Zero-knowledge Proofs and Scalable infrastructure | A Conversation with Nana Murugesan

Speaker A: A lot of the consumer apps have achieved that scale of billions, and that's because they made it fun. But many of them are not that serious. So if we can somehow take the serious things we do and make it fun, I feel we can really scale to millions of developers and billions of users that we want to get to.

Speaker B: Hello and welcome to this new episode of the Money Movement. I'm really pleased today to be joined by the president of Matter Labs, Nana Murugasan. And uh, it's a great pleasure to see you again, um, in this context in your new role as well. Uh, excited for the conversation.

Speaker A: Great to see you, Jeremy. And um, congrats on all the progress and it was also so great to see your New York office. I'm here in New York and just near the World Trade Center. So cool to see you.

Speaker B: Okay. All right. You'll have to come to the opening celebration for sure. Yeah, yeah. Very cool. Well, you are, uh, you are now, you know, in the thick of it in terms of like fundamental infrastructure, uh, for crypto, for blockchain networks. Um, you know, I'm talking all the time, people, uh, are always asking me, you know, what's going to take to get to mainstream scale and acceptance. And there's a lot of different things that I talk about, but one of those is, um, the sort of innovations that are coming with ZK and with um, uh, new approaches to um, scaling and security and other things. And so I know the work that you do and the work that Circle is also doing with usdc, uh, on the platform, uh, is important and we'll come back to that in a little bit. But maybe before, you know, diving in, um, I'm always interested to, you know, talk about people's journey. Uh, so maybe we can just start just your professional journey, you know, into, into crypto, into this space and kind of ultimately kind of what, what's landed you, uh, where you are today?

Speaker A: Yeah, no thanks, Jeremy. Um, you know, my professional journey actually started with some of my personal experiences too. So maybe I'll touch on that a little bit. You know, I grew up in Southeast Asia and in India, like four countries. And uh, and then I moved to the US for grad school. And throughout this I experienced a lot of the challenges of the financial system, particularly around cross border transactions. Uh, so just grew up with a lot of pain and it kind of created a bunch of itch around why does this need to be so hard? Um, and then, um, you know, I worked in both enterprise, uh, and consumer early on in my Career. I worked in a startup. I was in you at Cisco and at Samsung earlier. But I really got into crypto about six years back when I was at Snapchat.

Speaker B: That's not one you usually hear is that people got into crypto and they're at Snapchat, but.

Speaker A: That's. Right. Well I'll tell you the. I'll tell you more then.

Speaker B: I have a former uh, a former Snapchatter, uh, who's someone, I think you know, Patrick Elias, uh, who uh, uh, is now. He got into crypto I think also went to Coinbase.

Speaker A: But uh, yes, no, Patrick was in my. I actually hired him at Snapchat and then he, he came to Coinbase with me and after that uh, he, you guys took him. Hope he's doing well.

Speaker B: He's doing great. He'll be happy to hear that on the, on the podcast.

Speaker A: No, no. At Snapchat I really got to understand Gen Z. Um, and I also have two daughters. Um, one is a Gen Z and one is ah, Gen Alpha. And you know, for me, uh, I was also entering, let's say the next stage of my career and I told myself I need to be working on things that matter for the next generation, which is Gen Z and Gen Alpha. And Snapchat got me into that, my daughters got me into that. And I can just tell you that this generation is more naturally aligned to the shared values of crypto. Um, and the way they think about centralized entities, the way they think about empowerment, the way they think about the creator economy, the way they think about assets, it's quite different um, from even how I may have thought about it. And it just aligns so well at the fundamental shared values of crypto. So that's actually how Snapchat, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, my daughters played a big role into me getting into crypto. I started uh, getting more and more into it, started investing myself, um, and that's why naturally after Snapchat I joined Coinbase, which was just such an amazing place to learn more and dig more into crypto, particularly for someone coming in from um, the web two and social side of things. Spent a couple of years there at Coinbase. The uh, Circle partnership we did with you and um, your team was a massive highlight. Um, and another one was a huge expansion of the international footprint that we did, particularly during the bear market. So that was another highlight. Um, after Coinbase I jumped even deeper, uh, into blockchain and crypto earlier this year. That's when I got into the infrastructure side of things as you mentioned. Earlier. And uh, so maybe I'll share a little bit more about um, Matter Labs and why I'm so excited about it. Matter Labs, better known as a creator of ZKsync, which is the most mature and most production ready, zero knowledge ZK rollup stack in Ethereum. And I'm also really fascinated by ZK, uh, just zero knowledge. This was actually conceived in 1985 if you can imagine. And it was just a mathematical way to provide a simple proof for the question without any additional information. Uh, so that was the logic. Kind of like saying I'm over 21 as a ZK proof without actually showing your date of birth or any other information. So pretty cool.

