and you make sure nobody reads whatever you're transferring or whatever.

3:26:47Valeriy PisarkovThere exists a community effort to make it less, to make it more convenient for non tech person. I remember Amnezia project that is doing this approach. So you basically you need to buy a VPS and download an application and lots of stuff are going pretty much automatically, but then there you have your own. So I think there should be more project like this, but Amnezia for sure doing something like that.

3:27:27Quinten van WelzenThere are also two VPNs that accept Zano for payments and I believe also fUSD. So I just want to mention them because they deserve it. One is vp.net and the other one is a bit of a strange name, but it's Meile dVPN. I think it's by Sentinel project, which is a cryptocurrency as well. So yeah, you can check those out as well.

3:27:56Vlad CosteaWasn't Roger an investor alongside Mark Karpeles and some sort of new VPN? And if that's the case, shouldn't they also accept Zano?

3:28:07Quinten van WelzenI think that is vp.net. Really? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, it's I think it's from Matt Kim and Roger was somewhere on the website as a strategic advisor or something, I believe so.

3:28:25Vlad CosteaOh, Matt Kim. Yeah, it's this one. You're right. Mark Karpeles and Roger Ver. Yeah, yeah.

3:28:34Incredible frog graphics, not Pepe, but frogs.

3:28:40Yes, yes. Yeah, so you can actually buy a VPN subscription using Zano.

3:28:48Quinten van WelzenYeah, and spoiler alert, soon we will launch a small campaign where you can get a small discount, like 20% off if you pay with Zano or Freedom Dollar. So if you plan to use it, might as well wait for that. And then you can get a small discount.

3:29:07Vlad CosteaIt's too bad that it defaults with credit card. And you have to actually scroll to the bottom where they have a button that's called more payment options. And in parenthesis, they say crypto. And then you actually have to register with an email. This sucks. I mean, no offense, I'm pretty sure that the VPN is decent. They're going to change it. It just generates a number.

3:29:33Quinten van WelzenYeah. And I was actually on a long, like two hour meeting with them last week. And they say they're going to change it all. I gave them the critique that it defaults to the credit card as well. So they're going to make the button for pay with Zano very large. And then if people are, you know, interested in what is Zano, they can click on it, and it will lead to intro.Zano.org so that they can learn about it. And also, they're going to get rid of the email thing that is attached to it.

3:30:03They're going to go with some kind of key. I'm not too technical. So I forgot the name, but there was going to be some kind of a little bit like how Mullvad has it, right? You can get like this account number that generates and then you can basically top it up with if you send Monero to it. I think they were going to go with a similar approach.

3:30:25Vlad CosteaYeah, Nym works in the same way, except that it generates like a BIP 39 seed phrase for your account. So not just a string of numbers. You get a seed phrase that's associated with your account and you can restore it. You don't have to register. They don't have to know who you are or whatever. No identity required. You can actually open their website using the Tor browser. So they don't have your real IP address either. But you do have to log into the service using your real IP address, but it's more decentralized.

3:30:59You choose between various providers. Anyway, cool tech. It's out there. You can protect your network level privacy with it. And I'm happy that we opened up the conversation so people can learn something new about the stuff that's out there. Maybe you can get Nym to also accept Zano.

3:31:19Quinten van WelzenYeah, that would be great. I mean, we're in touch with them a lot, actually, that we're also going to do a Twitter Spaces soon. I believe, Andrey, weren't we... We were on a meeting with them like maybe a year ago, half a year ago, but the main pain point was why we couldn't integrate them into the Zano wallet was that it's a paid service. So the users would have to pay for the Nym mixnet subscription, or we would have to pay for it, like either of those two.

3:31:48Andrey SabelnikovYeah, yeah. And I was a little bit skeptical about this. So, yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't, I don't see how it's, and then someone can abuse the system also. And I don't know, if you have to put some security deposit in the tokens, or buy some amount of tokens, assuming some usage that will be someone can abuse it. And I mean, that's, it's really hard to, that's actually the problem, because the attempt to buy, to build mixnet on top of the blockchain technology was made a few times.

