In Ethereum, a block server 12 approximately twelve seconds. So within the twelve seconds, you can whoever is the solver and whoever has the control over the what goes in a bundle acts like a god. In the case of Bitcoin, you had the idea of time chain. In the case of Ethereum, it's not even this time chain. It is time travel because because now the chain is much more programmable. Yeah. Every transaction that's in the blockchain already confirmed as a past tense, and each transaction that's in the mempool are within the future tense. Ethereum, unlike Bitcoin, is the blockchain that allows for present tense transactions properly. What you're ultimately designing is not user experience, but shareholder experience.

Dasgupta. Yes. Hi, everybody. So I'm very happy to be here. Thank you, Josh, for inviting me for this. So yeah. I mean, I think, we're having exciting conversation.

Sure. So, I'm here sharing a project that I found at with Vlad Zamfier. It's called smart transactions. And initially started, like, three, four years ago, we are researching the Mev space. And so, like, one of the early insights I had where we discussed that the beginning of Mev is the end of blocks, which just means take a fancy way of saying that it's the end of blockchain as we know it. And things are gonna change quite rapidly. And then this this change, the market structure, the supplies, and everything change. But through all that, we realize that transactions, when you send on blockchains, are kinda quite straightforward. Like, you say, okay. I want to send this e to this person. I want to receive this. And the only thing you can do, kind of programmable ability, a bit more flexibility, expressibility are on smart contracts. And we realize now that transactions are routed through this intermediate layer called the solvers, maybe transactions from the wallet or from the dApp can add this extra can we can think of it as metadata saying I want to like, for example, I want to give this, I want to swap x with y provided the price changes and so on. So provided this person gets it or can have x grow or gets locked in a certain way. These things, solvers can take care of that, can find out the best time to execute that, can find best price or whatever conditions you give. So that's smart transact transactions that are smart enough to find whatever the user has, defined in the wallet, in the dApp. And we use a lot of fun stuff like time travel and and, other kinds of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So,

Yes. Yes. Could you unpack that a bit? I mean, you could say that, except that it is not. And and, because, you know, intense is, I mean, called old fashioned, but as a computer scientist, I would say intense are a kind of a psychological thing. But worse of it is that it's there is no way to verify what somebody's mind what the intentions are behind something. I mean Right. The only thing we can verify are consequences of actions. So in some ways, you could say the intents, but what we actually do is, like, for example, say on the wallet, you click and you give a measure saying I want a certain kind of slippage, then that's something we can verify. So you can see that's an intent, but I will just call it an objective of whatever, like like, the word objective and goal. Something is out there in the world, something that is verifiable. So you could say that, yes, it is that, but it's also another way of, talking about it is is, Vitalik has this believe it's EIP seven seven zero two, two, which is basically extending the expressibility of every transaction to be able to have these other conditions, no things I was talking about. And that's, that's something, you know, in some ways in line with what we have already been trying for a couple of years now. And maybe I'll give you if I may let me give a different very different, metaphor, landscape to, like, paint the picture a little bit. So right now, if you look at Ethereum, most of the stuff in Ethereum boils down to, doing a swap coin x, coin y. We have the Uniswap. Then we have Uniswap x based on Cowswap. Many other platforms do the same thing. Sure. You have bridging. You have staking of all that. But, ultimately, if you can't, take your money out or put new money, which is against, swapping, you're kind of stuck. It wouldn't work. Right? So swap is not just important, but if you look at DappRadar, it is the most important application. But the thing is, from the case of MEV, most of the solvers who actually are the kind of the underlying engine that kind of runs MEV. Searcher is a solver, same word. The thing they do, essentially is receive transactions from different wallets, and they try to figure out what's the most optimized way to provide, the transaction bundle. And what the transactions do? Swaps. Like, I'm sending eight. I'm trying to get one. I'm selling something. I'm waiting for a price to happen, be it a limit or a bit, whatever it is. We realize that this, way of optimizing transactions for the best swap could be extended to other use cases. So because swap is essentially a matching problem. Right? I want to sell ETH for DAI. You want to buy DAI for ETH. CallSwap will find out the best, pair. And we realize we can do it for not just, money or, like, tokens, but, like, any kind of a like, building an Uber on chain. Building an Airbnb, it's a matter of matching.