Speaker B: Identity credentials are one of the most commonly uh, uh, uh, given examples of the power of this in a very basic human way.

Speaker A: Yeah, and I was like fascinated by zk, um, and that's one of the reasons why I joined MatLabs, because it's really a pure play ZK and so after four decades since 1985, I think we're really on the verge of having a ZK moment. Thanks to all the crypto funding and the builders, including Matter Labs, um, as one of the earliest pure plays, as I mentioned, because I really think zk, um, allows blockchains to, you know, scale efficiently, uh, inheriting the security of Ethereum, not really compromising on the core properties that make blockchain so powerful. And like I mentioned earlier with that IMO21 example, it really brings a whole new dimension to privacy, KYC and so on and so forth. So anyways, so with that, excited to be tackling problems like tokenization in TradFi or the creative economy on consumer and so many more use cases on emerging markets. But really, even after I say all that, it really feels like it's day zero. And that's why I'm so excited to continue to be in crypto and you know, can't fight for all the things that are going to come at us.

Speaker B: Right? Yeah, I mean it's a, it's a, it's a special moment. I've reflected on this, uh, you know, online and some other conversations which is um, you know, we've been at this kind of collectively here for a while. I've been at this for 11 years. Obviously you've been at it for a while and you have these really significant infrastructure improvements. And I think it's notable that um, during the bear market of the dot com bust, um, in the most recent kind of bear market in crypto that so much progress was made uh, on infrastructure and technologies like ZK and rollups and the ability to um, take cryptography and its application to the next level to actually enable scalability, enable better user experiences, enable better privacy identity models, all this stuff, these were just not ready. Um, and we had to go through uh, proof of stake migration. And then obviously um, I have a huge amount of admiration for the ZK Zksync uh, implementation and I've always felt like it's one of the most impressive layer two models out there, um, because of its effective implementation of ZK rollups. Right. So it's really, really strong on that. Um, but uh, we're now at a place where with these kinds of layers people can deploy meaningful applications. And um, I'm interested. You know, I kind of compare this period of time a little bit to um, you know, in 2003, 2004, like there was like broadband started to become available, WI fi started to become available. People are connecting devices. Wasn't yet iPhone, but it was mobile devices were coming and digital media was coming online. All these things. And so you kind of like the pipes got, the pipes got there, right? And the infra got there and then it really took off. And so I think we're in a very similar place. And so I'd be interested as you look at the matter labs kind of R and D agenda and technical agenda, Um, I keep saying like 2025 is going to be the breakthrough year when we can actually deliver delightful user experiences that work for end users. Um, and I'd be interested just are you seeing that kind of progress and what are some of the most significant kind of infrastructure things that, that, that you can talk about that you guys are moving towards? Um, uh, you know, in the coming 12 months.