3:32:33And the problem is that it's really hard to monetize this and control this because the nature of the network and it works. It's really, it's really tricky. So, yeah, I don't know, it's, but I like it, the team, I like it, the guys, they're trying to build something really decent. So it's, maybe they will come up with some improvement at some point so we can use it. But right now, the problem is not only that we cannot find the right partner for this. The problem is the fundamental, addressing this problem in a fundamental way.

3:33:21And that's the tricky part. If we use their infrastructure, we have to kind of trust what are the nodes there. If the nodes are not involved in some sort of data collecting, it's not, if it's not intelligence, actually. But because, you know that a lot of VPN providers are actually created to create intelligence, because it's a perfect honeypot. It attracts people who have something to hide, and it's way easier if you have a VPN.

3:33:57You cannot break all the protocols, but you have some advantage for this and it's introduced a lot of complications. Also, we don't know how the latency behaves in this network. So I prefer if we're building something and integrating Zano, it should be either built ourselves, or we know how it works and it uses the infrastructure of the Zano network, which is the best way. Or it exists just as an optional, for example, if we're building a SOCKS proxy for the relaying transaction, it's optional if the user is running his own Tor proxy, or anything else.

3:34:50It could be any other mixnet. And they normally provide a SOCKS proxy as a way to work with this network, it's connected to this network. So, yeah, it's up to user, they can, they can use it and we are happy to provide them a way to connect Zano transaction relaying and proof of stake block relaying over this network. Sure, but yeah, it's very tricky and we are not sure that we want to put our network in the dependence of other projects. That's my point.

3:35:31Vlad CosteaI appreciate the commitment of you guys, like you have not shortened this conversation just because we almost ended the podcast two times. You actually discussed it as in-depth as it was required.

3:35:43Andrey SabelnikovMy headphones died. I switched them to one charging.

3:35:48Vlad CosteaYeah, that's why you use wired stuff, you know, because there is no battery, there is nothing that can possibly go wrong. Zero delay. Zero delay also. And I also read some stuff, of course, it's negligible maybe, that basically you're sort of microwaving your brain when you're wearing Bluetooth devices.

3:36:13A little bit.

3:36:14I'm not saying I'm that paranoid, I'm just saying that I use wires.

3:36:22Valeriy PisarkovYeah, I'm the same thing. I love wired headphones.

3:36:30Vlad CosteaNot just headphones, pretty much everything, microphones. Microphones as well, yes. Yeah, I have a lot of cables on my desk and I have a drawer full of cables just in case and every year I look at them and I'm like, should I keep them? Am I ever going to use them again? And I'm like, who knows?

3:36:52Andrey SabelnikovAll right, I'm the one who used the Bluetooth. Okay, no, Quinten also using Bluetooth.

3:37:00Quinten van WelzenYeah, well, I only have to charge this thing like once every two weeks or something. I use it every day, the entire day for work, so I guess my brain must be pretty fried by now.

3:37:16Andrey SabelnikovMaybe this one gives you more energy to work.

3:37:20Quinten van WelzenWho knows, who knows?

3:37:23Vlad CosteaOkay, now seriously, is there anything else that we haven't discussed? I think that's it. Like this is the most complete interview that you'll be doing all year. Take that, podcasters. There's no way you can top this.

3:37:40Yes. I guess we can do this again next year. The last time we spoke was, I think, October or November of 2024 and it was with you, Andrey, and it was also with Pavel.

3:37:57Andrey SabelnikovYeah, probably. I don't remember, but maybe.

3:38:01Vlad CosteaNow this was much more technical and it had actually three people and it had Val. I've been trying to get Val for a long time. I just needed an excuse.

3:38:13Valeriy PisarkovI'm really happy to be there. Thank you.

3:38:17Vlad CosteaAnd also, Mr. Kwibs, thank you for tuning in. Immediately after it was about his work, I guess he was watching this and he was like, no, I gotta defend the marketing of the project. And he just popped in.