I guess, bots. Mhmm. So there are other computers.

yeah, usable for many different types of things besides Yeah. Exactly. Matching for swaps. Exactly. I mean, like, you know, when when we're in we're in Defcon in Bangkok, everybody has been using Grab. And in Grab, you can put a request saying, I want to have bath time, and somebody will respond, like, hotel or whatever will respond and saying, okay. We have bath high. They will send it to you. That's a match again. So between you you have it. So this is it's almost it's a joke we say. You know, how makes the the peer to peer connection in some ways between a coincidence of wants, like, on both sides. What about the want is more than just I want x coin for y coin? Yeah. The real ones, like, I want. And other, side will respond to, I want the ride. Others, that's an Uber. I or whatever is the case. So any marketplace, you could think of it, even Telegram where I want to send a message to Josh. And on other side, somebody could be a broadcast server. Telegram broadcast hosted in on their own computer. They could say I am willing to provide the service of broadcasting the service that you want to send to Bujos. So in many ways that you can think of most of the things that we do online, especially things that are kind of social networky, be it Uber or this, that, and the other as kind of a supply and demand or rather kind of ask and bid, like, two sides of the matching engine problem. And so that's what Right. We are trying to generalize the matching engine, not just swaps, but any kinds of,

Some people hate it, but I think it's the best metaphor to use. Yeah. Because what happens in Mev is just like you have transactions that are order one after the other, but what may have happened, the ordering of ordering of transactions would get manipulated. So somebody wants to sell ETH and somebody could come before that by buying up enough ETH and changing the price of the ETH. That's front running or other cases or other kinds of attacks. So if you can change the order of transactions, in some ways, you change the way, time happens. For example, I was supposed to go before you. Right. Now I'm I'm going after you. Right. So my time was before you. Now my time is after you. So by changing the time or changing the order of transactions, you're essentially changing the time that somebody will have something will happen. Now this is not real time time travel as in nobody will use our platform and end up yesterday. Right. That will not happen. But what will happen is somebody will use our transaction, and they would be able to make bets based on future that did not happen. So as an example, say you want to short a trade, and you don't even have those coins to short. So you can see I want to short if I have the coins in the future. And in the future, we will try to make sure that's fulfilled. So in Ethereum blocks every twelve approximately twelve seconds. So within within the twelve seconds, you can whoever is the solver and whoever has the control over the what goes in a bundle acts like a god. Because, as long as, you know, within the twelve seconds, they're able to make up for it and it actually is coherent in terms of there are no problems of causality, what caused what, it's perfectly fine. So you can make this weird transactions where you say do x based on y, and y will happen later as long as the latest within the same block. So if in a twelve second block, a transaction that happens in second second can say, you know, do the short if I get so many ETH, in the next five, seven seconds. In the twelve seconds, that's still. Yeah. And within twelve seconds, there's another transaction comes in, which is which will give this ETH to this other transaction provider. Then, you know, the solver will be like, okay. This makes total sense. They will take these two transactions, put it in a bundle, and send it to be to be accepted by the the block builder and proposal and all that. So this is why it looks like time travel when it's finally submitted and it's on the blockchain. Mhmm. Actually, what's happening is kind of shenanigans within those twelve seconds where you can act like God.

Time manipulation because we have this kind of window of twelve seconds where you're god. You know?