Speaker A: Yeah, and thanks for saying that, Jeremy.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: One of the things that I've really admired about the work that um, you circle have done and I've heard you talk about this is also like hype is great, but what is long lasting is the legacy of what remains after the hype. Um, and so it's really important for us to be building future proof stuff, uh, things that we believe and have conviction is going to happen in the future. So with that your question, um, the what of what we are uh, doing is like really we talk about Web3, Internet of Value, we've heard these things a lot of times. But what it really means is we need to have a borderless, transparent and secure backbone of the Internet that'll power the world's financial system, consumer apps, identity and everything. In between using Zero Knowledge as the core, we truly believe that Zero knowledge is the one that's going to actually deliver a lot of the properties. And I can talk about a few things that um, zero Knowledge can enable, which will get to your question. First is, I mean really the chain you build on matters, even though there's so many chains, but really the chain you build on matters and why Zero knowledge at the core matters is one is um, it's not a one size fits all world, right? Um, this Internet of value is not going to be on a single blockchain, um, just like nothing is going to be on a single thing. Uh, and hence we have this vision called Elastic Chain, um, which is about an interoperable chain of chains. Um, so you could have a chain, others could have a chain based on um, whatever you prefer. You could prefer public, um, you could prefer private, permissioned, permissionless, um, it's your choice. But at the end of the day we want to create um, an infrastructure which creates and supports this. Not a one size fits all and creates that interoperability. So that's one element, the other element is throughput.

Speaker B: Sorry, is that like, um, kind of like a, like ZK Sync ERA stack, like kind of like a way for people to kind of build these instances of this kind of compute memory data space that they can do for their application. And it, and, and at the end of the day, right, it inherits the security and interoperability that's sort of underlying both Zksync and Ethereum.

Speaker A: That's right. Just to um, tell a little bit about the evolution to get into that. Right. Like, so in 2021 we, we announced this thing called Zksync Era Lite, which was a payment cell too. And then in 2023 we had our very first ZKEVM, uh, in 2023 with ERA. And then in 2024 just a few months back we launched uh, Elastic Chain which is this interoperability. There uh, is um, ZK Stack, uh, which enables the thing that you mentioned. And then you have different chains. ERA is one of the ZK chains. Now you have Kronos and you're going to have almost a dozen chains by the end of the year on mainnet. So, so that's the whole interoperability piece. Um, and we can get more into that, but there's a lot there. Second thing which I wanted to highlight is throughput, um, you know this really well, right? In the current traditional system, credit card payments, they can handle like tens of thousands of transactions per Second, and blockchains are like nowhere near that kind of throughput right now. But zero knowledge through the succinctness of the zero knowledge proofs, um, the way it's done is the only way we believe um, blockchains are going to get to that type of throughput that the current traditional financial system needs. Right? Like how can we upgrade the current financial system if blockchains can get that level of throughput? So ZK is that future proof, um, uh, technology. So that's the second thing which we're really focused on is throughput. And finally, and certainly last but not the least is um, security. Um, we're seeing a lot of uh, demand, natural demand when it comes to tokenization of assets. I mean the thing that you've done with programmable money and stablecoins and what's done to the US dollar, uh, similarly there's an entire opening out there with real world assets and the need to increase accessibility and making it um, more uh, efficient. Um, so again as more regulatory frameworks come through, um, and as these assets go fully on chain, um, you know, we don't take these things seriously right now, but this is where zksync's security features, when we are talking about full on chain, are going to really help support um, the tokenization at scale. So those are a few things that we just want to highlight.

Speaker B: I want to come back to one of those in a couple of minutes. But um, I think, just as an observation, uh, I think you have an interesting background. Obviously the Snapchat uh, world, which is sort of sexy and consumer and digital media. I spent 10 years in digital media, but also I've worked on infrastructure like app servers and programming languages and developer tools and Circle has had a few different kind of product arcs. But m. I think um, coming back to this kind of where are we in the evolution and what does it take to get to mainstream scale and other things like um, you know, building like building infrastructure is both difficult, but it's also fun. Right. And um, I'm just interested in particular given like where you came from and

Speaker A: where you are today.

Speaker B: Like you know, you're, you're like you eat infrastructure for breakfast basically. Right. And so I'm just curious how do you feel about that from an entrepreneurial perspective? I certainly can relate to that. Um, but you know, curious to hear your, your thoughts just as a, as a builder, as a leader, uh, in the space because there's a lot of people saying, hey, we got too much infra. We now need to. It's all about consumer. It's all about apps. Um, but there's still like a lot of unsolved infrastructure problems too.