3:38:32Quinten van WelzenYeah, well, I mean, I always watch everything, right? Because it's my job. And as soon as I heard it was about exchanges, I know that Andrey and Val have a hard time answering that question. So yeah, thanks for inviting me.

3:38:50Andrey SabelnikovIs your book on the wall?

3:38:52Yes. Isn't it nice?

3:38:55Vlad CosteaYeah, he has like the OG tiny version that they messed up in Mexico.

3:39:02Quinten van WelzenYeah, this one is signed. It's 74. I believe I have like number three somewhere or number four, I don't know.

3:39:11Vlad CosteaThis one is the slightly larger one, the way it was intended to be. So the story with the first edition, which actually might be pretty rare right now and collectible, is that I paid this print shop in Mexico City to do it. And they made sure that they cut costs with everything. So they made the format smaller. They also asked for more money and they basically sent half of them. And then there was this tattooed guy with tattoos on the neck who came and said, unless you give me more money, we're just going to burn.

3:39:47The rest of them, like you only get half and we spent more money making them. So you either give us more money or we're going to throw them away and burn them. And I was like, okay, go ahead. I'm not giving you any more money. We had a deal. Oh, really?

3:40:03Andrey SabelnikovYeah.

3:40:03You're that tough. Wow.

3:40:04Vlad CosteaAnd he realized that he's not getting… more money and he was able to concede and say, okay, will you pay just what we agreed? Here's your magazines. I don't want to see you anymore. And I was like, I'm the one who doesn't want to see anymore. I'm going to give you the worst possible review on Google Maps, where I found you. I gave them one star. I explained everything that went wrong. They were assholes and they were late by a couple of days with the printing.

3:40:32Andrey SabelnikovSo yeah, you got into the fight with the Mexicans. Wow. It wasn't fight.

3:40:38Vlad CosteaIt was more, more of an argument. And I stood my ground. I was like, this is not how you do business. You say how much you're going to charge for the service. And that's how much I'm going to pay you. You don't come later and you say, well, you know, I want more money. Like imagine going to your car mechanic, right? And he checks the car and says, it's going to cost you $200. And then you go take your car. And he's like, ah, you know, I put more work into this.

3:41:05It's going to be 400. That's your fault. It's not my fault. We had a deal. We had an agreement. If you increase the cost of your service, it's on you. It's not on me. I never agreed for that.

3:41:21Andrey SabelnikovYou guys are tough in Romania.

3:41:25Vlad CosteaMan, I grew up poor.

3:41:27Yeah, poor, but you know, not poor poor, but you know, middle class. And that was sort of non-existent in the nineties in Romania.

3:41:34Andrey SabelnikovYeah. Same in Russia.

3:41:36Vlad CosteaLike did you guys have a Dendy?

3:41:41Andrey SabelnikovUnfortunately, no, but I'm older than you. That's what the reason probably. Some of my friends, some of my wealthy friends had Dendy. I didn't.

3:41:50Yeah.

3:41:52Valeriy PisarkovMe too. Because I was too, not well, yeah. And in my childhood, we were very, very, very poor to afford the Dendy. So that's my point, right?

3:42:07Vlad CosteaBecause the Dendy was a clone of Nintendo, and we did not have Nintendo in Eastern Europe. We had like cheap Chinese clones that were being sold under different brands. Like it was Pegasus in Poland. It was Ending-Man in Romania and Serbia, and maybe also Bulgaria. It was Dendy in Russia. And we had these cheap knockoffs that cost like 10% of what a Nintendo actually cost. And most of us kids didn't even afford that because it was pretty expensive for what our parents were making at the time.

3:42:41It's crazy. Really. And then people wonder, someone actually told me that I have the white privilege and I'm like, man, you have no idea where I grew up.

3:42:50Andrey SabelnikovIt's not applied to... Yes.

3:42:53Valeriy PisarkovAnd it's from Europe and all this.

3:42:57Vlad CosteaYeah. Like I wish I grew up as a black man in the U S I had so many more opportunities and better chances.

3:43:09Yeah. Well, anyway, before I go on a rant about this, it was interesting. What were your first computers, by the way? What kind of computers did you start with?