I mean, the blockchain is all ready from the beginning Yeah. Of, of Time change. Being a time change. Yeah. Yeah. And of trustlessness. They're all connected. Because what is the question of trust? The question of trust is basically being able to when I say you don't have to trust anything on the blockchain, it means, like, if somebody locks up a coin on the blockchain, you don't have to trust it. It'll be there. It'll be there in ten years, hundred years, two hundred years, which means anytime somebody trusts, it's basically an assumption of a future promise to be fulfilled. That's what trust is. Every trust is an assumption on the future something to be fulfilled. So when we see on the blockchain, you don't have to trust anything, like, if you lock something in an escrow and you say the price changes, it automatically release so and so coins to somebody. And you know if the price changes, the coins will be released. Nobody can stop it. What that does mean? That means that you are making an assumption that you know for sure the guarantee is 100%. So that means the question of trust would not be even a question if in real life we could time travel to that future and always check it. Of course, we cannot do that. Right. Right. Right. So when we have something that is trustless, we are essentially saying saying it is almost like it is allowing you to travel to the future and give you that guarantee. Like, why is Bitcoin saying 21,000,000 is fixed? Nobody went to the future and saw 21,000,000. After that, it's not. But we don't have to trust it's there because it's in the code. It's in the culture not to change the code. It's a lot of these things. So, ultimately, what you get as a result of partly tech, partly culture of blockchain, Ethereum, all this crypto with trustlessness. Lessness. You get this paradigm of being able to make promises that you know in the future will be true even though you did not go in the future, and that's time travel in some ways. Mhmm. It's like being able to have a crystal ball and be able to see, you know, know, if a claim is made on the blockchain. That is kinda true. Right. And this is why this whole, angle that is there on blockchain. One one is this making promises, and you know that is true. Another angle, which is time travel in the future. Mhmm. Another angle is being able to see from all the existing blocks that anything that happened in the past, you can recreate it by running the same exact chain. Mhmm. From the beginning, you can, if you anybody runs Bitcoin or Ethereum from Genesis block, it'll exactly be what it was. It won't change ever. Mhmm. Because there are proofs of all the data, which is time travel to the past because we didn't nobody went to the past and so. So this is why I mean, time chain is actually a way better metaphor in some ways, if you think about it Right. Than than blockchain. So I would say what we are doing is in some ways it's kind of a joke we say that and I the time chain is not complete unless you have time travel. Like, it's the missing block because Nakamoto already came up with the time chain, which is the idea that you can make almost do virtual time travel to the future because you have that guarantees the future will be exactly that, or you can go to the past because you can see the proof of something actually happened. Like proof of, proof of work. You did not actually the network can check the difficulty level. Nobody went to the past and saw they actually had the acid, but you don't need to. Mhmm. You don't need to. And that's it. That's almost like virtual time travel to the past. So you have both these time travels in the blockchain. We just call it trustless. Yeah. But it's actually time travel. It's the same word. I mean, different word, but same essence. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's something about the I mean, definitely the

God in, like, MEV then is, like, a bit more complicated, and it really depends on, like, the the like an who builds the blocks and yeah. God. Like Yeah. Yeah. All those, like because it's not even just solvers or servers. It's also market makers. It's also, like, you know, people who are very good at meme making and changing and realizing the value of ETH and all that. So Yeah. There's a lot in terms of happening, but it's it's in in fact, the fact is, in the case of Bitcoin, you had the idea of time chain. In the case of Ethereum, it's not even this time chain. It is time travel because now the chain is much more programmable. Yeah. So by being able to almost think of it programmable time, which means the time is going forward, time is going back. So in many ways, it's like, during complete time.