Speaker A: No, that's a great question, Jeremy. I'm a big believer. Uh, and I personally want to work on serious things, but I want to make it fun. I just know that. And that's one of the things that I feel like institutions and enterprises can learn too, because a lot of the consumer apps have achieved that scale of billions, and that's because they made it fun. But many of them are not that serious. So if we can somehow take the serious things we do and make it fun, I feel we can really scale to millions of developers and billions of users that we want to get to. Right. So I'm always thinking about that and my Snapchat experience has really taught me how to make things fun. But then some of the other experiences and also Matter Labs is like really serious technology, really serious infrastructure stuff. So I'm always thinking, how do I do things that are both serious and fun? Um, and so some of the things, um, ah, I'll highlight. Right. One is, uh, ZK is really hard to understand, even for those who are in crypto. I mean, and hence it's like really not accessible. So one of the things we did was we, um, wrote a book, just almost written for a kindergartner called, um, and I don't know if you have. I would love to send that to you. It's really fun.

Speaker B: Sure. Yeah. Uh, I use GPT to make cartoons about topics for my daughters all the time. And it's like, how do you explain, uh, what a reserve currency is, uh, to a nine year old, uh, in a cartoon? Yeah.

Speaker A: We created these characters called mathimals, Math cartoon characters. And then we kind of talk about circuits and all these things in a way that a kindergartner can understand. And we've seen such great reception for this. We were in Argentina recently. The former president of Argentina came by Bar Boot. He carried along that book and he was like, this is great. So I think one of the things which we need to do, that's a great example of making really serious, hard concepts fun and easy to understand because that's how people are going to embrace it. Uh, but there's a lot of other things that, um, we are doing too. For example, uh, one of my favorite, um, uh, apps, uh, being at Snapchat and in general, the people who know me, you can ask Patrick too. I love taking pictures, um, and I feel like pictures speak a thousand words. And so, uh, we're working with Nodal, uh, they have a QLIK app where you can use your phone's metadata and store a hash of it on chain and you can verify what device, location and time a photo was taken. ZK proofs are going to be coming. And this is a great way where even for applications like Muse and other things where we are fighting things like is the picture, uh, the right one? Um, these are natural applications where ZK can help improve uh, whether it's fake news or whatever it is or just prove the legitimacy of the picture that you've taken. Um, so things like that are really cool, uh, and it gets the point across on the application of ZK at scale. Um, so anyways, those are ways in which you can make infrastructure functions totally. Are there.

Speaker B: Uh, I'm actually this is a sort of random question but like are given the ZK architecture, are you finding like web3games as a category just in terms of literal fun? Like ah, because obviously the architecture is one which kind of lends itself to uh, executing on, on. On. On game kind of models on chain.

Speaker A: That's perfect. I actually want to talk about it later. So you asked me already, that's amazing. I think gaming is one vertical. The two verticals that we are really excited about right now, um, on Tradfi with tokenization, tons of progress. And on the consumer side, um, gaming, we've had tons of progress. We had um, Treasure Dao who just switched over from Arbitrum to zksync for particularly the reasons that you mentioned. It's just such a natural um, fit for them. And they just switched over recently. And then uh, we have some very interesting announcements uh, coming up soon. We are working with pudgy penguins on their chain. Uh, and we have a few more announcements. All of that is going to be around creators and gaming and we are seeing a natural fit over there.