3:43:27Andrey SabelnikovI can bring a lot to this conversation if we go to complain about childhood and poverty and the childhood. I mean, I'm 45 now. I saw Soviet Union. I saw communism, like for real. It was, this was, this was really sad. So I think if we're going to start this conversation, meanwhile, we can bring a lot, but I don't want to, I don't want to finish our stream with this. Not a note of sadness and...

3:43:59Vlad CosteaNo, but I'm curious what kind of computers you started with.

3:44:04Andrey SabelnikovI was not able to afford computer for quite long time. My parents are very, not like simple people. And, most of the time I spent, in the, in the college, using their stuff, and, most computer, something shitty was given me at some point. I don't remember.

3:44:38Vlad CosteaWas it like a ZX Spectrum or was it like a proper PC? ZX Spectrum was running basic.

3:44:43Andrey SabelnikovBy the time there was a ZX Spectrum, it was too expensive. For me, my friend had one and then he was, he got, 286 CPU. And then he got, 486. I saw this computers only, when I was visiting my friends, I desperately wanted one, but, it was quite expensive and no way my parents were able to afford this. But then, way later when the computers became cheaper and more, available, I've got something, some Pentium, something, but it was like a Celeron or something like the cheap, cheap version of this, but it's like was way after this, but I know that this type of hardware, I've seen this.

3:45:33I was going to my friend who has this. I was going to work with my sister. She had this computer. I was, had the chance to see this computer or something in the computer class or when I was going to someone's work. Yeah, I was, well, most of, most of my childhood, I was learning about computers just from the books or the, from the articles or from the exhibition that I was visiting or when I was going somewhere, when I can access to the computer, my personal computer, my first personal computer.

3:46:02I got really late when I was like, 17 years old, 18 years old.

3:46:10Valeriy PisarkovI can relate almost exactly to what Andrey said.

3:46:16Andrey SabelnikovComputer is, was a luxury, literally a luxury by this time. So, yeah, probably in Romania, it was even better than in our place. How often you see the people who said, Oh, our childhood was worse than Romania and yours.

3:46:40Vlad CosteaYeah. I don't know. I was lucky enough to get a Pentium one in 2000 when I was eight years old, it was running Windows 95. I was one of the first kids in my neighborhood to have a computer, but it was like a five or six years old.

3:46:58Andrey SabelnikovYou're the guy with a silver spoon. Oh man.

3:47:01Vlad CosteaNo, it was just my dad who was, I don't know, like a visionary. He was like, this is the future. I got to get a computer for my son.

3:47:09Yeah. Okay. Of course I use it mostly for MS-DOS games and not for actually learning Borland Pascal, which is the first programming language that I tried. That's nice.

3:47:24Valeriy PisarkovYeah, me too. But in my case, it was a book, like literally a book. And I was on my vacation on countryside during the summer and I write programs on the paper. That's how it worked.

3:47:43Vlad CosteaDid you actually try them on a computer later or it was just imagination?

3:47:46Valeriy PisarkovLike after, like after a year, yes. When, when I finally get a computer, yes, I tried, but like at first, yes, it was programming on the paper. Sounds crazy now.

3:48:00Vlad CosteaI mean, I gotta ask Quinten because he grew up, I think in the Netherlands or something, did he have a PlayStation one or Nintendo 64 and the Pentium three when he was like 10?

3:48:16Quinten van WelzenWell, it's definitely entirely different than you guys. That's for sure. My first experience with the computer was just a family computer with Windows XP on it. I did get the Nintendo 64 from my older brother and sister after them. So that was my first gaming console. I never really had a PlayStation. No, my first computer that I had, like that I actually owned myself was with Windows 7. And, but this was like 2010 or something 2009. I'm 24 years old. So probably by far the youngest here.

3:48:56So different generation.

3:49:00Vlad CosteaAnyway, crazy. Like I remember looking at magazines that were presenting the Nintendo 64 and it was like, you could only see this in fancy shops, like put on display behind a glass window. You could never even touch it. But in the West, it was super popular. And I actually bought myself one with Monero like a year ago. It was on their marketplace. What's it called? Monero XMR Bazaar. And I bought one from someone from Spain. It was like a hundred euro. And I was like, yeah, I'm going to get this.