Yeah. Yeah. You could think of that. That sounds rough. I mean, I wouldn't say that because I mean I mean, yes. Of course. So much of finance is completely based on time travel anyways because when people do Yeah. Shorts and all those kind of, Bets on time. It's all based on based on time. Like, right now, you you think On a future. Yeah. The whole idea of speculation is based on time. Like, you can speculate Mhmm. And you're gonna make the time happen for something to re it's like a self fulfilling prophecy in some ways, you know, because every every week, the price goes up. So, I mean, this idea of time is, as you said, when when you talk about what seems to work, that it is integral to the concept of money, of value, of all of that. I mean, something has value because that stands the test of time. So, again, we we have the idea of time. And even when you said about the the the previous things about, like, how people start coordinating with each other. I mean, long story short, one of the claims historians sometimes have is it is the Catholic monks who kind of came up with the rigor and the discipline of eating not when hungry Mhmm. But based on the time. Waking up not when just you want to wake up based on time, going to so this idea that we just don't eat and nobody questions it when we are hungry, we just automatically entire world gets hungry at twelve in the afternoon. Mhmm. It's really weird, but it does happen because regimented how that happened is when the revolution happened, they cannot say every man a priest, which means every man will be like the Catholic priest doing things on time. So that is and we know one of Marx's papers work and others where, you know, this whole work ethic was invented by the monks. Mhmm. And this is why the time of the Lord. So time is Lord in some ways. Right? Right. Right. Right. So, I mean, this kind of metaphor is in the case of Bitcoin, Bitcoin white paper is very interesting because it poses the problem of, this how can you not have reversibility? How can you not have double spending? And the solution is provided in the first page is decentralized time stamping server. Yeah. And the entire paper is obsessed about time stamping. And so many ways, it's like, I think in every page, there is some mention of something to do with time. And even in computer science literature time and how to have a time that that you can agree on between many different processes is the birth of distributor systems and then decentralization and then Bitcoin and then so it is also dystopian, of course. I mean, I I I couldn't agree more because because there's a whole element, that precedes crypto from extravian online community where I mean, in again, long story short, immutability, in some ways was in invented to argue that if we, die or leave for and come back or if you don't even die, we'll leave for thousand years, we need a form of value that, you know, can stay for good for thousand million years. Years. And so, you mean to be it is great because you know your your money, your asset would not be overturned, would not be changed. So, you mean to be really in many ways is a shorthand for immortality. And that again is a conversation about rhetoric of time. So, it is unavoidable. So I would instead of saying dystopian or utopian, I would say it is programmable. So it's how you program it, you know, sometimes. Yeah. So then, like, there's a question in my mind of, like, if, you know, if you

Freedom look like? Air drops. You know? Air drops. That that's that's Freedom freedom is getting as many airdrops. Airdrops. I mean, when you get airdrops for because you did something, you participated in a in a platform without expectation of anything. Maybe sometimes, most of them, you didn't know. At least you didn't know how much you will get. Yeah. And next thing you know, you got some airdrops that allows you some kind of a freedom because, you know, if it has some value, if it goes up, you know, you can buy. I know it sounds super, you know, antithetical move to the spirit, but you do you know, it's like the poison is its own very medicine in some cases. Right? So that which, you know, got us not having time, getting the airdrop, being able to know, but it's basically swap those airdrop talk tokens to fiat or other kinds of services values online. You get to have some, you know so I think airdrops are one of the great, I mean, things which, you know, give us little sense of, like, I don't know, time well spent. You can get it retroactively. I know it sound maybe more dystopian, but I think there is a more, I don't know how to put it, like, nicer, fair, provided the airdrop is fairly distributed. It's not like the founding team. Like, it depends on how it's distributed. Exactly.

Communism is airdrops done properly. So it's like a fair distribution of air drops where Property air drops property. Yeah. Yeah. I mean and you know, this is why it's it's interesting that the whole air drops also kind of in a little way, if I exaggerate a bit, it kind of makes question makes us question this whole notion ideology of scarcity. Because somebody just giving out just like that. So it's maybe it's not that scarce. The glimpse of abundance, you know, which Yeah. You know, which is, I think, also free time, the abundance of time. So I I think, if time is money as we say in in in everyday language, I think airdrop is just like, you know, like free time in some ways. I mean, again, how it's done, which stage of the project, how much is the pre mining thing, you know. Are people just, like, shilling it? Somebody will drag you after that. I mean, all those things, of course, that makes it make it much more complicated, but, I mean, there is that, you know. And then if you think of programmable time, as I said, you know, just say it's like a speculation. If somebody does the airdrop to a token that are, like, you know, locked in a certain way where you have to do x y z z to to get the value out of it. So there are all kinds of, like, ways to, like, do experimental programmable Mhmm. Funky airdrops also and then also.

Well, I mean, I I I I would say it would be I mean, I am more and more of a fan of, I mean, actually, with smart transaction, we try to do something like that. I'm shilling against smart transactions.