Speaker B: That's awesome. Um, yeah, maybe kind of connecting some dots here like uh, the, the coming back to this sort of like serious crypto. Uh, there's sort of like serious applications and I think one that we write about extensively actually recently, um, we launched a Circle Global impact report which really talks about the growing use of USDC in humanitarian aid, in uh, disaster relief, um, in supporting um, households in markets and countries that really want to depend on a digital dollar as a store of value. And um, yeah, it's serious right, because we're talking about people's livelihoods. We're talking about people who are like in places like Argentina who uh, hopefully things are Getting more under control but where it's still really challenging. And so we really think about, and I know you do too, so I want to kind of hear what you're seeing and learning is um, you know, a lot of times these sort of more efficient technologies that kind of deal with like access and cost and other things in fundamental ways. Their adoption like scales up faster in emerging and developing markets than it does in developed markets. And it really feels like the adoption of crypto infrastructure, the adoption of stablecoins, like it's, there's sort of like this leapfrogging which is like what happened with you know, with, with like WhatsApp, you know, in its adoption cycle. And um, and so I'm curious, like do you see that, that happening? Um, and, and, and how are, how are you seeing kind of Latin America, Africa, other emerging markets in terms of people who are building with, with ZK or ZK Sync and um, and the opportunity space there. And then obviously like we uh, you know, we launched usdc, um, and CCTP and bringing those there to kind of ensure that there's the best possible digital dollar in the world with, with great underlying liquidity and so on. Um, what are you seeing in terms of that demand and that, that sort of use case?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great question, Jeremy. Right. Like in the Western world we often talk about things like tokenization, gaming, you know, a lot of those use cases to crypto. I spent two weeks in Argentina and we can talk a little bit about um, uh, what we are seeing over there. There are like basic day to day use cases and utilitarian things that are happening there that are so inspiring. Um, and folks in high schools and colleges and we spoke to a lot of them who are just so much talent in that region too and they're just building on crypto blockchain. Right. Um, USDC has done wonders over there to solve one of the most basic problems. And there are so many other things too. One of the things that we are working on is Quark id. So Quark id, uh, is um, the id, the uh, KYC and ID that the government is creating. And uh, so they're actually building. They're going to be a ZK chain and they're going to be building on them which is really uh, incredible because some of the basic challenges that people are having with respect to driver's license which is going to be rolled out next, birth certificates, uh, marriage certificates and things and so on and so forth, it's creating so much inefficiency, uh, leading To a lot of underbanked, unbanked, a lot of those problems. And so uh, the ability to partner with the government on Quark id, not just in Argentina because Quarkid is expanding across LATAM as well. Um, to kind of figure uh, things out at that identity level and then to partner with innovative uh, companies like Lemon Cash, um, uh, and also companies uh, like uh, Klave, um at the UX level with Wallet. These are all things that we are doing to just solve day to day um, use cases in Argentina. And it's really inspiring. Um, and we are actually going to be starting in Argentina, doubling down from there. It's a little bit of a different approach that I think we took both at Coinbase and also I think at Circle. You might be taking with more Brazil because there's a bit more of an established central bank but for us Argentina is a much more of a uh, natural fit. But really excited about the entire region.

Speaker B: Totally agree. We uh, you know we've been making a big push in Latin America. We recently launched direct USDC liquidity and banking and infrastructure at a wholesale and institutional level in Brazil and Mexico um, with 24.7rails and um, I think we sort of think about the broader region is just an enormous uh, opportunity space. Um, that's really exciting. I think um, I'd be interested in that implementation. Um, uh, is that essentially kind of a permissioned implementation that then there's their own apps kind of built around it. Um, but is it designed so that it can kind of those credentials essentially can come out to the public Internet, uh, and to public blockchains? That's exactly right.

Speaker A: Right. Because um, we have to bring harmony between permissionless and permissioned through this interoperability that I talked about. Uh, I mean just like we saw in uh, Web two. Right. I mean those who opened up the technology to anyone were able to scale to billions and and so permissionless blockchains are appealing from that standpoint. It's like open to uh, anyone. However, for a lot of these things like very private, confidential things like identity and uh, privacy, uh, permission is much more uh, it makes much more sense. And so one of the things that we are really focusing on is customizable, compliant and collaborative. And so ZK chains are customizable and which means it completely can support private and uh, permissioned um, and also allows it to be interoperable with um, public and permissionedness. And so this is a great way we think there's going to be that collaboration and harmony between both worlds instead of Making it an either or. But we can really think about it in terms of an end, uh, between both and we can really open things up when it's needed.