3:49:37I never actually used it, but I'm just proud to have it. It's like a trophy.

3:49:45Andrey SabelnikovThere is no way anyone would listen to this podcast until this point. No, they will.

3:49:51Vlad CosteaThey will. Just make up a random word and tell people to write that in the comments.

3:49:58Andrey SabelnikovI don't know. Val, can you come up with a random word?

3:50:03Valeriy PisarkovYeah, let's write down 25519.

3:50:09Andrey SabelnikovBut it's not random.

3:50:11Vlad Costea25519? Yes. Okay. Let that be the random... ...secret or whatever. So if someone actually listened up to this point, just typed 25519 in the comments chat or whatever you have, don't forget to leave a like or rating so more people find this interview. Thanks to all of you for being here for almost four hours. It's amazing, really. It's not even close to my record, which was set by another Russian guy who was on the show for 10 hours and 20 minutes. I know. I know.

3:50:50And it's not like we actually planned to make it that long. He actually had stuff to say that was that long, like frustrations regarding Bitcoin development. I guess that's what you get when you try to push an upgrade on Bitcoin. You never get it. And then you either start a career in stand-up comedy or you go on podcasts for 10 hours. Or you write a book. I don't know.

3:51:15Andrey SabelnikovI actually believe Bitcoin will be proof of stake at some point. I'm pretty convinced about this. Not later than in 10 years. You can mark my words. Okay. But let's not speak about this another hour.

3:51:31Vlad CosteaI mean, I can fight you on it, but it's fine. I'm not gonna. I'll let you go. Thanks to everyone.

3:51:36Andrey SabelnikovNo way you're going to win this argument.

3:51:43I can literally put my life on this, that Bitcoin will switch into proof of stake. And it's going to be a very interesting time, but it's going to happen.

3:51:55Vlad CosteaOkay. I mean, I hope I'll be around for 10 more years to see that happening or not happening. I can roast you in 10 years. You'll be 55 years old in 10 years, man.

3:52:10Andrey SabelnikovIf I survive this time, okay. Only in that case. With this stressful work, I'm not even sure. Every year counts as two. Every Immunefi report steals a few days of my life.

3:52:30Vlad CosteaThat's sad.

3:52:32Andrey SabelnikovYeah. Sometimes we have a panic attack. Sometimes we have a panic attack together with Val because we think something is really broken, but then we figure out now it's not broken. But it's enough stress to have a cardioactivity for the next until the end of the day.

3:52:55Valeriy PisarkovIt's a part of life already. So from time to time I have a feeling that, oh no, this is not true. Oh yes, everything is good. Okay.

3:53:08Andrey SabelnikovAnd it was not like this before, but now when so much things are built on Zano and we know the people who are building, we know people who are invested, we know everyone. And it feels like really bad when something like this happens and you have this on mind, oh fuck, are we screwed or not? And then you say, no, no, it's all good so far. Yeah. So let's hope we're going to make it until 2036.

3:53:43Yeah.

3:53:45Vlad CosteaLet's hope that privacy will be the default for everything until then. For messaging, for financial transactions, for all sorts of communications and it will be just normal. Nobody will call you anything for using it.

3:54:02Andrey SabelnikovAll right. Let's hope for it.

3:54:06Vlad CosteaThank you very much, guys. Thank you, Val. Thank you. I was going to call you Zoidberg, but I'm going to call you Andrey because it keeps it consistent throughout the interview. Thank you, Mr. Kwibs, a.k.a. Quinten. And thanks to the sponsors once again. Braiins, big announcement coming next week. Bitcoin.com News. LayerTwo Labs. Noones.com and SideShift.ai. Thank you all for listening, all 600 something of you, and I'll see you in the next one.

3:54:38Andrey SabelnikovThank you very much. Have a good evening. Thank you, everyone.

3:54:41Quinten van WelzenBye bye.