I don't know if these are the right questions. Exactly. No. Because one of the fun things we do in smart transactions is every dApp or wallet, when it sends transactions, we we have individualized, mempool for every user, and the mempool is on chain. So it's almost like your, mempool is your on chain wallet. So, for example, I send three, four transactions that the solver gets. When the solver tries to solve it, it also puts it on chain. So it we cannot blur the boundary between mempool being off chain in the, you know, memory of each, full node or of solver to by making the mempool itself on chain, which is a weird idea, we are kind of claiming this thing that, what you do could be made public provided that you have the guarantees that you know it will be properly picked up. And if it's not picked up, you can have you can argue that somebody some other solver would pick up. So, I mean, from that perspective, I mean, the idea of mempool is also, interesting because what happens in a a Mempool are I'm going back to time. Are anything that's in a Mempool stays there as a potential to be picked up by the solver eventually the proposer and gets so in many ways, it remains in a kind of a future state. Like, it is it is not yet a present. Like, it's it could be the potential. Whereas anything that gets accepted in the blockchain gets frozen and cannot be changed and becomes in the past tense because you can't change the past. Mhmm. So every transaction that's in the blockchain already confirmed as a past tense, and any transaction that's in the mempool are always in the present are in the future tense. And only during the twelve seconds when the transaction is being processed, picked up, validated, executed, they remain in the present tense. Now before MELV, that present tense was completely invisible because once you send transactions, it would remain in the future state, and then you would if you paid enough gas, you would see it in the past tense. You would never interact with the platform, with the in between you and the miner to get it accepted. Now with MEV, you do, because that's the whole point of solvers. Solvers are almost kind of an interactive protocol with the transactions, trying to see that, okay. I see this transaction, tries to buy this ETH. Can I put something before that to raise the value, lower the value, make some money? So it makes sense to have this transaction go through. So the solvers are actually not just, or like before, like, miners in Bitcoin blindly accepting transactions based on fees. They're actually validating transactions based on how much they can get out of it. So as the transactions processed with with the server. This is the only present tense. Otherwise, transactions in blockchain remain either in a future state Mhmm. Or in a past. So I would state Ethereum, unlike Bitcoin, is the blockchain that allows for present tense transactions to be properly managed. Bitcoin doesn't have it because there is no maybe happening. So when when is when is the present tense happening? The present tense happening so I send a transaction. It's in Mempool. Yeah. Say it stays in Mempool for, I don't know, say three blocks. And so they use those three blocks. Nothing has happened to the transaction. It just stays in Mempool, gets broadcasted. So it stays in a future state because it could be to happen. Bound about to happen if it happens. Yeah. Could happen. But then when a solver sees, ah, now the market condition because the I want to sell some token called, say, Josh coin, I'm just saying. Suddenly, Josh coin spikes up the value. To the moon. Yeah. To the moon. Suddenly. It's and it's always like, hold on. This transaction has been waiting, wanting to sell Josh coin. Maybe I just and we can, involve we can include that in the next bundle. Mhmm. Because the solver could make lots of money by having somebody sell or buy doing some sort of a trading strategy around that transaction of selling Josh coin. Mhmm. So during that block, that twelve seconds, when the solver is reading the transaction, figuring out it's about selling this coin that is going to the moon, deciding that I can actually add transaction before or after to manipulate the price to make some money out of it, it is in the present tense because it is neither waiting to be accepted nor it has already been accepted. It is in the process of being accepted. Right. Right. Because the it's it's the present is like ing, like it being a so the solver is processing by being interacting. Because before in Bitcoin, either the miner doesn't care about the transaction because the transaction fees are not enough. It's already filled the block. All the transaction is filled, and it just picked up includes. There is no interaction. It's not like seeing what's in the transaction. Doesn't care about it. The fees are only thing that matters. Mhmm. So now this and also there's only 1 coin in it just I mean, in Bitcoin classically. So here, because there's so much of logic in every transaction because of this during completeness, also because there are many coins, also because the whole thing of, like, it depends when to pick a transaction, not just based on fees, but what's the content of the transaction. Because before it was like, this is where the censorship resistance idea also comes in, that in Bitcoin, it's censorship resistant because the miner would not read the transaction, has no incentive to it. We cannot gain from it. It's just based on fees. Where Whereas in Mev, it's not just based on fees. It's based on what inside the transaction. Right. And I see it's actually not always a censorship conversation. It's also a present tense conversation that because it's only during these twelve seconds, then finally it is being picked up after waiting for three blocks. And during that block, the fourth block, the current block, is the solver actually interacting in interactive protocol with the transaction. So that is the only time a transaction sliver of time gets to be in the present tense. Mhmm. Whereas the sliver is much narrow. It's just about reading the value of the transaction fees, which is high enough in Bitcoin. So may actually opened up the this present tense from so it used to be, like, only past and then suddenly future. Sorry. Only future mempool and suddenly past. Yeah. Yeah. And now future and the present and then past. So the present is opening up. Right now, Mev is limited to a single block. Right. But if Mev can be extended, many people are trying to multi block Mev. The present tense becomes multi block. Wow. So this is again programmable time. Mev multi block. Wow. So this is again programmable time.