Speaker B: I mean, I think that that kind of architecture is definitely going to be a big part of sort of how all this scales up.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: And, um, people use a lot of different phrases, permissioned, permissionless app chains, layer threes, all this sort of stuff. And I like to use the metaphor of virtual, uh, private clouds. Uh, so I think people are more familiar with sort of the Internet. They're like, well, you can run your own private data center and that's how it used to be done. And then there's like the public cloud, which was like, wow, you could like scale up on by using, you know, Amazon's resources. And then there's sort of the virtual private cloud, which is. I don't want to just like, be sharing the same computers and same, you know, space as others. And maybe, like, startups might be willing to do that. But like, I want, I want control. I want control over my own security. I want control over protecting my own data. But I want to know that I'm still like, leveraging the scale of the public Internet and leveraging the economies of scale of this infrastructure and still can make access really seamless for people. And in some ways these architectures are kind of enabling, whether it's enterprise or tokenization or government identity or whatever it is. But I think the important thing is sometimes there's an ideological posture people take on this. It's like, if it's not completely on the public blockchain, why bother? We can just use database cases, right? But I think that's a simplistic view and we really do need kind of these layers and we really do need. You want people building on the primitives of cryptographic infrastructure and proving, um, and blockchains, um, and they're not made for everything. But definitely when it comes to sort of trusted data, kind, uh, of compute integrity, all these things that you get out of kind of crypto as an infrastructure and then kind of make that work with the public permissionless. And one of the things that we've tried to straddle with USDC is, um, we're now kind of crossing over into a world where people are launching, um, whether it's on a stack like yours or other stacks they're launching and they're using kind of a bridge, USDC standard to make USDC available even in a permissioned environment. Um, but it's still ultimately interoperable that Digital money needs to exist in all those places basically. Um, yeah, yeah, no, totally agree.

Speaker A: And one more thing, um, in addition to the point you made about control is um, as an industry I think we kind of need to work hard on making these things invisible to the end user because one of the biggest, biggest, biggest challenges in crypto is the ux. It's so clunky. Uh, seed phrases this that so hard. It's so confusing which chain, uh, like what do I do? And it doesn't matter what kind of technology we are building, we're going to go. It's going to be hard to make progress. And so that's something where another thing which we are working on, I'm sure you're working on it but I feel like there's a lot of work we should do.

Speaker B: Everybody's working on chain abstraction, right? Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, but also curious to hear your thoughts on uh, chains and um, all that too. I think um, particularly I've always been thinking about programmable money is solving one aspect of it now how do we truly um, achieve scale um, with m. Programmable money and some of the work that we are doing. Love to hear your thoughts as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, sure. I mean I think um, at a high level I completely agree with what you just said which is um, the ux like we have to kind of like make this leap where a person who's interacting with an application, a Web3 application, whether it's contained in a Web2 app and then it's Web3 embedded or it's like standalone Web3 in a browser or on a mobile device. But whatever the case where that Web3 experience that the user doesn't know that they're using blockchains, they don't know that uh, they're using crypto, uh, but they will certainly be aware of like that they have a digital asset, they have a digital object, they have a digital identity, they have these things that they possess and control and are secure and people can convey that and understand that. But then when they interact right, they're using more familiar paradigms like Internet based names, um, or um, QR codes, other things as well. We really want to see that evolve from a circle perspective. We're investing a lot in making sure that first of all USDC can be made available safely on all of these different um, infrastructures that are launching and that we can bring cross chain transfer protocol to all these so that effectively moving value. People shouldn't have to worry about uh, what chain they're on, what chain another user's on apps should be able to figure out, oh, this person's on zk, this person's on Base, this person's on Solana, whatever it is and just make it work. Right? Um, and then I think similarly like GAS abstraction is probably one of the most important things and so we're seeing proliferation in account abstraction, infrastructure and effectively um, paymasters or kind of, um, GAS fee, kind of payment, delegation and all of that is really important infrastructure which gets us to a world where I'm not thinking about gas, I'm not thinking about what these tokens are, I'm not thinking about what chain I'm on and I'm just having a good time, you know, uh, uh, whatever application I'm using. So um, I think everything that's happening in the industry is moving towards that and I think we're finally starting to see some great user experiences where you can onboard with an OAuth or with uh, a passkey and you don't have to remember seed phrases where um, you can on ramp kind of uh, instantly into USDC and then you can interact and transact um, and even use apps where any fees are de minimis because they're on these scalable infrastructures and developers can pay the fees on your behalf using usdc. And so it just makes everything smoother. So we're getting there. Um, and um, I really feel like when I look at all the entrepreneurs that are building right now and both at the infrastructure level and the end user level, we're really seeing really great progress. And um, I think this big push on chain abstraction um, is going to yield fruit. Um, and I really believe that that's going to lead to um, 2025, like I said earlier, being this incredible breakthrough year in terms of scalability, usability, legal certainty, global liquidity and availability. All these things are kind of happening and building to that moment. Uh, and I think uh, a phrase you probably remember like we will officially cross the chasm, um, uh, and be on the slope of enlightenment, uh, and bringing uh, hundreds of millions and more people uh, into the infrastructure and into these platforms.