Extending the future. It sounds like some mindfulness BS. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Fighting or something like that. Say that because, I mean, maybe in a kind of a weird, twist of, I don't know, human history, we have always tried to extract the most out of something. So if it's good or bad Better or worse. Better or worse. So just because somebody's extracting because the thing is, like, ex looking at extraction as only as a bad thing, it's not always nuanced because Uh-huh. Both from the right, politically speaking, and the left. So for example, the left would say, okay, we are extracting from nature in a way that's bats for ecology. The right would say, we're extracting from nature, things that we should not do, the divine law of God. Like, we should not do more than what like, so the conservative appeal, you know. Yeah. So in many ways, we can argue nothing I'm arguing, that any anybody who claiming or some people who are claiming maybe it's a bad idea, they have a conservative approach. Like, let's not extract more. Because it's almost like Nakamoto's divine law that you should just look at the transaction fees, and this is what it is. So I'm saying that neither I'm saying neither is right or wrong, but I'm saying that you can critique extraction as a bad thing from both angles. Mhmm. But what matters is how we are extracting what we are doing with it. And also the other idea is that MEV is usually, if not always, considered an economic problem to be solved, an economic reality. Yeah. But what what I argue for and what smart transaction ladder I argue for is mave is also a horological problem, a problem of time, like how you think of time. And if you think of time, in a way, to a certain extent, you can make a economic agnostic argument. This is about time. Not of course, time is also about value and money. But to a certain extent, you can talk about time for what it's worth. So in many ways, I could I feel like you're giving Mev, its own due a little bit. Otherwise, it gets so wrapped up with this economic conversation that it becomes one directionally with the conversation. So, I mean yeah. So I wouldn't say Mev is a wholly negative or a harmful thing. I mean, in some ways, I would say not MAB is inevitable. I would say extraction is inevitable throughout human history we have extracted. Like, right when we invented I don't know the fire, we realized we're gonna extract much more from our steam. I mean, we realize it's not the history of steam is it was invented, like, so long ago in Turkey or somewhere for, like, toys to make toys, this little steam engine toys. Okay. And nobody did anything about it. But then in England, many hundreds of years later, they realized you could extract way more out of that. Alright. Is it a bad thing? Sometimes, yeah. People are, you know, the harmful effects of, you know, oozing coil for steam engine. But it's also, you know, did do a lot of innovation. So I think extraction in general, more than MEV, extraction is kind of history because that's the human, you know, the spirit and we're trying to so how we do it, the politics of it Right. Right. Again, the political conversation. I think it's pivotal. It's not just the economic question. It's a political question.

referenced that. You said, you know, transactions of the world unite. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. The transaction union, I think it would go. That is it. That's something more we are so one of the things that we are quite because it may have opened some very interesting useful thing, like, useful for the users to do. So for example, right now, users who have very low value so we hear a rhetoric in crypto, or we make software that anybody can verify, but users, you know, they are not sophisticated enough to verify everything, or they are lazy to verify everything. And that's, of course, first thing is not not nice to talk about users in such a negative way. But more importantly, it's not true because users who are probably losing, say, $500 per month in slippage fees, the amount of money they would have to spend to have a full load, to maintain that, to verify everything, could be much more than the benefit of saving €500. So if the benefit that you get by actually, you know, having users become much more knowledgeable, much more independent, having full knowledge. If the if the benefit does not out like, exceed way more than the cost of doing all that, it doesn't make any sense. So one way to address transaction unions, which is the idea that in a bundle, during the present tense, and we call the present tense in MAF MAF time, just a branding, you know, branding, MAF time. During MAF time, time, solvers, if they would bundle transactions that are of low worth with transactions that are of high worth in such a way that the whole bundle has attached atomicity, which means if any of the transactions, the low value transaction, gets sniped, like, somebody comes in before, has a slippage, does not get what say, you're trying to buy, I don't know, 7 ETH, you already got 6.7 ETH, and the slippage is more than what you wanted, then the whole transaction bundle, so including the transaction with millions and whatever, hundreds of millions and billions, everything will get richer transactions to help secure transactions that have low value. And this is transactions of the world unite. This is Transaction solidarity. Transaction solidarity. Solidarity. Transaction unions, we call it. This is like bringing the transaction down to the same level playing bundle. And and and these are the great this is again and maybe the political question. You can make a movie so politically doing the right thing, I would say, because the level of programmability you have around how do you include a transaction, when does the transaction gets picked up, what does it mean to execute it. All of those things have become open to programmability, open to being worked on in some ways. Before it was, like, very flat. You send the transaction and the validator would just accept it based on fees. Nothing else to be done in between. Mhmm. Just you send it and in the name of, you know, the divine, you just, you know, hope it gets accepted. But now it's not that. You have a full ever developing protocol with all the many, intent platforms Right. And any of the, companies that are out there, we're all developing together. And and that's a great thing. I mean, as long as we, you know, have a political angle, not just an economic angle. Because ultimately, economics is in many ways subject to politics, more so than the other way around, I would argue. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. So Definitely. I mean, throughout history, actually, economics used to be you know, political economy used to be the subject. Economics didn't was not its own subject. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It became due to the mathematicization of, you know, anyways.

we are protecting users through design. I think this this, you know, this is exactly, like, what we were seeing previously, which is the idea that, this way of talking about users as if they're losers. That, you know, if only they knew better, they wouldn't use these platforms. Yeah. I believe they would use, you know, they don't verify everything, you know. And the fact of the matter is users, first and foremost, don't have an incentive to do anything better than that. As I was saying, it's sometimes the benefit is is not so, apparent to users. And it's not even the kind of question of, educating the users. That's also condescending. They don't know better or we have to tell them, raise awareness. Certain extent, yes. But not always not the full picture. So what would be rather interesting is what we never we always try to blame it on the users or fix the user in some way, you know, as if there is some kind of a machine or a little object. What about turning it inwards? What are we as builders doing? Maybe there's something wrong with us. And that's where my my claim inside proposal crazy idea is, which is we already have somebody in, like, a role in most companies whose job is, first and foremost, to serve the user's interests, and they are called UX. They are US user experience. They are there to uphold the rights of users. Now but what happens is, say, tomorrow, some company x y z wants to do a a change in the user interface where they make it super easy and frictionless to invest amount of money. Is the user experience his job not to design that, but first and foremost to question because they uphold the user. Right? So the users, is the user does it they really want it? More importantly, would they not endanger users to accidentally invest money and get rugged at the end of it? Could be, could be not. We don't know that. But the idea is that they cannot do that because as long as the user experience, engineer, designer is being paid by the company who's asked that, they're always more beholden to the company. Like, they who hold the capital get to have ultimate say. So ultimately and and what are the people who are the ultimate bosses who are telling them to do these things? They cannot, maximize shareholder value. And that's that's the point of it. That's great. But what if that is the only way to ultimately get paid as a UX designer and doing your work, then what you're ultimately designing is not user experience, but shareholder experience. You just what rather what would be an ideal world if and here's the claim. Like, we have a DAO that pays all UX designers in the world, like, a sufficient salary and compensation and everything, and it makes it almost criminal for culture, you know, whatever, for all tech companies to even pay a dime to UX because you don't want a conflict of interest. You know, it's like you can't pay judges, you know, for taking your case. You know, the the status today is complicated. So nobody can pay any UX designer, and the user designer could be, like, just activist if they need to. Like like, they would be almost terrorizing the engineering team, the business team if they ask for a feature upgrade that is not upholding the rights of the users. Instead of saying, oh, users don't know better. You know, if you do if the UX people think users don't know better, then this feature should not be shipped. That they would just would not do the work. They will strike. And the DAO will take care of it. And DAO will be the only repeat that. I don't know if I'm clear. Like, they will get zero salary from the company they're working. So every tech company would have to rent these UX designers from the DAO, and they will will work for, for for whatever time they work, and they will cons they will be, like, in every meeting and everything, first and foremost, user experience is their work. Users, right, maintaining. Second is, okay. You want this feature, we're even nice for the software. They don't care about the software. They only care about the user, then they care about the software. But that is not at all a reality because they can't afford and I can't blame the UX designers. Right. What can you do is get somebody holds the capital.