Speaker A: No, totally agree. And um, this is something we are also waiting on is just regulatory clarity too. I think that's going to help a lot. That's one of the biggest um, headwinds right now. So they'll help. But yeah, it all comes down to like you mentioned, right? Like it has to be serious and fun people. Just everything should work better. I think Chris Dixon probably mentioned this in the last show. I think I heard him say, you know you got to make old things better and then you also need to do new things. So you have to somehow make uh, do both. Otherwise uh, it's not a web3.

Speaker B: Yes, this is the 10x phenomenon, right? It's got to be 10x better, it's going to be 10x less expensive and it's got to enable new things that you just couldn't do for um. Yeah, well, and part of your other question to me was sort of with the programmability of money. And the kind of, the way I like to talk about this is, you know, circle. You know, we've been on this mission for 11 years effectively to get to a point where storing and moving value, um, you know, seamlessly, globally, interoperably just becomes a commodity free service on uh, the Internet, right? And so like we're basically like, we're arriving there, right? And that's really cool like that, that should cause like an explosion in the amount of like transaction activity that happens over the Internet because it sort of reduces all these, all these frictions. But the really interesting thing is programmability and um, and you know it's um, you know we've never had composable uh, programmable money on open public infrastructure that anyone can build with. And people, you know, a lot of times are like well what does that mean? Well I'm like well look at what's been built in the past five years in DeFi, just in the past several years. DEFI is programmable money. We're taking every fundamental building block of finance and building it as uh, as, as a LEGO brick, as a protocol that people can compose and integrate and build on. And it's extraordinary to see. And speaking of the earlier example, if you go to Argentina, Lemon Cash, great example. Here's a product that basically abstracts away all this underneath and it becomes a very straightforward way for someone to save, spend, uh, and earn and pay and these verbs that are really straightforward to the user. It's like, oh yeah, this is what I want. And it's 100% built on this on chain composable infrastructure and like things like that were just inconceivable years ago. So programmable money is already here. But we're still um, like we haven't yet hit the iPhone moment. Uh, right. We haven't yet had. There is not yet a UX container, uh, uh, that has that kind of um, appeal and seamlessness and that then all these programmable money utilities can ride uh, on top of and scale and use both enterprise and consumer across both um, you know, and so I'm excited.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, same here. I really hope with the programmable money plus some of the things that can be enabled in infrastructure so ZK technology truly creates that rating that. Yeah.

Speaker B: Identity, security, privacy. Yeah, I mean these are um, uh, it's again counterintuitive. People often uh, ask about like what are the biggest barriers to um, to uh, say enterprises that are using this? And my first response is actually like privacy. Uh, no business in their right mind is going to build on chain unless they have total privacy and totally secure confidential transactions. And so a lot of people thought about confidential transactions as like, oh, this is individuals that want to have private peer to peer transactions, which is also valid and important. Uh, but if you want society to adopt this broadly. Right. We have to preserve privacy and corporations actually that's incredibly important. So anyway, I know you guys are doing a lot of good work uh, in all these areas. Um, and uh, yeah, it's fun to chat through all this, Nana. And uh, excited to see your continued progress.

Speaker A: Thank you so much. Ermi, um, and congrats again and hope to see you soon either Boston or New York somewhere.

Speaker B: Yes, yes, I, I think it's probably likely I'll see you in New York. New York.

Speaker A: All right, thank you so much.

Speaker B: Have a great day.

Speaker A: You too. Take.