yeah, that you didn't, realize. Or or they made the user experience so smooth Yeah. Too smooth. Too too smooth. There was a problem in the nineties where they made in the nineties where they made accounting software that was so easy to use that accountants started making mistakes because it would get them to a mindless state. It's just click click and done. This is where some friction is good. It depends on on the software. Sometimes it's not good. But that's again, the UX designers role who never get paid from the company.

fields in the world. We have a mechanism for that, which is DAOs. Mhmm. So if there was a DAO by the way, my name for DAOs are VCs, I call them, which is venture communists. You know? So if this venture communists, funded this this kind of a of designers, the best designers in the world. I mean, then, I mean, we assured, like, if the, if, the company that SBF was FTX? Yeah. If all the designers said, not gonna do any work, shut down the software. What's she gonna do? You know? That's what I mean. Like, people in spite of knowing better, so many people I know, they work for places that are, you know, quite hostile to actual users, but they can't do nothing about it because, like, you know, at the end of the day, just my job. What do I do? Why not have a DAO? That is, you know, like in many of the protocols, blockchain protocols, you have a way to fund the developers. But we should have similarly funding the designers. And then that would be done in such a way that the the company behind it could not, like, manipulate the price or hold back the capital, nothing like that. It would be trust trustlessly given to the developers

with, like, users feeling good about using the actual product. Yeah. And and sometimes I know some companies hire these roles called ethicists and things like that. Yeah. And I'm like, why do you need ethicists? What are UX people doing if they're not ethicists? Right. You know, because you're working with users' experience. That's a very ethical, obligation to have you working with someone's experience. If I mean, I was like, what are what were we thinking? Like, it's not it's a a ethical job. Not at all. And so this is why we and even human ethicists in, like, some of the biggest companies, they routinely get fired if they do if they study and provide a report internally saying this is actually not good or bad. Of course, the company finds innovative ways to fire them. And that's the thing. The company if the company could not even hire such people, but they are obligated to use such people, and the DAO pays these people, that's amazing. This is why it's almost like, for the you know, for public goods, having UX designers. Mhmm. So it should not be like this is why Ethereum is kinda public good. I think crypto as one of the maybe the only thing in the world that could actually provide this public good service because it's actually built in the system to have this public good, which is, you know, paying people a good amount for doing the right thing that helps the community. Mhmm. So having a community token, like, which, reflects the quality of the product, not even that quality of the users' satisfaction with the product in terms of keeping their rights intact, always safeguarding their rights. If there was a token like that and designers get air dropped, with that, I thought that would be just amazing. That would be great.

Because, you know, interesting because when you say nationalized, it's still limited to a nation state. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But when you do DAO, it's like a public good, like Ethereum is public good, but it's not nationalized. Right. It's like a it's like the only It's a commodified design. Yeah. I mean, it Ethereum is not really, like, a regular commodity to ask. It's like people have been debating what it is, really. So it's just I don't know what it is, but what I know is it defies, all kinds of categorization. But what is definitely, it's a public good. This is why private blockchains I don't know what that is. It doesn't exist. I mean, somebody who claimed it is an oxymoron, you know? Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't exist. So I think, I mean, crypto being a public infrastructure is the best way to do these kinds of DAOs where you can DAO ify all kinds of public utilities that should not be privatized where the capital is held by a few people who get to dictate. And, of course, we'll have conflict of interest in this case. Right. And design is just one thing that I'm passionate about. But if somebody else in the audience can think of something and write about it or tweet about it, I mean, you know,

you can check out my work at stxn.io, which is our website. We have a white paper called Mevolution, you know, as a kind of a Mev and evolution, but it's actually about revolution, which we are here for. And, you know, and just generally online, you can find my stuff. Cool. Thank you very much, Josh, for this wonderful interview. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it.